Thank you, and welcome to greenlight bookstore, we are here to presentew charlotte alt. Shell be talking to jasmin hughes. Before i turn things over to them, housekeeping things, current off or silence cell phones. Books are for sale at the register and charlotte will be signing and if you havent gotten your copy, please do so at the end and going straight back to the table. Upcoming events are available at the register. Great stuff coming upb as well. Tonights event will be recorded by cspan so we will be passing handheld mics for q a portion. Wait w and we can give a mic. Our interviewer is Jazmine Hughes and she will be speaking with our featured author charlotte alter. Her work is has appeared in the New York Times, wall street journal and appeared on good morning america, morning joe and cnns reliable sources. The new book the ones weve been waiting for is a hopeful glimpse of generation of political leaders and what america might look when they are in charge. The book received praise by multiple writers, rebecca trayste. Anyone who has dismissed millennials charlotte alter wrote a revetting book and alter has given us a young voice that will shape our political future. So youre in for something special. Jazmine will be joining charlotte. Please join me in welcoming charlotte ande jazmine. [cheers and applause] oh, my god. Thank you so much for coming tonight, everyone and congratulations to charlotte, her a book comes out today. [cheers and applause] charlotte and i have been friends for a few years and the thing that we have in common is we love s gossip. Anyone has gossip about anything, we would love to hear it at the end. Just come right up right now. [laughter] can everybody hear us okay by they way . Cool, cool . Charlotte, you work in a magazine. I heard they still exist . They do. Paper. You have written a lot of cover stories from magazines. How did you know that this was not a long magazine story and this was going to be a book for you . Such a good question. Mostly because [laughter] i actually started at the magazine story in some ways because it came out of this story i did in 2017 about millennial mayors because essentially the genesis of the whole graphic is trump withdrew from the paris climate agreement in 2017 and i went temporarily insane and i just spent the whole day. I actually see my friend josh over there who was sitting next to me. Remember that day . [laughter] i was like, anyway. So that day i was googling about age and generations and i was thinking, look, this guy thats 71 years old, oldest firstterm president ever. Elected by older white voters, overwhelmingly people over 65. The senators who wrote to him encouraging to withdraw from the paris climate agreement were mostly guys in 70s and 80s and that day is like this is the first shot in a generational battle. This is a generational war and the more i w thought about it, e more i realized that so many things that trump was doing from his actions that affected young immigrants to banning transpeople from the military, something that young people cared more way about than older people to Climate Change, debt forgiveness. All were decisions being made by older people that were going to have disproportionate impact on young people and i was like, okay, i was going to look into that. Is my mic not on . [laughter] does that make sense . Wow. Thats way better. You also have a super loud voice. Strong jewish women. [laughter] am i cutting you off . No, im done. As someone who doesnt look like thats in 70s or 80s, what do they hold dear and what do millennials hold dear, whats the difference . [laughter] thats a god question. I dont want tot generalize all boomers, i can say that what this book examines is a fundamental shift away from 20th centurystyle of politics that was much more about that particularly in like the 80s and 90s in the reagan and clinton era were in center right, reagan on the right and clinton in the middle and clinton around what reagan wanted which was privatization and tax cuts and and all of the things that have led to the situation we are now in where our universities are under funded and the social safety net is loaded for us in a way that it wasnt for our grandparents and what this book is about is swing towards the left which is not unfortunately or fortunately is not going to go as far as some progressives in brooklyn want it to go. Its not like theres a socialist utopia in our future and i can get into that later, but its about kind of the like the pendulum shift and how the events since 911 have from 911 through the wars in iraq and afghanistan through financial crisis through obamas election, black lives matter, occupy and trump, how all of those things shaped the way millennials think from parents because parents had different times of experiences that informed their world view. Totally. Thats the way we define generations, right . Right. Like the first major global event that millennials experienced wasnt 911. How did that have an impact on politicians . Everybody remembers 911. For this generation its like where were you when jfk was assassinated. Pete buttigieg, for example, was lying in College Dorm Room and then he found out from his roommate and he went on long and like meditative walk where he thought about his generational purpose which is very Pete Buttigieg thing to do. [laughter] and aoc was a seventh grader and she school got a bunch of parents in suburb came and got kids from school and school emptied out and when she got home from school her mom wasnt home yet and turned on the tv and she saw the towers and she thought to herself, is my mom going to be before the apocalypse . Who these people are, backgrounds are, what kind of situation they were growing up in. A republican who i have in this book, theres a couple of republicans, she was senior at the private school in update new york and one of her hernandez had a sister who worked in the towers and when they found out about it, this girl obviously got incredible by emotional and that for alice was a great moment. It turns out that the sister was not in the towers and the friend was fine and everybody i talked to had if not something watching somebody think that their sister had died, something that it was a moment for them. It jolted them. It made them realize that america was not alone in the world. We went into wars that further complicate and destabilize the characters, what americas role in the world is and how much we should be interfering in other countrys business and that is informed how millennials think about politics now. Youre not a politician . No. How did 911 affect you, not necessarily your political oh, my god. Your political views. I was in seventh grade and we were taking a spanish quiz and announcement came on the loud speaker and he made us finish the quiz. [laughter] thats what i remember. And also when ile got home from school, we went i grew up in new jersey and theres sort of a high point in montclair and so we went up to that high point and watched just like looked at the smoke. It was very clear even on the day that this was a major historical event that was going to be a significant departure from the past and i think that thats why i started the book ayere because in some ways for people in this age group particularly the people that i was talking to theres the before 911 and then after 911 and millennials grew up after 911 and thats why its the beginning of the book. Another thing that you said in the book before harry potter and like after. I want you to tell everyone how ethe series of harry potter changed peoples viewpoint and how to be a person in the world. This is fantastic. This is why i didnt want me to do a reading because you dont want to hear me recite and the second part of the book is harry potter and the spawn of the boomers. Its mostly about all the ways that boomer parenting was fundamentally different than parenting of earlier generations. Boomers, and this is my generalized take on boomers, boomers sucked at everything except raising kids. They were super good at raising kids. Boomers did not do well in terms of making our economy work for everybody. They did not address Climate Change when they had the chance. They did a lot of really important activism in 60s and 70s around Racial Justice and social justice and actually movements were not led by boomers. Martin luther was not a boomer. A lot of the things that boomers take credit for, they didnt start that, they just kind of enjoyed it. [laughter] but one thing that boomers really threw themselves lywholeheartedly raising kids ad intense and sort of intentional way and so thats why boomer the word parenting didnt even really become a thing until the late 80s and 90s. All of this idea all the ideas of enrichment and your kid has to have piano lessons, this number of words before they are 3, be surrounded by a thousand books or theyll y be illiterat, like all of those things were part of the boomer preoccupation with parenting. If you look at the culture, parenthood, miss doubtfire. The jeans that they were were called mom jeans. Theyey were into being parents. They raised the kids that were super its why people think as millennials as snowflakes sometimes because they raised a generation of overprotected, under endangered kids. People started for the first time reallyhe worried about kids getting kidnapped as they came home from school and you couldnt ride your book because there might be a stranger and danger, dont get in a car. All of that was new in the 80s and it was because of new preoccupation with child safety, sopa in that context this book s written, the book about underparented, overendangerred magical power. [laughter] i dont think people really understand that it was literally unprecedented and human history, this book. [laughter] theres an article written in like 2003 and it said, at first we thought basically it was times that wrote this and they said they were going to compare to Charles Dickens but shes more influential and harry potter is unprecedented. This was a book that it was not only that every kid read this book once and got over it. Every kid wrotey the book and read it a when they were 11 and2 and the third book when they were 13 and hair roy potter aged along side of these people. Basically there are the studies that show that people who were eifans of harry potter tend to have moree progressive values, partly because the themes of the book are about tolerance and, you know, bringing in social outsiders and rejecting authoritarianism and kids banning together against evil. Oh, my god, he totally looks like him. [laughter] and so it was just a thing that kept kind of coming up in a minor way and people would do throwaway references. So and so is it made me think, of course, this is something that still informs the way people think about politics and power and morality. This was a cultural event that had never like happened before. Never had ever permeated childrens minds the way harry vepotter did. Of course, they remembered it as they grew up, obviously. Did any of the politicians you interviewed, did they sort themselves for you . They didnt. Okay, aoc was really into it according to her brother. The mayor was into it. The younger ones were much more into it than the older ones. Pete buttigieg was like, that was before my time and [laughter] and dan crenshaw, did you read harry potter and he was like, no. Nothing im saying applies to every millennial and if youre a millennial and you didnt read harry potter i didnt read harry potter. Im talking about broad trend that apply to most people. In the way that 911, harry potter and others affected the millennial generation, what do you think will affect the next generation . Thats such a great question. One of the things that i found in my research that social scientists have shown that the events you experience between 18 and 26 give or take determine your politics for the rest of your life and they might move a little bit like, you know, if you buy a property or start sending kids to school. That might change Politics Around the informations but its pretty rare to go from a hardcore leftwinger to hardcore rightwinger. In fact, what tends to happen is that popular president s attract young people to their party and unpopular president s repel them and thats one of the reasons that right now millennials, democrats 2 to 1. Son for gen z, i kind of think that Donald Trumps election will be a Pivotal Moment for gen zs. Think about being 19 years old or 20 years old when donald trump was elected. That must really shape your conception of american politics. It must really shape your opinion about frankly who knows what they are talking about because one of thehe other thins noticed with this is that there was such a loss of faith in conventional wisdom after trump was elected. So much of the conventional wisdom said its definitely going to be Hillary Clinton. Do not worry, shes going to win and then all of the people who were supposed to know what they were talking about were wrong, so thats why you saw all of the millennials being like, you know, the people in charge said that this wouldnt happen and then it did so they clearly are operating on old information and dont know whats going on, so like we are going thehe take the wheel basically. Well, to that point, i wonder what people what people said htout the news, im sure a lot of getting information from social media, a lot of radicalized and then youre reading newspapers r like, i dot know, the new york city that are telling you that Hillary Clinton is going to win the 2016. What do they think of journalism . Thats a great question. Its something thats challenging. I meet people all of the time that dont understand journalism, think journalism is fake, think things are made up, thinks that journalists are routinely in the habitt, of makg up quotes which is ridiculous and its one place that i think its going to be really challenging because youre right for a lot of millennials they get their news from social media and not only that, they get their general attitudes from social media, so when they see a news story that challenges attitude they are more likely to think,ke oh, thats bullshit. The New York Times is full of shit. Thats when it concerns me, frankly, because i think when you surrounds yourself only with people who think like you or reflect back to you what you already think is that your mind gets closed off to things that might challenge that. Well, theres some like social media. You use a lot of social media to get to your story. Yeah. Can you give us tips for those who [inaudible] how did you do all of those . Basically if you stock exboyfriend you can find videos. One thing that iy, got lucky wih this book the exact period of time happened to also be the period of time that facebook was encouraging people to do live video on their feeds which by the way stays there forever. [laughter] so so now i think if a journalist was trying to do what what if a journalists were trying to do this for this period right now it would be a lot harder because a lot of the things that were put on Facebook Live in 2015, 2016 are now put on Instagram Live and that actually does delete after 24 hours. So what i foundt out that, for example, i was, youou know, i hd an interview with aoc and she found out howow Standing Rock shaped herta politics and rather than just getting her recollection, yeah, it was great, i found out 12 hours of live video of her journey to Standing Rock with her friends and that was really somethingy that allowed me to see deeper in thought process from the time that she was actually there what she was thinking, what she was feeling, what kind of snacks they ate, what kind of music they k listened to and all of tt was so, so helpful in helping the kind of painted picture of that moment, Council Member in charlotte, North Carolina, i was really looking for somebody, again, a book about electives. Its not about a book about activists but black lives matter was such an important part of the generations social awakening. I was looking for somebody who had been a black lives matter activist to serving in elected office and Braxton Winston in North Carolina did that and he had recorded on facebook all of his time protesting in the streets and videos with encounters with police and videos of his time, you know, running away from smoke bombs and and videos of what he was saying, what he was doing, where he was going, it was there. Once they know that i can see them, they are going to delete them. That would suck for me. I did figure it out. [laughter] great part is comfort with millennials because one. I want you to tell everyone i about Hailey Stevens first and my question for you afterwards is do you think a boomer could have written this book, gotten the same reaction fromn people . One of the things that i got lucky with, early 2017, early 2018, everybody was like,al tru, trump, and i couldnt do that. Not only could i emotionally do that, doesnt have any sources. I wasnt like i just was never going toas get the big trp stories. I was like, okay, they are doing that. I will see if there are young interesting people around who are running for office and like who knows and stevens is a great example when to get there early. I met hailey when she hadnt yet won her primary and i called her up and she called me over to her moms house and her mom is a painter. Shes so nice. I went over to her house and had a big bowl of grapes and we talked and she showed me all of her rat skeletons and hailey came in and we talked for a long time. Its amazing what people will do mawhen you ask them. She was telling me, i was asking about her use of technology and when she got her first cell phone. Oh, let me check, i have it in my journal and she pulled out big box of journal and i was like, can i read some of them and she said, sure. I spent the rest of the day reading through her old journals of her and going through big box of stuff from when she was working on joe bidens campaign in 2008 and that was an example of like the only reason i was able to do that is because she wasnt yet taken seriously as a congressional candidate and she did not have a press person with herss or a calm person with herr any other people with her that would say, no, you cant, youre a reporter. Dont do that. [laughter] and it was has been really interesting and been interesting to watch now. Shes a member of congress. She takes it extremely seriously and now when i talk to her, when i say, what do you think about this, shesou like, well, if its good for the people of michigan 11th district, its whats good for me. In some ways its an interesting revolution watching somebody going from a kind of normal person, just sort of like me to being somebody thats elected representative of the American People and watching what that does to their presentation and their personality and, you know, what a person has become. What happened to mayor pete . Mayor pete was always the same. [laughter] i first metin mayor pete in 2017 when i was doing millennial mayor story and he was already working with liz by then because he was like, you know, thinking about running for dnc chair and so he was he was telling us that he had gotten the dog and the dog was named truman. Why did you name the dog truman . Well, harry truman said if you want a friend in washington, get a dog. But you live in south bend, whats that about . Like dnc chair, definitely for sure. And, you know, so it was very clear from the first time i met him, first oft all, this thats he has raw political talent period. Hes incredible by talented. Second of all, he definitely had something on something bigger than south bend and at first everybody else thought it was dnc chair and in late 2018 after he had run and lost for that, i kind of swung by and visited him on this midterm road trip that i did and we drove around the whole think and its really interesting, you know, people ask me about pete and people think that pete is really fake and really practiced and sort of hes objectively dorcky but people dont like it. Dont like whatever his personal aspect is a lot of the time and i find myself trying to explain to people that so much of petes assets have to do with being in the closet for 33 years. He knew he was gay from a super young age and he knew that he wanted a political career and so from the time he was literally 3 years old. People who knew him when he was 3 years old knew he was exactly the same person that hes now. Like super, super controlled, never lost his temper, super, you know, selfpossessed, super disciplined about presentation and his approach to the world, never had a tantrum, never had any kind of loss of control of any kind and i was kind of like, okay, i spent a lot of time looking for people who hated him in high school. It was my goal for a couple of weeks. I was like how could you not hate this kid, look at him. [laughter] i couldnt find one. People in high school said, listen, you would have thoughtop that people would make fun of him, you would have thought he was annoying or brownnose, whatever, actually people really liked him and didnt tease him and respected him and thought he was a nice guy and hes able to pull off this incredible thing which is he was the super dorkey,ky gay only child, growig up in south bend, indiana, he was liked and respected by his peers. [laughter] so you were just talking about this but you worked hard not to compare millennials and liberals. You are conservatives of the millennial persuasion and moderates too. Sure. Particularly because Bernie Sanders does have such a solid millennial base is that people kind of think, oh my god, all millennials are socialists and, in fact, a little bit more complicated than that. The actual registration for the democratic socials of america is way up, way up from 2010, like certainly increased a lot under, you know, while Bernie Sanders has been running for office but 35,000 people which could fit inside fenway park. Its not true that every millennial isit a socialist. What is true is that some of the ideas around socialism have just kind of lost their sting there are people that are more moderate and want medicare for all. Also i do really think that its important for everyone to realize that the young people in particular who flipped seats in 2018 were i moderates, they were people like Hailey Stevens or Lauren Underwood in illinois, just over here, or katie hill who had that big millennial flame with her new nudes, the first but not the last, and those were people who were who actually flipped a seat from a republican, those are people who are not actually in necessarily the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. They are more in the barack obama wing of the party and thats what actually a lot of the book is about, attention of the obamastyle millennials and berniestyle millennials and the last chapter is pete and aoc and they represent the two different anchors, and thats what i mean the pendulum to the left. Pete being a center is actually pretty far to the left. That means that the more conservative option is somebody who wants who wants universal health care, not necessarily medicare for all, Climate Change, huge amount of funding for college education. The idea that that is now the moderate and conservative or like the liberal conservative position just shows how far millennials have swung the pendulum to the left. I have it written down, you describe aocs progressive act ivism and thats what the party has coming forward, how do you any years will go . Right now gen zers that i know are fullon communist activists. [laughter] thats one of the things theres this book that i cite a little bit but wary too much called generations. What they say in this book is that there are sort of different some generations are more civicminded than others and the greatest generation were oriented and goes where some are like i dont remember the exact order yeah, basically what they do is go back to john adams. I didnt know they had generations like that. Neither did i. Thats why i skimmed the book. The generation from 1721 to 1758 believed this. Well, lets move on. [laughter] but what they found that basically some of the things go in cycles so that every four generations you have a civicminded generation and also every four generations you have a really activist minded generation who is like lets push it up and between those you have smaller generations like gen z and gen x, left of the outside world. Again, i only cited the book a little book. Gen xers are active right now. How many people you know running for office at 21 years old . They could start running for office soon, i dont know. Right now millennials are stepping up in an electoral way but Sunrise Movement and march for our lives are absolutely changing the conversation and those are all gen xers, sorry, gen zers. Why did they start at x . I dont know. How much of that is about the generation youre in and how much of that is how old you are and will get more conservative or change as we get older . So i think it has to do with being a particular age at a particular time. What happens is that, again, people take in all of this situation when they are in their 20s and they are like, who am i, who am any the world and once they figure that out, cool, figured it out and people arent necessarily looking often for a political awakening in their 50s or 60s. So thats why, for example, you know, actually young people in the early 1980s, a lot of them voted for Ronald Reagan and those same people now are the people whod voted for donald trump, 30, 40 years later. Its not really about being young and aging, its about what happened when you were young and what it did to your politics and how how you kind of keep that moving forward in your own life. All right, we got away from a question that i asked you earlier. Yeah, but i dont think they would. [laughter] do you think that your yeah, i think that well, i think fundamental like attitude that i have that maybe boomers dont necessarily have is that this okay, is that this stuff matters. People who are not necessarily already in power still matter in our political system and that their stories still matter and that somebody like Lauren Underwood who is a freshman member of congress who has gotten zero thats not true. TeLauren Underwood has gotten rl legislation through because hes been real advocate for black ematernal health crisis, but soe of the freshmen, you know, sofreshmen members of congress dont have a ton of accomplishments under their belt especially when Mitch Mcconnell run it is senate. A lot of boomers have an attitude, call me when they actually get something done which is fair but i think i was looking at it in a way thats like this Still Matters because they are stepping up and they are representative of something bigger even if they dont necessarily have like the payoff that one might expect yet so i think a lot of boomers, particularly boomers i write about politics like are so focused on the people already in power that they forget to look at people who arent in power yet and those are the interesting stories. I have my favorite part of the book. [laughter] Mitch Mcconnell is older than chocolate chip cookies. [laughter] whats your favorite part of the book . I like that part too. Is jackie rossy is here . Jackie helped me with research in the beginning of the who process and i had so many total meltdown freakouts, and jackie like walked me through it and she also helped me make this big spreadsheet where we had age, name and then so we had the year, we had when people were born and then we had common household inventions. [laughter] we could see like Mitch Mcconnell, older than the hoola hoop. Nancy pelosi was 9 when colored television was invented. This is off the top of my head. Dont quote me on that one. That was really fun. Im trying to think of what my favorite part is. I really like i really liked the part about alexandria ocasiocortezs trip to Standing Rock because it was one where i just got to focus on the videos and dynamic between her and herfriends evolution and what was kind of going on with her and i didnt have to bring all of the other data and research and that was the most fun that and finding Braxton Winstons videos were the most fun part of the whole thing. I found like the thing i need. So,ng yeah, i think that thatsy favorite part but also like learning that Chuck Grassley was 5 years old when the chocolate chip was invented. That literally for the first 5 auars of his life people were like little chuck, would you like a cookie, no chocolate in it. Dont know what that is. [laughter] like can you believe that this man is making policy in 21st century. This is my last question for you and then you guys are going to ask those questions. Whats the juicest piece of gossip . Everyone is going to buy a book. Okay, okay. I need to couch this carefully. So alis stefanick was doing dance around being moderate around trump and criticizing him but also embracing him but doing both and during impeachment she took a hard right turn and did like now very much on the trump train. She and buttigieg were at harvard at the same time, they were both in the institute of politics and there was a rumor that i heard from 3 people that they went on a date once and when i asked them about it, both of them were like, no, no. Definitely not. It was just a friendly coffee. [laughter] they both deny it, but i think it was like a date, like they sort of one person thought it was a date. Like a maybe date. Like a vibe check kind of date and when i asked pete about it, so, youas know, did you go on a date with alis stefanick his face was like, maybe. It was a maybe date. They did say that they had a friendly coffee. So make of that what you will. Does anyone have questions for charlotte we we have a mic going around and keep in mind we are onh cspan so say hi to my grandma. [laughter] oh, my god. No questions. Hey, im shocked by the fact that you brought up sandy rock and social movements that obviously had big impact on younger people. Im wondering, were there similar on the right like crenshaw, something totally different . Thats a great question. To answer a question there was not a comparable movement on right. There was the tea party. Black lives matter im glad that youre asking about this because i wanted to make this point. They did something really, really fundamental that people didnt understand at the time so when journalists were occupying laack lives matter in particular, Martin Luther king, where is malcolm x, take me to your leader and there was this idea that social movements would exist the way they do in txtbooks where its like, you know, the civil rights movements, leaders, this person and actually the 21st century millennial ledgh movements were leader and everybody was a leader and everybody was making decisions and nobody was making decisions and that meant that it had a lot of positives but also had negatives. It was hard for movements particularly occupy to settle on specific goal that would be actionable and move the ball in some tangible ways but also meant that it just changed the shape of what political power looked like and the way i put it in the book is it used to be that split call power was like a portrait. Here is the person who is in charge of this and these movements made it more like a image where dots were part of it and you didnt have just one person who represented the whole movement. On the right its important to note particularly somebody like dan crenshaw what is making some republicans some Young Conservatives lean to the right and a lot has to do with leftwing overreach particularly on College Campuses and particularly around things like Political Correctness and micro aggressions and things like that and there are a lot of sort of moderate to conservative leaning young people who probably, if you sat them down and talked with them, have pretty similar attitudes around some of the core issues like Climate Change or racial equality or or gay marriage but are turned off by some of the vibe of like the confrontational sort of police vibe and thats why youre leeing on College Campuses the free speech movement, i think probably the most the close toast what youre asking about. The idea of people shouldnt be shutting down people who disagree with them. You know, in some ways the left is most driving some young people to the right. Hi, matt. Hi. You talk about this a little but i was looking through your book and you are talking about the ages of politicians and alexandria ocasiocortez is the youngest of the ones and of these very old men in the president ial campaign, Bernie Sanders is the oldest and he has by far the strongest support fom the age group that youre writing about and the generation after that, i wonder and Pete Buttigieg has very little support from people our age and gihis supporters from boomers ad gen xers. Yeah, thats a really good question. I kind of get it in the last chapter but yeah, counterintuitive. Two things going on. One is that Pete Buttigieg in particular is an old persons idea of what a young person shouldf be. [laughter] and so he appeals to a lot of hes got very like good grandson vibes, so a lot of people really a lot of older people and in particular think hes such a nice young man and that is very appealing. Like, listen, underestimate him at your peril. Its appealing from many voters someone going from noname mayor in south bend, indiana to winning iowa caucus by a tinny hair according to delegates is an unbelievable trajectory, right . Those voters matter. Youre totally right. Bernie sanders is his candidacy is fortified by his popularity with young people both millennials and gen z and thats why i say its generational the no matter the way you slice it. If pete comes out on top, hes the youngest nominee. If bernie does, its because of his support with young people. One thing i found out on the trail recently which isnt in the book is that like old e people and younger people think ofk, age differently and its nt the way youd expect. I had kind of expected that younger people would be like, o hes too old and actually its the people in their maybe their 620s or early 70s themselves who actually understand what age means and maybe themselves are slowing down and they think oh, im 65 and im having trouble running after my grandkids, how could somebody who is 15 years older than me be president of the Enited States or im 67 and i have trouble remembering where my car keys are. Should somebody a decade old e than me have the nuclear code . Those are the [laughter] those are thean people who i think have more trouble with the idea of a really old person being president because they understand what age actually does to your like mental facultiesou and like physical capacity and i think a lot of young people dont have that understanding and so they just kind of think to themselves while bernie agrees with me on the issues and a lot of the book is laying out why so many young people are are with bernie on the issues like why they want medicare for all, why they want a Green New Deal and why income inequality is so important to them, and so because they dont necessarily have an understanding of age and how it affects your ability to do the job, it doesnt bother them as much, does that make sense . I have a millennial question. You mentioned that 911 and harry potter, those are pretty big events. Are there some smaller or maybe less pronounced events or cultural phenomenas that make it unique to counterparts . Thats a good question, one little one that i think is interesting is zero tolerance policies for bullying in schools is something that i think you can really draw direct line from the first people to grow up in era where it was like if a kid pushed another kid on the playground youre expelled. For our parents it was like oh, thats just kids being kids and everyone is going to get called names and everyone is going to get bullying, whats the problem. For millennial this is part of the boomer super parenting thing. Bullying thing became problem and you had the zero tolerance onlicies in schools which had two effects, one, more more effect was that it unfairly targeted black and brown kids in a way that pushed them into the criminal Justice System and exacerbated all kinds of racial inequalities which we all know about now but were not clear at the time. These kids black and brown kids in particular were overdisciplined and punished for stupid Little Things for throwing a pencil at somebody or pushing somebody or calling somebody a name and they would get kicked out of school and often end up in some kind of juvenile program that would then like set them on a totally different path for this tinny little thing that should not have had that big of an impact in their lives. But the other more broader effect of that i think is that it created a social system where it was where you could have radical punishment finish small crime. The idea that somebody would be expelled for calling somebody a name is not that not that different from canceling somebody from making a bad joke and i think that you can draw a line from zero tolerance policies in School Discipline to what we sort of have jokingly called cancel culture now where theres this idea that one strike and youre out. The stakes are theres no room for error, theres no place for forgiveness and i dont necessarily, you know, this is a punishment structure that was imposed on millennials by their parents and by their School Administrators so i think that theres sort of a connection between the two things and i havent quite proven it, does that make sense . No more questions. Oh, wait, theres one in the back. You can shout. I can hear you. [inaudible] you talked about the next Generations Trust of the media or lack thereof, how do you see the next generation getting pleddia and also media and shaping the landscape . Thats a good question. I think the generation is getting media through social media. I have to say the fake news problem is a boomer problem. Boom rester the people who see totally fake news on facebook and are like, oh, my god, did you see Hillary Clinton is a pedophile. Millennials are much more sophisticated about interpreting online information and knowing whats true and whats not. Theres a lot of distrust andtr theres a lot of skepticism and there are a lot of bubbles, but some of these kinds of like total wacky fake news conspiracy theories are kind of boomer space. Listen, if i knew where the next generation was going to get their media, i would be really rich. [laughter] so i wish i knew the answer to that question. I know that it is going to be i think prince print will be part of the conversation forever but i do think that its going to be mostly digital and mostly on social media and i think one of the big things that news organizations are going to have to deal with is how to navigate the social media so easy for Bad Information to flourish and so hard for good information to fight back. So i dont know, thats for someone smarter than me to figure out. Do you feel like politicians today are held to higher standard because they grew up with social media and do you think they view social media as a tool or more like a liability that they are always are concerned about . Its interesting, such anc gd question. There are some people, for example, you know, probably now that they know im like digging around in case books, they are like, thats not great. Everybody one of the things mayor said to me, he was like, we grew up knowing that everything put on the internet would be found by somebody. In some ways this is another thing thats unique to millennials and not true of gen zers, millennials grew up in ecosystem, you would put something on facebook and it would be there for years and what people are doing tik tok and not live there for 5, 10 years for journalists to dig up. I also think that its one of the reasons why somebody like aoc emerged as naturally talented or somebody like pete. They grew up in front of the camera having an experience of of like knowing how to talk to a camera. Knowing how to talk to an audience and in some ways the same skills that you used in communicating with people on facebook about a party that youre having are not that different from the skills that you would use to run for office. You need to be talking to a lot of people and delivering information and youu need to be e, you need to be presentablen a certain way and so i think earlier generations, there was more of a learning curve in terms of developing a public face and so a lot of people our aim because of social media everybody has a public face. Some people are more public than others butc theres nobody who doesnt have any kind of public facing persona unless you complete i will swear off social media altogether. So i think that that has made it easier in some ways for some of these people to navigate fame because fame isnt just for famous people, if that makes sense. I dont know. Thats a little weird. I dont know if that makes sense. [laughter] we have time for one more. How would you say the most surprising or biggest way having more millennials in elected office is going to change the way politics happens or the way we experience the political system in the next decade or two . Oh, my god, i love this question. They just have different ideas on the right way forward and want a more marketbased solution and that will be the battle whereas now you have jim inhofe who is 83 and came to the floor of the senate with a snowball to prove that Climate Change isnt real. Thats not going to happen when millennials are in power. I also think theres going to be i started the book saying there was going to be more bipartisanship among millennials and now i think theres a little bit less. I think theres a lot of polarization exacerbated by social media but with more millennials in power we will see more people like aoc or dan crenshaw, celebrities like figures. There is a celebrity aspect to the way these people present and exist in the public eye. We will see more of that and more stage to not staged but a lot more drama if that makes sense, less backroom dealing but there will also be a couple particularly how do i put this . The agenda is going to change. Not necessarily the we will definitely get to a new place but Climate Change is a back burner issue because we have a government dominated by boomers and people older than boomers who dont think it is that important. When millennials are in power it will be a front runner issue. Income inequality will be a front burner issue. Education funding will be a front burner issue. Im not trying to say when millennials are in power there will instantly be a Green New Deal and free college because again there are many conservative millennials and even more moderate millennials, but the issues on the life on the back burner will be brought to the front burner. Thank you. [applause] thank you so much for that awesome discussion. If you havent gotten your book they are available at the register. We will start the line right here and go single file to the back. Is the Coronavirus Impact the country, here is a look at what of the Publishing Industry is doing to address the pandemic. The spring book festival season has been canceled with book fairs in san antonio, an applet, maryland, and charlottesville, virginia, opting not to reschedule was the Los Angeles Times festival of books has decided to all their 20 fifth annual festival in october. North americas largest convention, book expo has discarded to put their date back to july. 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