Morgan Housel

And the parents basically being like, oh, well, one day this is going to be yours.

And the kid being like, I would appreciate if that day were now.

Very complicated topic.

I don't think there's any formula for doing it right.

And I think in general, I like that philosophy.

So the Vanderbilts, of all the Robert Barron families who lived not far from where you and I are recording right now,

I think the Carnegies and the Rockefellers did a very good job at using their wealth to both give themselves a good life and to benefit society.

Not perfect, but they did a pretty good job given the sums of money that they had.

And the Rockefellers still have a lot of wealth today, have billions of wealth today.

And every library, every city in America has a Carnegie library and Carnegie Hall and whatnot.

That still exists.

The Vanderbilts, I think, did the worst by far.

And it is hard to imagine another family who had so much money, who had the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars, who squandered it, I think is the right word, so quickly.

And part of it, I do have some empathy for them because I don't think they meant to do this.

I think when Cornelius Vanderbilt died in the 1800s, he wanted no one else in his family to have to suffer ever again.

He just said, you're going to have tons of money and you can just live like an absolute king for the rest of your days, for generation after generation after generation.

And what I think it inadvertently did, even though some people foresaw this when it first happened, was it created a family who valued nothing but money.

And the money was their dictator.

The money told them who they could be.

It told them where they could live.