Why Everything In Life Feels Out of Reach

00:00:03 Speaker 1: My name is Charlie kirk I run the largest pro American student organization in the country, fighting for the future of our republic. My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth. If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're gonna end up miserable. But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. You got to stop sending your kids to college. You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible. Go start at turning point, you would say college chapter. Go start aturning point youould say high school chapter. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade, most important decision I ever made in my life, and I encourage you to do the same. Here I am Lord, Use me. Buckle up, everybody, Here we go. Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirkshaw, a company that specializes in gold I rays and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegold investments dot Com. That is Noblegoldinvestments dot Com. 00:01:17 Speaker 2: All right, welcome to the Jarley Kirk Show. It is August twentieth Man. This week is flown by Actually we are here in Phoenix, Arizona at the y REAVI Studios. Blake, how we doing today? 00:01:28 Speaker 3: We're doing lovely. We're doing lovely. 00:01:30 Speaker 2: So without further ado, Blake, why don't you introduce us to our first guest? 00:01:33 Speaker 3: All right, this is a guy I wanted to have him on for the past month and we finally got to put it together. His name is Johann Kurtz. He's the author of the book Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack, which I strongly recommend to everyone trying to get him on for last month because a month ago he had a post. It was an article of his on Substack, but it was also posted on x It went wow, really, I think fifteen million plus fewers something like that ton for a long article and it was titled young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise. 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 Speaker 2: But you know, this is the twenty dollars burrito show, obviously, so, but it's not even just the twenty dollars barrito. 00:02:26 Speaker 3: It's so much deeper than that. And that's why I'm so excited to have him on. So, Johan Kurtz, I believe we have him there. He's if there's any delay, I think he's joining us from from far away. But Johan, thank you for joining the program. 00:02:38 Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me. 00:02:39 Speaker 3: Excellent, excellent. So let's let's just kind of leave the floor to you on this. You say, Okay, you might look at the data and it says salaries are really high, and you know, people complain about prices, but prices of food haven't gone up. But you know, 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. What's going on? 00:03:15 Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it's a big question. I think part of it is the strongest arguments against the position I'm going to take would be something like real income or inflation adjusted incomes for young people have risen substantially over the last few decades, and unemployment is at low levels across the West, in America and my own country as well. The problem is 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, which suggests to us that we are better off than ever, tend to be disposable goods, tend to be pleasurable goods. It's electronics, it screens, it's toys, travel, it's cheap food. Ironically, that's often touted as something that has got cheaper, perhaps not in the last few months. 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. People who want to have children, people who want to get married, people who want to build something greater than themselves. These are the cost of homes, both in terms of rent and in terms of the affordability of buying a house. 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. Completing your studies, entering into a stable job, finding a spouse, getting married, having children, and buying a home. Those are the things that have become more difficult than ever to achieve. 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 their 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, and that's more difficult to capture in the statistics. 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 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. 00:05:44 Speaker 3: Well, so I think that social capital thing is interesting. So for our viewers who don't know financial capital, that is money, dollars and cents. But can you explain to them what what is social capital? Maybe with an example I really liked in your part to follow up piece that you published on this, you talk about dating as an example where dating is more expensive and more difficult because there's these invisible social capital factors that have receded. So how about you explain social capital and you build out that example for people who haven't read your piece. 00:06:17 Speaker 4: That's right. 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. So the classic example is financial capital. How much money do I have in my bank? You know, what are the assets that I control worth? Another classic example is human capital. So 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. And in addition to financial and human capital, there is something which is well understood as social capital, and this is value which inhars or exists in relationships, in communities, and networks, in the things which allow people to collaborate, to call upon each other, to trust each other. 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 to It lowers transaction costs, It means that you can trust your counterparties, you don't have to involve lawyers and contracts and background checks and the police and so forth litigation, and so social capital is a real factor in delivering you the life that you want. 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. The example you gave, which I think is a clear one, is in the dating market. So traditionally, if you go back you know, fifty sixty, seventy, and certainly further back in time years, dating and finding potential spouses is something that emerges naturally out of a community. 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, who could make an introduction, Because they understood both those people, their reputations, their prospects, they could make a kind of calculation. 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. 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. Now we're moving into a time where dating emergers out of anonymous spaces, and in those spaces you have to prove yourself through expensive social signaling. 00:09:04 Speaker 2: I want to play k on affordability and continue on with Johan here, let's play tot seven. 00:09:09 Speaker 1: The American dreams has become a luxury item for the wealthy elites. 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 never marry and work until they die. Under Biden, our young people own nothing and they are miserable. 00:09:33 Speaker 2: That's Charlie saying the American dream has become a luxury item. 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. So this is what you say in your piece. My argument is that previous generation 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 light upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated. 00:10:05 Speaker 3: 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. Some of those things I'm not sure you could necessarily obtain at all. 00:10:16 Speaker 2: No, I mean, especially the courtship culture. 00:10:19 Speaker 3: I guess. 00:10:20 Speaker 2: So, yeah, you talk about this, it's like 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. Now, I mean this is my personal opinion on You don't have to agree with it. But now you have a bunch of immigrants that you don't necessarily share. Their values, their language, their religion, things like that have gotten more expensive. It's harder. So now you have to pay to take them to you know, for my kids, we take them to indoor slide park or whatever, and that costs one hundred and fifty bucks. You you know, you talk about courtship culture. Now you have to peacock on your first date instead of you know, your mom or anti across the way going he has high you know, he has great prospects for the future. Explain how this happened. 00:10:59 Speaker 4: Wow, well it's a big story. I mean, so you know, if you go back to the nineteen fifties and you say, okay, well I've got a choice between public school and private school, and you ask what the differences are. There are differences, of course, but one of the things that there isn't a big gap in is, for example, intact families. Will I be sending my school, if my child to a school if I go for the less expensive option to a place where families as a concept is 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. Now that difference is really different. So back then, eighty five percent of families at your local public school would have lived in that atomic structure, and that meant that that was a genuine option for you. And now the divergence between public school and private school in most of the US is really tremendous, and this compounds out across you know, if you look at the upper class versus the lower classes, Church attendance is different, all kinds of measures of social health are different. And so you can say, well, you know, the cost of certain kinds of school might not have gone up by the way it has, even in real terms massively for private school. But what is essential to recognize is that you're not even paying for the same thing. It is qualitatively different. The fact that the actual composition of who is at your school, how are they living, are they living according to a moral midiere that you would want to embed your children in. These things have substantially changed. 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. The same is as you were alluding to true for your neighborhood. You know people now decry helicopter parenting, not letting children out of your sight. 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, and so as you sort of alluded to at that point, well, now we need to privatize my children's childhood. We need to get a bigger backyard so that they can play outside, because I don't trust them alone in the local park. 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. The number of children who walk to school every day in America has collapsed over the last seventy years. 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. All of this is because not only have these things become more expensive, they've become more necessary because of this collapse in social capital, the loss of a common understanding of the common God good and how it is appropriate to behave in public, and how it is appropriate to raise and treat children. 00:14:06 Speaker 2: I so, as a father of three, I can tell you specifically what you're talking about. Do I trust my neighbors to share my values when it comes to my Christian values? What is appropriate or inappropriate to teach my children or to expose them to that. You know, so when you find other friends that you trust, it doesn't matter if they live across the street. Now 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, and it affects the way that you let them interact with the neighborhood around them. It's a huge, huge problem. Sorry, Blake, I just had to say that that is so spot on. 00:14:45 Speaker 3: Do you think this loss of social capital it seems to have happened across the West and even in you know, non Western but modernized countries. Was this an inevitable product of globalization, modernization, industrialization, urbanization, 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 Speaker 4: I think some of it is inevitable 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, some of these were policy choices. Immigration certainly a policy choice. Some of these are misguided of personal movements. And the collapse of religion of the various denominations of Christianity is an example there. So I think we have what we need to reconstitute, but it's going to be a long journey. 00:15:45 Speaker 2: 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. Charlie believed that ideas shaped character, conviction, and courage. That's why he spent years studying the classics the American Founding in the Bible through Hillsdale College's free online courses. He would rave about these courses all the time. These free online courses are taught by Hillsdale College professors and draw from the same great books and enduring ideas studied on Hillsdale's campus. Hillsdale's newest free online course is The Iliad, where Professor Stephen Smith guides students through Homer's great epic of honor, courage, friendship, leadership, and the pursuit of true greatness. For nearly three thousand years, the Iliad has shaped the Western imagination. 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Learn deeply, think clearly, lead boldly, and carry it forward, just like Charlie Blake. We got some emails we do. We got h react. 00:17:33 Speaker 3: Yeah, people, people are really into it. We got Judy said, Johann has been on my radar for a while. I'm thrilled to see him on your show. He is so relevant and sisive and thought provoking. And we got another from Roger. I believe it's actually Roger's wife, but she uses his email and she says, I'm getting his book spot on. I've been noticing our bibbles and beads and trinket culture for decades, and we were not even immune to this back in the day, but it's gotten so much worse, so much people really like what Johann has to say. 00:18:01 Speaker 2: Johann, you mentioned immigration and you're I believe a Londoner American kind of You're a true citizen of the world, it sounds like. But the immigration to me, we call it the fix everything switch. I believe so much of this is driven the fact that people don't understand this. I actually had this conversation with Chris Cuomo on his podcast a couple days ago, and I got to find it and clip it up and get it on social media. But we were talking about the fact that even if you go back to the first immigration waves in the eighteen eighties 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, and people don't remember that. They misremember it because after the Great Depression, after World War One and two, there was a binding effect, right, everybody sort of saw themselves as triumphant victors of these world wars. It brought the America that we now know in love together. Then comes nineteen sixty four sixty five Heart Seller Act. We start we get rid of the quota system. We have a lot more foreign cultures that are coming into the country, and it puts additional strains. And then in nineteen ninety we took it from five hundred thousand immigrants a year to about one point two million. Okay, so the massive stretching, massive pressures on the culture. I think that we cannot overstate the amount of pressure that's put on social fabric. You know, you've got England to choose from, You've got all of Europe America. What, in your opinion are the I don't know the consequences of our immigration policies. 00:19:36 Speaker 4: No, I know I'm the problem. Dad's English and mother's family are all Americans. 00:19:39 Speaker 2: So you are thank you for ruing our social fabric here, yo, I'm just kidding. 00:19:45 Speaker 4: Go ahead, well, okay, so I'm going to answer the question about immigration directly. It give me thirty seconds to go on a tangent to explain how I'm going to how I'm going to answer it. One thing that is very important for the establishments of valuable social capital multiplex relationships. Multiplex relationships are ones that take place over more than one context. So you have a multiplex relationship with someone if their kid is at your school, you go to the same church, you live in the same neighborhood, maybe you do business together. So there are many dimensions to your relationship with another person. A simplex relationship is one in which you only have a single narrow focus in your relationship with them, typically a professional transaction with someone who you just hire and then don't speak to again. That is a simplex relationship. 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 and the 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 fourteen year old and you trust how they've raised her, you might hire her as a nanny rather than going to a professional service. The list goes on. Essentially, a more dimensionality there is to a relationship. The more trust, the more opportunity to give and receive favors. 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, So there's multiplexity. This density of relationships is essential for meaningful social capital that really actually makes you feel wealthy and empowered and effective. Immigration really challenges that, even when done with the best of intentions even in diverse communities with really lovely people. Robert Putnam, who is possibly the most important American social scientists, the kind of giant of sociology of the twentieth and early twenty first 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. The most important study that's relevant here is called Eblurbus Unum. 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. It was assumed before he conducted this study that one of two things was true. 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. 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. What Putnam found in this huge, huge study, you know, thirty thousand survey respondents and so forth. Is actually a third thing, which is that in more diverse settings, by very large borders of magnitude, even when you control aggressively for confounding factors, more diverse set up don't produce either conflict or contact in the ways previously described. They just cause everyone to retreat into a private life. It's not like people start associating more with their own ethnicity or their own group, as it were. They simply retreat from the commons. And this is a real problem. And it's a problem because let's say I have a neighbor who I really like, but he is quite different from me. He's different ethnically, he's got a different history, he practices a different religion. He's a great guy whenever we speak. It's a real challenge to the formation of multiplex networks. When we have so little in common, we can really only transact and help each other along very narrow lines. As you can pound 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. They are markedly opposed to, for example, second Amendment tissues. 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 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 deep. 00:24:31 Speaker 3: This is so so deep. I'm so glad we got you on for the full hour. So crisis is bad. Immigrations made it worse, urbanizations made it worse, so many things. The national step is, Okay, we understand the problem. It's a vast what do we do to start rebuilding those multiplex relationships, rebuild that social capital, even if it's a generations long process. 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 Speaker 4: Still working on that, you caught me in between essays, but I'll give it my best shot. The answer is it is going to be wickedly hard once the social fabric has degraded to a certain extent, it is basically rational for everyone to retreat from it 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. There is some level of professionalization there. If I don't know my neighbor well, I simply can't rely on them to provide someone to step in instead. And so that makes this very difficult, 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. 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. 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 for that for a long time, 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 in existence, that they will start participating if they're not already. There are some places in the country that are really active on this issue, and you know their intentional communities. Typically they're very religious, you know, of course one of the denominations, and I think, you know, we should double down on that. But at a national level, you know, it's some pretty bit pills to swallow. I do think immigration is a huge problem. I think things that artificially push women out of domestic settings and into the labor force should be seriously recon considered. It's you know, Putnam has these has these fascinating statistics, and again he's liberal, he's kind of uncomfortable fore grounding them. But for example, women's volunteering outside the home drops by fifty percent when she enters the labor force, and she in fact, they the family hosts less, you know, they spend less time with their children and so forth. So it's it's a pretty tough range of policy issues, maybe unpopular, but necessary to start rebuilding. 00:27:35 Speaker 2: This summer marks three years since the Dobs decision, and since then, the total number of abortions each year has only increased. With greater access to telehealth and abortion pills in the male medication. Abortions now account for more than sixty percent of all abortion and that number is only growing. That's why Preborn gives free ultrasounds to girls and women. When a young woman sees her baby and hears her heartbeat, it doubles the chance she'll choose life. So one hundred and forty dollars helps give five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies. Two hundred and eighty dollars helps save ten babies, and just twenty eight dollars a month can save a baby a month for less than a dollar a day and a fifteen thousand gift, and I know there's some of you out there, fifteen thousand dollars gift will provide an ultrasound machine that will save the lives of countless babies for years to come. Call eight three three eight five zero two two two nine or click on the Preborn banner at Charliekirk dot com today. 00:28:30 Speaker 5: Preborn was so special to Charlie and it's so important to me as well. Right now, you can help make motherhood possible by providing ultrasounds with preborn I'd be so honored if you'd prayerfully consider joining us. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: The liberal media will love it. They'll say, oh, yes, Okay, now I get it. Joe Biden is now fixing his own problem. Joe Biden is stepping up and he's allowing a flow of people from the Middle East into America. Thank you, Joe Biden. You're such a hero, so benevolent, you're so respectful, you're so compassionate. Do you see what's going on here? What's going on here is Joe Biden wants a couple hundred thousand more elan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently. We're playing checkers and they're playing chess. 00:29:14 Speaker 3: That's an old clip from Charlie. 00:29:16 Speaker 2: Talking about changing the body politic. And Johann Kurtz has, I think, as well as anybody I've heard, explained why that is so cost so deep, why it's so expensive actually, and we talk about benefits and not just. 00:29:29 Speaker 3: Why it's expensive, why it feels so out of reach. We got an email from Caleb in the break who said, short answer to the problem church, and I think that's totally clearly a big part of it. You discussed that in your pieces, Johann, but I want to discuss another thing because I want another chance to shout out more of your work. You're also the author of the book Leaving a Legacy, and it's about sort of multius you say, thousand year families. That's see inheritance charity and thousand year families, and so it's about, I guess, basically treating your family not just as your nuclear family unit, but have the courage to imagine yourself as a dynasty that will last into the future. So let's relate it to what the articles we've been talking about the rest of this hour. 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 Speaker 4: Yeah, well, if I had to connect the two, I would say something like this, This kind of crisis of ephemerality, this crisis of things dissolving, is present in the social space. It's also present in the financial space. You know, Victor Hagani and James White, the two hedge funk guys out of New York, have this very interesting book called The Missing billionaires. And one of the things they point out in there is that if you took the single cohort of the thousand, the thousand wealthiest families in the US in nineteen hundred and you projected out their returns, if they just made average investments that reproduced at the normal rate, they would have give rise to sixteen thousand billionaire families today. But there are only sort of nine hundred billionaire families in the US at the moment, and that sixteen thousand would have come from one cohort alone at one point in time, in the greatest century of wealth creation in history. 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, 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 one hundred and fifty years. It is a crisis. And so you know, I wrote the book. 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 five hundred million pound fortune to various charities. I think one of the two he named was a dog charity, 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 it is, in fact sometimes wrong to give your wealth to charity rather than your own children, like what's the use right and creating a trust fund child? And so the book is really a defense of multi generational wealth, it's place in society, and how to orient children raised in the context of wealth and an affluence towards virtue, towards understanding that they have a burden of stewardship, because this is an incredibly rich Western tradition. You know, there are many great projects, the aspects of our culture and history that we are incredibly proud of that exist because they were stewarded over generations by great families with the wealth to patronize them, and with a continuity about. 00:33:00 Speaker 3: Belief, Johan, I love reading history. I suspect you do as well. 00:33:05 Speaker 2: That I was just thinking about it. 00:33:06 Speaker 3: I think if you read English history or French history, you'll have these dynasties that recur throughout. And it's not just that they're important. There's often almost an ideological aspect to them. Oh, this family generated multiple saints. This family, they were carriers of a culture. Carrier they were enforcers of a culture. And I want to just address the elephant in the room here. We've got the rise of DSA and all this stuff. You know, there shouldn't be billionaires or whatever. There will always be elites. 00:33:34 Speaker 2: And if you get a socialist system or a communist system, you will have elites. They will look different and they will have different powers, and they will be able to control you. But you will always have elites. And the question is not whether you will have them, it's will they be virtuous elites? Or will they be tyrannical elites? Will they be selfish? Will they be focused on the common good? These are the questions that elites the burden that they must bear. And so I love what you're saying here. 00:33:58 Speaker 3: Do you want your elite to be whoever happens to be running the Aspen Institute this you know, this year, or do you want your elite, you know, potentially to be this you know dynasty that's been in America for two hundred years and they have a business that they're associated with, and they care about leaving it to their children. I think I think that's what you're getting at there. 00:34:18 Speaker 4: That's exactly right. I mean, if you look at a place like Boston, for example, you had a social media called the Boston Brahmin which emerged out of the kind of early Puritan Massachusetts culture, and they give rise to the Adams family, you know, of presidential fame. They gave rise to the Winthrops and the Cabots and the Lodges who built Harvard. They built beautiful churches, They stewarted architecture, they bought the fine arts to America. They built an amazing city. They you know, installed bells and churches, and it was it was the presence of that multi generational true elite. And I mean that not in the you know, we live in a time of very degree aided elites. I would argue, but these were men, 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 Boken of myself, the founding father of the United States, that their wealth did not exist as an independent good. It existed as a tool to exert Christ's will on earth. And you know, there's these amazing passages in the history of a man like John Hancock, where his sister George Washington, he says, all my wealth is bound up in property in Boston. But if what is necessary to take our city back from the British is to burn all that wealth to the grand then so be it. You know, it's this sense that in fact, we have a duty to dominate the earth, right to to sort of go forth and multiply. And that wealth is a tool. It's on an and onune to itself. It always carries the temptation to corrupt, but it is a force multiplier and in the hands of a virtuous steward who understands himself has beholden to God and has been entrusted with a powerful tool to serve the Lord's will. It is one of very few instruments that can really meaningfully change the world. And the alternative is giving it all the way to a quote unquote charity. These are not charities in the traditional Christian sense. Charity is a virtue, it is love. These are philanthropic organizations, which is a kind of secular, humanist, bureaucratic, professional managerial structure, which are typically oriented towards the hand that I find problematic. 00:36:39 Speaker 2: We've got to wrap it up, but everybody needs to check out a substack Becoming Noble and get his book. Learn this was deep deep stuff deep wells here Johann and we. 00:36:49 Speaker 3: Just so you want to have you back when you're Part three is out exactly. 00:36:57 Speaker 4: For more on many of these stories and news you can trust Charliekirk dot com