Blood Satellite - Livestream Happening - Boomers v Zoomers： Passing the Torch

00:00:00.000 all right welcome everybody to a live stream panel that i'm extremely excited about um as you know

00:00:10.980 we have a great selection of guests here to speak on a topic that i think is very important and very

00:00:15.520 relevant to our political sphere now we have one guest who's not here uh currently um ideally he

00:00:22.180 will be soon and we'll let him in once he gets there by the name of herb but i didn't want to

00:00:26.000 Keep everyone waiting because some people are very short for time.

00:00:29.740 And we're not one of those rinky-dink two-bit podcasts that get started 15 minutes later.

00:00:34.700 We're going to get started on time and ahead of schedule.

00:00:38.660 So for people who don't know, my name is Dimes.

00:00:42.060 I'm the host of a show called Blood Satellite.

00:00:44.960 I'm not going to give a big preamble about that because everyone who wants to hear from me, right?

00:00:49.300 But I'm going to let everyone here introduce themselves.

00:00:54.080 Most of these people require no introduction, but we're going to give one anyway for those who don't know.

00:01:00.100 So, Steve, if you would like to introduce yourself.

00:01:03.760 Hi, I'm Steve Saylor.

00:01:06.460 I guess I represent baby boomers in this discussion.

00:01:11.500 I'm out promoting my anthology, Noticing, which is available from Passage Publishing.

00:01:18.540 uh i've been a an opinion journalist for the entire century i guess going back before going

00:01:25.900 back to the 90s as well so i'm happy to be here now the prudentialist if you wouldn't mind

00:01:33.340 yeah absolutely hello everyone my name is matthew i'm best known as the prudentialist on twitter

00:01:38.760 youtube and substack i write about international relations contemporary culture as well as social

00:01:45.200 media ecology and how that shapes our politics. Very happy to be here.

00:01:53.040 Now, John, or actually, let's go with Alaric. Alaric, if you wouldn't mind.

00:01:58.740 Hello. I write under Alaric the Barbarian, and I'm a story, a history writer, a publisher,

00:02:07.400 and I guess a political commentator now. I've been called that. If you're not familiar,

00:02:12.920 you can find me on twitter mostly also on sub stack and i run the dissident review which is a

00:02:18.680 publishing house uh john if you would please i am likewise excited to be here my name is john

00:02:28.280 doyle i've been doing political commentary across social media platforms for about five years now

00:02:35.640 and i've given speeches at universities i've done some consulting i work with some

00:02:40.120 different right-wing media companies um and so yes i'm excited to be here representing uh generation

00:02:46.280 z as an older an elder zoomer i guess i'm 24 now you know some of these 15 16 year olds i don't know

00:02:52.280 quite so much about what they get into but it should be a good discussion classic gen z cope

00:02:58.440 trying to age himself up now he's going to tell us he's an old soul next now herb great to have

00:03:05.320 you tonight thank you so much for taking the time here now we're just introducing ourselves um you

00:03:11.560 will share whatever you would like about um yourself and your background

00:03:17.480 uh i'm herb i um

00:03:22.280 i i'm a little north of the um of the generation of the uh

00:03:29.080 but um i have interest in politics i belong to a number of groups here in sarasota with whom i

00:03:38.440 interact and i'm delighted to be here to see how this thing all evolves and thank you everyone for

00:03:46.060 taking the time as i said so without hemming and hawing too much we'll just get into it i thought

00:03:50.940 i could just set it up from my perspective what this is all about and i know everyone has a lot

00:03:56.200 say especially john we spoke at length about this prior but from my perspective um and when i speak

00:04:02.840 to boomers and i speak to zoomers and millennials like myself there seems to be not only amongst

00:04:08.760 ourselves but in the discourse in the news there seems to be some contentious feelings and some

00:04:14.520 hostility even between the younger generations and the older ones and both seem to have valid

00:04:20.920 points. The issue is the torch being passed from the elders to the youth. Now, what do we mean by

00:04:27.660 the torch? Well, we mean capital, we mean influence, we mean wealth, we mean all sorts of things. And

00:04:33.900 the examples were given by other side is the younger people will say, we're not being allowed

00:04:39.840 to take the reins of society. We're not being allowed into the upper echelons and being promoted

00:04:44.780 to CEOs, boomers are holding on to their influence. Whereas the boomers will say that, 0.93

00:04:51.040 well, these young people, they don't have the values that we like. They're not driven. You'll 0.87

00:04:56.340 hear avocado toast brought up a lot. So they just don't see apparent heirs. And what I found in my

00:05:03.640 experience, that was very rare that either of these sides ever got together to talk. And so

00:05:08.200 But without any other real political bias, without any sort of drama in the scene or any priors, I thought this would be a great way to just hopefully inspire some conversations with the viewers and their elders or to look around and look for opportunities.

00:05:26.260 But I thought we should start by actually trying to understand each other in a way they haven't before. 0.87

00:05:32.520 So I was curious if we could go around and just we'll start with the baby boomers. 0.97

00:05:38.200 Steve and also Herb what is your opinion on as as people who are successful as people who have

00:05:46.340 influence as people who are active in their local and maybe even international scenes what is your

00:05:53.060 view of the younger generations are they lacking anything that maybe you might have wanted to see

00:05:58.380 from someone of your age and we start with Steve yeah I'm I'm not big on putting down younger

00:06:07.500 people. My general impression is that the world, the United States, has gotten more crowded and

00:06:14.320 more competitive, and that in many ways makes life tougher for younger people. And I mean,

00:06:22.240 I was thinking, I usually end up going back to baseball, but I was thinking, yeah, you know,

00:06:28.980 how hard did Mickey Mantle work in the offseason? What were the heaviest weights he lifted? Well,

00:06:36.000 probably a beer mug. That's about it. Did Warren Spahn spend his off seasons throwing weighted

00:06:44.980 balls in order to add three miles an hour to his fastball? Nah, he just got out there and

00:06:51.380 threw the same stuff. Baseball was kind of less competitive. Nolan Ryan started lifting weights

00:06:59.680 in 1973 and immediately became a star and he couldn't convince anybody else on his own team

00:07:06.940 to do what had obviously worked for him for an entire six more seasons you just you just didn't

00:07:13.900 do that kind of stuff in baseball that was that was weird uh now you know baseball is hyper

00:07:21.020 competitive and pitchers get throw incredibly hard and they get injured and they're constantly going

00:07:29.340 to get operations. They pitch very few innings because when they do, it's so stressful.

00:07:38.580 Everybody, all the batters lift weights. So they're all a danger to hit a home run at any

00:07:44.040 moment. The game is more intense and, you know, it doesn't have kind of as much of the easygoing

00:07:51.820 charm as it used to, partly because people back then, they weren't trying that hard.

00:07:57.880 But now people study how to compete, and there's a bigger population trying to compete.

00:08:04.740 And it makes life tougher in a lot of ways for younger people.

00:08:09.860 That's a great point.

00:08:11.180 And Herb, same question.

00:08:12.820 What are your feelings on the younger generation?

00:08:15.520 Well, let me digress a little bit with baseball, because I've got a grandson who's throwing 88, 89, and he's getting up to 91, 92 because he pumps a lot of iron.

00:08:24.940 But my issue is a lack of understanding of what made and makes America great and unique in the history of all humankind.

00:08:39.540 And my complaint is that there is a lack of appreciation of the uniqueness of our situation and a veneration.

00:08:48.020 We have a generation, and I don't know whether it's Z or below Z or whatever the particular number is.

00:08:55.940 You have to forgive me.

00:08:56.740 I'm not as O'Quran as I might be on this. 0.97

00:09:00.520 We believe that this is a corrupt and discriminatory civilization.

00:09:06.120 There has never been anything as enabling as this country in the history of humankind.

00:09:12.500 And yet, our young people are taught that this is a horrible place, that we have an original sin of slavery from which we've never moved.

00:09:24.500 And yet, the fact of the matter is that there is no place in the world that is more open and welcoming and enabling than this country and its constitutional structure has ever been.

00:09:39.500 fantastic point i'm willing i'm very excited to hear what uh let's start with prudentialist

00:09:46.220 what do you think about all this from your perspective as a gen z

00:09:54.460 uh prudentialist are you there all right we'll just go to a john john what are your reactions

00:10:00.700 to that i think that each of these points are pretty valid i suppose in terms of the competition

00:10:06.780 I would only say that my generation, particularly young American men, are not averse to competition.

00:10:13.200 I think the problem is that the product itself is not getting better.

00:10:17.420 I mean, our education is not getting better.

00:10:19.740 Our lawyers and doctors are becoming less competent.

00:10:22.540 And so there seems to be a dynamic where it isn't a matter of how hard we're willing to push ourselves to reach our ceiling for excellence.

00:10:29.100 The scale, as everyone here is aware of, has been tilted to be disadvantageous to young American men, and they're having their opportunities instead given to women, to people of color, to illegal aliens, to whomever.

00:10:42.760 And so there seems to be a dynamic that's constructed.

00:10:45.000 I mean, even we saw recently, what is it, that S&P 100 thing, like 94% of new jobs that were created within those companies in the post-George Floyd era were going to people of color, to women, to whomever.

00:10:56.800 And so I think that it is true that we are more competitive as a society, but young men

00:11:01.680 are being like sidelined, like we can't even play necessarily.

00:11:04.280 We're more the umpire, as some would say.

00:11:07.500 And then in terms of the history, I think that that's also very true, that even at every

00:11:10.920 stage of your development in this country, I'm sure that there was always a liberal

00:11:14.860 bias in academia or even in the public education system.

00:11:17.920 But the stock of teachers you have now seem to be far less intelligent, far less capable,

00:11:23.100 and school as a whole seems to have transitioned.

00:11:25.220 even if you look at like, you know, state exams, for example, and there was one that was going

00:11:29.400 around quite a while ago. And it was like an eighth grade exam from the 1910s or something.

00:11:35.080 And I mean, the questions there were very advanced, you know, fast forward 100 years later,

00:11:38.520 it would seem like child's play compared to what they were learning then. But then I also think

00:11:43.520 that there's something to be said about the type of person who is now teaching our children

00:11:47.200 in these schools. And there may be an attitude of, you know, being ashamed of the country's

00:11:53.760 history because of what they're taught. But I think the demoralization that our generation has

00:11:58.060 as a whole is what leads them to sympathize with those victim narratives. Like, for example,

00:12:01.820 look at the kind of guy who is hitting like your, I think you said your grandson is, or pitching

00:12:06.520 like your grandson is pitching. That's probably like a well-built, handsome young man who's

00:12:11.220 probably not going to be very sympathetic to narratives about his country's history being

00:12:14.920 like horrible or things of that nature. It is when you have these very like almost biologically

00:12:19.840 or spiritually ill stocks of people, people who are foreign to the nation's history in the first

00:12:24.520 place. I think that those people are the ones who are the most sympathetic to narratives of evil and

00:12:29.260 oppression. I think that if we could get on track the health of the youth, that you would see a lot

00:12:35.800 of that propaganda conditioning sort of melt away naturally because they just wouldn't be susceptible

00:12:39.900 to it. Amen. I mean, I couldn't agree more with that. My issue is with the fact that our young

00:12:48.640 people in elementary school, never mind high school and college, are being indoctrinated

00:12:54.780 with stuff that I find completely abhorrent.

00:12:59.200 Absolutely.

00:13:00.940 Now, Alaric, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this.

00:13:05.360 Well, the historical narratives are one thing that I tend to look at a lot.

00:13:08.960 That's one of the main topics I write and think about.

00:13:12.620 And education is obviously very subpar and laced with propaganda right now.

00:13:17.140 but at the same time uh you see a falling back of liking american ideals even with people that

00:13:25.400 are opposed to the propaganda because they feel like those ideals either never existed or don't

00:13:31.380 exist now um when i speak about gen z you know my people my age i'm thinking white men my age not

00:13:37.900 you know we can talk about different categories but i don't have as good of a mental model there

00:13:41.880 i can just speak from experience and people i know um everyone feels that everyone else has

00:13:49.200 deranged historical views and usually they also hold deranged historical views themselves because

00:13:54.820 you're in this matrix of propaganda counter propaganda new narratives argumentation and

00:14:01.440 rhetoric everyone's been politically active whether they like it or not since about age 12

00:14:06.460 I'm actually a little bit younger than John here, and everyone has been pulled into a

00:14:12.040 political realm and known and understood that they've been pulled into political rhetoric

00:14:15.760 from a very young age, usually around elementary or middle school.

00:14:19.500 So as a result, things are very cynical and argumentative when it comes to self-conception

00:14:25.200 and historical views.

00:14:29.000 That's one thing, and I believe the fix to that is just offering something constructive,

00:14:33.340 like a full vision rather than just rhetoric and argumentation. But that that's a much longer

00:14:39.560 point. I will go back to the competitiveness point with baseball. I thought that was really

00:14:43.740 interesting because this is a generational divide that I think is the source of a lot of

00:14:49.100 misunderstanding. Competitiveness for young people is the same thing as nowadays, at least

00:14:56.600 specialization. Uh, you end up specializing far earlier than people did, you know, I'll say even

00:15:03.660 30 years ago, 40, 50, 60 years ago, people specialize. You can see this in sports. You'll

00:15:08.000 have, uh, kids playing like little league football and they're already specializing into positions at

00:15:12.780 seven or eight years old. You know, they're like, Oh, I'm, I'm a corner. What? You're eight. You

00:15:18.060 know? Um, and the same thing happens with career paths. You're expected to drive onto a career

00:15:23.540 path very early. And that specificity is a source of great stress for Gen Z. Whether it's necessary 0.50

00:15:30.960 or not is a different question, but that's a source of generational stress that people

00:15:36.020 feel like you have to lay things out very far in advance just to be competitive.

00:15:41.160 Just to add to that briefly, my grandfather, before he passed, his whole life he worked as

00:15:47.660 a lawyer. And I know that part of becoming a lawyer, at least where I live in Canada,

00:15:51.780 was taking an lsat test um and that just didn't exist when he was taking a lawyer and that lsat

00:15:56.820 test had filtered out a few of my friends who had dreams of being a lawyer so that's just one example

00:16:02.260 of i think the increased credentialism in certification that's out there just to even

00:16:08.340 get to the level where you can participate would that be fair to say oh yeah those those points are

00:16:15.540 very legitimate i think the specialization among young and i'm going to talk about boys

00:16:21.540 because boys are more not exclusively but more involved in sports the specialization at early

00:16:29.940 ages is a terrible terrible thing but unavoidable in today's environment i've got three grandsons

00:16:37.220 one's a baseball player another was a soccer player third one hasn't quite declared yet

00:16:42.660 but the baseball player and the soccer player have been going on their track

00:16:47.380 for much too long and they've never experienced you remember i mean steve is old enough three sport

00:16:55.140 athletes you can't do that you can't you can't do that and so that's terribly unfair i think

00:17:02.100 to young people today well that's interesting three sport athletes if you wouldn't mind just

00:17:07.700 explaining that for a second what the guy used to be able to play baseball football and basketball

00:17:13.300 You can't do that anymore.

00:17:15.820 Yep, that's true.

00:17:16.740 Because you have to specialize in one sport earlier in order to be competitive.

00:17:21.720 And if you have real credentials, you've got to develop it.

00:17:26.220 I have two granddaughters, one of whom is a swimmer, but she's in college and not swimming

00:17:30.180 alone.

00:17:30.420 The other one's a gymnast, which I will tell you is the most demanding of all sports, and 1.00

00:17:36.040 God help her. 0.99

00:17:36.780 I mean, she goes through what none of us could go through, but she does four or five hours a day in gymnastics.

00:17:43.000 I mean, think about it.

00:17:44.200 She's a 14, 15-year-old girl.

00:17:46.000 That's her whole life.

00:17:47.820 It's not right, but it is the world that we live in today.

00:17:52.540 There's a few people in the chat who are getting confused by all the sports metaphors, and there's people my age most likely.

00:17:59.960 Don't worry.

00:18:00.820 As a millennial, I will be making plenty of A24 films references.

00:18:06.780 So, Prudentialist, sorry, you were a bit quiet when I asked you before, but I would love to hear your take on this so far.

00:18:13.340 Yeah, I do think that there was a lot that was said that many others on the panel had sort of, I think, would agree with is that there has been sort of this great divorce from any common ancestry when it comes to history.

00:18:26.660 There's no unified story of what America is anymore, which I think for younger people, especially that leads you to be is what John had said, forced into political camps very early on based upon, you know, who you interact with, where you live, what are the politics of your city, suburb or small town and the rest. 0.51

00:18:45.280 And it's very hard, I think, for younger Americans, particularly white men, because that's really who I talk to or I associate with these days. And they're automatically thinking that the world is sort of against them in this sense. They don't mind fighting that world. There is still that competitive drive.

00:19:01.860 but there has been this overall feeling that they have a lot more hurdles to clear than what had

00:19:08.600 come before them. And that often I think generates a lot of intergenerational animosity. As for

00:19:15.620 competition, you know, I think that most of the guys that I know, and even the younger gentlemen

00:19:20.080 here, I'm 28 years old going on 29. You know, they're very competitive, they're very driven,

00:19:25.340 they're very passionate about what they do, whether that's, you know, maintaining their

00:19:27.940 physical health or learning about how to better themselves or prepare to be a good husband or a

00:19:34.000 good Christian, whatever. It also illustrates, I think, a great struggle when it comes to,

00:19:40.680 well, how do I hold on to a positive identity when I'm surrounded by politics or an economic

00:19:46.680 situation that feels like it doesn't want to identify with the historical American nation

00:19:51.480 that many who are older than us grew up in or identified with, or perhaps in the eyes of some

00:19:57.840 of the more resentful younger men taken for granted. And so I think that that's maybe the

00:20:03.500 biggest divide here is that the nation, the way of life that once had by our older cohorts here

00:20:11.380 doesn't feel like it's around anymore or has been abjectly taken from them.

00:20:17.460 Now, the next area of questioning, I thought we could just get right to the meat of it,

00:20:21.540 of course so having expressed all this what does either side as it were think that the other could

00:20:29.620 be doing to resolve this issue because everyone has their you know prejudices everyone thinks

00:20:35.500 that they're owed something uh whereas i you know maybe i'm a romantic hell maybe i'm a lib

00:20:42.160 but i tend to think of us as links in a chain whereas boomers and the younger generations

00:20:48.020 in the media and in the discourse they talk of each other like they're different species

00:20:52.500 or sometimes that they're opposing teams and that's really what i was trying to

00:20:57.300 address and break down here but i wanted to start by saying you know let's blue sky it

00:21:02.620 um and we'll start with uh mr sailor uh in your mind having heard everything is there anything

00:21:08.500 that the younger generations could be doing to help resolve issue on their end well

00:21:16.040 let me um let me go back to something i think i first articulated in 1976 when i arrived at college

00:21:25.760 in uh texas i'm a native californian and somebody asked me well what's good what's going to happen

00:21:34.300 in california and i said okay california is basically underpopulated for how nice the weather

00:21:40.500 is, and so people are going to keep pouring in, and it's going to get more expensive all the time

00:21:48.440 until eventually the standard of living, you know, including the beautiful climate,

00:21:55.320 is no better than anywhere else, and then the population will stabilize. Now, when I said that,

00:22:01.140 yeah, that, you know, 38 years ago, yeah, that pretty much is what happened. What I wasn't

00:22:07.360 anticipating was that we were going to put that process into hyperdrive by leaving the borders

00:22:15.680 fairly open. And not surprisingly, a large part of the rest of the world wanted to move to California.

00:22:22.640 So over time, people from Ohio and Indiana and so forth have dropped out of thinking about,

00:22:30.700 well, I should move to California because they know it's really expensive and their standard

00:22:35.200 the living is going to be poor and you know that that whole process would have happened but we

00:22:41.920 probably sped it up twice as much by uh through mass immigration um so that's one obvious thing

00:22:51.140 is to cut back on immigration and let americans enjoy a little bit more of the benefits of having

00:22:59.720 this big continent to ourselves and uh and so we don't have to live you know like uh east asian 0.86

00:23:08.940 tiger mothers and just intensively drill our kids all the time and so forth so yeah i'm not 0.95

00:23:16.120 that that's not answering the question of what should younger generations do but it's kind of 0.81

00:23:22.440 like if we all get together, we can make life not as quite as stressful by just having and allowing

00:23:31.880 an immense amount of immigration. Now, Herb, the same question. And I know that you're very active 1.00

00:23:38.580 in your political space. You probably deal with young people in a pretty political context. And

00:23:43.920 I'm wondering, based on what you've seen on the ground, what do you think young people could be

00:23:48.500 doing to make it better. Well, let me pull it back and say that I don't really deal with young 1.00

00:23:54.640 people on a political basis. The political discussions and interactions that I have are

00:23:59.400 people of my generation, old fogies and, you know, worrying about what our grandchildren

00:24:04.300 will inherit going forward. I don't know that there's anything that, you know, the real world

00:24:10.800 has a way of smoothing off the rough edges and introducing you to reality. And the problem with

00:24:18.840 an ivory tower is the whole concept of an ivory tower. You're isolated from the real world.

00:24:24.960 So I don't know. I mean, every generation has always had conflict with the preceding generation

00:24:32.020 or generations. And I'm not sure that there's anything endemic here other than the fact that

00:24:40.280 a lot of the young people have simply been brainwashed with ideas that I find totally

00:24:46.060 repulsive. I mean, you know, the fact that half of our college graduates think that socialism

00:24:54.140 is as good as capitalism is, to me, shocking. And the disrespect for the Constitution,

00:25:00.980 a lack of understanding of how unique our experience is. But I don't know that they

00:25:07.400 won't get there on their own as they get, you know, families and mortgages and deal with the

00:25:12.260 real world. I mean, the real world has a way of imposing itself on a lot of crap. 0.99

00:25:19.040 Now, I'm sure there's probably some thoughts on that. Let's maybe mix it up here. Alaric, 0.94

00:25:24.720 we'll go Alaric, then Prudentialist, then John. So Alaric, what are your thoughts on,

00:25:28.580 from your perspective, could baby boomers be doing anything different? And if you have any

00:25:33.880 general thoughts on what's been said so far? Well, first of all, um, Herb mentions a sort

00:25:42.380 of disconnection from the constitution, from American ideals. This is largely because people,

00:25:49.860 again, you know, younger white men will say late teens to early twenties have understood that that

00:25:55.660 has not applied to them since they've been very young. Um, we've been looking at, you know,

00:26:01.700 disparate impact type policies, DEI and its unnamed ancestors and things like that.

00:26:09.060 Everyone has had the same experience of looking for college scholarships or grants or something

00:26:14.020 like that and going, oh, wow, 90% of these are just for women or black people or Asian

00:26:19.960 Americans or something like that. At the same time, we also had Me Too occur at a very formative age

00:26:27.320 where you're trying to talk to girls. That's pretty weird. That kind of screwed over young 0.71

00:26:31.420 people. Um, just generally speaking, there's, there's very little belief in these things

00:26:36.700 because we haven't experienced them. Uh, there there's right or left because the generation's

00:26:42.000 very polarized politically far more than people, uh, you know, we'll say people 20, 30 years ago,

00:26:47.560 even, um, there's just very little belief in this. And one of the big frustration points of

00:26:53.980 younger people with, we'll say baby boomers is that they did experience that. And they're coming 1.00

00:26:59.800 from a frame of reference where this was a lot more, you know, this was potent. These,

00:27:04.360 these ideals meant something. And now whenever things like, you know, American, the American

00:27:09.980 dream or, um, you know, American exceptionalism are invoked, it, it sort of to many people feels

00:27:17.760 a bit like a, like a joke, um, just because they haven't experienced it. You know, I, I don't think

00:27:24.380 I got a large dose of the American dream or American ideal growing up and, uh, it doesn't

00:27:30.580 look like it's alive now, especially with, you know, deranged communists in a lot of positions

00:27:35.020 of power. So that's, that's one thing. There's a misunderstanding, I think, of how really deep

00:27:40.760 this hits you when you're raised into it. Um, the other thing is just generally, you know,

00:27:46.620 A lot of people in the chat have mentioned wealth and power transfers and things like that over time, you know, giving young people responsibility, ability to do things, sort of a long leash to actually work and not be – this mostly applies in politics, I think, and just not wanting to appeal to an older sort of consensus.

00:28:09.180 So, yeah, there's – I could go into that longer, but I don't want to hold up too much.

00:28:12.780 yeah so a prudentialist uh thoughts on anything you've been hearing and if anyone else wants to

00:28:18.200 jump in you don't need to rely on me you know conducting everything if you want to tell me to

00:28:24.260 shut up i can do that well i i think maybe just by growing up as a military brat my father was

00:28:31.140 in the army for quite some time that you know i was given and i was blessed to be raised with 0.62

00:28:35.540 the notion of a country of a flag of the creed of a constitution to believe in and you sort of

00:28:42.220 witnessed the, at least in my view, in growing up, you witnessed that global war on terror,

00:28:49.640 sense of patriotism quickly dissolve into the ether after George W. Bush leaves and the war

00:28:54.420 grows unpopular. But on top of that, you know, it's only compounded by the ongoing differences

00:29:00.840 between America, as Steve had pointed out, as the borders opened up. And I think that there's a lot

00:29:06.600 of talk these days about people feeling aimless or that the economy isn't really built for them

00:29:13.380 anymore, or that they don't see a reason to keep going. And so you have these things called like

00:29:18.600 deaths of despair, as our colleague of ours, Jeremy Carl, wrote in his book, The Unprotected

00:29:23.420 Class. But I think one of the biggest things about that atomization or this resentment has

00:29:28.600 been just the fundamental transformation of the country over the last 50 years, that America had

00:29:34.680 gone from a place that was seen as this place where the constitution was enshrined it was

00:29:40.020 protected it was defended it was the civitas of the country to where now most places you live are

00:29:47.000 very low trust environments or at least they feel that way and that despite the fact that according

00:29:52.640 to an article from fortune that you know gen z is doing well for themselves economically it's an

00:29:59.060 entirely different social world and environment where inflation is through the roof. We have

00:30:05.200 politics that seem to cater more towards older people than looking towards the next generation.

00:30:10.500 And so there's this big divide between, say, the previous generations and those who are younger

00:30:16.060 who are getting involved in the world where they feel as if, A, they've been left behind, but B,

00:30:21.960 that there is no kind of politics that looks towards their future. Now, Herb mentioned that

00:30:27.160 he was, you know, caring about their grandchildren. And that's a great attitude to have. And I wish

00:30:32.100 more people had it. There's just, for many people, they don't feel as if there's anyone focusing on

00:30:37.500 planting that tree that they're not going to live, see, grow up and be the shade that their

00:30:42.480 grandkids or great grandkids sit under. All right. Now, John, we can throw it to you unless

00:30:49.560 someone had a point to make there. Yeah, I just want to jump in. I mean, I'll give my theory.

00:30:57.160 And it sounds pretty partisan, but basically the Democratic Party figured out a generation ago or so that America was becoming more diverse and that they could benefit because as being the party of diversity.

00:31:16.000 And that's worked pretty well for them in the in the last eight presidential elections.

00:31:21.640 They've won the popular vote seven times.

00:31:24.600 So what they've done is they've put together what I call a coalition of the fringes of American society, or Democrats might call it the coalition of the margins of American society.

00:31:37.960 You get the black church ladies, the transgenders, the Hollywood moguls, you get this wide variety, immigrants, and so forth.

00:31:52.720 And there's a lot of them. 0.94

00:31:54.560 And you can keep putting together more and more groups.

00:31:57.940 You can encourage people to come up with new diverse identities like, you know, transgenderism over the last 10 years.

00:32:07.960 All right. But there's one problem with it, which is kind of obvious, which is that all these 1.00

00:32:14.920 different fringe groups don't really like each other. And what's holding them together? Well,

00:32:20.740 the Democrats have thought about it and they go, well, the one thing that can hold together

00:32:24.660 our coalition of the marginalized is hating core Americans. So we're going to demonize people who

00:32:34.000 are, you know, the more you're like George Washington or Ben Franklin or John Adams

00:32:40.300 demographically, yeah, you're the bad guy. And everybody else in the country can unite around

00:32:47.920 being mad at you and trying to think of ways to take away your privilege and so forth. And that's,

00:32:56.520 and Republicans have generally sort of put up with it. They haven't really called it out. They,

00:33:03.600 tend to use kind of euphemisms like socialism, Marxism, critical race theory, and so forth,

00:33:13.920 instead of just going, yeah, we've got a lot of racist anti-white hate that's being

00:33:22.640 promulgated by the Democratic Party and their allies in the media and academia and so forth.

00:33:29.300 all right so i think was the prudentialist or john who was going to go next i say

00:33:37.140 yeah i think that's uh that's a perfect articulation of the impulse that is driving

00:33:42.160 young people to support socialism i think a lot of times when we analyze generation z

00:33:47.580 we do so assuming that it's demography demographically the same as prior generations

00:33:52.720 but gen z i think is majority non-white or something close to that i think since what

00:33:57.340 2013 all births in this country have been by majority non-white and so what is driving that

00:34:03.280 impulse for young people to be sympathetic towards socialism i think is because socialism is

00:34:07.600 as he mentioned defined in practice by redistributing opportunities and wealth away from

00:34:13.200 white men to women not because that's the thing about that coalition you know it's very popular

00:34:18.300 for example with the sort of like we'll say boomer or conservative messaging to poke fun at how that

00:34:23.720 coalition can have people out there waving pride flags at a demonstration that is supposed to be

00:34:28.560 about the liberation of Palestine. And they see in that behavior a contradiction, but the Democrats

00:34:33.740 know that what unifies that coalition is ultimately that everybody, be it Palestinians, gay people,

00:34:39.320 trans people, feminists, they all have some bone to pick against white American men. And so that's

00:34:46.820 been very successful for them as a strategy in terms of unifying their coalition. And so what

00:34:51.380 I don't like about that is that I have to be told by a lot of these organizations that socialism is

00:34:57.080 the biggest problem, which I run a show that is anti-communist. And so I do understand that, but

00:35:02.160 it's like when we're asked, okay, what is the solution to that problem? We're told to go read

00:35:07.080 some century old economic treatise. And so they almost want to take the messaging that is opposed

00:35:12.340 to socialism, opposed to communism, and use that to fundraise. But then is that money used to

00:35:18.200 actually solve the problem? Is that money then actually used to provide job opportunities to

00:35:23.440 young American men? No, we get things like the Young Women's Leadership Summit,

00:35:27.800 the Young Jewish Leadership Summit, the Young Black Leadership Summit, things like that. So

00:35:32.320 you have all this infrastructure that is collecting money off of what everyone understands what is

00:35:37.220 happening in this country, but then they're not using that money to dispense it to the victims

00:35:41.140 of that. They're using that to instead just do whatever else with it, basically, get black car

00:35:46.240 service, nice hotel rooms for themselves. I mean, it's very good work if you can have it. But

00:35:50.420 I think the problem is that the transformation of the country, which was alluded to, 1.00

00:35:55.320 has been presided over by baby boomers. And it seems not, again, to indict anybody on this panel 1.00

00:36:00.600 in particular at all, but it is to say that there seems to be a lack of communication there

00:36:04.760 when people in my generation voice those concerns. It is dismissed as, we don't know,

00:36:10.060 we're out of touch, we have to work harder. And I think that there is an inability, largely

00:36:14.760 speaking, to understand just how drastically things have changed for, you know, a guy in his

00:36:19.560 early or mid 20s trying to make something of himself in this country. Now, I've got a question

00:36:25.020 and we'll start with Steve and Herb on this. One thing I'm detecting in a lot of these answers

00:36:30.180 is a bit of a divide on, let's call it faith in the system. And just anecdotally, I remember

00:36:35.860 speaking to my grandmother at one point, she watches the news, all baby boomers watch the

00:36:40.280 news. So they know kind of what's going on out there. I remember she was commenting on the

00:36:45.320 housing market and she was kind of shaking her head up here in Canada. I don't know how many

00:36:49.820 Canadians are watching, but it's abysmal up here if you want to own a house. Won't go into that.

00:36:55.120 But she was kind of shaking her head saying, you know, I don't know how young people are ever

00:36:58.280 going to be able to afford a home. But I detected when both sides are kind of saying the same thing

00:37:03.640 with young people, they blame the system. The system is broken and maybe it can't even be fixed.

00:37:09.560 But I did detect with my grandmother and people of her generation, there's still some faith in the system, even for someone like Steve

00:37:16.420 Saylor, who is so ingrained in this sector of the further right, I was wondering, do either of you, do you still maintain a belief in the

00:37:25.260 system? Has that changed perhaps over the past 10 years versus when you were younger? And what are your feelings towards, by the

00:37:33.760 system, I mean, the government and the interplay between that and the culture and academia and everything?

00:37:39.560 Yeah, I mean, clearly starting about 2013, after Obama's re-election, we had the great awokening, a real intensification of kind of the looting of traditional America. 0.59

00:37:55.960 Like, I suspect, I predicted in 2008 that Obama's first term in office would be pretty moderate and cautious because he wanted to get reelected and didn't want to, you know, scare the, what was still a white majority. 0.75

00:38:12.600 And then kind of the gloves came off with the second term, whether that was particularly Obama's plan or he just sort of let his people kind of run amok.

00:38:22.960 But, yeah, you just had enormous increase in the racist, sexist attacks in the media on men and white men. And, you know, basically white men were too much of a gentleman, too gentlemanly to like call it out for what it was, racism.

00:38:46.240 So, you know, you're seeing over the last year or so, you know, the people speaking out more and not being scared to admit that the dominant conventional wisdom of the establishment is kind of is sexist and racist against white men.

00:39:10.880 Now, Herb, the same question. Yeah, just the same question.

00:39:16.240 well basically social movements are pendulums they swing from one extreme to the other and

00:39:24.640 the question that we have to face at this time is whether we've reached an extreme and started to

00:39:29.360 swing back again and whether in fact the unique american psyche and remember all of us whether

00:39:38.960 it's two generations or three generations or four generations of the progeny of people who left

00:39:45.040 something to find something better. And there is a unique American attitude. And I would go so far

00:39:53.040 as to say that probably 90% of the people coming over the southern border, though I think it should

00:39:58.780 be stopped, and they're no different from any of our grandparents or great parents. They just want

00:40:03.740 a better life, and they're willing to take a chance. So do we have enough strength to reject

00:40:13.040 the bureaucracy and the government intrusion, which has basically, really, you can start it

00:40:19.540 with the New Deal, and it reached its peak probably under Lyndon Johnson and the Great

00:40:26.540 Society, which destroyed the Black family and had a host of other sociological implications

00:40:32.180 that were very detrimental to the country. Are we going to come back again? I don't know the

00:40:37.140 answer to that. You know, sometimes I talk to young people and I say, gee, they're really going

00:40:44.460 to find the answer to this. And sometimes I talk to them and say, gee, they don't have a clue what's

00:40:48.100 going on. So I don't know the answer. But my hope is that as with all societal movements,

00:40:55.320 they reach an extreme and then they come back. And whether we're starting to see that,

00:40:58.980 We are seeing the rejection of DEI and CRT in schools and in corporations more significantly.

00:41:10.800 This next election, it seems to me, is extraordinary in what it means for the country.

00:41:16.420 And what's just happened, I don't know whether we're supposed to go to political things at this point or not, but I will, because I don't mind throwing a bomb here and there to have people respond.

00:41:27.620 This tragedy of lawfare is so detrimental to the country, broadly speaking.

00:41:35.860 Never mind Trump or anybody else.

00:41:37.460 The fact that we are now behaving like a banana republic is totally terrifying to me.

00:41:44.280 He's the one who's going to eliminate norms, and yet here we have something that we've never seen before.

00:41:51.360 Hopefully the pendulum swings back, and we're going to start to move back toward the center.

00:41:56.000 we've gone to the extreme maybe we come back um i had another question there um someone made a

00:42:03.780 good point about uh zoomers um it's kind of hard for me as a millennial to get a read on zoomers

00:42:09.740 and maybe the zoomers can clarify because you know for years i was hearing that they're going

00:42:13.040 to be the most based they're going to be most conservative far right everything and then every

00:42:18.940 couple years it would switch the other way that oh they're actually the most neurodiverse and

00:42:23.560 gender diverse, so I can never get a read.

00:42:26.180 John Kane- Could I interrupt just to ask a favor? Because when you bring up these generational 1.00

00:42:32.500 titles, can you mention how old these people are? Because I can never remember.

00:42:38.040 John Kane- Good point. So that would probably be a good place to start, actually. So what,

00:42:41.960 because I know- 0.99

00:42:42.280 John Kane- Older Zoomers.

00:42:43.000 John Kane- Yeah, how old are Zoomers? What's the age range for there? Because there's also

00:42:46.560 Gen Alpha that's kind of getting older now, too.

00:42:49.100 John Kane- There is.

00:42:49.580 yeah so let's say hey john donald larick what would you classify as a zoomer because there's

00:42:56.400 like older zoomers and younger zoomers what would you say it is i think officially it's like uh maybe

00:43:02.220 97 to 2015 but in my personal study i like to draw a line right around 9 11 um and i think that the

00:43:12.520 sort of second wave zoomers so to speak experience a much different upbringing because of the

00:43:17.100 integration of technology into their day-to-day as opposed to maybe myself and Alaric who had it

00:43:24.140 more ornamented in our day-to-day but it was not something that we were dependent on but I believe

00:43:29.540 officially if you looked it up it'd be like 1997 to 2012-2015 somewhere around there yeah so like

00:43:37.060 even for me a millennial like we complain about ourselves all the time we're weird we're like 0.92

00:43:41.820 existentially anchored to rap rock you know so i'm wondering with the zoomers what do you what

00:43:47.900 what are your feelings on the zoomers are you optimistic about your own ability to maybe

00:43:52.140 succeed in the future and this will dovetail to our next question but are you optimistic about

00:43:56.940 let's say the genetic stock that you're surrounded with uh in a certain sense so i think it is true

00:44:04.060 that the people who are our guys are definitely better politically um than in previous generations

00:44:11.420 probably just because they had to grow up a little bit faster in that regard.

00:44:15.100 But overwhelmingly, I don't think that we are this sort of like force for American conservatism the way I remember that article came out in like 2016 or something.

00:44:23.920 You know, what is it like Gen Z is the most conservative generation since World War Two.

00:44:28.180 I don't think that that's accurate. 0.95

00:44:30.460 But I think it is true that in terms of people who are in our generation who do believe in conservatism,

00:44:35.720 I think that they are much better on the issue, so to speak, than would have been the case maybe

00:44:40.640 10, 15, 20 years ago. So I'm optimistic on the basis of that. I'm also optimistic because

00:44:45.480 I think there is something to be said about historically when you've got people who should

00:44:50.120 be able to sort of naturally ascend into the upper class who are no longer able to do so because of

00:44:56.560 credentialism, because of this sort of nepotism against them. For whatever reason, I think that

00:45:01.500 Those people start to sort of network with each other and know each other and can assemble a sort of counter elite, so to speak, which would be ready to take up reins in the event of some mass immiserations scenario, which I think is probably likely within the next 20 years or so. 0.75

00:45:16.400 You saw this, for example, recently with the frat boys all across the college campuses, and you had an impulse on the far right to demonize these guys and counter signal them and claim that everybody who was out there was doing it because they're all Zionist shills, whether or not they're aware of that. 0.78

00:45:31.500 And it was sort of like this ridiculous scenario because those are the guys, you know, healthy, young, handsome, educated white men. 0.62

00:45:39.740 These are the guys who are going to be working for us in based world. 0.62

00:45:43.520 These are the guys who we need on our side.

00:45:45.720 And everybody does have that sort of entry level where they realize really what's going on in the world, some of us sooner than others.

00:45:52.280 But for those young men, that was probably a very awakening moment where maybe they grew up in neighborhoods which weren't exactly enriched.

00:45:58.660 They go to college and all of a sudden they're being told all of these horrible things in their

00:46:02.300 classrooms. They literally cannot walk to their classrooms because they are being blocked by

00:46:07.060 these like just disgusting orc-like humans who are telling them that they're going to destroy 0.98

00:46:13.360 the entire country basically just to spite them. And so I would say I'm optimistic just because 1.00

00:46:18.020 at the end of the day, there are tens of millions of us. We're not going anywhere. And typically

00:46:23.440 what tends to happen is when our stock decides it's time for something to happen, that's usually

00:46:27.780 when it does tend to happen. And so I don't think that we should be pessimistic. I don't think that

00:46:32.200 we should be blackpilled. I think that everything will be, it's going to be very bad for quite some

00:46:36.420 time, but ultimately I think that we'll prevail. Now, Alaric and then the Prudentialists, I'd be

00:46:41.680 curious to hear what you think, like looking around and I believe Alaric, you'd be the youngest

00:46:45.500 one on the panel. What do you see where you're standing with your cohorts?

00:46:50.140 well you said that um the perception swings between the most neurodiverse and you know 0.97

00:46:57.840 gay and whatnot and the most conservative or like nazi-like generation uh they're both true

00:47:03.560 they're simultaneously true um again you look at young white men you're largely going to see 0.80

00:47:10.340 right-leaning views you look at young women overall you're going to see left-leaning views

00:47:14.840 uh in general though it's very polarized there are you know no one's like uh like apolitical

00:47:21.240 or doesn't care uh people will sort of put up a front of that but realistically you know there's

00:47:27.440 two teams and they're increasingly diverging and they have very strong visual effects on people

00:47:34.040 you know um if you're a younger guy and you have normal ideas about the world at this point you're

00:47:41.260 probably lifting and, you know, social and you just look like a normal person. Uh, at the same

00:47:47.420 time, there's a, uh, sort of dissent for the people who, you know, pick up left-wing ideals

00:47:55.420 and they have, they're the stereotype. They have, you know, awful hair dye and, uh, imagined mental

00:48:01.580 disorders and things like that. Um, so both are true at the same time, but, um, generally speaking,

00:48:09.800 the the younger frustration with uh we'll say older leadership comes from the fact that older

00:48:18.320 leadership generally doesn't want to recognize the reality of the situation in a political sense

00:48:22.300 like young you know white guys my age uh you see things like feminist or female power coming from

00:48:30.840 the right you see like these you know young women's leadership conferences like john brought up

00:48:35.180 um and it all feels like part of the same thing just an earlier ratchet uh in the movement so

00:48:41.920 the the disassociation with the we'll say like mainstream right or things like that

00:48:50.420 is is there because it feels like all one thing it's just oh everything's 1.00

00:48:54.840 you know that usually you'll hear like everything's kind of gay everything's kind of stupid 0.96

00:48:59.740 um and besides that everyone my age at least i would think sort of realized that 75 of what 0.99

00:49:05.600 they're doing at any given moment is just fake in 2020 uh the entire world was picked apart

00:49:11.000 with covid and the lifestyle changes were drastic and nonsensical and really absurd

00:49:16.160 it sort of felt like a like a kafka story for two years um and that's that's had a big effect

00:49:22.780 as well it's like okay you know these things don't matter you know things like uh we'll say

00:49:28.580 bureaucratic norms are just foreign because why do you care you know that that's the general

00:49:34.020 attitude um i'm not saying that's a good view to necessarily have but that is the attitude because

00:49:39.040 so many of these things clearly didn't matter for two years and the entire country didn't burn down

00:49:44.500 and uh prudentialists i haven't spoken to you in a little bit just same question what are your

00:49:49.580 feelings on gen z where you're sitting well it's always difficult i think to sometimes ask for one

00:49:55.940 generation, and then we're kind of ignoring, say, Gen X or the millennials. I mean, I think that

00:50:00.700 Gen Z is coming out from the overshadow of, say, millennial culture. I think that people will say

00:50:07.340 millennials get blamed. There's some articles from the mainstream press over the last 15 years that

00:50:12.360 say the millennial generation is killing X product or X service. And at the same time, that also will

00:50:19.260 include the younger Zoomers that are now coming of age and participating in education and the economy. 0.98

00:50:24.600 But I mean, this is generations that have grown up in the midst of the Obama administration as either their childhood or their formative years. So witnessing, you know, Barack Obama did promise that he would fundamentally transform the country. And I think he has. And he's probably one of the most consequential presidents in modern American history that I don't think it's enough attention now that he's out of office. 0.94

00:50:47.020 But I think that for Gen Z, I think what Alaric said is absolutely true. They are simultaneously, depending upon their racial background, where they were raised or what they grew up with, they are either militantly conservative or they are militantly a progressive liberal activist.

00:51:03.320 As for participating in the future, I think that one of the things that has to be considered is that there is no real public square anymore. There isn't the civic ideal of Mr. Smith goes to Washington because Mr. Smith can nowadays just tweet at his local representative or even the airline customer service line on Twitter and get an answer way more effectively and quickly than, say, the bureaucratic process, which doesn't get respected.

00:51:29.000 And as someone who works in government, I find it rather strange that there's so much political illiteracy for as much political anger and vitriol there is either towards previous generations or just in general.

00:51:40.280 Because a lot of our problems, while they do come and stem from Washington, they also can be fixed at a rather local level.

00:51:47.820 And most people do not take the time to yell at their county commissioner or to meet their city councilman over issues that can be fixed at a relatively local area or level where they are.

00:51:58.080 at least when it comes to say the suburbs or smaller towns for big cities I know that that

00:52:03.680 can be a huge hurdle and a mess but we we don't take advantage of the real world connections as

00:52:08.760 much as we do online because I think for many people Gen Z especially that's the only place

00:52:13.500 that you can really exist with your ideas or to vent your frustrations because if you try and

00:52:18.760 engage in real life as John had said if you're on a college campus good luck expressing anything

00:52:23.940 that's to the right of Chairman Mao, because you just will be shouted down, bureaucratically

00:52:29.980 harassed or be labeled by as an extremist by the Student Grievance Center. And your risk of getting

00:52:34.480 kicked out of college is very real. Those are fantastic points. And you mentioned something

00:52:39.800 there that I just wanted to just underscore, which is that there was some news I'd read one time,

00:52:45.920 you know, same thing that happens to all of us, you see a screenshot come across your desk,

00:52:50.160 you immediately believe it and then sometimes you actually look it up to see if it's real

00:52:54.560 the screenshot that i read was that you know baby boomers represent the majority of new homeowners

00:53:01.440 in america and actually looked it up and it's not true um it's millennials that are kind of just

00:53:07.200 you know they're still there the boomers but the millennials are still number one right now

00:53:10.640 and i think we are seeing a transition in the mainstream news looking at millennials as the

00:53:16.240 financial driver right now like you're starting to see more shows the very fact that we have so

00:53:20.800 much true crime horse out there is pretty much driven by millennial women so almost the entirety

00:53:26.800 of netflix right now is built around millennial women um that's irrelevant but you're starting to 1.00

00:53:31.920 see that shift and maybe that shifts away from boomers eventually into millennials holding the

00:53:37.680 hot potato but um i just wanted to maybe segue into the next question which is and we can speculate

00:53:44.720 on this all we want. And I know baby boomers right now, maybe those on the panel and most of the time

00:53:51.280 elsewhere, even if they're not connected that politically, they are right about now seriously

00:53:57.340 thinking about their legacy, what they're going to leave behind. So they are oftentimes looking

00:54:01.860 towards their grandchildren. And I wonder, and we can start with the older representatives here,

00:54:07.460 if things continue the way they're going.

00:54:12.640 I'll give an example.

00:54:14.200 There's a lot of news.

00:54:15.180 A good friend of mine, Sean Weiland, in the chat,

00:54:17.020 who's a financial advisor, he tipped me to this,

00:54:19.280 that there's some serious issues with Social Security

00:54:22.560 that are probably going to become apparent around 2030,

00:54:26.520 which might very well decrease the amount of monthly payments

00:54:29.360 that go out.

00:54:29.880 It doesn't mean it's necessarily going to collapse. 0.98

00:54:32.140 However, maybe baby boomers are the last generation

00:54:36.140 that experienced this thing called retirement at 60.

00:54:39.980 And maybe the seeds of that have been planted

00:54:41.820 in younger people, speaking for myself, my generation,

00:54:44.840 we don't really think about retirement that much.

00:54:47.940 Forget job security.

00:54:48.980 We don't think about retirement as the same certainty

00:54:51.900 as I think others do. 1.00

00:54:53.460 And I would assume it's the same with Gen Z.

00:54:55.980 So I'm wondering if current trends persist,

00:54:59.480 have you looked ahead into the next 10 years, 15 years?

00:55:02.080 Where do you think that might lead us?

00:55:06.140 Well, you can see it on college faculties. Back in the 90s, Congress passed the law, I believe, pretty much outlawing mandatory retirement for college professors.

00:55:22.460 And I'm just amazed these days by the number of octogenarian professors who still have really

00:55:30.460 good jobs at really good colleges and have no intention of retiring at all. And of course,

00:55:38.220 that means that, you know, it's practically impossible for a younger, you know, a PhD

00:55:44.700 candidate to get hired on any kind of non-adjunct position um yeah so people are people at least

00:55:54.540 in most of the world not so much the united states in the last few years but that's probably more

00:55:59.740 murders and traffic accidents are living longer and you can kind of get fixed up enough to

00:56:07.180 do a half-assed job and so people with nice jobs are tending to stay in these nice jobs

00:56:13.980 and they're not getting out of the way the way it was expected they would at age 65.

00:56:21.580 And Herb, same question. Let's just, and we can speculate as much as we want here.

00:56:27.260 From where you're standing, the next 10 to 15 years, if things persist,

00:56:30.940 where do you think America might end up?

00:56:32.940 I really don't have any comfortable idea.

00:56:44.180 My own perspective is that we are beset by too much government intervention.

00:56:51.900 We have a deficit that continues to grow.

00:56:56.540 but my concern has always been the government intervening in our lives, and we've just accepted

00:57:04.820 it. We have a permanent bureaucracy in Washington that basically runs things, and so what? Every

00:57:11.780 four years, you change it, and nobody cares, because they're there, and they're not going

00:57:15.300 anywhere, and they are unelected bureaucrats, and if you understand anything about bureaucracy,

00:57:21.800 Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate itself.

00:57:25.260 On the other hand, you know, this is a great country with a great deal of freedom.

00:57:30.600 And who would have ever thought?

00:57:32.560 I mean, none of us can live without the phone.

00:57:35.880 It's 20 years old.

00:57:37.480 I mean, think of what has happened.

00:57:39.520 I don't know where AI is going to take us.

00:57:41.860 I don't know where all the technology is going to take us.

00:57:44.460 And I don't know how deeply ingrained the American ethos is in terms of being independent and wanting to do things for themselves.

00:57:54.500 It's a unique characteristic that defines all of America.

00:57:59.900 And I don't know where that's going to play out.

00:58:02.540 If it plays out normally, if it's given a chance to express itself, we'll be fine.

00:58:07.820 Because there is nothing in my mind stronger than the ability of free men to figure out what's going on in the world.

00:58:14.460 and and herb just to maybe develop that a little bit let's say that uh the these values that you

00:58:22.080 believe are so important are not present in because they're not as present in millennials

00:58:26.700 i would argue less zoomers and the subsequent generation maybe even less um do you see you

00:58:33.660 know i know you're not a fan of socialism would america become more socialist more open borders

00:58:38.720 No, just learn to speak Chinese. 0.90

00:58:43.860 Now, we can throw it to the younger gents here. 1.00

00:58:47.340 Now, let's start. 0.83

00:58:48.660 Actually, let's start with you, Alaric.

00:58:50.160 What are your thoughts?

00:58:51.020 Let's say 10 years, 15 years, current trends continue.

00:58:55.200 Where do you see things going?

00:58:57.940 Well, for one, I see that American exceptional ideal sort of fading out of relevance completely.

00:59:05.300 I don't think it's a good thing, but I see it happening.

00:59:07.980 I can't speak to the economics of things just because like Herb said, it's very unpredictable

00:59:12.620 with where tech goes and where the financial markets go. I'm not an expert on that sort of

00:59:17.300 thing, but I can talk about the cultural directions. And I can say that younger people,

00:59:22.780 the younger you go, the less there is a belief in building wealth in a normal way, the less you see

00:59:28.780 a belief in getting a good job and then a retirement plan and things like that, retirement

00:59:34.500 minute 60 uh most people uh feel at least that some kind of gradual collapse or dissent is imminent

00:59:41.700 and that we are in the looting the treasury stage uh most people can't articulate it that way most

00:59:47.360 young people by that i mean but that's sort of their revealed preference i guess ideologically

00:59:53.600 um they they feel like it's it's time to you know secure your foothold and that's not done

01:00:01.100 via traditional means that that's one very common idea um at the same time people you know young

01:00:07.600 white guys and people on the right see patronage politics as the the sort of crux of what's going

01:00:13.540 on with the left it's every job is just you know like you're a diversity hire or an ideological

01:00:18.940 hire or something like that again i'm not saying this is the case for every single job in america

01:00:23.660 i'm just saying this is the perception of what's rising um and generally speaking it goes for

01:00:29.700 everybody but us. And a lot of the practical, economic, and just general legislative ideas

01:00:38.380 coming up are, give us that. Give us our slice of the pie. That's a very common sort of feeling.

01:00:46.260 Just that the looting the treasury thing, I think, is a really potent generational divide

01:00:51.580 because it feels real the younger you go. Again, I don't know if that's true, but that's definitely

01:00:58.820 one thing that I feel on it. Well, Alaric, you mentioned something very interesting there. I

01:01:02.440 just wanted to maybe underscore this as well about the talk of collapse. Now, if you're in

01:01:07.460 our political spaces, everyone's talking about it, dreaming of collapse, really excited about

01:01:13.280 the next apocalypse, of course. But I read this really fascinating book called Decadence by Jim

01:01:18.440 Haugen. Some people are probably sick of me talking about that, but I ain't going to stop.

01:01:22.760 It's a book by a journalist about the 1960s counterculture, which I believe truly was

01:01:29.180 the baby boomers culture at its core.

01:01:32.480 And one thing he had mentioned in there was the boomers.

01:01:35.520 I'd be curious to hear from the baby boomers here whether this is true.

01:01:38.980 But there is this idea in the counterculture that the next great paradigm shift was not

01:01:45.040 only on the horizon, but it was their job to usher society into that.

01:01:49.360 And the counterculture that he was describing, people think of the counterculture as a leftist

01:01:53.440 thing.

01:01:54.120 And it kind of wasn't.

01:01:55.000 It was a conflagration of a bunch of different disassociated things kind of being grouped

01:01:59.300 together that was hijacked by the left later.

01:02:02.440 But the idea was that as opposed to the beat generation that came before it, where they

01:02:07.060 were kind of very dour and nihilistic and saw the end coming, the end is always coming.

01:02:11.540 The baby boomers saw it as a bit more positive that there's an exciting paradigm shift and

01:02:17.600 maybe an exciting collapse coming down the road. 0.73

01:02:19.460 And my sense was that never really left us.

01:02:23.500 And I don't know if that's a distinctly American thing,

01:02:25.640 but it sounds like it could be a distinctly Western thing.

01:02:28.540 And I'm just curious about, how do you feel about that?

01:02:31.100 When you were young, were people talking about collapse?

01:02:34.740 Of course, there was the sort of nuclear war and everything,

01:02:37.300 but was there a vibe back then that society was on the downturn?

01:02:42.780 What do you think?

01:02:43.240 how people always uh enjoy apocalyptic fantasies it's it's hard to project into the future and

01:02:54.840 just imagine how can things carry on anymore and yet generally they do they just kind of keep

01:03:02.680 bumping along um you know i think uh i mean part of the baby boom experience was uh especially if

01:03:12.080 you were an early baby boomer, like from the 40s or born during World War II, the world was kind

01:03:20.280 of your oyster because there had been so few people born between 1930, the Depression, and

01:03:28.160 World War II that society and the economy really needed a whole bunch of young people to get good

01:03:37.780 jobs and step up and fill in this missing population and so what we've seen is what

01:03:44.980 we've got four presidents uh born in the 1940s three of them born in 1946 the first year of the

01:03:52.020 baby boom we don't have any born in the 1950s because that part of the baby boom there was a

01:03:57.540 whole lot of people around and the opportunities weren't as outstanding as they were in the 40s

01:04:05.380 so yeah there was uh you know kind of the late 60s as part of somewhat apocalyptic but it's also

01:04:11.940 it was kind of a blast you could life was cheap uh young people could drop out for a while then

01:04:20.500 get good jobs yeah you didn't there was there were fewer worries but uh you know check out

01:04:26.660 tom wolf articles from the late 1960s is probably a really good source on kind of the economic

01:04:33.140 optimism of the time um all right yeah now herb uh same question uh do you remember these sorts

01:04:40.900 of collapse narratives or vibes back when you were younger no not really uh you're talking about

01:04:48.500 the post-war expansion and all of the growth that occurred yeah we had a couple of terrible

01:04:55.860 recessions. We had a stock market that was cut in half. We had the 1968 Democratic Convention

01:05:04.700 in Chicago. You know, we had the hippies, but basically it was a big growth period of time.

01:05:11.740 I mean, it was, you know, I think for the reasons mentioned, the population numbers and also the

01:05:19.580 fact that it was a post-war growth and there was just tremendous energy. I think it was a time of

01:05:25.540 great optimism. And I would also add the civil rights movement. I think there were some great

01:05:33.420 things going on in terms of improving the society and enriching our potential.

01:05:42.080 You know, make love, not war. That's not a terrible way to look at the world, is it?

01:05:47.580 All right. So back to the original question, I think I only touched on a lyric there. So

01:05:51.620 John and Prudentialist. Prudentialist, I'll start with you. Where do you see things going in the next little while?

01:05:58.960 Well, as I've said elsewhere, I think that it is entirely dependent on one's political eschatology. I think that everyone will look at the news and react to things differently. And so I think everyone's in their various camps. Some people act like Millerites, where they say that this is the exact date, the exact time where everything is going to go down and heck in a handbasket.

01:06:19.600 And there are others that will always say, well, nothing really ever happens.

01:06:23.260 No man knoweth the hour type deal.

01:06:25.080 And I think that that really does come as people can measure a sort of decline in quality of material conditions and also the increase in DEI towards some of the most important high skilled jobs that you need.

01:06:41.420 For instance, earlier this year, there was the announcement from the FAA that they were going to look and expand towards hiring diverse and neurodiverse peoples for air traffic controllers.

01:06:53.620 Now, this is one of the few jobs that doesn't require a college degree, but has insane amounts of aptitude tests.

01:06:59.860 And now we're saying that we're going to try and hire people that don't really belong. 0.99

01:07:02.740 And I think that that definitely contributes to people's concerns in the same way that many have thought that the sky is going to be falling, both due to Boeing aircrafts and potentially just due to non-white and diverse pilots. 0.99

01:07:14.740 So we'll see how the chicken littles of the world go around. But one of the things that will definitely I see continue is that the United States will continue to fracture along sort of these socioeconomic and more importantly, these ethnic divisions as America's cities and sort of the hinterlands get more and more stratified on what kind of jobs are out there and what kind of communities that people form. 0.58

01:07:39.120 And so I think as John and Alaric had pointed out that if you're a younger white guy, especially Gen Z or Gen Alpha, you're already built in and born with this sort of political attitude because the narrative and the coalition, as Steve has outlined here, and I think it is VDR conference speech, not this year, but last year, that really you are sort of persona non grata in the public discourse.

01:08:02.640 So as long as that continues, then that will be the case. 0.53

01:08:06.880 And as we've seen in other countries that had ruling majorities or ruling classes of a particular ethnicity,

01:08:14.060 and as they fade away, it doesn't really matter how long the Democrats or, say, the ANC have been in charge.

01:08:20.800 They're still going to blame the minority or the former guys in power and never take responsibility for themselves

01:08:27.620 because they just physically and mentally can't. 0.69

01:08:29.860 I think we'll hear the term legacy majority more and more as whites fade out from being a majority like they have in California and Texas, but they'll still make a good punching bag. 0.99

01:08:47.960 Yeah, absolutely. 1.00

01:08:48.900 Yeah, that's definitely correct. The same way that we are made to apologize for the supposed sins of our ancestors, that we will then have to apologize for having occupied the government for so long or for holding all the real estate or all the wealth and more of that will be transferred from us to the masses of new Americans. 0.66

01:09:07.620 and i think that some people will be able to escape from that you may have a brazil-like

01:09:12.680 system or really any third world country-like system where if you are wealthy enough then you

01:09:17.960 can live away from the consequences of what has happened and you can have a gated community maybe

01:09:23.580 we'll even have themed gated communities in america imagine like the disney theme parks you

01:09:28.200 can go live in like a midwestern colonial you can go live in like a new england cape cod or something

01:09:32.720 and they'll be like lined up and people are like wow this is what america used to be like and you'll 0.62

01:09:36.820 have these sort of things going on, but the middle class of white people will be totally

01:09:40.980 left behind. I mean, it'll be more expensive for them to live their lives, but they're also

01:09:45.320 in return for working harder and trying to earn money that they're able to purchase a lower

01:09:50.460 material standard of living, a lower general quality of life, a deteriorated social fabric,

01:09:55.460 which is now completely hostile to them to the extent that it's not already.

01:09:58.880 So things are going to be very bad. And unfortunately, it's not, I don't think going

01:10:02.960 to be a situation where like they win. And now all of a sudden we can just sort of all come

01:10:08.140 together and be the rainbow country. I think that the vector is going to continue and they're going 1.00

01:10:12.620 to say, well, we still have not achieved total equity. And so it must just be that we have not

01:10:17.140 implemented this extremely enough and they will continue to persecute old stock Americans, 0.96

01:10:23.900 heritage Americans until maybe then a collapse is possible because the government will have 0.93

01:10:29.020 become so incompetent. But in the meantime, I think that we have enough human capital and enough

01:10:34.260 wealth in this country to trudge along for at least another couple decades, I think, before you

01:10:40.140 see something like a collapse actually occur. But I think we can also reverse that. Depending on who

01:10:45.540 you speak to, collapse was inevitable after 2020 or after 2008 or after the French Revolution or

01:10:53.320 or whatever. And people want to draw a line in the sand, but I think that we can actually make

01:10:58.460 things better and we can maybe delay the ceiling, even if we're due for a ceiling, at least for my

01:11:04.900 generation and for the next generation, because we do still have people, we do still have time

01:11:09.980 to work with before these things, I think, reach a point where there are no off ramps left for us.

01:11:15.300 Do you mind if I jump in real quick? Yeah, of course, of course.

01:11:18.080 Yeah. Just so just to make this clear, when I talk about collapse and this feeling of collapse and looting the Treasury, I don't mean like civil conflict and, you know, just going back to the Stone Age or something like that.

01:11:30.020 I mean what John's describing. I mean favela world. That's what is going to happen on the current track, flat out. Whites persecuted into a complete underclass. American ideals long gone, but still invoked to further persecute that white minority. Things like that.

01:11:48.300 you know just generally the outlook is that whatever america was from we'll say like post

01:11:54.320 civil war to post world war ii that that is ending or already ended and whatever comes next is

01:12:00.760 necessarily going to be radical one way or the other uh either we're going to have favela world

01:12:05.680 or we're going to repeal the civil rights act which is necessarily an extremely right-wing

01:12:09.460 government thing to do um yeah just wanted to clarify i'm not like a collapsed doomer well no

01:12:15.960 But I look at that and I have spoken to a few people in our scene, guys who have way more financial sense than I do.

01:12:24.200 And one thing that comes, they always talk about is a lot of people, a lot of young people desire investment or the passing on of wealth to them, but they don't seem to have any solid projects or solid organizations with which to absorb that capital and to scale.

01:12:40.780 And that sounds like something I think that could be attractive to boomers from the young people, which is maintaining the civilization itself.

01:12:51.000 And one thing that springs to mind is I'm sure a lot of people are aware of the book Bowling Alone, pretty popular in our spaces.

01:12:58.980 But I read it quite some time ago.

01:13:00.800 But one thing that always stood out to me was the part on civic organizations, about how the baby boomers were way more interested in civic organizations that were local.

01:13:12.740 Right. And these are the bowling leagues was one example.

01:13:15.300 But it could be, you know, Rotary Clubs. It could be Chambers of Commerce.

01:13:19.640 It could be there's actually just dozens and dozens of groups, probably in your area, that are almost exclusively staffed by baby boomers right now.

01:13:28.180 There's no young interest in it. And there's a lot of money bound up in these organizations. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in carrying it on. And these organizations are at risk of dying completely. So I think there is some interest, and correct me if I'm wrong, from the baby boomers to actually pick up the torch on that level. And from my experience, young people just don't have an interest in those, or they don't like doing things locally.

01:13:53.860 And that was kind of what was argued in the book, which is that you actually do see young people joining organizations, but they are more national or even international focused organizations.

01:14:04.720 They're the opposite of local. They're trying to project into the rest of the world.

01:14:08.300 And so but no one is looking inward. And Prudential, as you mentioned earlier about, you know, municipal politics and whatnot.

01:14:15.540 But I think there might be some opportunity there. And I'm curious, maybe we start with the two elders here.

01:14:22.640 Is that what you experienced growing up? Was there more of a proliferation of people joining clubs and joining local organizations? Has that gone down? And just your thoughts on that.

01:14:32.980 I mean, the country has tolerated the persecution of the Boy Scouts by plaintiff's attorneys.

01:14:46.700 You know, we've seen it, even though what all these lawsuits were about was quite different

01:14:55.040 from, you know, the Catholic Church sexual abuse cases where the bishops were moving

01:15:01.020 around the bad actor priests you know the boy scouts nationally were trying to trying to find

01:15:09.020 perverts and put them on a list and never let them join uh the volunteer ever again uh but

01:15:16.780 both organ you know both organizations have been pretty much ruined financially by that and

01:15:21.980 you know these uh you know the loss of large organizations like that that can that can uh

01:15:30.860 you know provide a socialization for for large numbers of people it's hard to

01:15:36.460 that's that's hard to fill that gap now herb i'm curious to hear from you um

01:15:43.580 is that appraisal of the situation true and have you seen anything on your end about

01:15:48.700 people maybe in your political spaces who are complaining that they don't have any interest

01:15:53.740 from younger people or they have a difficulty maybe even interfacing them with them rather

01:16:03.260 you know i i think that that different age groups have different priorities um

01:16:10.300 the uh i i mean i don't want to speak for the younger folks because i don't

01:16:17.180 really understand you know their situation but uh the whole the whole social dynamic has changed

01:16:24.860 dramatically i um you know organizations were formed to meet certain needs and uh what's happened

01:16:35.740 probably since the new deal is that lots of the social organizations whether it was churches or

01:16:43.820 or men's clubs or these kinds of things that had a great sense

01:16:48.700 of community responsibility have been usurped by the government.

01:16:54.560 And so those organizations don't exist so much.

01:16:58.580 On the other hand, I'm here in Sarasota, and I got to tell you

01:17:02.420 that the number of organizations, whether they be art or social

01:17:08.180 or what have you, just have tons of people volunteering

01:17:11.800 and giving money and trying to do good things.

01:17:15.520 I think everybody's in a different stage.

01:17:17.800 I mean, you know, the younger folks are busy developing careers

01:17:23.440 and raising their kids.

01:17:24.700 And I think the nature in which parents interact with their children

01:17:28.780 has changed a great deal too.

01:17:30.720 I think they're much more involved on a day-to-day basis.

01:17:33.640 And I think that takes away something from the community,

01:17:36.760 but, you know, maybe works out better for the kids themselves.

01:17:40.680 I don't know.

01:17:41.140 The younger folks would be better able to address the question of what they want in terms of organizations than I would be in terms of what I see in the older organizations, because the older organizations are vibrant.

01:17:54.500 I mean, people are committed to community, work very, very hard, give money and time, and are basically motivated to do things for the community, to make things better.

01:18:06.080 now just a note to the chat i don't want to see all this shortwave radio discussion going on

01:18:12.880 anyone who's talking about their ham radios in the chat i'm gonna find you and i'm gonna

01:18:18.940 take the bones right out of your body now from the perspective of the young younger people here

01:18:25.560 i'm wondering like are you engaged in any sort of local civic organizations anything municipal

01:18:30.140 anything regional even and for your your the people that you're surrounded with is there just

01:18:35.340 a general disinterest in that, or perhaps they even see these organizations, as Herb

01:18:40.780 is implied, as just thematically different than what they're looking for.

01:18:46.580 We may start with the prudentialist first.

01:18:49.260 Sure.

01:18:49.960 And I think that the civic participation part's a really good question, because many people

01:18:55.220 don't feel, and maybe this is just by the nature of how we look at politics these days,

01:19:00.860 or better yet, they just feel as if there's no place for them to get started, is that

01:19:05.260 a lot of people don't participate in civic or local organizations i feel kind of like an odd

01:19:11.380 man out or sometimes they quote unquote spiritual boomer no offense and that like i still enjoy

01:19:17.000 things like going to uh community clubs or going to local festivals that are hosted by my my town

01:19:23.340 or going to a an orchestra kind of showing type deal going to a concert like that because younger

01:19:29.640 people aren't particularly involved unless their family is involved especially with things say like

01:19:35.140 Elks Lodges or other groups like that. Scouting, as Steve had pointed out, has just been so utterly

01:19:41.040 destroyed. I mean, I still carry my Eagle Scout card in my wallet and it's on my resume, but

01:19:45.900 I feel like it's a relic of an older banished time as scouting has been so gutted to its

01:19:51.280 institutional core. It's no longer the Boy Scouts of America, it's Scouting America.

01:19:55.780 And again, I think that for many people, it's that they don't feel as if those things are built

01:20:00.740 for them. But on the other hand, I would see a very valid criticism that many young people don't

01:20:07.420 participate unless I think they care because they feel like it's a progressive cause.

01:20:11.080 I work in the nonprofit governmental background. I won't go too far into it because I don't want

01:20:15.660 to dox myself. But I've noticed that one of the things that nonprofits and charities have been

01:20:22.100 really focusing on, they focus on millennials more so than Gen Z, is about experiences. They

01:20:27.920 want these people to help them in their cause and they need to make them feel like they're part of

01:20:31.800 it, that they're doing something good, that they get something out of it for themselves. What's the

01:20:35.920 me factor? Why should I care? What's in it for me? Which is a

01:20:39.860 totally different way to look at charity, especially within, say, the older

01:20:43.920 Christian religious context, that you gave alms and you did charity works, that's what you were

01:20:47.840 supposed to do, not because you want to feel good about it or take a selfie about you helping an

01:20:51.900 old man. I think that that Mr. Beast style of social capital

01:20:56.020 and charity phenomena has certainly done a great deal of damage to younger people.

01:21:00.520 But also, I think the big reason why they don't participate is according to an Experian

01:21:06.260 survey with Experian Credit Reporting in 2023, more than three-fourths of millennials and

01:21:12.800 Gen Z self-report that they are somewhat or very dependent on their parents for money.

01:21:17.880 And it's very hard to be like a participating member of society if you're still dependent

01:21:22.540 or reliant on intergenerational or family dollars to live a life. I mean, if you're dependent on

01:21:30.420 somebody else and you're not your own person, it feels very hard to have a reason to date or a

01:21:35.720 reason to go out and participate, especially if you're dependent on someone else for money.

01:21:40.000 And so I think that you have a mix of people don't feel the need to care. They feel locked

01:21:44.960 out economically or greater yet, most of them have checked out of the system. Whereas I feel

01:21:50.480 like an oddity or an odd man out because I'll be one of the few people under 30 going to city

01:21:55.480 government meetings or going to local, you know, volunteer fire departments and seeing, you know,

01:22:01.760 going to their fundraisers because I depend on a VFD where I live. And I know that that puts me in

01:22:06.740 an isolated geographic position, but maybe those who live closer to the cities might have more to

01:22:11.240 say on this than I do. Yeah, for the other two younger people here, feel free to jump in anytime.

01:22:20.480 all right i was gonna give it to him but i think it sounded like he was

01:22:27.280 away and he had to glide over in the chair

01:22:29.960 yeah sorry about that but um no what's it called with the organizations uh a lot of the frustration

01:22:40.640 comes from the sort of the fact that they're a lot they're often bureaucratically beholden to

01:22:47.480 some kind of left-wing thing, and everything's sort of politicized by default. This is more of

01:22:54.260 a criticism of national organizations with local chapters. Like, for example, a lot of people in

01:22:59.620 the chat have mentioned fraternities. I was in a fraternity. It's a great thing. I really

01:23:04.140 recommend it. But, you know, these are not what they were even 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30.

01:23:09.760 um and other local organizations that i've i've been involved with have often fallen into this

01:23:18.140 this weird thing of where you're kind of fearful of just doing your thing without paying progressive

01:23:23.140 fealty um that that's an issue you know that i personally have but i don't think it's by any

01:23:30.260 means the main issue uh the main issue is definitely what prudentialist was bringing

01:23:33.940 up with the economics of it. It's just people are poor. I think there's also for a lot of people,

01:23:41.780 not an obvious transition when you become an adult. Um, you know, like you can get involved

01:23:47.280 in boy scouts or high school athletics, and then you go to college and maybe you don't have friends

01:23:51.740 there. So you join clubs that are at the school or you join a frat. But once you get out of college,

01:23:56.160 I think it's tough for people to, especially young men to naturally find friends because,

01:24:01.460 Men don't usually just become friends because we meet each other at the subway or something.

01:24:06.980 It's usually centered around an activity.

01:24:09.180 And a lot of guys just, like was said, don't have the money or they just don't even have the interest.

01:24:13.380 They just have checked out.

01:24:15.180 They don't have hobbies because I think a lot of what drives young men to pursue different hobbies and interests is because they're trying to get the attention of young women.

01:24:25.140 And because of technology, because of the way, and Alaric actually has a really great thread on this. 0.62

01:24:30.220 the way that the male sexual impulse is policed nowadays by women has made it so guys are either

01:24:36.640 not engaging or interested in that at all. Maybe they're just literally homosexual or the ways that 0.91

01:24:40.940 they're allowed to because of Me Too and these other bureaucratic organizations are ways that 0.96

01:24:45.760 are very like emasculating. And so maybe starting a garage band or even just going out with your

01:24:51.400 friends on a Friday, Saturday, a lot of guys just don't even do that anymore. You know, if they hang

01:24:55.540 out, they'll hang out at home. They'll play video games. Maybe they're doing so online with other

01:24:59.040 guys. But the places I see those sort of communities forming with younger men, independently

01:25:05.080 of some larger island, like a university or something, is at gyms, fighting gyms, even

01:25:13.620 honestly, different coffee shops or like sort of co-working spaces, which I frequent sometimes

01:25:19.420 because I am self-employed and I can work remote. I've got the laptop job and everything.

01:25:25.580 but there doesn't seem to be an interest in forming anything that is trying to take itself

01:25:29.500 more seriously than that which i think is because my generation is very cynical maybe even more so

01:25:34.060 than gen x like it's all okay when you're doing it online or you're not putting a label on it so to

01:25:39.500 speak but if you try to start an organization for something people almost tend to wince at

01:25:44.860 that unless it's aligned with some explicitly or even implicitly progressive cause yeah and

01:25:51.500 one thing you'll notice is that as our culture has become more explicitly overtly anti-male

01:26:00.620 that it sure hasn't made young women happier it's almost as if young women

01:26:07.260 feel best when the culture encourages male assertiveness and admiration of young men.

01:26:22.540 So we have a society that puts down young men and women, young women are having the worst

01:26:30.900 psychological health that's ever been recorded according to psychologist gene twang right now

01:26:37.780 and i think it's totally connected

01:26:42.260 all right i just want to let people know we got well over 1200 live viewers watching right now so

01:26:47.860 hope people are enjoying this we're going to be we're coming up to an hour and a half shortly and

01:26:52.340 i put that as a hard exit for anyone that needs to take it i'm trying to be very very conscious

01:26:58.020 of everyone's time but we actually could technically keep this going for as long as we want so but

01:27:04.180 anyone who uh feels that they need to go feel free to in the next few minutes um but i wanted to ask

01:27:12.340 one thing in the event that any of the the baby wars needed to go um there's been some comments

01:27:17.860 in the chat pointing to the greatest generation which would have been the generation preceding

01:27:23.060 you and they don't get brought up a lot uh even though that's a very kind of a pretentious name

01:27:29.300 for them to give themselves the greatest generation and maybe that's kind of doomed us all if you

01:27:33.860 think about it anyway um i'm wondering compared to what you've heard from young people now and

01:27:40.900 in your lives how did you how was your relationship with your elders back then did you hear any of the

01:27:47.700 similar complaints because just uh some context i told some people our listeners i'm like you know

01:27:54.900 think down the path to how they're going to speak of millennials you know we'll be in the baby

01:28:00.340 boomers position one day think of the things that they're going to say about us i got one for you

01:28:04.980 and i've said this before they're probably going to talk about how we really messed up crypto

01:28:11.460 a lot of younger people they're going to talk about millennials the crypto like they talk about

01:28:15.300 boomers with the housing market why were you so weird with it why were you so frivolous there's

01:28:20.500 no reason for us to treat crypto like the casino we have been making it into a joke so i can imagine

01:28:27.060 younger people would make fun of us for that but i am curious to hear about your feelings

01:28:31.460 what you're generating the greatest generation or even the silent generation how does the situation

01:28:37.220 you're hearing from these young people different from your own did you have a different sort of

01:28:41.140 respect for your elders or any opinions on how, what they might've gone through?

01:28:45.500 I mean, my impression is that generational thinking goes in and out of style.

01:28:54.240 I can't, I can barely remember before President Kennedy's assassination, but my impression

01:29:01.380 is that talking about generations and so forth was not terribly fashionable.

01:29:07.840 and then two months after JFK's assassination the Beatles land in New

01:29:15.160 York and go on the Ed Sullivan show and all of a sudden for the rest of the 60s

01:29:19.540 everybody's talking about the generation gap and this struggle between the

01:29:24.700 generations and then at some point in 1970s people stopped talking about it

01:29:29.980 and you just didn't hear much about generational differences as other kinds

01:29:36.580 diversity became more seemingly relevant uh when did generation little talk come back maybe 2008

01:29:45.620 and the economic crisis of that set it off again so it's uh it's this thing that comes in and comes

01:29:54.180 and goes over time um and uh you know especially among whites it's been really big in the last 10

01:30:02.500 or 15 years uh but i could i could well imagine um you know that at some point people get bored

01:30:11.060 with it and stop talking about it uh in the future again it's it's really hard to predict fads like

01:30:19.140 this yeah and herb to you uh the same question but what it partially reflects is how focused

01:30:28.180 a marketing society we have become and the segmentation of different groups with different

01:30:33.040 interests and just how is a function of how business is done. So you segment generations

01:30:40.860 and you produce things that they want and you market to them. But the interesting question was

01:30:48.040 how my generation looked at what you referred to as the greatest generation. They didn't consider

01:30:54.380 themselves the greatest generation they were just people that went to work every day they were people

01:31:00.460 second or third or first generation americans who basically just wanted to get their families going

01:31:06.300 and i don't think we ever idealized them i think that the respect that that we attribute to them

01:31:14.060 from looking back at them as a greatest generation is is seeing what they accomplished and the

01:31:19.340 sacrifices they made and the successes they made remember these were 18 19 20 year old kids who

01:31:26.620 died on the beaches of of normandy to to fight the nazis they came back and they had families and

01:31:34.620 they worked you know they nine to five they were the the uh you know i i don't remember exactly

01:31:40.620 what the phrase i'm looking for but uh the the the the men in the great flannel suit i guess that's

01:31:46.540 what i was looking for they just went about their business they didn't you know they didn't have the

01:31:51.180 luxury of wallowing in in this extraordinary self-examination that we have now and that

01:31:58.140 our generations have had i think that's the other thing that needs to be acknowledged that

01:32:03.740 the extraordinary material wealth that our children and grandchildren have been blessed with

01:32:12.140 and the elimination of hard times.

01:32:16.180 I mean, the greatest generation went through the depression.

01:32:20.400 They were kids in the depression.

01:32:21.860 They saw people who couldn't put food on their table.

01:32:26.140 So, you know, I think they didn't consider themselves the greatest generation,

01:32:30.680 but I think that we, in looking at what they accomplished,

01:32:33.960 did because of what they accomplished.

01:32:36.480 I think, look, there have always been conflicts between generations.

01:32:40.240 that is part of the nature of the human condition.

01:32:45.080 Everything changes, you know,

01:32:47.460 and that's just part of things, the way things evolve.

01:32:53.040 The issues, I think, that underlie a large part of this

01:32:56.320 is the technological speed that's coming.

01:33:02.420 Toffler talked about future shock

01:33:04.340 and how things would change and change more rapidly.

01:33:08.140 And, you know, that's just part of the human existence.

01:33:10.640 That's where we are.

01:33:12.480 A lot of this stuff, I think, is noise.

01:33:16.080 Human beings are still human beings.

01:33:18.860 I'm fascinated by the sense of oppression that our younger men have gotten.

01:33:25.880 And it's something, you know, which I can see but have a difficult time relating to.

01:33:32.260 But I understand that.

01:33:33.680 and i see it and if you look at the numbers more women get college degrees more women get graduate

01:33:40.960 degrees all the programs are too and frankly it hadn't made them any happier and so you know i

01:33:48.480 i'm an old guy and i look at this stuff and say you know maybe all this change isn't the best

01:33:54.400 thing in the world for everybody and we gotta slow down a little bit and take our time

01:33:59.120 that's a great point um so once again if anyone needed to leave uh feel free to um and if you do

01:34:08.560 wish to leave i would offer you the opportunity for any closing remarks or i'm going to leave

01:34:14.340 i've enjoyed this a great deal i thank you all for being here and i've been watching some of

01:34:19.240 the comments i i find some of them fascinating i find some of them shocking because i don't spend

01:34:25.240 a lot of times on the social network and you know why is everybody so angry i don't get it

01:34:33.720 so true herb a great point thanks again and i appreciate being with all of you and i appreciate

01:34:39.880 the evening thanks so much thank you so much for taking a good night have a good night take care

01:34:44.280 thanks for coming all right so i got some lols in the chat that's a good question why are we so

01:34:51.480 i actually do think uh that might have started with uh millennials and also maybe gen x as well

01:34:58.200 because everyone's complaining there's no love for gen x and you're right there is no love for

01:35:02.440 gen x and there won't be not here not in millennials millennials were promised epic bacon

01:35:09.000 and instead they got like fake meats that's like that's that's what it is um i also i guess we'll

01:35:15.640 even it out a little bit i also i'm gonna have to get going here though i i appreciate the invitation

01:35:20.280 And I enjoyed the discussion a lot. So thank you for having me. And I'm glad that there were some comments that we're enjoying. And I'm glad, too, for the haters and losers who were maybe upset by some of the discussion.

01:35:31.780 Let me just say, there were not nearly as many haters as I was anticipating for this stream. So that's good.

01:35:40.700 You know, I think usually I reject the idea of conversation in a political sphere, which is not to say that we don't want political conversation, but I'm sure everyone knows that there's a whole subgenre of political content, which is all about bringing people together and having conversations, which is ultimately about very unimportant subjects.

01:36:00.780 But this is an important conversation because I do have optimism that the younger generation and the older generation of people who sort of understand what's going on can start to see that the generational divide that maybe had defined the relationships between previous generations are not going to be as relevant as we move forward. 0.99

01:36:18.900 So I have nothing but respect for boomers. They have a lot of wisdom and a lot of knowledge, certainly practical knowledge that my generation does not have. And I am always humbled and appreciative of when the respect is extended back to those in my generation who are deserving of it. Sometimes that's not the case, but when it is, I think it is well earned. So thank you again for the invitation. And I'll be listening in as it continues, but I do have to get going.

01:36:45.040 Great to have you here, John. Thanks again for taking the time. You've been greatly appreciative. Thank you.

01:36:50.180 Take care, guys. Have a good night as well.

01:36:53.980 Yeah, I'm sorry, Prudentials. I feel like I haven't, you know, you and I are very good friends outside of this.

01:36:58.920 And maybe that has inspired me to throw to you the least.

01:37:03.980 I don't know if you have if you need to have a hard exit as well.

01:37:07.680 I don't. I was actually going to maybe push back slightly on on what Steve had said about this focus on generations, maybe coming out of 2008. I recall in the 1980s, there was a television show, you know, called sort of a slice of life family drama called 30 something, which, of course, if you were 30 something in the 1980s, you were probably born in the 1950s, that prime later baby boomer years.

01:37:30.660 and I can't help but think to myself that if that's the case, we've kind of always had this

01:37:34.800 focus on generations. And I know that Tom Brokaw is the one

01:37:38.940 that really popularizes the term the greatest generation, but you're right for the market

01:37:42.940 and you're right because you want someone to call you that. And I feel like the greatest generation

01:37:47.060 didn't mind being called the greatest generation because they want them to be called that. I mean, if you're

01:37:51.020 part of the thing that emerged out of the Great Depression and wins World War II, you kind of want a title

01:37:54.920 for yourself, as Bob Whitaker might have remarked. But I think we've always, as Americans, been

01:37:58.960 uniquely interested in generations because especially in the 20th century onward each

01:38:04.320 generation i think isn't so much defined by when the years they were born with but especially for

01:38:09.040 younger people and i think aleric can definitely back me up on this it's with the technology you

01:38:13.520 grew up with i i see a lot of uh memes and uh imagery and graphics being brought up saying

01:38:20.000 well you're part of this generation if you were raised on on this operating system or with this

01:38:24.880 video game console or with this president and i think that you know despite our our focuses on

01:38:32.560 the very real issues of immigration and this this coalition i think that there's this sort of

01:38:38.080 side tangent to it where technology and what you were raised with makes a big part of your

01:38:42.640 generation i mean uh your mention of the tv show 30 something reminds me of my one reform

01:38:53.280 suggestion that of course we'll never ever catch on which is that instead of coming up with these

01:39:00.160 generations that are some number like 16 to 19 years long but they're not quite the same length

01:39:09.440 and then different marketing consultants compete to come up with catchy names like oh generation

01:39:17.120 alpha or something why don't we just call people 1940s babies 1950s babies 1960s babies by

01:39:27.200 their birth dates and uh and then we have a 10 year long decade and we can see that yeah it's

01:39:33.920 arbitrary because obviously it's going to roll over into the next one but yeah i can actually i

01:39:39.840 I can do the arithmetic in my head, if you're a 1980s baby, you're going to be probably in your

01:39:48.560 40s to late 30s today. Did I get that right? I shouldn't have promised I could do it in my head

01:39:56.480 on the fly. But anyway, that's my suggestion. But of course, we have this giant investment

01:40:03.520 in generational titles that basically only marketing consultants have ever quite memorized.

01:40:11.700 Well, that's a good point. And we've talked about this on our show, not to get too esoteric,

01:40:17.160 but this is something Marshall McLuhan talked about. I know Prude's perking up right now.

01:40:22.400 But we talked about how sort of post-Industrial Revolution, time took on a different meaning as

01:40:28.900 of a container of value and these sort of demarcations between the generations who have

01:40:33.780 walls to allocate like this era of time represents a certain amount of value but one thing you're

01:40:40.420 noticing especially with younger generations is that we're starting to shrink that so like people

01:40:45.860 have mentioned here a generation is typically 20 years but when you talk to millennials you even

01:40:50.740 heard it in this chat it's like oh i'm a high millennial i'm kind of a zillennial i i go over

01:40:55.940 into the zoomer side a little bit so we're already starting to like break these down into smaller

01:41:00.420 and smaller segments of time probably accelerated by technology you know my wife is five years

01:41:07.460 younger than me which is actually a big deal when it comes to technological progress like social

01:41:13.620 media our relationship with social media is actually pretty different she's a woman so it's

01:41:17.940 already pretty different anyway but like me being able to remember 9 11 in a way a different way

01:41:24.340 than her i think represents something there and so we're actually shortening the generations in

01:41:30.340 the sense uh what do you guys think about that i i think the uh the 1946 to 64 baby boom generation

01:41:39.780 that set the template for everything else is too long uh that i mean we have enough memory of you

01:41:48.740 know all the social events that i think if we talk about 1940s babies versus 1950s i pointed out

01:41:57.140 that there's four presidents were born in the 1940s you know we've got we've got a so-called

01:42:03.460 greatest generation uh individuals president right now bizarrely enough um you know we'll

01:42:10.740 have a 1946 guy as the next president. You know, there were certain advantages that people born

01:42:20.580 in the 40s had that there weren't very many people born in the 30s, so they got good jobs pretty

01:42:27.060 young. And then people born in the 50s and the early 60s were kind of at the tail end of this

01:42:34.260 huge mass of young people. And, you know, there was a lot of competition to move up in the world for

01:42:39.700 them. So, you know, even in things like that, I think talking about 1940s, 50s, 60s kids make

01:42:47.360 more sense plus the ease of calculation. Sean Weiland made a good point here. He says the kids

01:42:55.340 these days don't even remember chat roulette. Hey, try chatterbait, old man. Alaric, what do you

01:43:01.200 think about all this? I'm actually thinking on a bigger historical scale here. The Industrial

01:43:06.880 revolution point is definitely notable but i don't think you really start seeing generations

01:43:11.220 crystallize until post-world war ii uh now you have notions of it before that it was already on

01:43:16.500 its way to happening like the 1920s for example had a defining ethos and aesthetic um you can

01:43:22.300 like today but even you know 40 years ago you could have a 1920s party and people know what

01:43:28.340 that means you know there's a there's a definite vision of it via created media products namely

01:43:34.360 nowadays it's like the great gatsby but um again there was a defined vision and feel for a decade

01:43:41.320 yeah i mean f scott fitzgerald and evelyn waugh kind of exploited uh the notion that they were

01:43:49.640 20s writers when they started out and uh um that's that was very rare before then

01:43:56.920 And so at the elite level, you're having people starting after the Great War to start just defining themselves as a generation, as a cohort.

01:44:12.180 And people generally didn't think about that too much before about 100 years ago. 0.99

01:44:19.340 Yeah, that's definitely true. 0.97

01:44:21.260 And my second thought would be that post-World War II is when you really see, and I think this is where it crystallizes, you see the invention of the marketing invention of the category of teenager.

01:44:33.560 You see, you know, like young person, not quite adult, not quite child existing rather than child, come of age, adult.

01:44:40.840 Obviously, those categories have been broadening for quite some time, but you really see an explosion of it in the 50s into the 60s, I would say.

01:44:47.780 I might be wrong on this, but that's my feeling. 0.89

01:44:49.560 I think that's quite right. I mean like my late mother-in-law in 1945 when she was 15 put on her

01:44:58.120 bobby socks and went to downtown Chicago to see Frank Sinatra during his bobby socks or craze

01:45:07.240 do one of nine shows in a day and there's only after after that point you start seeing that kind

01:45:16.520 of thing over and over again if you go back further in history it's real hard to find

01:45:22.280 like rudy valley in 1928 appealed to young women where they swooned over him and that's about as

01:45:30.120 far back as we can go to the the teen idol singer and so forth basically people didn't think about

01:45:38.840 teenagers much at all as any sort of separate class until yeah until the basically the marketers

01:45:47.160 got there in the post-war era yeah i think you can pin it with uh the who's my generation

01:45:53.840 um that's interesting that's a really cohesive look at that the sort of view that didn't exist

01:46:00.240 20 30 years before well you know what's interesting and this and a lyric you might

01:46:06.080 have some thoughts on this, but in our space, especially in the vitalist sphere, there's a lot

01:46:10.800 of talk about youth and the vitality of youth. And I think when people hear youth because they're

01:46:17.300 raised in the current zeitgeist, they just think teenager. But when youth was spoken of throughout

01:46:23.880 history, go back a few centuries, was the conceptualization of youth different than just

01:46:29.960 teenager, teenager as this segmented identity. Well, I actually, I wrote a piece about like a

01:46:37.020 very short thing about this recently. Um, the, the idea of a teenager, the view of it changed

01:46:43.840 really hard. I'd say around the eighties, I might be wrong on that, but that's how I look at it via

01:46:47.920 media, uh, of like a moody and disenfranchised and angry, you know, youth. Meanwhile, you go

01:46:55.060 back to the 19th century or even the early 20th century. And you look at when people are talking

01:46:59.200 about youths this goes all the way back to ancient times they're talking about when they're talking 0.87

01:47:04.280 about guys they're talking about fiery maybe naive and kind of foolish young men that get into a lot

01:47:10.040 of trouble and really really want to go to war like that's the defining feature of youth for most 0.91

01:47:15.300 of human history um with you know like girls it was wanting to marry as soon as possible and this

01:47:21.180 is a in a lot of the sort of self-reflective victorian literature you see mentions of this

01:47:26.480 but you can find motifs going back all the way to the greeks um that was sort of the conception of

01:47:32.160 youth as this eternal class that existed and wasn't really they weren't really positioned

01:47:37.080 opposite their elders they were just their own thing and they were a vanguard that kept shifting

01:47:41.740 as you know time went on um and they were fiery and really just wanted to experience life or

01:47:49.360 adventure or things like that and then you start getting this like this very different view post

01:47:54.760 world war ii where you have teenagers as a defined marketing group as a defined cultural group with

01:47:59.900 tastes and then later sort of emotional states that go with it um that then shaped the culture

01:48:05.280 that came out directed at them and which you know that was a reciprocal relationship they kept

01:48:10.060 shaping each other and now you have this very historically divorced view of what being young

01:48:15.220 actually is yeah i mean for for example uh catcher in the rye in 1950 was one of the first

01:48:24.480 famous uh characters who was clearly a teenager and was feeling this kind of teen angst but if

01:48:32.160 he also when i read it as a teenager in the 70s i was struck by how holden caulfield thinks that

01:48:43.840 being that what he wants to do is go hang out in bars with 35 year olds and basically dress like

01:48:51.520 a 35 year old and pass for somebody who's older and so forth, and that after the great teen

01:48:59.280 revolution of say the 1960s that that just seemed very alien. So yeah, the modern teenager

01:49:08.080 you know definitely emerges after World War II and it's really quite a different thing than

01:49:17.440 uh than you know the western world had ever seen much of before

01:49:24.880 i feel like there's a lot of unfair hatred aimed at uh marketers in this stream well i was a

01:49:31.280 marketing researcher which is like a marketer but we're not actually really good at coming up with

01:49:38.320 catchy stuff i know i i work in marketing and it's our job is to measure it what the marketers do

01:49:44.160 Yeah, you're the real, the numbers guys. 0.99

01:49:46.240 I'm the guy who goes into a room drunk and says, you know, what if the burger had a vagina? 0.99

01:49:53.560 Has that been tried yet? 0.99

01:49:55.240 And it turns out it has, but not this big.

01:50:00.380 Now that Herb's gone, we can really have some, I was keeping a lot of these horrible sentences to myself because I didn't want to offend the sensibilities.

01:50:09.080 is now you're going to get a double-barreled shotgun

01:50:12.120 of the worst things you've ever heard.

01:50:15.400 We've got a lot of really good comments here.

01:50:18.920 I'll start talking about Skibbity Toilet, I mean.

01:50:22.420 You know what?

01:50:23.100 You know what's funny?

01:50:23.520 Can I just say this?

01:50:25.360 I think people have been unfairly maligning Zoomers

01:50:28.900 because they will look at the Skibbity Toilet meme.

01:50:32.320 To me, it's a bit of a try-hard Reddity meme, but whatever.

01:50:36.160 They look at that and say, oh, the youth is lost. 0.78

01:50:38.260 look at this it's just random it's it's nonsense and then if you think back to the stuff millennials

01:50:44.900 were laughing at it was still just random like it was family guy it was oh what if what if the

01:50:50.900 baby was a serial killer and talked british like we would kind of invented random humor but then 0.98

01:50:57.080 you think back to you know what the fuck was kids in the hall and monty python and everything too 0.99

01:51:01.500 so i i don't think that skeeby de toilet is as damning as people are treating it 0.94

01:51:06.240 sweeping the uh youtube poop and random montage sound clips out under the under the carpet there

01:51:12.480 i appreciate that dimes there's a whole generation of people who were raised on that look my generation

01:51:17.520 was raised on dragon ball z clips set to lincoln park music and i hate to say it i still kind of

01:51:24.500 think that's cool so we don't really have a leg to stand on millennials and and that i can just

01:51:29.460 hear the gen x's in the audience cheering throwing my this is me throwing myself under the bus for

01:51:35.760 you burnouts well you know just everyone who saw the end of transformers in 2007 with what i've

01:51:41.860 done while shia labeouf makes out with megan fox on a car i feel like that kind of defined a

01:51:46.680 generation for some moviegoers but that was the name that defined america for a generation it

01:51:51.740 sure did while the global war on terror was right at the at its peak so to speak that you had that

01:51:57.160 was the kind of thing that you could have uh i think yeah the the unfair you know shade thrown

01:52:02.940 marketers, I think sometimes is totally deserved just because I work with a lot of marketing

01:52:07.760 people in my own job and they're very eager to be the guy that coins the next big phrase.

01:52:13.140 But I mean, that's the kind of ambition that you want someone in marketing to have is to

01:52:16.400 be the one that tells the world to sing and have a Coca-Cola while they're at it, no matter

01:52:20.980 what they're doing.

01:52:21.940 And I think it's good stuff to have.

01:52:24.340 Well, it is interesting how the teenagers, what they did was they identified that as

01:52:29.840 an economic class and so you know even more nefariously and we can cop to this you know

01:52:35.040 it's illegal technically legal to market towards children but have you ever seen a serial commercial

01:52:41.620 of course they find a way to do it so kind of targeting immature audiences and i would say

01:52:48.720 teenagers are an immature audience targeting them not only for financial exploitation but also

01:52:54.300 revolutionary exploitation i mean that's a deep issue if you want to go there but saying oh an

01:52:59.820 And once it was believed that the youth would take over the country, now it's being blasted at them by Pepsi and Microsoft.

01:53:11.200 These are my old millennial references, by the way. 1.00

01:53:13.740 Can you tell them all this shit? 0.99

01:53:15.160 Anyway, but they're being told they must be revolutionary. 1.00

01:53:18.160 They need to be revolutionary.

01:53:19.180 In fact, that is the only acceptable identity to have.

01:53:22.780 And I think there's an interesting social phenomena where you've created this biomass that is in search for a revolution. I think that overlaps with the bowling alone reference we made earlier, which is that these kids, like they're still looking for unity, they're still looking for some kind of collective, but they're doing it online and they're trying to project that to the rest of the world.

01:53:45.960 They can only think internationally.

01:53:48.800 And I'm not sure I see that changing anytime soon.

01:53:53.420 Would that be sort of the experience of you and Prudentialist and Larrick?

01:53:59.360 Well, I actually wrote like a piece on this specifically on punk rock.

01:54:05.540 And a lot of Gen Z, you know, you don't have that defined monolithic culture.

01:54:11.200 Like I think millennials might have been the last to have that.

01:54:13.720 uh things are a lot more splintered now but one thing that people do is latch on to the the quote

01:54:19.680 unquote like youth generational movements of prior generations and build their identity around that

01:54:26.660 which is a really odd thing to see i think it's very emergent with social media and punk rock is

01:54:31.540 one of those things punk rock is like a dead man walking culturally but it still holds clout among

01:54:36.820 young people because it's defined as this like oh this is a young person thing right um and it's

01:54:42.860 just interesting to see things like that there's tons of those that you could just you know examine

01:54:46.960 that's just one i happen to have experience with so uh the media side of things and the subculture

01:54:53.000 formation is very interesting well and mr sailor i think this is a great time to ask you this

01:54:57.820 because you have just been on a book tour i'm promoting your book noticing released by passage

01:55:02.840 press and uh you were speaking about meeting all of the young fans and you were kind of surprised

01:55:09.120 at the age range of your fans, if you'd like to speak to that a little bit.

01:55:13.860 Yeah, I mean, I probably shouldn't admit this as an ex-marketing researcher,

01:55:20.760 but I actually don't do any marketing research on my own audience.

01:55:27.140 So I sort of assumed, because I'm 65, that most people who read me are 50 to 80.

01:55:33.760 and and you know over the years my audience will diminish basically by

01:55:42.000 dropping dead of old age so but then I went on this book tour and and you know

01:55:49.420 probably average age was like 32 or something like that it was showing up

01:55:54.380 for my events so I guess I've got younger fans all the people a lot of

01:56:01.480 people attribute it to the uh the red scare podcast which uh which i've i finally listened

01:56:07.500 to and it was very amusing and then i did a podcast with them uh but i i don't really know

01:56:13.940 it's uh it was a pleasant surprise but uh i i can't really explain the dynamics of it that well

01:56:21.640 well you got a lot of young fans watching right now and i believe prudentialists like my experience

01:56:27.960 was reading your writing and some of the older gen x's like jim goad would be an example being a

01:56:33.160 fan of v dare and all these places many many years ago um i think there is a surprising maybe not

01:56:39.640 surprising but there is an interest from younger people to read these accounts and appraisals of

01:56:45.160 how america used to be and and people who lived through it like yourself because so much in our

01:56:51.880 our generation is speculative. And I think, I'm not sure I truly believe this, but let's just say

01:56:58.780 I do for now. I think there's more of an interest in the millennials onward of really scouring 0.99

01:57:04.320 through history and seeing the patterns over the past century. Would you say that's true,

01:57:11.980 Prudentialist? Yeah, I would definitely say so, especially because I think for a lot of people

01:57:17.960 our age and younger, there has been this desire to look more inwardly. I think some of that's

01:57:24.160 brought on by, not to throw marketers under the bus, but there has been this trend to be

01:57:28.920 introspective or to think that you're part of your greater self or anything like that. And

01:57:33.800 you see this, especially with nonprofits and charities, like I mentioned earlier,

01:57:37.260 trying to bring people in and make them feel like they're a good person because there has

01:57:41.980 been this sort of commoditization of misery or just greater commiseration of people,

01:57:47.520 fetishizing their own sadness and so on and so anyone who tries to find an escape looking towards

01:57:52.320 what did the past have uh you see this on the right where there's sort of this nostalgia for

01:57:56.960 a time that they can't ever belong to or understanding what were the great men of the

01:58:01.940 past like and i mean alaric has done a really good job at this uh he had recently republished

01:58:06.320 at uh with the dissident review um my confession by samuel chamberlain which is one of the greatest

01:58:11.640 recollections and memoirs of the mexican-american war and it was also the inspiration for blood

01:58:16.940 meridian and it's a fantastic read and no one knows about its existence nowadays despite the

01:58:21.860 fact it inspired one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and so i think that what you're

01:58:26.400 seeing people do a lot now like you mentioned their dimes is that people are looking towards

01:58:30.680 previous writers and seeing how they are i know a lot of canadians like to read uh george grant

01:58:36.140 to sort of see how on earth did how did canada get to where we are today um and you know i i first uh

01:58:42.360 found Steve Saylor when he was replying to some of the articles and arguments that were put out

01:58:47.500 by Freakonomics with respects to abortion and so on. That's the first time I heard you. And

01:58:51.820 unfortunately, now that article just says authors. They've kind of redacted you from

01:58:56.360 history, unfortunately. But, you know, you're still around, thank God.

01:59:00.720 Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, it was, I debated Stephen Levitt, University of Chicago economist

01:59:09.200 and Slate in 1999 and uh they kept our debate up there but they took our names off and now it just

01:59:16.520 says by authors yeah Steve do you know that you're kind of a um you know everybody younger around my

01:59:24.740 age might not know who you are but your work is very prevalent um it's very well known I mean

01:59:30.940 before I even I knew who you were I had read screenshots and extracts on like Instagram and

01:59:37.120 4chan and i funny and stuff like that you're you're on tick tock um okay you'll see also

01:59:43.960 because you know you understand how to use twitter whereas you know a lot of us in this space would

01:59:50.280 probably have also maybe come of age around jared taylor guys like that you know maybe if you're a

01:59:55.840 bit more on the further right it might be someone like david duke or someone but jared taylor

01:59:59.680 you know he had a moment where he was really in the mainstream talking about a lot of these issues

02:00:05.300 But, you know, he might not really want to got thrown off Twitter about seven to nine years ago and he still hasn't been let back on.

02:00:15.920 I I talked to him about it a month ago at dinner and yeah, he'd be really good on Twitter. 0.79

02:00:23.460 And it's it's ridiculous. The people who are allowed on Twitter are not a fine gentleman like Jared.

02:00:31.460 Yeah. I wonder if we can pressure them. Someone can to get Jared Taylor.

02:00:34.800 he's probably like the if i had to elect someone to go on like joe rogan right now it would be 0.85

02:00:40.320 jared taylor um he he's not as much of a psycho schizo as some other people in times you know

02:00:49.680 um even though we've got some great representatives of the young people here 0.55

02:00:54.480 you know as we've seen over the past 30 minutes i i really start to burn out into nonsense if

02:00:59.940 just kind of let me going um just reading the chat right here by the way um not to alarm anyone

02:01:07.780 there has been a confirmed woman in the chat i've been seeing a lot of people overreacting to that

02:01:13.460 i've been seeing a lot of people talking dms i want everyone to chill i've lit a couple candles

02:01:20.820 everyone is good everyone it's a vibe in here now leave her alone we don't need to scare her off 1.00

02:01:26.900 We don't get a lot of women in these chats, and anytime 1.00

02:01:28.960 you hear about one, she gets her 1.00

02:01:30.900 limbs ripped off, practically. 1.00

02:01:33.480 Here goes 0.97

02:01:34.800 Mystic Cheese saying, where is she at? I'm going to tell you. 0.93

02:01:37.360 Get back to Odyssey.

02:01:39.640 Get back to the trenches.

02:01:40.700 14 underscore Mystic underscore Cheese

02:01:42.820 underscore 88 with the triple X.

02:01:45.740 That's just a

02:01:46.580 masterpiece of a username.

02:01:48.880 It's a 2007 Xbox

02:01:50.640 Live gamertag. You probably would have called

02:01:52.740 me a slur on

02:01:53.800 Xbox Live in a Modern Warfare 2 lobby.

02:01:56.900 you know, 15 years ago. So it's good to see that that tradition is still alive. But I think,

02:02:01.820 you know, maybe to get back on topic real quick, it's just that I think one of the bigger 0.77

02:02:05.780 things there has been is that there has been this trained animosity towards the baby boomers. And 0.77

02:02:13.080 to some extent, I would say, you know, when you have hindsight is 20-20, or you're sold

02:02:17.440 a political narrative or formula about where things all went wrong, and again, everyone's

02:02:22.620 got their own form of political eschatology and historiography that, you know, especially after, 0.69

02:02:29.780 say, the financial crisis in 2008, you know, people, like you said, dimes, they're going to

02:02:34.360 yell at people who are mishandling the housing market or so on in the same way that people will

02:02:39.040 probably blame us for ruining crypto. And I wonder, you know, how much of that can we fairly

02:02:45.020 put on towards the baby boomers? Because I feel as if people will accept intergenerational conflict 0.94

02:02:51.200 and hatred very easily without perhaps doing the reading or research themselves. I mean,

02:02:56.540 a lot of people do like to blame the baby boomers, but how much of the structural changes

02:03:00.680 that transformed America were instituted by people who were older than the baby boomers?

02:03:06.040 Let's not forget the generations of them born in the 1940s, 50s, and very early 60s,

02:03:11.360 followed by the changes that came were instituted by those born prior to them. The Supreme Court

02:03:17.840 justices that were ruling on all sorts of things such as like wickard b philburn or other cases

02:03:23.080 that have sort of laid down the framework for our america sort of you know lack of better term sort

02:03:28.820 of like race communism as some like to call it we're all instituted by people older than them

02:03:33.040 and i mean there were multiple political generations of baby boomers whether it be

02:03:37.560 like sam francis or bob whittaker others who worked in the so-called new right for the reagan

02:03:41.480 revolution some of them were boomers some of them were older i i think that it's very easy to just

02:03:46.280 slap a label on a generation or a group of people and then to hand wave the nuance or anything like

02:03:53.500 that and it makes it very easy for us to just shoot at each other across the generational

02:03:57.880 trench lines and not figure out the root cause of some of these problems yeah and this is where i

02:04:02.980 come from on the whole issue which is that we have so many other enemies opponents maybe even

02:04:09.140 oppressors that it seems not to get conspiratorial. If there was some kind of psyop, a highly

02:04:17.100 effective one would be to turn people of a similar ethno-religious background or even people within 0.56

02:04:25.960 their own families against each other, seeing each other as the primary enemy, a young man seeing

02:04:31.420 their own grandparents, their own great-grandparents as the primary drivers of their

02:04:35.800 oppression and it just seems like a failed opportunity it seems like energy displaced

02:04:40.680 into a place it shouldn't be and i think we do all the other good work we could do a disservice

02:04:46.760 if we don't try and resolve that and concentrate as we discussed in this stream in other areas and

02:04:52.900 once again that's the reason i wanted to broker this discussion and i think that's why you know

02:04:58.600 someone like steve or someone like herb is so um important because they represent similar but as

02:05:03.720 we've seen somewhat different ideas of what America is capable of. And these are just two

02:05:10.280 representations of the people you will meet when you go out and engage in these conversations

02:05:14.760 with them. And I think you should. I would hate for people to hear this conversation and think

02:05:22.180 that it's a lost cause and that it's not worth doing. Because I actually do think it's probably

02:05:28.220 the only thing worth doing and i do think it needs to be done on a one-to-one level and that's kind 1.00

02:05:33.980 of why i was pushing the um the civic groups and the in real life socialization because boomers 0.93

02:05:39.400 they don't like really coming on live streams that much we got lucky tonight but a lot of them

02:05:44.460 just don't like social media that much especially post covid where everyone wants a zoom meeting and

02:05:50.620 now no one wants a zoom meeting so you almost have to meet them where they are that's my opinion

02:05:55.340 sorry steve i think you're about to say something yeah i mean i would just in turn say that uh

02:06:02.140 you know that people my age have to have to be made aware that uh complaining about kids these

02:06:11.260 days since that kind of thing is just a stereotype that you're cranky and old and try to try to be

02:06:19.020 sympathetic to your own children and grandchildren they've got issues you didn't have to deal with

02:06:25.340 and uh you know we can we can help each other out uh we don't have to like put each other down

02:06:32.380 constantly oh we got one uh paid chat here is steve coming to the old glory club conference

02:06:39.500 from bolero 39 i wish but perhaps next time i don't know we would love we would love to have

02:06:46.220 steve come uh and uh have you speak at one of these we'll talk sometime later we'd love to

02:06:51.660 to have that happen today all right um now that essentially wraps up all the talking points that

02:06:58.800 i had i think believe we covered most of the super chats let me just uh check on odyssey i think i

02:07:05.120 missed a couple here uh we had milk trucker uh saying very interesting thank you i don't have

02:07:10.880 the odyssey chats piped in here like i do the youtube chat so i'm just reading them off right

02:07:15.300 now. We have one here from Darby who spent $25. I just really

02:07:21.220 wanted to read this. He had said fantastic conversation. I'm not

02:07:24.700 sure we need the government to back off what we need is for

02:07:27.480 government or local organizations to be staffed by

02:07:29.880 people with our values and mercilessly drive out the 1.00

02:07:33.780 libtards clear them out. That's pretty much what the other 1.00

02:07:36.960 side has been doing for 60 years. Thank you very much for

02:07:40.480 that Darby. I believe that covers the super chats on

02:07:44.620 odyssey right now um i guess any thoughts on that darby saying if we the clear them out

02:07:50.140 theory of politics what do you think about that clear them out i mean you're saying you're seeing

02:07:56.540 uh school boards uh you know local citizens kind of reclaiming their their local public schools

02:08:04.700 in a bunch of different parts of the country and you know good for them and this is essentially the

02:08:11.760 Project 2025 that people have been talking about, which is, you know, irrespective of whatever

02:08:18.340 happens to Trump going forward, is a plan to not just elect, but staff the organs of power

02:08:26.060 and the entire Republican Party and that whole political apparatus with, quote unquote, our guys,

02:08:32.720 which would mean, you know, the most, the craziest guys that we know, you know, instead of trying to

02:08:38.940 vote them in, try to use, basically take over the managerial elite is one way of looking at it.

02:08:44.740 And there's a whole, Christ, I don't know, thousand page PDF outlining that and a few

02:08:49.800 articles written about it. But that seems to be an interesting opportunity. I'm not terribly

02:08:56.460 optimistic on democracy, but it struck me as something interesting, which is a bit more of

02:09:01.540 a cynical power play that I think could work. I would like to see that. Prudentialist, what do

02:09:08.300 think about that i know you've read quite a bit about this stuff yeah i've read bits and pieces

02:09:13.680 of that thousand some odd page project 2025 thing i mean it just seems to be i know in say the united

02:09:21.040 kingdoms politics you have a lot of these sort of conservative or labor party manifestos saying

02:09:25.080 this is what we're going to do if elected and that's what this feels like is if if a republican

02:09:29.940 administration gets in this is what these heritage think tank guys have said this is what we're going

02:09:34.000 to do. Some of it's good. Some of it definitely could read the room, so to speak. But I think

02:09:40.620 that the idea of clearing them out or making things more institutionally viable for younger

02:09:46.280 men of competence to definitely come on board would be great. As someone who works in local

02:09:52.280 government, I know that I am the youngest person at my office by about 30 years. And so it's

02:09:58.420 certainly a big divide where people who are totally unaware that their problems have names

02:10:04.160 and addresses. And I mean that in a non-Fed post-y kind of way. I mean that you literally

02:10:08.680 could go to these people and try and get your issues resolved, whether it be about your roads

02:10:12.180 or whatever. People just don't realize that that exists because I think we're so comfortable

02:10:16.620 focusing on these metanarratives or the grand scheme of things on Washington and politics

02:10:21.060 writ large. And I think that when people say, oh, localism, I think that that always gets

02:10:25.940 misinterpreted for go build a farm or a homestead somewhere not to say that that's not an option for

02:10:30.500 you but you know a lot of your options locally do have avenues for political resolution but there

02:10:36.580 was um a question for steve i noticed it was because i'm also restreaming this for you uh

02:10:42.420 dimes and mona asks the question he says um i i'm sorry for the tangent he sends five dollars he

02:10:48.560 says but mr sailor he says do you have an opinion of michael jackson do you think of him as a

02:10:51.880 superstar do you think of the attacks about him being a racial or a sexual abuser true or

02:10:56.380 totally random question but people are curious on your thoughts

02:10:59.280 it was an amazing talent uh i suppose the scandals were true uh it's kind of it's distasteful and i

02:11:12.620 haven't looked into them but uh yeah i mean i can i can remember uh i want you back uh in

02:11:21.280 54 years ago coming on the radio on the am radio and oh that's exciting new band i think they're

02:11:31.700 probably going places so yeah we're talking about michael jackson huh so i think uh the entire issue

02:11:40.360 was buttoned up by

02:11:42.240 the great Cat Williams

02:11:43.900 during his bit when he

02:11:46.260 had said, 1.00

02:11:47.160 I like bitches, so in my house 1.00

02:11:50.200 I have things that bitches 1.00

02:11:52.280 like. Now, if 1.00

02:11:54.340 I have an amusement park

02:11:56.160 in my house,

02:11:57.260 and really, he starts to say, oh yeah, why

02:12:00.200 does this grown man have so many

02:12:01.960 water slides and

02:12:04.200 teddy bears and childlike

02:12:06.560 things? You know what I mean? I think that's

02:12:08.460 a fair

02:12:09.700 take to have on that? What do you think, Prudentialist? What do you think about Michael Jackson?

02:12:16.540 For someone who kind of grew up as a kid, hearing all the rumors of him being an abuser or someone

02:12:22.360 who was a little too friendly with kids, I think that a lot of people who are brought into stardom

02:12:27.500 when they're very young children are oftentimes incredibly traumatized and or abused. And so I

02:12:33.400 think that this was someone who had a lot of arrested development kind of issues. And I think

02:12:39.340 that that probably played a much larger role i mean this was a man who deeply uh wanted his

02:12:44.180 privacy so i mean when all these sort of scandals brought out in court i mean you know you're

02:12:48.440 talking about wanting to expose photos of him uh to the world you know nude uh medical analysis of

02:12:55.300 michael jackson i mean he wouldn't do anything to keep that private so i think that certainly

02:12:58.860 uh he would want to be keeping that um you know private so i think you know he's probably much

02:13:05.400 more misaligned and slandered than anything. And I kind of take the razor fist perspective that

02:13:12.120 he's probably more innocent than he is guilty. I mean, yeah, I'm not a big fan of making children

02:13:20.720 into stars at incredibly early ages. I wouldn't mind. Something I think what's been going on is

02:13:30.360 that we used to have a lot of baby chimpanzees used in entertainment, like Bedtime for Bonzo

02:13:39.140 with Ronald Reagan, which is a pretty interesting movie, by the way. But now we don't do that as

02:13:46.440 much. It's considered kind of not a good thing to capture baby chimps in Africa and then bring

02:13:55.120 them to America and then then when they turn eight they're not cute anymore

02:13:59.440 they're ugly and scary and they live another 50 years it's just it's just a

02:14:05.140 disaster so how do they make entertainment well they do a lot of CGI

02:14:10.720 these days maybe in the future we could like stop using child really young child

02:14:19.060 actors and stop making them into stars and just have

02:14:22.060 CGI the way Bart Simpson is voiced by

02:14:26.980 a middle-aged lady. You know, I think that might be 0.98

02:14:30.940 healthier for child talents like that.

02:14:34.800 Let them grow up kind of normal out of the spotlight.

02:14:40.980 Well, Alaric, what do you think about Michael Jackson? Apparently my take

02:14:45.200 was the unpopular take.

02:14:49.060 i don't know i've never dug into michael jackson to any significant degree i mean he's got a couple

02:14:55.600 of good songs um besides that very strange figure is that that's the most i can glean from it just

02:15:04.220 because i haven't really dug into it just a strange guy for sure i got one for you why would

02:15:09.380 a good guy record a song like bad he says it all in black and white right there guys 0.94

02:15:15.400 i mean what the fuck that's pretty funny yeah don't act surprised i've had a lot of bangers 0.97

02:15:25.440 on this that i feel i've been underappreciated frankly because i got a lot of disinformation 0.98

02:15:29.720 agents in the chat including this cheese guy who's one of my greatest friends by the way

02:15:34.780 but he's been plotting for my downfall this entire time he acts like i don't see it like

02:15:39.660 i'm not laser focused on the chat right now um here we go jacob chat and there have been some

02:15:45.360 some pretty funny things in there from um you know just good jokes to just wild misunderstandings of

02:15:52.300 like the words people are using oh look good point eric he's a smooth criminal i mean you know these

02:15:58.600 guys they like to sign their work all right we've been going for uh over two hours now um i think i

02:16:08.140 i need to head out soon um and i wanted to just wrap up this stream i've had a phenomenal time

02:16:13.820 and i'm wondering if anyone who's rain would like to just plug anything that they've got going on

02:16:19.260 here or any closing remarks on the issue we've kind of had closing remarks over the past little

02:16:23.900 while but um including myself but if you have any plugs or any closing thoughts well i'll plug my

02:16:29.660 book, Noticing. It's an anthology of my best stuff going back the last 30 years. You can get it on

02:16:38.700 Amazon, paperback or Kindle. You can get it directly from Passage Publishing, just look them up,

02:16:46.700 $29.95. So it's selling really well and it's been a pleasure being able to go on

02:16:55.180 on discussions like this and go, hey, buy my book.

02:17:00.700 Noticing.

02:17:01.520 It's great to see a book like that selling so well

02:17:05.120 in a publishing environment that we've always understood

02:17:08.420 to be pretty hostile to people of our political persuasion.

02:17:12.160 I honestly think a lot of people had written it off entirely

02:17:14.540 until you had the likes of Anne Lopel, Imperium Press,

02:17:18.000 which is one of my favorites as well,

02:17:19.180 and also Passage Press, obviously.

02:17:22.820 So a prudentialist and a lyric.

02:17:25.180 hit me with the digits oh sure um once again thank you so much dimes for having me on this

02:17:32.300 was a great opportunity to talk to to you mr sailor it's a great pleasure great honor uh for

02:17:37.340 me i would just simply say that uh you can find me on youtube and twitter and sub stack the

02:17:41.740 prudentialist.substack.com and have an article about uh jeremy carl's book the unprotected

02:17:47.500 class how anti-white racism is tearing america apart that should be out in the coming days

02:17:51.740 And again, I would also echo Mr. Saylor's call to buy book, as Mystery Grove would say, go ahead and go buy Noticing from Passage Press. It's a great book. I've got it myself. It's some great of the greatest hits of Mr. Saylor. Well worth reading.

02:18:07.280 yeah i will second that um absolutely support noticing it's it's a fantastic collection of

02:18:15.640 work i've only read it so far i'll admit i have not read the whole thing but i want to to fully

02:18:21.440 get a straight read through but uh that aside this has been a great conversation i think i think

02:18:28.540 a boomer zoomer like rapprochement is a rapprochement is a good thing overall uh there's a

02:18:35.220 lot of undue anger directed at the young or the old on both sides. And I think we're a lot better

02:18:45.360 if we're, you know, working towards a common goal. With that said, on my side, you can follow

02:18:54.600 the Dissident Review on Twitter, check out the website. There's actually a new article on there

02:18:58.600 As of yesterday, I think worth reading on Irish history.

02:19:03.240 A couple of books available now and a bunch available on Amazon.

02:19:07.460 You can also follow me on Twitter.

02:19:09.140 And yeah, thank you, Dimes, for having me on.

02:19:10.880 This has been an absolutely excellent conversation.

02:19:13.120 And thank you, everyone, for taking the time to watch tonight.

02:19:17.120 I've been greatly lightened.

02:19:21.420 It's very late.

02:19:22.180 I don't know what I'm saying.

02:19:23.260 I've been heartened, even worse word.

02:19:25.540 anyway i'm loving the chat loving the positive feedback we were not brigaded like i thought we

02:19:30.560 would um and for myself uh host of blood satellite check out bloodsatellite.ca i'm also editor of the

02:19:38.120 vanguardist journal check that out vanguardistjournal.com i'm not going to spend too much

02:19:42.620 time plugging myself because you've spent enough time listening to me so i just want to say thank

02:19:47.260 you everyone for tuning in at a fantastic time hope you did as well and i'll see you next time

Blood Satellite - June 01, 2024

Livestream Happening - Boomers v Zoomers： Passing the Torch

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