The Fourth Turning Is Here: Our Great National Challenge | Neil Howe

What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces. A podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens, to challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is bestselling author and renowned historian, economist, and theorist of generational change, Neil Howe. 25 years ago, Neil and his co-author William Strauss, put forward a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back over the last 500 years, they uncovered a distinct pattern. Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years, with each composed of four eras or turnings that always arrive in the same order, and each last about 25 years. The last of these eras is always the most perilous. It's a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal in World War II, the Civil War or the American Revolution. The authors called it The Fourth Turning, and Neil joins me today to explain why he thinks that Fourth Turning has finally arrived. What it means for those of us living during this period, and how his theory of generational change can help us navigate it with courage, competency, and a newfound sense of resiliency that may seem unimaginable to us today. Neil and I spend the first hour of our conversation laying the foundation for this theory, discussing the four different seasons of the saeculum as well as the four different generations that propel it forward. We spend the second hour applying that framework to the Fourth Turning itself. We discuss what it would take to consolidate our society, and what an existential threat to our nation's survival will look and feel like, and what we can do to prepare ourselves for this great national challenge that will draw all other problems into it and require the extraordinary mobilization of most Americans. If you want access to that part of the conversation and you're not already subscribed to Hidden Forces, you can join our premium feed and listen to the second hour of today's episode by going to hiddenforces.io/subscribe. All of our content tiers give you access to our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode, right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q & A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis in-person events and dinners. You can also do that on our subscriber page, and if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [e-mail] and I, or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly inspirational and enlightening conversation with my guest, Neil Howe. Neil Howe, welcome to Hidden Forces. Demetri, it's great to be here. It's great having you on, Neil, and congratulations on the publication of your new book. The Fourth Turning Is Here, I think this is a quarter-century in the making. A previous Fourth Turning, I believe was published in 1997, co-authored by you and William Strauss. I'm curious to ask you how developed this field was, this field of generational theory before you guys wrote your book in the late 1990s, because it's a theory that you guys are both so closely associated with today. Who else was talking about or writing about the subject at the time that you guys took interest in it? Yes. And it really did not exist. The basic cornerstone of the theory kind of laying out a lot of its building blocks, was an earlier book that Bill and I wrote called Generations, which is basically a series of collective biographies of American generations going all the way back to the early 17th century. And that came out in 1991, and really that was when... We wrote about it in the late 1980s, and at that time, almost no one in America was talking about generations. Generations, and you won't be surprised to hear me say this, Demetri. Generations is itself a generational phenomenon. That is to say when we get interested in generations, right? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, everyone in America talked about generational differences. There was a famous generation gap. There were books called Clash of Generations. It was obvious, you had coming of age boomers railing against the greatest generation that built postwar America, and it was a big deal, and any boomer who was coming of age at the time knew it was a big deal. And then later in the late 1970s, I don't know, maybe with the death of disco or something like that, it sort of just fell into advance and no one really talked much about it. Gen X was coming of age. The culture turned in a new wave, new direction, and people were silent. We kind of resurrected it really drawing upon our own lifetime experiences and our own fascination with generational change. And just, this is something we might want to talk about, but our original interest, Bill's interest, my interest was initially in generational differences and generational change, not so much in anything having to do with the cycles of history that came later. Well, what was the major contribution that you guys made to the field in the 80s and 90s when you wrote Generations and The Fourth Turning? Well, what we did was that we discovered as we went back and we wrote this long history of a sort of generational history of America, that first of all, generational awareness goes way back in American history. It's not something new which was originally discovered after World War II with boomers, but rather it goes all the way back to the very origins of America. In fact, it goes all the way back to modernity itself. It really goes back throughout all of the modern centuries since the Reformation and the Renaissance talking about new generations, coming of age with new ideas and new ways of thinking about the world and people aware of these differences. And the other thing we noticed is that even starting with the so-called Puritan generation that came here in the, and massively migrated to New England in the 1630s, that what we found was that certain types of generations always followed other kinds of generations. In other words, there was a pattern in the way generations follow each other. For example, following on a very idealistic generation, we associate with boomers being very idealistic about how the world works. Having a very comfortable upbringing and being very demanding of how institutions should change this new set of ideals. We practically always see the emergence of a generation that is deemed to be cynical, pragmatic, almost a concerted reaction to that, sort of the boomer, X-er pattern. But this is not new in American history, following the generation of Abraham Lincoln, and then Transcendentals, came the Gilded generation, given the name by Mark Twain and his co-author and personified by Custer and Ulysses Grant, a generation of metal and muscle, just a completely different collective persona and so on with yet others. There was a pattern, and it was through that discovery of a pattern that we linked it up to a pattern in the structure of history itself. One mystery and curiosity about American history is that we seem to have these huge periods of civic upheaval mobilization, and reconstruction about every 80 or 90 years, right? About the length of a long human life apart. We had the glorious revolution in the late 17th century, the major colonial period of revolt and revolution and war. And then about a lifetime later, we had the American Revolution, which of course, set the United States off as a new country. And then again, another human lifetime, we had the American Civil War, and then another period like that, we had the Great Depression World War II. And now here we are, were in another period like that again today and roughly in between of those great, sort of civic events, we have the great awakenings of American history. And what's really interesting here, Demetri, is that there's kind of a yin and yang relationship here. In the civic events, we remake the outer world of politics, economics, infrastructure, how we live with each other in the world and in the awakenings, we remake the inner world of religion, literature, culture, values, as we use the word today, values. Every boomer knows that word. So that was interesting to us, and that actually is the key to another thing which is associated, I say another attribute of our thinking, which is associated with us, and that is this sort of fourfold typology of periods and generational archetypes. So I want to get into all of that. One last question, Neil, before we get into the framework or delineate it more clearly in all the four different archetypes and that drive each turning. I'm curious what it feels like for you, because I imagine that when you published the book in 1997 that you didn't expect, actually, I don't know what you expected. I'd be curious to know what you expected the reaction to be, because you, this was right as the dot-com bubble was just beginning to gain steam and traction. So I don't necessarily imagine you would've expected to get a resounding reception for a book that basically said, "Hey, hold on a second. Times are really good, but just around the corner things can change. Winter is coming." So I'm curious to know what people's reaction was to the book, but I'm also curious to know what it's been like for you to watch this book become kind of like a cult classic, and I would say even more popular later in its lifetime than it was when it first came out. It's been kind of extraordinary. And you're right, when we published the book, America was becoming steadily more optimistic. We were pulling out of a, Clinton's first term was impacted by 1994 and sort of Newt Gingrich, the Republican takeover and a lingering recession in the early 90s. But as we moved into 1996, 1997, there was just a growing optimism and the whole idea that we had a number of predictions about how we might be moving into a new era of crisis starting sometime in the middle of the 2000, 2010 decade, which seemed a ways away at that point. We had a number of scenarios which we could talk about if you want. Many of which have actually come to pass. And people thought that that was just outlandish. I mean, we predicted, for instance, well, we could have a WMD attack on New York with airplanes. We predicted a pandemic, we predicted a budget crisis led by Tea Party members and so on. And I think we also predicted a Russian invasion of previous Soviet states. We made these as not so much predictions, but just exemplary scenarios. I mean, obviously we were just saying, "Here are five things that could happen." And they seemed outlandish to people at the time. Remember, this was the era of the Cold War was over. Francis Fukuyama's end of history seemed to be dominant. Markets were flourishing, individualism were had triumphed, and governments seemed to be fading away. All the great struggles, all the great battles of history seemed to be over. And the microchip as both the Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. And Bill Clinton, were all saying was going to undermine and overthrow authoritarians all over the world. And that was the future. And we said, "No, that's really not how it works." So you're right. It got an interested audience, I think a curious audience when it first came out. But as we begin to see the hits later on to America, really starting in 2008 and then 2016 with the Clinton-Trump election, and then with the pandemic, this very belated popularity of the book sort of come into its own. Yeah. I think one of the values of what you've done here is that you give people a story. And in fact, I do feel like, because I listened to a lot of your interviews, Neil, in preparation with this conversation, and I read the book as well, and it feels like there's a sermonizing quality to how you approach this in your book. You quote Jung, you quote Joseph Campbell. So there's also an appreciation for the power of mythology and storytelling as a framework for helping galvanize people and society towards a higher calling. So I think it's incredibly valuable in a way that isn't necessarily the kinds of frameworks that people are familiar with. So speaking of frameworks, I mean, you kind of alluded to it in the beginning of your response, but I would like to just make sure that for anyone who isn't familiar with it that we give it's do here. There are four turnings. There's the initial turning. Again, we can think about various examples in history, but we can look to the most recent turning just to give people an initial idea of what we're talking about here. The First Turning in the most recent seculum was the 1950s and 60s. It was an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism when a new civic order implanted and an old values regime decayed, that First Turning is driven by a generation that grew up in the previous seculum, I don't know how you would describe it, but in that case, it would've been the silent generation, presumably, and as well as the... As well as the G.I generation, that- G.I generation. Yeah. And you have the Second- ... that fought the war. ... Turning, that's the Awakening. It's the era of spiritual upheaval. When the civic order comes under attack from a new value regime, this would've been the 60s and 70s. The Third Turning is an Unraveling. It's a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions when that very old civic order decays and that new values regime that came into being during the awakening in plants. And then you have the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis, which is the period that we're in now. And it's a decisive era of secular upheaval with the new value regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. And in all of those, we have four different generations. We have the prophet generation, which would've been the boomers, the nomad generation, which would've been Generation X, the sort of latchkey generation that we covered in our episode with Jean Twenge, along with all the other generations. The hero generation, which is a really interesting, I mean, yes, the G.Is, we all think about them as heroes, but it's interesting to imagine that actually us millennials are supposed to be heroes. And then you have the artist generation, which you call the Homelanders. People associate them with Generation Z. What's also interesting about your book is that you have different timelines for which generation is which. I just gave a really, really simple, concise sort of overview of what that is. I would love for you to fill any gaps, and then we can begin to apply that to think about where we are, how we got here, where we're going, and what all that's going to feel like, because that's what I think is the most compelling and interesting part of your book today, in this year, 2023. Yes. And each of those generations you talked about were simply the generations coming of age. They were moving from childhood into adulthood during those periods. And each of them is represented today and in America, certainly in politics, the silent generation were the children of the Great Depression in World War II, they were just too young to participate as adults in the war. And as it turned out later on, just too young to be free spirits during the consciousness revolution. They already had married, they got married, they had jobs. So they were kind of awkwardly in the middle of the generation gap. That generation is always at a very awkward relationship with history. They were never the right age. They were just too young for the war. They were just too old for Woodstock. And they've been a great generation of listeners and moderators of compromisers and mediators. And interestingly enough, this generation, and I should say this type of generation has a very weak record for political leadership, meaning no one really turns to them for decisive leadership. And in fact, had Biden not been elected, that generation would've never had a president. It's interesting to think about, we completely leapfrog that generation in the presidency when we went from George Bush Sr. who as we all know was a fighter pilot during World War II, albeit a very young one, just at the very end of that generation, born in 1924 to a boomer born after the war. Bill Clinton, born in 1946, and we never chose that generation again. We never went back. We just sort of leaped over it. Kind of interesting, it turns out that there are such a thing as dominant political generations in history, in American history, and the GI generation was certainly one of them. The GI generation who came of age voting for FDR in the 1930s with incredible majorities estimated over 80% of that generation. First time voters in 1932 and 36 voted for FDR. Everyone associated them with the new deal. They went on to be the great foot soldiers and personnel that won World War II, conquered half the world, and they largely identified with rebuilding America after the war was over, and they became a very dominant generation politically. The first member of that generation to run for the presidency was Tom Dewey, who ran in 1944. The last president was George Bush Sr. who lost his attempt to be reelected in 1992. The last member of that generation to run for the presidency was Bob Dole in 1996. You think of 1944 to 1996, that's over 50 years of major party candidates running for the presidency. And so they ran just multiple times. I don't know how many major party candidates they had Demetri, but it was probably something like 16, 17, 18. The silent generation, I believe, only had four. They had Mondale, they had Dukakis, they had John McCain, and they had Joe Biden. That's it. Only one of them won. And I guarantee you, we will never have another running. So it's interesting too, to think about generations as being strong and weak politically, but you have many generations participate in each of these turnings. I mean, there are people of all ages that play a role, and it's the what we sometimes call the generational constellation of the Fourth, First Turning, when you think of the 50s and late 40s, 50s, early 60s, which gave it that personality, you had the silent generation coming of ages, young adults, you had the G.Is kind of taking over power. They see, Wright Mills called them the power elite. Coming into midlife, taking over American institutions, building dams and highways and research laboratories and weapons, plants and all the rest. And then you had an older generation, the lost generation, the Truman and Eisenhower generation, which was just generally differentially to brighter and smarter younger people at that time. And after 1960, we barely heard about them at all, right? They sort of just disappeared. And then of course, you had the consciousness revolution and everything changed. A new set of generational persona came into the limelight. Suddenly boomers appeared. They had been children during the High, and now they made their stage, they made their entry to the stage, and it was a very noisy, boisterous entry. Really, this was a generation that spearheaded the most defiant youth awakening of the 20th century. And everything that the G.Is tried to perfect and build seemed to come to pieces under the onslaught. We suddenly had, well, Vietnam War was lost, so there was that demoralization. And we had sex, drugs, rock and roll, the rise of crime. We had inner city riots, we had riots on campus. The entire culture in America seemed to turn toward individualism, the cult of self, which the GI generation found so hateful, to its life mission of banding together in teams and cleaning up the world. And so there was a very interesting process that happened in those years when the G.Is retired. I mean, the G.Is were retirement age at that point. I mean, the oldest of them were born in 1901. So they were now reaching age 65 in the late 60s, and they all had a record number of them had union jobs, and when they retired, they all just joined ARP, right? So suddenly the senior lobby, suddenly became very important, and they all started moving to Sun City and Leisure World. We suddenly had these huge communities for people to move to the southwest and live in these hermetically sealed communities where they were age restricted, by the way, so you didn't have to let young people move in and they could be sealed away from the boomer culture, which they found frankly hateful. And they could still leave their doors open, they could still be friendly to each other. And the GI generation liked to be with each other all their lives, and they liked to be with each other when they're retired. And they didn't particularly want to be with our kids. And so this generation, which coming of age were the great junior citizens of America. I mean, they saved America. We had a new word that we applied to that same generation when they were entering old age, Demetri. Senior citizens. And we forget, it's the same generation. We never called old people, senior citizens before this generation entered that phase of life, and all other generations honored them. And they basically proposed a trade. "I'll tell you what, we'll take all this wealth that we built and you boomers don't particularly like, and you'll give a large share of that back to us, and in return we'll give you boomers dominance over the culture." So that's essentially what happened during the 1970s. All of the post-Vietnam fiscal dividend went to senior benefits. We created Medicare, Medicaid, we had automatic indexing, COLA of social security. We even had double indexing for a while. We had this enormous surge of senior benefits, and we still labor fiscally under the tailwind of those agreements. But that was the trade-off. And by the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan, I think he was badgered by his wife into doing this, but invited The Beach Boys to the White House, to the boomer domination of the culture was complete. And that was really typical of an Awakening era. This is the new values regime that boomers brought in. And it's interesting to see now, Demetri, that so many of the problems that we see in America, this obsession with values, the culture wars, the polarization of America, the values camps, I think by most estimations really started toward the end of this period. I mean, people date that fisher to the late 1970s. And boomers have always been a values obsessed generation, as is all members of the prophet archetype. We call them the prophet archetype because there have been many other generations in American history just like them. And they have been a polarizing generation. They came of age excoriating the values of their parents, they had their counterculture, and then in the 80s and 90s they attacked each other. And then today, they're trying to set an example, a values example, and concade and teach their values to younger generations. But that is their persona. And one interesting thing about generations is that they do develop persona early in life collectively, and they continue to keep those kind of collective attributes as they grow older. You mentioned the Unraveling, right? This Third Turning, I guess if you're keeping track of seasons, that would be the fall season, from summer to fall. And that is a period when individualism is triumphant, institutions are discredited. I think it's fair to say that ever since, I think almost any American who's gone into a bookstore since the late 1980s sees that the most upbeat, optimistic books are about me, myself and I. "I can do anything. I can conquer everything." But all of our most downbeat books you see in the bookstore are about the end of the family, the end of community, the end of politics. And that's because we've been living in this era. And that brings me to another point, Demetri, and that is that the timescale is so vast, that the cycle, that these are long title emotions. And what's very interesting is that if the entire cycle lasts a long human lifetime, the era that we're entering is always the era that is just being forgotten by the oldest people who are passing away. So no one really remembers that era when we were entering it. The last time we're in era, like that was the 1920s. When we found such a profound influence of sort of individualism dominating the culture. But we lived through it. And the 1990s was a decade of sort of liberation, cynicism, bad manners, certainly individualism, a very low or ebbing sense of civic responsibility. It was a decade of sort of celebrity circuses and show trials. You remember O.J Simpson? Well, again, if you look at a decades like that, you'd immediately recognize instead of the roaring 90s, you'd recognize the roaring 20s, or you'd recognize the 1850s, you'd recognize the 1760s. These are all very similar decades manifesting some of the similar attributes. Now, history teaches us that these Third Turnings always end in Fourth Turnings. And in Fourth Turnings are in many, you could say the Third Turning is in many way the opposite of a First Turning, right? Individualism triumphant, institutions discredited. But in a Fourth Turning is in many ways the opposite of an awakening. In awakening, the supply of order in society is very high, but the demand from order from the rising generation in particular is very low, right? Is declining. We want less order. So an awakening is always about throwing off social discipline, social responsibility, all of these civic constraints, letting people just live their own lives, not just only in the culture, not necessarily doing your parents want you to tell you to do. Your community tells you what to do, your neighbors tell you what to do. But also in the economy, remember at the end of the Awakening was a period of deregulation and tax cuts. Let's throw off all the economic constraints. So in many ways, Demetri, it encompassed both the left and the right. They all participated in the awakening. In the Crisis era, in The Fourth Turning, we move in the opposite direction. That is to say the society is supplying very little order, and yet people alive at the time today, Americans today, particularly the rising generation, this time millennials, demand more order. And so it's a very different kind of era. And as a result, The Fourth Turning is all about the recreation of community. And in the Awakening, it was all about the dissolution of community. And that's really one of the big stories. And it's also the remaking of the outer world, not the inner world. But we can talk more about that if you wish. Mm-hmm. I do actually. I mean, you're hitting on so many things that I found really interesting and compelling while reading the book. Let's go back to the Unraveling. When did we first begin to see evidence of that unraveling occur? And what are some examples that you can point to? I think the Awakening finally lost steam in the late 70s, early 80s. Jimmy Carter turned out to be not, he was sort of a product of the Awakening. A lot of boomers voted for him, and then he lost popularity. And Americans began to be somewhat frightened by double-digit inflation. He finally brought in Paul Volcker and the sort of feeling of dysfunction in America at the time. I think a lot of millennials, of course, would have no memory of this. But it is interesting that if you look at polls indicating America's sense of panic about America, that the only time that's comparable to the pandemic and the election of 2020, which I think millennials certainly do remember, was back in 1980 and back in 79, 80. There's a real sense of panic about what was happening to America, particularly the stagflation. No one understood. The stock market dropped to valuations, which no one had ever seen before. I think most of the S&P at the time could just be scrapped and sold for scrap and profitably liquidated. Just incredible phenomenon that we were noticing. And then- The Iranian hostage crisis as well. Exactly. The Iranian hostage, the yellow ribbons. So a sense of real despair. Jimmy Carter called it Malaise, in a famous speech at the time, which certainly cheered no one up, particularly not one coming from the president. And Ronald Reagan was reelected. Things turned around. And I think the real capstone or how I would end at that period, is the 1984 morning again election. The whole mood of America just seemed to change. And Boomers at the time were coming of age with their own Awakening experiences through films like The Big Chill. Suddenly looking back at this period with a little bit more self-awareness of where they had gone, and perhaps areas where they had gone a little bit too far. And for the first time, you saw, as we always do with the new turning, signs of the Brat Pack and all these new Gen X stars, right? Alex from Family Ties. Michael J. Fox. Yeah, exactly. The young Republican with a tie and, "People who don't need people are the richest people in the world." Those kind of lines. So you basically had a whole new coming of age persona, which is very different from boomers. Boomers with these buoyant, idealistic kids teaching the world to sing in the famous Coca-Cola ad. And now you suddenly had these, well, there was a famous cover story on Time Magazine just showing these black-clad kids sort of with dazed expressions, almost traumatized expressions, not looking at each other to sort of looking around. And people wondered, "What happened to these kids?" They weren't speaking up, they were just surviving. They were just taking care of themselves. And the awareness of what the Awakening had done to the... ... themselves and the awareness of what the Awakening had done to the family. And I think for Gen Xers, they were the ultimate throwaway kids. Remember, during the Awakening era, everyone was focused on themselves. The GI generation was focused on their own retirement, getting out of the house, the silent generation was going through their incredible divorce wave, which was unprecedented America and really was a tremendous shock for a lot of the Gen Xers who were growing up with small kids. But those small kids were like the kid in Kramer versus Kramer, that was a Gen Xer. Exactly. Kramer versus Kramer or the Tatum O'Neal kid, just before her time. And in fact, this whole era was the era of the child was devil horror movie. This was The Exorcist, and the Rosemary's Baby, and the It's a Life. Children of the Corn. Yeah, it was an unremittingly negative view of childhood throughout the entire early childhood of the Gen Xers, really starting in the mid 1960s, extending all the way to the early 1980s. Movie theaters were packed with audiences that wanted to see this image of children. And interestingly, Demetri, it suddenly changed in the early '80s when Millennials started coming along as kids. We suddenly rediscovered kids. Everyone wanted to protect them. All these books and articles came out about how badly kids have been treated, they needed protection, they needed structure. Suddenly, we had minivans designed for kids with five different ways of buckling them into their seats. Back when Gen Xers were kids, you just told them to, I don't know, put your hands in front of your face or something, deal with it yourself. And suddenly all these safety devices, the entire world turned child-friendly once Boomers decided, dominating the culture as always, that now this was something important for them to do is to protect this new very special generation of kids. And we saw the change too in the box office. You suddenly saw Three Men and a Baby, and Parenthood, and Baby Boom. You remember all these very cuddly baby movies, and 10 years later it was movies about soccer moms and kids inspiring their parents to become better people. But again, we sometimes don't realize how this influences generations at the time. I have a number of Millennials in my company, and one thing we used to do is actually go and watch these Xer Child movies, Made, Dazed and Confused, and Rivers Edge, and some of these really dark movies made back in the 1970s, and it brought some of them to tears. I mean they couldn't believe. Their question was didn't anyone love these kids? I had to assure them that Xers are doing fine. They grew up, they moved on, but they grew up and moved on differently. They absorbed collectively different traits and one of them is one which Millennials don't really have, but what Xers developed was resilience, pragmatism. The ability to absorb everything or anything and still move on, make do. There's always hope. This intense pragmatism and a sense of self-sufficiency. No-one else is going to look after you. This is something that Millennials don't have. I think Millennials do expect someone should look after them and ought to look after them, and Millennials also didn't expect to look after each other. Millennials are much more individualistic in that sense, and I think it's made Millennials very different politically and commercially. I mean Millennials are very good at adapting to markets and tend to be contrarian investors. Millennials tend to do crowd investing, they always want to invest in the same thing so if they all go down, at least they all go down together. See Millennials all investing in target date funds. I think Xers have been much more comfortable being in with the fact that there're winners and losers. This is how at a young age we see different generational persona being developed. I think from a very early age, Millennials developed a sense of, first of all, they were special, they were protected, they were optimistic about the future, and they were more peer oriented, more community oriented, and more conventional. They were more attached to their parents from a very early age and they continue to be more attached, even today when you see record levels of Millennials, even in their late 20s, early 30s, even late 30s living with their parents. One of the great phenomena that we see now is this incredible renaissance of the extended family in America. This is why large homes are selling so well. Everyone wants to move into a large home where they can have their grown kids living with them, which they are doing at such a high rate. We have not seen such a large fear of people in their late 20s and mid 30s living with their parents since the GI generation. Isn't that Interesting? Back in the late '30s, early 1940s. Well, really just on the verge of World War II. And in many ways they were very similar. I think a lot of us today recall those Frank Kaplan movies like You Can't Take It with You, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with these big Victorian homes showing a lot of generations living together. Well, we've reconstructed that. It's the McMansion that we're all living together today. But what a contrast to the 1970s, Demetri, when Gen Xers were being raised as kids and Boomers are coming of age. In the 1970s, no-one wanted to live with each other. In fact, the 1970s, I say this as a demographer, was the one decade in American history when the average number of people living in a household fell faster than any other decade in American history. Seniors wanted to move out to senior communities, couples were divorcing, that was mainly the silent generation, and Boomers were moving out and hitchhiking, and going to Wheeler Ranch or some commune somewhere. No-one wanted to live together. But again, what will you expect? Decades of budding community, or developing, or nascent community versus decades of nascent individualism. There's so much here to discuss, Neil, and I think the most unique contribution that you make as a demographer is this overall framework that you put forward. And I don't want to lose the opportunity because we have a limited amount of time to discuss the fourth turning that we're living through today. Because again, the title of this latest book is The Fourth Turning is Here. For anyone who's interested in learning more about the actual demographics in the generations, besides reading your book, which I highly recommend, we also did recently an episode with Jean Twenge who also cites your work, yours and William Strauss's work. We get much more into the generations there so for anyone who's interested in that, that'll be in the related tab to this episode. I want to ask you now about the fourth turning, Neil. The way that I'm going to come at this question actually has to do with what you call precursor events. These sit somewhere, I guess they're technically in the third turning, correct? Yes. They're at the end of the third turning and they foreshadow the larger crisis that is to come. And in the previous saeculum, it was presumably World War I that not only preshadowed but historians would argue actually created the conditions that led to the Great Depression and eventually World War II. I've heard you say that 9/11 was that precursor event for our saeculum. For someone who lived through 9/11, I mean I was 18 years old when it happened, I was a freshman in college. Actually, I was a sophomore in college. Pardon me, I was 19. What was it about 9/11? Because it was such a definitive moment in my personal coming of age, what was it about that event that we can point to today and say that it foreshadowed what I think you have determined as the crisis of this fourth turning, which is the great financial crisis, and the subsequent societal crises and challenges that we have faced, and that we have yet to confront before this cycle is over? What was it and could we have even known it at the time? Well, what it was was in the third turning, in a period of growing individualism and declining trust in big institutions or even the sense of any need for big institutions, suddenly we had this disaster. We felt like we were under attack, and every indicator of patriotism and sudden trust in big institutions soared. I don't know if you recall, but for a year and a half after 9/11, there was an enormous rally around the flag effect. And I think that we haven't seen this yet, except within partisan camps today in America, but eventually by the climax of the fourth turning, which is yet to come, we will see this return. And let me lay this out a little bit more in a broader context, Demetri, because I think what you're really looking into now is what we call the morphology of a fourth turning. In other words, how does a fourth turning progress and what stages does it go through? And this is something we discuss, this is something certainly I narrate all of the great fourth turnings in American history, and going back in British and English history as well. And I look at them and I describe them as unfolding in these stages. Now, the first attribute is this thing I call a precursor, and the precursor to our current fourth turning was 9/11 that occurred well before the global financial crisis of 2008, which I think was the real entry into today's fourth turning. I mean that's when the fourth turning actually began. World War II was that same event for Black Thursday, October 24th, 1929, and America's entry into the last fourth turning. The Mexican American war was the precursor for the Civil War, and the Seven Years War, or what we call the French and Indian War in America, was the precursor for the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution. Now, one thing that's very interesting in all those events, the nomad archetype is young adults. They're getting their first taste of combat, or adventure, or whatever it is. And certainly, it was the Lost Generation that came before the GIs that were the foot soldiers of World War I, it was Gen X and not Millennials who were the major participants as enlisted people in 9/11 and the Iraq, Afghan wars that followed. And certainly they were the field grade officers, they were the captains and majors, and a few of them may be beginning to be colonels. But you go back and obviously it was in the Mexican American war that you have Grant, and Stonewall Jackson, and so on. And all those people that later became the generals of the Civil War were the young officers of the Mexican American war. And it was the liberty generation of George Washington that were later the midlife leaders of the American Revolution that were the young officers of the French and Indian War. It's a very interesting event to examine in the early revealing of what was happening with the nomad and profit archetype in an earlier phase of life, but it comes and it goes, and when it's over, it's over, and we go back into the third turning because the generations have not yet aged enough to bring us to the point of the eventual entry into the fourth turning. Now, the entry into the fourth turning is what we call a catalyst and the last two catalysts have been economic downturns. In fact, they've been global balance sheet depressions or recessions, financial panics. We all know about the GFC and I think we all know about the stock market crash which rapidly became global in the fall of 1929. I think earlier catalysts, such as the election of Abraham Lincoln and the immediate secession of the Southern states, which I think really was a catalyst, in the fall of 1860, and we know about the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, and so on. And all of these catalysts are a mood which doesn't end. That is to say once we've entered that turning, it never turns back to the unraveling. I mean we're in it, trust levels fall, despondency rises. America feels terrible about itself, it feels like it's no longer in control of events. History has changed in a way that it shouldn't have. An interesting aspect too of the precursor, Demetri, that you mentioned is precursors coming after a long period of individualism is usually a period when absolutely no-one expects anything bad could ever happen again. One of the things you remember about 9/11 was this was after everyone believed that it was the end of history. We believe that a Pacific world was the inevitable way of the future, so that was also a sense of shock where the World Trade Centers went down. And I think the absolutely same sense of shock was with World War I, which similarly came after the very long period of European peace. Everyone believed that another big war that was impossible and if it ever happened, the socialist workers would never fight for their own countries, and we were all too invested in each other. We had all various reasons why there could never be a war like that again and so it shocked people. I think that's what the precursor has in common, that sense of shock. And also these third turning wars tend to be fought with great enthusiasm, but very little patience. And very often we turn on them afterwards and we regard them very negatively in retrospect. When 9/11 was happening, did you recognize it as a precursor or did you look at it and say, "This is the fourth turning, it's here. This is the catalyst."? We knew it wasn't the fourth turning, and I remember Bill and I both being asked that question and we said, "I know it looks terrible, but the generations aren't old enough." I mean Boomers weren't yet retiring, Millennials weren't yet really coming of age. You know what I mean? And indeed the message really was, I mean if you think about it, the message from the Bush administration was, "Don't worry, we got this. We're the older generation, we got this. Just go and shop." And that's the other aspect I said that we have great enthusiasm, a little patience, and we remember them very badly afterwards. World War I was terribly remembered, particularly in America, and we never agreed to the Versailles Treaty, we never agreed to go into the League of Nations, we just completely repudiated Europe. We were going to go isolationist and we remained isolationist for a long time. I think Robert Kagan has a very good expression for World War I, he says basically the mood around the time when Gamaliel Harding was elected in 1920 was basically Wilson lied and people died. Wilson lied and people died. Well, that's exactly how we looked at 9/11, and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean that was that sense of disgust. We never should have been nation building in the first place. What a stupid thing we did. And we again went into this long period of isolationism. And so again, but this is typical. Then comes, however, the catalyst, we enter the fourth turning, and we go through these events that we've just described where we enter it, and then the mood changes longterm. You have this despondency, this public depression, this lack of trust, this sense of disorder that can never be redeemed. And then what happens further in the fourth turning, to think about how the fourth turning proceeds, and I think this may be interesting to listeners because it's a little bit how we know where we're going, where are we in the fourth turning? Is that we enter an event which we sometimes call a regeneracy. And a regeneracy is when suddenly people find reasons to become excited and interested again in some sort of community activity. We begin to band together in some new often partisan definition of who we are. In the Great Depression, World War II, it was, I think unquestionably, the election of FDR over Hoover. No-one knew who FDR was except they all knew he wasn't Hoover. And remember, the Democrats had always been the party no-one ever voted for after the Civil War. We had Wilson, we had Grover Cleveland, but basically they were in semi elected by accidents, but we always expected Republicans to be the dominant party, but suddenly we wanted someone new. And FDR came in and he had this stirring inaugural address, he said he was going to treat this crisis like a war, he was going to take every measure possible. He was going to experiment with all kinds of new policies and programs. And after the speech was over, people thought he was taking over like a dictator and, by the way, they didn't always mean that disapprovingly. I mean they said that sometimes approvingly and many of his new deal programs were discussed, approved by Congress, and signed all in one day, Demetri. I mean that's how urgent the mood was at the time. In his first 100 days and then about a year and a half later, his second new deal. And it was amazing, that sense of innovation and excitement. And of course, it divided America in two, there were the New Deal Democrats and particularly the younger generation who loved him, and then there were older Republicans, and particularly among the Lost Generation who didn't like what he was doing, and it divided America. Americans who were conservative saw the 1930s as the red decade, Americans who were progressive, who were popular front new dealers in the 1930s saw it as the fascist decade. And you have to remember, it was a decade, Demetri, in which liberal democracy and capitalism seemed no longer an option. I mean you either had to become fascist or communist because there was no moderate option again. That's how divided America had become as the 1930s went forward. And I think the obvious parallel is the 2016 election contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump because suddenly, just like then, America was divided into two camps. In 2016, and then later 2018, 2020, and 2022, we saw voter participation rates that we hadn't seen in a century. And suddenly all of America thought it was absolute vital importance that their party win. If the other party won, the nation would be irredeemably lost. I mean that's the sense of panic, and partisanship, and sorting now that Americans have when they approach politics. But we saw the same thing before, and I think, by the way, we see the same trends around the world. The trends we've seen over the past 10, 15 years are exactly like we saw in the 1930s, populist authoritarians taking over increasingly governments of the world. According to V-Dem and according to Freedom House, the sheer of the world's population governed by free or democratic leaders and governments peaked in 2007, right before the GFC, has been declining ever since. Just like the 1930s when increasingly countries all started falling. Well, a couple to communism, but most over popular front governments, but mostly to fascism. And another thing we see is in terms of the retreat from globalism. Global trade as a share of global product peaked in 2007, right before the GFC. It has still not regained its former level and recently it's been declining again because of the sanctions over the Ukraine invasion. We saw the same thing after 1929, especially after this Smoot-Hawley tariff and obviously global recession, and the dividing of the world into different zones of economic autarchy, exactly what we saw in the 1930s with a co-prosperity sphere in Japan and various fascist efforts to divide up the world, the new emphasis on commodities, access to commodities. We're seeing so many of the same trends, Demetri, but there you have it. You have the first regeneracy. Now, many fourth turnings have more than one regeneracy, and I talk about that in the book. Ultimately, the first regeneracy peters out. Now, the Great Depression, World War II, FDR's New Deal Energy petered out. After his second landslide election, unbelievable landslide election, of 1936 when I don't know how many Republican senators were left in 1936, I think it was less than 20, I don't know. 14, 15, 16, something like that. But it was an amazing victory, but immediately after that, the power of his coalition began to just started stumbling and losing energy. He had the court packing scheme, which the public didn't like, packed the Supreme Court. Thinking about issues becoming again in the news today. And suddenly the public, because of the new violent sit down strikes, which often involve violence between police and trade unions, some of them influenced, and newly activist communists who were out on the streets as well, the public began to turn against the unions, which was new and alarming for FDR but, most of all, the entire country went back into a very severe recession 1937, '38. In fact, by 1940, deflation was still a problem. Bond yields reached their record lows in the summer of 1940, and most Americans believe we still had not yet gotten out of the Great Recession despite all of the New deal activism. And it was at that point that FDR, who was increasingly focused on international issues, began to change his constituency. He began to give up some of his isolationist Northern supporters among the Democrats to pick up Southern supporters and pull back on some of the New Deal programs that would've influenced the South. And this is an interesting turn, as been much discussed. I mean FDR was hugely dependent upon the Southern Democrats, and not only were they a very large share of his coalition in the House and the Senate, but they dominated the committee leaderships. You remember committees of seniority, and of course these Southern Democrats had all the seniority. So he absolutely needed the support of the Southern Democrats. He tried to get more progressive Southerners elected in 1938, he failed, and so he had to get their support, and it was in foreign policy they got their support. So increasingly, he became a foreign policy president and he reoriented the energy of the New Deal toward re-armament. And providentially, I mean it was a horrifying prospect for Americans, but it was providential for FDRs leadership, right around the time of the fall of France and the beginning of the Battle of Britain, in the spring and summer of 1940, suddenly American opinion began to change away from isolationism and toward the need to re-arm. We enacted the first peacetime conscription in American history and we started hugely re-arming. And it was that re-arming which enormous armament bills passed Congress with practically not a single descending vote. By the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941, the whole economy began to lift out of the recession and America began to be convinced that we needed to prepare for a struggle in which we might be the only democracy left on the earth. This was nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, and I think people don't realize that the second regeneracy, so to speak, the second consolidation of community energy occurred before Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was a time we call simply the consolidation. The consolidation of a fourth turning is when the nation realizes its very survival is at stake. We need to win this or it will permanently alter our future in a very negative way and that was Pearl Harbor. The last two hallmarks of a fourth turning are the climax, which came in June, July of 1944 when we mounted simultaneous invasions in two separate parts of the world. We had obviously the D-Day invasion in Normandy, and simultaneously we had the invasion of the Mariana Islands and the Battle of the Philippines Sea in the Pacific and extraordinary. Man, what an incredible thing to do. Unbelievable. The two largest maritime invasions, either one of them would've been historically unprecedented, but the fact that America was able to do two of them at the same time, and produce all the landing craft, and all the naval support and the logistics to make it happen is stunning to think about in retrospect. And so far from where we are today. I mean listeners know this, Elbridge Colby was on the show about a year ago, and he's been pounding the table for us to focus on the pivot to China and making the case that we can't focus on two wars simultaneously. Obviously, one of the reasons that Joe Biden pulled out of Afghanistan was, again, to try to focus on this pivot to Asia and on countering the rise of China. Clearly, the public was fully behind the war in the Pacific and in Europe at the time in a way that they aren't in this conceptual threat environment, but it's just fascinating to juxtapose the two paradigms, today versus then, and what we were able to accomplish when everyone was focused on the war and that existential threat. But one thing to keep in mind with fourth turnings is how what we are early in a fourth turning bears no relationship than what we are when we emerge. And this is one of the big points of the book I try to emphasize a lot, Demetri, and that is we become truly transformed as a people in ways that we can't even imagine by the time we're at the end of it, and it's not that long a period. I mean when we went into the Civil War, even after Lincoln was elected and was sworn in in March of 1861, the end of slavery was not even on the table. No-one imagined that. In fact, FDR actually agreed that if the South wanted, he would support a constitutional amendment to make slavery permanent in the Southern states. And it's a great irony, of course, as the 13th Amendment might have been the slavery amendment, not the freedom from slavery amendment. But of course, the Southerners, by seceding, basically nixed that option. I mean by leaving, they put the radical Republicans in charge. The emancipation still wasn't on the option when the war started, but once it got toward total war, once the death toll started mounting, once people realized the magnitude of the struggle, well then slavery was contraband. And then came the Emancipation Proclamation that was announced. Well, Lincoln needed a victory first, and they weren't getting many victories late in 1860 going into '61, but when the Battle of Antietam was over, he announced it and it just completely changed the nature of the war because suddenly now, particularly triumphantly in the eyes of the radical Republicans, this was going to be a war about the end of slavery and great victory for Lincoln. It completely put an end to the efforts by Jefferson Davis to get support from England and France. Really, when the Emancipation Proclamation came out, that was the end of Southern hopes for European aid, and the story went on from there. And I realize we have limited time here, but I would just say that one thing we talk about, and I talk about with all these fourth turnings, is how they are uniquely moments of civic recreation in America, and how we become a transformed people, and how so many of the longterm policy decisions which shape the very identity of our country are made near the crisis of fourth turnings. And the reason I say that, Demetri, is it seems completely paradoxical to most people. If you were to ask most people when should we make big, new, bold policy decisions? How to transform our constitution, be different as a country, everyone would say, well, let's do it on a sunny day when we're all prosperous, there's no recessions on the horizon, we have a big surplus, and we'll all plan to do it in just the right way. Well, that might be how we would like it to happen, but history says that's never how it happens. It's the opposite. We make these huge changes in who we are as a country when our backs are against the wall, and it's a cold and stormy night. Think about one of the most catastrophic decades of American history, it was the 1780s, which probably was a miseration and poverty greater than the Great Depression, enormous loss of income from before the war. And a lot of the Tories who actually ran plantations, and commerce, and so on had left America. I sometimes tell people the number of Tories that left would be the equivalent of 7 million Americans leaving today. And we actually de-urbanized during that period. I mean people couldn't even eat in the American towns, they went back into the country to raise food. Anyway, it was a catastrophic decade, and many people thought that the American Republic was going to be stillborn. And at that period of tremendous crisis, we designed this unbelievably ambitious constitution with these Roman sounding institutions like a Congress and a president, and just all of this stuff where we're going to tax people far more harshly than Britain ever taxed the colonies. And suddenly we all agreed to it. Or during the Civil War, when we suddenly had a national currency system, we regulated the banks, we had an income tax system all of a sudden. We were requisitioning industries and the railways, we were planning the Transcontinental Railroad, we were designing state college systems. We even planned the first Yosemite grant and actually started the National Park system. This was all during a year when Congress felt that Washington D.C. itself might be under attack at any moment from Jubal Early, and his troopers coming up the Shenandoah Valley. Or think about the Great Depression. When did we legislate social security and plan social security? The cornerstone of the modern welfare state. It wasn't just social security, by the way, it's what today call AFDC, or I guess we call it TANF today, and SSI, and all of the panoply of state federal programs, the contours of our welfare state, we put it into place, we designed it in 1934, we legislated 1935. This is a period when GDP was down by double-digits, Americans, we'd completely lost hope. Fascists were taking over increasing number of countries in Eastern and Central Europe. What a- ... number of countries in Eastern and Central Europe, what in the world, Demetri? And yet here was this new program which had budget projections going all the way out into the 1970s. So here's my point is that it's in these periods when we shift from deferring problems to suddenly solving them. And it's amazing, it is counterintuitive. There are a number of other social transformations we see other than just the general move from individualism to community by the time we get to the end of the crisis. Well, that's what I really want to get into in the second hour with you, Neil. And I want to start that part of the conversation with one more question that I have for you about both the initial catalyst of this recent fourth turning, which you've identified as the great financial crisis in '08, as well as the regeneracy, which you've said we can see evidence for beginning with the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. And then I think that will give us a chance to really get into a discussion about where we are today, which I think is what is on most people's minds. What would it take, for example, to consolidate our societies? Would it need to be an existential threat to our survival, or can we begin to see the early evidence of that consolidation in the preparation for a possible war with China, or in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine? And then what does a resolution to this crisis look like? And are we able to imagine what the eventual first turning of the new seculum will look and feel like? Or is that something that only the climax and resolution of a crisis can make clear? That's what we're going to talk about in the second hour. For anyone who is new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Neil Howe, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app just like you're listening to this episode right now. Neil, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed. Neil, welcome back. Well, great to still be with you here. So I want to just make an observation before we continue this conversation, Neil, that I'm sure you're as aware of as anybody, which is that so many people, especially young people, hunger for stories about the past. They love to hear about the way things were because the way things were, I think is really a story about not only who they are or who we are, but also it's about who we're becoming, where we're going and why we're not alone in that journey, which is so important, especially today, I think because people really long for community. And I feel like what your work is really about is that, it's a hero's journey where the archetypal hero is each successive generation that goes through its own trials and tribulations that might be new in their particulars, but which are really part of a cyclical, almost cosmogenic cycle of death and resurrection. And we're now in the winter phase of that cosmogenic cycle, which is why I think everything feels so much more consequential than it has, certainly in my lifetime. And I just wanted to have a chance to say that to you and for the audience to hear it before we get into the rest of our conversation today because I think it conveys why I think at least this conversation is so important. Well, let me- No, yeah, go ahead. ... let me respond to that. And that is that particularly among younger people, there's this feeling of isolation, loneliness, a sense of feeling detached. But I think not just detached from society, other people, but detached from their future and their past. This is something I talk about in the book. I talk about cyclical versus linear time. And in the modern world, we're very attached to the idea of progress. Time is linear. It started somewhere, it's going to end somewhere, and we're always progressing toward something. What that means, however, is that you have nothing in common with your parents, you have nothing in common with your kids because you're at a higher level and your kids will be at a higher level than you. And traditional societies that embraced cyclical time did not have that feeling of isolation. You were always reenacting something that an ancestor did. And to the extent that in the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey, a man could do nothing better than to just emulate Hector or Achilles, that was it. You had roles that were enacted at the beginning of time by the aboriginal gods. And all men could do, or anyone could do was to reenact those roles. And reenactment is such an important part of how we find ourselves. After all, if you're founding a company or founding a city or starting a family and no one ever did it before, how would you have any guideposts? How would you celebrate it? How would you even think about it? And I do think that in broader history, this is what thinking about generations and thinking about recurrences does, it connects us to our past and our future. In the epilogue to the book, I point out that something called, which I just call our personal history span, and that is the length of time. And think about it this way, think about the oldest person that you knew as a child and think about that person's lifespan. And then think about the youngest person you will know before you pass away and think about their lifespan, extending way into the future. If you add together those periods, which I call our personal lifespan, that is to say the personal lifespan of all the people that you will personally know in your life, it probably will be around 220, 230 years. Think about that span of time. That's longer than the United States has been around. We've been talking about crises and awakenings. How many crises and awakenings have those people been through in the past? How many will they go through in the future? It should inspire us almost with a sense of awe and a sense of, my God, we're part, we're the bigger drama here, we're connected. We have roles to fill, and we can fill them well or we can fill them badly. And as I point out, we can talk about how society moves into crises, how it moves into awakening, but we obviously cannot say whether we will move into them well or whether we will perform well. We don't know the outcome. It could be terrible, it could be catastrophic. That's up to us. So this is not deterministic in that sense, and that's what's empowering. I think we're actually more empowered when we have a role than we just simply have no role at all. History's completely random. We're all dangling out at the end of history somewhere, and absolutely no one knows what's going to happen. It's probably going to be terrible, but no one knows what it is. That's not empowering at all to most people. And so I'm agreeing with you, I guess. Having a sense of where you are actually is creative, it can inspire you to do more. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it was in the beginning of the first hour that I mentioned how you have this sermonizing quality to the way that you write and that your mentioning of the work of Carl Jung and the mythological structure that Joseph Campbell puts forward feels very aligned with actually how I think your framework and the theory that you put forward makes sense, because I think you have to really take it in as a story that through the mythological archetypes and structures within it, it shows you the way, and it's a way that others have walked before you. And knowing that others have walked the path gives you the courage to walk it yourself. Exactly. Yeah. Which is what I think those stories are so powerful. So I was saying that there are two questions that I had. Let me just ask them separately. I said to you that I was going to ask them together, but I think they're probably easier if I just do them separately. And they're basically points of clarification. And my first question had to do with the catalyst event. And that question is what was it about the great financial crisis in 2008 and its effect on social mood that qualified it as a starting point of the fourth turning? And has there been any other catalyst in this fourth turning that could similarly qualify? I don't think anything else comes close. It was a massive balance sheet, recession/ depression that started in America spread out. It was really on par with what happened in Black Thursday, October 24th, 1929, and spread out from there. In fact, there were very parallel events, and as we've discussed, economic crises become more and more likely as catalysts of the fourth turning as society becomes more market oriented and economically interdependent. I think that large market downturns have always been contributory elements to the beginning of a fourth turning, even going all the way back to the mid 1670s with the shutting down of the Exchequer, which was something that Charles II did, and actually bringing about the period we call the glorious revolution. It's always been there. We had the crisis of 1857. We had the massive shutting down of the London banks and the calling of all their debt, which happened in 1772, which was a huge impact on the Patriots and the colonies. It's a fascinating story actually. It was caused in India, there was a great famine in India and it was a massive problem for the East India Company and the problem reverberated out to London. London then had a lot of trouble covering their loans. They had to call in loans. And so all these planters in Virginia and the Carolinas who were perennially in debt, they were always borrowing to buy London and fashions and so on. And so the debt were called in. They had to pay in specie, they had to pay in hard coin just as the revolution was hitting just as they heard the news about the Boston Tea Party. And there's no doubt that it probably encouraged many of them to take the revolutionary side after all. I think right now I'd rather be on the side of the political side that's in favor of repudiating our debt to Britain, because suddenly I can't pay my debts. But that was a contributory cause, and I should just say as an aside, by the way, is one way to get the East India Company back on its feet, they allowed it to import directly to the colonies without the usual cut and the revenue going to the London traders, which actually allowed the tea to be imported into Boston and other ports at a lower price than before. But of course, the Parliament insisted on putting a little bit of tax on it just to preserve the principle that a tax would be on the tea. And as it turned out, Sam Adams and the other Sons of Liberty and all the Patriots said we're totally opposed to the principle of the tax. We don't care that the tea actually costs less than it did before. And it just shows you the ways in which when we want to get into a fourth turning, we are going to get into a fourth turning. The tea is less expensive, but we're going to throw it into the- And what a radical Sam Adams was. Oh, he was a total radical. And he's a great example of the prophet archetype. He's of that ilk. And he had a lifecycle that was, he was not quite as old, but he was more or less a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin. And this is a generation that came of age roughly at the time of the Great Awakening with Jonathan Edwards. So again, you have that characteristic lifecycle, and you have those elder leaders who were often called during the American Revolution, the Black regiment. They were the clergy, they were the Presbyterians, they were the not, in England, they would've been considered non-conforming clergy. They were the Puritans, and they absolutely favored the revolution. Down with Babylon. Let's separate ourselves from that horrible monster across the Atlantic, and they stiffened the spine of younger generations into carrying out this remarkable birth of the American Republic. But that question about 2008 has two parts. So it was a huge event and decade over decade decline in real GDP per capita was about on par with what happened before and after decade over decade, before and after 1929. Obviously 1929 was followed by a much sharper decline in GDP, but then it had a very sharp rise again by 33, 34. But the overall decline in decade over decade growth was about the same. And it completely changed the outlook of younger generations, both Gen X and millennials toward their economic future. There's no question about it. And it's meant that the new generation growing up has never known a time, weren't either going into a recession, struggling to get out of a recession or worried about or entering the next recession. And so it was definitely an event of that magnitude. And the other thing, of course, is it happened right about the right time. As you pointed out before 9/11 came too early. This was perfect timing because each generation was beginning to enter its next phase of life. So for us, the timing was dead on. So I have a question, you brought up the Great Depression. There's interesting comparisons here between the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crisis and the lead up to the Civil War because so much of the Civil War was really about economic questions and distributional questions. And it feels like of all the economic catalysts that led to any of the previous fourth turnings, the Great Depression created the least amount of inequities in society because there was a broad based deflation, whereas let's say 2008, the resolution embedded a lot of the inequities, the cheap money created by the Federal Reserve and the bailouts allowed for asset prices to remain high, and it allowed for previous generations who had accumulated wealth to benefit at the expense of labor. I'm curious how you think about that. Is that an accurate representation in your view? And what role has that played? How has that changed the flavor of this particular fourth turning relative to previous ones like the Great Depression, which eventually led to World War II? Well, it is true that obviously asset prices crashed and didn't really... Now they were, I should say, there's extreme volatility of asset prices in fourth turnings. That's always the case about political events and economic events. I often ask people, what's the second greatest recession of the 20th century? And people won't know, and then I'll tell them the answer is the recession of 1937, no one's heard of it. But the point is that we recovered from the initial downturn and then we went right back down again, an incredible pace of the stock market declined over the course of that downturn by about 50%. So enormous volatility. It is true that asset prices remain depressed through much in the 1930s, and that was not the case clearly in our own fourth turning, which is why I think the markets are more downside vulnerable today than they were in 1940. Just to draw a parallel there. I also just want to clarify this. The reason that I also brought it up specifically was because it's a way of asking a question, which is, are we more disunified today than we were in the thirties leading up to the attacks on Pearl Harbor? Number one, are we? And number two, could that be because of the way in which this financial crisis was handled relative to the last one? I'm not sure we're more disunified. People, again, we see history backwards, and this is the biggest problem with being an historian. You have to put yourself back into the mindset of people at the time. Today, long after World War II, we think it's the greatest generation. They must have been these all American kids brought up. They always believed in America. The whole story was just these great kids and suddenly Pearl Harbor, and they all volunteered. One thing we forget, Demetri is that in the late 1930s, as I think we've discussed, and many of them were still very isolationist. None of them wanted to go to war signing the Oxford Pledge, not to go to war, and more importantly, a significant share of their best and brightest joined the popular front, indeed joined the Communist Party, dedicated to the commentary, the overthrow of capitalism in the political system that supported it. And say, as you say anything you will about a millennials living in Brooklyn, at least they're not sworn card carrying members of a party that's dedicated to an international organization dedicated to the overthrow of the American economic system. Do you see what I mean? You think we're divided now, what do you call that? We had running street battles back then between the Pinkertons, and- That's a great point. There was even a conspiracy to overthrow the Roosevelt administration. Well, that gets back to the Sinclair Lewis book. It can't happen here and Huey Long and all the colorful Father Coughlin and all the colorful quasi fascists. It's interesting. Wasn't it Biden, who recently talked about Trump as being a semi, I think he called him a semi fascist? Well, back in the mid-thirties you had real fascists anyway. Totally. No, it's a really great point, and maybe that's something that lies in our future. And do have the point that if you would ask someone in 1930s, probably 1937 or 1938 when we were down again economically, and if you said we're going to have a crisis in America in the not too distant future, is it going to be a internal crisis or external? That is to say, will it be a civil war more or less, or is it going to be a war against foes abroad? I think most Americans would've said a civil war. See what I mean? It's so interesting because you're right that there was this really strong divide, and now we're going off on a tangent, which I'm actually facilitating, which is the opposite of my role is supposed to be, but we'll go with it. There was this divide between people that were fascist sympathizers, eugenicists, people like this, and people that were in favor of communism and other forms of redistributionist and socialism. Today, we don't have that divide, but there is a cultural divide in the society, but it's hard to really know how consequential that is. You've got the woke and anti woke factions, and then you also have this strain of tech, bro, big tech people that- Well, they're the eugenics crowd. Exactly. A hundred percent. Think about lining them up. And by the way, the eugenics, there's a lot of mistake about that. The eugenics crowd back in the twenties and thirties were mainly progressives, many of them were, politically they could have been either Republican or Democrat, and many of them were quite radical in their political beliefs. These were not conservatives by any imagination. The greatest enemy of eugenics types, frankly, were Christian evangelicals. This is often forgotten today. The people who are most dead set against eugenics practices tended to be the people who no one thought of much as being participating in intellectual life. The eugenics people were the best and the brightest, they were the smartest. They believed in Darwin, they were farsighted, they were technocrats. And back then we think, well, it's incredible that we could have had people like that. But no, those were the farsighted people. They could transcend our mockish sentimentality and really think about the good of society. They were the ultimate cost benefit types. What do we call about it? What do we say? Effective altruism today, we talk about really thinking about the future and really actually imposing all of our intellectual power and really thinking about how the future is going to work out. Well, that was that crowd. But you can form parallels. I often, I'm very drawn recently to the history of the Spanish Civil War, which played out in the middle of this. It started in the spring and summer of 1936, it went to 1939, and it drew people from America all over Europe to serve on one side or the other, most of them served on the Republican side with the Lincoln Brigade and all of these different ideological schools were there. And I will say that the big problem for the Republicans is that they were just, they had so much ideology that they were splintered in all these different groups, Trotskyists and anarchists and syndicalist. And then finally the Stalinists took over and it was just a complete mess. And each side has its own strengths and weaknesses. And I think if you look around today in America, you'd say, well, blue zone and red zone, they both have their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of their future prospects. But to me, what's interesting is examining these parallels and looking at where this means we're likely to go, and to know what things are predictable and what things are not, when something is not predictable, like this whole question you're raising, where do we go from here? What kind of climax do we have? I admit to a lot of just ignorance because I see historically it's often so hard to tell. Yeah. So in the course of this conversation, I've also thought of a number of books to recommend to people, and I'll just throw those out real quick so we'll continue. One is Kevin Phillips' book, 1975, sorry, 1775: A Great Year for Revolution And I had the opportunity to get to know Kevin and interview him years ago when he had published that book. It's a great story. It's a great book about the period right before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, and also of course, Homage to Catalonia, which George Orwell wrote that came out of his experience of the Spanish Civil War before he even published Animal Farm in 1984. Let's go back to eugenics in a second here. So this is not going to be perfectly articulated, but it's an idea that I've had in my head because I agree with you, I see a lot of those common strains today. But it's different today because eugenicism really came out of the discoveries of Darwinian evolution, natural selection, the concept of natural selection, this idea that there's something inside of each of us, and some of us are more special than others. And if we can identify the people who are more special and breed them and select them, we're going to create a Übermensch species. Whereas the modern version of that is something like transhumanism, but that's much more plutocratic. At the very least there, you could argue that there's a meritocratic substrate within eugenicism. You didn't do anything to acquire the genes that you have. But the idea is still that there are some people, it doesn't matter if they're born in poverty, they've got that special thing. But with transhumanism- Yes. ... there is none of that. It's a plutocratic vision, which is we're Gods, we're going to remake everything, including consciousness. We're going to transport that into the cloud. The difference is, is that, and I think this is what you're pointing to, is that the Eugenesis at least wanted to improve all of society. That's your point. They wanted, by designing it better and to saying, well, we're going to encourage these births. We're going to make sure that these other people don't procreate. We're going to design a better society. And whereas a transhumanist don't give a damn about society, it's like, I'm going to depart from... I really don't care about the rest of society. I'm going to take my wet wear and put it onto hardware, and I'm just going to leave all of you people. I'm going to be in a different realm. And frankly, at that point, you'll all just be like bugs to me. You know what I mean? What difference does it make? Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. And actually, I'm going to add to that a guest who I had on the podcast, and he and I have talked about this, we disagree, and I've been public about that disagreement. So it's not the first time I'm mentioning it here, but Balaji Srinivasan, who published a book called The Network State, puts forward an argument like this. And the argument is effectively that everyone should and can have the right to exit. And the kind of world that people like this are describing as a world where really there is no obligation to community. Everyone can just exist in this, I think, false notion of a cloud. And really, it's all about the wealth that each person has, and it's all about me and mine. It's funny, Demetri, this conversation is taking an interesting turn, but I've- It's the fifth turning. Yeah, an interesting turn. Yeah. Fifth turning. But one thing I've wanted to write about, actually, something I've been fascinated by is the history of a Christian heresy, which I do think comes back from time to time and is actually, I think is very strong today by the name of Gnosticism. The gnostics believed that, and this did become a heresy, although it was very common in the first century AD when different forms of Christianity were out there. But the gnostics believed that essentially God, Yahweh and the created universe were all evil. Everything about nature was essentially bad, malformed, designed to taunt us and enrage us. Look around at the world. It's like today, there's slavery everywhere, there's inequality everywhere. Nothing's fair. And that the only object for us as individuals was to reach our own salvation to a God which is utterly beyond this world, which is completely outside the universe. And that at the beginning of time, there's a little shard of light put into some of us and some of us through special procedures, because we knew this all had to do with knowing, like the transhumanist. There was special knowledge would allow me to migrate away from this horrible world and rejoin the infinite, which had nothing to do with this world. And you see what that does? It means that the gnostics had no real tie to their society. It was each individual had to find their own way, presuming you were one of the elect to the infinite deity, which was utterly unknowable to us in this completely fallen world. Orthodox Christianity used to say, well, the universe is actually good. You know what I mean? As Augustine used to say, evil is just the absence of good. If we could really look at nature correctly, we would see that it's all for the best purpose. The gnostics denied that. And I think today in this postmodern world, and after movies like The Matrix and so on, I do think there's a lot of gnosticism today. There are people who think, I just simply wasn't created for this world. Everything about this world I find hateful and alien, and I want to escape. So speaking of alien, this is now we're really, we're turning again, but this has also been on my mind. Now, I'm a very open-minded person when it comes to everything, and I have no reason, I'm not opposed to the idea that there are aliens, whether these are material beings, whether they are operating in some dimension that we can't necessarily perceive with our eyes and ears, or at least on a regular basis. I'm open to anything here, but I also try to think about things a little differently or try to turn the object and look at it from a different angle. And one of the things I always ask myself, irrespective of what the real phenomenon is that people are grappling with, I also always want to understand, and I think you can appreciate this, because so much of your work really reflects it, which is what are the stories that we're telling tell us about ourselves, how do they act as a mirror? And I think it's very interesting today that there is this resurgent interest and fascination with the possibility of alien life. And I think some of that has to do with a sense of wanting to be saved. I think one of the ways in which people explain what's going on with aliens today is that the number of sightings are up today, much more than they have been since, I guess, going all the way back to the 1940s. And that the common point is Oppenheimer and the bomb, the nuclear weapons, the splitting of the atom, and the potential for global destruction that these aliens came back then to save us. And they're doing it now again with AI. And AI is another deep source of existential angst. How are we changing? How is it changing us? How is it changing our perception of the world? How are we also, again, we're living in this time with increasingly disintermediate experiences because so much of people's life happens online. It's not something you write about in the book, but since we just got to it here, I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that, about the conversations that are happening, about aliens now, about how they connect to AI, and the larger existential angst that people have, which you do write about in your book. Wow. Yeah. We really are going out there. I think a lot about AI, actually, part of my team, I have a guy who does machine learning, we actually do a lot of work on neural network models and try to predict various aspects of financial markets. That's what a lot of people in finance do. So I think a lot about the ability of AI to predict things, to fill in sentences and words, and to provide this simulacrum of intelligence, which is all AI is, it just provides this likeness of someone who can think. But to me, it is absolutely, and essentially different from fundamental human creativity. And I actually think that AI does people a favor because I think that if you're in a job, and maybe you're an X-ray technician working in a lab and you're looking at X-rays, looking for disease and an AI algorithm comes along and does it better, or you're writing these horrible sports stories for the news, and an AI can come along and do it better. AI's doing you a favor. If what you're doing can be replaced by AI, you're doing something fundamentally uncreative, and AI is doing you a favor by telling you change your life. Do something that really taps into the full potential of your human creativity, which extends far beyond AI. And I would say, here is one case, and probably the only case in which I agree with Noam Chomsky, who recently came out, you may have seen it, a rather large essay, which I thought was actually pretty good about how AI is not in any way, should not be regarded as competition for anything that humans should care about in terms of genuine creativity. That's my feeling about it. And I think that people who really don't see the difference between what AI can... You don't see the difference between what AI can do and what genuinely creative humans can do in terms of particularly their ability to do something for humans, to be with that empathy and altruism for the rest of society we've been talking about, and to come up with new myths and something genuinely new that we all admire as coming from someplace beyond us. If you don't see the difference between that and what large language algorithm can do, you need some deep, I don't know, you need to go on some retreat or really think about- Need to drop some acid. Yeah, you need to, exactly. To bring us back to the awakening of the boomer. Yeah, exactly. You're in dire need of an awakening. I think maybe we're looking forward to the need for the next late sixties to tune in and drop out and yeah. I don't think it's a coincidence that there's been a resurgent interest in psychedelics. What's sad and pathetic is people talking about these drugs as being productivity enhancers, which sure they can do that, but that you're missing what's so compelling about taking these types of drugs or going on these types of journeys, whether you're dropping acid or eating mushrooms or doing ayahuasca or just meditating. It's really about are you really doing all these because you want to be stuck in the material world and just make more money? Because of really interesting opportunities to explore what's really going on. What is the nature of our reality? Well, Dmitri, that, that's your inner boomer coming out here. I'm sorry. I mean, I think you guys had the best time, man. I think you guys had the coolest generation of all. The best music. I was thinking about this a lot. But it only worked because of the era we were in. Right? Exactly. In other words, we needed these huge institutions that worked well. I mean, the thing that people don't remember about the boomer coming of age era, is you could go hitchhiking for hundreds of miles, perfectly safely. Everyone around was kind of corny and conformist. And so it created this wonderful place for non-conformists to be in. And this is how the irony of generations work. It was only because the GI generation was so robotic and conformist and everything was completely wholesome in all their suburban neighborhoods, they created the ideal climate for hippies and people just to roam around because it was perfectly safe. Because no matter where you ended up after a bad trip, three neighborhoods away, well, there'd be some nice person there who would make sure you got back to your mom and dad. Everyone could be trusted who was older, because they were all trustworthy. That's how they were raised, and all the institutions worked really well. They could take care of you. And during Woodstock, the most amazing scene to me in Woodstock was not so much Janis Joplin and the various people coming on stage, but where the older generation flying in helicopters full of bottled water and food to all the kids. In other words, protest all you want, but we're going to make sure you get your cookies. You know what I mean? We're going to make sure you have plenty of water. You're going to be all hydrated well. We're going to take care of you. And this is what we don't remember: only in the context of a very conformist generation that's been raised to actually be good community members, do you have the perfect soil for non-conformist to have a great time. But once society becomes full of older non-conformists like it is today, it's a terrible time for a young person who's a free spirit. And in fact, what happens is typically is that the younger generation comes of age as much more collectivist community oriented in their orientation. And what they want to do is they want to build a better world and they want metrics according to which they can behave better because their parents aren't giving them those things. All of the new age stuff that boomers discovered to break rules and explore their mind, are being used by younger generations now, as you correctly pointed out, to become more effective. I mean to become, to work out better or to think better. So many of the drugs now are new tropics. I mean, they're designed to make you concentrate better so you can do more spreadsheets late at night for your boss in today's go-getter culture, as all these kids, free agents for these big corporations. So I think that's where we are. And it's inevitable. It's inevitable that all this stuff, all this new age stuff is going to be reinterpreted in terms of these superficial memes and stuff, as mere entertainment or mere means to become more productive. And as boomers grow older, their stomach turns as they watch this stuff being turned into sequels and old movies redone, taking out all the inner meaning of them. And I think that happens to every generation. You get older and older and you see what you've created transform through the eyes of younger generations and you just shake your head. Well, again, we talk and episodes or books come up. I want to point people to an episode that I did with Chuck Klosterman, the cultural historian who wrote a book on the 1990s, and I had Chuck on the show and spoke to him. It was a really awesome conversation. And one of the things we talked about was Mark Fisher's theory of the slow cancellation of the future, which speaks to this thing of what happens in a society where, and his theory, the explanation for this theory according to Mark, comes from the digitization of the world and the infinite hard drive space on which the past can exist. But it suggests that we're living in an infinite present where culture ceases to evolve. And you can see that in these constant re-makings. And there's something also really death defying, non-regenerative about that because basically, the last culture continues to have an imprint on the future in a way that it wouldn't otherwise. Now I want to ask one more question about cultural stuff, Neil, before I get us to a conversation about consolidation, climax, and resolution, because we have a limited amount of time and I want to make sure we'll get to that. So I'm just going to skip my question about the reunification, but my last question about cultural stuff, because it's so important, I actually want to get your take on it, is what's your view of what's going on with all this woke stuff? Because in some sense it feels like it qualifies as a kind of awakening because it's so culturally aberrant to what we have today. But how do you interpret that? What does your theory have to say about that, the presence of this woke ideology in the Fourth Turning? And also what does it say about maybe people's lost sense of identity and their attempt to understand who they are in this new reality? I think wokeness is a kind of distant or distorted way of dealing with some of the problems of today's Forth Turning, some of the big kind of social imbalances we see. We do see a lot of growing and large and growing inequality in America today, which I think a lot of younger people are frustrated by, particularly not so much inequality among their ranks, but also the inability of themselves to actually match or exceed the living standards of their parents. And I think there's a tremendous amount of frustration about that. And I think younger people too are filled with this idea that we could make the world so much better than it is, which I have no problem with that. I believe that is true. I mean, if younger people did, I mean that's the thing really to worry about, if younger people lost that belief that the world could be better. The way- Well, there is a kind of nihilist strain that I've noticed in the world today, and it comes up, especially in online circles and online communities. I don't know how representative it is of society at large, but it's very present in the world that I encounter. Nihilist in what sense? There's a kind of cynicism and a sense of nothing really matters, so let's just yolo. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that's because right now at a time when we don't see a path forward in this Fourth Turning, by the way, the Fourth Turning, I should just emphasize, is a generation long era. So it's filled with these periods, these lulls, even long periods where people feel they can't connect, nothing's leading anywhere. How do we get out of this? How do we get to someplace better? And to me, what it points to is a world in which our entire society could move collectively in another direction very fast because there's so much alienation and fundamental disaffection out there. I mean, there's so many, particularly young people, and by the way, I would say particularly men, young men who are utterly in disengaged in their work today. They're doing crappy stuff for some crappy company that to help enhance their brand in some monopolistic market, which they absolutely don't care about. And it's often some insubstantial media company or something, and they realize this is sort of dead end for what they regard as sort of a dead end society. And there's an aspect of that I don't disagree with at all. I sympathize with them. And as I point out, and this is part of the future scenario of the book, when the urgent crisis hits, it will be fed not just by the urgency of the objective crisis, we talked about internal and external events or tensions, but it's going to be fed by the fact that so many people realize what they're doing now, makes no difference, but in a crisis they can suddenly remake our society. And it doesn't even matter what the crisis is. And I think that's really important to point out about the Fourth Turning. Ultimately when people truly confront the fact that they're not doing anything in their life, which they think matters, that it pulls all those people in to anything. That's what's so scary about these turnings. The longing for purpose and meaning can be channeled in extremely positive and extremely dark directions. But in some sense that's positive, meaning they're using the fact that we have a crisis to try to actually reshape the world in a way that actually finally engages them. It's not just something that could be done by an AI algorithm, but it's actually part of their genuine creativity engaged with their fellow citizens. I think that's positive, right? As long as they don't use it to construct a Nazi war machine, you know what I mean? Or some kind of cultural revolution that kills millions of people. I mean, I hear you, but obviously ... As I said, we cannot guarantee if our turning ends well or poorly, but what I can guarantee is that if we don't have a Fourth Turning and everything continues on its current course, we will end up in a horrible place regardless. So again, let's actually focus here on tying a knot here, because you and I could go on forever and I can't think of another episode where time flies so quickly where I'm speaking to somebody. And it might be because you're a historian and you're so gifted at being able to pull threads from the past and bring them into the present. So let's talk about consolidation, climax, and resolution. Let's just get a sense of where we are moving forward. If a regenerated society is eventually expected to reach some kind of consolidation, when everyone understands more or less that their community's engaged in a true struggle for survival, does this mean that the true consolidation only happens once a society has fully confronted the threat to its survival? Or can that consolidation begin to happen prematurely in a way that acts as a kind of guidepost or a leading indicator? Like, for example, the more aggressive orientation towards the Chinese Communist Party and the increasing defensive stance that the US administration, subsequent US administrations, have now taken. Does that represent a possible early consolidation or does a consolidation happen with some kind of watershed event like a 2008 financial crisis, but more likely- Well, it has to be a watershed event, meaning the consolidation occurs when events are rolling, which are guaranteed to being that one person's going to win big and another person's going to lose big. I think that's what we're talking about. So we talked about, for instance, the second regeneracy the last fourth turning occurred in the summer of 1940 with the fall of France, which was genuinely a shock to the world. I mean, my God, four years of World War I, France remained unconquered, but after less than six weeks, Hitler tore through the Ardennes and finished France off. I think that was a complete shock to the world, and the Battle of Britain began after that. And I think at that point, that was the second regeneracy of the last crisis. And that completely changed as it turned out, not only public opinion, but Congress. We started re-arming, we talked about that earlier, we started re-arming, we pulled America finally, definitively, out of the Great Depression because of these enormous re-armament bills. We pulled the South back into the Democratic coalition that FDR had behind them, and he won his next election. He won against Wendell Wilkie, and we were off. But we were not yet a consolidation because who knows how long that could have lasted? I mean, maybe we could have just let this float for a while. Maybe Hitler wouldn't have done more. Maybe Japan would've decided to attack Russia rather than go after the United States. I mean, that was one of the two camps in Japan. They were deciding which way to go. I mean, they could attack right now. How history would've been different if they had attacked Russia from the East. And then Hitler moved on Stalin from the West. My God, what a different world. But they decided- They decided to attack Pearl Harbor. And so that actually leads to question which is, Pearl Harbor, I mean, at the time, Hawaii was not a state, but it was a territory on which the United States had a naval base. And so my question is an attack against Taiwan commensurate today? Because for example, the US is more of an empire and its relationship to Taiwan and its relationship to some of those Asian economies and countries is so much more involved today than it was in the 1940s. Well, I think that's true. I think we have a much larger, in other words, back in 1940, we were one of the concert of powerful nations organizing the world and keeping kind of the world a peaceful place. Today, we are the dominant power. Without us, without the United States, NATO would be powerless. And all of those nations in the Western Pacific, all of those advanced high income democracies, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and so on, would be defenseless without us. So we do play a much more important part of the world. But I would say one other thing is that Japan, and this is sort of parallel, if people say, well, China today doesn't want to attack the United States, this is ridiculous. Why would the United States get into this huge conflagration? But of course, there are two arguments to make. One is, but they do care about all these powers in the Western Pacific. If they were effectively Finlandized and made part of China, this would be a completely different world. And then in some sense, once again, the United States would stand alone. But there's one other argument, and that is, who says they're just going to go after Taiwan? It's very interesting, when Japan went after Pearl Harbor, that was the suggestion of Admiral Yamamoto. That was not their goal. They had no interest in Pearl Harbor. Their interest was the Philippines, and I think we should remember this. What they wanted to do was they wanted to go down into the East Indies. They wanted to go down in Indonesia and Borneo and so on to get oil. I mean, that was their problem. They were shut off from oil. This sounds like Russia all over again, it sounds like we're talking about today. They wanted to go get oil because their war machine was going to come to a halt because FDR had been gradually stopping the amount of oil and aviation fuel and so on, that was flowing to Japan. And then finally, actually in kind of an accidental decision in late 1941, FDR actually just shut off even the availability of cash to the Japanese to buy oil. And suddenly they were just faced with a real crisis. They had to get oil. Japan produces no oil, and they had a huge war machine. They had invaded China. They had an enormous war going on. They needed petroleum. Their only interest was going down and picking up, the Dutch were already conquered by Hitler, so the Dutch East Indies were for grabs. France was down, so Indochina was basically up for grabs. So they wanted to go down and grab all those places to get raw materials, rubber and so on. But particularly, they wanted to get oil, but they had to go through the Philippines, and the Philippines, they were a separate republic, but they were a very close ally of America. And that's where FDR was based. They realized that the ships would be going through the Philippines to get there, and they'd be vulnerable to an American attack. So the problem was the Philippines. They said, well, if we are going to get in war with America, we want to do it on the best terms possible. We want, gee, well, what if we attack Pearl Harbor way out there, and that would keep them out of the Western Pacific maybe for the next year, a year and a half? Well, that's what we'll do. So think about the Chinese parallel. In other words, well, we want Taiwan, but they have all these other assets. Americans have all these they have Guam, they have the Mariana Islands, they have all these various bases and so on. Gee, if we want Taiwan, we need to go after these other bases first. We need to surprise attack those, take those out, and then we'll have a totally free reign to take Taiwan. I mean, I'm not necessarily arguing that point right here, but I'm just saying the parallel is absolutely there. Japan did not want to attack the United States. No, American thought that. Nonetheless Pearl Harbor was a consolidation. Do you see my point here? Sure, yeah, I do. Again, recommendations for people, Ian Toll's trilogy on the war in the Pacific, actually, not a series of books that I have read, but I've been recommended those books. And man, oh man, there are some books that I really want to read, and they're so long, and I feel like it's hard to run a podcast if you've got to read. Because I got to read everybody's books. I can't imagine reading so many thousands of pages to read a trilogy, but that's something I recommend to people. And also Michael Beckley and Hal Brands who have been on the podcast before, wrote a book called "The Danger Zone," and it captures that game theoretic dynamic of seeing the window close and wanting to strike at a time that's advantageous. So I think those are important elements to consider. Neil, let's talk a little bit here about, let me ask you this again because we got to wrap it up at some point, and in the interest of time, let me just ask this for you: you can never know what it's going to be, no one knows. But I'm sure you think you're a human being and you're someone who has read a lot of history, and you've written about this in your book, when you think about this in private, when you speak with your friends off the record, do you have your biases on how you think this is going to unfold? What some of the more likely possible consolidative events are going to be in this Fourth Turning? The answer is no. Surprisingly, as it may seem, people often ask me that and I say no. When it comes to events, I try to be informed. I try to read all I can about whether it's Ukraine or Taiwan or about what countries are doing geopolitically. And I try to read about so I try to be well-read, I try to be well-informed, but I know nothing really, more about current events or what's likely in the near term than anybody else. I mean, I just want to be honest here. I don't. What I do is spend a lot of time studying these longer term patterns, so I know where we are headed. And I think a lot about how it is likely to settle out in the longer term. That is to say, what sort of destinations. It's a little like a good driver is supposed to keep their eyes way down the road, not on the road right ahead of them. And that's what I think of myself. And I'm looking down the road and I realize there's a lot of near term things that I can't determine. I do think that does even give me some biases when I look at current events. For example, I think the two parties today are basically leaderless. I think that first regeneracy that I talked about in 2016, which has certainly galvanized the nation politically and sorted us into these two partisan tribes, and you're right, that was a little bit unlike 1933 because one tribe was obviously much stronger than the other, but maybe a little bit more like 1860. But in the sense that they were more similar in size and clout at the moment, but of course not with the tremendous speed with which that was resolved. A civil war being, in some sense, sort of an anomalous period. And we didn't have a one term president in either case. Well yeah. And obviously all events are unique, but I would say that it creates a tremendous amount of potential for surprise in politics. I've often said as late as even today, I would not at all be surprised if one or both of the current incumbents, Biden and Trump actually aren't candidates in 2024. I think such would be the desire to have someone else in there. And we know even from both parties, we're locked into this. This is, need that candidate to block that other horrible candidate. And no one likes the current situation. And I think you almost need an excuse to break out of that. So I think events could break in an unexpected direction quite fast. And in any case, this Fourth Turning has many more years to go, and we will see how it turns out. So Neil, I have a last question for you. You're a father, and actually in your book you mention, you thank your children who you name in your book. And one of the thoughts I had was, well, a really good way to ask Neil how we should prepare for this turning and the eventual resolution and the beginning of a new saeculum, is to ask him what you tell your children? How do you advise them? And if you have grandchildren, your grandchildren, to prepare themselves. If we can't predict, as Margaret Heffernan says, who has also been on the podcast, and I strongly recommend that episode, if we can't predict, we certainly can prepare. So how do you think people should prepare themselves to walk through what you have described as this great gate of history? Yeah, actually, it was a great quote from FDR. It was in the late 1930s, he said, and this was actually very interesting given what the country had just been through. He says, we can't always prepare the future for our children. Needless to say, but I think by 1939, everyone would agreed with that. We can't always prepare the future for our children, but we can prepare our children for the future. And I think that that was very true considering what people are thinking about young adults in the 1930s, saying, we want to prepare you. And I think that's the way we should be thinking, particularly older generations, X-ers and particularly boomers, you're not going to solve it. You're not going to rebuild these institutions at this point. You've messed them up, not advertently, but it's happened. But what you can do, is prepare your children to be the agents to rebuild. And that's basically what I tell them. I tell them, yeah, America is a great country. It is right now broken to some extent. It doesn't really work that well. You can see that around you, you read the headlines. But that's happened before and it will be repaired. And that's part of our greatness, to confront that and overcome it and build something better. So I tell them that they will be builder generation, and that this means that things that will be very important to them, will be very different to my generation. My generation is all about subjectivity and the individual, your generation is going to be all about the objective reality and the community. And you stand at two different ends of the generational cycle. And your location in history is at two different ends of the saeculum. And that's okay. That's complimentary. We need generations of all types. They all participate, they're all necessary. They're all different ends of the Carl Jung's quaternity that you pointed out earlier. And we layer each other over time, but we compliment each other in effect. And I think it's important, what I always say to people is not to be cynical. I think cynicism is a disease. It's a malignancy. And if everyone was cynical, society would just die. And somehow we find our way through, which again, it goes back to the importance of mythology and stories, to know that others have faced great challenges before, and that courage matters and that you can walk through the fire, you can make your way through this great gate of history. And I think also talking about it as an epic or in this epic form, makes it feel consequential and gives you a sense of purpose around it, which is important because people need meaning. And even the cynics give me hope because as someone said, I can't remember who said this, but a cynic is a thwarted optimist. And someone who truly has given up won't even be a cynic. They just won't care, right? I mean, they'll- They'll be an nihilist. Yeah, they'd just be an nihilist. They'd just be just dealing with events day-to-day. But a cynic is someone who can be revived in the right situation when given another excuse to hope. And I think a lot of the millennial cynics will rejoin just like Rick in his cafe. Do you remember that? Casablanca? Rejoin the cause Rick. You remember that? Yeah. Well, a cynic is someone who's had his or her heartbroken. So hearts mend and there's always a opportunity to fall in love again. Neil, this was really a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it. I feel like we could have gone on and on and on and on. We do these dinners for our Genius community all over the world, and the last few have been in Europe, but I plan to do one of our next ones in the DC area. So maybe we can have you join us for one of those. It would be really great to have you. Absolutely. Just in my backyard here. Yeah, that's another option as well. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Okay, thank you. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hidden forces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @kofinas, and you can email me at [e-mail]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

Channel: Hidden Forces

Views: 30,853

Keywords: Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas, Neil Howe, the fourth turning, generational theory, boomer generation, millennial generation, hero archetype, demographics, demographics podcast, likelihood of war, likelihood of war with china, likelihood of war over taiwan, today vs. pre world war 2, 1930s vs now, us dictatorship, us authoritarian, world war 3, fourth turning theory, fourth turning millennials, fourth turning predictions, fourth turning is here, fourth turning book

Id: 2Bdn8sSE8Rs

Length: 71min 5sec (4265 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023