Great Houses

In Episode 33 of the Great Houses Forum, Gregory Treat argues that the modern credentialing system, originally built to educate Prussian peasants, produces leaders of "ungrounded virtue" who cannot be trusted with the new seats of power that AI, robotics, and surveillance technologies are creating. He proposes reviving the cursus honorum, the tiered ladder of ascending public offices used by Rome and the British aristocracy, to train "AI paladins" who master three core skills, code, content, and command, through real-world challenges rather than classroom certifications. The progression spans three levels: mastering software and rhetoric to build digital communities, applying those skills physically through autonomous manufacturing or AI-guided farming, and finally serving in medicine, policing, or the military where lives are at stake. Treat frames this through his "aristocratic-democratic technology thesis," arguing that catastrophe follows whenever a society's leadership system mismatches its technology, just as the French Revolution followed from aristocrats confronting the democratic technology of firearms, and COVID from democrats managing the aristocratic technology of biotechnology. He contends that AI will make traditional testing obsolete by instantly profiling every user, and that the converging of civilian and military drone technology is erasing the boundary between those career paths.

Read more of Mr. Treat's thoughts on AI at his Substack: https://avaloncircle.substack.com/

Continuing the series on the Cursus Honorum of the AI future, this episode tackles three main questions: (1) whether "AI-proof jobs" actually exist, (2) the economics of a "prime", someone who masters the core AI skills of code, content, and command, and (3) how AI reshapes the corporation, illustrated through the "zero human company," Microsoft's evolving structure, and the Visa chaordic model.

Read more of Mr. Treat's thoughts on AI at his Substack: https://avaloncircle.substack.com/ 

In this episode of The Great Houses Forum, Gregory Treat sits down with Zack Fava, founder of Methian, an AI-powered homeschooling operating system built to give parents full sovereignty over their children's education. Zack shares his journey from 15 years in the Department of Defense to building a platform that handles curriculum creation, state compliance documentation, mastery-based tracking, and AI-assisted grading, all customizable to each family's principles and pedagogy. The conversation explores how AI can restore household sovereignty by replacing institutional dependence with parent-controlled tools, and how platforms like Methian and Runcible might eventually form an integrated household AI stack covering education, business management, and domestic life. Gregory and Zack also discuss the dystopian risks of hosted AI, where employers gain deep insight into users' profiles, and argue that family-held data sovereignty is the healthier alternative. Read Ronald Dodson's article "House-Centric AI and the Return of the Aristoi" here.

In Episode 30 of The Great Houses Forum, Gregory Treat continues his series on the “Cursus Honorum of the AI Future," arguing that AI will collapse today's thousands of specialized roles into three core skill sets: Code, Content, and Command. He stresses that humans are not obsolete, there is always a human in the loop, and that claims of "fully automated" systems really just mean people are insulated from responsibility, a legal doctrine he expects to fail under pressure. Gregory walks through industry vignettes showing this convergence in action, including Marc Andreessen's "Builder" role collapsing programmers, product managers, and designers into one; a solo marketer running a full content operation with AI agents; and a one-doctor cataract practice with zero employees thanks to AI automation. He covers Figure AI's factory where humanoid robots build themselves, drawing an analogy to the electric motor revolution to argue that corporations need redesigning around distributed judgment rather than departmental handoffs. In a major segment on agriculture, Mr. Treat explores how laser weeding, UV pest control, and robotic harvesting could enable polyculture and permaculture at industrial scale, replacing the toxic chemical inputs and monocultural practices of modern farming. He ties these civilian applications back to military skill sets, noting that the same scout-classify-strike loop applies whether you're defending a field from blight or a battlefield from threats, meaning the most valuable peacetime professional and the most dangerous wartime operator will increasingly look the same. Next episode will tackle where the "safe" professions are and the economics of a "Prime" someone who has mastered all three core skills.

In this episode of The Great Houses Forum, host Gregory Treat sits down with James McPherson, author of the Substack "Aegis of Zeus," a former teacher, and an edtech entrepreneur for a wide-ranging conversation rooted in the question of what gets lost when civilization loses its institutional memory. James traces his intellectual lineage from a Georgetown professor steeped in Aristotle and Hesiod, through years building boys' schools and launching STEM businesses, to his current work on AI solutions, weaving together themes of leadership, household economics, Catholic social capital, and the Zeus principle as a model for fatherhood and kingship that the modern world quietly discarded after World War I. Gregory and James explore how trusts and family legal structures mirror ancient household governance, why edtech's promise to close the achievement gap was always wishful thinking, how AI will accelerate existing hierarchies of competence rather than flatten them, and why the Ivy League's transformation from seminary-inspired formation into a prestige-signaling game represents the same kind of hollowed-out magic that runs through so much of late-stage American institutional life.

Find more of James' work here:
https://jalmcpherson.substack.com/

Find more of Gregory's work here:
https://avaloncircle.substack.com/

Gregory Treat interviews Will Tanner about rebuilding “great houses” and why asset ownership matters more than wage income, using late-17th-century Virginia yeomen and planter society as a model of adaptation and competence. Tanner outlines a Virginia-style cursus honorum, from plantation management to unpaid church and county roles to the House of Burgesses, as a system for cultivating leadership, public virtue, and second- and third-order thinking. They contrast aristocracy with plutocracy and discuss how AI and emerging technologies may reward cross-domain “builders,” long-term legacy planning, and localized power.

Gregory Treat continues his series on AI as an aristocratic technology, arguing that AI will collapse society's need for thousands of specialized roles down to a small handful of masterable skills — code, content, and command — allowing a single "prime" or small team to run what once required vast managerial bureaucracies. He illustrates this through military disruption: cheap drone operators using AI can now neutralize million-dollar tanks, jets, and infrastructure, meaning defense will increasingly depend on a small number of highly skilled, locally-present human commanders rather than large institutions. He argues this points toward the need for a modern cursus honorum — a deliberate training ladder — to produce these rare, high-value operators.

Gregory Treat launches a new series arguing that AI is an "aristocratic" technology — one where cheap access doesn't produce equality, but instead rewards rare skill and intensive training, creating steep, durable hierarchies. He traces this pattern through history (knights, longbowmen) and more recently through CAD/3D printing, which democratized tools but ultimately consolidated value around certified experts and dominant platforms like Autodesk and Dassault.

Gregory Treat argues that modern institutions (pensions, public schools, student loans) are failed substitutes for functions the household historically performed, and that society has run out of the trust needed to sustain them. Drawing on the ordo amoris(rightly ordered loves), the biblical concept of the "guarantor," and Ricardo's comparative advantage, he argues that mutually beneficial relationships require a shared ultimate authority — and that neoliberal economics abstracts away from the individual to the nation-state precisely because we've lost the will to sort people into roles despite being very good at it. He calls for rebuilding households, churches, and patron-client relationships as intermediary structures that can restore genuine, hierarchy-based trust — including offering people risk mitigation (education, pensions, guarantees) in exchange for loyalty and specialization.

This episode continues the story of Gens Valeria, one of Rome's oldest and most distinguished houses, tracing its arc from the height of the Republic through its decline under the Empire.