Fiduciary in All Things: George Kinder on Trust, Freedom, and What Comes Next
Note sull'episodio
More than twenty years ago, in a room full of financial advisors learning to breathe before they talked about money, Clayton encountered something that quietly changed the course of his life.
The man leading that room was George Kinder.
Today they are back together.
George Kinder is one of the most original thinkers in the intersection of financial planning, contemplative practice, and human freedom. He spent two years in solitary meditation practice after graduating from Harvard. He built a six-day-a-week practice of meditating from six in the morning until noon for 30+ years, while running a financial planning practice in the afternoons. He wrote The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, built the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, trained thousands of advisors to put a client's life ahead of their portfolio, and then kept going deeper.
His latest work, The Three Domains of Freedom, has led him to something he calls FIAT: Fiduciary In All Things. A single sentence of legislation that asks every organization on earth, business, government, nonprofit, to place the interests of truth, democracy, people, and planet ahead of its own self-concern. Not socialism. Not idealism. A practical, achievable shift in how civilization organizes itself around trust.
But before any of that, this conversation goes somewhere quietly stunning. George shares what science recently revealed about listening: that it is 100 million times faster than thinking. Not as metaphor. As measurable fact. And what that means for presence, for trust, for what actually happens in the space between two people when one of them truly stops thinking and starts to listen.
Clayton and George also explore self-forgetfulness as a spiritual and practical practice, why the deepest virtues become available only when the self steps aside, and what it actually felt like to build a decades-long contemplative life entirely outside of institutional support, following St. Francis and the Zen poet Ryokan as models rather than any living teacher.
Find George's work: fiduciaryinallthings.com.
His books:
The Three Domains of Freedom: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1960044001?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
The Seven Stages of Money Maturity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385324049?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback