The Fourth Turning: What past generations can teach us about our future

you've heard me talk about the fourth turning and um i was lucky enough uh back in 1993 94 i had the privilege of working the president united states bill clinton and you couldn't do this today but simultaneously i was working with the speaker of the house newt gingrich on the other side i literally left the white house went over a pass across the capitol and worked on the other side on the same day and the reason i mentioned to you is bill clinton was the first person who told me about this book called generations by strausen howe and this book was basically 500 years of anglo-american history and it showed that history is shaped by generations and generations are shaped by history it was a fascinating book and it talked about book was written in 1991 then in 2020 there'll be this crisis that we'll be facing and it was predicted because of how generations raise the next generation how we then interpret history you can have events but they're interpreted differently by a different model of the world and i thought it was fascinating and then in 1997 i was going to borders bookstore one of those places and i always go by the bin where the non-popular books are because i'm a contrarian i found some of my favorite books in those places and it was in that thing like marked down seventy percent or fifty percent of ridiculous some ridiculous number and i picked up the book and it's strauss and how again and i picked up this book and it's been one of the guidebooks for me to understand what the hell's happening in our world ever since it really helped me understand the patterns because if you think about it we talk about power of patterns what's the most powerful pattern of all you've heard me talk about it before that changed humanity that took us from starving running around as hunter-gatherers to where we could stay in one place it was one distinction what was it recognizing the seasons understanding see before that it was looked random you planted in the winter you didn't even know it was winter you just knew it was cold and for some reason you worked your ass off and you got nothing for it and what i began to look at here is like humanity once it understood the seasons and knew when to plant and when not to if you do the right thing at the wrong time what kind of reward do you get zilch nothing so all of a sudden humanity understood this so now we could stay in one place we could build a community we could build cities we could build countries that one distinction changed all of humanity but there's also the seasons of your own life that's so valuable to understand think of it as four seasons of your life zero to twenty roughly is your spring time but that initial spring time you're learning you're growing probably protected you're absorbing things that's the stage some people starts at 16 14 some say 19 20 but let's just call it around 21 you enter a different stage of life you become kind of the soldier of life you enter the summer time 21 to 41 that's a different stage isn't it now you go out in the world and say i'm going to test this stuff i was told all this what's true and you think you're going to be a billionaire or 10 times billionaire and you're going to be president united states and you're going to have 100 relationships and it's all going to work out smoothly and then you get your first relationship and discover none of that is true and you start to understand that you have vulnerabilities you find out you're not invincible so this young adulthood is testing and discovering just trying to figure out what's really real that's when we learn a lot and usually some of it is painful because it's not quite like we expected but you're the soldier of society quite literally that's where soldiers are right 21 to 41 usually right you're the person that goes to war you're the person that's out there doing the hard work now if you really grew in spring and you really grew in summer then there's the fall the autumn and that means 42 to 62 is a real reaping time if you've grown if you're not grown like if you don't plant in the spring you're going to weep in the fall you're not going to reap in the fall right but if you push through the hot summer it's difficult time goes 21 to 41. by the way when you ask people when they do all the research on people what's the most unhappy time of their life it's that two decades not for every human but for most because trying to figure out who the hell you are prove to yourself make it through all the trying to figure what's going on in your life but when you get to 42 to 62 again if you've grown if you've not grown you're kind of stunted there's not much crop but now you're really in your mid-life power and you get to start to have a harvest time this is for a lot of people their greatest financial time of their life because they built up understanding and they worked hard and developed skill sets and now they're in a position to lead they might start running an organization they start to really grow to expand and then 63 to 83 you can think of as winter and 83 to 120 is the oldest living humans if you're fortunate enough maybe you'll have an extended winter but in this stage you really end up being a leader who's really there to mentor that's really the position you're in it's like what i love most now it's like the example i give you playing a video game against a child you know the child is always going to win and it's not because they're faster it's smarter it's because they played this game a million times they know the first bad guys here the next bad guys here makes bad guys here so they're able to do something really important is this is what today is all about if you want it simple phrase anticipation is power anticipation is power leaders anticipate losers react if you and i are going to have a great quality of life for our families for our communities for anybody we want to serve our job is to anticipate in order to do that you got to recognize patterns so these seasons of your life are precious every season has different challenges right how many can remember some of the challenges of the springtime of your life i remember some of the challenges of the summer in that stage the things you wrestled with some are still there how many remember the fall experiences right so everything has opportunity every house challenge and if you can anticipate the challenge you can make that season a half a lot more enjoyable so there's the patterns of nature there's the patterns of your life the seasons of your life and what we'll look at this morning is seasons of history because if you understand the seasons of history interact with what stage of life you're in like some of you some people 0 to 20 is when they experience winter historical winter because there's one about every 80 years as you'll see shortly and so some people enter winter in midlife some people do it at their power stage some people towards the end of life if you have a full life you're going to experience all four seasons but all of us in our first two seasons of life meaning your spring zero to 20 or 21 to 42 are going to experience an awakening in internal turmoil within the country around values like you saw in the 60s and 70s or you're going to experience a crisis right because that's the cycle everyone experiences them but depending upon when your generation experiences that that shapes the way you look at life the way you interact and what you do but it might be nice to anticipate where that is so there are these seasons i just want to give you the big picture so we got to think of the seasons of nature the seasons of your life and the seasons of history and if you understand them you start to be able to predict so this book in 1991 says in 2020 we're going to have this giant crisis but in uh the fourth turning it's even more specific here are some of the prophecies that were there was going to introduce it there will be 25 years ago it would be a global terrorist group that blows up an aircraft there'll be an impassive federal budget that reaches a stalemate with a government shutdown they'll be antiquated within the former soviet republic and russia is going to conduct training exercise on its borders and the cdc is going to announce a new communicable virus that could take down the world 25 years ago so i picked up this bug i was so obsessed with it i flew to meet these two authors in their home in virginia and i interviewed them for a program i had called power talk where i used to interview people and so i was 37 years old i'm now 62 and we have the privilege to have here in person one of those two authors has passed away but we're here with mr howe please give a big hand for one of the great authors neil howe thank you brother you have a seat it's great to have you back um a lot of people have read your book some people have not let's start at the top i tried to give the giant pattern to save time so we could get into some of the more deeper pieces but give people an understanding how this all came about i mean you're you you've got expertise as a historian you've got expertise in finance uh give people sense how did you first come across these discoveries together for generations and then how did fort turning come about yeah this was uh this was back in the uh late 80s it's a long time ago and uh bill and i were looking at generational differences i mean we're boomers right obsessed with generational differences right i mean we all knew that there'd been no generation like us since this planet was you know first created so um and we look back we said were there other times that this has ever happened a big promethean war winning generation right that completely reshaped america these very self-centered idealistic kids growing up and then of course at that time we were aware that this generation coming up after us cynical pragmatic right exchange yeah generation x really was uh uh you know they're they're they're in it for the money and uh they just hated yuppies you know they ate at disco and they hated yuppies uh but we went back and found that this had happened again and again and not only it had happened before we went all the way back to the great migration in new england back in the 1630s and looked at this entire panorama of how many centuries and found again and again not only were generations very distinct and people at the time understood that generations were different this is this a myth that you know generational differences are just a product of of our age not true and what we found that each generation has a different location in history that makes all the difference because it's how old you are when a big event hits that shapes how you learn about it right if you're a child during a big traumatic event what's your job what's your social role stay out of the way don't bother adults keep it all to yourself because no one wants to hear your complaints be helpful right generally a lot of repression goes on among kids talk about the silent generation today you ever want to know why joe biden's generation uh you know i whole group is so mannerly so over socialized so considerate so nice this is the nicest generation of 80-somethings we're ever going to see in our lifetime you ain't tell boomers reach their 80s you're not going to want to say hello to them on the street okay but they're nice today why every every phase of life they went through they've been nice yes they were nice 30 somethings they were nice because they were protected because of christmas but they had to keep it to themselves they had to be they were over socialized during the time of war but this has happened since the beginning now if you're just over the age of service this is why even one year of birth can explain that when you wrote your book i remember reading this grab me during the vietnam war if you were born july or excuse me december 31st at 11 59 versus january 1st of 1201. you get sorted in different school classrooms right that determines which class you are that determines whether you go to war or not that determines whether you're laid off at your first job or not and we know economists tell us all the time that makes huge life cycle differences and how you later succeed economically whether you were drafted or not could be determined by one minute of birth exactly so you do have generation now not all generations have this you know knife age division occasionally you have these um you have these uh kind of you know zones of transition um you know you have a lot yeah a lot of early wave uh millennials today people in their you know early early 80s maybe 80 born 83 84 they call themselves xenials yes you know because they're millennials they're sheltered they're always taught everything is nice but they're just old enough to remember when things weren't that sheltered so jenna even within generations generations could be generation of trans but my main point is is that every role of every your role of life in your age determines how you react to that event and then as you move to see older events that actually determines which events you will likely trigger as you get older and reach the age of leadership you become leader of a political institution you become you know parents of your family you're creating decisions in the community so the overall lesson is history shapes generations young but then generations as they get older shape history so it's a complete circle of life you see going on here in fact the big lesson of generations is that that those seasons of life you're talking about who you are and how history works is determined by the overlap between your seasons of your life and the seasons of history so we looked at this we found that for instance uh we had constantly found that when you have this this hero generation go you know that that completely reshapes the society goes through a major war society publicly reshapes who it is that you have this generation born after the word that's that's very rebellious idealistic and so on and and and knows nothing but affluence and then the generation just after them is the cynical you know detached anyway you see this again and again so what we learned from that tony is that this is actually tied to a cycle of history itself it's not just a cycle of generation cycle of history think about it the great civic remakings of american history i mean if you want to go back and i'm talking about colonial history too but one of the first great makeovers of our kind of civic identity uh a lot of it happened in england at the time of course at that time late 17th century you know all of the immigrants from the old war were almost entirely english-speaking in fact a lot of them actually were immigrants about half of them were still immigrants but my point is it was a glorious revolution and there was an enormous rebellion in the colonies too it all happened in the 1670s 1680s that was the first enormous crisis in american history and it was a time of great war too we were with new france the the french had settled all over canada so that was the first great crisis and then about 80 90 years later we had the american revolution 89 years later we had the civil war and i think i need not describe what the civil war was for america right but absolutely even absolute numbers forget share of the population by far the most deadly deadlier than all the other conflicts combined yes and then 80 or 90 years later they get a great depression world war ii 80 are not easily not years later guess what we're right here we're right here and we started with the gfc and you're right recent uh crises have started with economic downturns and then they later proceed to other kind of system breakdowns and finally toward the climax of the crisis you suddenly decide the leadership decides the entire community decides you have to remake everything you can't just solve this problem that problem it all needs to rema be remade and by the end of world war ii fdr was going in his last inaugural address which was early in in 1945 he basically said total war total community total he wasn't hiding it there was there was no wordsmiths back then they were saying go easy the public doesn't want to hear the bad news no he was saying there's going to be more danger there are going to be more deaths get ready for it we're reshaping the world things that would have been unimaginable back even in the late 1930s and by the way in the late 1930s most young people were still signing the oxford pledge on college campuses declaring they'll never go to war everyone thought about world war one and what a horrible experience that was right we'll never go to war well there were all there were now yeah we're going to remake the world congress is going to be refashioned world peace is going to be redone we're going to remake the world rules of the world not just of american society so by the end of that crisis we reshaped humanity's relationship with technology my god we created the a-bomb which is probably what put an end to the war so we had atomic technology we out-produced the rest of the world combined in this country so we became you know as winston churchill said at the end of the war america stands at the summit of the world today right i mean he was amazed we reshaped the relationship between government and the economy obviously um we reshaped uh uh the political role of citizen and nation so the gi generation became a generation of citizen soldiers until the day they died but this huge reshaping which has even extended the world what happened after world war ii well we founded you know the the the world bank i mean the imf the united nations we just you know all of these institutions nato all of these things we have today we have been living for decades on institutions and infrastructure founded then yes and by the way tony this reminds me because you had a question you asked me you know right for the event you said why don't we solve these problems in better times yes right why do we wait till it's a crisis why do we wait till it's a crisis and it's interesting you can look at all of american history as a series of punctuated equilibriums we solve all of our problems when conditions are worst i mean that's isn't that ironic that's totally counterintuitive if you ask most people when do we just choose a problem that you don't like about america today right i don't care what it is i don't care whether it's you know we we don't enforce immigration laws uh you know our infrastructure is a disgrace i mean you go to uniform countries now look at their airports compared to our i mean it doesn't matter where what you do right uh whether you look at you know social services and education today whether young people are getting fleeced at universities what used to be an escalator for generational prosperity is now a generator of generational debt for no purpose but you go and outrage after outrage why don't we ever solve these problems you're saying okay when are we going to do it well maybe on a sunny day maybe that's it we're just waiting for maybe a partisanship dies down there's no recession everything is great right if you think about that all the experts can study it we all come around the table you say okay yeah i think at least this one problem will get a solution sounds reasonable right it never ever happens that way tony it never happens that way we solve all of these problems not on warm sunny days dark stormy days is when we solve these problems we're backed into our corner there are days like 1776 when benjamin franklin was telling all of his friends we got to hang together or we will all assuredly hang separately yes right and and that's what he was telling everyone who signed the declaration of event pens you know what you've just committed right you've committed treason you know the penalty for that is well why is that and then at the end of that period which is one of the worst periods of the 1780s by the way was a period of economic depression worse than the 30s worse than the 30s we had 150 000 americans leave that would be the equivalent of 7 million americans today simply you know these are the tories i mean the american revolution by the way was a civil war it wasn't just a revolution it was a civil war of american against america many of them left particularly the professional classes the loyalists yeah yeah the loyalty yeah and and the old economy was in ruins uh america actually fled the cities back to the country that's how bad things were in the 70s 1780s so what do we do in that crisis we invented a whole constitution i mean that was the miracle of 1787 right we designed our constitution in that dark hour and guess what over the next several decades we had growing problems we had problems with tariffs we had problems with nullification we had problems with um a foreign policy and above all we had the whole problem with slavery did we do anything about it and all that peace and prosperity that we had no we didn't know anything about it it was all solved in 1861 to 1865 in four years of total war when people were huddling in washington dc fearful that dc would about to be invaded at times i mean president lincoln was suspending habeas corpus he was rounding up and jailing thousands of people without you know illegally with anybody i mean telling them what their charges were so we had a real crisis in america right i remember when i was in junior high school i had a shop type teacher and i remember one day he was reading it reminded me of your book because one of the great things about fourth turning and if you haven't read it still watch it make sure you read it you'll be reading a passage from an article from the new york times and you'll think it's from today and it's from 80 years ago and then you'll read another one it's from 160 years ago well i remember he was reading this article it was all about we're running out of oil because i was growing up in the 70s and there were you know lines some of you are old enough to remember you had the license plate i didn't have a car yet but i think i was ever going to have one because you know the number on the back otter even determined you could get gas that day that's how bad it was right and so he read this whole article from the new york times about oil rad of oil and the darkening of the world and how the whole world is going to go to and at the end it was from 80 years before and it was whale oil when we were based on whale law and he's like you know i never fed him saying you know necessity is the mother of invention when we have to we find answers and by the way how many have found that in your own life when you have to right that's when most people do now we work to do it more proactively but crisis creates a breakthrough if it doesn't kill you it creates a breakthrough and historically that's been true like what's the purpose of crisis in essence is what you're telling us the purpose of the crisis is that's how we transform it is how we transform but there is a different nature to the transformation as you go through the sacral right yes please walk through that yeah because i think we need to focus on that i think so too so coming out of the um coming out of the crisis you go into the what we call the high that's the spring right the high like the american high that was actually william o'neill famous u.s historian he actually described the years 1946 to 1964 as the american high and i think many of you if you haven't lived through it like like i did as a kid you you kind of know what i'm talking about a period when the nation felt very optimistic but in in a certain way and by the way african-americans is interesting terrible period from for them from the vantage point of the civil rights area for the advantage by legman but actually in terms of economic achievement one of the best periods ever for african-americans that's right in terms of uh you know gains and family they moved out of the south for one thing during world war two it was the single best thing that ever happened to and anyway so but a great time for america in many ways um it was a time of terrific conformity you didn't want to be someone left out of the mainstream that was true but it was also a time and i think we so much missed this today when people felt that collectively there were more than the sum of their parts and i think today tony coming out of the third turning kind of the opposite end and still today early in the in the fourth turning we feel that collectively we are less than the sum of our partners how often do people say there are such talented individuals out there i mean any of us getting around they say any of us can do better than the jackasses they have there in washington dc i mean it's incredible the incompetence and the dysfunction how is it that they can be so bad and just take any random group of five of you and be all together we can agree on right so how does that happen and and and it's a very different kind of problem and that explains why we have awakenings and why we have crises the awakening is to release the individual that's what we do in awakening so the winter gets us to come together to fight that battle we become optimistic because we don't go through that crap anymore and we're unified and we have this high and everything grows but we lose the individual so now the individual night is the pop-up that's our summer time that's when there's internal strife it's a very different kind of transformation now the generation that sometimes has a hard time with the awakening is the silent generation because they're all you know socialized to be conformed and socialized to go along so they're torn right they're torn gen xers are torn too today but they're torn in the opposite direction because gen xers and a lot of you are exers you know i define exercises born 1961 and 1981 birth year you look at the census census bureau defines boomers as born 1946-1964 i the census did it just to reflect fertility rates we're talking about social generations we go through a lot of reasons why 1943 to 1960 makes a lot more sense so we defend that we still do so what exers need to do exers are raised in an awakening you you put it rightly no one gave a damn about them there were latchkey kids uh their parents were you know discovering themselves a lot of them had silent generation parents going through their midlife passages and suddenly wondering my god i'm suddenly discovering myself and and boomers were just having fun right and the entire country was into self this was you know the the the self revelation yeah regenerative and so exers are kind of left alone and they raise themselves right and so exercise have been very used to in their lives just running their own lives and solving problems themselves maybe with little groups of friends or little workable arrangements if they have to and that leads to the pragmatism and the cynicism of big broad national causes they've never worked for them and by the way all these big institutions supposed to help everyone never helped them i mean no one gave a damn about kids when they were young and as soon as they started graduating from from high school in 19 you know first ones 1981 1982 nation at risk report came out which declared that this nation has never had such a generation of dumb kids as gen xers so you know so gen xers are these dumb left alone under socialized the opposite of silent generation right over essentially and so and they said that's okay that's all right you don't have to like us we're just gonna go on and get things done our own way and our one of our goals is is to stay off the community's radar screen because the last thing we want to do is get regulated taxed identified you know what i mean so you have x-rays of the natural individualists because of the way they've been raised because of the season in which they grow up and you see this again and again in history you were a child during awakenings you're used to taking life one-on-one on your own yep so where the problem with the silent was moving from the group is everything the group in the side of the generation in the 50s everything was about adjusting yourself to meet the expectations of others you know dale carnegie and you know being the kind of person that others wanted you to be so it was all about uh the other directed self you know the social ethic the opposite was true for xers just do your own thing right do the do you know i just obey your thirst i don't know whatever the hell it was uh just do it just do it so you got this extras right pragmatic take care of themselves but they have to undergo the opposite adjustment and by the way the peers of of john adams and george washington had to do the same thing and the peers of of um of george patton and harry truman had to do the same thing these were both craggy pragmatic individualistic children left alone you know they came of age during the roaring 20s a lot of them um they tended to be republican all their lives by the way the lost generation uh they they detested a big state and everything but they had to figure out what they were going to do during world war ii everyone was banding together how does an individualist grow up or adjust at a time when community is refining itself we are now at a time when groups are refining themselves we're a time of growing tribalism in america the right time when everyone is going back to the groups say one sign of that extended generation families they're everywhere today everyone is is reverting back into the extended family right millennials i mean gen x is used to boomerang back home millennials don't boomerang back home they just never leave and and and now you've got older people coming back to live at home you know aunts and uncles everyone why is it that larger homes have had their prices go up so and and they're not coming back remember with millennials originally we said it would be the mini helms that would go up more than price they said they never buy real estate they never they're not going to form families i remember people saying that going you don't understand generations and now they're buying like crazy and now they're buying and very often moving on with their parents but they want larger homes and people did not have to so larger homes look at neighborhoods now look at political tribalism which is growing unbelievable today in america right red zone blue zone these are now mega brands and people are self-sorting across america into these things this is what's happening further i want you to go help the next generation in this room understand the millennials here because because the x generation was under protected and again i was that stage it was 1960 but that's i have the memories somewhere in my psyche probably because it was recapped every year in those days of kennedy and the optimism of that time because i was three years old was happening but i was raised by myself i had to raise myself i had to figure it out so i had this optimism but the pragmatism but the way you raise your children usually as a whole is different because since you were underprotected that became baby on board if you looked at movies in the 70s babies were very different they were like evil little bastards like it was rosemary's baby right it was the omen it was you know somebody's head twirling around the exorcist and suddenly it's three men and a baby baby on board talk a little bit about that transition why millennials are the way they are because they've done nothing wrong they've just been raised differently the golden age of childish devil horror movies really lasted from about 1965 to about 1982 so exactly when xers were small kits i mean that was the most negative image of small kids in american history there were no g-rated movies there were there was not even you know you had to drive 500 miles just to find benji but my point was so that was that was what was going on and um uh the phrase you can do an engram search if you want but the phrase uh children are special was literally no mention going all the way up through the late 60s 1970 until about 1977 78 no one ever wrote that phrase in a published work so suddenly it began rising and after 1982 or 3 with millennials it just goes into the stratosphere right so suddenly millennials are surrounding these cuddly baby movies and these signs will be baby on board and minivans with 12 different ways to buckle the precious kids into their seats back when exers are small you just told kids to do this that was good enough but so all of this has see all of this has changed but this shapes generations permanently here's the thing archaeologists know this you can take a tree you can cut the tree down and you can look at the rings on a tree and look at the widths of the rings on a tree and you can tell when that tree had you know a really lush spring and summer a lot of water a little thin ring that's when it went through the drought we are all like that we are all like trees and very often if you're a certain age you know by the way any tree you cut down all has the same kind of rings right all the same ring pattern because they all went through the same thing so it's the same thing generations are like trees in that respect and we all internalize we have a record inside ourselves of when you went through these different seasons yes but the big challenge is again i want to come back to this because this is a challenge of the crisis you look around the world today by the way this isn't just america why is the whole world moving away from sort of individualistic liberal democracy where everyone's individual rights are protected the whole world is moving toward populism moving toward guarantees for the group you talk to millennials they want security they want community they don't want that rugged individualism that a lot of extras you know recall right it's it's a shift in perspective and there's also raised you know there's a there's a great book called the coddling of america that you haven't read you should also read by jonathan jonathan yeah and he's he goes through and shows that it started with babies at that stage not only being taught you got to be safe every moment safety wasn't a question before right but now everything is about your safety and your security and on the milk cans or the milk bottles that most people did with their cereal every morning was a child that was missing they started that during that time and they never told you the kids were found or that it was stolen by the father who's you know just got the divorce so all it was is constant fear and uncertainty and then the constant peace it magnified that when we get to the point of social media when around 19 you know or 2010 all of a sudden everybody's got an iphone and now there's a different world where constantly they're being reinforced to be a certain way right so it creates a radically culture but but i want to plant a seed for the millennials right now so you hear it the millennials are our next heroes they will when we hit this next crisis just like the flappers the ones we talk about in great generation i have great excitement for the millennials because they have a different level of relationship to technology of networking i'd like to make sure we talk about that they're really going to be an important part of the solution but they also have a different relationship with each other true and that's the point and that's how they differ from exers millennials really get it they believe in doing everything as a community and they believe that people need a simple set of rules prescriptions let's just follow the same rules that way we avoid any of these problems let's just get everyone on the same page and by the way if certain group of people refuses to be on the same page and i i was going to talk about this eventually conflict yes let's have it out that's right because it has to happen it's going to happen because it is immoral or wrong if you have a different point of view there's something wrong with you it's not we have different points of view my view is the way your point of view shouldn't be there shouldn't be free speech who in their lifetime thought we'd be hearing that from liberals we're all about free speech but this is going on around the world you look at you know i don't tell you whether you're and everywhere around you xi jinping and china narendra modi and india you go look at abe shinzo and sort of the transformation in japan but you look you look increasingly a europe you know le pen unbelievably she's probably one election away from winning in france but my point is all of these societies are becoming more populous around a kind of cultural social center gravity in the nation no one really cares so much about the marginalized groups anymore everyone is focusing on the majoritarian center let's get the rules right for them so at least basic things work again that's happening all around and we sometimes think that's just america that has this problem it's not this is this this generational pattern now increasingly involves much of the world and they want the ones were raised that way the older millennials are now around 40 years old so they're the ones writing for the washington post and for the new york times or the ones that are on television doing that so they're entering positions of power and influence and they're bringing the value systems that they've learned and grown up with to the world and expecting the rest of the world to be that way and by the way just to point out you saw the same thing happen during the 1920s so you're right about the 1990s while exers are out enjoying you know grunge and nirvana and thrash metal and just doing all that stuff you know it was totally transgressive and you know the damaged font advertisements and everything was so extra right um millennials were watching you know barney and his friends and you know blue's clues and they were going to this this huge renaissance of disney you know uh movies you know like lion king and all the so they were enjoying this very protected culture even while young adults were all into their wildness you saw the same thing happening in the 1920s so during the 1920s when the older generation young adults were the with the with the flappers and that you know they're doing you know barnstorming and rum running and all the things that they the veterans who came back from world war one were doing you know the the peers of hemingway and fitzgerald i mean they were kind of they were a wild crowd and they drank a lot so they were a wild generation they put the roar into the roaring twenties but meanwhile the kids were being protected the first boy scouts girl scouts campfire girls four age clubs and by the time you had for 20 year olds the first miss americas in 1923 we were building huge college stadiums for the younger generation right so this would have been the equivalent of the millennials and they were all becoming used to the spirit of optimism cooperation national unity so finally when we had the great crash a huge plurality of them voted for fdr yes and they voted for the new deal that's right and so the new deal was incredibly favored by younger people just like i mean you you all you all seen the polls you see how you know millennials all vote for the democratic party exers are now actually arguably the most pro-republican group uh out there and like the last generation who was always you know lean more to the more to the republican party but what exers need to do is adjust themselves to this new communitarian ethos because one way or another they're going to have to live with it right that's where the country's going and i think that's going to be the interesting transformation and so people who are into personal transformation so in fact i was going to ask you tony it's actually one of my questions that i see i came with my own list too so the question i was asked you're a person who has spent your entire career really perfecting to an unequaled level in my opinion personal transformation i mean i you know you have to i i wonder but i'm sure you would disagree how can you take it any further than you've taken it but but i know but i know you have things you still want to do right but in other words and and and a lot of your base has always been exercise right yes and that's what they're into personal transformation yeah yeah boomer's next what about your next stage collective transformation yeah i think i think when we do that that's what we do with groups because we create that collective value system how many know what i'm talking about like at a date with destiny like that so yeah exactly millennials find it very comfortable as far as that's concerned and everyone wants to grow but millennials are also entering a stage just like they said they weren't going to buy houses i remember saying you're idiots to say that they're not they look like they're going to buy houses they're going to buy homes but what's the different about it is you said a bigger home a different environment but now they're entering that stage of life 40 years old 35 years old where they start evaluating in my experience transformation in the 20s you think you're as i said earlier you're invincible when you get to your mid-30s and you have relationships and then the sudden you have a family and then you have kids and then all of a sudden things look differently so i'm seeing that group just as responsive as previous groups but it they like doing it collectively they don't want to be unsafe you have a problem in america where public speech has become so coarse or common so wild right yeah i mean i i saw even in reaction to this uh you know recent school shooting in texas yeah congressmen are trading f-bombs with each other on twitter congressman i mean this is blaming each other while kids are just dying right but but the point is the level of discourse is degraded to such a point and it reminds me by the way of the of the of the 1850s he had the same thing we had congressmen actually shooting and knifing each other you know in the middle and we know where that went it went to war but my point is is that this level of incivility what happens after the crisis with the generation that actually has to fight it they clean up everything language is homogenized you look at language political language of the people after actually fighting world war ii particularly by the 1950s early 1960s it's all homogenized cleaned up it's your walter cronkite yes you know good morning america everything was great today and and but so this has a cycle too because after a crisis there's so much pain people want something completely new yes and this is why identity politics after the crisis is never an issue yeah because no one cares about your own individual identity anymore after what we all did together to get through this thing your own little identity doesn't matter and by the way these are all the great melting pot periods of american history yes i mean you went through world war ii you were no longer a hyphenated american you were no longer an italian american a polish we had all those eastern european attack hyphenated him they were all just americans think about cultural appropriation that term that's been created yeah america is nothing but a melting pot everything we do has come from somewhere else and we used to honor that i think it was a beautiful thing now it's part of the crisis creation is that sense of division and if you look at ray dalio and many of you know ray and he's talking about you know the changes in the world order that come there's three principles that determine that one are you spending more than you're earning or earning more than you're spending right we're obviously spending way more than we're earning number two level of internal conflict in the country and number three a rising power when rising power takes advantage because your economics are gone and you're completely divided and that's unfortunately where this country is and it doesn't mean it has to stay there but that's where this country is right now so tell us a little bit about i want to go into the crisis in a second but i want you just if you would you use jungian uh archetypes and you kind of alluded to them a little bit here and what i found interesting about that is for example you know boomers when they started out were very permissive and then later in life they become you know they become very moralistic and very intense many people start out one way and end up a different way can you explain those four archetypes and how you see them attached to these generations that we're familiar with in all generations you've seen and how they start when why and why do they become sometimes almost the opposite so yes uh we attach to these four types of generation archetypal names uh so for the for the generation that is born right after the crisis we call them the prophet archetype and that would be for instance boomers but we've had many other examples yes the original puritans were actually an example of a prophet archetype generation and what are the qualities of the prophet so their life cycle i think you're familiar with uh indulgently raised uh in a very secure era they come of age during these times of spiritual awakening a lot of protests a lot of social divisions and they break breakthrough they try to you know they they want to individualize the country they want to br they want to free individuals from this sort of tyranny of the collective that everyone's been enslaved with and they don't understand why we had a collective he had to have gone through the war to understand that right and they didn't go through it that's why they're different so they want to free everyone from that and then they go through the the fall season which is a fair period of individualism this would have been like the late 80s the 90s the early also when financial markets go crazy opportunity like that goes crazy at those times right and it's and it's the time and recently it's true when you go into any bookstore you look at all the books in a bookstore and all the upbeat and positive books are all about me myself and i you know all the great things i'm going to do with my all the downbeat books now in bookstores and this has been this way for the last 25 years are all about who we are collectively the decline of the family the decline of the nation the decline of you know schools the decline so so but they become more moralistic during this period yes and why is that they go from very crazy almost individualistic and permissive to moralistic and controlling because they realize that those those idealistic principles aren't really being realized so the moralism starts and then they become the moralistic elders of the crisis we we sometimes call them great champions right yes um uh fdr was that lincoln was that right uh sam adams was that and then uh the the the the exeter generation is the nomad archetype right nomad alone right individual all of life is just kind of a one-on-one encounter i find i used to teach uh history to gen xers and i found the only way to interest gen xers in history was to have them read biography they all understood a life of an individual that i can understand tell me about social trends and all that stuff that makes no sense to me you know i don't have anything in common with but you tell me about an individual struggle i get it right so they're the nomad archetype we've talked about their qualities their qualities are in their background under protected to sort of taking life as an individual pragmatism uh uh cynicism uh get things done really well break things down to the simplest components um i think uh uh uh efficacy in sort of uh execution is their strength and by the way generation before often will create breakthroughs but the people make those breakthroughs real is that nomad generation they're they want to perfect it and refine it they take microsoft and they you know it's built but these guys come in and they take it to the next level google whatever nomad are the generations we're very likely to have nomad by the way our nation really hinges on them because they are the ones in midlife during the crisis they determined whether we actually get through the damn thing alive and while these old aquarians you know sometimes want to blow up the world right because they're moralistic right holistic yeah it's just kill putin yeah right you know well no matter what it means to the rest of the world i mean global war the next generation is like more pragmatic about it and this generation is the one in real leadership position in crisis they are they are the generals they are the ones who are actually the hands-on leaders right and they were the uh we were talking about them earlier they were the the uh the omar bradleys the general prattans the dwight d eisenhower's laconic pros just everything to the point right or you know harry truman who never had a comma in any of his sentences just you know very simple utterances right so always to the point though right and and then you have um the next the next one is uh the uh the hero generation um and we know their you know their strengths community that's millennials achievements uh and it's the gi generation and it's the republican generation that created the united states of america right that fought the american revolution and created the constitution now they are wonderful because they create these long-term institutions they're institution defenders they um they represent the community they represent always optimism the triumph of technology but technology together not like nomad technology it's an individual cell phone no the the gi generation technology was always infrastructure that reformed our public spaces we hardly have a concept of that anymore and probably during the crisis we'll have to actually rebuild that infrastructure that's right and then finally the artists archetype these are the generation now the and or or the uh the silent generation which in other words these are people that during the war during the crisis they're protected their job is just shut up and deal with it because you're being supported by the elders that are fighting the war and they developed very early on an ear for for sensitivity for fairness so very often the generation that's young develops a talent for the things that older generations aren't perceiving yes and that's what's fascinating to me and you see that today by the way among those the group of kids i call homelanders or generation z you find that they're very um they're very caring they're very much into kindness in a in a world today which is all into um you know cancel culture and screaming everyone down and the world is being divided in these black and white groups or i should say red and blues groups and a world you know half of americans today believe a civil war is very likely this wasn't even on the radar screen 10 years ago half of america is saying that and and we see too that the the possibilities of of global war now rising so we're we're at this place now this younger generation senses that and that's why they're into nuance kindness seeing the kinds of distinctions which are lost on older generations the silent generation is the same way by the way so these are the different archetypes and and a couple of them keep rotating and they they keep rotating and a couple of them are big i mean you look at um uh joseph campbell who wrote about myth um and you know lucas with star wars and we know it was done on joseph campbell but you see in in myth every phase of life is occupied in the same order as we're talking about historically you always find that the young hero like arthur always has a much older uh wizard you know like like merlin who helps him right so there's always the prophet archetype in old age when the hero is coming of age right and then when it's reversed when it's the other way when you have an elder hero and a young prophet that's the storyline of the founding of religions right that's more like orpheus or jesus or buddha or you write it's like pontius pilate or hammurabi is sort of this you know very secure but spiritually soul dead world and a young awakener a young prophet challenging that speaking truth to power now they're both heroes been in almost opposite direction yes one is reshaping the inner world the other is reshaping the outer world the hero reshapes the outer world the realm of kingdoms the realm of society you know making new collective infrastructure the prophet is reshaping the inner world of culture by the way in america today when we talk about politics we always say post-war right we say oh yeah that's the way a political institution has been post-war we mean world war ii we talk about culture we talk about since the 60s that's right and and that's how we periodize things depending on when you're talking about inner world or outer world tell us where do you see us now 2008 you see is the beginning of the winter the crisis period it started with finance we didn't really solve it we just printed more money and now we're starting to get around the end of that aspect usually traditionally there's some form of war is that is that a war with china is that a cyber war i mean no one knows for sure obviously but tell us what your point of view is where we are in the cycle and how long does winter last is this another seven or eight years based on history uh i think that the phases of life are actually getting broader recently uh we actually see a dilation in phases of life kids are taking longer to become adults i mean you all know that i don't remind you they're probably still living with you right anyway um and then you see people are political leaders at older and older ages i mean look at pelosi look at biden we've never seen people at that age so in other words phases of life are dilating remember it's the length of a phase of life that determines generational length so and it also determines turning length so we think that after actually compressing for the last century and a half they're actually beginning to dilate now so in earlier history things might have been a 25-year season they've gone back to kind of a 20 and you see it starting to expand so we think this next uh this fourth turning we're currently in starting in 2008 will probably last till around early 2030s wow and and so we have a ways to go um i think almost certainly we're gonna have more uh all of these periods are are characterized by enormous degree of financial and economic instability not just the the opening crash like the crash of 29 the crash of you know 2008 but also during the period i talked about the 1780s before what about the uh what about the recession of 1936 you know the stock market went down in 1936 by 55 i mean you want and by the way inflation i mean you were talking about inflation during fourth turnings we haven't seen anything yet yeah and uh i'm convinced that jerome powell is not going to stop i think he's going to go all the way so it's kind of an interesting game there did you end up with a recession well the only way he's going to be able to suppress demand is by creating a recession i don't think there's any question about that and so that will bring you know interest rates down that will bring it but then then you have a problem where congress isn't going to be able to do anything either this is going to be like volcker without the novocaine right congress will not be able to help right congress will not be able to create those huge deficits while fed monetary policy is is squeezing inflation out of the system and by the way we now have a very small generation coming into the workplace very large generation leaving so over the 2020s there is zero net growth in working age population um i just want to remind you that zero in that growth during the 1980s when reagan was there and volcker was doing his thing we had one and a half percent per year of just increased working age people right so we have a demographic situation a monetary policy situation and an inability of congress to act i'll tell you why congress can't act why congress cannot do any uh stimulus which you'd think they would right the reason is is because debt is so high i mean debt is now about up to about 100 and 405 of gdp right that's where we were at the end of world war ii yes that's where we've done just since 2008 we went from 35 to over 100 of gdp a deficit but we we didn't fight a total war god knows what we did but we're there the future deficit projections that cbo does and by the way i review this to all my clients i do this once a year so i go over them all 30-year cbo projections they're hugely dependent now on interest rate assumptions as those real interest rate assumptions go up and inflation expectations goes up those things balloon to infinity so guess what at the same time while jerome powell is increasing those interest rates increasing you know and and everyone's suddenly acknowledging those inflation expectations that are going into effect that will completely spike any hope that congress has with running any deficits because we're dependent on foreign investors who keep buying our bonds you know we have about 40 of of us treasury treasuries are owned by foreigners today um so you have a period of inflation and products and probably deflation of assets this is very bad and and you know you have to be very careful um and i i don't know if someone's going to talk about this later about where to invest in a fourth turning point um well first of all get out of uh nominally uh denominated uh fixed income assets that's the first thing because those are ruined by inflation and you would have done better if you had gotten out of them about six months ago but they still don't look good so you get out of those uh and the whole business of um of about you know uh sort of the parody arrangement where you know you do stocks and bonds together because you know when one rises the other goes down that's completely collapsing so it's no longer true so so basically you get out of that and then you get out of all the high risk stuff you get out you get out of high beta high leverage um uh you know uh you know you kind of go down the list of everything that's sort of sort of bad for you and then you and then you you also get out of stuff that probably isn't going to do well in the future like the communication sector and stuff which is just tremendously overvalued basically high multiples is the other thing you look for so you get out of that and what do you get into you get into things you get into commodities you get into real estate um and you get into sectors they're probably undervalued and a fourth turning manufacturing materials and possibly energy i think energy is actually looking good now particularly because everyone's being forced to get out of it makes it kind of a buy we obviously have a problem god knows what's going to happen to food prices but if you're in materials that means producing ammonia you know what ammonia is used for energy is needed for agriculture so if you want to talk about energy to keep us warm and food to keep us fed i mean you're talking about those sectors you you obviously all the other things apply diversify yourself everywhere um the most important thing though in a fourth turning is to know where your investments are be very wary of stuff where you don't know what the hell it is you know i'm talking about if you understand you know web 3 or nfts or if you really want to spend an if you really think you understand uh you know board apes yacht club uh go ahead but anybody see what what the overall price of nfts has come to yeah down 90 right now yeah so so anyway so i i've never recommended that but my point is get out of that stuff because you don't know where your money has by the way the whole valuation of that was generated by negative real interest rates we're unlikely to see that again right what are the most important things we can do to prepare and anticipate personally other than the financial side your family that's number one just know who your family is get back on good relations with people that you may have you know not chosen a family as well right exactly your chosen family everything about you know your your your sort of elective community i mean whoever you're living with because that will become very important your network would be everything a real network not a fake network not a facebook network but the network of people that you can count on you exactly and if you don't have one find one generate one reputation matters enough worth turning and by the way conventional values come back on a fourth turning look at any fourth turning um you know the songs have become popular the movies they're carny they're schmaltzy they're reaffirming no one's transgressing anymore in a fourth turning there's no benefit in that no one gives a damn about all that stuff anymore right and so if you look at the kinds of movies that were big in the late 30s or certainly during world war ii and art itself culture transforms into propaganda hollywood moved to washington during world war ii i mean everyone needed to make something that was for the cause we all became used to that so this is something millennials by the way are well primed for that they all understand art for the cause right so this this is also important and i think i think also one other thing is and it's very important for all the exers out there you need to get back in touch with the official community authorities in your area who the politicians are who actually is on the committees that actually create the regulations that affect your industry one thing that's very important in every fourth turning is being able to influence and talk to the people that are re-drafting and re-legislating all of the laws and regulations going to reshape your interview all the way down to the school boards yeah right yeah well we've seen that recently right but you need to know because politics can reshape your world overnight in a fourth turning you need to be connected and i know a lot of extras i hate politics i hate all those guys i mean everything they do is just you know ruins everything certainly in my life but this is survival think about it that way so just think of it as an extra survival code so who you know is pretty critical who you have relationship is really critical exactly so these are i don't know these are the things that i think are how do we know when we're coming out of a fourth term by the way now that we've uplifted you all with your future compelling future um but but isn't it better to know and anticipate than to get struck and react yes so the question is you know what follows a fourth turning is a new awakening excuse me a you know a new time a new springtime a new high a new optimism how do we know when we've turned the corner out of this fourth turning that we're in right now that will be like a flight you will know you know why because every fourth turning its final climax is absolutely history changing so toward the end of the fourth fruit turnings can sometimes build like the 30s did like this one is it's building right it's this crescendo of interest and by the way every election today is a national election so this isn't like the 1990s when you could just be a kind of a flaky third third party candidate or someone you know just sort of a no everything now is you're either red zone or blue zone i don't care if you're running for dog catcher you're running for you know uh on the school board it's all now parallelized because the only thing that matters now by the way it's not like the 1990s a lot of arguments people trying to persuade other people to change your mind i'm in washington dc i mean that's where i am politics no one in dc is anymore arguing with each other why they've already made up their minds they've made up their minds there's no and it's amazing do you think that uh so tip o'neill and those guys used to fight like hell in congress and go have a beer together yeah now they don't speak to the other side they speak they're not socialized they don't they have nothing to talk about they have no and you can understand they have nothing to talk about they're in completely different world views and their visions of america's future are mutually exclusive right and by the way this is the danger point for civil war you talked to barbara walters the biggest you know she just wrote a book on it she's the biggest scholar of civil wars and she goes around the world i mean she's she went to rwanda she went she went to uh you know cambodia she's been to certainly uh uh uh all around all the stands and then down in africa and so on she says no one ever sees it coming she's interviewed i don't know how many people she said they never think it's gonna happen in their country right seen this country become more regional people moving in mass to where they're more aligned with other people whether it be blue states or reds if you if you poll people today you will find that of all the people they don't want to live with right this is more than living with next to someone of another religion another race another it doesn't matter what about but i don't want to live with a person politically the opposite of i am because i just will not be able to get along with that person so this is the level of polarization and again if you don't know history you don't know where we've been go back and read about the about the 1850s how all of america became separated the churches in america separated in the late 1840s and then suddenly the two the national political parties died i mean first it was the wig party that went out in the in the early 1850s in 1858 it was the democratic party that basically disintegrated so by 1860 you just simply had purely regional parties and that was before the civil war started so think about it this is happening we see this happening this possibility now the other possibility is external conflict we see that rising as well yes given all these new populist nations around the world and you know they're all feeling they're all by the way run with post-crisis leaders like xi jinping and narendra modi they're all born after these are great champions right so the possibility of of global conflict is also rising now which will it be it could be totally one totally the other or sometimes a little of both american revolution is a little of both we were fighting americans against britain but it was also americans against americans at the same time the loyalists versus the revolutionaries the 1930s had a strong almost civil war component i mean the 1930s are terrible i mean cities were full of violence pinkertons against against communists and socialists you know on the unions particularly when you had the the sit-down strikes in the late 50s by the way back then republicans could truthfully claim that young adults were card-carrying communists and socialists they really were they were joining the communist and socialist party during the great depression and they could truthfully you know claim that the other side once it captured government would try to reshape the country which it did with us with a new deal so any of you complain about millennials it could have been worse you could have had young gis you know and they did a lot of them a lot of them joined you know strong levels so after a crisis there's usually you know in the summer summertime the awakening there's a cultural change after a crisis there is a change worldwide the structure how the world relates to each other what do you see what is your view of where we are and where we're heading what's the timeline of these things that you're seeing and and what makes you optimistic on the other side of this because it might be helpful people know that no war goes forever even though it may sound forever no pandemic as we said goes on forever you know no night is forever there's always the daytime right and it always follows it thank god so tell us a little bit about what you see happening and then what's the other side look like uh you cannot know in advance okay such as the chaotic nature there are certain patterns you can tell you can tell the timing of this whole thing when it will get worse why don't resolve and so on but internal versus external you don't know that you can't predict because it could flip one way or the other interestingly as as we saw in the 30s uh to the 40s i mean who would have predicted that who would have predicted that after the second new deal and after fdr would go madison square garden jammed with 10 000 people and he would get up there and he says i know that the the capitalists and the robber barons they hate me and all these are republicans they hate me and they said i glory and their hatred you know and there are 10 000 people screaming that was the partisanship in 1837 in 1936 and by the way when roosevelt won republicans were almost completely wiped out in congress i mean there were there were only like 14 republican senators left in the senate i mean so in other words we're talking about what happened back then yes we could be seeing that again and would you have predicted that at the end of that we wouldn't be in a civil war but we'd end up completely unified and that's how fast collective identities can change as you get toward the end of a fourth turning it's a very dynamic period right so timing we are right now look both both political parties are leaderless right i mean we've got a republican party that doesn't know where the hell it is right now and you know we got trump we saw lance out there and we got desantis we got cotton and we got all these people is kind of we don't know the democratic party a leaderless i think it's fairly certain now from everyone i talked to in washington d.c biden is not going to run for a second term um and you've got you know no one is thinking you've been thinking about the vice president so essentially you have a democratic party that's a leaderless a republican party that's now essentially leaderless it's open and one question you asked me actually before before we went on the identity of a leader the idea where do leaders come from yes one thing i've learned from fourth turnings to answer that ancient question are leaders born or are they made one thing about fourth turning is they are made they are made leaders are not born teddy roosevelt who was franklin roosevelt's you know fifth fifth cousin uncle kind of thing he was a man of vastly more capacity intelligence energy than franklin roosevelt i mean he was a dynamo everyone thought the theodore roosevelt was like a phenomenon a god on earth you know the guy would read you know two books a day he would be out you know chasing rhinoceroses with his gun i mean he was just an amazing phenomenon he did galvanize the country but he was unable to put through any kind of major changes it wasn't the right season right franklin roosevelt no one thought much of him i mean he was he was not a great intellect actually he did have an amazing capacity to make friends and empathize and i think polio was part of that right that was a personal crisis which really transformed him in a very beneficial way he was made abraham lincoln i mean a nobody a one-term congressman i just suddenly was the right man at the right time um same thing you could say about you know george washington in a way but that's my point is it is it during the crisis is it the great prophet that becomes the leader or and it's executed by the ex or the nomads so the millennials make do the fighting so the the great champion is the sort of the elder prophet yes now whether that great champion is also the supreme national leader that can vary it was true with with franklin roosevelt he was a prophet archetype he was the elder leader and the gi generation absolutely worshiped franklin roosevelt and the same thing was true with abraham lincoln and when franklin roosevelt died the nation mourned for him exactly as they met mourned for abraham lincoln when he died i mean that was the generation that all young people followed and certainly all the union followers all the republicans in the north you know would follow lincoln you know anywhere so great leaders made not born um that took us through this harrowing period i now they were great champions they were both prophet archetypes in the american revolution we did have prophet archetypes people like sam adams or benjamin franklin but the one that everyone worshiped was george washington he was a nominee exactly another one would be queen elizabeth you know and actually we we write about all these crises going back but another one who was queen elizabeth who was a nomad i mean queen elizabeth had a little copy of you know machiavelli's the prince you know right under i mean you know she was always reading like how to stab him in the back when they were looking and stuff and and she was a total pragmatist when it came to religion right she just wanted a practical way to get rid of this issue so but she was she was a nomad right so typically it's someone who's a um an early born nomad or if they're a prophet they're a late-born prophet someone around the cusp of the two i want to finish with a compelling future of the springtime because it's not a year or two once we make it through this then we have 20 or more years usually of a more optimistic time describe you know what the springtime is to come the springtime like everyone is gonna guide the springtime as a wonderful time given what came before and and there would be no doubt about when it starts because suddenly the great conflict will be over it's when all the the treaties are signed all the resolutions are made and suddenly it's a time when after history becomes moves very fast it suddenly really begins to slow down and when suddenly institutions can be made very quickly remade very quickly and new laws and so on all this great stuff put into place suddenly things become harder to change now socially it's what millennials have been dreaming about it's what gi's were dreaming about it's what the republican it's where we will have calm everyone will have a place everyone will be unified um and we will all feel great about our country sounds impossible right now doesn't it but that's what crisis does because people get exhausted with the emotion these seasons think of it as emotional seasons and you know the optimism season you go go go but if you smile all the time your face hurts eventually right after 20 years and so people go through that summer time of that internal fight and looking for the individualism i don't want to be part of the group and then all of a sudden the unraveling happens and everybody supposedly has the rewards at least financial awards and then after that big fall of rewards what do you have the next winter time again and now people come together to fight the crisis and so this is the cycle of humanity this is not just your cycle or my cycle this is the cycle of human history and when you start to see that it can be compelling when you i look at it i look at my my own daughter for example and i think by the way what will what will be the next generation when do the when's the cut off for z's we don't know yet i guess we don't we don't know actually we don't even know when they start interestingly enough you have to wait until the crisis ends and let me get a good example 1925 is where the silent generation starts 1924 is where the gi generation stops you would not have known that until 1946 when world war ii ended so we have to wait until that final but right now we we think that the last birth year of millennials is 2004 first birth year of of our homeland generation is 2005. but homeland is interesting and the reason why they named it homelanders first of all because back then i think we did this poll in 2000 i can't remember 2010 or something like that but uh first of all remember after 9 11 the department of homeland security everyone was in their homeland right and and also this fact that everyone was suddenly into sort of you know protecting the home protecting the community and then the fact that literally given these incredibly compulsively protective gen xer parents who swear that they're never going to allow their own kid to be left alone like they were left alone right again this pattern of overcompensation these kids are always at home i mean they they always have someone at home and they never go anywhere it's amazing this generation is they don't have to go anywhere you know for movies for entertainment for food for each other for food for whatever so they are literally the most homebound generation and during the pandemic it was off the charts right so we call them the quarantines right anyway for a reason so your question was so that's when we think they're going to be done and and and when they with their last their last cohort obviously is going to be determined um a little bit by when we determine the profit the beginning of the process will be the next profit generation but it's probably going to extend uh from from 2005 to to sometime in the late 2020s yeah so um uh and we've talked a little bit about their attributes they're going to be very well behaved by the way uh young young artist archetypes very well behaved very well socialized and this is the amazing thing and i i maybe this is one point i should come back to because i think people find it so counterintuitive that they don't believe it but if you go back through all of history going back to the i don't know the the 1500s to like the generation of erasmus you think about a very well socialized uh a very well-educated generation but these generations of extremely consensus-minded socialized educated erudite you know young people who who later on you know deep in that right position as they go go older they always were raised by very closed tight-fisted pragmatic parents at a time of crisis right yes and similarly the most uh uh the most uh pragmatic survivalist generations were always raised at a time of openness and chaos in their childhood right and i think that's what's interesting about that is you can see that they were raised in in you see that jungian thing that idea that who you are is almost the opposite of how you are raised i think so many extras today they are so protective so hands-on with their parents and it's so obviously different by the way when i talk to exers and i've done this a lot and i've surveyed them and i've talked to them it's not even unconscious it's conscious they know they're doing it for that reason yes damn it i'm never going to have my kid with the way i remember you know when i was home alone and stuff so it's very deliberate very conscious and similarly the silent generation why did they raise extras that way yes because of that they were raised in a closet right back in the late 1930s 1940s it's also why oftentimes people relate more to their grandparents than their parents yeah exactly because see now they're relating to the similar archetype across the cycle and that's what's amazing this is why so many millennials admire their gi generation parents or great grandparents because wow i recognize something in that you know granddad grandma whatever right yeah so that that sense i think it was igor stravinsky who said that you know we we every generation declares war on its parents and makes friends with his grandparents and and that that again that's looking across the cycle at your archetypal similarity versus your opposite so the question is where are you in the seasons of history when did you come of age at 21 to 41 range so i came you know i was born in 1960 right on the cusp so i can remember somewhere in my psyche that optimism for those first three years before kennedy died i can remember seeing kennedy and king and all the absolute unraveling that occurred there robert kennedy dying was part of my youth and then i came of age of my 21 and 41 during the unraveling during the fall right so inflation exploded and then all of a sudden the changes that happened in the 80s and the 90s and so now i'm running the next stage of my life in the middle of halfway through the winter and you know the next section of it i'll get to see hopefully if i live decently i'll get to see the next springtime good portion of it where are you in your location in history and how are you going to navigate it and if you only look at today you're going to have the wrong view when i say the wrong view you'll have an accurate view of life and also you know many people want it to be easier but nothing that's ever come easy has been valued very much in our lives your parents tell you that you never listen to them but you get older you know it and so these years it'll be challenging over the next seven eight nine ten years whatever it really is challenging financially challenging in terms of uncertainty they're also going to make us have to be more nimble make us grow in ways that you wouldn't have to grow without it and on the other side of it you have 10 or 20 or 30 years whatever it'll be for you of a great deal of optimism and then what'll happen is there'll be another summer there'll be another awakening internal battle and i don't know how long you're gonna live but it'll be interesting i think about my daughter and think about what she'll go into she's gonna you know be a child during the crisis at least half of it she'll come of age in this beautiful springtime she'll participate probably in the next summer and if she's lucky she'll make it into fall maybe she's a long life maybe she'll make it to the next winter and take what she learns from that there's a there's a beauty in understanding life from a different perspective than just how you're looking at it right now and that beauty you brought to all of us let me just maybe a couple of closing things please important um people often they listen to me and and they will say you know neil this just sounds so terrible you know you're telling us about all these things how far turnings usually end where they usually go i mean we're talking about war after all we're talking about conflict we're talking about additional you know economic times of economic financial duress um it seems so bleak and then i my answer is what what's the good news what's what's the upside of a fourth turning and i said the upside of a fourth turning is that we actually at the end of it we actually solve all the problems that we now have in a way that today absolutely no one thinks we'll ever solve and i said and maybe one way of saying this is what is the worst future you can imagine and i think you'd have to say maybe the worst feature is take all of today's trends everything you see over the last 10 years right that you see whatever you're looking at an indefinite future of that that's a world without a fourth turning that's a world in which winter does not happen yes do you want that no no i don't think any of us so intellectually we understand it and there's actually a fascinating uh speech uh it's it's actually very famous many of you probably heard about it william james it was a great kind of pragmatist american philosopher he he gave a speech in um uh 1906 at stanford university and it was called the moral equivalent of war i'm sure the moral could we ever arrange sort of kind of a practice run where we've got to we can have all the the socially enabling things about a war without actually not fighting one anyways it's fascinating and he goes back and he he he finally admits even though he hopes we grab one he was a pacifist but he says it it probably isn't he said everything we need to remain together as a nation all the social habits are forged in war if we're honest with ourselves uh or at least in in conflict of some sort i mean he was trying to be as broad about it as possible that's where we learned that the value of sacrificing for the sake of others but then he had this fascinating hypothetical question i think it's really great for what you do and and this audience he said he said there's something paradoxical in how we look at this he said if you asked americans right now would you had preferred that we had never fought the civil war remember he's saying this in 1906. so that's sort of like you know not that long ago and he sort of says i'll bet most americans would say no no i don't prefer that we know because we couldn't have imagined the kind of dynamic national industrial affluent america that we were by 201906 without the civil war we had to fight that war to be who we were today and he says he thinks that almost everyone would say no it was actually better we fought that war after all we we did do the 13th 14th 15th amendments and you know so all of that was was good but then he said but then he says paradoxical if you polled most americans today would you like another one in your near future almost all americans would say no and he kind of leaves it there as a paradox but i don't think it's paradoxical at all it's just like ourselves as individuals we look back in our life and we think you know that horrible experience i had i was really down in the depths i didn't know how i was going to go onto the next day i didn't know i was going to survive i didn't know i really learned so much from that i'm a new person after that i force myself to change no i do not wish that i never had that experience but then you ask most people well do you want another experience like that next week and most people will say no no and that's why spring times last so long too right 20 years after that where people don't want to go through that crap so that that's kind of the that's kind of the analogy and i think we have to think of ourselves like that um that it's not that we want to be in a fourth turning it's simply it's necessary i forests need fires rivers need floods uh the seasons need a winter we have to kill everything above ground so that things below ground can germinate and they will have space yes and that's another thing we look at america today we see the inequality inequality by the way always grows during peace time and this is you you go back to the the end of the neolithic revolution we we all this has always happened in times of peace and prosperity inequality over again always gets worse why because families always want to protect their offsprings and their sinicures and they all rigged the laws and everything to help those who have it always gets worse what equalizes income all the horrible things people don't like to talk about you know it's the plagues the famines the total revolutions the total wars that's and same thing happened in the 20th century that's when equality got much better the 1930s world war ii and then the high that followed in other words the the ethics of equality after the war these are the only times when our society becomes back to normal again and then we can it up again over time creation and destruction creation creation and destruction and creation but uh that that that's kind of how it happens and that's kind of how it has to happen you are a special gift to us all you've really delivered for us as you have for decades for so many let's have it [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Tony Robbins

Views: 726,867

Keywords: tony robbins, motivation, inspiration

Id: lX1Csk2vn5A

Length: 94min 1sec (5641 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022