The Eric Metaxas Show - Mark Bauerlein (Encore)

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Mark Bauerlein has an important, don't miss update on the twenty-somethings when he dives into his new book, "The Dumbest Generation Grows Up." (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Taxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hello there. I'm Eric Mettaxas. I get to talk to interesting people on this program. And I guess you get to listen to me, talk to them, or hopefully you get to listen to me

listen to them. That's my goal. My guest for this hour is Mark Bowerline, who is a professor emeritus of English at Emory University. He's an editor at First Things magazine where he hosts a podcast. He interviewed me recently about my book, and I was excited to see that I would be soon interviewing him about his book. And that soon is now. The title of the book is The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, from Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults. Mark Bauerline, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me, Eric. It was great to do that taping. We're going to do your podcast next week at first things on the book, Is Atheism Dead, a book which I love so much. I gave to my son, my 16-year-old son, to read a few chapters as part of his physics class.

So, uh, holy cow. Talk about high praise. That's really, seriously, that's how wonderful to hear that. Because you know this. When you write a book, you know, your goal is to get these ideas out into the world. So the idea that,

that you assign some of the chapters of my book is atheism dead to your 16-year-old son. That's pretty cool. I think this conversation, I think this conversation is over. I'm done. Albin, I wanted to go out on a high note. Goodbye, ladies.

gentlemen. No, you... No, we'll get higher. We'll get higher. But what you see in those chapters on, say, the Big Bang theory, they're going to, kids are going to get that in school, in their physics class, but they're not going to get the cosmological, the full cosmological implications of that

theory relative to faith. Yeah. Relative to eternity and metaphysics. And so what I like about the book was, the total absence of any defensive note about faith. It is long past the time when people of faith need to be on the defensive for their beliefs. You meant offensive. And you lay it out in the book.

We've got the goods. Science is continuing to reaffirm the actual scientific basis increasingly of faith with runs against the whole secularization thesis, well, the thesis doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. That was the pleasure in that book. Well, it really does mean a lot for me coming from you. And I think that when I wrote the book, I was myself astonished. I thought to myself, this is amazing stuff.

And most people don't know this. I haven't known much of it. And it's exciting and galvanizing. And it makes you think, why in the world, have I been slightly apologetic about my faith or kind of striking an apologetic posture when dealing with issues of faith? It would be like striking an apologetic posture,

apologetic in the negative sense, you know, for the curvature of the earth. You know, like, well, I know people differ on whether the earth is flat, but I'm just saying I have an opinion here that it's a sphere and I hope it doesn't offend you and you think, wow, why? Why have I internalized these critiques of the faith view?

But we're not here to talk about my book. It means a lot to me, however, that you would say those things, and I want you to know that. But your book is titled The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, from Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults. So what do you mean by the dumbest generation? Well, that refers to the millennials, born in the early 80s up to, say, year 2000. And I wrote this previous book, The Dumbest Generation, in 2008. And the thesis there was, hey, everybody, this Web 2.0 is taking off. And we are letting teenagers lead the way on social media, on texting, the handheld devices,

all the tools of participation and chatting and Instagram and YouTube, whose motto was broadcast yourself. And we're letting teenagers dive into the, these screens surrounding themselves in youth culture, peer pressure, adolescence, and the mentors are not trying to compensate for that by insisting you learn religion, you learn history, you learn politics, you read some great literature, good books, civics, geography. They're just letting them go and that this is going to be a horrible intellectual, spiritual, and emotional formation for young people. Now we're 15 years later, and we all heard about how amazing the

millennials were. How are they doing now? They're in middle age. They're bitter. They feel betrayed. Millennials are in a sour mood. Anxieties is up. Depression is up. Suicide rates are up. They have sort of a vindictive sense of their fellow Americans. They have high levels of social mistrust. And when they see what they think is an injustice going on, even a microaggression, they want to see that culprit punished. That's why millennials lead the way on cancel culture in America. And I saw you last week speak eloquently about cancel culture, that this is really a demonic trend in American life. I fully agree with you on that. But the millennials feel quite righteous. indignation. They will sign a petition with 2,000 others to get someone fired, a stranger,

for telling a sexist joke on social media, for instance. And I think that that's because they are hitting the ordinary tribulations of adulthood, and they don't have the equipment, the spiritual or intellectual equipment to handle a grown-up life. They want their 30s to be like those characters in that Friends episode from that TV show from the 1990s. And it's time to put away childish things. But they don't have anything to replace those childish things with. They don't have faith. They don't have patriotism.

We didn't give them a country that we're supposed to be gratitude, proud in that country. Most of them don't, again, the nun's phenomenon. They don't have a religion. They can't sit down. They don't have the wonderful experience at night. It's quiet. The day is over. Reading four of the Psalms out loud. What a wonderful experience. It's not going to make you happy, but it's going to put the day's events in a better context. They don't have that, Eric. And so they rush into these false gods of Black Lives Matter, of Antifa in some extreme cases, social justice. And it's not making them happy. They are, as I said, disappointed that their lives haven't turned out the way that promise when they were 15 years old in that wonderful sphere of the bedroom with all the screens

going and all the friends coming in. Everything was self-affirming and life isn't like that for them. And that's why I say that the mentors betrayed them. What have we done to them? That's the first sentence of this new book. What is going to happen? In other words, or let me ask you, what can be done? Because I think that, you know, we all, every generation, of course, has its positives and negatives, you know, and we always talk about the greatest generation. Yeah, the greatest generation was great for a couple of years. And then they came back and took the warm bath in the Eisenhower 50s, which led to the youth rebellion and the prosperity. You know, every generation has its positives and negatives.

So when you talk about the dumbest generation, obviously, you're not just saying they're inherently dumb, but you're saying that we've allowed them to, in a way, to destroy themselves. But I guess the hope is that that's only temporary, that there's a way out. Well, we always think that when people get older, they have kids, they start paying taxes, they become a little more conservative. I don't mean deeply politically conservative, although that can happen. But the problem is that the millennials are not doing that at nearly the rate that older generations did.

By age 40, one third of millennial men will never have married, never have had. Holy cow, wait a second. When we come back, I want to dig into that right there. Folks, I'm talking to Mark Bauerline, the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up. We'll be right back. Tell me, Eric, why is relief factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal.

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Go to inspireinsight.com today and register for free. That's InspireE. Insight.com. Go there. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up. His name is Mark Bowerline. Mark, you just ended the last segment with a startling statistic. You said that something like 30% of 40-year-olds, just go there. You were just mentioned it. Sure.

This is a report I quoted in the book from the Urban Institute. Institute, one third of millennial males will never have been married by age 40. That's a huge drop from the boomers, obviously. And it really is a demographic nightmare. I mean, you know, you want to say to the millennials, you guys know that when you hit retirement age, social security age, there aren't going to be enough young people to pay for you getting those monthly checks. And I take the absence of family formation or the lower rates of family formation as a sign that young Americans, they don't really have a positive feel for the future. They don't feel like they're building anything or maybe when they were growing up. The family was not presented to them as a place of support, of comfort, of sort of your own little world within the business.

bigger world. And we all know how much progressivism in general has targeted the family. The family is a unit. It's a resistance to the totalitarian impulses of progressivism. And we see this with the schools today where more and more teachers and school leaders, administrators, progressives all, believe when your kids are in our schools, there are kids. They belong to us. So I think that part of what millennials has absorbed in terms of this family formation is political, but also it's pessimism, right? It's not, I'm sacrificing for something bigger than myself. The digital age was all about me, me, me, me.

Remember the idea of the daily me in 2010. They absorbed that at a very young age in adolescence. And so the idea of having kids and sacrificing staying, you know, I'm thinking of their future. not my future, their passions, their needs, not my own, that is less and less on the radar of the kids. They're not kids anymore. When they were kids, this is what they were told. Duty, sacrifice, honor, loyalty to something else, and actually some divine orientation in your life, some bigger arc of history. They didn't get it.

And again, now they're looking for it in the wrong places. In politics. Politics is going to disappoint you. They were traumatized by November 2016. You wanted to say to them, that's politics. Sometimes you're going to lose. You can't win every time. Why can't we win every time?

We're the good people. We're the ones who care. We're the millennials. That we gave them a very unrued. realistic expectation about what life is like, the limits of every individual life, the limits of each individual soul, that is, that, that's really a tragic, it's an awful fate in their eyes. It's kind of like part of what you're describing, and this is, it's just so fascinating, really, to see how these things happen. But we all know that, I mean, I've, I've written about it in my book,

if you can keep it, about America, right? We know that democracy can go wrong. You can vote in a tyrant. We know that the free market can go wrong. The free market can give you better pornography, better entertainment, better drugs that will destroy you. In other words, you have to have virtue. Otherwise, these things, these technologies can ultimately harm you.

So you have to know what you're doing. And it seems to me that what happened with the rise of the, the internet and social media is that something, uh, something got away from us. In other words, we weren't really able to see that we're presenting, um, alternative reality, which is to say not reality, which is to say an illusion. And it's, it's overwhelming. It's powerful. You can live in this illusion enough that it will basically destroy your connection to reality, to, you know, your rootedness in the world God created. And you were just saying earlier that when you deal with reality, when you have kids, you get a job, you pay taxes, whatever,

when you're forced to deal with reality, you know, it makes you grow up, it seasons you, it matures you, it makes you think about sacrifice and the future and that kind of thing. But something strange happened in our lifetimes, that's what you described in your book, is that we for the first time had the possibility of this illusory reality, which of course is not a reality, but we were able to kind of swim in this. We had a whole generation of people who were able to swim in this and bathe in this. And then at some point, you're who you are, you're 25 or 30 years old, and you've never known anything but that world. And so I guess the point is you're, well, it strikes me what you're saying.

is that this generation is in for a really rude awakening, and that's hard for me to think about. I think the way you put it a moment ago, something got away from us is sort of the right experience. That's how, that seems to how people were excited about Facebook at first. We had the dot-com boom in the 90s. Bill Clinton got very lucky with that. And it seemed like we were entering the 21st century.

It's the third millennium. and we are going to enter this glorious time of having to work less, having goods available, more, having more community that you could find online. And then, you know, the years go by, the glow is off of Facebook after a time. And we realize the kids on the video games, the tie eyes attached to this room, this new iPhone coming out over and over again, something has gotten away from it. It's almost, you know, is it too late? Is it too late? Have we already gone too far to go back to a more real life, a more grounded existence? Can we get kids to turn off that phone tonight and let's read the sermon on the mound? Read some of the songs. Watch a good drama. You feel disappointed. Let's watch Death of a Salesman together to understand the disappointment.

of middle age and work and a family that hasn't really, you know, sparkled the way it should. Meaning and purpose, that's what they need. And this whole liberal, secular outlook of, you know, follow diversity and, and let's all, let's all get along. It's so, it's so empty, Eric, they know this at age. You know, Facebook was fun when you were 15. it's not that fun anymore. Success.

You know, success. Then what? Diversity? For what? What are the big goals? That's what people start to hunger for in middle age. And if you don't have kids, if you don't have country, if you don't have faith, where do you go? Well, what happens to you?

And I don't know what, Eric, I don't know what's going to happen to them when they're in their 50s. single, no kids, no bigger picture to pursue. I think there's a level of brokenness in a sense breaking upon the culture in the people that you're talking about that will lead many of them, I hope, to faith. In other words, I think that when things are truly hopeless, you're open to the idea of the God, God of the Bible. And I think that unless, I mean, listen, we know famous scripture, Romans 828, all things work together for good for those that love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. And so if you're longing for truth, God can use this brokenness and the sense of meaninglessness to drive you to him. I mean, that sort of happened in my life, honestly, in my mid-20s. I think I just had,

you know, I'd graduated Yale University and I'd had everything that you were supposed to be able to get. And it led me nowhere. And I was just a drift. And it was only in that brokenness, I think, that I finally was open to God, a little bit. But I guess that's my hope for the generation that you're describing that some of them will see the bleakness of getting what you, what you wished for, so to speak. Let me ask you, Eric, when you had that experience, in your 20s, were there figures of faith to whom you could turn who were strong, who had conviction, who would present this thing, this faith, this belief, this practice, this prayer as a powerful good?

And is that a little bit missing in our churches, in our religious leaders today? Oh, gosh, gosh. I mean, there's a long answer to that short question, but I mean, the fact of the matter is it was by God's grace that I bumped into someone. I use his name whenever I think of him, Ed Tuttle, who was a colleague at this horrible job I had, and he had that kind of a faith. And apart from him, pointing me to others who had that kind of a faith, I can't imagine. We'll talk more about this when we come back. I'm talking to the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, Mark Bauerline. We'll be right back. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis, and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need.

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to your house. Call Legacy at 866-528-1903 or visit them online at LegacyPMinvestments.com. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up from stupefied youth to dangerous adults. Mark Barrelein, the author. Mark, you just were asking me, when I was in my mid-20s, which was in the late 80s, I did have someone that God had put in my life really to lead me away not just from the meaninglessness of the secular world in which I had existed among my Yale University friends, my publishing friends in Manhattan, but could lead me into a community of people who were excited about the God of the Bible, excited about the Bible, excited about a relationship with Jesus as though that were a real thing. I was really. I was

really skeptical. I mean, I was hostile, skeptical. I was just afraid of those people because they struck me as being, you know, they're the enemy. They're the people I was told to avoid. And of course, when I was at my lowest point, it was

that world that had actual answers. And when you talk about, you know, churches today, I mean, I honestly think that most mainline churches for sure, mainline churches for sure, many Catholic churches, and many evangelical churches now have really just ceased to present what you're talking about,

this is a real community of faith that understands these basics. So that's part of the challenge, actually, isn't it? You wonder why this is when you look and see, what have you got? You've got, you've got cane in the fields and God looking down. what have you done? The blood of your brother cries out from the soil. I mean, this is powerful. This is such a dramatic moment.

I'm actually not even thinking religiously, but the strength of those characters and that story and that climactic moment. The parables of Jesus, how resonant they are, how they apply for thousands of years, these things can be absorbed in you. You live in the shadow of greatness.

You live in the shadow of what people have sacrificed for their faith. And they've done so with a smile. You mentioned the word confidence. The root of the word confidence is fides. Faith should give you confidence. Why one would take the blessings of the Lord and offer them in such a tepid, timid, bland,

watery way. No wonder the young are becoming nuns. They want when they're 18, 19 years old. And you don't mean NUNS, which would be fine for half of them. You mean N-O-N-E-S. Yes, yes.

Yeah. Well, I mean, look, this is something I talked about a lot, and I think I mentioned it in the panel at NRB that you said that you watched. But I just, I really do feel like, it's almost like we've made an idol of evangelism, to the point where we're afraid to say anything that might be harsh or divisive, contrary, or, you know, too much truth to scare them away because we're hoping we can get

them to agree with us and, you know, join our team. But then you think, what kind of a team is it if you're afraid to speak about truth, if you're afraid to speak? So there's a kind of a conundrum there. But that's, that has obviously gotten worse and worse and worse to where a lot of these churches, you know, the youth groups, it'd be better for the kid to stay. home. I mean, you know, depending on the youth group, but oftentimes that's the case. Well, slogans like, everybody welcome. That's like, that's like, that strikes a meandering 18-year-old

as, as weak as participation trophies. Right. You know, they, they want something to lift them up. They want those big cathedrals. They, they rise. They, they elevate your spirit. And this is, again, you've got the goods. It's all there. It's why the Bible was the most important book in American history for hundreds of years. There's nothing more important than King James. To Abraham Lincoln, you admire Abraham Lincoln's speeches, the civic religion of Lincoln. He was steep.

The Old Testament and New Testaments were the air that he breathed. This is all, again, waiting for you. And our religious leaders should be supplying the young with what their teachers happened. Their teachers don't do this anymore. It's all about achievement and skills and critical thinking. Nothing that they can posit for themselves. Nothing that they can affirm and say, I am part of something bigger here, whether it be, you know, the legacy of civilization. right, the Great American novel, those things are out of their lives.

This is a great opening for religious leaders to come in and say, you know, the greatest speech ever given was by a guy on a mount a couple thousand years ago. It's really good. Let's study it. Let's say it out loud. Let's know what it means to be blessed in this strange way. Blessed or the meek. This is a strange wisdom.

Let's talk about that. It's so contrary to so many of the bad things that the kids do online. They went in their rooms. They shut themselves up in all the screens, and they simply went back and forth with one or another. And remember about cancel culture, what could they do? Eric, in 2008, they've got their 300 Facebook friends, and if one of those friends start saying something disagreeable,

what could you do? Cancel. Unfriend that person. They learned the habits of kids. learned the habits of cancellation 15 years ago. And so they transferred a lot of those norms of a bedroom. Actually, that is a particularly fascinating point. When we come back, I want to follow up on that point. I think that's very interesting. Folks talking to Mark Bowerline, the book is the dumbest generation grows up. Hey, folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk

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such as individual towels, blankets, comforters, and much more. Or call 800, 978, 3097. That's 800, 978 3057. To use the promo code, Eric. Hey there, folks. Welcome back. I'm talking to Mark Bauerline. He is the author of a new book, The Dumbest Generation, Grows Up. Mark, you just said something really, I thought, very interesting, that something about the way, you know, the internet works, social media works, kind of groomed this generation to be the, you know, the vanguard of cancel culture, that as soon as you see something you don't like, boom, you get rid of it.

Now, we know that cancel culture is, you know, fundamentally Marxism, atheism. It's this idea that I don't need to be gracious to my enemies or, love my enemies or have dialogue with my enemies or pray for my enemies, I need to wipe them out. It's a secular humanist view of reality. And I think that, you know, as the church has taken a step back or allowed itself to be pushed back, this robust view that has existed for such a long time in the West and certainly in the United States for two and a half centuries, it's been pushed away. and really this is what comes in rather naturally, is this brutal, you know, Maoist Chinese cultural revolution

dictatorship of the youth. I mean, it's kind of a strange thing to see happening in our time, and yet it's exactly what is happening. Well, it's certainly you bring up the communist revolutions, China. We could add Cambodia. How much were the very young instruments of the punishments and the discipline that went on back then, certainly, that that was true. And the young are sort of, they're zealous in a way that a lot of older people are not. And so the cancel culture,

which you said a few minutes ago, you talked about how delicate our democratic freedoms are. What we've learned is really just how fragile, this sort of pluralistic society that we have achieved is it's almost miraculous that we haven't sunk into these forms of totalitarianism before. What the kids could do in those crucial years when their civic sense was forming is they could create an all affirming reality for themselves, right? They could simply surround themselves with only the agreeable things. They could shut out the disagreeable things. It was the daily me. That was the phrase for it back in 2010.

Why should I have to hear something that offends me? And not only do I have to just leave, no, no, I'm going to make you shut up. That's sort of the term. Someone says something you don't like, whatever. That's the pluralistic outlook. But, boy, they raise the threat level. You know, when Tony Morrison in her Nobel Prize speech, in the early 90s said,

speech can be violence. Speech can be violence. That took a step. And no wonder the left has tried to expand the definition of hate speech wider and wider. Free speech demands you have a thick skin a little bit and you accept the fact that there are people different from myself. They created a reality with the web where no.

There will be no people different from myself. I don't like that. And it went on for years, years of sort of acculturation to this outlook of, I'm offended. That's your crime. You say something I don't like. I don't have to refute you. I can just get rid of you. As Joseph Stalin put it, no man, no problem.

actually I don't I don't remember that quotable quote from from good old uncle Joe but it's kind of it's kind of interesting the the idea that you would call language violence or you would I mean that that's pretty sloppy of somebody who made her living and in fact got a Nobel Peace Nobel Prize in literature for for writing to say something like that I mean we have said the pen is mightier than the sword. It's a different kind of way of putting it, and it's a crucial difference, really. It strikes me that when we talk about this very issue that you're talking about, the first time I saw this raising its head was when people who were same-sex attracted, and these would be the activists, right, said, unless you affirm me, you are hating me. In other words, the idea of disagreement was taken off the table. It's like, no, no, no, we don't have room for disagreement. Either you agree with me and affirm me in my view, or you hate me as a person. You're doing violence to me as a person. That's when I saw that first raise its ugly head.

And it's kind of been downhill ever since. We've been going in that direction. You know, it's almost as if we look back at those sort of liberal slogans of celebrate our differences, right? More diversity. No, that was like a half step on the way to you celebrate me. You affirm who I am and that if you're different from me, well, tough, you need to conform. It turns into, again, sort of this idea of a happy rainbow, right, a salad. We're not going to have the melting pot. We'll have a salad now.

Nah, that was a con, right? And we were chumps for buying into this idea. Diversity isn't diversity. We know what this is about. This is about controlling people. And that means in order to control people, you're going to have to suppress a few people. The kids were utopians because they were in their bedroom and they created an atopian reality for themselves. And we know a disappointed utopian at age 30 is a merciless creature.

And he always has an answer for why we don't have the utopian society. society that we should. Well, it's only because we got a few bad people out there. Yeah, it's the Jews. It's the Jews. Oh, no, it's not the Jews. It's whatever group. We'll find a group. Let's find a group to hate. What about the evangelical Christians? What about the Trump supporters? We'll find a group to blame for our problems, which we created, but we don't want to take credit for that. We just got 30 seconds left. I have to ask you, what was your focus in teaching English at Emory? What period was your focus? You know, I focused mostly American literature, a lot of 19th century literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, whom I love.

When I came into academia, I was a militant, atheist, secular, liberal kind of guy. I changed in my 40s. Part of it was having a child. It altered me. I came back into the Catholic Church. I was baptized Catholic. My parents got caught up in the 60s. I'm going to let you finish this when we come back. because I want to hear the rest of this story, folks. We're talking to Mark Bauerline. The book is The Dumbest Generation Grows Up. Folks, I'm talking to Mark Bauerline.

He is many things, but right now he is the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up. Mark, I was asking you about your story, and you said that you came to your Christian faith late in life. You came to be a father later in life. So it's kind of you give hope to people, I would think, who maybe have stumbled around for a while and are looking for meaning. You found the meaning of life later in life. Well, I came to realize that my atheism was really a reaction to a not-so-good family situation growing up. I won't go into that.

But when I saw my son and what seemed to him, five, six, seven years old, such a natural inclination toward faith. He accepted the idea of God just so, so easily. And so when I met a man, I was at Princeton for a year, and I met a man who was in Opus Day, he said, let's go through the Catholic Catechism. And, you know, it opens by saying the belief in God is written in the human heart. That's true. That's true to my experience with my child. And it's also true to me in that this atheism that I've had,

it just doesn't, it doesn't fit with what I'm feeling inside. It was more an intellectual formation. It wasn't a formation of the heart. And we actually went through the Catholic Catechism page by page, hundreds of pages. And I thought, you know, I didn't hear a word about any of these ideas,

about the universe, about truth, about sin. I didn't hear any of that in my graduate school. That didn't come up in my courses on Foucault. So I thought, but it holds up. Easy. It's a family program. Holds up. So, and I was, I was kind of persuaded in, into the Catholic Church and find that the experience of sitting there in the pew in the dark, sometimes by myself, it is, it is a soothing, grounding experience.

Well, I mean, we were talking earlier about reality, right? I mean, ultimately, God is the author of reality, the reality in which we find ourselves, the physical reality, the larger reality. And if you want to deal with reality, you end up dealing with God. And there's no other way to navigate the storms of our lives, ultimately. There is no other answer. And that to me, as I say, is what it gives me hope that people as they, you know, find themselves on the rocks, so to speak, maybe it will lead them to the rock, so to speak. Because I really think that there is going to be a desperation, as you describe this generation, kind of coming to terms with what it is.

They are desperate. and that gives a duty to mentors of all kinds. You've got to step in. Because I don't think that they're going to just find it in most cases. They're not going to find it on their own. They're going to need guides, counselors, mentors, ministers, priests, rabbis. They're going to need a sage who, again, has conviction. and confidence to lead them in.

Do not underestimate the power of power to the young. They feel sometimes I'm alone. I'm all alone in the world. And loneliness is a horrible feeling. And Mark Zuckerberg, or Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, I can't remember which one said, with social media, we're making it. So you never have to be alone.

You never have to be lonely. What a fake. It's flat out crazy and funny. It's like, come on. Help me create this tower of Babel. We'll reach the heavens. No problem. Let's go.

Not going to happen. We're out of time, Mark Barrelein. God bless you. Thank you for your time. Folks, the book is The Dumbest Generation grows up.