"History Comes In Patterns" Neil Howe: Civil War, Market Crashes, and The Fourth Turning | PBD #441
Patrick Bet-David sits down with author Neil Howe to discuss the "Fourth Turning" theory and its impact on societal change. Together, they delve into the potential for an impending revolution and what it could mean for the future.
00:00 - Podcast intro
01:13 - Patrick welcomes the audience and explains who Neil Howe is.
02:17 - PBD Podcast Intro
02:41 - Patrick welcomes today's guest Neil Howe
04:50 - Neil Howe explains why he wrote the book The Fourth Turning.
11:30 - Neil explains what The First Turning is and the last time it occurred in the U.S.
13:56 - Neil explains what The Second Turning is and the last time it occurred in the U.S.
19:01 - Neil explains what The Third Turning is and the last time it occurred in the U.S.
22:28 - Neil explains what The Fourth Turning is and the last time it occurred in the U.S.
25:11 - Will The Fourth Turning include a global World War or conflict?
37:04 - Neil explains the four types of Generational Arch-types
43:23 - Which of the Generational Arch-types typically move away from family and principles.
50:40 - Neil discusses the generational shift of views on LGBTQ issues.
1:02:24 - Neil discusses which Generational Arch-types make a return to morals.
1:13:03 - Why and how civil wars are playing out across the globe.
1:18:38 - The process for States to succeed from the Union.
1:23:30 - Where to live if the United States breaks out into a civil war.
1:39:10 - The role of faith and God in The Fourth Turning.
------
🧢 Represent Valuetainment & The PBD Podcast! Buy One "Future Looks Bright" Hat, Get One Free: https://bit.ly/3zFTJE9
Represent Valuetainment & The PBD Podcast! Buy One "Future Looks Bright" Hat, Get One Free: https://bit.ly/3zFTJE9
Purchase tickets to PBD Live - "Reagan" Movie Screening & Live podcast w/ Dennis Quaid on Friday, August 2nd: https://bit.ly/3xNPhCS
Meet Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson! Join the Minnect League Championships for your chance to win a meet-and-greet with The Rock at The Vault 2024 | Sept 4th – Sept 7th | Palm Beach Convention Center: https://bit.ly/4aMAar8
Purchase the limited edition Stars & Stripes VT Collection: https://bit.ly/3z6VaLM
Purchase the new "Angry Patriot" t-shirt for $34.99 at VTMerch.com: https://bit.ly/4c3WsW2
Purchase tickets to The Vault Conference 2024 featuring Patrick Bet-David & Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: https://bit.ly/VAULT2024
Connect one-on-one with the right expert for you on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3MC9IXE
Connect with Patrick Bet-David on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3OoiGIC
Connect with Tom Ellsworth on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3UgJjmR
Connect with Vincent Oshana on Minnect: https://bit.ly/47TFCXq
Connect with Rob Garguilo on Minnect: https://bit.ly/426IG0R
Purchase Patrick's new book "Choose Your Enemies Wisely": https://bit.ly/41bTtGD
Register to win a Valuetainment Boss Set (valued at over $350): https://bit.ly/41PrSLW
Get best-in-class business advice with Bet-David Consulting: https://bit.ly/40oUafz
Visit VT.com for the latest news and insights from the world of politics, business and entertainment: https://bit.ly/472R3Mz
Visit Valuetainment University for the best courses online for entrepreneurs: https://bit.ly/47gKVA0
Text "PODCAST" to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!
Get PBD's Intro Song "Sweet Victory" by R-Mean: https://bit.ly/3T6HPdY
SUBSCRIBE TO:
@VALUETAINMENT
@vtsoscast
@ValuetainmentComedy
@bizdocpodcast
@theunusualsuspectspodcast
Want to be clear on your next 5 business moves? https://bit.ly/3Qzrj3m
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller "Your Next Five Moves" (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
About once every long human lifetime, we basically reshape our outer world of politics, infrastructure, and usually in violent organized conflict.
And the fourth turning is that process.
In order for that to happen, there has to be a very, very high level of fear.
If that event needs to happen for us to get in line, where are we at right now?
We don't realize how close we are.
We live in a country that is so split.
One end has to come out on top.
They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate.
Get back!
Get back!
Or they are scared straight into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.
There's no way that's going to happen.
This is the cycle.
People don't understand how history works.
These things happen and they force us to do things even that we don't like.
It doesn't work because it goes in the way you want it to go.
But it up and takes us where we have to go.
This is probably a message everybody needs to hear in America right now with the book Fourth Turning Neil Howe.
And by the way, the first 35 minutes of the podcast, I hope it doesn't discourage you from listening to the last 45 minutes of it because you almost need to listen to the first 35 minutes to understand the last 45 minutes.
The stuff we asked about on the fourth turning, he says there's five predictions we made in the book that they wrote in December of 1997.
Four out of the five came true.
The fifth one, you have to hear what he says about the fifth one.
And it was pretty wild how close we are for it.
And he says, look, it's a definite that every other fourth turning we've had in the history of America, it's led to a war.
And here's what it's looking like right now.
And I asked him what role certain events have played for us to be as divided we are with values and principles today and why he thinks it could be a civil war.
It was interesting.
We had a couple moments where we disagreed and agreed, but it will make for very, very good content for you.
Again, don't let the first 35 minutes discourage you from listening to the last 45 minutes.
You'll see why when you watch the entire thing.
Having said that, here's Neil Howe, the author of The Fourth Turning.
Did you ever think you would make it?
I know this life meant for me.
Yeah, why would you bet on Goliath when we got Bet David?
Valuetainment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to haters.
I don't even run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the, I'm the one.
Okay, so I want you to think about the greatest prediction you ever made.
Just think about, you know, I mean, you know, one day XYZ is going to happen.
What's the wildest prediction you ever made?
Imagine if you and your friend, William, your name is Neil Howe, and your friend's name is Neil Strauss, Neil, not Neil, William Strauss.
Neil Strauss is a different author.
You guys write a book in 1997 called The Fourth Turning, and you predict in the fourth turning, there could be a massive, you know, economical crisis and at the same time, a pandemic.
And then it happens, the fourth turning.
And then today, everybody around the world has recovered from that pandemic that's been taking place.
But there's a lot of people that are talking about this book.
And this is such an interesting book because on one end, the first time Al Gore read this book, he turned around and he says, everybody has to read this book called Generations, which made an impression on him.
Neil Howe wrote that book as well.
He said everybody in Congress had to read it.
So he bought a copy to everybody, send it to them.
And then think about the complete opposite person of an Al Gore, maybe a Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon reads The Foreturning and then wrote and directed Generation Zero, a Citizens United Productions film on the book's theory prior to becoming White House chief strategist for President Trump.
So anyways, I can say a lot of different things about today's author, but I've been looking forward to this conversation today.
Neil, it's great to have you on.
Patrick, it's really good to be here.
Yes, it's interesting because, you know, many of us have read the book.
It's not like we haven't read the book, The Foreturning.
A lot of people have read the book.
A lot of people have had people recommend it to them.
And then, you know, today we're seeing a lot of stuff unravel.
But basic question to the average person that's never read the book, and I got a lot of things I want to get into.
I want to talk to you about the economy.
You know, does it ever happen when we don't go through all the four turning, you know, different stages?
Is the currency about to change?
How much of it has to do with values and principles changing?
But if you don't mind just taking a moment first, what inspired you want to write this book and what are actually the fourth different turnings?
Okay.
Bill and I, and I should say Bill Strauss was my co-author for many years.
He passed away about 11 years ago.
We started writing in the late 1980s.
So this has been an alternative career.
I mean, you know, partly I've been a policy guy.
I actually wrote my first book, co-authored with Pete Peterson, founder of Blackstone Group.
We did a lot of stuff on debt, deficits, entitlement, what the hell's going to the federal budget.
You know, I'm the kind of guy who reads the latest CBO report and I weep.
You know what I mean?
The next 10 years, the next 30 years, what's going on in the federal budget?
I mean, it's bad.
It's much worse than it actually looks on the paper.
But I still have that in me, right?
I've done this for so many years, looked at budget projections.
But my other career.
Is there such a thing as budget projections today?
I mean, who's doing it today in Congress?
They're not sitting there counting when we're going to stop spending money and paying it off.
No, what they do is they just say current law.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
Another $2 trillion, another $2.1 billion.
It is disastrous.
And no one can do anything, right?
I mean, there's just complete paralysis.
But my other career was looking at generational change.
So I didn't, you know, I'm, you know, my study, my field in graduate school was history, history and economics.
But so Bill and I were really interested in generational differences.
You know, why are generations different?
Boomers are so different from their parents.
Xers are different from boomers.
Millennials, you know what I mean.
We went back and wrote an entire history of America as a sequence of generational biographies.
That was our book, Generation.
So we started in the 1630s with a great migration to New England of the Puritans, you know, the first old world, sizable migration to New England.
You know, their city on a hill, they called each other saints.
I mean, this was a very idealistic enterprise.
And then they had their kids who were called cavaliers who didn't understand, mom, dad, why the hell did you bring us up to this godforsaken wilderness?
They look back at England, they saw, you know, gold, pedigree, all kinds of riches to be made.
These generational differences have been with us throughout, Patrick, our entire history.
Different generations see each other differently because they have a different location in history.
So that was what we figured out.
And then we found something we didn't expect.
We did not go in here looking at for a cycle of history, anything like that.
What we didn't expect is that these generational differences came in patterns.
Certain kinds of generations always follow other generations.
After the Puritans came the Cavaliers.
After the Transcendental Generation, they came of age with the Second Great Awakening.
This would have been the peers of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau and all those poets and commune founders and feminists.
And I mean, they came of age in the 1830s.
And the generation that came after them got the name Gilded Generation.
They bore the brunt of the Civil War.
They were a generation of metal and muscle.
They really didn't say very much.
But again, that kind of shift, right?
And you look at this shift from idealism to pragmatism, survival coming right after it.
And there are other patterns too.
That pattern made us reflect on something else.
If generations come in patterns, then the history that shapes generations must also come in patterns.
And that got us to reflect on a very basic pattern that historians have often noticed.
And that is about once every long human lifetime, we basically reshape our civic institutions, our outer world of politics, infrastructure, the economy, our constitution, and usually in violent organized conflict, right?
So this really started in the last quarter of the 17th century.
This was the era of Bacon's Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution, King Philip's War.
It's what Thomas Jefferson later looked back and he said, you know, 100 years before 1776 was the first real American revolution.
That was Bacon's Rebellion.
But this was an extraordinarily violent reshaping of the colonial identity.
And then, of course, a lifetime later came the American Revolution.
A lifetime later came the Civil War.
A lifetime later came the New Deal, the Great Depression, World War II.
And a lifetime later, here we are, Patrick, right?
And what's interesting is that roughly halfway in between these what I consider to be outer world upheavals, you know, when our institutions are basically, our sense of community is being creatively destroyed.
We have what historians call the great awakenings of American history.
And very conveniently, historians number them.
You know, they talk about the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening.
Probably the fourth or fifth Great Awakening was the late 60s, 70s, early 80s, you know, when boomers were coming of age.
And these are periods when we don't remake the outer world.
We remake the inner world of religion, values, culture.
Now, this basic yin and yang rhythm has coursed throughout American history.
Historians often don't pay attention to it because they don't, you know, political historians don't really value looking at religion.
Religious historians don't really, you know what I mean?
This requires a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary perspective.
And it gives rise to this idea of four turnings, during each of which a new generation is coming of age, and each generation is sort of moving up to another phase of life.
And we have rising adults moving into midlife, midlifers moving into elderhood, and so on.
So I'll give you a tour through the first four turnings, and then we can proceed.
Sure.
Let's look at what I think is most familiar to Americans on a long cycle, and that would be what happened after World War II.
The historian William O'Neill called this the American high, right?
This would have been the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, John Kennedy, you know, 1946 to 63.
Let's just think of it that way.
It was an era when institutions were strong, individualism was weak.
People had a strong consensus about where the nation should go.
People in America felt like they were more, that the sum of what they were was more than each part individually.
In other words, in an aggregate, they mattered more than citizen.
Exactly.
A sense of strong collective.
People were modest about their individual talents or their individual rights, and everyone had a job to do.
You were a boy in school.
People said go out and be a breadwinner.
You were a girl, they said be a homemaker.
You know, everyone had a role to do.
This is typical of a high.
In fact, it's typical of every post-crisis generation.
And the generation coming of age in that era was the silent generation.
These were the kids who had been children in World War II and the Great Depression.
This would have been, we have very few of them in politics left.
Who remembers World War II still in politics?
Joe Biden?
Yeah, he remembers it.
He's old enough.
Mitch McConnell, that's about it.
And some would question whether they remember it or not, because they're currently.
The problem is that.
Maybe Ollie remembers it.
But that's another way of saying it.
But my point is that that shaped them.
And these tend to be pretty conformist young people.
We had universal conscription in the 1950s, and there wasn't a single kid who rebelled.
Elvis Presley called into the army.
Yes, sir.
You know, shaved his hair, was off to Germany.
I mean, the next generation, all that would change, right?
Okay, so that is the high.
Community strong, individualism was weak.
The second turning is the awakening.
And this is a time when the post-crisis generation is starting to come of age.
There would be boomers in the lettuce caps.
By the way, I mentioned the second Great Awakening.
That was a generation that was born and raised just after the Republic was founded.
So you've got the rhythm now.
These are the kids raised in the peace, plenty, and orderly prosperity that came after the crisis.
Low chaos, not a lot of crisis.
Exactly.
It's chill.
Right.
Pretty peaceful.
You can be creative if you want to.
That's this phase.
Yeah, well, there's nothing.
Yeah, you could be creative, but no one will allow you to do it, right?
That's the problem.
You have to be a member of the system, right?
I mean, that's so they, yeah, they have all this inner creativity born through all that stability and affluence, but they don't have the, there's no way to express it because you're supposed to be part of the system.
So you have Mario Savio, free speech movement, 1964, saying we need to throw ourselves on the gears of the system.
That famous speech on Sproul Plaza in UC Berkeley, to throw ourselves on the gears of the system to stop it, right?
And that started this whole boomer awakening.
That started this.
What you do in an awakening is you want to throw off all the social conformity.
You want to throw off all this overriding sense of community.
We don't need to be building so much anymore.
Your parents went through the crisis and they were programmed to just keep building and make institutions stronger.
Why?
Why?
We don't no longer need it, mom and dad, right?
So I think that In the most recent context, it started mainly on the left on college campuses.
It was protesting the patriarchy and sex role divisions and how you dress and how you talked and all that stuff.
But I think at the later end, in the 1970s with Prop 13 and the Reagan movement, it was more the right that got in on us, cut our taxes, cut regulation.
But here is what it all had in common, left and right.
The individual should do whatever the hell he wants.
We don't need this community.
The boomers was raised at a time of maximum equality in terms of income and wealth.
You look at the Gini coefficients, you look at any of the data, that's just when everyone agrees that we had the most maximum income and wealth equality, late 60s.
And they hated it, right?
It was the strong middle class.
It was these little boxes that all look the same.
Remember that Melvina Reynolds song?
It was Pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere.
It's the boomers' worst nightmare.
Why?
Let people go their own way.
I think boomers over their lifetime have been very accepting and indulgent of growing income inequality.
I think that that has been, yeah, every individual can do his or her own thing, right?
Is that a mindset of libertarianism?
Like the DNA.
And it's not necessarily they wanted inequality.
What they wanted was the freedom of every individual to choose whatever they held they wanted to do.
And do you know when the Libertarian Party got started?
1971.
Well, there you go, right in the middle of the day.
That's exactly.
That's what I'm saying, which makes sense.
Rob, did you see that?
So Libertarian Party, if you look it up, 1971.
Right.
But what you got is that boomers wanted, they didn't want to find benefit pension plans.
Define contribution.
Contribute if you want.
Don't contribute if you don't want.
Everything should be your choice.
And of course, boomers end up.
A lot of them didn't contribute.
They borrowed against it.
They never rolled it over.
All these boomers now were unprotected going into retirement.
So it's had all these consequences, but the boomer ethos was the institution shouldn't be responsible for you.
Just, you know, everything would be okay if people had more freedom.
And they really mastermind.
I think most of the tirades against boomers have emphasized this.
Most recently, I can't remember the author.
It was that Xer Gibney, the guy who was one of the PayPal founders, one of the guys in California, wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Generation of Sociopaths.
I think one of the most scathing screeds against boomers as a generation.
He points this out, right?
Boomers never wanted to work on continuing the community-oriented institutions that brought us together.
They started the trend.
Okay, so that's the awakening.
Now, what's the third turning?
The third turning is the unraveling.
And that in the most recent context would have started in the mid-1980s, morning again in America, probably gone all the way through to the GFC, the great financial crisis, you know, 2008.
What was that era?
Well, think about it.
The high, you know, banding together, building things, being a stronger community, took the lessons from the recent crisis, right?
And everyone is scared.
You got to circle your wagons.
You got to, you know, we might go back into a crisis.
The awakening comes, and then the unraveling, you take the lessons of the recent awakening.
What do you need to do to be happy and fulfilled?
Be an individual, right?
So the unraveling is sort of the maximum individualizing of American society, and that was when Gen X was coming of age, right?
And Gen Xers were the ultimate throwaway generation as kids.
I mean, they were individuals from the time they were three.
These were the first kids that people took pills not to have.
They were alone at home.
They were the alone at home generation, right?
And you can notice that the words that have followed Xers in the pop culture, words like reality, survivor, right?
Think about that.
Think of those black shirts they used to wear, you know, with the die yuppie scum, you know, back in 1970, you know, and the very different kind of actors and actresses, a very different impression that they had in Hollywood when they came of age, almost traumatized, you know, not really acting up so much as boomers.
For Xers, individualism wasn't a discovery.
It was just a fact of life for the time they were kids, right?
I mean, you were on your own and you were expected to grow up really quick.
And this is the mood of the unraveling, maximum individualism.
These are historically, these often feature wild market euphorias, you know, like in the 1990s, the dot-com bubble, I think, has gone down in history.
This is also the 20s.
You think about the famous decades in third turnings in American history, you're talking about decades of cynicism, bad manners, and weak, very weak civic instincts.
I'm thinking about the 1990s, the 1920s, the 1850s, the 1760s.
These are wild decades where we didn't think we had any kind of civic core in America.
And I would say the book which gave the best sense of direction of the 1990s was written by Francis Fukuyama.
It was called The End of History.
And you read that book, and it's all the big institutions are going to fade away.
All the authoritarians and dictators were going to collapse, right?
And there'd just be individuals transacting with each other on the internet.
You'd go into a Starbucks, get out your laptop, and just transact with people around the world, and all your million-in-one wants would be satisfied.
No sense of community in that vision at all, right?
That's where we were.
But history says the third turning is always followed by the fourth turning.
And the fourth turning is that process.
It's dark, it's violent usually, but it's where we refine community.
And I think one thing that's fascinating, and this latest book I wrote last year, The Fourth Turning is Here, I look at how familiar we are in knowing how a society goes from community individualism, because in our own human lifetimes, we've all lived it, right?
But clearly, there's got to be another direction history often goes, right?
It's got to go from individualism to community.
None of us have any familiarity with that because it's beyond our lifetime, right?
Ah, that was the last fourth turning.
But hardly anyone is, you know, almost everyone who lived through that is too old to tell us about it.
But that's what I want to focus on, because we are now in the fourth turning and its most climactic moments.
We have about a decade to go.
Its most climactic moments are ahead of us.
So you got high, first turning, awakening, unraveling, crisis, which is the one we're in right now.
It's the fourth turning.
The fourth turning.
It's kind of like seasons.
Think of spring, summer.
And the way you have them is you have, yeah, I saw how I think Tony did it the right way, the way he broke it down when you and him sat down together.
He broke it down by seasons, which was an easy way to see it.
So high, you got World War II lasted till mid-60s.
You got 1946 to 64, which is the, you know, 18 years that boomers produced 76 million kids, most ever in an 18-year period.
Soldiers coming back from war, boom, bunch of babies are born, and you got the Mustang.
You can even predict what businesses could do if you can get this right.
Then the last event of the high was GFK assassination.
That's the last event.
I think that's what you referred to.
Then two, awakening.
That's 64 to 84.
Three, unraveling.
That's 84 to 2008-ish.
This is the weakening of institutions and the rise of individualism.
And then crisis is now 2008 till about, you said late 20s, 2028, early 30s.
Early 2030s.
Yeah, we think now about 2032, 2033, it will be resolved.
That will be the resolution.
That'll be like 1946 when we're founding everything is in concrete, right?
Bretton Woods, UN, all that.
Each of these that have happened in the past, when you break it down, a lot of these have to do with a war.
It leads to a war.
Is one of your predictions, you said there could be a global pandemic.
There was one when you guys said there could be a global pandemic.
Financial challenges, we experienced it.
Do you also foresee or predict that a World War III could happen the next five to ten years?
Well, it could happen any year.
Could happen in almost 30 days.
Yeah.
1960, 1962, as I recall.
Look, let's take war first, and then I'll move on to your other thing.
In the most recent book, I think in Fourth Turning, we went back.
So we deal with sort of the Anglo-American saculum.
So, you know, we go back even before America, and we go back, or most recently, we go back to the War of the Roses, the Armada.
You know, we go, this pattern is, you know, five or six saculum long now, right?
It characterizes the modern world, you know, sort of post-Renaissance, post-reformation in the modern world.
And it's becoming increasingly global.
And I hope we come back to that because we see now these trends happening globally, right?
This trend back toward community, authority, ethnocentrism.
My God, Patrick, it's around the world.
Name a place in the world when you don't see it.
We got the French elections.
Yes, we got India.
We got Pakistan.
We got China.
We got Philippines.
Argentina.
Look, these are becoming – so I want to return to how this became a global – how this became global.
World War II and the Great Depression were global events, after all.
And so you can see global echoes, generational echoes from that.
But I want to now deal with this thing going back that far to the 15th, 16th century.
At least in our history, every total war has happened in a fourth turning, and every fourth turning has had a total war, right?
Every.
Every.
That's a prediction.
But, well, it's not a prediction.
It's a correlation.
It's an association.
Look, I want to be as optimistic as possible.
I don't say in the book that it requires it, but I am saying, and I go through a lot of sociology here about how do you incubate community?
And I went through all the sociology.
I mean, I went back to Weber, Durkheim, Tunneys, all of them.
They all agree community springs out of conflict, right?
I mean, that's what creates.
That's what brings people together in community.
9-11 brought us together, right?
Let's go fight the enemy.
You know, it's interesting when people talk about, well, Neil, you know, we could never have trust in institutions again.
We could never trust a leader again.
And I said, do you know what G.W. Bush's ratings were four months after 9-11?
81%?
What's that?
Over 90.
It was like 93%.
Don't tell me you can't bring trust.
It's not going to be pleasant.
It's not going to be a trust where you wake up one sunny day and say, oh, you know, I think I want to trust someone today.
That is not how trust is born.
People don't understand how history works, Patrick.
It doesn't work because it goes in the way you want it to go.
These things happen and they force us to do things even that we don't like.
And I hope we get back to that because I think that's an interesting point about, you know, how community works and how history works.
It doesn't take us necessarily where we want to go, but it often takes us where we have to go.
So can there be a fourth turning without a war?
You're not saying yes or no.
Here's what I'm saying.
It does require total urgency.
It requires an emergency.
It requires adrenaline, Patrick.
It requires people to say, you know what?
If we don't form a community, we're history.
I mean, you know, in the over sense.
So when you're developing leaders, one of the things you speak a lot about when you're raising kids or you're developing leaders in business, you'll say, you know, you want things to change, you got to change, right?
And change comes in three different ways.
One that is intentional, okay, where you're intentionally choosing to change.
Second one is accidental.
It wasn't like you were choosing to change.
An event happened, then you're like, oh, okay, you're in an environment, you're working at a company, you have the right friends around you, you got lucky, they're reading books, you read the book.
They're getting on a diet to lose weight, you're getting on it.
But it's accidental.
It's not really intentional.
And then the last kind of change happens through force.
You don't have an option.
That's the burning plus.
That's exactly the one where, you know, the conflict equals community, where to me, you know, a guy who was born in Iran, I see war.
You know, I'm born 78.
We escape Iran in 89.
You're seeing all that hot mess in Iran.
You're like, oh my God, there's no way in the world, you know?
And you go through a certain level of pain.
By the way, the early 80s was terrible in Iran.
I mean, that was horrible.
That's when I lived.
Checking out the kids to clear minefield.
That's where I lived.
I lived in the capital in the early, mid, late 80s.
Did you ever know Lawrence Miller?
No.
You ever read the book Barbarians to Bureaucrats?
No, I haven't.
So I think you would like this book.
The way he broke it down, he gave this perspective before business.
And he said, corporate life cycle strategies.
Okay.
And he said, throughout every single company, first you have the profit.
The face of any company goes through.
First, there's a prophet, the founder.
Okay, here's what we're going to be doing.
The founder comes out and says, we're going to do this, except we're going to do it better.
Then a founder attracts barbarians who goes and gets stuff done.
Founding fathers also had barbarians.
Then barbarians attract builders and explorers.
What if we build this?
What if we explore to the west?
What if we explore to the north or the south or the east?
Then they attract administrators.
Then administrators and lawmakers attract bureaucrats and aristocrats.
Then comes the fall.
Okay.
Yeah, then they got the decadent generation born after that.
That's it.
So in other words, the way he explained the business life cycle is similar to the way you're describing the life cycles of a country that we're going through.
Maybe let me ask you a different question.
But I want to say something interesting.
When we did the fourth turning back in 1997, it was kind of a nice moment in America.
The economy was doing better.
The stock market was winning.
Everything was pretty nice.
Freedom bubble.
Yeah, and the bubble was beginning to warm up.
Comcast, AUL, Yahoo.
Yeah, these guys are predicting this crisis way out there.
Wow, it's kind of a gloomy book, pessimistic book.
We came out, I came out with this book last year, The Fourth Turning is Here.
And I get the opposite reaction.
People read the book and they say, what, you think it's actually going to end?
It's going to get better?
There's something good coming after that.
We're going to refine community.
Are you kidding?
So it's interesting how our perspective has changed, right?
In other words, people are so hopeless now.
People are so alone.
People feel so completely separated from any sense of either partisan community, national community, whatever.
But that's it.
On this sense of war, there is a place in the book where I talk about this.
William James, who actually took a summer, he took a year.
He went out to Stanford.
Yeah, kind of went out to California.
I believe that was 1906.
It was the year of the San Francisco earthquake.
It's kind of an interesting year.
But earlier in that year, he gave a speech, which is very famous.
I think most Americans have heard the name.
If they haven't read it, you should read it.
It's only about 20 pages long.
It's called The Moral Equivalent of War, right?
Very famous.
He was a pacifist, by the way.
He didn't participate in the Civil War.
And he asked, is there any way we could substitute the social function of war?
And most of the speech is about how important war is for shaping and developing nations.
It teaches people to sacrifice their personal needs, give to the common wheel, to confront adversity, to do great things, to have great things come out of them, and to build big institutions and to try new projects and to take new risks.
And it sounds very convincing.
In fact, it sounds so convincing that you're not really sure he thinks there's a substitute for war.
But in the middle of the speech, he says something very interesting.
He says, I want to ask everyone here who's listening.
Again, this is in 1906.
He said, how many here would have wished that the Civil War had never happened?
Kind of interesting.
I mean, probably some of the people there are veterans, right?
Some of them probably disabled.
And he immediately answers his own question.
I know already, almost none of you wish the Civil War had never happened because we would not be the kind of nation we are today.
We're united, industrializing.
We have national railroads, national time zones.
I mean, we're a juggernaut that's been unleashed.
No one would have wished the Civil War had not happened.
That's kind of interesting, right?
And then he asked another question, but this is paradoxical.
He said, how many would wish another such war just a few years from now?
Because no one would.
What a great question after following up with that.
But interesting, Patrick, isn't this the way?
I've talked to a lot of people about their personal lives.
And I've asked people, I've said, think about an event in your life that was pretty bad.
It might have been a death in your family, a divorce, a business that went bust, just a horrendous period.
And then you ask people, think about that.
Would you have wished that that never have happened?
I've done this with a lot of people.
And I find most people, upon reflection, say, you know, it was good it happened.
I'm actually a better person.
I'm a more perceptive person.
I'm a deeper, I'm more mature.
I'm wiser.
And then, of course, he asked me, do you want another event like that?
And I said, no, no, I'm good.
I'm good on that, right?
But isn't that interesting?
We always gain by a rite of passage, but we don't want a new rite of passage.
This is why I say that history is like that.
History takes us places we don't want to go.
But in this complex system, social system, which is the history of a modern society, it takes us places where we don't want to go.
As I imagine a lot of Americans right now feel we're, you know, we're all being taken to a place where no one wants to go.
I mean, I'm just thinking of this political season right now.
Yeah, it's pretty wild where we're at.
But let me go back to it.
So generations.
First, we talked about the high, the awakening, unraveling, and crisis, right?
Then you talk about the generational archetypes, right?
The prophet, nomad, hero, and artist.
Yes.
These are born in each one of these four terms.
And they always have the same pattern.
So a prophet archetype always has the same basic life cycle story.
They're born in the era, the generational long era after the war, right?
They're born and raised as kids.
They come of age in the awakening, right?
And they spearheading these attacks on the institutions of their parents.
These very strong institutions built by the parents.
The problem with these institutions is not that they're failing, not like today.
The problem with these institutions is that they work too well.
They're too good.
That's what the boomers hated.
You know, our parents did everything right.
They were too strong.
And what is the one refrain which characterizes every awakening?
It's salvation not by works, but by faith, by going in the heart.
So moving from salvation by works to salvation by faith is the clarion call for every young generation coming of age and awakening.
And by works, they mean all these big projects by their parents, right?
Meaningless.
Turn in, turn inside.
Look at who you really are.
Be authentic, right?
So that's the boomer story.
And the boomers always, you know, go into midlife during this kind of culture worry kind of period that we've been through.
And then in entering old age, they always take America into and through the next great national crisis.
I mean, you know, Lincoln's generation, you know, took us into the Civil War.
But so that is that archetype.
And then you look at other archetypes that are different.
A hero archetype, like the GI generation that took us through, you know, World War II.
And they were a Promethean generation of builders, right?
I mean, not only did they take us through the Great Depression, they won World War II, they conquered half the earth, but then there were builders during the American high.
The interstate highways, the miracle vaccines, the trips to the moon, the great society.
And no generation in American history poured more concrete than that generation did.
Building all the dams, by the way, that boomers then later wanted to take down, blow up all their dams, all of their dikes.
But that generation has a very different location in history.
They're always born just after an awakening when attitudes toward child rearing are becoming more protective.
They come of age during the crisis, and then later on entering old age is during the awakening.
So they're the generation of elders that gets greeted right in old age as senior leaders by the next awakening.
The nomad archetype are the children of the awakening.
They generally are the throwaway kids.
During the awakening, no one is really, you know, families are minimally engaged with kids.
Everyone is experimenting.
Everyone is discovering themselves.
This is generally a time of great social turbulence, and it's their fate to be kids in that era.
They are in midlife during the crisis, and they tend to be the realistic hands-on doers in midlife.
For example, during World War II, the nomad archetype was the lost generation, and these would have been, you know, your tough generals like George Patton or, you know, the Harry Truman types, the Ridgways and all the Eisenhowers and so on.
They were the tough guys who took us through, made often brutal decisions that they had to make and took us through it.
Interesting, you know, their legacy.
And finally, the artist archetype are the children of the crisis.
And they become very different from...
Because they can afford to.
Well, they're the children of the crisis, so they're very protective.
They're very protected, excuse me.
So they rebel.
No, they don't rebel.
They are very well socialized.
They didn't grow up after the crisis.
They grew up during the crisis.
So they are very socialized.
So you've got the generation in the late 40s and 1950s on college campuses right after World War II.
Their motto was, we don't want to change the system.
A lot of the GIs, not only conquering the world, but a lot of them became communists.
I mean, anyone who saw Oppenheimer realizes a lot of this generation joined the Communist Party.
They were socialists.
A lot of them were radicals.
The silent generation motto was, we don't want to change the system.
We want to work within the system.
We want to join big corporations and work with huge numbers of other people.
We kind of want to stay anonymous.
We just want them silent.
They got the name Silent Generation, by the way, because of an essay that was written in the Time magazine in 1951 about these kids who never protested, just wanted to join and be helpful.
They were nice and they had a certain amount of social conscience.
This was the civil rights generation.
Many of them went down to the South, became civil rights workers, but they didn't want to put a brick through the window like boomers.
They always thought there was a way they could keep the system going, but just make it more humane.
So it's very interesting.
Each of these archetypes have played a very crucial role in American history.
So which one produces the, you said the feminist, the Walt Whitman, the, you know, the- The prophet archetype, yeah.
The prophet archetype gets those guys to come out.
Okay.
Now, which one of them has typically, which phase does it typically get away from family principles, family values and principles?
Well, during the awakening, everyone moves away from family, but they do so for different reasons, right?
I would say that the two generations that move away are the artist and the prophet.
So the artist does it at an awkward time because they're already in midlife.
Who spearheaded the divorce revolution of the 1970s, you know, late 60s and 70s?
Mostly actually the silent generation.
But they had already been conformist, right?
So that was really awkward for them.
You know, they went through that midlife crisis.
In fact, Gail Sheehee and everyone who invented and talked about the term midlife crisis were in the silent generation.
So that was very awkward.
Boomers generally still had not gotten married, you know, had no commitments yet.
So that was very awkward for them.
And of course, that led to the trauma of little Jan Xers, right, who were often the children of the silent, right?
Boomers, of course, also contributed to the dissolution of family life, didn't want to get married, kept it on hold, thought we didn't need the institution anymore.
And a record share of this generation, particularly as you get to late wave boomers, stayed unmarried throughout their lives.
And in fact, early wave Xers now we're seeing, you know, somewhere close to 20% women childless for life.
So you want to look at reasons why declining fertility rate.
I'm a demographer, so I look at this all the time, but that's part of it.
How much is this generation, how much of it is a bad politician at a wrong time?
How much of it is bad policies?
Like, you know, LBJ comes out in 1964.
You know, he comes out with his policies where all of a sudden birth rate for, you know, single mothers went from 4% to 40%.
So how much do policies play a role with generations and different turnings?
Policies always play a role.
Technology always plays a role.
But I always think it's we too often see technology as an exogenous accident that sort of shapes generations, right?
Someone developed a cell phone and kids are all shaped one way and someone invents a computer or shaped another way and so on.
I look at it the other way.
I often look at what is the, how do generations shape technology, which I think is much more interesting.
If you want to look at why we had personal computers, you know, starting in the 1970s, I think of the 1960s, who was designing computers?
Think about those generations and their mindset.
It was the silent generation, the GIs, right?
And their idea was an A-frame organizational pyramid.
You had a leader at the top.
Everyone got their marching orders.
You remember how that used to work back then?
And so a computer was at the top where you made decisions, right?
So Rand Corporation did a study in 1967.
The study was how many computers would America need?
You know what their answer was?
Seven.
Wait, they said, well, you know, AT ⁇ T would need one.
The Pentagon would need.
You see how they say they looked at it?
That was because of the generational mindset, how they looked at this kind of information processing technology.
Suddenly you had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and the next get boomers, right?
And suddenly they had a different vision, right?
1984 won't be like 1984.
You remember the guys swinging it into the screen shatters and all they spent $400,000 on that commercial.
Him and Steve both put up $200,000.
It was hugely greatest commercial of all time.
It was iconic.
But it was also incredibly generational.
This was their parents, you know, kind of Brezhnev world being shattered.
All those veterans of World War II and all these huge institutions.
What was the new computer going to be?
It's going to be a personal computer, one for each individual to liberate each individual.
And isn't it interesting, Patrick, that after that, the next several presidents, I don't care whether it was Reagan, Clinton, G.W. Bush, the elder Bush, they kept on saying the microchip will topple democracy, you know, dictators and autocracies everywhere.
You remember Reagan used to say that?
Clinton used to say that.
In other words, the new internet, everyone saw after the awakening that the impact of the internet and computers was going to be individualizing and it was going to topple all authority structures.
And for the next 20 years, that's what we thought.
And that was what, I mean, Reagan used to say that all the time.
With this microchip, you would even hold one up, you know, something from Hewlett-Packard or something.
This will topple, right?
He used to, he was great on that.
Isn't it interesting?
Then after the GFC, right, we enter the fourth turning.
A new generation is coming of age, right?
No longer Generation X, millennials.
And suddenly, dictators and authoritarians fell in love with the new technology.
The internet, the cell phone.
We can surveil you.
You just change a few of those chips and reverse the direction.
We get to surveil you.
We can organize hate mobs with social media.
We can flick off various.
This is what Narendra Modu routinely does every time there's Orion Kashmir.
He just flips off the internet.
They can orchestrate everything in their own countries through this kind of technology.
Now, isn't it interesting that is that the technology that changed that suddenly enables these authoritarians to become more powerful through technology?
No.
It's the mood has changed.
The era has changed.
The turning has changed.
The generations have changed.
So we use technology for a different purpose.
But you see my point.
The technology is being shaped by what we need to use it for.
In these uncertainty times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright.
So you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear.
And this is what we're doing.
If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free.
If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out.
Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people will stop by and say, you also watch a value team?
You also follow PBD podcasts?
I do too.
Place your order.
Go to VTMerch.com, click on a link above or below, place your order, and represent the VT and the PBD podcast gear.
Yeah.
You know, I'm trying to go a different angle, and I want to see if we're going to get there or not.
So I'm curious.
So here's what I did once, and I need your help.
So generational wealth.
Okay.
I'm a family guy.
I got four kids.
I was in California last month.
Great state.
At one point, I'm there.
We're there at Pride Month.
And I'm asking myself, what the hell happened for all of a sudden LGBTQ to own America?
What happened for LGBTQ to own the world?
World Cup, sports, everything is about them.
Small community, that's all we want to promote?
Really?
That wasn't the case 20 years ago.
So what part of this generation thought it's okay for that to happen?
Are we back to the libertarian generation where it's like to each a zone and do whatever you want to do and who gives a shit?
Because a bunch of journalists went to San Francisco this past week to Pride Month.
I don't know if you've seen the videos.
I'm definitely not going to be playing the clips.
I'll maybe show it to you afterwards.
If I show you the clips, you won't believe what's going on in the streets.
Kids are standing out there.
Men are butt naked with nothing to be shown.
And cops, people go up to cops.
Are you going to do anything?
Did you see a man is on his knees doing what you think is doing to another man while he's peeing on him?
They go to the cops and saying, there's kids on the sideline.
This is okay?
Yeah, we can't do nothing about it.
What made any political leader, society, people to think that's normal?
Because in no possible way is that normal.
When I was in the military, there were plenty of guys in the military that were gay.
It wasn't something where we sat there and were like, oh my God, just do your thing.
We're going to do our thing.
Everybody's good to go.
So my curiosity with this whole thing, Neil, is values and principles.
What generation loses principles?
About a year ago, my interest became about doing generational wealth transfer, okay?
And you go and study different families.
Rothschild.
You go study Rockefellers.
You go study Medici family.
You go study Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt, apparently, the father wasn't that involved with the kids.
I think he had eight or nine kids.
Rob, can you pull up how many kids Vanderbilt had?
I think he had eight or nine kids.
But he didn't give a shit.
He wasn't like, he's like, yeah, 13 kids.
Okay, my apologies.
I'm off by five or four kids.
He's like, ah, whatever.
So let me get this straight.
This guy's got 13 kids.
He's the richest man.
And his money only lasts one generation.
And then that's it?
Yes.
Why?
Then you have the Rockefellers or the Medicis or the Rothschild.
It keeps transferring generation after generation after generation.
What do they do correctly?
So, you know, I'm at an event in Chicago five weeks ago.
It's a Goldman Sachs event.
And it's the 60 billionaire families out of Chicago.
You and I were talking about Ken Griffin, Citadel, who left Chicago and went to Florida, went to Miami.
That was one of the names that came up.
Crown family was there.
The Walsh family was there.
The Reinsdorf family, who owns the Bulls, you name them.
All the families are there.
And they're kind of talking about how they manage the wealth and the family to not go to the next one.
Those who are too reckless and didn't build it based on values and they spoiled, money barely stays after a generation or two, okay?
Even if you're a billionaire, one of the families, their fifth generation, they call the G5s, that 150 G5s.
And our family's worth $14 billion.
It's a crown family, the general dynamics.
It's a very well-known family in Chicago.
So it's like, so what do we do?
If we got, you know, we're a $14 billion family, fifth generation kids, we got 150 of them.
What do we do?
We give each of these guys 10 million bucks.
We give each of these guys, that doesn't work.
You can't give each of them a billion.
That just doesn't work that way, right?
So what is the right model?
But to me, someone got casual about certain values and principles that leads to actual moral values, principles being down.
Do any of these turnings have to do with a level of casualness towards actual morality where we sit there, we're like, yeah, I don't really care.
Two each zone, do your thing.
You know, like you said, the feminist, the communist.
Where do you put the massive LGBTQ movement that we have today that everybody around the world feels.
Matter of fact, I'm probably talking about this right now.
It makes you uncomfortable because it's uncomfortable to talk about it.
You could get canceled.
People may not buy your books.
People may not do anything.
Oh my gosh.
I don't want to be part of the community that says this.
I grew up in California.
Yeah.
I went to UCST.
I went to UC Berkeley.
Back in the day, it was a beautiful state.
Everything worked.
Schools were great.
Freeways were free.
I mean, everything worked.
And people poured in massively into that state.
As you know, people are now leaving California.
And I've been back there.
You know, I stayed in cabins in the mountains.
I've been everywhere in California.
You go backpacking in the Sierras.
I used to go up along the coast.
It's gorgeous if it weren't for Californians.
You know what I mean?
That's the problem.
I don't understand that state anymore.
I go back and I just don't get it.
They will continue to lose people and they will continue to lose congressmen as they already are.
It's going to get smaller politically.
And you know which states are gaining.
We've had now 15 years.
Basically, the red zone is winning.
The blue zone is losing population.
They have higher birth rates in the red zone.
They also are getting huge net in migration, right?
What's really weird about this is I've looked back at state migration throughout the decades.
And the typical pattern is people move from lower income per capita states to higher income per capita.
That's the typical pattern.
You think about it, right?
Everyone wants to move to a richer area to get better jobs.
This is the opposite.
People are moving from Connecticut to Illinois.
And California, they're moving into the red zone because the cost of living is so much less.
What's happening in America when I talk about the renewed sense of community, it's all today in tribalism.
We've got a blue zone tribe.
We've got a red zone tribe.
And people don't even care who's at the top of the ticket.
You know what I mean?
Biden could be dead.
You'll still get 50% of the vote, right?
Because that doesn't matter as long as my tribe keeps the other tribe out.
The reason why our country can't do anything is right now, this is part of the fourth turning.
It's gridlocked, and we're on the verge of civil conflict.
Now, I talk in the book about two forms of organized conflict, which have come back continuously in fourth turnings.
One is external, the other is internal.
And usually it's a little bit of both.
I mean, the American Revolution was basically an internal conflict.
People don't realize this.
The American Revolution was basically Patriots against Tories within the United States.
More people killed each other within America than red coats, right?
I mean, I think people need to get that straight.
And typically a losing side in a civil conflict, whatever side perceives they're going to, you know, on the losing side, calls in external help, right?
So that's how you get, that's how you turn a civil conflict.
Of course, the Patriots thought they were getting drummed, you know, getting pretty beat by the British general.
So they brought in the French.
That's how we won.
It hadn't been for the French.
My God, we made it a global war.
Britain had to worry about a million other things that finally said, okay, we'll let you guys go.
In the Civil War, the Confederacy tried to bring in France and Britain.
I think they were one battlefield victory away from doing it.
I think if Lee had won at Antietam, which he didn't, but if he had, the British might have actually said, okay, we'll recognize you.
And then once the Emancipation Proclamation had been made, it was kind of all over.
No European country was going to go inside the South at that point.
But this has been, and we go back and talk about this.
But it's often at a razor edge, which way we go, external or internal.
And I see the same thing now.
If you had gone back in 1938, and remember that 1938 was one of the most, 1930s was one of the most polarized political decades in American history.
Half of America thought it was the Red Decade.
The other half thought it was the fascist decade, right?
It was the New Deal.
People either loved it or they absolutely detested Roosevelt, right, and the man who brought it in.
We had, and in Europe, I mean, democracies were falling to, you know, dictatorships.
But everyone thought that the liberal middle was gone.
I mean, capitalism was over.
It was either fascism or communism.
That was the future.
And there's incredibly polarized.
We had labor riots.
We had sit-down strikes.
We had the Pinkertons out.
It was a charged environment, and we were still mired in the Great Depression.
You know, by 1938, 1939, still a double-digit unemployment.
If you had asked Americans at that time, you say, we're going to have a huge conflict in America in a couple of years.
What do you think it's going to be about?
They probably would have said internal.
It's going to be, I don't know, it's going to be the right wing against the left wing, you know, in America.
No one would have said, oh, we're going to have a global conflict against fascism, which is what in fact happened.
So one of the things I like to do is kind of do an anatomy of these fourth turnings and to try to discern what kind of trajectories they take.
But one thing you see within these fourth turnings is this growth of tribalism, right?
This is how what happens in a fourth, remember how we enter, we go from an unraveling into the crisis.
And what people are overwhelmed by is the sense that everyone feels alone.
You remember we triumphed individualism for so long.
We all feel alone.
I talk to millennials today all the time.
I talk particularly to late wave millennials in their 20s.
And the one thing I get response most of all is isolation, disconnection, a sense of complete aloneness.
They don't have communities.
They try to have, you know, er satz communities, you know, through social media, which obviously just makes them even more miserable, as you know.
Have you read Silent Generation yet or not yet?
Anxious Generation.
Anxious Generation.
Yeah, he's a great book and a great writer.
Jonathan Hyde, you know, Jonathan Hyde.
Phenomenal book.
Yeah.
And a phenomenal writer, a phenomenal thinker.
And in fact, our portrait of this generation is very much, I mean, we kind of go through the different generations in the most recent book.
And my portrait, I think, is reasonably overprotected and anxious, right?
That's exactly the artist archetype.
Remember, we talked about this.
This all goes back to everything.
I'm asking you about morals and values.
Okay.
Morals and values.
I want to know which one of these phases, turnings that we go through, where man, leaders, fathers, husbands, presidents, police officers, local people say, it's okay.
Let them do whatever they want to do.
You're saying this happens regularly.
I believe it.
City of Corinth, where, hey, look at all this stuff that they're doing.
But then now it's as if if you don't accept this as the norm for values and principles, you're the problem.
So what happens by the end of the fourth turning is that one authority is in charge, right?
So authority is enforced and the morals and values become conventional again.
Always happens.
Always happens.
You look at how people dressed by the end of World War II as opposed to how they were dressed going into the late 20s, going into the 30s.
You look at how America became after the Civil War, kind of your Victorian image of respectability.
We all become more conventional by the end of the fourth turning, always.
And I talk about that in the book.
So that's the answer to that question.
Because along with community, it's conventionality that supports community.
Think about the American high.
Very community-oriented, very conventional culture.
The two things buttress each other, right?
So if you're looking forward to that kind of morality, things aren't said, things are said, are supportive of conventional norms, you have something to look forward to in the next 5, 10, 15 years, because that's where we're moving, right?
But it moves in that direction under the brunt of urgency and conflict and national mobilization.
But it all goes together, and that's what I try to bring out.
Here's what you're going to get by the end of the fourth turning.
You're going to get much greater community, one community, not different tribes, which we have today.
You're going to get greater equality.
That always happens.
And by the way, we can talk a little bit about economically how we're going to achieve equality because some way it's going to be ripping off rich people.
Inflation, number one, always an ingredient in fourth turning.
We can talk about that.
The next thing you get.
Your phone on this.
I think it's picking up something.
The next thing you're going to get is authority, right?
One person in charge and one set of norms in charge, because that's what the new regime is going to be.
The new regime is going to be very powerful.
You're also going to get a renewed commitment to the long-term future.
This is where we build our huge long-term infrastructure, huge new institutions toward the very end of the crisis and at the very beginning of the first turning.
That's when we make our long-term investment.
Totally unlike today where we're mortgaging our future.
You know, we talked about that earlier.
Then finally, this movement from defiance and the culture to convention.
So that's where we move.
And I play it out now.
When you say conventional, you mean traditional?
Is that kind of a good word?
Well, convention.
The Latin root of convention means calling everyone together.
You know, it's kind of like everyone moving together in one set of values, which reinforce time-tested norms.
In order for that to happen, there has to be a very, very high level of fear, right?
And a high level of fear to commit because I think you're beginning to understand it now.
I think I've been in many different situations where, you know, you're in a setting where a fight breaks out.
Everybody has very strong opinions.
They realize only one guy's in charge is that guy's terms.
My mother's family didn't like my dad because he had a very strong personality.
But when every one of their relatives stole money from them and they needed money to know who they could give that would never be lost and you can always get it back, it was only one guy you trusted.
That was my dad.
But it was always on his terms.
So if you went to him, he says, this is how this works.
Boom, boom, boom, right, in Iran.
So people eventually went back to strength, even though they didn't like the fact that that person with strength was right based on certain values and principles.
You were forced to go through it because you made shitty decisions and your back was against the wall.
I don't think America's back's against the wall yet.
So now let's go back.
Hang on, but that's the scenario we're headed to.
So then, so that means if shit's going to hit the fan, Neil, and let's just say shit hitting the fan could be a civil war.
Can I just say 10 years ago, we didn't even, Civil War was so far off our radar screen, we never even asked survey questions about it.
But starting about seven years ago, we started asking it, particularly after, you know, 2016 and 2020 and everything.
Now it's about half the population thinks it's likely.
Did you see the movie Civil War?
I haven't seen it.
I did.
I've seen most of the clips from it.
I don't like to go to movies.
You're not going to like it.
Did you watch Leave the World Behind, a movie that Obama did?
Yeah, I saw that.
What did you think about that?
I just thought it was loopy.
Okay.
But the problem with Civil War and the problem with Leave the World Behind is that they don't show that there's any particular community behind it, right?
It's just random crap happening, right?
The guy who produced Civil War basically said he was sort of like a modern-day Hemingway.
It's just reporting on violence and facts and names and numbers and nothing means anything.
Here's the problem.
When you're in the middle of that civil war, everything is going to mean a lot.
That's why you're fighting it, right?
This is what they don't portray.
And it's not just like a colossal auto accident.
No one saw World War II like a huge auto accident, right?
It was a cause.
It was whether the free world was going to survive or not.
Everyone knew what it meant.
The problem with these new movies is they just show it like an anonymous disaster.
That's not how it's going to look to people.
Let me go back to my question.
If a civil war, that kind of pain and fear, that event needs to happen for us to get in line with the right values and principles, if that's a level 10, okay?
If that's a level 10, where are we at right now?
You know, look, we used to be at two or three.
I think we're now at six and we're rising.
And so six.
And do you think, according to your studies of the fourth turning, it has to get to a nine or a ten?
It has to.
And the social dynamic inevitably leads there in order for the thing to be resolved.
In other words, it keeps moving in that direction.
And it's accidental within the fourth turning.
Civil War, Barbara Walter, you know, did this recent book.
She toured the world reporting on civil wars all over the world today, you know, from Biafra to Burma and everywhere.
She said the one universal thing that she had from everyone she interviewed is she says they all say the same thing.
We never saw it coming.
We thought we Henry Adams, who did his autobiography late in life around 1900, 1903, but he talked about this as a young diplomat in, he was a young diplomat in Washington, D.C.
He was in his 20s in 1860, 1861.
And he said, no one saw the Civil War coming.
No one believed it.
No one thought it was going to happen.
The South was always claiming there was secede.
You know what?
By then, it was just like, you know, every 10 years you make a big threat like that.
We just ignored you by now.
And then suddenly it happened, right?
But I think when you look at history more broadly, you can see the general social dynamics that lead us to this moment.
We're in one.
The question for me is external versus internal, will it be one?
Will it be the other?
Will it be both?
And that actually is a dynamic which I kind of speculate on throughout the book because I think it's an interesting one in how it's going to work out.
And we look at both of them today, right?
You look at the world today.
My God, you look at external conflict.
The entire world is growing tribal, right?
We have kind of an anti-democratic faction, which is all aligning.
We have the so-called democratic world, which is trying to align.
But we see danger points around the world everywhere.
And this is where we're heading.
In that original book, to come back to those predictions, you remember you took from that book.
We had a series of bullet points.
I think I'm just on two pages.
This is, again, 1997.
We're looking in the future.
We predicted five things.
I think you mentioned a couple of them.
We predicted a global financial crash.
We predicted a pandemic with imposition of martial law.
We predicted Russia would invade a neighboring former Soviet republic.
Wow.
We also predicted a Tea Party freeze on the national debt.
We actually used the word Tea Party.
This was long, but that was just a lucky guess.
So we said Tea Party freeze on the national debt.
That's four.
What's the upcards?
Those have been flipped.
Those cards in it.
Those are all flipped.
The other one's still a down card.
That's several states start nullifying federal laws leading to secession, right?
That's the down card.
We haven't had that yet.
Let me tell you what could lead to that.
I'd be curious to know what's yours.
Several states leading to a succession.
Several states.
Like Texas saying we want to be our own country.
We're not dealing with.
Nullifying.
You know, it'd start with nullification.
It would say, you know, we think our sovereign right of states to just nullify, we're not going to follow those laws.
We're not going to ship to the federal government these category of taxes on immigration.
We're just going to ignore what the federal government wants.
We think we have a sovereign, you know, that's how it starts.
And then at some point, it'll say, you know what?
We're just going to make our own decisions.
We're going to band together with some other states.
This is sort of the 1860, 1861 scenario.
Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen.
I'm saying that that is another of these scenarios.
But it's either going to be something like that or it's going to be external.
But imagine how the external thing.
You saw what's happening in the Second Thomas Shoal in the Philippines, right?
We have a treaty with the Philippines.
Article 5, the bongbong Marcos, you know, after Duterte, Marcos is a real friend of.
He says, if soon as a Filipino is killed, he's going to invoke Article 5 in that treaty.
What's the United States going to do?
I mean, if the United States doesn't go to defend its Philippines, what's Japan going to think?
South Korea, Taiwan.
In other words, we don't realize how close we are, Patrick.
You know how they called it Brexit?
Yeah, Florida actually would be pretty good.
It would be Flexit, if you think about it, right?
Texas will be Texit.
Yeah, Texas.
Tenet, Tennessee.
I don't know what Tennessee would call it, but okay.
So what's more likely?
Is it more likely to be a civil war or is it more likely to be a World War III?
Is there one of those two predictions you guys made, that one is more likely than the other?
I can't say.
Okay.
And it's not because I don't discuss that in detail in the book.
What I say is, like in the 30s, you wouldn't have known.
You know what I mean?
Even as late as 1939.
The Barbara Walters.
I'll tell you when America's mood suddenly changed on World War II.
We began to say we're going on a world war.
It wasn't Pearl Harbor.
It was about 16 months earlier.
It was the fall of France.
That was it.
The fall of France, we thought, my God, in World War I, they held out for four years.
I mean, they never, they fell in three weeks.
And because France was completely divided between left and right.
And by the way, preceding the fall of France came a national popular front to keep the fascists from taking over France.
Did you see the elections in France last week?
The 28-year-old guy that's a far-right guy that married.
Yeah, he's yeah, well, he's the older one, the younger one you're talking about, the guy in his 20s.
28 years old.
Yeah, but he's the one who's serving under Le Pen.
And we don't know yet whether Le Pen's party is going to get an absolute majority and whether they can have their own prime minister.
But here's my 28.
Yeah, Jordan Bardella.
And he's amazing.
He's sort of unflappable.
He's cool.
He's immensely popular.
Certainly more popular, I think, than Marine Le Pen.
But here's the point I'm trying to make.
They organized a national front of leftist parties to keep Le Pen's party from getting in.
And they organized under the name of the Popular Front.
When was the last time that the left all organized together under the Popular Front to keep the fascists in?
1936.
I mean, that was Léon Blum.
It was when the Spanish Civil War was going.
They made huge appeachments to Hitler.
And we saw what happened.
My point is that France fell in three weeks.
And it was after that fall that suddenly the opinion started changing in America.
We passed the Two Ocean Navy Act in July of 1940, just after the fall of France.
It went through Congress with not a single opposition vote.
This is one of the biggest armament bills in American history.
It doubled the size of the U.S. Navy, laid the keels for the Iowa-class battleships, the new Essex-class carriers.
If we had not made that investment then and waited until Pearl Harbor, we would not have been able to win in the Pacific until 1946, 1947.
I mean, think about it.
These are the things in time that matter.
This is actually what sometimes worries me, is that you can't tell how the fourth turning is going to move, but sometimes individual investments made early can make all the difference in how it later turns out.
I think about that when I think how, you know, we're running out of missiles, running out of ammo.
We'd run out of Patriot missiles in six hours in a war in Asia.
We'd be just out of them, right?
Who's manufacturing them?
Who's declaring the emergency to say that we're completely unprepared for conflict?
Nobody.
What is the actual process for somebody of states to succeed, to become their own countries?
What is the actual process of that?
When you're in a knife fight, there are no rules.
You realize that, right?
I mean, there are no rules.
There's no process for breaking the process.
No, there's no process.
And particularly after the precedent set by the Civil War.
I mean, it's just assumed that that's unconstitutional.
And there would be a war to be fought for it.
Secessions, and I point that out in the book.
Secessions in long-established states, long-established nations like the United States, never proceed peacefully.
I mean, you can go back and try to look for any example you want.
They never proceed peacefully.
There's never an example of a large, long-established nation having a huge significant group break away and have that happen peacefully.
And I don't think it's going to happen this time, certainly.
Which states have the strongest military?
We know Texas, Fort Worth, you know, they got a bunch of them, right, in Texas.
But what states have the strongest military that if they did do that?
Here's the point.
That actually becomes a cause's belly.
I mean, think about it.
I've had, so I've worked with all the branches of the military, particularly because all the stuff I do end generations, because everyone wants to know how to recruit millennials.
So I've dealt with the U.S. Marine Corps now for 25 years.
And you know what question they now ask me?
If California becomes a sanctuary state, you know what I mean, kind of secedes a little bit, just starts drawing its own rules.
I run Coronado Naval Base.
You know what I mean?
I run, what do I do?
But you know what that draws up again?
Fort Sumter.
I mean, we have a precedent.
That's exactly how the Civil War started.
The federal government had a fort in the middle of Confederate territory.
That's what triggered the war, Patrick.
I mean, that was the opening shot.
So there's an issue right there.
What do you do with military assets?
What do you do with federal assets in seceding territory?
But there are a lot of other issues too.
What do you do with people who belong to your side who are on the other side of the secession?
What do you do, for instance, if Texas secedes, red zone state, what do you do with Austin?
You know, a blue zone bullet in a red zone state.
So what happens to them?
Where do you live right now?
I live in West Virginia.
Do you know what state has the worst, worst military in America?
I want you to take a wild guess, according to statista.
You're talking about a nation or a state?
State, like a state.
Rob, can you pull this up?
Most active duty Armed Force personnel by state.
Now, no, I sent you the link, Rob.
Just go on the link I sent you.
I want to see your reaction to this.
And please don't get upset at these stats because I don't want you to be offended by these stats.
Let me know once you got it, Rob.
Okay, so at the top, California is number one.
Okay.
You got Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee.
Florida makes it into number six.
Expand all the way at the bottom, Rob.
West Virginia.
What are you doing living in West Virginia if shit hits the fan?
Come on, Neil.
Can I tell you something, Patrick?
Tell me.
Everyone around me owns 10 guns.
I mean, I have never seen a more armed camp.
And by the way.
They're all serving.
Half of them are serving in the military.
They just don't, they're just not based in West Virginia.
They don't need a base in West Virginia.
You need a base in Connecticut.
You need a base in Illinois.
You know what would be interesting though, what's the better question to ask, to ask the question of most privately guns owned per capita.
Is that the right question to ask?
You know what I'm asking, right?
I want to know like who is, who is like, I know Idaho is going to be up there.
Who do you have as, okay, Wyoming?
That makes sense.
Do you see it, Rob?
Or no, what is it?
Let's see what, okay, Montana.
I get it.
Go Lillore.
Wyoming, Alaska, Oregon.
West Virginia, right up there.
There you go.
Makes sense.
West Virginia and Idaho.
But yeah, okay.
So let's just say if that's going to be happening.
We don't need a military.
Military would not want to go into West Virginia.
But here's a question, though.
Here's a question.
Let's say a possibility of a civil war happens.
Where would one want to live?
You know, where I live just seems great right now.
Meteorologically, wind patterns.
I mean, everything looks pretty good out there.
And by the way, it's so poor.
No one would ever want to go in and take it.
Where I used to live in the suburbs of D.C., everyone had lots of money.
No one had any time.
You know what I mean?
No one had any time for you.
You know, you ask someone, everyone goes like that.
You know, where I now live, no one has any money, but everyone has lots of time.
You go and ask your neighbor, they're not going to say, oh, yeah, well, I got this great plumber.
You can call him.
They'll say, I'll come over to your house right now, trying to fix it for you, right?
It's a very different set of values, right?
We live in a country that is so split, right?
Between, you know, we talked about red zone and blue zone.
That's part of it.
But it is just so different.
You feel like you're moving into a different country, right?
And then I'm talking about a two-hour drive, you know, from the outskirts of D.C. up into the hills of West Virginia.
So, you know, when I think bleakly about the internal conflict, that's what I think about.
I think about these are two Americas which seem like they were there like on opposite ends of the earth.
Yeah, I saw a video of a mother saying, I feel so unsafe raising my child in Florida.
The state is so irresponsible.
They're not allowing my child to get puberty blockers at 14 years old.
And then I'm like, I mean, listen, it's turning into a point where, listen, you're going to have to go to California.
That's where you're going to feel the safest.
So it's going to become so tribal where if you want welfare and all that, go to California.
If you want to be standing on your own two feet and being left alone, go to these seven states.
If you want to go do start a business.
It's already doing it.
The self-selection is already well underway.
People are moving to places where, you know, and by the way, if you survey people about who they least want to live around, people on the other end of the political spectrum are the number one most hateful things that people want around.
They care less about race, religion.
They don't care about anything else so much as having someone on the other end of politics living near them.
This is why it's driving this self-segregation locally.
And by the way, it's also driving the whole phenomenon of the stolen election.
One reason why people, it's easy to believe in stolen election, this didn't used to be true.
You live in more and more landslide counties.
You know what Landslide County is.
It's a county where, you know, 80% of everyone just votes for one candidate as opposed to the other.
What that means is the typical voter, say you vote for Trump in 2020 and Biden wins, and you think, I don't know a single person who voted for Biden.
I don't know anyone in my town.
I don't know anyone, right?
I've never seen anyone talk about Biden.
It must have been stolen, right?
How can it be other than that?
America didn't used to be that way.
We didn't used to be so tribal.
We all knew people who voted for someone else.
I remember growing up, I mean, the neighbor voted for Nixon, the other neighbor voted for Kennedy, right?
And the parties weren't that different.
Now it's like these total mutually exclusive worldviews, right?
This is what scares me, Patrick.
And they're living in different communities.
They're living in different counties.
I don't know if that doesn't worry you.
It worries me.
But I see where this is going.
It worries you because of what?
Why does it worry you?
It worries me because I think this can only have one end has to come out on top.
They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate.
And I don't think either one would accede to a peaceful separation.
Either they separate through violence or they are scared straight into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.
There's no way that's going to happen.
You're going to force, you've read Atlas Shrugged, right?
And what eventually happens?
Where the idea is, you know, the John Galts of the world just kind of want to go live together, right?
Where Peter Thiel, did you follow the story about Peter Thiel building his own city on the middle of the water in San Francisco and, you know, how the water water?
Yeah.
Have you followed this, Rob, or no?
Type in Peter Thiel building his own city.
Yeah, it's going to get to a point where one's going to be like, look, you guys, I can't raise my kids around what you believe in.
You feel like you're comfortable walking around outside doing all this stuff.
Yeah, I can't be there with you guys.
And you can't change me.
And you think that's normal.
I can't change you.
You live there.
More power to you.
The biggest challenge that I notice right now is common sense values and principles are being questioned.
And we're questioning what even this guy, Jonathan Haidt, right?
He's talking about in the interview, the anxious generation guy who wrote this book.
And he says, you know, which types of parents, Rob, do you have that clip I sent you a long time ago about Jonathan Haidt, where he's being asked by the interviewer, which ideology raises less anxious kids?
Okay.
Yeah.
Conservative families?
I don't know if you've seen this or not.
Yeah, I have.
I have.
It's girls with progressive parents who are the most effed up.
F'd up at the top.
Yeah, no.
But then he gets asked you the questions.
He gets asked the question and he says, he's asked the question saying, so conservatives raise more peaceful kids, less anxiety, all this stuff.
Then the interviewer asks him and says, if you, based on your research, see that that philosophy and ideology raises better kids, why don't you change your philosophies to that?
He says, I can't do that.
I'm from academia.
You've never seen this?
No.
Wait, you belong to some sort of guild which dictates that.
Now if you've never seen it, I have to show it to you.
I mean, there's no way I can now not show this.
Because he's from academia.
You've never seen Rob.
I send it to you in text.
How do you spell his last name?
H-A-I-D-T.
No, you got to see this now.
There's no, no, this is not a drop.
He's actually being interviewed by this.
No, that's not it.
I'll find it to you and send it to you.
So the part I'm asking about, even if a guy like that is sitting there doing the research, he's not from the political side.
He's on the progressive side.
He's on the left.
And he also says those values and principles are better to raise a society.
What other proof do you need to know that we are gaslighting and confusing the hell out of our kids?
So for me to go back to what you're saying, when you say, you know, either one side has to force or the other side has to agree, I think it's going to end up being a division between the two.
And I think eventually families have to sit there.
I mean, look, my parents raised me where I was born in Iran.
They lived in Iran their entire lives.
My mom speaks Armenian, Assyrian, Turkish, and Farsi, okay?
My dad speaks Assyrian, Armenian, and Farsi.
They've lived there for 40-something years.
You mean to tell me last minute they decide to leave Iran to go to Germany causes them to get their second divorce against each other?
And then they come out here and my dad loses everything he had.
Why did they leave?
Why did they leave?
Because they simply didn't see the values and principles of Iran as a place they wanted to raise kids.
What's the difference with what's going on today?
So I think the more and more you're saying your concern is that back in the days, more and more people agreed.
It is such radical division right now between the two sides, where at least back in the days, a John F. Kennedy and a Nixon wasn't radically that big.
No, but this is the cycle, right?
In other words, after a war, we do have that coming together of all the parties.
But if you go back to America in the 1850s, about half of the congressmen were armed going into the House, right?
I mean, it was a free-for-all.
It was incredibly violent between the increasing regionalism of the United States, right?
South versus North.
Everyone knew that they were two nations kind of coming to pieces, right?
The churches had all divided, right?
The Baptists had divided.
The Methodists had divided, North and South.
Everything had divided.
But this has happened before, Patrick, is what I'm trying to say.
And that's what I try to do.
I try to bring the lens of history.
Because if we just sit here and thinking, oh my God, this has never happened before.
What are we going to do?
We're blind.
No, that's not what I'm saying.
We need to use history.
Let me ask you a question.
Yes.
Let me ask you a question.
If somebody in your family voted for Nixon versus Kennedy, okay?
Early 60s, whatever, pick and choose.
What was the difference between the values?
What was the biggest dramatic difference on why a person voted for Kennedy versus Nixon?
It's how warmly you felt about the communists and the New Dealers during the war and during the Great Depression.
So those kinds of things were still in the air.
Nixon was more supportive of the McCarthy era, the movement to root out all the communists during the 1950s.
Kennedy was more on the, you know, a little bit more lenient.
However, they had so much in common, right?
I mean, they both believed in a strong America.
They both believed in arming.
They both believed in ICBMs.
They both believed in standing up to the Soviet Union.
I could go down all the things they had in common, right?
But that's my point.
Sure, there were differences.
And people talked about them, a little bit of animosity among some of the old leftists, right?
But it was completely unlike today, right?
That's what I, when I talked earlier about these mutually irreconcilable, there's a great essay written in 1940.
Carl Becker is a great intellectual historian.
He wrote a book called The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers, one of my all-time favorites.
Anyway, a great intellectual historian.
He wrote a book near the end of his life in 1940.
This is when the world was going to hell, right?
Everyone could see it.
I mean, how many democracies had fallen in Europe to the fascists?
You know, Stalin was going great.
I mean, it was a terrible time in the world.
It was before Pearl Harbor.
We could all see what was going.
And he wrote a very dark essay on democracy.
And he said something, I think, really interesting.
He said, and I think this gets to your point.
He said, democracies work best when there isn't much to talk about.
Meaning, democracies work best when the only thing you're talking about with your neighbors is the size of the sidewalks and what kind of gauge sewer line to put in.
You know, just coordination issues.
That's my point.
You agree, but isn't that interesting?
No, I agree.
And he made the point, he said, when people disagree on fundamental values, again, he said this in 1940.
He said, democracy can't work because no one is going to go with, no one's going to change your entire life because you won only 49% of the vote, right?
You see what I mean?
No, I fully agree with that.
That's why I'm saying I don't think it's a similar example of your family voting when it was Nixon-Kennedy because— It's totally different.
I agree with you.
The values and principles don't make sense today.
Nobody, when you were growing up, said, my son wants to cut his dangling off, and I'm supporting him at 13 years old.
Did you ever have a conversation like that at 13 years old?
You didn't even know about any of that.
That's the point.
You know what I mean?
What is going on?
We're talking about gay and all that stuff.
We didn't even add.
Here's the thing.
This is the tragedy, actually, is that when I was a kid, you get all these guys to undress in front of each other.
No problem.
We did it all the time.
You know, we had locker rooms and all that stuff because we didn't know hell, anything about anything, right?
We were innocent in that sense.
Today, you can't get kids to undress in front of each other.
Everything is, you know, am I ripped?
Am I buffed?
And then do I have this?
And sexually, what am I that, right?
So this hyper-awareness, this hyper-sexual sexualism, it has led to a very different and more restricted life for young people who don't have the freedom to grow up uninhibited, as we did.
Is that going too far to say that?
Yeah, I'm with you.
That's why I'm saying for me, a guy asked me a question.
Ice Cube was here two weeks ago.
Last week, Ice Cube was here, right?
Big rapper, LA, NWA, F the Police, you know, all this.
This is the music that he sang back in the days.
But he's a family guy.
Here's what most people don't know.
He's been married for 32 years to the same woman.
Okay.
He's got four or five kids.
He's actually a very good father.
He's a great family guy.
And, you know, I said, you know, you're going to live and die in L.A. Famous song, to live and die in L.A., right?
It's a place to be.
And I can't see myself living in L.A. today.
I can't.
I can't see myself seeing the way the policies are coming out where they're lack of respect for small business owners.
I saw a chart that you put up where you said the top three things that Americans trust the most today, what's most trusted, you put small business, military, and police.
What's least trusted, television, big business, and Congress, right?
That's kind of how you put those two.
And, you know, that's the chart right there for some.
We'll put the link below for people that want to see it.
But the main reason why I can't see myself living in California.
By the way, values and principles.
Tell people where this comes from.
This is from Demography Unplugged, right?
This is my website.
Right.
Well, we're going to put the link below.
So this is demographyunplugged.com.
Yeah, it's a substact.
Okay.
So they got it.
Put it up.
Rob, if we can put the link below for that as well.
So last role, last thing here.
What role does faith play in these four turnings?
Any role faith in God plays?
Huge.
Huge.
Where is our faith the highest?
Where is it the lowest?
Ah, it's not as simple as that.
It's that our faith changes its quality as you move through.
Meaning.
Well, let me go back.
You remember when I talked about the awakening?
Yeah.
So what's the big movement in the awakening?
Not salvation by works, salvation by faith.
This would have been the Reformation, all the big awakenings.
Suddenly, let's cast off everything our father said.
Let's cast off all these big institutions.
Let's look into ourselves, right?
Wasn't Billy Graham's movement called the Great Awakening?
Yeah, they all call themselves Great Awakening.
You know, all of those movements.
And by the way, he was, you know, Billy Graham's, you know, high tide was during the 70s and 80s.
Huge resurgence of evangelicalism, by the way, during the awakening.
So this is when the mainstream churches, you know, the Methodists and the Presbyterians and kind of mainstream Protestantism began to decline, and evangelicalism and all the charismatic groups, the Pentecostals and everything began to rise.
That came out of the awakening.
So you see this movement toward interiority, toward individualism, toward looking inside yourself for validation.
That's the direction religion always takes during the summer season, the awakening, the second turning.
You got it?
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's interesting.
So what happens in the fourth turning?
That's when we begin to say that, well, faith to actually do anything, it's got to have works.
It's got to build something.
Something needs to win.
Right?
Yeah.
And so I think you get it now.
Now, in many ways, Americans, younger Americans, are turning more secular.
You know, they claim not to have any religious affiliation.
I think what a lot of that is, is that they're turning away from that inner-driven boomer kind of stuff, and they're really looking to build community.
The big challenge for religion in the next 20 years is how to build communities that work, communities that do exactly what you were talking about.
You can raise kids to live decent lives, to believe in things that allow them to get along with other people, to keep their noses clean, and form communities, wholesome communities that work for the long term and a renewed focus on the long term.
Remember, when you believe the faith is inside you, you're not worried about the long term, right?
Zuboomer's parents are worried about the long term.
We're going to enter that era just coming up.
Worried about the long term, worried about institutions, worried about works.
That's the other side of faith.
All right.
Hopefully next time you're here, maybe we'll be post-Civil War and everything's going to be okay.
Because I don't know if I want to have you on when we're during Civil War and we're going through it, Rob, because who knows if we're going to feel safe.
Well, maybe if we do it in West Virginia, we'll feel safe, Rob.
Yeah, you're going to visit my place up there.
You'll feel safe.
All right, Rob, if we can put the link to his latest book and Fort Turning, if you haven't read it, we're going to put the link below as well as to his website.
Neil, appreciate you for coming out.
This was fantastic.
Thank you so much.
Yes, take care, everybody.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
In these uncertain times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright.
So, you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear.
And this is what we're doing.
If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free.
If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out.
Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people will stop by and say, You also watch a value team?
You also follow PBD podcasts?
I do too.
Place your order.
Go to vtmerch.com, click on a link above or below.
