Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #788: Rebuilding The High Trust Society with Johann Kurtz

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#788: Rebuilding The High Trust Society with Johann Kurtz · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
• 0:10
  If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
• 0:16
  So it's all acting like safe haven.
• 0:18
  I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
• 0:23
  currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
• 0:28
  I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
• 0:31
  If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
• 0:36
  Johan Kurtz, welcome back to the show.
• 0:39
  Thank you, Matthew. It's great to be here.
• 0:41
  It's a pleasure to have you.
• 0:43
  I have to say, the first episode we did last December, the first conversation we had, was probably one of the most popular we've ever done.
• 0:50
  I had a ton of people reach out to me and I can see the analytics on the back of the site.
• 0:56
  The podcast page for that episode is still the most viewed page on the site on a daily basis.
• 1:02
  Really?
• 1:03
  Wow.
• 1:03
  Yeah.
• 1:03
  There you go.
• 1:04
  I didn't know.
• 1:06
  Well, I wish you hadn't told me that.
• 1:08
  There's all kinds of pressure now, but I'll try and say some outrageous things and I drive those views.
• 1:12
  It's not outrageous.
• 1:13
  I think people are thirsting for this type of conversation and the framing that you bring to these conversations.
• 1:21
  And I guess just jumping into it when we last spoke, conversation really centered around duty of older generations, how to preserve wealth, how to raise capable heirs, how to make sure those heirs stay rooted and build things that outlive you.
• 1:35
  Since then, you've been writing about very similar topics, but on the other side of things, writing about young adults.
• 1:43
  And how, even though they have higher measured incomes and cheaper televisions, they cannot afford the house, spouse, children, school, neighborhood, and trusts that make durable life.
• 1:53
  So I think just following up from our first conversation last year, sort of connecting these things with the other side and really diagnosing the problem of modernity when it comes to family formation and living a life of dignity, if you will.
• 2:11
  Yeah, I mean, that's right. All these pieces are interconnected. So what we discussed last time
• 2:17
  was a kind of entreatment to actually invest in your family multi-generationally to set your family
• 2:23
  up in such a way that it can steward wealth, assets, heirlooms across the generations,
• 2:29
  and that there is a right way to do that that sets them up for virtue and flourishing. And I think
• 2:36
  what we're here to discuss today, what you suggested we just discuss today leads into that,
• 2:40
  Because an inevitable question you face is, well, I, as the patriarch, generation one of this family and family wealth, really managed to build something, maybe from nothing, maybe from a difficult standpoint several decades ago.
• 2:56
  And now I want to put my children in the same position to do it. And I'm looking around and I'm seeing these statistics that suggest there is no reason they shouldn't do exactly what I did in that it does appear that, you know, real wages have increased.
• 3:11
  So if they were to go and work a job, they would theoretically be earning more than I did at their age. And unemployment, at least among millennials, less so for Gen Z, is low. So there seems to be plenty of opportunity out there for them. So why would I not just let them? Why would I invest in them and not give my money away to causes I cared about? Do I not risk spoiling them on top of the extravagant opportunities that they should be pursuing?
• 3:36
  But I think as we've seen, the reality is not quite as rosy as a handful of headlines statistics suggest.
• 3:48
  And how do you see past the headline?
• 3:50
  What should we be looking for past the headlines that really prove that things are not as rosy as they're presented to be?
• 3:58
  Well, at some level, there has to be a measurement problem, right?
• 4:04
  You know, it's that Bezos quote about when the metrics and people's lived experience, their reported anecdotes clearly mismatch.
• 4:15
  Typically, it's that you're collecting the wrong metrics and that you're not revealing the underlying truth of the situation.
• 4:20
  And in our case, the kind of revealed preferences of where the actual behavior of Gen Z and the millennial generation does seem to indicate profound struggle, despite the fact that real incomes are up and unemployment is relatively low.
• 4:37
  Um, you know, I went looking in the piece that you discovered for subtle indicators of that,
• 4:44
  but the obvious undeniable indicators are declining homeownership,
• 4:49
  waiting until first age of homeownership until deep into their lives by some
• 4:54
  reliable metrics that has crossed 40 for some of those in the millennial cohort,
• 5:00
  which is very old historically by American standards to be buying your first home.
• 5:05
  Family formation the number of marriages the number of children even just the number of basic relationships being formed friendships and romantic relationships through the floor
• 5:18
  And a sort of variety of other indicators of basic human flourishing, mental health and so forth,
• 5:25
  that do indicate that something is seriously wrong. And at some point, you sort of have to
• 5:29
  step back from just saying again and again, well, inflation adjusted wages are up and start
• 5:35
  actually questioning your premises. Like, okay, what does that actually mean? How is that calculated?
• 5:40
  And how is that supposed to be playing through to the way that people live the lives that they
• 5:45
  desire? Because in some of these statistics, it's clearly not preference. People like the
• 5:50
  demographer Lyman Stone have shown there's a big gap between people's stated number of children
• 5:56
  they would like to have and the number of children that they are actually able to have. There's a
• 6:01
  large and growing divergence between the two. So I think it's more than just anecdotal.
• 6:09
  There are really important measures which are clashing in significant respects,
• 6:14
  and that deserves some kind of sophisticated analysis.
• 6:18
  Yeah, I think last year in the US, the median age of the home buyer was, it was higher than
• 6:26
  than 40. It was 56 last year in 2025. And I mean, I'm sitting in the first house I ever bought.
• 6:35
  I bought that. I bought this house earlier this year at the age of 35, which is my parents bought
• 6:41
  their first house when they were 21. So I'm already 14 years behind my parents' generation.
• 6:46
  And I feel very fortunate to be able to get in the house because I know others are struggling.
• 6:51
  And even when it pertains to the Verosy statistics, they're gained as well because I think the employment statistics were released here in the United States last week.
• 7:05
  And the one way they masquerade the health of the overall economy is by not counting certain individuals in the labor force participation rate.
• 7:17
  And so even though unemployment's relatively low compared to where it would be if you were to believe that we were in a crisis scenario, the participation rate in the U.S. is collapsing, particularly around young men.
• 7:31
  And that's what I think. I mean, I think we'll talk about the men of these generations and the women separately.
• 7:38
  But for the men, I think they're at a point where there are a lot of men are complete, particularly younger men are completely dejected.
• 7:46
  And they're looking out at the world and wondering, how am I ever going to actually build not only wealth, but just like a life worth living?
• 7:57
  Right. Right. And people dismiss those concerns. I mean, something you hear frequently is, well, if you look at the houses that first time buyers are now buying, they're larger than they were historically.
• 8:11
  And so these people must be spoiled because they're holding out these very large kind of mansions in the perfect suburb rather than doing what we did, which is by these tiny bungalow mid-century modern type constructions 50, 60 years ago.
• 8:27
  Unfortunately, that can't be true.
• 8:31
  So one of the things that is really squeezing young people in the situation that you describe is that rents unambiguously and by all measures have gone up significantly.
• 8:41
  Renting is very expensive.
• 8:43
  And so it doesn't make sense to say, well, these people deem it beneath them to buy a small house.
• 8:51
  So instead, they are subjecting themselves to extortionate rents and living in shoeboxes, which is the reality for most of these young people.
• 9:00
  it simply doesn't make any sense. And certainly amongst the people that I know in America and in
• 9:07
  England, it's not the lived reality. They want to be on the home ladder. They're really struggling
• 9:13
  to get there because of the confluence of what wages actually buy you. And perhaps we can sort
• 9:20
  of look at how the price of goods, various categories of goods has diverged to create
• 9:24
  situation where incomes might seem promising, but actually buy very little of substance.
• 9:31
  And then, for example, the property choices they're making where rents are crushingly high,
• 9:36
  there's nothing that they can afford to buy that makes sense for them to buy.
• 9:39
  And why that is, is an interesting question to pursue. And yeah. So again,
• 9:48
  if people could buy buying homes, they would be buying homes. That is a common dream of young
• 9:54
  people that is a historic element of having made it in the Western story, the American dream.
• 10:00
  It's a metric that people evaluate their own lives by. Again, it's not good enough to look
• 10:06
  at one particular metric and say, well, the size of these homes is growing. The price per square
• 10:11
  foot in some of these homes is falling. The complete picture reveals a generation who want
• 10:16
  to be home and simply can because of rents and other factors But you written about this idea of social capital and how high social capital families can do more cheaply and can do things more effectively than atomized families with the same income
• 10:33
  What is this idea of social capital? How does it work operationally? And how should one view this concept and applying it to their lives?
• 10:43
  So the original piece basically made two parallel tracks of an argument about why young people are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise.
• 10:56
  One of those was the one that we've touched on so far, which is that even if you look at their purely financial wealth, their financial wealth does not buy them what many assume it would.
• 11:07
  And the reason for that is some goods have become radically less expensive over the last few decades, consumer electronics, screens, software, toys, travel, etc.
• 11:19
  However, these tend to be disposable goods, which are nice pleasures, but perhaps aren't very good for us and certainly aren't the underpinnings of a rich and productive adult life versus things which have become unambiguously more expensive over the last few decades.
• 11:33
  And these are health insurance, childcare, education, housing, these kinds of things
• 11:40
  that are certainly very important for family formation. So the financial capital piece is far
• 11:45
  more complex than commonly understood. What is basically not understood at all, at least in kind
• 11:52
  of popular, overly optimistic discourse. And this isn't a reason for blankpilling. Perhaps we can
• 11:59
  identify some solutions and cause for hope later on, but is this concept of social capital.
• 12:06
  How wealthy you are, what you can achieve in the world, how empowered you feel to achieve,
• 12:13
  to build the kind of life you want to have, which features the kinds of things that you
• 12:17
  want it to feature, is not just a function of financial wealth. It's not just about how much
• 12:22
  money is in your bank account or the theoretical value of the assets that you own and control.
• 12:27
  It is also about, for example, human capital is one that is frequently discussed. So this is your knowledge, your skills, your education, your professional standing, your health as well. These things combine to give you trajectories in life, which allow you to accrue greater goods, achieve greater things and so forth.
• 12:47
  Another one is social capital. And social capital is not the value that inheres in assets or the value that inheres in individuals. It is the value that inheres in relationships, in organizations, networks. And this is a really meaningful source of power, control, influence, ability to change the world, ability to move fiscally efficiently through the world as well.
• 13:16
  So typically when people talk about conditions of, you hear things like a high trust society
• 13:21
  versus a low trust society, that is one of the ways of describing a world that features rich
• 13:28
  social capital. In conditions of strong social capital, you will find things like
• 13:34
  a lot of volunteering, a lot of association forming, a lot of trust. When you have trust
• 13:41
  between different neighbors or business partners, it makes things radically less expensive because
• 13:47
  you don't have to bring in lawyers and contracts and due diligence and background checks and
• 13:52
  litigation and surveillance and security and all of these things that you do in a low trust setting.
• 13:58
  A low trust setting is one of a million paper cuts of friction, of checks, of validation,
• 14:05
  and one where you increasingly have to turn to private services and pay for private services.
• 14:11
  which previously would have emerged for free because of the strength of relationships.
• 14:17
  And so social capital, conditions of high social capital, where people trust each other,
• 14:26
  they understand each other, there are low barriers to coordination. In many ways, these are cheaper,
• 14:33
  fiscally cheaper. You will end up with more money in your bank account when you operate in a setting
• 14:38
  like that. And what has largely happened is that we have moved away from a society in basically
• 14:44
  every domain of contemporary life from conditions of relatively high trust. It's important not to
• 14:49
  idealize the past. And there are settings like 1970s New York where this wasn't true.
• 14:54
  So I'm not making a kind of kitsch return argument here, but it is definitely true that in most
• 15:00
  settings of American life, you can find substantially higher social capital 50, 60,
• 15:08
  70 years ago than you can now, which forces people to increasingly turn to private expensive services
• 15:13
  and to move through the essential elements of building capital in a more laborious and
• 15:20
  intelligent fashion, which basically slows them down and makes everything more expensive.
• 15:24
  And for anyone who wants to read the kind of masterwork of this journey I recommend Robert Putnam Bowling Alone which is a sort of survey of the intensity of American social engagement across every area of life from the 1950s onwards It a fascinating book I wouldn say I necessarily agree with all his conclusions but the history is very impressive
• 15:45
  No, this gets back to something else that we discussed last year.
• 15:50
  Just truly faith-based communities, too.
• 15:52
  You think about the church that we're involved in both here and then down the shore and just getting,
• 15:58
  having the ability to get together after mass and and and do things it's small little
• 16:04
  interactions like that that help you build that and build that trust and
• 16:08
  it's funny i um my oldest i he was it was last saturday he was
• 16:16
  asked i mentioned this game that i played as a kid to him and his cousin a couple weeks ago and
• 16:22
  saturday morning he woke up and he had a bug in his head and he was like i need to learn all about
• 16:27
  this game. The game's called Manhunt. I don't, there's probably something similar in Europe in
• 16:33
  terms of the game. You basically have two teams and you typically play in a neighborhood or a
• 16:38
  playground and one team's hiding and one team has to go capture them, bring them to jail.
• 16:42
  You can jailbreak them. And so I was explaining to it all morning as we're walking around our
• 16:46
  neighborhood and I was telling them that when I grew up, you had like boundaries in the neighborhood
• 16:50
  of where he could play.
• 16:53
  And then I texted a bunch of his friend's parents.
• 16:57
  He was like, hey, he really wants to play Manhunt.
• 16:59
  If you guys want to come over, we'll have dinner
• 17:01
  and the kids can play while we hang out.
• 17:04
  And so we did that.
• 17:05
  And I sent a tweet out just like from the hip
• 17:07
  Saturday afternoon explaining this
• 17:10
  and the amount of responses of people being like,
• 17:11
  oh, that was such a core childhood memory.
• 17:15
  I love that game.
• 17:17
  Was encouraging, but what was discouraging
• 17:19
  is the amount of responses that are like, kids can't play this in my neighborhood anymore.
• 17:23
  And it's like something that's almost immeasurable, but is core to what I think you're
• 17:28
  getting at with social capital is this ability of something as simple as children being able to play
• 17:33
  a game that we all played growing up without us having to worry about
• 17:37
  something because we live in a low trust society.
• 17:41
  That's right. And the common response you get when you make an observation like that,
• 17:45
  and by the way, what you're observing is factually completely accurate. For example,
• 17:49
  if you track the number of seven-year-olds who are trusted by their parents to walk to school
• 17:54
  alone, it just goes down year after year, and it has been going down for 50 years.
• 17:59
  People will often rebut, like, well, actually, if you look at security as measured by violent
• 18:05
  incidents in most American neighborhoods, those are not at a high point at the moment. And so the
• 18:10
  security situation is relatively benign. You're just being paranoid. There is no reason. You
• 18:14
  shouldn't allow children to do this. Again, this misses the subtlety of what life is actually like.
• 18:19
  You trust a child to go out into a neighborhood and to take risks because they'll be next to roads and who knows what they'll be doing and climbing trees or whatever.
• 18:30
  They can get hurt.
• 18:31
  You only trust them and you are only being a responsible adult if you have some conviction that there will be other well-raised children out there with them who will know what to do.
• 18:43
  And you understand the instincts, the teaching, the morality of those children.
• 18:48
  and you believe you live in a neighborhood where any other adults who might be present
• 18:53
  at the scene of an accident will behave responsibly. They will likely have children
• 18:58
  of their own. They will know how to deal with children. They will have the same moral instincts
• 19:02
  as you. And basically you trust them because you know what people are like in your neighborhood.
• 19:07
  We now live in a situation where that is not true. Most people do not have children
• 19:11
  in most neighborhoods. There are radical ideological and religious divergences
• 19:17
  in most neighborhoods compared to 60 years ago. And the integrity of the families that does exist,
• 19:25
  that do exist, is radically diminished. So one of the things I mentioned in the piece is,
• 19:30
  you'll often hear things like, well, we had state school, public school then,
• 19:37
  and state school and public school is still an option now. And it's like, well, let's look at
• 19:42
  who actually attended state or public schools 60 years ago? And the answer is 85% of those families,
• 19:48
  86%, were intact families. These were functioning married parents who had a stable relationship
• 19:54
  and who were raising their children in the context of a school. Now that number has dropped off a
• 19:59
  cliff. And so again, the kind of social integrity of the ecosystem that you are releasing your
• 20:04
  children into is full of unknown actors, unknown ideologies, unknown moral frameworks,
• 20:12
  And you know the kind of things that people will try and teach children now and feel that
• 20:17
  they have a right, even a moral obligation to teach other people's children.
• 20:21
  It's often frequently shocking and alien.
• 20:25
  And so it's very difficult.
• 20:26
  I completely sympathize.
• 20:27
  On the one hand, I don't, you know, I want my children to be as free as possible.
• 20:31
  And so I don't want to be paranoid.
• 20:34
  I want to have a realistic assessment of my neighborhood and how safe they are.
• 20:39
  I want to maximize their freedom because I think that's great for them. It develops agency
• 20:43
  and independence and social networks. It's fantastic to the extent that it's a sensible
• 20:48
  decision. But you have to do that.
• 20:50
  be a realist and you have to say, no, actually life has materially changed in subtle, but real ways.
• 20:56
  You know, I took a lot from, there's a sub stacker who's really good called Lane Scott,
• 21:01
  who's one of my favorite sub stackers. And she was my inspiration for sort of
• 21:06
  poking and prodding around that point. She's got some, she's Catholic and has some insane
• 21:10
  number of children. So she knows better than most the realities here. But yeah, it's highly
• 21:17
  regrettable. But basically, if more and more people are helicopter parenting at some level,
• 21:23
  you have to accept that they're probably rational actors and they're probably responding
• 21:27
  to logically to a situation that they find themselves in.
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  And it's an implicit, intuitive reaction. And that's why this is not a hard conversation to have,
• 24:01
  but it's such a hard topic to tackle because a lot of these things are imperceptible.
• 24:06
  And they're based off of intuition that isn't really articulated as well or as often as it should be,
• 24:15
  which is why I love your sub stack and the subjects that you focus on,
• 24:18
  because it gets into this almost imperceptible.
• 24:22
  I mean, it is perceptible in the sense that we can see it every day,
• 24:25
  but nobody can really put their finger on the pulse of exactly what the core of the problem is.
• 24:31
  And it's these social interrelational problems that have been built up over decades and are now exacerbated.
• 24:39
  That's right. Yeah, and that's right.
• 24:41
  And it becomes, you know, it's a pattern you see play out again and again, which is to steal a very corrupted term.
• 24:48
  It's one of gaslighting, which is like we know the lived experience of what it's actually like.
• 24:54
  and we get hit on the head again and again by the same relevant, but slightly misleading
• 24:59
  statistics that suggest that everything's, you know, everything's fine. What's the problem?
• 25:04
  But there are problems and we need to understand those if we're going to come to solutions.
• 25:09
  And it's imperative at like every level of existence that America, I know I have a
• 25:15
  despicable English accent, but America is near and dear to my heart. Half my family's American.
• 25:21
  I love your wonderful country very much. But the same is true of England, where I was born.
• 25:27
  It is imperative at every level of existence that we return to a pro-family culture. Everything from
• 25:34
  the deepest metaphysical fundamentals of ethics, all the way up to the most hard-nosed, realist
• 25:43
  analyses of geopolitics. We need more families, we need more kids, and we need those kids and
• 25:50
  families to be embedded in stable networks that lead to their flourishing.
• 25:53
  And because of very reductive policies that maximize on the most crass reflections of GDP and so forth we really undermining that right now So you know it time to delve into these nuances
• 26:10
  Well, I mean, you mentioned it earlier,
• 26:12
  what really helps build social capital,
• 26:14
  particularly in neighborhoods of trusted individuals, is intact families.
• 26:18
  And again, a lot of the economic indicators that people will point out
• 26:23
  and say we're doing well,
• 26:24
  many could argue are actually the core of the problem why we don't have intact families because
• 26:29
  you're chasing those kpis of gdp job growth women's participation in the job market particularly
• 26:37
  and it's having a corrosive effect on family formation because we're in a way inverting the
• 26:46
  historical millennia old relationship between men and women by creating this job competition
• 26:54
  between the sexes. Yeah. I mean, there's a brilliant book called Seeing Like a State.
• 26:58
  And essentially there's an entire trap you can fall into where you start off by
• 27:05
  identifying something as really important. And then you identify the best metric you can find
• 27:12
  to serve as a proxy for that underlying thing you think is important. And over time, you kind of
• 27:17
  drift and you forget that the metric, the proxy is not actually what you're optimizing for,
• 27:23
  that there is an underlying reality that you're trying to capture and maximize.
• 27:27
  And in the case of something like GDP or GDP per capita, what you think you're looking at is a
• 27:36
  reflection of activity, production, the construction of value and valuable
• 27:43
  assets, situations, comfort, wealth. In fact, what you're looking for is a narrow band within
• 27:53
  that spectrum. And if, in the case of a stay-at-home mother, they are doing all kinds of
• 28:01
  highly productive work that is generative, it's important, it creates wealth in a very real sense
• 28:07
  across all these domains of human capital, social capital, financial capital, and so forth.
• 28:14
  But it is not captured in that form because they are not in the labor force, they are not
• 28:19
  being paid in a tax way by a professionally registered employer, et cetera. And so that
• 28:28
  labor and that value does not show up in GDP. Nevertheless, its real effect is often far
• 28:34
  stronger than the equivalent. The joke I alluded to, the economics joke I alluded to in the pieces,
• 28:40
  if a man marries his cleaner, that's a slightly chauvinistic example. But if a man marries his
• 28:45
  cleaner, you end up with the same amount of work being done. It's very chauvinistic.
• 28:52
  But GDP goes up and so do taxes. Sorry, GDP and taxes go down, but the same amount of work is
• 29:00
  being done and everyone's happier because they're now in a stable relationship.
• 29:03
  And I think what we've seen is, in a lot of ways, we've moved from a highly efficient,
• 29:09
  untaxed, and largely unseen system of contributions to these social structures,
• 29:14
  whether it's individuals, the family, or larger structures, which subsume the family,
• 29:20
  moving into more explicit corporate structures, which boost the GDP, not just because now
• 29:27
  the mother has to go and work a job and a salary, which is taxed, but the family then has to employ
• 29:34
  third-party services, professional vendors, to take up a lot of the slack that has been created.
• 29:43
  The GDP seems to be going wonderfully well, but that doesn't actually speak to the underlying
• 29:47
  efficiency or satisfaction of the situation.
• 29:50
  And in many cases, if you actually look at the numbers and you do a straightforward calculation
• 29:55
  about how much a woman needs to earn, especially if she's got two or more children who she
• 30:01
  wants to be well-educated, before it makes sense for her to stop being a stay-at-home
• 30:08
  mom and take a job, that number is really high because of all the subtle costs that accrue
• 30:13
  and the addition of taxes and everything else. You need to be earning pretty straightforwardly
• 30:22
  six figures before it even starts to make sense. And yeah, it's a huge shame. And one of the things
• 30:30
  that Putnam finds is when you pursue that arrangement, again, there are all these subtle
• 30:33
  negative externalities. So for example, women who have to enter into full-time work because
• 30:42
  of financial necessity. And in the early days of say the 1950s or 60s, before the so-called
• 30:48
  two income trap had arisen, which is now where we are, I'll explain in a second. Some women were
• 30:54
  voluntarily entering the workforce. So there was a real contrast between those who wanted to work,
• 30:59
  especially because they were high agency, they were very productive, they had lots of time on
• 31:02
  their hands they were high energy and women who entered the workforce by necessity who tended to be more sort of working class Now what has happened is as women began to enter the labor force and generate more income that income eventually became capitalized back into home prices
• 31:24
  And so now basically all families, unless they're pursuing very unusual arrangements to do with
• 31:29
  where they choose to live, who they choose to live among and their homeschooling situation,
• 31:33
  basically all families are now two income families by necessity. And Robert Putnam,
• 31:38
  in the study I mentioned earlier, in the book I mentioned earlier, identifies studies that say,
• 31:42
  for example, that a woman who works by financial necessity, her volunteering in any kind of local
• 31:47
  association falls by more than half, as well as they're entertaining as a family falls,
• 31:54
  their church attendance falls, et cetera. So it really places very real stresses on the household
• 32:00
  when these arrangements are pursued. Meanwhile, GDP goes up.
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• 34:31
  I mean, we can get into all the social negative externalities. There's just like a couple. I mean,
• 34:38
  a couple that come to mind immediately is number one, the woman, if a woman's going to work and
• 34:43
  she's not with the children a lot, obviously the children are being raised and influenced by others.
• 34:49
  and there is some detachment, long-term detachment effects that happen
• 34:54
  and really demoralize the children from thinking that they should build a stronger family.
• 35:01
  The second, I'm sure you've heard of the term, but it's big here.
• 35:05
  In the United States, you have this sort of husband-wife wedge
• 35:09
  that gets driven with the concept of something like a work husband
• 35:11
  And you have like the woman's going to the workforce to spend most of her day with other men, which introduces some weird social dynamics as well that ultimately can erode the strength of the marriage at home.
• 35:31
  Yeah. I mean, getting into reactionary territory here, but it is an unusual arrangement whereby
• 35:39
  a woman leaves the home every day. So going back historically,
• 35:45
  the real trad arrangement from even going back to the 18th century was both the locus of economic
• 35:56
  activity for both husband and wife was the home. And so they wouldn't necessarily be working on the
• 36:02
  same things across the same hours, but blacksmiths, whole ranges of trades, professions were all
• 36:10
  conducted from the home. And there was typically some kind of agricultural components as well,
• 36:15
  and they would have different tasks and the home would be the locus of economic production.
• 36:19
  Then you have the rise of the industrial revolution men leave the home and the locus of economic activity becomes first the factory and then the office with the rise of white collar work in the 20th century And that sort of works
• 36:35
  in a fragile way. It allows for the kind of explosive social engagement of the 1950s,
• 36:42
  which is a very particular moment for a variety of reasons, the post-war period and so forth.
• 36:46
  But the situation that we're now in, whereby married women will leave the home, not spend
• 36:55
  much time with their children, not spend much time with their husbands, and have a very
• 37:01
  direct authority figure over them all day who is a different man to whom they're not
• 37:06
  related.
• 37:06
  I mean, I don't think you have to be that radical to be like, at the very least, that
• 37:10
  is a very historically unusual situation. And one can kind of see the pressures that that would put
• 37:18
  on a relationship. But at the same time, you might observe that the divorce, the integrity of the
• 37:25
  family is low. And yeah, I mean, that whole question of work wives, it's getting to something
• 37:34
  real. I know it's a bit of a meme, but there's something real there about how uncomfortable it is
• 37:39
  that instead of working as husband and wife all day, as we once were of, and this is not a kind
• 37:45
  of, you know, go back to, uh, 300 AD high Christendom, you know, 400 AD high Christendom,
• 37:52
  like, uh, uh, or whatever. This is not like, this is like for most of human history,
• 38:00
  husband and wife took work together in the home and they shared a bond of cooperation
• 38:05
  over really every aspect of their productive lives that led them into a very deep place.
• 38:12
  Yeah, the arrangements now are odd. I think it's fair to say that.
• 38:17
  Yeah. No, I feel very fortunate. I've been working from home since before it was popular
• 38:20
  because of COVID. That's great. I have my office. I can drive the boys to school. You go to the
• 38:26
  Catholic school around the corner. I can pick them up during the day. If I have a break, I can
• 38:31
  sit down and talk to my wife about things.
• 38:34
  I feel very fortunate.
• 38:37
  But then, I mean, dovetailing this into the whole concept of,
• 38:43
  as it pertains to women in status games and how they've changed as well,
• 38:47
  I think this is a very important segue to that, which is, I mean,
• 38:51
  not only do you have the concept of a work husband or work wife
• 38:57
  in the professional world, but you also have the,
• 39:00
  concept of the girl boss, right? Which is really inverted the, or not inverted, but changed the
• 39:08
  goal of status for women in modernity compared to what it used to be. And so really leaning into
• 39:14
  this idea of status as a goal and why like striving to be a girl boss is the wrong status
• 39:22
  symbol societally if you believe that strong families are the cornerstone of strong high
• 39:30
  trust societies versus what it used to be in terms of being a mother, a caring mother,
• 39:37
  and a family, a family woman. Yeah. I mean, again, it's a great subject to discuss with nuance
• 39:44
  because sort of much like the last thing we were discussing, which is women leaving the home to go
• 39:49
  work in the workplace, a realist analysis and nuanced analysis has to sort of permit that
• 39:55
  most of those women are doing it from economic necessity. Like it's not, it's not a kind of,
• 40:01
  it's, there are moralizing elements to it, but, but more deeply, like most women just have to work
• 40:07
  now. That's, that's the kind of economic reality. And, and I think the same is true. I think we
• 40:12
  should bring to bear the same kind of realism and nuance to this question of female status and the
• 40:19
  argument that I've made that status and changes in status mechanisms in society are existential
• 40:27
  for the birth rate and for the crisis of family formation. Specifically that
• 40:34
  social status is a human universal need. We're encouraged not to be sort of social strivers,
• 40:44
  I think for good reason. Pride is a sin. But more positively, status can be understood as
• 40:53
  does your community respect you? Do the people you see every day appreciate your contribution,
• 41:01
  what you're capable of, what you've achieved? Do they value your input? Do they call on you for
• 41:06
  advice? Do they take pride in introducing you to other people? Social status is a human universal.
• 41:12
  It is one of the fundaments of human behavior, how we sort ourselves, why we pursue goals,
• 41:18
  et cetera. It's not going away. You can have a healthy relationship or an unhealthy relationship
• 41:22
  to status, but society wouldn't function in its absence. And the way, you know, in the essay,
• 41:30
  that I think you're referring to, I quote, Will Storr,
• 41:33
  who's a writer who has a good book on status theory.
• 41:38
  And he, in the framework,
• 41:39
  key quotes, there are essentially three kinds of social status which are relevant. These are
• 41:45
  dominance games, moral games, and competence games, virtue games and competence games.
• 41:54
  And so in dominance games, someone is high status simply because they're powerful.
• 41:58
  In virtue games, someone is high status because everyone appreciates that they are a moral actor,
• 42:04
  that they have made sacrifices for the group, that they rise to meet moral expectations.
• 42:09
  in a forthright and they have honor. And in competence games, someone is appreciated for
• 42:15
  their skill, their brilliance or their genius. And in the world we used to inhabit, a woman
• 42:22
  could secure meaningful social status in ways that did not trade off with her ability to have
• 42:30
  children. So if you look at, basically, women's status was derived from their family and from
• 42:41
  their moral standing within the church. Now, you might have moral qualms with that. That's a huge
• 42:45
  subject of discussion. But it is true, for example, that king's wives, lord's wives,
• 42:54
  even very minor figures' wives were recognized due to their familial ties. So king and queen,
• 43:02
  lord and lady, et cetera. Now, the highest status people in our society,
• 43:07
  they get no titles, they get no recognition for merely being the spouse. And the reason is,
• 43:14
  is that after the Enlightenment, we moved into a kind of... To take a radically reductionist
• 43:22
  approach to 500 years of history, we moved into a meritocratic, scientific, quantifiable
• 43:29
  economic and social arrangement, which prioritized competence above all else.
• 43:38
  The merchant class came to dominate, and increasingly over the last 100 years in particular,
• 43:44
  very specific metrics, again, are indicators of success. So which university did you go to?
• 43:51
  which college did you go to, which firm do you work for, what's your title at that firm.
• 43:55
  And traditional sources of status like virtue games simply don't function anymore because
• 44:02
  virtue games, i.e. you're making sacrifices for the group according to the group's moral code,
• 44:08
  only really exist in functioning small, tight, thick communities that have a way to recognize
• 44:15
  group sacrifices and a way to reward them. Now we live in the kind of universal meritocracy
• 44:20
  where people who are high status are those who have achieved a lot. And this is kind of summed
• 44:27
  up in when you meet someone, the first question they will ask you if they're looking for a question
• 44:32
  to ask is, so what do you do? What job do you do? What company do you work for? What is your role?
• 44:39
  Tell me about yourself according to the one thing that matters most when I judge you in that initial
• 44:45
  moment of contact, which is how important are you? How high status are you? How deferentially
• 44:49
  do I need to treat you? How much should I ask you to do things or rely upon you?
• 44:54
  And women who do not engage very actively in the job market simply don't have a good answer
• 45:01
  to that question. It's very difficult for stay-at-home moms, as they're now known,
• 45:06
  to answer that question. What do you do? What do you say? I'm a mom. And it's like, well,
• 45:10
  everyone, you know, lots of women say they're a mom, but it's much juicier to be like,
• 45:15
  oh, I'm a vice president at Goldman Sachs or, you know, whatever. It's like, oh, okay,
• 45:20
  well now we're talking. That's a high status job. You know, I'm head of admissions at wherever.
• 45:25
  And so, yeah, we've moved into a world where it is very difficult for exceptional women,
• 45:34
  really brilliant women to achieve the social status that they could achieve, that maybe they
• 45:41
  rightfully deserve without making a full commitment into a meritocratic, zero-sum
• 45:53
  career-based game that conflicts very heavily with their ability to have children.
• 46:00
  And I think South Korea is the ultimate example of this, where you have very explicit social hierarchies that are attached to positions in particular high status companies, particular colleges, etc.
• 46:14
  I think that that way doom lies, unfortunately, because no one has kids.
• 46:19
  I mean, again, like women are the ones who suffer because they have to make hard tradeoffs.
• 46:24
  Like, do I want kids or do I want status in the eyes of the world?
• 46:26
  And I don't think it's surprising that we see the rise of the quote-unquote co-boss in that context.
• 46:34
  Yeah, it's funny.
• 46:36
  It one of those in American culture for people who again instinctively feel this it always like when you with a close group of friends and maybe you just went to a bigger party with some strangers that you introduced to One of the most common sidebar conversations you have with a guy friend it like i can believe he asked me what i did i don want to talk about like because that that that what do you do for a living is so
• 47:00
  ingrained in everyday small talk conversation here in the u.s i'm sure across the world
• 47:07
  and like what is a better first question to ask do you think like how can we slowly
• 47:12
  like incept in people's minds,
• 47:15
  like do not go to the party
• 47:16
  and ask this guy you just met
• 47:18
  what you just did
• 47:18
  or this woman you just met
• 47:19
  what she does for a living.
• 47:21
  And what is a better first
• 47:22
  opening question in your mind?
• 47:24
  What do you think about Vatican II?
• 47:30
  Get right to the heart of that.
• 47:33
  I have no idea what that is.
• 47:35
  Vatican City, the Pope?
• 47:37
  But then dismiss them immediately.
• 47:39
  Yeah, move on to the next person.
• 47:40
  No, it's really tough, right? It is really tough. I mean, but this sort of like,
• 47:49
  that obviously my answer there was flippant, but it is a problem if whatever the thing you
• 47:56
  actually value is, like I would work backwards, starting with a question, what do I want to reward?
• 48:05
  Like, what is it that I think should be a source of status for the person who I'm talking to?
• 48:10
  Um, and then you kind of need to be in a community, if not at a large level, at least at a small
• 48:18
  level, like your local group of friends who actually values that thing such that it makes
• 48:22
  sense to ask early on in a question.
• 48:25
  Um, because otherwise, you know, uh, you go, you go crazy never being able to ask about
• 48:30
  the things that you want to ask about and being met with, what are you talking about?
• 48:35
  You know, let's go back to my CV, please.
• 48:38
  I want to, let's connect on LinkedIn as soon as possible.
• 48:40
  Ah.
• 48:43
  It's so great in our culture.
• 48:47
  No, it's fine.
• 48:47
  I mean, as you were describing that,
• 48:50
  I'm thinking in my mind if I should break this up
• 48:54
  because I wonder who's going to hear it, but I don't care.
• 48:55
  It's like simply my wife's a stay-at-home mom
• 48:58
  and the boys are going back to school soon.
• 49:00
  And she received an email of a flyer of a cocktail party
• 49:04
  the week of school starting back up for working moms.
• 49:08
  and if you're not a working mom you're not allowed to attend
• 49:12
  but it's like
• 49:13
  not that you're not allowed to attend
• 49:17
  but it's explicitly for working moms to get together
• 49:20
  and talk about the struggles of balancing home life
• 49:22
  and work life
• 49:24
  and we just thought that was very funny
• 49:26
  that there's like an implicit exclusion of stay-at-home moms
• 49:31
  in the flyer itself
• 49:32
  I once worked for a company
• 49:37
  where my team was quite literally over 90% women
• 49:42
  and they had a girls' night.
• 49:44
  So it was just me and another guy kind of sitting there like,
• 49:48
  I guess we weren't invited to this one.
• 49:52
  But yeah, no, it's really tough.
• 49:54
  It is really tough.
• 49:57
  I mean, one sympathizes for both sides of that equation, right?
• 50:01
  Because the truth is that the struggles are real
• 50:03
  for working women who also want to have a family.
• 50:05
  I get it's, it's pretty brutal. You have to make hard trade-offs. And, um, I think those of us who
• 50:11
  can find a way to, uh, allow, um, their wives to focus on the million other things that are
• 50:22
  essential for family and social flourishing, it's a real privilege. I think we should be grateful,
• 50:27
  but yeah, I mean, that's, that's tough. Yeah. And I want to be clear. I'm not trying to
• 50:31
  shit on working moms or anything like that. And thank you. You're much more articulate than I am.
• 50:37
  It is incredibly nuanced conversation. And I'm trying to get at it because I believe
• 50:42
  that the path we're on is not great, particularly for younger generations. I come from a big Irish
• 50:49
  Catholic family, as I've told you before, and I find a lot of strength and stability
• 50:54
  in my nuclear and extended family. And I'm trying to replicate that with my children and
• 51:01
  their cousins. And I am not ashamed to say, I think it is the optimal way to live a life is to
• 51:11
  have that strong nuclear extended family, stronger communities outside of those family connections.
• 51:17
  And it's very clear that we're getting away from that. And to your point, it's a very nuanced
• 51:23
  conversation. I hope I'm not coming off as somebody who just thinks these people are despicable. It's
• 51:29
  not the case at all. It's like, how do we get to the core of this? And you wrote in that status
• 51:35
  game about the interesting case study out of Georgia, the country, where you had a celebrity-like
• 51:43
  figure being the bishop agree to baptize any third child that was born in the country. And that led to
• 51:53
  an immediate increase in fertility rates.
• 51:59
  But it ties that status gain that that bishop was highly respected in Georgia And so therefore people strove to attain the status of having their third child baptized by this bishop
• 52:12
  That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I'll butcher the details because it's been a few years since I
• 52:16
  read the study, but it is one of the more remarkable, if you look at the fertility
• 52:23
  graphs of Western countries and you identify sort of pivotal moments where the fertility
• 52:28
  trajectory of a country abruptly and significantly changed. It's one of the few, and certainly one of
• 52:34
  the few in a positive direction. And that was in Georgia, the country of Georgia, where the patriarch
• 52:40
  of the Georgian Orthodox Church, who I believe was called Ilya II, and unfortunately, sadly died
• 52:46
  earlier this year. So rest in peace. In an attempt to make a contribution to the country's
• 52:55
  fertility crisis offered to personally baptize and become godfather to, uh, was it all third
• 53:01
  children onwards? And what you saw was, uh, a, that nationwide spike in births, which was very
• 53:08
  significant, uh, was specifically in third children and onwards. So there was this, um,
• 53:18
  there was, it, it wasn't, it wasn't so much a religious phenomenon as in he was identifying
• 53:24
  a moral necessity of the church and people were listening to his teaching, it was a status
• 53:30
  phenomenon whereby they would get to meet and initiate into their own family an incredibly
• 53:36
  important and significant figure in Georgian public life. And these are significant figures.
• 53:42
  I've spent some time in Romania recently and the patriarchs, they love to dress in gold and build
• 53:50
  tremendously large churches.
• 53:52
  And honestly, I'm not complaining.
• 53:54
  It's very impressive some of the things they've built.
• 53:56
  But they're towering figures in the lives of these countries.
• 54:00
  Well, that gets the question, Derek.
• 54:02
  Do we have just terrible high-status figures in our society?
• 54:08
  And how much of the burden is on those high-status figures
• 54:13
  in popular culture?
• 54:15
  to how important are they in swaying these tides back towards family formation and strong communities?
• 54:24
  Well, I mean, on the one hand, we've got to work with what we've got.
• 54:28
  And I think what we do have is we've got a mass society with mass celebrities,
• 54:32
  and it would be great if they were living really pro-family lives.
• 54:37
  I think, you know, I mean, who cares what I think about Taylor Swift's wedding?
• 54:43
  But I do think it's a shame that she didn't do a big public spectacle, beautiful traditional wedding, which I think would have been very elegant, but also would have been very inspirational.
• 54:54
  You know, I don't know why she did what she did.
• 54:57
  I'm sure she had her reasons for it.
• 54:58
  But it would also be wonderful if if some of those women like Usha Vance is a fantastic, positive example, really lived in public and had large and flourishing families full of beaming young children.
• 55:11
  You know, mimetic effects are very real and people copy the fertility patterns of those they idolize.
• 55:18
  There's a lot of data on the subject.
• 55:21
  Unfortunately, I don't think this is a real solution.
• 55:24
  And that is because the place where you find really large families are places which have maintained an ability to play virtue games of status, i.e.
• 55:35
  They're small, thick, specialized communities, whereby when someone very obviously abides by the particular moral code of that community, they get respected and elevated for it.
• 55:50
  It's funny.
• 55:51
  It's like maybe it's a bit of an extreme example, but I definitely felt it myself.
• 55:55
  I've spent a lot of time recently since I published my first book in American Christian
• 56:04
  intentional communities, meeting people who start businesses and run them according to Christian
• 56:09
  principles and these kinds of things. And there's a real, like, there's a real switch
• 56:16
  kind of around the four child mark there. It's like, if you've got one child or two children,
• 56:21
  you're probably a bit of a normie, like we're not going to take you too seriously.
• 56:26
  If you've got three children, it's like, okay, now we're getting somewhere. But it's like,
• 56:30
  once you've got that fourth child, it's like, okay, now you are clearly outside the mainstream
• 56:35
  and you're playing our game according to our rules. Like you're actually, you're taking this
• 56:39
  seriously and I'm going to take you seriously as a result. And it's amongst these communities,
• 56:44
  you know, and I'm sure to a skeptic, this all sounds very handmaid's tale. It's really not.
• 56:52
  It's a crazy good time when everyone has big families and they're just crashing around the
• 56:58
  park. And, you know, you bring your kids to church and you don't need to worry that they're
• 57:02
  being a bit poorly behaved because there's like 500 kids in the church. Everyone's kids are poorly
• 57:08
  behaved because it chaos It like wonderful chaos you know but it like those are the communities that actually provide the moral firmament and support to overcome the tremendous sacrifices that having a large family entails Because having a lot of kids is difficult
• 57:25
  It's expensive. It's tough. It means sacrificing consumer comforts. It's scary for women. Pregnancy
• 57:31
  is frequently uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. You have to find very particular, strong,
• 57:38
  felt ways to offset that. And the way that I think this is done effectively, as much as I wish...
• 57:45
  And I'm sure that will be, by the way, a baby bump when Taylor posts her first beautiful photo of a
• 57:52
  beaming three-month-old on Instagram or whatever. But the way that you actually overcome that is in
• 57:58
  a thick community where people are idolized and elevated for having big families and actually
• 58:05
  perpetuating a particular community and they're appreciated by the members of that community
• 58:09
  i wouldn't be shocked if you know the stat but you know the the largest growing population
• 58:14
  subset of the united states today oh uh so i would guess but i don't know it's hasidic jews but
• 58:28
  that's a guess the amish the amish okay that's yeah that's where i was gonna go second yeah
• 58:33
  the mennonites they're uh but it does like they they uh i'm sure the hasidic jewish
• 58:40
  i mean he's very similar but no the amish are like where i'm in pennsylvania so just west of
• 58:45
  me and spreading down into west virginia kentucky tennessee and even ohio they're they're growing
• 58:54
  like at insane rates and it's because obviously they value very large families yeah and they're
• 59:00
  And they're somewhat isolated from popular culture as well.
• 59:04
  Well, yeah, that's the, that's the thing. It's you kind of,
• 59:08
  all the communities that have seriously high fatality. And by the way,
• 59:13
  it's like, I tread carefully.
• 59:18
  I'm probably not doing a great job of it when having this discussion,
• 59:21
  because it's very easy to subconsciously flip from what I think is the right
• 59:26
  way to have this discussion, which is virtue is rewarded because we have set up society
• 59:34
  correctly to our own form of fixating on very particular reductive statistics and being
• 59:42
  like, we must move this number at all costs.
• 59:45
  And like that, you know, detail is personal and intimate and consequential is like how
• 59:50
  many kids you have should not be pushed around according to arbitrary metrics to the extent
• 59:54
  we can even do that.
• 59:55
  But yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, but it's really complex because a lot of, you know, the traditional high fertility communities in the US were Orthodox Jewish, Amish, traditional Catholic and Mormon.
• 1:00:18
  and in uh i'm not sure about the jewish statistics amish is really high but slowly falling
• 1:00:27
  mormon has fallen significantly and then catholicism is is like pretty aggressively
• 1:00:33
  bifurcating between uh kind of normie catholics and and the rad trads uh and so
• 1:00:40
  it's it's but i do think like switching back to the kind of more instrumental mode for a second
• 1:00:47
  And it gives me great hope that a country as Christian as America still is, despite all its
• 1:00:58
  flaws, is holding up really well in terms of its population. It's a serious offset to the rise of
• 1:01:06
  China's hard power, the fact that we're having way more kids than them. And every decade that
• 1:01:12
  that goes on, the equation changes radically. And also for the sort of rebuilding of Christendom,
• 1:01:18
  America still is one of the most radically Christian countries in the world, certainly
• 1:01:21
  in pockets. And it's sort of, you know, by your fruits, you will know them. It's great to see.
• 1:01:28
  Well, to your point about not chasing metrics for metrics, it is a trend here. Now, there is a
• 1:01:35
  a growing number of zoomers particularly that are converting to catholicism and it has many i would
• 1:01:46
  hope most are doing it for earnest reason but you do see the status game uh arising in that in that
• 1:01:52
  particular subset of people converting to catholicism where it seems like for many people
• 1:01:58
  it's like the cool thing to do um but i think it is seeped uh at least the beginnings of it were
• 1:02:04
  seeped in legitimate reasons, mainly people beginning to hit the dating scene on the apps
• 1:02:14
  and realizing it was fruitless.
• 1:02:17
  And many people taking the advice of like, hey, go to church and try to meet a girl there
• 1:02:21
  seriously and doing it successfully.
• 1:02:24
  I think there has been, objectively, I think this Easter season.
• 1:02:29
  We had the most Kazakh conversions in decades across the United States,
• 1:02:34
  particularly in the Northeast.
• 1:02:36
  But you do begin to see that sort of status game emerging there as well.
• 1:02:40
  Yeah.
• 1:02:40
  Well, you know, let them have their fun as long as they're coming back.
• 1:02:44
  You know, I'd say who amongst us hasn't done a bit of Crusader LARPing
• 1:02:48
  at one point or another?
• 1:02:50
  Who amongst us?
• 1:02:51
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:53
  And then, I mean, on the other side of the spectrum,
• 1:02:55
  maybe ended on this,
• 1:02:57
  you see the social decay
• 1:03:00
  I'm not sure if you've been following this Lindsay Clancy
• 1:03:02
  development and
• 1:03:04
  a sort of
• 1:03:05
  mass psychosis that is
• 1:03:11
  emerging on social media
• 1:03:13
  TikTok particularly of women
• 1:03:15
  who are defending her and
• 1:03:16
  now beginning to
• 1:03:19
  showcase
• 1:03:21
  the neglect of their children
• 1:03:22
  too and it's just very
• 1:03:23
  weird how
• 1:03:25
  of that's manifested over the last couple of months as well.
• 1:03:30
  Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure I have, I have particularly, uh, insightful things to say
• 1:03:35
  about that case. I mean, the, the only, the only thing that strikes me is like, again,
• 1:03:42
  the dynamics of mass society are so unhealthy because it's just like,
• 1:03:47
  I probably sound like a bit of a normie on this point, but it's, um,
• 1:03:50
  the
• 1:03:53
  it more than just that one case like a lot of crazy views uh uh the the kind of conspiracy you know I love a good conspiracy
• 1:04:07
  mostly I love an intelligent conspiracy and like very dumb conspiracy mindset is, is like
• 1:04:13
  just blowing up all over the place. And it's, in my opinion, it's a lot to do with the fact that,
• 1:04:19
  untrustworthy information sources are being mass consumed by people who are not embedded
• 1:04:28
  in thick networks of relationship with other real people who can guide them and sort of like take
• 1:04:37
  the reins. It's a pretty crazy situation where, and you know, men get caught up in this in their
• 1:04:42
  own way. But when, when, okay, please don't clip this. I don't want this to be a YouTube short or
• 1:04:50
  whatever, but, uh, but, uh, you know, when, when women spend a huge amount of time with unhinged
• 1:04:57
  information sources in their phones without any kind of reality check from their husbands. And I,
• 1:05:04
  I think it's something of a universal, generally speaking, that the realist party in these
• 1:05:16
  kind of discussions typically are the men.
• 1:05:19
  And women they do love a good true crime saga and the opportunity to have one play out of them in front of them in real time and they can actively participate and you know it like a call show or something it um yeah it not good so this combination of
• 1:05:35
  like mass society no natural human checks on bad instincts being called out and just like
• 1:05:42
  have a deepening psychosis uh is it's popping up in a lot of bad ways uh yeah yeah no i mean i i
• 1:05:51
  succumb to the doom scrolling actually and my wife my wife's very very cognizant and when she's
• 1:05:57
  falling down that's right not to say that she fell down the lindsey clancy thing uh at all but she i
• 1:06:02
  mean pulled us out she made us buy these these bricks so that we literally cannot be on social
• 1:06:07
  media for most of the day unless we're we're physically by these things but like intentionally
• 1:06:12
  trying to uh declutter our lives by by reducing the usage of of these social media apps i think
• 1:06:21
  actually, I've been liking it too
• 1:06:24
  because it's not for both men and women.
• 1:06:27
  It's not good for your psyche
• 1:06:28
  if you don't know the power that it yields over you.
• 1:06:32
  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:06:35
  Johan, it's been a pleasure.
• 1:06:38
  Any parting notes for anybody listening to this?
• 1:06:44
  Can I shill for one second?
• 1:06:46
  Shill. Shill.
• 1:06:47
  Shill. Let me shill.
• 1:06:48
  Leaving a Legacy, Johan Kurtz.
• 1:06:50
  It's my book.
• 1:06:52
  So it's my best writing.
• 1:06:54
  If you interested in anything I said that a good place to start You can find it on Amazon I had many people reach out to me after our first episode saying thank you for recording it
• 1:07:06
  They went and bought the book.
• 1:07:06
  They love it.
• 1:07:07
  I highly recommend it.
• 1:07:08
  I think it's probably the best book I've read in the last two years.
• 1:07:16
  It's short.
• 1:07:17
  You can read it in an afternoon, but it's very dense and thought-provoking.
• 1:07:22
  So highly recommend you go pick it up.
• 1:07:24
  I appreciate that.
• 1:07:25
  Thank you, Marty.
• 1:07:26
  All right.
• 1:07:26
  Peace and love, Freaks.
• 1:07:27
  Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
• 1:07:31
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• 1:07:35
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• 1:07:39
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• 1:07:41
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• 1:07:46
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• 1:07:49
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• 1:07:53
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• 1:08:16
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• 1:08:19
  Okay.
• 1:08:23
  Thank you.