The Charlie Kirk Show - August 20, 2026


Why Everything In Life Feels Out of Reach


Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

175.08

Word count

6,481

Sentence count

405


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.
00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.
00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful.
00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.
00:00:26.000 You've got to stop sending your kids to college.
00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.
00:00:33.000 Go start a Turning Point USA High School chapter.
00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.
00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.
00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.
00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.
00:00:45.000 Here I am.
00:00:46.000 Lord, use me.
00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:56.000 Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:06.000 Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at NobleGoldInvestments.com.
00:01:13.000 That is NobleGoldInvestments.com.
00:01:17.000 All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:19.000 It is August 20th.
00:01:21.000 Man, this week has flown by, actually.
00:01:24.000 We are here in Phoenix, Arizona at the YREFI Studios.
00:01:27.000 Blake, how are we doing today?
00:01:28.000 We're doing lovely.
00:01:28.000 We're doing lovely.
00:01:30.000 So without further ado, Blake, why don't you introduce us to our first guest?
00:01:33.000 All right, this is a guy I wanted to have him on for the past month.
00:01:36.000 And we finally got to put it together.
00:01:38.000 His name is Johan Kurtz.
00:01:40.000 He's the author of the book Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack, which I strongly recommend to everyone.
00:01:50.000 Trying to get him on for the last month because a month ago, he had a post.
00:01:54.000 It was an article of his on Substack, but it was also posted on X.
00:01:58.000 It went wildly viral.
00:01:59.000 Really viral.
00:02:00.000 I think 15 million plus views, something like that.
00:02:03.000 He puts out a ton for a long article.
00:02:04.000 And it was titled Young Adults Are Poor Despite Every Metric Which Suggests Otherwise.
00:02:11.000 And it's all about concepts Charlie would love about loss of social capital and how everything, you know, we're superficially very rich, but everything feels more expensive.
00:02:20.000 And this is the $20 burrito show, obviously.
00:02:24.000 But it's not even just the $20 burrito, it's so much deeper than that.
00:02:27.000 And so that's why I'm so excited to have him on.
00:02:29.000 So, Johan Kurtz, I believe we have him there.
00:02:32.000 If there's any delay, I think he's joining us from far away.
00:02:36.000 But, Johan, thank you for joining the program.
00:02:38.000 Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:40.000 Excellent, excellent.
00:02:41.000 So, let's just kind of.
00:02:43.000 Leave the floor to you on this.
00:02:45.000 You say, okay, you might look at the data and it says salaries are really high, and people complain about prices, but prices of food haven't gone up.
00:02:54.000 You can have the economics experts come out and debate this, but at a core level, why does it feel like the core goals people have in life, marriage, family, kids, community, they feel way more out of reach than they did for your parents' generation, or especially your grandparents' and great grandparents' generation?
00:03:13.000 What's going on?
00:03:15.000 Yeah, well, it's a big question.
00:03:18.000 I think part of it is the strongest arguments against the position I'm going to take would be something like real income, so inflation adjusted incomes for young people have risen substantially over the last few decades.
00:03:30.000 And unemployment is at low levels across the West and America and my own country as well.
00:03:36.000 The problem is that when you dive into exactly how that inflation is calculated, when you disaggregate it across different baskets of goods, what you find is that the things which have become much cheaper.
00:03:49.000 Which suggests to us that we are better off than ever tend to be disposable goods, tend to be pleasurable goods.
00:03:56.000 It's electronics, it's screens, it's toys, it's travel, it's cheap food.
00:04:02.000 Ironically, that's often touted as something that has got cheaper, perhaps not in the last few months.
00:04:09.000 But on the other hand, the things that have unquestionably become more expensive, and it's very difficult, even if you're on the other side of this argument, to statistically rebut these elements, are the elements of an essential family life.
00:04:20.000 People who want to have children, people who want to get married, people who want to build something greater than themselves.
00:04:26.000 These are the cost of homes, both in terms of rent and in terms of the affordability of.
00:04:31.000 Buying a house.
00:04:33.000 This is the cost of life insurance, childcare, education, these essential aspects of moving through the kind of core pillars of a responsible adult life, as an American society has always understood it.
00:04:49.000 You know, completing your studies, entering into a stable job, finding a spouse, getting married, having children, and buying a home.
00:04:58.000 Those are the things that have become more difficult than ever to achieve.
00:05:02.000 And, you know, what's more is that not only have these things become more expensive in definite terms, but a lot of the things that helped us along the road to get there, or in tangible sense, what I describe in my piece as social capital, which perhaps we can discuss more on, that has truly collapsed as well.
00:05:22.000 And that's more difficult to capture in the statistics.
00:05:24.000 So I was attempting to give a nuanced expression to the combination of these factors as something that really is, unlike, you know, the people who sort of wave away the concerns, something that.
00:05:36.000 That definitely is a hard barrier to overcome, not an insurmountable barrier, but a set of very hard barriers for people who have grander aspirations than their own pleasure.
00:05:45.000 Well, so I think that social capital thing is interesting.
00:05:48.000 So, for our viewers who don't know, financial capital is money, dollars, and cents.
00:05:53.000 But can you explain to them what social capital is, maybe with an example?
00:05:58.000 I really liked in your part two follow up piece that you published on this, you talk about dating as an example, where dating is more expensive and more difficult.
00:06:08.000 Because there's these invisible social capital factors that have receded.
00:06:12.000 So, how about you explain social capital and you build out that example for people who haven't read your piece?
00:06:17.000 That's right.
00:06:18.000 So, how wealthy we feel, how able we are to acquire things and enact our will on the world depends on our ability to make use of capital.
00:06:28.000 So, the classic example is financial capital how much money do I have in my bank?
00:06:33.000 What are the assets that I control worth?
00:06:36.000 Another classic example is human capital.
00:06:40.000 You have more value in your life, and it's easier to generate wealth and effect if you are very highly educated, if you have specialist knowledge, if you have special training, which is rarefied and valued in the corporate world.
00:06:51.000 And in addition to financial and human capital, there is something which is well understood as social capital.
00:06:57.000 And this is value which inheres or exists in relationships, in communities, in networks, in the things which allow people to collaborate, to call upon each other, to trust each other.
00:07:08.000 So when you hear people talking about a high trust society, That is an example of social capital delivering often a social good, but often an economic good too.
00:07:16.000 It lowers transaction costs.
00:07:18.000 It means that you can trust your counterparties.
00:07:20.000 You don't have to involve lawyers and contracts and background checks and the police and so forth, litigation.
00:07:26.000 And so social capital is a real factor in delivering you the life that you want.
00:07:33.000 And my argument is that this social capital factor is extremely important when it comes to questions of where we choose to live, which neighborhoods are desirable to us, which would allow us to realize the life we want.
00:07:46.000 The example you gave, which I think is a clear one, is in the dating market.
00:07:51.000 So, traditionally, if you go back, you know, 50, 60, 70, and certainly further back in time, years, dating and finding potential spouses is something that emerges naturally out of a community.
00:08:05.000 The West has never practiced arranged marriages, but it certainly had arranged meetings, you know, where friends would introduce friends to others, or you were introduced through church or through friends of the family, through different aspects of a rich community in which people knew each other and were able to tell who might be right for each other because they knew both parties well.
00:08:25.000 Who could make an introduction because they understood both those people, their reputations, their prospects.
00:08:30.000 They could make a kind of calculation.
00:08:33.000 And that meant that when those two people met, they came together with the backing of reputation, with people vouching for them that they both trusted.
00:08:42.000 If they had friends in common, they could get away with a kind of easy first encounter in which no one had to prove anything.
00:08:50.000 Now we're moving into a time where dating emerges out of anonymous.
00:08:55.000 Spaces and in those spaces, you have to prove yourself through expensive social signaling.
00:09:04.000 I want to play CK on affordability and continue on with Johan here.
00:09:07.000 Let's play SAT 7.
00:09:09.000 The American dream has become a luxury item for the wealthy elite.
00:09:15.000 Democrats have given hundreds of billions of dollars to illegals and foreign nations, while Gen Z has to pinch pennies just so that they can never own a home.
00:09:27.000 Never marry and work until they die.
00:09:29.000 Under Biden, our young people own nothing and they are miserable.
00:09:33.000 That's Charlie saying the American dream has become a luxury item.
00:09:36.000 And I think that's a really interesting point because it does feel like so many of the things that society just provided for free, you have to pay for, right?
00:09:44.000 So this is what you say in your piece.
00:09:45.000 My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital, trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon.
00:10:01.000 That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.
00:10:05.000 And it strikes me some of those are things that, okay, if you make a lot of money, you could buy, you know, an approximation of them.
00:10:13.000 Some of those things, I'm not sure you could necessarily obtain at all.
00:10:16.000 No, I mean, especially the courtship culture.
00:10:19.000 If you're an Amish, I guess.
00:10:20.000 So, yeah, you talk about this.
00:10:22.000 It's like you, you know, you used to go to the public park and you knew that everybody in the public park would be your neighbors, share your values.
00:10:28.000 Now, I mean, this is my personal opinion, Johan.
00:10:31.000 You don't have to agree with it, but now you have a bunch of.
00:10:34.000 That you don't necessarily share their values, their language, their religion, things like that have gotten more expensive.
00:10:40.000 It's harder.
00:10:40.000 So now you have to pay to take them to, you know, for my kids, we take them to an indoor slide park or whatever, and that costs $150.
00:10:46.000 You, you know, you talk about courtship culture.
00:10:50.000 Now you have to peacock on your first date instead of, you know, your mom or auntie across the way going, he has great prospects for the future.
00:10:57.000 Explain how this happened.
00:10:59.000 Well, it's a big story.
00:11:01.000 I mean, so, you know, if you go back to the 1950s and you say, okay, Well, I've got a choice between public school and private school.
00:11:12.000 And you ask what the differences are.
00:11:14.000 There are differences, of course, but one of the things that there isn't a big gap in is, for example, intact families.
00:11:22.000 Will I be sending my child to a school if I go for the less expensive option to a place where families as a concept has just broken down, where most people are living in the context of a mother and a father in a Christian home, and the unit is intact?
00:11:41.000 Now, that difference is really different.
00:11:44.000 So, back then, 85% of families at your local public school would have lived in that atomic structure.
00:11:51.000 And that meant that that was a genuine option for you.
00:11:54.000 And now the divergence between public school and private school in most of the US is really tremendous.
00:12:00.000 And this compounds out across, you know, if you look at the upper class versus the lower classes, church attendance is different.
00:12:07.000 All kinds of measures of social health are different.
00:12:09.000 And so you can say, well, you know, the cost of certain kinds of school might not have gone up.
00:12:13.000 By the way, it has, even in real terms, massively for private school.
00:12:18.000 But What is essential to recognize is that you're not even paying for the same thing.
00:12:22.000 It is qualitatively different.
00:12:24.000 The fact that the actual composition of who is at your school, how are they living?
00:12:28.000 Are they living according to a moral milieu that you would want to embed your children in?
00:12:33.000 These things have substantially changed.
00:12:34.000 And so that is, again, this example of social capital coming in and basically demanding that you replace something that was once provided for free with very expensive outlays of financial capital to send your child to an expensive school.
00:12:51.000 The same is, as you were alluding to, true for your neighborhood.
00:12:54.000 You know, people now decry helicopter parenting, not letting children out of your sight.
00:12:59.000 The fact is that helicopter parenting is a rational response if you live in a neighborhood where you don't understand the values of your neighbors, if you don't know them well, if you don't know what they think about children and how they should be raised and what it is appropriate to teach a child, let alone security concerns in some neighborhoods as well.
00:13:18.000 And so, as you sort of alluded to at that point, well, now we need to.
00:13:21.000 Privatize my children's childhood.
00:13:23.000 We need to get a bigger backyard so that they can play outside because I don't trust them alone in the local park.
00:13:29.000 We need to get another car because I'm going to be driving them to school every day because they can't walk to school.
00:13:35.000 The number of children who walk to school every day in America has collapsed over the last 70 years.
00:13:42.000 And I need to be sending them to summer school and I need to be sending them, exactly as you said, to the water park and so forth.
00:13:48.000 All of this is because not only have these things become more expensive, they've become more necessary.
00:13:54.000 Because of this collapse in social capital, the loss of a common understanding of the common good and how it is appropriate to behave in public and how it is appropriate to raise and treat children.
00:14:07.000 So, as a father of three, I can tell you specifically what you're talking about.
00:14:11.000 Do I trust my neighbors to share my values when it comes to my Christian values?
00:14:17.000 What is appropriate or inappropriate to teach my children or to expose them to?
00:14:22.000 So, when you find other friends that you trust, It doesn't matter if they live across the street now.
00:14:29.000 You're going to go out and you need that extra car to drive your kids to the parents' house that you trust because it's that important.
00:14:36.000 And it affects the way that you let them interact with the neighborhood around them.
00:14:40.000 It's a huge, huge problem.
00:14:42.000 Sorry, Blake.
00:14:43.000 I just had to say that that is so spot on.
00:14:45.000 Do you think this loss of social capital seems to have happened across the West and even in non Western but modernized countries?
00:14:52.000 Was this an inevitable product of globalization, modernization, industrialization, urbanization?
00:15:00.000 Or were there policies that were chosen that engineered this and brought it about, maybe even if we weren't thinking about it?
00:15:08.000 I think some of it is inevitable.
00:15:10.000 Changes in the economy from the end of the medieval era to the modern era and the locus of economic production leaving the home presented a real and inevitable challenge, technologically and economically speaking, to these.
00:15:23.000 Some of these were policy choices.
00:15:25.000 Immigration, certainly a policy choice.
00:15:28.000 Some of these are misguided, sort of personal movements and the collapse of.
00:15:34.000 Religion of the various denominations of Christianity is an example there.
00:15:39.000 So, I think we have what we need to reconstitute, but it's going to be a long journey.
00:15:45.000 Before he ever stepped onto a debate stage or behind a microphone, Charlie understood something really important that if you want to lead, you first have to learn.
00:15:55.000 Charlie believed that ideas shape character, conviction, and courage.
00:15:58.000 That's why he spent years studying the classics, the American founding, and the Bible through Hillsdale College's free online courses.
00:16:05.000 He would rave about these courses all the time.
00:16:07.000 These free online courses are taught by Hillsdale College professors and draw from the same great books and enduring ideas.
00:16:13.000 Studied on Hillsdale's campus.
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00:16:27.000 For nearly 3,000 years, the Iliad has shaped the Western imagination.
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00:16:37.000 But Homer's epic is more than a story of ancient battles, it raises enduring questions about courage, duty, and leadership.
00:16:43.000 Sacrifice and self command.
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00:17:11.000 You can enroll today completely free and take this class or their 40 plus other free online courses.
00:17:17.000 Just visit charlieforhillsdale.com to start learning today.
00:17:20.000 That's charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:17:23.000 Learn deeply, think clearly, lead boldly, and carry it forward, just like Charlie.
00:17:30.000 Blake, we got some emails.
00:17:31.000 We do.
00:17:31.000 We got.
00:17:32.000 People are really reacting to it.
00:17:33.000 Yeah, people are really into it.
00:17:34.000 We got Judy said, Johan has been on my radar for a while.
00:17:37.000 I'm thrilled to see him on your show.
00:17:39.000 He is so relevant, incisive, and thought provoking.
00:17:42.000 And we got another from Roger.
00:17:44.000 I believe it's actually Roger's wife, but she uses his email.
00:17:47.000 And she says, I'm getting his book spot.
00:17:50.000 On, I've been noticing our baubles and beads and trinket culture for decades.
00:17:55.000 And we were not even immune to this back in the day, but it's gotten so much worse.
00:17:58.000 It's gotten so much worse.
00:17:59.000 People really like what Johan has to say.
00:18:01.000 Johan, you mentioned immigration, and you're, I believe, a Londoner, American kind of, but you're a true citizen of the world, it sounds like.
00:18:12.000 But immigration to me, we call it the fix everything switch.
00:18:17.000 I believe so much of this is driven.
00:18:20.000 The fact that people don't understand this, I actually had this conversation with Chris Cuomo.
00:18:23.000 On his podcast a couple days ago, and I got to find it and clip it up and get it on social media.
00:18:28.000 But we were talking about the fact that even if you go back to the first immigration waves, the 1880s and so forth, and we started getting a lot more Italians, we started getting a lot more Irish, the amount of consternation and stress that put culturally on America was extreme.
00:18:44.000 And people don't remember that, they misremember it because after the Great Depression, after World War I and II, there was a binding effect, right?
00:18:51.000 Everybody sort of saw themselves as triumphant victors of these world wars.
00:18:55.000 It brought the America that we now know.
00:18:58.000 In love together.
00:18:59.000 Then comes 1964, 65, Hard Cellar Act.
00:19:03.000 We start, we get rid of the quota system.
00:19:05.000 We have a lot more foreign cultures that are coming into the country and it puts additional strains.
00:19:11.000 And then in 1990, we took it from 500,000 immigrants a year to about 1.2 million.
00:19:16.000 Okay.
00:19:16.000 So the massive stretching, massive pressures on the culture.
00:19:20.000 I think that we cannot overstate the amount of pressure that's put on social fabric.
00:19:26.000 You know, you've got England to choose from, you've got all of Europe, America.
00:19:29.000 What, in your opinion, are the.
00:19:32.000 I don't know, the consequences of our immigration policies.
00:19:36.000 No, I know.
00:19:37.000 I'm the problem.
00:19:37.000 Dad's English and mother's family are all American.
00:19:39.000 So you are part of the problem.
00:19:41.000 Thank you for ruining our social fabric here, Johan.
00:19:44.000 Just kidding.
00:19:45.000 Go ahead.
00:19:47.000 Well, okay.
00:19:48.000 So I'm going to answer the question about immigration directly.
00:19:50.000 Give me 30 seconds to go on a tangent to explain how I'm going to answer it.
00:19:55.000 One thing that is very important for the establishment of valuable social capital are what are called multiplex relationships.
00:20:02.000 Multiplex relationships are ones that take place over more than one context.
00:20:07.000 So you have a multiplex relationship with someone if their kid is at your school.
00:20:11.000 You go to the same church, you live in the same neighborhood, maybe you do business together.
00:20:16.000 So, there are many dimensions to your relationship with another person.
00:20:20.000 A simplex relationship is one in which you only have a single narrow focus in your relationship with them.
00:20:25.000 Typically, a professional transaction with someone who you just hire and then don't speak to again is a simplex relationship.
00:20:33.000 Valuable social capital that meaningfully changes your life by being a part of it is multiplex because you can do things like if you need a nanny.
00:20:43.000 And your daughter and your neighbor, who you know really well because they're at your church and you know them from your street and so forth, has a 14 year old and you trust how they've raised her, you might hire her as a nanny rather than going to a professional service.
00:20:56.000 The list goes on.
00:20:57.000 Essentially, the more dimensionality there is to a relationship, the more trust, the more opportunity to give and receive favors.
00:21:04.000 Maybe you give one in one context and you're happy to do that, knowing that you will receive one back in a totally different context because one opportunity will come somewhere down the line.
00:21:13.000 So, this multiplexity, this density of relationships is essential.
00:21:17.000 For meaningful social capital that really actually makes you feel wealthy and empowered and effective.
00:21:24.000 Immigration really challenges that, even when done with the best of intentions, even in diverse communities with really lovely people.
00:21:32.000 Robert Putnam, who is possibly the most important American social scientist, the kind of giant of sociology of the 20th and early 21st century, suppressed, he's something of a liberal, he suppressed his findings on this issue for a long time because he was so uncomfortable with them.
00:21:50.000 The most important study that's relevant here is called E Pluribus Unum.
00:21:54.000 It's a comprehensive study of the effect of immigration on social trust and engagement, as expressed in volunteering, organizational membership, church membership, how much time you spend watching TV, these kind of things.
00:22:09.000 It was assumed before he conducted this study that one of two things was true.
00:22:14.000 There was what was called contact theory, that diversity is actually largely in people's imagination, and when they meet new people, And they learn about them, they actually realize that they have a lot in common and that contact between groups reduces tension.
00:22:30.000 There was also conflict theory, which suggests that when two groups meet, both of them retreat into their own ethnic identity and other the other group, as it were.
00:22:42.000 What Putnam found in this huge, huge study, you know, 30,000 survey respondents and so forth, is actually a third thing, which is that in more diverse settings, By very large orders of magnitude, even when you control aggressively for confounding factors, more diverse settings don't produce either conflict or contact in the ways previously described.
00:23:06.000 They just cause everyone to retreat into a private life.
00:23:09.000 It's not like people start associating more with their own ethnicity or their own group, as it were.
00:23:15.000 They simply retreat from the commons.
00:23:17.000 And this is a real problem.
00:23:21.000 And it's a problem because, let's say, I have a neighbor who I really like, but he is quite different from me.
00:23:26.000 He's different ethnically.
00:23:27.000 He's got a different history.
00:23:28.000 He practices a different religion.
00:23:30.000 He's a great guy whenever we speak.
00:23:32.000 It's a real challenge to the formation of multiplex networks when we have so little in common.
00:23:39.000 We can really only transact and help each other along very narrow lines.
00:23:44.000 As you compound this out and you start to recognize that different groups have different political orientations, there are certain immigrant groups that are steadfastly Democrat always, and they will always remain that way.
00:23:56.000 They are markedly opposed to, for example, Second Amendment issues.
00:24:02.000 These things become very difficult to reconcile because all of these relationships are reduced to these very thin, instrumental things rather than these rich, multiplex, complex systems of gift and reward and traversing context.
00:24:18.000 And the sense that you really share every aspect of a life with another family, such that you're willing to make deep sacrifices and put yourself in positions of tremendous vulnerability because you trust them and understand them so deeply.
00:24:32.000 So deep.
00:24:32.000 I'm so glad we got you on for the full hour.
00:24:34.000 So, crisis is bad.
00:24:36.000 Immigration's made it worse.
00:24:37.000 Urbanization's made it worse.
00:24:38.000 So many things.
00:24:40.000 The national step is okay, we understand the problem.
00:24:42.000 It's vast.
00:24:44.000 What do we do to start rebuilding those multiplex relationships, rebuild that social capital, even if it's a generations long process?
00:24:53.000 What could we do as individuals, or for that matter, what could we do with government to try to make that happen?
00:24:59.000 Still working on that.
00:25:01.000 You caught me in between essays, but I'll give it my best shot.
00:25:04.000 The answer is it's going to be wickedly hard.
00:25:07.000 Once the social fabric has degraded to a certain extent, it is basically rational for everyone to retreat from it.
00:25:15.000 Because, simply put, if I go to a professional service to hire my babysitter, I will at least know that the babysitter has undergone a professional background check, she's babysat before, etc., etc.
00:25:27.000 There is some level of professionalization there.
00:25:29.000 If I don't know my neighbor well, I simply can't rely on them to provide someone to step in instead.
00:25:35.000 And so that makes this very difficult.
00:25:37.000 Because every time you retreat from participation in these mutual networks of obligation, it makes the social fabric thinner for everyone from there on out.
00:25:46.000 I think the answer, at least at a personal level, has to be you have to make sure, even if it means moving, that you are embedded in a community that you are willing to make sacrifices for, because this will be uncomfortable at first.
00:25:59.000 You will have to be more active in hosting, in entertaining, in throwing your weight behind churches and civic institutions, and you won't get a lot back.
00:26:10.000 For that, for a long time.
00:26:12.000 And that can only be justified in the context where you really believe it's worth suffering for a particular community and you have faith that other people in that community are similar enough to you across a diverse range of issues and existence that they will start participating if they're not already.
00:26:28.000 There are some places in the country that are really active on this issue and they're intentional communities.
00:26:35.000 Typically, they're very religious across one of the denominations.
00:26:40.000 And I think we should double down on that.
00:26:42.000 At a national level, It's some pretty bitter pills to swallow.
00:26:48.000 I do think immigration is a huge problem.
00:26:51.000 I think things that artificially push women out of domestic settings and into the labor force should be seriously reconsidered.
00:27:03.000 Putnam has these fascinating statistics.
00:27:06.000 And again, he's liberal, he's kind of uncomfortable foregrounding them.
00:27:11.000 But for example, woman's volunteering outside the home drops by 50% when she enters the labor force.
00:27:17.000 And she, in fact, they, The family hosts less, they spend less time with their children and so forth.
00:27:24.000 So, it's a pretty tough range of policy issues, maybe unpopular, but necessary to start rebuilding.
00:27:35.000 This summer marks three years since the Dobbs decision.
00:27:38.000 And since then, the total number of abortions each year has only increased.
00:27:41.000 With greater access to telehealth and abortion pills in the mail, medication abortions now account for more than 60% of all abortion, and that number is only growing.
00:27:51.000 That's why preborn gives free ultrasounds to girls and women.
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00:28:01.000 So $140 helps give five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.
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00:28:22.000 Call 833 850 2229 or click on the preborn banner at charliekirk.com today.
00:28:30.000 Preborn was so special to Charlie, and it's so important to me as well.
00:28:34.000 Right now, you can help make motherhood possible by providing ultrasounds with preborn.
00:28:38.000 I'd be so honored if you'd prayerfully consider joining us.
00:28:44.000 The liberal media will love it.
00:28:45.000 They'll say, oh, yes, okay, now I get it.
00:28:47.000 Joe Biden is now fixing his own problem.
00:28:49.000 Joe Biden is stepping up, and he's allowing a flow of people from the Middle East into America.
00:28:55.000 Thank you, Joe Biden.
00:28:56.000 You're such a hero, so benevolent, you're so respectful, you're so compassionate.
00:28:59.000 Do you see what's going on here?
00:29:01.000 What's going on here is Joe Biden wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omar's to come into America to change the body politic permanently.
00:29:12.000 We're playing checkers and they're playing chess.
00:29:14.000 That's an old clip from Charlie talking about changing the body politic.
00:29:19.000 And Johann Kurtz has, I think, as well as anybody I've heard, explained why that is so costly.
00:29:24.000 So deep, why it's so expensive, actually.
00:29:27.000 And we talk about benefits.
00:29:28.000 Yeah, and not just why it's expensive, why it feels so out of reach.
00:29:32.000 We got an email from Caleb.
00:29:33.000 In the break, who said, Short answer to the problem, church.
00:29:37.000 And I think that's clearly a big part of it.
00:29:39.000 You discussed that in your pieces, Johan.
00:29:41.000 But I want to discuss another thing because I want another chance to shout out more of your work.
00:29:44.000 You're also the author of the book, Leaving a Legacy.
00:29:49.000 And it's about sort of multi, you say, thousand year families.
00:29:53.000 Yeah, let's see, inheritance, charity, and thousand year families.
00:29:57.000 And so it's about, I guess, basically treating your family not just as your nuclear family unit, Have the courage to imagine yourself as a dynasty that will last into the future.
00:30:09.000 So let's relate it to what the articles we've been talking about the rest of this hour.
00:30:15.000 What is the message of your book and how does it relate to this phenomenon of building social capital and building community long term?
00:30:22.000 Yeah, well, if I had to connect the two, I would say something like this kind of crisis of ephemerality, this crisis of things dissolving, is present in the social space.
00:30:33.000 It's also present in the financial space.
00:30:36.000 Victor Hagani and James White, they're two hedge fund guys out of New York, have this very interesting book called The Missing Billionaires.
00:30:42.000 And one of the things they point out in there is that if you took the single cohort of the thousand wealthiest families in the US in 1900 and you projected out their returns, if they just made average investments, they'd reproduced at the normal rate, they would have given rise to 16,000 billionaire families today.
00:31:03.000 But there are only sort of 900 billionaire families in the US at the moment.
00:31:07.000 And that 16,000 would have come from one cohort alone.
00:31:10.000 At one point in time in the greatest century of wealth creation in history.
00:31:14.000 And so, what is happening at the moment is this tremendous explosion of wealth creation in the abstract, which we are completely unable to capture and preserve in families.
00:31:25.000 This principle of shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, of families completely flailing while trying to learn how to preserve their children's virtue against the temptations of wealth and materialism, which have beset us for the last 150 years.
00:31:44.000 It is a crisis.
00:31:45.000 And so, you know, I wrote the book.
00:31:47.000 I think the initial provocation was this incredibly viral Twitter post a couple of years ago where Simon Cowell announced he was disinheriting his son, that he was giving away his 500 million pound fortune to various charities.
00:32:01.000 I think one of the two he named was a dog charity.
00:32:05.000 And everyone reacted with outrage, but they didn't, you know, my observation was that I think it's right to be outraged in that setting, but they didn't necessarily have a moral or theological language to explain why.
00:32:16.000 It is, in fact, sometimes wrong to give your wealth to charity rather than your own children.
00:32:21.000 Like, what's the use, right, in creating a trust fund child?
00:32:24.000 And so the book is really a defense of multi generational wealth, its place in society, and how to orient children raised in the context of wealth and affluence towards virtue, towards understanding that they have a burden of stewardship.
00:32:42.000 Because this is an incredibly rich Western tradition.
00:32:45.000 You know, there are many great projects, the aspects of our culture and history that we are incredibly.
00:32:51.000 Proud of that exist because they were stewarded over generations by great families with the wealth to patronize them and with a continuity of faith and belief.
00:33:01.000 Johan, I love reading history.
00:33:03.000 I suspect you do as well.
00:33:05.000 I was just thinking about it.
00:33:06.000 If you read English history or French history, you'll have these dynasties that recur throughout.
00:33:11.000 And it's not just that they're important, there's often almost an ideological aspect to them.
00:33:15.000 Oh, this family generated multiple saints.
00:33:18.000 This family was carriers of a culture.
00:33:21.000 Carrier, yeah, exactly.
00:33:22.000 Reinforcers of a culture.
00:33:24.000 And I.
00:33:25.000 I want to just address the elephant in the room here.
00:33:27.000 We've got the rise of DSA and all this stuff.
00:33:29.000 You know, there shouldn't be billionaires and whatever.
00:33:32.000 There will always be elites.
00:33:34.000 And if you get a socialist system or a communist system, you will have elites.
00:33:39.000 They will look different and they will have different powers and they will be able to control you, but you will always have elites.
00:33:44.000 And the question is not whether you will have them, it's will they be virtuous elites or will they be tyrannical elites?
00:33:50.000 Will they be selfish?
00:33:51.000 Will they be focused on the common good?
00:33:53.000 These are the questions that elites, the burden that they must bear.
00:33:57.000 And so I love what you're saying here.
00:33:58.000 Do you want your elite to be whoever happens to be running the Aspen Institute this year?
00:34:04.000 Or do you want your elite potentially to be this dynasty that's been in America for 200 years and they have a business that they're associated with and they care about leaving it to their children?
00:34:16.000 I think that's what you're getting at there.
00:34:18.000 That's exactly right.
00:34:19.000 I mean, if you look at a place like Boston, for example, you had a social milieu called the Boston Brahmin, which emerged out of the kind of early.
00:34:28.000 Puritan Massachusetts culture.
00:34:31.000 And they gave rise to the Adams family, you know, of presidential fame.
00:34:35.000 They gave rise to the Winthrops and the Cabotts and the Lodges, who built Harvard.
00:34:40.000 They built beautiful churches.
00:34:42.000 They stewarded architecture.
00:34:44.000 They brought the fine arts to America.
00:34:47.000 They built an amazing city.
00:34:48.000 They, you know, installed bells and churches.
00:34:52.000 And it was the presence of that multi generational, true elite.
00:34:57.000 And I mean that not in the, you know, we live in a time of very degraded elites, I would argue, but these were men.
00:35:03.000 In many cases, imperfect, but many of them were men of deep faith who understood, like John Hancock, who's a great hero of the book and of myself, the founding father of the United States, that their wealth did not exist as an independent good.
00:35:18.000 It existed as a tool to exert Christ's will on earth.
00:35:23.000 And there are these amazing passages in the history of a man like John Hancock where he says to George Washington, he says, All my wealth is bound up in property.
00:35:34.000 In Boston.
00:35:35.000 But if what is necessary to take our city back from the British is to burn all that wealth to the ground, then so be it.
00:35:42.000 You know, it's this sense that, in fact, we have a duty to dominate the earth, right?
00:35:48.000 To sort of go forth and multiply.
00:35:52.000 And that wealth is a tool, it's not an end unto itself.
00:35:57.000 It always carries the temptation to corrupt, but it is a force multiplier.
00:36:02.000 And in the hands of a virtuous steward, Who understands himself as beholden to God and has been entrusted with a powerful tool to serve the Lord's will?
00:36:13.000 It is one of very few instruments that can really meaningfully change the world.
00:36:19.000 And the alternative is giving it all the way to a quote unquote charity.
00:36:23.000 These are not charities in the traditional Christian sense.
00:36:26.000 Charity is a virtue, it is love.
00:36:28.000 These are philanthropic organizations, which is a kind of secular, humanist, bureaucratic, professional managerial structure, which are typically oriented towards things that I find really problematic.
00:36:39.000 We've got to wrap it up, but everybody needs to check out his Substack, Becoming Noble, and get his book.
00:36:45.000 Learn.
00:36:47.000 This was deep, deep stuff.
00:36:48.000 Deep wells here, Johan.
00:36:49.000 And we just so appreciate it.
00:36:50.000 We want to have you back when your part three is out.
00:36:52.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:36:57.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.