Neil Howe - Ideas Lab Series - August 23rd, 2023

[00:00:06] Neil

We never solve on bright sunny days when everyone feels comfortable. We always do it on dark stormy nights when our backs are against the wall, that’s when we write our new constitutions, that’s when we start regulating the national banks for creating a federal currency or creating social security, you name it. Whenever we come up with these huge new ways of shaping our national community, it’s always at a time when it seems like the least likely time to do it.

[00:00:40] Intro

Imagine spending an hour with the world’s greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes and their failures. Imagine no more. Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world so you can take your manager due diligence or investment career to the next level.

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Here’s your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kaastrup-Larsen.

[00:01:35] Niels

For me, the best part of my podcasting journey has been the opportunity to speak to a huge range of extraordinary people from all around the world. In this series, I have invited one of them, namely, Kevin Coldiron to host a series of in-depth conversations to help uncover and explain new ideas to make you a better investor. In this series, Kevin will be speaking to authors of new books and research papers to better understand the global economy and the dynamics that shape it so that we can all successfully navigate the challenges within it. With that, please welcome Kevin Coldiron.

[00:02:09] Kevin

All right. Thanks, Niels, and welcome everyone. Our guest today is best-selling author and renowned historian Neil Howe. Neil is the man who coined the term millennials to describe the generation that, as you’re about to discover, is going to be exceptionally important to all of our futures. Neil is the author of a new book called The Fourth Turning is Here. The book was published only a few weeks ago, it’s already on the New York Times bestseller list.

Neil’s idea is that modern history moves in generational cycles that last about the length of one long human life. Each cycle has four eras, what he calls turnings, and what matters for all of us now is that we’re midway through a fourth turning, the last era, which is a time of exceptional upheaval and conflict. To give you a sense of just how important fourth turnings are, the last one occurred during the Great Depression of World War Two, before that was the American Civil War, and before that, the American Revolution.

The good news is that a society that successfully navigates a fourth turning emerges reborn, more equal, more optimistic, and more united. So that’s an ambitious agenda for the next hour. But hey, fourth turnings are all about meeting challenges so we’re going to give it a go. Neil Howe, thanks so much for joining us, and welcome to the show.

[00:03:35] Neil

Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. It’s great to be here. You’re right. You’ve kind of laid out a big agenda there.

[00:03:43] Kevin

You start the book by talking about how cycles have always been fundamental to human life. For ancient people, it was the calendar cycle that mattered, but for modern people, the cycles are longer, they’re driven by the public mood, which in turn is driven by the human life cycle. So each of these long cycles has four areas that you call turnings, each lasts 20 to 23 years, and we’re in a fourth turning now, and we’re going to spend most of our time talking about that.

But you’ve also told me, hey, to understand how a fourth turning works, you need to understand how we got there. So I’d like to maybe start there. Let’s work our way through the eras, maybe talk about what characterizes them, how one leads to the other. A natural place to start is the beginning. So what is a first turning? What triggers it? What does it mean for society? Maybe if we could frame that by talking about the first turning in this cycle to set the example.

[00:04:46] Neil

Yeah, we can talk about turnings and then talk a little bit about generational succession, which is driving it. Actually, to turn this around, Bill Strauss and I originally got involved in this work by looking at generational differences, not by looking at cycles in history. So looking at how we got into this is really looking at the driver behind it, which is generational differences.

Now, the way we looked at this in our earlier book, certainly in this most recent book, the first turning is a generational era that follows a crisis, follows the resolution of a fourth turning, a crisis which redefines the country, redefines the republic constitutionally in its outer shape, its politics, its economics, its constitutional arrangements. The last first turning we recall is the period that came after World War Two. These are the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower and John Kennedy.

It was a period when institutions were strong, individualism was sort of weak, there was a strong ethic of social conformity. I’m describing a social mood, which not only informed our institutional life and our legal system, but just our very way of relating to each other. It’s kind of what we expected of each other. It was a world in which people were pretty modest about what they thought about themselves. People were taught and agreed to make a lot of effort to fit in with the needs of others. In fact, that was taught in schools infamously in the memories of a lot of boomers.

Boys were taught to be wage earners and girls were taught to be homemakers. It was like a colony of social insects, sort of a bee colony. In fact, it’s interesting the image of a bee colony or that kind of organization comes up a lot in first turnings in history. There was one of the early first turnings we had which was after the late 17th century period of revolution and war called the Augustan Age. Of course, at that time, the American colonies shared the culture of Britain, of England at the time, and they were in their Augustan Age.

The Augustans talked a lot about bee colonies and ants. Everyone had their duty and everything fit together. Today, in retrospect, it is kind of neoclassical way of looking at society. This was popular at the time. Conformity was priced and there was a rising I think of equality and a rising reality of equality. Income and wealth was becoming increasingly equal.

[00:07:53] Kevin

Is all that, what you’re just describing, the emphasis on community pulling together, equality?

[00:08:02] Neil

It’s because in each of these turnings, the fear of the last turning hangs over it.

[00:08:07] Kevin

So it’s one foot back, and again, we needed these characteristics.

[00:08:11] Neil

Right. We just barely managed to survive the crisis. Well, we’re going to make sure that our institutions are really strong because of the fear of the crisis. So it’s that. We set up this kind of society in which individuals made it feel constrained, but society itself is able to solve huge problems, has a great sense of progress, has a great sense of being able to solve. That was a time in which we spent a lot more on defense than we do today as a share of GDP., but we always managed to balance the budgets. In fact, we had surpluses and we were able to build interstate highways and ultimately launch an expedition to get a man on the moon and miracle vaccines and all kinds of other things. It was a period of rapid standard of living growth; extraordinarily rapid during that period.

[00:09:09] Kevin

We have this crisis that threatens to dismantle society and then people pull together, they solve the crisis, and then that ethic allows them to reimagine, rebuild society afterwards, in part because there’s still a fear that another crisis could emerge.

[00:09:33] Neil

Yes. There’s always the fear of what happened just before. It sort of hangs over each. So each era is a trajectory. You’re trying to escape the fear of what you were just in. Now, the awakening is a period when people try to throw off all this social conformity. They try to throw off all these rules and regulations, all this social discipline. Why are we doing all this stuff?

[00:09:59] Kevin

That is the second era, right? The awakening is the second turning?

[00:10:03] Neil

The summer season, if you will. So the spring season to the summer season, this would be the summer solstice, the days are long. There was a time that, in our last experience, you could just call this a consciousness revolution, which extended from the mid ’60s up until the early ’80s. It was a time that really started in inner cities and college campuses, and particularly getting rid of police authority, male patriarchy, you name it, all the kinds of conventions and limitations that people had in their personal and cultural behavior.

It really ended by the late ’70s, early ’80s, with more on the conservative end of the spectrum with getting rid of taxes and regulations. That was the era of tax cuts and deregulation. It actually started in Carter before it went into the Reagan administration. But you can see from first to last, both on the right and the left, the success of that awakening period was a throwing off of all kinds of social obligations. Everyone wanted to do what they wanted. We didn’t really care about necessarily saving for our kids anymore, so deficits became standard.

Obviously, we’re going to cut taxes, but maybe we wouldn’t have been so rigorous about cutting benefits to ourselves, right? You see what I mean? Increasingly too, we no longer wanted to make institutions big and lasting anymore. One important part of the boomer critique was that their World War Two winning parents were trying to build institutions too big and too strong. That was their problem. They were too civic-minded.

So let’s stop building those dams, let’s stop straightening those rivers. What’s that army corps of engineers doing anyway? An Apollo Moon landing? No, after about 1973 to ’74, no, let’s just stop spending money on that anymore. Let’s turn toward the inner, let’s turn toward the inner world and solve problems here at home. That collapse of interest in the outer world toward the inner world is a constant refrain of the awakening period. We saw this during the Age of Jackson, in the 1830s, early 1840s.

So halfway in between these great civic crises you talked about, Kevin, are the great awakenings of American history. So that’s the other solstice. The fourth turnings are the shortest days of the year. The awakenings are the longest day of the year, the summer season. They come roughly halfway in between the fourth turnings. Very conveniently in American history, we numbered them; we call them the first great awakening, the second great awakening.

Many call this period of the consciousness revolution America’s fourth or fifth great awakening depending on if you want to start your count with John Winthrop in the 1600s or Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s, but there we are. So then you have this period in which we become a much more individualized society, a much less governed society, a much less conformist society, and a much less, increasingly, a less equal society. One of the things that boomers hated most, and by the way, it’s the generation coming of age which often gives best expression to the mood of the era.

When we think of the American high, we think of the silent generation who were the children of World War Two coming of age with their gray flannel suits, and going to work for RAND and big corporations. They wanted to do things in groups, they were very much interested in their job security. In the early ’50s, their first questions in job interviews were about their pension plans. Well, this changed. You had boomers now coming of age and they were at the cutting edge of obviously throwing off all these limitations.

One of the things that boomers hated most, as I was saying, was the middle class. It was too big. It was too powerful. In a way, America had become too equal. Pleasant Valley Sunday with charcoal burning everywhere was the biggest nightmare for boomers. You see the contrast here. Today, millennial generations would love to join the middle class. Their question is, where is it? Where can I sign up?

[00:10:03] Kevin

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I’ve got kids who are millennials and that’s the refrain I hear all the time, not just from them but their friends. There’s almost (fear might not be it) the sense of being stuck, that there is no way into the middle class, the doors are closed.

[00:14:56] Neil

There’s no way to join their peers in some great sense of common cause. Boomers fled that. That’s the last thing that boomers wanted. In fact, even living together, I often point out to people that today, of course, everyone is living in extended families. Millennials most of all, they’re all going back to live with their parents even in their late 20s, early 30s. In the 1970s, no one wanted to live together.

I often point out the 1970s experience, the largest decline in the average household size, meaning the number of persons per household, seniors are leaving home to go and live in a leisure world and Arizona and boomers are leaving to join Wheeler Ranch commune, and the generation in between, we’re all getting divorced. So we had this huge decline in the size of the household.

So that’s where we ended up, in a much more individualized, less supervised, less regulated society in which big civic projects no longer really worked very well anymore. That enters the fall season, the third turning, which is much the opposite of the high. The high institute is destroying individualism as weak. The fall season, which really started with the mid 1980s and went all the way up to the GFC – the global financial crisis in 2008, this was a period in which individualism was strong, institutions were weak.

If you think about third turning decades in American history, you think of decades of weak civic authority, cynicism and bad manners, kind of like the roaring ’90s or the roaring 20s or the 1850s or the 1760s, they’re very similar in that regard. You had the children of awakenings who were coming of age into young adulthood like Generation X, and really defining that era. History shows that these fall seasons are in turn (this brings us full circle here), brings us to the fourth turning.

A fourth turning is when we begin to enter these multiple crises. Ultimately, by the end of this era, we enter a period of increasingly severe organized conflict in which new institutions are born and finally a new common republic emerges in which competitors are destroyed and a new republic is emerging, and emerges by the resolution of it.

[00:17:54] Kevin

I guess I have two questions. One is the fourth turning is, as you say, characterized by conflict, and the third turning is what you call the unraveling. The individualism, the looking after yourself, does that lead to this conflict because society starts to fragment?

[00:18:17] Neil

Yes, it leads to the opposite. One way to think about it is that in the awakening, you enter an awakening with society supplying a large amount of order. It supplies a large amount of structure and order and constraint. Of course, during the awakening, society demands less order, but society keeps offering it and giving it. That gives rise to the conflict of the awakening, which is basically a society in which individuals in that society, particularly the young, are rebelling against all of this order that society is providing.

The crisis, the fourth turning, is much the opposite. You go into the fourth turning, society supplies almost no order and no security, and society increasingly wants order.

[00:19:11] Kevin

That’s what I think is fascinating about the millennials, is you say they crave order.

[00:19:16] Neil

Millennials want all these social guarantees. They don’t want all the risk that boomers wanted. The whole idea of, well, we shouldn’t have defined benefit plans, let’s have defined contributions. I’m free to contribute. If I want, if I don’t want, I don’t have to, and who knows where they’ll end up. Boomers are very cavalier about risk-taking in their own lives.

In fact, almost every measure of risk-taking raced upwards among youth during the 1970s and interestingly as boomers have grown older, the measures of risk for older age brackets has increased as they’ve grown older today even among seniors. We worry about deaths of despair and STDs and deaths on motorcycles. We never used to worry about seniors before. Well, boomers have remained. This generation of risk takers, living solo, not really caring if they know their neighbor, they have a spouse or anyone looking after them, these are actually problems that state and local governments worry about their senior populations today.

I think millennials are really looking in the other direction. Millennials themselves, one thing that was noticed very early among millennials is their peer orientation; the idea they’re very community-oriented, social media, they flock to it because they love this place where you live in a fishbowl existence and everyone can see what you’re doing and you always get feedback from other people, and the idea of collective security.

Even in their pension plans, you see millennials basically crowd investing. They’re all in those target date ETFs. They’re all filled with equities, although they don’t like to think they own any stocks. But of course, that’s what they are. It sounds safe to them. But the great thing about these target date funds is that they’re all tied to the S&P 500 index, to the SPY. Of course, if the whole thing goes down, they all go down together. So that’s great. Most millennials would much rather go down with their peers than be left behind. So it works for them.

By the way, with Generation X, I think it was very different. Back in the 1990s, Xers were told that most of them were destined to be losers. So the whole idea of an Xer was I want to be different from my peers. I want to be that one person who is the active investor who goes the opposite direction from all of my loser peers. But that whole idea of this great peer orientation among millennials, and the idea of wanting a more ordered world, and also I think this turning away from democracy itself, which I think a lot of us find most disturbing.

By the way, this isn’t just in America, this is around the world. It’s in Latin America, it’s in southern Europe, it’s in South Asia. The rising generation increasingly sees democracy as a way of being tied to proceduralism, tied to airing and discussion of every issue but never about changing anything, which is why you see the rise of populist and authoritarian leaders around the world today. Not only is it not primarily in the United States we see this, it’s really the United States probably does not as much reflect that trend as many other countries around the world.

There’s another thing we can get to by the way of how generational cycles are increasingly becoming global. Why is it that so many generations now have similarities across national boundary lines?

[00:22:52] Kevin

Well, why is that? Why do you think that’s the case?

[00:22:54] Neil

I think it’s because the major events are increasingly becoming synchronous, the historical events, the Great Depression World War Two, which was our last fourth turning, it was a fourth turning for most of the world. Certainly, all the English-speaking countries, all of Europe, including Russia, at that time the Soviet Union, as well as southern Europe, you think of India and the partition, you think of China and Japan and Korea. They were all involved. This was a huge conflagration.

Then roughly 30,40 years later, you had a great youth awakening around the world. It wasn’t just in Berkeley or Columbia that we saw boomers in rebellion. It was in Paris, it was in Berlin, it was in Rome and Milan, it was with the Red Brigades and “anni di piombo”, the Years of Lead in Italy, it was in Prague, remember and the Prague Spring. It was in China, where you at a Red Guard generation in the Cultural Revolution trying to throw out 2000 years of Confucian culture. It was in Santiago, it was in Mexico City.

In every place, you saw youth rebelling against overly strong institutions that their war-winning parents had built, and it was often accompanied by horrendous massacres of young people. Think about Mexico, the famous massacre in Mexico City in ’68. It was horrible. Hundreds of young people, students died there. But this was happening around the world, this conflict, this generational conflict between young people who wanted more freedom from older people who wanted to impose very tough, strict authoritarian institutions.

So my point is that this has become more global. I think the United States, America, for various reasons we discussed, has the longest track record because of how we were set up. Originally, with colonies and how we were born as a nation, we have the longest and most regular track record of these generational turnings, but I think increasingly we see that elsewhere in the world.

[00:25:19] Kevin

I want to get to when the fourth turning started. One thought I had was that with America, people came here specifically so they could have an experience that was different than their previous generation. They literally came because they wanted their life to be different. It was the motivating driving force behind your theory. So it kind of makes sense that we see these cycles most clearly in the US relative to different places. But let’s talk about the current era of the fourth turning. You believe that it started with the global financial crisis in 2008. Why is that event so important?

[00:26:11] Neil

Every fourth turning starts with the catalyst, and a catalyst is a huge event which discredits existing institutions and their ability to provide security to their populations and demoralizes societies and leads to this initial period of extreme loss of trust. So yeah, it’s a very individualized world, but we no longer feel very happy about it.

You remember back in the 1980s, the third turning, the light motif was Francis Fukuyama and the end of history, and basically, markets and individualism had spread throughout the world and governments would just fade away and we’d be deracinated individuals, nomads, contracting with each other on our computers. That was it. No great ideas were left. We hardly figured out how everything was going to happen forever and ever, and so we had all these myriad choices and there’d be no community left. It’s sort of the ultimate vision of a third turning on steroids.

You have to think that back in the first turning was the first turning on steroids. It was kind of George Orwell’s 1984, which came out during that period. But each turning has its own exaggerated epitome. In other words, if you just keep going in this direction forever, that’s where you go. It’s almost as though the generation coming of age just gives rise to more and more generations that are increasingly more exaggerated forms of itself. So the generation after boomers would be even more like boomers, and after that, they’d be like super, super boomers.

[00:27:56] Kevin

That’s quite important, Neil, because you talk about this in the book. We are linear thinkers, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about now. It’s like, okay, here’s what’s going on now, let’s just project more of that into the future. Because of that, we’re always surprised when that doesn’t happen, when there’s a cycle, it’s not linear, it catches us by surprise. The speed that it happens catches us by surprise. So it’s not just that the cycle reemerges. It’s that it reemerges is much faster than we expect.

[00:28:33] Neil

It happens in these increments which are basically related to the length of the phase of life. Two things happen simultaneously when we exit one turning and enter another, and that is we’re both surprised at the change of the mood of the era, and we’re also simultaneously surprised by the change in the nature and collective personality of the new rising generation. Those two come together.

It’s like back when boomers finally got to Reagan and morning again in America, they began to look around and notice things were really different. It was The Big Chill. Do you remember the movie? You remember the Big Chill, right? Suddenly, wow, what happened to the revolution, man? They looked around and simultaneously they saw these Gen Xers. It was Michael Jordan and Michael Dell and Michael J. Fox. Do you remember? With the Wall Street Journal under his arm and they’re wearing the tie. So suddenly, whoa, what’s happening here?

[00:29:37] Kevin

I’m embarrassed to say, I had a little bit of Michael J. Fox in me when I started university, because it was all about that I grew up with capitalism versus communism in the Cold War and it felt like we had constrained ourselves. So I bought in, initially, to the free market, everyone from South ethos, so it took me a while to see the problems with that, so I fully understand it. So did the GFC usher in that kind of…?

[00:30:11] Neil

The GFC ushered in the catalyst. Let me just remind you, the GFC was very similar to Black Thursday, the great crash in October of 1929, which was actually also a global crash. So we’ve seen this before. October 1929 was a catalyst for the last fourth turning. In fact, financial crashes have been at least somewhat related to the timing of earlier fourth turnings.

The crash of 1857 had a very interesting relationship to Lincoln’s election. He probably wouldn’t have been elected without that crash, interestingly enough, because it turned a lot of the particularly Pennsylvanians, some of the big Mid-Atlantic states, made them more likely to vote for a Republican who was more in favor of state intervention in the economy, basically. Also, the Great Crash of London, in 1772, came very close before the Tea Party, and that was caused by actually with a big famine in India.

It’s a long story Kevin, but ultimately, to bail out the East Indian company, the British actually cut the price of tea and allowed it to be imported directly from India into Boston and Philadelphia and all the ports of the colonies without paying any imports to Britain. This was designed to first of all bail out the East India Company and as almost a favor to the colonies. We’ll give you this tea actually cheaper, but we will put a tiny tax on it to preserve the principle.

But of course, that wasn’t good enough for Sam Adams and all the Patriots. The tea may be cheaper, but it still has the original sin of a tax on it. But what really did it was the fact that all of these London banks wanted to call in their loans, particularly for the planters in the south. Now, the planters can only sell their tobacco or whatever they were selling, indigo or rice or whatever they were selling, they can only sell it to their London factors. So they felt trapped to these factors.

Now suddenly, all these banks were calling for specie repayment, and they were always in debt right because you couldn’t build any English manufacturers in the colonies, you had to import them. Of course, these are plantera. They weren’t as wealthy as British nobility, but they liked their fine things so they had to import all this stuff from London. They were chronically in debt.

So suddenly, what happened is that the London bankers wanted payment in gold, gold or silver for all the loans because you call your loans in a crisis, and they couldn’t. No doubt a lot of these patriots in the south, these rich planters, much more favorable to the Patriot cause I think for interesting reasons.

But look, every crisis has a catalyst. It was the Tea Party and the Coercive Acts in 1773, it was the election of Lincoln and particularly the Confederate response to it. It was the great crash and the huge change in America that was causing the later use of the Hoover administration and the election of FDR and the New Deal, and it was the GFC ultimately giving rise to the second to milepost in the fourth turning, which is the regeneracy; which is the fact that people move beyond their shock and distrust. In the beginning, they’re refining themselves as larger groups to try to deal with this change and very often this comes with realigning elections. Realigning elections in America always occurred during awakenings and crises.

[00:34:15] Kevin

So the regeneracy in this fourth turning was 2016?

[00:34:21] Neil

Yeah, it was 2016. It was the Trump-Clinton election. In that election, we saw the Republican party turn, I don’t want to say permanently but on a long-term basis, toward populism, particularly populism around education as a differentiator. A lot of the Democrats who were non-college Democrats who had voted for Clinton and Obama became fully in the Trump camp, and the GOP lost the educated suburban voters who started voting for Democrats. We’ve just seen that repeated now in every single election since 2022. It’s interesting.

Political scientists are beginning to talk about the seventh period of political realignment. The sixth was either Nixon or Reagan back in the awakening, and the earlier one was FDR in the early 1930s. You go back, McKinley-Bryan during the previous awakening and then you have Lincoln during the Civil War. You can keep on going back but these are all the great realigning elections. They occur during awakenings or they occur during crises, and the ones in crises are the most significant because what they always are synchronized with are these periods of sudden intense polarization.

Polarization is always an aspect of fourth turnings. We’re surprised by the polarization today, right? Not only surprised, I think we’re numbed by it. I think we’re penned in. We have problems actually dealing with the polarization.

[00:35:57] Kevin

Well, that I think goes back to your point of speed. It feels like it started and then it gathered strength, and all of a sudden, we find ourselves 10 years into it or however long and it’s like, wow, this is intensifying, it’s not going back. I guess the question is, is that polarization a reaction to the lack of uncertainty in the environment, that people find their tribe and pull together because it’s a way to kind of create some security and safety in a broader, less safe world?

[00:36:41] Neil

Remember what we talked about before. In fourth turnings, the public is order seeking. So, of course it wants community. Who wants community more than millennials? Think about FOMO, think about fears of loneliness. You talk about either millennial young women or young men, loneliness is the thing that most disturbs them, the idea of being unattached. So the idea of attaching yourself to something. Look, what are the two? Right now we have red zone versus blue zone, obviously, and it’s so strong at an affinity. So hated is the opposite side that people are sorting themselves geographically into different communities.

We now see elections where only three or four states are up for grabs. Presidents don’t even campaign in most states anymore. There’s no reason to. The number of landslide counties, as a share of all counties is increasing. We increasingly regard living next to someone with the opposite political views as the one thing we would most like to avoid in our daily life.

We have a stronger desire to avoid that than living with someone of another race, another religion, you name any other possible thing, but that idea. When you are looking at dating sites, what is the one thing that people don’t want to date? It’s someone with radically different political views much more than anything else socially. So this is now dividing people today, but it was no different in the 1930s.

If you were a Republican, you thought of the 1930s as the red decade. But if you were a Democrat, and you believed in the New Deal and were proud of the Popular Front, you thought of the 1930s as the fascist decade, and there are reasons for both names. Fascism was taking over a whole bunch of countries in Eastern Europe, it was on the march in Asia. Obviously, it was the red decade because a lot of dissatisfied workers and young people were joining the Communist Party, taking their orders from Moscow, including, by the way, the greatest generation as young adults.

I think we saw that in the new movie Oppenheimer that came out. It was very interesting. I think it brought to America’s awareness the fact that these young Americans, who all joined the armed forces after Pearl Harbor and conquered half the world, we forget that a lot of them had been card-carrying communist members, and many of the most educated of them. Many of them were also signing Oxford pledges pledging even as late as 1937 never to fight in a war declared by their country because the memory of World War One was so bad.

This is something, Kevin, that I think is very important. To understand that, when we think about history, we often tell a narrative which is very comforting because we already know how everything turns out. So we think about the greatest generation. We think of them as all on board with the whole project of World War Two and everything that it created from the time they were little kids. Well, they did have some of that. I think they were, like millennials today, a community-oriented generation. They voted by overwhelming majorities for FDR and the New Deal.

An estimated well over 80% of first-time voters in ’32 and ’36 voted for FDR. Those are amazing margins. They did like the idea of a national community and they joined these WPA and the CCC, building dams and planting trees and all these things that boomers hated them for building later on. But the point is, they were a great builder generation but they also had features of them that rendered them controversial later. One of them was how late they agreed with the idea of going to war. The other was how many of them supported the left, the radical left, the revolutionary left.

But here’s my point, you had one side of America who, they called their president Franklin, Stalin or Roosevelt, and then the other side who thought that democracy and capitalism were doomed. In fact, during the 1930s it was every bit is hopeless as today, even more hopeless. Everyone thought that democracy and capitalism had no future. It was either going to be communism or Fascism. It was going to be one of the two.

[00:41:30] Kevin

We start hearing that a lot amongst the younger generation today. I was thinking as you were talking about the polarization, going back to your framework for how fourth turnings, how they end or what the peak point is. You say that it can be that the polarization continues and then you end up with a civil conflict; civil war, like what we had in the 1800s, or you can have this quite partisan divided society that is suddenly met with an existential external threat, and that is so great that it wipes away the internal divisions and unites the country, which sounds like what happened in World War Two.
You had a divided country, still divided up until maybe even the eve of the war, and then once the war happened, there is this coming together and then the society that emerged afterwards retained that unity.

[00:42:40] Neil

That’s what we sometimes call a second regeneracy, meaning the first regeneracy was really FDR’s inauguration in 1932 and so you had the two sides right. But then you had a second regeneracy later on when FDR was repudiated after 1936. The court-packing scheme and suddenly the sit down strikes, the labor radicalism actually alarmed the public, and then ultimately, most obviously, a further depression in ’37 and ’38. So the Republicans surged back in the elections of 1938.

FDR found itself much more involved in foreign policy, and that New Deal then was kind of over. Yet by 1940, America was still in the Great Depression. Long-term bond yields actually reached their lows in 1940. Early in 1940, the economy was still deflating, unemployment was still in double digits. I think almost all Americans would have said despite the New Deal, we’re still in the Great Depression. Well, what happened? FDR actually changed his constituency. He shifted away from a little bit the more peace-oriented Democrats in the north, and he shifted to the Southerners.

On the way, he gave way on a lot of civil rights issues, I should point out. But he did want to bring the entire country together, he had to. As you know, I’m sure you know that the southerners controlled all the committee chairmanships. He couldn’t get anything through Congress without the Southerners being on board and that was a very important part of the Democratic Party. It turned out the Southerners were totally on board with arming World War Two, the Southerners loved the idea of protecting the United States militarily, a lot of that spending would go to the South.

So he brought the South back on board and the big change began to happen in the summer of 1940 with the fall of France and the beginning of the battle of Britain. Suddenly, the mood in America began to change. No longer any of those Oxford pledges. We suddenly appeared and felt very alone in the world and that’s when I think most notably, FDR put through the Two Navy Act; the biggest expansion ever in the history of the Navy. We basically doubled the size of the Navy and we basically started laying the keels of these Iowa class battleships and S6 class aircraft carriers.

If we hadn’t done it that year, where would we have been in 1943 when America was down only one aircraft carrier left by the time we were invading Guadalcanal? Suddenly, these big S6 aircraft carriers became important. So it’s amazing, if you think about it in retrospect. That early moment when we were able to get that consensus, we started moving in that direction and suddenly, what happened too, was that the left started coming on board the idea of fighting fascism worldwide, and that was a huge change. So not only the South, but a lot of the radical North came on board so we were all on board. Even the South, they didn’t mind sending Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union.

You know the rest of the story, right? We suddenly became a unified nation against all odds. Who would have thought it back in 1936 that we would do that? Now, that doesn’t always happen as you know.

Civil War, it just absolutely went… Although there was an interesting episode that I wrote in the book. It’s interesting by way of example. William Seward, who missed being elected president, he wanted to be the Republican candidate for president. He was passed over in favor of Abraham Lincoln. Well, Lincoln was very gracious. He knew that Seward was a big, powerful politician in New York. He appointed him as Secretary of State. Seward wrote the famous April 1st memorandum very shortly after Lincoln had assumed the presidency. William Seward basically advised Lincoln, thinking about exactly what we’re now talking about, Kevin. Seward advised Lincoln, I think you should immediately declare war on Spain, England, and France.

[00:47:17] Kevin

Find someone to attack.

[00:47:19] Neil

Exactly. It was kind of like, let’s give America something to rally behind. So everyone worried of course about Fort Sumter. It was just sitting there, the South hadn’t yet fired on it. That would come about two weeks later. You understand his mindset though, right? That’s how his mind was working. Now, Lincoln, he read it, responded politely, and I think Lincoln said, that’s ridiculous. It is far too late for this, they’ve already succeeded. It wouldn’t work. At that point, it was too late.

It’s interesting, however, that all of our great fourth turning crises have always had a dimension of both the external and the internal in it. The American Revolution was filled with both internal and external dimensions. It was external in the sense that we’re throwing off King George’s authority, the authority of Parliament. But it was internal in the sense that most of the killing was loyalists against patriots within the colonies, and ultimately, although ironically, the Patriots ultimately had to bring in France to finish the war.

[00:48:31] Kevin

When you think about our current situation, you and I have talked before, and also, I’ve heard you speak on other podcasts, and you’re agnostic. You basically say I don’t know if we’re headed toward a civil conflict or if it’s an external conflict, and that’s fair enough. I wonder if given the global nature of what we’re talking about here, is it more likely that the cycle, or is it possible that the cycles align so that we have essentially almost a replay of the Cold War; we have a global conflict where it’s kind of the Democratic West against I don’t even know what. You could say China or you could say the non-democratic rest of the world. Is that a possibility for synchronizing the global cycles?

[00:49:33] Neil

Well, I hate to say this, Kevin, that might actually be one of the better scenarios. Meaning this, one thing I really worry about, and I just say that now with the situation with Trump, the party’s likelihood of what we’re going to see in 2024. I mean, look, we’re looking at this right now. I’m thinking that one of the terrible things about an intense civic conflict which paralyzes government, paralyzes the executive branch today, which is different from earlier fourth turnings is America’s critical role of the executive branch in maintaining orders throughout the globe right now.

Imagine what would happen if we had a six-month or a year period when the executive branch or the military around the world couldn’t function. Just imagine today. Now, in 1860, it didn’t really matter. America played no role in the world. It wasn’t really a danger in the late 1930s, early 1940s, but even then, America didn’t really play that much of a role, although, obviously, our policy toward oil purchases certainly influenced Japan I think to attack Pearl Harbor.

But today, our role is so huge that what I fear is that even a temporary period of incapacity would cause tremendous turmoil in the world. If extended long enough, you can imagine if a conflict actually broke out. What always happens in a civil conflict? The losing side always wants to bring in foreign allies. That’s how it all works. That’s what the Patriots did. We brought in France to help. Losers always want to bring in, that’s what the Confederacy wanted. The Confederacy wanted Britain and French help.

I think Lincoln put an end to that with his victory at Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation. So I think Lincoln dealt with that threat very skillfully. But what I’m saying is this time, imagine a world war that doesn’t involve the United States. To me, that would be the ultimate nightmare where some foreign powers are actually invited to participate in a conflict going on in the United States. That would be some late 2020s scenario. It would be so nightmarish, I hate to even think about it.

[00:52:14] Kevin

You can see the contours of the end in the sense that we talked about the millennials. That’s the generation, I said right at the beginning, the generation that’s going to be most important for us. I’m basing that on your theory that that’s the generation that’s ultimately going to take over and lead.

[00:52:33] Neil

They won’t lead, but they will be the motive force. They will be carrying out the orders. They’ll be doing all the work. The leaders will be Xers and even boomers still.

[00:52:43] Kevin

Okay. I guess what I was going to say, tell me if I’m wrong here, was that this desire for order amongst millennials, I guess what I’m saying when I see the contours, you get to the point where they’re like, that’s enough. This disorder has gone far enough. I know it’s a risk-averse generation, but it’s kind of like the greatest generation. They finally say, okay, it’s time to finish this and we’re all in on finishing it.

[00:53:17] Neil

Cut off all the debate, cut off all the process, cut up all the safeguards, get rid of the guardrails, and you see that increasingly. Who wants to get patience with the Supreme Court anymore, who you had patience with a filibuster? Just manage the whole thing like it were a subsidiary of Amazon or the Pentagon. Look, what institutions do we still have trust in? Amazon and the Pentagon. They can get stuff done. So why don’t we just get rid of the facade? Get rid of the facade, just go for it, because who trusts Congress anymore? Who trusts any of those institutions?

This is very worrisome, Kevin. It is true. Look, in any great conflict, societies become more authoritarian. It just goes with the nature of their territory. You have some urgent thing, you have to start making decisions, you have to start exercising triage. A lot of stuff you’re just not going to worry about. You’re really worried about surviving. Lincoln got rid of habeas corpus. Lincoln did a lot of things.

He was asked after the war before he died and he basically said, look, if I hadn’t gotten rid of habeas corpus and a few things that were in the Bill of Rights, we would have lost our country and there would have been no Bill of Rights. You understand the thinking behind that. That’s where you go in a crisis. In a crisis, you basically make hard decisions. Xers will be making those decisions by the way.

[00:54:49] Kevin

But they’ll be motivated by the millennials desire for order, safety.

[00:55:00] Neil

Living down their own mistakes, and that too. Remember that these Xers are raising their kids, their own kids, many of them post millennials, very protective. So a lot of Xers are raising their kids the opposite of the way they were raised. No longer latchkey childhoods for them. Xers know where their kids are 24/7, you know what I mean? But that’s the mindset among Xers. It’s like, yeah, all this freewheeling individual, all this free range stuff that we experienced was pretty traumatic.

I think if you think about how they’re going to do that, I think Xers will be a very divided generation. Let me say, Kevin, this is actually an archetype. We call them the nomad archetype. In many ways, they’re the most fascinating of all generational types. They are the children of the awakening and we see them always emerging with the same collective personality; cynical, pragmatic, survivalist, getting the job done with not a lot of words, very much the opposite of the boomer, what we call the prophet archetype.

Following the generation of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau and Walt Whitman, lofty words and lofty expressions, great ideas, feminist coming, founders, religion, you just think of all the images that come to your mind with the transcendental generation. After them came the gilded generation of George Armstrong Custer and Ulysses Grant and General Sheridan. This was a generation of metal and muscle, and they got the job done.

They were very often very torn internally about their loyalties. They didn’t know whether to be loyal to the old regime, the new regime. Some of them became radical libertarians, never wanted to adjust to this new, more powerful social order. Others put themselves in its service, like George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower, they went along as midlife generals in World War Two forging this new powerful America, getting us through the World War Two, obviously.

Think of Eisenhower afterwards presiding over the first turning, a very avuncular president proud of this great leviathan America that he had created. But a fascinating, turbulent story that nomads always had. Their life story is always the most amazing, filled with the huge ups and downs of the economic crashes and then going into midlife and being buffeted by these huge political and civic crises.

In many ways, they have the most picturesque or adventurous or exciting stories. I think the rest of the extra lifecycle, will it be a lot like the lost generation and their amazing lifecycle, the generation that really grew old, entered old age during the 1950s and early ’60s.

[00:58:20] Kevin

So you put us midway through the fourth turning. Obviously, this is all quite imprecise, but you’re syncing over this era that has another, I don’t know, potentially eight years or something like that to go.

[00:58:41] Neil

You’re looking for full resolution in the early 2030s.

[00:58:46] Kevin

What’s that going to mean, again, not asking for any specific predictions here, but from a financial point of view, you say fourth turnings can be triggered by a crisis, which this one was. Presumably, we’re looking at 10 years of increasing volatility in your view in markets, but also, I guess that you would expect governments to be much more aggressive in their control of markets, in their willingness to marshal resources, even private resources to fight whatever conflict emerges. It feels like it’s going to be a very challenging stage for people who have wealth and investments to protect that.

[00:59:33] Neil

Well, that’s part of the greater equality that comes at the end of the fourth turning and through the subsequent first turning. Part of the inequality is just the fact that the devaluation of assets or the confiscation or distraction of assets by the plutocrats. Think of the Civil War, what happened to all the slave owners. You go through and imagine what happened to all the very rich people during the crash of the ’30s and then the ’40s. The other thing is inflation.

Government racks up huge liabilities, and government can never pay with current taxation. It always has to borrow tremendously. Inflation is one of the ways of getting out from under those liabilities either in the fourth turning or sometimes in the first turning that follows it. So that makes nominal fixed income assets very problematic in my opinion, because inflation is always, and I say always, a repudiation of those debts, and I would say more than ever today because our public liabilities are very high even before any major conflicts.

I think in this fiscal year, we’re going to get 100% of GDP in publicly held debt. That’s where we were at the end of World War Two. Think of that. We’re before that. In fact, I think there are pros and cons. If you look at today’s fourth turning relative to early ones, I think in terms of economic performance, we’re obviously better off than we were during the Great Depression. The Great Depression was obviously much deeper. It was an enormously V-shaped recession. We got a huge recovery in ’34, ’35, ’36. But I think obviously, we’ve experienced less volatility than that. That’s much better than we experienced back then.

On the other hand, I think in some ways, we are worse off. The GI generation, as they looked forward into the future, government was still very small. There was enormous fiscal room. In other words, if you wanted to build all kinds of new institutions, you had all this free space to build it. You’re dealing with federal government that was maybe 5% of GDP. You could build that up to 20% of GDP and all that free space. You can imagine a growing economy, how much resources that gave you. Today, we’re all full, you know what I mean?

What’s alarming is, of course, as you well know, Kevin, our government really isn’t so much a government, it’s sort of an insurance company with an army, as it’s often been said. We spend very little money, particularly at the national level, on any civic-oriented purpose. It’s all just payments to individuals and an armed force. Well, how are you going to get fiscal room? What happens in every fourth turning? There’s going to be triage. I do think among boomers and Xers, there’s going to be a lot of giving up that’s going to be required.

[01:02:55] Kevin

You actually say that the boomers are going to do that voluntarily.

[01:02:58] Neil

They won’t do it happily, but I think they will do it. I think that they will, as a generation, they will give up many of their fiscal promises in order to regain moral authority. We see that happening repeatedly with these generations. In other words, they don’t mind the sacrifice, just so long as their kids don’t back down and actually step up to the plate and keep the country together. This is much the opposite of what happens during an awakening when the trade is in the reverse.

During the late ’60s and 1970s, when boomers were, in the eyes of the GI generation, ruining the culture, celebrating selfishness and drugs and sex, just everything that was disorderly to the junior citizens who were at that time becoming senior citizens. This was a first generation of senior citizens, they’re suddenly getting all these promised rewards from Social Security, and their presidents had just legislated Medicare and Medicaid and they went through in 1964 and ’65.

I think the trade-off was this. The GI sensed that they couldn’t withstand these new cultural currents from their boomer kids. So, they went off to live in these age-segregated retirement communities where young people weren’t even allowed to come near so they could hear their Benny Goodman music. They could hear their kind of culture and they could leave their doors open, and they could trust each other as long as they didn’t have to be around their kids, and they let the boomers take over the culture. But in return, boomers were going to give them every ounce of material reward that they had built for all those institutions.

So all of the post-Vietnam fiscal dividend went into Social Security and Medicare. We now introduced COLA indexing on Social Security, which hadn’t been there before but it was double indexed for a while. So the replacement levels hugely rose and everyone was okay with that. Even boomers had to be okay because they kept on saying that they weren’t into it from material things. So what was their argument? They kept claiming that there were higher values than material values. They had to kind of say, okay, it’s all right, you can hugely boost our future FICA taxes to pay all these benefits to retirees.

Finally, by the time Reagan was in the White House, they allowed Beach Boys to play there. You remember when Nancy Reagan…? But anyway, so the triumph was complete. The GI generation got all the material rewards. After all, who could argue against them? They had built this whole thing. They had won the war, they had built all this infrastructure, so they had the right. All these GI senior citizens, they all joined AARP and they all voted as a monolith, so they were very powerful civically, and most boomers said, that’s okay, we’ll take over the culture.

[01:06:05] Kevin

So now you think it will be, in some sense, a similar dynamic where the boomers will be like…

[01:06:13] Neil

It’s going to be the opposite dynamic. It’s going to be the opposite in the sense that boomers will be giving up.

[01:06:17] Kevin

They’ll be giving up. They’ll be acceding to the wishes of the younger generation.

[01:06:22] Neil

In that respect, but they will be keeping values in their own hands. In fact, I already think you see that happening in popular culture, if you just look at Hollywood how much boomers are still present in movies and just in recordings. Ask millennials what’s the best decade of music, a lot of them still say the ’60s.

[01:06:47] Kevin

Yeah, it’s a bit shocking to see my kids’ playlists in that regard.

[01:06:52] Neil

They know ’70s music better than I do. It’s absolutely shocking to me. But as a boomer in the late ’60s, I knew nothing about the 1930s and I didn’t want to, and no one my age wanted to know anything about the music of our parents. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said coming of age, he said this in the 1830s. He says, “We care not a whit about anything our parents said or thought or imagined.”

I think it’s the same with that kind of generation every time. It’s the transformation of values which is the focus of the prophet archetype coming of age during the awakening. They want to transform values. They don’t really care too much about civic institutions, and that really is the difference between awakenings and crises, second turnings and fourth turnings.

[01:07:51] Kevin

If we maybe just spend a few minutes here at the end talking about, you were talking a lot about crisis and volatility, but at the end of that, if the society successfully navigates it, is a rebirth and not only a rebirth, but things get done in first turnings, problems get solved in first turnings that you say were unimaginable at the end of the fourth turning. So the problems that we look at now and just kind of like this will never change, they could be solved in a decade or they could be solved in 15 years.

Now, it will be a traumatic process, but I do want to focus on that part of your book that societies can be, and are transformed, in ways that we can’t imagine. Do you have a sense for certain issues that we face now that might just get, I don’t want to say swept away, that’s too cavalier, but I’m thinking like homelessness, or gun violence or health insurance, infrastructure, all those things could be vastly different.

[01:09:07] Neil

Here are the big social trends, when you go to the end of the third turning, the beginning of the first turning. So if you started just before the fourth turning to just after the fourth turning, how does society change? Think about how America changed in the late 1920s when America was hardly governed at all in terms of national government, a very libertarian society, a very freewheeling culture, Hemingway’s Moveable Feast and the gin fizz crowd with Fitzgerald and Zelda, and you think about how we changed to the early 1950s, just a completely different society.

The government’s relationship to the economy, humanity’s relationship to technology, everything had changed, and how the culture changed. So think about that as we move from the LOs, the mortgage bubble, to the mid-2030s. So that’s kind of the same thing. So here are the big changes. The first is the change from individualism to community, and that’s sort of the overall shift. But here’s some of the individual shifts, we talk about this when I talk about the fourth turning as a social transformation.

The other is from privilege to equality, we become a much more equal society, not just in terms of outward measures like Gini coefficients on wealth and income, but also just the whole social ethic. The famous book the author Whyte talked about in his Organization Man, the social ethic, it was a great thing to fit in, to please your neighbors, please your employees. Everyone wanted to be thought of as being a helpful person.

It’s amazing to remember that back on the 1950s, the soft drink ads appeal to civility and niceness. It was like, “Have a Pepsi, please.” I love that one. It’s not like, “Do the do, jerk.” But no, have a Pepsi please or be sociable, have a Pepsi. That was actually a big ad that was in 1956. Be sociable, have a Pepsi. My point is, it’s culture. It’s not just government policy. It’s what people expect to happen. The next thing is a change from defiance to authority. Leaders are authoritative and people follow.

We remember back then in the 1950s, one thing that progressives might like about the 1950s in retrospect is that people trusted the experts. They actually did what they told them to. It’s amazing in retrospect. You had the right coach and he had a credential and people actually did it because that was important to survival at a time of crisis. That was the lesson learned.

We go to deferring social problems to permanently investing in alleviating them. So from deferral to permanence is huge and I think that’s the idea of creating a new republic, and suddenly the huge new infrastructure. We rebuild the outer world from scratch not just to solve current problems but to avoid future problems. Remember, after World War Two, we didn’t just win the war. We created the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, Bretton Woods, all these institutions to forego further problems and to manage a global system that would provide prosperity for our kids and grandkids.

It worked for decades, and it provided this enormous amount of prosperity that all of us grew up experiencing. But this idea of solving permanent problems and using crisis as an excuse to do that is one of the most counterintuitive things about fourth turnings. We never solve our problem. Our biggest problems, we never solve on bright sunny days when everyone feels comfortable. We always do it on dark stormy nights when our backs are against the wall. That’s when we write our new constitutions. That’s when we start regulating the national banks, or creating a federal currency, or creating social security, you name it. Whenever we come up with these huge new ways of shaping our national community, it’s always at a time when it seems like the least likely time to do it.

Finally, in the culture from irony to convention, and that’s why the culture of the 1950s seems so utterly different from the culture of the 1920s, so cloying almost. Remember the doo-wop music and the sophisticated essays by young writers who were trying to fit in and say something cute. It was an incomprehensible decade, culturally, when young people did test the limits of the culture but they did so in surprisingly modest ways through Bauhaus or new design architecture or beat poetry. It was testing the waters very carefully. Only later on during the awakening did all the floodgates open, but that’s typical of these periods.

In the last part of the book, I talk a lot about first turnings and what they feel like. I would say that first turnings and what they achieved, first of all, there’s no such thing as a good or bad turning. It’s always a compromise. You’re foregoing some things to get other things. Obviously, a period of greater conformity, when people feel they have to fit in, there’s a cost to that. A lot of us wouldn’t like living in that period.

A lot of us who are going to be older then might have second thoughts, might have difficulty adjusting to that. But it will be a period when the younger generation will feel energized, very optimistic, just as the GI generation did in the 1950s. They felt they were building a new world, and they had absolutely no question as a generation. This was vastly superior to the one they had experienced as children or coming of age. These are the new golden ages, Kevin.

If any age could merit the age golden age, it would have been the period after the American Constitution, the era of good feelings, James Monroe and presidents renominated and elected by acclamation or the period of the Victorian high of industrial progress and conformity after the Civil War, or the American high. Obviously, there’s a lot of things, in retrospect we think were costly about that, particularly the seeding of individualism to conformity, a lot of the social problems, sexism, racism, among many of them that we look back on and we think that’s a terrible cause. But in other ways, they were very important. As I point out, even in the area of sex and race, they’re sort of ambiguous.

Non-whites actually enjoyed tremendous economic standard of living gains in the late ’40s to 1950s and early 60s, not just in absolute terms but relative to whites. There was absolutely unprecedented prosperity and that era ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ’65, which finally was an attempt to guarantee the kind of equality which had been promised by the 14th amendment but never actually enforced in America. Sometimes I ask people, would we legislate the Civil Rights Act today with partisanship in America?

Sexuality is actually another interesting case because today we talk about, millennials often talk about, the problems of sex in their own life. One thing we can say is that the grainy Ed Sullivan era, Kevin, is that young people were certainly more enthusiastic about sex back then than they are today. Young adults were doing a lot more of it.

[01:17:38] Kevin

Maybe if the only alternative was watching Ed Sullivan.

[01:17:41] Neil

That’s right. You couldn’t even see what Elvis was doing beneath his waist. Exactly. But there’s no question that turnings involve trade-offs. One thing that we focused on, particularly in the unraveling and when Xers were going to see Pleasantville, the movie which made fun of the 1950s I think very effectively, it was a very funny movie, is that we learned to become very good at focusing and achieving inner perfection; knowing what we were about and being very successful in our own personal lives and becoming very good at self-actualizing your own personal potential.

But one thing that we sense that we’re very bad at today is becoming actual competent communities that are actually capable of carrying out common tasks, actually just forming livable communities and actually creating livable spaces that are nice to live in and communities where you feel safe and comfortable living with others. I think that it’s in that respect that we miss something of what people were able to do during the first turnings in American history. That’s how the cycle turns. There’s a yin and yang to this, and what we most miss, we’re likely to get back in the not-too-distant future.

[01:19:12] Kevin

Well, Neil, that’s a great place to leave it. I really appreciate you joining us and bringing your vast knowledge of history and generational psychology. You say in the book that there’s nothing worse than a fourth turning except not having a fourth turning, and that is the yin and the yang. The book is great. I really recommend it. You talk about conflict, but you also talk about the good stuff that could potentially come out of it. Once again, thanks so much for joining us and I really wish you all the best.

[01:19:53] Neil

Great. Thank you, Kevin. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[01:19:56] Kevin

With that, I will pass it back over to Niels.

[01:19:59] Niels

Thank so much Neil and Kevin for a very insightful conversation about one of the most important topics we currently face, namely, how we will experience the last part of the current fourth turning and prepare for the awakening that will follow. Of course, the conversation was also focused on the similarities between the generations that went through the last fourth turning and how it will be my own two wonderful millennial kids that will be part of the generation that will build the world up again after we’ve gone through the destruction that lies ahead.

From an investment point of view, those of you who have followed the podcast for some time will know that I also fear that interest rates and inflation can go much higher than most experts believe, so it was interesting for me to hear that this is also what Neil believes based on all his work. Finally, as Neil stressed towards the end, the most important thing we can do to prepare for the next 10 years or so is to make sure that we are members of great and strong communities.

I just want to say a big thank you to all of you for being part of the TTU community. It means a lot to all of us who produce the content every week. That’s it for today. Make sure you go and follow Neil’s and Kevin’s work, as well as getting a copy of both of their excellent books, because as you can tell from today’s conversation, so many of these ideas and topics are not being discussed enough on mainstream media.

From Kevin and me, thanks so much for listening. We look forward to being back with you on the next episode. In the meantime, take care of yourself and take care of each other.

[01:21:47] Ending

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