Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation (Z)

0:00Welcome to the Kato Podcast. I'm Ryan Bourne, Kato's R.F. and Shaft Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics. Today we want to introduce you to a new Kato colleague here. Ricky Schlott is a New York Post-Colomist and the co-author of the book The Canceling of the American Mind. She writes about free speech, civil liberties, internet culture and Gen Z. And she's also built a reputation for having long-form conversations that try to cut across political tribals. Now some of you may have met Ricky before. She's done a few Kato events around the country in the past few months. But she now has an official title here. She's a Kato media fellow. So Ricky Schlott, welcome to the podcast and welcome to the Kato Institute. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to both be here and part of Kato now. Now there's so much we could discuss today. New York City politics, the state of the media environment. What the hell is wrong with Gen Z. But I want to start with you. You've become one of those people others now turn to when they want to understand young

1:03people, free speech and what's going on with the internet. So how did you end up becoming that person? Completely by accident. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I kind of like to say that my libertarian awakening occurred when I was watching surfers get tickets for surfing on their own thousand dollar fines. But I was a college kid at that point in time. And I decided that full tuition for Zoom school made no sense. So I started first with just a leave of absence and submitting some op-eds here and there and ended up getting my foot in the door with the New York Post with a really generous editor who saw that perhaps there was potential, but I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. And she had the patience to actually curate that. But some of my first pieces were about the state of free speech at NYU where I was going to school and how I felt that it was quite stifling and unhealthy. And after I wrote that, I was really surprised by how many people in my universe reached out to me and said, oh, I completely agree with you, but I just don't want to say anything myself. And it made me realize like, oh, I'm being a sort of centrist person putting myself

2:09out there and saying, it feels like some things are off in our culture is actually a type of voice that's needed. I, in my modest way, I attempt to still do the same. And since then, I have been a columnist at the New York Post now for about four years. And they've very generously let me kind of explore what's going on with my generation, what's going on on campuses quite a lot. I was on Columbia's campus for a lot of the protests. So I've been kind of in the depths of campus culture as a recent de facto from it. And now, yeah, I'm excited to sort of expand into the world of Kato a little bit and to get the benefit of all the wonderful analysis and research that you guys do. Because I think, you know, I write a lot about my opinions, but it's really wonderful to be able to have a partnership with an institution that's affecting change and the way that you guys are. Well, we're definitely pleased that you're now associating with us. Now that period during

3:10the pandemic that you talked about, looking back, it can seem completely crazy when you remember some things that are going on. But of course, there was a lot of other things going on campus. Well, perhaps on Zoom campus at the time, a lot of sensoriousness, a lot of issues with ideological conformity. We had the summer of love and the outbreak of stuff around the George Floyd stuff, a lot of institutional insanity. How much did that other stuff, kind of a bit separate to the pandemic, like inform your world view? It sounds as if it was everything going on at that time and not just, you know, COVID itself. Sort of like a insane time to sort of becoming of age as a young adult and being in New York in particular. I think that that sort of sense of conformity, but also it was a period of time where some people were putting themselves out there in a different, more heterodox ideas were kind of bubbling up on social media and in the media. And it seemed like the way that we were headed in terms of sort of the institutional insanity and stuff was not sustainable. And that's obviously turned out to be true.

4:12We're living through a complete reactionary period to that initial period. But yeah, I mean, I have some of my formative experiences where like, you know, people being furious at me because I didn't post a black square when apparently we were all supposed to do that. And it felt, I mean, not that I don't have empathy for that cause, but there is a lot of sense of coercion and if you don't think one way or completely the opposite other extreme, then you don't really have a community, which has always been kind of disappointing. But I do feel like there's more and more people who've been turned off by both the left going incredibly woken and sane in 2020. And now the right becoming their own version of like conservative woke new right that there seems to be an opening for more dialogue in the middle and anything, but whatever's going on on both sides, if that makes sense. Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why your work on this has taken off and your writing has taken off is because you're not just writing about it as an outsider, you know, you're somebody who actually like lived through some of this stuff. And I know that a lot

5:14of the writing that you've done has been about the state of what we might loosely describe as Gen Z. Now, I'm an economist. I tend to have historically been quite skeptical of the idea of, you know, generations that have like a lot of similarities, a lot of commonalities in their world view or whatever. So what would be the best argument for somebody like me that there is this identifiable thing called Gen Z. And it has like a separateness in terms of its vision, its ideology, the way they interact with the world than previous generations. So I would say I agree with you in prior generations, but I do think that there's something very distinct going on with young people who have had the experience of growing up online. And that's a formative way that they kind of developed an understanding of the world and a place in the world. And I mean, as a demonstration of that, I think it's fascinating that like, for example, kids in countries that don't even speak English are saying six, seven. Like there's a spontaneous

6:16sameness in Gen Z and Gen Alpha because we have all the same social media exposure, all the same trends that we consume and we've been kind of formed by this technology. So not just in that those sort of like, memified aspects of us, I think that's one part of it, but also like what has that done to us psychologically. You know, I think my peers and I probably, most people may age like struggle to get through an actual full movie without being on a second device. I do think it actually has meaningfully rewired our brains. And then also I would say just in the political realm to hear domestically in America, I mean, growing up in a lesser of two evils era of American politics is a very different understanding of how our country works and what right and left is and what our fellow citizen is. I had the first election that I can really remember with any sort of sophistication as 2016. I was 15 in the lead up to it. And you know, until I got older and had a better perspective on the world, I thought that that sort of dysfunction that we're

7:17living through right now is just sort of the default. And I think a lot of young people are more susceptible to extreme voices or crazy opinions online because they've only really lived through cultural political chaos. If that makes sense. You know, that definitely makes sense. And I'm showing my age here a bit, but I was at a university when Facebook first came out. And I think my college was one of the first colleges to adopt it. And I dread to think how much time I've spent on social media since then. But I can't imagine having grown up with those social media tools available before the age of like 18, 19 or whenever I first started using them. That must really affect the way that you consume media. You interact with current current affairs in a completely different way. Oh, entirely. Yeah. I have, I mean, I've had internet access for as long as I can remember. But I got a phone probably at 10 or 11 and iPhone and Instagram definitely by 11. I'd always sort of been on YouTube growing up. And you know, I've personally seen what I

8:19think a lot of parents are concerned about what their parents are with their children, which is like it's very easy to fall down a rabbit hole and be in a completely different political world than anyone around you. Because you're getting that reinforced to you over and over. And when you're starting with the sensibilities of a child who still doesn't really understand how the world works, it's really seductive to find the sort of almost noctisism of some of these online influencers who can explain everything to you. And from your sensibility is it makes perfect sense. I had a period of time where I was like down the, this is probably like middle school, I was down the like young Turks rabbit hole and gone to the far left. Like they're like a socialist YouTube channel. And then I've kind of swung to the opposite side because I'd stop making sense. And you know, being a teenager, you do the most reactionary thing possible and see what's going on in the extreme right, which is never my thing. But I think that's sort of what we're living through and mass culturally right now is like certainly young men gravitating towards influencers like

9:25Nick Fuentes and stuff. There's this sort of reactionary back and forth and push and pull that you get kind of set down when your algorithm keeps on telling you that whatever you've most recently consumed is correct. And here's more like it and here's further proof of whatever worldview you're kind of forming at the time. So in your view, what is the like mechanism through which, you know, the proliferation of social media leads to these extremities in politics. So you could imagine it could be something like, you know, a clarity of message. If you're putting a much clearer message and, you know, populists on both ends tend to have very simple solutions to often very, very complex problems. But another mechanism might be, you know, all of a sudden, all ideas have a level play in field. And when previously we had gatekeepers, you know, established media outlets wouldn't publish certain things. Like what's in your head, what's the mechanism by which this leads to kind of more extreme or at least divided politics? I think that we're definitely living through like a period that could be analogous to right after the printing press

10:29was invented. And just this massive information and culture has not created the norms and systems in order to sift through it properly. So I think that, you know, obviously it was a very different technological era, but there were concerns about like pamphleteering and spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. And I mean, that's pretty much what we're experiencing right now. I think obviously we all know now because we're not part of the several generations who were foisted into a decades-long religious war after the printing press that that was going to turn out to be a good thing, but it probably felt pretty crummy if you were living through the consequences at the time. So I have faith that hopefully, ultimately, we can develop more cultural norms that that allow us to utilize what should be a gift of as much free expression and dialogue and as diverse of ideas as possible, which the internet facilitates. But we haven't gotten there yet, obviously. I think you're definitely right that there's sort of a sense of sameness to

11:30credibility that everyone seems to get when they're a person online. But also, I think there's something particular going on with this sort of new right front as thing with young men where it, you know, if you're a teenager today and you grew up, you know, 2020 is kind of high in your mind and early in your development, you kind of want to do the most react- or most provocative thing that will like make your teacher clutch her pearls. If you- I mean, this edge-lording culture, I think, is really just a rebellion against what culture, a lot of young men in particular and young people in general came up in. And obviously, this is a completely unhealthy response to it, but I think there's also this sense of community that really comes along with, you know, performing the- how provocative can you be? What sort of shock-jock-take can you come up with? So I think it's- it's almost like teenage angst that- and wanting to be the opposite of whatever

12:31authority figures in your life have pushed on you that has kind of created particularly this new rate, I think, for sure. Yeah, I think that's- I think that's right. And there's a like- there's a bit of a paradox here. I guess some people consider it a bit of a paradox. I guess it's strictly not, which is the, you know, the social media environment does allow this incredible diversity of views, but because of the incentives in built into many of the platforms, you'd get a stifling degree of conformity on many things, right? Because, you know, once you have a message that you've at least a bit bought into, the incentive is to share everything to do with that, and it gets reinforced by your stuff being retweeted, reposted, shared, and once you've created that tribe and community, there's like a lot of pressure to just conform to all the, you know, all the aspects of the world view that that tribe represents. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think anyone who has tried to tweet something nuanced on X has found out that that's like exactly how

13:33you avoid the algorithm picking up anything that you've said. I think, especially on platforms like that, the sort of, the aim of having the most quippy short take, I don't know, was it like 140 characters or something like that? I can't remember exactly. That's what it used to be in the episode. Yeah, before they expanded it up, now you can write like your newspaper on X with those articles, but the kind of incentive to say things in as simple terms as possible, and as provocative of terms as possible, I think is definitely just completely perverted our discourse and also our attention spans too. But I've always found it interesting that on the flip side, though, there does seem to be this contradiction where people are so attracted to like short, quippy hot takes and short form video content. But then on the flip side, there's also this kind of expansion of our mediums and someone like Joe Rogan, who's going to have a conversation for three

14:34and a half hours with someone has really hit a different sort of aspect of the social media brain. It's hard to figure out how to square that, but that sort of appetite for longer form conversations obviously exists. His success is proof of that. So I think on some maybe on some different register of our brains, we're aware that this short form content is very corrosive and it would be better to tilt more towards those longer form mediums. But I also think it's always interesting, like everyone's always listening to a podcast while doing something else. We're always still in our sort of scatterbrained social media world and no one's concentrating fully, but I think it's definitely better than the alternatives. Yeah, no, no, that's definitely right. Hold my hands up. I only listen to podcasts in the gym usually. So again, when I'm doing something different, but I think this brings us to kind of interesting kind of overview of your work really,

15:36because the way that I read your work as a kind of through line is that young people today have been shaped by this kind of toxic combination of the institutional insanity that we talked about, the social media incentives and this culture of conformity and as a result, this generation is perhaps more anxious, more self-sensoring, more politically volatile. But a point that I think you've just kind of alluded to is that I think a lot of young people seem to know it and I think a lot of young people seem to privately hate it, which is perhaps explains why they're also willing to consume some of this other content because they know at some deeper level that it's good for them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things when there's so much conversation about banning social media for kids and I mean, what I think is government overreach that I always point back to is like, I don't know a single person my age who's like, I think I should have spent less time outside and more time on my phone growing up that it's like pretty much universal agreement

16:38that this is not good for us. And everyone, even if you are part of an online fringe group, you have your enemy and you can point and say, whatever's going on in that corner of the internet is not healthy. I think we all can see the effects on other people and sometimes it's harder to see those effects on ourselves. But we're kind of coming around to this cultural consensus where young people want to get off their phones. They're starting to date in real life. Like, teachers in schools are banning phones in a way that I think is really healthy and productive so that kids actually have a sense of each other as human beings and not just digital avatars. So I definitely think there is a meaningful grassroots pushback both in terms of just social media and even like our media ecosystem or our kind of new news ecosystem. I think there's an awareness that, you know, I mean, how can you log on to something like X right now in its current state and think that this is like a healthy, effective dialogue and discourse for a culture of long term. It's just simply unsustainable. So yeah, I think there's definitely that and also

17:43just my generation seems to have like a broader ability to give some political figures a chance because I think what which I think is a good thing and a bad thing. I found it interesting that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have experienced the largest drops in approval ratings from young people. I think we've kind of had seen how both sides have failed us recently for various ways and so, you know, young people are willing to update their priors. I think they're looking for alternatives to the sorts of lesser of two evils, party politics. Unfortunately, some of them then end up in weird extreme crevices, but I think there's a hunger for something different and the fact that, you know, young people are willing to go out on a limb and support some of her president and then perform disastrously and they're willing to admit as much as proof that like, okay, we're trying on this kind of identity and that kind of identity and like where actually is the healthy effective political future that we're all kind of craving in a way if that makes sense.

18:47That's maybe a glass. Yeah, I wonder if that's a glass half full take on it. I mean, another take might just be that younger people are a bit more naive about what politicians can achieve and so get disappointed very quickly. That's true. Although, but I do think that like, there is something healthy probably long-term to the fact that more and more young people don't have an allegiance to a party don't feel that like they have a team shaped by like an old school media institution that told them to think one way or another. I think we're almost like going through this weird cultural adolescence right now with social media and just trying to figure out like who we are as a nation. Both young people and all of us in general and you know, more open mindedness and more skepticism of parties and institutions that also have not been tremendously effective recently. I think is a positive thing and I it's always interesting to me to see like even friends that are very politically different from me seem to often be interested in

19:52dialogue or understanding in particular libertarian principles because it seems like a cohesive worldview that was not often really presented to them when they were younger as an option when it's just bright and left and red and blue. I want to come back to the libertarianism a bit later. But first I want to talk about another case study of somebody who has effectively tapped into this new media environment and somebody you know you're experiencing and have written a lot about which is Zora Mamdani. Of course the new mayor of New York City because whether one likes his politics or not he clearly understood this media environment. He clearly was able to tap into the enthusiasm of young people. I think he spoke in a language that was emotionally in tune with them. Pretty moralizing this generation seems to be quite moralistic and a lot of his appeal was very native to the platforms that these people had grown up on as well. So what do you I mean other than the fact he was using the platforms what was it that Mamdani understood about reaching young people

20:55that perhaps some other ideologies some other political individuals don't understand so well. Yeah I mean I have to give him credit for as many critiques as I have of him. He's a remarkably talented politician and has a remarkable way of communicating with people on on digital media that doesn't feel forced like putting a politician in front of a camera and they I don't know what was that like I'm just chilling in Cedar Rapids video of Hillary Clinton. Oh there was the Elizabeth Warren one where she's just cracking open a beer in her kitchen and oh and my husband's here like thank you for being here to the husband. Exactly I mean I think there's definitely he has a leg up because he's he's sort of of this digital native generation but he was so effective at telling other people's stories. I think the the one video that really just like set him off was when he went out until one of the burrows and he was asking people who were Trump voters

22:01why they voted for him and then reframing their their whether it's affordability or whatever other issue they decided reframing them as as someone who should be voting for him and saying like I mean obviously he's tapping into populism that's not healthy and there is a true like horseshoe effect going on but he he wanted to hear other people's voices and platform them and legitimize them in a way that I think really spoke to people but also he just has this like indefatigable millennial enthusiasm on every single clip and he he leaned into meeting people where they were and also trusted that he could run a campaign that way without relying on traditional institutional support and he was also very fortunate that he was running against the people that he was running against and you know I went to one of Cuomo's last campaign events in the lead up or the final days and so much of the cultural attention had been sucked up by Mamdani that it felt

23:04like he was literally just talking about the other guy the entire time and why we're not voting for him and why we're not being him and Mamdani had a positive restorative vision that spoke to people and also pulled out of them you know how are you struggling what what is your rent bill like like he really spoke to the daily concerns of people in a way that Donald Trump also did I mean I don't think that either of them are politicians that I would support but they they were able to use social media to reach people directly with the concerns that were important to them and not feel forced and contrived yeah I struggled with this I struggled with the extent to which the Mamdani phenomenon was to do with him focusing on the the core issues that people undoubtedly worried about I mean even now Americans number one concern is still affordability if you look at Donald Trump's polling on affordability it kind of peaked in January 2025 and then has declined ever since and I think the best explanation for that is there are a lot of people who voted for him who thought that he could actually reduce prices across the board which

24:08always outside of his abilities as a president of the United States but I do wonder how much Mamdani stuff was about the actual you know framing of the issues as against his just authenticity because I agree with you I think he was incredibly authentic you know don't want to sound like Donald Trump he was very telegenic as well you know he looks young he looks fresh and of course other than the fact that he was running against Andrew Cuomo there was also the animating issue for many many young people of the Israel girls are conflict at the same time so I'm I'm just not sure how many transferable I mean I guess I guess a question from that is you know what could we as libertarians kind of learn from his success given that we don't want to become socialist on the issues yeah I mean I think one thing that he really failed to do in a spectacular way was take these legitimate issues and turn them into some like an empowering message it's all

25:08about how you can't get ahead it's impossible I only I can fix it for you now we're seeing that he's absolutely scrambling trying to figure out how he's going to do half the things that he's trying to do without completely breaking people's backs with taxes but I think there's a way to kind of reorient those those messages and say like well here's how we can empower you to live a more enriched life or here's how we can make taxes less burden some because that's a big part of affordability in living in New York City too I do think that it was a very very disempowering campaign at its core and about how the government will help people who can't help themselves and I that's not a healthy affected message is pretty much the inverse of the libertarian message but I think reframing that as a lot of these things that you're talking about whether it's the housing market whether it's it's rent control like these things exist in the first place because government got involved in many cases and so telling that story effectively I think is is a way to

26:14talk about the exact same things but flip them around and reframe them and of course excessive government stimulus and monetary stimulus drove the inflation that drove the discontent in the in the first place so the idea that government can come in and sweep up and solve all these problems is a bit doubtful so if the Mamdani story is one of persuasion there's another kind that's a bit darker and you kind of alluded to it earlier a lot of alienated young men aren't drifting towards democratic socialism but increasingly towards kind of more toxic online figures grievance merchants should we call them um so why do you what's your best explanation for the appeal of someone like a Nick Fuentes to young people yeah I think um sort of circling back to what I said before they did I hope that this is a temporary phase of of cultural rebellion um because young people today did grow up like in the depths of a pandemic where politics and social media was pretty much

27:18your connection to the rest of the world and it was also a time where cancel culture was taking off an ideological conformity was being imposed in a way that um really I don't think has been the case since and I think that growing up in that context I even kind of like had some earlier iteration of this myself going to a very progressive boarding school where you know everyone was mad at everyone also over like even just the most slightly conservative take that you might have or trying to sniff out who who was the dissenter um like that made me sort of look around and go like well I don't like this so I'm going to look for the complete opposite and the complete opposite orientation and worldview and I think um because there was so much sensitivity and language policing and speech codes on campus and and kids getting in trouble for an insensitive tweet or whatever um to the point that it was unsustainable and and stifling our culture and causing young people to walk on egg shells this was this is I think the manifestation of a rebellion against that of like

28:22absolutely not I will smash the egg shells I will say the most ridiculous provocative thing that I possibly can come up with to offend this sensibility that kind of ideologically oppressed and shaped me um it's a completely immature reaction to to wokeness but I think that it's interesting how much of wokeness on the left kind of is now mirroring wokeness on the right but the bonding ritual is not exactly the same because obviously one's about offending sensibilities the other ones protecting them but um in a lot of ways there's you know if you're if you're not with us and you're not further to whatever corner then you're not part of the team anymore um it's kind of mirroring itself but I do feel like there's obviously a lot of exhaustion um as like everyone else has to be a witness online to all this like gripper edgelord stuff that that seems to be taking off um I don't know if you saw James fishback this guy who's running for governor down in florida is um sort of leaning into this fentazification of our politics um and he is very unpopular

29:29with the general populace there um I think it was like five to one or four to one um people saying that they would uh support biron daniels his opponent heard donalds or daniels i can't remember um but i think biron donalds i think it's biron dogs okay um but on the flip side if you looked at like 18 to 30 year olds or whatever the youngest age demographic was it was um like four to one or five to one the opposite way for James fishback and about as um massive of a a difference as you could possibly have between um different age demographics it was it was staggering and I think that that's a demonstration that there's actually like a legitimate political threat and appeal to some of this ideology but also it's so ridiculous it's so performative it's so exhausting um like looking at this guy's social media stunts that I just think now that it's really bearing its head in public for the first time and and people are not just expressing these far-right views on on forechan or whatever and it's it's really coming to the mainstream like sunlight is the best

30:31disinfectant and I don't think that will have long-term tolerance for the sort of politics but it feels like the transgressive thing to do which is very ironic because being a conservative is not traditional or being on the right is not traditionally transgressive at all it's just the opposite but it's it's sort of inverted that whole landscape um and is like a way to rebel against you know your your woke teacher or your woke school or the woke girls in your class it's interesting young men and young women are diverging as much as they are too yeah and I think um it kind of ties into some of the stuff you're saying about social media incentives right so put my economist hat on for a second one of my colleagues wrote uh one of my former colleagues wrote a really good article about a decade ago when there was a big political correctness outbreak in the UK and he said the best reason why to understand why this becomes more and more extreme over time is because having these really edgy views is like a a positional good right so you say something

31:31that's really extreme people saying wow you know look you get tons of retweets or whatever uh but then other people follow it the signal the incentive is to follow it so everybody starts saying that so just to keep getting the retweets you have to say something even more extreme and so I don't I think that explains a lot of this edge lordism and a lot of the extremities of the woke stuff on the left and I think it also explains why Nick Fuentes you know doesn't have quite often a clear ideological view right so he came out I mean yesterday he came out and said you know we've we've lost on immigration you know we're not going to do any of the deportations that stuff is over and I think it's it's the same reason he's it's the shock value right saying something more and more extreme keep taking it to the next level and that's the way that you'll get the the retweets the monetization whatever else comes with it oh for sure um and on top of that part of the problem too is if you see something so outrageous by someone on the opposite side of the political aisle and you engage with it because it's annoying to you and irritating to

32:35that also is just the exact same sort of reaction in terms of how the algorithm thinks about it it doesn't care if you like it or you hate it and so we see also the worst of our opponents as well as the most extreme of our our own side um for sure I also think one dynamic here that is kind of interesting um thinking back to the book that I published in 2023 we uh we're talking about this study from um this national contagion research institute that they allowed us to sort of debut in the book um about how every single time that Twitter had done mass bands of whether it was crowdboys accounts or or outright accounts whatever it might have been um at the exact same time there's this platform gab which is like a sort of I don't know if it's like literally calls itself a right wing alternative to x but that's effectively how it's it um kind of situated itself um and every single time there was a mass band from Twitter there was a mass exodus

33:37over to gab and and people were using the word ban and and like censorship more and more in that period of time and it was pretty much just like a demonstration that you can't you're not we're going to squelch out the voices of the most extreme and they they were fewer than I believe um but I understand the the desire um from twitter at the time to just not have some of this odious stuff on their platform I think now we're seeing what the alternative vision looks like and uh action but at the same time we're I think those people really were kind of quarantined and put away there was even a period of time where the president of the united states felt like he had disappeared from the face of earth because he had been banned from twitter um but none of those people went away and they actually just went to a different crevice of the internet where they're all saying the same things and listening to one another and agreeing with one another and falling further down the rabbit hole and now I I mean I think it was kind of very poorly executed how Elon just opened the floodgates back up for everyone and unbanned everyone is like a uh kind of show um

34:44however I don't think it's fully his fault how odious it is because we're seeing what was festering underground and the worst part of it like front as it was was creating his momentum and in that period of time and I think he's still banned from like youtube and and and like mainstream platforms and when the one that stuff just exists in its ecosystem with its own audience no one really gets the chance to say especially to young people who are watching it like hey this is why this is wrong I'm gonna engage with this in a in a like debate or in a spirited way and tell you the the opposite take and that just went underground and insulated itself and came back in such a more extreme yucky way that I think surprised everyone who was living in the real world and not in those little crevices of the internet yeah no I think that's right and you can see the way that even you know when Fuentes is platformed on a more mainstream channel he did a big interview with Piz Morgan a couple of months a few months ago his tone completely changed as well he paints

35:48himself as just somebody who wants the country of his parents back and you know not somebody who's looking for an extreme radical agenda now just just in closing here though I mean you've suggested that libertarian ideas can appeal to young people if they're actually presented to them and that caveat if they're actually presented to them is doing a lot of work there so so what do you think good libertarian communication to younger audiences looks like you know what type of themes are we talking about what type of approaches how do you think we can kind of capitalize on this environment yeah I mean I think going back to what I said in the beginning about how young people today have these very formative collective experiences I think one major opportunity and perhaps where like the alt rate was able to capitalize on this more than anyone was the COVID-19 pandemic and I think the sense rightfully so that a lot of young people had that a lot of their liberties were trampled and we weren't able to have a proper conversation about like developing

36:48science and obviously that has free speech implications but I think that is a formative life experience to have seen what it means to really have the government in some ways vastly overreaching to your life is something that really could make a libertarian worldview very appealing to young people because it is about saying giving you the liberty to make your own decisions using the government as minimally as possible so as not to impede in your day-to-day life and I think especially for kids who went through lockdown and like fundamental school developmental years in that era that's still fresh in their mind in the way that we all kind of memory hold it but I do think that that's a the fundamental formative experience and everything about the social media landscape and and Gen Z like has to be framed in personal experience that's just I think the the name of the game and reaching people and not being too theoretical and saying this is actually how this can affect and impact you but I would also say on the flip side

37:51that is something that sort of pushed some young people to the right that formative experience but right now the fact that Trump's polling numbers are plummeting it's probably as blatant as ever our liberties are not being respected I think that that you know we've seen both as young people where the left can overreach and where the right can overreach and there is a cohesive worldview that would have opposed both of those things on principle if young people are inculcated with that and even like there's so many moments of inroads where free speech seemed like it was like a conservative coded issue for right wingers who just like were too sensitive to put themselves out there on campus and now it's obviously demonstrated that it can protect people who are pro-Palestine pro-Israel who are conservative who are far right like it's it's a universal principle and I think that a lot of young people have woken up to the fact that you know our liberties can regardless of our political orientations can be similarly under threat at any given time

38:53the ice stuff that had happened in Minneapolis I think is another argument of you know you don't have to pick between compromising yourself on one side or the other side or risking a politician on this side or that side facing themselves into your life in a way that's unpleasant if you hold this consistent worldview that would protect you from that regardless but it is difficult I think in a culture where we're so right left like liberal conservative coded to explain that there's a third option and you don't actually have to choose that yeah I don't like using the term third way because it sounds very blare-right or that's true but no you're right I mean you're absolutely right in that extremities and attacks on our liberties attacks on people's abilities to live their own lives are happening we're being seen from both the left and right and I think that's an opportunity and a challenge for us at the Kato Institute to exploit that to get our ideas out there but

39:56ultimately empower people with the ideas so that they can affect real change I'm afraid that's all we've got time for we'll definitely have you back onto the podcast soon as you continue to do some some some fresh work with Kato you'll be able to follow everything that Ricky's doing on her landing page on the Kato website and check out her regular writing for the New York Post Ricky Schlock that's all we've got time for but thank you to our listeners and we'll see you