Hello everyone and welcome to the focus group podcast I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bullwork, and this week we are checking in on young people again, because the youths have a lot going on.

It's been a suboptimal time to be young in America the last few years.

This year's college graduates were robbed of their high school graduations, and now their college

graduations are being marred by the chaos on campuses over the pro-Palestinian protests.

So we decided to talk to some graduating progressive-leaning college seniors about the last few years

and how they're feeling about campus politics and the future.

My guest today is my buddy Tim Miller, host of the Bullwork Podcast,

and someone who hangs out with the youths, because this spring he was a fellow at the University of Southern California's

Center for the Political Future. Teaching said youths about how politics actually works.

Tim, thanks for being here. I thought that was going to be a gay bar joke. So I do like to hang out

with 20-somethings every once in a while, you know, at the gay bar. But youths, it made me a little

bit concerned about the fact that you were going to frame it as youths. You know, it's funny, Connor, you know, my producer, you know, he writes some of this stuff, and as I was reading it, I was like,

this sounds like not great.

Is this a twink joke?

Is this a twink joke at Tim's expense?

I was at the USC Center for the Political Future and those were very bright youths and I'm happy to talk

about that.

I did a stint at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics last year and also spent some time

with young people I got to say before we jump into this because we were asking

them specifically about COVID and sort of the years like this cohort of graduating in 2024.

They were seniors in high school in 2020 when the pandemic hit and I did find myself feeling

really badly for them.

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