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You ve heard me talk about the fourth turning.
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And I was lucky enough, back in 1993, 1994, I had the privilege of working with the President of the United States, Bill Clinton.
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And you couldn t do this today, but simultaneously I was working with the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, on the other side.
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I literally left the White House, went over, passed across the Capitol and worked on the other side on the same day.
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And the reason I mention it to you is Bill Clinton was the first person who told me about this book called Generations by Strauss and Howe.
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And this book was basically 500 years of Anglo-American history.
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And it showed that history is shaped by generations and generations are shaped by history.
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It was a fascinating book, and it talked about, the book was written in 1991, that in 2020 there ll be this crisis that we ll be facing.
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And it was predicted because of how generations raise the next generation, how we then interpret history.
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You can have events, but they re interpreted differently by a different model of the world.
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And I thought it was fascinating.
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And then in 1997, I was going to Borders Bookstore, one of those places.
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And I always go by the bin where the non-popular books are, because I m a contrarian.
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I found some of my favorite books in those places.
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And it was in that thing, like marked down 70% or 50% or some ridiculous number.
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And I picked up the book, and it was Strauss and Haugen.
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And I picked up this book, and it s been one of the guidebooks for me to understand what the hell is happening in our world ever since.
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it really helped me understand the patterns.
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Because if you think about it, we talk about power of patterns, what s the most powerful pattern of all?
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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.
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It was one distinction.
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What was it?
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Recognizing the seasons.
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Understanding, see before that it looked random.
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You planted in the winter, you didn t even know it was winter, you just knew it was cold.
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And for some reason you worked your ass off and you got nothing for it.
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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?
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Zilch, nothing.
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So all of a sudden humanity understood this and now we could stay in one place, we could build a community, we could build cities, we could build countries.
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That one distinction changed all of humanity.
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But there s also the seasons of your own life that s so valuable to understand.
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Think of it as four seasons of your life.
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Zero to 20, roughly, is your springtime.
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But that initial springtime, you re learning, you re growing, probably protected, you re absorbing things.
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That s the stage.
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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.
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You become kind of the soldier of life.
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You enter the summertime.
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21 to 41, that s a different stage, isn t it?
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Now you go out in the world and say, I m going to test this stuff.
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I was told all this shit.
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What s true?
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And you think you re going to be a billionaire or a 10 times billionaire, and you re going to be president of the United States, and you re going to have 100 relationships, and it s all going to work out smoothly.
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And then you get your first relationship and discover none of that shit is true.
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And you start to understand that you have vulnerabilities.
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You find out you re not invincible.
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So this young adulthood is testing and discovering.
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Just trying to figure out what s really real.
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That s when we learn a lot.
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And usually some of it is painful because it s not quite what we expected.
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But you re the soldier of society.
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Quite literally that s where soldiers are, right?
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21 to 41 usually.
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You re the person that goes to war.
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You re the person that s out there doing the hard work.
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Now if you really grew in spring and you really grew in summer, then there s the fall, the autumn.
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And that means 42 to 62 is a real reaping time if you ve grown.
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If you re not grown, like if you don t plant in the spring, you re going to weep in the fall.
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You re not going to reap in the fall, right?
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But if you push through the hot summer, it s a difficult time, those 21 to 41.
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By the way, when you ask people, when you do all the research on people, what s the most unhappy time of their life?
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It s that two decades.
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Not for every human, but for most.
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Because you re trying to figure out who the hell you are, prove to yourself, make it through all the bullshit, trying to figure out what s going on in your life.
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But when you get to 42 to 62, again, if you ve grown.
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If you ve not grown, you re kind of stunted.
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There s not much crop.
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But now, you re really in your midlife power.
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And you get to start to have a harvest time.
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This is, for a lot of people, their greatest financial time of their life.
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Because they built up understanding, and they worked hard and developed skill sets, and now they re in a position to lead.
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they might start running an organization.
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They start to really grow, to expand.
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And then 63 to 83, you can think of as winter, and 83 to 120 is the oldest living humans.
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If you re fortunate enough, maybe you ll have an extended winter.
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But in this stage, you really end up being a leader who s really there to mentor.
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That s really the position you re in.
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It s like what I love most now.
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It s like the example I give you of playing a video game against a child.
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You know the child s always going to win.
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And it s not because they re faster or smarter.
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It s because they ve played this game a million times.
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They know the first bad guy s here, the next bad guy s here, the next bad guy s here.
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So they re able to do something really important.
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This is what today is all about, if you want it in a simple phrase.
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Anticipation is power.
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Anticipation is power.
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Leaders anticipate.
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Losers react.
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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.
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In order to do that, you ve got to recognize patterns.
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So these seasons of your life are precious.
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Every season has different challenges, right?
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How many can remember some of the challenges of the springtime of your life?
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I remember some of the challenges of the summer in that stage, the things you wrestled with.
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Some are still there.
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How many remember the fall experiences?
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Right, so everything has opportunity, everything has challenge, and if you can anticipate the challenge, you can make that season a hell of a lot more enjoyable.
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So there s the patterns of nature, there s the patterns of your life, the seasons of your life, and what we re gonna look at this morning is seasons of history.
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Because if you understand the seasons of history interact with what stage of life you re in, like some of you, some people, zero to 20 is when they experience winter, historical winter.
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Because there s one about every 80 years, as you ll see shortly.
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And so some people enter winter in midlife.
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Some people do it at their power stage.
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Some people do it towards the end of life.
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If you have a full life, you re going to experience all four seasons.
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But all of us in our first two seasons of life, meaning your spring, zero to 20, your 21 to 42, are going to either experience an awakening, an internal turmoil within a country around values, like you saw in the 60s and 70s, or you re going to experience a crisis, right?
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Because that s the cycle.
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Everyone experiences them.
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But depending upon when your generation experiences that,
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That shapes the way you look at life, the way you interact, and what you do.
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But it might be nice to anticipate where that is.
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So there are these seasons.
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I just want to give you the big picture.
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So we got to think of the seasons of nature, the seasons of your life, and the seasons of history.
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And if you understand them, you start to be able to predict.
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So this book in 1991 says in 2020, we re going to have this giant crisis.
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But in the fourth turning, it s even more specific.
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Here are some of the prophecies that were there.
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I was going to introduce it.
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25 years ago, there ll be a global terrorist group that blows up an aircraft, there ll be an impasse of federal budgets that reaches a stalemate with a government shutdown, there ll be anarchy 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.
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25 years ago.
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So I picked up this book, 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.
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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.
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Please give a big hand for one of the great authors, Neil Howe!
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Thank you, brother.
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Grab a seat.
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It s great to have you back.
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A lot of people have read your book.
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Some people have not.
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Let s start at the top.
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I tried to give the giant pattern to save time so we could get into some of the more deeper pieces.
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But get people to understand how this all came about.
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I mean, you ve got expertise as a historian.
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You ve got expertise in finance.
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Get people to sense, how did you first come across these discoveries together for generations?
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And then how did fourth turning come about?
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Yeah, this was this is back in the late 80s.
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It s a long time ago.
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And Bill and I were looking at generational differences.
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I mean, we re boomers, right?
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Obsessed with generational differences.
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I mean, we all knew that there had been no generation like us since this planet was, you know, first created.
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So
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And we look back, we said, were there other times that this has ever happened?
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A big Promethean, war-winning generation that completely reshaped America, these very self-centered, idealistic kids growing up.
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And then, of course, at that time, we were aware that this generation coming up after us, cynical, pragmatic, right?
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Extinction.
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Yeah, Generation X really was, you know, they re in it for the money.
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And they just hated yuppies, you know?
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They hated disco and they hated yuppies.
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But we went back and found that this had happened again and again.
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And not only did it happen before, we went all the way back to the Great Migration into England back in the 1630s and looked at this entire panorama of how many centuries.
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and found again and again, not only were generations very distinct, and people at the time understood that generations were different.
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This is this myth that generational differences are just a product of our age.
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Not true.
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And what we found, that each generation has a different location in history.
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That makes all the difference.
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Because it s how old you are when a big event hits that shapes how you learn about it, right?
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If you re a child during a big traumatic event, what s your job?
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What s your social role?
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Stay out of the way.
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Don t bother adults.
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Keep it all to yourself, because no one wants to hear your complaints.
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Be helpful.
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Generally, a lot of repression goes on among kids.
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Talk about the silent generation today.
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You ever want to know why Joe Biden s generation,
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That whole group is so mannerly, so over-socialized, so considerate, so nice.
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This is the nicest generation of 80-somethings we re ever going to see in our lifetime.
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You wait until boomers reach their 80s, you re not going to want to say hello to them on the street.
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But they re nice today.
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Every phase of life they went through, they ve been nice.
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They were nice 30-somethings.
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They were nice 40-somethings.
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Because they were protected.
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But they had to keep it to themselves.
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They were over-socialized during the time of war.
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But this has happened since the beginning.
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Now, if you re just over the age of service, this is why even one year of birth
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Explain that.
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When you wrote your book, I remember reading, this grabbed me, during the Vietnam War, if you were born December 31st at 11.59 versus January 1st at 12.01, what would the difference be?
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Because you get sorted in different school classrooms, right?
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That determines which class you are, that determines whether you go to war or not,
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That determines whether you re laid off at your first job or not.
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And we know, economists tell us all the time, that makes huge life-cycle differences in how you later succeed economically.
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Whether you were drafted or not could be determined by one minute of birth.
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Exactly.
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So you do have generation... Now, not all generations have this, you know, knife-edge division.
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Occasionally, you have these kind of, you know, zones of transition.
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You have a lot of early wave Millennials today.
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People in their early 80s, maybe born in 83, 84, they call themselves Xennials.
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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.
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So even within generations, generations can be generations of trends.
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But my main point is that your role of life
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in your age determines how you react to that event.
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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.
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You become leader of a political institution.
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You become parents of your family.
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You re creating decisions in the community.
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So the overall lesson is,
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History shapes generations young, but then generations as they get older shape history.
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So it s a complete circle of life you see going on here.
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In fact, the big lesson of generations is 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.
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So we looked at this.
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We found that, for instance,
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We had constantly found that when you have this hero generation that completely reshapes a society, goes through a major war, society publicly reshapes who it is, that you have this generation born after the war that s very rebellious, idealistic, and so on, and knows nothing but affluence.
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And then the generation just after them is the cynical, detached.
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Anyway, you see this again and again.
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So what we learned from that
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Tony is that this is actually tied to a cycle of history itself.
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It s not just a cycle of generation.
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It s a cycle of history.
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Think about it.
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The great civic remakings of American history.
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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
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A lot of it happened in England at the time.
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Of course, at that time, late 17th century, all of the immigrants from the old world were almost entirely English-speaking.
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In fact, a lot of them actually were immigrants.
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About half of them were still immigrants.
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But my point is, it was a glorious revolution, and there was an enormous rebellion in the colonies, too.
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1670s, 1680s, that was the first enormous crisis in American history.
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And it was a time of great war, too.
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We were at war with New France.
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The French had settled all over Canada.
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So that was the first great crisis.
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And then about 80, 90 years later, we had the American Revolution.
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80, 90 years later, we had the Civil War.
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And I think I need not describe what the Civil War was for America, right?
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even absolute numbers, forget share of the population, by far the most deadly, deadlier than all the other conflicts combined.
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And then 80 or 90 years later, the Great Depression, World War II, 80 or 90 years later, guess what?
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We re right here.
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We re right here, and we started with the GFC.
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And you re right.
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Recent crises have started with economic downturns, and then they later proceed to other kind of system breakdowns.
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And finally, toward the climax of the crisis,
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you suddenly decide, the leadership decides, the entire community decides, you have to remake everything.
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You can t just solve this problem, that problem.
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It all needs to be remade.
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And by the end of World War II, FDR was going, at his last inaugural address, which was early in 1945, he basically said,
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Total war, total community.
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He wasn t hiding it.
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There was no wordsmiths back then.
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They were saying, go easy.
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The public doesn t want to hear the bad news.
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No, he was saying, there s going to be more danger.
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There are going to be more deaths.
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Get ready for it.
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We re reshaping the world.
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Things that would have been unimaginable back even in the late 1930s.
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And by the way, in the late 1930s,
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Most young people were still signing the Oxford Pledge on college campuses, declaring they ll never go to war.
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Everyone thought about World War I and what a horrible experience that was, right?
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We ll never go to war.
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Well, they were all at war now.
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We re going to remake the world.
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Commerce is going to be refashioned.
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World peace is going to be redone.
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We re going to remake the rules of the world, not just of American society.
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So by the end of that crisis, we reshaped humanity s relationship with technology.
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My God, we created the A-bomb, which is probably what put an end to the war.
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So we had atomic technology.
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We outproduced the rest of the world combined in this country.
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So we became, as Winston Churchill said at the end of the war, America stands at the summit of the world today.
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I mean, he was amazed.
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We reshaped the relationship between government and the economy, obviously.
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We reshaped the political role of citizen and nation.
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So the GI generation became a generation of citizen soldiers until the day they died.
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But this huge reshaping, which has even extended the world, what happened after World War II?
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Well, we founded the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, all of these institutions, NATO, all of these things we have today.
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We have been living for decades on institutions and infrastructure founded then.
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And by the way, Tony, this reminds me, because you had a question you asked me right before the event.
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You said, why don t we solve these problems in better times, right?
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Why don t we wait till it s a crisis?
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Why don t we wait till it s a crisis?
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And it s interesting.
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You can look at all of American history as a series of punctuated equilibriums.
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We solve all of our problems
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when conditions are worst.
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I mean, isn t that ironic?
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That s totally counterintuitive.
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If you ask most people, why don t we just choose a problem that you don t like about America today, right?
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I don t care what it is.
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I don t care whether it s we don t enforce immigration laws, our infrastructure is a disgrace.
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I mean, you go to foreign countries now, look at their airports compared to ours.
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I mean, it doesn t matter what you do, right?
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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.
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But you go in outrage after outrage, why don t we ever solve these problems?
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And you think, okay, when are we going to do it?
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Well, maybe on a sunny day, maybe that s it.
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We re just waiting for maybe a partisanship dies down.
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There s no recession.
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Everything is great, right?
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And if you think about that, all the experts can study it.
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We all come around the table and say, OK, I think at least this one problem will get a solution.
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Sounds reasonable, right?
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It never
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ever happens that way, Tony.
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It never happens that way.
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We solve all of these problems not on warm, sunny days.
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Dark, stormy days is when we solve these problems.
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We re backed into a corner.
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There are days like 1776 when Benjamin Franklin was telling all of his friends
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We got to hang together or we will all assuredly hang separately, right?
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And that s what he was telling everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence.
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You know what you ve just committed, right?
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You ve committed treason.
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You know what the penalty for that is.
2
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Well, why is that?
2
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And then at the end of that period, which is one of the worst periods, the 1780s, by the way, was a period of economic depression worse than the 30s, worse than the 30s.
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We had 150,000 Americans leave.
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That would be the equivalent of 7 million Americans today.
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Simply, these are the Tories.
2
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The American Revolution, by the way, was a civil war.
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It wasn t just a revolution.
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It was a civil war of American against American.
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Many of them left, particularly the professional classes.
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The loyalists.
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Yeah, the loyalists.
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And the old economy was in ruins.
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America actually fled the cities back to the country.
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That s how bad things were in the 1780s.
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So what do they do in that crisis?
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we invented a whole constitution.
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I mean, that was the miracle of 1787, right?
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We designed our constitution in that dark hour.
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And guess what?
2
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Over the next several decades, we had growing problems.
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We had problems with tariffs.
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We had problems with nullification.
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We had problems with foreign policy.
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And above all, we had the whole problem of slavery.
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Did we do anything about it, all that peace and prosperity that we had?
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No, we didn t do anything about it.
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It was all solved in 1861 to 1865 in four years of total war.
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When people were huddling in Washington, D.C., fearful that D.C.
2
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was about to be invaded at times, I mean,
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President Lincoln was suspending habeas corpus.
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He was rounding up and jailing thousands of people illegally, telling them what their charges were.
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So we had a real crisis in America, right?
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I remember when I was in junior high school, I had a shop-type teacher.
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I remember one day he was reading it.
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It reminded me of your book, because one of the great things about forth turning, and if you haven t read it, I still want you to make sure you read it.
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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.
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And then you ll read another one that s from 160 years ago.
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Well, I remember he was reading this article, and it was all about we re running out of oil, because I was growing up in the 70s, and there were lines.
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Some of you are old enough to remember.
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You had the license plate.
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I didn t have a car yet, but I didn t think I was ever going to have one.
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Because, you know, the number on the back, odd or even, determined whether you could get gas that day.
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That s how bad it was, right?
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And so he read this whole article from the New York Times about oil, ratable oil, and the darkening of the world, and how the whole world s going to go to shit.
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And at the end, it was from 80 years before, and it was whale oil.
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when we were based on whale oil.
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And he s like, and I ll never forget him saying, you know, necessity is the mother of invention.
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When we have to, we find answers.
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And by the way, how many of you found that in your own life?
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When you have to, right?
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That s when most people do it.
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Now, we work to do it more proactively.
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But crisis creates a breakthrough.
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If it doesn t kill you, it creates a breakthrough.
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And historically, that s been true.
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We re like, what s the purpose of crisis?
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In essence, it s what you re telling us.
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The purpose of crisis is that s how we transform.
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It is how we transform.
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But there is a different nature
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to the transformation as you go through the saeculum, right?
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Yes, please walk through that.
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Yeah, because I think we need to focus on that.
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I think so too.
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So coming out of the crisis, you go into what we call the high.
2
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That s the spring, right?
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The high, like the American high.
2
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That was actually William O Neill, famous U.S.
2
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historian.
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He actually described the years 1946 to 1964 as the American high.
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And I think many of you, if you haven t lived through it like I did as a kid, you kind of know what I m talking about.
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A period when the nation felt very optimistic, but in a certain way.
2
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And by the way, African-Americans is interesting.
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Terrible period for them.
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from the vantage point of the Civil Rights era, but actually in terms of economic achievement, one of the best periods ever for African-Americans, right?
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In terms of gains and family.
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They moved out of the South, for one thing, during World War II.
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It was the single best thing that ever happened to them.
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But a great time for America in many ways.
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It was a time of terrific conformity.
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You didn t want to be someone left out of the mainstream.
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That was true.
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But it was also a time, and I think we so much miss this today, when people felt that collectively there were more than the sum of their parts.
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And I think today, Tony, coming out of the third turning, kind of the opposite end, and still today, early in the fourth turning,
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we feel that collectively we are less than the sum of our parts.
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How often do people say there are such talented individuals out there?
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I mean, any of us, getting around, any of us can do better than the jackasses they have there in Washington, D.C.
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I mean, it s incredible, the incompetence and the dysfunction.
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How is it that they can be so bad and just take any random group of five of you and put you all together and say, we can agree on shit, right?
2
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So how does that happen?
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And it s a very different kind of problem.
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And that explains why we have awakenings and why we have crises.
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The awakening is to release the individual.
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That s what we do in awakenings.
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So the winter gets us to come together to fight the battle.
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We become optimistic because we don t go through that crap anymore and we re unified and we have this high and everything grows.
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But we lose the individual.
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So now the individual needs to pop up.
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That s our summertime.
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That s when there s internal strife.
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It s a very different kind of transformation.
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Now the generation that sometimes has a hard time with the awakening is the silent generation.
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Because they re all, you know, socialized to be conformist, socialized to go along.
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So they re torn, right?
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They re torn.
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Gen Xers are torn too today, but they re torn in the opposite direction.
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Because Gen Xers, and a lot of you are Xers, I define Xers as born 1961 to 1981, birth year.
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You look at the census, Census Bureau defines boomers as born 1946 to 1964.
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The census did it just to reflect fertility rates.
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We re talking about social generations.
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We got through a lot of reasons why 1943 to 1960 makes a lot more sense.
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So we defend that.
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We still do.
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So what Xers need to do, Xers are raised in an awakening.
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You put it rightly.
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No one gave a damn about them.
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They were latchkey kids.
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Their parents were, you know, discovering themselves.
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A lot of them had silent generation parents going through their midlife passages and suddenly wondering, my God, I m suddenly discovering myself.
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And boomers were just having fun, right?
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And the entire country was into self.
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This was, you know, the self revolution.
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And so Xers are kind of left alone.
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And they raise themselves, right?
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And so exers 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.
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And that leads to the pragmatism and the cynicism of big, broad,
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They ve never worked for them.
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And by the way, all these big institutions supposed to help everyone never helped them.
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I mean, no one gave a damn about kids when they were young.
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And as soon as they started graduating from high school in 19, you know,
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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.
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So Gen Xers are these dumb kids, left alone, under socialized, the opposite of silent generation, right, over socialized.
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And they said, that s OK.
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That s all right.
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You don t have to like us.
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We re just going to go on and get things done our own way.
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And one of our goals is to stay off the community s radar screen, because the last thing we want to do is get regulated, taxed, identified.
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You know what I mean?
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Exers in the natural individualist because of the way they ve been raised because the season in which they grow up And you see this again and again in history.
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You were a child During awakenings you re used to taking life one-on-one on your own.
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Yep so where the problem with the silent was moving from
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The group was everything.
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The group, in the silent generation, the 50s, everything was about adjusting yourself to meet the expectations of others.
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You know, it was Dale Carnegie and, you know, being the kind of person that others wanted you to be.
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So it was all about the other directed self, you know, the social ethic.
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The opposite was true for Xers.
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Just do your own thing, right?
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Do the do.
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You know, just obey your thirst.
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I don t know, whatever the hell it was.
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Just do it.
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Just do it.
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So you got this exercise, right?
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Pragmatic, take care of themselves.
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But they have to undergo the opposite adjustment.
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And by the way, the peers of John Adams and George Washington had to do the same thing.
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And the peers of George Patton
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And Harry Truman had to do the same thing.
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These were both craggy, pragmatic, individualistic children, left alone.
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They came of age during the Roaring Twenties, a lot of them.
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They tended to be Republican all their lives, by the way, the lost generation.
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They detested a big state and everything.
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But they had to figure out what the hell they were going to do during World War II.
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Everyone was banding together.
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How does an individualist
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grow up or adjust at a time when community is refining itself.
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We are now at a time when groups are refining themselves.
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We re at a time of growing tribalism in America.
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And we re at a time when everyone is going back to the groups.
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I ll tell you one sign of that.
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Extended generation families.
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They re everywhere today.
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Everyone is reverting back into the extended family, right?
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Millennials, I mean,
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Gen Xs used to boomerang back home.
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Millennials don t boomerang back home.
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They just never leave.
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And now you ve got older people coming back to live at home, aunts and uncles, everyone.
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Why is it that larger homes have had their prices go up so and they re not coming back?
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Remember with millennials originally, we said it would be the mini homes that would go up more than price.
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They said they d never buy real estate.
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They re not going to form families.
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I remember people saying that, going, you don t understand generations.
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And now they re buying like crazy.
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But not only are they buying, and very often moving with their parents, but they want larger homes.
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And people did not anticipate.
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So larger homes.
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Look at neighborhoods now.
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Look at political tribalism, which is growing unbelievably today in America, right?
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Red zone, blue zone, these are now mega brands.
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And people are self-sorting across America into these things.
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This is what s happening.
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Before you go further, I want you to help the X generation in this room understand the Millennials here.
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Because the X generation was underprotected, and again, I was that stage, I was 1960, but I have
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The memories somewhere in my psyche, probably because it was recapped every year in those days, of Kennedy and the optimism of that time.
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Because I was three years old when it was happening.
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But I was raised by myself.
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I had to raise myself.
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I had to figure it out.
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So I had this optimism, but the pragmatism.
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But the way you raise your children usually as a whole is different, because since you were underprotected, that became baby on board.
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If you looked at movies in the 70s, babies were very different.
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They were like evil little bastards.
3
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It was Rosemary s baby, right?
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It was the omen.
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It was somebody s head twirling around the exorcist, and suddenly it s three men and a baby, baby on board.
3
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Talk a little bit about that transition.
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Why millennials are the way they are, because they ve done nothing wrong, they ve just been raised differently.
3
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The golden age of child-as-devil horror movies really lasted from about 1965 to about 1982, so exactly when X-ers were small kids.
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I mean, that was the most negative image of small kids in American history.
3
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There were no G-rated movies.
3
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You had to drive 500 miles just to find Benji.
3
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But my point was, so that was what was going on.
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And the phrase, you can do an Ngram search if you want, but the phrase, children are special, was literally no mention going all the way up through the late 60s, 1970, until about 1977, 78.
3
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No one ever wrote that phrase in a published work.
3
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So suddenly it began rising, and after 1982 or three with Millennials, it just goes into the stratosphere, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So suddenly Millennials are surrounded in these cuddly baby movies, and these signs of a baby on board, and minivans with 12 different ways to buckle the precious kids into their seats.
3
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Back when X-ers were small, you just told kids to do this.
3
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That was good enough.
3
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But so all of this has changed.
3
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But this shapes generations permanently.
3
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Here s the thing.
3
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Archaeologists know this.
3
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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
3
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You know, a really lush spring and summer, a lot of water, a little thin ring.
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That s when it went through the drought.
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We are all like that.
3
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We are all like trees.
3
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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?
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They all have the same ring pattern because they all went through the same thing.
3
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So it s the same thing.
3
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Generations are like trees in that respect.
3
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And we all internalize, we have a record inside ourselves of when you went through these different seasons.
3
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But the big challenge is,
3
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Again, I want to come back to this because this is a challenge of the crisis.
3
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You look around the world today.
3
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By the way, this isn t just America.
3
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Why is the whole world moving away from sort of individualistic liberal democracy where everyone s individual rights are protected?
3
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The whole world is moving toward populism, moving toward guarantees for the group.
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You talk to millennials.
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They want security.
3
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They want community.
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They don t want that rugged individualism, though a lot of Xers, you know, recall.
3
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Right.
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It s it s a shift in perspective.
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And they re also raised.
3
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You know, there s a there s a great book called The Coddling of America that you haven t read.
3
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It should also read by Jonathan.
3
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Jonathan Haidt.
3
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Yeah.
3
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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.
3
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Safety wasn t a question before.
3
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But now everything is about your safety and your security.
3
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And on the milk cans or the milk bottles that most people did for their cereal every morning was a child that was missing.
3
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They started that during that time.
3
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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.
3
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So all that was is constant fear and uncertainty.
3
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And then the constant piece, it magnified that when we get to the point of social media, when around 19, 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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it creates a radical new culture.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I want to plant a seed for the millennials right now, so you hear it.
3
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The millennials are our next heroes.
3
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They will, when we hit this next crisis, just like the flappers, the ones we talked about, great generation, I have great excitement for the millennials because they have a different level of relationship to technology, of networking.
3
SPEAKER_00
I d like to make sure we talk about that.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re really going to be an important part of the solution.
3
SPEAKER_01
But they also have a different relationship with each other.
3
SPEAKER_01
True.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s the point.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s how they differ from Xers.
3
SPEAKER_01
Millennials really get it.
3
SPEAKER_01
They believe in doing everything as a community, and they believe that people need a simple set of rules, prescriptions.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s just follow the same rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
That way we avoid any of these problems.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s just get everyone on the same page.
3
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, if certain group of people refuses to be on the same page, I was going to talk about this eventually.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let s have it out.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
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Because it has to happen, it s going to happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because it is immoral or wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you have a different point of view, there s something wrong with you.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not we have different points of view.
4
SPEAKER_01
My view is the way.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your point of view shouldn t be.
4
SPEAKER_01
There shouldn t be free speech.
4
SPEAKER_01
Who in their lifetime thought we d be hearing that from liberals?
4
SPEAKER_00
We re all about free speech.
4
SPEAKER_00
But this is going on around the world.
4
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Everywhere around, Xi Jinping in China, Narendra Modi in India.
4
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You go look at Abe Shinzo and sort of the transformation in Japan.
4
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But you look increasingly at Europe.
4
SPEAKER_00
Le Pen, unbelievably, she s probably one election away from winning in France.
4
SPEAKER_00
But my point is, all of these societies are becoming more populist around a kind of cultural, social center gravity in the nation.
4
SPEAKER_00
No one really cares so much about the marginalized groups anymore.
4
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Everyone is focusing on the majoritarian center.
4
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Let s get the rules right for them, so at least basic things work again.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s happening all around.
4
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And we sometimes think, it s just America that has this problem.
4
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It s not.
4
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This generational pattern now increasingly involves much of the world.
4
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And the ones who are 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.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re the ones that are on television doing that.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, just to point out,
4
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you saw the same thing happen during the 1920s.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you re right about the 1990s.
4
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While Xers were 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 Xer, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Millennials were watching Barney and his friends, and Blue s Clues, and they were going to this huge renaissance of Disney movies, like Lion King and all that.
4
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So they were enjoying this very protected culture, even while young adults were all into their wildness.
4
SPEAKER_00
You saw the same thing happening in the 1920s.
4
SPEAKER_00
So during the 1920s, when the older generation, young adults, with the flappers, and they re doing
4
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you know, barnstorming and rum running and all the things that they...
4
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the veterans who came back from World War I were doing, the peers of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they were a wild crowd, and they drank a lot.
4
SPEAKER_00
So they were a wild generation.
4
SPEAKER_00
They put the roar into the roaring 20s.
4
SPEAKER_00
But meanwhile, the kids were being protected.
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The first Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, 4-H clubs.
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And by the time you had, for 20-year-olds, the first Miss Americas in 1923, we were building
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huge college stadiums for the younger generation, right?
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So this would have been the equivalent of the millennials.
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And they were all becoming used to the spirit of optimism, cooperation, national unity.
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So finally, when we had the great crash, a huge plurality of them voted
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for FDR, and they voted for the New Deal.
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And so the New Deal was incredibly favored by younger people, just like, I mean, you ve all seen the polls.
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You see how millennials all vote for the Democratic Party.
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Xers are now actually arguably the most pro-Republican group out there, and like the last generation, who has always leaned more to the Republican Party.
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What Xers need to do is adjust themselves to this new communitarian ethos.
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Because one way or another, they re going to have to live with it, right?
4
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That s where the country s going.
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And I think that s going to be the interesting transformation.
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And so people who are into personal transformation.
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So in fact, I was going to ask you, Tony.
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It was actually one of my questions.
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See, I came with my own list, too.
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So the question I was going to ask, you re a person who has spent.
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your entire career, really, perfecting to an unequaled level, in my opinion, personal transformation.
4
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I mean, I wonder, but I m sure you would disagree, how can you take it any further than you ve taken it?
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But I know you have things you still want to do, right?
4
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But in other words, and a lot of your base has always been Xers, right?
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Yes.
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And that s what they re into, personal individual transformation.
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Boomers and Xers.
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Yeah, boomers and Xers.
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What about your next stage, collective transformation?
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Yeah, I think when we do that, that s what we do with groups, because we create that collective value system.
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How many know what I m talking about?
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Like at a date with destiny and like that.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Millennials find it very comfortable as far as that s concerned.
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And everyone wants to grow, but millennials are also entering a stage, just like they said they weren t going to buy houses.
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I remember saying, you re idiots to say that.
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They look like they re going to buy houses.
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They re going to buy homes.
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But what s different about it is, like you said, a bigger home, a different environment.
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But now they re entering that stage of life 40 years old, 35 years old, where they start evaluating.
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In my experience, transformation in the 20s, you think you re, as I said earlier, you re invincible.
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When you get to your mid-30s and you have relationships, and then all of a sudden you have a family, and then you have kids, and then all of a sudden things look differently.
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So I m seeing that group just as responsive as previous groups, but they like doing it collectively.
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Let s be less individualistic.
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And they don t want it done a certain way.
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They don t want to be unsafe.
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You have a problem in America where public speech has become
4
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So coarse.
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Or comedy.
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So wild, right?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I saw even in reaction to this recent school shooting in Texas, congressmen are trading F-bombs with each other on Twitter.
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Congressmen.
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And blaming each other while kids are just dying.
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Right.
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But the point is the level of discourse is degraded to such a point.
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And it reminds me, by the way, of the 1850s.
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We had the same thing.
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We had congressmen actually shooting and knifing each other in the middle.
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And we know where that went.
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It went to war.
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But my point is that this level of incivility, what happens after the crisis with the generation that actually has to fight it, they clean up everything.
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Language is homogenized.
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You look at language, political language of the people after actually fighting World War II,
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particularly by the 1950s, early 1960s, it s all homogenized, cleaned up.
4
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It s your Walter Cronkite, you know, good morning America, everything was great today.
4
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So this has a cycle too.
4
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Because after a crisis, there s so much pain, people want something completely new.
4
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Yes, and this is why
4
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Identity politics after the crisis is never an issue because no one cares about your own individual identity anymore.
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After what we all did together to get through this thing, your own little identity
4
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It doesn t matter.
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And by the way, these are all the great melting pot periods of American history.
4
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I mean, you went through World War II.
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You re no longer a hyphenated American.
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You re no longer an Italian-American, a Polish-American.
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We had all those Eastern European hyphenated.
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They were all just Americans.
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Think about cultural appropriation, that term that s been created.
4
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America is nothing but a melting pot.
4
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Everything we do has come from somewhere else.
4
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And we used to honor that and think it was a beautiful thing.
4
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Now it s part of the crisis creation is that sense of division.
4
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And if you look at Ray Dalio, many of you know Ray, and he s talking about the changes in the world order that come, there s three principles that determine that.
4
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One, are you spending more than you re earning, or earning more than you re spending, right?
4
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We re obviously spending way more than we re earning.
4
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Number two, level of internal conflict in the country.
4
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And number three, a rising power.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, rising power takes advantage because your economics are gone and you re completely divided.
4
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And that s unfortunately where this country is.
4
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Now, it doesn t mean it has to stay there, but that s where this country is right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
So tell us a little bit about, I want to go into the crisis in a second, but I want you to just, if you would, you use Jungian archetypes, and you kind of alluded to them a little bit here.
4
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And what I found interesting about that is, for example, boomers, when they started out, were very permissive, and then later in life, they become very moralistic and very intense.
4
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Many people start out one way and end up a different way.
4
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Can you explain those four archetypes and how you see them attached to these generations that we re familiar with, and all generations you ve seen, and how they start one way and why do they become sometimes almost the opposite?
4
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So yes, we attach to these four types of generation archetypal names.
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So for the generation that is born right after the crisis, we call them the profit archetype.
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And that would be, for instance, boomers.
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But we ve had many other examples.
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The original Puritans were actually an example of a profit archetype generation.
4
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And what are the qualities of a profit?
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I think you re familiar with.
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Indulgently raised in a very secure era.
5
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They come of age during these times of spiritual awakening.
5
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A lot of protests, a lot of social divisions, and they break through.
5
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They try to, you know,
5
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They want to individualize the country.
5
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They want to free individuals from this sort of tyranny of the collective that everyone s been enslaved with.
5
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And they don t understand why we had a collective.
5
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You had to have gone through the war to understand that, right?
5
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And they didn t go through it.
5
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That s why they re different.
5
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So they want to free everyone from that.
5
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And then they go through the fall season, which is a period of individualism.
5
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This would have been like the late 80s, the 90s, the early 00s.
5
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Also when financial markets go crazy, opportunity like that goes crazy at those times.
5
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Right.
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And it s the time, and recently it s true.
5
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I mean, 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. 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.
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The decline of the family, the decline of the nation, the decline of schools, the decline...
5
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So, but they become more moralistic during this period.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and why is that?
5
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They go from very crazy, almost individualistic and permissive, to moralistic and controlling.
5
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Because they realize that those idealistic principles aren t really being realized.
5
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So the moralism
5
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starts, and then they become the moralistic elders of the crisis.
5
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We sometimes call them great champions.
5
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FDR was that.
5
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Lincoln was that.
5
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Sam Adams was that.
5
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And then the Xer generation is the nomad archetype, right?
5
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Nomad, alone, right?
5
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Individual, all of life.
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It s just kind of a one-on-one encounter.
5
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I find I used to teach history to Gen Xers, and I found the only way to interest Gen Xers in history was to have them read biography.
5
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They all understood.
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A life of an individual, that I can understand.
5
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Tell me about social trends and all that stuff.
5
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It makes no sense to me.
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I don t have anything in common.
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But you tell me about an individual struggle, I get it.
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So they re the nomad archetype.
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And what are their qualities?
5
SPEAKER_01
Their qualities are, and then their background, underprotected to sort of taking a life as an individual, pragmatism, cynicism, get things done really well, break things down to the simplest components.
5
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efficacy in execution is their strength.
5
SPEAKER_00
The generation before often will create breakthroughs, but the people who make those breakthroughs real is that Nomad generation.
5
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They re the ones that perfect it and refine it.
5
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They take Microsoft and it s built, but these guys come in and they take it to the next level, Google, whatever.
5
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Nomad are the generations.
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We re very lucky to have nomads, by the way.
5
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Our nation really hinges on them because they are the ones in midlife during the crisis.
5
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They determined whether we actually get through the damn thing alive.
5
SPEAKER_01
And while these old aquarians, you know, sometimes they want to blow up the world, right?
5
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Because they re moralistic, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Moralistic.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s just kill Putin.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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Right.
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You know, no matter what it means to the rest of the world, I mean, global war of the X generation is like more pragmatic about it.
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And this generation is the one in real leadership position in crisis.
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They are the generals.
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They are the ones who are actually the hands-on leaders, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And they were the – we were talking about them earlier.
5
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They were the Omar Bradleys, the General Prattens, the Dwight D. Eisenhowers, laconic pros, just everything to the point, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Or Harry Truman, who never had a comma in any of his sentences.
5
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Just very simple utterances, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So always to the point, though, right?
5
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And then you have the next one is the hero generation.
5
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And we know their strengths.
5
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community achievement.
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And it s the GI generation.
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And it s the Republican generation that created the United States of America, that fought the American Revolution and created the Constitution.
5
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Now, they are wonderful because they create these long-term institutions.
5
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They re institution defenders.
5
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They represent the community.
5
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They represent always optimism, the triumph of technology, but technology together, not like nomad technology.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s an individual cell phone.
5
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No, the GI generation, technology was always infrastructure that reformed our public spaces.
5
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We hardly have a concept of that anymore.
5
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And probably during the crisis, we ll have to actually rebuild that infrastructure.
5
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And then finally, the artist archetype.
5
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These are the children.
5
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It should be the Z generation now.
5
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Or the silent generation.
5
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Silent generation, which in other words, these are the people that during the war, during the crisis, they re protected.
5
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Their job is just shut up and deal with it because you re being supported by the elders that are fighting the war.
5
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And they develop very early on an ear for sensitivity, for fairness.
5
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So very often, the generation that s young
5
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develops a talent for the things that older generations aren t perceiving.
5
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And that s what s fascinating to me.
5
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And you see that today, by the way, among the group of kids I call homelanders or Generation Z. You find that they re very caring.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re very much into kindness.
5
SPEAKER_01
In a world today which is all into
5
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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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a world, you know, half of Americans today believe a civil war is very likely.
5
SPEAKER_01
This wasn t even on the radar screen 10 years ago.
5
SPEAKER_01
Half of America is saying that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we see, too, the possibilities of global war now rising.
5
SPEAKER_01
So we re at this place now.
5
SPEAKER_01
This younger generation senses that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s why they re into nuance, kindness, seeing the kinds of distinctions which are lost on older generation.
5
SPEAKER_01
The silent generation is the same way, by the way.
5
SPEAKER_01
So these are the different archetypes.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a couple of- And they keep rotating.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they keep rotating.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a couple of them are big.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you look at...
5
SPEAKER_01
Joseph Campbell, who wrote about myth, and Lucas with Star Wars, and we know it was done on Joseph Campbell.
5
SPEAKER_01
But you see in myth,
5
SPEAKER_01
Every phase of life is occupied in the same order as we re talking about historically.
5
SPEAKER_01
You always find that the young hero, like Arthur, always has a much older wizard, like Merlin, who helps him.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s always the prophet archetype in old age when the hero is coming of age.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then when it s reversed, when it s the other way,
5
SPEAKER_01
When you have an elder hero and a young prophet, that s the storyline of the founding of religions.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s more like Orpheus or Jesus or Buddha.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like Pontius Pilate or Hammurabi is sort of this very secure but spiritually soul-dead world.
5
SPEAKER_01
and a young Awakener, a young prophet challenging that, speaking truth to power.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, they re both heroes, but in almost opposite directions.
5
SPEAKER_01
One is reshaping the inner world, the other is reshaping the outer world.
5
SPEAKER_01
The hero reshapes the outer world, the realm of kingdoms, the realm of society, making new collective infrastructure.
5
SPEAKER_01
The prophet is reshaping the inner world of culture.
5
SPEAKER_01
By the way, in America today, when we talk about
5
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Politics, we always say post-war, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
We say, oh yeah, that s the way political institutions have been post-war.
5
SPEAKER_01
We mean World War II.
5
SPEAKER_01
We talk about culture, we talk about since the 60s.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s how we periodize things, depending on whether we re talking about inner world or outer world.
5
SPEAKER_00
Tell us, where do you see us now?
5
SPEAKER_00
2008, you see as the beginning of the winter, the crisis period.
5
SPEAKER_00
It started with finance.
5
SPEAKER_00
We didn t really solve it.
5
SPEAKER_00
We just printed more money.
5
SPEAKER_00
And now we re starting to get around the end of that aspect.
5
SPEAKER_00
Usually, traditionally, there s some form of war.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is that a war with China?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is that a cyber war?
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, no one knows for sure, obviously.
5
SPEAKER_00
But tell us what your point of view is of where we are in the cycle, and how long does winter last?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is this another seven or eight years based on history?
5
SPEAKER_01
phases of life are actually getting broader recently.
5
SPEAKER_01
We actually see a dilation in phases of life.
5
SPEAKER_01
Kids are taking longer to become adults.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you all know that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to remind you.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re probably still living with you, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, and then you see people are
6
SPEAKER_00
are political leaders at older and older ages.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, look at Pelosi, look at Biden.
6
SPEAKER_00
We ve never seen people at that age.
6
SPEAKER_00
So in other words, phases of life are dilating.
6
SPEAKER_00
Remember, it s the length of a phase of life that determines generational length.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it also determines turning length.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we think that after actually compressing for the last century and a half, they re actually beginning to dilate now.
6
SPEAKER_01
So in earlier history, things might have been a 25-year season.
6
SPEAKER_01
They ve gone back to kind of a 20, and you see it starting to expand a little bit.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we think this fourth turning we re currently in, starting in 2008, will probably last till around early 2030s.
6
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so we have a ways to go.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think almost certainly we re going to have more... All of these periods are characterized by enormous degree of financial and economic instability, not just the opening crash, like the crash of 29, the crash of 2008, but also during the period.
6
SPEAKER_00
I talked about the 1780s before.
6
SPEAKER_00
What about the recession of 1936?
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, the stock market went down in 1936 by 55 percent.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you want and by the way, inflation.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you talk about inflation during fourth turnings.
6
SPEAKER_00
We haven t seen anything yet.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I m convinced that Jerome Powell is not going to stop.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think he s going to go all the way.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s kind of an interesting game there.
6
SPEAKER_00
Do we end up with a recession?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, the only way he s going to be able to suppress demand is by creating a recession.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t think there s any question about that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so that will bring interest rates down.
6
SPEAKER_00
But then you have a problem where Congress isn t going to be able to do anything either.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is going to be like Volcker without the Novocain.
6
SPEAKER_00
Congress will not be able to help.
6
SPEAKER_00
Congress will not be able to create those huge deficits while Fed monetary policy is squeezing inflation out of the system.
6
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, we now have a very small generation coming into the workplace, very large generation leaving.
6
SPEAKER_00
So over the 2020s, there is zero net growth in working age population.
6
SPEAKER_00
I just want to remind you, zero net growth.
6
SPEAKER_00
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?
6
SPEAKER_00
So we have a demographic situation, a monetary policy situation, and an inability of Congress to act.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ll tell you why Congress can t act, why Congress cannot do any stimulus.
6
SPEAKER_00
which you d think they would, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
The reason is because debt is so high.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, debt is now up to about 104, 105% of GDP, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
That s where we were at the end of World War II.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s where we ve done just since 2008.
6
SPEAKER_00
We went from 35% to over 100% of GDP in deficit.
6
SPEAKER_00
But we didn t fight a total war.
6
SPEAKER_00
God knows what we did.
6
SPEAKER_00
But we re there.
6
SPEAKER_00
The future deficit projections that CBO does, and by the way, I review this to all my clients.
6
SPEAKER_00
I do this once a year, so I go over them all, 30-year CBO projections.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re hugely dependent now on interest rate assumptions.
6
SPEAKER_00
As those real interest rate assumptions go up and inflation expectations goes up, those things balloon to infinity.
6
SPEAKER_00
So guess what?
6
SPEAKER_00
At the same time while Jerome Powell is increasing those interest rates and everyone is suddenly acknowledging those inflation expectations that are going into effect,
6
SPEAKER_00
that will completely spike any hope that Congress has of running any deficits.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because we re dependent on foreign investors who keep buying our bonds.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, we have about 40% of US treasuries are owned by foreigners today.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you can have a period of inflation in products and probably deflation of assets.
6
SPEAKER_00
simultaneously.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is very bad.
6
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, you have to be very careful.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know if someone s going to talk about this later, about where to invest in a 430.
6
SPEAKER_00
Tell us your perspective.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, first of all, get out of nominally denominated
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you get out of those and the whole business of You know
6
SPEAKER_00
sort of the parity arrangement where you do the stocks and bonds together because when one rises, the other goes down.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s completely collapsing.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s no longer true.
6
SPEAKER_00
So basically, you get out of that, and then you get out of all the high risk stuff.
6
SPEAKER_00
You get out of high beta, high leverage.
6
SPEAKER_00
You kind of go down the list of everything that s sort of bad for you.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then you also get out of stuff that probably isn t going to do well in the future, like the communications sector and stuff, which is just tremendously overvalued.
6
SPEAKER_00
Basically, high multiples is the other thing you look for.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you get out of that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And what do you get into?
6
SPEAKER_00
You get into things.
6
SPEAKER_00
You get into commodities.
6
SPEAKER_00
You get into real estate.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you get into sectors that are probably undervalued in a fourth turning.
6
SPEAKER_00
Manufacturing, materials.
6
SPEAKER_00
and possibly energy.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think energy is actually looking good now, particularly because everyone s being forced to get out of it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Makes it kind of a buy.
6
SPEAKER_00
We obviously have a problem.
6
SPEAKER_00
God knows what s going to happen to food prices.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if you re in materials, that means producing ammonia.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know what ammonia is used for.
6
SPEAKER_00
Energy is needed for agriculture.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
You obviously, all the other things apply.
6
SPEAKER_00
Diversify yourself everywhere.
6
SPEAKER_00
The most important thing, though, in a fourth turning is to know where your investments are.
6
SPEAKER_00
Be very wary of stuff where you don t know what the hell it is.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, I m talking about if you understand, you know, Web3 or NFTs or
6
SPEAKER_00
If you really want to spend, and if you really think you understand, you know, Bored Apes, Yacht Club, go ahead, but... Anybody see what the overall price of NFTs has come to?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Down 90% right now.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, anyway, so I ve never recommended that.
6
SPEAKER_00
But my point is, get out of that stuff, because you don t know where your money is.
6
SPEAKER_00
By the way, the whole valuation of that was generated by negative real interest rates.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re unlikely to see that again, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
What are the most important things we can do to prepare and anticipate?
6
SPEAKER_00
Personally, other than the financial side, your family.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s number one.
6
SPEAKER_00
Just know who your family is.
6
SPEAKER_00
Get back on good relations with people that you may have not had good relations with.
6
SPEAKER_00
And your chosen family as well, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, your chosen family.
6
SPEAKER_00
Everything about your sort of elective community.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, whoever you re living with.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because that will become very important.
6
SPEAKER_01
Your network would be everything.
6
SPEAKER_01
A real network, not a fake network, not a Facebook network, but a network of people that you can count on and count on you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Real people.
6
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you don t have one, find one.
6
SPEAKER_00
Generate one.
6
SPEAKER_00
Reputation matters in a fourth turning.
6
SPEAKER_00
And by the way,
6
SPEAKER_00
Conventional values come back in a fourth turning.
6
SPEAKER_00
Look at any fourth turning.
6
SPEAKER_00
The songs have become popular, the movies.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re corny, they re schmaltzy, they re reaffirming.
6
SPEAKER_00
No one s transgressing anymore in a fourth turning.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no benefit in that.
6
SPEAKER_00
No one gives a damn about all that stuff anymore, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And so if you look at the kinds of movies that were big in the late 30s, or certainly during World War II,
6
SPEAKER_00
And art itself, culture, transforms into propaganda.
6
SPEAKER_00
Hollywood moved to Washington during World War II.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, everyone needed to make something that was for the cause.
6
SPEAKER_00
We all became used to that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Millennials, by the way, are well-primed for that.
6
SPEAKER_00
They all understand art for the cause.
6
SPEAKER_00
So this is also important.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I think also one other thing is, and this is very important for all the Xers out there,
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
One thing that s very important in every fourth turning is being able to influence and talk to the people that are redrafting and re-legislating all of the laws and regulations that are going to reshape your industry.
6
SPEAKER_00
All the way down to the school boards.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, we ve seen that recently, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
But you need to know because politics can reshape your world overnight in a fourth turning.
6
SPEAKER_00
You need to be connected.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I know a lot of experts say, I hate politics.
6
SPEAKER_00
I hate all those guys.
7
SPEAKER_01
Everything they do is just, you know, ruins everything, certainly in my life.
7
SPEAKER_01
But this is survival.
7
SPEAKER_01
Think about it that way.
7
SPEAKER_01
Just think of it as an extra survival code.
7
SPEAKER_00
So who you know is pretty critical.
7
SPEAKER_01
Who you have a relationship is really critical.
7
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
7
SPEAKER_01
So these are, I don t know, these are the things that I think are important.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do we know when we re coming out of a fourth term?
7
SPEAKER_00
By the way, I know that we ve uplifted you all with your future, compelling future.
7
SPEAKER_00
But isn t it better to know and anticipate than to get struck and react?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes?
7
SPEAKER_00
So the question is, what follows a fourth turning is a new time, a new springtime, a new high, a new optimism.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do we know when we ve turned the corner out of this fourth turning that we re in right now?
7
SPEAKER_01
That will be like a flood.
7
SPEAKER_01
You will know.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know why?
7
SPEAKER_01
Because every fourth turning, its final climax, is absolutely history changing.
7
SPEAKER_01
So toward the end of the fourth, fourth turnings can sometimes build, like the 30s did, like this one is.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s building, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
It s this crescendo of interest.
7
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, every election today is a national election.
7
SPEAKER_01
This isn t like the 1990s when you could just be a kind of a flaky third party candidate or so and just sort of a, no.
7
SPEAKER_01
Everything now is, you re either red zone or blue zone.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t care if you re running for dog catcher, you re running for, you know, on the school board, it s all now polarized because the only thing that matters now, by the way, it s not like the 1990s.
7
SPEAKER_01
There are a lot of arguments, people trying to persuade other people to change your mind.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m in Washington, D.C.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s where I am, politics.
7
SPEAKER_01
No one in DC is anymore arguing with each other.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why?
7
SPEAKER_01
They ve already made up their minds.
7
SPEAKER_01
They ve made up their minds.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it s amazing.
7
SPEAKER_00
So Tip O Neill and- Those guys used to fight like hell in Congress and go have a beer together.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now they don t speak to the other side.
7
SPEAKER_01
They don t speak.
7
SPEAKER_01
They don t socialize.
7
SPEAKER_01
They have nothing to talk about.
7
SPEAKER_01
And you can understand, they have nothing to talk about.
7
SPEAKER_01
They re in completely different worldviews.
7
SPEAKER_01
And their visions of America s future
7
SPEAKER_01
are mutually exclusive, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, this is the danger point for civil war.
7
SPEAKER_01
You talk 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, she went to Rwanda, she went to Cambodia, she s been to, certainly, all around, all the stands, and then down in Africa and so on.
7
SPEAKER_01
She says,
7
SPEAKER_01
No one ever sees it coming.
7
SPEAKER_01
She s interviewed, I don t know how many people.
7
SPEAKER_01
She said they never think it s going to happen in their country, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And this is something- You ve 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 red states.
7
SPEAKER_00
If you poll people today, you will find
7
SPEAKER_01
that of all the people they don t want to live with, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
This is more than living next to someone of another religion, another race.
7
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t matter.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
So this is the level of polarization.
7
SPEAKER_01
And again, if you don t know history, you don t know where we ve been.
7
SPEAKER_01
Go back and read about the 1850s, how all of America became separated.
7
SPEAKER_01
The churches in America separated in the late 1840s.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then suddenly, the national political parties died.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, first it was the Whig Party that went out in the early 1850s.
7
SPEAKER_01
In 1858, it was the Democratic Party that basically disintegrated.
7
SPEAKER_01
So by 1860, you just simply had purely regional parties.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that was before the Civil War started.
7
SPEAKER_01
So think about it.
7
SPEAKER_01
This is happening.
7
SPEAKER_01
We see this happening, this possibility.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now, the other possibility is external conflict.
7
SPEAKER_01
We see that rising as well, given all these new populist nations around the world.
7
SPEAKER_01
And they re all, by the way, run with post-crisis leaders like Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi.
7
SPEAKER_01
These are great champions, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
So the possibility of global conflict is also rising.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now, which will it be?
7
SPEAKER_01
It could be totally one, totally the other, or sometimes a little of both.
7
SPEAKER_01
American Revolution is a little of both.
7
SPEAKER_01
We were fighting Americans against Britain, but it was also Americans against Americans at the same time.
7
SPEAKER_01
The loyalists versus the revolutionaries.
7
SPEAKER_01
The 1930s had a strong almost Civil War component.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the 1930s are terrible.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, cities were full of violence, Pinkertons against communists and socialists on the unions, particularly when you had the sit-down strikes in the late 50s.
7
SPEAKER_01
By the way, back then, Republicans could truthfully claim
7
SPEAKER_01
that young adults were card-carrying communists and socialists.
7
SPEAKER_01
They really were.
7
SPEAKER_01
They were joining the Communist and Socialist Party during the Great Depression.
7
SPEAKER_01
And they could truthfully claim that the other side, once it captured government, would try to reshape the country, which it did with the New Deal.
7
SPEAKER_01
So any of you who complain about millennials, it could have been worse.
7
SPEAKER_01
You could have had young GIs.
7
SPEAKER_01
And they did.
7
SPEAKER_01
A lot of them joined strong leftist organizations.
7
SPEAKER_00
So after a crisis, there s usually, in the summertime, the awakening, there s a cultural change.
7
SPEAKER_00
After a crisis, there is a change worldwide, the structure of how the world relates to each other.
7
SPEAKER_00
What is your view of where we are and where we re heading?
7
SPEAKER_00
What s the timeline of these things that you re seeing?
7
SPEAKER_00
And what makes you optimistic on the other side of this?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because it might be helpful if people know that no war goes forever, even though it may sound forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
No pandemic, as we said, goes on forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, no night is forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s always the daytime, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And it always follows it, thank God.
7
SPEAKER_00
So tell us a little bit about what you see happening and then what s the other side look like?
7
SPEAKER_01
You cannot know in advance, okay, such as the chaotic nature.
7
SPEAKER_01
There are certain patterns you can tell.
7
SPEAKER_01
You can tell the timing of this whole thing, when it will get worse, when it will resolve and so on.
7
SPEAKER_01
But internal versus external?
7
SPEAKER_01
You don t know that.
7
SPEAKER_01
You can t predict, because it could flip one way or the other, interestingly, as we saw in the 30s to the 40s.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, who would have predicted that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Who would have predicted that after the second New Deal and after FDR, we go Madison Square Garden jammed with 10,000 people, and he would get up there and he says,
7
SPEAKER_01
I know that the capitalists and the Robert Barons, they hate me.
7
SPEAKER_01
And all these Republicans, they hate me.
7
SPEAKER_01
And he said, I glory in their hatred.
7
SPEAKER_01
And 10,000 people screaming.
7
SPEAKER_01
That was the partisanship in 1936.
7
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, when Roosevelt won, Republicans were almost completely wiped out in Congress.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there was only like,
7
SPEAKER_01
14 Republican senators left in the Senate.
7
SPEAKER_01
So in other words, we re talking about what happened back then.
7
SPEAKER_01
We could be seeing that again.
7
SPEAKER_01
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?
7
SPEAKER_01
That s how fast collective identities can change as you get toward the end of a fourth turning.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s a very dynamic period, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
So, timing.
7
SPEAKER_01
We are right now, look, both political parties are leaderless, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we ve got a Republican Party that doesn t know where the hell it is right now.
7
SPEAKER_01
And we ve got Trump, he s sort of laying it out there, and we ve got Santos, we ve got Cotton, we ve got all these people.
7
SPEAKER_01
We don t know.
7
SPEAKER_01
The Democratic Party, leaderless.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think it s fairly certain now from everyone I talk to in Washington, DC, Biden is not going to run for a second term.
7
SPEAKER_01
And you ve got no one is even thinking about the vice president.
7
SPEAKER_01
So essentially, you have a Democratic Party that s leaderless, a Republican Party that s now essentially leaderless.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s open.
7
SPEAKER_01
One question you asked me, actually, before we went on, the identity of a leader.
7
SPEAKER_01
Where do leaders come from?
7
SPEAKER_01
One thing I ve learned from fourth turnings to answer that ancient question, are leaders born or are they made?
7
SPEAKER_01
One thing about fourth turnings is they are made.
7
SPEAKER_01
They are made.
7
SPEAKER_01
Leaders are not born.
7
SPEAKER_01
Teddy Roosevelt, who was Franklin Roosevelt s fifth cousin, uncle kind of thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
He was a man of vastly more capacity, intelligence, energy than Franklin Roosevelt.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he was a dynamo.
7
SPEAKER_01
Everyone thought that Theodore Roosevelt was like a phenomenon.
7
SPEAKER_01
a god on earth.
7
SPEAKER_01
The guy would read two books a day.
7
SPEAKER_01
He would be out chasing rhinoceroses with his gun.
7
SPEAKER_01
He was just an amazing phenomenon.
7
SPEAKER_01
He did galvanize the country, but he was unable to put through any kind of major changes.
7
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t the right season.
7
SPEAKER_01
Franklin Roosevelt, no one thought much of him.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was not a great intellect, actually.
8
SPEAKER_01
He did have an amazing capacity to make friends and empathize.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I think polio was part of that.
8
SPEAKER_01
That was a personal crisis, which really transformed him in a very beneficial way.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was made.
8
SPEAKER_01
Abraham Lincoln.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, a nobody.
8
SPEAKER_01
A one-term congressman just suddenly was the right man at the right time.
8
SPEAKER_01
Same thing you could say about George Washington, in a way.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s my point.
8
SPEAKER_00
During the crisis, is it the Gray Prophet that becomes the leader?
8
SPEAKER_00
It could be either one.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s executed by the nomads, and then the millennials do the fighting?
8
SPEAKER_01
So the Gray Champion is sort of the elder prophet.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, whether that Gray Champion is also the supreme national leader,
8
SPEAKER_01
That can vary.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was true with Franklin Roosevelt.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was a prophet archetype.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was the elder leader.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the GI generation absolutely worshipped Franklin Roosevelt.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the same thing was true with Abraham Lincoln.
8
SPEAKER_01
And when Franklin Roosevelt died, the nation
8
SPEAKER_01
mourned for him exactly as they mourned for Abraham Lincoln when he died.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that was the generation that all young people followed.
8
SPEAKER_01
And certainly all the union followers, all the Republicans of the North, you know, would would follow Lincoln, you know, anywhere.
8
SPEAKER_01
So.
8
SPEAKER_01
Great leaders made not born.
8
SPEAKER_01
That took us through this harrowing period.
8
SPEAKER_01
I know they were great champions.
8
SPEAKER_01
They were both profit archetypes.
8
SPEAKER_01
In the American Revolution, we did have prophet archetypes, people like Sam Adams or Benjamin Franklin, but the one that everyone worshipped was George Washington.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was a nomad.
8
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
8
SPEAKER_01
Another one would be Queen Elizabeth.
8
SPEAKER_01
Actually, we write about all these crises going back, but another one was Queen Elizabeth, who was a nomad.
8
SPEAKER_01
Queen Elizabeth had a little copy of Machiavelli s The Prince.
8
SPEAKER_01
She was always reading how to stab them in the back when they were licking.
8
SPEAKER_01
She was a total pragmatist when it came to religion.
8
SPEAKER_01
She just wanted a practical way to get rid of this issue.
8
SPEAKER_01
But she was a nomad.
8
SPEAKER_01
Typically, it s someone who s an early-born nomad, or if they re a prophet, they re a late-born prophet.
8
SPEAKER_01
Someone around the cusp of the two.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have 20 or more years, usually, of a more optimistic time.
8
SPEAKER_00
Describe what the springtime is to come.
8
SPEAKER_01
The springtime, look, everyone is going to regard the springtime as a wonderful time, given what came before.
8
SPEAKER_01
And there would be no doubt about when it starts, because suddenly the great conflict will be over.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s when all the treaties are signed, all the resolutions are made, and suddenly it s a time
8
SPEAKER_01
When after history moves very fast, it suddenly really begins to slow down.
8
SPEAKER_01
And when suddenly institutions can be remade very quickly and new laws and so on, all this great stuff put into place, suddenly things become harder to change.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, socially, it s what millennials have been dreaming about.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s what GIs were dreaming about.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s what the Republican, it s where we will have calm.
8
SPEAKER_01
Everyone will have a place, everyone will be unified, and we will all feel great about our country.
8
SPEAKER_00
Sounds impossible right now, doesn t it?
8
SPEAKER_00
But that s what crisis does, because people get exhausted with the emotion.
8
SPEAKER_00
These seasons, think of it as emotional seasons.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the optimism season, you go, go, go.
8
SPEAKER_00
But if you smile all the time, your face hurts eventually, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
After 20 years.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so people go through that summertime of that internal fight and looking for the individualism.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t want to be part of the group.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then all of a sudden the unraveling happens and everybody supposedly has the rewards, at least financial rewards.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then after that big fall of rewards, what do you have?
8
SPEAKER_00
The next wintertime again.
8
SPEAKER_00
And now people come together to fight the crisis.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so this is the cycle of humanity.
8
SPEAKER_00
This is not just your cycle or my cycle.
8
SPEAKER_00
This is the cycle of human history.
8
SPEAKER_00
And when you start to see that, it can be compelling.
8
SPEAKER_00
I look at my own daughter, for example, and I think, by the way, what will be the next generation?
8
SPEAKER_00
When s the cutoff for Zs?
8
SPEAKER_01
We don t know yet, I guess.
8
SPEAKER_01
We don t even know when they start, interestingly enough.
8
SPEAKER_01
You have to wait until the crisis ends.
8
SPEAKER_01
Let me give you a good example.
8
SPEAKER_01
1925 is where the silent generation starts.
8
SPEAKER_01
1924 is where the GI generation stops.
8
SPEAKER_01
You would not have known that until 1946, when World War II ended.
8
SPEAKER_01
So we have to wait until that final.
8
SPEAKER_01
But right now, we think that the last birth year of millennials is 2004.
8
SPEAKER_01
First birth year of our homeland generation is 2005.
8
SPEAKER_01
But Homelander is interesting.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the reason why they named it Homelander is, first of all, because back then, I think we did this poll in 2000, I can t remember, 2010 or something like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
But first of all, remember after 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security, everyone was into homeland, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
And also this fact that everyone was suddenly into sort of protecting the home, protecting the community.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then the fact that literally, given these incredible
8
SPEAKER_01
incredibly, compulsively protective Gen X-er parents who swear that they re never going to allow their own kid to be left alone like they were left alone.
8
SPEAKER_01
Again, this pattern of overcompensation.
8
SPEAKER_01
These kids
8
SPEAKER_01
are always at home.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they always have someone at home, and they never go anywhere.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing.
8
SPEAKER_01
This generation, they don t have to go anywhere, you know, for movies, for entertainment, for food, for each other, for food, for whatever.
8
SPEAKER_01
So they are literally the most homebound generation.
8
SPEAKER_01
And during the pandemic, it was off the charts, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
We called them the quarantines, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, for a reason.
8
SPEAKER_01
Your question was, so that s when we think they re going to be done.
8
SPEAKER_01
And when they, with their last cohort, obviously, is going to be determined a little bit by when we determine the profit, the beginning of the profit.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s when we think it will be the next profit generation.
8
SPEAKER_01
But it s probably going to extend from 2005 to sometime in the late 2020s.
8
SPEAKER_01
And we ve talked a little bit about their attributes.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re going to be very well-behaved, by the way.
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Young artist archetypes, very well-behaved, very well-socialized.
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And this is the amazing thing.
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Maybe this is one point I should come back to because I think people find it so counterintuitive that they don t believe it.
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But if you go back through all of history, going back to the, I don t know, the 1500s to like the generation of Erasmus, you think about a very well-socialized, a very well-educated generation.
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But these generations of extremely consensus-minded, socialized, educated, erudite young people who later on deepen that reputation as they go older, they always were raised by very closed, tight-fisted, pragmatic parents at a time of crisis, right?
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Yes.
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And similarly, the most
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pragmatic survivalist generations were always raised at a time of openness and chaos in their childhood, right?
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And I think that s what s interesting about that is you can see that they were raised, you see that Jungian thing, that idea that who you are is almost the opposite of how you were raised.
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I think so many extras today, they are,
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so protective, so hands-on with their parents.
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And it s so obviously different.
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And by the way, when I talk to Xers, and I ve done this a lot, and I ve surveyed them, and I ve talked to them, it s not even unconscious.
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It s conscious.
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They know they re doing it for that reason.
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Yes, damn it, I m never going to have my kid the way I remember when I was home alone and stuff.
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So it s very deliberate, very conscious.
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And similarly, the silent generation
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Why did they raise Xers that way?
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Because they were raised in a closet, right?
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Back in the late 1930s, 1940s.
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It s also why oftentimes people relate more to their grandparents than their parents.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And you ll see now, they re relating to the similar archetype across the cycle.
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And that s what s amazing.
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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?
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So that sense.
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I think it was Igor Stravinsky who said
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Every generation declares war on its parents and makes friends with its grandparents.
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And again, that s looking across the cycle at your archetypal similarity versus your opposite.
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So the question is, where are you in the seasons of history?
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When did you come of age at 21 to 41 range?
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So I was born in 1960 right on the cusp.
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So I can remember somewhere in my psyche that optimism for those first three years before Kennedy died.
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I can remember seeing Kennedy and King and all the absolute unraveling that occurred there.
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Robert Kennedy dying was part of my youth.
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And then I came of age in my 21 and 41 during the unraveling during the fall, right?
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So inflation exploded and then all of a sudden the changes that happened in the 80s and the 90s.
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And so now I m running the next stage of my life in the middle of halfway through the winter.
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And the next section of it I ll get to see, hopefully if I live decently, I ll get to see the next springtime, a good portion of it.
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Where are you in your location in history?
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And how are you gonna navigate it?
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And if you only look at today, you re gonna have the wrong view.
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When I say the wrong view, you have an inaccurate view of life.
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And also, many people want it to be easier.
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but nothing that s ever come easy has been valued very much in our lives.
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Your parents tell you that, you never listen to them.
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But as you get older, you know it.
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And so these years that ll be challenging over the next seven, eight, nine, 10 years, whatever it really is, challenging financially, challenging in terms of uncertainty, they re also gonna make us have to be more nimble, make us grow in ways that you wouldn t have to grow without it.
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And on the other side of it, you have 10 or 20 or 30 years, whatever it ll be for you,
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of great deal of optimism, and then what ll happen is there ll be another summer, there ll be another awakening, internal battle.
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And I don t know how long you re going to live, but it ll be interesting.
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I think about my daughter and think about what she ll grow into.
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She s going to be a child during the crisis, at least half of it.
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She ll come of age in this beautiful springtime.
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She ll participate probably in the next summer.
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And if she s lucky, she ll make it in the fall.
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Maybe she has a long life.
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Maybe she ll make it to the next winter and take what she learns from that.
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There s a beauty in understanding life from a different perspective than just how you re looking at it right now.
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and that beauty you ve brought to all of us.
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Tony, let me just, maybe a couple closing things.
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Please.
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I think it s important.
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People often, they listen to me and they will say, you know, Neil, this just sounds so terrible.
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You re telling us about all these things, how fourth turnings usually end, where they usually go.
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I mean, we re talking about war, after all.
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We re talking about conflict.
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We re talking about additional economic, times of economic financial duress.
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It seems oblique.
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And then my answer is, what s the good news?
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What s the upside of a fourth turning?
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And I said, the upside of a fourth turning is that we actually, at the end of it, we actually solve all the problems.
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that we now have in a way that today absolutely no one thinks will ever solve.
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And I said, and maybe one way of saying this is what is the worst future you can imagine?
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And I think you d have to say maybe the worst future 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.
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That s a world without a fourth turning.
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That s a world in which winter does not happen.
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Yes.
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Do you want that?
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No.
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No?
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I don t think any of us.
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So intellectually, we understand it.
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And there s actually a fascinating speech.
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It s actually very famous.
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Many of you probably heard about it.
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It was William James.
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It was a great kind of pragmatist American philosopher.
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He gave a speech in 1906 at Stanford University.
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and it was called The Moral Equivalent of War.
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Could we ever arrange sort of kind of a practice run where we could have all the socially ennobling things about a war without actually not fighting one?
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It s fascinating.
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And he goes back and he finally admits, even though he hopes we would have one, he was a pacifist.
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But he says it probably isn t.
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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.
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Or at least in conflict of some sort.
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I mean, he was trying to be as broad about it as possible.
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That s where we learn the value of sacrificing for the sake of others.
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But then he had this fascinating hypothetical question.
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I think it s really great for what you do and this audience.
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He said, there s something paradoxical in how we look at this.
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He said, if you asked Americans right now,
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would you have preferred that we had never fought the Civil War?
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Remember, he s saying this in 1906, so that s sort of like, you know, not that long ago.
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And he sort of says, I ll bet most Americans would say, no, no, I don t prefer that we know.
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Because we couldn t have imagined the kind of dynamic, national, industrial, affluent America that we were by 1906 without the Civil War.
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We had to fight that war to be who we were today.
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And he says he thinks that almost everyone would say, no, it was actually better we fought that war.
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After all, we did do the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments.
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So all of that was good.
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But then he said, but then he says, it s paradoxical.
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If you polled most Americans today,
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Would you like another one in your near future?
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Almost all Americans would say no.
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And he kind of leaves it there as a paradox, but I don t think it s paradoxical at all.
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It s just like ourselves as individuals.
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We look back at our life and we think, you know that horrible experience I had?
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I was really down in the depths.
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I didn t know how I was going to go on to the next day.
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I didn t know how I was going to survive.
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I didn t know.
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I really learned so much from that.
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I m a new person after that.
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I forced myself to change.
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No, I do not wish that I never had that experience.
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But then you ask most people.
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Well, do you want another experience like that next week?
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And most people will say, no.
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No, I d rather not.
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And that s why springtimes last so long, too, right?
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20 years after that, where people don t want to go through that crap again.
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So that s kind of the analogy.
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And I think we have to think of ourselves like that, that it s not that we want to be in a fourth turning.
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It s simply it s necessary.
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Forests need fires.
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Rivers need floods.
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The seasons need a winter.
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We have to kill everything above ground so that things below ground can germinate and they will have space.
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And that s another thing.
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We look at America today, we see the inequality.
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Inequality, by the way, always grows during peacetime.
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And this is, you go back to the end of the Neolithic Revolution.
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This has always happened.
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In times of peace and prosperity, inequality always gets worse.
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Why?
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Because families always want to protect their offsprings and their sinecures, and they all rig the laws and everything to help those who have.
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It always gets worse.
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What equalizes income?
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All the horrible things people don t like to talk about.
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You know, it s the plagues, the famines, the total revolutions, the total wars.
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And the same thing happened in the 20th century.
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That s when equality got much better.
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The 1930s, World War II, and then the high that followed.
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In other words, the ethos of equality after the war, these are the only times when our society becomes back to normal again.
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And then we can f*** it up again.
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Creation and destruction and creation.
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Creation and destruction and creation.
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But that s kind of how it happens.
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And that s kind of how it has to happen.
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You are a special gift to us all.
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You ve really delivered for us, as you have for decades, for so many.
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Let s have it for Neil.