Why Everything In Life Feels Out of Reach

**Charlie Kirk** (0:03)
My name is Charlie Kirk. I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country, fighting for the future of our republic. My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth. If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable. But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. You got to stop sending your kids to college. You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible. Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter. Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade. Most important decision I ever made in my life, and I encourage you to do the same. Here I am. Lord, use me. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go.
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**Charlie Kirk** (1:17)
All right, welcome to The Charlie Kirk Show. It is August 20th.
Man, this week has flown by, actually. We are here in Phoenix, Arizona at the Y-Refi Studios. Blake, how are we doing today?

**Blake** (1:28)
We're doing lovely. We're doing lovely.

**Charlie Kirk** (1:30)
So without further ado, Blake, why don't you introduce us to our first guest?

**Blake** (1:33)
All right. This is the guy I wanted to have him on for the past month and we finally got to put it together. His name is Johann Kurtz. He's the author of the book, Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack, which I strongly recommend to everyone.
Trying to get him on for last month because a month ago, he had a post. It was an article of his on Substack but it was also posted on X. It went really, really viral. I think 15 million plus views, something like that. A ton for a long article and it was titled, Young Adults Are Poor Despite Every Metric Which Suggests Otherwise. And it's all about concepts Charlie would love, about loss of social capital and how everything, we're superficially very rich, but everything feels more expensive.

**Charlie Kirk** (2:20)
And this is the $20 burrito show, obviously.

**Charlie Kirk** (2:24)
But it's not even just the $20 burrito.

**Blake** (2:26)
It's so much deeper than that. Of course. That's why I'm so excited to have him on. So Johann Kurtz, I believe we have him there.
If there's any delay, I think he's joining us from far away. But Johann, thank you for joining the program.

**Johann Kurtz** (2:38)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Blake** (2:39)
Excellent. Excellent. So let's just kind of leave the floor to you on this. You say, okay, you might look at the data and it says, salaries are really high and people complain about prices, but prices of food haven't gone up.
You can have the economics experts come out and debate this. But at a core level, why does it feel like the core goals people have in life? Marriage, family, kids, community, they feel way more out of reach than they did for your parents' generation, or especially your grandparents and great-grandparents' generation. What's going on?

**Johann Kurtz** (3:15)
Yeah. Well, it's a big question. I think part of it is the strongest arguments against the position I'm going to take, would be something like real income, so inflation-adjusted incomes for young people have risen substantially over the last few decades, and unemployment is at low levels across the West, and America, and my own country as well.
The problem is that when you dive into exactly how that inflation is calculated, when you disaggregate it across different baskets of goods, what you find is that the things which have become much cheaper, which suggests to us that we are better off than ever, tend to be disposable goods, tend to be pleasurable goods, its electronics, its screens, its toys, its travel, its cheap food. Ironically, that's often touted as something that has got cheaper, perhaps not in the last few months.
But on the other hand, the things that have unquestionably become more expensive, and it's very difficult even if you're on the other side of argument to statistically rebut these elements, the elements of an essential family life. People who want to have children, people who want to get married, people who want to build something greater than themselves. These are the cost of homes, both in terms of rent and in terms of the affordability of buying a house. This is the cost of life insurance, child care, education. These essential aspects of moving through the kind of core pillars of a responsible adult life, as an American society has always understood it. Completing your studies, entering into a stable job, finding a spouse, getting married, having children and buying a home. Those are the things that have become more difficult than ever to achieve. And what's more is that not only have these things become more expensive in definite terms, but a lot of the things that helped us along the road to get there are intangible sense. What I describe in my piece is social capital, which perhaps we can discuss more on. That has truly collapsed as well, and that's more difficult to capture in the statistics. So I was attempting to give a nuanced expression to the combination of these factors as something that really is, unlike the people who sort of waive away the concerns, something that definitely is a hard barrier to overcome, not an insurmountable barrier, but a set of very hard barriers for people who have grander aspirations than their own pleasure.