From Our Generation

About From Our Generation

From Our Generation is all about making sense of history, economics, and politics through real conversations. We dive into the ideas and events that shaped the world, how they still affect us today, and what they mean for the future. No lectures, just honest discussions about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Publisher

Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell

Category

history

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

18 Mar 2025

Latest episode

23 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

70 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Oct 2026

   SACRED COWS

   Ryan Reynolds has built a brand on 1980s nostalgia, calling the decade “brutal” and painting it as some kind of survivalist upbringing. He was born in 1976. He was four when the decade started and fourteen when it ended. The 80s he’s selling never happened to him. Success Academy, the charter school network serving 22,000 students across 59 locations in New York, is suing the state for suppressing its AP test scores. The network spends roughly $17,000 per student, half of what New York City public schools spend, and educates a population that is 80 to 90 percent Black and Hispanic. Every student takes AP classes, including calculus and physics. The state’s refusal to report those scores isn’t an oversight. It’s a political decision to bury results that embarrass the public school monopoly. The House held a procedural vote condemning socialism. It split along party lines, except for two Democrats who broke ranks. One, from a Trump-plus-seven district in Maine, quit the party. The other, from Washington’s coast, now faces internal sanctions. The Democratic caucus isn’t debating socialism. It’s enforcing silence about it. In Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has exposed the state’s inverted insanity defense law. Every other state in the country places the burden of proof on the defendant to prove insanity. Massachusetts requires the prosecution to prove the defendant was not insane. The jury split 11 to 1. The legal architecture of that state made the outcome almost inevitable. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, has a documented record of statements supporting Sharia law. The primary electorate chose him anyway. Whether voters were informed or indifferent is the more uncomfortable question. A data center leak in Oklahoma spilled three million gallons of water, and the headlines wrote themselves. What didn’t make the headlines: New York City loses 155 million gallons per day from aging pipes. Texas cities lose 240 million gallons per day. California lets 740 billion gallons of runoff escape annually into the ocean. The outrage over tech’s water use is a rounding error next to decades of public infrastructure neglect. Jason Arday became Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor at 37, a story celebrated worldwide. It ended in allegations of fabricated research and his suicide. The institutions that elevated him are now scrambling to distance themselves. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com (https://fromourgeneration.com/). Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com (https://giantsofpoliticalthought.com/).

2. 

   16 Sept 2026

   WHAT WE WISH WE KNEW AT 30

   What do you know now that you wish you knew at 30? The question sounds soft until you try to answer it honestly. Health compounds in one direction. The damage done in your 30s and 40s cannot be fully reversed in your 60s. Smoking was the obvious destroyer a generation ago. Today it is high-potency THC, which causes permanent brain damage in teenagers and is being sold by an industry whose tax revenue has made state governments complicit in the harm. Lower body strength is the single best predictor of longevity in older adults. Bones grow stronger under stress and weaken without it. Weight-bearing exercise is not optional after 55. GLP-1 drugs are transforming lives in the short term, but the long-term side effects are not yet understood. If you can lose weight through diet and exercise, that remains the better path. Relationships outlast logic. Never use the words "never" and "always" in a dispute. The moment you do, the argument stops being about the incident and becomes an indictment of the person. You cannot take back the spoken word. You can apologize for it, but it lingers. Harry Truman wrote furious letters he never sent. That discipline is harder than it sounds and more valuable than most people realize. Respect is not a feeling. It is a practice. If you do not respect your partner's judgment, remember that you were one of their choices. Engineers enter the world believing reason solves everything. It does not. Relationships take priority over logic in every organization. Brilliant people need to be managed differently. Elon Musk's ability to solve problems disappears the moment you pull him into something unrelated. Focus and sensitivity are a tradeoff. You cannot be deeply engaged in solving a problem and simultaneously attuned to the people around you. Managing that tension, rather than pretending it does not exist, is what separates good leaders from smart ones who fail. Naive realism is the belief that you see the world as it is. You do not. Two people can observe the same event and arrive at opposite conclusions, each certain the other is wrong. The Dunning-Kruger effect compounds this: people who understand the least overestimate what they know the most. A scout mentality, one that actively seeks information that might change your mind, is more effective than a lawyer mentality that defends what you already believe. Warren Buffett's partner Charlie Munger built a career on the willingness to reverse a position when the evidence demanded it. Strategy is not only what you will do. It is what you will not do. Southwest Airlines succeeded for decades by explicitly refusing to handle baggage transfers, serve meals, or assign seats. Every refusal reduced cost and reinforced focus. Most businesses never articulate what they will not do, and the mission bleeds outward until nothing is executed well. Government operates on the opposite incentive from every point above. In the private sector, inefficiency kills you. In government, inefficiency grows the budget and the headcount, which increases the manager's compensation and authority. A product that eliminates 90% of the workforce in a government function will be rejected, not because it does not work, but because it works too well. That structural reality is the single most important thing to understand about why government grows and rarely shrinks. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com (https://fromourgeneration.com/). Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com (https://giantsofpoliticalthought.com/).

3. 

   10 Sept 2026

   $40 TRILLION

   The national debt crossed $40 trillion this week. Divided across 340 million Americans, that is roughly $110,000 per person. At a 3% interest rate, each person's share of the debt costs about $3,000 a year in reduced standard of living. For a family of four making $100,000, the burden is 10 to 12%. For a family making a million, it is 1%. The debt is the most regressive tax in America, and no one voted for it. The trajectory is accelerating. The country hit $1 trillion in 1980. By 2002, it was $6.4 trillion. In the same span of time since, it has reached $40 trillion. Each 22-year period multiplied the debt by roughly six. Under Reagan, $200 billion annual deficits were treated as a crisis and discussed constantly. The current deficit exceeds $2 trillion a year and draws almost no attention. The economy is not collapsing. Unemployment is low, job openings are high, and incomes are growing faster than inflation. But the affordability pressure is real and growing. Health care costs continue to rise faster than every other category and are now large enough to affect every family. Energy costs compound the problem because they are embedded in the price of everything else. The debt itself functions as a slow bleed: not crushing yet, but accumulating in a way that narrows the margin for error. Economic convulsions are not theoretical. The late 1970s saw inflation above 15% and mortgage rates that froze the housing market. The 1980s produced a real estate bubble driven by tax shelter depreciation rules that left cities with years of empty apartments. The dot-com crash wiped out trillions. The 2008 recession was built on millions of no-documentation mortgages issued to people who could never make the payments. Each crisis had a different trigger, but the underlying pattern is the same: debt and distorted incentives compound until a shock forces a correction. The Democratic Socialists are not the fringe of the party. They are the energy. James Carville, who publicly said he would not be in a party with them, reversed course three days later and endorsed DSA-backed Senate candidates in Michigan and Florida. Only eight House Democrats signed a letter opposing elements of the DSA platform. John Fetterman remains the only Senate Democrat openly refusing to go along. Every Democrat aspiring to the presidency now calls for abolishing the Electoral College. The platform includes packing the Supreme Court with six additional justices, granting citizenship to every undocumented immigrant, and mailing ballots to every household. These are not policy proposals. They are structural changes designed to make reversal impossible. The Federal Register, the book of all federal regulations, reached 106,000 pages under Biden. Trump has cut it to 60,000, the first time in living memory that the regulatory burden has actually shrunk. He has also reduced the federal workforce by 300,000. That is why the institutional left hates him in a way it never hated Bush or Romney. Those presidents left the machinery intact. Trump is dismantling it. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com (https://fromourgeneration.com/). Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com (https://giantsofpoliticalthought.com/).

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YouTube views

260

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 54 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

69

Social presence

0

YouTube

64

Engagement

32

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