Valentine’s Day was Friday, but this episode still talks about what it’s like to date in D.C., a place where newly employed and recently relocated host Jack no longer lives, though his guest Madeline Fry of the Washington Examiner does.
More 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.
More 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.
More 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 LOSTÂ references sneak in.)
More 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.
More Jack quite violently violates the show’s ban on guests over 30 to discuss with Reagan expert Steve Hayward whether people who were born after the Reagan presidency ended should care about it.
More Is there a conservative case for smoking? No? All right, let’s move on, then. Kidding: In this episode, Young Americans Jack Butler and Alec Dent crashed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Friends, trying to turn it into the Department of Health and Human Flourishing as they make the case to two inveterate smokers that there is nothing bodily or philosophically defensible about smoking cigarettes. Their argument inadvertently becomes a Millennial vs. Gen X clash along the way.
More Does Kanye West’s latest album Jesus Is King mean he is a Christian now? If so, should Christians embrace him? Jack invites Free Beacon media analyst and freelance Kanye West expert Nic Rowan back onto the show to answer these and other questions.
More This episode of Young Americans is special for many reasons. For one, it is a crossover with the White Noise podcast, whose co-host, Joe Pappalardo, joins Jack. For…two, Jack and Joe attempt to discuss the effect that excessive technology use may be having on the ability of young people to focus on what matters. And for…three (?), they attempt this discussion…while themselves deliberately distracted by as many apps as they could have open while recording.
More In another first for this podcast, Jack gets a priest onto the show, Fr. Brendan Glasgow of St. Peter’s on Capitol Hill. Fr. Brendan is 27, only slightly older than Jack himself. So Jack asks this eminently trustable (since younger than 30) fellow what it’s like to be a Millennial priest, why he became one so young, and…whether he watched SpongeBob when he was growing up. The important questions, in other words.
More Will Brexit actually happen? Do young Brits want it to? William F. Buckley Fellow (and Scotland native) Madeleine Kearns rejoins the Young Americans to answer these questions (after a fascinating digression about her experience with study drugs). Also, stay tuned to the very end to experience several firsts for this podcast.
More In the latest episode, the Young Americans get super nerdy, with the help of real-life tech policy researcher Caleb Watney of the R Street Institute. He and Jack discuss the virtues of free markets vs. Millennial skepticism thereof, question the emerging conventional wisdom on tech addiction and Silicon Valley, rebut the Unabomber (!), and go full nerd with semi-related digressions about Blade Runner, The Matrix, and, of course, Dune.
More Should childlesss Millennials be banned from theme parks? Should Millennials have children? Are they ruining marriage? Relying too much on their parents for money? This special lightning round episode with Jack and Washington Examiner culture writer Madeline Fry attempts to answer all of those questions…in five-minute increments.
More On this episode, Jack and guest Anders Hagstrom discuss the rise of Area 51 memes, what they say about memes as a whole, whether this is Generation Z’s first meme, and if the U.S. government would actually kill millions of Internet weirdos if they showed up at the gates of Area 51 trying to get in.
More Well, maybe not everything. But in this episode, Jack invites a longtime friend, former running competitor, and budding cardiovascular expert for an episode (our longest yet) about running: Why people do it, whether it’s bad for you, how a non-runner would get into it, etc.
More For some reasons beyond his control and some that were not, host Jack Butler resorts to that most desperate measure of podcasts: a crowd-sourced, ask-me-anything-style Q&A episode. Topics include (predictably): running, aliens, Lord of the Rings, and more.
More Trying to solve the mystery of why kids these days are so unhappy, Jack enlists the help of leading purveyor of charts and Washington Free Beacon staff writer Charles Fain Lehman.
More Today’s guest, Chris Pandolfo, covers politics from beyond the Beltway, and Jack asks him what it’s like to observe Beltway bedlam from afar.
More We’ve all heard the stereotypes about Millennials: They’re jobhoppers, they’re unhappy, they’re unmarried, they’re obsessed with brunch, etc. But how many of these are true, and how many of them are just made-up? To find out, Jack invites Lyman Stone, himself a Millennial, onto the show to use his expertise in demography and sociology to sort fact from fiction.
(Closing music excerpts “Why Generation” by FILDAR.)
More As Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tries to bribe college students into voting for her with promises of student loan debt forgiveness and free college, the Young Americans draw from their own experiences to discuss Warren’s plan, the student loan debt crisis, and what, if anything, we can do about it.
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