About once every long human lifetime. We basically reshape our outer world of politics, infrastructure, and usually in violent organized conflict. And the fourth turning is that process.

In order for that to happen, there has to be a very, very high level of fear if that event needs to happen for us to get in line. Where are we at right now?

We don't realize how close we are. We live in a country that is so split, one end has to come out on top. They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate, goodbye, goodbye. Or they are scared straight into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.

There's no way that's gonna happen.

This is the cycle. People don't understand how history works. These things happen, and they force us to do things even that we don't like. It doesn't work because it goes in the way you want it to go, but it often takes us where we have to go.

This is probably a message everybody needs to hear in America right now with the book four turning. Neil, how and by the way, the first 35 minutes of the podcast, I hope it doesn't discourage you from listening to the last 45 minutes of it, because you almost need to listen the first 35 minutes to understand the last 45 minutes. The stuff we asked about on the foreturning, he says, there's five we made in the book that they wrote in December of 1997. Four out of the five came true. The fifth one, you have to hear what he says about the fifth one. And it was pretty wild how close we are for it. And he says, look, it's a definite that every other fourth turning we've had in the history of America, it's led to a war. And here's what it's looking like right now. And I asked him what role certain events have played for us to be as divided we are with values and principles today, and why he thinks it could be a civil war. It was interesting. We had a couple moments where we disagreed and agreed, but it will make for very, very good content for you.

Again, don't let the first 35 minutes discourage you from listening to the last 45 minutes. You'll see why when you watch the entire thing. Having said that, here's Neil Howe, the author of the four turning. Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed I could take sweet victory I know this life meant for me. Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet? David? Now you came and given the value's contagious, this world of entrepreneurs. We can't. No value. They hate it. I run, homie. Look what I become. I'm the one. Okay? So I want you to think about the greatest prediction you ever made. Just think about. I mean, you know, one day, Xyz is going to happen. What's the wildest prediction you ever made? Imagine if you and your friend, William. Your name is Neil Howe and your friend's name is Neil Strauss. Neil. Not Neil. William Strauss. Neil Strauss is a different authorization. You guys write a book in 1997 called the Fourth turning, and you predict in the fourth turning, there could be a massive economical crisis and at the same time, a pandemic. And then it happens, the fourth turning.

And then today, everybody around the world has recovered from that pandemic that's been taking place. But there's a lot of people that are talking about this book. And this is such an interesting book, because on one end, the first time Al Gore read this book, he turned around and he says, everybody has to read this book called generations, which made an impression on him. Neil Howe wrote that book as well. He said everybody in Congress had to read it. So he bought a copy to everybody, send it to them, and then think about the complete opposite person of an Al Gore, maybe a Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon reads the four turning and then wrote and directed Generation Zero, a citizens United Productions film on the books theory prior to becoming White House chief strategist for President Trump. So, anyways, I can say a lot of different things about today's author, but I've been looking forward to this conversation today. Neil, it's great to have you on.

Patrick, it's really good to be here.

Yes, it's interesting because many of us have read the book. It's not like we haven't read the book. The foreturning. A lot of people have read the book. A lot of people have had people recommend it to them. And then today we're seeing a lot of stuff unravel. But basic question to the average person that's never read the book, and I got a lot of things I want to get into. I want to talk to you about the economy. Does it ever happen when we don't go through all the four turning different stages? Is the currency about to change? How much of it has to do with values and principles changing? But if you don't mind just taking a moment. First, what inspired you want to write this book and what are actually the fourth different turnings?

Okay. Bill and I. And I should say Bill Strauss was my co author for many years. He passed away about eleven years ago. We started writing in the late 1980s. So this has been an alternative career. I mean, partly. I've been a policy guy. I actually wrote my first book, co authored Pete Peterson, founder of Blackstone Group. We did a lot of stuff on debt, deficits, entitlement. What the hell's going to the federal budget? You know, I'm the kind of guy who reads the latest CBO report, and I weep, you know what I mean? The next ten years, the next 30 years, what's going on in the federal budget? I mean, it's bad. It's much worse than it actually looks on the paper. But I still have that in me, right? I've done this for so many years, looked at budget projections. But my other career.

Is there such a thing as budget projections today? Yeah. Who's doing it today in Congress? They're not sitting there counting when we're going to stop spending money and paying it off.

No. What they do is they just say.

Current law, another 2 trillion, another 2.1 trillion.

It is disastrous. And no one can do anything right. I mean, there's just complete paralysis. But my other career was looking at generational change, so I didn't. You know, I'm a. You know, my study, my field in graduate school is history. History and economics. So Bill and I were really interested in generational differences. You know, why are generations different? Boomers is so different from their parents. Xers are different from boomers, millennials. You know what I mean? We went back and wrote an entire history of America as a sequence of generational biographies. That was our book, generation. So we started in 1630s with a great migration to New England of the Puritans, the first old world sizeable migration to New England, their city on a hill. They called each other saints. I mean, this was a very idealistic enterprise. And then they had their kids, who were called cavaliers, who didn't understand. Mom, dad, why the hell did you bring us up to this godforsaken wilderness? They looked back at England. They saw gold, pedigree, all kinds of riches to be made. These generational differences have been with us throughout, Patrick, our entire history. Different generations see each other differently because they have a different location in history.

So that was what we figured out. And then we found something we didn't expect. We did not go in here looking for a cycle of history, anything like that. What we didn't expect is that these generational differences came in patterns. Certain kinds of generations always follow other. You know, after the Puritans came the Cavaliers after the transcendental generation. They came of age with the second great Awakening. This would have been the peers of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau and all those poets and commune founders and feminists. And, I mean, they came of age in the 1830s, and the generation that came after them got the name Gilda generation. They bore the brunt of the Civil War. They were a generation of metal and muscle. They really didn't say very much. But again, that kind of shift, right? And you look at the shift from idealism to pragmatism, survival coming right after it. And there are other patterns, too. That pattern made us reflect on something else. If generations come in patterns, then the history that shapes generations must also come in patterns. And that got us to reflect on a very basic pattern that historians have often noticed, and that is about once every long human lifetime.

We basically reshape our civic institutions, our outer world of politics, infrastructure, the economy, our constitution, and usually in violent, organized conflict. Right? So this really started in the last quarter of the 17th century. This was the era of Bacon's rebellion, the glorious revolution, King Philip's war. It's what Thomas Jefferson later looked back and he said, 100 years before 1776 was the first real american revolution. That was Bacon's rebellion. This was an extraordinarily violent reshaping of the colonial identity. And then, of course, a lifetime later came the American Revolution, a lifetime later came the civil war, a lifetime later came the New Deal, the Great Depression, world War two, and a lifetime later, here we are. Patrick. Right. And what's interesting is that roughly halfway in between these, what I consider to be out of world upheavals, you know, when our institutions are basically, our sense of community is being creatively destroyed, we have what historians call the great awakenings of american history. And very conveniently, historians number them. You know, they talk about the first great awakening, second great awakening. Probably that the fourth or fifth great awakening was the late sixties, seventies, early eighties, you know, when boomers are coming of age.

And these are periods when we don't remake the outer world, we remake the inner world of religion, values, culture. Now, this basic yin and yang rhythm has coursed throughout american history. Historians often don't pay attention to it because they don't. You know, political historians don't really value looking at religion. Religious historians don't really. You know what I mean? This requires a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary perspective, and it gives rise to this idea of four turnings, during each of which a new generation is coming of age. And each generation is sort of moving up to another phase of life, and we have rising adults moving into midlife, midlifers moving into elder, and so on. So I'll give you a tour through the first four turnings, and then we can proceed. Sure. Let's look at what I think is most familiar to Americans on a long cycle. And that would be what happened after World War two. The historian William O'Neill called this the american high. Right. This would have been the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, John Kennedy, you know, 1946 to 63. Let's just think of it that way. It was an era when institutions were strong, individualism was weak.

People had a strong consensus about where the nation should go. People in America felt like they were more, that they were. The sum of what they were was more than each part individually. In other words, in an aggregate, they mattered more than citizen. Exactly. A sense of strong, collective. People were modest about their individual talents or their individual rights. And everyone had a job to do. You were a boy in school, people said, go out and be a breadwinner. You were a girl. They said, be a homemaker. Everyone had a role to do. This is typical of a high. In fact, it's typical of every post crisis generation. And the generation coming of age in that era was the silent generation. These were the kids who had been children in world War two and the Great Depression. This would have been. We have very few of them in politics left. Who remembers World War two? Still in politics? Joe Biden. Yeah, he remembers it. He's old enough. Mitch McConnell. That's about it.

And some would question whether they remember it or not, but. Because their current state.

But that's the problem is maybe Ollie remembers it, but that's another way of saying. But my point is that that shaped them. And these tend to be pretty conformist young people. We had universal conscription in the 1950s, and there wasn't a single kid who rebelled. Elvis Presley called into the army. Yes, sir. You know, shaved his hair, was off to Germany. I mean, the next generation, all that would change, right? Okay, so that is. That is the high community. Strong individualism was weak. The second turning is the awakening. And this is a time when the post crisis generation is starting to come of age. There would be boomers in the lettuce, kids. By the way, I mentioned the second great awakening. That was a generation that was born and raised just after the republic was founded. So you get the rhythm now. These are the kids raised in the peace, plenty and orderly prosperity that came after the crisis.

Low chaos, not a lot of crisis.

Exactly.

It's chill, right? Pretty peaceful. You can be creative if you want to. That's this phase.

Yeah, well, there's nothing. Yeah, you could be creative, but no one will allow you to do it. Right. That's the problem. You have to be a member of the system. Right. I mean, that's so that. Yeah, they have all this inner creativity born through all that stability and affluence, but they don't have the. There's no way to express it because you're supposed to be part of the system. So you have Mario Savio, free speech movement, 1964, saying, we need to throw ourselves in the gears of the system. That famous speech, sproul Plaza and UC Berkeley to throw ourselves in the gears of the system to stop it. Right. And that started this whole boomer awakening. That started this. What you do in an awakening is you want to throw off all the social conformity. You want to throw off all this overriding sense of community. We don't need to be building so much anymore. Your parents went through the crisis, and they were programmed to just keep building and make institutions stronger. Why? Why we don't no longer need it. Mom and dad. Right. So I think that in the most recent context, it started mainly on the left, on college campuses.

It was, you know, protesting the patriarchy and I sex role divisions and how you dress and how you talk and all that stuff. But I think at the later end, in the 1970s, with the Prop 13 and Reagan movement, it was more the right that got in on this. Cut our taxes, cut regulation. But here is what it all had in common, left and right. The individual should do whatever the hell he wants. We don't need this community. The boomers had was raised at a time of maximum equality in terms of income and wealth. You look at the Gini coefficients, you look at any of the data, that's just when everyone agrees that we had the most maximum income and wealth equality, late sixties, and they hated it. Right? It was the strong middle class. It was these little boxes that all looked the same. Remember that Melvina Reynolds song? It was Pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere. It was the boomers worst nightmare. Why let people go their own way? I think boomers, over their lifetime, have been very accepting and indulgent of growing income inequality. I think that that has been. Yeah, every individual can do his or her own thing, right?

And the.

Is that a mindset of libertarianism, like the DNA of fundamental.

And it's not necessarily they wanted inequality. What they wanted was the freedom of every individual to choose whatever they held they wanted to do.

And do you know when the Libertarian Party got started? 1971.

Well, there you go. Right in the middle of.

That's exactly, that's what I'm saying. Which makes sense. Rob, did you see that? So libertarian party, if you look it up, 1971, right?

But this was, but what you got is that boomers wanted, they didn't want to find benefit. Pension plans define contribution. Contribute if you want, don't contribute if you don't. Everything should be your choice. And of course, boomers end up, a lot of them didn't contribute. They borrowed against it. They never rolled it over. All these boomers now were unprotected going into retirement. So it's had all these consequences. But the boomer ethos was the institution shouldn't be responsible for you just, you know, everything would be okay if people had more freedom and they really mastermind. I think most of the tirades against boomers have emphasized this most recently, I can't remember the author. It was that Exor Gibney, the guy who was one of the PayPal founders, one of the guys in California, wrote a book a couple of years ago called the generation of sociopaths. I think one of the most scathing screeds against boomers as a generation. He points this out, right? Boomers never wanted to work on continuing the community oriented institutions that brought us together. They started the trend. Okay, so that's the awakening. Now, what's the third turning? The third turning is the unraveling.

And that in the most recent context would have started in the mid 1980s. Morning again in America, probably gone all the way through to the GFC, the great financial crisis, 2008. What was that era? Well, think about it. The high banding together, building things, being a stronger community, took the lessons from the recent crisis, and everyone was scared. You got to circle your wagons, we might go back into a crisis. The awakening comes and then the unraveling. You take the lessons of the recent awakening. What do you need to do to be happy and fulfilled? Be an individual. Right? So the unraveling is sort of the maximum individualizing of american society. And that was when Gen X was coming of age, right? And Gen Xers were the ultimate throwaway generation as kids. I mean, they were individuals from the time there were three. These were the first kids that people took pills not to have. They were alone at home. They were the alone at home generation, right? And you can notice that the words that have followed excerpts in the pop culture, words like reality, survivor. Right? Think about that. Think of those black shirts they used to wear, you know, with the dye.

Yuppie scum, you know, back in 1970, you know, and the very different kind of actors and actresses, a very different impression that they had in Hollywood when they came of age, almost traumatized, you know, not really acting up so much as boomers. For Xers, individualism wasn't a discovery. It was just a fact of life. At the time, they were kids, right? I mean, you were on your own, and you were expected to grow up really quick. And this is the mood of the unraveling. Maximum individualism. These are historically, these often feature wild market euphorias, like in the 1990s, the.com bubble, I think, has gone down in history. This is also the twenties. You think about the famous decades in third turnings in american history. You're talking about decades of cynicism, bad manners, and very weak civic instincts. I'm thinking about the 1990s, the 1920s, the 17, excuse me, the 1850s, the 1760s. These are wild decades where we didn't think we had any kind of civic core in America. And I would say the book which gave the best sense of direction of the 1990s Washington, written by Francis Fukuyama, it was called the end of history.

And you read that book, and it's all the big institutions are going to fade away. All the authoritarians and dictators were going to collapse, right? And there'd just be individuals transacting with each other on the Internet. You'd go into a Starbucks, get out your laptop, and just transact with people around the world, and all your million and one wants would be satisfied. No sense of community in that vision at all, right? That's where we were. But history says the third turning is always followed by the fourth turning. And the fourth turning is that process. It's dark, it's violent, usually, but it's where we refine community. And I think one thing that's fascinating, and in this latest book I wrote last year, the fourth turning is here, is I look at how familiar we are in knowing how a society goes from community into individualism, because in our own human lifetimes, we've all lived it. But clearly, there's got to be another direction. History often goes. It's got to go from individualism to community. None of us have any familiarity with that because it's beyond our lifetime, right? Ah, that was the last fourth turning. But hardly anyone is.

You know, almost everyone who lived through that's too old to tell us about it. But that's what I want to focus on, because we are now in the fourth turning and its most climactic moments. We have about a decade to go. Its most climactic moments are ahead of us.

So. So you got high first turning, awakening, unraveling, crisis, which is the one we're in right now.

It's the fourth turning, the fourth turn. It's kind of like seasons. Think of spring, summer, and the way you have.

Yeah, I saw how. I think Tony did it the right way, the way he broke it down when you and him sat down together. He broke it down by seasons, which was an easy way to see it. So high, you got world War two, lasted till mid sixties. You got 1946 to 64, which is the, you know, 18 years that boomers produced. 76 million kids, most ever in an 18 year period. Soldiers coming back from war. Boom. Bunch of babies are born, and you got the mustang. You can even predict what businesses could do. If you can get this right, then the last event of the high was JFK assassination. That's the last event. I think that's what you referred to. Then two awakening. That's 64 to 84. Three unraveling. That's 84 to 2008 ish. This is the weakening of institutions and the rise of individualism. And then crisis is now 2008 till about. You said late twenties, 2028, early thirties, early 2030s.

Yeah. We think now about 2032, 2033, it will be resolved. That will be the resolution. That'll be like 1946 when we're founding. Everything is in concrete. Right? Bretton woods, un. All that.

Each of these that have happened in the past, when you break it down, a lot of these have to do with, you know, the war. It leads to a war is one of your predictions. You said there could be a global pandemic. There was one when you guys said there could be a global pandemic. Financial challenges. We experienced it. Do you also foresee or predict that a world war three could happen the next five to ten years?

Well, it could happen any year.

Could happen in almost 30 days. Yeah.

1960, 1962, as I recall. Look, let's take war first, and then I'll move on to your other thing. In the most recent book, I think in fourth turning, we went back. So we deal with sort of the anglo american saculum. So, you know, we go back even before in America, and we go back. Our most recently, we go back to the War of the Roses, the armada. You know, we go. This pattern is five or six saint long. Now. It characterizes the modern world. Post renaissance, post reformation in the modern world. And it's becoming increasingly global and I hope we come back to that, because we see now these trends happening globally, this trend back toward community, authority, ethnocentrism. My God, Patrick, it's around the world. Name a place in the world where you don't see it. We got the french elections yesterday. We got India, we got Pakistan, we got China, we got Philippines, we got Argentina. You got a lot of argent. Look, these are becoming. So I want to return to how this became a global, how this became world War two and the Great Depression were global events after all. And so you can see global echoes, generational echoes from that.

But I want to now deal with this thing going back that far, to the 15th, 16th century, at least in our history. Every total war has happened in a fourth turning, and every fourth turning has had a total war. Every, every.

That's a prediction.

But when it's not a prediction, it's a correlation. It's an association. Look, I want to be as optimistic as possible. I don't say in the book that it requires it, but I am saying, it often takes us where we have to go.So can there be a fourth turning without a war? You're not saying yes or no.Here's what I'm saying, it does require total urgency. It requires an emergency. It requires adrenaline, Patrick. It requires people to say, you know, what, if we don't form a community, we're history. We're, I mean, you know, in the, in the, in the oversense.So I, you know, when, when you, when you're developing leaders, one of the things you'll speak a lot about when you're raising kids or you're developing leaders in business, you'll say, you know, you want things to change, you gotta change. Right? And change comes in three different ways. One, that is intentional, okay? Where you're intentionally choosing to change. Second one is accidental. It wasn't like you were choosing to change. An event happened. They're like, okay, you're in an environment, you're working at a company, you have the right friends around. You got lucky. They're reading books. You read the book, they're getting on a diet to lose weight. You're getting on it. But it's accidental. It's not really intentional. And then the last kind of change happens through force. You don't have an option.That's the burning platform.That's exactly the one where the conflict equals community. Where to me, a guy who was born in Iran, I see war. I'm born 78, we escape Iran in 89. You're seeing all that hot mess in Iran. You're like, oh, my God, there's no way in the world. You know, and you go through a certain level of pain.By the way, the early eighties was terrible in Iran. I mean, that was horrible. That's when I got the kids to clear mindfulness.I mean, that was, that's where I lived. I lived in the capital in the early mid, late eighties. Did you, did you ever know Lawrence Miller?No.You ever read the book barbarians to bureaucrats?No, I haven't.So I think you would like to spoke the way he broke it down. He gave this perspective before business, and he said, corporate life cycle strategies, okay? And he said throughout every single company, first you have the profit. The face of any company goes through. First there's a profit. The founder. Okay, here's what we're going to be doing. Okay? The founder comes on and says, we're going to do this. Except we're going to do it better. Then a founder attracts barbarians, who goes and gets stuff done. Okay? Founding fathers also had barbarians. Then barbarians attract builders and explorers. What if we build this? What if we explore to the west? What if we explore to the north or the south or the east? Then they attract administrators. Then administrators and lawmakers attract bureaucrats and aristocrats. Then comes the fall. Okay.Yeah. Then they got the decadent generation born after that.That's it. So in other words, you know, the way he explained the business life cycle cycle is similar to the way you're describing the life cycles of a country that we're going through. Maybe. Let me ask you a different question.But I want to say something interesting. When we did the fourth turning back in 1997, it was kind of a nice moment in America. The economy was doing better. The stock market was pretty nice.Preta bubble.Yeah, I was in the bubbles beginning.To warm up and everyone Comcast, aol, yahoo.Yeah. These guys are predicting this crisis way out there.Wow.It's kind of a gloomy book. Pessimistic book. We came out, I came out with this book last year, the fourth turning is here. And I get the opposite reaction. People read the book and they say, what? You think it's actually going to end, it's going to get better. There's something good coming after that. We're going to and developing nations. It teaches people to sacrifice their personal needs, give to the commonweal, to confront adversity, to do great things, to have great things come out of them, and to build big institutions and to try new projects and to take new risks. And it sounds very convincing. In fact, it sounds so convincing that you're not really sure. He thinks there's a substitute for war. But in the middle of the speech, he says something very interesting. He says, I want to ask everyone here who's listening again, this is in 1906. He said, how many here would have wished that the civil war had never happened? Kind of interesting. I mean, probably some of the people there, veterans, right? Some of them probably disabled. And he immediately answers the question. I know already, almost none of you wish the civil war had never happened, because we would not be the kind of nation we are today.We're united, industrializing. We have national railroads, national time zones. I mean, we're a juggernaut that's been unleashed. No one would have wished the civil war had not happened. That's kind of interesting, right? And then he asked another question, but this is paradoxical. He said, how many would wish another such war just a few years from now? Because no one would.But what a great question after following up with that.But interesting, Patrick, isn't this the way I've. I've talked to a lot of people about their personal lives, and I've. I've asked people, I said, think about an event in your life. of this generation, particularly as you get to late wave boomers, stayed unmarried throughout their lives. And in fact, early wave Xers, now we're seeing, you know, somewhere close to 20% women, childless for life.So you want to look at reasons why. Declining fertility rate. I'm a demographer, so I look at this all the time, but that's part of it.How much is this generation? How much of it is a bad politician at a wrong time? How much of it is bad policies? You know, LBJ comes out in 1964, you know, he comes out with his policies where all of a sudden birth rate for, you know, single mothers went from 4% to 40%. So how much, how much do policies play a role? With generations and different turnings?Policies always play a role. Technology Now it's like these total, mutually exclusive worldviews, right? This is what scares me, Patrick. And they're living in different communities, they're living in different counties. I don't know if that doesn't worry you. It worries me, but I see where this is going.It worries you because of what? Why does it worry you?It worries me because I think this can only have one end, has to come out on top. You know what? They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate. And I don't think either one would accede to a peaceful separation. Either they separate through violence or they are scared straight. Into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.There's no way that's going to happen. There's no way that's going to happen. There is no way that's going to happen. You're going to force. You've read Atlas Shrugged, right? And what eventually happens where the idea is, you know, the John Galts of the world just kind of want to go live together. Right. Where Peter Thiel. Did you follow the story about Peter Thiel building his own city on the middle of the water in San Francisco? And you know how the water. Yeah. Have you followed this rob, or. No type in Peter Thiel building his own city? Yeah. It's going to get to a point where one's going to be like, look, you guys, I can't brace my kids around what you believe in. You feel like you're comfortable walking around outside doing all this stuff? Yeah, I can't be there with you guys. And you can't change me. And you think that's normal? I can't change you. You live there. More power to you. The biggest challenge that I notice right now is common sense, values and principles are being questioned. And we're questioning what even this guy Jonathan Haidt. Right? He's talking about in the interview, the anxious generation guy who wrote this book, and he says, you know, which types of parents.Rob, do you have that clip I sent you a long time ago about Jonathan Haidt, where he's being asked by the interviewer which. Which ideology raises less anxious kids? Okay.Yeah.Conservative families. I don't know if you've seen this or not.Yeah, I have. I have. It's. It's girls with. With progressive parents who were the most effed up. Yeah, yeah.No, but then he gets asked you the questions. He gets asked the question, and he says. He's asked the question, saying, so conservatives raise more peaceful kids, less anxiety, all this stuff. Then the interviewer asks him and says, if you, based on your research, see that that philosophy and ideology raises better kids, why don't you change your philosophies to that? He says, I can't do that. I'm from academia. You've never seen this?No, wait. He belongs to some sort of guild.Which dictates, now, if you've never seen it, I have to show it to you. You. I mean, there's. There's no way I can now not.Show academia you've never seen Rob?I send it to you in text. How do you spell his last name?H a I d t. No, you.Got to see this now. There's no, no, this is not a drop. He's actually being interviewed by this. No, that's not it. I'll find it to you and send it to you. So the. The part I'm asking about, even if a guy like that is sitting there doing the research, he's not from the political side. He's on the progressive side. He's on the left. And he also says those values and principles are better to raise a society. What other proof do you need to know that we are gaslighting and confusing the hell out of our kids? So, for me to go back to what you're saying, when you say, you know, either one side has to force or the other side has to agree, I think it's going to end up being a division between the two. And I think eventually families have to sit down. I mean, look, my parents raised me where I was born in Iran. They lived in Iran their entire lives. My mom speaks armenian, assyrian, Turkish and Farsi. Okay. My dad speaks assyrian, Armenian and Farsi. They've lived there for 40 something years. You mean to tell me last minute they decide to leave Iran to go to Germany, causes them to get their second divorce against each other, and then they come out here, my dad loses everything he had.Why did they leave? Why did they leave? Because they simply didn't see the values and principles of Iran as a place they wanted to raise kids. What's the difference with what's going on today? So I think the more and more you're saying, your concern is that back in the days, more and more people agreed it is such radical division right now between the two sides, where at least back in the days, a John F. Kennedy and a Nixon wasn't radically that wild.But this is the cycle, right? In other words, after a war, we do have that coming together of all the parties. But if you go back to America in the 1850s, about half of the congressmen were armed going into the house, right? I mean, it was a free for all. It was incredibly violent, between the increasing regionalism of the United States, right? South versus north. Everyone knew that they were two nations kind of coming to pieces, right? The churches had all divided, right? The Baptists had divided, the Methodists had divided. North and south, everything had divided. But this has happened before, Patrick, is what I'm trying to say. And that's what I try to do. I try to bring the lens of history, because if we just sit here and thinking, oh, my God, this has never happened before, what are we going to do? We're blind?No, that's not what I'm saying.We need to use history.Let me ask you a question.Yes, let me ask you a question.If somebody in your family voted for Nixon versus Kennedy, okay, early sixties, whatever, pick and choose. What was the difference between the values? What was the biggest dramatic difference on why a person voted for Kennedy versus Nixon?It's how warmly you felt about the communists and the new dealers during, you know, during the war and during the Great Depression so that those kinds of things were still in the air. Nixon was more supportive of the McCarthy era, you know, the movement to root out all the communists. During the 1950s. Kennedy was more on the, you know, a little bit more lenient. However, they had so much in common, right? I mean, they both believed in a strong America. They both believed in arming, they both believed in ICBM's, they both believed in standing up to the Soviet Union. They both. I could go down all the things they had in common, right? But that's my point. Sure, there were differences and people talked about them. A little bit of animosity among some of the old leftists, right? But it was completely unlike today. Right? That's what I, when I talked earlier about these mutually irreconcilable. There's a great essay written in 1940. Carl Becker is a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book called the Heavenly City of the 18th century philosophers. One of my all time favorites. Anyway, a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book near the end of his life in 1940.This is when the world was going to hell, right? Everyone could see it. I mean, how many democracies had fallen in Europe to the fascists? You know, Stalin was going great. I mean, it was a terrible time in the world. It was before Pearl harbor. We could all see what was going. And he wrote a very dark essay on democracy. And he said something I think really interesting. He said, and I think this gets to your point. He said, democracies work best when there is much to talk about. Meaning democracies work best when the only thing you're talking about with your neighbors is the size of the sidewalks and what kind of gage sewer line to put in, you know, just coordination issues.That's my point.You agree? But isn't that interesting? And he made the point. He said when people disagree on fundamental values, again, he said this in 1940, he said, democracy can't work because no one is going to go, no one's going to change your entire life because you, you won only 49% of the vote. Right? You see what I mean?No, I fully agree with that. That's why I'm saying I don't think it's a similar example of your. Your family voting when it was Nixon.Kennedy, because it's totally different. I agree with you.The values and principles don't make sense today. Nobody, when you were growing up said, my son wants to cut his dangling off, and I'm supporting him. At 13 years old. Did you ever have a conversation like that at 13 years old?They didn't even know about any of those.That's the point.You know what I mean?What is going on?Talking about gay and all that stuff. We didn't even add. Here's the thing. This is the tragedy, actually, is that when I was a kid, you get all these guys to undress in front of each other with no problem. We did it all the time. You know, we had locker rooms and all that stuff, because we didn't know, hell, anything about anything, right. Innocent, in that sense. Today, you can't get kids to undress in front of each other. Everything is, you know, am I ripped? Am I buffed? Do I have this sexually? What? Am I that right? So this hyper awareness, this hyper sexualism, it has led to a very different and more restricted life for young people who don't have the freedom to grow up uninhibited, as we did. Is that. Is that. Is that going too far to say.That I'm with you? That's why I'm asking. That's why I'm saying, for me, a guy asked me a question. Ice Cube was here two weeks ago. Last week, Ice Cube was here, right? Big rapper, La nwa, f the police. You know, all this. This is the music that he sang back in the days. But he's a family guy. Here's what most people don't know. He's been married for 32 years to the same woman, okay? He's got four or five kids. He's actually a very good father. He's a great family guy. And, you know, I said, you know, you're going to live and die in LA. Famous song. To live and die in LA, right? It's a place to be. And I can't see myself living in LA today. I can't. I can't see myself seeing the way the policies are coming out wherever their lack of respect for small business owners. I saw a chart that you put up where you said the top three things that Americans trust the most today. What's most trusted? You put small business, military and police. What's least trusted? Television. Big business, and Congress. Right. That's kind of how you put those two.And, you know, that's the chart right there for some. We'll put the link below for people that want to see it. But the main reason why I can't see myself living in California, by the.Way, values and principles tell people where this comes from. This is from demography unplugged, right? This is my website.Right. Well, we're going to put the link below. So this is demography unplugged.com.Yeah, it's a sub stacked. Okay, so just put it up, Rob.If we can put the link below for that as well. So last role, last thing here. What role does faith play in these four turnings? Any role faith in God plays?Huge. Huge.Where is our faith the highest? Where is it the lowest?Ah, it's not as simple as that. It's that our faith changes its quality as you move through meaning. Well, let me go back. You remember when I talked about the awakening?Yeah.So what's the big movement in the awakening? Not salvation by works, salvation by faith. This would have been the reformation. All the big awakenings suddenly, let's cast off everything our father said. Let's cast off all these big institutions. Let's look into ourselves. Right?Wasn't Billy Graham's movement called the Great Awakening?They all call themselves great Awakening, you know, all of those movements. But. And by the way, he was, you know, Billy Graham's high tide was during the seventies and eighties. Huge resurgence of evangelicalism, by the way, during the awakening. So this is when the mainstream churches, you know, the Methodists and the Presbyterians and kind of mainstream Protestantism began to decline. And evangelicalism and all the charismatic groups, the Pentecostals and everything began to rise that came out of the awakening. So you see this movement to interiority, toward individualism, toward looking inside yourself for validation. That's the direction religion always takes during the summer season, the awakening, the second turning. You got it?Yeah.Okay.Yeah.So that's interesting. So what happens in the fourth turning? That's when we begin to say that, well, faith, to actually do anything, it's got to have works. It's got to build something. Something needs to win. Right? And so I think you get it now. Now, in many ways, Americans, younger Americans, are turning more secular. You know, they claim not to have any religious affiliation. I think what a lot of that is, is that they're turning away from that inner driven boomer kind of stuff, and they're really looking to build community. The big challenge for religion in the next 20 years is how to build communities that work, communities that do exactly what you were talking about. You can raise kids to live decent lives, to believe in things that allow them to get along with other people, to keep their noses clean and form communities, wholesome communities that work for the long term and a renewed focus on the long term. Remember, when you believe that faith is inside you, you're not worried about the long term. Right? The boomer's parents are worried about the long term. We're going to enter that era. Just coming up.Worried about the long term, worried about institutions, worried about works. That's the other side of faith.All right. Hopefully next time you're here, maybe we'll be post civil war and everything's going to be okay. Because I don't know if I want to have you on when we're doing civil war and we're going through a rob, because who knows if we're going to feel safe. Well, maybe if we do it in West Virginia, we'll feel safe. Rob. Yeah.You can visit my place up there. You'll feel safe there.I'd Rob, if we can put the link to his latest book, end for turning. If you haven't read it, we're going to put the link below as well as to his website. Neil, appreciate you for coming out. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. Yes. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye. In these uncertain times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright. So you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear. And this is what we're doing. If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free. If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out. Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people stop by and say you're also watching. Value timing. You also follow PBD podcast. I do, too. Place your order, go to vtmerch.com, click on a link above or below. Place your order and represent the VT and the PBD podcast gear.

it often takes us where we have to go.

So can there be a fourth turning without a war? You're not saying yes or no.

Here's what I'm saying, it does require total urgency. It requires an emergency. It requires adrenaline, Patrick. It requires people to say, you know, what, if we don't form a community, we're history. We're, I mean, you know, in the, in the, in the oversense.

So I, you know, when, when you, when you're developing leaders, one of the things you'll speak a lot about when you're raising kids or you're developing leaders in business, you'll say, you know, you want things to change, you gotta change. Right? And change comes in three different ways. One, that is intentional, okay? Where you're intentionally choosing to change. Second one is accidental. It wasn't like you were choosing to change. An event happened. They're like, okay, you're in an environment, you're working at a company, you have the right friends around. You got lucky. They're reading books. You read the book, they're getting on a diet to lose weight. You're getting on it. But it's accidental. It's not really intentional. And then the last kind of change happens through force. You don't have an option.

That's the burning platform.

That's exactly the one where the conflict equals community. Where to me, a guy who was born in Iran, I see war. I'm born 78, we escape Iran in 89. You're seeing all that hot mess in Iran. You're like, oh, my God, there's no way in the world. You know, and you go through a certain level of pain.

By the way, the early eighties was terrible in Iran. I mean, that was horrible. That's when I got the kids to clear mindfulness.

I mean, that was, that's where I lived. I lived in the capital in the early mid, late eighties. Did you, did you ever know Lawrence Miller?

No.

You ever read the book barbarians to bureaucrats?

No, I haven't.

So I think you would like to spoke the way he broke it down. He gave this perspective before business, and he said, corporate life cycle strategies, okay? And he said throughout every single company, first you have the profit. The face of any company goes through. First there's a profit. The founder. Okay, here's what we're going to be doing. Okay? The founder comes on and says, we're going to do this. Except we're going to do it better. Then a founder attracts barbarians, who goes and gets stuff done. Okay? Founding fathers also had barbarians. Then barbarians attract builders and explorers. What if we build this? What if we explore to the west? What if we explore to the north or the south or the east? Then they attract administrators. Then administrators and lawmakers attract bureaucrats and aristocrats. Then comes the fall. Okay.

Yeah. Then they got the decadent generation born after that.

That's it. So in other words, you know, the way he explained the business life cycle cycle is similar to the way you're describing the life cycles of a country that we're going through. Maybe. Let me ask you a different question.

But I want to say something interesting. When we did the fourth turning back in 1997, it was kind of a nice moment in America. The economy was doing better. The stock market was pretty nice.

Preta bubble.

Yeah, I was in the bubbles beginning.

To warm up and everyone Comcast, aol, yahoo.

Yeah. These guys are predicting this crisis way out there.

Wow.

It's kind of a gloomy book. Pessimistic book. We came out, I came out with this book last year, the fourth turning is here. And I get the opposite reaction. People read the book and they say, what? You think it's actually going to end, it's going to get better. There's something good coming after that. We're going to and developing nations. It teaches people to sacrifice their personal needs, give to the commonweal, to confront adversity, to do great things, to have great things come out of them, and to build big institutions and to try new projects and to take new risks. And it sounds very convincing. In fact, it sounds so convincing that you're not really sure. He thinks there's a substitute for war. But in the middle of the speech, he says something very interesting. He says, I want to ask everyone here who's listening again, this is in 1906. He said, how many here would have wished that the civil war had never happened? Kind of interesting. I mean, probably some of the people there, veterans, right? Some of them probably disabled. And he immediately answers the question. I know already, almost none of you wish the civil war had never happened, because we would not be the kind of nation we are today.We're united, industrializing. We have national railroads, national time zones. I mean, we're a juggernaut that's been unleashed. No one would have wished the civil war had not happened. That's kind of interesting, right? And then he asked another question, but this is paradoxical. He said, how many would wish another such war just a few years from now? Because no one would.But what a great question after following up with that.But interesting, Patrick, isn't this the way I've. I've talked to a lot of people about their personal lives, and I've. I've asked people, I said, think about an event in your life. of this generation, particularly as you get to late wave boomers, stayed unmarried throughout their lives. And in fact, early wave Xers, now we're seeing, you know, somewhere close to 20% women, childless for life.So you want to look at reasons why. Declining fertility rate. I'm a demographer, so I look at this all the time, but that's part of it.How much is this generation? How much of it is a bad politician at a wrong time? How much of it is bad policies? You know, LBJ comes out in 1964, you know, he comes out with his policies where all of a sudden birth rate for, you know, single mothers went from 4% to 40%. So how much, how much do policies play a role? With generations and different turnings?Policies always play a role. Technology Now it's like these total, mutually exclusive worldviews, right? This is what scares me, Patrick. And they're living in different communities, they're living in different counties. I don't know if that doesn't worry you. It worries me, but I see where this is going.It worries you because of what? Why does it worry you?It worries me because I think this can only have one end, has to come out on top. You know what? They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate. And I don't think either one would accede to a peaceful separation. Either they separate through violence or they are scared straight. Into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.There's no way that's going to happen. There's no way that's going to happen. There is no way that's going to happen. You're going to force. You've read Atlas Shrugged, right? And what eventually happens where the idea is, you know, the John Galts of the world just kind of want to go live together. Right. Where Peter Thiel. Did you follow the story about Peter Thiel building his own city on the middle of the water in San Francisco? And you know how the water. Yeah. Have you followed this rob, or. No type in Peter Thiel building his own city? Yeah. It's going to get to a point where one's going to be like, look, you guys, I can't brace my kids around what you believe in. You feel like you're comfortable walking around outside doing all this stuff? Yeah, I can't be there with you guys. And you can't change me. And you think that's normal? I can't change you. You live there. More power to you. The biggest challenge that I notice right now is common sense, values and principles are being questioned. And we're questioning what even this guy Jonathan Haidt. Right? He's talking about in the interview, the anxious generation guy who wrote this book, and he says, you know, which types of parents.Rob, do you have that clip I sent you a long time ago about Jonathan Haidt, where he's being asked by the interviewer which. Which ideology raises less anxious kids? Okay.Yeah.Conservative families. I don't know if you've seen this or not.Yeah, I have. I have. It's. It's girls with. With progressive parents who were the most effed up. Yeah, yeah.No, but then he gets asked you the questions. He gets asked the question, and he says. He's asked the question, saying, so conservatives raise more peaceful kids, less anxiety, all this stuff. Then the interviewer asks him and says, if you, based on your research, see that that philosophy and ideology raises better kids, why don't you change your philosophies to that? He says, I can't do that. I'm from academia. You've never seen this?No, wait. He belongs to some sort of guild.Which dictates, now, if you've never seen it, I have to show it to you. You. I mean, there's. There's no way I can now not.Show academia you've never seen Rob?I send it to you in text. How do you spell his last name?H a I d t. No, you.Got to see this now. There's no, no, this is not a drop. He's actually being interviewed by this. No, that's not it. I'll find it to you and send it to you. So the. The part I'm asking about, even if a guy like that is sitting there doing the research, he's not from the political side. He's on the progressive side. He's on the left. And he also says those values and principles are better to raise a society. What other proof do you need to know that we are gaslighting and confusing the hell out of our kids? So, for me to go back to what you're saying, when you say, you know, either one side has to force or the other side has to agree, I think it's going to end up being a division between the two. And I think eventually families have to sit down. I mean, look, my parents raised me where I was born in Iran. They lived in Iran their entire lives. My mom speaks armenian, assyrian, Turkish and Farsi. Okay. My dad speaks assyrian, Armenian and Farsi. They've lived there for 40 something years. You mean to tell me last minute they decide to leave Iran to go to Germany, causes them to get their second divorce against each other, and then they come out here, my dad loses everything he had.Why did they leave? Why did they leave? Because they simply didn't see the values and principles of Iran as a place they wanted to raise kids. What's the difference with what's going on today? So I think the more and more you're saying, your concern is that back in the days, more and more people agreed it is such radical division right now between the two sides, where at least back in the days, a John F. Kennedy and a Nixon wasn't radically that wild.But this is the cycle, right? In other words, after a war, we do have that coming together of all the parties. But if you go back to America in the 1850s, about half of the congressmen were armed going into the house, right? I mean, it was a free for all. It was incredibly violent, between the increasing regionalism of the United States, right? South versus north. Everyone knew that they were two nations kind of coming to pieces, right? The churches had all divided, right? The Baptists had divided, the Methodists had divided. North and south, everything had divided. But this has happened before, Patrick, is what I'm trying to say. And that's what I try to do. I try to bring the lens of history, because if we just sit here and thinking, oh, my God, this has never happened before, what are we going to do? We're blind?No, that's not what I'm saying.We need to use history.Let me ask you a question.Yes, let me ask you a question.If somebody in your family voted for Nixon versus Kennedy, okay, early sixties, whatever, pick and choose. What was the difference between the values? What was the biggest dramatic difference on why a person voted for Kennedy versus Nixon?It's how warmly you felt about the communists and the new dealers during, you know, during the war and during the Great Depression so that those kinds of things were still in the air. Nixon was more supportive of the McCarthy era, you know, the movement to root out all the communists. During the 1950s. Kennedy was more on the, you know, a little bit more lenient. However, they had so much in common, right? I mean, they both believed in a strong America. They both believed in arming, they both believed in ICBM's, they both believed in standing up to the Soviet Union. They both. I could go down all the things they had in common, right? But that's my point. Sure, there were differences and people talked about them. A little bit of animosity among some of the old leftists, right? But it was completely unlike today. Right? That's what I, when I talked earlier about these mutually irreconcilable. There's a great essay written in 1940. Carl Becker is a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book called the Heavenly City of the 18th century philosophers. One of my all time favorites. Anyway, a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book near the end of his life in 1940.This is when the world was going to hell, right? Everyone could see it. I mean, how many democracies had fallen in Europe to the fascists? You know, Stalin was going great. I mean, it was a terrible time in the world. It was before Pearl harbor. We could all see what was going. And he wrote a very dark essay on democracy. And he said something I think really interesting. He said, and I think this gets to your point. He said, democracies work best when there is much to talk about. Meaning democracies work best when the only thing you're talking about with your neighbors is the size of the sidewalks and what kind of gage sewer line to put in, you know, just coordination issues.That's my point.You agree? But isn't that interesting? And he made the point. He said when people disagree on fundamental values, again, he said this in 1940, he said, democracy can't work because no one is going to go, no one's going to change your entire life because you, you won only 49% of the vote. Right? You see what I mean?No, I fully agree with that. That's why I'm saying I don't think it's a similar example of your. Your family voting when it was Nixon.Kennedy, because it's totally different. I agree with you.The values and principles don't make sense today. Nobody, when you were growing up said, my son wants to cut his dangling off, and I'm supporting him. At 13 years old. Did you ever have a conversation like that at 13 years old?They didn't even know about any of those.That's the point.You know what I mean?What is going on?Talking about gay and all that stuff. We didn't even add. Here's the thing. This is the tragedy, actually, is that when I was a kid, you get all these guys to undress in front of each other with no problem. We did it all the time. You know, we had locker rooms and all that stuff, because we didn't know, hell, anything about anything, right. Innocent, in that sense. Today, you can't get kids to undress in front of each other. Everything is, you know, am I ripped? Am I buffed? Do I have this sexually? What? Am I that right? So this hyper awareness, this hyper sexualism, it has led to a very different and more restricted life for young people who don't have the freedom to grow up uninhibited, as we did. Is that. Is that. Is that going too far to say.That I'm with you? That's why I'm asking. That's why I'm saying, for me, a guy asked me a question. Ice Cube was here two weeks ago. Last week, Ice Cube was here, right? Big rapper, La nwa, f the police. You know, all this. This is the music that he sang back in the days. But he's a family guy. Here's what most people don't know. He's been married for 32 years to the same woman, okay? He's got four or five kids. He's actually a very good father. He's a great family guy. And, you know, I said, you know, you're going to live and die in LA. Famous song. To live and die in LA, right? It's a place to be. And I can't see myself living in LA today. I can't. I can't see myself seeing the way the policies are coming out wherever their lack of respect for small business owners. I saw a chart that you put up where you said the top three things that Americans trust the most today. What's most trusted? You put small business, military and police. What's least trusted? Television. Big business, and Congress. Right. That's kind of how you put those two.And, you know, that's the chart right there for some. We'll put the link below for people that want to see it. But the main reason why I can't see myself living in California, by the.Way, values and principles tell people where this comes from. This is from demography unplugged, right? This is my website.Right. Well, we're going to put the link below. So this is demography unplugged.com.Yeah, it's a sub stacked. Okay, so just put it up, Rob.If we can put the link below for that as well. So last role, last thing here. What role does faith play in these four turnings? Any role faith in God plays?Huge. Huge.Where is our faith the highest? Where is it the lowest?Ah, it's not as simple as that. It's that our faith changes its quality as you move through meaning. Well, let me go back. You remember when I talked about the awakening?Yeah.So what's the big movement in the awakening? Not salvation by works, salvation by faith. This would have been the reformation. All the big awakenings suddenly, let's cast off everything our father said. Let's cast off all these big institutions. Let's look into ourselves. Right?Wasn't Billy Graham's movement called the Great Awakening?They all call themselves great Awakening, you know, all of those movements. But. And by the way, he was, you know, Billy Graham's high tide was during the seventies and eighties. Huge resurgence of evangelicalism, by the way, during the awakening. So this is when the mainstream churches, you know, the Methodists and the Presbyterians and kind of mainstream Protestantism began to decline. And evangelicalism and all the charismatic groups, the Pentecostals and everything began to rise that came out of the awakening. So you see this movement to interiority, toward individualism, toward looking inside yourself for validation. That's the direction religion always takes during the summer season, the awakening, the second turning. You got it?Yeah.Okay.Yeah.So that's interesting. So what happens in the fourth turning? That's when we begin to say that, well, faith, to actually do anything, it's got to have works. It's got to build something. Something needs to win. Right? And so I think you get it now. Now, in many ways, Americans, younger Americans, are turning more secular. You know, they claim not to have any religious affiliation. I think what a lot of that is, is that they're turning away from that inner driven boomer kind of stuff, and they're really looking to build community. The big challenge for religion in the next 20 years is how to build communities that work, communities that do exactly what you were talking about. You can raise kids to live decent lives, to believe in things that allow them to get along with other people, to keep their noses clean and form communities, wholesome communities that work for the long term and a renewed focus on the long term. Remember, when you believe that faith is inside you, you're not worried about the long term. Right? The boomer's parents are worried about the long term. We're going to enter that era. Just coming up.Worried about the long term, worried about institutions, worried about works. That's the other side of faith.All right. Hopefully next time you're here, maybe we'll be post civil war and everything's going to be okay. Because I don't know if I want to have you on when we're doing civil war and we're going through a rob, because who knows if we're going to feel safe. Well, maybe if we do it in West Virginia, we'll feel safe. Rob. Yeah.You can visit my place up there. You'll feel safe there.I'd Rob, if we can put the link to his latest book, end for turning. If you haven't read it, we're going to put the link below as well as to his website. Neil, appreciate you for coming out. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. Yes. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye. In these uncertain times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright. So you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear. And this is what we're doing. If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free. If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out. Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people stop by and say you're also watching. Value timing. You also follow PBD podcast. I do, too. Place your order, go to vtmerch.com, click on a link above or below. Place your order and represent the VT and the PBD podcast gear.

and developing nations. It teaches people to sacrifice their personal needs, give to the commonweal, to confront adversity, to do great things, to have great things come out of them, and to build big institutions and to try new projects and to take new risks. And it sounds very convincing. In fact, it sounds so convincing that you're not really sure. He thinks there's a substitute for war. But in the middle of the speech, he says something very interesting. He says, I want to ask everyone here who's listening again, this is in 1906. He said, how many here would have wished that the civil war had never happened? Kind of interesting. I mean, probably some of the people there, veterans, right? Some of them probably disabled. And he immediately answers the question. I know already, almost none of you wish the civil war had never happened, because we would not be the kind of nation we are today.

We're united, industrializing. We have national railroads, national time zones. I mean, we're a juggernaut that's been unleashed. No one would have wished the civil war had not happened. That's kind of interesting, right? And then he asked another question, but this is paradoxical. He said, how many would wish another such war just a few years from now? Because no one would.

But what a great question after following up with that.

But interesting, Patrick, isn't this the way I've. I've talked to a lot of people about their personal lives, and I've. I've asked people, I said, think about an event in your life. of this generation, particularly as you get to late wave boomers, stayed unmarried throughout their lives. And in fact, early wave Xers, now we're seeing, you know, somewhere close to 20% women, childless for life.So you want to look at reasons why. Declining fertility rate. I'm a demographer, so I look at this all the time, but that's part of it.How much is this generation? How much of it is a bad politician at a wrong time? How much of it is bad policies? You know, LBJ comes out in 1964, you know, he comes out with his policies where all of a sudden birth rate for, you know, single mothers went from 4% to 40%. So how much, how much do policies play a role? With generations and different turnings?Policies always play a role. Technology Now it's like these total, mutually exclusive worldviews, right? This is what scares me, Patrick. And they're living in different communities, they're living in different counties. I don't know if that doesn't worry you. It worries me, but I see where this is going.It worries you because of what? Why does it worry you?It worries me because I think this can only have one end, has to come out on top. You know what? They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate. And I don't think either one would accede to a peaceful separation. Either they separate through violence or they are scared straight. Into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.There's no way that's going to happen. There's no way that's going to happen. There is no way that's going to happen. You're going to force. You've read Atlas Shrugged, right? And what eventually happens where the idea is, you know, the John Galts of the world just kind of want to go live together. Right. Where Peter Thiel. Did you follow the story about Peter Thiel building his own city on the middle of the water in San Francisco? And you know how the water. Yeah. Have you followed this rob, or. No type in Peter Thiel building his own city? Yeah. It's going to get to a point where one's going to be like, look, you guys, I can't brace my kids around what you believe in. You feel like you're comfortable walking around outside doing all this stuff? Yeah, I can't be there with you guys. And you can't change me. And you think that's normal? I can't change you. You live there. More power to you. The biggest challenge that I notice right now is common sense, values and principles are being questioned. And we're questioning what even this guy Jonathan Haidt. Right? He's talking about in the interview, the anxious generation guy who wrote this book, and he says, you know, which types of parents.Rob, do you have that clip I sent you a long time ago about Jonathan Haidt, where he's being asked by the interviewer which. Which ideology raises less anxious kids? Okay.Yeah.Conservative families. I don't know if you've seen this or not.Yeah, I have. I have. It's. It's girls with. With progressive parents who were the most effed up. Yeah, yeah.No, but then he gets asked you the questions. He gets asked the question, and he says. He's asked the question, saying, so conservatives raise more peaceful kids, less anxiety, all this stuff. Then the interviewer asks him and says, if you, based on your research, see that that philosophy and ideology raises better kids, why don't you change your philosophies to that? He says, I can't do that. I'm from academia. You've never seen this?No, wait. He belongs to some sort of guild.Which dictates, now, if you've never seen it, I have to show it to you. You. I mean, there's. There's no way I can now not.Show academia you've never seen Rob?I send it to you in text. How do you spell his last name?H a I d t. No, you.Got to see this now. There's no, no, this is not a drop. He's actually being interviewed by this. No, that's not it. I'll find it to you and send it to you. So the. The part I'm asking about, even if a guy like that is sitting there doing the research, he's not from the political side. He's on the progressive side. He's on the left. And he also says those values and principles are better to raise a society. What other proof do you need to know that we are gaslighting and confusing the hell out of our kids? So, for me to go back to what you're saying, when you say, you know, either one side has to force or the other side has to agree, I think it's going to end up being a division between the two. And I think eventually families have to sit down. I mean, look, my parents raised me where I was born in Iran. They lived in Iran their entire lives. My mom speaks armenian, assyrian, Turkish and Farsi. Okay. My dad speaks assyrian, Armenian and Farsi. They've lived there for 40 something years. You mean to tell me last minute they decide to leave Iran to go to Germany, causes them to get their second divorce against each other, and then they come out here, my dad loses everything he had.Why did they leave? Why did they leave? Because they simply didn't see the values and principles of Iran as a place they wanted to raise kids. What's the difference with what's going on today? So I think the more and more you're saying, your concern is that back in the days, more and more people agreed it is such radical division right now between the two sides, where at least back in the days, a John F. Kennedy and a Nixon wasn't radically that wild.But this is the cycle, right? In other words, after a war, we do have that coming together of all the parties. But if you go back to America in the 1850s, about half of the congressmen were armed going into the house, right? I mean, it was a free for all. It was incredibly violent, between the increasing regionalism of the United States, right? South versus north. Everyone knew that they were two nations kind of coming to pieces, right? The churches had all divided, right? The Baptists had divided, the Methodists had divided. North and south, everything had divided. But this has happened before, Patrick, is what I'm trying to say. And that's what I try to do. I try to bring the lens of history, because if we just sit here and thinking, oh, my God, this has never happened before, what are we going to do? We're blind?No, that's not what I'm saying.We need to use history.Let me ask you a question.Yes, let me ask you a question.If somebody in your family voted for Nixon versus Kennedy, okay, early sixties, whatever, pick and choose. What was the difference between the values? What was the biggest dramatic difference on why a person voted for Kennedy versus Nixon?It's how warmly you felt about the communists and the new dealers during, you know, during the war and during the Great Depression so that those kinds of things were still in the air. Nixon was more supportive of the McCarthy era, you know, the movement to root out all the communists. During the 1950s. Kennedy was more on the, you know, a little bit more lenient. However, they had so much in common, right? I mean, they both believed in a strong America. They both believed in arming, they both believed in ICBM's, they both believed in standing up to the Soviet Union. They both. I could go down all the things they had in common, right? But that's my point. Sure, there were differences and people talked about them. A little bit of animosity among some of the old leftists, right? But it was completely unlike today. Right? That's what I, when I talked earlier about these mutually irreconcilable. There's a great essay written in 1940. Carl Becker is a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book called the Heavenly City of the 18th century philosophers. One of my all time favorites. Anyway, a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book near the end of his life in 1940.This is when the world was going to hell, right? Everyone could see it. I mean, how many democracies had fallen in Europe to the fascists? You know, Stalin was going great. I mean, it was a terrible time in the world. It was before Pearl harbor. We could all see what was going. And he wrote a very dark essay on democracy. And he said something I think really interesting. He said, and I think this gets to your point. He said, democracies work best when there is much to talk about. Meaning democracies work best when the only thing you're talking about with your neighbors is the size of the sidewalks and what kind of gage sewer line to put in, you know, just coordination issues.That's my point.You agree? But isn't that interesting? And he made the point. He said when people disagree on fundamental values, again, he said this in 1940, he said, democracy can't work because no one is going to go, no one's going to change your entire life because you, you won only 49% of the vote. Right? You see what I mean?No, I fully agree with that. That's why I'm saying I don't think it's a similar example of your. Your family voting when it was Nixon.Kennedy, because it's totally different. I agree with you.The values and principles don't make sense today. Nobody, when you were growing up said, my son wants to cut his dangling off, and I'm supporting him. At 13 years old. Did you ever have a conversation like that at 13 years old?They didn't even know about any of those.That's the point.You know what I mean?What is going on?Talking about gay and all that stuff. We didn't even add. Here's the thing. This is the tragedy, actually, is that when I was a kid, you get all these guys to undress in front of each other with no problem. We did it all the time. You know, we had locker rooms and all that stuff, because we didn't know, hell, anything about anything, right. Innocent, in that sense. Today, you can't get kids to undress in front of each other. Everything is, you know, am I ripped? Am I buffed? Do I have this sexually? What? Am I that right? So this hyper awareness, this hyper sexualism, it has led to a very different and more restricted life for young people who don't have the freedom to grow up uninhibited, as we did. Is that. Is that. Is that going too far to say.That I'm with you? That's why I'm asking. That's why I'm saying, for me, a guy asked me a question. Ice Cube was here two weeks ago. Last week, Ice Cube was here, right? Big rapper, La nwa, f the police. You know, all this. This is the music that he sang back in the days. But he's a family guy. Here's what most people don't know. He's been married for 32 years to the same woman, okay? He's got four or five kids. He's actually a very good father. He's a great family guy. And, you know, I said, you know, you're going to live and die in LA. Famous song. To live and die in LA, right? It's a place to be. And I can't see myself living in LA today. I can't. I can't see myself seeing the way the policies are coming out wherever their lack of respect for small business owners. I saw a chart that you put up where you said the top three things that Americans trust the most today. What's most trusted? You put small business, military and police. What's least trusted? Television. Big business, and Congress. Right. That's kind of how you put those two.And, you know, that's the chart right there for some. We'll put the link below for people that want to see it. But the main reason why I can't see myself living in California, by the.Way, values and principles tell people where this comes from. This is from demography unplugged, right? This is my website.Right. Well, we're going to put the link below. So this is demography unplugged.com.Yeah, it's a sub stacked. Okay, so just put it up, Rob.If we can put the link below for that as well. So last role, last thing here. What role does faith play in these four turnings? Any role faith in God plays?Huge. Huge.Where is our faith the highest? Where is it the lowest?Ah, it's not as simple as that. It's that our faith changes its quality as you move through meaning. Well, let me go back. You remember when I talked about the awakening?Yeah.So what's the big movement in the awakening? Not salvation by works, salvation by faith. This would have been the reformation. All the big awakenings suddenly, let's cast off everything our father said. Let's cast off all these big institutions. Let's look into ourselves. Right?Wasn't Billy Graham's movement called the Great Awakening?They all call themselves great Awakening, you know, all of those movements. But. And by the way, he was, you know, Billy Graham's high tide was during the seventies and eighties. Huge resurgence of evangelicalism, by the way, during the awakening. So this is when the mainstream churches, you know, the Methodists and the Presbyterians and kind of mainstream Protestantism began to decline. And evangelicalism and all the charismatic groups, the Pentecostals and everything began to rise that came out of the awakening. So you see this movement to interiority, toward individualism, toward looking inside yourself for validation. That's the direction religion always takes during the summer season, the awakening, the second turning. You got it?Yeah.Okay.Yeah.So that's interesting. So what happens in the fourth turning? That's when we begin to say that, well, faith, to actually do anything, it's got to have works. It's got to build something. Something needs to win. Right? And so I think you get it now. Now, in many ways, Americans, younger Americans, are turning more secular. You know, they claim not to have any religious affiliation. I think what a lot of that is, is that they're turning away from that inner driven boomer kind of stuff, and they're really looking to build community. The big challenge for religion in the next 20 years is how to build communities that work, communities that do exactly what you were talking about. You can raise kids to live decent lives, to believe in things that allow them to get along with other people, to keep their noses clean and form communities, wholesome communities that work for the long term and a renewed focus on the long term. Remember, when you believe that faith is inside you, you're not worried about the long term. Right? The boomer's parents are worried about the long term. We're going to enter that era. Just coming up.Worried about the long term, worried about institutions, worried about works. That's the other side of faith.All right. Hopefully next time you're here, maybe we'll be post civil war and everything's going to be okay. Because I don't know if I want to have you on when we're doing civil war and we're going through a rob, because who knows if we're going to feel safe. Well, maybe if we do it in West Virginia, we'll feel safe. Rob. Yeah.You can visit my place up there. You'll feel safe there.I'd Rob, if we can put the link to his latest book, end for turning. If you haven't read it, we're going to put the link below as well as to his website. Neil, appreciate you for coming out. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. Yes. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye. In these uncertain times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright. So you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear. And this is what we're doing. If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free. If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out. Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people stop by and say you're also watching. Value timing. You also follow PBD podcast. I do, too. Place your order, go to vtmerch.com, click on a link above or below. Place your order and represent the VT and the PBD podcast gear.

of this generation, particularly as you get to late wave boomers, stayed unmarried throughout their lives. And in fact, early wave Xers, now we're seeing, you know, somewhere close to 20% women, childless for life.

So you want to look at reasons why. Declining fertility rate. I'm a demographer, so I look at this all the time, but that's part of it.

How much is this generation? How much of it is a bad politician at a wrong time? How much of it is bad policies? You know, LBJ comes out in 1964, you know, he comes out with his policies where all of a sudden birth rate for, you know, single mothers went from 4% to 40%. So how much, how much do policies play a role? With generations and different turnings?

Policies always play a role. Technology Now it's like these total, mutually exclusive worldviews, right? This is what scares me, Patrick. And they're living in different communities, they're living in different counties. I don't know if that doesn't worry you. It worries me, but I see where this is going.It worries you because of what? Why does it worry you?It worries me because I think this can only have one end, has to come out on top. You know what? They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate. And I don't think either one would accede to a peaceful separation. Either they separate through violence or they are scared straight. Into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.There's no way that's going to happen. There's no way that's going to happen. There is no way that's going to happen. You're going to force. You've read Atlas Shrugged, right? And what eventually happens where the idea is, you know, the John Galts of the world just kind of want to go live together. Right. Where Peter Thiel. Did you follow the story about Peter Thiel building his own city on the middle of the water in San Francisco? And you know how the water. Yeah. Have you followed this rob, or. No type in Peter Thiel building his own city? Yeah. It's going to get to a point where one's going to be like, look, you guys, I can't brace my kids around what you believe in. You feel like you're comfortable walking around outside doing all this stuff? Yeah, I can't be there with you guys. And you can't change me. And you think that's normal? I can't change you. You live there. More power to you. The biggest challenge that I notice right now is common sense, values and principles are being questioned. And we're questioning what even this guy Jonathan Haidt. Right? He's talking about in the interview, the anxious generation guy who wrote this book, and he says, you know, which types of parents.Rob, do you have that clip I sent you a long time ago about Jonathan Haidt, where he's being asked by the interviewer which. Which ideology raises less anxious kids? Okay.Yeah.Conservative families. I don't know if you've seen this or not.Yeah, I have. I have. It's. It's girls with. With progressive parents who were the most effed up. Yeah, yeah.No, but then he gets asked you the questions. He gets asked the question, and he says. He's asked the question, saying, so conservatives raise more peaceful kids, less anxiety, all this stuff. Then the interviewer asks him and says, if you, based on your research, see that that philosophy and ideology raises better kids, why don't you change your philosophies to that? He says, I can't do that. I'm from academia. You've never seen this?No, wait. He belongs to some sort of guild.Which dictates, now, if you've never seen it, I have to show it to you. You. I mean, there's. There's no way I can now not.Show academia you've never seen Rob?I send it to you in text. How do you spell his last name?H a I d t. No, you.Got to see this now. There's no, no, this is not a drop. He's actually being interviewed by this. No, that's not it. I'll find it to you and send it to you. So the. The part I'm asking about, even if a guy like that is sitting there doing the research, he's not from the political side. He's on the progressive side. He's on the left. And he also says those values and principles are better to raise a society. What other proof do you need to know that we are gaslighting and confusing the hell out of our kids? So, for me to go back to what you're saying, when you say, you know, either one side has to force or the other side has to agree, I think it's going to end up being a division between the two. And I think eventually families have to sit down. I mean, look, my parents raised me where I was born in Iran. They lived in Iran their entire lives. My mom speaks armenian, assyrian, Turkish and Farsi. Okay. My dad speaks assyrian, Armenian and Farsi. They've lived there for 40 something years. You mean to tell me last minute they decide to leave Iran to go to Germany, causes them to get their second divorce against each other, and then they come out here, my dad loses everything he had.Why did they leave? Why did they leave? Because they simply didn't see the values and principles of Iran as a place they wanted to raise kids. What's the difference with what's going on today? So I think the more and more you're saying, your concern is that back in the days, more and more people agreed it is such radical division right now between the two sides, where at least back in the days, a John F. Kennedy and a Nixon wasn't radically that wild.But this is the cycle, right? In other words, after a war, we do have that coming together of all the parties. But if you go back to America in the 1850s, about half of the congressmen were armed going into the house, right? I mean, it was a free for all. It was incredibly violent, between the increasing regionalism of the United States, right? South versus north. Everyone knew that they were two nations kind of coming to pieces, right? The churches had all divided, right? The Baptists had divided, the Methodists had divided. North and south, everything had divided. But this has happened before, Patrick, is what I'm trying to say. And that's what I try to do. I try to bring the lens of history, because if we just sit here and thinking, oh, my God, this has never happened before, what are we going to do? We're blind?No, that's not what I'm saying.We need to use history.Let me ask you a question.Yes, let me ask you a question.If somebody in your family voted for Nixon versus Kennedy, okay, early sixties, whatever, pick and choose. What was the difference between the values? What was the biggest dramatic difference on why a person voted for Kennedy versus Nixon?It's how warmly you felt about the communists and the new dealers during, you know, during the war and during the Great Depression so that those kinds of things were still in the air. Nixon was more supportive of the McCarthy era, you know, the movement to root out all the communists. During the 1950s. Kennedy was more on the, you know, a little bit more lenient. However, they had so much in common, right? I mean, they both believed in a strong America. They both believed in arming, they both believed in ICBM's, they both believed in standing up to the Soviet Union. They both. I could go down all the things they had in common, right? But that's my point. Sure, there were differences and people talked about them. A little bit of animosity among some of the old leftists, right? But it was completely unlike today. Right? That's what I, when I talked earlier about these mutually irreconcilable. There's a great essay written in 1940. Carl Becker is a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book called the Heavenly City of the 18th century philosophers. One of my all time favorites. Anyway, a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book near the end of his life in 1940.This is when the world was going to hell, right? Everyone could see it. I mean, how many democracies had fallen in Europe to the fascists? You know, Stalin was going great. I mean, it was a terrible time in the world. It was before Pearl harbor. We could all see what was going. And he wrote a very dark essay on democracy. And he said something I think really interesting. He said, and I think this gets to your point. He said, democracies work best when there is much to talk about. Meaning democracies work best when the only thing you're talking about with your neighbors is the size of the sidewalks and what kind of gage sewer line to put in, you know, just coordination issues.That's my point.You agree? But isn't that interesting? And he made the point. He said when people disagree on fundamental values, again, he said this in 1940, he said, democracy can't work because no one is going to go, no one's going to change your entire life because you, you won only 49% of the vote. Right? You see what I mean?No, I fully agree with that. That's why I'm saying I don't think it's a similar example of your. Your family voting when it was Nixon.Kennedy, because it's totally different. I agree with you.The values and principles don't make sense today. Nobody, when you were growing up said, my son wants to cut his dangling off, and I'm supporting him. At 13 years old. Did you ever have a conversation like that at 13 years old?They didn't even know about any of those.That's the point.You know what I mean?What is going on?Talking about gay and all that stuff. We didn't even add. Here's the thing. This is the tragedy, actually, is that when I was a kid, you get all these guys to undress in front of each other with no problem. We did it all the time. You know, we had locker rooms and all that stuff, because we didn't know, hell, anything about anything, right. Innocent, in that sense. Today, you can't get kids to undress in front of each other. Everything is, you know, am I ripped? Am I buffed? Do I have this sexually? What? Am I that right? So this hyper awareness, this hyper sexualism, it has led to a very different and more restricted life for young people who don't have the freedom to grow up uninhibited, as we did. Is that. Is that. Is that going too far to say.That I'm with you? That's why I'm asking. That's why I'm saying, for me, a guy asked me a question. Ice Cube was here two weeks ago. Last week, Ice Cube was here, right? Big rapper, La nwa, f the police. You know, all this. This is the music that he sang back in the days. But he's a family guy. Here's what most people don't know. He's been married for 32 years to the same woman, okay? He's got four or five kids. He's actually a very good father. He's a great family guy. And, you know, I said, you know, you're going to live and die in LA. Famous song. To live and die in LA, right? It's a place to be. And I can't see myself living in LA today. I can't. I can't see myself seeing the way the policies are coming out wherever their lack of respect for small business owners. I saw a chart that you put up where you said the top three things that Americans trust the most today. What's most trusted? You put small business, military and police. What's least trusted? Television. Big business, and Congress. Right. That's kind of how you put those two.And, you know, that's the chart right there for some. We'll put the link below for people that want to see it. But the main reason why I can't see myself living in California, by the.Way, values and principles tell people where this comes from. This is from demography unplugged, right? This is my website.Right. Well, we're going to put the link below. So this is demography unplugged.com.Yeah, it's a sub stacked. Okay, so just put it up, Rob.If we can put the link below for that as well. So last role, last thing here. What role does faith play in these four turnings? Any role faith in God plays?Huge. Huge.Where is our faith the highest? Where is it the lowest?Ah, it's not as simple as that. It's that our faith changes its quality as you move through meaning. Well, let me go back. You remember when I talked about the awakening?Yeah.So what's the big movement in the awakening? Not salvation by works, salvation by faith. This would have been the reformation. All the big awakenings suddenly, let's cast off everything our father said. Let's cast off all these big institutions. Let's look into ourselves. Right?Wasn't Billy Graham's movement called the Great Awakening?They all call themselves great Awakening, you know, all of those movements. But. And by the way, he was, you know, Billy Graham's high tide was during the seventies and eighties. Huge resurgence of evangelicalism, by the way, during the awakening. So this is when the mainstream churches, you know, the Methodists and the Presbyterians and kind of mainstream Protestantism began to decline. And evangelicalism and all the charismatic groups, the Pentecostals and everything began to rise that came out of the awakening. So you see this movement to interiority, toward individualism, toward looking inside yourself for validation. That's the direction religion always takes during the summer season, the awakening, the second turning. You got it?Yeah.Okay.Yeah.So that's interesting. So what happens in the fourth turning? That's when we begin to say that, well, faith, to actually do anything, it's got to have works. It's got to build something. Something needs to win. Right? And so I think you get it now. Now, in many ways, Americans, younger Americans, are turning more secular. You know, they claim not to have any religious affiliation. I think what a lot of that is, is that they're turning away from that inner driven boomer kind of stuff, and they're really looking to build community. The big challenge for religion in the next 20 years is how to build communities that work, communities that do exactly what you were talking about. You can raise kids to live decent lives, to believe in things that allow them to get along with other people, to keep their noses clean and form communities, wholesome communities that work for the long term and a renewed focus on the long term. Remember, when you believe that faith is inside you, you're not worried about the long term. Right? The boomer's parents are worried about the long term. We're going to enter that era. Just coming up.Worried about the long term, worried about institutions, worried about works. That's the other side of faith.All right. Hopefully next time you're here, maybe we'll be post civil war and everything's going to be okay. Because I don't know if I want to have you on when we're doing civil war and we're going through a rob, because who knows if we're going to feel safe. Well, maybe if we do it in West Virginia, we'll feel safe. Rob. Yeah.You can visit my place up there. You'll feel safe there.I'd Rob, if we can put the link to his latest book, end for turning. If you haven't read it, we're going to put the link below as well as to his website. Neil, appreciate you for coming out. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. Yes. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye. In these uncertain times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright. So you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear. And this is what we're doing. If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free. If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out. Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people stop by and say you're also watching. Value timing. You also follow PBD podcast. I do, too. Place your order, go to vtmerch.com, click on a link above or below. Place your order and represent the VT and the PBD podcast gear.

Now it's like these total, mutually exclusive worldviews, right? This is what scares me, Patrick. And they're living in different communities, they're living in different counties. I don't know if that doesn't worry you. It worries me, but I see where this is going.

It worries you because of what? Why does it worry you?

It worries me because I think this can only have one end, has to come out on top. You know what? They either have to separate each other, but I don't see any example in history where they peacefully separate. And I don't think either one would accede to a peaceful separation. Either they separate through violence or they are scared straight. Into agreeing because we have bigger problems outside.

There's no way that's going to happen. There's no way that's going to happen. There is no way that's going to happen. You're going to force. You've read Atlas Shrugged, right? And what eventually happens where the idea is, you know, the John Galts of the world just kind of want to go live together. Right. Where Peter Thiel. Did you follow the story about Peter Thiel building his own city on the middle of the water in San Francisco? And you know how the water. Yeah. Have you followed this rob, or. No type in Peter Thiel building his own city? Yeah. It's going to get to a point where one's going to be like, look, you guys, I can't brace my kids around what you believe in. You feel like you're comfortable walking around outside doing all this stuff? Yeah, I can't be there with you guys. And you can't change me. And you think that's normal? I can't change you. You live there. More power to you. The biggest challenge that I notice right now is common sense, values and principles are being questioned. And we're questioning what even this guy Jonathan Haidt. Right? He's talking about in the interview, the anxious generation guy who wrote this book, and he says, you know, which types of parents.

Rob, do you have that clip I sent you a long time ago about Jonathan Haidt, where he's being asked by the interviewer which. Which ideology raises less anxious kids? Okay.

Yeah.

Conservative families. I don't know if you've seen this or not.

Yeah, I have. I have. It's. It's girls with. With progressive parents who were the most effed up. Yeah, yeah.

No, but then he gets asked you the questions. He gets asked the question, and he says. He's asked the question, saying, so conservatives raise more peaceful kids, less anxiety, all this stuff. Then the interviewer asks him and says, if you, based on your research, see that that philosophy and ideology raises better kids, why don't you change your philosophies to that? He says, I can't do that. I'm from academia. You've never seen this?

No, wait. He belongs to some sort of guild.

Which dictates, now, if you've never seen it, I have to show it to you. You. I mean, there's. There's no way I can now not.

Show academia you've never seen Rob?

I send it to you in text. How do you spell his last name?

H a I d t. No, you.

Got to see this now. There's no, no, this is not a drop. He's actually being interviewed by this. No, that's not it. I'll find it to you and send it to you. So the. The part I'm asking about, even if a guy like that is sitting there doing the research, he's not from the political side. He's on the progressive side. He's on the left. And he also says those values and principles are better to raise a society. What other proof do you need to know that we are gaslighting and confusing the hell out of our kids? So, for me to go back to what you're saying, when you say, you know, either one side has to force or the other side has to agree, I think it's going to end up being a division between the two. And I think eventually families have to sit down. I mean, look, my parents raised me where I was born in Iran. They lived in Iran their entire lives. My mom speaks armenian, assyrian, Turkish and Farsi. Okay. My dad speaks assyrian, Armenian and Farsi. They've lived there for 40 something years. You mean to tell me last minute they decide to leave Iran to go to Germany, causes them to get their second divorce against each other, and then they come out here, my dad loses everything he had.

Why did they leave? Why did they leave? Because they simply didn't see the values and principles of Iran as a place they wanted to raise kids. What's the difference with what's going on today? So I think the more and more you're saying, your concern is that back in the days, more and more people agreed it is such radical division right now between the two sides, where at least back in the days, a John F. Kennedy and a Nixon wasn't radically that wild.

But this is the cycle, right? In other words, after a war, we do have that coming together of all the parties. But if you go back to America in the 1850s, about half of the congressmen were armed going into the house, right? I mean, it was a free for all. It was incredibly violent, between the increasing regionalism of the United States, right? South versus north. Everyone knew that they were two nations kind of coming to pieces, right? The churches had all divided, right? The Baptists had divided, the Methodists had divided. North and south, everything had divided. But this has happened before, Patrick, is what I'm trying to say. And that's what I try to do. I try to bring the lens of history, because if we just sit here and thinking, oh, my God, this has never happened before, what are we going to do? We're blind?

No, that's not what I'm saying.

We need to use history.

Let me ask you a question.

Yes, let me ask you a question.

If somebody in your family voted for Nixon versus Kennedy, okay, early sixties, whatever, pick and choose. What was the difference between the values? What was the biggest dramatic difference on why a person voted for Kennedy versus Nixon?

It's how warmly you felt about the communists and the new dealers during, you know, during the war and during the Great Depression so that those kinds of things were still in the air. Nixon was more supportive of the McCarthy era, you know, the movement to root out all the communists. During the 1950s. Kennedy was more on the, you know, a little bit more lenient. However, they had so much in common, right? I mean, they both believed in a strong America. They both believed in arming, they both believed in ICBM's, they both believed in standing up to the Soviet Union. They both. I could go down all the things they had in common, right? But that's my point. Sure, there were differences and people talked about them. A little bit of animosity among some of the old leftists, right? But it was completely unlike today. Right? That's what I, when I talked earlier about these mutually irreconcilable. There's a great essay written in 1940. Carl Becker is a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book called the Heavenly City of the 18th century philosophers. One of my all time favorites. Anyway, a great intellectual historian. He wrote a book near the end of his life in 1940.

This is when the world was going to hell, right? Everyone could see it. I mean, how many democracies had fallen in Europe to the fascists? You know, Stalin was going great. I mean, it was a terrible time in the world. It was before Pearl harbor. We could all see what was going. And he wrote a very dark essay on democracy. And he said something I think really interesting. He said, and I think this gets to your point. He said, democracies work best when there is much to talk about. Meaning democracies work best when the only thing you're talking about with your neighbors is the size of the sidewalks and what kind of gage sewer line to put in, you know, just coordination issues.

That's my point.

You agree? But isn't that interesting? And he made the point. He said when people disagree on fundamental values, again, he said this in 1940, he said, democracy can't work because no one is going to go, no one's going to change your entire life because you, you won only 49% of the vote. Right? You see what I mean?

No, I fully agree with that. That's why I'm saying I don't think it's a similar example of your. Your family voting when it was Nixon.

Kennedy, because it's totally different. I agree with you.

The values and principles don't make sense today. Nobody, when you were growing up said, my son wants to cut his dangling off, and I'm supporting him. At 13 years old. Did you ever have a conversation like that at 13 years old?

They didn't even know about any of those.

That's the point.

You know what I mean?

What is going on?

Talking about gay and all that stuff. We didn't even add. Here's the thing. This is the tragedy, actually, is that when I was a kid, you get all these guys to undress in front of each other with no problem. We did it all the time. You know, we had locker rooms and all that stuff, because we didn't know, hell, anything about anything, right. Innocent, in that sense. Today, you can't get kids to undress in front of each other. Everything is, you know, am I ripped? Am I buffed? Do I have this sexually? What? Am I that right? So this hyper awareness, this hyper sexualism, it has led to a very different and more restricted life for young people who don't have the freedom to grow up uninhibited, as we did. Is that. Is that. Is that going too far to say.

That I'm with you? That's why I'm asking. That's why I'm saying, for me, a guy asked me a question. Ice Cube was here two weeks ago. Last week, Ice Cube was here, right? Big rapper, La nwa, f the police. You know, all this. This is the music that he sang back in the days. But he's a family guy. Here's what most people don't know. He's been married for 32 years to the same woman, okay? He's got four or five kids. He's actually a very good father. He's a great family guy. And, you know, I said, you know, you're going to live and die in LA. Famous song. To live and die in LA, right? It's a place to be. And I can't see myself living in LA today. I can't. I can't see myself seeing the way the policies are coming out wherever their lack of respect for small business owners. I saw a chart that you put up where you said the top three things that Americans trust the most today. What's most trusted? You put small business, military and police. What's least trusted? Television. Big business, and Congress. Right. That's kind of how you put those two.

And, you know, that's the chart right there for some. We'll put the link below for people that want to see it. But the main reason why I can't see myself living in California, by the.

Way, values and principles tell people where this comes from. This is from demography unplugged, right? This is my website.

Right. Well, we're going to put the link below. So this is demography unplugged.com.

Yeah, it's a sub stacked. Okay, so just put it up, Rob.

If we can put the link below for that as well. So last role, last thing here. What role does faith play in these four turnings? Any role faith in God plays?

Huge. Huge.

Where is our faith the highest? Where is it the lowest?

Ah, it's not as simple as that. It's that our faith changes its quality as you move through meaning. Well, let me go back. You remember when I talked about the awakening?

Yeah.

So what's the big movement in the awakening? Not salvation by works, salvation by faith. This would have been the reformation. All the big awakenings suddenly, let's cast off everything our father said. Let's cast off all these big institutions. Let's look into ourselves. Right?

Wasn't Billy Graham's movement called the Great Awakening?

They all call themselves great Awakening, you know, all of those movements. But. And by the way, he was, you know, Billy Graham's high tide was during the seventies and eighties. Huge resurgence of evangelicalism, by the way, during the awakening. So this is when the mainstream churches, you know, the Methodists and the Presbyterians and kind of mainstream Protestantism began to decline. And evangelicalism and all the charismatic groups, the Pentecostals and everything began to rise that came out of the awakening. So you see this movement to interiority, toward individualism, toward looking inside yourself for validation. That's the direction religion always takes during the summer season, the awakening, the second turning. You got it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So that's interesting. So what happens in the fourth turning? That's when we begin to say that, well, faith, to actually do anything, it's got to have works. It's got to build something. Something needs to win. Right? And so I think you get it now. Now, in many ways, Americans, younger Americans, are turning more secular. You know, they claim not to have any religious affiliation. I think what a lot of that is, is that they're turning away from that inner driven boomer kind of stuff, and they're really looking to build community. The big challenge for religion in the next 20 years is how to build communities that work, communities that do exactly what you were talking about. You can raise kids to live decent lives, to believe in things that allow them to get along with other people, to keep their noses clean and form communities, wholesome communities that work for the long term and a renewed focus on the long term. Remember, when you believe that faith is inside you, you're not worried about the long term. Right? The boomer's parents are worried about the long term. We're going to enter that era. Just coming up.

Worried about the long term, worried about institutions, worried about works. That's the other side of faith.

All right. Hopefully next time you're here, maybe we'll be post civil war and everything's going to be okay. Because I don't know if I want to have you on when we're doing civil war and we're going through a rob, because who knows if we're going to feel safe. Well, maybe if we do it in West Virginia, we'll feel safe. Rob. Yeah.

You can visit my place up there. You'll feel safe there.

I'd Rob, if we can put the link to his latest book, end for turning. If you haven't read it, we're going to put the link below as well as to his website. Neil, appreciate you for coming out. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. Yes. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye. In these uncertain times, if there's anything we need is we need people to believe the future looks bright. So you, if you've heard about me saying this mission to you, we're on a mission to get a million people to wear this gear. And this is what we're doing. If you buy one of these hats, there's a category of buying one hat, getting the second one free. If you haven't yet worn this gear publicly, go ahead and test it out. Buy some of the gear, wear it in public, and see how many people stop by and say you're also watching. Value timing. You also follow PBD podcast. I do, too. Place your order, go to vtmerch.com, click on a link above or below. Place your order and represent the VT and the PBD podcast gear.