← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
BONUS - America’s Lost Generation – Cameron Cowan
00:25:13
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature.
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B
Like, I didn't write this as some sort of outsider who was kind of like, oh, look, this is very interesting. I've been living this. This has been my life.
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A
One of the core questions we keep coming back to on this show is why so many people feel burned out, cynical, and disconnected from politics, even when the stakes feel higher than ever. A lot of our public conversation focuses on personalities, scandals, and outrage of the day. But underneath all that is something deeper. A growing sense that the systems we're supposed to rely on, government, media, the economy, no longer work for ordinary people, and in some cases, may even be working against them. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeier, and my guest today has spent years reporting on what that breakdown looks like at a human level, particularly for younger generations who did what they were told and still found themselves shut out of opportunity.
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B
Hi, my name is Cameron Cowan. I'm the author of America's Lost Generation. You might know me from the Cameron Journal. You might know me from my newsletter or The Cameron Journal NewsHour or the Cameron Journal Podcast. I'm the creative director of the Cameron Journal. I've been writing about culture, society, and politics for over 10 years now.
- [01:33]
C
One of the reasons I wanted to have Cameron on Outrage Overload is that his work sits right at the intersection of culture, politics, and lived experience, which is where a lot of today's outrage actually comes from. Rather than focusing entirely on daily political drama, he spent years looking at what happens when institutions stop delivering on the promises people grew up with and how that gap between expectation and reality shapes
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A
trust, identity, and political behavior.
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C
That disconnect, more than any single election or political figure, is a major driver of the distrust and disengagement we're seeing right now.
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A
This isn't a conversation about partisan blame or quick fixes. It's about power, institutions, and what happens to a democracy when large parts of the population stop believing the system is worth investing in. We talk about how economic precarity feeds political disengagement, why concentrated power, especially in technology and media, poses new risks, and what history can tell us about moments like this, when trust breaks down faster than it can be rebuilt. If you're feeling exhausted by outrage but still care about where this country is headed, I think you'll find this conversation grounding and challenging in the right ways. Let's get to it.
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C
Cameron Cohen. Thank you so much for making time for our program.
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B
Thank you, David. Happy to be here.
- [02:53]
C
Nice to have you back. I am, I apologize, taking me a little while to catch up to this book. I'm really, I'm really a little behind on all my reading, but it was, it was quite, quite an interesting book and has some interesting approaches of how you put the book together too. So we can talk about some of that. I guess, you know, it's another one of these books I want to be a little careful about giving everything away because people should go read the book. But one, one, you know, it's kind of one of the main themes, I guess, is kind of this idea of the parallels to Japan's lost generation. So by the way, everyone, the book is called America's Lost Generation. And so this parallel to the Japan's lost generation. So, so what are some of the sort of, in concrete terms, you know, what are some of the practices or policy that that makes those things comparable?
- [03:53]
B
Yeah, well, there's a couple of kind of stark parallels. One is the 1991 property crisis in Japan that crashed what was considered to be an unstoppable Japanese economy sort of thing. And the 2008 financial crisis that, you know, we weren't probably quite had as much cache in 08 as we, as Japan did in 91, but we'd been on some solid growth coming out of the dot com bust for, for those, for those years amidst starting two wars and everything else. The economy was surprisingly robust during that period. And also a bit of a double tap. Japan's was closer. They had the 91 recession and then the 97 Asian financial crisis. 12 years to get the pandemic, which for a lot of millennials was, including me, was a double tap. We had just finally started to kind of maybe get things together. And then the pandemic hit and reset everything. And even, even my dad called me at one point and he's kind of like, yeah, I saw all the momentum you had going. And then the pandemic hit and it absolutely, it was like pushing the reset button, you know. And so though that was kind of what really inspired me, what followed the 91 property crisis in Japan was really a lost decade of growth. They had, they could not get inflation, they had terrible deflation. I think Japan was the only country happy coming out of the pandemic with global inflation because they'd been begging for inflation for 20 years at that point. And so this idea that a whole generation of people in a whole economy can be derailed by one property Crisis. What these was, what these two events have in common. In 91, companies had always hired new graduates of Japanese young people from school. And in Japan, when you enter the corporate system, you move up and your pay moves up every year on your birthday because you got a year older. It's literally that programmatic, which some would say is very inefficient. But in America, we did the same thing where we hire graduates out of college and they get on the corporate ladder and they can move up if they're successful, drop out, do something else if not, we're a little bit more freewheeling over here. And so what they did not do coming out of the 91 property crisis in Japan is they didn't hire two classes of graduates. Those people were never able to get into the Japanese corporate pipeline. And they would spend, because of how Japan's quirky economy works with corporate. They would spend the rest of their lives really bereft of being able to really make a lot of money and. And do a whole lot. And it's actually turned into a pension crisis. It's been so many years now. It's actually a pension crisis because these people have never really into their pensions. So they're supposed to get a public pension at a certain age, and the government doesn't have any money to pay it on top of Japan's difficult age demographics and all this sort of thing. And so one of the things, kind of developing stories that, you know, no one's talking about with millennials, when we start talking about retirement. What retirement, what savings? Social Security may not last the end of next decade. So I found as I got into this, there were all these little parallels between a halcyon moment, people getting left behind, and an anemic economy thereafter. And I view Japan as sort of a harbinger of what's to come. And if you look at what the wealthy have done since 2008, the concentration of wealth at the top has been stark. And the reality is millennials have 4% of the national wealth. And 2% of that is Mark Zuckerberg, just Mark Zuckerberg. That means everyone else is that 2%. And people ask, where did the money go? And I would say, check the bank accounts of the. Not even the top 1%. The top 01%.
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C
Yeah. And I definitely have a couple things I want to ask about some of that. But. And so. And one thing, you know, you're also. You have a chapter about, you know, you sort of. I think it's your brain on poverty.
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B
Yes.
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C
Kind of Talking about the effect of the scarcity on, on our mental health. And also this idea of kind of challenging this American view of like seeing poverty as like a moral failing. Can you talk about that a little bit?
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B
Absolutely. So one of the things that we have found is that poverty affects brain composition and brain chemistry in profound ways. I'm not going to get into the technicals of that call a brain person. I am not a brain person, but it has profound effects. I recently was confronted with this because a close friend of mine who had been at one time very successful, oftentimes in the years some of the rest of us were really on the struggle bus, really ended up drinking himself to death. And we're the same age. He's only two months. He was only two months younger than I am. And it was a quite stark reminder.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And your book uses this term which I guess was somebody guy standing created this term.
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A
Precariat.
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B
Yes.
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C
I guess it fuses precarious and proletariat. Sort of capturing some of that, some of that. Tell us about that a little bit.
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B
Yeah. So the, the new Precariat is basically a class of workers and people that are at the bottom, using the old 20th century on the bottom end of the proletariat. They have no security in their employment, their job or their income. They are working as a pendant contractor for Google. Google's notorious for that, by the way. They are doing the gig economy. They are a freelancer, independent contractor. Hi. Hello. That's how I've worked most of my adult life because I can never get a job. You know, all this sort of thing. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of that, that in, in the Precariat. The thing is this is now a whole class of people. This is a whole class of jobs. This is a whole way that people live their lives. The difficulty, even though I kind of predicted it would happen in 2010, the difficulty with that is by its very nature it's both precarious and deeply impoverished, which means you're going to have all those health issues, you're going to have mental, physical health issues, all this sort of thing. And the reality is it's very easy for people to drop out of the procureate into being totally homeless. And the reality is a lot of people in that class will die as a result of not being able to secure something more stable and more secure in a society that isn't really ready to deal with people living those types of asymmetrical lives.
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C
Well, what do you think that looks like for the next generations? You know, the Gen Z ers and ultimately Gen Alphas. Is this, is this just the new normal?
- [10:33]
B
Well, here's what's funny. It took me so I started this book in 2020 because I was bored as we all were. 2020. It took me a couple years to write it because I decided to do a graduate degree in the middle of all that. And so by the time I released or finished the draft we were already having the conversation about Gen Z. So I kind of had to go back through and insert some Gen Z stuff in there. And I feel really bad for Gen Z. They didn't so I. They're. They're at the confluence of a whole other set of economic trends in the shadow of an economy that never recovered. An economy that still doesn't produce great results for workers, that still not is doing what it needs to do for the everyday person. It is not possible that money is gone. Doesn't care how wealthy that money is gone. Just putting that out there anyway. So Gen Z didn't graduate into a recession that's helped them with their initial earnings. But there's a whole host of other problems that are affecting them. One is simple employment. Youth unemployment in this country is getting to be about as France, bad as France and Italy. Absolutely atrocious. New Gen Z graduates can't find jobs. And this is on top of a lot of these kids finished high school under college during the pandemic. Their social lives were profoundly changed by that. There's a lot of resentment over that and rightly so. There's a knowledge gaps. Kids that didn't that were doing school over zoom tended not to learn very much. All of this has had profound downstream consequences, not only in nihilist attitudes and to some degree voting patterns in 2024, but the reality is there. They have graduated into a. A better economy, but right into the precariate, right into the precariousness that is now the new normal. That's the job market they're inheriting. It's a, it's another tectonic shift. I mean in, in the last 25 years between January 1st, 2000 and today, we've been through three major tectonic shifts in our society and every one of them has radically changed. The job market has radically changed. Employment has radically changed. While we live, meanwhile the cost of everything has gone up. So I feel very sorry for Gen Z. Also with AI taking over entry level jobs, that's going to affect Gen Z far more than we millennials who are 15 years, 15, 20 years older. So they're, they're at the confluence of a whole other set of economic trends in the shadow of an economy that never recovered, an economy that still doesn't produce great results for workers, that still not is doing what it needs to do for the everyday person. And it's structured that way and that even for millennials, it became so obvious that if you come from a certain class and background, there's a whole lot more opportunities than if you're at the bottom. And a lot of the story in my book is a story about social mobility. And the end. The social mobility engine that, that flung boomers into the upper class for, for millennials is entirely broke. And for Gen Z, it's not broke. It doesn't exist. We had an out of order sign for Gen Z. It's closed and has been bulldozed and it's now dirt. Like, you know, it's entirely, it's entirely gone. The reality is give me your zip code in your father's income and I'll tell you how far you'll go in life.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And that's all the information. I mean, it's a quite sad thing, right?
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C
Yeah. And there's a lot of research showing that too. And that takes me to something I wanted to talk about too is, you know, this sort of apathy about politics and, and you know, kind of a cynicism. Right. Where.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Almost like you're saying they're like, I don't have any impact on policy anyway. It's not really, I don't really trust these institutions. It's a plutocracy or whatever. Right. So maybe you can talk about that. I know I gotta let you go here pretty soon, but maybe you can talk about that a little bit and how some of that, it's like a rational thing to say those things. Right. It's not irrational.
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B
No, I mean here as there was a great quote from someone in the Antique who said millennials don't believe in democracy because we've never lived in one. You know, sort of feels like it would. That sounds like a great idea. We should implement that. We're recording this on the 15th of December 2025. And just today new poll came out. 50, 54% of Americans do not believe in our current governmental system. And I'll tell. And, and, and that number comes up because their question they asked was, do you think, you know, the wealthy control the government? 50% said yes. And that, that, you know, the wealthy will do whatever they want. To. I mean, people have woken up to the fact that if you are wealthy or you are a corporation, this gets into my first big guess I ever wrote called we the people. How we the people became we the Corporation. They people have realized, if you are wealthy enough or you are a corporation, our government will bend over backwards to do anything for you. If you are not in one of those two groups who care, you're not a priority. Someone asked me one time, well, who represents us? I said, no one. Are you wealthy or a corporation? No. No one represents you. No one cares that much. Like. And so the political apathy is honestly real and reasonable in a system where government has become a line item for corporations, where the wealthy can manipulate the government through sheer force of money. And quite frankly, for all the liberal people who are mad about Trump and everything, and I certainly don't love Trump, let me make that clear up front. You can draw a direct line to the economic failures post 2008 to why Trump got elected. You can also draw a straight line from treaties like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO in the 90s. Thank you, Bill Clinton. Straight to why Trump got elected. People have been crushed, seen their jobs offshored, hollowed out, costs of living go up, kids stuck at home, all this type of thing. Every one of these issues should be a major national scandal. In another day in time, the French would have already burnt the country to the ground. By the way, we're very lazy here in America. And at any other time, any one of these issues would have been a major national scandal that should have ended presidencies. We have all of it happening all at once, and yet people stand on television and claim it's business as usual. And you have Republican accounts on Twitter talking about how great the Trump economy is. And my question is, for who? For the usual suspects. The wealthy, incorporations, because they bought government. So the political apathy is very real.
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C
But. And the guy saying that the Trump economy is great is a guy with a busted down pickup truck in Alabama too. Right? I mean, that's what. That's the funny, funky, funny thing about it.
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B
Yeah. Yes. I mean, or they'll take the smallest thing and promote it as a great thing. I saw one meme today on Twitter. He's like, there's 37 states where gas is below $3 a gallon. Trump's delivering for the American people. I'm kind of like, okay, you accomplished the gas prices of George W. Bush. Bravo. I guess, you know, sort of, you know, sort of thing, you know, not that biden didn't make some mistakes on refineries in California, all this type of thing. But, I mean, congratulations. Okay, that's moderately good. During the pandemic, I was buying gas for A$10. Do you want to go back to that? I mean, the smallest things that. I mean, yes, it'll affect transportation prices and shipping. Things will be cheaper, and prices of food will probably come down due to fuel cost inputs. And that's good. I'm not going to say that's not a good thing for people. Lower grocery store prices is a great thing. I have to. We all have to buy food. I have to. I went to all these the other day. We all have to buy food. It's a good thing. But the smallest of small wins when the reality is this is the same man who will go to a rally and give a speech and say, oh, the affordability. We're going to bring affordability, but then also say, it's a Democrat hoax. They're making it up. No one cares about this, all this type of thing. And the sad thing is, this is even a Trump problem. No president has taken the plight of millennials seriously, ever, including Obama. Like, no one has ever really cared about what's affecting young people and now very much adult people. And quite frankly, if the boomers were treated by their government the way the government has treated millennials, the boomers would have burnt the country down. Like, we'll get my mom on the phone. She'll. We'll. And, yeah, she. Yeah, she'd be out. I mean, remember what the boomers did in 1980? They wanted to completely tear apart the economy of the New Deal because they felt like it was jilting them. And they elected Ronald Reagan on a deregulation Austrian economics platform to get it done. They did burn the system down to serve themselves. That's kind of part of the problem. So it's kind of like it's. For me, the political apathy is at one time understandable, but also incredibly frustrating because I'm kind of like, oh, yeah, the boomers would be in the streets. They would have burnt this. They. They would have burnt the country down by now. What are we doing sitting around, you know, sort of thing. But I think for a lot of millennials, unfortunately, we're a deeply collaborative generation. We followed the rules. We drank less than Gen X, we had less sex than Gen X, we stayed in school. We didn't get. We fought. We ticked all of the boxes that our parents said that we would have a successful life. That's not A generation that's going to burn the country down. That's a generation that's going to want to try to fix institutions, is going to try to fix the system, to get it going again. And I think even that a lot of people have simply given up because it's not responsive anymore. It's quite sad. It's quite sad.
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C
Yeah. Well, and it's the, the irony of like, sort of being, you know, seeing, you know, because there's some polling also that shows that there's a pretty large segment, and it's not just younger folks, but younger folks are a piece of that. It's also just sort of working class. And those struggling, you know, are at least apathetic about the idea of sort of an authoritarian model.
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A
Right.
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C
Some kind of a plutocracy or theocracy or something like that, where it's like. But the irony there is it's those institutions that if they're working right, those are the things that do create a more equal playing. Those are the only things that will stand up for the folks at the bottom. Right. If you don't have those institutions, there's nobody standing up for you. But, and I get it, the institutions don't seem like they're. Nobody sees that. Them doing that these days.
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B
I think they're. And in some cases, people feel like institutions are not only not working for them, they're actively hostile to them. And that has led to, you know, a complete distrust in all of it. And part of the reason why Trump has been able to change government the way he has with hardly a breath of resistance, is because a lot of people think, yeah, what do we need the Department of Education for? You know, what do we need all of these things for? And why are we playing? Why are we paying for transgender surgeries in Lesotho? You know, why are we funding theater in Pakistan? Again? You know, I can't pay the bills, but there's a theater company in Pakistan who's put on a show tonight at the American taxpayer expense. What the hell? I mean, used to. That's why people, when people say Trump is a symptom, not the disease, this is what they're talking about. They're looking for a society that works for them. And if anything, America's lost generation is a story of a generation that quite simply is being forced to live in a country that doesn't care how successful it is. And the reality is, before the New Deal, before 1933, this is how the country operated. We've been here before. This isn't even A new thing. We've been here before. I mean, regulations were passed because William Hearst had too much power because he controlled American public opinion. No one talks about how Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella basically control public opinion in this country because the tech companies own all the platforms.
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C
Well, and that's gonna, that's getting worse. With AI, right? You have a handful of companies that are literally gonna control how we think
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B
those two problems begin to crash into each other. Right? If AI can figure out what the algorithm wants, that's all people will see. And all of a sudden, sudden the perception of an issue changes and public opinion changes. That is a huge amount of power. That's held by eight companies in total. Four big AI companies, four big social media companies. That's eight companies that basically have more power than is what is good for anyone. I mean, that's, that's, that's actual power. We should all be in great fear of anybody having that much power. And the last time a handful of people had that much power in this country, they almost crashed this country. Because out of that great system you got the Great Depression. We know what happens. We know how to avoid it. The question is, will we have the will to do so? And that's where millennials political apathy is particularly problematic, because we really should be in the streets all day, every day, all the time. And, and maybe that time, the time for this has passed. Maybe it's too far gone. That is one of my fears is that we've already lost the moment and we're, we're doing this now, you know, sort of thing, and we may, we may be unable to change that. The forces and powers are simply too great. I hope that's not true. I really do. If GM workers in 1934 could go on strike and get decent wages when they had everything to lose, surely we can do the same. I hope, I hope. And for a lot of us, that's all we've got left. And even as a good journalist who comes from a lot more privileged, a lot of people do, who, you know, has had wonderful opportunity and, but has also struggled and all this type of thing. I hope that for us, I do, I hope that for us, lives depend on it. Very seriously. Lives depend on it.
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C
Yeah. Well, Cameron Cohen, thank you so much for making time for us. Really, really enjoyed the conversation.
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B
Thank you so much, David. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.
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A
That is it for this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast, for links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrage overload.net if something in
- [24:31]
C
this episode sparked a thought, or maybe
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A
even lit a fire, I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a voice message or even Schedule a quick one on one chat right from our contact page at outrageoverload.net contact if you found this episode valuable, please share it or leave a review.
- [24:48]
C
It really helps.
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A
Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next.
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B
Ram.