Guilherme Freire explains why his elite training program uses the classics to cultivate virtue and action in business, and how this can lead to social and political rejuvenation.
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Transcript
Training a new aristocracy (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome back to The Students. So I’m here again in Brazil with Guilherme Freire. He’s a philosopher and something of an influencer, and he runs a company that’s very interesting and unique in Brazil, which is training the future elite of Brazil in philosophy as applied to business. Now—what’s interesting about this is that it’s an approach for how to restore civilization by training a new elite—in an aristocratic pattern, in a philosophical pattern. So I found this very interesting.
So Guilherme, I’d love to hear, first of all, why don’t you give kind of an overview of how do you create a new elite to restore our civilization? I think Brazil has many of the same problems that we have up in the United States.
Guilherme: Yeah. That’s one of the biggest problems we have in the world right now actually, because we lost a lot of the ethos to create a new elite in the world. People don’t want to be associated with the idea of, “I’m a member of an aristocracy.” But really what aristocracy means, and Aristotle used it that way, is just the government of the best. It’s just striving for excellency and having people of excellency ruling.
And so the first thing you need to have an aristocracy is to actually trying to prove your own life to live virtues, to live a life of self-sacrifice, to grow in temperance, self-control to our pleasure, like fortitude, which is to face adversity and increasing adversity. Justice, which is the sense of having proportion and doing your duty, and prudence, which is practical wisdom. Now, if you have all the very famous cardinal virtues, you’re starting to control yourself. Now, if you can control yourself, you can actually achieve a lot of things, and you can start to spread this through the next generation throughout a family. So the family unity, since the Roman times, one of the foremost schools of leadership, of ruling because you need to have the sense of duty to raise the next generation.
In our company is a very natural extension of that because you have people who really, all the good things we have in the world come from labor, come from work, come from the fact that people sacrifice themselves for excellency to actually have to build things. And this culture of builders, once you have someone who’s actually striving toward virtue, they can actually assemble people of excellency within the company. So, the company structure can have a sort of what Aristotle called a mixed monarchy. Now you have a monarch, which is the owner, the CEO of the company. The aristocracy, which is the people of high capacity, next to the CEO, and then you can have a system of merit, of sacrifice, that is a republic.
Because republic actually means—a system in which you grow in responsibility insofar as you grow in service to the organization and in merit. Now, if you have this sort of mixed structure, then the company works as a school of self-sacrifice, and it has to be agile. It has to actually work. You need to deliver stuff, otherwise the company goes bankrupt. Now, if you think of the state, if you have people who are living those virtues, who are tending to the next generation, and who are actually making things work by having high-capacity people, being highly productive and looking toward the common good, towards self-sacrifice, then entrepreneurs can come together to start changing all sorts of things.
Like media could start telling the truth. Imagine that. Media that strives for the truth. Like education institutions, the whole HR system that’s actually today very geared toward bureaucracy and cancellation and whatever. And if they change that, and they’re actually striving toward excellency, then entrepreneurs together can change a whole lot of things, like from local politics to the whole nation.
And so what you’re forming is a new type of aristocracy. It’s not people with wigs in 18th century France. It’s actually you’re selecting people to have a position of power based on how much they want to actually change things for the better, to actually assume responsibility for things. And people have been taught in this bourgeois sort of human rights, bureaucracy, UN sort of the machine mentality, like you shouldn’t strive to be excellent. You shouldn’t strive to be this leader of society.
You actually should hide somewhere, make your own money, turn away from anything that strives toward the good. But this is a very unreflected life. It doesn’t work within the companies because if you just let the bureaucrats run the company, they ruin the company. So it’s not going to work. It doesn’t work in the family because if you just delegate your education to the random public school in your neighborhood, your kids are going to be terribly educated.
And it doesn’t work in a country because you’re just outsourcing everything, and you’re destroying your own country. So, Tocqueville, in the second part of “Democracy in America,” he said how America needed an aristocracy to protect it from the subtle tyranny that could arise from Washington. Now, people don’t tend to think those terms because they tend to think, “Well, but aristocracy, isn’t that destroying my liberty? Isn’t that destroying my freedom?” And it’s quite the opposite because it’s actually people who are highly capable that can protect other people’s freedom or the common good.
If you don’t have people who actually have power, who have capacity, you can’t protect common people. It’s the same in a company because one of the functions of the monarch, Aristotle actually speaks of that in the “Politics” in, I think it’s book 12 or something that he talks about it. One of the functions of the monarch is to actually protect people who are striving toward the common good from the evil elements, from the bad elements within an organization. Because the bad elements, they can lie, they can manipulate, they can destroy things. And if you don’t have a monarchical figure, who is to do away with the oligarchs within an organization?
You don’t have the mechanism to get away from that. So by teaching responsibility, monarchical thinking and responsibility thinking and leadership in this classical sense within companies, the company leader can get rid of the oligarchs, and actually start building beautiful stuff and promoting actually competent people. And if they come together and do that in society, and they’re already doing, our students are doing that in Brazil, they can at least at the local level, start changing things beyond what they thought they were capable of.
The founder against the bureaucrats (07:23)
Wolf: Yeah. So implicit in all of this is something of a thesis of what’s wrong with society and what can be done to fix it. So the diagnosis as I understand it is we have this over-bureaucratization. We have maybe the wrong class of people in charge, this kind of HR bureaucrat. You mentioned the human rights, UN kind of consensus-driven—managerial society that is not only reflected in our political institutions, it’s reflected in the businesses and the corporations.
And there’s actually an alternate way that things could be run, which is maybe kind of an older form of capitalism in a way. Which is where you have the founder, owner, director—character actually as a much more powerful political force within the companies and also within the country. And you’re sort of identifying this—class of people that could be elevated into an aristocracy—and then teaching them the virtues and the skills that would be necessary to first of all elevate them in their companies—and improve their control over their companies—improve the governance of their companies. But in so doing, actually elevate them as a class—relative to the bureaucratic class in society.
Guilherme: Yes. Yes, exactly. And there is some beautiful synergy between what formed Alexander the Great, what made the American growth in the Gilded Age, and what makes a startup grow or all sorts of things. Because Steve Jobs actually, when people ask him what he wanted from AI, he started talking about the mentorship that Aristotle gave to Alexander the Great. Now, this is very interesting because Greece was in this very decadent, read Plato’s dialogues, they’re talking about sex, drunk, and they’re not going anywhere.
And in Greece, and always the civil wars and this self-destructing mentality. And then Aristotle becomes the private tutor of Alexander, and Alexander changes everything. The Book of Maccabees even begins by saying everything was Alexander. Alexander became this new reality, like the Colossus of Rhodes, the beacon of Alexandria, the Library of Alexandria. They come from this Hellenistic world in which the Greek culture just became this dominant culture, like 300 years after Alexander.
They had Greek coins in India. So you’re actually coming from this semi self-destructing manner to this—it’s not like Alexander was perfect. He had a lot of problems, but you have this sudden rise of authority, of competence that happened. And Julius Caesar, when he was actually conceiving the Roman Empire, he based himself on Alexander the Great. Now, Aristotle of course taught his classical political philosophy and taught those virtues, but it’s very interesting because when you look at how a startup works, you actually need authority, agency, you need accountability.
You need this sort of guy who goes in front of the troops like Alexander went in front of the troops. The guy who’s risking his neck to make things work. I went to visit this very rich friend of mine, and he was sleeping at a mattress on the floor because he was moving, he was changing his house, and I was like, “Well, finally. First time I see you with an entrepreneur’s house.” And this sort of mode of self-sacrifice to actually be a father is very similar because the kid’s crying, you have sleepless nights.
The kids, they twist on the floor and you want them to stop eating candy, actually do math, and they spin on the floor like crazy. And so you have this really tough challenge to face because as James Burnham wrote in “The Managerial Elite,” now once oligarchy takes place, it’s very hard to get rid of it. And so within a company or the oligarchs, they attract people who don’t work They’re like those big fishes that have those small fishes beside them, and they’re trying to traffic influence to grow within the organization instead of actually putting in the hard work or innovating or having the best people. So the monarch needs really a lot of inner resilience to expel the oligarchs, and this is actually habitual. You’re fighting entropy on a daily basis.
This is what a lot of what running a company is about is that. And then within a family, you’re always fighting entropy. Your kids want just another party, just another donut, whatever. You’re always fighting entropy. You’re fighting entropy against yourself.
Your cravings are against what’s going to forge you. I practice jujitsu. There’s not a single day I went to jujitsu that I didn’t feel lazy about going, that I “Oh, really, I need to get a beating today. I need to go.” So actually, you are always in a situation where you have to grow in this resilience to change things.
And the same problem happens in politics because people are seeing government as something that’s entirely different. It has nothing to do with. But if you look at the managerial elite, the current oligarchical system, it’s a bunch of parasites taking hold of institutions that were supposed to—some of them were badly created, but some of them were supposed to be good in their origin. We even lost that origin already. And you lost the sort of feeling of Baron Stanford wants to make a university out of his farmhouse, and the university just starts to pop out, like—this sort of free spirit.
And even more so, if you actually start to get rid of the bad elements in a company, why couldn’t you do that the same in the country? Well, you could say the challenge in the country is quite big. Yeah, sure. But that’s the whole point. Once you have a lot of people who have a lot of influence and who are doing that in their organizations, and they’re coming together instead of just fighting for their egos, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re having a shared knowledge project,” they’re capable of a lot of stuff.
They’re capable of infinite types of changes.
Getting business elites to act together (14:30)
Wolf: I’m curious about that point in particular. How do you get the stereotype of the business elite kind of person who does really well in business, who succeeds at that, is that they are going to be very sort of selfish. They’re going to have a hard time coordinating with other business elites. There are a lot of big egos involved. And is that sort of how you see the role of the kind of self-sacrificial development of those virtues that they enable that kind of coordination?
Or more generally, how do you overcome that kind of coordination issue? Because I think, Peter Thiel had some interesting ideas about this, sort of reflecting on PayPal and other companies, that you can get these really A-player guys—but you usually can only get one in any given organization—because they have a very hard time coordinating with each other. Can you comment a little bit on that? How do you actually get these—business elites to not just act as business elites acting selfishly, but act together—as an aristocracy?
Guilherme: Yeah. So, in some of our groups of students, and today in Brazil, we have 2,000 business owners here as students, and out of the 20 biggest entrepreneurial families in Brazil, 12 have been through the classes. So, those are very prominent people. People didn’t believe it was going to be possible because when we started, we opened our headquarters in Faria Lima, which is the financial district here. It’s like Wall Street, the equivalent of Wall Street in Brazil.
And actually, when I decided to go to Faria Lima was in one of the dinners, and one guy was like, “Yeah, Guilherme, very nice, virtuous, changing the country, but Faria Lima is lost. That place is lost. There’s no hope.” And I was like, “Oh, great. So I’m going to open a company in Faria Lima.”
So we’re going straight to Barad-dûr. Where the ring was forged, that’s where it’s supposed to be destroyed. And your point about it’s something that’s very real because there’s this sort of ghost of Atlas Shrugged, because the whole point of Atlas Shrugged is that they’re going away, they’re leaving. “Yeah, I’m very competent, so I don’t care about you guys. Bye.”
But this is, of course, the opposite of the Socratic ethos, because, in Plato’s cave, if you leave the cave, the next step that you go back to cave to take the other guys outside of the cave. That was Plato’s whole point, because there is no point in just living a life in which you opt out, you tap out of the battle. If you want business battle, you definitely, first of all, you never win the business battle because bigger battles will always be happening. You definitely have to win the family battle also, but you have to win the societal battle because the company is within the country, and the country is within a civilization. You can’t escape from the problem.
You can’t just think, “Oh, I’m going to change countries,” because the next country is going to suffer from the same problems, and you’re always leaving. Of course, in the United States, there are people who leave New York because, “Oh, New York’s declining, and so we’re going to Texas.” And I was in Texas, and the guy was like, “I’m going to Montana because Texas is declining.” Then you’re going to, of course, leave Montana because Montana is declining. And then it doesn’t end.
So—what do we do for our students? Instead of thinking of where do I live, how do I escape to the safer point, how do I stop escaping, stop planning my ski trip to Europe and actually do the fight. And I actually posted the students some battles. There is a stereotype here, it’s a funny one, that they fire the HR director when they start studying here. It’s not necessary, but hey, you can’t really have an HR director that’s against you—in the company, and doesn’t have a concept of virtue, of excellency, of human capital, if he doesn’t understand that.
But your company’s self-destructing whether you realize it. And that’s one of the reasons the guy just wants to leave his own company, is that his own company starts to become unbearable for himself, which is wild. But it’s true, and he has to prevent that. And once he sort of, “Yeah, I fired my HR where I selected a new HR, which is actually good HR. My company’s actually looking toward those good people.”
And I think part of why the A players, they leave, is that, there is a problem, talent is rare, I think there is that, but part of the problem they leave is that the bureaucracy within those companies, they start fighting against those a players. And they don’t want to fight against the machine. And actually, the entrepreneur should be fighting against the machine for the A player. It’s a—it’s a different mentality. And what we teach our students that, okay, so you fired your HR, you’re actually hiring the great kids that were not being hired anymore.
Sales is not a bad word, merit is not a bad word anymore. Virtue is not a bad word anymore. You bring back all those stuff. But now you have this other friend who’s also entrepreneur. Now, you guys are studying together because that’s the whole point of creating the classes.
You’re meeting, it’s in person, so forth. Why don’t you guys buy a school or create a school, get rid of all the bad teachers because they are indoctrinating your kid. They’re giving the worst education possible to your kid. They’re teaching whatever to your kid, like George Washington was George Floyd. They can create all sorts of weird combos—for kids.
And yeah, we’re actually going to teach math and the great classics and actually stuff that you use at a company. Not that you’re going to create a utilitarian education, but some of our students, they started buying schools and reforming schools, and the kids are playing classical music, fighting jujitsu, reading great books, and studying hard math. And what happens now is that your kid’s not being indoctrinated, so half of your problems toward the next generation, they’re stopping. And then you can buy a local media, and the media starts telling the truth. So another huge part of your problems, they’re not there anymore because, A, you’re actually very rich, and your friends are very rich, and the other guy who’s in class is very rich, and sort of the journalist who’s trying to destroy you, why don’t you hire good journalists for the same local media, the piece of media?
And now you have good local journalists, and why don’t you ask of your local politicians, they actually select competent people and not machine weirdos. And at a local level, everything starts to change. Your whole life around your company changes really fast. So the company changes, your family changes, everything changes really fast, but you’re not going to be able to do that without a serious study, without really going and delving deeply into the correct books for that. Because it’s not like you have to be a full-time intellectual to do those reforms, but you need the right theory, and you need to justify that.
There’s this dialogue by Plato called “Laches,” and Laches is a very brave general, he lives courage, but he doesn’t know how to argue in defense of courage.
And then he faces a sophist, and a sophist just wrecks Laches in a debate. But you can see that Laches is actually the right guy. He’s correct, but he’s very easily prey to the sophist. And so this dialogue is actually Plato’s whole point is that you need the philosophical education. Now, we use the word actually formation.
People use formation for military purpose, like in the United States, but the idea is the German word bilden, like to forge people, to actually assemble them. And there was this really beautiful idea in Prussia of bilden, of we’re going to forge this next generation of Junkers, of those young aristocrats, and they’re going to work in industry and the military, and they’re going to fight all those things. And Prussia really punched above its weight because of that. And so this idea that, “No, I’m going to create this junker class,” it’s very powerful. So if you start going to this direction with the right theory, and Confucius implanted a sort of system that decayed into bureaucracy in China, but in some moments, it was really about forging those virtues to create the best people to run, and China became a dominant power with that.
I’m talking about Song dynasty or—whatever. But if you have all those principles rightly articulated in the right theory, then you can do all that without creating as much of a noise. Because if you’re just using the crass language of current-day politics, you’re doing things that are simultaneously less radical, and they are being less effective, and they’re drawing more attention than if you’re actually doing this like Aristotle would do, in a more—intellectually savvy manner. And I think a lot of our students, we’re not interested in philosophy, like an academic pursuit, like abstract pursuit. We’re actually very interested in reading Spengler and applying that to business, and reading Plato and applying that to business, and the practical application of that.
And that intellectual formation is in the community that’s formed. It’s a synergy of a lot of stuff, right? But the synergy of all those things, they actually tend to transform the business leader from just planning my ski trip to like, “No, I’m leader, at least of this community.” At least of the, I don’t know, tech guys from my city, I actually getting them together to do incredible projects. So, we break that by the formation.
Reversing the abdication (25:23)
Wolf: Right. Interesting. It’s almost the opposite of the abdication process that is—One way to read the decline of aristocracy, the decline of monarchy over the past several hundred years is this kind of progressive abdication as we face these difficulties. The trench fighting against the bureaucracy and so on. In the case of Brazil, obviously, we’ve got the old flag here of—Pedro II—who abdicated because—
Guilherme: Abdicated. He didn’t fight, yeah
Wolf: He just couldn’t be bothered to fight these new-fangled bureaucrats who were—trying to oppose him. But what you’re doing, in a way, is kind of reversing the abdication.
Guilherme: Yes. Yes. Yeah, and half of my school kid colleagues were Japanese, right? And at a very early age, I became obsessed with martial arts. And so Brazil is very famous for jujitsu, and I got into jujitsu.
I started in karate, but I went to jujitsu. And there are a lot of stuff you learn by doing jujitsu, like you have to keep your cool when you’re being strangled. I think that’s one of the—that’s a very interesting thing. And actually, Plato started by doing wrestling. And old leaders were formed like that because they have to keep their cool when everything was falling apart.
And so we got away from this fighting spirit. One of the Valar of “The Silmarillion” of Tolkien, Tulkas is the one, he laughs when he sees the devil because he’s so used to fight that he doesn’t care about one more fight. And the loss of religion, the loss of the sense of mystery, to use the Spenglerian term, really created a society where people fear death above all. And the fear of death weakens them because they’re not seeing beyond death. They’re not thinking of, as Plato would say, the immortality of the soul.
Now, what does that have to do with business? Well, to create a startup, you have to sort of die in a certain sense to see your work come to life. For some years, you go into the cave. You have to emerge from the cave with the company. It’s a cyclical death of the project, of everything.
And you have to actually be predisposed to kill everything you’re building to build it better. There’s this sort of very adventurous mentality. And Brazil was actually founded by the Great Navigations project, which was this entrepreneurial mentality. But Camões, the great poet in Portuguese, he said the Portuguese have two defects. They don’t value their heroes enough, and there is the old guy from Restelo.
The old guy from Restelo is the guy who says everything’s going to not work. Everything’s not working. They’re like, “You’re going to the Great Navigations.” Restelo is the port in Lisbon, and they were leaving for the Great Navigations. And the guy is like, “Yeah, your wives are going to cheat on you when you are outside. The boats are going to sink. You guys are not going anywhere.”
So there’s this sort of defeatist mentality, and the Portuguese have this sort of idea of we have to just appease everyone. Let’s appease everyone. Let’s be friends with everyone, which in some ways came from the alliance with the British, and that’s a long story. And Dom Pedro, he tried to be the appeasing guy. Instead of the heroic spirit of the past, let’s try to appease everyone, and they just exiled him because that’s what when you try to appease evil, evil just kicks you in the butt and exiles you.
So after we lost our monarchy, Brazil fell into this really decadent, oligarchical, agricultural, stagnated structure. Although it’s a very rich country, it’s still a very rich country, it’s run by those socialists, like mob mentality. And this tends to fight against the great entrepreneurs. Now, that’s all well and good, but decadence does happen in society. Julius Caesar came out of the decadent Republic.
Alexander came out of the decadent Athens, or post the decline of Athens.
Charlemagne came after, actually, after Charles Martel, the great empire was fragmented. Alfred the Great, the origin of England, came after the old kingdoms were fragmented, and he had to unite them. So there’s this sense in which actually the call of leadership is the call in the face of adversity. And people in the West, since they were looking at it from a too materialistic, hedonistic, which are bad ideas, even for a company, even for profit, because if you’re too only for the money, you can’t create a company. It just doesn’t work.
You can create a bad company, but you can’t create a great company if you’re only for the money. You have to be for the profit. You have to be for sales. You have to make a profit. But you have to strive for something more than just profit.
And so if you overcome a bit of that, and you’re actually thinking in a sense of purpose, then you’re leaving your own ego, your own little world, and now you’re back into the real world. In the real world, yeah, they have the replicants. You’re sort of plugged to the matrix. They have all sorts of weird stuff going on. But yeah, what if we start like, yeah, we unplug to the matrix, turn away the machine, and start actually breaking some machines.
“Oh, no, you shouldn’t break machines. Oh, that’s terrible.” Go back to the... No, no, actually, I think if I break three or four, this might start working again. And you break three or four machines, and people start to thank you.
They’re like, “Yeah, thank you so much.” So I actually learned that in a company, that you could that in a state, and you could that in your life, because I saw those oligarchs in those big companies, and I was director in a company, and I saw those terrible oligarchs. And you have to expel the bad oligarch. People, they just tell you it’s doom. “You’re going to get a lawsuit. Oh, it’s going to be terrible. You can’t run a company without me,” and whatever.
And you fire the oligarch, and people start thanking you, like, “I didn’t know how you could live like that.” And once you do that, and you actually start promoting competent people, and you see, wow, that actually works, you start thinking, “Why don’t I do that with the whole of society?” Even more profound, Alexander is great. I love it. Instead of trying to vote every election and hoping Alexander rises, how about you be sort of Alexander-like?
At least within your power.
Elite formation vs. mass movements (32:16)
Wolf: So your approach is very, I don’t know, we could call it elitist, right? It’s aristocratic. You’re very much focused on the formation of an elite. You’re focused on what these relatively small number of—very powerful people—are able to do to reform society. Now, that makes a lot of sense, but various other movements, ultimately tackling the same problems, have taken populist approaches—or very more mass approaches, trying to create a big movement.
One that I’m very fond of is Partido Missão here in Brazil. Renan Santos, I think has done a great job kind of building this inspiring, vertically integrated—what is really a mass movement, even though—it’s sort of a segment of the youth right now. And I’d love to hear you comment on the outlook of that kind of strategy versus what you’re talking about, which is this more elite formation strategy. Do you need both? Do they need to work together?
Is yours just dominant? How do you see that relation?
Guilherme: Those two things are very complementary, right? They’re two different angles. But the good thing I see about elite formation, focusing on the elite, is how fast things can move. Like, for instance, I have this student, he’s in mining. He’s mining the rare minerals that have been used for microchips and so forth.
A lot of those are in Brazil, by the way. That’s a big topic because China is trying to grab all of those, and it’s a huge topic right now in Brazil, and one of my students is doing that. So I was talking about create your own school. Stop sending your kids to those schools who are indoctrinating your kids. And he created a school in one month, like from scratch.
Because he has capital. He knows people. He knows how to do business. So if you actually get one guy who’s not like, “Yeah, I’m getting all my money, and I’m spending it for myself and putting my money in some weirdo bank in Switzerland, so people don’t mess with my money. If the United States fall, I leave it.”
What if the guy actually starts doing crazy stuff like that for real, like with his actual money? Now, things start changing really fast. Now, the problem is that there’s a game theory problem because no one wants to be the prisoner who’s the—it’s like an inverted prisoner’s dilemma. No one wants to be the guy who speaks alone, right? In the prisoner’s dilemma, you should be quiet, but let’s invert it, yeah, and you actually are saved if you speak, right?
Inverting it. Now, if you are saved if you speak, no one wants to be the guy who speaks alone, because if you speak alone, you’re going to get persecuted. But that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because the whole point is that the entrepreneur, he fears to do more than just make immediate money, because he fears he’s doing it by himself. But the other guy, he’s fearing the same. He’s actually your friend, and you can actually come together and start doing stuff together.
There’s nothing impeding you from doing that. And I think what we do here is to create the environment and to actually bring the pieces that glues everything together. Now, once you do that, you just can’t change everything because the business guys, they own the media, they own all sorts of stuff. So, and the problem is that the popular mass movements, they’re actually going to be scripted by the previous institutions. There’s no agglomeration of people in Montana.
They have no way to beat “Harvard” or “The New York Times” or be an alternative in any way, shape, or form. The idea doesn’t even apply. They can’t even think in those terms. So it’s like, it’s a different creature. They’re not operating in the same world.
And this sort of problem, then if you have a problem with “The New York Times,” then everyone’s going to suffer for that, and you can amount all the mass movements you want. You’re going to still be attacked by the same problem. And so we have to actually change that, and the business leader who’s been taught by the consulting agents like, “Yeah, just leave your company, man. It’s okay. You’re an investor. You have nothing to do with the company. Leave the bureaucrats in charge. We know what we’re doing.”
People are actually paying a lot to hear that. To feel like everyone who has more testosterone than 200 points has to leave the company. That’s how people are being taught. So yeah, sure, but the problem with the low T approach to business is that anyone who actually built anything in their lives know this doesn’t work in the field. It’s like Ernst Jünger says that you actually understand your life when you’re about to lose it, and you’re in the battlefield.
And of course, every time I’m strangled in jujitsu, I learn a bit of that. I get strangled a lot because I fight those monsters here in Brazil, like the UFC monsters, like I have some of them as students. And the thing is that if you’re up for the challenge, in some sense, you become an aristocrat because you are learning the warrior virtues, the intellectual virtues, the virtues of the other castes that you’re sort of being deprived of because that’s the whole thing. Our society is actually trying to separate those virtues, and if you have your warriors not be your entrepreneurs, not be your intellectuals, those virtues are all fragmented. People lose a sense of unity and lose a sense of leadership.
Now, the idea that elitism is bad comes from the sort of democratic propaganda type of mentality, like, “Oh, but you think you’re better than anyone else.” But about that, there’s an interesting topic. First of all, the idea that created the United States, it can’t be really a democratic idea in the sense that you have a Republican idea. There’s actually, why don’t you guys take charge? That’s the whole point.
That’s quite the opposite of the democratic ethos. And in a company, if you have a democratic ethos, that amounts to the destruction of the company. Actually, usually a company begins as heroic monarchy because it has to, and virtue and the success of the company, they’re very connected. Then it reaches its apex as a mixed monarchy, and you have the CEO, the engineering team, the board of the directors, and whatever, and then the complex hierarchy that leads up to this and the merit hierarchy within the company. Now, when the company starts to decline, it becomes more oligarchical, and then in the late stages of its decline, it becomes democracy.
Then that’s unionizing. It’s my group versus your group. It’s my sector. It’s not your sector. And they start fighting among themselves.
Until once upon a time, the union connected to Alphabet, to the company, they started breaking toilets. It might be a myth, but it’s a good myth. In Italian, they say “If it’s not real, it’s at least well invented.” And the employees started breaking the toilets for the right to have Japanese automatic toilets. And yeah, sure.
That’s like hyper-democracy, like ultra-hyper-democracy. The world owes everything to us, and you see a lot of that with some elements of Gen Z who are actually in the company. There are great Gen Z-ers, and actually, most of my guys are Gen Z-ers, and I’m pro Gen Z, but the more system-inclined Gen Z-ers, they go into the companies, and they feel like the whole point of the company is giving them more. It’s not like what they can sacrifice for whatever is there because they feel that toward their family, and they feel that toward the country. It’s the same mentality.
Now, once an organization becomes a democracy, it’s going to either go bankrupt or go to private equity. It’s about to be liquidated because once democracy takes over, it can be a monopoly, and its rust takes a lot of time. That can happen. You see that in states, actually, not the United States, in any state, in any country. It can go bankrupt.
So it just starts rusting out. It slowly starts sinking in its own weight. Nothing works. They can’t create any project. But in an organization, it might start to catch fire a bit faster, and so they start buying other companies to raise the valuation of the company, but they’re thinking of stock value, but they’re not thinking of the actual results and product.
And you can’t make a Gen Z university indoctrinated robot kid to actually go back to heroic culture. So the problem is that you have to institute heroic culture within an organization as soon as possible. Otherwise, it’s going to fall into this democratic phase, and it’s going to self-destruct. You see the same cycle with countries. They tend to begin as heroic monarchies, like George Washington is going to fight whoever to create the country, and then you create this sort of mixed monarchy system, and then it starts to decline, and people become more democratic as time passes.
Plato says that the last stage of decline is tyranny. Polybius actually puts kleptocracy, that’s organized crime ruling. That’s very symptomatic, like—Brazil, we’re seeing like a kleptocracy happening, and the good thing I see is that all through that is happening, a lot of people are waking up, and once you start to understand, to read Plato in this manner or start in this manner, they’re not dead books like in a college professor, “Oh, in 1800s, the great professors spoke of how...” It’s not that. They’re alive.
They’re alive back again. You’re now in Greece, and yeah, people, they’re drinking, and they’re destroying the country, and they are not caring about anything. And now we need Alexander the Great to come in. We need something to happen, and people need to start to live those virtues right now because things are happening right now. So, we actually make those things alive.
It’s like making a statue alive again. You have to take those ideas and instead of thinking of them as museum pieces, you have to think of them as, yeah, you are the guy in the idea. You are the guy. You are the guy in the cave myth. You are the guy.
Your company is actually a little fiefdom in the great scheme of things, and you created it because you’re building stuff. You’re actually advancing society. So, if you are not the guy in “The Foundation” and you’re not the guy in “Dune,” right, if you don’t want to be poor traders, and you don’t want to start the foundation, you’re going to be the guy in “Blade Runner.” There are not a lot of... You’re going to be the guy in “Terminator,” not the revolutionary, like Mexican revolutionary model of John Connor.
You’re just going to be wrecked. And the problem is that you actually need this mentality of I’m going to restore things and fight entropy all the time to run a company. If you understand that, you should apply the same mentality to everything else.
How the program works (44:20)
Wolf: Mm-hmm. So, we’ve said or hinted at many times here, the company that you run, the contents of your course—how you teach these virtues to business elites, but can you give us more directly, how do you create this new elite for Brazil—with your course, with your program? How does it work?
Guilherme: Yeah. We started the company because I only believe in companies. I don’t believe in NGOs because they’ll be—begging people for money, and—that would create an... I’m not against NGOs. I’m just saying it would create, for this kind of thing, it wouldn’t work at all.
It wouldn’t work because you need a sort of autarky. You need to be able to be self-reliant. And then I created a startup to do that and started hiring talented kids. Those talented kids that I started stealing them from finance because—you can just sit and be part of the bureaucracy, or you can start changing the world. What do you want?
And so the crazy kids, they want to come work, and they start reading the great classics, the great books, like living this culture. And so we start calling. It began with dinners for entrepreneurs. They started calling their friends, and then we created the whole system. We built our headquarters here in Faria Lima.
We created sort of a club, right? So, you have a two-day immersion, and then you join the club. So, we have encounters for people in financial markets, encounters for people in industry, encounters with... And they read the books. They see the classes.
They go through all those different themes. And then we have one-on-ones with a lot of them to actually make those projects concrete, and we started opening those classes in different cities in Brazil. My company has three years, right? So, people get shocked that it’s three years because you’re visiting it. It’s like things are growing fast, but it’s how they should be.
And so I reinvest most of the money the company makes into the company, and into finding new talent. And my idea is that, well, every single one of those students is part of the class, so we need the best people we can assemble together, because if you don’t have the best students... The fact that you invite the best students is also part of the formation in itself, so we actually grab coffee with the students, invite in one-on-one their famous students, known cases in Brazil that they... And then they start reforming their companies, changing a lot of stuff in their companies. We actually teach at the companies, too.
And then after it starts working on their company, sometimes the student is like... It’s very interesting because sometimes he’s not really that much into it. At first, he’s like, “Wow, it’s going to be like a classics department at a university. Is that real?” And then he hears this sort of wild red pill at one of the classes, and he’s like, “Yeah. Wow, that is real.”
And then he applies one idea to his company, and that works. And then he’s like, “Man, I’m up for the task. What do you want? What do you need of me?” Yeah, this stuff actually works because the thing about creating something new, like bringing the classics to the business world today, is a different approach.
It doesn’t exist. So, there is a downside and a good side to that. The downside is that since it’s a new creature, people don’t know what to expect, and they have to see it to actually participate. But there is the good side. The good side is that once they take a bite of it, they go crazy to just multiply it.
So, most of our students, they’re invited by the other students. It’s not Freemasonry. It’s not a cult. It’s not any of that. It’s just because the business guys, they know the right guys that need to hear this content they know who’s the sort of guy who’s actually going to, and this is a very important thing about our program, we are focused on people who actually call the shots.
I have nothing against mass education sort of initiative, but if the guy’s not taking the shots, he’s not really going to understand what I’m talking about. It’s not going to make any sense. He’s going to think it’s too weird. He’s saying, “Yeah, but I have to deal with my boss,” whatever. Now, if he’s the boss and he’s together with these other guys, I remember this very funny episode.
I have a lot of episodes, but there’s this big hedge fund manager and there’s this other entrepreneur, and they’re sitting together at a table, and he’s like, “I’m a very busy entrepreneur. How could I read Plato? I don’t have time for that.” And the other guy in front of him, it was a famous hedge fund manager everyone knows about, and of course, he’s a more busy person than he is, and he’s like, “Oh, I’m in my sixth Plato book, ‘In Search of Truth.’” And the guy’s like, “Man, if this guy’s reading that, I need to know what’s going on.”
And of course, a lot of his motivation is that he’s applying of that. He’s not just reading for the sakes of showcasing his classics Cambridge program or whatever. So they actually gave a lecture in Cambridge, and it was very funny because the guys in classics, they were like, “Wow.” One of the guys, an English guy, he’s very funny, he was like, “I could actually apply the things I’ve been studying my whole life.” And I was, “Yeah, you can apply that. You should apply that.”
Actually, Plato wrote that stuff for you to apply that, like those virtues. When I go to train jujitsu, it’s not because I like to be strangled, it’s just that I’m trying to forge the virtue of fortitude. Because I’m trying to change this country. And it’s for real. It’s actually for real.
And when I try to, like the kids, people change their diets, it’s because they want to grow in temperance. And when I’m reading Plato, it’s because I want to grow in prudence. And the whole point is changing things, because if I watch my own country be destroyed and I did nothing, then I am the problem. I am part of the problem, part of the whole oligarchical thing. And this is a very interesting idea in Aristotle.
Aristocracy and oligarchy, they’re actually polar opposites of the same coin, right? Because the same guy who becomes an aristocrat becomes an oligarch. So you’re always on this fine edge where you can become an oligarch, and you can become an aristocrat, and it does depend on your spirit. So what we’re doing is like, “Yeah, so you’re a business owner. Let’s apply this in your business. It works. Now let’s read that. Now let’s fight jujitsu. Now let’s improve, I don’t know, your diet.”
That’s not the main point, but whatever. Like your T is going to rise. It’s falling in 1% every year in the United States. It’s pretty much like one American today has like 50% of the sperm count of one American in ‘60s. It’s a pretty big problem, right?
It’s impacting a lot of stuff. So this is a minor problem, but if you start looking at those problems in perspective, then how about if you do all of that? “But Guilherme, that’s too crazy. You want me to be a good father, a good entrepreneur, to make my company have a profit, to just choose the good kids, to get away of all the kids, to actually change politics, to change media. It’s too much.”
Well, that’s the point. Hey, you are lost. You came to the wrong program. If you want me to just massage your ego, you came to the wrong classes. So, actually, there’s a lot of challenge to the students.
It’s a challenging idea. I don’t want to say kind truths. Or I’m sorry, kind lies. It’s all about unkind truths. It’s entirely about that.
And it’s about having a company of unkind truths. I hate the PowerPoint BS stuff, the presentation, like, oh, look at the pastiche from AI that they sent. The whole corporate bureaucracy is destroying the world. And if you work in government, actually work in government, this bureaucracy devoured everything. It’s like the nothingness of the Neverland that’s eating everything up.
And to rage against that and to be a beacon of light, to be like in this cult of Apollo, of I’m actually going to shine some light in this goddamn darkness, and I’m going to start changing it. It’s something so far away from the imagination of those entrepreneurs because they think, “No, company’s for money, personal money.” It’s not even collective money because Aristotle talks about, I don’t know how to translate that into English. I know in Greek, I know in, its magnificent—Magnificence yeah, virtue. It’s to make great sacrifices with money, to use your money for the public good.
Magnanimity? Yeah, it’s not magnanimity because it’s magnanimitas. It’s a difference. Magnificence. Magnificence.
See, magnificitas is you’re making great sacrifices with private money for the public good. I think we saw a bit of that when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Imagine if that was the rule and not the exception. Now that’s a bomb. That’s a nuke in the current system because, in Aristotle, he speaks of that all the time.
The Aristotelian project is this, because he’s actually thinking that the guys he’s educating, they’re going to be highly successful. It’s not a loser’s program, okay? It’s like a program for people who are going to be highly successful. And so since this, to be magnanimous, is connected to that. But I think people, entrepreneurs tend to be magnanimous in the sense that they strive toward doing great things.
I think that’s part of the entrepreneurial mindset, but they’re not necessarily thinking of how can I use that for the common good. Now, if you’re doing all of that, you are an aristocrat. You might not like the term. You might say, “Oh, but America was created to destroy the aristocrats.” It doesn’t make any sense because America was created to create a company, like the Gilded Age, you’re having business guys.
That’s aristocracy. You might not like the term. You can call it whatever, but every time you have a culture of excellency and having the best ruling, that’s aristocracy. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it doesn’t become a woman. So you can call things by the wrong term, but they don’t change.
It’s like people, they said, “Well, you shouldn’t call companies monarchies. You shouldn’t call your project aristocracy because people are going to have the wrong idea.” But it’s better to teach the right term than to try to deal with the bad terms because we’re living in—Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann has this thesis about the spear of silence. You’re silent about what’s happening. He’s silent.
The other guy’s silent, and it’s a spear. It keeps growing because everyone is silent, so the terrible idea grows every day stronger. Now, how do you break this spear of silence? You break the spear of silence by saying the right words, like if they are enchanted, like they have actual power. You have to use the right terms to call things as they are.
And I think this sort of egalitarian, if egalitarian ideology in universities, the spirit of this political religion, as Eric Voegelin used to call, is collapsing. It’s dying. It’s a dying religion. It’s like a shaman trying to do a ghost dance to invoke a dead god from the past. It’s dead already.
It’s cargo cult. And since the spirit is dying, what could be born out of this? What could be reborn out of this? Now, you might think, well, but aren’t those old ideas? I think those are the best fitting ideas for a startup world.
I think those are the best ideas for a world in which people are not having kids, and they’re having a demographic collapse. And actually, our students start having kids. Start having a lot of kids, actually, because they’re saying, “You know what? I’m a wimp. I’m going to have 10 kids, and I’m going to create my own private army of kids, and I’m going to make my own...”
This mentality, I say, yeah. And this is like, how many kids do you have? Five. And you’re like: Wow, you’re not going to stop and say, “Hey, I’m going to have five kids more for everyone who questions how many kids I’m going to have.” And then you’re going to multiply because people who are highly competent, if they had mentality of having less kids, then they are with—Spengler speaks of that.
You’re trying to destroy yourself. You’re in a death cult of your own civilization. So fertility is very much connected to creating new companies. And creating new companies is very much connected to restoring countries, which is very much connected to restoring your soul, to actually thinking in terms of this life is just a scrapbook of the whole eternity that is behind the world. So there is a metaphysical component to it, but it’s not a religious program.
But we’re trying to make students think in terms of purpose. Because you can’t create a family, a company, if you don’t have a sense of a higher purpose.
Plutarch, Caesar and great men (58:54)
Wolf: Yeah, and connecting those things together. It seems like people can do one or the other of those without the kind of holistic mindset. But to do them all together, to do them as a joint project.
Guilherme: People talk about Plutarch, but they talk in a dead way because Plutarch was concerned about that. About great men, and his whole point about great men was like, yeah, they changed history for real. They’re not great men because they want to showcase for their friends in some sort of private party. They’re great men because they, for real, change history. They are real.
They are not deracinated. They are inserted into actual historical reality. They’re actually doing things. So Charlemagne was obsessed with St. Augustine. Julius Caesar went to have mentorship at a Greek island, at Rhodes, if I’m not mistaken.
And actually, the oligarchical structures like Sulla and the Roman Empire, they feared Greek philosophy because they said, “Oh, this is going to bring monarchical ideas back into Rome.” So they feared that. Of course, you were having all those great thinkers, and Napoleon, he actually fought for his conquests to come, and Machiavelli was more important than anything else. And people should definitely read the “Commentaries on Livy” by Machiavelli. That’s actually the great book.
It’s not “The Prince.” People read “The Prince” and they’re like, “Wow, that’s like the rules of power.” No, it’s not. That’s not what Machiavelli is about. It’s all in the “Commentaries of Livy” because for a great man in the past, you had to comment Roman history to be great man.
Now, why do you have to comment Roman history? It’s not for you to be the great guy at parties that recite Roman classics. It’s because you’ve seen the downfall and the rise of regimes multiple times. And you actually understand what makes it rise and the downfall. The bad founder in a company, the bad business guy.
I actually use that for myself to invest, but it teaches students that and they use it, so it’s good. But I use that to invest. He’s like Pompey, because Pompey, when he fought Julius Caesar, he’s the insecure guy. He’s asking his wife, “Oh, what do you think, honey, about this?” He’s asking the oligarchs.
He is hesitant. He’s always insecure. He never really takes the front of the fight. Now, Caesar, and that’s the opposite of a lot of the politicians we see today. His bite is very strong.
He doesn’t really bark. He barks very softly, but he bites—like crazy. And a lot of politicians, they are the opposite. They bark all the time. It’s like, “Yeah, man, I’m going to change the...”
They don’t bite. And Caesar, like the great entrepreneur, he’s very workaholic, always trying to get. The Senate, there is this moment before Pharsalus, after the Rubicon. Oh, not after Rubicon, just before the Rubicon, when he’s marching. They don’t know what to think.
The people don’t know what to think, like what the guy’s doing. We’re asking for him to return. Is he going all the way? Could it be possible that he actually crosses the Rubicon and they go all the way? And part of their anxiety is that Caesar, he doesn’t care.
He just does it. He’s just doing what has to be done, and he’s going to change everything. So, in Augustus, Augustus actually in the Prima Porta of the famous statue of Augustus, he has this little Cupid beside him because he’s, of course, the son of Venus. He’s descended from Ascanius in the Aeneid and everything. That’s a whole different topic.
But Augustus was an interesting kid to be a successor, and the good successions in, like the bad successions like the series, “Succession.” That’s like the worst nepo kids who are very insecure. And Pompey, like Kendall in the “Succession” series is like the Pompey. It’s always—what does everyone think of me? It’s very performative, right?
What are they thinking of me? And Julius Caesar doesn’t care about what they’re thinking of you. And Augustus is the kid no one wanted but was the best kid. And when Caesar was assembling his team to face Pompey, he actually put these guys with this crossing scar across their faces against the pretty boys of Pompey, like the battle-ready, scarred, old soldiers to fight the beautiful people of the time. Like the and he beats the shit out of Pompey because of that.
And I do see that in business, it’s the same thing. The guy who’s actually concerned is not concerned about what people are going to think, how am I being perceived, how is this being perceived. I’m not against public relations. I’m just saying it’s like he’s not insecure about things, and he’s actually concerning himself with truth. That’s a very—Peter Thiel has this bit in which he says it’s only autists are good founders today.
And I do see why that is happening. It’s because in a world of sophists, you have to be very obsessed with truth to keep persevering in truth. And this is what’s lacking in political leadership. You’re not having the obsessed with truth, the Augustus type of kid who’s like, “This is the best. I’m going all the way. I’m going to actually make this real.”
Wolf: Great. Well, I think we’re out of time. Thank you so much. This was very enlightening. I’m really looking forward to seeing where your program goes.
I hope it goes much beyond Brazil. We really need something like this in America, so—good luck to you, and thanks for coming on.
Guilherme: It’s really an honor to welcome you guys here to Brazil. It’s my honor, and yeah, I definitely want to spread this around, and I think those ideas need to circulate. I think it’s very important, so I’m very excited about that.
Wolf: We’ll see what we can do in America. All right. Thank you very much.
Guilherme: Thank you very much.
Wolf: Until next time.