In yet another Young Americans first, Jack speaks to a non-American guest calling from another country: Oscar Holmstrom, his Boston Marathon finish-line friend and a young medical professional from Finland. They discuss the wonders of Oscar’s homeland, and how it has been dealing with coronavirus.
Do Millennials love Parasite? Do Millennials love Bernie Sanders? Is there an overlapping fan base? Jack invites Free Beacon War Room Director Paul Crookston onto the show to answer these and other questions. (He also confesses to eating an entire pizza when he should have just eaten half.)
In a special crossover episode, Jack turns the last episode of The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg on which he appears in sidekick capacity into an episode of Young Americans. He spends it quizzing Jonah about things he has been meaning to ask him for a long time. Drugs, alcohol, punching people and getting punched by people are all discussed.
What do young liberals think of the Democratic presidential candidates? How did a Cincinnati restaurant employee end up as a D.C. reporter? Does anyone trust Pete Buttigieg (who’s over 30, by the way)? Jack invites Timmy Broderick, his friend of many years and now a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor, to discuss what Timmy’s young liberal friends think of the Democratic field (aside from not trusting Buttigieg), and what drove them to leave their mutual hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio and come to Washington in the first place.
Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason magazine, author of 2019’s Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, and someone who is (just) over 30, (finally) joins Young Americans to discuss whether the political activism of young people today, especially on campus, is uniquely dangerous and poised to spill out into the culture as a whole. (Also, some LOST references sneak in.)
Young people and commentary about them tend to focus a lot on the present. But what will the future that Millennials and younger generations inherit actually look like? Jack enlists R Street Institute Technology and Innovation Resident Fellow Caleb Watney to return to the podcast for some big-picture thinking about what the future might hold.
This episode is either an excursion into intergenerational conflict, or the pilot for a 21st century version of The Odd Couple, where Oscar and Felix are a Millennial and an aging Baby Boomer. This week’s episode is actually a crossover show with The Young Americans, hosted by Millennial sports and wonk prodigy Jack Butler of the American Enterprise Institute. Jack recently read Steve Hayward’s two-volume Age of Reagan books, and wanted to pose several challenges to Steve about what—and whether—Millennials might learn from Reagan in the Age of Trump. Steve, an ex-jock, wanted to talk to Jack about his impressive distance running prowess, as well as the etymology of a lot of current slang that the young people are using (like “OK, Boomer!”).
It’s a wide-ranging conversation, covering athletics, youth slang, boomer pretensions, education, Straussian esotericism, but mostly the great questions about Ronald Reagan. But just like The Odd Couple, we never do settle the question of whether a Millennial and an aging Baby Boomer can co-exist without killing each other.
