Towards a systemic investing approach for wisdom infrastructure

What if we invested in wisdom cultivation like we do in cities and infrastructure—Creating the wisdom infrastructure and commons that can provide lifelong holistic learning?

Imagine an investment model designed not just for financial return but for cultivating wisdom at local and societal scale—one that provides the equivalent of roads, plumbing, power grids, and public spaces for human and ecological development that can be built upon for centuries to come. An investment model that integrates real estate, human and ecological development, culture, and research to create higher education ecosystems where individuals and ecologies evolve together.

Instead of merely funding individual projects or ventures, we could create an approach to building decentralized yet interwoven Wisdom Infrastructure—a set of developmental spaces, cultural narratives, communities, ecologies of praxis, and economic engines designed to foster discernment, depth, and relational intelligence at scale.

What Zak Stein might call "a decentralized education system for a time between worlds"—the necessary architecture for cultivating life-affirming local and planetary wisdom.

What is Wisdom?

In its simplest definition,

Wisdom = knowing what to do, and when.

Within that simple definition lies a deeper, multidimensional process which involves not just the individual, but also the ecology in which an individual exists. John Vervaeke describes wisdom as relevance realization—the skill of filtering information to uncover meaningful patterns and insights. True wisdom requires overcoming self-deception, seeing beyond biases and illusions that distort perception.

Vervaeke identifies four ways of knowing that shape wisdom:

• Propositional Knowing – Understanding facts and concepts

• Procedural Knowing – Developing skills through practice

• Perspectival Knowing – Seeing through different viewpoints

• Participatory Knowing – relationality with people, land and culture

Wisdom is not just intellectual—it is lived, embodied, and cultivated through virtue, dialogue, and deep connection. It is not an abstract ideal but a practical necessity, shaping individuals, communities, and entire civilizations.

Wisdom = practical, embodied, and tied to place

An Accelerating Wisdom Gap

Our world is transforming rapidly, yet the infrastructures needed to cultivate wisdom—ethical discernment, embodied insight, and relational depth—are missing. Despite unprecedented access to information, society is increasingly fragmented and disconnected from meaning.

Once anchors of deep learning, traditional institutions now function more as bureaucracies than catalysts for transformation. Modern education sharpens intellect but neglects relational intelligence, emotional regulation, and ethical action, leaving many informed but unprepared to navigate complexity.

Meanwhile, technological progress has outpaced our collective capacity for wisdom and sense-making, widening what the Center for Humane Technology calls The Wisdom Gap—the growing divide between rising global complexity and our ability to meet it with coherence.

As the Center for Humane Technology illustrates, technology not only accelerates the complexity of global challenges but also erodes our ability to process and integrate information meaningfully. The rise of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and algorithmic manipulation makes it harder for individuals and societies to discern truth from misinformation. This manifests in:

• Disconnection: from oneself, others, and the more than human world.

• Fragmentation & loss of meaning – Information overload, ideological polarization, and a crisis of coherence

• Shallow responses to complexity – Quick fixes, reactive decision-making, and oversimplified solutions to intricate global problems

• Erosion of relational skills – Burnout, social disconnection, and the decline of intergenerational wisdom transmission

• Vulnerability to crisis – Poor leadership, misinformation, and an inability to navigate systemic change effectively

This widening wisdom gap isn't just a theoretical concern—it’s driving a tangible shift in behavior, as people seek out practices, communities, and frameworks that offer deeper integration and meaning. The market reflects this shift, revealing a growing demand for structures that cultivate wisdom, not just knowledge.

Declining Investment in Higher Education

The world is starving its intellectual commons. Across the Global North, public investment in higher education is in steady decline, reflecting not just shifting budgets but a deeper crisis of cultural foresight.

In the U.S., public funding for higher education has dropped from 11.4% of state budgets in 2000 to 8.7% in 2023, with another $1 billion in cuts looming. France has slashed nearly a billion euros from university budgets, jeopardizing research and scholarship. In Germany, rising defense spending threatens social investments, while in the UK, 75% of universities are projected to be in deficit by 2024.

This is not an isolated trend—it’s a global pattern. As governments divert resources toward military expansion, the space for intellectual and cultural development contracts. The long-term risks are existential: without sustained investment in education, we erode the very foundations of adaptive, resilient societies.

For systemic investors, this shift has profound implications. As the state retreats, the burden falls on philanthropy, private capital, and new institutional forms. This moment calls for a rethinking of higher education— an alternative to the dominant mode of rote learning - creating alternative, resilient learning ecosystems. Modern monasteries, regenerative learning hubs, and networked wisdom centers must rise to fill the void. If we fail to act, this is not just a budgetary crisis—it is a civilizational failure.

But, There is a Clear Market Demand

The surge in wellness, self-help, eco-tourism, and related industries over the past decades signals a deeper, unfulfilled longing. This growing demand reflects a widespread impulse to reclaim neglected ways of knowing. Modern education has privileged propositional and procedural knowledge, leaving participatory and perspectival ways of knowing underdeveloped. In response, people are gravitating toward alternative modalities—meditation, therapy, yoga, plant medicine, transformational travel, and wisdom traditions—seeking the relational depth and embodied intelligence that formal systems have failed to cultivate.

Rather than merely chasing personal growth, mindfulness, or therapy in isolation, I propose that they are—whether consciously or not—attempting to piece together a more integral understanding of wisdom, albeit in fragmented ways.

This shift is evident in the rapid growth of key markets, all signaling the same core need:

• Eco-Hospitality Real Estate: $116.7B growth (2024-2028) at 13.55% CAGR

• Wellness Tourism: $1T+ (2024) → $1.4T (2027) 11.87% CAGR

• Transformational Travel: $200B (U.S alone)

• Higher Education Market: $2.2T globally in 2023, projected to grow at 9.4% CAGR

• Community-Driven Media: Podcasts to exceed $3.5B ad revenue by 2025, growing 24% annually

• Meditation Market: $8.87B (2025) → $37.53B (2035) at 15.52% CAGR

• Leadership Development: $3.9B (2023) → $7.5B (2033) at 6.3% CAGR

• Personal Development: $67B by 2030 at 5.5% CAGR

However, despite this surging demand and clear market signals, current solutions are falling short of addressing the fundamental need for wisdom development (the integration of of multiple ways of knowing). Understanding why these existing approaches fail is crucial for designing more effective alternatives.

Yet, Most Offerings Fall Short

Most existing programs fail to deliver the depth and coherence required for true transformation. The landscape is crowded with fragmented, shallow, or misaligned solutions that struggle to create lasting impact:

• Commodified and Surface-Level Approaches – Much of the self-improvement industry prioritizes quick fixes, performance hacks, or commodified spirituality, reducing deep wisdom to marketable techniques rather than fostering genuine transformation.

• Detached from Place and culture – Many offerings exist in abstraction, untethered from the ecological, historical, and relational contexts that shape human development. Wisdom is inherently situated—it arises in dialogue with land, culture, and lineage. Without this grounding, many programs feel disembodied, universalized, and ultimately ineffective in fostering deep belonging.

• Misaligned Incentives – Economic models often prioritize scale and profitability over depth and discernment, resulting in diluted programs that favor broad accessibility at the cost of rigor and transformative potential.

• Fragmentation Across Fields – Mental health, leadership, personal growth, and spiritual development remain siloed, rather than existing within integrated frameworks that reflect the interconnected nature of wisdom.

• Inaccessibility of Traditional Wisdom – While deep wisdom traditions exist, many were developed within vastly different cultural and historical contexts. Institutional constraints, esoteric language, and outdated structures make them difficult to access or translate into contemporary, culturally relevant practices.

Without a coherent foundation, these efforts remain scattered, fragile, and often incapable of providing the kind of enduring transformation people seek. The solution is not to create yet another program or platform—it’s to build the underlying infrastructure that can connect, support, and deepen these initiatives in a meaningful way.

The key question becomes: What would it look like to create a comprehensive system that addresses these shortcomings while meeting the rising demand? How might we design an infrastructure that fosters genuine wisdom development at scale—without losing depth, rigor, or coherence?

So, What Could Wisdom Infrastructure Look Like?

We often think of education as something that happens in classrooms, confined to a specific phase of life. But what if we viewed learning as a lifelong process, woven into the fabric of everyday existence? Zak Stein argues that our educational models must evolve beyond industrial-era schooling to support human development across an entire lifespan. This means shifting from a narrow focus on formal education to creating wisdom infrastructure—an interconnected system of spaces, practices, and institutions that foster continuous growth, deep inquiry, and societal transformation.

Instead of treating wisdom as a personal pursuit, we could embed it into society by investing in the infrastructure that enables collective cultivation. From this perspective, imagine four interwoven domains, each reflecting a fundamental aspect of how societies are built:

• 1. Culture – The Roads & Networks of Wisdom

  • Media and communities that cultivate shared narratives and deepen collective wisdom.

• 2. Place – The Buildings & Public Spaces of Wisdom

  • Physicals spaces such as developmental centers, urban hubs, bioregional hubs, folk high schools, eco-villages and modern monasteries where wisdom is lived and practiced.

• 3. Vocation – The Economic Engines of Wisdom

  • Applying wisdom in action by supporting entrepreneurs, educators, and leaders integrating wisdom into business, education, governance, and technology.

• 4. Commons – The Utilities & Governance of Wisdom

  • Ensuring wisdom remains a public good by funding research, open-access knowledge platforms, mentorships and fellowships for scholars and practitioners advancing systemic wisdom.

  • Ensuring interoperability among the ecosystem

These domains don’t function in isolation—they form a reinforcing cycle. In startup terms, this could be seen as a growth loop, where each element strengthens and expands the others over time.

Imagine the journey from an individual’s perspective:

• You engage with a piece of media that sparks curiosity, leading you to explore an online course.

• The course deepens your interest, prompting you to join a physical retreat or immersive program.

• Through these experiences, you begin re-evaluating your work or purpose, leading to a vocational shift that aligns more with your values.

• As you integrate these changes, you contribute back—through inspiring others, mentorship, or acts of service—helping expand the collective understanding of human development and inspiring others to embark on their own journeys.

The above is of course a highly oversimplified an linear illustrative example, of course, real growth is never a straight line. It’s iterative, nonlinear, and shaped by personal and societal conditions. But the key idea is that by providing the infrastructure to support development over a lifetime, we can make wisdom more accessible—not just through isolated experiences or content, but through a system designed for long-term transformation.

So, what does this mean for how we invest in it?

A Hybrid Capital Approach to Portfolio Creation

Building wisdom infrastructure requires a blended financial strategy—one that balances market-driven innovation with mission-protected stewardship. Just as thriving cities rely on both private investment and public goods, wisdom infrastructure must integrate for-profit capital to drive growth and philanthropic capital to experiment with new structures, safeguard depth, equity, and long-term resilience.

When thoughtfully deployed, these forms of capital don’t just coexist—they reinforce and amplify each other.

For-Profit Capital: Scaling Sustainable Wisdom Infrastructure

Investing in developmental real estate, wisdom-aligned businesses, and media platforms creates financially sustainable pathways for wisdom infrastructure, ensuring long-term scalability and continuous innovation. While not exhaustive, the following areas illustrate key investment opportunities:

• Developmental Real Estate – Mixed-use developments integrating education, residential living, retreat centers, and bioregional regeneration.

• Wisdom-Aligned Companies

  • EdTech & AI – Tools for personal development and deep learning.

  • Mental Health Innovation – Advancing emotional and psychological well-being.

  • Regenerative Business Services – Implementing wisdom-based governance models.

  • Community-Building Platforms – Enabling deep connection and collective intelligence.

• Media & Content

  • Long-Form Digital Media – Thoughtful journalism and interdisciplinary content.

  • Wisdom Communities – Online and offline spaces for practice and peer support.

  • Publishing Ventures – Books and educational resources.

  • Film Production – Preserving and transmitting transformative insights.

Nonprofit Catalytic Capital: Seeding and Safeguarding Public Wisdom

Philanthropic capital plays a critical role in funding research, fellowships, and cultural initiatives—ensuring wisdom infrastructure remains a public good beyond the constraints of market forces.

• Research Initiatives – Bridging natural science, humanities, contemplative traditions, and indigenous knowledge systems

• Proof-of-Concept & Risk Mitigation – Funding early-stage models and first-loss mechanisms.

• Fellowships – Supporting scholars, practitioners, and emerging leaders.

• Cultural Initiatives – Public education, arts, and intergenerational knowledge-sharing.

• Steward-Ownership & Cooperative Models – Ensuring long-term mission-aligned governance.

The above is not an exhaustive list, but merely a pointer towards a high level architecture. Much of this work is already in motion, and future posts will explore these components in greater depth, including potential governance structures, market mapping etc. For now, this serves as a broad orientation—a starting point for thinking about how capital can be structured to support a resilient, regenerative wisdom ecosystem. In future posts I will go into more detail with specific elements.

The question then arises, are there historical precedents that we can look to learn from, and maybe also to help provide the guardrails that can disable bad actors from weaponizing such an infrastructure etc.

Historical Precedents: Learning from the Past

This is not the first time in history that we face the challenge of cultivating wisdom at scale. Many societies—across vastly different cultural contexts—have systematically invested in wisdom infrastructure during periods of profound change. These investments were not incidental; they were deliberate responses to societal transformation, creating institutions that shaped human development for generations.

With this broader lens, we can still learn from historical precedents where societies made deliberate investments in integrated knowledge cultivation:

While these institutions may have stagnated or introduced new challenges over time, they were the right solutions for their era, offering valuable lessons on both success patterns and failure points. Their legacy proves that investing in wisdom development is not only possible—it has been foundational to thriving civilizations.

Yet, limiting our perspective to educational models rooted in a single societal framework ignores the deep wisdom embedded in Indigenous traditions, where learning is interwoven with land, kinship, and lived experience. These traditions hold vital insights for designing more decentralized, embedded learning ecosystems suited to our time. The goal is not to privilege one model over another, but to recognize that each holds essential pieces of the puzzle—together contributing to the solutions we now need.

The question is not whether to invest in wisdom infrastructure, but whether we have the foresight to build developmental ecosystems capable of carrying us beyond today’s crises into a future worth living.

Will we choose short-term expedience or long-term flourishing? History shows what is possible—the future is shaped by what we do now.

The Path Forward: A Call to Action

History shows that investing in wisdom infrastructure isn’t just an idealistic pursuit—it’s a proven strategy for societal flourishing. Time and again, civilizations that prioritized wisdom cultivation created enduring legacies of innovation, resilience, and prosperity. Today, we find ourselves at a unique crossroads, where unprecedented technological capabilities, market demand, and historical necessity converge to create a rare window of opportunity.

The crises we face are not just technological, economic, or environmental—they are failures of sensemaking, relationship, and cultural transmission. We need more than education; we need a reconstitution of the conditions for learning itself. This means integrating an ecological worldview, leveraging technology without being enslaved by it, and reintegrating the wisdom traditions that have guided human development for millennia.

It’s about shifting from extractive models of knowledge to generative, life-affirming practices that cultivate coherence and syntropy—within individuals, in ecologies, between communities, and across systems. This is, I believe, the needed architecture and infrastructure of wisdom: the spaces, tools, and cultures that enable humans to grow in complexity, wisdom, and relational depth.

This future is still unwritten. The question is not whether transformation will happen, but what kind—will we drift further toward dystopianism, or will we cultivate a Renaissance of Regeneration, where wisdom shapes the next era?

—--------

It takes a village to build something of this magnitude. No single person or institution can carry it alone—it requires a deeply collaborative, multifaceted approach. We are a growing group committed to turning this vision into concrete action: unlocking capital, forging partnerships, and laying the groundwork for wisdom infrastructure at scale. If you resonate with this mission and want to contribute—whether through investment, expertise, or operational support—we’d love to connect.