You Must Understand the Fourth Turning to Survive What's Coming...

This episode explores the concept of the Fourth Turning, a theory that predicts societal change and crisis based on generational patterns, focusing on its implications for the future.

1. Cyclic Nature of Societies: Societies experience recurring cycles of crisis and regeneration, which are influenced by generational dynamics.
2. Current Crisis Analysis: The current period is identified as a 'Fourth Turning', a time of heightened societal crisis that could lead to major structural changes.
3. Generational Impact: Different generations react uniquely to these turnings, with Millennials poised to play a pivotal role in navigating this current crisis.
4. Historical Context: The episode links current events to historical patterns, suggesting that understanding these can provide insights into future developments.
5. Potential for Renewal: Despite the challenges posed by such turbulent times, there is a strong potential for societal renewal and improvement.

1: Introduction to the Fourth Turning

Neil Howe introduces the concept of the Fourth Turning, explaining how societal cycles align with generational changes. The chapter sets the stage for a deeper exploration of historical patterns and their implications for the future. Neil Howe: "Each Turning is a critical passage in the history of a society."

2: Generational Dynamics

This chapter discusses how different generations—Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials—experience and influence the cycles differently, focusing on their roles and responses to societal challenges. Neil Howe: "Millennials may lead us into a new golden age as they reshape institutions in response to the crisis."

3: Historical Patterns and Predictions

Howe uses historical examples to illustrate past Fourth Turnings, comparing them to the present day and discussing potential future scenarios. Neil Howe: "Looking at past crises gives us a roadmap for understanding our current challenges."

1. Educate Yourself on Generational Characteristics: Understanding the values and perspectives of different generations can improve communication and collaboration.
2. Prepare for Change: Be flexible and adaptable to navigate the turbulent times of a Fourth Turning effectively.
3. Focus on Community: Strengthen local communities as they will be crucial in rebuilding trust and social cohesion.
4. Promote Inter-Generational Cooperation: Encourage dialogue and cooperation between different generational groups.
5. Invest in Renewal: Support initiatives that aim to reform failing institutions and systems.

How can past crises teach us how to deal with challenges in today's world?
Our guest NEIL HOWE is a renowned historian and generational theorist, known for co-authoring the seminal books "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" and "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy."

In this timely one-on-one conversation with SCOTT HARRIS -- a seasoned facilitator and trainer for Tony Robbins -- Neil discusses his latest book, "The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End." Drawing on his expertise in history and cycles, Neil reveals how different generations experience and shape our world. Howe also helps us better understand the multiple crises that we're facing today, and how upcoming challenges will affect each generation differently.

How can understanding generational cycles in "The Fourth Turning" help us prepare for today's societal and economic challenges? Neil offers insights on how individuals, communities, and families can effectively prepare for the future. This discussion is particularly crucial, as we approach a critical juncture expected by the early 2030s.

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"The Fourth Turning" by William Strauss and Neil Howe

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Tony Robbins
Hi, thanks for listening to the Tony Robbins podcast. This is just a quick note about this episode in case you'd rather watch and see the video of this conversation. And that's found@YouTube.com tonyrobbinslive. If you'd like to listen, you're in the right place.

Scott Harris
What do you think the experience is going to be for current younger generation of this fourth? Training for all the millennials out there? You know, for people who were born in the this is, this is going to be your chance to remake the world.

What do you say about our guest speaker? He is an historian, a demographic expert, a long term fiscal policy expert, the smartest organizations around the world. Listen to what this man says. For myself, I can remember, I think might be a couple here that have been here that long. I remember Neil being in an event as the traitor in 1998 when Tony came out on stage and said, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

I have to tell you about this book that I just read and I haven't yet digested it all, but it's going to change my life. It's going to change your life. And he went on a little rant for 45 minutes about this book called the fourth training, and I was blessed enough to be in that room. We know what a great guiding force in his life your work has been for so long. We're so ever grateful to have you here.

Talk about this amazing new book. The novel seas out 430 is here. We've been talking about for a little while. Chapter one is going to smack you in the face. Winter is here.

That's chapter one, ladies and gentlemen. So can we just not delay this process anymore? And with great fanfare, welcome one of the most brilliant people of our time, the author of that book and many, many books before that. I'm sure you guys are all familiar with his words. Please give it up for the one aluminum.

Neil Howe. It's been 25, 26 years since Tony bought that original book in 1997. And he did some work even earlier in the nineties after our first book called generations. It came out in 1991. One of his, you know, power tapes, power lectures that he did, I think back in the early nineties.

Tony Robbins
Anyway, it's been a long time. We're all older now. You know, we're all kind of in our own new phase of life. And that's a good segue, actually, in the generations and history and south, you know, we all go through phases of life. We grow up as kids.

We come of age into some sort of adulthood. We still have a lot of learning to do as young adults. And then we get older, and we all have our own phases as we move through our own lives. One thing that I try to show both in the original book and in this one is that society also goes through phases. There's such a thing as a life cycle per society, right?

And we all go through. And society itself has its spring, summer, winter, and autumn. And I think one thing that's fascinating, and I do reflect on that in this book, is what makes history so interesting. And actually what pushes it forward is the intersection between the seasons of our own life and the seasons of history itself, because that's what shapes us and young, and that's what later on, stages our interaction as parents and leaders, as we shape history. And most of the people in this audience, know it or not, are shaping history.

I mean, you guys are all out there making decisions which affect where the country's going. And a lot of those decisions you make, your lifestyle, all those decisions in your businesses, in your families, as public leaders in your communities that are actually shaping. Where this entry is going is a dim reflection of the lessons you learned as children and coming of age. And that is why generations mattered, because each generation learned somewhat different lessons from its own childhood. Different generations have different childhood that reflect their own age, location in history.

And that kind of is a good stage for, I think, what we talked about last year in Florida and what we talk about, what we talk about now. Obviously, in this new book, we cover a lot of new ground that we didn't in the original. We look a lot more closely. Back when Bill and I wrote returning the idea of a crisis era, of the winter season, history was still way out there, right? I mean, that was a prediction of something was going to start in maybe the late teens go through the so on.

Now we're in it. We're here, right? And now we look at it up close. And a lot of what we do in this book is look closely at earlier foreigns and give them a kind of a taxonomy, a chronology. What are the patterns?

What usually precedes a forward turning. We talk about forerunners. We talk about what happened with 911 and the Iraq Afghanistan wars before the GFC finally hit 2008. We talk about World War one before the Great Depression hit. We talk about the mexican american war before the civil war hit.

Then we talk about the catalyst itself. How do we actually enter the forehead, turn the last two foreigns? The entry was a global economic crisis, a collapse in financial markets, which had worldwide implications. Of course, that was black Thursday in 1929, which just impacted the whole world, american especially. And more recently, it was 2008 with the global financial crisis.

That's the catalyst. And then we talk about the regenerative. What is it that actually starts the polarization? How do we actually start refining ourselves as members of tribal communities? We all want this.

We all want that. Everything was torn to pieces. Nothing makes any more sense. We're all disorganized. We're all lonely.

We all lost community. We feel aggre phobia. We're out there. There are no boundaries. There are no limits.

We don't know where anything's going to go. We all feel helpless. How are we going to reorganize our public lives? And so we start refining ourselves as members of small platoons at first, and then we start joining these larger tribal communities.

Well, we saw that in the 1930s. Tribal, you know, we had different points of view about where did America should go to. People on one side, the 1930s with a red decade.

People who believed in that founded the president as Franklin Stalino Roosevelt. That was his name, right? People Mof saw that as a fascist decade. I mean, democracies around the world were falling to new fascist regimes. That was another part.

What was going on back then. We saw the same thing, obviously, in the 1850s, going into the civil war. We saw the same thing during the American Revolution. You were either a Tory or a patriot. If you were on the wrong side, you got tarred and feathered.

We moved into that era, and suddenly the stakes are higher and higher. We realize that the vacuum is at the highest level now. We feel pretty settled in our own family lives, our own immediate community life. We have no idea where our nation is going any longer. And that becomes, that leads in crisis.

And we talk about that in the book. That is the final regeneracy, which we call actually consolidation. We haven't had that yet in this crisis. But that's when you realize that's a mobilization of the public code, where we realize that this time we either win or we completely and permanently or semi permanently for a long time fall apart as a country. We either win or we truly lose.

And what we all know when that happened in the thirties, that actually didn't occur until pro harp. And it really occurred after the fall of France. Talking about that, suddenly America begins to mobilize. We all know when that happened, the civil war. You go back and look at these earlier events.

We finally realized that this was really big, this was going to settle things not only for our own lifetimes, but the lifetimes of our family, and that's still in our future. And then finally we moved toward what I call the ectosis and the climax. And the climax is when the final act, the decision that decides it all one way or the other. And then we finally move to the resolution. We spent a fair amount of time in this, but, too, not just talking about climbing or the crisis, but what's the spring going to be like?

What if we move ahead to the mid 2030s? What's it going to be like for our kids? What kind of new era? And I think that might come as a surprise to a lot of people because I wrote a fairly long section on that because they described the period in which big institutions actually work. Again, there's a new sense of community, a new sense of public trust.

We have a great sense of belonging. Individualists. And I'm sure a lot of Xers out there spent a lot of time being pretty radical individualists, right? I could feel a little bit out of place. Right?

Suddenly, here's this world in which everyone wants to fit in. Whoa. That's going to be really a challenge, right? Roloni? Just lifelong iconoclast, always going on your own, taking care of yourself, so you can't trust anybody.

And now here in a society where everyone needs to trust and people have brought up and trusted, that's going to be to a lot of people, particularly those who bore most of the right to getting certain crisis, that's going to seem like a new golden age. And that's very much how we finally broke out of the last 430 going into what we call the american high, the good times. This was the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower and John Kennedy, really the period between be day and BJ, day and Kennedys assassination. And that was a new phase of life. Right?

But we had the same thing after the civil war, after the American Revolution. We had the same thing after around the year 1700, when the colonies had this new sense of solidarity, new sense of united mission of Britain. When we take that back, we talk also, I think, a little bit about a contingency history. What can change this pattern? And most of all, what does this mean for our own lives?

And I know, Scott, you want to come back to that, but what does it mean, what I should do? How do we participate in that? I do have an epilogue to the book, and I'll just close out my initial comments to you, Scott, with this. I do have an epilogue in the book, which some people will find maybe a little strange, but I talk about. I talk about navajo sand paintings and I talk about the Bhagavad Gita.

And I talk about eternal lessons in how we all have roles. We're not just unguided missiles out there just in a completely random mess, that there is a rhythm and a nature and an order to how things play out. And we do have a role. We do have a script. Sometimes it's a personal script.

Sometimes in the case of a generational membership, it's a collective script. And whether you like your generation or not, whether you're on age or not, very often, we often detest people our own age. We just think I'm part of the bulls and Bashan, just the worst possible creatures that ever came upon the scene. Nonetheless, you're part of them. And guess what?

You're fated to live the rest of your life with them. A couple of things that I want to ask you. One is it's got to feel good. To be so right, doesn't it? I mean, I should have.

That's got to feel good. You know, when I was going through. The list of things that were in the early books of generations, I mean, that's 1991, for God's sake, generations. And then, and then obviously for journey. And so forth, that's got to be so.

That betrays my own generation. So I'm a boomer, and boomers always love to be right. That's what got us to them. Right? You might ask a question, every man, Byron X or I might value something else, you know, that's true, too.

That's true. You're right. I'm rich, you know, or something else, you know. Can you speak to this fourth turning? So the fourth turning that we're in, what are the characteristics and traits of this fourth turnings?

Scott Harris
I mean, I know we know we're in it, but tell me, do you see obviously similarities? Are there some differences? And then we might talk about what's going to happen, how do governments change and society changes during it. But talk to this specific fortune that. We'Re in right now when we talk about a crisis era, Scott, we're talking about a generation long era.

Tony Robbins
It's like talking about winter as a season. There will be great days. There will be calm days. There will be days of good weather, weeks of good weather. I think we all realize in some sense that the era we're living in is one profoundly different than the one our parents had at the same phase of life, or the era that we recall most of us here in this audience when we were in our twenties, it's just a different era.

It's not just we're a different age, this is a different time. We're living it right. Since our institutions aren't working the same way, nothing is functioning like it did. And I think there's something else, and I think this is what causes profound pessimism about where we're living, is that we see that on our current track, everything is going to get worse. I mean, I don't care what you name, but the middle class is getting smaller.

The distances between inequality, between the privileged and the unprivileged is getting wider.

Not just the inability, but the admitted inability of institutions to solve anything is becoming more clear. No one actually depends on public media. They're looking forward. You poll people, people's feeling about depending on public benefits. Half of all experts don't think they're going to get any Social Security.

I mean, we feel profoundly that as time goes on, nothing is holding any longer, right. And almost any problem you will look at, we see that their leaders don't seem to be competent. They haven't a clue. We don't know how we're organized to get anything done. We seem to have ever less sense of community.

As I point out in the book, half of Americans think we're on the verge of civil war. And now we look, what are we in any shape to take on a foreign adversary? You can kind of add that on, and you're thinking, where the hell are things going? And I think, but the reason I say that is this is the good news of the fourth turning, is that the fourth attorney, in a way, when you realize that our current trajectory is hopeless, that we need some huge transformation in our society to change the trajectory. That's where the fourth turning becomes positive.

And we can't go back. We can't go from the 2020s back to the early sixties, you know what I mean? If you just. I'm speaking metaphorically, right? We can't just move back and try to change society that way.

History has no rewind button. There are forces in history, just like forces in nature, which only go one direction. These are called laws of entropy. These are baked into the laws of thermodynamics. You can't take a waterfall at the bottom of a waterfall and actually wait until there's a time at which all those drops will, like, regather at the top of the waterfall.

Birds don't fly backwards. I mean, I could go through all these examples, but there's so many things in history that only go in one direction. And what I tell people is it is possible to recapture so much of that and maybe even recapture without any of the bad side of that era, that we look back and you look back at the american eyes. There are a lot of things that today that would bother us to live back then, but we can enjoy the positive aspects of that era, but we have to move forward to do it. And of course, turning teaches us the only times in which we achieve those eras after a crisis, these golden ages always recur after a crisis.

The first golden age in history will talk about was the age of Augustus, and it followed this huge period of civil war at the late Republic, and that was the first great golden age that people used to talk about. But this recurs constantly in history. Tell me, Neil. I get the analogy where you're saying, and so I know you talk about in the book, you know, people do come together as a group and a community when they're not focused on self and individualism and so forth. People, when they take less risks as individuals, they take more risks as a group.

I don't like to say the question. But I mean, do we need a war? Like, I mean. I mean, is that what we need to get us through this fourth journey? I don't want to be so pessimistic or hopeless, instead saying that it requires a war, but it does require a sense of total public urgency to force us.

In other words, you need something to raise at our adrenaline level and make everyone realize that we either, as Benjamin Franklin put it after signing the Declaration of Independence, we either all hang together or we all hang separately. You know what I mean? And that's the moment you need that. It turns out war is very effective. That's got it.

But you need that prospect of ruin if we don't act now, and I think all of you realize that again in your own personal life. I mean, sometimes that's what it takes. We used to call it scared straight. You know what I mean? But I just say, historically, total wars have always occurred in fourth turnings, and every fourth turning is how the total war.

That's all I could. That's a big sentence. You can say that's accidental or coincidence or whatever. I'm just saying that's been it. But eternal optimist that I am, I do not say it's necessary.

Yeah. And I think it's possible that as governments have become more sophisticated, as we've moved along this linear timeframe, it's possible that we could have an organized conflict that wasn't total chaos. It's possible. I do reflect in my more sober mood that if we had possessed a weapon of mass destruction in 1863, I guarantee you either Richmond or Washington would have been in ashes. Right.

Scott Harris
And as you put out in the book, every time we've had that power, we've used it. Well, in World War Two, we put the best and brightest young people in our country in a man and private all the way to devise a weapon of mass destruction, which we used immediately. Right, as soon as developed. So, look, I'm very sober about that. And I simply say, but I think it's better to meet clear eyed.

Tony Robbins
You know, this is the potential and we need to take it seriously. That's what we're facing. We have an awesome trust to do the right thing, to make the right decisions. Obviously, if you make the wrong decisions, the consequences of that are very long lasting. We're thinking about government's role right now and government changing.

Scott Harris
How do you see government? I'm going to say the american government. But for me, it's all western, liberal democratic governments. How do you see them either being forced to change or wanting to change or needing to change to keep us moving forward? Well, change.

Tony Robbins
I mean, look, we all believed in linear.

We all belong to minority in that sense. And I think it doesn't necessarily mean that we believe in progress or that we're christian or we're Muslim or I mean, any other religions of the book believe that history is fundamentally about time beginning and time coming to an end. And man's faith is to the fate of mankind is to constantly progress in some way, and it's all going to end at some point. And there's a secular version of that, which is that we're all going to progress and become ever more powerful. It's kind of the omo deus, it's Ray Kurzweil that transformed human.

We're going to download our wear and hardware and we're just going to live. We're going to be immortal. But that kind of a long term collective destiny for our species or for people like us is something that we all grown up in. And I think we're used to thinking about that as our general frame of reference. I think what's really interesting and what I do point out in the book is that before modernity, and this is certainly very prominent primitive societies or just simply traditional societies, ancient societies, you know, pagan societies, polytheistic societies that they didn't really share, that the ancient Greeks, as brilliant as they were with Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, they had no concept of linear progress.

History was simply about infinite repetition. All things are a circle in their rendering. And I think what's really interesting about us is that as we become more linear in our beliefs about time, our social behaviors become more cyclical. And so I remember you, part of the book is explaining that true dots, because what happens is because every generation thinks it's their mission to improve society, we're always trying to correct for the excesses of the last generation and do it right this time. So Bill Clinton, when the boomers comes into the White House, remembering in 1992, and he says, I'm going to run the most ethical administration in history.

And then, so I've got a laughable in retrospect. But the point is, let's just recognize that's not unusual, right? Every new generation figured out something that no one else figured out. And I'm going to do it right this. And what that does is it creates a sequence of compensations and changes in direction.

And before you know it, we actually have an actual cycle of behavior among leaders, and they don't realize how they're playing out.

They're playing up a circle. Let's talk about this current fourth trony. So most of us here are in a certain season of our lives, not all, but most. One of the things we've noticed in Tony's audience in the last little chapter since COVID is that our audience is now much, much younger. And so Tony's audience is now hugely under 35 years of age.

Scott Harris
Let's talk about the different generational experience of this fourth training. I know that intersection is really important. So we've got people here that are in that sort of season where they're sort of 40 to 60 and some not there, but most there. What do you think the experience is going to be for the younger generation of this fourth journey? It's going to be empowering ultimately, and I think that's the message I would give.

Tony Robbins
But for brawl the millennials out there, for people who were born in the eighties or nineties, this is going to be your chance to remake the world. Now, like all things, it's not going to be permanent. Your kids will do a number on you later on. And you recall, Scott, in the very last chapter, I actually alluded a little bit to the awakening that's going to greet them. And it may not be pleasant for them, but that's after they built this new world.

So we are all within the cycle, but I think it's going to feel enormously empowering to this generation. It's going to be a collectively empowered experience, I think, in that it's going to be very different than anything Gen X ever had. So those of you who are genet, mostly in your fifties and sixties, I'm speaking to you, Gen X, mostly up near, um, you were raised as, as you know, the quintessential throwaway kids. Uh, you know, you had to look after yourselves. Everything was dangerous.

Uh, if. If, you know, if you didn't look after yourself, no one else would. And you took that into the. The falsies of history. You took that, really into the eighties and nineties, when you were young adults and starting your careers and survey building it.

You were all nomads. You were all out there for yourself. You individualized the merit. Boomers may have sort of showed the way and broken down the institutions. They wouldn't work, but uxers really were the ones who lived that dream.

Very individualistic. And I'm just thinking of how Harford and Eric changed when Gen X was that age. No longer the a frame paramount organization, but we also talk about matrix organizations and pre agency, and everyone is hired as an individual contract. I mean, actors are really used to that world. Nowhere to find benefit.

Pensions is all the fine contributions. And if you didn't contribute, well, tough luck. You know what I mean? I mean, everything was up to you. And by the way, I'll point out again an analogy with the lost generation.

The phrase it's up to you was coined in the 1920s by the lost as young adults. And that was the idea. Everything was up to you back in the 1920s, and that's again an era very weak government, and we were a very individualistic society. Millennials are really trying to create a different world, one which is much more community oriented, one in which institutions look after them and they contribute to the institution. This is very alien, the extra mind, and I think that is a generational contrast.

It will age as these two generations grow older and as millennials begin to take over America at the peak of the fourth turning, and just after the fourth turning, that's typically when millennials actually finally begin to take over, be a little bit like the GI generation, finally getting elected in large elections in the 1950s, and beginning to take over Congress and state housing and so on, and ultimately bringing about the great society and all the lost generation by that time is old. People are just lippy, got it utterly mystified, and quickly made their departure. They just didn't get it. But we're going to see that same contrast FDR, when he was running for his reelection, is huge reelection. This was 1936, by the way.

When that reelection was over, Congress had fewer than, I think, only about 60 or 70 republicans. All the rest were something, 300 something democrats to maybe 60 or 70 republicans. That was neat. Wipeout election of all time. The New Deal was utterly triumphant.

And FBR, in his speeches, he knew this was generational. He said, I see an America that's been corrupted by an older generation of money changers who kept on saying, it's up to you. It's every man for himself. I see a new generation coming along. They believe in the broad highway where we all cooperate with one another.

And of course, he was pointing to this new generation that would eventually be the greatest generation in World War Two, who would think nothing about all joining the war, all having that collective experience and then coming over, and they would all build these suburban homes that were all identical, and they would live in gray flannel suits that were all identical. And they had no problem with that. That wouldn't. How do you think that might play out now? We talk about, in the beginning of our conversation, talked about the inequality, the rising economic inequality that's existing in western societies now that hasn't existed before, and you predicting that this millennial generation will cause that to change in some way, shape or form.

Thomas McKenna came up with his book on capital, and I can't remember, about six or seven years ago. And he said that it's the nature of capitalism, for varying straight economic reasons, that the rich always get richer and the poor gets poor, and inequality always rises. But then he said, of course there was a huge exception. It just happened to be an exception. He says it's an exception.

I say it's the rule because it's happened repeatedly. But he says, is this time from the late thirties to the late sixties, when throughout the west, inequality declined, a huge decline. I mean, if you look at almost every measure of g coefficient of income and wealth, it declined. It declined hugely during World War Two, and it declined during the 1950s, and most of the sixties started rising again at the end of the seventies. And that's really been the extra experience again, rising inequality and so on.

But you think about it, things got much more equal during World War Two and during the period after it. Why? Well, because government ran full employment economies. We had all these new social safety nets, we had higher tax rates. And by the way, a lot of the lost generation with fortunes got wiped out during the Great Depression, right?

I mean, in other words, it was created construction on a massive scale, on a public scale, on a national scale. And this new generation was much more equal. I mean, just think what, what living in the suburbs meant. Everyone got the same. Oh, yeah.

But it's not just the fact of economic inequality quite measured and actually number, but it was the ethic of equality. Even people who were rich during the 1950s kind of hid their wealth. You know what I mean? You didn't flaunt it like you did today. And I think actually today even, it's already beginning to change.

I think we're already beginning to feel that during the period for eternity to flood, privilege and wealth is not what it once was. And I think millennials feel that much more strongly than the older generation. I get that constantly. The word luxury for millennials is kind of a shun word. And I could go down a longer list of those things, but I think millennials feel that if you do have a lot of money and privilege, you can't share with all your friends.

I mean, that's what you do. Otherwise, you're really sort of ostracized. How do you feel the millennial generation is there leading us out of the fourth journey? How do they deal with all those things? I think they're aligned for the ride.

They realize they're not going to be making the big decisions as to which way it goes. They're just not in the age yet. I mean, of course they can vote, but, you know, the leadership generation is old. I mean, typically people would be in entering positions of real leadership in late midlife and, you know, sort of pearly, you know, sort of that, you know, another phase of life has to go by. So I think the way they see it is I want to vote for whichever, whichever direction gets us all on board somehow.

And I think for a lot of millennials, it didnt even matter which one it is. Yeah, all on board going. Because whenever we actually have a consensus and decide to move forward in something that works, and im not talking about whether its overhauling health care in this country, which obviously doesnt work, to the, to our university system, which is broken along with student loans and that horrible system we have for shoveling many of the universities, but you just go down the list, nothing works. I'm saying if anyone just simply takes over and this isn't, then it would be a plus. And we'll go along with that, because once we can start destroying some of these old institutions that work, that better solutions will become obvious.

And this is why creative construction is so important. And this is what crisis does. We only made our huge new policy innovations, Scott, at times of crisis. And this sounds completely counterintuitive to most people. If you ask people, they think, well, gee, the right time to make huge changes in our institutions is on a clear, sunny day, and we're all affluent.

We can think about it. We never do that. You look back in all of american history, you look back throughout history, we never do that. We always make our biggest, most profound decisions for the future. When we're backed into our corner, we worried about our country might even not last until tomorrow.

And in the book, I actually go through example after example about. Yeah, I remember reading. Yeah. And this is a lesson. So I think this is why so many millennials, and there are polls that back this up.

This is not just true in America, it's around the world, millennials are actually turning on democracy itself. You ask millennials, they're much less likely than older generations to think democracy is a good idea. And you asked them why, and they just said, well, democracy is an excuse for older people to talk about everything. And then through process and procedures and lawsuits and whatever, never do any. Yeah.

Scott Harris
Your stats in the book, they're almost alarming when you're, when you read the. Stats, democracy is a crisis to millennials. So in other words, older people, sooner or later, always veto everything. Yeah. And that means that nothing changes.

Tony Robbins
And the old gets keep what they have. Right. Because the incumbents get to keep what they have and, you know, and they get to get their benefit. They get to keep. Right.

And so nothing changes. And this is why younger people, interestingly enough, are actually drawn to these populist leaders. And this is actually something shown by the Cambridge center for the Study of Democracy. They looked around this, around the world, and it turns out that millennials really are drawn. I mean, if you want to know, and this is particularly clear if you look at who supports Bolsonaro or Xi Jinping, or the the hunt, Eden, Myanmar, or look at the Philippines, look at Italy under Giorgio Maloney.

Look at some of these recent elections in southern Europe. But you see it again and again, young people want a big change, and I'm convinced that it's less the ideology involves and more just they win with a big change. The young always win when things change, because they're young, they can inherit the new order. Yeah. Let's talk about, from my lines here on the call, we have an event, I don't know if you know that, in February, which it's our finance event, and we had a couple of speakers come on who are generationally wealthy.

Scott Harris
So a couple of families came and spoke that were 10, 12, 15 years into generational wealth, which is an unusual thing, given that many of our lines are building wealth and thinking about what happens next with that wealth. They've all got children that are sort of about the ages we've been talking about. If you were to give people some thoughts or coaching or wisdom into how do we, I don't know, protect and prepare to write out this stormy chapter till the end of 2030 or 2033, how do we prepare for that and protect ourselves? And then maybe after that, how do we maximize or take opportunity from what's going to come? Right now, if I'm any of my lines, I've got a big bucket of money.

How do I protect that and prepare that for my children and what I do with that? I think there's some broader aspects, too, and one is of letting your children know. First of all, this is just ancient advice of what you believe in by your example, I think kids always get that. I mean, if you are managing the family's wealth and you have some real interest in life in the country, and you are pursuing it in a very earnest way, and you have a vision for where this country ought to go, and you're trying to do it, and you're trying to look at a practicable, broad vision of how we move forward and involve your kids in that. That is the huge plus.

Tony Robbins
You know, I often meet people with a lot of wealth, and they kind of don't really involve their kids with it, right? And they often tell their kids, this is what you gotta do. They don't live that life yourself. I mean, this is sort of an old story, right? If you do that, you're gonna have problems.

But I do believe that you can explain to your kids as they grow older and as they come of age, get to the age of actually enter careers themselves, that you see a vision from the future which includes them and includes their generation, not just them as privileged people, but it gives a role for their peers, their friends, gives a role for all of them. And remember that this millennial is a collaborationist organization. They're bunch of Norm core players. They want to fit in with their peer group much more than exer has ever cared about their peer group, or even boomers, for that matter, is very important to them. And I think that's important.

It's kind of a first step, because I think millennials know more than anywhere that the only way we're going to get out of this is by being able to practice community virtues in a much more rigorous way than we've had to practice them in the past.

Scott Harris
I hope you guys all took notes on that because that's really profound if you're looking to impact your children, because our model, because I were their same age, is so different to theirs. Because. We'Re so self focused, because we really were that generation that was left alone and left to work it out and Latchkey children, and we have to just, you know, find our own way. But our children do not want that. And they really do want to be included in the greater good and bring the community along.

And so selling a story to your children about wealth that includes their needs, their desires, their values, their perspectives, is, I think, is really important. I would say this is one of the reasons why you find so many young people with money often sort of bequests and so on, sort of generational wealth, as you put it. And I noticed this from all investment advisors status, theyre the ones Bigginstead to ESG, right? I mean, theyre like, oh, my God, ESG. I got.

Tony Robbins
Why is that? Because they feel guilty about their worth versus their peers. And I think what I see very often for parents is the first thing they say is, and believe me, I would leave this defix that eons James is a pretty stony set of criteria, right? I mean, ive written extensively on the institute. I kind of know how phony it is, but itd be a sibling harp on the fact that ESG has a bunch of stuff drained up by the blue zone to leverage government power over our lives.

Thats not going to make it with younger people. What you really need to show them is that there are big challenges for the next generation. And I do take them seriously. Heres how I take that seriously. I think what you want to realize, I guess, is what I'm saying is their passion for ESG isn't so much that they care about ESG per se.

They really want to feel that they're bonding with their own peers. And that's what I'm getting at, which. Is so different to our generation. Exactly. They want a big part of the big brand.

Gen Xers wanted to be away from the big brand because they were going to survive better if they weren't part of the mainstream. And I think millennials realize the opposite. And one way I explain that is by saying that if you grew up at a time when big institutions seem to be working okay, that the winning strategy is selfishness because you do better off just getting for yourself and letting youre not worried about the community. But if you come of age when the community itself seems to be in trouble, yeah, altruism is the best strategy. And this is the Wilson, you know, Edward Wilson and his collaborator who used to put it, he said, he said in, among individualism, selfishness isn't best strategy, but among groups, altruism is the best strategy.

So if you're aware that you are one group among many in your entire groupmate eras, then suddenly it's very different. But you were prized. And we often wonder how the GI generation of the greatest generation came out of World War Two. How did they become such team players? Where did that come from?

The Jimmy Stewarts and all those be of the Oz shucks kind of that attitude that came out of these people who were bomber pilots and splashing at shore at heroin Iwa Gima, where did they get that? Well, they get that because as they were coming of age, a very different reality struck them that it wasn't about individuals getting ahead of each other. It was the fact that their entire group was in danger. And then suddenly the whole strategy changes. And for the rest of their lives, the GI generation always thought that altruism was the better strategy.

And so they were always sacrificing themselves for the government doing what the government told them to, fitting in, to get along, right. I mean, we had ads that celebrated politeness and sociability, you know, have a Pepsi, please. I don't know if you remember, probably before your time. And I remember those commercials, have a Pepsi, please be sociable. Have a Pepsi.

There was no appeal to doing your own thing and breaking away. That hell came later. But here's a point I'm trying to make, is that for that generation, altruism was a winning strategy. And it remained that until the day they died, until finally, when we had people like George Bush Sr. He seemed like antediluvian.

Like, where did that come from? Because the nation completely moved on to a much more self oriented epic. And so we look back upon that as like some shadow of some weird past. Well, history teaches. It comes back, right?

It comes back. Let's change hats. Where are we investing? Where are we investing geographically based on generations? Is it different in southeast Asia?

Scott Harris
Is it different in southern hemisphere? Is it different in western Europe? Where we. Is it, is it industries we're looking for to a be safe and be optimized? Well, look, I mean, in any great crisis, we expect volatility of the economy will usually speed up.

Tony Robbins
One thing I've got to remind people is everyone is aware how serious the great crash was and how great the Great depression was. And I have been asking what was the second worst economic downturn of the 20th century? And no one knows what that is. True galaxy. It's the recession of 1937.

I mean, it was enormous. The stock market went down by over 50%, and the GDP decline was the second largest. It was a period of enormous volatility. So crisis eras are one in which we can expect more volatility of the post 2007 GFC variety, or even very briefly during the pandemic, where it's the post pandemic crash that we've seen, we're going to continue to see that. And what that means is that you want to get out of momentum, high leverage, high beta, all of that.

This doesnt work well. And I say that because we go through these crashes of public confidence, but then we also go to these periods, particularly near what we call the irosis and the catalyst, where suddenly, once we decide what we want to do as a nation were all concerted to do it. Unemployment goes to zero, inflation takes off, and suddenly, even though we're asked to pare back on all our personal expenditures, the nation as a whole wants much more, almost, than what we can possibly deliver, even if we're all working to the same goal. And that's really what you saw in 1943, 44, 45, and then going on through the korean war. Inflation simply caused by the fact that this nation was growing so big, so massive, so quickly, and enhancing its power to change the world so quickly that we couldnt even keep up with this massive expansion in what were collectively capable of doing.

I believe that theres tremendous untapped potential in America right now. Thats just been completely trauma by the fact that so many institutions dont work. But once thats untapped, that causes the opposite, not the crash, but the incredible booms to take place. But what you want to do is get out of any strategy, which is a one way strategy. I do think that given the fact that we can have these enormous falls, particularly not only the economy, but in any given sector, once the economy starts retooling that, those are the things you want to do geographically.

You want to diversify, Scott, and you want to look at other areas of the world which are likely to be better off over time, long term. So a lot of those would be places, economies in Asia, for example, that are very strongly, probably you don't want to choose economies which could be in the middle of a geopolitical conflict. So I'm not advocating investing in China, but I think already whats doing very well are the China alternatives. Right. All the other countries in Southeast Asia dont show the same fertility decline, which still have very powerful demographics going forward as much as the economy is maligned today.

I like the Philippines a lot.

Its an anglophone country, a lot of english speakers, and its has great workforce potential. And it's going to be growing demographically through the end of the 21st century. So it's a big player in my book. I think India is better or worse right now. It passed China in population, as many of you know, in 2022, and it is expected to be.

This is the UN projection. By the end of, by 2100, it will be twice as large as China in terms of population. China will be declining rapidly. That's a whole other discussion we could go into, what's happening with chinese birth rate and so on, but that's an actual mess right now. China is really imploding demographically and obviously, given the fact that globalization is now in reverse.

Global trade as a share of global GDP has been falling ups and downs, but ever since 2007, it's been falling. And in this new age of sanctions and possibly geopolitical conflict, it will fall even more. Is just sort of the general proposition. Now. It might gain in specific cases where you have two countries working together and trading assets, but I think the general mood of globalization is a new reverse.

So the big multinationals are going to suffer. And I would be particularly cautious of economies which depend. There's a great book out if anyone's interested in this aspect. I thought it was a good book. It's a book by Peter Ziehan, who it's called the end of the world is just the beginning.

And he's a demographer, but more importantly, he's an expert on metallurgy and sort of the, the sourcing of commodities and resources around the world. He points out that many of these countries around the world, some of them in the Mideast, but many of them in the Far east, his best single example is China face all kinds of bottlenecks, too, things that they absolutely die if they dont have, starting with energy and obviously with energy and with a lot of basic commodity inputs in their economy, that no one depends upon globalism more than China. And obviously, its not doing a lot to buttress. This seems to be a problem for China, I think, just in terms of asset groups, im bullish on commodities, manufacturing, particularly defense, as well as new materials and materials as a sector. I mean, if you look at s and p sectors, manufacturing materials.

These have been very poor sectors for most of the past several decades. Obviously, we've been throughout all the 1990s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, defense was declining and we all believed in the post material universe in every crisis, the importance of materials and reshaping the outer physical world. Right. Rebuilding the harbors and the buildings and our living structures, the thing that bring us together as communities.

What I find very interesting in the past, in the fall season, the unraveling we think of the 1980s, nineties and whoa, Scott, is it? All the industries that did good were all the personal gadgets, you know what I mean? There were our cell phones, the flat screen tvs and the things you manufacture, and they ran that all over the world. And we became more and more efficient at doing them. But everything that was community oriented in what we produce, that is to say involves an element of sort of community cooperation and producing it.

Actually suffering negative productivity is one of the reasons why we, we don't have, we show so poor GDP growth. It's not because we can't paper our walls with flat screen tvs or newfangled light bulbs and so on. It's rather things like healthcare. That's 18% of us GDP right there. 18 mm education, both primary, secondary and university level education.

Then we move on to housing, land use, development, how we organize our communities. Then we move on to things like social services and so on. And how about finance? How do we organize finance? I think I'm up to 50% of gdp right there in healthcare.

I think we've had negative productivity over the past 30 years. Life expectancy in the United States last peak in 2014 and mortality rates will last their lowest among under age 65 in 2010. I mean, thats how bad healthcare. We keep spending more and more money and people dont understand most of what influences your health. Its not how much we spend on doctors and hospitals, but I think somehow the medical industrial sector has convinced us thats true.

So you need to let a doctor or hospital agree with his patient how to spend someone elses money, namely the federal government insures money. And we think that's a great system and I think, are you kidding? But that's the system we're addicted to. Absolutely does not work. And for some reason, conservatives defend that as free market or something.

It makes no sense to me whatsoever. It's completely bankrupt and Americans hate it. But if you want to ask most americans, and ask any millennial in particular, why living standards are no longer growing and why you are not reaching the living standard of your parent at the same age. It's not because they can't buy the next cell phone. It's because they can't afford, and I just got at least, I just said they can't afford elk near.

They can't afford a university degree, and they can't afford to live anywhere. I think that just covered the same thing I just talked about the industries. But notice they all involve our material world, right? We have two different turning points in our sacred. We talk about this year.

We have two solstices, right? One is the summer, the other is the winter. The sun is longest. The sun is shortest. They summarize the awakening and then the away gang, and the crisis is obviously the winner.

Well, what are the great crises? Well, we've already been discussing them. These are when we remake our outer civic world of institutions, political institutions, economic institutions, kind of the things we actually build with material and kind of shape how we live in this world.

This would be the period we're living in now. The 1930s, world War two, civil war, revolution, and so on. Then similar, similar civic crises and periods of rebuilding way back in history. But in between these, we have the awakenings, and the awakenings are when we rebuild the inner world, right. This is when we come up with new values, new culture, new religions, new perceptions, new ways of, new vocabulary, new ways of speaking.

The last time we went into awakening in this statue was the late sixties and seventies. A prophet archetype like bloomers comes of age during an awakening where we got, like the GI generation, like millennials comes of age during a crisis. And one thing about the awakening is that it tends to be very destructive of outer world public creations. Certainly the awakening was suddenly everyone is into exploring their inner world. You had Marilyn Ferguson talking about wages to the interior.

Boomers declared the first earth day, and the first thing they did was take sledgehammers. This is a big publicized national event. In 1972, they took sledgehammers to a car. First of all, they declared it fondly guilty in a courtroom, and they all took sledgehammers, and they beat this car to pieces, and then they buried it. So that was the first earth day.

And a couple of years after that, we stopped the Apollo moon launch program. No one wanted to go to the moon anymore suddenly. But you see my point, no one wanted anything more with technology. We all wanted discovery. We all wanted to turn inward.

And I think the following period was one with the areas of our economy that really expanded, was all in feeding our creature comforts and things that appeal to us as individuals. What happens during the crisis is we become really hungry for things that appeal to us as communities and empower communities. And that's what millennials are interested in. I look at healthcare and living spaces, living areas, as just examples of that. But this is really what the crisis is all about.

Ultimately, it's about getting us out of our solitude and our loneliness and rebuilding effective community lives. And that means that the following first turning is all about just continually building up the community world. Right. The reason I'm up on this, Scott, when I'm talking about economic sectors, is it gives you an idea of what we're going to be doing in our economy. We're really going to be worried about things like housing, community.

How do we build that? How do we build transportation that really works. We really would love it to work, not just the way we just happen to inherit it. I'm living in the same stupid internal combustion engine car that I grew up in as a kid. I see no progress at all.

People are constantly talking about the world is changing so fast. My God, in history is speeding up. When you look at our material, like our institutional life, I see no change. I think it's a great time, if you're okay with it, Neil, to just open up to our peeps and just see if any of you want to just take the great opportunity I have in front to ask a question, that we got an intimate group, so we can afford to be personal. Normally, we like to ask global questions.

Scott Harris
We've also got some different geographies on our call, too. Not everyone here is necessarily north american, so if anybody wants to ask a. Question, if you go ahead and just. You know, wave your hand or whatever, I'll see you. There they go.

They all go. I'm going to start with. I got to start with. He's a speaker now, wealth market. So I got to start with David.

So let's. Hey. Hey, buddy. Thank you, Scott. Thank you.

Tony Robbins
Thank you, Neil. That was really, really interesting. Thanks so much. And I saw you speak at last year at the Lions event, so I had a question. I'm sorry if I missed, and you might have said it, but typically, in a fourth turning and the best judgment you can make and where we are, that's a hard question, I assume, but.

Scott Harris
You might have some idea with your expertise. And then also, like, what signs would you look for? Like, right now? Like stock market. Some stocks are going up a lot.

Tony Robbins
And what signs would you look for where things might change drastically in the next year or two, like, how do you see, like the next year or two in this cycle? I guess I don't need to say it. In the United States, there's just a huge flashback coming up, which is November of 2024. Right. In fact, I think everyone in America is sort of gradually their knuckles were getting white just thinking about it.

We've got two. We've got a politically leaderless nation. But unbelievably, we have no effort to find new leaders. But these two incumbents that no one really wants there, but they just feel fated they have to go with because the political system is offering no choice. There's tremendous dissatisfaction about it.

I do think that events could happen very rapidly in which neither of the people that are currently talking about either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will end up as the candidates. 2024. I think that can still change very rapidly due to the fact that there's just tremendous, there's absolutely no desire to have these two people running. And I think that speaks to the potential for widespread trauma breaking out. The underlying tensions have not gone away.

And if anything is true, and we saw this during the recent debt limitation debate, there's a hardening both sides. I mean, no one talks to each other anymore. And what worries me is, at any point, one side could just decide to spike the system or decide they won't cooperate.

I'm worried about both. This is something I talk about a lot in the book, is, do we have to worry most about civic conflict or civic discord, our system breaking down because the two sides won't cooperate? Or do we have to worry about geopolitical events? And I remain undivided. I remain undecided because I hear arguments on both sides that can happen.

I think things are speeding up in Southeast Asia. There's no question about it. Everyone I talk to, I'm here in Washington, so I speak to the guy, the law. But there's no question the national security people, national security officials, everyone, is sort of speeding up the clock. And whats likely to happen on Taiwan, which I think is where everyones focused right now, and partly because the long term feature is now closing down for China.

I think when things were much more positive, longer term, China wanted to wait. I mean, why do anything when history is on your back, right? I mean, the winds at your back and you can just word, I dont think theres a feeling they can afford to wait any longer, particularly now. The United States is beginning to fortify the second island chain. Its being take steps designed to weaken Chinas economic growth.

So I think both things worry me a lot. There is no specific timetable, however I can say and something I talk about in the book in terms of years, youre asking for a timetable.

What we see in looking at the clock and looking at current phases of life, which are beaming the lengthened somewhat, is we see the likelihood of a climax is going to be at the very end of the mean. If you were asked, actually ask me when it is. And the conclusion, the resolution of the crisis being in the early 2030s, we are best against years 2033, but thats just simply, simply on a bell curve. Thats the one that we think is likeliest possibility by running the numbers. But I think its unlikely to peak before 2026.

That would be so unusual. That would be almost an anomaly.

But it would be also very unlikely to peak in resolve after 2036. And I realize that's a long period of time. You can't say you're watched by that. But I think it is specific enough to show you how you should plan your life. You know what I mean?

Scott Harris
Thank you. Thank you, David. Michelle, let's jump in and say hi. Hi, Neil. Hi, Michelle.

Neil Howe
First thing that I want to say as a non english first language speaker is thank you for this book. I ran the first, and it was so hard. I bought the audiobook and I had to read to kind of listen more than once. It was dense. And the language on this book is so easy.

It flows, you know, and it's really fun to read. Like, I'm getting fascinated by american history because of your book. So I just wanted to share that with you because I think the world will feel like that as well. Now, as far as questions, what was the biggest concept or pattern shift from the first book to this one? Something you believe then and you don't believe anymore that you have seen a shift.

Is that anything.

Tony Robbins
That'S, you know, that's a really interesting, you know, I would say it's more, that it's a much greater sense of resolution is kind of how I put it. And when we wrote the book in 1997, again, that was almost science fiction. That was like way out in the world. We didn't even know what was going to be happening in America. That, I mean, this was before Obama and before, certainly before, well, actually, we did know Donald Trump back then.

He was already in the news. But my point is that no one believed, if you had asked him back there would have Donald Trump president. We would have just thought, what? You got to be kidding, right? But so in some sense, that shows you how little we knew, how little we knew, how ignorant we were.

So what the difference is, and back then, it was a very impressionistic picture. We just saw almost archetypal pieces, but we didn't know what would actually play which role that, I mean, if we talked about the pattern of geopolitical conflict back then, we had no idea what the geopolitical conflict would be. Well, now we know, I mean, now we know there's actual axis of powers out there. We identify them. We discussed them in the book, right.

We didn't know red zone and blue zone. They weren't terms in America in 1997. I think that was almost to be invented a few years later during the, during the Gore Bush election in 2020, when suddenly we saw CNN for the first time because some states would be red and the states would be blue. And then we started talking about a red zone, blue zone. But I think thats the big difference.

Its the sense of a very fuzzy, indistinct picture, which is only archetypal, almost like in a dream. Now they build in, we now see it in much more detail. And I think thats why in this current bug, we talk in much more detail about past crises. And that's why, by the way, we have so much in there about american history as we go through those earlier crises, actually sort of narrate them. Last year, I think it was last year when we went to Tony's house that you spoke, Tony gave us a big book, and he said, okay, now you guys go along with this big book, see where you fit in.

Neil Howe
Which generation are you? Where are we in the world? Where are we in cycles of history? Which generations are hiring in your businesses and everything that is happening, and map that out. And so I came home, read the book, listened to it like three or four times and mapped everything out.

And as I'm hiring now, I'm thinking of desk assessments. I'm thinking of cycles of history. I'm thinking of the diversity of my employees by 76 people, which generations they are. So I understand how they are thinking. And now I have another piece that I have to put in there because I work with international people.

So my second question to you is, how does diversity and migration, for example, if we consider only the US and US history on cycles of history and cycles of generation and how they kind of interlace and we can kind of predict some of those things, what role population shift would make, like immigration in terms of this? Yeah, you know, it varies. I think there is a pattern of fertility rises and falls. There's also a pattern of migration. Generally, we have rising immigration after awakenings in our history because typically awakenings weaken public institutions that protect, but we just basically let the borders open, let people come in, and not just for cultural reasons, but also for business reasons.

Tony Robbins
Right? Remember? Because. And I kind of remind people when I think about the awakening of the 1970s, it started out as a cultural revolution against, you know, the patriarchy and, you know, the family and square culture and convention and all that. And, you know, I could wear my hair long and I could strip my.

Wouldn't have to wear the suit and, you know, all the. But it was also an economic revolution, right, against taxes, regulation, immigration restrictions. And there was a huge economic reason for wanting immigrants. I mean, if you run a business, that could be great. You know, have a lot of low wage people.

And we forget that one of the reasons why this ebbs and flows is that then you have the fall season, the unraveling, which most recently was the late eighties, nineties, the oos, which is a period of huge immigration in our country, very large. We're up around seven or eight immigrants per thousand people every day. And that's a large net immigration stream. But that's like earlier third turning. That's like the turn of the century, around the 1890s, around there, or the 19 hundreds.

This is the peak of migration in America. What happens during a crisis? Typically sometime during the crisis, immigration falls. And that's because America becomes less desirable as a location and also because we become much more protective about the people that are here now. Sometimes that's due to unions.

I mean, unions. It's funny because today the democratic party supports open borders. And let's bring everyone, let's give everyone the privilege of coming in America and so on. But historically, unions have always been anti immigration. That's true all of american history until very recently when that stopped.

But unions wrongs anti immigration because it invited in people who undercut wages. Right? And in the 1920s, in the early 1920s, we shut the immigration window suddenly. And that's suddenly when the GI generation grew up in a very low immigrant country when they came of age. But as a result, wages started rising.

And one of the reasons why equality arose again, inequality declined during the 1930s and forties and fifties. It was a very low immigration decades. And by the way, the 1920s and then again during World War two, these are the decades when African Americans came up from the south and their wages improved tremendously. They couldn't come up from the south during I immigration from Europe because all those jobs are being taken by unskilled wage earners from eastern Europe and from other places around the world. Right?

So in other words, this created opportunities within America. I think more importantly though, I think America will always be a high immigration metric. Let me just say that America has by far hugest destination for immigrants of any country in the world in absolute shares. And our immigration rate is very high, Scott, not quite so high of Australia. Australia is very high.

Along with very interesting that these anglo quote, nations are huge immigrant countries and they believe in immigration and they are the highest immigrant countries in the world. Right. Europe much less so. East Asia, almost no immigrants. And those who do come in are guest workers.

They never become citizens and so on. So I'm very proud of America's tradition as being a high immigrant country, but I do think that it ebbs and flows according to the cycle. And what's really important is in the first churning after the crisis, the idea of diversity changes, right? For external, you're expected to be a team player. It doesn't matter when you were born here, everyone's expected to be part of a melting pot, right?

And that is when the melting pot idea of immigration becomes very popular. So if you're thinking that in your case people are having infant the rest of the world, you can tell them that they can look forward to an America in which everyone is expected to join, you know, they'll all be on the same team. Thank you, Michelle. Hey, we got time for a few more, I hope. Casey, you've had your hand up patiently for a long time, man.

D
Thanks, I appreciate it. Neil, this is kind of a twofold question, so I'm curious. You know, the origin of the word saculum, I believe you said originates hundreds of years ago, if not millennia. And at that time, the average life expectancy for most humans was, correct me if I'm wrong, around maybe the high forties, low fifties, is that correct? Well, we actually discussed that in the book.

Tony Robbins
I can tell you where to go. The average life expectancy was lower, but it was mainly because of high infant mortality and child mortality and higher mortality and symptoms throughout your life. But as I point out, anyone who reaches age 20 or 25, even at high mortality, pre modern societies, most of those people will still be alive by their mid eighties, that is, say, majority will still be alive. So the difference is that the average mortality was less because there's a lot of more mortality early in life, which today we've almost completely eliminated. The point is that once you reach a certain age, like your mid twenties, a very large, in fact over 50% I got to remain all the way to end old age.

And what I point out in the book is that when it comes to elderhood as a phase of life, it doesnt matter how many people seal that role. All that matters is someone kills it. And in fact, you look at traditional societies, what is the role of elders? Right. I mean, their role.

We go through actually what your faces of life roles are, you know, young and certain learning values and practices when you win your child. And then as a young adult, it's actually following through those teaching and actually getting done for society. And then in midlife, it's leadership, organizing people, founding families and so on and organizing and kind of guiding society. And among elders, it's providing authority and providing a sense of direction. Stacey, can I ask what's your interest in the world?

Scott Harris
Sorry to jump in. There is a whole big chunk in the book that talks about that word history. It's not Neil's word. It's been around, right. I actually thank you for this book, Neil.

D
I actually read the book, the whole book. And right before that, I read Peter Zahan's book about the end of the world is just the beginning. So it was very prolific. Your book come with this opportunity. My question is, a Saculum has always meant the life cycle of a human with the advances of biosciences, longevity, technology.

If we are living to 100 to 120 to 150 years, will a saculum always be indicative of four generations or will there be a fifth generation, so to speak? Big question. Yes. What are the implications of new raised on the new book. I talk about late elder as an emerging phase of life and the fact that we have at the end of 2020, calendar year 2020 for the first time, obviously the first time in history, not only mere God, I can think of any nation, we had octogenarians at the head of the Senate, the House and the White House, right?

Tony Robbins
At the same time we had Biden, Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. They were all 80 or 81 years old. I mean, just absolutely extraordinary, right? I mean, you think about that. When have we had anything like that?

So what's actually causing though the dilation of life phases, meaning the phase of life will be slightly longer. What that means is the generations will be slightly longer. And it means actually that the saculum will actually expand somewhat. And as I explained in the book, and Scott, you remember, theres a discussion in the book, I talk about how in the pre modern world, even though life expectancy was shorter, childhood is longer. In other words, it took longer for young adults actually to become independent back in the late 17th and most of the 18th century, particularly in the old world.

In Europe, you werent independent in your early twenties. Its much more like millennials today. You couldnt really get out and found a new house until maybe your late twenties. And there was no premarital pregnancy back then. We know that from church records.

Im almost, you had to get married to set up a new household. And I was usually in here like 20 we found back then, but the generations were longer and the entire saculum was longer back then. It gradually got shorter, moving into the 21st century. Now we think it's getting longer again, but it's not primarily determined by Leibniz pregnancy. It's interesting, throughout most of the 20th century, life expectancy has got much longer due to reduced childhood diseases or young adult diseases.

But as I said recently, life expectancy is actually shorter. I don't know if you remember my rant about the healthcare in this country, but younger generation, they're not in great health. As I point out, obesity, diabetes, stress, hypertension, that stuff is not in control of today's younger generations. And if this stuff is not controlled as I grow older, this stuff is going to get worse as they grow older. I don't know.

I'm just laying down my, laying down my cautionary notes there. I appreciate that. And may I ask one more quick question? Have you ever, regarding all the information that you have in looking at historical facts, have you ever run somewhat of like a regression analysis to be able to see if you could predict the outcome of an election? Because if you, you understand generations so well, I'm curious if you've ever data and gone back.

The problem is, it's different kind of events, little like predicting the stock market. It's a very particular event that could go one way or the other. I think what I can do is predict what, and a lot of people can do that. In other words, they crunch all the data. By the way, I have someone on my team who does neural network machine learning, and we actually try to do multi day operations on stock market data.

So I'm involved in that. But that's completely different. What I do here is I think I'm using think past as my guide to think about, thematically, about much longer term periods, and nobody else does that. And I feel my comparative advantage looking at teachers that no one else has any idea about. A lot of people can predict the next election, crunch a lot of data.

That's not my comparative advantage. Understood. Well, thank you so much. Your book was amazing and one of my favorite quotes from Voltaire says, history doesn't repeat itself, but man does. And thank you for looking right along those lines.

D
So thank you so much. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you. Thanks, Casey.

Scott Harris
Hey, Jeffrey. You've been waiting patiently, my friend. You're on. All right. Great to see everybody.

Tony Robbins
Neil, thank you for being here and taking time again. Yeah, you welcome. You know, the validation of the second book over your first book is just incredible. And the update of statistics and people's perception, I mean, one that struck me was. Was the fact, I think it was, what, 69% of people feel like we're headed towards a civil war or something.

I'm not sure the percentage. It's a big number. Right. So, you know, given that, where are you taking your family? Where.

Where's that haven on the planet that we can go for opportunities for lifestyle and. And opportunities and economics and then healthy, but, yeah, taking care and preparing for our family. We're on the planet. Is that. Yep.

Well, you have your bug out bag with you. You know, are you stuffing things into it right now? You know, just stuffing things into your bug head back. Look, I'll be honest with you and just don't get alarmed, but I'm actually moving with my family. I live now in Grace Falls, Virginia, which, those of you who knows, right outside DC, I'm sort of part of that big DC area.

But we're moving to West Virginia, a large property at the top of the mountain, you know, with its own orchard on it and so on. And now we're not. We're not. I'm not going survival here, so don't get me wrong, it's nothing like that. I'm not really an extrovert.

I really don't like living in a community like this. I love solitude. I get my. I get my best ideas when I'm sort of alone. I can meditate, I can look.

Vast distances. I grew up in California and I grew up in the wilderness, and I really missed that. I like that. That's personal. I think that's more of a personal style.

I'm a well functioning introvert. I get along great with people. Don't get me wrong. I got to get along great with folks, but that's not where I charge my energy. And I think that's the sign.

I think introverts need a little solitude to recharge. I think extroverts to recharge. They just got to get with people. You know what I mean? That's the difference.

That's how I look at myself in terms of the big five personality traits, but I do think that in terms of the most important thing, we talk about portfolios. We talked about a lot of that. Here's one piece of advice I would give, because I talked a lot to millennials about this, because they often ask me, well, where should I invest? And I said, well, I can give you investment options if you want. I can tell you dont get into nominally denominated assets that dont work well in an inflationary environment unless youre into tips, but dont get into treasury bonds and all that kind of stuff.

I can give you all that kind of advice. But I think one piece of advice I would give, and I give this particularly to young people, is your best investment or misery down the road, particularly in a returning situation, is to bond with your family, particularly your extended family. We have no workable long term care insurance in this country, and the whole idea is so right. With moral hazard and inability to negotiate a fair price, it's never going to work. Your long term health, your long term care insurance is your family.

And let's face it, it's true for everyone. Bond with some long term friends and with family members. If you have trouble with your family members, find a way to overcome that, because in the long run, that's going to be worth far better than extra money in your portfolio. And I say this very seriously and in terms of your relationships with the people that are close to you, because in a forest tournai, we don't know what kind of Social Security or Medicare, we don't know what Medicaid is going to be like. There may be other agendas that may be subtly much more important for this country to be spending money on.

Right. And your personal well being, this may not be the top of anyone's priority, but what will save you in a situation like that is having your own close community. Right. Your own family connections. And this is something, I think much more important than a fourth turning than necessarily in an awakening or getting rid of the patriarchy.

And we all want to live alone, and we all want to go solo and ready. Well, that may be a good time to do that. This is not a good time to do that. Jeff, thanks for the question. And Neil, you can be so gracious.

Scott Harris
Patricia has been waiting so patiently. We got one final question, then we really are done. Patricia, you're on. I agree with the healing emotionally, us. It helps our kids, everyone.

Neil Howe
And I totally agree with you. In a situation of crisis, we want them to be connected and in that note community. If you were to give a recipe to build a community, not only your family and your friends, but I'm talking about an industry. If you want to create an industry community, to have that bond, what are the recipes? What are the things that I would need to take?

Consider.

Tony Robbins
Build an industry as a community. You mean fellow people across firms? Is that kind of. That kind of community? Yes.

Neil Howe
Banka tribe, where people have a sense of belonging, that, that sense of care, that sense of a place to go for that someone has my best interests at heart. What would be the ingredients that I would need to consider in order to create this community? Well, you know, the first thing is, don't break any antitrust laws.

Tony Robbins
I guess my second piece of advice is to get them to behave like a community. And I think that is a really good question. I would remind them all, what would you all do if the demand for whatever we produce suddenly went down by 50%? What would we all do? Where is your safety net?

Where is our safety net? And if we produce something which has some public benefit, do we make a case? One thing I talk about is, in fourth turnings, representation in our political system becomes more important. A lot of Gen Xers got, and this saves a kind of a generational thing, but a lot of Gen Xers came of age thinking, I don't want any regulation. I want nothing to do with government.

When it comes to government, I just want to stay out of their radar screen, right? I'm just going to do my thing. Totally competitive environment. But in a foreign turning, those are the people who get crushed. And I think very often in a foreturning, people begin to refine communities, even businesses and communities, and they find a way to say, look, let's be fair here.

Everyone is going through huge privations. Everyone is suffering. In this current crisis, we may have to save money to spend on something else. Nonetheless, what we offer as an industry is valuable, and government or the public should take an interest in it and protect us. It becomes more important to have a presence in our political system because those decisions will become much more powerful and much more consequential than they ever were whenever it happened back in the 1990s or the two thousands.

But in a world in crisis, the public sector is going to be making or breaking the fates of industries and companies. And you really want your voice heard? And I would organize your community by getting them to think about this, getting to think about their future and getting them to think about what do we do in worst case scenarios? Are we, do we make our case as an industry or do the communities in which we already were know about us and do they care about what we do and do they care about what happens to us? Yeah, that's be my advice.

Neil Howe
Thank you. Thank you so, so much. That's helpful. You're welcome. You're welcome.

Scott Harris
Thank you, Patricia. Hey, we've reached our time. We want to be respectful, Neil, of your time. Just thank you. I know Tony so respects and reveres what you teach and what you do, and he's been so grateful for your teachings in the last 30 years.

In his life as a participant of Tony and someone who's on his team, we're ever so grateful. I know the Lions are so grateful to have you come to his house last year and be here again with us today. We wish you great success with the book and hope that it's a huge, phenomenal world success, as it should be and deserves to be. As Michelle said, dekey, for writing it was so beautiful to read, just ever so grateful, and we wish you phenomenal success with it. Ladies and gentlemen, can you please give Neil a big, beautiful hand?

Tony Robbins
Thank you. He's got it. Thank you, Scott. It was a pleasure. I enjoyed looking out when I was in Tony's place, looking out on the Atlantic Ocean.

All right. And here we all together got. I feel like here's another team that I'm a member of, so, you know, well, we'll have you back anytime you. Want, anytime you want to come play with us or hang out with us. I'm sure the team are always excited to do that.

Scott Harris
I see big smiles on all their faces. So again, we thank you, we appreciate you, we respect you, and we're grateful for any time we get to spend with you. So thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen, give it up to make some noise. All right. And thank you.

Thank you, my friend. Really great. Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys for having me.

Tony Robbins
The Tony Robbins podcast is inspired and directed by Tony Robbins and his teachings. It's produced by us team Tony, copyright Robbins Research International.