Neil Howe

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. The New Deal was hated by a lot of Americans.

There was violence and division in America over what was happening, you know, between classes. You have to go back and rethink what did things look like at the time. I often tell people again and again, our biggest problem is our inability to see life the way they saw it. We always start with what we know and look back at what must have been obvious at the time, but often it wasn't obvious. I'm thrilled to introduce today's episode of The Puck, a conversation I had with Neil Howe, a historian, consultant, and author of The Fourth Turning is Here, what the seasons of history tell us about how and when the crisis will end.

Howe shares his years of research examining the differences in generational attitudes and behaviors and the way they influenced the course of history. There's a lot for us to cover, so let's get to it. Well, Neil Howe, welcome to the Puck. It is exciting to have you here, and I am a big fan of the fourth turning. But before we jump in to talking about the fourth turning in your book, would you give us a little history of your background and actually how you got to the point where you actually wrote the book?

Well, there's a there's a history to the book. And this whole topic of the relationships between generational development and history and patterns of generational change and patterns of history is something that I've been working on, really ever since the late 1980s. So throughout most of my career, I did have an earlier book that I actually co authored with Pete Peterson at the time, called Unborrowed Time. It was on the I'm an historian, I'm also an economist and demographer, and I was very interested, particularly back then, and so what was happening in the federal budget. We had this increasing, you know, huge increase in the share of federal spending that was going from young people to old people.

Of course, that continues to be an issue in fiscal policy today, But I was really interested in how that started. And I work with Pete very often during those years. He had just founded the Blackstone Group. At the time, he had moved from Lehman Brothers. Anyway, there's a whole history to that.

But that was also the first time I got a relationship with sort of large financial institutions in America and how they worked. But at the same time, I began writing with Bill Strauss, and both of us were really interested in history and generations. We wrote a book called Generations back in 1991, which was the history of America told as a sequence of generational biographies, really starting from the great Puritan migration to New England in the sixteen thirty's and going all the way up to 14 generations later to millennials, who at that time were just little kids. Right. So we were thinking of something to call them.

No one, you know, at that time, even Gen X did not have a name yet. So in our book, we just called them thirteenth generation, which actually led to a further book of its own. I think it was, a couple years later, we did a book called thirteenth gen, abort, retry, fail. Wow. You remember the old DOS command on the computers back then?

And the fourteenth, people weren't even talking about what was coming after Xers. Well, we said the first birth year was probably around 1982, given the trends that we observed at the time. I think that was a really good choice because I wouldn't even change that year today. And the first of them would come of age as the high school class of 2,000. So we'll call them millennial generation.

So if you want to know how millennials got their name, that was it. That was in 1991. In that book, we really laid out a lot of the fundamentals of the relationship between generational aging. The premise is that generations are shaped young by history, both in childhood and coming of age into adulthood. And about, you know, thirty, forty, fifty years later, as parents and elder leaders, they shape history.

Right? So it's a complete cycle. And in generations, what we discovered was that there is a pattern of generational succession. Certain generations always follow other generations. That was really what we were interested in.

We were not, at that time, interested in cycles of history, interestingly enough. We were interested in generational succession. And for example, we found that every time you had a utopian, idealistic, anti establishment generation like boomers, and there have been many in American history, they were always followed by a pragmatic, hardscrabble, cynical generation like Xers. This is not new. This is, you know, following the the transcendental generation of Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson and, you know, that crowd, you had the famous gilded generation of people like George Armstrong Custer and Ulysses Grant, a generation of metal and muscle.

And certainly, we don't associate with being a great generation of idealists. But you see this again, and then we start discussing other patterns, right? And then it occurred to us that this was related to an actual pattern that people have often noticed in history. Why is it that these periods of great civic upheaval, public mobilization and reconstruction, often periods of war and revolution occur in American history about once every long human life? I mean, we had the period during the colonial era of the Glorious Revolution, which was filled with, you know, total wars, revolts, revolutions really in the colonies.

And then about a lifetime later, we had the American Revolution, a lifetime later, the Civil War, a lifetime later, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and a lifetime later, here we are, right? So the fourth turning is here, that kind of points to that, right? And then roughly halfway in between these crises, we had the great awakenings of American history, where the object wasn't so much to bring about new community and rebuild the outer world of politics and infrastructure and economics, but rather to rebuild the inner world of culture and religion and value. So that's sort of the overall outline you see, and the seeds were there and implicit in it was a theory of history. We talked a little bit about at the end of the book.

But then in 1997, sort of the growing optimism of the late Clinton years, you might say, this was before the dot com bubble, but we were sort of looking things were looking better and better in America. We wrote a book called The Fourth Turning and that looked ahead to this period where we thought the nation and America and even much of the world was gonna enter the winter season of history, one of those periods I just talked about of civic upheaval, conflict and reconstruction. And that book has had a very interesting history as you know. It sold successively better as time has gone on over the last twenty six years. And in fact, I'll tell you, the printing is pretty impressive of the book.

I will tell you roughly half of the hard copy sold have been sold since the pandemic, right? So it's a book that's sort of crescendo upward over time. It's kind of an interesting commentary. And obviously, given the times we're living in, my co author Bill Strauss passed away in 2007, but as time has gone on, I've wanted to come back and revisit this approach and that led me to write this recent book, The Fourth Turning is Here and where I add a lot, obviously we're in the era now, we know more about it. And I think in Fourth Turning, we just talked generally about cycles how exactly fourth turnings proceed, how we get into them, how we get out of them, what's happened during them, and what we're likely to look forward to in the future.

I think a lot of younger readers, particularly millennials, they wanna know what comes after the fourth turning, what kind of world are we gonna inherit. And Neil, before we jump into the what the fourth turning is and answer some of those questions, can you take a minute for our listeners and talk about what the four different turns are that a society generally takes? Yeah. I think of them as as really seasons. I mean, you think of a long human lifetime as maybe eighty to a hundred years and divide those up into four seasons.

You're thinking of four periods of twenty to twenty five years and the beginning, sort of the first turning, comes after the crisis, comes after the resolution of the last crisis, and that's the spring season. And a recent example would be the American high. The historian McNeil gave that term. This would be the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower and John Kennedy, late 1940s, 50s, early 60s, a period when institutions are strong, individualism was weak. The nation had a gradually, building confidence and optimism about their collective future, but may have felt a little bit trapped about their private lives or their possibilities of individual self expression.

It was a time when the country felt like it was more than the sum of its parts, pretty much the opposite of today, right? Inevitably, the first turning is followed by the second turning, and this is the summer season. And these are always periods of awakening. You know, this is the spiritual awakening, and it's spearheaded by the generation that was born after the crisis. So they'll be coming of age into adulthood now, right?

And it happens again and again. You suddenly have a new urge by people to throw off all that social discipline, all that social conformity. I mean, what's the purpose anyway? I mean, everyone's comfortable. Why don't we just enjoy ourselves and throw off outmoded forms of sort of, cultural authority?

And you saw this in the late sixties and seventies, early eighties. It really started in particularly in college campuses and inner cities, you know, throwing off the patriarchy, throwing off authority in family life, throwing off social authority in local government. And ultimately, I think late in that era, it really started more on the left, I think you could say, but it really, by the end of the era, the right was joining as well because it was deregulation, it was tax cuts, and no one really wanted to be imposed upon anymore. This was the coming of age moment for boomers, a period, awakenings are always a period of enormous cultural creativity. And typically, that generation sort of becomes the repository of values for the rest of their lives.

Everyone looks up to them afterwards as having said everything that's original in terms of the inner world, right? I think certainly boomers are looked at that that way. I think the transcendentals were looked at that the same way as as they grew old. The original Puritan generation was looked at that way. You know, the Simon Bradstreet's back in, you know, by the time you get to the sixteen eighties, sixteen nineties were looked at that way.

So there's a pattern. And the awakening is followed by the fall season. This would be the, in many ways the opposite of the high. Individualism is triumphant. Institutions are weak and discredited and distrusted.

This is the example I think anyone who goes into a bookstore today, you go in and you read the titles of books. This certainly was true ten or twenty years ago. I think it remains somewhat true today, and that is all of the most upbeat and optimistic books are about me, myself, and I. Right? I can do anything.

I can conquer the world. I'm great. And all the downbeat books are about what we have in common. End of society, end of family, end of politics. And I think that really is the social mood of the fall season.

You think of decades, third turning decades in American history, usually, you know, markets are usually very robust. Libertarianism is certainly flourishing. You think of the roaring nineties, the roaring 1990s. You also think of the roaring 20s. You think of the 1850s.

You think of the 1760s. These are all times when America felt lightly governed, almost centripetal forces. Everything was kind of flying to pieces, right? We didn't really have any good idea how we were going to endure as a single country very long, but maybe it didn't matter. Right.

1990s, I thought that the greatest leitmotif was Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History. Markets were dominant, individualism triumphed, governments would wither away, all the great struggles of history were over, and that's kind of it, right? The microchipped, as Reagan and Clinton and, T. W. Bush used to say, the the microchip was gonna topple authoritarian dictators all over the world.

Well, I think you could say over the last fifteen years, boy, has that changed. Right? I think we've learned how to retool technology very effectively to meet the new social mood, and it's a very different direction. So that's the mood of the third turning. And then the fourth turning is the crisis.

And in a crisis, we move to do the opposite of what we do in an awakening. In an awakening, we have too much order, too much social order, and suddenly the public demands less of it, particularly the rising generation. In a crisis, we have too little order. Nothing works at a national level. Inherited, political institutions seem dysfunctional, sclerotic, incapacitated, and we want more order.

And that demand is pushed by the rising generation. So in many ways, the millennial generation is very much archetypally the opposite as boomers, right, in the sense that what they're looking for is almost the opposite. A lot of boomers came of age in the mid late sixties oppressed by the order in America. We thought the middle class was too big, too strong. We thought America was too homogeneous.

You remember that? The middle class was actually too powerful. It was just a whole country full of Pleasant Valley Sundays, right? With complacency everywhere because everything seemed to work so well. So boomers wanted to break America up.

More individualism. I think boomers have been remarkably unconcerned about rising differences between rich and poor or just rising fragmentation of our community life because after all, it was so oppressive when they were coming of age. Right. And we remain all of our lives a prisoner of the generation we were when we were age 20. Right?

It never goes away. Millennials, when it comes to a strong middle class, their reaction is, where is it? I'd like to sign up. Where do I go? Is there an exam?

You know, can I join? So you understand the difference in perspective. And history also shows these four turnings, ultimately, by the time of the climax and the resolution, are times when we permanently reconstruct. Not permanently, but for a long period of time, we reconstruct these public institutions and actually redefine who we are as a republic. You think of how we came out of the American Revolution with the new constitution, and suddenly we had all these, you know, Roman sounding institutions like a Congress and a president.

Where did all that come from? Or after the Civil War, my gosh. Or after the New Deal in World War II, we were transformed nations in terms of how our public institutions function. And I think that agenda remains in the rest of the fourth turning that we still have to run. So you recently were motivated to refresh your book.

And in terms of your decision to do that, is that because the fourth turning is starting to arrive? I mean, where where are we in this cycle? Well, we've been in it for, you know, ten, fifteen years. We entered it with the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis, and I think that it was exactly when each generation was beginning to move into a new phase of life. The civic or hero archetype was beginning to come of age.

The boomer or what we sometimes call the prophet archetype was beginning to enter old age, right? So everything was set up correctly. We were at the same position with Black Thursday and 10/24/1929 when we entered our last fourth turning, right? And a very similar event, I might add, a very large balance sheet market crash, which affected much of the world. This was the catalyst.

This was the entry time. We've been in it ever since. And in the book, we talk about stages of the fourth turning, but ultimately it will come to an end at the beginning very beginning of the 2030s decade. So it will be the rest of the 2020s we certainly have yet to go through. So let me ask you a question because you compare the beginning of the fourth turning with 1929 when there was a seminal event with the stock market.

You talked about the fourth turning starting now back. It sounds like if I understand this 02/2008 with the financial crisis. Are you a believer that the Barbara Tuckman philosophy of World War one and World War two, which is that World War one never ended, World War two was just a continuation? Do you believe that essentially a financial crisis of two thousand eight really never ended because we just paper over it with printing all this money? And therefore, we are in the fourth turning, but we're just kind of it's building because we've been able to mask the problem with all this easy money.

I don't think the last for attorney started with World War I. I think for most of the world, World War I came to an end and the world recovered. I mean, the 1920s was an incredible decade of prosperity. In America. We were manufacturing, I don't know, five out of six of the world's automobiles, and it was a time of great prosperity.

I do think that 1929 was a better watershed. There may be some areas in the world in which you could argue a very long fourth turning started with World War I and just didn't stop until 1945. I would argue Russia and much of Eastern Europe simply had no respite right during the 1920s. It was just a terrible, terrible time throughout that entire period. But the parallels between the 1930s and what we've been through the last decade, I think, are incredibly strong.

I mean, not only do we enter this era the same way with this great crash, but I mean, just think of all the trends, right? That seemed to parallel. We had global trade reached a peak in 2007 as a share of global product that's been declining ever since. Same way in 1929, it reached a peak then with obviously not only the depression, but with Smoot Hawley and and all of the other terrorists rising around the world, we had the catastrophic decline in global trade. We had the similar trends in geopolitical mood in the sense that authoritarian dictatorships are rising all over the world in the 1930s.

In fact, by the time we got into the late 1930s, liberal democracy just didn't matter. Capitalism was dead. You only had one choice. It was either communism or fascism. Which side did you want to take?

Well, I think something similar. If you look at Freedom House or VDAM, or look at these people who track the share of people who are free around the world, that peaked in 2007. It's been going down ever since. We've been losing huge chunks of the world's population. Not long ago, we lost India, which is no longer regarded as a free society, but we see the rise of authoritarian populism.

We don't want to see its specter here in America, but even more in Latin America. I mean, just look at Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, look at Southern Europe, look at Central Europe, look at South Asia, look at East Asia, look at India or Burma or China or The Philippines. I mean, just look around, right, at what's happening. And we also know that a very good parallel is that back in the thirties, young adults were with the spirit of giving up on democracy. And the same thing today, we see this at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Democracy.

Vtocracy. You pretend to have votes and you talk about everything, but nothing ever changes, and older people get to keep everything they've got. Right? They no longer see their possibility, they see a less than even odds that they will surpass the living standard of their parents. Well, again, the parallel.

You saw in the 1930s, the huge increase in multi generational living. What have we seen over the last decade? A renaissance in multi in fact, the big home builders actually brand their homes now, you know, multi generational homes. We actually have kind of a brand name on that so that an unprecedented year, I shouldn't say unprecedented, but right around the time even before the pandemic, we had the highest share of people in their late twenties, early thirties living with their parents since 1940, right? Since late in the Great Depression, we remember those Frank Capra movies like, Mr.

Smith Goes to Washington, those big Victorian homes filled with many generations living together. Well, we've just done it again with McMansions. Right? We also saw younger people in the 1930s believe fervently in community, right? Building community.

They no longer believed in the competitive worldview of the generation just older than they were. And at that time, that was the lost generation who had come of age with World War One and were the biggest, you know, market advocates during the 1920s. These are the barnstormers and the rum runners. They're really a wild risk taking crowd. Right?

And these would have been in literature, these would have been the F. Scott Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways. This younger generation that went to college in the twenties were much more of a cooperative bent, right? They had been much more sheltered. We had a lot of rules against child labor laws during the progressive era to keep them, protect them from competition, give them playgrounds, give them allowances.

We invented boy scouts and girl scouts and four H clubs. But here's my point. We look at that generation much later and we think of themselves, well, they were the greatest generation, right? We really go back and look at how did they reshape young? Well, when they were young, they were regarded as protected and special as opposed to this kind of ruined and wild generation just older than they were.

I would say exactly the parallel today. Right? How are millennials raised compared to the Gen x throwaway kids, right, back in the nineteen eighties? They were increasingly protected. They were increasingly regimented.

You know, they say Barney and Friends on their TV, they had cuddly baby movies as opposed to the child is double horror movies that Gen X had. Right? I mean and you see that contrast today among people in their late forties and fifties, contrasting it with people in their thirties. A very different attitude toward community. We see it today.

We saw it back then. FDR was very aware of this. And in fact, new voters in the 1932 and nineteen thirty six election, unprecedented share of them voted for the New Deal. Over 80% according to polls taken at the time. We see the same thing today.

Right? Millennials are a very you know, they they vote for the party that at least pretends to represent national community. And right now those are the Democrats. But what I'm interested in is sort of the archetypal similarity. I really don't care about which party it is.

I'm looking for archetypes. And to me, the archetype is striking. The other thing that happened is, is that the GI generation as teens and young adults brought down crime in America during the 1930s and particularly during the 1940s. And similarly, millennials have done the same thing, less incarcerated, committing less crime. And all of this, this yearning for risk, risk free, a risk free life for which they often get ridiculed by older generations, needless to say.

You know, boomers and exes, we like to rib millennials about this, but they they want freedom from risk. They want security, and they want a new and special future for themselves and their generation. I think in an archetypal sense, the boomers were very focused toward the subjective when they were coming of age and they were also focused toward the individual. I think millennials, by contrast, are focused toward the community and focused much more toward the objective. That is to say, they think you need sort of to take an objective look at reality and are much less influenced by things like religion.

It's interesting, during the 1930s, many historians talk about a religious recession. You know, young people weren't going to churches. The same thing, by the way, that was true in the 1790s. When I was in graduate school, I had one of the most famous I happen to have one of the most famous as one of my instructors, a famous historian of religion, Sydney Ahlstrom. And he was the one who said that the 1790s was the low point of religion in America.

All the young people just wanted politics. They wanted to be like Hamilton and Jay and Madison. They just wanted to study building. How do you build empires and how do you do all this stuff? I think millennials are tending in the same direction.

We see an unprecedented share of them, claim to not wanna go near religion. They don't like metaphor very much. I remember boomers in my day, we love metaphorical, and all our songs were in metaphors. Do you remember, Bob Dylan and Donovan and just all of those people? We thought metaphorically about life.

I find millennials don't do that. You don't find many metaphors in their songs. It's all just about stuff, things that happen to you. We could go on in this variety, but these are the things that that I look at and we look at a little bit in the book. I love the archetypes and I love focusing on that.

And I wanna talk a little bit about how, you know, the generations can work together. But before we go there, let's go back to the in 1929, there was a stock market crash, and the roaring twenties came to an end. According to some schools in America, depending on how you look at it, the stock market and economically, we we got the lowest unemployment in a long time. When people talk about the world debt quote crisis, people are like, what what crisis? Can't we just keep borrowing like Japan for the next twenty years?

Do you think we are in a debt crisis? And if so, is it gonna continue to get worse? We know about the potential war in The Pacific. We know about what's going on in Ukraine. But is the debt situation something we should be looking at and if so, why?

Well, I think, yes. What makes the debt situation so bad is that is its prospects for the future. We are fundamentally so out of alignment. I mean, you could say, okay, so we ran up the debt between the GFC and the end of the pandemic about as much as we did during World War II. In fact, the magnitudes are almost identical from about 30% of GDP to about 100% of GDP, almost identical to what we did from the beginning of World War II to the end of World War II.

So you say, Okay, we've done a total war full of debt. What have we got for it? What did we purchase? Gee, did we purchase a new world order? You know, where's the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, right?

Where's NATO? Where is this new world order? That disturbs me, right? During World War II and during the New Deal, one of the great advantages we had was that we had so much fiscal room. Federal government was tiny back then.

Its budget was smaller than some large corporations, right? I mean, if you just take out some of the veteran spending and so on, it was tiny. So the GI generation, as it came of age, was able to build up the New Deal, all of these new regulatory institutions and go to war, right, with this just absolutely spectacular expansion and more infrastructure material from a very low point. Today, we enter the fourth turning with a huge and bloated public sector, which is not even pretends to be in balance in the long term. Every year I do a report for my clients on the thirty year CBO projection.

A new one just came out by the way, so we'll be doing a new report shortly. And it's just it's radically out of balance. Even if you assume that a lot of these tax breaks are gonna be sunsetted, which they probably won't, you know the game in Washington. Right? You do a tax cut, but then it pretends to sunset in about five or six years, so it doesn't count toward future deficits.

But of course, all voters know that it's gonna be extended, right? So that the situation is actually even worse than the CBO projects, which is already completely nightmarish. I mean, two fifty percent of GDP by the time you get out to the 2040s, you're talking the CBO just has an NA, not available. We don't even want to go past two fifty. We just don't even want to think about that.

I mean, if interest rates go up, if a whole bunch of things do not go our way, this is going to be bad. And the demographics are also very problematic. I think they're problematic for a lot of countries. I think in China, the demographics have turned in a radically adverse direction. It actually bothers me because I do believe in Olshansky's theory of power trajectories.

I do think that countries suddenly realize they may be going down rather than up are actually impelled to an earlier to speed up the pace of history, so to speak. So that absolutely worries me right now, and I think China is beginning to realize that. But in America too, we have no new net additions to our workforce. In fact, if you look at all the high income countries around the world, plus add the emerging market economy. So let's add India, let's add China, let's add Brazil, and look at the total workforce.

It's actually gonna start declining year after year by about 2027. That's incredible. That hasn't happened since Adam Smith first started writing. I mean, our entire way of thinking about economics has been predicated on ceaseless demographic growth. Productivity growth is just a little icing on the cake you get on top of that.

Right? So you always assume GDP was undergirded by this fundamental increase in the number of people working. You are going to have very soon, and we're already beginning to see it, aging recessions in Southern Europe because those working age populations are beginning to decline that fast. What you find now in Italy and Portugal and Spain and Greece is if the working age population and and the employment is declining each year faster than productivity is labor productivity is rising, you get negative GDP even in a non recession year. We're not used to that.

That's just doesn't compute in how we think about it. Right? And what does negative GDP mean for macroeconomic policies? How does it mean for business practices? What does it mean when when you, no longer have to net net build any new houses like today in Italy?

What does that do to industries? What industries do when they're not growing from year to year? Well, experience shows, and we saw this in nineteen thirties, that they tend to cartelize. Right? They tend to actually start dividing markets and designing monopolies.

Right? When the pie is no longer growing, the entire psychology of market economics begins to change, and I think in a very disturbing way. For anyone who believes in a liberal polity, right, in in liberal economics. So I do believe that your book has a very optimistic tone because not withstanding these grave, quote, challenges that we have to deal with, you talk about that there are gonna be solutions to these complex challenges. And where do you see the millennials and the gen x's and the boomers coming together to deal with some of these challenges?

How how do you see that playing out? It's gonna be through urgency. It's gonna be a trial by fire. And, much of my book talks about conflict because ultimately, fourth turnings are resolved by conflict. I don't say that because I think I don't like conflict more than anyone else.

I just look at it as an historian and I see how does every fourth turning ultimately get resolved and how does it socially transform society, right, from beginning to end, particularly during the climax years? Every single one of these fourth turnings, not just in Anglo American history, so we're going about seven examples, but even looking abroad, because increasingly societies were all in the same pattern, right? It's through conflict and what that does to mobilize a population to engage in creative destruction of its public institutions and thereby create a new world and empower the rising generation to suddenly create institutions that now invest in the future and build for them rather than just reward the old, which is what our current system does. And I think that it is through that period of mobilization when inevitably old interests are sacrificed, right, and the incumbents lose, right, all the industrial incumbents. You think about the airlines and the healthcare sector and the financial sector, you just go down and you can just see they've kind of divided everything up in a very safe environment.

Well, when all that changes and we need resources from anywhere, we will get them from anywhere. We will inflate our way out from all of those fixed income assets. I warn people, financial repression and inflation devaluing the real worth of fixed income assets has been a feature of absolutely every fourth turning in the climax. Right? And, yeah, and many other implications as well.

But we need to be ready for that roller coaster ride, which will be in some ways terrifying, but it will also be exhilarating, and it will present huge opportunities at last for the young to come on board and not just feel, you know, don't just be cynical and trying to drop out and despair of, you know, any future for their lives. They will feel a new sense of participating in the future, much as the GI generation. And remember, the GI generation, again, I come back to this, we think of them as the greatest generation afterwards. We don't look at what history is like at the time. Many of the best and brightest of this generation were joining the communist party, right?

They're joining the common turn dedicated to the overflow of capitalism and democracy. That's how desperate they were. Well, by the time they joined the war and began to reshape the world, they came home and they rebuilt America, right, in a way that they thought after a blueprint that they thought was vastly superior than the one they had. And the suburbs that boomers hated, they loved because they said, you have no idea, kids, how improved this is from the toiletless farmhouses and the inner city tenements that we rented and didn't even own, you know, when we were kids. Right?

They thought they had built a much better world. Right. It's interesting even in retrospect because I know the the movie Oppenheimer is now out there, you know, to think about, you know, Opie's life, right? And the willingness, think about this, the willingness of the best and the brightest of that generation to spend twenty fourseven working on and designing a weapon of mass destruction, which of course the nation almost instantly used because that's how urgent the future looked at the time. Well, we look back upon that, we raise all kinds of questions, but there's very little debate at the time.

And I think when people look at the alternative, they think, well, how many would have died if we hadn't used it? I think people would have said that's kind of a slam dunk. Certainly, president Truman did. When you look at the research that you did, and at least my recollection is most of it is talking about the history of America. And then you talked a little bit about Britain.

Do these cycles apply to the entire world, and did you take some time to look at other countries or the Roman Empire, for instance? Well, they apply I actually did spend some time looking at Rome, sort of the origins of the saculum. That's the, you know, the long unit of history which which really originated with Rome and interestingly with Etruria. The saculum actually might have been an Etruscan word, interestingly enough, an ancient language of which we still haven't actually deciphered. But it is basically characteristic of modern societies, societies which feel that they want to progress from one generation to the other.

And the origin actually of thinking generationally is also a feature of modern progressive societies. It really came about first with the reformation and the Renaissance, but more especially with the French Revolution, the American Revolution, that period of Atlantic Revolution is just at the end of the eighteenth, early nineteenth century. When everyone began to speak about generations, sequences of generations. And that's when we began to, you know, have gen generations theories. But I think that increasingly the world, as the world begins to become more progressive in that sense, right, Each generation beginning to improve on the last generation.

Yeah. We we see that everywhere in the world today. We see it in China. We see it in Latin America. I mean, this is common, right?

This is no longer just something we do in the West. And I think increasingly, we have a chapter on that actually in chapter five where we talk about the increasing global scope of the four turnings. Most recently, the World War II and the Great Depression obviously were worldwide events. India was hugely engaged in that. China and all of East Asia was enormously engaged.

Obviously Europe and the entire English speaking world, right? This was an event for all of us. And roughly thirty to forty years later, we had an awakening around the world. We had young people protesting. It wasn't just in Berkeley and then, you know, Columbia University.

It was in Paris. It was in Prague. It was in, Rome. It was in Berlin. It was the Baader Meinhof gang.

It was the Red Brigade. It was the cultural revolution in China with the Red Guard trying to discard, you know, two two millennia of Confucian tyranny. You know, the culture it was a cultural revolution in China. And it was in Santiago. It was in Mexico City.

The violence and the kids rebelling. Right. Increasingly, these four turnings are not just Anglo American. And that's a big point of the book. I think they have the clearest expression in America.

I think partly because we've been such an isolated society. We've been so unaffected by other societies and so unaffected frankly, in our very origin from class differences, from, you know, clergy and tradition and aristocracy. We never had that. We were founded at the very origin of our colonial development by radical protestants and radical exponents of the enlightenment. Right?

We were the ultimate modern generation at our very origin with none of the vestiges of the dead hand of the past, so to speak. And it has made us the best exemplar from the earliest time of this rhythm of history and action, which is so much the result of a people that believes in progress. One fundamental dynamic, and it's a little bit paradoxical, but it is the belief in progress which so strongly impels each generation to improve on the last and overrule the last that actually gives rise to the social cycle. And I think it is a little bit paradoxical that societies that believe in linear time, you know, we're just gonna improve until the end of time, and then we'll be perfect. And some utopia is actually the type of society most likely to give rise to rhythms of history.

But but I think it actually works out that way. When you look at COVID as an urgent situation, why didn't we pull more together? Why didn't it bring the world closer together? Well, it did bring people together, but into two camps. Right.

Right? Yeah. This worries me because this may be more, you know, 1859 to 1860 to 1861 than possibly the new deal. Right. So in other words, it did bring people together into different values camps, and I think that's partly what we think of when we think of the first degeneracy during our current fourth turning, which really started in the twenty sixteen election of Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, where we suddenly began to be engaged in politics again.

Right? We we saw voter participation rates we hadn't seen for a century. Everyone began to be convinced that if their side didn't win, this country was lost forever. And in fact, in the twenty twenty election and again in 2022, making sure the other side lost was more important than losing democracy. I mean, that's how people actually responded to opinion polls ten or fifteen years ago.

And I remember this because I've been following this. Just even ten years ago, people didn't even ask the question about secession or civil war. It was so far off the radar screen. Today, roughly half of Americans believe that that is likely in the next few years. We did not ask questions before too much about the possibility of geopolitical conflict.

You know, after all, right? It was the end of history. Well, we do now. The mood has shifted. Now, whether or not this will be more internal rather than external is a very good question, you know, and that we could pursue.

And actually, you know, we have a fair amount of discussion, I think, as you know, in the book about that and what usually determines whether it goes one way or the other. But I do think that the pandemic simply furthered the split, which I think right now, so far in the fourth turning has been largely internal stress. Now the rise of Ukraine and the growing threat of China as Xi Jinping begins to put the full press, I think now on Taiwan, is a fascinating discussion. Is this gonna go the same way as the thirties? Remember the thirties started out with almost purely internal conflict.

Republicans called the 1930s the red decade. Well, popular French supporters of FDR called it the fascist decade. And if you had asked a typical American in 1937, let's say you had pulled an American in 1937 and you do ask them, we're gonna have a huge crisis, I mean, a huge conflict in America in the next few years. Is it going to be external or internal? I think most of them would have said internal.

I mean, think about it. The New Deal was hated by a lot of Americans. And you had labor organizers and communists and socialists, you know, street battles with Pinkertons on the streets. You had sit down strikers. There was violence and division in America over what was happening, you know, between classes.

This was fascism versus, socialism. Pearl Harbor? That was not on anyone's radar screen. Right? So again, you have to go back and rethink what did things look like at the time.

I often tell people again and again, that's that our biggest problem is our inability to see life the way they saw it. We always start with what we know, right, and look back at what must have been obvious at the time. But often it wasn't obvious. In terms of finding a solution to work together, any suggestions for our audience that as to what we can do? Well, I think at its best, when you look at password turnings, you find each generation filling a different role and filling a role that only it can fill.

I mean, typically in a fourth turning, the aging prophet archetype as the elder leaders, and I sometimes call them the gray champions of the crisis, right? This is actually inspired by a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called The Gray Champion, who appeared at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1690 in Boston and reappeared at the time in the American Revolution. Sort of a craggy ancient man, you know, with the who inspired command and sort of re memorialized younger people to stick up for their values. Right? And he was seen, you know, overseeing the digging of the ramparts on Bunker Hill and so on.

But it is interesting because if if Hawthorne had counted the same number of years from 1690 to 1776, counted forward, it would have taken him right to 1862. You know, you can't make this up, but, of course, he didn't do that. I mean, he was writing in the eighteen thirties. Right? But we take that image as sort of, characteristic of what the elder prophet archetype has to offer.

That is to say, the ability to reconnect younger generations with their legacy, with the culture, with values, and the importance of understanding why you're fighting, why you're in a conflict, why you're building, what you're building for, connecting with the heritage and inspiring them. These great champions, you know, you look at FDR, you look at General MacArthur, you look at any of those famous wise old men, you know, of the late thirties and forties, they tended to be people with enormous egos. You know, I will return, I shall return. I mean, these are people with gigantic egos. They were clearly a prophet archetype growing old, you know.

And then you look at the next archetype and that would be the nomad archetype, Xers today, right? And they're typically in midlife at the time of the climax of the crisis. And what the nomad archetype offers is ruthless pragmatism, right? A survivalist tenacity. The ability to improvise in any situation and to think outside the rules and outside the box in a way that the prophet archetype can't because the prophet archetype, you know, is too impractical, too idealistic.

And the younger hero generation can't because they're too collective. Right? It's the nomad that is excels in breaking rules and cutting corners to get the job done. And that's what we expect from, you know, the Dwight Eisenhower's, the Omar Bradleys, the George Patons. It's what we expect from the George Washingtons or the Ulysses Grants, right?

I mean, these are the get it done people. And finally, from the hero archetype, what we get is the ability to act as a collective and the ability to organize huge teams which are very effective at actually doing what people tell them to do. This is a generation that actually does what the experts say that you should do. And I know it was a big issue during the pandemic. Right?

The experts are saying things and no one did it. And, well, millennials will actually do what the experts tell them to do, and they'll all do it together. What do you think about that? You tell them all to invest and targetate funds, they all do. You know?

They all crowd invest. So that way if the market goes down, at least they all go down together. That's fine with them. But that mentality of loyalty to each other and optimism about the ability to design a fresh world starting from the outside in, not like boomers always did, it started, you know, approach every problem from the inside out, is the secret. And it was the secret when the GIs remade the world.

It was the secret when the Republican generation of Jefferson and the Federalist Papers remade the world in the seventeen nineties and the eighteen hundreds. They thought that they could redesign the world fresh again, and that made it seem naive. These generations believe you really can nation build. You know, today we think nation building. No one can nation build.

Well, think about the GIs. They didn't do a bad job with South Korea or Germany or Japan. They had the optimism. They had the confidence they could do it, and they had the authority to do it. Today, we're all cynical.

Right? Nation no one can nation build. Well, yeah, some generations can nation build. And certainly, America at that time could nation build very effectively. Right?

So they tend to expand, and I think this is very effective about the hero generation. They expand our sense of limits, and they really do design a future that no one before thinks possible, but they actually make possible. And then finally, you have the generation of war children, right? Like the silent generation growing up as kids during World War II, like today's post millennials growing up as kids today, they will be, we call them the artist archetype. They will adorn the new order.

They will actually take it to yet a further level of civilization. They will add the human touch. They will add the detail, the expertise and the expressiveness. They'll provide an excuse for future Americans to call this new era a real golden age. But to get to that golden age, we need to go through the gate of history and that too is a lesson of history.

One final question. We need a leader that's gonna galvanize across generations to bring things together as the crisis builds as we start to come out of the fourth turning. But you are optimistic and you do believe that we will quote attract that leader. And in the same way, we got FDR, but Europe got Hitler and Mussolini. What gives you optimism that America is different and that we will attract the right kind of leaders to galvanize and bring the country together?

Well, first of all, I have to say, I have no certainty, right? And so I don't wanna give anyone a sense of complacency. Fourth turnings can turn out horribly. You've named some examples, you know, Stalin, think how that one turned out. And to this extent, history is not determined at all, right?

But what the rhythm of history does is it tells us what our roles are. It gives us basic boundaries. It says, here's the role you need to play as a generation. You better play it well. If you play it badly, as for instance, you might even argue that Americans played it fairly badly during the American Civil War, you end up with maybe success, but success mixed with tragedy or maybe just unambiguous tragedy as we've seen in other times.

I am optimistic about America because I think America has done very well in the past. And most importantly, because when you look at previous fourth turnings, all of the fourth turnings, there was so many excuses to be extremely pessimistic. Right. If you had gone back to earlier points in those eras, you would have said, it looks absolutely hopeless from here on out. Right?

But it turned out not to be. So for that reason, I am hopeful. This is a leader that will galvanize different generations, will no doubt create huge enemies. FDR was that man, you know. He was Franklin Stalino Roosevelt to a very large share of Americans.

You can't forget that. He was divisive too, as was Lincoln. I don't even wanna tell you what Lincoln was called in the press by his Democratic opponents. Right? So these will be people who will be hated too.

Make no mistake about it, but they will be effective enough. And ultimately, the nation will galvanize around them. And it's an interesting point though that early on, we may not, when this person arrives, we may not immediately see their potential. It will emerge gradually over time. Neil, it's a wonderful, wonderful way to end here.

My real purpose is to reconnect people with our history and with our future. I often remind people that, you know, in the last chapter of the book, I tell people about, you know, your personal history span. I say to people, if you think about the oldest person you knew was a young child, right? And then think about the youngest person you will know before you pass away. And then think about their collective lifespans, going from the birth of the earliest person to the death of the latest person, what I sometimes call your personal history span.

I mean, the entire life experience of everyone you will personally know, it's likely that that is in a span of around two thirty years. That's as long as United States has been around. It's a long time. Think of the fourth turnings, think of the winters of history and the summers of history they have experienced. Think of the lessons there.

Think of your connection to them. You are one part of a much greater story here. We're not just left dangling out on the edge of history. I think one of the most debilitating aspects of modernity and linear history, and we think of ourselves as constantly just trying to get better and better all the time, or if we're in a bad mood, we think things are getting worse and worse all the time. But either way, you have no connection to your parents because, you know, they have no idea what's happening, and your kids will have no connection to you.

So it makes us irrelevant, right? It makes us despair. And I think particularly at a time of history when we're facing hardship, and we're likely to face hardship, I do think that humans are hardwired for hardship. We're very good at sustaining hardship. What we're not very good at is sustaining hardship without purpose, without meaning.

And so if you don't have a sense of your place in history, of what the possibilities are, of what your roles are, of any sense of boundedness, of what's possible and what's probably very improbable, you will feel a certain sense of despair. I think what I try to write is to some extent to give people an excuse or a reason not to feel despair, to feel they do have a place, that what they do in history would be recognizable by their parents and will be appreciated by their children. They will come to understand your role in history. Neil, that is beautiful, poetic, and as Viktor Frankl said, man does need meaning. And I think the way you talk about the different generations and instead of everyone thinking of themselves as kind of isolated, you're basically saying you're all in this play together.

You all have a part to play, and now we need a director to kind of pull everybody together to work as that team. And you do create a sense of hope. And I think your book is wonderful, and I urge our listeners to read it, but I also urge our listeners to go out and find out more about your podcast and your videos you've done, Neil, because I think you are an optimist in the way the New York Times banner, so to speak, headline did not quite get it. People have to do the work, And if they do the work, I think that there is a beautiful message in your book, and I thank you for sharing that today. Well, thank you very much for saying that.

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