18. The Architecture of Trust: Part 1

This episode explores trust through the lens of two Substack articles: one critiquing African funeral traditions for keeping people poor, and another on how to become trustworthy. Gregory Treat uses cryptocurrency concepts — proof of work and token burning — as an extended metaphor to argue that what looks like "wasted" wealth in kinship rituals is actually a conversion into social currency on a different ledger.

Central to the discussion is the distinction between traders' games (short-term, transactional, frictionless) and farmers' games (long-term, consistent, relationship-based). Gregory argues that modern financialism has tried to convert everything into traders' games, but many of life's most important things — parenting, marriage, elder care, community — only work as farmers' games, sustained by multi-generational family structures.

What is Great Houses?

The Great Houses series is a private discussion on the enduring structures of elite families, their strategies for generational continuity, and the practicalities of building a lasting legacy. Led by Gregory Treat, the series explores concepts like illegibility, patronage, feudal instincts, and the mechanisms by which great houses have persisted throughout history.

Okay, everybody.

Hello, and welcome to episode 18 of The Great Houses Forum.

So, uh, this is where we talk about what it means to have a, a multi-generational family-oriented plan for owning your own property, being
able to keep your people, and, you know, moving forward into these bright and glorious futures, uh, that we are, we are all hoping for.

So, um, today we're gonna talk about the architecture of trust.

So, uh, over the last, uh, couple weeks, I... You know, people send me articles, and the algorithm serves up articles for me, and, uh, so I, uh, I, I get to look at various things on Substack.

So there are two Substack articles that I want to, uh, compare for you.

Well, first is, um, so why African funerals keep people poor is, I think, the... I think that was the title of it.

Um- And then, um, and then the other one was, uh, how to become trustworthy by, by the creative kingmaker.

So, uh, why African funerals keep, keep people poor is, is kind of a, uh, a classic liberal we're gonna, we're gonna decide we're gonna make a point about modernity.

And to make the point that modernity is good, we're gonna go and find a group of people that are in, in... They are incredibly poor.

They don't have any indications of a high IQ background.

They're a small group of people.

They're in a nation that's small with a corrupt government, and we're gonna use this.

This is our, this is our foil for saying that, uh, modernity is good.

So, uh, in, in, in this article, he basically goes through and he talks about something that i- that is a real problem, and I'll, I'll, I'll acknowledge that it's a real problem.

Um, but, but I, I just kinda wanna start off by the fact of recognizing that he is, he is following his people's tradition, shall we say.

So of course, what I'm gonna do is to follow my people's traditions.

Namely, I, I'm going to make it in a, a wildly overdone crypto analogy and just hammer it to death for the rest of the episode.

So that's what we're gonna do today.

And, uh, you know, I was, I was trying various things with, with PowerPoint to have a presentation for you, but I've got all the content in my head, and we're gonna, we're gonna go ahead and have fun.

Um, so the, uh, the, the first thing is the, to, to, to talk about the, the, the very real problem, right?

So there's places in Africa that have, um, funeral traditions, and the idea is when somebody dies, you, you gather everyone around, and you have a big party when they die.

Um, and this is, this is... The, the original context of this was a tribal village, right?

You might imagine some respected person dies.

Everyone shows up.

The family of the dead person feeds everyone in the village.

You know, presumably in this small tribal village, the death of a, of, of a patriarch or matriarch is also an occasion where inheritance rights are shifted around.

So, so that, that is the right to farm certain lands is changing hands, and maybe the, the, the inheritance that you've gotten is not exactly what you w- what you want.

And so there's some horse trading.

There's some swapping that's going on where people will say, "Well, instead of, you know, getting this land or these, these animals, we're gonna do something different. We're gonna, we're gonna flip things around." Right?

And that's, uh, you know, that's, I, I think, what, what everybody wants when they're thinking about how do we, um, how is this supposed to work.

Well, obviously these people are not in a tribal village anymore.

They are in modernity.

They are in a situation where, um- You know, they're, they're living in urban areas.

They, they have access to refrigeration.

Um, and so one of the problems is that, that people can... You can keep bodies on ice for a very long time.

Um, and so, so what happens is you just, you, you put the person in a, a hospital, in a morgue, right?

In a, in a refrigerated room, and their body could be kept for months or maybe, maybe up to a year.

And, and every day that you leave them there, the, the, the hospital fees mount, the funeral home fees mount, and you're kind of running around trying to gather more and more and more money to have the grandest, most splendiferous funeral that you can, right?

Now, I actually have some doubts.

Uh, the, this, this guy's name, I'm gonna pronounce it as Oks, so O-K-S, and he, he basically says there's no redeeming value to this whatsoever.

Um, it just is a waste of money.

And, and, and, you know, color me, I'm not sure if that's true, okay?

Um, but, uh, l- b- because whenever you have social gatherings, whenever you're doing things that make a big splash, there's ways to make money.

But I will admit, it is... this is a very different dynamic from what was going on in the village, right?

Very different dynamic indeed.

These people are half converted to modernity, okay?

And that's, uh, you know, that's a, that's an important thing to think through, uh, when we're, when we're considering, okay, how do we, how do we frame what, what situation these folks are in?

They are using an old cultural template that made a lot more sense.

I'm not saying it made perfect sense in a, in a different context, but it made a lot more sense in that older context, and then now people are, um, people are kind of looking back and, and saying, "Well, this is, this is just terrible. This is just terrible."

So-

But there is a problem.

There is a problem when you, when you are not taking care of old people.

One of the, the, uh, things that, that folks will say is, "Hey, you're, you're not, uh, you're not taking care of, of the elders. You're sort of letting them die," and that's obviously a, a, a horrible and ugly kind of a thing.

Um, so you, you have... You'll have situations, and it's, it's an unfortunate situation, but you'll have a situation where there's no... there's not, not any money available for, uh,
the care of the older people, but there is, you know, the, the... these folks will raise, will raise money to have a great big funeral where none of the money comes back to them, right?

And, and this is, this is, this is one of the, the, the critical distinctions, right?

In addition to, hey, there's some inheritance release when a person dies, um, you know, the, the land is changing hands 'cause there was a landed inheritance for most of these tribes, and that's all gone away.

The other thing that's gone away is the people that you're paying to do the, the party in the old village, that was your immediate family and friends, right?

That was the people that you lived with.

So if you were slaughtering the fattened calf, you were... There, there was kind of a, a capitalization thing that's going on where we're taking assets, and we're, and we're cashing them in.

And, and when you have small economies, you actually ha- It's, it's very important to have rituals that allow you to say, "Okay, at this point,
this is the moment where we're gonna slaughter the fattened calf, where we're gonna cash out this asset we, that we've been holding onto," right?

So, uh, and, and, and then he, he goes on from this, from the funeral example, and he draws a number of conclusions about that, that basically kinship systems, kinship groups, uh, this guy talks about, are keeping Africa poor in general.

They're keeping... He, he would say that they would keep anyone who practices kinship systems poor.

Obviously, you know, the, the immediate rejoinder will, I don't know w- if we'll get to this, uh, today, 'cause this, this feels like something that I might talk about for a week or two, friends.

Um, um

The, the immediate rejoinder is, well, what about Jewish people?

What about, you know, some of these minority communities that are highly urbanized, that are also highly communal, right?

That have these very strong kinship groups and very strong kinship affiliations and, and have social obligations, and they seem to be doing quite well for them.

You know, is it possible that there's a skill issue here?

Um, and, and, and the funny thing about this article is, you know, again, David Oaks, how, uh, how to, how to keep...

How funerals keep Africa poor, um, is that he, he even mentions a neighboring tribe, right?

So he's, he's kind of talking about this, this, this hypothetical tribe that's in a, in an urban area, and he talks about how, well, there's, there's another tribe called the Igbo.

Now, the Igbo are not just a tribe.

They're a major people group.

There's, you know, I, I can't remember how many of them, but there's, there's like in the tens of millions of people belong to this ethnic group a- across a couple different African nations, and, and they are... They're a powerhouse.

They are... They have areas that they're able to control, and interestingly enough, because they have these zones of, of ethnic dominance, if you will, in their zones of ethnic dominance, these traditions work a lot better.

One of the reasons why is because they- they've had kinda some of their elders, the Igbo elders, have gotten around and saying, "Hey, actually, uh, the most destructive version of this kinship group stuff, where you, where you keep a, a dead person's body in
a, in a funeral home for a whole year with fees mounting so that you can raise money from an ever increasingly large group of, of relatives who will then come to the funeral and, and kind of celebrate the, the, the magnificence of your family, um, that's bad.

We don't wanna do that, and so we're just gonna say you're not allowed to.

You have to have... You have to bury the body quickly, and then you can have a second... You know, you can have the initial funeral with the bodies there, and
you put them in the ground, and then you can have a second funeral with the extended family, uh, as they're able to gather, you know, weeks or months later."

But it's not the same kind of thing because the, the, the people that actually lived with this dearly departed ancestor have gone.

Okay?

So, you know, uh, uh, as I was talking about what I wanted to do in this episode, I, I said, you know, the, this, this, this gentleman is, is, is following his, his people's traditions.

Um, and, and, and as the British said to the Indians when they were burning widows, you know, both, both, all parties should follow their traditions.

So, uh, what I wanna put in front of you is the, um, an article, How to Become Trustworthy, uh, by the Creative Kingmaker, and this is riffing off of an, an early ar- earlier article, uh, by a gentleman named Max Marsal.

These are all Substack articles that I'm referencing.

Uh, you know, talking about the, the, the fact that, that there's a, there's an exchange between different, different styles.

Okay?

So, um, Max Marsal's original article, he has, he has this great graphic l- uh, you know, it's the, uh, hard times create good men, strong men create, uh, easy times, easy times create weak men, and then, um, and then weak men create hard times, right?

And the cycle continues.

So his version of it was low trust creates skeptics, uh, skeptics create high trust, high trust creates liars, and liars create low trust.

And so you, you know, Max Marsal talks about you, you have kind of three groups.

You have the believers, um, you have the liars, and you have the skeptics, and basically there's always some group of believers, and the skeptics and the liars kind of trade places as, as the dominant, uh, kind of counter, counter minority force, right?

And so, uh, Marsal says, you know, basically y- life would be great if we could have no liars and everyone be believers, and there would never be any problem with trust.

But that's not real, right?

The, the incentive, the, the, the prisoner's dilemma, the, the, the benefits of defecting for any particular person, um, if they be- if they decide to become
a liar, if everyone else is a, a believer, is just so high that, that when you get above 90, 95% believers in a, in a community, then somebody is gonna break.

Some high IQ person who's down on their luck is gonna realize, "Oh my gosh, I can just lie." Uh, there's a, I think it's a Ricky Gervais movie.

There's this great, you know, movie about this guy that, you know, he, he's in a world where everyone tells the truth, and suddenly he realizes, "Oh my gosh, I can just lie, and then people will believe me, and I can, you know, do all these..."

I think he starts a religion at one point.

It is a Ricky Gervais movie.

Um- So, uh, but then you get to the point where, okay, so there's a bunch of liars.

So when there's a bunch of liars, there's kind of the natural predator of the liar is the skeptic, and the skeptic doesn't believe anyone.

He wants everyone to prove everything.

And, uh, you know, Max Rosat talks about the fact that, uh, skeptics are costly, not just... It's not just costly to be a skeptic, right?

It's costly to have skeptics around because they're constantly making people, you know, trust but verify.

Well, can you prove it, right?

You know, give me, give me the evidence, right?

And, and we, we, we've all, we've all been on those forums, and most of us have probably been that guy on, uh, several forums.

So, so that's kind of this, this, this recognition that there is, there is a cycle, and there, there's actually some, some math that you can apply to the, the, the question of trust.

Well, so, um

The creative kingmaker takes that and, and he says we, we can, can think about trust as, as an equation, right?

So he says trustworthiness is, is the proportion of irreversible cost already paid slash poten- you know, divided by the potential gain from deduction, from defection.

So, um, this is of course the, the proof of work mechanism, right?

So there's, there's two ideas that most of you will all, uh, all be familiar with from the cryptocurrency context, but I'll go through them, you know, for, for if, if anybody on the call, uh, isn't.

So, um-

The first is proof of work, right?

So you, when, when you're, when you're dealing with a, a Bitcoin or a Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency, you have to burn a lot of ex- electricity to do a bunch of calculations to calculate a particular
number, and i- incurring that cost, especially incurring that cost along with a bunch of other people in the network, means that it's very unlikely, uh, that, that you will defect, right?

And, and the way that Bitcoin kind of chains transactions together means that anything that's over 10 minutes old, it starts to get increasingly, uh, harder to change transactions that are old.

So the proof of work means, hey, I've invested a bunch i- i- in this, in this chain, and a bunch of other people have invested a bunch in this chain, and that is, uh, that means that we're all trustworthy together.

Because if we defect, all of that, uh, all of that trust becomes useless to us, right?

It doesn't, it doesn't benefit us, 'cause we spent a bunch of time and effort building it, right?

Um, and I, there's a, there's a, a, a friend and, and a guy that I greatly respect named Tim Yarbrough, who has just a wonderful definition of trust, and he says, "Trust is future expectations based on past performance."

Right?

So if you have burned, if you have, if you have used up a lot of, um... I apologize.

Burn, I'm gonna use burned in a different context here in a second.

But, uh, if you have used up a bunch of energy to create something, and you want a return from that energy, you're all in, right?

The, the, the sunk cost fallacy is actually sort of beneficial to people collaborating, right?

Because the other thing is, it's not always a fallacy, right?

Sometimes it's a choice.

Do we stay in?

And if we can all stay in and all stay committed, then, uh, you know, the, the, the prisoner's dilemma, right?

The, the best outcome is for both people to not, not rat each other out, which is very, very hard for individuals.

But if you are a part of a group, and the groups have some ability to influence the, the character of the people, well, then a person who is, is ratting the other person out doesn't just need to consider the other person.

They also have to consider the group that they came from.

Okay?

So this is, this is that, that, that proof of work concept applied to trust.

Uh, hopefully that makes sense.

We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll definitely talk about it, and I'm sure there will be questions.

But, uh, so that's kind of the first piece, right?

Yeah, the thing about sunk cost is it's only a fallacy if you have, if you have other options, which if you can get somebody to put it all in, right?

People do this in the, um, in the investment space all the time, right?

Uh, so the, they, they want... People don't want to invest in somebody that doesn't have skin in the game, right?

And, and, uh, a lot of times, a lot of times y- young entrepreneurs will say, "Well, I, I put everything I, I have into this," right?

And, and, and it's like, well, yeah, but you have nothing, right?

Uh, the floor, you're so close to losing everything already, it's very difficult to see what additional things you would have to lose if, if an investor invests in you.

So what, what, what people want in order to make investing rational is they want you to have something that you could lose, some quality of life, enjoyment, you know, wife and kids, the house, whatever, right?

And then they want you to take that and put that at risk by putting a large chunk of money into the project, and they believe that that will make you work really hard, uh, so that th- that you will take care of their money when they, when they put it in.

That's the kind of thing that, that, that we're talking about here, okay?

Um, so then the second, the second crypto concept in this extended metaphor that I'm gonna, you know, beat on for the next, uh, couple episodes at least, um, is the idea of, of burning a token in crypto.

All right?

So one of the things you can do with crypto is you can send a, a, a piece of cryptocurrency, a, an amount of cryptocurrency to a wallet address that no one controls, right?

There's, I think one of them is, uh, 0X00, uh, dead is, is one of these addresses that no one has the keys to it.

So if you send your crypto to that address, so that wallet address, it can never be gotten back.

You can't get it back, no one else can ever get it back, right?

And it's interesting because this is a, a digitally verifiable, a public thing that you've done.

You can prove that you had the, the, the coins, and you sent them to this address from which they can never be recovered, right?

So you can do those things, uh, for kind of social reasons, right?

So, uh, Vitalik, uh, who's the co-founder of Ethereum famously burned a, uh, a, a huge amount of, of, of a cryptocurrency that was related, uh, the Shiba Inu, uh, cryptocurrency.

Um, and so he just, he, he gives some, he donated some to a, a, uh, crypto relief fund, COVID crypto relief fund, and then he takes the rest of it, he just burns it to remove the supply, right?

There's a number of crypto projects where, uh, people have burned various amounts of Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin maximalists always celebrate when, when someone burns their,
their Bitcoin 'cause that means that the, the amount of, uh, of, of Bitcoin in circulation is less, which makes their, uh, makes their holdings less, uh, more valuable, right?

So the other thing you can do when you're burning coins is you can use that event, so you burn your coin in one currency, and you can use that event as a trigger, a digital trigger to unlock tokens or rewards or something in a different cryptocurrency, right?

So, uh, this is, you know, how Counterparty works, right?

Um, you burn a, a Bitcoin to mint a new currency, right?

So, um, you... if you, if you, you send Bitcoin to an unspendable address, a verifiable permanent burn recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, and in
return the sender has received XCP, the native token of the Counterparty medical, uh, meta protocol, which was a separate ledger built atop Bitcoin.

And, uh, I think people buil- uh, burned about 2,100 Bitcoin and re- permanently removed them from the Bitcoin supply, and that's what allowed the, uh, the issuance of the Counterparty, the Counterparty asset.

Um, and then people do this in, in, in circle all the time.

Um, and, I mean, in a sense, you do this every time that you, you know, switch money between banks, right?

When you... W- what, what happens when you, when you go from Bank of America to Chase is Bank of America takes the money out of your account,
kind of, it, it burns it, if you will, and then it tells Chase, "Okay, add this much money to one of the accounts that you control," right?

In, in their, in Chase's internal system.

And that's how you move money between accounts, right?

The, the nice thing, of course, about cryptocurrencies is that it's all public, so anyone can verify what happened.

It's not with these gatekeepers, right?

And I want to suggest to you, um, that that is partly what's going on with these kinship groups, right?

When you take a bunch of stuff and you burn it, you set it on fire... I mean, the, the Native Americans actually, you know, it's, it's
funny, you know, these, these folks that, that do these articles on, on why liberalism is just the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Um, I, I have, like, a whole bunch of better historical examples if I wanted to argue their point.

So you think about the potlatch from, uh, from the, the Native American context.

Uh, potlatch was you actually set your wealth on fire, all right?

And why did you set your wealth on fire?

Well, um, you set your wealth on fire to solve, you know, sometimes if you were too wealthy, people would be mad at you.

There'd be war between tribes.

So if you did a potlatch, then that would be a condition of peace.

Um, but a lot of times, uh, it was done just to kinda show, to, to, uh, uh, accrue some spiritual benefit and some social benefit.

So the spiritual benefit was you had demonstrated that you were not controlled by the resources that you had, and in response, what other people would do is they would kinda give you, give you kudos, give you credit, uh, for that.

So I would suggest to you that maybe, you know, this, this, these senseless kinship, um, kinship groups that are burning all this wealth, maybe they're not burning it.

Maybe they're converting it into another currency.

Okay?

Into a social currency, into a, a, a set of rights.

And, and again, I think the thing is, we could, if we wanted to, if we were to, to, to get into these tribes and kind of talk to them and say, "Well, what's going on here?

What happens when somebody does the big funeral?" Well, it means that everyone that came to the funeral is maybe not indebted to them, but that there's some sense of reciprocal obligation.

So this, this can be used to bury the hatchet, right?

It always has been, right?

There's a way of making peace between troo- two groups that are, that are feuding in some way.

It can be used as the basis, uh, for new economic arrangements.

We're gonna negotiate a trade deal, right?

We're gonna, we're gonna showcase... I mean, the, the obvious thing to do, if you are a smart person, if you're, if you're a smart tribe, and you
make sure that the people providing the food are your people and your businesses, and, and you're not hiring out at great expense to outside vendors.

Okay?

Which that was another thing that, uh, David Oaks talks about in, in, in the article is, is the, this idea of, well, you know, the, the money just leaves.

Well, that's just bad planning.

Um, it doesn't have to be that way.

Um, but you're... W- when you do it properly, you ha- you're having in-house, you're meeting these needs in-house, and that means that you're able to take the, uh...

to, to, to showcase different people in your community who are now able to s-show, "Hey, I can feed 1,000 people. I can, you know, make all this stuff." And then as, as people have need for those services, uh, then they'll, they'll call upon them.

People would demonstrate.

You know, they... Oftentimes you'd have a kind of Olympic-style games or, or, um, you know, physical contests at these things, and that's a very useful way to demonstrate the, the strength, the intelligence.

You know, I, I, I recall in, I think it's the, uh, the Mayan or Incan context that, uh, that one of the things that they would do was they would have math competitions in their, in their tribal gatherings.

And, and, um... And in fact, specifically math competitions between the women, as I, as I recollect.

Um, they, they had a, a particular way of, of training their ladies to kind of have like a household accounting system in their head.

And so the, the woman's job was to sit there and remember where all of the, uh, all the grain was.

Um, and so they would have competitions, uh, at, at, at tribal gatherings for that.

And, and the, the, the people who won those competitions or who demonstrated skill in those competitions, that was something that would cause people's behavior to change.

It would, it would open up opportunities for trade, for just a, a whole bunch of benefits.

So- So returning to, um, the, the Creative Kingmaker article on, uh, on, on trust, there's two terms that, that he uses that, that,
that, that... I've, I've, I've articulated similar things, but I, I find these terms very useful, so I'm gonna give you the to, to them.

Um, so the idea, there's two types of games.

There are traders' games, and there... that is, that is games for people that are making trades, not traitors games, as in, you know, betrayal games.

Though sometimes, right?

Um, there, there, there's, there's... Th- it has often been remarked that there is a great deal of similarity between trader, the, the merchant
who comes in and sells goods of questionable project, products, pr- uh, providence, and traitor, the person who betrays his, his land and kin.

Um, there, there might be a reason for that somewhere.

And then farmers' games, right?

So traders' games are, are, you know, what I've talked about in the past about these, these short-term transactional, let's put everything on the table, and we're gonna bargain, and then
we're gonna pick up, you know, we're gonna trade things between our two piles of stuff, whether that's money or goods, and then we're gonna pick our stuff up at the end and, and walk away.

And then the other thing, the, the other possibility is, is farmers' games.

These are low-intensity, kind of longer timescale.

Many farmers' games involve, uh, one of the reasons why they're called farmers' games is they, they involve daily tending to plants or animals, right?

So you gotta give water to your plants.

You gotta give water to your animals.

And, and especially for animals, you gotta, you gotta water your animals every day, right?

Or they die And that consistency i- is important.

And, and this, again, this is one of those things where there's, there's certain things that are sunk costs, and there's certain things that are, well, you, you do just gotta keep being consistent and, and, and keep at it, right?

If you can keep feeding and keep watering an animal until it reaches the point where it's, it's ready to slaughter, then there's a huge return that comes after a long period of, of frankly, fair- fairly gradual investment, right?

It ... And on any given day, it doesn't cost that much to feed a sheep.

It doesn't cost that much to feed a cow.

Um, and, and hopefully you have water for them.

Hopefully that's not a, that's not a concern for you.

But, okay.

Um, so but you have to keep doing it every day or nearly every day, otherwise your animals will get sick and they will die, okay?

Uh, and that, and that's why it's called farmer's games.

Um, there are certain games where you have to play, you have to keep playing with a low intensity but a lot of consistency to get any payout at all, right?

It's not, it's not just that you're, you're getting a big payout, it's that you're getting any payout versus no payout.

That tends to be a, a feature of, uh, a farmer's games, right?

Um, and, and what we've been doing for the past, you know, 100 to 400 years, depending on how you think about it, is we have been attempting to make everything into a trader's game, make everything into these kinds of financialized, frictionless, you know, uh

Frequently the way we'll do that is by creating legal or financial abstractions of other things, right?

First we, you know, legally abstracted goods, then we would legally abstract services, and then we would, you know, abstract the, uh, abstraction.

So we have, you go from goods and services to corporate interests, and then you go from actual ownership in companies to stocks and bonds and more, more intangible things.

Then you have derivatives, shorts and all these things based on bundled packages of, of, of more and more and more complex, uh, combinations of the lower things.

But the point of that is to say, hey, there's, there's an ad- there is an advantage.

And I want to acknowledge the advantage.

There is an advantage of being able to frictionlessly trade certain things, right?

If you can go, "Hey, I, I want, I wanna trade my abstraction to you," right?

And, and, and that's basically just a, a, a version of, well, you cross it off of your ledger and I record it onto my ledger, um, then that can happen very quickly.

We don't have to get up, get out, physically pick up, um, you know, goods and move them from point to point, right?

But the problem is, of course That you're, you're incentivizing short-term behavior, and that, uh, uh, somewhere in your system there are a bunch of games like, you know, farming right?

Uh, one of the, one of the funny things about, about modern, you know, financial management is it's really bad at interacting with farmers, like actual real farmers.

And this is, this is a, this is a very real problem that we're having and we're gonna continue having, 'cause as more and more farmers retire... Basically, there's no economic incentive under the current system for somebody to become a farmer.

People become farmers right now almost exclusively for ideological reasons, and the kind of farming that they're willing to do ha- it has less and less and less to do with how, how our food system actually works and how we feed ourselves, right?

And, and, and you know, I mean, the, the, the, the pe- the powers that be are gonna, gonna solve all this with, uh, with, with drones and robots and, and, and various things.

And maybe they will, right?

Maybe they will, uh, for, for a particular, uh, type of person.

But I just want us to observe, like anything that is a farmer's game, anything that requires long-term, consistent, um...

I mean, it c- it could be higher impact, but, but ev- even low impact, low intensity, it's not that much attention, but it has to be some attention every day.

Um, our, our modern system is bad at this, right?

It doesn't know how to do this.

So how, how did we do this, right?

How did, how did we manage farmer's games, right?

How do we manage agriculture?

Well, the answer is the, the, the multi-generational family, right?

The lineage, okay?

That is the, the social structure that the thing that we, that we call in both the, the... well, not just the, in, in both in, in the East, uh, with the Confucian civilization,
in the West with the Greco-Roman civilization, and then in the Indus Valley Civilization, all three of those, the thing they called civilization was having family lands
that you guarded and kept, you know, producing, that where you buried your ancestors, where you had your people and, and, and that is what made successful farmers, right?

Where you have a storehouse and, and you can take a little bit out of the storehouse each day and use it to feed your animals, use it to feed your people, accumulate resources for later dispersal, okay?

That is a farmer's game, right?

And, and that is, you know, historically, empirically how we, uh, how we mastered farming.

Now, this is important because, uh, there are many games, there are many types of activities that, uh, that are really only moral, a- at least
in, in, in the, the way that we think of them, if you practice them as a farmer's game, if there's a, a time-based, a long-term component, right?

Um, and, and this is essentially the same kind of distinction as I, I've drawn earlier in the, in the podcast with concepts, um, concepts like,
you know, there's, there's, there's the framework of Here, here is a, a, a covenantal obligation, and here's a transactional obligation, right?

So there are certain types of... There's, there's certain types of things.

Or another way to put it is, uh, liberty of contract versus the duty of covenant, right?

So there's s- there is, and I'm not denying it, I'm not saying it, and, and, and I, I welcome it.

I'm glad for mass production and for mass, you know, the logistics and transport and, and the, the flows of capital, the frictionless flows of capital and financial abstractions that are necessary to make that system work.

Those are good things within their domain, right?

Within their domain.

There is a set of games that the way that you win those games is by maximizing the number of actors, okay?

So you wanna... You know, the way you win, th- th- we, we might also call these libertarian games, right?

Traders games, where, hey, the way to win, the way to increase net wealth for everybody is just have as many different people who can
play, uh, who are not connected to each other and cannot influence each other's behavior other than through the pricing mechanism, right?

And there's some wonderful games where that is true, okay?

And they're important, and we should, and we should have them and, and keep them.

The question that we have to ask ourselves in the modern moment is, is literally everything, uh, some kind of traders game?

Because that is what our system does.

Our system so heavily incentivizes and so traders games and so heavily penalizes farmers games that, that we, we don't know how to make stuff that takes a long time, right?

So you think about assets, you think about real estate, you think about animals, a- and then ultimately you think about people, right?

You think about the fertility crisis that we're having.

The way that you raise... You know, the way that you get children, especially non-sociopathic children, right, is you are present.

You, you build a long-term relationship of trust with the, the mother of, of, of the children, and then you are there present in those kids' lives day after day, um, you know, d- doing, doing what you're gonna do
and, and helping them grow in, in these ways that are... It- it- it's, you know... And, and to some extent, you know, you can have the f- you can have a father be more high impact than the mother, for instance, right?

But even for a father, f- parenting is a, is a, is a consistency game, not a, um, for in a lot of ways, a consistency game, not a, a, a high, high capacity, "I'm gonna go in in one moment and transform you" game, right?

There are certain lessons that you can only learn if you do them 100 times.

We've lost Gregory there.

Gregory is, uh, parenting is a consistency game.

Oh, well let me see what's internet.

Yes Hold on a second.

While, and while he switches internet, I'll just, uh, make sure there's not dead air for him.

Uh, he's bringing up such an important issue that I, I read a book once, I can now not recall the book, probably had to do with the rise of major cities, 'cause I like reading about cities.

But that the history of, uh... I mean, that com- the history of the emergence of what we call today the agriculture commodity standards kinda came specifically out of Illinois, because Chicago is a hub of railroads.

Uh, it was just so crazy.

Within a span of a couple years because of the railroads and, and the commodity business and all of that, that like, wow, it just rippled through agriculture and family businesses and all sorts of wild things.

Are... You, are you ready yet, Greg?

I, I'm, I'm ready.

Yes.

Okay.

So, so one of the, one of the, the, the things that we have to remember is, is many of these traditional transactions, right?

Again, assets, animals, people, um, developing real estate, m- a- anything that requires consistent application of attention, time, labor, and attention over a, a long period of time, um, these all started out as farmer's games, right?

We have 6,000 years of this is how we're solving, uh, the, the, these types of problems.

Um, and, and these are the, the kinds of things... You know, they, they also involve marriage, parenthood, vocation, citizenship, right?

Citizenship was always seen as a thing that required a long-term formation process to, uh, to, to involve.

Th- th- think about that, folks.

Um, you know, a- even, even concepts like friendship, elder care, succession, uh, all of the inheritance related questions, it's very hard to detangle that from the context in which we negotiate it.

So, so, um, we negotiated all of those things for a very long time as farmer's games, right?

Now, I'm not saying that there can't be more, uh, there can't be versions of these, of these things that are, that have less friction that are not moral.

All right?

But I'm saying I'm not sure we know how to do that.

It's not clear to me that we know how to do that.

Okay?

And there's a, uh, in a, in a, in a chat...

Let's see if I can add a, a picture to, uh, to the chat.

Um- No, I cannot.

Anyway, so there's a dear friend of mine, uh, who, um, who, uh, posted a, a, a, a, a graphic that said, "The cost of avoiding structure is that every day has to be renegotiated from scratch," which is just a great, a great line.

Uh, every day has to be renegotiated from scratch.

And, um, you know, that's, that's kind of a, a, a telling piece of where we are.

Renegotiating everything from scratch is what traitor's games are based on, right?

I mean, in, in the libertarian context, the idea of coming to a deal with any kind of pre-negotiated or certainly, you know, uh, imposed framework or structure is just verboten and probably a violation of the non-aggression principle.

Terrible.

Terrible, right?

The, the, this is... There's this assumption that that's, that's immoral, right?

And, and, and to some extent it is.

If, if the game that you have cl- claimed is, "Hey, we have a level playing field and everyone is equal," well, then pre-negotiated templates and, and, and, and all of these things, that, that does seem kind of, that does seem kind of problematic, right?

Um, but you know, I, I remind everybody of, of the, the concept of the feudal instinct, right?

Um- So the, the, the concept of the feudal instinct is this idea that we have deep structures for how we want to relate to other people, and most humans are actually operating off of those deep structures regardless of what the legal documents say.

Right?

And, and I think, um, you know, there, there's, there's two examples that I'll give you.

One is, uh, is, is the, the obvious, the, is marriage, right?

The red pill guys have talked about basically how modern-- the legal contract of modern marriage is astonishingly bad.

Uh, it might be one of the, the, the worst arrangements that we, that we have in history.

Um, and, and one of the points that I make there is no, no marriage or partnership actually looks like the hypothetical legal contract that, that is imposed by our, by our marriage laws.

Millions and millions and millions of women, the most interesting thing, and this is kind of to push back on the red pill guys, the most interesting thing
about the red pill information is how relatively few women access the, the, the, the, the legal rights that their structure, uh, that that structure gives them.

They are still behaving as though they're operating under a very different, you know, set of, of, of rights and responsibilities, most of them.

Okay?

Uh, now that, that's, that's changing and, and, and the, the statistics get worse every year because, you know, long-term, if you have
a standard, then that is the standard that gets baked into the next transaction and the next transaction and the next transaction.

Okay?

Um, another, another example of the feudal instinct is, um, just general employment.

Uh, you know, Robert Kiyosaki tells this great story about, uh, you know, selling s- a business owner selling a business for $14 million
and, and giving all of the employees 14, uh, days pay 'cause the business was being transferred away from Hawaii to back to the States.

And so everyone that actually worked at this company was fired, right?

They had to go find a new job.

And he talks about, you know, the deep bitterness that, um, that accompanies the, the employees and how mad they were at the owner and, and, and, uh, I mean, I... Every
time we tell that story, I know it, it, it seems like from reading between the lines that that business owner might very well have been him, um, with his first company.

But, um- Didn't they know?

Didn't his employees know that they were at-will c- at-will, uh, employees and what that means, right, legally speaking?

And, and, and the answer is, and I've done this in, in groups of business owners when I'm explaining this concept, is you need to recognize that
there's, there's some kind of futile instinct that's going on, and your people are placing expectations on your relationship that do not legally exist.

And I can prove it to you.

For, uh, let's say, uh, you know, I've said this to, to, to rooms full of business owners.

Let's say that you were to do a, a traditional pay table where you handed... You know, people kind of line up, and you hand them a
check, and they open the envelope and look in the check, and then they put- slide it back in, and then they, they scurry off, right?

Um, and I'll stand next to the pay table, so you do this for all your employees.

I'll stand next to the pay table, and I'll say something like every time they open the check, I say, "Remember, in two weeks, you could get one last paycheck, and that could be the last paycheck you ever get."

And the question that I have for most people is, how many of your businesses would still be here, uh, in six months if I were to do that?

Now, the-- there are a, a group of business owners that their businesses really would be here.

Um, um, there's a, there's a gentleman that I'm trying to get to come talk to us, um, at the end of this month that, that he, he is actually one
of the very few people that I'm quite confident that any of his businesses, that me doing that would have zero impact on his employee retention.

But for the overwhelming majority of people, okay?

For the overwhelming majority of people, that would destroy their businesses.

Their employees, starting with their, their best and most high-performing employees would leave.

And that means that what's going on here, there's, there's an information, there's an information gap.

There's a gap between what people are agreeing to and, and what is, what is actually happening, right?

Um, and, and of course the, the, the reality of that situation is the internet solves that sort of information gap long-term, right?

So, uh, a- another way, returning to the marriage, the marriage concept is, uh, d- I wonder if any of you know the original definition of prostitute in Latin, like what, what, what, what prostitute meant.

Uh, the original definition of a prostitute was a woman who worked outside of her own household.

So if you worked for a man who was not your father, brother or, you know, adopted father or something like... You know, there, there, there were ways of, of, of solving this problem in a more long-term fashion.

But if you had a job, if you were an employee of a person, right, of a man in the Roman Empire, and you were n- as a woman, and you were not related to that man, then the word for you was prostitute.

They, they had... They, they did not have a separate category for female employee, right?

I find that very interesting.

Another, uh, another quip that, uh, o- o- on this subject, just to kind of give you a sense for what we're talking about, there's this great quote by, uh, Doug Wilson that talks about the difference between prostitution and Christian marriage, right?

And, and there's a lot of people who don't understand Christianity who think that the difference is that prostitution involves money, and marriage, Christian marriage is not supposed to involve money.

And, and Wilson's like, "What are you talking about?" The problem is that prostitution involves too little money and too little sex on too short of a timeframe.

Christian marriage says it has to be much more money and much more sex on a much longer timeframe, right?

Specifically, till death do you part.

Um, and that's actually the difference, right?

What, what makes prostitution immoral... And, and again, we, we do this with a lot of these things and in your... And again, I, I see it all the time in the farming community, right?

Um, there is this assumption that, well, the problem is money, and so we're gonna solve the problem of money being in this by having some kind of communal thing.

It's like, no, no, the problem is not money.

The problem is the transactional nature of the relationship, the fact that either party can break it, and that there's no pre-negotiated, uh, there's no pre-negotiated things, right?

Um, when you're, when you're doing a farmer's game, there's always some set of standards that are imposed on you, right?

Whether that's what will keep the cow alive, what will keep the cow giving milk, what will keep the chickens alive, what will keep the chickens laying eggs, right?

Um, what will, what will keep the sheep from, you know, growing wool and all of those things.

What... There, there are objective, functional things that if you don't live with them, if you say, "Well, I'm gonna take as much as I can" well, is that what you wanna do, right?

Is, is what you wanna do take all of the, the, the cow's grain?

Um, well, then you won't have a cow anymore.

This doesn't seem like that's gonna work out well, okay?

Um, but all of these games, they come with a pre-negotiated bundle.

Marriage is the same, right?

There is a, there is a function to marriage, right?

Um, in, in, in, I think it's Malachi in the Bible it says the, the, the thing that God wants from a marriage is holy seed, right?

Holy seed.

Um, and, and, and kind of the, the, the lesser, the lesser version of that is what I say frequently about what everyone wants from marriage is non-sociopathic children.

And who wants the non-sociopathic children?

Well, it's the grandparents usually, or the old people, right?

Who want to be taken care of by people who are not sociopaths.

Um, occasionally a generation, uh, forgets this and, you know, that's when you get boomers.

But that, that's a problem that resolves itself

So, um, w- w- and, and, and, uh, wow, I have, I have not gotten through very many of my notes in this hour, so we, we may be here for a couple of weeks.

Um, so a- as I'm, as I'm giving you this concept of, of there are farmers' games, there are traders' games, and there are different ledgers for these games, right?

So if you take your time, effort, and attention and you spend it building resources in a farmer's game, you keep spending it, right?

You're, you're eventually gonna get a, a ledger, a reputation.

You're gonna get, you know, the, the, the recognition of a cow.

You're gonna get something that people are, are like, "Okay, this person can do this thing," right?

Um, whereas in the fiat system, you go to college, you get a, you get a degree.

Why do you get a bachelor's degree?

So, right, the, the, the classic line was, "So that you can prove that you can finish something," whatever that means.

Um, so that you can prove that you can finish something, which is interesting because nothing else in our system rewards finishing things, broadly speaking.

Um- But I wanna, I, I wanna frame as, as, as I'm, as I'm closing this out, the ... We, we, we tend to look at, um, systems of, of fiat currency.

They're the default right now 'cause mer- managerial financialism is the system that rules the world.

And we look at smaller family systems, right, like these tribes, uh, in Africa that are burning all this money burying their, their dead, and we say, "Well, that's, that's bad." Right?

The, the, the, the, the, the, the financial system, the capital system has the right to demand that you sacrifice time, and attention, and effort to, to a- accumulate value in that system and keep, you know, rolling your transactions forward in that system.

Well, what if, what if ... You know, the, I think the question is always: What, what do you want, and, and, and which system is more able to give you the goods that you want?

So we think about, you know, m- in the fiat system, the fiat system can give you fiat goods.

It can give you access to the logistics train.

It can help you order, again, all these, these fruits of the mass-produced world, right?

The family system is where you can get social goods, closeness, uh, security, the, the, a sense of purpose, uh, the ability to have reconciliation with yourself, with, with your family, with your, with your tribe and community.

All of those goods are incredibly difficult to procure in the, in the fiat system, right?

Um, and it, and I think in many ways what, what most therapists spend their time doing is trying to convince people to go invest their time, attention, and resources in
some non-financial, non-fiat system so they can build enough weight, enough accumulated assets in a social network to begin to rebuild those social goods in their life.

But both of these, you know, both of these things, they have different ways of rewarding and incentivizing their people, okay?

Um, and I'll note, you know, parenthetically, uh, that most traditional societies, their, their tithe, their taxes, the, the amount of money that kind of flows out, um, it usually does not exceed 23, 25%.

Okay?

Um, n- now, you get weird scenarios like the, like this tribe in Africa where people are spending, you know, an entire year's wages on, on a funeral or, or more than that, right?

There were entire groups of the family are basically bankrupting themselves to pay for the funeral of their ancestor.

Um, that's, you know, that

But that's what you get when you're kinda half in, half out of modernity, right?

Um, but when you, when you have a, a, a tribe that's whole, that's able to, to be consistent, to keep accumulating goods when you've got the minimum, you know, the minimum point of, of containment.

Another one of the metaphors that I use for this, this concept is the internal combustion, right?

Uh, internal combustion requires a certain amount of containment.

Any system does, right?

If you try to, if you try to light gasoline on fire and you don't have a way of channeling that into very repeatable kind of piston things, you know, well, well, gasoline is, is, is uneven.

It's, it's, it, we, we don't know what it's gonna do.

Well, that's 'cause you have no containment, right?

Uh, yes, when a, if someone, a, a person who knows a lot more about engines than me says, "That's called external combustion, and we tried that." And we did try that, right?

But if, if, s- so when you have somebody that's been sliced open, when you have a community that's been sliced open, yeah, they're, they're

You're not gonna get the, the greatest outcomes out of that structure.

Um, but that's, that doesn't mean that when operating properly, when operating holistically, that you're, you- there's no benefit to, to maintaining one of these systems.

One of the things, uh, my, my friend Josh Rashid talks about is, is that, you know, uh, people in Africa, you know, and p- tribal people in general tend to report incredible, incredible amounts of happiness, right?

Their self-assessment of how happy they are, and, and then a bunch of, like, you, you can test them for stress hormones and all of these things.

Their stress levels are just way, way, way, way, way lower.

Um, and, and I think a lot of that, uh, people just sort of assume, you know, again, that the problem is money, right?

That it's, it's the material wealth, uh, that just s- something about having material wealth raises your stress.

Well, maybe it's not that having material wealth raises your stress directly.

Maybe it's that not having that tribe, not having that community, not having a bunch of people who are incentivized by the things that
they have done collectively to not defect, right, from the group, uh, maybe that's, maybe that's actually what lowers your stress.

'Cause the, the final thing, the funny thing about, uh, David Oaks' article is he tells the story of what happens when people don't spend their money on funerals, when they don't spend their money, when they accumulate resources.

What do they do?

Well, they defect, all of them.

And he frames that as the good and moral thing, that these people should defect.

They should break away from their kin.

They should establish themselves.

They should not be beholden to these standards and these, these, these tribal groups which they've outlived.

And, and again, I think there's a certain logic to that, right?

Modernism has definitely conquered these people's lands, and they're, they're

You know, the smaller tribes are not able to, to, you know, be self-determining and to help themselves, um, to, to interact with, with what they need to interact with to, to get those goods, right?

But it's, it's sort of like you think about something like a, like a fig tree, um, that takes a couple of years before figs...

You know, I think it takes three to five years before figs even start producing at all.

Um, or, or olive trees, right?

Olive trees famously take 50 years before they're at full production, okay?

That's a long time to care for an olive tree, right, before it gets to full olive oil production.

And so if you said, "Well, we have a rule, and the rule is we're gonna cut down all the olive trees at year three," right, "and see if there's any value in them."

Well, friends, you would not get, you would not get olive oil.

You would not get the fruit that this plant gives you when it matures.

Okay?

Um, and, and, and as a result of that, you know, people, people don't ... They don't have a framework for saying, "No, we need to stay the course. We need to keep on investing small amounts of money," right?

Um, again, a l- a lot of this comes to us from, you know, from that tribal village where there wasn't really a cash economy, and so you needed these events to kind of stimulate demand, 'cause you're cut off from the outside world.

The problem that these people are facing is not, "Hey, we need to stimulate demand," and so these rituals get, get disordered.

Um, but that's not, that's not a problem inherently with the ritual.

It's how do we ke- co- keep people from defecting, right?

'Cause that's exactly what the creative king maker says will happen.

If you don't, if you don't put your money in to the structure, if you don't, um, if you don't irreversibly pledge assets to the thing that
you're all doing together, then you're gonna defect, because the cost of defection is lower than, than the, the assets that you've committed.

And so, um, in conclusion, I know I've gone a little bit, little bit longer than I normally talk, but we started late.

So thank you everybody for, uh, for, for being with me on this, uh, this, the, the free public version of the Great Houses Forum, and we will
be back next week to talk more about what it looks like to, to think about trust and, and, and how to build trust at a, at a kinship level.