Backgammon, Great-Grandmother's Candy, and Dead Philosophers: Three Bridges of Intellectual Heritage
Picture merchants in a bustling ancient trading town, with narrow streets and dusty roads, the midday heat forcing everyone to pause. They settle onto cushions in the shade, refreshing beverages in hand, and unfold a backgammon board worn smooth by countless games. As the dice roll and pieces move, they share stories—tales of this morning’s successful commercial dealings, rumors of distant kingdoms, secrets of what has worked in trade and business for as long as anyone can remember.
Between moves, an older merchant offers wisdom his grandfather taught him. A younger one listens, absorbing not just the words but the rhythm of how knowledge passes from one generation to the next. The game itself is ancient, older than any of their family lines, yet here it sits between them: a living connection to everyone who has ever played, everyone who has ever paused in the middle of a working day to pass on what they know.
Over the holidays, I learned to play backgammon. It was something I’d been meaning to do for a while, and once I started, opportunities to play seemed to multiply. What struck me most wasn’t the game itself—though I found it captivating—but the interactions and stories it brought about.
One fellow player mentioned backgammon’s Middle Eastern origins, dating back to the cradle of our modern civilization. Over the following days, I found myself playing with several people whose ancestors came from that region, each with stories. A grandfather who taught them to play. A great uncle who was impossibly skilled. Others would see us playing and couldn’t resist joining in, offering tips, sharing vivid memories of games played decades ago in different corners of the world.
In those moments, I realized I was touching something that stretched back over a hundred years through these personal connections alone. But zoom out further, and backgammon itself is one of the oldest games ever played—traced back to ancient Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE. The oldest known board was discovered in Ur, modern-day Iraq. For five thousand years, this game has been passed down, generation to generation, across civilizations: Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian, through medieval Crusaders to modern gaming clubs.
I was touching history. I was touching a skill that’s been passed on for millennia.
Here’s what fascinated me: if you just gave me a board, dice, and pieces, I could never figure out how to play backgammon on my own. I needed someone to show me—whether in person or through words written in a book. That act of teaching connected me with an intellectual heritage stretching back thousands of years.
And it made me think about the various bridges through which intellectual heritage passes to us.
The Mentors Who Carry Memory
When I started in the investment profession and moved to New York, I had the extraordinary privilege of working at a firm with deep Wall Street roots—generations of family stewards of capital. It gave me the opportunity to sit down with experienced professionals in their eighties, some approaching their nineties.
One of them told me about October 1987—how he’d lived through it, how his mentor had steadied him by recounting 1973-74, which that mentor had survived by remembering lessons from someone who’d invested through the Depression. Four generations of market wisdom, passed directly from person to person, concentrated in a single conversation over lunch.
I heard tales of mentors who remembered the Great Depression. Those mentors had been shaped by investors who knew a stock market from an even earlier era—a time when railroad stocks defined the exchanges.
Go back further still, and the mentors of those mentors would have remembered the early days of the U.S. stock market. Follow that thread, and you arrive in the Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, where the very concept of trading securities took modern form. Continue to rewind time, and you reach early financial markets, credit systems, and commercial routes that connect European trading hubs back—remarkably—to the Middle East, where backgammon itself was first played. Commerce, ownership, markets: they all trace similar ancient paths across Asia, around Africa, spanning the globe.
When you buy a share of stock—when you participate in the joint-stock company—you’re touching history. You’re touching a heritage.
There’s beauty in this because when you can look that far back, you can also look that far forward. I have reason to believe that a thousand years from now, people will still sit down and play backgammon. The board might change. The setting certainly will. But the essence of the game will persist.
Similarly, I imagine that the essence of ownership in businesses and economic activity will endure. How we trade, what devices we use, what technology powers our processes—these are secondary questions. The fundamental truth that we can own pieces of businesses, that we can give wealth a kind of eternal life, that we can leave a legacy—this will remain.
And I see that legacy as so much more than numbers and digits. I see it as a continuity of presence that outlasts us all.
The Pillars of Three Generations
In my professional life, this heritage takes a different form—the accumulated wisdom of markets and capital stewardship. But in my personal life, I encountered these same patterns of transmission through family.
I had the privilege of meeting three of my great-grandparents, all born around the year 1900—which still feels magical to me. I especially remember one of them: an older lady, meticulously dressed, living on her own, always reading and writing. She was diligent about cultivating correspondence with far-flung family relations. She had a big table covered with letters. She was fluent in more than one language, which sounded mysterious and intriguing to a young boy. But the best part? The candy she kept for me during my visits with my maternal grandfather.
My late maternal grandfather was jovial and cheerful—a persona he’d acquired to compensate for hardships in his early wartime life. He taught me how to play chess, another game that binds us to the past. I have fond memories of the games we played, though at the time I didn’t recognize I was receiving the same gift those backgammon players were giving me: a connection to something older than either of us.
Great-grandma was serious but warm, with a smile for her great-grandchildren. She was a bridge to an era I don’t think I ever fully understood, though I tried to imagine it. I can almost hear her distinct voice, words pronounced with care, unhurried.
She probably knew and remembered some of her grandparents and in-laws, which would take us back to the late 1800s. I vividly remember holding and reading a letter written by my great-great-great-grandmother, born in the mid-1800s. My late paternal grandfather recalled more than once spending time with her daughter, his grandmother. The letter listed the great-great-great-grandmother’s parents, her husband, and her children. Her parents would have been born when Beethoven was writing his symphonies, during the Napoleonic Wars.
That’s a 200-year span I can trace through actual human connection—a letter I held, the words I read, stories I cherished.
Managing family fortunes, I get to hear similar stories from clients. I “spend time” with ancestors long gone who played a role in creating the reality we observe and enjoy today. The monetary expression is just one aspect. I’m under the impression they passed on far more than that. Even if accounting principles don’t capture it, we know it. We feel it.
The Books That Bridge Time
Charlie Munger told us about communing with the eminent dead. Through reading books, hearing their words, and absorbing their thoughts, we can interact and be friends with people we’ve never met. Think of reading Plato and allowing someone who’s been gone for millennia to have an impact on your life today.
Someone once pointed out that more people are enjoying Plato’s ideas today than knew about them when he was alive. This is what Chris Mayer calls “time binding”—something I explored recently in conversation with him and fellow author and investor Robert Hagstrom on the 100 Year Thinker podcast with my co-host Matt Zeigler.
Books allow us to bridge across time. They create moments where the past reaches into the present and shapes the future. They’re how intellectual heritage gets passed on when direct human connection isn’t possible.
Because we absorb these ideas—this intellectual heritage—we shape the minds to come through our own creative acts and teaching.
In my field, I’ve absorbed the wisdom of Peter Lynch, Phil Fisher, Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, and Charlie Munger. I never met them, but I know them. Their thinking shapes mine. Their experience influences my stewardship of capital. The lessons they learned through decades of markets now help me navigate today’s.
This is the power of intellectual heritage: knowledge and wisdom that doesn’t die with the individual but continues, accumulates, and compounds across generations.
The Game That Never Ends
Here’s what I learned from backgammon that applies to everything—investing, family, life itself:
You cannot reverse engineer the game just by looking at the board. The same way you can’t look at the stock market and figure out how it all works without guidance. Without understanding from people who carry their own intellectual heritage.
Every time you play, you connect with everyone playing now and everyone who has ever played. Each individual game might have an end, but the ritual of playing is endless, as long as there are people who remember how to play and pass that knowledge on.
No one has ever figured it out entirely on their own. They learned from someone, tapping into a direct line of knowledge that traces all the way back.
I think of the mentors I’ve had. The clients I’ve worked with who shared stories of their families and the lessons they’ve carried forward. The people I’ve met briefly—over a lunch in New York, coffee in Paris, dinner in Singapore—who left an impression that endures.
I think of my family. Not just the people I knew, but the ones I’ve heard about in stories. The anecdotes and little vignettes about great-grandparents who departed before I arrived. In a strange way, I feel like I knew them. Maybe I am a little bit them, too.
A Living Inheritance
What I’ve realized is that intellectual heritage remains active, alive, evolving—yet preserving its essence across generations.
The backgammon I learned is not identical to the game played in ancient Ur, but it’s recognizably the same. The game has evolved while remaining almost unaltered at its core. The essence persevered.
This is true of investing wisdom, too. The tools change. The markets evolve. Technology transforms how we participate. But the fundamental principles of patience, of business ownership, of long-term thinking, of stewardship over speculation—these persist because they’re rooted in something deeper than market mechanics. They’re rooted in human nature and the nature of value creation itself.
When I sit down with clients to discuss generational wealth, I’m not just talking about financial assets. I’m talking about passing on understanding. About being a bridge—like my great-grandmother was for me—between eras, between wisdom earned and wisdom yet to be learned.
The intellectual heritage I’ve received didn’t start with me, and it won’t end with me. I’m a steward of it, just as I’m a steward of capital. My role is to absorb it, to live it, to refine it through my own experience, and to pass it on—through my work, through my writing, through conversations with clients and colleagues, through moments of teaching and being taught.
The Next Time You Play
So next time you pick up a board game—backgammon, chess, or any other—think of all the people who played it before you. Think of the unbroken chain of human connection required for you to know how to play.
And when you buy a share of a company, think about what it took for this phenomenon to even occur. Think of the merchants in the ancient cities who developed trade systems. The Dutch who created the modern joint-stock company. The American investors who weathered the Depression and passed on their lessons. The mentors who shaped the mentors who shaped the mentors who now shape us.
We are all part of something larger than ourselves. We touch the past every time we play these games, whether on a board or in markets. And through our stewardship—of knowledge, of capital, of wisdom—we reach into the future.
That continuity of presence, that intellectual heritage passed hand to hand and mind to mind across millennia—it’s one of the most beautiful aspects of being human. It’s what allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants. It’s what makes us, in turn, a foundation for those who come next.
All from an innocent game of backgammon over the holidays, which connected me with an intellectual heritage I had yet to fully appreciate—and reminded me of the one I’ve spent over two decades acquiring in the world of investing and family wealth.
The games we play are never just games. They’re living bridges to everyone who came before and everyone who will come after.
And that, I think, is worth preserving.
Before you go…
If this post resonated with you, take a moment, and please share it with anyone in your network who might find it valuable too—this Substack grows entirely through word of mouth from readers like you. Thank you so much!
Disclosure:
Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser. The information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial adviser and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.