The question is this: how can you look around, at the economy, at the presidential debates, at your social media feed, and not be radicalized? How can you live in a system that has never prioritized any kind of long term vision without feeling a sense of impending doom?

In this episode, we talk with Rowan Emslie, a podcaster based in Brussels, about the global forces that are causing young people to move to the left: Endless debt. Work. Housing. Elite indifference, opportunism, and inaction. We discuss how so much in politics has moved to the right in the US, so that even perfectly reasonable positions in other countries seem "leftist" in America. And all these things become even more stark in times of crisis like, say, during a pandemic.

As is common when talking to any international person at all, we were embarrassed by how much more American history and economics he knew than us, but still we managed to have a coherent conversation about the larger forces shaping our current political moment and whether it is possible to enact meaningful change in a system where is it so much easier to move towards chaos than it is to move towards order.

Links: 

Rowan's podcast, Connected and Disaffected: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/id1244893114

Many of the stats cited in this episode come from this Huffington Post piece, "Millennials are Screwed": https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

This is a specific episode Rowan did on his podcast with the author of the above article: https://soundcloud.com/connectedanddisaffected/s2e08-millennials-killed-napkins-boomers-killed-housing

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.