Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Whittle here with Still Images of Steve Green and Scott Ott. This is a right-angle show, but one that's going to be different for two reasons. First of all, I'm reading from a prepared script here. And second, Steve and Scott are here in spirit, but not in person simply because I didn't want to put them through this for reasons that'll be clear in just a moment. Now, I've spent the last several months thinking a great

deal about a book called The Fourth Turning. You're going to hear that name and that book a lot for me

in the next week and months. However, in a pistachio-sized nutshell, Strauss and Howe have noticed a remarkably

well-documented cyclical pattern to human history. It's an 80-year cycle, give or take a few

years, that the Romans, who also noticed this pattern called the secular. Now, while the average

lifespan has increased spectacularly since then, humans still live lives that are about 80 years long,

four-score years. Now, Earth has four seasons, obviously, spring, summer, fall, and

winter, believers in this theory of human behavior, and I become more staunchly one of them

every single day. See, each human life divided into four seasons as well, each of about 20 years

long. Childhood, young adulthood, maturity, and then

decline into old age. These 20-year segments are what we today call generations, and according

to Strauss, Howe, and many others now, the way a particular generation thinks and acts, the values

they hold and the behavior they exhibit is consistently and therefore

predictably tied to where that generation is born in reference to the last great existential

crisis of this 80-year cycle.

And these crises come every 80 years, every secular, every maximum human lifespan,

because they are, in fact, created by the speculum. The theory states that every 80 years,

society is faced with a major, utterly transformational existential crisis, not just regular

wars are fighting an existential crisis. Now, the Declaration

of Independence was signed in 1776, but most of the American Revolution was fought in the 1780s.

So add one seculum, 80 years, a long human life, full human life, to the 1780s, and you get the 1860s,

which is, of course, the Civil War. Add another

...