Episode 173 - The Fourth Turning Part II - Emerging from the Crisis
Max and Aaron finish their discussion of the Fourth Turning, including evaluations of the theory, how it could be tested, what it predicts, and speculation on how the coming crisis could play out.
Links
Book: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny
Nageswaran: The Fourth Turning is Here and it might not end well
Brandon Quittem: Bitcoin and the Rhythms of History
What Bitcoin Did: Brandon Quittem says Bitcoin is Fourth Turning Money
New York Times: When Dungeons and Dragons set off a Moral Panic
Related Episodes
Episode 172 on The Fourth Turning Theory of History
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to Local Maximum, Episode 173.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Alright, and we're back, we are still talking about the Fourth Turning. If you are just tuning in, make sure that you listen to part one of this episode, where we describe exactly what the fourth turning is. You can read all about it in this 1997 book by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which predicts, supposedly predicts, a lot of things that happened today.
Let's talk about the evaluation of, my evaluation of what this book says. So we just discussed what this book says, and I'm just gonna give my current thinking on how, because this is clearly not very scientific, I would say.
Aaron: I was gonna throw out—
Max: It’s hard for me to evaluate it, because my Bayesian inference mind, my scientific method says, hey, I don't know what to do with this.
Aaron: Yeah, I was gonna throw it as my first challenge here. How is this different than what like Nostradamus-type predictions. Granted, he's laid out a much more comprehensive, self-reinforcing theory here. But there certainly seems to be enough room for, you can make the evidence fit the theory, you can cherry pick a little bit when you're looking at history, and the proof would be in the pudding with future predictions. But is he making those kinds of predictions?
Max: Yes, yes. There's a lot of things that happen that sounds very presient in the book, but there's so much stuff in the book, and some of it just doesn't seem right. Or it seems like, yes, this is right, but you have to tilt it around a little bit to say that it fits. That makes me a little bit nervous in terms of calling this book, kind of a Nostradamus. Well, no, Nostradamus in a good way. I like to say, oh, it's totally predictive, because it's clearly not.
On the other hand, look, we're clearly in a time that's closer to what they describe as a fourth turning than what they describe as a first turning, that is for sure. We're not living in a time of social conformity, and we're certainly not living in a time of individualism. We're living in a time of crisis, we're not certainly not having a great awakening. Although they do kind of say that there are some similarities between an awakening and a crisis sometimes.
But yeah, I feel like there are enough things that are right in here that I'm not going to throw it out as junk. I'll put it that way. I'm definitely going to incorporate this into my thinking. But I'll do it in a cautious way, because I think a lot of it is narrative building. The book also didn't have to be that long, it's 300 pages. I think we covered it in an hour. He goes into a lot of details about all of the different generations and how they're expected to behave and different, what different quotes from people is in those generations. But I just feel like you could find so many quotes. It's not like it's hard to find a boomer. You could find so many quotes by so many people, almost anybody that could fit your thing, that it's hard for me to, I don't know, it's hard for me to see that as sufficient evidence.
Aaron: Also, I guess, what would be the form of sufficient evidence to build this kind of a theory to back it up?
Max: Yeah. You know, I thought about that, and I really don't know. It is kind of interesting that a lot of historical thinkers have said the same thing. But Aristotle was wrong about a lot of stuff in physics. Fortunately, we had a way to test physics. So this is really hard to test. I sort of thought, what data can I get to suggest this? One graph that I came up with was the debt to GDP ratio, which you could see in the Revolutionary War, in Civil War, the debt to GDP ratio goes up and then it gets paid off—
Aaron: Do Strauss and Howe say anything specifically about that, or are you just saying you're looking for eighty-year cycles?
Max: I'm looking for eighty-year cycles. Yeah. But then of course, once you get the federal reserve, that thing goes off the rails. Now we're really, we're basically at the debt to GDP ratio after the war that we're supposed to be in before we're before the war. So that's—
Aaron: Well, before the crisis.
Max: Before the crisis.
Aaron: There’s no saying that it has to be a war.
Max: I hope not. That's my question. Is there anything testable in here, and I'm not really sure how you would test something like—
Aaron: I mean, this is a classic problem of history, especially social history like this. The level of detailed statistics and record keeping doesn't really go back far enough that you can make those confident, highly-supported conclusions.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: You, you have to work from the available records, which presents challenges.
Max: Yeah, yeah. I also think, yes, certain things in history do seem cyclical, but can you have wartime and peacetime without a cycle? It almost seems like, and is it necessarily 80 years? I feel like some of their examples, well, sometimes it's 100 years, and sometimes it's 70 years, and sometimes it's less, but we're gonna count that as an awakening. So I'm not so sure. Of course, they would say, “Well, yeah, it's history. It's not literally the season, so it's not going to be exact.” But it's like, but then, how do you, how can you confirm the theory?
Aaron? Right, it weakens the predictive power?
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: I suppose there is value in being able to predict the trends, even if you can't predict the exact timing, but how much value? That's a tricky one to answer.
Max: Yeah. So a lot of their predictions about the millennial generation also seem wrong. I think part of that is, they were looking to compare us to the greatest generation. But a lot of times they're comparing this fourth crisis to the World War 2, fourth crisis, but that was not very similar to the Civil War crisis. So why would they assume that this one is similar to the last one? So that I think is kind of a misplaced—
Aaron: They say in the market, past performances is no indication of future earnings.
Max: Yeah. So what they said about the millennial generation is, we become very civic focused, and we're team builders, we have a cheerful patience, and we turn against entitlements/the old regime. I have that on page 295. And crime is reduced. I actually think that's true, until the last couple years. But I don't know, would I describe the millennial generation that way, having not read the book? I mean, I guess there's a way to push us into that.
Aaron: I'm conflicted, because I don't like to think of myself as a millennial, but—
Max: Well just just talk about millennials in general.
Aaron: Well, it's hard to do that accurately, because it's essentially asking you to work with a stereotype.
Max: Yeah. I mean, I just, renewed civic focus. I'm trying to think what that is. I don't see, you know, I certainly don't see people having more confidence in their leaders. That's for sure.
Aaron: I mean, I could interpret a renewed civic focus is as people who are more involved with nonprofits and being less focused on making money and more focused on making a difference and wanting their job to also save the world. Which, I don't know if that's specific to millennials, but that definitely seems to be the stereotype, that that's a group that values that much more. Whereas Gen Xers are more kind of head down, make money and I'll get my satisfaction through other venues not through the nature of my work.
Max: So that could be it. But that, but I feel like that, that the Civic focus of this generation is in totally the wrong areas.
Aaron: That could very well be true.
Max: Yeah, yeah. It could be like all the mask mandates and the lockdowns and making sure that nobody, everybody has the right opinions, all the woke stuff. Could that be the civic?
Aaron: I'd be very curious to see a breakdown by generational group of who's in favor of what policies there. I haven't seen that.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: I hesitate to make a sweeping generalization.
Max: I think you're right. I don’t know. Yeah. It's millennials being directed by profits, just like they said it would, and again, it's turning very badly.
Aaron: The one that I have heard numbers on is that in general, and I don't know if this is specifically millennials or maybe more what we frequently call Zoomers, a ease of willingness To give up individual rights for collective benefit for greater “security.”
Max: Yesah, that's what we're supposed to be doing. And that does seem to be what we're doing.
Aaron: I guess that kind of fits into this.
Max: Not me personally, but maybe I'm one of the people that gets emphasized at a different time. Who knows? Or it could just be spitting into the wind. Okay. A big hit that they said that during this time, no one will be interested in team culture, teen culture, except to chastise anything that offends, and I agree. What is teen culture in the year 2021?
Aaron: Is that, is that specific to a fourth turning?
Max: Yes.
Aaron: Because I feel like it's—
Max: What's teen culture in 1942?.
Aaron: That, I don't know. But I feel like during the rock'n'roll era, I'm thinking of music in particular, that every generation has their new music, and everyone who's older than them thinks that it's terrible, and the worst thing ever and stupid. Yeah. I feel like that doesn't change with the turnings. That's pretty universal.
Max: No, but they say that the music styles do change, that the musical styles do repeat. Not exactly, obviously. We're not bringing it back Big Band.
Aaron: But in every turning the generation older than you is still going to think that the youngest generation’s music is terrible. The youngest generation is going to think that all everyone else is old fuddy duddies. That's not specific to whether you're in a awakening or a fourth turning or the high.
Max: I haven't heard teen music now. Like, what is it? I haven't even heard it. Like, it's I'm waiting to hear this music that I think is terrible. And I don't even know what it is. It never plays.
Aaron: I don't think so much about the music when I think about teen culture and maybe trash ties does exactly that. Tik Tok Snapchat, maybe? Yeah. Yeah, but there's probably some new cool thing that I haven't even heard of, because I'm too old.
Max: The whole thing, like the chastise everything that offends, of course this is right on. But yeah, again, they have a lot of predictions about the previous fourth turning. These guys are very pro government for fourth turning. People rely on authority. And they're like, well, you should send your kids to public schools, because, that's where they're gonna get the conformity to—
Aaron: trauss and Howe saying that that that government is the solution. The fourth turning, or are they saying that people are going to naturally turn towards the government?
Max: A little bit of both? A little bit of both? They're like, well, you should go to public schools, because that's going to, that's going to give you the social relevance and conformity and team building that you're going to need in the fourth and first turning. I think, particularly for millennials, they're talking about, but maybe even into the fourth turning now, because you have to remember it’s written in ‘97. But it's like, Yeah, I don't think they realized how bad some of these public schools were gonna get. So, and they do say, children will be very pro government and our children more pro-government today than they were 30, 40 years ago. Again, I don't know.
Aaron: Yeah, I don't even know exactly what the metric would be used to compare that I'm sure there's some sort of surveys and studies that look into that type of thing, but I'm not familiar with benchmarks there.
Max: Yeah. All right. Let's look at some of the other predictions. So here's an interesting quote, I'm gonna I'm gonna bring out this this quote, because it's, I think some of the best prediction was the one that he said wasn't going to happen. They make sure I have this picture. Here it is. Right. So he's like, you can't just use the 1990s to project into the 2020s, because then you'll say something like this: “The 2020s would be a mere extrapolation of the 1990s with more cable channels and webpages, and senior benefits, and corporate free agents, plus more hand gun murders, media violence, cultural splintering, political cynicism, youth alienation, partisan meanness, and distance between rich and poor.
There'd be no Apogee, no leveling, no correction. Eventually, America would veer totally out of control along some bizarre centrifugal path. Now, not all of those things came to pass, but that wasn't as far off as he was that has—
Aaron: —the ring of truthiness to it. Yeah. I feel like and he was specifically saying, it would be wrong to predict this.
Max: I think part of our problem was we maybe if the 1990s weren't unraveling, we just kept on unraveling. They say if the crisis comes sooner, like it did in the Civil War, it can make the crisis worse. Maybe not. But I feel like if you unravel for too long—
Aaron: We’re supposed to be firmly in the crisis period now and we still haven't—
Max: We are.
Aaron: —distinctly identified what the crisis is.
Max: Well, there are lots of them. The problem is none of them, there's no way to put the—
Aaron: None of them are resolving the issue that, to be true fourth turning, it needs to not just be a big old crisis, it needs to then resolve to something that allows the ascension into nothing.
Max: Nothing is able to unite the country and put the country back together. But look, the Civil War, you have to do that by force. I feel like maybe if 9/11 came in the fourth turning, then the country would indeed unite around that. Although now it seems like maybe we wouldn't. So I don't know.
Aaron: So we really need to just be holding out hope for aliens.
Max: Yeah. I mean, hope? Hopefully not, do you really think that those UFOs are aliens, by the way?
Aaron: I haven't even looked into the latest round of things.
Max: I think that there could be extraterrestrial life out there somewhere. But I think these UFOs are probably just either technology or illusions, more likely.
Aaron: I think my favorite recent take on that was, and I realized it was from a satirical site, but it was, NASA announces that extraterrestrials may not be sufficiently sexy to mate with humans. So it's either someone's being very pessimistic, or just not trying hard enough on that front.
Max: Alright, so another point that some people have made, and there's a blog post on this, and also an episode on this in the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which I will link to as well, let me write this down, What Bitcoin Did podcast.
Aaron: The host of whom you've had on the show previously, I believe.
Max: Yep, Peter McCormick. I don't remember who the guest was, we talked about this. But basically, they were saying, one of the institutions that is unraveling and failing is the institution of money in this country. Now you have each successive administration printing, let's say double of what the last one did, increasing the money supply. It's becoming increasingly funny money. What that does is that gives certain people in the economy a very unfair advantage, it increases wealth inequality, it basically, because inflation on its own doesn't hurt you. Everyone who has $10 now as $100, every contract, you just 10x everything that is zero, that doesn't change your life at all.
The problem is some people when there's inflation, the political class, essentially, and then the big corporations get that money first. It sucks value out of the middle class, the people who are low-income are trying to save, basically. So they're like, we need to have sound money, and we need to build a new a new system based on sound principles. That is the new institution that'll create the first turning. He's like, Bitcoin was invented just at the dawn of the fourth turning, maybe that's not a coincidence.
I mean, I like that theory, because that's the one theory that says that this fourth turning is going to turn out well, and that the winners are going to be the good guys essentially. But what do you think about that?
Aaron: If the crisis of this fourth turning is an economic one—
Max: It seems like it’s been.
Aaron: —in the sense of money supply, what might be the tipping point, the final crisis there be that that causes us to to resolve the conflict?
Max: Hyper Bitcoinization, basically.
Aaron: But I feel like something has to trigger that to happen, something dramatic, and I'm having trouble picturing what that could be. I suppose if I could picture it, then I would be a savant. I'd be able to see the future. So it shouldn't be surprising that I can't, but—
Max: Okay, let's, let me put it this way, then. It starts with out of control inflation, let's say. The government goes through several upheavals. Finally, after a hundred years, you get someone in there who says, “We're going to resort to sound money, and instead of fighting this Bitcoin thing, we're just going to accept it and put it on our balance sheet, and that'll be that, that's our money now.”
That's something that everyone can get behind, because even though Bitcoin is sometimes tarnished, as, I've heard Bitcoiners tarnished in the way our political debates, like, “Oh, so and so is a racist, so and so is a horrible person.” People try to do that with bitcoiners, too, sometimes well-deserved, like, not as some of their scammers in their whatever. But I think in the end, people are just gonna realize this is just math, and it's objective. After all the craziness that we've been through in the 2020s, let's say it's like, 2028. Now, it's just, this is the only thing we could trust, because all the other institutions have failed us. So, yes, I think it's hard to say, I guess I didn't give you an exact answer that you wanted.
Aaron: Well, I think the thing that you got to that's helping me flesh it out in my brain is it would not be a purely economic, that because, I mean, nothing happens in a vacuum. So in order for this to happen, there would be all sorts of other upheaval and crises that go along with it. So you said a lot of turnover in leadership and government and getting crises there that maybe are a result of the economic factors here, but it's not like that's gonna happen purely on Wall Street and at the Fed, and the Treasury, that all of a sudden is going to tip this over. It's going to involve all aspects of society. Yeah. Whether or not that involves riding in the streets, and literal spilling of blood or not, is tdb, to be determined. But it could very well. Just because it's economic doesn't mean that that's all off the table.
Max: Right, right. But but it actually could end without all that stuff. I mean, it seems like some of this stuff is going on as we speak, in the last few days, but hopefully not in large scale. But yeah, so I'm going to link to that because that is a fascinating idea. Another one, so what does this mean for the 2020s? When does the fourth turning end? It's hard to say. If we are coming up this year, on the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. So I think that the saeculum is usually a little longer than 80 years. I think, from Pearl Harbor to the start of Civil War was almost exactly eighty years.
But I think that to the start of the Revolutionary War was maybe a little bit more. So let's say 85 years. So maybe we have five years until we have that big event. Okay. So, yeah, we could be in the, in the years of the run up to, or it could just happen this year. We don't know, it could happen tomorrow. Right. So if you're going by the 80-year cycle, their example here was hey, the catalyst happens in 2005, which they, people are now claiming, oh, that's the housing. crash. I'm not sure.
Aaron: That was, was that actually 2008? Was in the crash happened?
Max: Yeah, ‘07-’08. They're saying, oh, the climax happens in 2020 and the resolution 2026. You might say, Coronavirus, 2020. But I'm not so sure. I'm still open to the idea that it hasn't happened yet. Just because I feel like we are still, there's still not, we're still jumping from thing to thing. Every few months, I feel like there's another big thing to be outraged about that everyone's going crazy over. The fact that people don't have a long media attention span. It's all, one week we're hearing January 6, that's all we're gonna hear about for the rest of our lives.
Now it's like, wait, what happened that day? Or COVID You know, we're gonna defeat this like World War Two, we're gonna I mean, yes, Biden is really into that, like, this is this generation's war. Well, now that we're all vaccinated, and people don't have to yell at each other about masks and elevators anymore. Okay, like people are screwed up now, so what happens when they get together? But I think it's gonna be something else. I don't know. I feel like all this is definitely leading up, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don't know about you.
Aaron: Yeah. Even if somehow we could wave a magic wand and you know, COVID was wiped off the earth. No one ever had a confirmed case ever again. That doesn't feel like it would be a segue into a first turning.
Max: No, no, because our institutions have not been rebuilt.
Aaron: Right. If anything, they've just been further weakened.
Max: Exactly, exactly.
Aaron: So something else needs to come along to fully break them.
Max: It does feel like something will, because the path we're on now is not sustainable. One of the things I say, okay, maybe this new ideology, it's called whatever you want to call it, the woke ideology, maybe that wins the fourth turning. But is that sustainable? Does that sustain to a first turning? Could you have a woke 50s? I'm not sure it's sustainable in that way. But maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe, we'll see what happens.
Aaron: Yeah, I haven't given enough thought to really wrap my head around.
Max: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's partially a horrifying thought. But I don't think that's what's gonna happen.
Aaron: I'm tempted to think about the Russian example. You said before that they're out of phase with the rest of Europe and rightly with America. But if their fourth turning was the Russian Revolution in 1917, then with the 20s and 30s have been their high. I feel like not so much, because I think they struggled pretty hard in that period.
Max: Yeah. I mean, they're, it's Russia.
Aaron: Yeah, I suppose if they weren't struggling, it wouldn't be Russia. That's a fair assessment. Yeah. Because they didn't really seem to get their stuff together until maybe the late 30s, and then they got slammed with the war.
Max: Yeah, yeah, I guess. But then, of course, I feel like, there was a fourth turning fall in Russia, followed by another fourth turning elsewhere in the Soviet Union, that kind of—
Aaron: They got a one-two punch of fourth turnings.
Max: Yeah, they got a one two punch of fourth turnings, that's a good way of putting it. I think that that could happen, especially when you have lots of different societies interacting that are all out of phase. They say here that it doesn't work for other countries, which again, it kind of weakens, they have a plausible reason why it doesn't, but it also kind of weakened theory, so.
Aaron: I didn't read that section. But how much of that was on the American exceptionalism, Anglo tradition lines, and—
Max: No, it's more like the self-contained, non-contaminated type of thing. Some of the earlier fourth turnings in British history are also very interesting: Spanish Armada is coming to get you and you'd have to beat that. Then there's the War of the Roses was before that. All I know from the War of the Roses is it was basically like Game of Thrones, and you had Tyrion in there, sending dragons? I don't know.
Aaron: Indeed. How did the, I guess it was the tail end of the fourth turning in France was, so there was the French Revolution followed by Napoleonic era, and that was all lumped together into their fourth turning and ending in 1815 when they get rid of right.
Max: Right, and that was during our first turning, which was—
Aaron: Our post revolutionary high?
Max: Yeah, so we had a long first turning. There was the constitutional era followd, so it wasn't really in 1950s. Again, it's not always like 1950s. It was like, okay, you—
Aaron: It wasn't without war, because we had the War of 1812 right in there. Which—
Max: But then no—
Aaron: But that's post—
Max: that's a great example of a first turning war. A perfect example of a first turning war, it confirms the previous result.
Aaron: I guess that does make a good analog to Korea.
Max: Yeah. But it wasn't like the 1950s, it was more like, we have this crazy, fourth turning institutions are being built. You have the articles, Confederation and all that. I think that the Constitutional Convention would have been, like the first turning.
Aaron: Yeah, I think they think they marked that as the the end of the fourth, the beginning of the first.
Max: So now you have a stronger central government with George Washington, the Federalists. Now, they also count the Era of Good Feelings, which is 30 years later, is also part of the first turning. So maybe we have a really long first turning, or maybe they had part of the awakening, it bleeds into that Era of Good Feeling, I don't know. But, again, so the timeline gets a little bit off.
But definitely, I mean my knowledge of American history, I have strong opinions about political stuff that's going on now, When I express an opinion about stuff that happened hundreds of years ago, I'm way more open to changing it just because I know so little about it. But my feeling is, once we get to Andrew Jackson, things are very different. That's where I think, I'm actually very, I sort of recognize Thomas Jefferson's party as the left-wing party of its time, but I'm very sympathetic toward that party. I think that was one of the few eras in the American history where the left was good, or even better, than the other party.
Aaron: One and Jackson is generally seen as the turning points of that. That was the end of the Democrat Republicans, in the sense that Jefferson would have known them.
Max: Yeah. So I think, and interestingly enough, all the, most of the times in history where I think the left were the good guys were first turnings, so that's kind of interesting. But we can go into all of that. So maybe in 10 years, I will be a staunch Democrat.
Aaron: So how does FDR fit into that? He was fourth turning, right? Would would it be incorrect to refer to him as left? I would assume that—
Max: Yeah, the democrats at the time were the left party. I would say I'd be more sympathetic to like Kennedy in 1960.
Aaron: I guess that was the tail end of the first turning.
Max: Sure. Even Truman tried to have another new deal type situation—
Aaron: But didn’t have the capital to make it happen.
Max: Look, there are also a lot of problems during the first turning. I guess Eisenhower was pretty good. But you could also point to every president in American history, you could point that,,I know all libertarians listening are like, look at all the bad things all these presidents did. And I get it, I get it. But it's just this is a comparison.
Aaron: It's implied when we say president, that the terrible, terrible things, we have to say explicitly every time.
Max: Yeah. But you could also say some were better leaders than others. This book is, these people are pro-government, they live in DC. So I understand what it's like to write for, sometimes you're writing for the people in power to say, “Hey, check this out.” Where it's like, when, by the way, I think you could still have a theory of this, where these are more about social attitudes, then about, you don't have to give up your political point of view, just because it's a different turning. But you can adopt your political point of view: you could be a libertarian in a very individualistic time, or you could be a libertarian in a very conformist time. It doesn't matter in terms of the use of force against individual rights, but—
Aaron: You will likely be fighting different, specific flashpoint battles in the political front.
Max: Exactly. You'll definitely would tailor your message very differently. Same for conservatives, same for liberals, all that. That's one of the lessons they give, which I think is important to understand this. Also, if you're not into politics, it's true for marketing campaigns as well. I mean, actually, one of the interesting ones was, there was a trend where the movies that were popular were about demon children.
Aaron: Like The Exorcist and what was the one with Damian?
Max: Yeah. That must have been during the second turning. That was really awakening. Yeah, that's when Gen X was growing up and being ignored, like demon children.
Aaron: Was that also when the big D&D scare happened?
Max: What's that? I don't know.
Aaron: Oh, the Dungeons and Dragons. There was a moral panic about, it was actually dark magic. People were getting, people were basically being tricked into committing suicide or murder people. Crazy stuff. But people believed it back in. I don't know if that timeline matches up with the awakening, what would have been like late 60s, early 70s.
Max: Anyway, basically, millennials came around us and all of a sudden they like kids, again, is what the book is saying. So the culture hated children. Sorry, Gen X. I actually think Gen X is gonna save us in all this because they seem to be the most sensible. I think I have more in common with Gen X than millennial as well, even though I'm a bit younger. But the point of that was okay, all these movies come out about demon children, right way up to problem child or whatever in the 80s.
Then the third turning rolls around. Now do you think those, the people making the movies, do you think they were saying, “Well, all of these movies about demon children are doing really well at the box office, but I think the times are changing. Let's stop making them.” No, they didn't. They kept making them. But the interesting that happened was they stopped selling. People didn't want to go there anymore. It's not like people willfully decided, it was just it was consumer trends. So this is not just about selling politics, it's about selling consumer trends as well, and I thought that was an example. So then all of a sudden in the popular movies, children became the good guys.
I'm trying to think of an example of that, but I don't know. Okay, so what else? What else did this book say? Adapting for changing times—
Aaron: Did we talk about the great champion?
Max: Oh, yeah, I missed the great champion. Right. So the great champion is Obi Wan Kenobi, Gandalf. Moses.
Aaron: The wise mentor.
Max: From the Prophet generation. Generally, it's a political leader that comes along that the heroes kind of grab on to, and I look around and I don't see one. But it's clear that the millennial generation does like to latch on to really old people. So he got that right. Anywhere from, well, let's start with Ron Paul. But then, of course, to Joe Biden, and Trump to an extent. Bernie Sanders, of course, Bernie Sanders.
Aaron: So would this be part of—
Max: Dr. Fauci. No, I'm not just saying I like all these people. But I'm saying yes, I feel like there's a sort of a yearning for this old guy as like the paragon of leadership, which is this glorified in the past, like Winston Churchill, if you from the UK example. Okay, I know, I'm not gonna go through and I'm not, I know I'm gonna be accused of everything for bringing everyone up. But you know what I mean, okay. But none of these leaders tend to stick.
Aaron: Yeah. So in, we certainly saw in the last round of presidential primaries that it seems, maybe Gen X just isn't isn't old enough. But it seems like there's no, the young bench of politics is failing to get people to the fore. So we're ending up with people who are much more seasoned, would perhaps be a generous way of putting it, and recycled would be a less generous way. They've, they've been through this, and they haven't cut the mustard before, but they're what we've got left now, and so we're gonna go for him.
Max: I don't think we have the great champion that, they paint FDR as the quintessential great champion that comes in and changes the whole political system. Yes, some people are saying that's what Biden's doing now, but I just, I don't see it. But I guess we'll find out what people are going to say in, we’ll know in a few years, won't we?
Aaron: Yeah, I'd have to think of the analogies to who I would more accurately draw the lines from Biden—
Max: They can also be fairly authoritarian, which gets a lot of leaders are these days. When they talk about the type of great champion leader, I see some of Biden and some of Trump, but I don't think they either fit the bill entirely. So we'll see what happens. It could just be an archetype that doesn't show up, or shows up late.
Aaron: Well, so, I hesitate to do this but since I already good wind us in part one of the episode Yeah. Would Hitler have been a great champion for Germany? What generation does he fit into?
Max: No, he was not a Gen X. He was a —
Aaron: Was he a nomad?
Max: Lost generation, yeah. Authoritarian. Yeah. They said that could happen too, you could get an authoritarian type from that generation, but that's not the great champion. But sometimes you can get a leader from the middle aged generation. What’s a good example of that? Sort of a good example, almost the opposite of Hitler, would be George Washington,
Aaron: Because, we were talking about this before we started recording, that even though he was active very much in the same era as Jefferson that he was a generation older than that he was, Jefferson was very much a young man at the time of the revolution and the Declaration of Independence, whereas George Washington had already had a military career behind him. He’d fought in the French and Indian War During the third turning, right. He was, he fits the great champion.
Max: I believe he made a mistake in that war that kicked off a World War. It's like, oops. But no. Yeah, I think who would be in the who would be in the prophet generation? There may be Ben Franklin. I'm just not sure. Actually, they got a list here.
Aaron: He's certainly depicted as being significantly older, and yeah, that's why it says old man womanizing in France days as an Ambassador. It's tough to judge sometimes because completely on a tangent here—
Max: Benjamin Franklin. Sam Adams. Crispus Attucks.
Aaron: I never think about how old he is because he's most known for being killed.
Max: So he would have been, oh I thought he was like a young guy. He was the first guy killed in the Boston Massacre. So he would have probably been, well, I don't know. Boston Massacre was that 1760s?
Aaron: Okay, I was gonna say, I thought it was before the 1770s. But I couldn't remember what exactly what year.
Max: But they say, born 1701 to 1723. So it could have been 40 or 50. Okay, so I guess, I don't know. The great champion thing is interesting. He spends a whole chapter on that here. But I don't I just don't see it as relevant these days, other than to understand why millennials are voting for very old people, or looking for very old mentors as kind of a—
Aaron: Are there people of that generation who are prominent outside of politics? I'm assuming that they'd be boomers, like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, those are boomers, right?
Max: Bill Gates is. Jeff Bezos might be a little younger. I feel like Jeff Bezos might be more Gen X, but I'm not sure.
Aaron: Obviously, and I'm completely blanking on his name, but Facebook. He's a millennial.
Max: Yes. Let's just call him Mr. Facebook. I don’t need that name on my podcast. Yeah, so there's, well, okay. Tim. Tim Apple, Tim?
Aaron: Well, because you mentioned his, his, his predecessor being from the prophet generation, Steve Jobs.
Max: I feel like he's an example of an entrepreneur who put the awakening to use, if that makes sense. No, I think it does make sense. He put the awakening to use by infusing spiritual ideas into technology. Let's put it that way.
Aaron: Interesting.
Max: Steve Jobs is a very interesting character. I can't say, he didn't seem like the nicest boss in the world. But honestly, kind of a brilliant thinker, I sort of be interested to know what he would have to say about the the tech trends today, if he were alive, not just what's happened at Apple, but just like the nature of work, the nature of big tech. I don't know what he would have, what he would have to say about it, but it's sort of something that I think about sometimes.
Again, I think your question remains like, there doesn't seem to be any obvious answer. Because people are living so long, we're supposed to be in the middle of the crisis, where the boomers are the oldest generation, but you still have the silent generation kind of falls away. No, we have a president in the silent generation. We still have lots of people in the silent generation who are highly influential. I was gonna say the Koch brothers, but I think there's, who's the one that's remaining, I think David Koch passed away. The other Koch brother’s still around.
George Soros, all those people who are silent generation. Even Charlie Munger, who's commenting on Bitcoin and saying how he doesn't like it, very wealthy billionaire from Berkshire Hathaway. I was gonna comment on Reddit, someone's like, “Oh, that's Boomer thinking.” He's too old to be a boomer. He's a silent, and there's like, no, he's older than that. He's part of the GI generation. So he's 97 years old. Even if he's wrong, it's pretty cool that he's part of the World War Two generation and gets to comment on Bitcoin.
But still, it's like, there's so many elderly, elderly people, even older than they're supposed to be, who are very influential in our society. That might be screwing this up, screwing up the script a little bit.
Aaron: So I want to come back to the great champion thing in just a second. But your mentioning of that, with, and also I think previously, you talked about the measuring of the oldest person who influenced you. Yeah, measure there. It reminded me there's a tidbit and I don't have the numbers in front of me. But there's a trivia question about, “When did the last Civil War widow die?” It is far, far further into the 20th century than you would have thought because it was a guy who fought in the Civil War relatively young. Yeah. Then, late in life, he married a young woman. When he died, she then went on to live another 50 years beyond that. It was it was well into the 20th century that the Civil War widow died.
Max: No, no, no.
Aaron: Is it more than that?
Max: December 6, wait, December 16th, 2020. This year. “Helen Viola Jackson was the last surviving widow of a union soldier and the last surviving widow of a Civil War veteran overall. She died on December 16, 2020, at the age of 101.”
Aaron: So that's even further than I thought. But it just goes to show that with slightly longer than average lifespans, you can you can stretch that from the beginning of one life to the end of another life that it that it directly impacted pretty far
Max: It makes you think about history in a more interesting way. Like they point out, think of the oldest person you know, and then think of the youngest person you're going to know and how long they're going to live. That's going to span, let's just assume lifespans are similar. That's gonna span longer than the time the United States has been around.
Aaron: That's pretty much ugly.
Max: For me, if I talk about, I knew someone who's born in 1899, he could have met a Civil War veteran easily, almost certainly. I guess there were people, there's video from the 1950s of someone who is being interviewed who witnessed the Lincoln assassination at age four. He's there on TV in 1850. During the Civil War, there was a journalist who was interviewing people who met George Washington.
Aaron: That's mind boggling.
Max: It makes you feel like, oh my God, this stuff is a lot closer. I think about this in genealogy too. You could really pass this on. It's almost like, you know in finances the concept of leverage, you could take your lifetime, but also kind of leverage that up, so you can expand before your life and after your life and kind of bridge the gap, if that makes sense. I know that wasn't very specific.
Aaron: So let me let me pull us back in here for great champion so So did we say already that FDR was a great champion?
Max: Yes.
Aaron: So how does the New Deal fit into that? Because I mean, that occurred in a fourth turning. I supposedly said it but the talk about, is our fourth turning going to be like the previous one, why might it not? But the obvious conclusion to jump to there might be something like the Green New Deal, primarily because it's explicitly invoking FDR.
Max: And they say in this book, the next new deal.
Aaron: But who would be the champion of the Green New Deal?
Max: Biden.
Aaron: Okay, maybe.
Max: Look, that's one way things could work out.
Aaron: I was going to make the point that Ocasio-Cortez. It’s certainly not of the right generation to be a great champion.
Max: No. She’s millennial.
Aaron: She's a millennial. Okay, so perhaps she’s one of the soldiers on the ground marching to Biden's great champion orders there, in that metaphor. I hesitate to see him as the champion of something like that. But maybe history will tell it differently.
Max: Yeah, I mean, we, I feel like, we can go into the question here of, who wins the fourth turning? Because I feel like these days, there have almost been like three or four times where one group has been like, “That's it. We did it. We won the fourth turning.” Of course, they don't put it in those terms. Although Steve Bannon, Trump's advisor, when he was running, was into this stuff. But apparently, Trump wasn't interested or wouldn't have it.
But anyway, We've heard a lot about we are on the right side of history, we’ll win the future, we’ll be in power forever. I think by power forever, they don't mean forever.Take the Civil War, for example. Yeah, slavery is abolished, there's some backsliding after that for sure. But the change is massive. Same with the New Deal. But now we have, Obama comes in, this is permanent. And the backlash happens, like almost immediately, like a year in. The same happens with Trump. It looks like the same might happen this time. I don't know.
Aaron: Now, when you say backlash, you're talking about flipping of House of houses of congress in the midterm.
Max: But not just that, but just like a stymie of one thing is popular, then it's not popular, and then another thing’s popular, then it's not popular. There's no goal to work towards. It's almost like we're on a wheel of fortune or some crazy game. “Where will the wheel stop? That's where you're gonna live with, where would the wheel stop?” We keep thinking it’s—
Aaron: Right now, the impression is that things are so close to a 50-50 split and what people want, that it's easy to oscillate back and forth. Presumably, at the conclusion of the fourth turning something will occur that causes the populace at large to coalesce around one of those, those two worldviews, so it's not going to be a 50-50 split. It’ll at least be enough that there's a solid majority for something moving forward so that the restructuring of institutions can occur rather than ping pong back and forth between every administration kind of rolling back the changes or events of the past one. I don't know what that is that causes that, whether it's a shift of people from one side to the other, or a redrawing of what the the paradigm is, but—
Max: I think Democrats will not like what I'm gonna say, but they're gonna understand what it's gonna hit too close to home, where it's like, the Democrat side of the aisle, the left keeps on thinking they're about to win it. There. We're about to get that permanent majority. And then it turns out, oh, that just didn't quite happen. Next time, we'll get it. I must be very frustrating for them. Because they don't. Because it hasn't quite gotten there. So I feel like there has to be some kind of a resolution there.
Aaron: There's, there's predicting the inevitable and it never quite surfaces, and that can't go on forever. Something is going to Yeah, like you said the other shoe has to drop eventually, but we don't know what that's gonna look like.
Max: That's why you know, something involving the crypto economy, Bitcoin, but also the decentralization of big tech, and all of that could be a big part of it, because it's a little bit less partisan. Maybe it's a direction we can go in where people are not going to be so dug in and divided, I don't know.
Aaron: I wonder if that's almost diametrically opposed too, because the path out of the fourth turning into the first turning is conformity, and it almost sounds like a coalescing of government power. That seems the opposite of what you're proposing there, but maybe that is something that a, a new, a new consensus could coalesce around.
Max: It could be, it doesn't have to be a conformity of government power, it could be just more of a just kind of a social conformity. It would look very different from the 50s. But I don't, does the 50s look like the Gilded Age? Or does it look like the Washington administration? No, none of these things look similar at all.
Aaron: It depends who you ask, because in 2016, that was, depending on who you ask, that may or may not have been the Great America to which Trump wanted to return us. If you ask some other people, the 1950s were not so great for a lot of Americans. There's, I guess that's the other thing that, I don't know if I explicitly said this or not, or or just alluded to it, but there's a lot of rose-colored glasses, and the victors write the history that certainly flows into this model here. I don't know how you disentangle that. That's the job of professional historians, so presumably, Strauss and Howe have good insight into that. But I could see that easily tinting their view of what these cycles look like, that it's very much colored by who won the fourth turning. So also, they have the ability to write the previous turnings the way they wanted.
Max: Also, they're very overly political and government focused. Just because, I believe they live in DC and are writing for a DC audience. That caused them to focus on things that wouldn't necessarily be my focus all the time. I love politics, as you know, but it's like, you know, there's, I think a lot of the best stuff happens outside politics,
Aaron: Presumably, people who are at the levers of power would be very interested in this type of thing. This could be valuable to them. Which raises the question, we are not sitting at the levers of power, we are not in DC, or wherever the future capital of these United States might be. What do we do with this information? How do we use this in our daily life?
Max: So first of all, I'm going to go back to the example with the movies changing. Demon children is in, now all of a sudden demon children is not in. You can use this, even if you're not in politics, if you're just in marketing, or sales or investing. You can use some of this framework to try to anticipate where the future is going to go. Or, you know, what type of, for me, I'm going to think about this in terms of what type of technology to build, what type of consumer applications to invest in. I don't know what the takeaway is exactly in that. But I want to think about that a little more, because I think it does, there are lessons to be taken here on how to build a consumer app, or not how to build consumer app, but like, what—
Aaron: What consumers want?
Max: Where, what direction society is going to go in. Also, in terms of preparing for more crises, because I think most people would agree with me that we're not out of the woods yet. There are definitely specific examples in the book of what you can do, but a lot of it is, have very close friends and family connections. Make sure you have multiple sources of income. All sorts of good idea things that you should have during a crisis that are probably good practice anyway,
Aaron: It sounds like we just started a Tom Woods commercial there.
Max: I could probably read, read some more stuff. But yeah, you can get the book and give their give their takeaways, but I think some of the takeaways are that like, hey, if there's going to be a bunch of upheaval in society, I think then it's like, okay, there are things I could do to prepare personally. Could you prepare for, could you have foreseen COVID? No, but if you were dependent on one thing for your income, I guess in some cases you might be in a position where there's not much you can do, but I guess everyone just does what they can.
Aaron: And we've mentioned COVID, at least once or twice now.
Max: Oh, another thing in this book is like, that's why if COVID happened 40 years ago, people just been like, meh, nothing. I think because we are in a fourth turning mode mood mode, which is, everything is an overreaction in the fourth turning. I can't say I disagree with that prediction.
Aaron: Well, I was just thinking that the previous pandemic that is most compared to COVID was the 1918 flu, which would have been in a third turning. Very different from that perspective. But how different was the pandemic itself? So I think maybe that that could be useful in thinking about how we reacted to it and the impact that it's had on us socially, politically, economically.
Max: I mean, it's so I don't generally look at that stuff in terms of the saeculum trends. I mean, I just, looking at it in terms of coming back to linear time. We had modern times where governments didn't really react to pandemics that much. Until recently, it seems like each one, we're reacting more and more. Now people, individuals react to the 1918 pandemic, there were certainly masks, but federal government didn’t do anything. Surprisingly, very little. So I don't know. There was a pandemic during the Revolutionary War that didn't. I mean, that was a big concern, of course, but I think it was, what was it? Was it smallpox?
Aaron: That would be period-correct. But I don't recall.
Max: Yeah. Okay. I think there could have been multiple ones. I don't know. But the reaction and policies put in place seem to be consistent with fourth turning. Again, who wins the fourth turning? Part of me says, God, it can go so many different ways.
Aaron: So this is maybe getting a little bit far afield.
Max; What if critical race theory is the conformity that we're expected to go by in the first turning? I don't know, that could happen.
Aaron: I'm not really sure how to prepare for that. What action do you take there to thrive in that environment?
Max: I don't know if there is, what do you do if the fourth turning if the fourth turning doesn't go your way? I guess, you know, that. I guess the good thing about the first turning is, you're kind of going to be allowed to just go back to work.
Aaron: Germany came out of the last, the last cycle, they're there. They're strong now. But they had a long hard road to—
Max: Yeah, something like that could happen.
Aaron: It took them at least half of a speculum to basically rebuild.
Max: I mean, or even three quarters.
Aaron: West Germany, they were doing pretty well during the late Cold War. But then after the fall of the wall, it took them a while to reintegrate and get all that back up.
Max: These sites still had rubble from World War Two. But, look, I actually don't think this thing is going to end that badly. If that's gonna be positive, I was like, end that badly? Could get pretty bad. No, I actually think that, my running theory is that the technologies that we're building, in terms of Bitcoin in terms of other kind of blockchain/decentralized technologies that are going around the gatekeeper, I think that, and yes, there's a little bit of a contradiction here where they're decentralized technology. But I think they're going to lead to the new institutions upon which the new social order will be created. It could, for a time, be more conformist social order, but it will be on top of a much stronger foundation that could lead to better social change in the next awakening.
Aaron: So I'm sure there's a lot more we could say, but let's go out on that positive note.
Max: Yeah, I want to that's why I started raising kids because I wanted to go out in the positive and that's why I want to talk about that stuff a lot more in the podcast, because I kind of want to nudge things in that direction, if we can. I will next week, as well, because I'm talking to the founder of Odyssey, lives here in New Hampshire, and is decentralizing YouTube. So that's very exciting. This is not just YouTube clone. This is some really interesting technology that this is on top of, so I'm very excited to do that interview.
Aaron: So exciting for the nerds among us, as well as the casual viewers of internet videos.
Max: All right, Aaron, thanks a lot. I'm gonna have to tell people on the video that the video went out. And if they want to hear about who won the fourth turning, they're gonna have to listen to the podcast. Yeah, but I think it went pretty well. We'll get the studio straightened out in no time.
Aaron: Absolutely.
Max: All right. Have a great week, everyone.
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