The "Boomer Blues" and a Return to Faith | Roger Mitchell

Episode 445 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/boomer-blues-and-a-return-to-faith-roger-mitchell is the ninth installment in the Hundred Year Pivot podcast series. In it, Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams speak with Roger Mitchell, an entrepreneur and writer whose essay "The Answer Was Here All the Time https://www.grant-williams.com/2025/fin-de-siecle/," published in Grant Williams's 2025 compendium, explores faith, meaning, and the search for moral grounding in a contemporary West that feels increasingly unmoored and in epistemic freefall. The conversation begins with a diagnosis of the cultural and spiritual malaise that seems to have taken hold of Western societies: the fraying of the social contract, the "boomer blues," as Roger Mitchell calls them, and why life inside "the machine" leaves us lonely, angry, afraid, and in dire need of real human contact. The second half of the episode turns to a discussion about the dangers of politicizing religion and weaponizing faith in response to growing social and existential angst in Western societies. Demetri, Grant, and Roger explore Europe's identity crisis, the destabilizing effects of uncontrolled immigration, the cultural consequences of collapsing birth rates, the economic and social tragedy facing younger generations, and the broader epistemic collapse that has made consensus-building nearly impossible and replaced reasoned debate with a totalizing ambition for political domination. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting 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 10/10/2025

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 ninth 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, 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 that we believe is currently underway.

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  In today's conversation, Grant and I speak with Roger Mitchell, an entrepreneur and writer whose essay "The Answer Was Here All The Time," published in Grant's 2025 compendium, explores faith, meaning, and the search for moral grounding in a contemporary West that feels increasingly unmoored and in epistemic freefall. We begin today's conversation by diagnosing the cultural and spiritual malaise that seems to have taken hold of Western societies: the fraying of the social contract, the boomer blues, as Roger calls them, and why life inside the machine leaves us lonely, angry, and afraid, and in dire need of real human contact. The second half of the episode turns to a discussion about the dangers of politicizing

• 1:28Demetri Kofinas?

  religion and weaponizing faith in response to growing social and existential angst in Western nations. We explore Europe's identity crisis, the destabilizing effect of uncontrolled immigration, the cultural consequences of collapsing birth rates, the economic and social tragedy facing younger generations, and the broader epistemic collapse that seems to have made consensus building nearly impossible and replaced reasoned debate with a totalizing ambition for political domination.

• 1:58Demetri Kofinas?

  The episodes in this series are published a week ahead of time on both the Hidden Forces and Grant Williams podcast subscriber only feeds. If you want early access to these conversations, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed so you can listen to this episode and other subscriber only content on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber

• 2:41Demetri Kofinas?

  page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this deeply meaningful and spiritually grounding conversation with our guest, Roger Mitchell.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Welcome everybody to another edition of The Hundred Year Pivot. Joining me as always on this is my friend and co-host, Demetri Kapinos. Dimitri, how are you, buddy?

• 3:14Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I'm good. I'm good. It's been a while. We've been

• 3:18Demetri Kofinas?

  I was gonna say, it's been a while since we

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Doing a whole bunch of stuff.

• 3:21Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, since we did one of these shows, we text, but I haven't spoken to you in a while. Maybe it feels like it's been a while, but how long has it been? Like a month?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it probably has only been about a month, right? It's just weird. There's so much happening in the world and in each of our lives and you just kind of get wrapped up in this stuff and suddenly you look at a month's gone by. Because of what you've packed into it, it feels like it's much longer.

• 3:40Demetri Kofinas?

  I've been tuning out a lot of the world. I don't know about you.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I've been trying to. I think you've been more successful than me.

• 3:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Oh, yeah. Well, one of the things I did was I deleted Twitter off my phone and I didn't even make an effort to do it. I really just, I think I finally reached the point because I've gone through a few phases here with this. I reached the point where it's like, it wasn't even an effort. I just like, I just can't.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what? That's great. I need to do that.

• 4:04Demetri Kofinas?

  It's not even valuable from a business point of view anymore, but it's a form of pollution and I don't want to pollute my life with it.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that. I still find it useful for finding stuff out, but you've got to be so surgical now and you just kind of got to wash all the filth off anything you find, you know?

• 4:22Demetri Kofinas?

  I've gone back to just ordering books and Reading books now. My new hobby is learning about the disintegration and collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, not because I'm looking for some kind of corollary to the United States, because I know that's a popular comparison point these days, but actually because of the resurgence in nationalist movements in Europe, as well as the events unfolding in the Middle East, and a desire to think more deeply about organizational forms of governance and how transitions from one form to another can lead us to all sorts of political upheavals and violence that, in the case of the Balkans or the former Ottoman

• 5:05Demetri Kofinas?

  territories in the Middle East, form the basis for the world that we are living in today, even if we don't realize it. Anyway, that's a whole nother conversation, obviously.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Well, but, you know, an understanding of conflict and the nature of it and the paths to it has never been more important than now, right?

• 5:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm kind of geeking out on history at the moment.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Good man. Doesn't make you a bad person. Well, listen, we've, we've got a guest joining us in a second, a good mate of mine, Roger Mitchell. And the reason Roger's joining us back in February, one of the things that started this journey for Dimitri and I was a collection of essays that I published in February of this year. I called the compendium Fandesjekla, End of Century, because I'd asked some friends of mine, because of the same impetus, the same feelings that led to Dimitri and I doing the Hundred Year Pivot, that I just felt things were changing. And I wanted to get five people who I have an immense amount of respect and admiration for to write their feelings about the nature of that change. And one of those essays was written by Roger. And each of my five friends

• 6:08Speaker 01

  was given a very broad brief. I didn't tell them what to write. I wanted them to come at it from whatever direction they wanted, thinking that if they all came at it from the same direction, there was as much information as that as if they all came from a different direction. And they did all come from different directions. And Roger's direction was a direction of religion, you know, something which plays a key role in his life. And so, you know, as Dimitri and I have talked about before, this kind of yearning for faith, this yearning for something to kind of pin a hope to about the future. For a lot of people, that is spiritual. For a lot of people, it's faith-based. And so we thought it'd be a great idea to get Roger to come on and talk about the essay. And Dimitri, you know, I'm keen to do that. Roger and I. Speak all the time, but we haven't really, certainly not since maybe March, talked about

• 6:51Speaker 01

  this subject much. So I'm keen to get him to come on and talk about the essay, how he wrote it and what it all means in a bigger context.

• 6:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I'm excited for this too. I'm like, this is the episode for which I'm the most unprepared, like of any episode that

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Not your wheelhouse at all.

• 7:06Demetri Kofinas?

  in the series. I normally sort of write down some questions. I wrote down no questions. All I did was reread his piece, which I, as you know, I really loved. It's one of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time. And I read it, of course, when it first came out. When did this come out again? How long ago was this?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  February.

• 7:20Demetri Kofinas?

  February. And I, and I went back and I listened to Evita's Don't Cry For Me, Argentina by Tim Scott, which he quotes in the piece, just to kind of get me in the mood, get me started. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Don't know what to expect, but it's, I'm sure it's going to be great.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Well, neither is doing. It'll be, I'm sure that whenever the subject religion comes up, you know, it's going to be challenging in parts because it just is these days. It's one of these things that you struggle to talk about. But, you know, we're all coming at this from a, a place of curiosity, which I think is the best you could do, right? Your intentions are what they are, and you go where the conversation takes you.

• 7:54Demetri Kofinas?

  And the thing is, I think, you know, it's so important for people to understand, if I dare say it this way, it might sound self-assured, but the reason it's difficult to talk about religion is because you're inherently limited by language. Language cannot encompass the totality of what it is that we're talking about. This thing that we feel, what we call the divine, the mystery. And this is for me, why it's always been difficult and why I never feel comfortable with any particular word to describe what people will refer to as God, or Yahweh, or Allah, or whatever. Because we're all just kind of doing the best we can. And that's, you know, Roger makes this point too, actually, now that I think of it, because he brings up the importance

• 8:37Demetri Kofinas?

  of poets and poetry. And what is poetry? It is our best attempt to use metaphor to describe feeling. And that feeling, I think, is the closest thing that we get to understanding this thing that we call God.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, look, let's talk to Roger. And with regards Roger's essay, Dimitri is going to include it in his show notes. I'm very happy to send the full compendium of essays to anybody that wants them. So feel free to email me and I will happily send you a copy of them. And then so they are, they're five very different essays from five very different men, but I found an awful lot of meaning in each one of them. So without any further ado, Dimitri, why don't we invite Roger on and get stuck into this?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Well, Rog, mate, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining us on the Hundred Year Pivot. So much to talk about, you know, Dimitri and I've done a little.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  You mean, this is a goal on goal? I think I'm on the wrong podcast.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  You and I are so used to doing these podcasts and just laughing about the world.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Still time to get over this one.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  No, it's too late now. You're locked in. But, you know, I guess the place to start with this is to, as I say, I asked you to be one of the contributors to this collection of essays that I published in February, because, you know, you're one of the most thoughtful people I know. And I had a very good sense of where you'd come at this problem from, and I wanted that perspective. And you didn't disappoint me. You came at it from the angle that I expected you to, but the content of it was so fascinating. And in all the correspondence I got, you know, so many people highlighted your piece, which was interesting in and of itself, given this is a largely financial business interested crowd. The other essays were largely targeted

• 10:17Speaker 01

  to that crowd specifically. Yours is much more secular and in appeal. So why don't we start with going back to when I asked you to write that essay? I'd love to get, and you and I've never spoken about this, I'd love to get your thought process in when you sat down to be a part of that process, how you arrived at the decision, the direction that you took.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, first of all, for being on this. It's a real pleasure. Hopefully I can do some decent. Work here, it is a little bit intimidating, but we'll have a go. Like all my pieces, which most of them, actually all of them aren't as important as the one I did for you there that you're referencing, Grant, they are organic. I'm not a writer, I've never been a writer, I actually wasn't that good at English at school. So I find these things start and they grow arms and legs in a process that I'm not sure I'm necessarily in control of. And then at the end, I put some polish and order into it and it seems to come out okay.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  In this specific one, you know, my starting point was we all as a generation should be pretty happy with life. But the question you asked me is, I think the question many of us have, which is something seems off, something is wrong, the process isn't working anymore. And we're all experienced enough to have a view about what's happening. And even if it doesn't affect us, because we're at the later stage of our journey, we can see how it's going to affect everybody else. And then, you know, so you start from there and you then you start thinking, well, what's wrong with the world? And you go through all the things that you believe are different to what you were told was,

• 11:59Speaker 02

  let's call it the social contract when you were eighteen or nineteen or twenty. What's changed there? And once you start thinking about all those, and I'm sure we'll get into the individual elements of them, you start seeing a lot of commonality, a links. And, you know, it kind of like wrote itself because from my point of view, it had to write itself. You know, my main theme about all of this isn't really about evangelizing for Christianity or God or anything like that. It's about this, Grant, whether you're secular or an atheist or a believer or not, our code in the West. Comes from there, you know, somebody smarter than me said, everybody thinks that

• 12:43Speaker 02

  they don't need to have God to have good values and good principles. They don't realise that they started off on third base, which is true, you know, third base being what was written in books 1500, 2000 years ago. It can be changed and articulated in a different way, but our value set is from, in the West, certainly, is from Abraham and then Christianity. So, you know, you start looking at that and you start comparing to the things that you think has gone wrong in the social contract, then you end up hopefully with a piece that makes sense. That's the best I can do as an answer, Grant, that went that way.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, it was fascinating to me because I'm not a religious man, you and I've had this conversation many, many times, you know. But the reason it struck a call with me was because around the time I was thinking about that essay, Dimitri and I were talking about the world as we do, and as you say, there's just this sense that something's off. And it's been really interesting to me, the number of conversations I've had as I've travelled around the world this year with people that don't start off anywhere remotely spiritual, but end up there with people who I've had many conversations with over the years for hours on end about all kinds of things. And the subject of religion, the subject of Christianity, the subject of spirituality

• 14:06Speaker 01

  has never come up in any of those conversations. And I'm kind of just sitting there going, it's really interesting that now this is somewhere that so many people seem to find their way back to it, as you found your way to that essay. And, you know, the title of the essay was telling, the answer is here all the time, right? It is that idea in the syc即ity of everything, that maybe this is just somewhere that we do go back to when we're searching for that anchor, that centre, those principles, those guiding values, that seem to be completely lost wherever we look right now.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  All I would say to the listeners of yours is that I've been lucky enough to have that faith since forever. So I'm not a newbie, I'm not a born again. I come from a Catholic family and it kind of was always there. My own journey was, you know, at some point, I think it all sounds a little bit melodramatic, but it has to be, this isn't simple stories, but I remember normal going through school as a Catholic, you know, you go through the ceremonies, you're kind of sniggering and laughing with your mates, looking at the girl over at the other side and you're not really into it, you know, as we were saying a little bit earlier off of Mike, we were, it's a process, you know. Then I went on a school

• 15:26Speaker 02

  trip about 16 to St Peter's in Rome and I walked in there and something happened, something happened. So the point is, I'm not a newbie one here. So I'm in a position of trying to look at people that you're describing now, Grant, that have not talked about this for most of their life and now are talking about it. And the pieces about, well, why are they doing that now? And there's a lot of reasons, but I think one of the simplest reasons is this one. When the society has been set up to work on accumulating money, and that's not a bad thing, let's get that out there, accumulating money to look after

• 16:08Speaker 02

  your family, to give your kids a better chance than you had, to maybe do some charity work, money and career and progress and all of that, when that is shown to everybody to now not be worth the candle, where else are people going to go? Because they have lost their north star. Their north star was, I'm born, I get educated, I get a good job, I put in some graft, I get promoted, I meet a girl, we have a family and we end up climbing the social ladder. That was the social contract. When that is thrown in the furnace, where else are they going to go? Now, the way I see it is, some are going the way that we

• 16:52Speaker 02

  are talking about with your experience of your mates. Others are going somewhere else. It's no coincidence that we are seeing. On a financial podcast, what seems to a lot of us to be the rise of something that seems like communism light or even communism heavy, you know socialism inheritance tax should be a hundred percent, really, really strong ideas and no concept that the government is always able to bail you out and pay you what you need to do to believe in what you need to be. So some people are believing in that kind of world. Other peoples are throwing themselves into politics and we can go into that if you want, but you know, a lot of that is very, very concerning about some of the things that are coming back decades

• 17:37Speaker 02

  after we thought we'd killed them. And others are about stranger things that seem to, some people call it woke, some people call it gender stuff, that doesn't seem to make any sense. And it strikes me, I don't think you need 70 genders, right? I'm not one of these Christians that says it's a man and a woman and that's how same sex marriage doesn't exist. No, I'm not like that. I'd be quite liberal on that side. But I'm pretty certain you don't need 60 genders. I'm pretty certain you don't need that. So why do you have 60? It's because somebody, I guess, need something to believe in that makes them feel a little bit unique. And that's because the thing that was there for 40 years, 50 years, 80

• 18:20Speaker 02

  years, if you want to call it a fourth turning, since the war, money, the social contract, progress, move up the social mobility has gone and everybody's scrambling for the lifeboat. And one of them, not saying it's the one, it is for me, but I'm not saying it's the one, was always here all the time. It's been around for 2000 years. It seems natural to me that the thinking people will go their grant.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Dimitri, the interesting thing about this is, from what Roger's saying there, the antithesis of what Roger's talking about in terms of the place people are going, is your concept of financial nihilism. That was one of the big. Components of this, of the piece I wrote, of our conversations, of our decision to do this podcast together, is this framing that you did so brilliantly a couple of years ago, of the idea of financial nihilism. So when you, when you hear that from Rog, and you think about your, your understanding of what financial nihilism means, how do you place the two in opposition to each other?

• 19:20Demetri Kofinas?

  I actually do have some thoughts about that, but if you don't mind, Grant, I wanted to ask Roger a different question.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, jump in.

• 19:26Demetri Kofinas?

  To start off, because your piece, Roger, it pulls on so many threads, it opens so many doors. And it begins really with a diagnosis, not even before a diagnosis, it comes with, it begins with a, a description of the symptomology of what appears to be wrong, before you get into a diagnosis of what is wrong. And that symptomology isn't just generational, but you do focus very much on what you describe as the boomer blues in the piece. And you, you observe that we're not happy. You say essentially that the children of Reagan, the children of Clinton, of Thatcher are in a bit of a funk. And you ask why? I am curious,

• 20:07Demetri Kofinas?

  as someone who's not a baby boomer, but who does see this, I'm curious to, to understand, what has your personal experience been of aging into this stage in your life, surrounded by your friends and colleagues of a similar age and demographic, and seeing what is going on? Can you describe for me and for the listeners, exactly what it is that you have seen that inspired you to write what you wrote?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  That is a really good question. And that isn't false modesty. I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask this, because one could make a very good case that these last five to 10 years for me have been the salad days of my career, and hence my life. You know, so it's not that I peaked at 45 and I've been hanging on to not let the younger kids come in. You know, like a lot of where I am today and how people look at me today would be considered my peak in my career. I think a lot of it is That people may be not as lucky as that. Let's say people around fifty. Who are getting to that stage in their career.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Where they're maybe starting to be asked to move aside or told to move aside. And they look around them and they see. A job market now that is going to actively discriminate against a white, middle aged man. Certainly if he's straight, you just have to say these things. And that's that messes around them a little bit. The other thing is that. They feel responsibility to their children, which they will have children at this point. They know the children will not be independent. I'm talking in the main here now, there are obviously a lot of exceptions, but I would say in ninety percent of the cases.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  The children will not be independent. They will have to rely on what's now called the bank of mummy and daddy. And mommy and daddy don't think they've got the reserves to be able to do that. And that makes them sad. You know, one of the things that any decent person, any decent human is going to get the blues about. Is thinking, Dimitri, that this is going to be the first generation. Where children are less well off than the the parents that came before them. And it's not less well off a little bit. It's not even stagnant. It's dropping off a cliff. What happened to us and what's happening to them now. I'll give you an example of this.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  You know, when you've got kids, Grant's children are a slightly different position to mine, but my kids are in their early twenties. And, you know, we have jokes in the house. We've always had a good household of of dialogue and and been able to debate things. And obviously you do debate generational issues and and generational struggles. And, you know, my son will say to me sometimes, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's okay, Dad. You're doing great and everything like that. But you are where part of the generation that just had to turn up. You just had to be relatively intelligent, get a good education, get a degree. Put in a bit of a graft. Don't be stupid in in work. When you get naturally promoted, you'll end up making a nice salary.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  And your house will be super affordable and you'll pay it off around a certain amount of time. Look at us into all the issues of this generation and any decent parent is gonna be sad, Dimitri. And then this isn't the case for, I don't think, a lot of people that are listening to your podcast here, but then you look around the society that your children are now in, and this is the symptoms that you're talking about. Some of the things make you desperately, desperately depressed. You know, some of the ideas of things like, you know, there's no meritocracy anymore. You know, the thing I was mentioning earlier was more or less it was

• 24:03Speaker 02

  meritocracy, more or less, more or less. Now you can have the greatest children that do everything they're meant to do, do all the stuff, have a perfect application to get into the top universities and they don't get in for reasons that are various reasons. You know what they are. That's depressing. Then you see other ones who don't take that route, but decide that they can go on to OnlyFans and make an exceptionally rich living. So the answer is this, the old way of just living a good life and grinding down and being a decent person is being thrown in your face all the time now as the sucker play, Dimitri, if that

• 24:46Speaker 02

  makes sense. That's why I think we're all a little bit depressed, those of us that are of good heart.

• 24:52Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, there's, you know, I don't know where to even go because there's so many places to go with this. First of all, I totally agree with the observation about OnlyFans. Years ago, when I used Facebook, I've stopped using Facebook, I think in like 2017 or 2018, but around that time, I had posted something. And I remember someone quote shamed me for using the word prostitution and that I should use the word sex worker. And I didn't understand at the time, really what that meant.

• 25:21Demetri Kofinas?

  But obviously now I get it, you know, it's part of this large reformulation of language and what is correct and what is not correct and the whitewashing of morally reprehensible behavior. Sure, there are some people that probably enjoy being prostitutes. I wonder if that's true for the vast majority of people and it's not a job that I'd ever want my daughter to do. And I think that no one would say that they want their child to be a prostitute or to sell themselves sexually for money. So I think there has been a broad moral decline in America. It isn't just, you know, the fact that people will do things for money. There's also a broad moral decline. Your comments about being the sucker at the table also resonate.

• 26:02Demetri Kofinas?

  I think this is what you see in societies that go from high to low trust. You know, you end up saying, okay, what am I going to be the sucker that pays the taxes? Am I going to be the guy that plays it by the rules while everyone else skips ahead of the line? And so do your comments about meritocracy. And I think this is absolutely true. I mean, this is an area where in, you know, Grant brought up financial nihilism. This is one avenue where you certainly see this with the financialization of our economy and the ability to generate life-changing returns in financial markets without necessarily investing in companies that produce commensurate real economic value or anything meaningful. And so I think that all of this kind of fits in. But I have one more question, if you don't

• 26:47Demetri Kofinas?

  mind, which is kind of where I was driving this. So when you talked about the boomer blues, like, because I see some of this, I mean, I see a lot of this in terms of the anger and resentment. I look at a lot of folks who are, you know, in their 60s or especially in their 70s. And they're, they've really made it. They've had a, they've hit home runs. I don't, you know, they hit it out of the park in life. And they've got, in some cases, a lot of money, but they're in, often cases, they're angry or they're resentful. And I wonder what that's about. Because while I can't relate to the anger or the resentment, and I'm not a boomer, I was born in 1981, I did find something relatable there when you were running through a list

• 27:30Demetri Kofinas?

  of possible symptoms in your written piece, which you said, that we boomers, you said, we feel like we don't understand the world anymore, is this experience of not understanding the world. I have started to feel this, like I feel, and I describe it as a kind of homelessness. But I think this also steers us towards God and towards religion and towards the divine. But I have felt increasingly homeless in the world we live in today. But recently, we baptized, so I grew up Orthodox Christian as a kid, you know, this idea that you were talking about, I spent more time looking at girl skirts in church than I did, you know,

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Well, that's

• 28:05Demetri Kofinas?

  paying attention to the liturgy. But I recently, we recently baptized my son, and that was, I also, actually, my godson and his sister baptized our son, and they're very religious, they go to church all the time. And we moved to a new neighborhood where the church that they go to happens to be a really wonderful Greek Orthodox church, and they go there all the time. They're right there in the first, the first, you know, pew. And so I started going, and it has been a very emotional experience for me going, I will tell you. And it has been one of the

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Why's that? Why's it been emotional?

• 28:43Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, that's probably a conversation to have.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  You don't know?

• 28:46Demetri Kofinas?

  I don't quite know. It's been very emotional. I will say, but one of the reasons, I think, is that it's one of the few places where I have felt this kind of coming home. You know, when I was a kid and we would go to church, this was, you know, shortly after my grandfather had passed away. My grandfather passed away when I was three, I think, my mom's father. And when we would go to church, my mom would always say, we're gonna light a candle for grandpa. And we would light a candle. And I feel that when I go now. And actually, I light, I will light a candle for my grandmother, for my mom's mom, who passed away in 2009, or 2010. Anyway, and unfortunately, you know, when you're an immigrant family, everyone's away, so she passed away and I couldn't be there. But, you know, I remember,

• 29:30Demetri Kofinas?

  I remember what that was like, being a little boy, holding my mother's hand, going to church. And it feels like a kind of homecoming. And the liturgies, I know them, even though it's been so many years since I sang them. And I also, I think there's something especially comforting about the ritualistic nature of the orthodox tradition because of all the chanting and the rituals. And I see all these people, a lot of people that have been going for the last 20 years since I dropped off, that are still there, or you know, 25 years are still there. And so there's a kind of community element. But I kind of went off, so I asked you a couple of questions, Roger, and then I went off describing my experience.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Let me answer that because I remember your questions and I think that you said something there which I think is the answer. And it starts with a financial or business symptom. In my view, one of the great business opportunities in 2025, and it has been for 10 years, if not more, is actually doing proper customer service for anything now. Basically, the pitch would be, you call a number, a human will answer you within 30 seconds. You could be anything, but I think that is a winning business at any service at all. Now, you say, why are older people angry, or why are even you angry? I'll tell you the answer is because you can't speak to a human anymore. And this is a symptom

• 30:48Speaker 02

  of the roll-up play of private equity. You get all these little smaller niche operators, you put them together, you save costs, you make a process where it's all outsourced. Everybody laughs and says, yeah, that's a bit of a trope. But I'm telling you, it's true, because older people who by definition may be a little bit lonelier now, they want to speak to a human. And like, when they do speak to a human, you hear them and they start talking about the most absurd conversations, because they've just got a need to speak to a human being. It's the same with everything that we have to do in the, in the prime of our life of having to get something done, achieve something, get a new driver, like

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Dyson, whatever it is, we know the pain before we start because we won't get to speak to a human.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Guess what? You go into a church or a synagogue or a mosque, I can only speak for a church. You feel that you're speaking to somebody. Somebody is there for you. I would say even more than that. They were waiting for you. You know, I don't want to get too holy wolly and all of this, but it doesn't happen very often. But sometimes when I go into a church, doesn't happen very often at all. Especially when it's empty and you've gone because you've missed it or something like that. You just feel, ah, you're here. Welcome back, you know? And that just washes everything else away. Forget the spiritual side. I'm saying humans are basically social animals.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  And when a phone has made that nobody even has eye contact on an underground train anymore. And on the other side where call centers and bots and automatic things don't allow you to just have thirty seconds of small talk with a stranger, which makes you feel a wee bit better and part of a human community. You get lost because you're in your little cocoon and we are, we are being ripped away what is our basic nature, which is social. You know, that's why sport is so important because you go to that stadium, you're in the main, surrounded by strangers. But you will strike up a conversation because that's what you do.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  And that's why I think two business things, the invent of the smartphone that has done everything that it's done. And the other side, the invent of destruction of human customer service is made us all secularly utterly depressed.

• 33:14Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, I'll let Grant go, but for the audience to have some context, before we got on this call, I was ranting. And actually I felt bad about it afterwards because I was like, this is not the energy that I want to use to start this call. But I I'd been recently, and our genius members know this because I posted some videos to the community about it. The last couple of weeks I've been dealing with this health thing. No big deal. Everything's fine. But it required me to interface with the healthcare system meaningfully for the first time in, you know, a long time. And while of course I've had this customer service nightmare experience in every other facet of my life because it's pervasive. I've had it in the healthcare area where you can't even get the doctor's staff on the phone. Now you have to get the call center on the phone. And they could care less about you. They hand off one thing to the next. You get just sent. And you know, I am one of those people, and it's really fascinating to hear you say this.

• 33:59Demetri Kofinas?

  I am one of those people that once I get on, first of all, you're a hundred percent right. I get on the call. I know what I'm in for. I'm already prepared. And I've learned to stop buying into the bullshit of accepting the prompt structure. Because I know I'm just going to go through hell. So I just go immediately to representative. And when I don't get what I want, I'll curse into the phone line. Because I've discovered, or at least it used to work, that if you cursed, they kind of realize they have an angry customer. They kind of expedite the call. Their AI figures it out. Like I, I don't even.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 34:27Demetri Kofinas?

  And it's such a universal problem. But to your point, what the god is money. Money, efficiency, how do we increase profits at the expense of the customer experience? Everything is about increasing profits. And you see this in every form of automation, even at the checkout line in supermarkets. I'm the kind of guy, believe it or not, that my wife makes fun of me because she actually likes the self-checkout. She's like, I'd rather just not talk to somebody. I actually like going to the person to check out like a normal, what seems to be like a normal human experience. And all of those things are being done not to make the customer experience better. In some cases, the automation could make it better. But they're being, they're being done to increase profits for the corporation at the expense of the customer

• 35:09Demetri Kofinas?

  by putting more decision-making burdens on the people who are already exhausted from the number of decisions they have to make in their daily lives.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Well, I want to ask this question to both of you, and I'm curious as to what you both think about it. Just listening to that dialogue is absolutely fascinating. And you know, this boomer blues, Rog, of yours, which was so beautifully identified in the piece. And again, to anybody listening that wants to read that piece, the compendium that Roger's essay was a part of, just let me know, Domenich, I'll give it to you. You can include it in the show notes or whatever. And if people want to get it from me, they can just email me and I'll happily send it out to you. But part of the problem, it seems to me, Rog, is that the older you are, the more experience you have, or the more likely you are to have had experience of a time when things were much, much better, right? You've lived through it. So you've felt and you've seen and you've lived and you've experienced the deterioration. So you just feel things are getting better.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  The younger you are. This is the water you're swimming, right? So you are, all you've known, press one for this, press two for that. You don't know, you're not used to speaking to a human being on the other end of the phone. You've just, you've grown up with it. So I'm curious as to, if there is a circular nature to this, that we get to the point where we go back to the beginning again. I can see how that return can be driven by the boomer generation and to some extent, Gen Xers like me, because I'm also old enough to have witnessed the decline. But is this just part of the fact that these people, the boomers are going to die off before the X's, the X's are going to die off before the millennials?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  So the change has to happen now because we know what we're fighting for. We know what we're trying to get back to. And other generations maybe don't have that. They have to be, somehow have this, this value set inculcated within them, within a time limit here. Because at what stage do you lose the anchor, lose the thing you're trying to get back to? Because all the stories have died and all the people that remember them have died. I'm curious as to what you think about that, both of you.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Well, let me, let me start first then, because there is a risk here of generalization. Let's talk a little bit about Gen Z, the way I see them and I perceive them. And then we can talk about millennials differently, because I think it's significantly different.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you, you've got Gen Z kids, I've got millennial kids.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Right, so I believe millennial kids are a lighter version of who we were. They're not significantly different. We would say they're not as go-getting. They didn't come up in the eighties and deregulation and go for it. They were more the nineties and it was already getting a little bit into a changed world for a million different reasons. They included dot com bust and included the twin towers and everything like that.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  So I just think they are a lighter version of us and like everything, they've got good members and they've got they've got average members. Gen Z, I think, is different. I think the best versions of Gen Z are an extraordinary generation. And I'm not just biased by my kids, I see it elsewhere as well. They have, I believe they're more mature, because you would expect them to be more mature when they had the world of knowledge at their phone since when they've been born, really. They find stuff out, they fact check in real time, and if they've got a brain and they're curious and they're good people, they're ahead of the curve of the head of where the boomers were, where the certainly where the millennials were, and they are strong. And the tragedy is, guys, they've

• 38:46Speaker 02

  already come up with some conclusions. They won't be able to buy a house, they probably won't get what they deserve for their effort, because they use phrases like nepo baby. And that's not a phrase that we ever had, but they do. I mean, they immediately will say that because they know the reality of this world of ours now, where certain people will get ahead and certain won't. And they also have given up, I believe, even the good ones, on the idea of savings, because they're saying, why bother? Why bother? All of this, the welfare state, the Medicare entitlements, all of that, it's all going to be gone by

• 39:27Speaker 02

  the time that we are ready for it. So they've got into this situation, I think, of just living for the moment. And that doesn't mean they're they're wasters. Don't get me wrong, I'm saying they understand that they're never going to be able to create wealth, they will never be able to save in the way that we did by putting away everything some month, or getting a mortgage and in 20 years you actually own your house. They know that's not on the cards. So they go day after day. And day after day is the opposite of having a project. The old project used to be, you would get married sometime in your late twenties, it was always getting a little bit older, but that was the plan. You know, and your

• 40:08Speaker 02

  dating history and the way you behaved changed as you got near that year, you were starting to look at potential project partners as opposed to just dates. That now isn't what they do because there isn't any bloody project. The project is where are we going this weekend to have some fun? Because the day to day is not great and we're not the social contract is not the way it was for our parents. So that's why I think Gen Z is at the sharp end. They're resigned. Sadly, mobile phones and everything that we know and bots and algorithms has taken the usual average, which is across all generations.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  You've got to say that my mother was a teacher. The bulk of people are pretty stupid. You've got to say that. Otherwise, all this talk is just philosophy. So I believe there's a certain percentage, call it as 2030, 2515, who will make difference in civilization and life and everything. They are the achievers. The other ones, they in the past had the ability to have what I call is a decent life, have a decent job, get a family, have children, watch them play Little League and it was a fine life. Now these people, they're not having that family life. They are just consumed in their little algorithm. And that's dramatic.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  So that's how I see Gen Z and neither of these versions are optimistic.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Gee, I'd be curious on your thoughts on that.

• 41:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, first of all, I do think that North Star is what Roger has written about and I look forward to him enunciating that this conversation. Let me tell you what, let me just say a little bit about what bikes, because I completely agree with you. I was born in 1981. And my experience also, I was a, we were an immigrant family. This first five years of my life, I spent in a one bedroom on Ditt Mars Avenue in Queens. And we progressively moved up the socioeconomic ladder. So I had that experience of also seeing, you know, very hardworking immigrant father and the benefits that accrued from that work. And that's sort of how I understood the American dream.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:23Demetri Kofinas?

  I also remember what it was like to live in the world as opposed to what it increasingly feels like today, which is that you're sort of interfacing with reality or with people because of the reaches of the digital experience.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  It is.

• 42:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  It is interface.

• 42:44Demetri Kofinas?

  I long for that world. Again, I don't want to indulge in nostalgia, but at the same time, I don't agree with people who immediately discard notions of nostalgia as being a kind of trite fixation with the past and you gotta just get over it. Because I do think nostalgia, which is the longing for home, is, points to something meaningful. It, it, it points to what has been lost. And I'm not suggesting that everything about the past was great. Of course, that's ridiculous. But for me, the real change, and I've talked about this with Grant, I mean, there were three important change points.

• 43:23Demetri Kofinas?

  One was the 2001, 2003 period, which was the security paradigm changed in America with nine 11 and you could feel that. I mean, the, the extent to which America has become a security state since the nine 11 attacks cannot be understated. You know, you come to America now and you feel like you're in a police state, you're afraid. And this is particularly scary for immigrants. You see what happened recently to these skilled workers down in Louisiana or Georgia, where was this? These South Korean workers who were here on visas to help the United States reskill. And they got rounded up by ICE employees. So it's particularly scary for immigrants, but it's scary in general. Like the last thing you want to get done is get pulled over by some cop with a gazillion red lights or, you know, coming out and treating you like a criminal. So there's that, the security state, the loss of freedoms.

• 44:07Demetri Kofinas?

  There's 2008 and all the ways in which the sort of response to the crisis caused the cascading and never ending series of challenges known as secular stagnation. And then you have that 2012, 2014 period, you know, a few years after the App Store was launched.

• 44:27Demetri Kofinas?

  And social networking technologies went mobile and that ubiquitous mobile connectivity through social media, something really changed. And the world is, you know, especially for me, unrecognizable since that. You know, it's like the security state, it's for sure, but you can wrap your head around that. You know, you, you can say, okay, well, I, yeah, I'm in the TSA line and I feel like Simon Mikhailovich said, like, I'm back in the Soviet Union. And not in the Beatles sense of the fun, you know, back in the US, sorry, but really, but there's something that undermines our sense of reality that has happened since that 2012, 2014 period with the algorithms, with the way that we interface with the world,

• 45:08Demetri Kofinas?

  the decline in the institutional trust of media and the collective sense of losing our mind so that even the people within the media have themselves, like, kind of lost the plot. And now you see with the introduction of large language models, and this speaks directly, I think, to something that Roger said about Generation Z and the bifurcation, the bipolarity of the sort of really great, smart kids at one extreme and, and the rest. This is a very dangerous mix because if you're intelligent, then you can really benefit from these technologies because you're questions-based, you're inquiry-based, you know what to ask, you're not looking for answers, you're looking for, in the case of LLMs, let's say, you're looking for a thought partner, but you have your own capacity to think critically.

• 45:53Demetri Kofinas?

  Most people don't have that capacity and they're going to default to treating these LLMs as oracles. And, you know, one thing that's particularly concerning is these systems train on a corpus of independent data. Now, that data that they've been trained on thus far was not polluted by AI. But now, as you see, people increasingly take the answers that these systems provide and they incorporate them into their work and increasingly do less and less editing. And so the data starts to become polluted on which these systems become trained. And this is one reason, for example, that I take pride in the physical library that I've built over the course of my life, and I think it's a great inheritance. And I think that books written before 2023

• 46:37Demetri Kofinas?

  Or 2022, we'll, we'll trade at a premium because we are entering a world where it's becoming increasingly difficult to trust what you read. And so I think in addition to there being a moral collapse in America, which is, has been ongoing for a while, I think we are also living through an epistemic collapse and we're not really aware of it. It's not like the fire of the, at the Library of Alexandria where you could see the flames over the building. There is a fire raging through the base of knowledge in the West and we're not aware of it and we don't quite know how to deal with it. It is affecting our politics. It's affecting our capacity to build political consensus. And this to

• 47:20Demetri Kofinas?

  me, in addition to the moral collapse, which I think can be addressed with many of the things that Roger has talked about and with, again, people use, what is that phrase of truth, there's one truth, but the sages speak of it by many names. I think that God can provide answers to the moral questions. I think when it comes to this epistemic problem, which has to do with how do we actually live in the world? I don't have an easy answer.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Let me just comment on that. And then Roger, I want to, there's something Dimitri said there that I want to throw to you because I think you can offer some really interesting insight in this because, you know, Dee, the problem with this collapse in knowledge and this, this constant reinforcement of easy solutions to complex problems, which we're constantly being thrown, you know, ChatGPT, its most common usage is for homework, right? I don't know if you've seen the chart of the usage of ChatGPT, it fell 80% when the schools went on recess, right? It's just, it's a cheat. And until we have a genuine desire to make hard choices and do hard work in order to achieve outcomes, or do hard

• 48:30Speaker 01

  work to really understand things. The story, I was talking to someone yesterday on the podcast I recorded. So anyone listening, this is going to hear this story again, but this is a different audience that's worth repeating. You know, Charlie Munger was asked at a Berkshire Hathaway AGM, he mentioned in one of his answers about knowledge and understanding and the difference between the two. And someone put their hand up and asked the question to me, can you explain the difference between knowledge and understanding? And Charlie told this great story that Max Planck, the German physicist, who in the early nineteen twenties, I guess, or late nineteen twenties, was doing a lecture tour around Germany. And he had a chauffeur who was driving him from one town to another. And he's doing, you know, this was back in the day when a physicist giving a lecture would, you know, pack out auditoriums all around the country. That's the kind of world

• 49:15Speaker 01

  that they had back then. And they were driving between towns and the chauffeur's having a conversation. The chauffeur says, you know, Mr. Planck, I've heard you give your speech so many times now, I could deliver the speech myself. I know it off by heart. And Max Planck said, well, why don't we do that the next town? We'll do that. You can go and give the speech. So they get to the next speech. They swap uniforms. The chauffeur puts on Max Planck's, you know, I presume white tie and tails. And Max Planck dresses the chauffeur and sits in the front row. The guy delivers the speech word perfect, you know, huge round of applause at the end, opens it up to questions. And the first question is a very, very complicated question about physics. And the chauffeur doesn't miss a beat. He says, well, that's such a basic question. I dare say even my chauffeur could

• 49:58Speaker 01

  answer it. And he brings the chauffeur up to answer the question, right? He said, that was the difference between knowledge and understanding. And so until we are, we have that hunger that humans have always had for understanding and not just knowledge, it's really difficult to get back to these places. And these fires raging, which I think you're absolutely correct about, these fires raging through this library of knowledge that's been built up, no one really cares because they just want the knowledge. They don't want the understanding anymore. And until we find a way to reinvigorate people's search for understanding, not at the pointy end that Rod spoke about, because that's always there. There are always people that want, that strive for understanding. But generally speaking, if you give human beings a shortcut to anything, they're going to

• 50:42Speaker 01

  take it. The whole history of human progress is trying to make our lives easier. No matter what it is, it's a shortcut to do less work and have more time to do nothing. So I just wanted to comment on that before I address something you said there.

• 50:55Demetri Kofinas?

  By the way, Roger, I think there's a story in the Bible that speaks directly to the dangers of looking for shortcuts to the tree of knowledge, isn't there?

• 51:02Speaker 02

  No, listen, I'm not a theologian, I'm certainly not a chapter and verse guy, but absolutely, the shortcut is not the right way.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Right, but let me, you know, Dimitri, you've talked often about America and this collapse of all this stuff in America, and that's understandable because you are an American first and foremost, and you spend your time there. For me, this collapse is, you know, I'm here in the UK at the moment, I've been all over the place, in Australia, Canada, I've seen this collapse everywhere. This is not an American thing per se, but the interesting thing, Roger, which I want to come to you, there is one seemingly outlying country in the West at the moment, and that is Italy. The president of Italy, Giorgia Maloney, who was, you know, we were all warned that she was this dangerous, far-right lunatic, who if she ever got anywhere near the levers of power, would be Il Duce II, the return, and would, you know, send Italy back to the Dark Ages.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  What's actually happened is, she is the president of a deeply religious Catholic country, and she has gone back to values. Her campaign planks are actually traditional values, the family, and church, and God, and all these things that are wrapped up in the religious centre of Italian life, Rog. So I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that, because it does seem as though Maloney is different, and she's different at the head of a country that is different in terms of where it places religion on the framework of everyday life.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Right, okay, I think you're slightly generous with her.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  That's fine, that's fine.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  She's a very, very intelligent woman that has adjusted her pitch to make it more mainstream.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  But don't all politicians do that when they get into office?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  I just don't think there's many smart ones anymore. And she's a very smart one, you know, she came from a party which was the descendants of fascism, and they've kind of evolved a little bit. I'm not saying they're wolves in sheep's clothing, but I think she's been very intelligent. And when you say Italy's a religious country, I'm not sure it is anymore, and the stats, the stats would back that up in terms of attendance at church and everything like that. What Italy is... Is a country of tradition and culture. A little bit like, you know, Greece, or even if you want Russia, you know, they are both orthodox. But it's the same thing.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  The role of the church isn't necessarily about deeply believing and venerating the Virgin Mary. It's about the role of the church in your routine every single day. So the centre is not the church in Italy, in my view, anymore. It's the family, it's the old family. Italy has always been much more about individual families that together create a nation. And the family story is the one Maloney is playing into. What happens in Italian families? Certain moments in time, church is very important. The sacraments, you get baptized, first communion, confirmation, first confession, marriage, the last rites.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  All of that is put in a beautiful cornice, a beautiful frame of beauty, of churches, of ceremony, of hymns, of everything like that. And it's extremely comfortable, the church bells ring on a Sunday morning. She's just playing into that. She's basically just said, they all talk about gender here. None of you people understand that because you know that the boy of the good family down the street marries the girl of the good family at the other end of the street. They have their own family and they go through the same process of the kids go to school, they'll go to church on a Sunday. After that, they'll go out to the football field that is linked to the church.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  And that's where they learn their football skills. And so, so she is tapping into nostalgia more than the idea that we believe, you know, whatever version of Christianity in this case that's there.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  That's my version of it. I've lived, Grant, all of my life as a Catholic, as a Christian, ever more in a minority by going to church on a Sunday. So there's no way I can say that Italy is a God-fearing, God-abiding church. In fact, Italy very much is a perfect Catholic country because we, different to our Protestant brothers, we've got confession. They don't. So the Italians are the great sinners, Grant, the great sinners. This is Machiavelli, this is, you know, sleeping with twenty different women, you know, Gianni Agnelli has the family

• 55:56Speaker 02

  over here and the mistress is over there and they never meet but everybody knows. And then you've got this confessional thing that gives you the cleansing, right? Absolutely, yeah. I'm being flippant to make the point, but it's, the point is the correct one, that you're saying she's tapping into something, but it's family more than religion. Religion just strengthens what everybody feels is right, which is a traditional family. And that's my main issue with everything that's been around. You know that my head was blown by what I saw in the Paris Olympics about that. That's why all these people on the left, regardless of what's right and wrong, are tactically and strategically stupid to

• 56:39Speaker 02

  not see that. They are part of a generation that is in the minority in this, and they'll never get elected. It's an election loser because there is still most of the people living on this earth in the West that believe in the values of the traditional family and how that is the right way to live your moral life. You look after your kids, you look after your parents.

• 57:04Demetri Kofinas?

  Can I ask you guys something? This is a question for both of you. So, and two of these insights I want to attribute to two different people. I think one of them is Paul Kingsnorth and the other is Shoshana Zuboff. So I think Paul is the one who says that the West began the project of colonization as an endeavor that was projected outwards. And that what has effectively occurred in recent years is that we have turned those energies of colonization inwards onto ourselves, that we've effectively colonized ourselves. And you can see this, I think, most visibly in America, which is really the epicenter of consumer capitalism. And as the role of religion and the family has declined, and as the focal point around

• 57:48Demetri Kofinas?

  which people have oriented and found meaning, consumer capitalism has gone from being a way to satisfy one's physical wants and needs and make one's life easier, to now becoming a source of meaning-making, where the creation of consumer experiences has taken precedence. And what is a better example of this than Apple, under Steve Jobs and the cult that formed around those product releases? I mean, that company was essentially a church under Jobs, and he was its pastor. And I don't think that it's a coincidence that this transformation occurred first in the United States. I mean, look, I used to work and live in Italy. I don't know if this is still true, but when I worked there, there wasn't a Starbucks

• 58:33Demetri Kofinas?

  in sight. And why is that? Because Italians know they do coffee better than anyone, and coffee culture is a core part of their identity. But I think over time, this force of colonization, if you want to use this term, has made inroads. Not necessarily, I mean, I'm sure it's made inroads in Italy, but certainly also in other countries. I mean, for example, I've seen this happen in Greece, beginning in the 1990s, as interest rates declined and domestic industries and companies began to become replaced by foreign products and services.

• 59:09Demetri Kofinas?

  And I don't mean to suggest that foreign competition isn't something that we want, or that we don't want foreign goods to enter our markets. Those are all great things, but I think if you don't have a strong enough culture and a set of traditions that provide you with a sense of collective identity, then consumerism begins to fill that hole. So that's one observation I just wanted to make about what Paul had said. And there's another observation that Shoshana Zuboff made in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which compares the initial period of Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 16th century with social media, where we have welcomed these companies and their platforms into our lives,

• 59:53Demetri Kofinas?

  into our nations, into our communities, treating them in some cases as though they were gods, and not realizing that we are welcoming our own annihilation and the destruction of our cultures and our traditions. And what we've actually done is adopt the values of hyper-consumer capitalism and machine-like efficiency in place of what were previously more ancient traditions informed by religion and family. And now we live increasingly in a cacophony of anger, competition, and conflict. And then we wonder why we're all depressed all the time. And maybe it's because we've built a world in which human beings aren't meant to live,

• 1:00:35Demetri Kofinas?

  in which they can't live, or they can't live meaningfully. So that's sort of my take on it, and I'm curious if any of that resonates with you guys.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  That's my summary as well. It's about meaning, regardless of every individual's answer to that. You know, when you go really far back, really high, really macro, which you have to do, especially if you're thinking about things like the fourth turning and you're talking in 100-year cycles. What was the big macro thing? The big macro thing is that we have spent more money than we should have, certainly since coming off the gold standard. And that's fed into all kinds of distortions that have major effects.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  One of them has been you have these crises, you drop the cost of interest, housing as the main thing goes up, people can't afford a house, they don't get married, they don't get kids. The second one which one could think is completely unrelated, I've just told you that it is related. The birth rates in the West are unbelievably low, less so in America because you've got, I think the Hispanics are doing their thing there, but in Europe it's a disaster. So if you were the grand planner in this kind of idea of the new world order that some people say is there, you know, World Economic Forum, United Nations, EU, all this kind of stuff.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  And you were saying, what are our big problems, folks? The big problems are we can't deal with this debt that we've accumulated since 1971. And the West doesn't have enough people to pay for the systems that they've put in place, entitlements, pensions, et cetera, et cetera. What's the answer you would come up with probably within the first two or three hours? Immigration. And that's a good answer. You and I, Dimitri, both come from immigrant families. Immigration is a good thing. I just wonder, and this does become high philosophy, I just wonder if at some point there are these people, these grand new world order leaders, the strong powers behind,

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  in the shadows that are saying, damn it, why are these immigrants that we're bringing in so bloody truculent? If they were just nice people, this might solve itself. But the issue is, they're not. And this is another thing that you need to say, and it's not Islamophobic or anything like that. History is always, past is always the prologue, history is where you learn things. The Battle of Le Panto and all this, and this isn't a new thing. Islam's coming in and there have been issues. That has always been the case, especially in Europe, in Spain, in Sicily and all of that. There have been major battles fought.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  I believe the fact that this hasn't been addressed is now one of the parts that's not allowing what could have been a possible solution. Let Europe be filled by Africans and other nations that are still with a strong birth rate and we can still keep going. And that's another reason for the depression. It's one of the reasons for my depression, Dimitri, because I know that whatever way, forced or planned, truculent or at peace with one another, within 50 years, the Europe that I know, the Europe of the Enlightenment, the Europe of Greek and Roman heritage is gone, Dimitri. You can't hold Poseidon-like back demographics.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Demographics is destiny. They are having more babies than we have. They have got a different culture. They will change the culture of Europe that has been here for 2,000 years. That's the main reason for my boomer blues.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  So, Roz, let me jump in and ask you a question there because it's interesting. And these are the kind of big sweeping themes, as you say. And sadly, they've become really difficult things to talk about because people are incredibly sensitive about them and they immediately jump to conclusions about what you're saying. But what I find interesting is that we've put forward religion and a return to the divine as a potential solution to the problems facing the world, right? And there is a sense that people are seeing religion as a solution. But at the same time, because of the nature of religion and how fervent people are about it from every angle to every religion, it's also, from what you're saying there, a potential accelerant for the problem, right?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  And that's the interesting dichotomy for me about religion. What we're talking about as a potential solution is a return of traditionally Judeo-Christian societies to Judeo-Christian religion.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And if that is some form of solution, if there is some sort of place where where generations can go to find an anchor, to find a centre that they need in order to kind of reconstitute society around the principles taught in those gospels. At the same time, religion could be the thing that stops that happening, from what you said there.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Right. So whichever way you come at this, you know, there is a religious component to it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel it or not, whether you think it's important or not, it's there. And so when you look at the problems that we're facing, Dimitri, earlier in this conversation, you talked about, you said you didn't understand, I think it was when you're talking about Facebook and you were told prostitutes, you can't say that, you've got to say sex worker. And you said, now I understand is the destruction of language. Along with the destruction of language comes the destruction of honest, peaceful, thoughtful debate. And without that, without being able to look at these tough issues

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  or issues that are real issues but have become tough because of the way language has been weaponized and because of the way conclusions are made when you bring up subjects like this. Again, it's another obstacle to having a measured conversation about these things and trying to come up with solutions. Because we've seen the polling, we've seen the results, we've seen the kind of poll results that suggest that right the way across Europe, there is a sweep towards people who are going to address the various issues that you just highlighted there, Roger. And it's not, you know, I've spent a lot of time in the UK this past year.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  And the conflict going on around the English flag and the Union flag is extraordinary. I mean, it's truly, truly extraordinary. And the symbolism that is inherent in flags. And the conflict that it's causing is extraordinary to me because when I was young, one of the things I loved about being in America was that you'd see people flying their American flag everywhere, you know, every garden had an American flag. It was a really cool thing to see. And I remember thinking about that, I wonder why the why Brits don't fly the British flag or the or the English flag or the Welsh flag. It's just not a thing over here. And my stepmother's Danish and they proudly fly the Danish flag in gardens all around the country. It's a peculiar thing, but it's been weaponized.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Again, you know, if you fly a British flag, you are a racist, period. End of conversation.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  But Grant, all of these are symptoms. All of these are symptoms.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I agree, Roche. And so, okay, so to take that, those symptoms are wrong with it.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Right. So you said something there that I think is very fundamental about religion could be a problem and a solution. One of the great things I love as a European coming through the Enlightenment is the separation of church and state. I have no good memory or fond memory of when the Vatican had power. Some of the most horrendous thing happens from the Spanish Inquisition to what happened in South America, things you saw in the film like The Mission. The separation of church and state for me is incredibly important. So when I talk about religion, it's a bad word for me. It should be faith. It should be faith. In many ways, it's a personal thing. It's your code. It's what you believe in.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  It's what gives you instruction to behave well. And I believe a lot of people were getting drawn to that for the reasons that we said at the start of the show. Other religions have not got the separation with them and their theologies, you know, theocrats, whatever you call it. That for me is extremely dangerous because that shouldn't be the way it is. And one of the things that has happened, that I said it as soon as it happened, and I'm sure I'll be right on this, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a major, major moment. Because sure, all the stats showed that where people were going back to God anyway, they

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  were going back to get baptized. That moment.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Institutionalized it in the political movement of what is MAGA. You know, they now are making statements and things talking about basically linking the Christian creed to what their policies are. You know, you can see that's wrong. You know, that's wrong. So sadly, this is the tragedy of that moment. This man, Charlie Kirk, not a Catholic, but a Christian, was a guy that was debating, that would go out and speak and talk about what he thought and why he wanted to be to be other people. That didn't go down with a lot of people and ultimately he was removed because of that.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  So whilst some people may say, oh, Charlie Kirk has energized the rebirth of Christianity, and this is a great thing, I don't actually think it is because he's brought it into the politics. Whereas if he hadn't died, his debates would have naturally brought individuals to the place I'd like them to get to, that where so many people are coming to now, people like now Ferguson and so many intellectuals saying, I've come back to God because that's my meaning in life, the way you said it earlier. Sadly, what happened to Kirk is going to do exactly what you've said. It's going to make religion more of a problem than a solution, I think.

• 1:11:15Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, so Roger, I love, I love what you said. I kind of feel like, first of all, I also feel that there is a lot of dark energy around some of the influencers in the MAGA movement who talk about God and religion. And for me, the tell is always whether or not you talk about love. Where is love in your message? And what I hear a lot from some of these influencer types or these media types is this kind of stern daddy energy Christianity, but the loving, mothering energy that is so core to my understanding of God and what has drawn me, me in particular, to this particular church that I'm so lucky is right by our home,

• 1:12:00Demetri Kofinas?

  is that the priest speaks about love. Love is a core part of that message. And

• 1:12:08Demetri Kofinas?

  I am, this is really an observation, I'm very concerned about the way in which Christianity and what it means to be a Christian is being explained to so many young people who never really stepped inside of a church, or didn't really have an opportunity to learn about Christianity or Christ for themselves, and are now learning about it en masse, within this larger political construct. What do you think?

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:12:36Demetri Kofinas?

  Or what are you concerned some of the political consequences of that could be?

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  For me, this is one of the core, core questions. You know, I go to church every Sunday, and you hear a lot of messages, especially about the tragedies in Gaza, and if the priest is good, they will talk about the link to the parables, about the good Samaritan, and everything you're meant to do about love and everything like that. That's a difficult moment for me, because as I kind of like, everybody's got their politics, everybody thinks what needs to get done in the world, how good needs to win over evil, and everything like that. It's very, very nuanced. What I think will happen, and it's what I said a little bit earlier, is the weaponization of Christianity. In the old days, the beat

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  tree, that was called the Crusades. When I mentioned history before, we've seen this before. Islam expands, Christianity gets its shit together, puts on the red cross, and pushes them back. You know, so this is history rhyming. You will get, I believe, and I'm not a geopolitical person like Pippa or some, a lot of other people, but I can smell stuff. You will get people unhappy, afraid, Dearborn, Michigan, when they're hearing the Islamic chants five times a day, and you see that on social media. Those people are going to vote for only one side of the political divide, and it's going to be the one that says, I'm

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  going to stop that. Those people are going to be covered in Christianity as a brand. That's going to be the same in Hungary, it's going to be the same in Serbia, it's already here in Italy, as Grant alluded to earlier. France and Germany and Spain, the three, and UK, the three kind of like ones that are not buying this, they're going to get forced out. And I believe that sadly, unbelievably, we'll be in a situation where the West will be a Christian West. Where before every state of the nation, we will say the Lord's Prayer and all this kind of stuff.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  And everybody will be kneeling at football grounds and all elements of our culture will go back to something like you say, that most people don't understand. But it will be a natural Newton's third law reaction to what's happening over there. And it will be battle lines drawn.

• 1:15:01Demetri Kofinas?

  And where will God be in all of that?

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Nowhere, nowhere, right? So this is how it's so bloody difficult because Dimitri, I'll be honest, if I have to choose between one or the other, I know which one I'm choosing. Because it's what I said earlier, Greek Roman heritage is the one I want. If there has to be something to happen to protect that, sometimes that needs to hap- I don't want it to happen, but if it has to happen, I know what side I'm on. And then I go to church on a Sunday and I hear things like, every day, every, choose any parable you want, but I'll give you the ones of the crucifixion, right? Two things happened at the crucifixion. The first one he says is, forgive them for they know not what they do. In his last breath, he was forgiving somebody.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  The other one is the guy on his left, the thief, who chastises the other thief and says, look, we deserve what we got. We've been bad guys all our life and he, he doesn't deserve it, he's somebody different and he says, you'll be with me. So forgiveness at the last moment is still possible, it's always possible, always.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  All of these messages in Christianity are utterly beautiful. There is nobody of good heart, of any background atheist, Buddhist, whatever, that can say this isn't exactly what goodness and love represents. And to see that weaponized is a bit tough. It's going back to when the Vatican had the Spanish Inquisition, or when Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in the 17th century. Nothing to do with the methods of the parables, but that's where we're going to be. Maybe that's the way it has to be, Dimitri. I don't know the answer to that.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Let me ask you, let me, let me dig into this because this was always...

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  That's all very heavy, sorry about that, but I mean, I think that's what you wanted.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, it's important. No, no, no, listen, it's important, it's really important because as I said when I asked you to write this piece back in February, and as I said to Dimitri when we started this conversation around the same time, you know, I've never considered myself a religious person, I've never considered myself a man of faith, as you would call it probably more correctly. And I said at the time though, you know, I feel this, this moral vacuum and I feel that I'm looking for something to organize my thoughts around and more and more this subject has come up. But that, what you just said there is, and always has been, my problem with religion

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  is that it has always been used as a cloak to wrap in something else.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Then what are you kidding about, Grant? Just, just ignore that, ignore that, it's personal. It's personal.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Fine, fine, but everybody has to make that personal decision. And for me going forward, you know, when I, on the one hand, I see the hope, and I'm, I've just got questions here, you know, all of this is me questioning out loud because I don't have any answer to any of this, right? But when I see this, when I feel that longing for something bigger to organize my thoughts around, to maybe that we can use as a central pole of some kind of tent of principle and character and integrity and faith and all those, all the teachings you've talked about, which we all understand are, are how the West has always kind of organized itself. I then hear what you say there, it resonates deeply with me because that's what I've always

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  felt about religion is that it's just been used as an excuse for violence, religion upon religion for centuries. And so you would hope that there is this beautiful peace in the middle where people organize around religion and it does bring all the good parts of religion. It brings the peace and it brings the love and it brings the goodness and it brings all those things. And maybe there's a part there before we get to the part you're talking about there, which is your religion against religion and my religion, my god's better than your god and we're gonna fight over it. And I don't know how this path looks, right?

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  I don't know if I should be cheering a return to religion because I want all those good things or I should be fearful of it because maybe we skip those and we go straight to the violence.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  One, you can influence, Grant, the other one you can't. You can influence the personal one. You can say, I need this meaning, I found it in this person. And by the way, this is the smart play for all the philosophers out there. If you're a good person, just cloak that in faith if you can. And if it was wrong, the faith, you've lost nothing because you were always going to be a good person anyway. And if it does exist, you're ahead of the queue. I always joke like that is the smart play, is the smart play. But seriously, religion should be a personal thing. And when it's used for something more than that, you can't do much about that, Grant.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  What are you gonna do about that? You know, I just see the forces, you know, what's that thing from the Usual Suspects? The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to say that he didn't exist. Well, the rise of Islam, and in some cases, not all cases, it's funny that the more westernized Arab countries, if that's a right phrase, are equally scared about some of their fractions of Islam as we are.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the radical, yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. They are. You can hear so many Saudis and Emirates people talking very, very much about this. So if this Islam radicalism rises and causes...

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  The rise of Christianity, which was, by the way, probably dying and has been dying for I don't know how long, the curve is down the way. Maybe that's destiny. You know, like, one of the things about being very solid in personal faith is you do believe in the greater thing, that the mysterious ways that you can never understand. Apart from being sad about the fact about how demographics are going to work, I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about the grand things about whether the Protestant Anglicans should come back into the Catholics, or whether, where does Buddhism sit? And, you know, all of that. I don't, because I can't influence any of that. I'm not a politician. I've no

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  intention of being a politician. I just find it very natural that my values and principles are absolutely those in the parables of the gospel. I find that very natural, and I feel that when I go to the church, the house of those parables, I feel very welcome. Sometimes particularly strongly, most times not. But it feels like that's my meaning. It's my moment on a Sunday to reset, to have a pit stop, to think about some of the things I've done wrong, some of the things I've done. Because life puts you in a frame of mind that you get your armour on. Sunday is a moment where you're allowed to just take

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  it off and say, am I sure I'm still on the right track? I think that's good for everybody, regardless of what the macro, all that means. You can't influence that, Grant. That will be what it will be. That's my answer.

• 1:22:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Can I add something to Grant's question, Roger, and have you answer it? Because I, there's a lot of what Grant said there that resonates with me. And I might be a little bit over my skis here, because I, again, am a bit younger. But even you guys didn't, you guys were born during the counterculture. So you kind of grew up in the afterglow of it. But it seems that the counterculture was a healthy reaction to the overbearing nature of religion in society during that time. Would you agree with that, Roger, or no? That stern daddy energy Christianity?

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  No, no, I think that if you call it counterculture, the sixties, that you know, that thing that's in the article about

• 1:23:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Liberation.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  The Times, they are, yeah. I don't know where that comes from, but it's, I don't think it's religion reaction. It's a reaction to a certain way of growing up. It's like I said before about Maloney, it's not religion, it's about family. Americans in the forties and the fifties, what do they call it? The greatest generation, the silent generation, they had a certain way of doing things. It came with stuff that wasn't great, like the role of women and everything like that. But it was their way of doing it. And then none of these things are living in a little island, they're all interconnected. When America starts doing things like Vietnam and, and everything like that, people start saying, what are you doing?

• 1:23:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Look, I mean, yeah, no, I'm not talking about that, but like, look, I mean, I see this, the darkness that I see among some of the folks that I sort of alluded to earlier. You know, there's a kind of heavy handedness with which these new self anointed splainers of Jesus and the Bible seem to be going about this new political project that they're engaged in, that they call Christianity. And what I hear, what I see is the polluting and the corrupting of the word of God, as I understand it. And again, this is why I think that love has to be at the core of your message. And so here's the follow up for you, Roger, the follow up question, which is,

• 1:24:29Demetri Kofinas?

  don't we have a responsibility, those of us who feel as you and I do, that love is the essence of this thing that we imperfectly describe with words like God? Don't we have a responsibility to try and send a different message and push back against those trying to pollute that message and turn it into something that you and I would not recognize as Christian? Or is God?

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, listen, I'm not Yoda and all of this stuff, right? You know, like, I've got a purse Yoda. I'm not the oracle and all of this stuff. I'm not Yoda. All I've got is a view. And sometimes it's a selfish view. And I'm very aware that I'm quite happy to have been an outlier, an outsider, a contrarian, when everybody was abandoning Jesus. I was quite happy with that because I thought that was my superpower. That's me. I've always been a little bit away from the pack. The pack doesn't really interest me. But your point is an important one, Dimitri. You know, where do you draw the line? You know, if I'm going to take a passage out of the Gospels that says the one about turn the other cheek so he can slap you both times, right?

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  That's one of the messages. So when they burned down a thousand churches in France, should I just say, why don't you burn down the other 2,000 or 3,000? There is some moment, there's got to be no. It's so big, the issue that you're attacking the fundamental stuff that I believe in. Because I know that if you do what you do in Lebanon, and there's no Christians in Lebanon anymore, and other countries, that will be the same in Italy. And I don't want that, and I'm going to dig my heels in. The language of how you do that, as you say, sometimes it is completely wrong, is insidious, it's done in a nasty way.

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  But at some point, you've got to stand up for what you believe in. And then you'd nickpicking and say, no, I'm not going to turn the other cheek. I'm not. But there's some bad politician or some preacher in America that's raising money and screwing everybody out in his tax situation or, I can't stop that. That's been going on for years. You know, these people fraudulently using the word, I can't do anything about that. But if you tell me, am I happy that somebody is standing up?

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  To what is represented by this unholy triumvirate of communism, antisemitism, and gender fluidity. Yes, I am. I mean, that's not politically correct to say that, but yes, I am. That somebody should be doing that. Now, they should be doing it correctly, but sadly, the most, like I said earlier, most people are in the middle. Most people aren't smart enough to get nuanced messages. You have to give them something that is easy for them to understand, which is, we are the good guys, they are the bad guys. It's inevitable, Dimitri. You're not going to change that, I don't think.

• 1:27:31Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, I would just say this, and then please, Grant, go ahead. Because I feel like what you're saying almost kind of parallels the argument, not to turn it to a geopolitical metaphor, the argument of like, we need to defeat China at all costs, even if it means we have to turn our own society into China as a surveillance state sort of thing. The reason that I asked this to you, Rogers, because I think that what you wrote in Grant's newsletter was one of the most beautiful things I have read in a very long time.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:27:59Demetri Kofinas?

  It was so deeply authentic. It resonated in such a deep way that I think isn't just true for me. It's obviously something that other people felt. And the part of that piece that moved me more than anything else was when you quoted Tim Rice's "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina." And you talked about, there's that passage where he says, "And as for fortune, and as for fame, I never invited them in. They are illusions." I think that speaks to what you spoke about earlier, that, you know, people, your generation, you know, you got educated, you got the job, you made the money, you had the family, you climbed the mountain, and you get up to the top, and you realize there's nothing there. What was it that I

• 1:28:40Demetri Kofinas?

  was climbing for? And then that song ends with, "That I still need your love."

• 1:28:48Demetri Kofinas?

  After all that I've done.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  I've done the same.

• 1:28:51Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, talk about beautiful. And you ask, who's love?

• 1:28:58Demetri Kofinas?

  And I think there's a lot of suffering and a lot of darkness in the world today.

• 1:29:05Demetri Kofinas?

  And the reason I asked if we have a responsibility is because I think in these times,

• 1:29:13Demetri Kofinas?

  people are looking for answers and for someone to show them the way. And I think your essay does exactly that.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Well, Dimitri, listen, um, thank you for your emotion because that's very powerful for a writer of a piece to to see that emotion. I don't know whether this goes out on on video or just on audio, but Dimitri, of all the people out there just now that are maybe like my background, I would have think I would have been the most vocal in promoting the parables of Jesus more than anybody. Against all the people that over these years have said, oh, there's the God squad, there's somebody, one of these people kumbaya, you know, the guitars in the church, where it was massively uncool.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  I would have think I would have been one of those people. And in the last five years, when we've had these culture wars. So my point is, what more can I do? What more can I do? I'm on the steps of the church saying, he's the guy. I can't change Trump or Vance or all these people. I can't do anything about that, but I can point to where the guy is. And that's me. That's my answer to you, man. That's it. That's all I can do.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  But that isn't that, I mean, Dimitri, you're saying that you need the shepherd, right? You need the guy to point to the guy.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  But sadly, the shepherds are other people. They they wear robes and all religions and everything like that.

• 1:30:46Demetri Kofinas?

  But Grant's right, you're doing that. Roger, you did this with this piece. And I guess, you know, maybe I sort of answered my own question, which is that I think we all have a responsibility, those of us that that see that, that feel that, to express it, because there's so many young, especially young people that don't know where to turn and they can be easily pulled in by the darkness.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  Dee, I think that's it. What is financial nihilism if it's not just complete and utter darkness? That's what it is. And so those essays and this conversation and every other podcast you and I have done in this Hundred Year Pivot series is nothing more than a chance to talk ideas through with people about what all this means. And everyone's going to find their own light and everyone's going to find their own path through the darkness and some will fall by the wayside. But all you can do is at least have the conversation and try and understand a multitude of different answers to where is the light and where is the path and where are we returning to and what do I need to try

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  and do? There's no one answer. There's no one person who can give us the blueprint for how to do this. And that's why I think for you and I, you know, to talk to Eddie Chancellor and then Roger Mitchell about the same subject is in some ways on paper preposterous and yet you cannot help but find the common threads in them if you're listening closely enough. And ultimately, whether it's faith in money or faith in the powers that be or faith in a higher power, there is an issue of faith there. There is an issue in trust. You know, you've talked about the post-trust society.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  This core of trust upon which every civilization is built ultimately. Trust is the ultimate foundation stone. And faith and trust, horses of a different color. That's all. That you trust in a higher power. You have faith in your leaders to make decisions that are better for everybody. You have trust that we will find a way through this. You have faith that the times that are to come are going to be better than the times we're in now. Without faith slash trust, whatever you want to call it, however you want to frame it. It's hard for me to see a path through this. So you have to find your own definition of it. You have to find the right way to frame it for you and then hang on to it and live

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  that life, as Roger says, for yourself. And maybe you can be a shepherd for other people simply by being honest and having the conversations.

• 1:33:17Speaker 02

  Guys, all I can say is that I'm sure if people listen back to this, there'll be a million contradictions on what I've said. By definition, you cannot, this isn't science. This is way, way above science. And there's loads of contradictions in the gospels, as I said, forgetting the Old Testament, even in the simple gospels. All I would say is this, and this doesn't, you don't have to be a believer or believe or not, but it's a great way to live life. And so we, everybody that you meet every day, you just need to transfix their face to, if it's a woman, Mary, and if it's a man, Jesus, and you see how your behaviour changes, you know? That's what

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  I try and do, because that's what it says in there. Anything you do to the lowest of mind, you do to me, you know? That's just a great way to live your life. And that's what I try and do. And, oh, by the way, you know, my kids probably don't believe, you know? So it's not as if there's such a household that there's no thought that, my daughter, she's not a believer at all, my son, who is a hardcore physicist, is on the line because he says, I've seen no evidence that the universe could have been created any other way. So he's still in the frame. So like, he's right on the line. My daughter, who is, and she

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  says, no, Dad, I don't believe in that. So it's not as if I'm coming from absolute certainty. My mother, who is getting close to the end now, been to church all of her life, she raised me, she's starting saying things like, I don't know, I'm not sure. You know, so anybody who's given it, he's there and I'm, he and I see him, it's nonsense. Just go to what the parables say and learn your life, live your life that way. And that works for me at least, and I think it works for most other people if you do it. And some people do without even knowing. I mean, that's the beauty of it. Some people do it without even knowing that they're just following what's in the parables.

• 1:35:22Demetri Kofinas?

  I get emails a lot from listeners and I try to answer as many of them as I can. I was recently sent one by someone who lost his wife recently of 23 years. And of course, you know, he's in the midst of grieving. And he expressed in the email this, because he had heard my recent episode with Paul Kingsnorth. And he expressed, among other things, this difficulty of trying to understand. He, I don't want to go into the details of his email, but what I would describe as think his way to God. And when I learned at some point in my life, and I try to share this message with people that reach out to me, have reached out to me over the years with emails like this, is that I think that that's a trap.

• 1:36:05Demetri Kofinas?

  That I don't think we can know God through our minds, what we call God. I think we learn, we come to know God through our hearts. And there's an author named Dan Millman, who wrote this book called The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. And I've mentioned this a few times in the past. There was a line in the book that I put on my Facebook page the night before my brain surgery in 2013. And the particular part of the passage is that a peaceful warrior's sword is love. Where it cuts, it gives life, not death. And I think that we are in the midst of a spiritual battle. And it's important also, besides understanding that we come to know God through our hearts

• 1:36:48Demetri Kofinas?

  and God and love is a core essence of what, for me, love isn't something that happens in our minds. I know it might sound weird from a, if you come from a materialist framing, but I don't think it's a chemical thing. I think love is something that exists in the world. But I think that, you know, it's hard to conceptualize battling or fighting from a place of love. But Dan Millman's words have always really resonated with me because there's something really powerful about this idea of being a warrior, but your sword is love.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Yep. I would say to lighten that a little bit, that's absolutely correct. But if you look at the story of everything that is written down, the fall of Lucifer and all of that, there's two major warriors, one major one, major one, Archangel Michael. He wasn't messing around, Dimitri. He was going down there and he was kicking some butt.

• 1:37:40Demetri Kofinas?

  And so what I would say is, again, you know, I'm not a student of the Bible. And there's a lot of stuff in the Bible that I haven't read for myself, but I've heard recounted that to me doesn't resonate. And of course, the Bible wasn't written by God. It was written by men and men attempting to convey the word of God. Some people might think they literally conveyed it. And again, I ascribe, I am someone who does not believe that the Christian Bible is the be all and end all. And nor do I believe that Christianity is necessarily the one true message. I think that there is a core essence that passes through all the great religions and perhaps all movements of spirituality over the world that speaks to this thing that our language cannot capture,

• 1:38:26Demetri Kofinas?

  which is so totalizing and great that it supersedes anything that our minds can absorb. Because I do think that life is in some sense a dream. I don't believe that, you know, science can give us an understanding of the world ontologically. I think that that is something that is revealed to us. It's something that we understand through revelation. And I think Christianity is, you know, one flavor of that attempt to convey those things. But that's just my opinion. And I know I kind of harped on about love. I'm a total gush, romantic, emotional person.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  No, but it's interesting, right? Because you've both identified that in different ways. You know, Roger, yours is a message of love as well and how you treat people. You treat them with kindness and respect and generosity.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  That's the thing. That's my challenge. On a good day, you know, because the other side, I've got that whole thing about I'm going to win in the game of life and whoever's in my way is going to get hammered. But over here, and I look at this, Dimitri, as the little, the little challenge I was given, you know? How far are you going to go over this way and forget all this bit here?

• 1:39:32Demetri Kofinas?

  But also, isn't that the challenge of being a human being in the world of flesh and blood?

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:39:38Demetri Kofinas?

  Have you, have you guys seen the thin red line?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, that was one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. And I feel like that movie, wasn't the main character wit, wasn't his name wit. I mean, I feel like that was the line that this protagonist was sort of walking. He was in the midst of the Battle of Guadalcanal. And they're all, including him, killing people. And yet God is somewhere in that, you know, there's the Colonel played by Nick Nolte, who sees the world and nature as this sort of fierce battle of the jungle swallowing itself and and life is just pain and suffering until you're dead. And then amidst out of that comes, you know, the beaming sunlight through the world. And I just feel like, anyway, whatever, I've said enough. I probably

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  But to be true, I would say in all of this to kind of like, close off a little bit from my point of view. And then I think you guys have been on this for a while. In a world since the war, certainly where the God has been money, undoubtedly money. When that game is up, which is clearly up now, macro and micro level, macro level, the debt is there. At micro level, the social contract is gone. When that game is up, people need meaning. And one of the main candidates for that meaning has to be spiritual, it has to be. You know, and that's where we are. And that's very clear to me. You know, everything beyond that, which you're obviously very deep in, like all of that stuff.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  Everything beyond that is is philosophy. And I just don't feel I'm qualified and good enough to give the answers that you're looking for. Because smarter people than me have tried great theologians, you know, Hume and Isaac Newton and all of these people. All I know is that one, it's coming back to religion for the reasons in the article and what we've discussed here. And ideally, you don't let it get weaponized. For me, that's where we are.

• 1:41:35Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, but your article, as I said, Roger, was one of the most beautiful things I've read in so long.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:41:39Demetri Kofinas?

  So you can say that

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:41:41Demetri Kofinas?

  You're not a philosopher, or you don't, but you nailed it. You nailed it. I mean, the whole piece spoke to my heart. So. And I listened to that song before I got on here, by the way. I took some time to put myself in the right frame of mind and reread the article. So I really appreciate what you did there.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Thank you. And thank you for inviting me on. I'm not sure I deserve to be on this thing, but.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Roger, it's been a pleasure, as it always is. And look, you know, it's the beautiful thing about this particular podcast is Dimitri and I have no idea where we're going next to this. We know who we're going to talk to. We know what we're going to talk about. We've got, you know, we've got a whole list of names kind of in a jumble that we're going to work our way through. But there's so many components of it. And just getting the chance to talk about any one of them with someone who's thought about it, as you have, and has an opinion, and right or wrong, we don't know if any of us are right, or any of us are wrong.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  None of us do.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  But the first step is having the conversation, right? And so, you know, I want to thank you for, for doing this, for writing that piece initially, and for coming on here and talking with us about it. And I don't know that we've reached any conclusions, to be honest with you. But it's been, you know, I find, Dimitri, I don't know about you, but each one of these conversations in particular, all the stuff happens to me, it'll happen to me in the next three days, right before we publish this, when I go away and I think about what we've talked about, and it settles and bits of it come up again, and parts of it resonate with me, and parts of it, I think, actually, you know what, I'm not sure I either understand that, or I'm not sure I agree with it. But I guess that's the point, right? Because there aren't answers, is to keep questioning. All right, Roger, my man, it's been great to see you, as always. I will see you again soon for a much lighter

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  subject when you and I next talk, no doubt. But in the meantime, give my love to all the family. And again, thanks for doing this.

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  Thanks, lads. Take care. Keep up the good work.

• 1:43:24Demetri Kofinas?

  Thank you, Roger. Take care.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Well, you have it, folks. Again, Dee, I don't know if we've got any answers from this, but I sure enjoyed the conversation. And I've certainly got a lot more questions. And I guess, you know, in some ways, that's the point, right? If you don't keep finding questions, what's the point of any of it?

• 1:43:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I'm slightly embarrassed of how emotional I get. I'm like, my wife actually walked in on me before this interview, when I was playing the song that I was playing, Don't Cry For Me, Argentina. And she was like, oh, my God. She's like, you and I could not be more different. She's like, you walk into me in my office, and I'm watching, like, you know, videos on like, how to solve some kind of like spreadsheet problem. And I come into your office, and you're like, kind of, you know, teary eyed, listening to Evita. But I feel so grateful for the good fortune that I've had in my life, Grant. And whatever word you want to use, let's use the word God. I feel so grateful to God for the life that I have, for the people in my life, for you. We've become such good friends. You're such a wonderful friend.

• 1:44:25Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, you first, when you had me on your show so many years ago and gave voice to my framework on financial nihilism, you were so generous and it was so wonderful to have someone highlight that contribution. And I just feel really grateful. And so I feel like those feelings come up a lot for me. And, and I feel like there's a, a lot of people are suffering in the world and Roger's words really resonate with me. And I hope that people can take that in and more people can hear it.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I appreciate the kind words. I'm, I'm, I'm every bit as emotional as you. It's funny, I, I'm what the Australians would call a big sook. I'll find myself tearing up at the weirdest things. It's funny, this particular subject carries very different emotions for me because I, I find every question I ask anybody, and I've been fortunate to speak to people who are far more understanding of this dynamic than I am, every question begets another question for me. And I'm, I'm fascinated by the journey. And I, I guess I'm still searching for something conclusive that I can pin that emotion on, you know, because I, I feel it emotionally, it's something within me that I'm trying

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  to understand. But I haven't, I haven't found a solution. It still feels like one part of this journey, you know, there are so many things I'm trying to understand. But the faith component of it, and importantly, my relationship with that is still very much a work in progress. And I'm, I'm inspired by people like Roger and Stephen Wilkinson, who wrote another one of those essays, who is another man of great faith. And, you know, hopefully we're going to have Stephen on here in the not too distant future to talk about his views in this, which are, even though they come from a similar place, are so different in the essay that he wrote in that compendium. So I'm grateful to all the people that are helping us on this journey. I'm grateful to you for doing this with me and agreeing to just go off into the bush

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  and see what the hell we end up talking about, because I know it's so out of your comfort zone, it's so out of your wheelhouse, because you are the most prepared, most meticulous podcast host anywhere in the world. And I love that you've had the faith to say, you know what, screw it, I'm going to fly by the seat of my pants and I'll, I'll do this your way and we'll go down this road together and, and I'll do it out of my comfort zone. So I'm hugely grateful for you doing that, because I honestly, I wouldn't want to do this particular show alone. I wouldn't want to do it without you. So without you, there wouldn't be a hundred year pivot. So here's to you and the guests we've had and the guests still to come.

• 1:46:55Demetri Kofinas?

  Totally. And you know, like so many of my episodes are so rigorously intellectual. And this one is so the opposite of that, you know, and yet what could be more important than this?

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Nothing.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, my friend. Well, listen, we'll do this again soon. In the meantime, as always, thank you, everyone out there for listening. You know how to get in touch with either of us. If you want to pick this apart and debate it and push back or agree with it, it's entirely up to you. We're agnostic either way, but we do enjoy the engagement. And we've had some phenomenal emails about this series and we look forward to receiving many more. So Dimitri, thank you. Roger, thank you, my friend. And we'll be back soon.

• 1:47:34Demetri Kofinas?

  Take care, everybody.

• 1:47:37Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.