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Any amount of money in front of such people are fascinated. Not every one of us, if you continue to die. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So make sure you have pen and paper. And listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen. There's a new book out. It's called The Fourth Turning, written by William Strauss and Neil Howe. This book confirms everything that I have been telling you. And we're going to be talking about this book in the next several days. I'm not selling this book. You can't buy it from me. I don't get any money if you do buy this book. Neither does the Harvest Trust or the Worldwide Freedom Radio Network or any other entity that I may be associated with, no matter in what capacity. I'm recommending that you read this book because this book is right on target, right on the money. This is not a commercial. They're not paying us to do this. It's not a book review, ladies and gentlemen. This is news. What is this book, The Fourth Turning About? Well, this book offers this bold prophecy. Listen carefully. Just after the millennium, America will enter a new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. The survival of the nation will almost certainly be at stake. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history as a series of recurring 80 to 100-year cycles. Each cycle has four turnings, a high, an awakening, an unraveling, and a crises. The authors locate today's America as midway through an unraveling roughly a decade away from the next crises, or fourth turning, as they call it, and they recommend ways Americans can prepare for what's ahead as a nation and as individuals. As Future Shock did in the 1970s and Megatrends did in the 80s, this groundbreaking book will have a profound effect on every reader's perception of America's past, present, and future. I recommend that you get it and read it. We're going to be covering a lot of what's in this book over the next few broadcasts. And tonight, you're going to hear, right now, an interview conducted with Ann Online with William Strauss, one of the authors of The Fourth Turning. And without further ado, here is that interview. Welcome to Ann Online. Hi, this is Ann Devin, and welcome back to Ann Online. They submit history is prophecy. That the future is the intersection of the influence of each of our generations and a specific turning point in this cycle of time. Four turning points in that cycle. And straight ahead, they predict a fourth turning point that, indeed, if history is to be repeated, will bring crisis, demand change. So what is the crisis ahead? How might you prepare? How and why do these cycles work? The predictions, the theory, and reactions to them are in the book, The Fourth Turning, and are free-flowing on the book's website. William Strauss is co-author. William Strauss, thank you so much for taking time. We do appreciate it. Thank you, Ann. I'm so grateful to be here. Let us start for the uninitiated with an explanation here of the title of this book, The Fourth Turning. You contend within this book that the number four provides, actually, the cyclical underpinning for all of recorded history, and certainly offers to us the turn of the seasons, not just of nature, but of life. We're describing history as a series of seasons. We describe those turnings, and each of them is the span of a generation. It's useful to think about it a little bit like a human life or as the season could be defined every year, where the first turning is a time of growth and rediscovery. The second is a time of flowering, and the third is a time of harvest and entropy, and the fourth is the time when there are discontinuities, when there is something colder and softer, as it happens, but it's also the time of rebirth. And we call that the fourth turning. To bring it to modern times, you can think about it as a full cycle representing the length of a human life, approximately 80 to 90 years. That would be a long human life, but it's the same length as long human lives have been now for centuries. And as you look at human history, since the end of the Dark Ages, and actually at other times as well in ancient societies like Rome or Greece or some of the Islamic dynasties or old China, you can see a real periodicity that every 80 to 100 years there is a change in empire, a redefinition of a people, some major civic convulsion that happens. And you go back in American history and you can see a pattern that a number of historians have noted, how there seems to be about 80 or 90 years between the great turning points in our history. Although you suggest in the book that actually this is very controversial among historians, there are those who don't wish to find patterns or cycles and some exploration of the whole idea. So they consider it a coincidence. But let's go back and see what these periodic fourth turnings have been. The most useful one, of course, was the Great Depression and World War II. The one before that was the Civil War. The one before that was the American Revolution. The one before that was the Glorious Revolution of the late 17th century in England and the colony. The one before that was England's epic triumph over Spain, we remember as the Armada. And the one before that was the establishment of the English kingdom under 170, under the War of the Roses. Each of them 80 to 100 years apart. And what's particularly interesting here, Anne, and our quick answer to the historians who might say, well, this is just a coincidence, is that halfway in between, you have this pattern of awakening. Times that culture is reborn. Not empires, but the world of ideas and morals and ethics and culture. And, of course, we had the consciousness revolution of the late 60s and 1970s, most recently. It's a time when everything that happened before seems a little antique, a little clink. Everything since then more hip. Well, that's not new. You go back to what historians call the Third Great Awakening, the 1890s and 19 aughts, the time when the culture was reborn, when there was a lot of argument about religion, when them people were attacking the supposedly spirit-fed elders. That was 80 or 90 years before the 1960s and 70s. You go back another cycle and you find what historians call the Second Great Awakening, in a time when the first seeds were being laid for the abolitionist movements and the women's rights movements, the great religion founding era around the 1820s into the 1830s. You go back before that and you, of course, have the Great Awakening of the 1730s and the Connecticut Ballad and elsewhere in America, a time that many historians do agree the foundation was laid for the American Revolution. It was the young preachers, and they were overwhelmingly young, who established the values regime that the surviving members of their generation, as elders, carried over into the idea and religious underpinning for the revolution. You go back before that another cycle and you find the Puritan Awakening, when the New Jerusalem settlements were established here in the colonies, and also when you have the Third Revolution in England. You go back the cycle before that and you have the Protestant Reformation. All of these are roughly halfway in between the great times of secular change. And when you look at this pattern of awakenings and crises, you can see more than just a chronological relationship. You can start seeing the generation at work. My co-author, Neil Howland, I believe that the generation may be the single most important unit of history. And by generation, we're referring to a group of people who were born at approximately the same time, and that span of time is approximately the same length that it takes to go from being born to losing full adulthood. In modern America, that would be about 20 to 22 years. That's about the length of a generation. You can see that in each of these cycles of history, there are four generations. Now, when you think about history in generational terms, it's especially useful to think about modern times. And I think what I should do right now, Anne, is explain to you what the four turnings of the current cycle have been, or at least the first three, because we're only in the third now. That was my next question. Terrific. Thank you. And how that lines up with the generations today. And once you understand that, then you can start looking at the rest of history from a new perspective. Excellent. The first turning is the high. That is the period from DJ Day to the Kennedy assassination, the first Kennedy assassination, approximately 1946 into 1963, 1964. That was a time when institutional life felt very strong, but individualism felt weak. It was a time when America felt like it could do anything, but it really had trouble feeling anything. And the second turning then, I referred to before, is the Consciousness Revolution, the Awakening, that roughly slammed the years 1964 to 1984, from the Student Revolt through the rise of the Tax Revolt, passing from the Hippie through the Yuppie, a marker by which America divided everything that was thought or felt before from everything that was thought or felt after. The third turning is an unraveling. This is a time, quite unlike the first turning, when institutional life feels weak, but individualism is triumphant. And you can think about Ronald Reagan's mourning in America as the marker of that era, the beginning of it. It was a time when a broad consensus was reached that the Awakening had triumphed. And whichever side of the 1960s arguments you were on, the arguments over Vietnam and Watergate and environmentalism and all that, there was a consensus by the 1980s that individualism should reign supreme over institutionalism and civic life. And we've seen that again and again through the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. This is one of those times in American history when the person, the right, the entitlement is what prevails over the community. And we're beginning to sense that our society is drifting far in that direction. Now, if history follows this rhythm further, in another eight or ten years, roughly in the middle of what Neil and I call the 00 decade, straight around the year 2005, but don't set your watch. It could be sooner, it could be later. There will be a mood change. There will be a new determined mood that people will feel, a new resolve. And it will be triggered by circumstances that we can see today, but that we don't really see where the end game will be, whether it's a combination of entitlements or nuclear proliferation or terrorism or nativism colliding with immigration or the spreading gap of rich and poor or the end game of the culture wars, or more likely some combination of those in ways that we can't foresee. And this will push us into a new 20-year era in which the outcome is quite uncertain. And all we've been warned is the lesson of history that it will be a time when the very survival of the nation may feel, and in fact be escaped when empires will be redrawn. And when the era is done, there will be either a sense of triumph or tragedy or both, and at least the possibility, and this is a good news, the possibility that our civilization will rise to a new point. Because these are the times, the crucibles of history, when great gates are passed, and something fundamentally new and modern is the key. So you suggest a number of possible force-turning-point scenarios, ranging from states threatening secession from the Union, terrorist acts that are international in scope or maybe national in scope, and also the fallout logically would be in many different worlds, but among them in the financial world. You also suggest independently that there could be a crisis that starts in the financial world. Do you see any one of them at this point as more likely? And the financial crisis seems perhaps more logical, because so many people have expressed a deep concern about how bullish the market is, now beyond all expectations. And there are certainly projections that not in the short term, but in the longer term, it will take a fall. It is impossible to say exactly what the trigger will be for the crisis, but we do have some real clues. If you look back at other cycles and other eras that are like now, in the 1920s were one such era, the 1850s were another, the 1760s were another. People in those decades were not predicting what came next. They didn't realize that a depression or a civil war or a revolution going respectively backwards was what lay ahead. What could they have reasonably foreseen? In the 1920s, there was a sense, like today, of an overbought market, of a speculative bubble, of a fund that felt like it was splintering the country, of cultural arguments that wouldn't end. There was a sense of exhaustion that was creeping in. And had someone said that there would be a speculative collapse, that there would be a payback, and that there would be a rise of some new civic authority, people might have accepted that as within the realm of what was possible, and indeed even a little probable, if they thought about it. What they could never have imagined was D-Day, Hiroshima, was the nation ultimately becoming so powerful as a unit and able to do such incredible deeds as a civic community. That was beyond imagining in the 1920s. You go back to the 1850s. Could they have imagined a John Brown or an election of a radical abolitionist president and a successionist flurry among the southern states? Yes. Could they have ever envisioned that within a few years after that, that a series of circumstances would lead to the worst war in the history of the world in terms of casualties up to that point? No. That would have been beyond imagining. The 1750s, could the colonists have imagined tax revolts and challenges against colonial governors and new demands for rights and new definitions of self-government? Yes. Could they have imagined the colonies damning together to form a nation and defeat England in a war that England fought to win and establish a new kind of government that felt unbelievably modern to the world at that time? No. And the lesson is you can see around you today the pieces that will gather to create the environment of the first quarter of the next century, but you cannot say exactly what it will be, and you especially cannot say what the climax and resolution of this crisis era would be. Can you list some of those pieces, though, for individual? I mean, do you concur? Would you put the financial markets at the top of that? I absolutely would put that as a key point, I think, right now. And this gets a little bit into the generational aspect of this that I'd like to get into as well. As boomers approach old age, they are now going through a phase of saving. Well, this generation, which not just because of its numbers, those are actually that's important in its life cycle dynamics at any one time, but when they reach the phase of life where they are disdain or when they are trying to preserve their assets at a time of a three-wheeling global marketplace, that could be a very dangerous time for the market. And there's something unprecedented that is happening, too, and that is that the generation behind boomers is less wealthy than them at each phase of life. The Gen Xers, or as we call them, the 13th generation, it will be a very volatile circumstance when the first boomers reach the IRA withdrawal age. And by boomers, we define people born between the years 1943 and 1960. So the first group of them will reach 59 1⁄2 in the year 2002. The first big cohort, the Clinton 1946 cohort, will reach the age of which a majority of people now, and unless the rules are changed then, will be eligible for Social Security at age 62. That will happen in the year 2008. And Neil Howell and I are concerned that sometime between those two years, the financial mood could change precipitously for the worst in terms of people's expectations. This will be combined with a realization that the entitlements projections for Medicare and Social Security are impossible, that the only way to satisfy the benefits projections that people have been making for decades is for the government to do essential nothing other than pay old debts and pay old boomers. Old boomers will reject that, and there will be a series of convulsions in those programs. Exactly when that happens, it's hard to say, but we think that it will happen well before the demographers suggest. A lot of people are saying it's the 2020s where that will be a problem, but we think the markets will start discounting that, and the politics of those programs will change that fundamentally. A combination of a get-real attitude about Social Security as well as the shifting expectations and demographics of the marketplace could create some real problems in the next decade. It's not anything that's going to happen anytime soon, and so enjoy the third turning, and then especially with the bubble and make the money while you can, but the dynamics are going to end a tenth hour early in the next century. And could we have a merger here of that, the public money problem, Social Security, Medicare, with perhaps a downturn in the market that will adversely affect for the first time broad numbers, the middle class and the lower middle class, who have invested their pension money in IRAs, for example, and other mutual funds. Oh, these are interconnected, and I think it could get tangled up with questions of nationhood and certainly global issues as well. We haven't talked at all about the world, but the world is following, much of the world, not all, but much of the world is following the parallel generational rhythm this year. You look in Europe, for example, and you see there Gen X and countries like France and Italy have unemployment rates twice as high as ours. Because social welfare programs are even more skewed towards older generations. You look at Russia and China, China particularly, who have had generational rhythms that suggest similar patterns. that Chinese peers of boomers went through a cultural revolution back in the late 1960s and early 1970s that was a tenth state to the tenth power. It was convulsive to a degree that very few Americans realize, and the Chinese themselves are even afraid of that generation. And at some point they will reach power, and that's their antography. It probably won't be for another 10 or 15 years, but they will. And you combine these different forces going on around the world, and we will not have this take place in the society in a vacuum. It's the kind of time around which national confrontations can occur and empire definitions can change. Back on the national front, it might also enhance the probability where people will begin to seriously question and openly challenge men the beliefs they've held in public institutions, governments, delivering on Social Security, Medicare. They made their payments diligently throughout their professional lives or work lives. Yeah, although a lot of boomers are not expecting ever to get the money back. It's a very different expectation from the generation that fought in World War II. Right, but they're still employed now, and it's not as meaningful to them as an academic debate or exploration. Well, I don't think there's any question that if there is, in fact, the collapse of the entitlement scheme that that could pose a threat to national definition here. And in addition, I mean, currently we have people, workers, saying, what does this corporation mean to me? What will it do for me? I can no longer tell on it. It has no loyalty to me. Perhaps that dismay with corporate America, work institutions will also reach radical dimensions, and people feel like I can't trust my government to deliver on a promise. But corporate America does not deliver for me at all. And there may be that sense of beyond disenchantment, beyond disillusionment, outright disgust with the belief that institutions failed to hold up their end of the bargain. Could that not force? Well, there is a risk that people will pursue that the institutions that make sense to them are either local or global and less national. Isn't that funny, though? Local or one extreme or the other? One they can control and the other one what? Well, the other they perceive the environment which they're really working. And when you think of a corporate environment today, the market tends to be local or global, not so much national. And when you think about questions of defense right now, during the third turning, our major defense issue is how we can keep men and women behaving properly, which is an interesting twist on the old question of preserving the national security. And what, to some degree, it feels like a luxury of peacetime, but you have to realize that the forces of history may someday look back on this as an almost laughable series of circumstances. Right now, people do not perceive that there is a national defense shield that is of particular importance to them in the same way that they did before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and certainly not in the same way as during the last war turning, during the Depression and World War II. Is it because we don't have an identifiable enemy? And we can also add here that one of your latest columns on your website is, are we preparing for the wrong war? Yes, well, in the sense that we figure that the war would be a delicate one. It would be one in which the population would win, but even a handful of casualties, one that would be fought in a very high-tech way. Fentiful. In a sense, there would be nearly no casualties, and we would show our wizardry with gadgetry and technology, and everything would be nice and over. That is a long pattern, not just in the most recent cycle, but throughout human history. People expect that the next military confrontation will resemble the last one, and it does not. There are ways in which it moves on. I think that if we look around the world, whether you're talking about global terrorism or China or Russia, as it may be reconstituted 10 or 20 years from now, or something else, it could be an economic battle. It could later have military dimensions in ways that we can't foresee. The world is not settled into some very tranquil end of history. The best proof of that is to look in Europe, where there's been all this effort to create a bureaucracy with a euro currency and the like, and young generations are resisting that wholesale. Now, it's important, and as I go over these things, for people to understand that the real root of all of this is the generations. It's the 18th generations and the connection that they feel with their history. It has happened five times in a row that the generations born in the immediate aftermath of one great crisis, one forced turning, one empire redefining period, has been raised indulgently as youth during the spiritual complacent, that institutionally muscular high that follows the crisis. They have come of age as angry young people who have launched spiritual awakenings into the next plan. And it has always happened that as elders, they have pushed their society into and through the next great day in history. This is what underlay the long war cycle of Arnold Toynbee. He called it generational forgetting, where it is the generation that never knew war, even as a child, that tends to create martial environments when they are elders. But there's more to it than that. It's partly just the life cycle pattern that they feel they're leading. And you can imagine the Hillary Clintons and the Newt Ingriches and William Bennett reaching old age, feeling their own mortality, and demanding that whatever the major problem is, whether it's terrorism or global warming or Social Security or a real economic clash with Asia or whatever it is, that some hard sacrifices have to be accepted and some real civic risks accepted in order to create a bright future for prosperity. That's what happens with these generations. It's happened five times in a row, and boomers are following exactly that same pattern. It was the relatively indulged children born in the aftermath of the American Revolution who were the spiritual zealots who pushed the society into the Civil War, for better or worse. It is the children born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War who became what were then called the great wise men who led America into and through World War II. This is the way history works. And it's not just boomers. The Gen Xers behind them, picture them entering midlife as the ones who will take the slogans of their coming of age as and applying those to the politics, or if it comes to that, the military circumstances. Just do it. Why ask why? No excuses. Whatever it takes. It will be a very action-minded group who will not be tangled in legalism, who will not be so concerned about compassion fatigue, who will not mind having the world in which sacrifices are imposed if they really make sense. But the most important generational dynamic is the children today, the millennial generation. Kids starting with the high school class of 2000, probably. The kids of the 1980s and 1990s who are now freshmen in high school. They are a wave of kids who have a new special aura. They are being raised as heroes. They are being praised where the Xers were criticized. You can see how we celebrated babies in the early 1980s. Well, we now celebrate pre-teens. And the last election was nothing if it wasn't about how to raise 14-year-olds in a moral environment. We want these kids to be great doers and achievers, and they are starting to turn out that way. And by the time they come of age as adults, another 10 years from now, the kinds of long-term harms to the future that have been tolerated while the Xers were children will not be tolerated anymore. Such as? Such as the collapse of Social Security down the road. Such as the festering problems of nuclear proliferation. Such as global warming. Such as the spreading gap of rich versus poor. Such as the institutional infrastructure that so favors the old and the handicaps the young in so many ways in America today. These things will not be acceptable. And when you combine this can-do special adult-blessed child generation coming of age with the very pragmatic extra group entering midlife with the kind of impending mortality and spiritual compulsions that the boomers are likely to feel, the values of folks from their likely to feel in old age. That is a society that is capable of taking big chances, potentially doing great things. If there is a problem with the global environment, that's how we fix it. We couldn't imagine ourselves fixing it today. There is also a time for real danger. You have to realize that every fourth turning has shown an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, but most importantly in the willingness of society to use those technologies. Recall that the Civil War represented that at its time. And recall, of course, in World War II how America had its wisest elder ethicists and smartest younger scientists at work to build the worst weapon they could think of which the society was prepared to use within a few days after it was developed and to use not once but twice. It's beyond imagining to us today how there could be a society like ours that could do that, but it's the generational dynamics that are driving us down that same direction. You do suggest that while the particulars of the fourth turning crisis cannot be evident in advance, we certainly can look at trends that are troubling, suggestive that they may be a part of whatever the upcoming crisis will be, and prepare now. And you have some very specific steps that you offer in the book of suggestions to all of us across generations. Yes, I think that there are ways in which our society as a whole could prepare, but I frankly don't think that will happen. It's certainly not happening under the regimes now in place, the Clinton White House, the Republicans in the Congress. We are having very incremental actions which from a historical perspective are likely to not have much relevance towards the crisis other than the time that's being wasted. So is this such a new thing that your offering here, you give a lot of credit to Schlesinger in the book going back into the 60s for identifying four turnings in the cycle, but is this such a new thing that public policy makers are not keenly aware of it and the opportunities it presents? I think the people are running ahead of the leaders here. The people may in fact be the leaders and I think that through the new technologies of the internet and the like, there are many more ideas being talked about than it's happening on the floor of the Congress. I'd like to encourage everybody to join our website at www.fourthturnings.com and that's fourth turnings spelled out as one word, fourth turnings. There's been a lot of talk about Clinton's bridge and about the Republicans in Congress and so on in a sense that at this time in our history we just are not having good leadership. But that's characteristic of third turnings. You look back at the 20s and you had Harding and Coolidge and you look back at the 1850s and you had Pierce and Buchanan. Well, we kind of are in the Pierce, Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge era right now with Clinton. But that is something that will change. It will change. People feel that in their bones that character ultimately will count. It will count not just with leaders but also with individuals. And one of our major suggestions to people, given the fact that the government is not really going to break the society for whatever will happen with an entitlement collapse and is not really working that effectively on the kind of fundamental defenses that we need to be thinking about in terms of the fourth turning. We're far more concerned with adultery than we are with the actual strategic planning in the Pentagon right now. Although I should say there's a major review going on which is getting absolutely no media attention. This isn't really the whole fault of the government. This is the people. What do the people want? They want tele-francy. They don't want to hear about how the military is trying to reconstitute itself for the year 2010. And you look at this and then you wonder what can you do individually? Well, the most important thing we can do individually is what we should be doing as a society. And that is preparing children because the ultimate safety net in these times are families. And the most important way that a person can prepare for this state of history if you accept this theory is at least a strong possibility is make sure that your family life is in repair. Make sure that your reputation in the community is fairly good and that you're somebody who can be counted on in a pinch and you know of other people who you can count on in a pinch that if the national government is less useful in the future than now that there are ways that you can not only solve your fundamental problems but also find meaning in life. The current third-turning cultural carnival is very enjoyable. There are a lot of ways in which the 1990s are a wonderful time in entertainment and travel and the prosperity and so on. Enjoy that but don't construct your life in a way that that's the only kind of life you can enjoy. And that's a very, very important thing to realize. One of the most interesting periods in our modern history are the years between 1929 and 1932 as the Depression settled in and a lot of people understand the economic hard times of that but there were actually some positives. The culture became clean again. Sometimes we wonder how can we possibly go from a rocky culture to a cleaner one? History does periodically and it does exactly in these ways. It was also a time when people became nicer to each other. All the talk today about aggressive driving and rudeness and life of manners. They returned in the years between 1929 and 1932. People re-strengthened the family life. The styles became more classical. People connected more with history. There are a lot of ways in which the mood changes and what it does is it prepares people collectively to do great things as a civic entity together. And here's where Neil Howe and I take real issue with the Alvin Tophers and John Nesbitt and the Bill Gateses who see that the future is just a broad plane of ever more individualism, ever more splintering, ever more cultural mix. Afforded in part by technology. Yes. Well, the technology will be important but the mood will determine how the technology is used. And yes, there probably will continue to be technological advances but come the fourth turning it will be used for civic purpose, not for the purpose of ever greater individualism. And the same technology that Bill Gateses uses in his house to let a person with an ID card walk from room to room and have music that he or she particularly likes played as he passes from one great room to another. That same technology with a turning of a switch to go the other way and information about that individual to be passed to whoever it is who wants to know. And we now are more concerned about technology taking us to chaos and anarchy. Across the cycle we were concerned about it taking us to Big Brother. And as the move shifts back, the direction of technology is going to go back towards civic and communal purpose again. You write in the book and on the website as well about how you will rise after history is prophecy message to all the rest of us. And you write that this is the most personal of books for you in that you believe that the import of the message here will impact not just those leaders but your own families, yourselves, your parents, your children. Right. it's a way of thinking about your grandparents, yourselves, your spouses, significant friends, your children, their children. We encourage people to think about the long sweep of history this way. and you have to envision your own children's life as being part of a much longer drama of generations. None of us wishes to be part of this, the last generation. and think of your own connection with history this way. Reflect on the oldest person you knew when you were a child, someone who had a real shaping role in your early life, probably a grandson. Think of when that person was born. And then think about when the youngest person you will probably have a chance to shape will die. Assume that you'll reach the middle 80s and in my own case my youngest daughter has four children. My youngest was born when I was 37. My personal memory stands, going back to the birth of my grandmother whom I knew well to the death of what I expect will be my youngest grandchild that will know well. That reaches from 1881 into the 22nd century. A longer period than the United States of America will have been and exist. And when you do this, all the talk of that three-year budget cycle just fades into oblivion. History is a very personal thing and we find that those who invest the time and trouble to read what we write and to try to think about history in seasonal terms find that it does connect a number of elements of recent history that somehow just seem chaotic to them and now we can see it's hitting a pattern that broadly makes sense. There was one wonderful comment that somebody made on our website a fellow from California who plays on Ted Tissier with us and he says you know you can poke a lot of holes in this theory but the dying things still flow. I want to ask you in a moment about as a final question the individual's reactions that you heard from their reactions to this book but first amplify if you will on how you arrive at this theory. Neil Howell and I began collaborating nearly a dozen years ago. I had written a couple of books about the dead now and war from a generational perspective. My first book was called Stance and Circumstance back in the late 70s and it was about how boomers were affected by the war and what they did to avoid it or serve in it. And when I was working in the Congress in the early 1980s I was really trying to get bothered by the assimilation of that and the entitlement collapse and the real way that we were flipping everything towards older people in our society of the generation gap ineffective ended up in an unstated but very energetic settlement in which the boomers took the culture and the GI generation the peers of Blake and Boe and Reagan took some money. and how this was not sustainable at the time and I wanted to write a book about this and I met him and I together decided to write a history of America told from a generational perspective. We published it. It was called Generation and it was published and is still available on paperback. It was published in 1991 and then we wrote a book about Gen Xers that we called 13th Gen which was the first book about that group and that came out in 1993. In generations we made predictions about what the 1990s would be like if the generational dynamics followed the historical pattern. We suggested culture wars and a new emphasis on kids and cleaning up the world for kids and adolescents and how the elder lobby would just begin to splinter and how there would be directionlessness and further decline in civic culture and the like. As the 90s have progressed we think that's happened. So in the fourth turning we decided to be very explosive about these rhythms of history and where they were leading. It's led some people to be startled by the book because here we are at a time when the stock markets are surging and people feel pretty good about their personal lives. But at the same time surveys show that Americans have never been more pessimistic about the long-term future of their country. There's the sense that we are driving this automobile that doesn't have any oil in it and sooner or later that engine is going to break. And what we find in the response to this book is that the mainstream media doesn't really know what's effective. political figures who found some generations interesting and sort of accepted it broadly are not so sure that they want to take it to the bottom line. But where there's a very positive response I would say two important things. Boomers and especially actors see something really positive in this broad. Actors have trouble making a broad connection with history. Where do they sit in? What is it the third generation will be called upon to do? And I don't think there's any other generation who flip through this book and more often will say yes, yes, that's right, that's it, that's how it feels, that's where we're going, that's us, that's them. And we are very encouraged by that because that's an over-criticized generation whose survival skills may end up being what the nation really needs. And the other thing that's very encouraging is the response that we have on the web. There has been a real outpouring of interest, and I think the program is one example of that, that this is a new way of spreading new ideas, and you're far more likely to see new ideas openly discussed on the web than you will be in the New York Times. You also have another avenue to advance your ideas, and that is the Capitol Steps, which is a pretty whole cabaret that has kept a rock in Washington for a long time. That's true. Very long. Other aspects of my life, but believe me, there's two very separate interests of mine, humor and history, and I want to emphasize that it's worth turning breathes, the history side and not the humor side. Well, I understand, and to that point, perhaps those people who resist, from the media to specific generations that would resist the content of this book as prophecy, perhaps see this as a very finely woven wet blanket on the headiness of entering a new millennium. But, I would also ask, in contrast to now, picking up on the comic side of your nature, what would the Capitol Fest have to say to advance these ideas? Any comedy sometimes? Well, right now in the third term, it's an excellent time for comedy. It's a time when the culture feels like a parody on a parody on a parody. And one of the interesting questions as you were close to forth turning is how does the culture replenish? How is there ever a time for something that feels fundamentally new again? How do you go back to the 60s? There are a lot of boomers that say, how do you go back to the 60s? And one of the things, of course, that we do in the Capitol Fest is we take a lot of the boomer classic songs and we give a political stand-up or a social stand-up. For example? Well, with Bill Clinton's secret Asian nonsense or for Paula Jones, I mean, don't cry for me, judge, believe that. I had a brilliant colleague named Elena Newport and one of the fun aspects of my life is how when I collaborate with Neil Howe, I produce this kind of stuff and when I collaborate with Elena Newport, I do the other times. And I do think that within humor and history, in both cases, you have patterns, you have ironies, you have prisms to our personal and collective souls that are important. right now, a lot of people wonder, how could we have another 50s? They were so culturally exciting, how can you have another 50s? And the bottom line is, you can't have another 60s without having a 50s before them. How do you have a 50s before them? Hello? Mary, thank you. Okay. Sorry. It's okay. Let me back up. That's fine. Go ahead. Out of your house. Okay. Hold on. Let me give you another spot. A lot of people wonder, how could you possibly have another 1950s? Because it felt so culturally engaging and fun and exciting and everything felt so new. Can we just go back to something like that? But the bottom line is, and the real lesson of history is, no you cannot. You have to go through a 1950s like era, a first turning, before you can have a second turning. And how can you have a 1950s? You can't go directly there either, because that requires if a nation has passed through a great day of history or a fourth turning. History is kind of like the water that rushes to the sea and it goes through rapids and then down waterfalls and then reaches tranquil zones. In fact, it cannot go backwards. You cannot take the seasons of nature and go from autumn back to summer. You have to go through winter. And for those people who disregard that, disregard your theory and present things like President Clinton put forward a massive health care plan, harkening back to the Johnson era. Yeah, it was wrong. If you had to do that in the early part of the second turning, it would have passed. But now it's wrong because we don't trust institutional solutions and we have all these individual constituencies. Think of how we splintered and everything is just kind of locked up into little niches with everybody battling each other. How do you ever break away from that? How do you keep those niches from just getting stronger and more numerous and strangling the civic life? The way you do it is suddenly the mood changes because the generational force is close to the air and we enter a fourth turn in. in which the era now will feel as quaint to Americans from the year 2010 as the roaring 20s felt by the year 1940. So thank you so much for your time. I look forward to continuing this conversation and there's a hot link in place for people jumping right over to your site to continue this year. Yeah, we have a fabulous discussion over there. Some people call it a university on the air and the talk about the future is nothing like you'll see in all this idle chatter about bridges to the 21st century. I assure you that. Pretty cool. Thanks. Have a great time. Bye. And online with a production of Discretion Communications and Serendipity Productions and Co-3. Now there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. And I hope that you were listening carefully and closely because there were a lot of things discussed in this interview that are applicable to all of us in this time. And as you know, I've discussed many of these things for many years now and wrote about some of them in my book. And I have talked about a coming conflict, the likes of which the world has never seen in this country. And the result will either be an uplifting of all humanity, the greatest improvement in civilization that you can imagine, or will sink back into the depths and depravity of enslavement that has been the lot of the human race throughout its history until the creation of this great nation. You can go to the website if you wish because we're going to be talking about this for the next several broadcasts. It's www.fourthturning.com Forth as in the number. Forth not F-O-R-T-H but F-O-U-R-T-H. If you'd like to help the Worldwide Freedom Radio Network expand its programming as we did last night and as we will continue to do, as long as people are taking advantage of our offers so that we can pay for the uplink time and we're going to pay for that transponder no matter what. We've bought it. You need to call 1-800-295-2432. That's 1-800-295-2432. 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