George Kinder — The Three Domains of Freedom: Redefining Life, Money, and Mindfulness with George Kinder

[00:00:00] George Kinder: There’s a deeper aspect to it that’s astonishing and you touch on it. When you say contemplative, what I realized over the years of doing it is that, and nobody’s talked about this, you can’t find it on the web. First of all, the only moment we’ve ever experienced in our entire lives is the present moment right now.

[00:00:17] George Kinder: This it right here. So what mindfulness is, it’s amazing. It’s a practice of the mastery of this moment. It’s astonishing. It should be taught in every school.

[00:00:33] Intro: Do you think money takes up more life space than it should? On this show, we discuss with and share stories from artists, authors, entrepreneurs, and advisors about how they mindfully minimize the time and energy spent thinking about money. Join your host, Jonathan DeYoe, and learn how to put money in its place and get more out of life.[00:01:00]

[00:01:03] Jonathan DeYoe: Hey, welcome back on this episode of the Mindful Money Podcast. I’m chatting again with George Kinder. After my brother died in 2021, I asked George to be my very first guest on the Mindful Money Podcast, and he joined me for that conversation two and a half years ago. I said, thank you. Then I say, thank you again so much.

[00:01:19] Jonathan DeYoe: You helped me launch the podcast and it’s been a labor of love this whole time. For those of you who don’t know him, George is an author and international thought leader in financial services. He’s kind of known as the father of life planning. He’s authored three books about money. He’s revolutionized client-centered financial advice through training thousands of advisors on on life planning across 30 countries and six continents.

[00:01:46] Jonathan DeYoe: It’s amazing. He’s also a mindfulness teacher for 35 years. Kinder’s led weekly meditation retreats and residential retreats around the world. Last time he was on the podcast, we introduced his poetry reflections on Spectacle Pond. I’ve been [00:02:00] getting those emails, and if you’re not subscribed, you should subscribe, and they come out pretty regularly every week.

[00:02:04] Jonathan DeYoe: I want to talk to him about the latest book, the Three Domains of Freedom, which he inspires us to discover, the freedom of each moment, the freedom to pursue our life purpose, and the freedoms of civilization. And we’re gonna wrap probably with this concept that he introduces called The Fiduciary in all things Fiat, advocating this universal sustainability.

[00:02:25] Jonathan DeYoe: And I wanna talk about that and how, how that comes about. George, welcome back to the Mindful Money Podcast.

[00:02:31] George Kinder: Uh, so good to be back, Jonathan, and really good to hear what you’ve accomplished over the last two and a half years, and unbelievable that in that short amount of time and in that same amount of time, I’ve completed a number of books and here we are with this big one that’s actually really very small.

[00:02:47] George Kinder: It’s a very easy, brief, hopefully inspiring volume for people.

[00:02:51] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, I hope it’s inspiring. I mean, I, I think that’s at the bottom line. I think that’s what you’re doing. You’re, you’re trying to inspire some pretty. Pretty major change in how we think about [00:03:00] things. But before we dig into it, remind us where’s home?

[00:03:03] Jonathan DeYoe: Remind us where you’re calling from.

[00:03:04] George Kinder: Right now I’m in Massachusetts, but I, I do travel the world. As you heard, I taught advisors and from over 30, 30 countries, but I spent a lot of time in Hawaii, which is just delightful. If I discovered where Jonathan lives before that, I might have. Just saddled in one place, but I, so I spent a lot of time in Massachusetts and Hawaii, and then the last 15 years or so, I’ve spent a good deal of time in the United Kingdom as well, allowing me to move into Europe some.

[00:03:31] Jonathan DeYoe: Did you grow up in, on the East Coast? Is that, do I remember that right?

[00:03:34] George Kinder: I actually, I was born in the Appalachian Hills. I was born in West Virginia and lived just across the river, the Ohio River in rural Ohio. And that was my life until I got sent off to school, to private school at one of these great East Coast schools.

[00:03:51] George Kinder: And the rest is history. I mean, the culture over here was just stunning to me. Yeah. I never experienced anything like it, and so I, I stayed in the Cambridge area [00:04:00] mostly. I,

[00:04:01] Jonathan DeYoe: I went from South Dakota to Berkeley and it was shocking. But yeah, I remember joining 24 Hour Fitness and I was sitting next to, on a treadmill next to Robert Reich, who I think was like, I was like, that’s so amazing.

[00:04:12] Jonathan DeYoe: You can go to the doctor’s office running a Nobel Prize winners. It’s totally different. Totally different world. Love it.

[00:04:15] George Kinder: He was a client of mine, one of my first tech clients in Cambridge, and no kidding. To get in touch with him. ’cause I, I think his work is really extraordinary, but we haven’t touched base since then.

[00:04:27] George Kinder: But it was, yeah, he’s quite a fellow.

[00:04:29] Jonathan DeYoe: So you’ve already answered like the core guest questions. We try to normalize the conversation about money and we went through that the last time we had you on. So I kind of wanna start with something we touched on because I think it leads into the book, right? I remember that you said.

[00:04:43] Jonathan DeYoe: You never wanted to go to work. You wanted to live an artistic and a spiritual life, and that that aligns Right. I understand that. I believe that I, I, I sort of pursued that myself. But you knew you needed to have money to make it happen. So do I have that right as part of the origin story? That’s

[00:04:59] George Kinder: right

[00:04:59] Jonathan DeYoe: on.[00:05:00]

[00:05:00] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. You also noticed in, in your tax work early on that other people had kind of a similar thing. They knew they had to have money and they caught themselves. They wanted the freedom, but right now they had to do this to get to the freedom, right. Is that right as well?

[00:05:14] George Kinder: That’s right.

[00:05:14] Jonathan DeYoe: That’s right. So I wanna go back to the financialization stuff.

[00:05:19] Jonathan DeYoe: I think that one of the things that creates this lack of freedom is we’ve just labeled everything with a dollar sign. Yeah. And. How does that affect our collective moment to moment awareness? How does it affect our family lives? How does it affect the communities and cultures?

[00:05:34] George Kinder: Yeah, I mean, it’s huge and it’s why I think both you and I were called.

[00:05:38] George Kinder: I. To that world, even though we had this other world that we were also being called to, and I did it from necessity, I had to make a living and then, and as to most people, right? It’s not like I’m unusual in that way, but what I tried to do then was to, I’m noticing that there was this split not only inside of me, but inside of just [00:06:00] about everybody I met, and that that’s continued when we’ve done.

[00:06:03] George Kinder: Life plans for people, even for people who are, uh, planners themselves reasonably, both reasonably well off and reasonably well educated. You think, Hey, they’re planners. They can figure it out. They can do it all themselves, and every single one of them, there’s not an exception, was missing something. I mean, it happens in so many different ways and you see it in the news all the time.

[00:06:24] George Kinder: And we’ve got now this huge split between the billionaire population and the rest of us in a way. And for decades there’s been this thing about you raise my taxes and I’m a billionaire and I’m gonna tell everybody through the media that all your taxes is gonna be raised too. And then we all get frightened and ’cause it’s our money and we wanna.

[00:06:43] George Kinder: Protect it, and so things get pretty skewed and skewed away from the truth and away from this deeper truth inside of ourselves. And away from what is trust, what we really [00:07:00] trust, what’s trustworthy. I think that word is a very important word to me, as you know, and trustworthy. And then the other word that’s very important to me is freedom.

[00:07:08] George Kinder: So this recognition early on for me was I’m not living in freedom when I feel constrained to do these things now. It ends up being that it’s a really rich life to test yourself, to struggle. And if you keep your eyes on the prone eyes, you’ll get there. But it takes work to to get there. And I think the.

[00:07:30] George Kinder: The reason that I wrote this book is I tried to put the whole notion of freedom and trustworthy in a way on multiple different levels down to each moment for ourselves, down to this kind of hero’s journey, the story that we all want to be on, that we identify who we really want to be or wish to be or wish we had been.

[00:07:50] George Kinder: And then the third one is, gosh, if it doesn’t happen with the species. If we don’t address the issues with money or whatever it is, [00:08:00] trustworthiness with the species and with our large institutions, what we’re finding is that we have, and there’s a term in business, and I know you know it, but maybe not all of your audience does.

[00:08:09] George Kinder: It’s called scalable. I. And as business gets scalable, what’s happened is that business has gotten scalable to a global dimension. Well, most economists will tell you that virtually every business has externalities to it, meaning unintended consequences. They call them negative externalities. And the classic example is the oil companies didn’t mean to burn up the earth.

[00:08:32] George Kinder: They knew there’d be a little pollution here and there, but they didn’t mean to burn up the earth. Well, now it’s gone scalable to the whole. Globe and that’s what’s happening. So this is, I think it’s a really exciting time when you talk about all these different elements. It’s a really exciting time because it’s challenging us as human beings to take that on and go, no, none on my watch.

[00:08:54] George Kinder: This is not for my kids and my grandkids. We’re gonna fix this.

[00:08:58] Jonathan DeYoe: It seems like, and, and [00:09:00] maybe, maybe this is fantasy, but it seems like it’s escalated. It seems like it’s gotten faster. It seems like we are less connected to our center. We are less connected to the things that are most important to us. And you see this in, in depression, in suicide, in divorce, and you see this in so many things.

[00:09:19] Jonathan DeYoe: We’re less happy, we have less wellbeing. And yet I’m scrolling and I’m on YouTube and there’s all this talk about wellbeing and everyone’s saying we should do this and try this and do this, and do this and do this. Where do you begin, like as an individual in this culture, where do you begin to sort of find your ground with all of this?

[00:09:38] Jonathan DeYoe: With freedom, like how do you get there?

[00:09:40] George Kinder: Gosh. You, you have, you have six hours. What I’m appreciating is what’s happened in two and a half years to you, Jonathan? I mean that, what a question. What a profound question. What a huge question. And thank you for framing it like that. And you and I are in communities where I.

[00:09:57] George Kinder: We find people who are saying, oh, it’s [00:10:00] getting so much better. Oh yeah. I mean, you can see all this is happening and you know, there are, there are good things that are happening, but you and I also, because we live in this other world and we’re really cognizant of it, we see, oh boy, there’s some dark stuff happening.

[00:10:12] George Kinder: And it seems to be, that seems to be strengthening. So there’s a lot of different, different ways. The reason I wrote the book was I thought. There are solutions to this, and the thing is that we can’t take our eyes off our own prize. We need to live our life so that we’re flourishing, and that’s what your life is.

[00:10:30] George Kinder: Yours is all about, like you’re talking about suicide and depression and divorce and all this. If you lead a life that is very constrained and it’s very difficult both to find peace inside yourself. That constrained quality, even with hamlets, you know, I could find, you know, myself in a nutshell, or I could find happiness, whatever.

[00:10:51] George Kinder: And the bigger issue of civilization where I feel like we, I can’t possibly take on that. There’s 8 billion people, you know? Mm-Hmm. Elon [00:11:00] Musk is practically a trillionaire. You know? I mean, it’s like, how can I take all this on? And I thought, no, no, that’s, I think we can, and, and you ask where do you begin?

[00:11:11] George Kinder: Yeah, and I think that what I love about the question is your honesty, and you’re seeing clearly that there’s a real problem here. And I think not everybody sees that. And so a lot of people say, well just go inside and be a nice person, and that’s part of it. That’s part of it. You like one bad apple, right.

[00:11:28] George Kinder: In a, you know, I grew up in the, in the country. I dunno if you probably had apples in your George. We, we certainly did. I have apples right now in my yard. There you go. And one bad apple in your, in your bush old basket. And it spoils the lot. Right. And all it takes is one person of greed and. And rage and self-centered arrogance to spoil a law.

[00:11:49] George Kinder: So we need to work in, I think, in three areas. I think that this area of, um, kindness and, and meditation and mindfulness, [00:12:00] prayer, contemplative activity, that whatever your version of it is, secular, religious, somewhere in between. That it, it’s great. You know, it’s

[00:12:09] Jonathan DeYoe: just wonderful to grow in that way. Do you know as like a percentage of the population, how many people have a contemplative practice of some kind?

[00:12:16] Jonathan DeYoe: How many people are reflective? I think that’s, that’s one of the things that we, I grew up going to church and I remember being 10 and I, I. Like, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, but I was being reflective. Right. And I don’t think people do it anymore. People, my, I didn’t send my kids to church. I feel terrible about it.

[00:12:31] Jonathan DeYoe: They don’t. I’m wait, and this is, I’m, wow. I’m just, I’m veering right now. But I, my kids, when my kids have their long, dark night of the soul, they will only have one thing to do. They’ll say, dad, what the hell’s going on? I am that contact point. Yeah. Because I’m like, I’m a spiritual kid in the family. Right.

[00:12:50] Jonathan DeYoe: But we didn’t send ’em to church. They don’t have anything Right. To gird them in that difficulty.

[00:12:55] George Kinder: Right.

[00:12:56] Jonathan DeYoe: That’s gotta be like normal Gen Z issue, like no one has it. [00:13:00]

[00:13:00] George Kinder: Yeah. Yeah,

[00:13:01] Jonathan DeYoe: terrifies me. Terrifies me.

[00:13:03] George Kinder: Yeah. And you can feel it in TikTok when you get on TikTok. And again, there’s some good stuff there, but it Yeah, you could, you could feel that, and my kids to some extent too, although we modeled a great deal of practice, both Kathy and I meditate a lot, and they see that and we talk to ’em about it.

[00:13:18] George Kinder: I think that the term mindfulness is out so much in the secular community. You have the spiritual community, but often tied into politics in a, in a strange way. That’s very, very. Challenging. Very difficult, I think for, for the future of humanity, frankly. But I think that there are things that, that mindfulness is something you, you can begin to talk about.

[00:13:39] George Kinder: Most people when they think about mindfulness, you know, you know this, I mean, they, they think it’s about improving your health. I. I mean, it is. Yep. They think it’s about lowering your stress. It is. They think it’s about longevity and audience, all those things. But you know, there’s a deeper aspect to it that’s astonishing and you, you touch on it when you say contemplative, what I realized over the years of [00:14:00] doing it is that, and nobody talked about this, you can’t find it on the web.

[00:14:04] George Kinder: First of all, the only moment we’ve ever experienced in our entire lives is the present moment. Right now, this it right here. So what mindfulness is, it’s amazing. It’s a practice of the mastery of this moment. It’s astonishing. It should be taught in every school because it’s every moment of our life. So I think that is increasing.

[00:14:26] George Kinder: People are aware of it. It’s not as woowoo as it once was. People actually are, corporations are using it. Government’s taking it on at various levels. We need a lot more of it. And that’s what you’re seeing.

[00:14:38] Jonathan DeYoe: Is that good? I mean, the fact that Google is teaching mindfulness practices, is that good or is that co-opting for?

[00:14:46] Jonathan DeYoe: Profitability. I teach mindfulness classes. You teach. So mindfulness is good learning. Any of it’s good, right? But Right. It’s also intention, right? The intention going in matters. I think that’s important.

[00:14:58] George Kinder: So you’ve been going through a [00:15:00] program to, to teach more. I. Teach mindfulness more, and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve always framed for my clients.

[00:15:06] George Kinder: You’ll see, yeah. I mean, whether it’s Google or you know, it’s online, you go, oh, just take a minute and just be quiet and, or take five minutes and be quiet. And those are, that’s fine. That actually, I think that helps, but it’s nothing compared to a really deep contemplative experience. Yeah. Yeah. And for that, you need at least, even if, if you’re a beginner, you really need 15 or 20 minutes to get a day.

[00:15:30] George Kinder: A depth enough that you feel, wow, this is amazing. This is still, this is cool. And the more that you do that, the cool thing about it is that it’s a cumulative process because what you’re doing is you’re re habituating the mind. The mind is used to going out and grabbing all this stuff at it wants, or it’s hungry for, or it’s a verse to, and you’re, you’re changing all of that by just coming back to the moment.

[00:15:57] George Kinder: Yep. You just, no, no, I have control. [00:16:00] Not this running of the mind. And then that deepens you. The more you do that, you go on a week long retreat and you find incredible depths that will occur as a consequence.

[00:16:09] Jonathan DeYoe: There’s this arc, and I’m, I’m learning it. You already know it, but the idea is you do this, you spend the time, you do 20 minutes a day, and you do get to know yourself very well, but then you realize.

[00:16:19] Jonathan DeYoe: Yourself isn’t, that’s not the most important thing. Like there’s this interconnectivity, you know, what is it? Dependent co origination, depending on which translation you, you use from the Buddhist text, right? That interdependency you are. Just a guy who has desires and I want stuff and I don’t want stuff.

[00:16:38] Jonathan DeYoe: And guess what? That guy also wants stuff and doesn’t want, and that guy wants, and that woman wants stuff, doesn’t want. And you start to say, oh, we’re all in this soup. Yeah. We’re all in this soup together. Right. And by realizing that, by developing compassion, by developing the kindness, suddenly, you know, love is just everywhere.

[00:16:56] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. And it seems like that’s what you’re trying to inspire with the three [00:17:00] levels of freedom. Yeah. So the first step, I think you’ve already said this, the first step is for us to be contemplative ourselves. Spend the 20 minutes, do that for a year, see what happens, right. Then what? Then how do we develop that into the next step?

[00:17:15] George Kinder: Well, the subtitle with the three, it’s called The Three Domains of Freedom, and the subtitle is, each Moment is Yours. So just kind of claiming that is really quite something to realize that, oh, I can claim that. And the 20 minutes a day gives us that greater. Level of confidence so that, yeah, I can do this at any time.

[00:17:33] George Kinder: I can drop in and claim it. And that means one of the cool things about that is that place of no self that you’re describing, which is what you move towards and you never. Get there entirely because you’ve got, you’ve still got a body that’s aging, that is, you know, gonna get sick and go to the hospital, is gonna die at some point, or that’s raising the kids.

[00:17:54] George Kinder: There’s all that stuff that comes up, but the, but you get more and more understanding that [00:18:00] way, and that’s wisdom. That really has great wisdom to it. And it means that you have greater access to all virtues. So you’ve got more courage. You. Hmm. Started out with this bold statement about what a terrible mess we’re all in.

[00:18:13] George Kinder: I agree completely. There’s a craziness in the world that we never imagined when we were children would be here. And it takes courage to deal with that. It takes patience to deal with that. It takes kindness to change it. So it takes all these different virtues and those virtues you have greater access to as you deepen this practice.

[00:18:33] George Kinder: But I actually often, I. Suggest that someone, first of all, even though this is the first domain of freedom, because it’s every single moment of our life, but I actually often suggest that the first thing that is really helpful to do is to take care of that second domain.

[00:18:52] Jonathan DeYoe: Hmm. Okay. Life preference.

[00:18:54] George Kinder: You know, you, you were born thinking you were gonna become this particular kind of person.

[00:18:59] George Kinder: And [00:19:00] you wanna be that person. And if you aren’t that person, then you’re filled with much more self-storage. You’re filled with much more desire and aversion and you know you’re frustrated and you’re neurotic and all these things because you, so something’s keeping you from being able to be that person and usually it’s them.

[00:19:16] George Kinder: Out there sometimes, always bit. Yep. Unless we’re terribly depressive, in which case it’s me. And then that’s dangerous in, in its own way. Of course. So what I suggest first is actually get life plan. Find someone who actually does life planning and who knows money as you and I talk about it, so that they know that money is really their meant for you to design and then live into your dream of freedom.

[00:19:41] George Kinder: And it doesn’t mean that you get to be as wealthy as Yvonne or the Queen was, but you look at what you really need, what would give you that freedom, but in a way where you’re kind of like who you are right now. So it’s not that different. So it’s not like just not something impossible to do. And a [00:20:00] good life planner can put you on that path and make sure that that’s happening, and then you have so much more kind of vitality, optimism.

[00:20:08] George Kinder: Clarity of seeing that it’s easier to do these other two tasks, which are tougher. So one of them that we’ve been talking about is. Every day do that 20 minutes and as much more of it as you can, the more you can’t do too much in my opinion. And then the other one is this world that is all twisted up.

[00:20:26] George Kinder: How do we see it clearly enough that we can take on the changes that are necessary against enormous powers that are out there? Because if we don’t make those changes, scientists are now saying. There’s a good chance we’ll go extinct in the next a hundred years. I mean, that’s in Scientific American. I mean, it’s incredible that we’d, we’d be heading toward that.

[00:20:48] George Kinder: So how do we take that on and

[00:20:50] Jonathan DeYoe: just say, Nope, there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. And you’ve done this with clients, right? So the idea that you can sit down with somebody who isn’t self-aware, who doesn’t [00:21:00] meditate, and then I guess there is a process. The life planning process is, you know, it’s written.

[00:21:04] Jonathan DeYoe: So there’s a process. Don’t, they have to have some self-awareness. So you have to meditate and have self-awareness in order to do the life plan. Right? But then you have to do the life plan to free the space for the, for the meditation and for the, for the self-awareness. Little chicken and egg problem there.

[00:21:20] George Kinder: You probably on our last. We talked briefly about the three questions that often I’ll introduce, and it’s part of the what we call evoke and the registered life planner programs and designation. And the third question there is a classic. So in this, you, you look at what if I had all the money I needed, and then you look at, oh my God, what if I only have five to 10 years left to live?

[00:21:43] George Kinder: And then the final one is this, is it 24 hours left to live? What did you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do? And that that 24 hours left to live is a kind of contemplation. That Medieval monks did in the West [00:22:00] and that throughout the Buddhist world, they’ve done it throughout the Hindu world, they’ve done it.

[00:22:03] George Kinder: So you’ll see these images of skulls and all that kind of stuff, and the crypts beneath the medieval monsters in Europe. And so we actually ask people that question, 24 hours left. Yeah, what did you miss? Who’d you not get to be? And there’s a percentage of people that have trouble going there, but most people get really reflective there.

[00:22:24] George Kinder: They just do. And it comes down to some stuff that’s really touchingly human or was aspirational in their early life, and they haven’t really managed to get to it. So relationships are huge that they come up. Yeah, family comes up a great deal, but you also get people who really wanted to contribute something to the world in a way it didn’t get to.

[00:22:44] George Kinder: So whatever that legacy was, whether it was reaching out in their community or it was now. Doing a totally new brand of TikTok, so that actually gets to people in some way or writing the Great American novel or whatever. Or [00:23:00] or doing some, or acts of kindness, greater acts of kindness, that they were too rigidified in their job to be able to actually have the generous nature they feel outside of it.

[00:23:09] George Kinder: So we get them in the life planning process to actually reflect on. What is the meaning of their life? What would be the most meaningful life that they could have? And yeah, they’re, they’re not as, they’re not gonna be as developed in that, as mature in that really as someone who’s done a lot of spiritual practice.

[00:23:27] George Kinder: But it’s gonna point them in the direction very strongly. And then a great advisor’s gonna say, that’s. You’re meant for that. That’s your life, and we can make that happen. And support and love

[00:23:39] Jonathan DeYoe: and Yeah,

[00:23:39] George Kinder: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All of that. And then as they’re flourishing, they’re actually experiencing more moments because they’re no longer kind of blaming themselves or blaming other people or feeling trapped.

[00:23:51] George Kinder: They’re realizing even if they’re not there yet, they’re on the path. They’re making it happen. They’re not gonna get stopped. Nobody’s gonna stop them once they see what this life looks like. [00:24:00]

[00:24:00] Jonathan DeYoe: I think we need to turn towards the third domain Yeah. Of freedom and dig into the, to civilization a bit. It’s almost aspirational, almost utopian to read.

[00:24:10] Jonathan DeYoe: And so just explain the third domain and, and some of the steps involved. I.

[00:24:14] George Kinder: So the third domain is the one, I mean, I, I put it in there intentionally. It’s the last thing you read on the cover of the book and it’s that, you know, so you go, yeah, I can understand. Each woman is mind, kind of, and my life is, well, that’s cool.

[00:24:27] George Kinder: Yeah, I’d love that. Civilization is mine. What? Wait a minute. You know, with all the powers out there. And so I, I put it in there intentionally because in the book and in the book I, I did it intentional so that you’re developing this greater and greater strength of confidence that I can be here in the moment.

[00:24:45] George Kinder: I can take that on. That can be a practice I want that I. For my life and for everybody’s life. It’s what a cool thing. And then I want my own life to be there. So now we get to civilization and, and I touched some of the tough stuff that you just mentioned. [00:25:00] I, I touched that we passed the, the Civil Rights Act, what, in 1964 was it?

[00:25:05] George Kinder: And it looked like we’re maybe getting somewhere and we elected a, our first black president. Astonishing two terms. And then the very next president was probably the most racist president we’ve had. In well over a hundred years and you go, oh, did we really get anywhere? Right Earth Day, 1970, I think it was the first 70, 72, somewhere back there.

[00:25:26] George Kinder: I was there, but I can’t remember the year exactly. But you know, and so we go, wow. And everybody embraced it and everything. Well, is the earth in a better place than it was then? And you go, oh boy. You know? So civilization’s challenging, but the first thing, I think that’s really helpful. Is to realize the really cool things that we have.

[00:25:46] George Kinder: So there you are in Berkeley, here I am in Massachusetts. We’re talking to each other and we’re making a friendship happen out of Yes. You know, out of, you know, this huge distance. And we know, you know, you get books behind you. I’ve got books behind me. [00:26:00] We, we know there’s stuff that we share in all these ways.

[00:26:03] George Kinder: And then there’s the amazing thing of our cell phones that we can communicate really with the whole world. I’ve got. Quite a bit of white hair. As you can tell, I live longer than most of my ancestors did, right? Already I’ve lived longer than most of my ancestors did. So astonish, she thinks, and we’ve got democracy, which 300 years ago we didn’t.

[00:26:22] George Kinder: So what do I mean? Let’s, I. So the first thing is to, it’s almost a Daniel Pinker kind of thing, to see what is really beautiful and astonishing and incredible that we’ve done. Yes. Celebrate, celebrate some wins. Yes, exactly. Go with it. Get into the joy of it. Celebrate it, experience it. And don’t just be a, an ior kind of putting it down, you know, all the time.

[00:26:47] George Kinder: You know, celebrate it. You’re meant to live with freedom, and this is part of the freedom you’re meant to live with. And then with that clear eye coming from each moment from your life and from the freedoms, you do feel civilization, then look with that cold [00:27:00] eye I. Clear. Seeing at the economic inequality that exists at the racism that exists at the media, that seems to be driving us crazy at the polarization that’s happening.

[00:27:11] George Kinder: And think about it in a critical way. And what I’ve tried to do in the book is to lead you as a reader toward what I think is actually a solution, a pretty neat solution. And you mentioned it early on, and that is this notion of fiduciary, the fiduciary concept in the financial world that. You and I work in, there’s this term fiduciary and you can be it as an investment advisor, you can be it as a CFP, but the notion is that we put our client first has to do often with charging, has to do with holistic nature of the advice has to with life planning, with listening, really putting the client first.

[00:27:48] George Kinder: So what I’ve been trying to do, Jonathan, is actually speak on a lot of podcasts that are, that are financial advisor related. But maybe going to the consumer too. So playing to both [00:28:00] these audiences. ’cause the financial advisors will get it and then the consumer’s gonna go, what is finisher? You wanna explain that to me again?

[00:28:07] George Kinder: Let me explain it again. It’s putting the client first, it’s putting you first. And what I realized was that we have a leg up on this because we know what it is. We wrestle with it. We’re the only profession really that has that as a term and constantly thinking about it and challenging ourselves around it.

[00:28:25] George Kinder: And my notion was what if, what if we simply required of every corporation, nonprofit as well? ’cause they can be one sided and, and not caring. What if we required of every corporation, every nonprofit, and every government to place the interests of their community, the humanity. Of the truth ’cause that’s a big one right now, to place the interest of the truth, the planet, and democracy ahead of their own self-interest.

[00:28:59] George Kinder: Just imagine [00:29:00] that for a moment, that every large institution, all those media sources that are getting you to either be on this side or that side, that they had to put the truth ahead of their own self-interest. And you know, you might scratch your head and go, well, how do you do that? Well, that’s a good question.

[00:29:15] George Kinder: It’s time for us to get down and look at it and make it happen. ’cause we can, we figured out what scientific truth looks like. We figured out what truth in a jury. Looks like we figured out what, what investigative reporting truth looks like. We figured out 50 years ago what a fairness doctrine in media would look like, and we can certainly do this one as well.

[00:29:38] George Kinder: You know the prisoner’s dilemma. Tell me,

[00:29:40] Jonathan DeYoe: I I’ve heard it. I have heard it. Remind me. So the prisoner’s dilemma is if we all decide tomorrow that we’re gonna pursue this fiduciary standard for everybody, then some small group, a small minority would decide, you know what? They’re all gonna do this. I see my little, I can take advantage of that, right?

[00:29:59] Jonathan DeYoe: And I can [00:30:00] take this for me and mine, right? And I just despise the fact that that’s what enters my head when you say, should we all be fiduciaries? I’m like, yeah, but wait. Right. I. I’m instantly guarded about someone gonna take advantage of me.

[00:30:13] George Kinder: You bet. And that, that’s important. And that’s why the next step in this for me is to find a way.

[00:30:19] George Kinder: And if, if anybody in your audience knows, please reach out to me. I wanna get a conference going where we look at the prisoner’s dilemma, where we look at what standards of truth might look like, where we look at what would this vision, how do we craft this vision and get it out to everybody. And then how do we begin the solutions to the problems that are there.

[00:30:38] George Kinder: And because I think we’re amazingly capable of solving this, but let me give a solution to the Prisoner solution just for a moment and then we’ll come back to it. One of the places that I’ve taken this from is Fiduciary. The other place. Mm-Hmm. I’ve taken this from obviously is what’s known as ESG. It’s a form of investing.

[00:30:55] George Kinder: You’re very familiar with it, but ESG is a voluntary. [00:31:00] It’s a voluntary thing that corporations can emphasize in their, in its environment and, and social and governance. Kind of good, good stuff that you want, you know, to your corporations to do maybe, but maybe you don’t, maybe you wanna just make the money, like the prisoner’s dilemma.

[00:31:14] George Kinder: Well, the problem with ESG is twofold. One is it’s not required, it’s voluntary. As long as you’ve got a voluntary fiduciary standard, the prisoner’s dilemma is gonna kill you. Yep. It’s gotta be the law of the land, number one. And number two, the other problem with ESG is it doesn’t include democracy and it doesn’t include the truth.

[00:31:40] George Kinder: Mm-Hmm. Both those things are kind of really basic that we’ve earned the right to them and, and if we don’t emphasize that every corporation and every nonprofit is required to give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And they may be angling in this area, but, well, the truth may be a bell curve.[00:32:00]

[00:32:00] George Kinder: Give us the, that whole bell curve. Tell us where they are. So, th these are things that can be dealt with, but it will be revolutionary, it’ll be huge. And it’ll be many conferences that will occur to figure this out.

[00:32:11] Jonathan DeYoe: Okay. My, my brain just is going all kinds of ways. So, so first I want to, I wanna go to you, you know, the Aspen Ideas Festival?

[00:32:16] Jonathan DeYoe: Sure. Yeah. So the, the idea of a, of a global corporate fiduciary standard, a day’s conversation or a day of a conference at the, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, that I think would play very well. Actually, I think Aspen Ideas Festival would love it. I think that’s something that they would want to do. Um, so there’s one idea.

[00:32:34] Jonathan DeYoe: The second idea was things are coming and going too quickly here in my head. The way outta the prisoner’s dilemma is to make it the law of the land, right? We’re not talking about US law, we’re talking about all corporations everywhere. Who is the law of that land? It sounds like we have to develop. The intergalactic, right?

[00:32:51] Jonathan DeYoe: The Is it un

[00:32:53] George Kinder: Yeah, we, we, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we don’t know yet, and that’s why we need to start getting conferences going and thinking about, yeah. [00:33:00] And we need the corporations to become aware of it so that the ones that are already doing ESG kind of practices begin to go. We can do this. Let’s take leadership on it.

[00:33:09] George Kinder: I mean, we already have a bunch of potential leaders. All the financial advisors who consider themselves fiduciaries, they are potential leaders in this as well. And they get it. Exactly. ’cause they get it. And they can just speak directly to the financial product. Companies that don’t get it, they might think they do, but they don’t really.

[00:33:26] George Kinder: But if you imagine, Jonathan, if every bank and every insurance company in the world was a fiduciary in all things. Would we have a problem with global warming right now? Would we have a polarization of community right now? Would we have a problem in democracy right now? And I don’t think we would. I just think, you know, if they just invested in companies that were fiduciaries in all things, the game’s over.

[00:33:52] Jonathan DeYoe: It is interesting the, the investment dollar does control what companies do. Companies do want the investment dollar. So if you sort of stimulate the investment dollar to pursue [00:34:00] democracy and truth and to force everyone who wants the investment dollar to also pursue democracy and truth, there’s a lot of power there.

[00:34:07] Jonathan DeYoe: If you can harness that power, a lot of power there. The other idea just popped in my head, there are. Places you can go that will tell you that that sort of rate media and rate the partisanship of media. Yes. Right. So there that’s developing, that’s out there. I don’t think people look at it often, but it should be on every, you know, you watch NBC, it should say, this is where NBC falls in the whatever matrix.

[00:34:29] Jonathan DeYoe: Right, right.

[00:34:29] George Kinder: In terms of just kind of the usual market forces developing in terms of that. That’s there. I was just on a site the other day that said, here, here’s how you do it. And pretty cool. I, I wanna talk for a moment about your brain’s going, you’re going, uh, well, it’s gotta be un it’s gotta be global.

[00:34:45] George Kinder: It has to be. However, you know, democracy hasn’t been global for the longest time. Hadn’t been global, but America’s played a leadership. Around that free press hasn’t been global and so we’ve played leadership with it. And it can be that [00:35:00] certain cultures are leadership In regard to this, I wanna go one more place that, ’cause I haven’t shared, I know we haven’t shared, this is a new speech that I’ve been working with and that is this, this notion of what occurred.

[00:35:11] George Kinder: First of all, the industrial revolution exploded 250 years ago, right? And then about 150 years ago, a lot, a lot of people you’ll, you’ll see on the. On the conservative side of things, and people who are just into business will say, I don’t want any government intervention in my crisis. That’s socialism, or that’s communism.

[00:35:30] George Kinder: Okay. So no, no government interference. Well, let me just ask you, it’s another one of my trick questions, but you’ll love it. So what was the single most invasive government intervention. Uh, and involved the most amount of money over the longest period of time in markets ever.

[00:35:54] Jonathan DeYoe: It ha it has to be like the introduction of some kind of tax, doesn’t it?

[00:35:59] George Kinder: In a way. [00:36:00] I’ll answer the question. ’cause if people go all over the place, they never get it, but they will. ’cause I’m gonna get this out. It’s limited liability. Which

[00:36:07] Jonathan DeYoe: was

[00:36:07] George Kinder: a

[00:36:07] Jonathan DeYoe: benefit, was a benefit to the corporation.

[00:36:09] George Kinder: It was a huge benefit. So, huge benefit. Yeah, huge benefit. So all these people saying, I don’t want government intervention, and okay, well, we’ll take away all government intervention.

[00:36:16] George Kinder: We’ll take away that limited liability too. How about that? Ah, and what, and what it brings up is that that limited liability was a social experiment. That we incurred, you know, in the middle of the 19th century. It was developing over a couple hundred years, over that before that. But it really, we, we made every corporation have that limited liability sometime in the 19th century.

[00:36:39] George Kinder: It was a social experiment. I. Done by government, done by a democracy, done by a country that is exploding in capitalism and in industrial growth. And that experiment delivered all these incredible things we’ve been talking about that Steve Pinker talks about Steve or Dan. Yeah. Anyway, Pinker talks [00:37:00] about, and we’ve now come to a point where it’s delivered global warming.

[00:37:04] George Kinder: And it’s delivering threats to democracy and it’s delivering a media structure that is trying to take things over rather than speak the truth. So it has come to the end of its salient period. If it’s great, period and it needs to be tweaked. And if it isn’t tweaked, then we’re all in trouble. So there was a social experiment that took place, and all we wanna do is tweak that at the base.

[00:37:30] Jonathan DeYoe: I, I read a lot. I read a lot, and I’ve never heard anyone say anything about tweaking the limited liability structure underlying corporations ever, ever. Not a single time have ever. Yeah. So that’s, I have to spend some time with that one, that time we don’t have today, but that’s, I’ll be, I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time to come.

[00:37:52] Jonathan DeYoe: Limited liability, that was, that’s, that is the most powerful thing that enabled. Corporations get away with anything they want to get away with because, you know, [00:38:00] the only thing I’m, I’m at loss of is the investment I’ve put into it. And that’s it. I can’t, no one can come after anything, any other part of me.

[00:38:06] George Kinder: And it was a huge gift to the wealthy at the time. This was not a gift. I mean, you know, obviously they had, just like in the, the Reagan revolution in the eighties, there were, and, and all the deregulation that went on, we were thinking idealistically about what it would develop. And similarly with this, this social experiment in the 19th century, yes, we’re gonna be giving.

[00:38:25] George Kinder: This, suddenly everybody’s gonna be able to invest. That weren’t able to invest before because they would’ve been sued if anything went wrong. And now, right, you and I can invest. Now it’s cons gone all the way down to the middle class very, very easily. And so there’s been huge benefits from it. But originally it was a gift to the wealthy.

[00:38:44] George Kinder: I. And a huge gift to the people who wanted to become super wealthy. Uh, it continues to be that gift, but it was a social experiment. And I’m not saying that we want to end it by any means. No, you need it. We need it. It’s how, it’s how we grow and how we make innovations really scalable.

[00:38:59] Jonathan DeYoe: [00:39:00] Yeah, real realizing that some liabilities you should be paying for some liabilities are, are, you know, externalities, as you said, as you introduced earlier, and that they should be included in the calculus.

[00:39:11] Jonathan DeYoe: Like we have to actually have those. In the analysis truth. Wow, that’s, that’s huge. Say I, thanks for that. I think, I think on that note, I think we’re gonna begin this wrap process. I wanna come back to personal a little bit. Yeah. Great. You’ve lived your life very just open. Like I think that, I think everybody, at least in the financial world, knows who you are, knows you know where you live.

[00:39:31] Jonathan DeYoe: ’cause you’ve been on so many podcasts. And is there anything that people don’t know about you that you really think that they should know about you?

[00:39:40] George Kinder: It is been happening over the last couple of years. I, I think I might have told you I got long covid. And I was one of the first people to get covid in the Western world and it ever went away.

[00:39:53] George Kinder: So I don’t, I don’t have internal organ stuff. They can’t find anything. It’s one of the classic long covid stuff, but I have [00:40:00] incredible fatigue that sets in in the afternoon. It’ll come soon enough. And so I’ve got this vitality that, but I’ve got another side that really needs to crash a lot. And so these last two and a half years since you and I met, I.

[00:40:14] George Kinder: I’ve powered in my productive time to get everything out there that people don’t know as much as I can. So I’ve got five books of poetry and photography that you’ve mentioned that were really, those are my legacy. People think of life planning as being my legacy and maybe this civilization work. But you know, I, it was really living like a contemplative in nature and recording it like.

[00:40:35] George Kinder: Walden, like Thore just 10 miles away that that was what really moved me in my life. Other than that, I think I live pretty much like an open book. I mean, my wife and I have a fabulous relationship, but we still fight. You know, we still have bicker so items, but we work it out and and go forward. I don’t know, I think I’ve tried to live like an open book.

[00:40:56] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. Yeah. That’s my experience of you. Let’s ask a harder one [00:41:00] then. What was the last thing you changed your mind about?

[00:41:03] George Kinder: Wow. Boy, that’s a tough one. Last thing I changed my mind about it, it probably something very simple like, what are we gonna have for dinner tonight? It was, if it was a big thing, changed my mind about this limited liability thing.

[00:41:16] George Kinder: Stunned me just when I, when I thought of it just stunned me. Yeah, yeah. And to realize I didn’t realize that it was a, such a huge gift. I mean, other people have, but I, I didn’t realize it was such a huge gift to the wealthy. And what a great argument to use against those who say, socialism, let’s get rid of government.

[00:41:35] George Kinder: You go, okay, let’s take away limited liability. It’s a pretty easy thing to do. We’re in an incredible time. I just wanna close if I can with this. We’re just in an incredible time. We have the capacity as the human species. That’s what civilization is. Civilization is us as a species. And this is why I say get, get in there.

[00:41:53] George Kinder: Civilization is yours. We’re, we’re meant to live within an incredible world. And so [00:42:00] let’s put our 2 cents cents in and let’s make it happen so that our kids and our grandkids really experience that. And, uh, um, so that, I mean, that’s just what it is to be a human being.

[00:42:12] Jonathan DeYoe: George, I just wanna thank so much for coming on the podcast again, tell people how to connect with you.

[00:42:16] Jonathan DeYoe: Where do they find you?

[00:42:17] George Kinder: Great. Yeah. If you, if you’re looking for a life planner, then it’s kinder institute.com. But if you’re looking for all my thought leadership stuff that goes all over the place, including an album on Spotify I didn’t mention, but, uh, album of protest songs, of course, with my daughter London Kinder, but that’s george kinder.com.

[00:42:37] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. Lot of stuff. Beautiful. Yeah. Everything’s gonna be in the show notes. I just, great. Wanna just say sincere appreciation for you. I, I love the work that you’re doing and, uh, keep writing.

[00:42:46] George Kinder: Thank you, my friend.

[00:42:47] Jonathan DeYoe: Yep.

[00:42:47] George Kinder: Good to talk.

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