Johann Kurtz: Rebuilding the High-Trust Society
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/high-trust-society-collapse-family-formation-johann-kurtz
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/high-trust-society-collapse-family-formation-johann-kurtz-transcript
Published: 2026-08-31
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:07] Marty Bent: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be.

[0:34] Johann Kurtz: Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Johan Kurtz, welcome back to the show.

[0:39] Johann Kurtz: Thank you, Marty. It's great to be here.

[0:41] Marty Bent: It's a pleasure to have you. 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. I had a ton of People reach out to me, and I can see the analytics on the back of the site. The podcast page for that episode is still the most viewed page on the site on a daily basis. Really?

[1:03] Johann Kurtz: Wow.

[1:03] Marty Bent: Yeah, there you go.

[1:04] Johann Kurtz: I didn't know. Well, I wish you hadn't told me that. There's all kinds of pressure now. Well, I'll try and say some outrageous things and drive those views.

[1:12] Marty Bent: It's not outrageous. I think people are thirsting for this type of conversation. The framing that you bring to these conversations, 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 that those heirs stay rooted and build things that outlive you. Since then, you've been writing about very similar topics, but on the other side of things, writing about young adults. And how even though they have higher measured incomes and cheaper televisions, they cannot afford the house, spouse, children, school, neighborhood, and trust that make durable life. 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 A life of dignity, if you will. Yeah.

[2:13] Johann Kurtz: I mean, that's right. All these pieces are interconnected. So what we discussed last time was a kind of entreatment to actually invest in your family multigenerationally, to set your family up in such a way that it can steward wealth, assets, heirlooms across the generations, and that there is a right way to do that that sets them up for virtue and flourishing. And I think what we're here to discuss today, what you suggested we discuss today leads into that because an inevitable question you face is, well, I, as the patriarch, generation 1 of this family and family wealth, really managed to build something maybe from nothing, maybe from a difficult standpoint several decades ago.

[2:13] Johann Kurtz: 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 shouldn't do exactly what I did, in that it does appear that real wages have increased. 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?

[2:13] Johann Kurtz: Do I not risk spoiling them on top of the extravagant opportunities that they should be pursuing? But I think as we've seen, the reality is not quite as rosy as a handful of headline statistics suggest.

[3:45] Marty Bent: And how do you see past the headline? 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] Johann Kurtz: Well, at some stage, at some level, there has to be a measurement problem, right? It's that Bezos quote about when the metrics and people's lived experience, their reported anecdotes clearly mismatch. Typically, it's that you're collecting the wrong metrics and that you're not revealing the underlying truth of the situation. And in our case, the kind of revealed preference, as it were, 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. I went looking in the piece that you discovered for subtle indicators of that, but the obvious undeniable indicators are declining homeownership, waiting until first age of homeownership until deep into their lives by some reliable metrics, that has crossed 40 for some of those in the millennial cohort, which is very old historically by American standards to be buying your first home.

[3:58] Johann Kurtz: 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. And a sort of variety of other indicators of basic human flourishing, mental health and so forth that do indicate that something is seriously wrong. And at some point, you sort of have to step back from just saying again and again, well, inflation-adjusted wages are up, and start actually questioning your premises. Like, okay, what does that actually mean? How is that calculated? And how is that supposed to be playing through to the way that people live the lives that they desire?

[3:58] Johann Kurtz: Because in some of these statistics, it's clearly not preference. People like the demographer Lyman Stone have shown there's a big gap between people's stated number of children they would like to have and the number of children that they are actually able to have. There's a large and growing divergence between the two. So I think it's more than just anecdotal.

[6:09] Marty Bent: There are really important measures which are clashing in significant respects, and that deserves some kind of sophisticated Yeah, I think last year in the US, the median age of the home buyer was higher than 40. It was 56 last year in 2025. And I mean, I'm sitting in the first house I ever bought. I bought this house earlier this year at the age of 35, which is— my parents bought their first house when they were 21. So I'm already 14 years behind my parents' generation. And I feel very fortunate to be able to get in the house because I know others are struggling. And even when it pertains to the rosy statistics, they're gamed as well because I think the employment statistics were released here in the United States last week.

[6:09] Marty Bent: And the one way they masquerade the health of the overall economy is by not counting certain individuals in the labor force participation rate. 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 US is collapsing, particularly around young men. And that's what I think I mean, I think we'll talk about the men of these generations and the women separately, but for the men, I think they're at a point where a lot of men are complete— particularly younger men are completely dejected 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?

[6:09] Marty Bent: Right.

[7:59] Johann Kurtz: 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. And so these people must be spoiled because they're holding out for these very large McMansions in the perfect suburb, rather than doing what we did, which is buy these tiny bungalow, mid-century modern type constructions 50, 60 years ago. Unfortunately, that can't be true. 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. Renting is very expensive.

[7:59] Johann Kurtz: And so it doesn't make sense to say, well, these people deem it beneath them to buy a small house. So instead, they are subjecting themselves to extortionate rents and living in shoeboxes, which is the reality for most of these young people. It simply, it doesn't make any sense. And it's certainly amongst the people that I know in America and in England, it's not the lived reality. They want to be on the home ladder. They're really struggling to get there because of the confluence of what wages actually buy you. And perhaps we can sort of look at how the price of goods, various categories of goods has diverged to create this situation where incomes might seem promising, but actually buy very little of substance.

[7:59] Johann Kurtz: And then, for example, the property choices they're making where rents are crushingly high, there's nothing that they can afford to buy that makes sense for them to buy. And why that is is an interesting question to pursue. And yeah, so again, if people could be buying homes, they would be buying homes. That is a common dream of young people. That is a historic element of having made it in the Western story, the American dream. It's a metric that people evaluate their own lives by. Again, it's not good enough to look at one particular metric and say, well, the size of these homes is growing. The price per square foot in some of these homes is falling.

[7:59] Johann Kurtz: The complete picture reveals a generation who want to be homeowners and simply can't because of rents and other factors.

[10:19] Marty Bent: Well, you've 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. 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?

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: So the original piece basically made 2 parallel tracks of an argument about why young people are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise. 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. And the reason for that is some goods have become radically less expensive over the last few decades, consumer electronics, screens, software, toys, travel, et cetera. 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.

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: And these are health insurance, childcare, education, housing, these kinds of things that are certainly very important for family formation. So the financial capital piece is far more complex than commonly understood. What is basically not understood at all, at least in popular, overly optimistic discourse— and this isn't a reason for blackpilling. Perhaps we can identify some solutions and cause for hope later on. But is this concept of social capital. How wealthy you are, what you can achieve in the world, How empowered you feel to achieve, to build the kind of life you want to have, which features the kinds of things that you want it to feature, is not just a function of financial wealth.

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: It's not just about how much money is in your bank account or the theoretical value of the assets that you own and control. 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. Another one is social capital. 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, in networks.

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: 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. So typically when people talk about conditions of— you hear things like a high-trust society versus a low-trust society. That is one of the ways of describing a world that features rich social capital. In conditions of strong social capital, you will find things like a lot of volunteering, a lot of association forming, a lot of trust. When you have trust between different neighbors or business partners, it makes things radically less expensive because you don't have to bring in lawyers and contracts and due diligence and background checks and litigation and surveillance and security and all of these things that you do in a low-trust setting.

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: A low-trust setting is one of a million paper cuts of friction, of checks, of validation, and one where you increasingly have to turn to private services and pay for private services, which previously would have emerged for free because of the strength of relationships. And so social capital, conditions of high social capital where people trust each other, they understand each other, there are low barriers to coordination, In many ways, these are cheaper, fiscally cheaper. You will end up with more money in your bank account when you operate in a setting like that. And what has largely happened is that we have moved away from a society in basically every domain of contemporary life from conditions of relatively high trust.

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: It's important not to idealize the past. And there are settings like 1970s New York where this wasn't true. So I'm not making a kind of kitsch return argument here, but it is definitely true that in most settings, of American life, you can find substantially higher social capital 50, 60, 70 years ago than you can now, which forces people to increasingly turn to private expensive services and to move through the essential elements of building capital in a more laborious and diligent fashion, which basically slows them down and makes everything more expensive. And for anyone who wants to read the masterwork of this journey, I'd recommend Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.

[10:44] Johann Kurtz: which is a sort of survey of the intensity of American social engagement across every area of life from the 1950s onwards. It's a fascinating book. I wouldn't say I necessarily agree with all his conclusions, but the history is very impressive.

[15:44] Marty Bent: No, this gets back to something else that we discussed last year, which is true, like faith-based communities too. You think about the church that we're involved in both here and then down the shore and just getting having the ability to get together after Mass and do things. It's small little interactions like that that help you build that and build that trust. And it's funny, my oldest, he was— it was last Saturday, he was asked— I mentioned this game that I played as a kid to him and his cousin a couple weeks ago. And Saturday morning he woke up and he had a bug in his head and he was like, I need to learn all about this game.

[15:44] Marty Bent: The game's called Manhunt. There's probably something similar in Europe in terms of the game, but you basically have 2 teams and you typically play in a neighborhood or a playground, and one team's hiding and one team has to go capture them, bring them to jail. You can jailbreak them. And so I was explaining it to him all morning as we're walking around our neighborhood, and I was telling him that when I grew up, you had boundaries in the neighborhood. of where he could play. And then I texted a bunch of his friends' parents. I was like, hey, he really wants to play Manhunt. If you guys want to come over, we'll have dinner and the kids can play while we hang out.

[15:44] Marty Bent: And so we did that. And I sent a tweet out just from the hip Saturday afternoon explaining this. And the amount of responses of people being like, oh, that was such a core childhood memory. I love that game. was encouraging, but what was discouraging is the amount of responses that are like, kids can't play this in my neighborhood anymore. And it's like something that's almost immeasurable, but is core to what I think you're getting at with social capital, is this ability of something as simple as children being able to play a game that we all played growing up without us having to worry about something because we live in a low-trust society.

[17:40] Johann Kurtz: That's right. And the common response you get when you make an observation like that And by the way, what you're observing is factually completely accurate. For example, if you track the number of 7-year-olds who are trusted by their parents to walk to school alone, it just goes down year after year, and it has been going down for 50 years. People will often rebut, well, actually, if you look at security as measured by violent incidents in most American neighborhoods, those are not at a high point at the moment. And so the security situation is relatively benign. You're just being paranoid. There is no reason you shouldn't allow children to do this.

[17:40] Johann Kurtz: Again, this misses the subtlety of what life is actually like. You trust a child to go out into a neighborhood and to take risks because they're playing. They'll be next to roads and who knows what they'll be doing. They're climbing trees or whatever, they can get hurt. 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. and you understand the instincts, the teaching, the morality of those children, and you believe you live in a neighborhood where any other adults who might be present at the scene of an accident will behave responsibly.

[17:40] Johann Kurtz: They will likely have children of their own. They will know how to deal with children. They will have the same moral instincts as you. And basically, you trust them because you know what people are like in your neighborhood. We now live in a situation where that is not true. Most people do not have children. in most neighborhoods. There are radical ideological and religious divergences in most neighborhoods compared to 60 years ago. And the integrity of the families that does exist, that do exist, is radically diminished. So one of the things I mentioned in the piece is you'll often hear things like, well, we had state school, public school then, and state school and public school is still an option now.

[17:40] Johann Kurtz: And it's like, well, let's look at who actually attended state or public schools 60 years ago. And the answer is 85% of those families, 86%, were intact families. These were functioning married parents who had a stable relationship and who were raising their children in the context of a school. Now that number has dropped off a cliff. And so again, the kind of social integrity of the ecosystem that you are releasing your children into is full of unknown actors, unknown ideologies, unknown moral frameworks. And you know the kind of things that people will try and teach children now and feel that they have a right, even a moral obligation, to teach other people's children.

[17:40] Johann Kurtz: It's often frequently shocking and alien. And so it's very difficult. I completely sympathize. On the one hand, I want my children to be as free as possible. And so I don't want to be paranoid. I want to have a realistic assessment. of my neighborhood and how safe they are. And I want to maximize their freedom because I think that's great for them. It develops agency and independence and social networks. It's fantastic to the extent that it's a sensible decision. But you have to be a realist and you have to say, no, look, actually life has materially changed in subtle but real ways. I took a lot from— there's a Substacker who's really good called Lane Scott, who's one of my favorite Substackers, and she was my inspiration.

[17:40] Johann Kurtz: for sort of poking and prodding around that point. She's Catholic and has some insane number of children. So she knows better than most the realities here. But yeah, it's highly regrettable. But basically, if more and more people are helicopter parenting, at some level, you have to accept that they're probably rational actors and they're probably responding logically to a situation that they find themselves in.

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[23:53] Marty Bent: And it's an implicit intuitive reaction. And that's That's why this is not a hard conversation to have, but it's such a hard topic to tackle because a lot of these things are imperceptible and they're based off of intuition that isn't really articulated as well or as often as it should be, which is why I love your Substack and the subjects that you focus on because it gets into this almost imperceptible— I mean, it is perceptible in the sense that we can see it every day, but nobody can really put their finger on the pulse of exactly what the core of the problem is. And it's these social interrelational problems that have been built up over decades and are now exacerbated.

[24:37] Johann Kurtz: That's right. Yeah, and that's right. And it becomes, you know, it's a pattern you see play out again and again, which is, to steal a very corrupted term, it's one of gaslighting, which is like, we know the lived experience of what it's actually like. And we get hit on the head again and again by the same relevant but slightly misleading statistics that suggest that everything's fine. What's the problem? But there are problems, and we need to understand those if we're going to come to solutions. And it's imperative at every level of existence that America— I know I have a despicable English accent, but America is near and dear to my heart.

[24:37] Johann Kurtz: Half my family's American. I love your wonderful country very much. But the same is true of England, where I was born. It is imperative at every level of existence that we return to a pro-family culture. Everything from the deepest metaphysical fundamentals of ethics, all the way up to the most hard-nosed realist analyses of geopolitics. We need more families, we need more kids, and we need those kids and families to be embedded in stable networks that lead to their flourishing. And because of very reductive policies that maximize on the most crass reflections of GDP and so forth, we're really undermining that right now. So, you know, it's time to delve into these nuances.

[26:09] Marty Bent: Well, I mean, you mentioned it earlier, what really helps build social capital, particularly in neighborhoods of trusted individuals, is intact families and Again, a lot of the economic indicators that people will point at and say we're doing well, many could argue are actually the core of the problem why we don't have intact families, because you're chasing those KPIs of GDP, job growth, women's participation in the job market particularly, and it's having a corrosive effect on family formation because we're in a way, inverting the historical millennia-old relationship between men and women by creating this job competition between the sexes. Yeah.

[26:56] Johann Kurtz: I mean, there's a brilliant book called Seeing Like a State. And essentially, there's an entire trap you can fall into where you start off by identifying something as really important, and then you identify the best metric you can find to serve as a proxy for that underlying thing you think is important. And over time, you kind of drift and you forget that the metric, the proxy, is not actually what you're optimizing for, that there is an underlying reality that you're trying to capture and maximize. And in the case of something like GDP or GDP per capita, what you think you're looking at is a reflection of activity, production, the construction of value and valuable assets, situations, comfort, wealth.

[26:56] Johann Kurtz: In fact, what you're looking for is a narrow band within that spectrum. And if, in the case of a stay-at-home mother, they are doing all kinds of highly productive work that is generative, it's important, it creates wealth in a very real sense across all these domains of human capital, social capital, financial capital, and so forth. But it is not captured in that form because they are not in the labor force, they are not being paid in a tax way by a professionally registered employer, et cetera. And so that labor and that value does not show up in GDP. Nevertheless, its real effect is often far stronger than the equivalent.

[26:56] Johann Kurtz: The GDP seems to be going wonderfully well, but that doesn't actually speak to the underlying efficiency or satisfaction of the situation. And in many cases, if you actually look at the numbers and you do a straightforward calculation about how much a woman needs to earn, especially if she's got 2 or more children who she wants to be well-educated, before it makes sense for her to stop being a stay-at-home mom and take a job, that number is really high because of all the subtle costs that accrue and the addition of taxes and everything else. You need to be earning pretty straightforwardly 6 figures before it even starts to make sense.

[26:56] Johann Kurtz: And yeah, it's a huge shame. And one of the things that Putnam finds is when you pursue that arrangement, again, there are all these subtle negative So for example, women who have to enter into full-time work because of financial necessity. And in the early days of, say, the 1950s or '60s, before the so-called two-income trap had arisen, which is now where we are, I'll explain in a second, some women were voluntarily entering the workforce. So there was a real contrast between those who wanted to work, especially because they were high agency, they were very productive, they had lots time on their hands, they were high energy, and women who entered the workforce by necessity, who tended to be more sort of working class.

[26:56] Johann Kurtz: 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. And so now basically all families, unless they're pursuing very unusual arrangements to do with where they choose to live, who they choose to live among, and their homeschooling situation, Basically, all families are now 2-income families by necessity. And Robert Putnam, in the study I mentioned earlier, in the book I mentioned earlier, identifies studies that say, for example, that a woman who works by financial necessity, her volunteering in any kind of local association falls by more than half, as well as their entertaining as a family falls, their church attendance falls, et cetera.

[26:56] Johann Kurtz: So it really places very real stresses on the household. when these arrangements are pursued. Meanwhile, GDP goes up.

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[34:29] Marty Bent: And sovereign healthcare. And I mean, we can get into all the social negative externalities. There's just like a couple. I mean, a couple that come to mind immediately is number one, the woman. If a woman's going to work and she's not with the children a lot, obviously the children are being raised and influenced by others. And there is some detachment, long-term detachment effects that happen. And really demoralize the children from thinking that they should build a stronger family. And the second, I'm sure you've heard of the term, but it's big here in the United States. You have this sort of husband-wife wedge that gets driven with the concept of something like a work husband. And you have like, uh, like you're— the woman's going to the workforce to spend most of her day with, with other men, which introduces some weird social dynamics as well that ultimately can erode the strength of the marriage at home.

[35:31] Johann Kurtz: Yeah. I mean, getting into reactionary territory here, but it is an unusual arrangement whereby a woman leaves the home every day. So going back historically, the real trad arrangement from even going back to the 18th century, was both that the locus of economic activity for both husband and wife was the home. And so they wouldn't necessarily be working on the same things across the same hours, but blacksmiths, whole ranges of trades, professions were all conducted from the home. And there was typically some kind of agricultural components as well, and they would have different tasks, and the home would be the locus of economic production. 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.

[35:31] Johann Kurtz: And that sort of works in a fragile way. It allows for the kind of explosive social engagement of the 1950s, which is a very particular moment for a variety of reasons, the post-war period and so forth. But the situation that we're now in whereby married women will leave the home, not spend much time with their children, not spend much time with their husbands, and have a very direct authority figure over them all day who is a different man to whom they're not related. I mean, I don't think you have to be that radical to be like, at the very least, that is a very historically unusual situation, and one can kind of see the pressures that that would put on a relationship.

[35:31] Johann Kurtz: But at the same time, you might observe that the divorce, the integrity of the family is low. And yeah, I mean, that whole question of work wives, it's getting to something real. I know it's a bit of a meme, but there's something real there about how uncomfortable it is that instead of working as husband and wife all day, as we once would have, and this is not a kind of go back to 300 AD, High Christendom, 400 AD High Christendom or whatever. This is like, for most of human history, husband and wife worked together in the home, and they shared a bond of cooperation over really every aspect of their productive lives that led them into a very deep place.

[35:31] Johann Kurtz: Yeah, the arrangements now are odd. I think it's fair to say that.

[38:16] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, I feel very fortunate. I've been working from home since before it was popular because of COVID That's great. I have my office. I can drive the boys to school. You go to the Catholic school around the corner. I can pick them up during the day. If I have a break, I can sit down and talk to my wife about things.

[38:34] Johann Kurtz: It's—

[38:35] Marty Bent: I feel, I feel very fortunate. But then, I mean, dovetailing this into the whole concept of as it pertains to women and status games and how they've changed as well. I think this is a very important segue to that, which is, I mean, not only do you have the concept of a work husband or work wife in the professional world, but you also have this concept of the girl boss, right? Which has really inverted the— or not inverted, but changed the goal of status for women. in modernity compared to what it used to be. And so, really leaning into this idea of status as a goal and why striving to be a girl boss is the wrong status symbol societally if you believe that strong families are the cornerstone of strong high-trust societies versus what it used to be in terms of being a mother. a caring mother, and a family woman. Yeah.

[39:41] Johann Kurtz: I mean, again, it's a great subject to discuss with nuance because much like the last thing we were discussing, which is women leaving the home to go and work in the workplace, a realist analysis, a nuanced analysis, has to permit that most of those women are doing it from economic necessity. It's not a kind of There are moralizing elements to it, but more deeply, most women just have to work now. That's the kind of economic reality. And I think the same is true. I think we should bring to bear the same kind of realism and nuance to this question of female status and the argument that I've made that status and changes in status mechanisms in society are existential for the birth rate and for the crisis of family formation.

[39:41] Johann Kurtz: Specifically, that social status is a human universal need. We're encouraged not to be sort of social strivers, I think for good reason. Pride is a sin. But more positively, status can be understood as Does your community respect you? Do the people you see every day appreciate your contribution, what you're capable of, what you've achieved? Do they value your input? Do they call on you for advice? Do they take pride in introducing you to other people? Social status is a human universal. It is one of the fundamentals of human behavior, how we sort ourselves, why we pursue goals, et cetera. It's not going away. You can have a healthy relationship or an unhealthy relationship to status, that society wouldn't function in its absence.

[39:41] Johann Kurtz: And in the essay that I think you're referring to, I quote Will Storr, who's a writer who has a good book on status theory. And in the framework he quotes, there are essentially 3 kinds of social status which are relevant. These are dominance games, moral games, and competence games. Virtue games and competence games. And so in dominance games, someone has high status simply because they're powerful. In virtue games, someone has high status because everyone appreciates that they are a moral actor, that they have made sacrifices for the group, that they rise to meet moral expectations in a forthright— they have honor. And in competence games, someone is appreciated for their skill, their brilliance, or their genius.

[39:41] Johann Kurtz: And in the world we used to inhabit, a woman could secure meaningful social status in ways that did not trade off with her ability to have children. So if you look at— basically, women's status was derived from their family and from their moral standing within the church. Now, you might have moral qualms with that. That's a huge Subject of discussion. But it is true, for example, that kings' wives, lords' wives, even very minor figures' wives were recognized due to their familial ties. So king and queen, lord and lady, etc. Now, the highest status people in our society, they get no titles, they get no recognition for merely being the spouse And the reason is that after the Enlightenment, we moved into a kind of— to take a radically reductionist approach to 500 years of history, we moved into a kind of meritocratic, scientific, quantifiable arrangement, economic and social arrangement, which prioritized competence above all else.

[39:41] Johann Kurtz: The merchant class came to dominate, and increasingly over the last 100 years in particular, very specific metrics again are indicators of success. So which university did you go to? Which college did you go to? Which firm do you work for? What's your title at that firm? , you're making sacrifices for the group according to the group's group's moral code only really exist in functioning small, tight, thick communities that have a way to recognize group sacrifices and a way to reward them. Now we live in the kind of universal meritocracy where people who are high status are those who have achieved a lot. And, and, you know, the— this is kind of summed up in when you meet someone, the first question they will ask you if they're looking for a question to ask is, so what do you do?

[39:41] Johann Kurtz: , what job do you do? What company do you work for? What is your role? Tell me about yourself according to the one thing that matters most when I judge you in that initial moment of contact, which is how important are you? How high status are you? How differentially do I need to treat you? How much should I ask you to do things or rely upon you? And women who do not engage very actively in the job market simply don't have a good answer to that question. It's very difficult for stay-at-home moms, as they now know, to answer that question, what do you do? What do you say?

[45:08] Marty Bent: I'm a mom.

[45:09] Johann Kurtz: And it's like, well, everyone— lots of women say they're a mom. But it's much juicier to be like, oh, I'm a vice president at Goldman Sachs, or whatever. It's like, oh, okay, well, now we're talking. That's a high-status job. I'm head of admissions at wherever. And so, yeah, we've moved into a world where it is very difficult for exceptional women, really brilliant women, To achieve the social status that they could achieve, that maybe they rightfully deserve, without making a full commitment into a meritocratic, zero-sum, career-based game that conflicts very heavily with their ability to have children. And I think South Korea is the ultimate example of this.

[45:09] Johann Kurtz: , I think that that way doom lies, unfortunately, because no one has kids. I mean, again, women are the ones who suffer because they have to make hard trade-offs. Like, do I want kids or do I want status in the eyes of the world? And I don't think it's surprising that we see the rise of the quote-unquote girl boss in that context.

[46:34] Marty Bent: Yeah. It's funny. It's one of those in American culture for people who, again, instinctively feel this. It's always like when you're with a close group of friends and maybe you just went to like a bigger party with some strangers that you're introduced to. Like one of the most common sort of sidebar conversations you'll have with a guy friend is like, I can't believe he asked me what I did. Like, I don't want to talk about like, because that stat that what do you do for a living is so ingrained. in everyday small talk conversation here in the US, I'm sure across the world. And like, what is a better first question to ask, do you think?

[47:11] Marty Bent: Like, how can we slowly like incept in people's minds, like, do not go to the party and ask this guy you just met what you just did, or this woman you just met what she does for a living? And what is a better first opening question in your mind?

[47:24] Johann Kurtz: What do you think about Vatican II? Get right to the heart of things.

[47:33] Marty Bent: I have no idea what that is. The Vatican City?

[47:37] Johann Kurtz: The Pope? But then dismiss them immediately. Yeah, move on to the next person. No, it's really tough, right? It is really tough. I mean, but this sort of like— that obviously my answer to that was flippant, but it is a problem if whatever the thing you actually value is, like, I would work backwards, starting with a question, what do I want to reward? What is it that I think should be a source of status for the person who I'm talking to? And then you kind of need to be in a community, if not at a large level, at least at a small level, like your local group of friends, who actually values that thing such that it makes sense to ask early on in a question, Because otherwise, you know, you go crazy never being able to ask about the things that you want to ask about and being met with, what are you talking about?

[47:37] Johann Kurtz: You know, let's go back to my CV, please. I want to— let's connect on LinkedIn as soon as possible.

[48:40] Marty Bent: It's so ingrained in our culture. No, it's fine. I mean, as you were describing that, I'm thinking in my mind if I should bring this up because I wonder who's going to hear it, but I don't care. It's like, simply, my wife's a stay-at-home mom and the boys are going back to school soon. And she received an email of a flyer of a cocktail party the week of school starting back up for working moms. And if you're not a working mom, you're not allowed to attend. But it's like, it's— not that you're not allowed to attend, but it's explicitly for working moms to get together and talk about the struggles of balancing home life and work life. And we just thought that was very funny that there's like an implicit exclusion of stay-at-home moms in the flyer itself.

[49:33] Johann Kurtz: Yeah, I once worked for a company where my team was quite literally over 90% women, and they had a girls' night. So it was just me and another guy kind of sitting there like, Because we weren't invited to this one. But yeah, no, it's really tough. It is really tough. I mean, one sympathizes for both sides of that equation, right? Because the truth is that the struggles are real for working women who also want to have a family. It's pretty brutal. You have to make hard trade-offs. And I think those of us who can find a way to allow their wives to focus on the million other things that are essential for family and social flourishing. It's a real privilege. I think we should be grateful. But yeah, I mean, that's tough. Yeah.

[50:30] Marty Bent: And I want to be clear, I'm not trying to shit on working moms or anything like that. And thank you, you're much more articulate than I am. It is an incredibly nuanced conversation. What I'm trying to get at is I believe that the path we're on is not great, particularly for younger generations. I come from a big Irish Catholic family, as I've told you before, and I find a lot of strength and stability in my nuclear and extended family. And I'm trying to replicate that with my children and their cousins. And I am not ashamed to say I think it is the optimal way to live a life is to have that strong nuclear extended family, stronger communities outside of those family connections.

[50:30] Marty Bent: And it's very clear that we're getting away from that. And to your point, it's a very nuanced conversation. I hope I'm not coming off as somebody who just thinks these people are despicable. It's not the case at all. It's like, how do we get to the core of this? And you wrote in that Status Game about the interesting case study out of Georgia, the country, where you had a celebrity-like figure being the bishop agree to baptize any 3rd child that was born in the country. And that led to an immediate increase in fertility rates. But it ties that status gain that that bishop was highly respected in Georgia.

[50:30] Marty Bent: And so therefore, people strove to attain the status of having their 3rd child baptized by this bishop.

[52:11] Johann Kurtz: That's right. Yeah, yeah. I'll butcher the details because it's been a few years since I read the study, but it is one of the more remarkable. If you look at the fertility graphs of Western countries and you identify sort of pivotal moments where the fertility trajectory of a country abruptly and significantly changed, it's one of the few, and certainly one of the few in a positive direction. And that was in Georgia, the country of Georgia, where the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, who I believe was called Ilia II and unfortunately sadly died earlier this year, so rest in peace, in an attempt to make a contribution to the country's fertility crisis offered to personally baptize and become godfather to— was it all third children onwards?

[52:11] Johann Kurtz: And what you saw was that nationwide spike in births, which was very significant, was specifically in 3rd children and onwards. So it wasn't so much a religious phenomenon as in he was identifying a moral necessity of the church and people were listening to his teaching. It was a status phenomenon whereby they would get to meet and initiate into their own family an incredibly important and significant figure in Georgian public life. And these are significant figures. I've spent some time in Romania recently, and the patriarchs, they love to dress in gold and build tremendously large churches. And honestly, I'm not complaining. It's very impressive, some of the things they've built.

[52:11] Johann Kurtz: But they're towering figures in the lives of these countries.

[53:59] Marty Bent: Well, that gets to the question, like, do we have just terrible high-status figures in our society? And how much of the burden is on those high-status figures in popular culture to— how important are they in swaying these tides back towards family formation and strong communities?

[54:23] Johann Kurtz: Well, I mean, on the one hand, We got to work with what we got. And I think what we do have is we've got a mass society with mass celebrities, and it would be great if they were living really pro-family lives. I think, you know, I mean, who cares what I think about Taylor Swift's wedding? But I do think it's a shame that she didn't do a big public spectacle, beautiful traditional wedding, which I think would've been very elegant, but also would've been very inspirational. I don't know why she did what she did. I'm sure she had her reasons for it. But it would also be wonderful 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.

[54:23] Johann Kurtz: Memetic effects are very real, and people copy the fertility patterns of those they idolize. There's a lot of data on the subject. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a real solution. , 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. It's funny, it's like maybe it's a bit of an extreme example, but I definitely felt it myself. I've spent a lot of time recently since I published my first book in American Christian intentional communities, meeting people who start businesses and run them according to Christian principles and these kind of things.

[54:23] Johann Kurtz: And there's a real There's a real switch kind of around the 4-child mark there. It's like if you've got 1 child or 2 children, you're probably a bit of a normie. Like, we're not going to take you too seriously. If you've got 3 children, it's like, okay, now we're getting somewhere. But it's like once you've got that 4th child, it's like, okay, now you are clearly outside the mainstream and you're playing our game according to our rules. Like, you're actually taking this seriously and I'm going to take you seriously. as a result. And it's amongst these communities— and I'm sure to a skeptic, this all sounds very Handmaid's Tale.

[54:23] Johann Kurtz: It's really not. It's a crazy good time when everyone has big families and they're just crashing around the park. And you bring your kids to church and you don't need to worry that they're being a bit poorly behaved because there's like 500 kids in the church. Everyone's kids are poorly behaved because it's chaos. It's like wonderful chaos. 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. It's expensive, it's tough, it means sacrificing consumer comforts, it's scary for women. Pregnancy is frequently uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous.

[54:23] Johann Kurtz: You have to find very particular strong—

[57:38] Marty Bent: Communities.

[57:39] Johann Kurtz: felt ways to offset that. And, uh, and the way that I think this is done effectively, as much as I wish, you know, and I'm sure there will be, by the way, a baby bump when, you know, Taylor posts her first beautiful photo of a beaming, you know, uh, a 3-month-old on, on Instagram or whatever. But, uh, but the way that you actually overcome that is in a thick community where people are idolized and elevated for, for having big families and actually perpetuate representing a particular community and they're appreciated by the members of that community.

[58:09] Marty Bent: I wouldn't be shocked if you know the stat, but do you know the largest growing population subset of the United States today? Ooh.

[58:20] Johann Kurtz: So I would guess, but I don't know, it's Hasidic Jews, but that's a guess.

[58:29] Marty Bent: The Amish.

[58:30] Johann Kurtz: The Amish. Okay. That's where I was going to go second. Yeah.

[58:33] Marty Bent: The Mennonites. They're, uh, but it knows like they, they, uh, I'm sure the Hasidic Jewish community is very similar, but now the Amish are like where I'm in Pennsylvania. So just west of me and spreading down into West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Ohio. They're, they're growing like at insane rates. And it's because obviously they value very large families. Yeah. And they're somewhat isolated from popular culture as well.

[59:03] Johann Kurtz: Well, yeah, that's the thing. All the communities that have seriously high fertility— and by the way, I tread carefully. I'm probably not doing a great job of it when having this discussion because it's very easy to subconsciously flip from what I think is the right way to have this discussion, which is Virtue is rewarded because we have set up society correctly to our own form of fixating on very particular reductive statistics and being like, we must move this number at all costs. And a detail as personal and intimate and consequential as how many kids you have should not be pushed around according to arbitrary metrics.

[59:03] Johann Kurtz: To the extent we can even do that. But yeah, I mean, it's really complex because a lot of the traditional high fertility communities in the US were Orthodox Jewish, Amish, traditional Catholic, and Mormon. And in— I'm not sure about the Jewish statistics. Amish is really high but slowly falling. Mormon has fallen significantly. And then Catholicism is pretty aggressively bifurcating between kind of normie Catholics and the rad-trads. And so it's— but I do think, switching back to the kind of more instrumental mode for a second, It gives me great hope that a country as Christian as America still is, despite all its flaws, is holding up really well in terms of its population.

[59:03] Johann Kurtz: It's a serious offset to the rise of China's hard power, the fact that we're having way more kids than them. And every decade that that goes on, the equation changes radically. And also for the sort of rebuilding of Christendom. America still is one of the most radically Christian countries in the world, certainly in pockets. And it's sort of, you know, by your fruits you will know them. It's great to see.

[1:01:28] Marty Bent: Well, to your point about not chasing metrics for metrics, that is a trend here now. There is a growing number of Zoomers particularly that are converting to Catholicism. And it has many— I would hope most are doing it for earnest reasons, but you do see the status game arising in that particular subset of people converting to Catholicism where it seems like for many people, it's like the cool thing to do. But I think it is seeped, at least the beginnings of it were seeped in legitimate reasons, mainly people beginning to hit the dating scene on the apps and realizing it was fruitless. And many people taking the advice of like, hey, go to church and try to meet a girl there seriously and doing it successfully. And I think there has been— objectively, I think this Easter we had the most Catholic conversions in decades across the United States, particularly in the Northeast, but you do begin to see that sort of status game emerging there as well.

[1:02:39] Johann Kurtz: Yeah. Well, you know, let them have their fun as long as they're coming back. You know, who amongst us hasn't done a bit of Crusader LARPing at one point or another? Who amongst us?

[1:02:51] Marty Bent: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, on the other side of the spectrum, maybe end it on this, you see the social decay. I'm not sure if you've been following this Lindsay Clancy development and the sort of mass psychosis that is emerging on social media, TikTok particularly, of women who are defending her and now beginning to showcase their— the neglect of their children too. And it's just very, very weird how that's manifested over the last couple months as well.

[1:03:28] Johann Kurtz: Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure I have particularly insightful things to say about that case. I mean, the only thing that strikes me is, again, the dynamics of mass society are so unhealthy because it's just like— I probably sound like a bit of a normie on this point, but it's— It's more than just that one case. A lot of crazy views, the kind of conspiracy— I love a good conspiracy. Mostly I love an intelligent conspiracy. And very dumb conspiracy mindset is just blowing up all over the place. And in my opinion, it's a lot to do with the fact that untrustworthy information sources are being mass consumed by people who are not embedded in thick networks of relationship with other real people who can guide them and sort of take the reins.

[1:03:28] Johann Kurtz: It's a pretty crazy situation where— and men get caught up in this in their own way, but when Okay, please don't clip this. I don't want this to be a YouTube Short or whatever. But, uh, but, uh, you know, when, when women spend a huge amount of time with unhinged information sources in their phones without any kind of reality check from their husbands— and I, I think it's something of a universal, generally speaking, that like, uh, The realist party in these kind of discussions typically are the men. And women, they do love a good true crime saga and the opportunity to have one play out in front of them in real time, and they can actively participate.

[1:03:28] Johann Kurtz: And it's like a call-in show or something. Yeah, it's not good. So this combination of mass society, no natural human checks on bad instincts being called out and just ever-deepening psychosis is popping up in a lot of bad ways.

[1:05:48] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, I mean, I succumbed to the doom scrolling actually. And my wife's very cognizant of when she's falling down. That's not to say that she fell down the Lindsay Clancy thing at all, but she— let me pull this up. She made us buy these bricks so that we literally cannot be on social media for most of the day unless We're physically by these things, but like intentionally trying to declutter our lives by reducing the usage of these social media apps. I think I'm actually, I've been liking it too because it's not for both men and women. It's not good for your psyche if you don't know the power that it yields over you.

[1:06:31] Johann Kurtz: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[1:06:36] Marty Bent: Johan, it's been a pleasure. Any parting notes for anybody listening to this?

[1:06:41] Johann Kurtz: Can I shill for one second?

[1:06:46] Marty Bent: Shill, shill. Shill. Let me shill.

[1:06:49] Johann Kurtz: Leaving a Legacy, Johan Kurtz. It's my book. So it's my best writing. If you're interested in anything I've said, that's a good place to start. You can find it on Amazon.

[1:07:00] Marty Bent: I've had many, many people reach out to me after our first episode saying thank you for recording it. They went and bought the book. They love it. I highly recommend it. I think it's probably the best book I've read in the last 2 years. And it's short. You can read it in an afternoon, but it's very dense and thought-provoking. So highly recommend you go pick it up.

[1:07:24] Johann Kurtz: I appreciate that. Thank you, Marty.

[1:07:26] Marty Bent: All right. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.