Young Americans

Boo! Sorry, did that scare you? Hopefully not. Because if it did, you might not be able to handle this special Halloween episode of the Young Americans. Jack and the gang discuss their most Millennial fears, their favorite horror movies, and whether horror can be respected as a genre or not. And if this episode scares you too much, please make use of the services of our first-ever sponsor: Calm.com, an all-purpose relaxation website and app.

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This month, the gamer known as “Ninja” became the first “esports” “athlete” to grace the front cover of ESPN Magazine. As “esports”–i.e., playing video games in a professional competitive setting–grow in popularity, the Young Americans debate whether this portends ill for their cohort, and wonder if video games are taking over society as a whole.

In an episode of multiple firsts, Jack strikes out on his own to interview Matthew Hennessey, the deputy op-ed editor of the Wall Street Journal, author of Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials, and, at 44, a decidedly un-young American. They discuss whether Millennials or Baby Boomers are really to blame for America’s problems, whether Gen X can save us, and whether generational warfare might ultimately be a distraction from the real enemy: excessive technology.

Follow this podcast on Twitter @youngamericanz.

Don’t let the title fool you: This is not a soap opera episode of the Young Americans. But it does cover one of the most important things in the world: children. Specifically, why young people are having fewer of them, and later. Host Jack Butler and veteran YA panelist Caleb Whitmer explore this topic with the help of two new panelists: Kayla Stetzel, and Weekly Standard factchecker Holmes Lybrand, who is now a father.

As the Young Americans find themselves in the dog days of summer, they wonder whether the “fur-ternity leave” now offered by some companies proves that young people love dogs too much. And with summer coming to a close, they also give some advice for college students going back to school or heading there for the first time.

The latest episode of the Young Americans is brought to you by Ricochet (of course), and by the concept of ownership: of libs, an increasingly popular posture on the right, including among young conservatives, and of homes, which young people are apparently not buying. The Young Americans attempt to explore and explain both of these trends, while learning in the end that what mattered most was the friends they made along the way. (Awww…)

In their third episode, the Young Americans take the occasion of the recent New York primary victory of 28-year-old self-declared socialist Millennial Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to wonder if their peers really are all socialists now, or are just going through a phase. They also reflect on the 10th anniversary of The Dark Knight and debate whether it is the best blockbuster released in their (so far relatively short) lifetimes.

With their name now official, the Young Americans take care of some unfinished business from the first episode, despite having two different guests. But they spend most of this episode discussing what the difficulty young Trump administration officials are having getting dates (as reported by Politico) says about both our political culture and our dating culture, drawing, in part, from their own dating experiences.

In this, the debut episode of the Young Americans (we changed the name from “Young Folks” after recording), Jack Butler, of the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, and his youthful interlocutors justify their podcast to a candid world, debate whether young people have to move to big cities to succeed in life, and wonder whether Incredibles 2 is yet another example of Hollywood’s nostalgia- and laziness-driven reliance on sequels.

Ep. 9: Making a Scene on Halloween

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Ep. 8: Gaming the Day Away

Ep. 7: Gen X To The Rescue?

Ep. 6: The Young and the Childless

Ep. 5: The Dog Days of Summer

Ep. 4: Lib Ownership and Home Ownership

Ep. 3: The Gulag and the Batcave

Ep. 2: Love in the Time of Trump (and Tinder)

Ep. 1: The Debut

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