Trump's First 100 Days and What Comes After | Neil Howe

Episode 413 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/trumps-first-100-days-fourth-turning-neil-howe is the second episode in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with some of the smartest and most plugged-in people they know to help them navigate the once-in-a-century economic, political, and geopolitical reordering that is currently underway. In this episode Kofinas and Williams speak with historian and author of "The Fourth Turning" Neil Howe about his and his co-author William Strauss' seminal generational theory framework. They assess how well it has tracked Trump's first 100 days in office, how well it explains the upheavals we are experiencing in both Western and Eastern societies, and what reasoned conjectures we can make about how events will unfold from here. Access this episode by subscribing to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/26/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. What you're about to hear is the second episode in a podcast series hosted by me and my co-host, Grant Williams, titled "The Hundred Year Pivot." In it, we speak with some of the smartest and most plugged in people we know to help position ourselves, our organizations, our families, and our portfolios for the once in a century economic, political, and geopolitical reordering

• 0:41Demetri Kofinas?

  that we believe is currently underway. In today's conversation, Grant and I speak with historian and author of The Fourth Turning, Neil Howe, about his and his co-author William Strauss's seminal generational theory framework. We assess how well it has tracked Trump's first 100 days in office, how well it explains the upheavals we are experiencing in both Western and Eastern societies, and what reasoned conjectures we can make about how events will unfold from here. This conversation sets the context for all the episodes that will follow in this series. If you want early access to them, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed so you can listen to this episode and other subscriber-only content on your mobile

• 1:26Demetri Kofinas?

  device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly thoughtful and clarifying conversation with our guest, Neil Howe.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Welcome everybody to the second in our new series, The Hundred Year Pivot, although technically, I guess this is really the first step of our journey. But joining me to take that journey, my co-host and good friend, Demetri Kofinas. Hello, my friend. How are you?

• 1:56Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm doing great, Grant. How are you?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I am just tickety-boo, as we say here in England. Tickety-boo.

• 2:02Demetri Kofinas?

  What does that mean, tickety-boo?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  You know what? I have no idea. I think it's a-

• 2:05Demetri Kofinas?

  I don't know how you guys have all these phrases. I'm always learning you British phrases from my British friends.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one, that's not going to help you out in too many situations, I don't think. But it's a very, I think it's just a very upbeat, old-fashioned way of saying everything's-

• 2:18Demetri Kofinas?

  Half the audience is looking it up right now.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 2:22Demetri Kofinas?

  Half the audience is Google searching tickety-boo.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I guarantee you in the 1950s, there were all kinds of like music hall songs about the called tickety boo with a guy playing a ukulele or a washboard singing about it. But we don't want to do that. We could sit here and do vaudeville acts, you and I, but I think we've got a much more important mission to undergo here, and that is following this trail we've started. And today we get to interview our first guest, and really the man who is, I guess, in many ways, responsible for this, Demetri, Neil Howe.

• 2:49Demetri Kofinas?

  That's right. I mean, it's right there in the name of the show, The Hundred Year Pivot. And that hundred years is really represents the 80 to 100 year cycle that is in the the four turning cycles of Neil Howe's framework, generational theory framework.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you and I have talked about this for many years. We've, we've both had Neil on our shows to talk about it. We it's a thread that's run through a lot of the conversations that we've had, and it's always kind of been sitting there in the background. And, you know, the last, I don't know, I guess, maybe since Trump, maybe a little bit before that, this idea of a fourth turn, he just keeps cropping up and up and up to the point where you just can't ignore it anymore. And it's amazing how many people I've, I've had say to me, you know, I felt like I finally had to read that book. I've been putting it off because, you know, it looks pretty dense, but I feel like I can't avoid it anymore. And, you know, when they do, they're like, man, I wish I'd read that years ago. It's that kind of book. But it does seem to be everywhere now, this idea of a fourth turning.

• 3:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, you and I have talked about this before. I'm technically a millennial, but I'm on the cusp. You know, I was born in 1981. So I have this weird relationship to my own generation. And it really was the slightly younger millennials, those born maybe five to 10 years after me, who were the ones that kept telling me about the fourth turning. And I remember when they used to tell me about it years ago, I was like, I hate this book. I don't want to read this book. Everyone's telling me about it. But eventually I read it. And it's amazing because I also, one of the things I want to ask Neil when he gets on and we have a chance to start the conversation, is what it's been like for him to live through so many of the events that he and his co author, William Strauss, wrote about more than 30 years ago, starting with his book, Generations, and then with

• 4:28Demetri Kofinas?

  The Fourth Turning. So it's just been an incredibly influential book in the zeitgeist.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And as I was saying before that, it's important, seems to be growing rather than diminishing. You know, it's more of What Bill and Neil laid out as a framework happens, more and more people are looking for explanations for it and looking for some kind of guidance as to what happens next. And a lot of it, we don't know what's going to happen next, but a lot of the really good suggestions are in that book. And so what better way to begin this journey than than talk to Neil about generational theory?

• 4:59Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. And you know, the other thing is I've also, I had done an interview recently with George Friedman, who wrote a book called The Storm Before the Calm, which also relied on some of these generational theories. And so I'm seeing this cropping up more and more as a way to try and explain for people to build a framework to understand the changes that are that are happening today. And I do think it gives us some comfort. It gives me some comfort because it brings order to the chaos, to what feels like chaos. You know, I mean, that's really what Neil, I feel like, is telling us with his framework is he's saying, look, this feels chaotic when you're living through it, but it's actually, there's an order to it and that order is generational. And there are certain drivers and it happens every 80 to 100 years.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a terrific point because having read the book and having talked to Neil at length about this on multiple occasions, I find myself saying, ah, yeah, this is the fourth turning, I should expect this, quite often, in fact. And so whether it's a comfort or whether it gives you a sense that you actually understand what's going on, either way, it's been very helpful in calming my mind and helping me make kind of decisions that perhaps in the in the fog of the chaos, you might make poorer decisions.

• 6:14Demetri Kofinas?

  Likewise, likewise. And so I'm actually looking forward to being calmed down right now with Neil. So why don't we, why don't we bring him on?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Let's do that.

• 6:22Demetri Kofinas?

  Neil, welcome to the 100 Year Pivot.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Well, Dmitry, thank you for having me.

• 6:27Demetri Kofinas?

  Now, we're really excited, Neil. You're the first guest that we're going to have in this series to kick things off. And I was just telling Grant that I wanted to ask you, really right out of the gate, what it's been like for you to live through so many of the events that you and your co-author William Strauss wrote about more than 30 years ago in your book, Generations, and then later in The Fourth Turning? What has this period been like for you?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  No, it's interesting. You know, very often I, people ask me that and I say, well, you know, in this respect, we sort of anticipated this or that, or this or that. We're talking about the 2020s, obviously. But you know, at the same time, I feel disoriented like everyone else. I feel, what is America today? You know what I mean? Where is our constitution? And I don't mean that in a good or bad sense relative to either party or, you know, or either, you know, either faction. Because the signal characteristic of America today is being divided between two factions, uh, red and blue. And, you know, red is aggressively anti-blue now, sort of, you know, pulling out of the stops, you know, getting rid of enemies. You know, we all know where blue stands.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  And this is a new reality. And I, people often ask me, younger people ask me, when has America been like this? And I answer both as someone who's lived in earlier decades. You know, I, I remember being around in the seventies and the eighties and I can't ever remember anything remotely like this. And going back historically, it's hard to find, obviously, except the closest thing we have are these fourth turning episodes in our past, right? You really do have to go back to the 1930s and the 1850s and so on. These periods of incredible partisanship accompanied by the seeming likelihood of very large and rapid changes in our political institutions. That's where we are today.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying is that even as I see it and I recognize why we're here, I still find it disturbing. You know what I mean? It's sort of hard to take in.

• 8:29Demetri Kofinas?

  When you say like this, what do you mean exactly? What is this?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the rapid redefinition of institutions which we thought were never going to change. You know, we always thought that we had three branches of government. They were all strong. They were all participating in government. We all thought that there was a middle. As you know, the founding fathers of this country, when they set up the constitution, had no idea of political parties. That was actually a malady, the malady of faction, you know, according to the authors of The Federalist. But we grew to adopt parties, obviously, early on. But even with parties, there was always a very broad middle, you know, where the two parties overlapped. And that was actually assurance that no side would go too far, right?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  You couldn't alienate both the middle as well as the other party, right? And I think that kept everyone searching for a consensus. But there have been periods, these are the fourth turning periods we're talking about, where that consensus has evaporated. And we're in one of them right now, because right now, we're, we're thinking about, Congress seems to be written out of the Constitution. And it looks like very soon, a few weeks for some of these contempt cases are coming before the courts, and maybe a few months before the Supreme Court starts actually ruling on the merits of some of the big things that Trump is doing now, that very soon, we're going to see a confrontation between the executive and the judiciary. That's the third branch of our government.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  And it's likely that in some way, the judiciary could be rolled. And if that happens, of course, that could lead to very unpredictable consequences for, for our situation here domestically, politically, institutionally, constitutionally.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Neil, when I read the book and when I spoke to you about this, and when I, when I go back and revisit it and I look at the potted descriptions of the turnings, just to give people a vague idea of what they are. You know, the fourth turning, you characterize so beautifully about the fact that it's a period of conflict and turbulence and can, in many cases, lead to war. But then you talk about the fact that one characteristic about fourth turning is the tearing down of institutions that are no longer kind of fit for purpose and the, and the rebuilding and the first turning of, of new institutions that serve the people better. And from the time I read the book, which is many years ago now, to now, I've had in mind the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, and now NATO.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  And these kind of things make sense to me as institutions that were built in the last first turning and may no longer be fit for purpose. What I hadn't really thought about in terms of institutions in that particular bind are things like the three branches of the US government, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, you know, these, I never thought of them as institutions. They are institutional. But I guess because there's no bricks and mortar, there's no headquarters, there's no figurehead, there's no nothing of them, I never really thought about them as being vulnerable. And now, to your point there, and looking at what's happening with a lot of the lawfare going on in the US and some of the moves, as you say, on Team Red and Team Blue over

• 11:41Speaker 01

  the last several years, it feels to me like it has the potential to be a far more existential crisis when we look at America in particular, because it does have those two beautiful documents at the core of its existence. And if you start tearing at those, the way that we're seeing, it opens up a whole new set of questions, not how is the world put together and do we reverse globalization, but the question of what is America, even though people are kind of asking it, if you ask what is America within the context of maybe the Constitution, the Bill of Rights in the longer haul, that's a very, very different question we're asking.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  It is, it is. That's why I say I am taken aback often by what I see and trying to reinterpret it. However, I will say that it's always been part of our thesis, that this reshaping of government political institutions did include our core institutions and our understanding of the Constitution. Bruce Ackerman, who's a professor of constitutional history at Yale, has written about this. I mean, he's written several books about this, about how the whole history of the Constitution is a punctuated equilibrium. You know, we started with this bold new experiment, the miracle of seventeen eighty-eight, seventeen

• 13:00Speaker 02

  eighty-seven, eighty-eight, in Philadelphia, which was finally ratified. And then we went through a period of relative stasis. And then, of course, it was, we went through the Civil War and we had the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendment, right? And we decided a lot of issues that weren't decided, right? In other words, the supremacy clause, above all. It turned out states did not have the option of pulling out of this, right? Well, that was fundamental. And by the way, to underline how fundamental that is. That is a single question that people are asking about the EU. I mean, why is it that a single state like Hungary can just paralyze everything, right? In other words, EU hasn't yet settled that.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And the whole problem, to some extent, with the EU, for instance, in devising foreign policy, which now they're kind of panicking about, I mean, they'd better be able to do something collectively, particularly if the United States is no longer there. But they're dealing with this problem, and it all goes back to what people often said that was distinctive about the EU. It was just a bureaucratic merger. Europe never had its civil war, right, to make sure that one power dominated. In fact, it was the policy of Britain in particular, and often with the aid of America, to prevent Europe from having one, you know what I mean? I mean, Britain was always an offshore equalizer of the balance of power

• 14:29Speaker 02

  to prevent one power from ever gaining control of Europe. So that's an interesting difference. Okay, and then you go ahead, another long human lifetime, and you get to the 1930s. And there you had a completely new understanding of the Constitution, particularly the broad, sweeping new interpretation of the Commerce Clause, which basically allowed the federal government to do anything it wanted to, which had never been true before. And then you have stasis again, you know, people working within that. I think we're at another one of those fissures, although I will say here, the extent to which so many of the underlying relationships are being questioned is stunning even to me.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And having said that, and I just want to do this because kick off another direction of this conversation, it is still unclear to me whether or not the fourth turning in America will climax with internal conflict or with external conflict. You know, that remains sort of an open question.

• 15:30Demetri Kofinas?

  So Neil, I think that we'll have an opportunity to get to that question about internal versus external conflict, and I think is very important. But before we do, we're actually recording this just a few days, and it's going to be released on the 100th or 101st day since Trump's inauguration. So we're in that 100-day window. What is your impression and what is sort of your takeaway of these first 100 days of the Trump administration?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Well, the obvious comparison of the 100 days is to the 100 days of FDR, right? I mean, that's where we get that comparison. So FDR came in in 1932. Let's talk about similarities and differences. One obvious similarity is that FDR was a bundle of activity, right? Huge amount of energy, huge amounts of new initiative, came out of the brain trust with all these new agencies, with all these new programs. Some of them probably did more damage than good. The NRA, for example, National Recovery Administration, probably was, you know, a terrible idea. Other things were good ideas, like going up the gold standard was probably high time the United States had to do that.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Anyway, Trump had all of these new agencies and programs. He was a bundle of activity, and he wasn't above partisanship to talk about the need for this new activity, right? He waxed into high gear, really, on his reelection in 1936, where he talked about the economic royalists and all the plutocrats who were standing in the way of, in other words, FDR had enemies. And there was this great speech he once gave in Madison Square Garden, where he talked about all the terrible things that people were saying about him, and he stretched out his arms and he said, you know, "I glory in their hatred." You know, I mean, that's kind of a Trump-like thing to say, you know? And then the more they hate me, the more I love it.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  So, in other words, the partisanship and the energy, right, are very similar. And that sense of transforming the nation in the face of a crisis. Now, that's an interesting thing, the face of a crisis. Trump did not come into office with double-digit unemployment and 20%, 30% decline in GDP. Although, interestingly, he may be the first president to actually cause that. His declaration of emergency comes before the emergency, whereas it happened the other way around with FDR. But you know, it's very interesting. Having said that, I will say that when you question Americans about their pessimism about the future, I have never seen Americans more pessimistic.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  There is a chord when he talks about America facing an emergency. Most Americans actually think, yeah, right now, our economy is fine. And we found that even at the height of the COVID crisis, you know, when, when the Fed and Treasury were out there, they're making everyone flush, putting money into their bank accounts. Everyone said, yeah, right now I'm feeling fine. But I feel this horrible sense of pessimism about where America is going. And that is actually even, you know, that's higher now. We'll see how higher it may get when even their near term future looks bad. When America actually does go into recession, it might get even worse. But my point is, that looks different, but in some ways it's the same.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Let me point out a couple of the differences, however. Maybe just two of them for starters, and then you guys can follow up. One was, is that everything FDR did was through Congress. He went down there, he went in the morning, you know, they come out with his brain trust, he would have some new idea, whether it's the SCC, or whether it's the AAA, or whatever new agency he had. He would formulate the legislation with his brain trust, he'd get it ready in the morning, he'd march it over to the House, they would pass it by noon, he would march it over to the Senate, they would pass it by afternoon, and by evening he would sign the damn. I mean, that's how fast this was happening. And very often, of course, they didn't even have time to read the thing.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  But there was a sense of crisis, and they approved it. Now, you could say, well, they didn't have time to read it, they were kind of compelled. I mean, here was this guy saying, this is our only chance. On the other hand, he did get it approved, right? In other words, everything was through legislation. It was all through Congress. It was not this executive order thing, which is leading Trump to such a Titanic collision with the Supreme Court, right? It's inevitable that that's going to happen.

• 19:57Demetri Kofinas?

  How much of that, though, also reflects the difference, which is that FDR had both Democratic Senate and Democratic Congress?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, Demetri, because that's the second difference I was about to bring out. So FDR came in in 1932 with, you know, sixteen, seventeen percent majority in the vote. And of course, he dominated the House and he had a substantial majority in the Senate. And that was even more lopsided in 1936. So yes, that's the other difference. And that's the problem, right? In this respect, it's a little bit more like the 1850s where you have two almost equal strength groups, right, that cannot reconcile their differences, right?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, going back to the 1850s, you know, when we look at the parallels, we're looking at the 1920s, 30s, we're looking at the recovery from the Great Depression. We go back to the 1950s and we're looking at the period before the Civil War. And the 1850s period, Neil, was obviously something which the US didn't recover from without the conflict that you and Bill had talked about being the kind of climactic happening of a fourth turning. And so when you look at the level of conflict, and let's just stay in the United States for the time being. We can get to kinetic conflict in the world a little later on. But you made the point about how divided red and blue are, and there's real enmity on both sides there. And you're seeing that same conflict between rich and poor.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  You're seeing the same one between boomers and millennials. You're seeing the same one everywhere you look. You know, there's blue collar America and white collar America. It's very difficult to figure out where some kind of rapprochement can really occur because it seems to be that in order for that to happen, one side of every single one of those arguments is going to have to concede an awful lot to the other side. If it's boomers and millennials, we're talking a big transfer of wealth. If it's left against right, red against blue, we're talking, we're going to have to concede an awful lot of points that both sides are incredibly entrenched upon. If it's blue collar and white collar, we're going to have to see a lot of white collar jobs go and blue collar jobs come back.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Whichever way you look, there's no, it seems to me, and I'd be curious your thoughts on it, there's no straightforward path whereby we can engineer this coming together again without some kind of duel, if you like.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Well, events have a way of achieving these things, you know what I mean? One of the patterns of fourth turnings has been that society obviously mobilizes, you know, for conflict. One of the enduring themes of my book, and I quote, I don't know how many social scientists from the late 19th century, from Durkheim to Weber to, you know, William Graham Sumner and all these people, is that conflict is the incubator of community. I mean, if there is one truism among social scientists, it's that. And that's an issue for societies that are a long lifetime away from any sort of conflict, right? Why is there any community?

• 23:08Speaker 02

  And when I look at young people today, and I look at, I survey them, I talk to them, the one thing they miss the most is community. Loneliness is one of their biggest problems. And just finding a connection, knowing why they're here. Does anyone need, you know, what uses their energy? Where do they connect with others with kind of a broader sense of what we're all about? That is what fourth turnings do, right? To go back to your, the things you were talking about, these large shifts, you know, like inequality and so on. Yep. There are fourth turning patterns. Fourth turnings always lead to a reduction in inequality, a very sharp and radical reduction. In fact, Thomas Piketty in his book Capital, you remember that book that came out, I don't know, a decade ago?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he said, you know, I think R is larger than G, you know, the rate of return on capital is larger than the growth rate of the economy, so the rich always get richer, you know, and the poor wage slobs, you know, never keep up. And he said, yes, that's just the rule of all of history. They said, yeah, but there's a great exception. He admitted there's a great exception. And that's what happened in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and early 60s, you know? And of course, that was the fourth turning and the first turning which followed, which in, you know, my rubric is sort of the fourth turning and the first turning are times when inequality falls. I mean, that's part of the pattern that we see. And when community is strong, inequality is, you know, weakens.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  And you can see how that happened in the, both the Great Depression, obviously destroying market value of a lot of the wealthy people, and then the mobilization for war and inflation. Inflation plus financial repression hugely undermined the wealth of the rich, who were basically forced to invest in all these treasury securities that were losing real value and very high real wages for workers and for soldiers and all the benefits of all those who came home. You saw a much more equal America by the late 1950s and most extremely by the late 1960s, when boomers coming of age thought the middle class was far too powerful, far too big. You know, boomers hated it. All of us hated the middle class.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  And today millennials is like, where is the middle class? Where do I sign up? All these beautiful little colored houses, they all look just the same. That sounds like paradise. Where do I get them? Well, sorry, we got rid of them. You know, that kind of thing. But that's my point. So in other words, fourth turning solved that. Fourth turning solved the problem of community. And ultimately, the fourth turning typically also brings about a, I should say, a conservative, but I will say rather, a conventional trend in the culture. And that's always happened with fourth turnings. With conflict, with a feeling of, you know, precarity, with a feeling that great events are about to happen, the culture tends to turn in a conventional direction.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  And many people are seeing that today, you know, sort of this, you know, vibe, the somewhat conservative vibe in the culture. A very interesting thing that is very much talked about today, which again, we predicted, I mean, I talked about it in my most recent book, I was predicting, is a larger gap between gender roles among young adults. I talked about that at some length in the book, and I think we're really seeing that now. We're seeing that particularly in, in boating and even in attitudes toward religion. We're seeing an increased gender gap among young people, which is where new social changes always appear initially is among the rising generation.

• 26:45Demetri Kofinas?

  Neil, I have a question because it's hard to separate out, I guess, to distinguish between what it's like to live. I keep coming back to this point that it's one thing to read about a time in history or to think about what the future might look like. It's another thing to live through it. And so I'm hesitant to make statements in comparison between or comparing FDR to Trump, but at least in my reading of the history, FDR was much more of a builder. And yes, there was a lot of experimentation. I mean, that was a core part of FDR's presidency was about experimentation and trying to figure out

• 27:24Demetri Kofinas?

  a solution. But with the Trump administration, it feels much more rudderless. And also, Trump and the wave of populism that elected him seems to be much more invigorated by the prospects of tearing down institutions rather than building them up, which is what FDR did. FDR built up, after all, so many of the institutions that we have still to this day. And so my question really is, how real are those distinctions? Or are they just because of how we're telling the story now and we're going to tell it differently when Trump leaves office? Or is it, does it suggest maybe that Trump is not the equivalent of an FDR?

• 28:05Demetri Kofinas?

  And that Trump's role is to tear things down and the person that comes after Trump will be there to build anew?

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Well, you know, look, I mean, this all has to do with how MAGA sees itself, right? I think, you know, an outsider sees, you know, MAGA versus how MAGA sees itself. I think MAGA sees itself as tearing down in order to build up. You know, the whole idea is a more autarkic America will have, you know, working class people working again, right? And we'll have higher wages relative to rich people and we will be an invigorated society. We, I mean, you see Trump occasionally, talks about an America that can build ships again, you know, that can do heavy industry again, that can do all these things, which

• 28:54Speaker 02

  he said, if we don't do those things, we're sunk. We can't possibly survive, even as a point of national security, which, you know, is an arguable point. You know, you can talk about the merits of that. But here's what I would say to your basic question. I think your underlying question is a really good one. What are we missing when we talk about people historically? And I've thought about that a lot. In fact, I don't know any historian who hasn't really thought about that. Right? And I've come to the conclusion, I think many other people have conclusions, that the single biggest thing we forget when we look at people historically is we forget that they didn't know how anything was going to turn out. I mean, that's the single biggest fact.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I mean, in FDR, the nation was crushed. I mean, when FDR had his initial inauguration, banks were closed in half the states. The exchanges were closed. I mean, this was a completely helpless nation. You had food lines outside of government agencies that had run out of money. You know, state and local organizations run out of money. And the other thing to see is that much of what FDR did at the time really didn't do a hell of a lot. You know, the country went into a huge recession again in 1937 and a 50% decline again in the stock market. And by early 1940, we still had deflation.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  US long-term bonds were at their lowest ever level in our history until post-GFC and all that nonsense, all the, you know, what happened then. Right? And unemployment is still in double digits. So in other words, it wasn't like anyone felt that FDR had brought America out of the Great Depression. America was still in the, that's why it was a Great Depression. We were still mired and no one had any idea what the future was going to be. That began to change, interestingly enough, now that we're on this topic, starting in June of 1940. And June of 1940, something happened which no one expected. France fell to Germany in four weeks. I mean, no one believed, France fell about as rapidly as Poland.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely no one anticipated that. Everyone thought this would be a huge slugfest. It would have gone for years. It'd be like World War I. France had an enormous military. Well, it turned out that France was as riven internally between Marxists and fascists as, you know, a lot of other societies are in a fourth turning. Right? And it put up a pathetic defense. Right? So they sliced right through the Ardennes. They got the Paris. Suddenly. The mood in America began to change. And it was that year, which was a presidential election year, that the GOP unexpectedly put forward. Everyone expected it to go with an America First candidate. I say America First because that's another big phrase today. I mean, you're talking about parallels, right?

• 31:48Speaker 02

  I noted with some interest that the budget resolution that the House and Senate are passing through Congress, the one they want to do a reconciliation on, right? It's called the America First Budget. Anyway, times are kind of echoing each other there, right? But in that budget that was passed then, they put through these huge new rearmament proposals, enormous. The Two-Ocean Navy Act, which went and doubled the size of the US Navy and laid the keels for the Iowa-class battleships and the Essex-class aircraft carriers that would eventually decide the Pacific War. They were laid then. Huge things.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Those went through Congress in July with not a single dissenting vote in Congress. Nobody, not even the Republicans, voted against them. And by the end of the year, the economy was already beginning to come up, right? The unemployment rate was falling, GDP growth was growing. Only about a year later do you have Pearl Harbor. And the reason I emphasize that, we often think that America is just sleeping and isolationist until Pearl Harbor. It's not exactly true. The mood shifted with what was happening in Europe and obviously the subsequent Battle of Britain. That was a turning point in the mood. And it does show, by the way, how foreign events can suddenly interfere into what seems

• 33:14Speaker 02

  just like a domestic political dispute.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Neil, can I just pull them a couple of threads there? The first one being this idea of MAGA and how MAGA sees itself as kind of tearing down to rebuild again. I guess this is one of the things that I am trying to reconcile, and that brings me back to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, because one of the big... Features of the MAGA movement in its early days was this worship of the Constitution and that America, what we want to do is tear the house down to the studs, if you like, with the studs being those two documents and build them up from there. And it does seem to have morphed into, to your point, want to tear the house down and start again now. So I'm curious your thoughts on that. And then the other piece of it that I'd love to explore a little more is this community as a solution to the problem, which I think

• 34:01Speaker 01

  is absolutely right. But I'd be interested in your thoughts on the communities of today. The communities back in the in the 30s were very much in-person communities. They were local communities, grassroots communities that benefited from direct contact between the members of those communities. Today, the communities are so disparate and they're so widely spread and they coalesce and they organize, not in person, but on social media and in chat rooms and on Reddit boards and in places that we now have all these communities, but they're kind of communities with a small c. They don't have the genuine community aspect of them. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on on those two in terms of the differences between now and 1930s.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's great, Grant. There are really two questions. One is this large fissure or contradiction within the MAGA movement, or I should say within the Republican Party, because you could say that there's MAGA on the one side, the traditional Republicans on the other. And here is where it's going to come to a head. When I said that Trump's all of his executive orders and what he's trying to do is going to run straight into a hostile Supreme Court, I'm not talking about, you know, the three progressive members of the Supreme Court. I'm talking about the entire Supreme Court, including Trump's own appointees, because they are huge proponents of, for instance, the major questions doctrine,

• 35:30Speaker 02

  which is that any major question has to have the positive and explicit assent of Congress, right? That's how they tore down Biden, when Biden tried to get rid of, you know, just basically say to half of everyone on paying student loans, oh, you don't have to pay them anymore. Well, Biden was using some tiny little codicil in the law, says he has the power in exceptional cases to forgive the debts. And he used that little thing to say, okay, half of everyone on student debts doesn't have to pay anymore. The Republicans took it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled in the Republicans the favor. They said, absolutely, that's right. This is a major question. The president

• 36:11Speaker 02

  cannot do this, cannot reinterpret a program and fundamentally reshape it in the way that Biden has without Congress giving its assent. There has to be legislation behind this, right? So this is going to hugely slam Trump. Do you see what I mean? I mean, basically, all of these major questions, guys, all these people talking about Chevron deference all the time, right? These are your Federalist Society conservatives on the Supreme Court. They cannot go along with what Trump is doing. And so I totally agree with you there. You know, FDR had his own problems, right? You want to talk about problems? Think about

• 36:53Speaker 02

  FDR. Half of his Democrats were from the South, and the head of all of his committees were in the South, and they didn't want any of his race equalizing, you know, New Deal programs in the South, right? So FDR had enormous contradictions. I would say, you know, FDR had a very fractious coalition, right, in the 1930s. With regard to communities being local, I think that the mythology of the Popular Front, which is sort of the, you know, all of the sort of what we would have called progressive, the progressive side in American politics back in the 1930s, you know, after the mid 1930s, we would have called the Popular Front. And it became the call the Popular Front because by that time,

• 37:37Speaker 02

  the communists were really worried, you know, Hitler took over and, you know, things weren't going their way. So they said, you know, instead of actually fighting capitalists all the time, we better join at least their progressive wing. And so they did, and they did in America as well. So the Popular Front... Began this whole mythology, you could say, of national community as being in favor of these new democratic socialist, you know, initiatives that FDR had. But it wasn't really cemented as this new community, America, until World War II. I mean, that's what really cemented it in because that's when everyone, even those, the great, you know, we like talk about the greatest generation, all volunteering after Pearl Harbor.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  What they don't say is that many of them, a year or two earlier, were signing Oxford pledges and the universities swearing never to join an army, to, you know, ever fight against a foreign power and put money into the coffers of profiteering arms industries, right? I mean, that was very popular among isolationists and isolationism, you could say, America first, wasn't just popular in the heartland among, you know, old agricultural folk. It was very popular among young people, too, in the college campuses and the Ivy League college campuses. That also suddenly turned around.

• 38:55Demetri Kofinas?

  So we're talking here about, obviously, the effect of World War II and international conflict in unifying the country. But for the time being, at least, we continue to be in more of a sort of civil discord dynamic in the US. And I'm curious, Neil, when you look at this country and you look at the Republican Party in particular, who are the various factions or what are the various factions within the American right that are currently vying for power in your view? I mean, I have my own opinion, but I'm curious to hear what you have to say and if there's any kind of clear winner in that direction.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  I'm not sure anybody knows. I mean, I would say we identified two of them.

• 39:40Demetri Kofinas?

  MAGA and the old ruling elite in the Republican Party, I think you identified.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, this would be, you know, more, you know, what's her name, Governor of South Carolina, who ran in the primary.

• 39:49Demetri Kofinas?

  Nikki Haley.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, Nikki, sort of her kind of, you know, Reagan coalition, if you want to say. This would be the, probably an older group, right?

• 39:58Demetri Kofinas?

  The group that a lot of MAGA refer to as neocons.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, or rhinos. Rhinos, you know, Republican in name only, right? And I think that's the major division. What was fascinating about the Kamala Harris versus Trump election is that Kamala Harris won in the oldest age brackets. I mean, it's a complete inversion of what everyone was always saying, you know, back in 2016. You know, the biggest shift from 2016 to 2024 was that the older age brackets shifted for the Democrats and the younger age brackets shifted toward the Republicans, right? And I would say where they lost and where they're still, I think, where they're losing now, if you look at the opinion polls, where they're losing are all those

• 40:41Speaker 02

  group of older Republicans who just couldn't stand Kamala Harris, couldn't stand Biden, just couldn't stand the direction of the Democratic Party and thought Trump was the better of the two. And, you know, at least they favored a lot of the things he was saying. But they're very, you know, they're horrified as to these innovations in the Constitution he's introducing. And I think what you and Grant have been talking about is his emphasis more on destroying than building. Now, of course, Trump would say, you have to destroy to build. That's how bad it is. You know what I mean? That's how bad, that's how sclerotic our system now is. You need to clean it out before you can start building new stuff. And I will say this in favor of Trump, when he was asked, well, all these

• 41:23Speaker 02

  tariffs bring about a recession, his attitude was kind of, you know, sometimes you just got to bear the pain, you know, to get to a better place. You know, we would all agree with that. My only big objection there was as long as you get a bear pain, why don't you attack the cause of America's current account deficit, which is the fact that we have a budget deficit that is 6% of GDP, that would cause pain and that would actually remedy the underlying dynamic that's giving rise to all of this trade imbalance, right? Well, he can't do that, unfortunately. Apparently, that's not the pain he's willing to bear. But I do find it interesting that in his Trump 2.0,

• 42:04Speaker 02

  unlike Trump 2.1, if there is a Trump put, it's a lot lower on the S and P 500 than it was back then. We don't know where it is. Maybe it's down around, where would you guess, Grant? Around 4,500 or something? It's further down.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe even lower, depending on how it gets there. You know, I think that's the important, that's the important part, right? If it grinds down there, probably lower. If it goes there one day.

• 42:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Or maybe it's in the bond market, it's in yields.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  But it is interesting, if he had wanted to have a period of, you know, unpleasantness, and this was, of course, this favors a president, right? If you're going to take the public through a bad time, do it early in your term. I mean Reagan timed that perfectly. I don't know how many of us recall that, but I mean, he backed Volcker, he said to Paul Volcker, do anything you want, you can take the interest rate as high as you want, we will stop the growth of money supply, I don't care, I don't care how bad the pain is now, because, of course, he didn't know this, but I think he would have sensed, four years from now, I'll be saying morning again in America, and we'll be running for another term. Now, of course, Trump can't

• 43:14Speaker 02

  run for another term, but I think he does want to hand off his legacy on a positive note.

• 43:19Demetri Kofinas?

  So Neil, I have a question. One of the things I've heard, I'm hearing more and more, is that when people are looking to explain the strategy coming out of the administration, because again, it isn't clear, and that may be by design, but I think there is a lack of clarity. And that's also an interesting juxtaposition, right? Which is, you compare FDR to Trump, and again, it seems only in retrospect, maybe only in retrospect, that there was more a clear articulation of policy coming out of the FDR administration.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  You know, Dmitry here, I just interrupt, I actually don't think that's true.

• 43:51Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  I think FDR was an economic lightweight. Hoover understood economics 100 times more than FDR. There was actually a meeting between FDR and Hoover, actually, you know, during the, after he was elected and before the inauguration, you know, back then, it was a longer period, it wasn't until March back then. And the country was in freefall, so the two of them met. And Hoover had this enormous explanation of everything that was going on in the economy. And FDR understood almost none of it. And basically, you know, it's his usual pleasantries. But the difference is, FDR attitude was, we're just going to try everything. I think there was no intellectual coherence whatsoever to FDR's New Deal. I think

• 44:36Speaker 02

  it was just throw everything against the wall. I think the National Recovery Administration was a good case. I mean, they had no idea what they were going to do.

• 44:44Demetri Kofinas?

  But their goal was to address the depression. I mean, that was the clear goal.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:48Demetri Kofinas?

  And I guess the equivalent goal in this case is... Reindustrialization?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  I think I understand your question, but a lot of people would have said, you know, the NRA by actually encouraging price fixing, you know, by actually preventing people from lowering wages. Well, that was actually counterproductive. I mean, that prevented the economy from reequilibrating, right? In other words, that is exactly what Keynes used to talk about. That keeps the wage level high and it makes sure that some people are unemployed, right? In other words, there was no theoretical integrity to the New Deal. The New Deal was a lot of stuff. Some of it worked, some of it didn't.

• 45:27Demetri Kofinas?

  And maybe it didn't actually work. We only think it worked in retrospect because we had a world war.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Well, exactly as we talked about before. I mean, definitively, I mean, you look about Germany today. Take a look at Germany's economy. Now that it's spending a lot on defense, it's beginning to turn around. That's kind of another analogy we can talk about, right? What's Germany and Europe doing now that it's sort of facing Putin more, a little bit more mano a mano, you know? How is that changing? But I guess I'm doing a lot of experimentation, not a lot of theoretical clarity. The clarity came later. There was a whole theory of Keynes brought in by Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s. It was really not terribly well understood by the New Deal crowd. Only later, after the war, did everyone then become a Keynesian

• 46:12Speaker 02

  and understand, you know, all this new economic theory. It really was not planned. The New Deal was a very huge amount of energy, huge amount of new administrations and stuff, a lot of desperation, more desperation than a clear theory of what was causing the problem. Remember that FDR, running against Hoover, ran on balanced budgets. He thought that Hoover's reconstruction, his reconstruction administration subsidies to, to companies was actually...

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Causing a large, too large of a deficit. Anyway, all I mean to say is the confusion I don't think differentiates the two. I do agree that what does differentiate the two, one huge one is the mandate. The mandate was huge for FDR in 1932 and even larger in 1936. And that is a large differentiator. And actually, that's very problematic for America today. Right? We don't have a sun party and a moon party. You know, we don't have one major party that can just take over and the other country just do a little lot of little negotiating as side deals. And that's really what we had by the height of the New Deal and for

• 47:26Speaker 02

  several decades afterward. Frankly, it was in the House all the way until Newt Gingrich, you know, took over the, finally got Republicans in the House in 1994. Right? So think of how long the Democrats prevailed in the House of Representatives. It was amazing. That was the New Deal generation and it had huge legs after the war.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Neil, you said something that was almost a throwaway line back there and I'd love to go back to it because it kind of rung a bell in my head. And that was, you know, you said, you know, of course, Trump can't run for a third term.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Well, as I said, actually, I almost figured that out. I said.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. But I'm very curious because obviously that is another of the sacred cows that he may try to burn to the ground. And I think, you know, something like that, when I heard that, and I saw yesterday, I think, that he's started to sell Trump 2028 hats in his own personal merch store, which is very on brand. But something like that, a casual Trump aside, you know, not walked back when given the opportunity, something like that can, I think, in the, in the environment we're in, end up being some kind of flashpoint. So I'd be curious for your thoughts on that as to how if he, because I'm sure he does

• 48:45Speaker 01

  want to run for a third term. We'll see if the next three and a half years go terribly. But I'm sure right now he would, he would love to run for a third term. How do you think that might play out?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  You know, for the never Trump crowd is for the never Trump crowd is very disheartening to see his latest physical. I mean, the guy apparently is in great shape.

• 49:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, we can't trust White House doctors. I think we've learned from, if we didn't already know it, I think the last four years have taught us that we can't trust the White House.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, you know, I'm just saying, you know, you read that report, it's got all the lab results. They look pretty good. I think a lot of people his age were looking enviously at some of those, some of those results. All right. Let me propose a kind of dark enlightenment fourth turning. Okay. Okay. A darker fourth, you know, because anything's possible, right? Fourth turning is a huge change. Let me propose maybe a darker vision of how this all could turn out.

• 49:41Demetri Kofinas?

  As if we were going through the optimistic version so far. Go ahead, Neil.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Well, because the optimistic version assumes that, of course, you know, community will prevail. The core of America's fundamental institutions will be preserved, reanimated and revigorated in a new way, right? After the crisis is successfully overcome, right? Through this period of public mobilization and emergency, that is the fourth turning pattern, right? But let me give a somewhat darker view. And we haven't had a lot of these in American history, except maybe if you were a southerner in 1860, you know, that was a pretty dark end, fourth turning for you. But here's another way it could turn

• 50:25Speaker 02

  out. And this is if what really is animating Trump and the MAGA is what we could just call patrimonialism. So Trump is just like a Don, you know, he just want all of these things, tariffs, everything else. He just wants to get a big on everyone's transaction. And frankly, that Donald S. Trump coin, what a perfect bribe vehicle. I mean, who knows whether Putin is putting a billion dollars into that coin? And, and Trump is automatically taking it out? So it doesn't impact price? No one would ever know? So here's another interpretation, right? That in the end, Trump really doesn't care about US abroad.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  He would be the non-Wendell Wilkie choice in 1940. He would be the Lindbergh choice. You know what I mean? So he's perfectly comfortable with Putin dominating Eastern Europe. And he would be perfectly Putin with Xi dominating the Western Pacific. And who knows? Iran can do what it wants and Europe can do what it must. And anyway, the point is, don't have to spend a lot necessarily on defense, but just rig the whole economy. So then the maximum amount goes to Trump. And then Trump gets to rule forever. Maybe his family just is in there indefinitely.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  We could be moving in this case, the fourth turning could be like the end of the Roman civil wars at the end of the Republic. We could be moving from the Republic to Octavian. You know, going from a Republican society to the principate, the empire. Just having a family, a man, and eventually we'll call him Dominus. You know, like eventually they called Diocletian and, and Constantine. He'll be the Dominus. Well, that grant, Demetri, what do you, now this is a darker, I say-

• 52:23Demetri Kofinas?

  I feel like whenever I've pointed that out, which that seems like, you know, one of the obvious conclusions to draw from things like a presidential meme coin, I get the response of you just have Trump derangement syndrome.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think that's a big part of this because, you know, what we're saying here, and people in their current state find it really difficult to, to listen to what's being said without doing exactly what you said there, Demetri. And what we're talking about here is a possible dark route that we could go down. We're not saying this is where it's going. But I think the important thing to understand, Neil, is the chance of what you've just described happening is no longer zero. It may be 0.5 of a percent. But until six months ago, the chance was zero. And it's just not anymore.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. It was unthinkable. And I think what got us there is, you know, everyone, when this polarization began, it's been, you know, rising for the last 25 years. But when it really became extreme after the GFC and the Tea Party and all that, and then obviously with Trump 1.0, everyone sort of said, oh, well, that's, that's okay. You know, people really don't, you know, it doesn't really matter. They don't really care about politics that much. I think now we begin to see it really does matter because these things, for instance, Trump saying that, you know, maybe I will run again. Maybe I just don't give a crap about the Constitution. There was a time when that would have immediately disqualified you, right?

• 53:50Speaker 02

  And remember, remember why Nixon resigned? I mean, just to go back, right? Why did Nixon resign? It's because the leaders of the party came to the White House and basically told him, sir, a large share of your own party will not vote for you. If the impeachment vote comes up in the Senate, right? They will vote to throw you out. That's why he resigned. That would never happen today, right? And I think that's where we are.

• 54:21Demetri Kofinas?

  It's also not clear who those people would be. If they're not members of the party, who would they be? But, you know, the question that I had that was formulating in my mind now for the last 30 minutes, Neil, is that in 1933, a group of Wall Street financiers organized a coup d'etat against FDR, and they sought to have Major General Smedley Butler lead it, who ended up blowing the whistle of Congress, and it foiled the plot. And, you know, when I asked you about who the factions are that are vying for power in this fourth turning, one of the factions that we left off was the sort of tech bros slash oligarchs. And they've been in the Trump camp, but, you know, it's not clear if they're going to be in the Trump camp indefinitely because a lot of these tariffs are not popular with them.

• 55:05Demetri Kofinas?

  And I just wonder, is there a chance there that a coalition of actors? Of course, there's a chance, right? What is this, what I'm even asking when I say there's a chance? But I'm just curious what you think of the idea of. You know, we saw the attempted assassination of Trump during the, when he was campaigning for the presidency. That propelled him into office. It boosted his popularity, but it could have gone the other way. How do you think about the possibility that some sort of faction could seek to overthrow the presidency and install a dictator?

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Well, we are going down some dark roads here.

• 55:37Demetri Kofinas?

  You started it.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  I started it. I did, I guess.

• 55:41Demetri Kofinas?

  Let me just add something. When I had done some interviews in the past, I had raised the possibility of an assassination of Trump during the, you know, before he had been elected and before the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. And I remember one of the guests who I mentioned it to, and this was generally universally the case, I felt like in the conversations I had, it was like, do not ask questions like that. Like, that's totally inappropriate. Don't bring up stuff like that in good company. And yet, it happened. And I feel like we're just kind of, I mean, it's happened historically. It happened to FDR. And what Trump is doing is so unpopular among certain people who, especially the sort of old guard, that was, you know, maybe a lot of those people have been emasculated or neutered from his first term.

• 56:24Demetri Kofinas?

  But I'm, anyway, I just wanted to add that additional context, but please, go ahead.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think it really matters. The only conspiracies that work are conspiracies with very small numbers of people. So it only takes a couple of people, really, who have the motivation and opportunity, right, to make it happen. If it's a big conspiracy, it won't work, just by definition. I'll tell you, there's one, that's another thing about history, I often explain to people, large-scale conspiracies never, ever work. I mean, just name an example, even the gunpowder plot didn't work. And that was pretty, you know, that had what, a 12 or 13 people in it, right? Even that one was discovered. But the reason I say that is because so many people have this conspiracy idea of history where vast number, thousands and thousands of people can all collaborate. And I just said, that's insane, you know, that never happens.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  But to come back to your point. Well, actually, your point about assassinate, but that was leading to another point, Dmitry. So, repeat what actually-

• 57:19Demetri Kofinas?

  So, my, okay, so my question was really about comparisons to the 1933 Wall Street push, where a group of Wall Street financiers tried to overthrow the FDR administration. I just think, and I'll also say, when I look at this term, I think that any chance of that really happening was more likely to happen in his first term, because I feel like Trump has really consolidated power within the American right. I don't really see a coalition. Back in his first term, he was attacking the intelligence agencies. If there was a power base, it was really in the old guard, in the intelligence community, the quote "deep state" that could have sought to overthrow him or oppose him. And I think that we're past that now. I don't think that that's likely, but I wanted to throw it out there because an interesting comparison that most people don't know, which is that things could have gone very differently

• 58:04Demetri Kofinas?

  in 1933, and FDR may have been overthrown in a coup d'etat.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. History is very contingent, right? And I will say, maybe I'll take this question in a little bit different direction than you wanted me to, but I think one issue about history is contingency. You know, even the smallest things happen, which really change history. A great example is the fact that Henry Wallace was not renominated to be vice president in 1944, when FDR ran for his final term. He was this close. He was this close, I mean, he was literally a millimeter away, till finally, one of FDR's bosses ran up on the convention and introduced Harry Truman and said, "No, no, we gotta get Harry Truman." And Henry booed him down. It was a very near-run thing, because FDR was perfectly fine going with Henry Wallace.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Henry Wallace, it turned out, was hugely positive about Joseph Stalin, thought that Stalin made the Soviet Union run like a top, it was a great idea how to run a government. It would be great to have Stalin, you know, telling Europe how to run its governments. And remember, the FDR died three months later, right, from a heart attack. So, that would have been Henry Wallace at the beginning of the coup. I mean, it's unimaginable, right? And I will say, in all fairness to Henry Wallace, a rather interesting guy, you know, a guy interested in agriculture and how to grow corn, and he was, he was a very interesting guy from the Midwest. But later on, in the late 50s, he admitted, he said, "I was completely wrong about Stalin."

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Well, that's too bad. You know, that's waking up a little bit late, right? But my point is, think about how history would have been, right? And the reason I bring that up is that, is that people often ask me about, you know, these turnings, because I look at history from a very large pattern perspective. And everyone says, how do you account for that kind of thing, right? How do you account for just an event like that? Or an assassin's bullet, or a battle that went the other way? You know, the US had lost in Midway, or something like that. And the answer is, ultimately, is that leaders are made, not born. You know, that leaders come into where they are because they have no real other option. They always move to the void.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  They always move to where they are beckoned to go. I think Trump is in this position today, not because he maliciously pushed America into it, but because America is ready for him. I really do. I think America needed, just was wanting a guy like Trump, for better or for worse. And, you know, the question is, you know, I'm not going to respond to the question of whether there might be two or three motivated people out there who might want to do harm to Trump. I mean, God knows, I guess that's always a possibility. But I will say that, to Grant's point, the possibility was zero. Now the possibility is non-zero.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  And I think that alone affects America's sensibility of itself, and what it could become, in a very different way than they had before.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Neil, let me, if I may, just switch tacks a little bit and go outwards a little bit from America. Another thing that both Demetri and I have noticed in our conversations, in our podcasts, in our communications correspondence with people, is lighter. And that is a return to religion, a return to spirituality. And we've seen in the last 10 days or so, particularly here in the UK, we're home at the moment, we've seen all kinds of data about church going in the UK. You know, the Church of England is seeing a surge in attendance, particularly amongst young men. So in terms of shifting from the dark to the light, can you talk a little bit about the place that spirituality and religion have

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  in a fourth turning as a kind of antidote to the inevitable darkness?

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is going in a lighter direction. So

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's time.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  In America, very interesting data just came out by Pew, Pew Research Institution, kind of the gold standard in measuring religious affiliation and religious practice in America. They came out with their new report, which basically said that after, you know, several decades of decline in religious affiliation, you know, the number of share of Americans who feel they're Christian or feel they're any religion, the rise of the nuns, in other words, people saying they're no religion, none, right? None as in, as in nothing. And it went a little bit further during the pandemic. But now in the last three years, it's actually come back. It's the first time we've seen it. So we're basically level with where we were in 2018 and 2019

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  in terms of share of Americans who affiliate as Christians. That's remarkable in and of itself because we've never seen that much of a correction in several decades going back, you know, since boomers came of age and kind of liberated us all of, I, I think less, less liberated us from actually going to church. I think more liberated us in the feeling that we had to tell pollsters that we ought to go to church. You know, it's mainly liberating us from hypocrisy perhaps. But I'll tell you, in the data, the most interesting thing was the very youngest people. It was 18 to 25 who showed no decline relative to the older millennials, you know, 25 to 35, which was remarkable. And in that data, the most, because you mentioned men, and particularly going back to church,

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  the most remarkable thing in these young people is that men actually register slightly higher than women in the sheer saying they're Christian, which is completely different from any older age bracket where, and this goes way back, by the way, historically, women have always been more likely to say they're religious or Christian than men. But I will say, to interpret this, Grant, let me just raise one more thing. The denomination that's increased the most is not any particular denomination, it's just non-denominational. So a lot of these men are non-denominational. And the interesting Possibility that has been raised by some people looking into Pew data is whether or not for these young men, Christian is simply a conservative identifier.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  In other words, if you're conservative, you should be Christian, right? That's kind of an identifier. In other words, that's what Liliana Mason once called a meta, a meta-brand, you know, in other words conservatism is the meta-brand and you know, MAGA is the meta-brand and as part of that, you're supposed to fill in Christian. But even if so, you know, hypocrisy often leads people into the most interesting places, right? And it is still very interesting. This gets back to what I said earlier. Remember, we were talking about this. Are we in the midst of a conservative turn in the culture? This obviously would be evidence to that. I would point out too, Prime Minister Kier Starmer,

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  right? Admitted the other day after the Supreme Court ruling that trans men really are women after all. Apparently the Supreme Court ruling has changed his mind on this, right?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  And you know, this is remarkable. And I'm just thinking, this is the leader of the progressive party in Britain. And I'm just wondering, are we going to hear Kamala Harris come out and say, I changed my mind?

• 1:05:28Demetri Kofinas?

  I still don't even know exactly, you know, it's the vortex in which we found ourselves in the last 10 years was so confusing. And I think most of us, at least older, again, I'm, I'm an older millennial. I still didn't even fully understand what exactly we were arguing about. In terms of what makes a man and what makes a woman and some of the more ridiculous hypotheses that were put forward there. But is there a consistency across fourth turnings when it comes to interest in gender roles?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is what I was pointing out before. In fourth turnings, from beginning to end, the differences between gender roles always widen. That is actually a rule. In other words, coming out of World War II is we have the famous American high when, you know, men were manly men. You just look at Hollywood, right? I mean, there were, you know, and the women were, you know, very much. That's when, you know, we're, we're helpmates, we're homemakers. And in fact, even in schools, you know, that was in the, put into the curriculum. You know, that was what women are supposed to do. And this is an old pattern. And obviously it's related to more the Apollonian, more the creative, the constructive. You know, when you're building the outer world, that's much more, you know, traditionally

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  the man's realm, exploring the inner world has always been historically where women often have been out in the forefront of our culture. This is why awakenings have very often coincided with a narrowing of gender roles, uh, gender role differences. We certainly saw that in the sixties and seventies. So in other words, that's when I said I had always been expecting this in the fourth turning widening again of gender role differences. And I'm suggesting that we may be beginning to see this.

• 1:07:09Demetri Kofinas?

  One other thing that I've noticed is that, you know, when I was growing up, drugs and alcohol were cool. And it seems also like in the last few years, more of what is the popular culture has come down negatively on drugs and alcohol, even on things like marijuana. And I'm curious if you've noticed that as well, and if that also speaks to this turning and sort of rising conservatism in the country.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, typically on, on substance abuse. Now it varies depending on what the substance abuse is known for, right?

• 1:07:43Demetri Kofinas?

  But not even substance abuse in this case. I mean, what we're seeing with alcohol is there's a real interest in kind of quote, healthy living. And obviously alcohol consumption and any kind of significant quantity is not consistent with that. And this is an interesting thing that I've known. There's an interest, at least among men, among the, the male cohort, an interest in healthier living, in bodybuilding, in martial arts. And part of that has also been a rebuke of drugs and alcohol, even though some of the older folks like Joe Rogan, they still, you know, might smoke weed on their show or, you know, or drink alcohol. But among younger demographics, I do seem to see this. And I'm curious, I guess, if you've seen it and if that has any consistent.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Well, absolutely, you've seen it. Both smoking and alcohol consumption have gone way down among younger cohorts over the past 30 years, right? So that you've seen, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a broader pattern of that. Typically in a third turn, you know, it goes up. In a first turning, it goes up a lot during an awakening when substance abuse becomes popular. Everyone kind of want to break social norms and explore themselves and so on and. And then typically starts going down again during third turning and it goes further down in a fourth turning. Interestingly enough, alcohol consumption reached its all time peak in America. I can't remember the figure, something like three or four gallons per capita per year.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Right at the mid eighteen thirties, which was near the end of the Jackson era. Which was an awakening, it was the second great awakening in American history. Alcohol consumption went down by fifty percent. By the time the Civil War started, this is a huge temperance movement in America, which which brought down. I mean, it was very successful. And you saw the same thing, it rose again after the Civil War and became a huge problem. You know, in World War One, and then obviously we enacted prohibition because it was such a huge problem. And it peaked again and went, it started going down, starting in the thirties and it went down in the forties, fifties. And then it started rising again in the sixties. So my point is that there is a rhythm to these things. There are exceptions, I mean, you see fentanyl.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Which is addiction to opioids and that was one of the things that was really brought into. Vogue really by, you know, the healthcare establishment because they started, you know, prescribing all of these. All of these opioids, but I do see that and and I do think that that. That definition of the young male as somebody who's healthy, as somebody who doesn't. Partake of all these things that I think became even an issue in Pete Hegseth's hearings, remember? He has had a problem with alcohol abuse in the past and I think that. That sort of was a little bit of a, something that. More than normally. I was held against him. Apparently not, not against him enough.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Cause he went through the confirmation hearings, but yeah, I I definitely do see that pattern.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Neil, can I take us full circle back to the beginning of the conversation again? And we talked at the beginning about the fact that fourth turnings have a lot of broad characteristics that they share. And you can look from a 30,000 foot level and you can look for things that you expect to happen, you know, the tearing down of institutions, the conflict, the rising conflict, that all the characteristics of a fourth turning that you and Bill laid out so beautifully for everybody. And then we talked about how there's so much chaos and so much that we didn't see coming that's happening right now. When you get down to that micro level and you're actually in the weeds of what it actually means to be in a fourth turning. But if we zoom back out again, what are the characteristics that perhaps sit in the

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  framework at the top level that you either haven't seen yet, or you're looking for, or you expect to maybe come next as we move through this period?

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  You know, by this time, that's hard to know. Like, how much more do you want to see, Grant? I mean...

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  None. I don't want to see any more. I'm ready for the first turning, or please.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  You're ready to go all the way, right? Yeah, we all...

• 1:11:42Demetri Kofinas?

  Both ready for the party to begin.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  No, I'm just curious as to whether there are any glaring missing pieces yet that you haven't seen fall into place?

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Well, in the terminology that I lay out, you know, when you talk about stages of a fourth turning, right? Obviously, the catalyst is long behind us and regeneracy, we've seen the regeneracy. We may have seen yet another regeneracy, you know, with Trump 2.0 kind of going off in a somewhat different direction. Typically, there's more than one regeneracy. What we haven't seen is the, you know, decisive moment when the struggle is joined. We know on what terms the ultimate conflict will be about, right? We did not know what it would be in World War II until Pearl Harbor. Now... As I suggested, that America began to change in its mood well before Pearl Harbor.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  But that point at which we knew that the battle for the country's survival was joined, we had no idea what the outcome was, but it was joined, it really was made clear with Pearl Harbor, right? And that actually is a stage, you know, that I lay out. And I point out in all the previous four turnings, when we hit that stage. We haven't hit that yet. We have no idea what the terms will be. As I said, the biggest question, and when I talk a lot in the book about my most recent book in particular, because I lay that out very explicitly, is this question between internal and external. Because this is what's fascinating to me. You can have a society practically about to fragment into pieces internally, when suddenly it can be galvanized by an external event.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  And that was indeed the case with World War II. America was very divided during the 1930s. You know, a lot of America thought that we were headed toward fascism, the other thought we were headed toward communism. The liberal democracy seemed dead. And so there was a tremendous division, there was a tremendous polarization. And then suddenly, something else happened, right? And we galvanized around something else. We don't know what that something else is. We see both possibilities, clearly enough. I think we haven't talked much about external, but it's out there in the headlines, right? We see it around there. There are a lot of hotspots around in the world, right?

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  And keep in mind this, that these turnings are now not just American, they're global, right? These global generate. We see the rise of these ethnocentric autocratic rulers everywhere. I mean, they seem to be popular everywhere. You know, everyone wants to make their country, you know, great again, you know?

• 1:14:19Demetri Kofinas?

  Also, I think Neil, isn't there just a general longing for order?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  And community.

• 1:14:24Demetri Kofinas?

  I feel it.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Community, order, and validation, collective validation. Right? And that's it. And we see that even with this recent blow up between Pakistan and India. You think, okay, yeah, there's a terrorist incident. You really want to go to war over that? Well, India, you know, Narendra Modi finds it hard to resist. You know, this is the beating heart of the BJP. You know, this Hindu nationalism, it's been affronted. It's how can it back down? How can it accept this loss of face? But this is the world we live in today. So I think we see the dangers around globally as well.

• 1:15:02Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I just want to say, going back all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, where I said, you know, Trump is focused more on tearing down the institutions, whereas FDR was more focused on building them up. What I should have also said was that the insight I should have had that I got later in the conversation is institutions don't have to be political institutions. Those can be institutions of the family, religious institutions, and so on. And I think that does resonate with me. I think there is, we've gone through such a long stage of tearing things down. I mean, during the previous administration, the whole woke movement was so much about tearing down cultural institutions and institutional frameworks that we had in our heads about whether we're talking about gender roles or other things.

• 1:15:46Demetri Kofinas?

  And I do think there's a kind of exhaustion, I certainly feel it here in the US, around just the permissibility of everything, and a desire to kind of bring some order to things and to establish lines of demarcation and a collective sense of identity.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree with that. Remember that one of his proclamations, I can't remember if it was an inauguration or whether it was his first address to Congress, but he talked about the revolution of common sense. So he wants to bring all of these social relationships back into their affirmed sort of their historical legitimacy. And then he's spending a lot of energy on that. A lot of his executive orders have to do with purging DEI from

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  You know, federal, not only federal government, but companies that work with the federal government, you know, companies that accept, universities accept federal money. He's out there. In other words, there's a lot of energy going into that. These common sense or almost ancestral, this is when I said ethnocentric. I kind of mean it. I mean, I think Trump has, shares some of that, too. We have roots, we have ethnicity, we have traditions, we have something that's been validated by a long history. We need to reaffirm these things. And in that sense, what's the difference between him and Xi Jinping is doing that now with traditional Han culture? I mean, the big thing in China now is, is these Confucian institutes and Han clothing and Han cooking.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  And, you know, it's all coming back. It's, it's amazing, too, because you, you think back during the Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping's generation, when it was teenagers, they tried to actually eradicate all of that traditional stuff. Now they're trying to bring it all back, right? But this is happening around the world. Particularly, I would say, what's really interesting to me is in Eastern Europe. Because Eastern Europe faces a unique problem. Not only do they have a low fertility rate, they have a high immigration rate. And I'll say, this is a nomograph, right? People often say to me, no, I don't understand it. These Eastern European countries, they're so averse to immigration from Syria, you know, from various places. Why is it? I mean, they're losing population.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  And I think it's very simple. The Eastern European leaders know that the members of their country, Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles, they can easily go, you know, they, they still have the Schengen Zone, right? They can always just move to Western Europe. If it's only about the wages, they'll move out. They have to give natives to the place a reason to stay there. They have to give them a sense that this is a country of their roots. You know, you bring in five million Syrians, it's going to seem less like a country of their roots. And this is why these countries have been the most averse to immigration, despite the fact that they face the biggest population challenges. They know that that's a losing game. That's a negative cycle downward, right?

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  You'll just have more people immigrating. But I'm just saying, these are interesting in how we see them in so many different areas of the world today. This trend toward, you know, Vonting, the powerful leader in charge of an integrated community capable of action based on its heritage is not just in America, it's not even primarily in America. It's all around the world and it involves the same generations, assuming, you know, their various roles.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Neil, on that, and this internal, external, these differences we talked about a little while ago, it seems to me, as I kind of try and piece all this together, that the nature of the fourth turnings in Western Europe are very, very similar, characterized by leadership change, not always left to right, but sometimes right to left, but just a tiredness with the ruling class and a want for change. And we see the conflict, we see immigration being a major issue, to your point there about Eastern Europe. And we're seeing, I'm seeing that right across Western Europe and the Western world in general. The nature of the fourth turning in perhaps the Middle East and Asia, I'd be curious as to, A, whether the turnings, you see them being synchronized, but they're just slightly

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  different in nature in the Middle East and the Asia, or whether they're slightly behind the West in the nature of the fourth turning and what it looks like ultimately, when we get to that external part of the fourth turn, what it looks like not just in local fourth turnings, but a global fourth turning.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, look, in, you know, South Asia, East Asia, and metro Latin America, I think it's very similar to the US, perhaps slightly behind, even Western Europe is slightly behind. Western Europe had its sixties a little bit later, right, than America did. America emerged from World War II, really, its first turning started earlier too, right? We were prosperous right off the bat in 1946. Europe was still in the rubble, right? So there's a little bit of a lag, but I would say the last fourth turning was a fourth turning, obviously, for all of Europe, including Russia, obviously, for China, for Japan, for India, that was its independence, and of island independence it was, we're living with that today. With this new blow up between, you know, in in the Kashmir, right?

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  So that's pretty synchronous and the same going with a lot of Latin America. You remember during the 1960s, we had the disappearances of youth. We had the massacres in Mexico City. A lot of it involved youth in huge groups who were rebelling and revolting against the big, powerful institutions built by their parents, their fathers especially. That was a theme here in America, but it's a theme in in Santiago, it's a theme in Mexico City, it was a theme in a lot of Latin American countries. I would say that the only part of the world which is a somewhat different generational cycle, lagging maybe a whole generation would be the Islamic majority countries. Many of them had their revolutions about a generation later, really late 50s, early 60s.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Osama bin Laden, which is, you might think of as the the oldest of the sort of boomer awakening archetypes, right, was born in the late 1950s, you know what I mean? And the great Islamic awakening started in 1979. It started with the the Mujahideen, the resistance to Russia, the takeover of Mecca, and obviously the Iranian revolution. I mean, all of that was really, so you can see their awakening started much later. It's kind of a later pattern, interestingly enough. So I'm fascinated by this. I'm fascinated by generational currents and what I see. And, you know, that could actually impact how we negotiate with, you know, the Arab countries and with Iran as we're now doing.

• 1:22:23Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, at the risk of overtaxing our faculties or competencies on the subject of the Middle East, Neil, I am curious how your framework applies to Israel, which prior to October 7th was dealing with a turbulent period of political upheaval and constitutional crisis that saw large scale protests take place across the country and which since October 7th seemed to come together in in common solidarity against an external enemy by being thrown into a different sort of crisis.

• 1:22:55Demetri Kofinas?

  And it does seem that generally speaking now, there is a kind of reordering of sorts happening in the Middle East with one pole being led by the Saudi Israeli American axis and the other by Iran and its backers. Is there any insight to draw here by applying your framework to the shifts that are going on in that part of the world?

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I've actually done some sessions with Israelis, you know, Israelis, business leaders, actually, who would want to talk to me about this because I think there's a huge feeling among Israelis that October 7th really was therefore for turning, right? I mean, this is exactly, you know, a lifetime, 80 years or so after the birth of their country. A lot of them see it as existential to their country's survival, right? This assault on many fronts orchestrated by Iran, you know, from Hezbollah to the Houthis to the Hamas and, you know, all the rest of it. So there, I think there's a huge sense that it's kind of the once and for all, right?

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  We need to, you know, never again requires that at some point we step up and make big decisions. I don't think that was around 10 years ago, that we have to take advantage of the opportunity to really make sure it never happens again. It's interesting that the Bagen Doctrine, which is a whole doctrine, you know, of never allowing another neighboring country that wants to annihilate us in the area ever get a nuclear weapon, has informed many of their decisions to bomb, you know, nuclear weapons programs in Syria and Iraq and so on. And they want to follow through with it. We just had the news that apparently Netanyahu was planning an attack in May. Apparently Trump told him he could, he put it off because we're in negotiations now.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  But I will tell you, this is what you were talking about archetypal movements as societies move into fourth turnings. In awakenings, a society starts taking more chances in individuals and start taking fewer chances as a nation, right, collectively. And in a fourth turning, the opposite happens. People tend to be more risk averse personally, but they take bigger risks as collectivities, right, decisive acts to permanently solve problems, which had lingered around for a long time. I think, by the way, you see a lot of that in Trump and the movement that supports Trump. I think a lot of the

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  emotion that is supportive of Trump is simply, I don't care if we break these rules. We've been trying to deal with these problems since I was born, and I just can't stand it anymore. We solve this problem now. I just, you know, I don't care what it is, but we got to put an end to it. And there's that sense of impatience. And we can't just simply hand this problem off again to our kids.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Neil, I've just got one more question if I can for you, but it's a pretty broad one. I'm curious to your thoughts on what this looks like for China. With your demographers hat on, obviously, they have a pretty significant demographic challenge awaiting them. What does the fourth turning look like for China? Because it does have different characteristics to the US and Western Europe. And obviously, a fourth turning rippling through China will be significant for the rest of the world, whether we're peaceful or confrontational.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, China is obviously the big question. You know, that's the number one competitor for the United States. I think this is for the last decade and a half. That's kind of all our intelligence reports keep reiterating that, that's sort of the pacing threat, as we like to call it. We've had administration after administration saying they want to divert resources to Asia. I think this administration really is absolutely determined to do that. And the big question is, what kind of compromise can America make at heading off? What could be, obviously, a very major confrontation, a war, right? Meaning, I think it boils down really to the South China Sea and Taiwan above all.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  And the real question is, if the US somehow cedes Taiwan to China, the big impact, I don't, you know, we can talk about computer chips if we want. That's one aspect of it. But maybe we could find some way to, you know, export their industries or something, you know, to some other place. But I think the other issue, the big issue is, what effect will that have on American allies in the region? And would that simply lead to the Finlandization of those countries and eventually being subsumed themselves? Right? This is a problem. This is why American leaders, American presidents have tended to draw the line there. I would say these increasing problems that China has with managing its economy,

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  keeping its productivity rate up, it can't simply continue to invest in vast kinds of infrastructure that no one lives in or no one wants. And it can't keep expanding its exports of goods to the rest of the world. Increasingly, the rest of the world doesn't want them, or, you know, their economies can't function well with that. And I think more broadly, the fact that its working age population is already shrinking. And everyone knows what its long-term, a demographic situation is. You know, by the 2040s, it's going to be losing 10 million people a year. I mean, it's just going to be shrinking very, very fast. This actually, I think, pulls up the sort of necessary window of opportunity for China.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  This is sort of the old power transition theory whereby countries that think they need to resolve a confrontation when it appears that their window of opportunity is closing, meaning long-term trends are no longer in their favor, are likely to act sooner rather than later. Keep in mind, if you go back ten or fifteen years, when the Chinese thought that wasn't really a demographic problem, their productivity differential over the United States was huge, the long-term trend looked great. So it didn't matter. There was no reason to have a confrontation now. The longer we wait, the more powerful we are, right? There was nothing that would force any near-term action. I don't think they see that anymore. And I think Xi Jinping

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  has been trying to prepare his people for, you know, stormy wind and high seas, or however, you know, they, he puts it in his metaphors and his speeches, the Chinese need to be prepared for this in looking out at their geopolitical future. So, I don't know, Grant, let me ask you. I mean, what do you see in that possible confrontation?

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think for me, it's, the problem of it is, it could go either way. And it really is on an knife-edge. And to your earlier point about externalities, I suspect Xi Jinping is looking for an excuse to do it, rather than doing it of his own volition. He would love to have something to point at, the way Putin did with the troops on the border in Ukraine and the NATO ascension debate. I don't know that Xi gets something like that. But again, when we've talked in the past, in this conversation about the unifying effects that conflict has, you know, Xi Jinping has a very juicy unifying conflict sitting across a fifty-odd, a hundred-mile-odd strait.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I suspect it won't necessarily be something that happens organically. It will be a decision that's made, and it won't necessarily be about unifying China. It won't necessarily be about, we need to get Taiwan back in the fold. It will be, okay, we need to do something here, and this is going to be our best option. And that's kind of what worries me, is that it will be a means to an end, rather than something that is strategically important to do, because that makes it a lot more unpredictable.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Well, the admirals who were ahead of the Indo-Pacific, you know, Command have basically said... Their exercises around Taiwan are getting so large that it's almost impossible to differentiate between an exercise and preparation.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Right, and a full-scale invasion.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? And that's when you start worrying, you know, they have these enormous, they're apparently experimenting with these with these enormous bridges that they can bring up to the landing beaches, you know, and actually to be able to ferry huge amounts of armored vehicles. I mean, we have images of all this stuff and we're looking at their equipment. It does seem like they have a plan, right? This is not just our thinking this might happen. I mean, clearly they're preparing for this and where they're putting their resources are all into adventure that is something like this. Yeah, it would be nice to have an excuse. Of course, they could always make an excuse, you know, the president of Taiwan says something that goes one step too far about, you know, saying something about Taiwan being independent or something like that.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  They're also, I think it's worth saying, spending huge amounts of diplomatic energy isolating any country that dares to have a relationship with Taiwan. I mean, all this does suggest that they're trying to set this up. You can't help but think they're trying to set up this. So I think the bigger question is how America responds. I think China's leadership, I think no question that this is what it wants. It seems to be preparing for it, you know. The real question is how, and particularly how Trump responds. I think it would have been much easier to say how, you know, other recent presidents would have responded, right? But I think that becomes a very, you know, look, Trump has appointed many people who

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  are, you know, including Colby, Marco Rubio, I mean, a number of these were waltz. A lot of his closest advisors are very anti-China.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  And so the real question is, however, you know, maybe, maybe his vice president, maybe J D Vance, maybe a little bit less so, maybe some of the other people will, aren't as interested in the Pacific, right? But I do suspect that that's going to be a big moment. And then, of course, the question is, if China feels the only way to get an edge is to take out America, it's a little bit like the Pearl Harbor problem, right? In other words, you have to strike first and take out America capabilities. You can get that one month, those 30 days, you can really get your forces into Taiwan, right?

• 1:33:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, I mean, I don't necessarily have any other questions. I mean, I would just share the concerns. I think it's hard to know, for me at least, what the perspective is of the leadership in Beijing when they look at the rhetoric coming out of both parties in the US, the bipartisan consensus on China, the semiconductor export controls, now these tariffs that are basically like 100 and whatever they were, 165%.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  35, I think.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  That's the latest number.

• 1:33:52Demetri Kofinas?

  That's basically a trade embargo.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  And he promises, by the way, he might cut them in half, so they'll only be like 85%.

• 1:33:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I mean, so like, that does concern me, more so than some of the more theoretical arguments about there being a kind of window of opportunity and driven by demographic shifts. I don't know that, again, I don't have some special insight here, but I don't necessarily think that the Chinese Communist Party or Xi Jinping are particularly eager on taking a big risk on and trying to take Taiwan. However, I do think that the actions coming out of Washington, combined with a, maybe an inability to really forge cooperative alliances and an alliance structure and an economic block to try and contend with the rise of

• 1:34:40Demetri Kofinas?

  China, I think that could lead to, or make more likely, an outbreak of war. And God help us if that were the case. I think it's also possible to consider the possibility that really war is much less likely than we think because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the integration of our economies. I get that Norman Angel would have said the same thing back in 1914, but I still think that that's a real possibility. And God help us if we were to find ourselves in another great power conflict today because it could easily escalate into new fronts in cyberspace or outer space. Without even needing to go nuclear to create a real humanitarian catastrophe.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you look at Ukraine war, you could have said that could have been nuclear, right? In fact, when Putin was losing, he talked a lot about using tactical nukes. That's typically when a nuclear power threatens, by the way, to use nuclear weapons, it's losing. This has been actually why many of the political scientists who look at the nuclear peace after World War II said this has been profoundly conservative or status quo, this nuclear peace, because the only time when a country would realistically threaten use of nukes is when it's losing, rarely when it's attacking.

• 1:35:55Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, that's a great example also because, you know, there were people like Michael McFaul, who was ambassador to Moscow, not at the time, but had been, who was advocating letting the Ukrainians shoot missiles into Moscow or giving them F-16s right at the outbreak of the war. And so you can see that like, it really also depends, you know, you can appease, but you also can't go overboard. And it does matter, you know, what kind of heads are prevailing in those situations.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  Well, it does. Use of nukes if you're losing. I think that's the main danger for either side. Even the United States endorsed first use of nuclear weapons during the height of the Cold War back in the 1970s. If all those tanks came through the full of the gap and our forces weren't strong enough, we basically told the USSR, we would use nukes to stop them. It's funny that we forget that America actually has endorsed first use. You know, it's not just Vladimir Putin, but any country will threaten to do that if it seems to be facing an unacceptable loss, you know, loss of faith, loss of power, a loss of whatever it started with. But I do believe that, contrary to many people's expectation, a fight in

• 1:37:07Speaker 02

  the Western Pacific would not necessarily be short. Could go on for a long time. You know, the illusion that big wars will be quickly decided has been belied again and again and again throughout history, right? World War I, World War II, Crimean, I mean, you just go through all the examples of these wars that we thought would be quick. They may not be. Typically, big wars between great powers that have a lot of resources and are well motivated, they only end when one side of the other is worn down logistically and morale and frankly is exhausted. And in the process, those years transform both societies into somewhat different countries by the

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  time it's over, right? That gets into fourth turning as a social transformation. We won't be the same country after emerging from a long struggle like that.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Neil, thank you so much for joining us and for, as I say, helping us kick the series off. We are excited to see where it goes and we may be calling on you again once we come full circle and we've got a lot more stuff to talk about and more questions for you.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, we might be in another phase of the fourth turning, so we might have to rejoin this. But again, thank you, the dream team, the two of you, you know, how to say, Michael and Magic, you know, anyway, it was a delight.

• 1:38:28Demetri Kofinas?

  I like this. I like this dream team illusion.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Okay, Neil, that's fantastic. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you again soon.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:38:36Demetri Kofinas?

  Take care, Neil.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Well, mate, what a first step on this journey that was. Absolutely phenomenal. Every conversation I've had with Neil over the years has been just mind-boggling and mind-expanding, and I've loved every single one of them. But that was, you know, to be having this conversation, not just thinking you're in the middle of a fourth turning, but being demonstrably in the middle of one and having so many people recognize that now, you know, adds another dimension to it. I thought it was terrific.

• 1:39:04Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I feel like in conversations that you and I've had, both public and private, and as well as with some other folks, that keeps coming up often, which is that You know, for those of us that have sat around thinking about these subjects for years, the key difference now is that we're kind of beginning to live inside of the vortex that we were trying to describe or think about conceptually.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels that way. It really does. And every day brings change and some of it is big. But again, I think having this fourth turning framework is a huge advantage in being able to step back and not just get completely caught up in all the madness, but try and step far enough back to see it as its part in the bigger picture. You know, it certainly, as I said at the beginning of the show, it certainly helps me keep things in perspective and remain, if not totally calm and unflustered by it, certainly more objective about it and where it might fit in.

• 1:40:03Demetri Kofinas?

  One of the things I liked about this conversation also is that we hit so many different subjects or themes like religion, drug and alcohol usage, gender roles, geopolitics, wealth and income inequality. You know, I think that's especially helpful because what I think we both wanted to accomplish with this first episode was to take a wider lens as possible. And I think we were able to accomplish that.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  I do. I do. Well, listen, thanks to Neil for joining us. If you haven't read Neil's books, all of them, Generations and The Fourth Turning with Bill Strauss, and Neil's new book, which was released last year, which is The Fourth Turning is Here, they're all magnificent reads and you can find them just about every major bookseller. You'll find them online, obviously at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Waterstones and all those places. So if you haven't read them, I cannot recommend them strongly enough. And Neil has his own website, demographyunplugged.com. There's a podcast that Neil does that talks about demographic issues. They're terrific. I think they're every week. They may be every two weeks, but they're regular and they're, and they're just fantastic. And a lot of what

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Neil talks about and a lot of the work Neil does is going to, I truly believe, become even more important than it is now. So I think he's going to be an invaluable follower for everybody listening.

• 1:41:19Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, couldn't agree more. Definitely recommend checking out Neil's work. And I tried to get a hardcover copy. You know, I don't know about you, Grant, but I hate softcover books. I absolutely hate them. And unfortunately, Neil's book, The Fourth Turning, is one of those books that you just cannot find in hardcover unless you pay a fortune from some kind of, you know, antique bookseller. So go on there, go on Amazon and get that softcover copy.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  I should also point out that Neil is on Twitter also, @howgeneration, H-O-W-E generation. So follow Neil there as well. If you want to follow Dmitry and I, we're both on Twitter. You'll find Dmitry at Kofinas, K-O-F-I-N-A-S. You'll find me at T-T-M-Y-G-H. And of course, don't forget to visit hiddenforces.io to follow all Dmitry's work there. And you'll find everything you need to know about me at Grant-Williams.com. That's it from us for another episode. We'll be back with another very special guest in the not-too-distant future. Until then, as always, thank you, everybody, for listening.

• 1:42:19Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm looking forward to it. Take care, everyone.