257 | Experiencing True Freedom in Your Life–and in Civilization–with George Kinder

Hilary Hendershott: Well, hello, Money Lover. Joining me on the podcast today is George Kinder. Hopefully, I can call him a friend. George is a past guest. He’s an author and thought leader, and he’s known internationally as the Father of Life Planning, which is a body of knowledge and a practice many financial advisors, including myself, embody, that seeks to enable people to fulfill their life’s legacies through financial empowerment.

Hilary Hendershott: George has been a mindfulness teacher for 35 years, and the first time I interviewed him on this podcast was in episode 150 back in November of 2019. But today we’re here to talk about George’s new book, The Three Domains of Freedom.

Hilary Hendershott: It’s available now, and it combines the learning he’s gained over his lifetime to empower readers to experience profound freedoms in their lives, and establish a fiduciary culture across civilization. Welcome George.

George Kinder: Hey. It’s great to be back, Hilary, thanks so much.

Hilary Hendershott: You have boundless energy. I’m excited to talk about this book. I know you’ve written many books, but the last time you came we talked about how good financial plans enable life goals and what freedom means to you. And we mentioned the three quintessential, globally known, Kinder questions that you came up with to help people get clarity about what matters to them. And I do, again, want to encourage my listeners to go back and listen to episode 150 of this podcast.

Hilary Hendershott: But since then, you’ve written a new book, The Three Domains of Freedom. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Hilary Hendershott: So, and I’m going to walk people through it linearly, but let’s talk about freedom. For the purposes of life planning in this book, how do you define freedom? And how does that relate to money?

George Kinder: Yeah, freedom is so cool. I mean, I had someone yesterday, the day before asked me, “What’s the difference between happiness and freedom? Because a lot of people are thinking, happiness is something that you know we really ought to know about. And what I realized is, hearing that question is, most people long for freedom. I don’t know that a lot of people long for happiness. Maybe if they’re depressed they might.

Hilary Hendershott: Happiness is sort of fleeting.

George Kinder: And for this freedom feel like, “I’ve got it!” and there, there… I feel lucky this year. My book is one of three, I hope, relatively renowned books of freedom. One of them was by the Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Stieglitz, on economics, money freedom, and another was by Timothy Snyder, and he’s talking about political freedom.

George Kinder: And my book, the way that I think of it that it’s different is, I think of freedom, not only in those terms. But I think freedom is something we experience.

George Kinder: And I’m interested in all of it, because you’ve got to put it all together to make it happen in the world, to make it happen here, in your own life. But what I wanted to explore in this book, and partly because of what my life has been about…

George Kinder: My life has been about teaching mindfulness. It’s been about training financial advisors all over the world in delivering their clients into their dream of, and you put legacy, and that’s great. Their legacy, or something like that. And I usually put dream of freedom. It sounds like way out there, but it is what we try to do.

George Kinder: We try to get them so excited and that’s in a way, the key. In life planning, what we try to do is to find a way to give our clients the experience of that freedom before they even have it. So that they go, “That’s what I want. And that’s why I’m here with you.” And then the third thing is, why aren’t we doing that in civilization? Right?

Hilary Hendershott: You jumped the gun, George, you got there early.

George Kinder: But that’s the third… So the subtitles are, “Each moment is yours.” You’re meant to live in freedom. “Your life is yours.” You’re meant to live in freedom there as well. And the third one is the challenging one, but I love it. It’s called “Civilization is yours.”

George Kinder: We’re meant to live in freedom there, and that’s both living in it and then making sure it happens for everybody.

Hilary Hendershott: I know, and I feel like it’s the first and the third that people are so far from experiencing freedom in. And yet it’s really an interesting juxtaposition, because we sort of shove people into this life where the highest aspiration is to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

Hilary Hendershott: And their parents press them. And you know we have kids self exiting in high school because the pressure is so high and this is the path to happiness. And yet all of us seem to know at some point that’s not actually the path to freedom, right? But I don’t know what we’re really doing about that problem because money is a real need. And you talk about this in your books, you don’t eschew the reality of financial resources. Can you say a little bit about how you marry those concepts? Freedom, and yet, yes, enable yourself with real dollars and cents.

George Kinder: Absolutely. And, and this is how my whole career was formed, was around this concept that these two things belong together in a way. But I want to say in preface to that, that the extremes are really important, and if I look at who were my teachers, who are the most profound people that I encountered. They were people who lived lives of poverty.

Hilary Hendershott: Oh!

George Kinder: They were people who chose to be poor. And the reason that they are mentors for me is that they worked out their trips with money.

George Kinder: Money was not complicated for them. And so many of the people you work with, and I work with, it gets so complicated, you know? And so a lot of the trick is, and a lot of what we do in life planning is let’s make it simple down to who you really want to be. That’s really where it’s meant to be. So you can think of getting lost in money issues. We all do.

George Kinder: The way that we counter that in life planning is, we ask those three questions back in 150. Go look for it. We ask those three questions and…

Hilary Hendershott: What’s your life really for? questions.

George Kinder: Exactly. What’s your life really for? What would really make your life sing? What would give you the most profound meaning? What would give you a thrill to be living this life and to feel that it was deeply meaningful?

George Kinder: And so that’s what we do. We specialize in that. That’s what I trained people in for 30 years in 30 countries all over the world, thousands of people and thousands of advisors. I wanted to leverage my skills and give them to everybody. So let’s make sure that everybody lives that way. And so to me, the answer is, let’s get everybody life planned. I thought a lot about guaranteed income. You know, I’ve thought about civilization a lot. People have these experiments and guaranteed income.

George Kinder: And sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. They show different things. Well, let’s have everybody who gets guaranteed income have a life plan and make it really simple, and so that they’re actually living who they want to be. That answers it.

Hilary Hendershott: And so your book gives people a pathway there. It’s a stepping stone model. Freedom in the moment, freedom in your life, freedom in civilization. So let’s begin with freedom in the moment. Can you talk about your as-lived experience of mastering the present moment? What does that actually mean?

George Kinder: The subtitle is, “each moment is yours.” And how many moments do we find ourselves going, “I wish I wasn’t here. Why do I have to do this?” We’re trapped in some to-do list or other, or something that civilization or our family, our relationships have trapped us in; our work has trapped us in.

George Kinder: And what’s extraordinary, I’ve been practicing mindfulness for over 50 years, since college, and I practice it for several hours a day, so I do a lot of it. But “each moment is yours” – when you do mindfulness, what it does is that it frees the mind. What you’re attempting to do… So many of us have tried to do it and it’s so difficult, right? You go back to the breath and you go, “oh, I can’t do it. I got these text messages coming in.” And you read your text messages and all that, and “I just can’t do it today.”

Hilary Hendershott: I wonder what went wrong? I was meditating right next to my iPhone.

George Kinder: Right on. And so it even happens to me periodically after many, many years. But the truth is that those moments of, where the fire alarm seems to be going off right next to you, those moments are at the cutting edge for you, of “are you here?”

George Kinder: And are you capable of being here, and of being relaxed and being at ease, and being authentic, being natural in your life. And when those moments occur where you get buzzed, no, you can’t. You get called in this other direction.

George Kinder: How many thousands of moments do we have just in an hour? And what mindfulness does is it clears the decks. And the more that you do it, the clearer they get. So what it does is it trains you so that you have greater and greater ability to be right here, right now, because of the focus it insists on, and because of all the times that you fail being here. Every time you fail, you’re getting a little lesson in emotional intelligence. Right?

George Kinder: Oh, I see I was clinging to that over there; I got all shaky about this over here. I’m going to come back to the moment. So every single time you do that–mindfulness is the greatest teacher of emotional intelligence. Because it just strips away all the things that distract you from being at ease, and being here.

George Kinder: So, I did a series of books, as you know, which are not the topic here. I did a series of five books on being in nature, being inspired by Thoreau and some Zen poets, and really living in nature so that every moment nature was my teacher. And if you want to know what mindfulness is; if you want to know what living in the moment is, walk along the beach, take your walk in the fields or out in the woods, and don’t think.

George Kinder: Just experience being there and love every moment of it. Love the wind as it touches you, the different senses of temperature, the stride that you take just being in the moment. That’s mindfulness, and that’s the way we’re meant to live. That’s authentic. That’s being here, right now. And you can do that in every moment by practicing this practice of mindfulness, taking on the challenges of how you get lost, how you get pulled away.

Hilary Hendershott: What would you say to a business owner or executive who has children and struggles to sleep six hours a night, when considering a two hour a day mindfulness practice? I mean, how do you think about the opportunity cost of your time and your accomplishments?

Hilary Hendershott: Said differently, how have you accomplished so much over these years while you meditate so much? You spend so much time in the moment.

George Kinder: It baffles me, Hilary.

Hilary Hendershott: No, that’s not the right answer, George.

George Kinder: No, I actually attribute a huge amount of it to the mindfulness practice. In the last few books I’ve written, I’ve made sure that I put a different map of time and space into them. I call it a map of mindfulness. And the reason I do that is that I think the map of time and space that we see, that the scientists study is wrong; is inaccurate. Because if you think about it, it’s primarily a map of the past and the future. You see this huge oval and broken into little boxes and cells. So you’ve got that huge oval, that’s supposed to be our reality.

George Kinder: Okay? But what about the present moment? When you really are in the present moment, do you feel like you’re all chopped up into these boxes and cells? That CEO that you’re talking about, yeah, they’re feeling it because they’re getting attached to different things. But when we’re really in the moment…

George Kinder: Oh, gosh! I mean, think about being on the beach, doing something you love. It feels spacious. Time expands. You want to be there forever. I mean, it’s something very different. So what I realized was, you know, it’s kind of one of these obvious things that Einstein used to talk about: All the brilliant questions are like childlike questions. And this is a childlike question. Have you ever experienced a moment of freedom in the past?

Hilary Hendershott: No.

George Kinder: The answer is no, right? No!

Hilary Hendershott: When I was there, it was the present.

George Kinder: Exactly! You only experience the present moment. So if that’s the case, then I mean, we really know it, that the present moment’s the only moment that is real that we’ve really experienced.

Hilary Hendershott: Right.

George Kinder: That’s stunning because everything we do is based on the past and the future. Everything we learn, the way we run our businesses. It’s all based on the past and the future. So I put together a map that puts the present moment at the center of the map. It looks like an hourglass.

Hilary Hendershott: It looks like an hourglass.

George Kinder: Yeah. And what happens is, the present moment is what’s real. And out of that present moment we create the past and the future. And then, when you really focus on the present moment–what we were just talking about, that expansiveness that you feel–that’s the realm of what I call virtue. It’s a realm of spirit, it’s a realm of consciousness itself; the deepest layers of it.

George Kinder: So it’s a profound realm. So you’re asking about the CEO or COO, and how do they? So if you get life planned and you figure out, who is it you really want to be? Nothing should hold you back. And there’s something, when you’re driven by your to-do list, and driven by those text messages, you’re not living the life you were meant to live. And most of us want to live a simpler life and really want to be here in the moment.

Hilary Hendershott: Can I ask you a different question, but related, about mastering the moment… Many of the conversations I have with high net worth investors involve their stress and anxiety about financial markets, the economy–unfortunately, this month it’s politics–it’s all different versions of “the sky might be falling. Hilary.”

Hilary Hendershott: Now, there’s an answer to that question, because the sky might be falling, right? So far in society, we’ve figured out every time how to pick up the pieces and regrow, but what would mindfulness, what would mastering the present moment access for a person burdened with those kinds of concerns that really do hold them back?

George Kinder: Absolutely well, my belief and my experience is that the more that you experience freedom on all of these levels, the more that you can address those economic levels, civilizational levels, political levels. And I think they’re extremely important right now, maybe more important than they’ve ever been. I would share that with a CEO.

George Kinder: But if you can’t live in moments of freedom; if you can’t find freedom in individual moments because you’re so driven, you’re not going to see the world clearly enough.

Hilary Hendershott: Right.

George Kinder: Even to know how to vote, really. You just aren’t. You’re gonna be driven by fears and anxieties and stress and all the rest.

George Kinder: What mindfulness is is the mastery of the present moment. Most people don’t realize that. Mindfulness is the mastery of the present moment. So if the present moment is all that ever really exists, it’s like the most extraordinary thing you could do. And why aren’t we doing it in every classroom? Why isn’t it part of what we’re all taught?

George Kinder: So it’s going to help you make the decisions that you want to make. And then the other, the second layer. And I have this. Yeah. You see, I’m creating an oval going this way. It’s because it’s the arc of our life. It’s like we’re born over here, and we rise up, you know, into the sky eventually, and maybe.

Hilary Hendershott: Or the ground, as it were.

George Kinder: Maybe it’s the ground, yeah. But there’s an arc to it, and Joseph Campbell called it the hero’s journey, and we all have it. We all have a passion to live something that’s extraordinary. And if we feel that we’re not on target with that right now, I mean the cool thing about life planning, it was extremely rare that I didn’t have someone absolutely thrilled with their life within a matter of months.

George Kinder: So they felt like they were either living in the dream that they believe in, or well on their way. That’s what life planning does. So if you keep your eyes on the prize of who you really want to be, you’re going to feel that freedom and that means you’re going to see things more clearly.

George Kinder: And then there’s the whole civilization piece which we’ll come to. I know.

Hilary Hendershott: Yes. Well, you keep trying to jump the gun. So thank you. And this last answer was a great segue to mastering one’s life–one’s life journey–I use the word legacy.

Hilary Hendershott: How do you know if you think you married the right person, went to the right school, I mean, George, you went to Harvard. You must have felt like you were on your way. How do you know if you’re not living the life that is your true destiny, your life of true freedom?

George Kinder: Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a lot of accomplishments, it’s true, and Harvard was an early one. But the truth was also that when I was at Harvard I was all up here. I was all in my brain. Nobody believes that I was a math major when I entered Harvard, because all my work is about emotional intelligence. I didn’t know what I was talking about, in a way.

George Kinder: And that’s one of the beauties about life, we’re constantly learning,

hopefully, to be better people and to be better functioning who we are. And that’s how civilization actually grows, I think, is by each of us doing that. So you’re asking me, how do we do it, when again, the essence of the question was, how do you know that you’re living your dream of freedom, right?

George Kinder: I think getting life planned is really important, I think, looking at those three questions.

Hilary Hendershott: Okay.

George Kinder: And keeping them on your refrigerator door. Getting- what I think is really helpful is getting a mentor. And one mentor that can be really helpful is a financial life planner, someone who knows life planning and the finances so that you’re really putting what you want most together.

George Kinder: As I said early on with guaranteed income, I think this belongs for everybody. I think it’s really important for everybody to be on target with their life plan. Everybody has dreams. Why should we not be living them?

Hilary Hendershott: Everybody does have dreams. Some people have more aspiration for influence than others, but correct, everyone has dreams. And where we, financial advisors, meet them is, what’s possible given the resources I have now, and how can I continue to create that, right? I find that some people get attached to a particular way that it looks, right, when it really is an experiential aspiration.

Hilary Hendershott: Speaking of that, what other hurdles have you seen people struggle with or surmount when it comes to pursuing their life plan, the freedom of their own life’s journey?

George Kinder: Yeah, I think a couple of things, and it takes us back to the first domain of freedom, each moment is yours, and the third domain of freedom, which is civilization. Yeah, I keep going there. So the obstacles come up- You know, we do this thing we call lighting the torch in life planning, in the life planning that I teach, anyway, for the registered life planner designation.

George Kinder: And lighting the torch means answering those three questions, and then your life planner puts them together in a way that is so inspiring, you can’t believe it. Tears will come to your eyes. You’ll shake. You might get fearful. There’s an emotional response. Usually it’s very positive, but it can be intermingled.

George Kinder: It’s so powerful. And we put together a vision that’s so powerful and so realistic that you can’t say no. And we support that realism by saying, “Don’t worry about the money. I can help you make that happen. Let’s go to it.”

George Kinder: So, having a mentor who can settle down some of the stuff that you go through, having a mindful practice that strips away the emotional dissonance, and then the third thing is, civilization keeps getting in the way of what I want to talk about.

Hilary Hendershott: Let’s do it. Let’s do it. If it’s okay, I’d like to read a quote from you, the last time we spoke.

George Kinder: Oh my, okay, yeah, cool.

Hilary Hendershott: You got really animated when you said, “It’s time. Why do we live in a world that’s flawed? Why is there still corruption in this world? We’ve had 250 years of brilliant entrepreneurial endeavor coming out of the Industrial Revolution. How come, at the top of our hierarchies of power, we aren’t finding wisdom at the top of every one of them? Shouldn’t this be happening? My argument is yes. And we should all be flourishing and not wrestling with a polarized politic and with darkness. Let’s end corruption forever. Let’s end war. Let’s end disrespect between people. And let’s just take it on and realize that this is what people want.”

George Kinder: Yeah. Wow! That’s powerful.

Hilary Hendershott: How has your thinking evolved since? And how does this new book address that very thought?

George Kinder: You know really, it started in that moment–I mean, not necessarily that moment with you–but that passion; that, that recognition of that. And all of that came out of, as you knew back then, I’d just gone on a world tour, and I traveled all over the world, and I’d seen rich countries and poor countries and democratic countries and dictatorships. I was in Hong Kong when the kids were marching through the streets saying, “We want democracy.” And I was in a conference where I was talking about democracy and pulling out from them what they dreamed of. What they really wanted is a golden civilization, this community. And at the back of the room two-thirds of the way through the conversation, this dark, deep voice said, “You can’t talk about that here.”

Hilary Hendershott: Oh.

George Kinder: Suddenly everybody got really quiet. And we know what’s happened to Hong Kong since.

George Kinder: So my goal then was to figure out, does everybody want the same thing? And I discovered they did. And they want democracy. They want kindness. They want an end to corruption.

George Kinder: And COVID came, you know, and it knocked me out, but it also knocked the world out in a lot of ways, and so we were stuck Zooming together, and all this kind of stuff.

Hilary Hendershott: I know.

George Kinder: So I couldn’t travel, and I thought, well, let’s get down and dirty. Let’s figure out, what could we do?

Hilary Hendershott: Right.

George Kinder: What would be an answer that would work? And I figured out something. And that’s part of what this book that you’ve just dived into, The Three Domains of Freedom, what it ends with, is that there’s a very simple way out of this craziness–and we all know it’s craziness–out of this craziness that we’re in right now.

George Kinder: And I don’t need to define it. But now we’re terrified about AI, and there’s polarization and news media- which culture are you in? And is the earth dying on us? Is democracy about to die? All of these things.

Hilary Hendershott: Well, it’s gotten to the point, George, where no one knows if they can believe what they read.

George Kinder: That’s right, and the truth is one of the major things I have in this solution. In fact, I think we’re holding a very low standard for truth in everything, and that the standard for truth should be back to the trials where they say, “We want you to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Hilary Hendershott: Hmm.

George Kinder: If our media did that around political things, then all of us, we’d be able to talk with each other. We might disagree, but we’d be able to talk to each other. And we’d be able to debate. And we’d clearly know what is true and what isn’t true. But it’s just one of the things.

George Kinder: So here’s what I figured out was, it does go back 250 years, and then it goes back to the beginning of incorporation in America and in England, and in Europe and the world, where we gave these incredible powers to the ownership of stock.

George Kinder: And it was an incredible thing, and it helped to go from the reproducible parts revolution that was happening, to being able to bring all of that into gathering tremendous forces of money, so we could create huge hierarchies of power. And we got that through capital, we got that through debt, and now we recognize- also big corporations get it through media, using media to fund nonprofits to speak their point of view, or to have media or their advertising. So, huge power.

Hilary Hendershott: Well, the democratization of the stock market has been a tremendous, tremendous asset. Literally no pun intended for Main Street, so agree.

George Kinder: Absolutely. Huge, huge, huge. And still, we don’t find wisdom and compassion. We don’t find… It’s not the best system. It’s a good system. It’s an incredible system. But it’s not the best system, because the best system would bring wisdom and compassion to the top of every hierarchy of power, and would filter it all the way down. So I got thinking, you know, this is happening at the base of civilization; it’s happening at the base of our institutional life.

George Kinder: So what if we simply required all of our institutions: government, corporate, nonprofit, to be humane. Just simply require them to be humane. Very simple, right? You’d think they’d be that, anyway, given-

Hilary Hendershott: George, John Lennon said, “You may call me a dreamer.”

George Kinder: There you go!

Hilary Hendershott: I mean, don’t you think we’re trying that?

George Kinder: No, no. We haven’t come close. For instance, in the investment movement, we have investment movements for ESG, for instance. And we’ve had ethical investing around for 40 years or more. We have B Corporations. We’ve got Business Roundtable… all of these kinds of things that are attempts to bring greater humanity in. But they’re all voluntary, number one, and there’s no real rigor.

Hilary Hendershott: They’re voluntary, and they’re from the outside foisting in. I mean, ESG just tries to control executives and boards of directors with capital.

George Kinder: Exactly. Exactly. So my notion was, it’s a single sentence.

Hilary Hendershott: I’m nervous. I’m nervous. Go ahead.

George Kinder: I mean, yeah, you should be. It’s dramatic, in terms of ultimate consequences. And I’m really looking for conferences on this idea. And, in fact, that’s my next phase of this, is to try to get a dozen conferences around this, all over the world, to be debating this idea. So here’s the idea.

Hilary Hendershott: I’m here for it.

George Kinder: What’s the idea you’re talking about? So require institutions to be humane, and it’s a single sentence where we require institutions to have a fiduciary obligation, to place the truth above their own self-interest. To place democracy above their own self-interest. To place the planet above their own self-interest. To place humanity above their own self-interest. Now I have it in a shortened form. So it’s to place the truth, humanity, democracy, and what was the one I’m missing. But anyway-

George Kinder: It’s a fiduciary responsibility. And so, instead of fiduciary responsibility just to the shareholders, it’s a fiduciary responsibility to humanity, to what we care about, to what makes the earth function, to what makes democracy function.

George Kinder: And if we don’t have that, then we’re building these huge powers that have much more power than that mad King George more than 200 years ago that we fought against, to throw off his power. So it’s really time for us to do something like this. And what’s incredible, the time that I’m most familiar with closest to what’s happening right now is the 1920s.

Hilary Hendershott: Oh?

George Kinder: There was a tremendous amount of wealth, right? You had the extremes of wealth and you had the beginning development of fascism, you had wars happening and armies developing, and all this kind of stuff. And then there was a crash. Now we haven’t gotten to a crash, but.

Hilary Hendershott: Please don’t predict the Great Depression on my show.

George Kinder: I don’t want to, and I’m in there. I’m invested. I’m really invested. The truth is that we are in a crisis, and there’s a very simple solution. I call it fiduciary in all things or FIAT.

George Kinder: And I think you’ll be seeing–because I’ve already been talking to people–conferences debating, how would we do this? How could it happen? What do corporations need to do? What does government need to do? What should investors be aware of, our consumers? But don’t we want all of our institutions to be trustworthy and humane?

Hilary Hendershott: I think some people want that, George. I think some people want that. Truly, people who are pursuing enlightenment, or at least a good quality life definitely want that. I do think that we still continue to pay homage to-

Hilary Hendershott: I mean, for example, let’s just take the most egregious, which is most politicians. Right? We’re still out there campaigning for them, making signs, voting for them, when in truth, it’s a system of-it’s a system that doesn’t-it’s not honorable. Right?

George Kinder: That’s right. And yeah-

George Kinder: Well, the politicians, we also know that, when you look at the contributions to them, they’re hugely bought, and bought by huge forces.

Hilary Hendershott: Self interests.

George Kinder: Absolutely, totally self interest. And if it’s you and me, and here I’m wearing blue and you’re wearing red. Here we go, alright! So-

Hilary Hendershott: I’m wearing autumn orange; this is sepia. Okay?

George Kinder: Well, I’m really kind of purple. But, anyway. If you get two people, and if, instead of having it be a democracy where people are really debating the ideas and everything, if you get two powerful forces kind of opposing each other, then they’re going to tell the people who are relying on them for their political contributions, “Don’t go down that path. Don’t go down that path.” So there’s these absolute boundaries that happen.

George Kinder: Rather than talking, debating, reaching back out to the people, finding out from the scientists what’s really going on.

George Kinder: So when you talk about that every institution should place humanity, the earth, the truth, and democracy first- I think that would solve it. It might take a generation of implementation, but I think it would solve it because the truth is so huge. You couldn’t have two competing truths out there the way we have right now in the media.

George Kinder: And if it’s all for democracy, you wouldn’t have huge powers controlling the people’s vote, in a way, and you would want people to be informed, you’d want them to know what the truth is and what to choose, how to choose. So.

Hilary Hendershott: Well, I’m concerned that even that word democracy has been weaponized a little bit, and I know that’s not the way that you’re meaning it. But you’re talking about rule by the people; representation at the level of governance, correct?

George Kinder: Well, I I love the republic idea. But yes, it’s an intermingling of those two, clearly.

Hilary Hendershott: Yeah. I’ve realized two things in this conversation. One is that I used to relate to money as finite. And in my transformative financial experience of my life, I realized truly, and I embody that it is infinite. And I teach that, and that, what you’re saying about mastering the moment–sorry to go back two steps. I’m going to come back to civilization–has to do with maybe a similar realization about the present moment being infinite, right? And I talked about the opportunity cost of time, sleep, meditation, being productive, doing things, getting things done.

Hilary Hendershott: Maybe there’s something to be realized there, at that juxtaposition, right? If wealth is infinite, so, too, is the present moment, as long as I’m here and breathing, and my heart is pumping.

Hilary Hendershott: And the second thing, and tell me if I’m wrong, is that your book, and your message is not a “how to” for civilization to get from the place it’s at, which I do think is two different things–there’s what we say and think and the media…if you log into Facebook or read about what’s happening in civilization, it’s very extremist in its negativity; that the reality is, it’s more balanced than that.

Hilary Hendershott: But your book isn’t a “how to” to get from wherever it is that we are to a place of fiduciary democracy and truth. But your message is, just embody that in this present moment. Yeah.

George Kinder: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the things in that final section, I do have the fiduciary legislation, which I think would be an incredible way, because we need some boundaries as civilization. But the bulk of that chapter is about celebrating where we are and really feeling the beauty of it. And then recognizing that civilization is who we are.

George Kinder: That’s something we don’t really think about. We think it’s out there; that they’ve got it; they’re controlling it. Civilization is who we are as a species. It’s who we are as human beings.

Hilary Hendershott: Well sure.

George Kinder: When you feel that, and you feel the freedoms that the book encourages you toward, you realize, oh, everything I do can make a difference.

George Kinder: And you feel more confident and more able, and less- a lot of people feel worn down, no, I can’t, and “they’re winning” and all that. No, everything we do, if we’re acting particularly in that present moment, the freedom of that present moment. But if we’re acting from the best of ourselves, we are creating a greater humanity as a consequence.

Hilary Hendershott: Thank you for your time. Thank you for continuing to write and advocate, and this has been a very refreshing conversation. We’re going to send everyone out to read your book. Anything else you’d like to leave my listeners with?

George Kinder: I think if you’re bogged down, read the book. Because you shouldn’t be, you know there’s no need to be bogged down. We can get free. Each moment is ours. Our life is ours. And civilization is ours, and it’s meant to be that way, and all of them are domains of freedom.

Hilary Hendershott: Thank you for your voice. I appreciate your message.

Hilary Hendershott: George, I do have a question that I ask all of the people I interview on this show, and I’m eager to hear your answer to that question. And that question is, if your money were writing you a love note, what would it be loving on you, or thanking you for?

George Kinder: Hmm. Let’s see, how would it say this?

George Kinder: Thank you for letting it be me. And for you being you. Thank you for just living your authentic life. And for knowing enough about me to work well with me in your process.

Hilary Hendershott: Living in functional partnership; in happy partnership.

George Kinder: There you go!

Hilary Hendershott: I love it. Thanks, George.

George Kinder: Thank you.