The Ben Mulroney Show - The Disillusioned Generation: Reclaiming Purpose in an Age of Broken Promises

Episode Date: October 10, 2026

On today's episode of "The Ben Mulroney Show," Ben welcomes back Wyatt Sharpe, a Gen Z Political Analyst and Host of The Sharpe Exchange. Wyatt's new book, The Disillusioned Generation: Reclaiming Purpose in an Age of Broken Promises, releases on October 20, 2026. Twitter/X: @wyattsharpe8 YouTube: @TheSharpeExchange If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. This is the Ben Mulrooney show. Well, I always love talking with my next guest. He comes in to share his thoughts on politics, as well as sharing access to the guests that he, he's had on his show, and he's the host of the Sharp Exchange. And now he dropped some more knowledge on me today. He is now a published author, The Disillusion Generation, reclaiming purpose

in an age of broken promises. Please welcome to the show Wyatt Sharp. When did you find time to do this? I got to say, great teachers make it possible, stayed up late a number of nights over the summer, but it's been a bit a year in the making. So it was really cool when I got the first advanced copies and they came in. Well, holding it in your hands. Congratulations. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay. So when did it come to you as an idea that you wanted to write, I mean, on behalf of a generation? Yeah. I mean, I think it was really after the presidential election in 2024 in the United States when I heard repeatedly a lot of people talking about how young people are apathetic towards politics. They just don't care about politics.

And for me, being around young people, being around my friends, I knew that that wasn't the case because, if I were to go up to them and say, you know, hey, what's on your mind? What's bothering you? Almost all of them would say, well, you know, I'm concerned about the cost of living and affordability. And so it really is a question of disillusionment, which by definition is different. That just means young people not really sure how to get involved, not really feeling as if they're politicians or the institutions that govern them are representing them properly. So that's really where it's at is kind of addressing that distinction of disillusionment versus apathy. And how did you go about embarking on doing this book?

How much, what was the research like? What was the, uh, because I look at you with all due respect as an out like a generational outline. And I would say that if you were part of any generation. Yeah. Your work ethic, your focus. Your ability to see what you want. No, your ability to see what you want, you want, what you want it from your life so early, right?

You were able to, you're able to catalyze that so early. And congratulations too. And we're all beneficiaries of it. But how did you think, how did you get your finger on the point? pulse and how did you determine you were on the pulse? Yeah, for me, it started by making sure that if I'm talking to people who are politically engaged, as you said, recognizing that the politically engaged young people might be the outliers. But I also made sure that when I'm talking to a young person who is politically engaged, that I'm balancing talking with young people who are engaged on the left,

on the right in between as well, so talking to some young people who have done journalism in their communities and such. And then it really does, in a lot of parts, just kind of go back to like the high school conversations I might have with my friends in like the dining hall of my school, for example, and listening to what they're talking about. So it really is just, it's kind of a combination of both like anecdotal and empirical evidence put together. And I think the fact that because of my age, because I'm 17, I'm in my last year of high school, I knew that even though I'm not necessarily speaking for an entire generation, I'm bringing forward the concerns that I've heard from, you know, my peers and some of the concerns that I have as well. So you, Wyatt Sharp, are

use the diagnosis is wrong, that apathy is not the issue, but instead it is what again? Disillusionment. Disillusionment. Okay. And the cause of that disillusionment is an unresponsive system to the needs of that generation. Yeah, you got it. And I also think just adding to that a number of other elements, one of the things that I talk about in the book is really like the professionalization of politics and how a lot of young people will notice that those in office are simply there just for the sake of it, because they want to be involved in kind of the pompous circumstance of the job without actually doing what they were elected to do. And that's something that is stereotypically becoming more and more true about politics

is that it really is a kind of marathon of broken promises, if you will. But there are a number of things that I talk about in the book in terms of how young people can push through that to get involved. I gave even just like my own story of how I got involved reaching out to my member of parliament at the time via email. And because they don't always hear from young people, they were actually really willing to have a conversation. So I said that in hopes that young people who read it might be able to do something similar and, you know, be surprised by the willingness

to engage from our elected officials. So what I've assumed about your generation and my, and my kids are a little bit younger than you, but still same generation, is your experience growing up has wired your brains differently. Expectations are different than what we had. And somebody, and what I meant by that is you'll never understand what. it means to have to sit through an hour of music videos before you see the one you want to watch. And a woman on social media actually put it very succinctly. She's like, the distance of time between a kid today wanting to watch a movie and watching that movie is, there's no time, but it's completely collapsed versus my generation.

We'd have to, first we'd have to get good grades because if we weren't going to our mom on a Friday, having gotten a D and saying, hey, mom, can we go to Blockbuster? Or can we go to Jumbo video? But if we were lucky enough to go there, then it was on their schedule, and then we would have to wait in the car and wait through traffic.

And then once we got there, there's a big chance we're not going to have the video we want. So there's an anticipation. And the woman said, from the moment you ask to the time you get it, that's where frustration lives. And if you compound that over years and decades, that was our normal,

that's not your normal, then that I wonder whether somewhere in that is a little bit of the disillusionment. In other words, the responsiveness of institutions to what your generation sees as speedy accountability, I don't know that we're speaking the same language or we're on the same timeframe. Yeah, I mean, there's two things I'll say. The first kind of part that drives the disillusionment amongst young people is I think the same as any other generation. and that is anytime something happens in Ottawa or whatever now, it has to take a year, two years before it actually happens because they'll throw in 20 government consultants,

they'll throw in committee hearings that last for months and months. So I think that partially drives the disillusionment. But conversely, on the other side of that is people's kind of constant streams of social media news that really just are informing, but they're not really enlightening people as to what's happening there. And when you have this constant stream of news on your feed, you're getting things that are in your own echo chambers, you're getting things that aren't exposing you

to a diversity of perspectives. And so it's no wonder young people start to feel the disillusionment if they're just hearing content from people who are making them more furious and more angry than they already were. And is any of your book, the disillusionment spent looking at those, the evil algorithm, right? Because it feels to me like we place the blame on the subject matter.

Because as much power as government has, in the context of news, they are the subject. They are what's being consumed. And the algorithm determines how that's going to get consumed. For sure. And I don't know that we spend enough time focused on that. Yeah, totally. I mean, the forward of the book is Ashley Banfield, who went from CNN and MSNBC, and now she does digital media. And so I asked her to do it primarily because I thought she's an interesting kind of symbol of what's happening in the media. ecosphere right now going from this very traditional legacy model to doing something independently on your own. And really, she talks a lot about why she thinks, as someone who has covered media and politics for such a long time, that people are starting to tune out of the media

environment. And she places a lot of that blame on the media algorithms, as do I, when I talk about it there as well. And a lot of it really does come down to not governments making the decision, because we've seen this with C34 and how kind of disastrous that has been in a number of respects, it comes down to the platforms having to make the decisions for themselves in terms of regulating it, making sure that people aren't using their platforms in ways that will make them more and more addicted, which don't always align with the profit incentives. But yeah, it's a big problem. And also what my dad said years ago when Justin Trudeau said that he was going to be, the final election that's going to be prosecuted on the first past the post. Well, he said that

he was in third place. And then he shows up and he becomes prime minister. And of course he doesn't do the thing because my dad said, no person in power. ever willingly gives up a portion of that power. Yeah. Like, you're not going to do that. And if you, if you manage to win an election by being the person who comes out on top on the,

who's the algorithm going to benefit, you're not going to mess with the algorithm. Yeah. Like you figure that, like, and you'll leave that to the next guy to do. And so most of that heavy lifting is not going to ever happen in a way where,

where that person or that party has benefited. We've got, no, we still, oh, we actually, We've got a little bit of time. I'm speaking with, gosh, so many,

now you're a multi-hyphenate, man. I'm speaking with journalist and broadcaster and now author of the disillusioned generation reclaiming purpose in an age of broken promises. Wyatt Sharp is joining me for another segment after this. I want to talk generally about a couple of the elections that we've seen in this province. I just went off on the gutter trash

that's happening in the BC election. Yeah. But I want to ask you, like, how do you define purpose? And what gives you hope? What takes the disillusionment away? So we've got lots more to come with Wyatt Sharp.

I'm looking at the cover here. And the picture that I'm seeing with the capital building behind you, this looks to me, and this would look to anyone who knows a thing or two about a thing or two, like a campaign picture. Right. I've got to be able to vote first before I can even run back. That's a good point.

That's a good point. Okay, so let me just read from. the back here. The problem is not that young people are tuned out of politics. They are tuned in closely enough to have concluded that the institutions asking for their participation have stopped answering them. All right, I know there's going to come off as me being an old

old guy screaming at the clouds, but I watched seemingly well-educated, well-off kids go off the friggin' deep end for three years, screaming to high heaven, having been force-fed, and a lot of them, a lot of them, a lot of them force-fed bad information and misinformation.

from either bad actors in universities, bad actors online. Yeah, for sure. So where, is that disillusionment? I think, like, yes and no. I think young people themselves can be, like, victims of the disillusionment, and then they turn it into what you're talking about, and they use it as a vehicle to get involved in ways that are hyper-emotional and hyper-aggressive. And we see that in a number of examples.

I mean, I even interviewed, like, a couple of days ago, the attorney for one of the Cornell 7. Oh, wow. And that conversation was interesting, not because anyone was, like, discrediting the experiences of Jane Doe, the woman who obviously endured something terrible. But one of the things that he did say that I, you know, started thinking, I was like, gee, that's a little bit interesting,

is just he said, like, everyone's opinions on this case have been formed through social media. And that part was true. And it's true about a lot of things with my generation is that a lot of it does come from social media. And so I think, again, disillusionment can go, both ways. It can be people who just don't care enough because they feel the institutions aren't governing them accordingly and so they don't really want to participate. And at the other end of that, it can be they're so dissolution that they decide, okay, let me try and scream at the top of my lungs

and see if I can be the loudest voice in the room. Is there a bifurcation between the generations in the United States and in Canada? What I mean by that is the pressures, more or less, that young people have felt in Canada and the United States have been similar. Homeownership has gotten increasingly out of everything's more expensive. And I mean, that's one of the biggest drivers that led Pierre Poliyev and the conservatives to win that cohort in the last election. And, and, but if that, in fact, was what happened in the States, they got their guy, right? They got their version of that in Donald Trump. Has that set both generations off in two different paths? I think so. I mean, I do think that in terms of like young people,

themselves, some of the driving factors that you talk about, like housing, like the cost of living, those oftentimes will push young people towards a more populous candidate like Pierre Polyev or like Donald Trump. I also think, though, that, you know, it's easier to be disillusioned in Canada because our political climate is not as polarized as it is in the United States. And so there's not as much of a burden on a young person in Canada to feel the impact of what would happen if they don't get involved. Whereas in the United States, if you don't get involved, it's much harder, right? Because all your friends are talking about it, your, you know, teachers are talking about, your parents are talking about. It's very much ingrained in your life, whereas in Canada, I don't

know how much longer this will be the case for, but I feel like it's a little bit easier to get away with not really caring or being involved in politics. I got to wonder whether there's an element of it being cyclical, meaning invariably when the party ends. And, you know, Justin Trudeau threw one hell of a party. Yeah. And all his friends were invited, and we all picked up at the tab. Yeah. But he's gone now, now we're dealing with the hangover. And that's fine. But typically we're in a scenario where it's not supposed to be fun, right? Nobody's going to get everything they want and it's not supposed to be fun.

But eventually the hope is the entire pie grows and there's more. And that gives the government options. And it gives every participant in the economy options. And I wonder whether that's the point that everybody starts feeling, oh, the government is responsive to me against. Politicians are responsive because we all have choices now. So they're listening to me because they might be able to do something for me. Yeah, I think part of the problem with the disillusionment kind of piggybacking off of what you said is the very kind of binary nature of our political systems, whether it's in Canada or in the United States. And that is,

you know, in the last election campaign, it was Pierre Pollyov, it was Mark Carney. And a lot of young people just don't fit nicely into any of these like ideological boxes. They might have an opinion that someone would deem super far left on one issue. And then an opinion. And then an opinion, that could be deemed super far right on another issue. And it's because young people really do care about authenticity in politics. And that's very different than audacity. Like, audacity is Donald Trump. It was Hunter Biden who told me this. Audacity is Donald Trump coming out and saying he's like six foot three, waste 220 pounds. That's in no way authentic. That's just super audacious. Whereas like the authentic component of this comes into, I think, why Mark Carney won the last

election. And that is he, Justin Trudeau had like this thing to him where like in the way he talked and stuff. People just didn't really believe that it was actually. him necessarily, whereas Mark Carney, like, he just kind of talks more normally. He, you know, is a former banker. He has the financial side. And young people kind of saw that for what it was. And they said, you know, look, this guy looks like he's a pretty authentic guy, which is something that I think needs to have more weight on it if you want to be successful amongst Gen Z. Mark Carney benefited from a lot, including, you know, what he brought to the table. But the fact that he was not Justin Trudeau. Benefited a lot. Benefited him so much. As somebody

used to say, what somebody said about Justin Trudeau once during a debate, they said all Justin Trudeau has to show up with his pants on. And that can be considered a victory because the expectations had been lowered so much for him. The expectations, even though Mark Carney set them very high, I think people just breathe a sigh of relief just if he could string a sentence together without any flourishes. And then it's like, oh, that's not who he is. That's refreshing. Well, I mean, what I've heard from a lot of people is regardless of whether or not you like Mark Carney or not, or whether you like Justin Trudeau or not. Like I think it's fair to say Mark Carney has a much more kind of prime ministerial cadence to him.

Like I was even joking about this with somebody when we were going back and forth on whether or not like 24 Sussex should be redone or whether or not Doug Ford should have a plane as the premier. I was like they're the prime minister. They're the premier if the biggest conversation is whether or not the prime minister should have a nice house. Like it's the prime minister. Let them have a nice house. Which again, speaks to what young people are feeling. Like we're having conversations about things that are just so pointless. It's like no young person reasonably cares about the prime minister's house.

Let them have a nice house. Are there any people of a younger generation who might not be in politics right now, but they might be spokespeople for organizations or they might be writers or they might be journalists. I mean, look, you're 17. I could see if you wanted to do it at 30, 35, 40, whenever. If you wanted to do it, you are setting yourself up very well to do that. is, do you have your eye on anybody who's doing anything interesting right now?

Yeah, I mean, a number of people that I just met at, like, different conferences or events, there's one guy named Jaden Jefferson. He is a little bit older than me, but like he was on the Ellen show for doing local journalism in his small town, and he's just been doing it ever since. And one thing that I really respect about the way he's doing it is he's truly nonpartisan. He's not like doing what all these people who are so-called journalists are doing now in terms of being like super provocative to try and win over the algorithm. them. He's just, you know, staying in his lane being nonpartisan. And then there's other people on both

sides. I was at a conference in August that was hosted by an organization called Dream for America. And it was basically a left-wing counter-organization to Turning Point USA. And I moderated a debate there between like a left-wing streamer and a right-wing streamer and the crowd was just like full of young people who were interested in getting involved. So those types of things do sometimes go, you know, hand-in-hand with what I'm talking about. And that is if young, people were truly apathetic of politics. They would just say, I'm not going to any of these conferences or I'm not getting involved in any way. But when you bring young people together in this type of a setting, you know, it does prove that they're interested in some way. They're

just wanting more. Part of that more, I hope, is being unafraid, being uncomfortable and having their ideas challenged and pushed back upon. Which I just want to say really quickly, I think one of the biggest, I talk about it in the book, but one of the biggest problems with Gen Z right now is the fact that they're uncomfortable when they disagree with somebody and they don't know how to approach that conversation. There's this idea that like if there's a sensitive topic, it's best to just not approach it. And that's true in our school system too, where sensitive topics just don't get addressed. It's like, this is the real world. So let's confront these issues. And we come back to my blockbuster thing. I was part of a generation that

was used to dealing with frustration. Frustration has been all but eliminated from the conversation. and it's not that you're not capable of dealing with it. It's almost a foreign concept. By the way, the book is coming out. When's the book coming out? October 20th. October 20th. I wish you nothing but success.

I wish you was such a happy Thanksgiving. Thank you, you too. Come back, I guess in what six months when the second edition is ready. We'll be here, everybody. Thank you so much. For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean. Like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds. Natopa means giving your favorite.

person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No. In Swedish, not aapa means night monkey. Mike! Ikea, 50 years of Swedishness at home. Look, he's wearing little pajamas. So cute.