Hey, What Gen Are You From?

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Hey, What Gen Are You From?"

The Commentary Magazine Podcast hosted by Jon Podhoretz delves into generational identities, their impact on political temperaments, and memorable personal encounters that have shaped the panelists' lives. In this holiday edition released on December 30, 2024, Podhoretz is joined by executive editor Abe Greenwald, media columnist Christine Rosen, Washington columnist Matthew Continetti, and senior editor Seth Mandel. The episode is structured around listener questions, fostering rich discussions that blend personal anecdotes with broader societal observations.

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1. Exploring Generational Identity and Political Temperament (00:46 - 21:16)

The episode kicks off with a listener question from Josh Strike addressing generational affiliations and their influence on political views. Strike identifies himself as being on the cusp of Gen X and Gen Y, drawing a line based on the presence of smartphones and social media during adolescence.

Abe Greenwald (00:21 - 03:37) reflects on his position as potentially the last generation accustomed to payphones, highlighting a transitional experience between the analog past and the digital present. He states:

"I go back to pay phones. I think in a lot of ways that people who were people of my generation grew up in a world that was more similar to the world of the '50s than it is to the world of today."

Abe expresses a sense of being torn between generations, criticizing the younger generation's smartphone dependency while acknowledging his own adoption of similar habits.

Christine Rosen (03:37 - 06:40) identifies more closely with Gen X despite being technically a millennial. She shares:

"I've always kind of identified more with Gen X than with the millennials, which I'm technically a millennial. But if you get super specific in this kind of generation theory or theology, I'm an edge millennial, which means I'm closer to Gen X."

Christine discusses the distinctions within generational labels, emphasizing her alignment with Gen X cultural and historical markers, such as memories of the Reagan presidency.

Matthew Continetti (06:40 - 10:44) defends Gen X by highlighting their unique position amidst significant social shifts like higher divorce rates and the rise of latchkey kids. He posits that this background fosters a healthy skepticism alongside a potential for cynicism:

"Gen X really is this strange hybrid if you look at it in terms of how we consume information... it made us the kind of dark horse."

Matthew attributes the surprising support for Trump in recent elections to Gen X's pragmatic resignation towards political extremes, suggesting a desire for balanced leadership.

Seth Mandel (10:44 - 17:30) challenges the notion of generational coherence, arguing that age differences often overshadow generational ones. He recounts his experiences with video games and technology, illustrating how niche interactions can transcend generational boundaries. Seth also critiques the marketing-driven creation of generational labels:

"The reason that we think about generations is itself anomalous... it's a marketing tool for Madison Avenue and corporations to say, this is how we're going to get a 17-year-old to start using our product."

The panel collectively explores whether generational differences are substantial or largely a construct of societal and marketing narratives.

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2. Listener Question: Indelible Personal Encounters (21:16 - 31:30)

The discussion shifts to a more personal tone with a listener question from Conor Dimison, asking about encounters that left a lasting impression on the panelists.

Abe Greenwald (21:45 - 23:09) shares a memorable encounter with legendary musician Bill Withers:

"I was at the bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel, and I met Bill Withers. He told me about how he wrote 'Lean On Me' while in the armed forces... he was incredible."

Abe recounts the surreal experience of meeting Withers, emphasizing the artist's humility and creativity.

Christine Rosen (23:09 - 25:07) presents a contrasting negative encounter with poet Kenneth Koch during her time at Columbia University:

"I submitted my stories to Professor Koch... the meeting did not go well. He was the most arrogant, selfish, condescending person I'd ever met."

Christine's interaction with Koch left a lasting impression, leading her to abandon her aspirations in fiction writing and pivot towards journalism and conservatism.

Seth Mandel (25:07 - 28:47) reminisces about his childhood encounter with football players at an airport hotel. As a young child, he approached what he believed to be football giants, an experience that solidified his perception of football players as larger-than-life figures:

"It cemented in my head that unlike baseball players and other athletes... football players were like a species."

This early interaction fostered Seth's enduring fascination with the mystique of football.

Matthew Continetti (28:47 - 31:30) shares a formative meeting with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, facilitated by his friend's father, who Matthew initially mistook for a regular individual:

"When I explained to my parents, my dad instantly knew that this was Alexander Solzhenitsyn... it led to me starting to read Solzhenitsyn's work."

Matthew credits this encounter with broadening his intellectual horizons, inspiring him to explore themes of morality, geopolitics, and history.

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Conclusion (31:16 - End)

Jon Podhoretz wraps up the episode by acknowledging the engaging stories shared by the panelists. The discussions provide a nuanced understanding of how generational identities intersect with personal experiences and broader cultural shifts. The episode offers listeners insightful reflections on the fluidity of generational labels and the profound impact of individual encounters on one's worldview.

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Notable Quotes:

• Abe Greenwald (03:37): "I go back to pay phones... feel very torn."

• Christine Rosen (06:40): "I'm an edge millennial, which means I'm closer to Gen X."

• Matthew Continetti (08:49): "Gen X really is this strange hybrid... Gen Xers are like a dark horse."

• Seth Mandel (10:57): "The reason that we think about generations is itself anomalous... a marketing tool."

• Christine Rosen (25:07): "Kenneth Koch... the most arrogant, selfish, condescending person I'd ever met."

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This episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast offers a compelling exploration of generational dynamics and personal narratives, providing listeners with a deep dive into how different cohorts perceive and interact with the evolving cultural landscape.

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Some preach and pain Some die of.

[Christine Rosen]

Thirst the way of knowing which way.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It'S going Hope for the best, expect.

[Abe Greenwald]

The worst, hope for the best.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Welcome to this holiday edition of the Commentary magazine daily podcast. I am Jon Podhorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So we are answering listener questions here at the end of the year, the beginning of the new year, and we have a couple today that I would like to toss out to the panel for your general perusal. And they are they're a little personal today. So the first comes from Josh Strike, who says, I'm a frequent listener. I was born under Carter on the cusp of Gen X and Gen Y. I personally draw a more important line between people who had smartphones or social media as teenagers and those of us who were a little too old to. I get the sense that John is the eldest of the band. That sense is entirely correct by by about 10 years at a minimum. And his references are usually to growing up in the 60s and 70s. But I'm curious which generation each of you feels the most affiliated with, how being part of or in opposition toward your generation affected your political temperament and also whether it makes a difference in the long run or whether all generations end up the same. What an interesting question from, from Josh Strike. So, Abe, as the as the second oldest here, perhaps you could explain yourself generationally.

[Abe Greenwald]

I feel as if I'm sort of the last generation to use payphones for, for to have used payphones for a huge portion of my life and planning and like, you know, socializing. So we're forget about smartphones. I, you know, I go back to pay phones. I think in a lot of ways that so I was born in 71. I think in a lot of ways, people who were people of my generation grew up in a world that was more similar to the world of the 50s than it is to the world of today. Yet I've spent half of my life in the world of today. So I feel very torn. I think, unfortunately, I think I go through life criticizing the generations that have been raised with smartphones while in embodying all their worst habits myself.

[Christine Rosen]

You know, I think it's funny because John is 1961, you're 1971, and I'm 1981. So it's kind of this staggered by decade there. And I've always kind of identified more with Gen X than with the millennials, which I'm technically a millennial. But if you get super specific in this kind of generation theory or theology, I'm an edge millennial, which means I'm closer to Gen X. And I think if you have memories of the Reagan presidency, then you're probably Gen X more than a millennial. And I do have memories of the Reagan presidency, of course, kind of dim ones, and they happened when I was pretty young. When you say that you saw the Challenger explode in your kindergarten class, you know, that you were kind of a youth, a wastrel during Reagan's time, but a more Gen X than millennial.

[Jon Podhoretz]

You know, as conservatives, I think we all feel as though we are out of step or influenced by things older than the contemporary or, you know, have been morally framed by things older than our own contemporary experiences and cultural landmarks and things like that. The greatest expression of this, of course, comes from the greatest English poet of the second half of the 20th century, Philip Larkin, who in his poem Honest Mirabilis said the sexual revolution began in 1963, which was just too late for me between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP, the Chatterley Band being the ban in England on D.H. lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, for being a work of obscenity. Something that is almost unimaginable to think about now that, you know, you can basically access, you know, like people having sex while eating crickets on your computer. You know, like this was a thing that was where one of the great writers of the day could have a work suppressed on the grounds that it was.

[Unknown Speaker]

It was obscene.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But the whole point is being out of step, out of joint, and not quite there with the things that were happening, that were liberating, that seemed liberating to people. And every moment over the course of the decades, people have these illusory senses of liberation from the shackles of the past that we then discover maybe some of those shackles were there for a reason and that loosening them meant chaos rather than a greater degree of freedom. Not all of them, but also that a lot was lost when you. When you replace the old with the new. Christine.

[Matthew Continetti]

So this is where I'm going to jump in and make my pitch for why I'm. I was born in 1973, so Abe and I are both Gen Xers. You're way too modest about our amazing Generation 8. But this is where I think Gen X is unusual because we Lived through some massive social shifts. The latchkey kids, higher divorce rates, a real cynicism about a lot that was pervasive in the culture at a certain point. And instead of, I think at the time, I mean, I remember as a child following cultural discussions and debates, we were aware that something was being lost at the time. And I think it's what's made us, at our best, very cultivate a very healthy skepticism, whether it's about new technologies, new forms of political leadership, new kinds of expressions of culture. At our worst, it makes us so cynical, we just shrug and go, oh, well, no, we can do nothing where it's nihilism, basically. So there is that constant tension. But Gen Gen X really is this strange hybrid if you look at it in terms of how we consume information. We remember the old ways, we remember the pace of the old ways. So I think it's why it made us the kind of dark horse. In the most recent election, Gen went for Trump. And a lot of people were shocked by this who aren't in Gen X. I was completely not shocked by that at all. Because there's a sort of shrug and like, well, the generation has tended to try to resist the extremes. It's like, is democracy going to end? That's ridiculous. Is it okay to drink warm water out of the hose? Probably not, but it's the only option. I mean, there's a real. There's a kind of acceptance, world weariness that I remember some of my friends having when we were all like 13. So. So I will make that defense. There's a group of us here in D.C. organized by my wonderful friend Andy Smarak, and we get together for sort of a Gen X conservatives lunch. And among Gen Xers who are conservative, it's really fascinating to hear people's intellectual journeys, how they got to conservatism, because they're very meandering paths. There doesn't tend to be some moment of deep radicalization. And I would make a pitch that we, you know, it would be nice to see a Gen Xer in a leadership position at the national level in the near future.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, you know, it's interesting because Josh Strike, in his note to us, you know, says this offers this delineation between the smartphone generation and the generation before smartphones. But I think all of us have some version of the smartphone that we just missed that I. That I think we don't feel was amiss at all. And in my case, it was video games. Now, this may sound like very little, and I played video games in my dorm room, in my dorm's basement at the University of Chicago. Space Invaders and Frogger and games like that on machines you put in quarters and that, that was the thing. But the gaming that went home and that people did at home, I was three or four years too old for. And I genuinely don't know what would have become of me had I fallen into that world. Now I know great many people who are gamers and have grown and have grown into very fine middle aged adults whose lives weren't delineated by their basement rec room with that TV and those games and getting ever and ever more complicated. But knowing my own personality and knowing how I sometimes consume culture, I feel like I dodged a bullet. Not having been old and having been able to say this is a whole thing I'm not even going anywhere near because it just seems to me like a giant, colossal waste of time. And the more engaging it is, the more time you waste at it. And a lot of things are waste of time. Being a sports fan is kind of a waste of time. There, there are things that you could sort of defined as waste of time.

[Seth Mandel]

I mean, as jazz, as a Jets fan, I can.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, that's certainly, that's. That's. You know, it's been 50 years since it wasn't a waste of time to be a Jets fan. 55 years since it actually, the video.

[Seth Mandel]

Game thing is actually very interesting because I nintend. I'm in. I'm. Matt and I are the same generation. Almost, almost the same age. We're like a year apart. Um, and I have. Being part of that generation has actually. Or that part of that generation has made me not believe in generations, sort of, because I, for a long time we were known as Elder Millennials, which was a way of saying we were not really Millennials. We also didn't have the same experiences that Gen X had. We were like, Matt and I were like, we're part of like a three year generation. We have like, there's like three or four years when all of us are like, and it'll never be named. And then they, they changed that from Elder Millennial to. They tried to change it to Geriatric Millennial because Elder Millennial was deemed not insulting enough to us. So there's like, we're sort of looked at as like the camp counselors of Millennials. It's a weird situation and that has always shown me that, um, it's really the trends and the time difference. Age differences are much bigger than generational differences. And I had Once I had employees that were technically within a generation of me but were like from another planet that really hit home. You know, if I. For somebody worked for me who was like six years younger than me, it was like, it was like my nephew. It was like they, you know, they. They came from a totally different planet. But the video game thing is interesting because in our generation was that my generation, the geriatric millennials, I like edge millennials, as Matt said, were the generation of Nintendo. Nintendo was invented and released when we were just born. We were only a few years old, so we were, we were sort of present at the creation of that. That changed everything with video games. I also played, you know, Frogger and stuff like that. Because until, until a few, a couple of years after Nintendo was really out, when you went to your friend's house, nobody had a Nintendo. They did have Ataris left over from whenever. And so you did play those games?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Commodores?

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, yeah. But the, but the games, you know, I played as a kid, I liked video games. And then, you know, I. I always thought that video games are sort of modern. Video games are bit too. Not sure I have the attention span for them. But then I had kids and what I did was I did something very interesting with the kids. My kids got really into playing Super Mario Run or something like that on my wife's cell phone, which is just a game where Mario is. Is running from the beginning, I guess. And you know, the early cell phone games were just like, you don't control the movement, you just have to control the jumping or whatever. And anyway, they got into Mario and the characters and they thought it. And I explained to them that this thing they're holding this phone, you know, Mario is decades old and that I used to play on a console. And then I had to explain what a console is and with a controller. And then I had to explain what a controller is. Because if you were born in the touchscreen generation, you don't even understand attaching a wire to the thing you were controlling.

[Christine Rosen]

You could also just get them a switch.

[Seth Mandel]

So. Right. So eventually get them a switch.

[Christine Rosen]

And that will explain.

[Seth Mandel]

That is what we did. But what we started is I said, you know, I showed them, I did Nintendo emulator on my computer. And we started with the first Mario, but why the second Mario? And we went to Mario to take a tour of how much things had really changed in that time.

[Jon Podhoretz]

See, and this is why I'm glad. I don't even know about Mario and I don't know about Atari and I don't know about. And all this because. And it's by the way, rap music also came in later. I mean, first rap, of course, real hip hop started in, in New York City when I was a teenager in the 1970s, but it really hit when I was in my, my twenties. And that's again in all of modern popular culture, which I, A lot of people would consider me an extraordinarily informed person. That is an entire branch of the culture of which I have absolutely no experience whatsoever. But generationally, and then we should move off of this. The reason that we think about generations is itself anomalous. So I'm a baby boomer. And the reason that we think about generations is because of the baby boomers. The baby boomers represented a completely anomalous moment in world history where coming back from the war, victorious war, America as the most powerful country in the world, this surge of, you know, optimism and self confidence and this population of 16 million people who had served in the military and wanted to come home and get on with their lives and make new lives and live a life of purpose and meaning and with family and all of that created this population bulge. And then all of American culture, capitalism, everything became dedicated to servicing it because there was so, it was so big and there was so much of it and there were so. And suddenly there was music dedicated to it and there were, there was television dedicated to it and there were products, breakfast cereals and Saturday things that were sold on Saturday morning cartoons and all of that. And we still talk about generations as though, well, that was the baby boomers and then there were the Xers and then there were the millennials and then there were the Yers and now there's the Z ers. But, but those generations are not, they are completely knock on just normal. The product of normal population growth and people having children and stuff like that and trying to come up with generational consciousness when there's no real reason for generational consciousness except as a marketing tool for Madison Avenue and corporations to say, this is how we're going to get a 17 year old to start using our product.

[Unknown Speaker]

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[Matthew Continetti]

Well, but there are generational cultural markers and I can't believe you. You didn't. You. You did not have any sort of experience with Rapper's Delight because that was like 1979. That was sugar Hill Gang. That was the beginning of the. But there are cultural markers that I wonder, particularly for Gen Z given how fragmented popular culture is now and how niche oriented, if they will even see themselves in the same way as a generation in the way that all of us did because we were kind of grandfathered into the culture.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But I hope they don't because I don't think it's a. I don't think it's a proper perspective on society or on, you know, you, you. You don't actually have any particular connection to people. Well, but your own.

[Matthew Continetti]

The animosity that Gen X has towards the boomers, for example, is deserved because you guys just won't get off the stage, and we're totally deserved.

[Unknown Speaker]

I apologize.

[Matthew Continetti]

No, but there I do think for.

[Jon Podhoretz]

My generations, horror, nightmare, narcissistic cultural detritus, like, very little to praise our code.

[Matthew Continetti]

The millennial generation was a large generation. So I do think the size in terms of just the scale and the cultural impact and the cultural production of each generation, we're still, we're now living in a parasitical relationship with the culture produced by the boomers. So when everybody complains about the boomers, I do like to remind them of that fact, too. But I do think size matters, and I think that with the millennial generation, their impact on culture was far greater in some ways than Gen X, just because there were more of them.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, let's move on to a question. Everybody doesn't have to answer this if you don't have an answer, but it's sort of an interesting question from Conor Dimison. Tell us about an encounter with a person that left an indelible impression on you. So obviously, that could be anybody. It could be a teacher, it could be a famous person, it could be a politician, it could be a writer, whatever. Anybody.

[Abe Greenwald]

Have I have an answer.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Just trying to date it. I think this was somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 years ago. I was at the bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel, and I met Bill Withers. And it wasn't just that I met Bill Withers. He was incredible. He told me about how he wrote Lean On Me when he was in the armed forces, and he had sort of snuck into a supply room that had a piano, and he just put his hands on the chords and went up and down, and that ended up being Lean On Me. And then he took this very eccentric idea for a movie that he wanted to make, and then his daughter showed up, and he introduced me to his daughter, and she was lovely and amazing. And it was just one of those experiences where he's. I, I said, was this a dream? What was this? Did this happen? He was great. He was incredible.

[Christine Rosen]

So I, I. So that is my story means that I have to use the negative story that I was contemplating. I had a positive one, but I'm going to go with the negative one. And that is when I went to Columbia and showed up in 1999 there, I wanted to be a creative writer. I thought I would be a fiction writer. And I had started writing. People who listen to the podcast regularly won't be surprised. I started Writing science fiction stories and sending them out and everything. And one of the, you know, appeals of Columbia was that there were some prominent writers who worked there. And among them was a man named Kenneth Koch, who was a very prominent poet and a member of the New York School of Poetry, which included figures like John Ashbery. And probably the most famous of them was the poet Frank O'Hara. And so I thought, okay, my plan was. And I wasn't a conservative or anything at this time. My plan was, I'm gonna. I'm doing my writing, doing my reading. I'm gonna meet Kenneth Koch and I'm gonna become. He's gonna become my mentor. And this is gonna be my entree into the New York literary scene. And I. At that point, I, like. I went to a poetry reading by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the last he ever gave on the Lower east side and everything. So that was my kind of. This is what I wanted to do. So I submitted my stories to Professor Koch for his creative writing class, and we had to have a meeting with him during office hours to see whether you would get in. And the meeting did not go well. And he was the most arrogant, selfish, condescending person I'd ever met. And he said, I've read your stories. You need to sober up before you can be in my class. And so I left.

[Seth Mandel]

And Matthew Continetti, famous goofball, decided not.

[Christine Rosen]

To become a fiction writer, but to become a journalist and became a conservative. So take that, Kenneth Coke. Look what you did.

[Jon Podhoretz]

A, I loathe Kenneth Coke's work. B, Kenneth Koch, also famous for being an anthologist. He was one of the people who gathered the poetry of the second half of the 20th century in various anthologies and did a terrible job of it. And, yes, he was famously unpleasant and has now been completely obscured by history and will long be forgotten while you will be admired and remembered.

[Christine Rosen]

Don't know about that part, but it was an indelible. You asked for an indelible encounter, and I will never forget it.

[Seth Mandel]

Okay, I will. I will use. I'll go. Also go in another direction and use a childhood encounter. Probably the thing that stayed with me the most. My encounter was about how things shape your impression of them when you're a kid. And we were staying at an airport hotel on our way to Disney World when I was a kid, my parents took us, me and my two sisters, and we were all staying in one room overnight. It was like the night from hell, we refer to it as. It was everybody in the same room. And at one point we heard that somebody told my father that the Indianapolis Colts were staying in that hotel because they're playing the jets the next day. So they said, why don't you go down and see if you can find a cult or, you know, whatever. And we took, I think that we had our. Just a hotel pad in case I got autographs, you know, whatever. And I went downstairs and we waited. We waited. We didn't say. Finally some giant men came out of a room and I was like, they've got to be football players because they're, you know, and, and I, and I was really little, I was really very young. And I went over to them and I asked them, I just, you know, can I have your. I didn't even know who they were because it was like, you know, a linebacker and an offensive lineman or like these, these are like giant humans. These are the ones you know are football players. You don't always know the wide receiver or the running back is a football player by looking at them. The guys you know are. The guys are more likely to be sort of anonymous and. And they. The first one who took it sort of grunted in ascent and I had to hold the pad while he signed his name and kept walking through the lobby and out into the rain. And so I was like, I don't know, like, you know, five or six year old Seth. And I was doing this because a giant, this meaning Seth is holding the.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Pad, holding the pad in his hands.

[Seth Mandel]

I'm holding the pad up horizontally as if, as if I'm pushing something like, like, like benchmarking against him, right? Yeah, because the four. I had to hold the, the notepad. And the force is so great from this giant football human and you know, the chicken scratch. You couldn't even make out really who it was, but it was, it was like this feeling of being among gladiators. This person like couldn't see me. I was, you know, I was like behind the pad, I was tight. He was looking straight ahead and he would only interact with me as I held the pad and he continued walking and I walked out into the rain. That's how I got these guys, some of these guys, autographs. And that stuck with me because it was. It football was cemented in my brain as this kind of gladiatorial.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But you don't know who he was?

[Seth Mandel]

No, I don't even remember. I don't even. Somewhere. So we figured out, I think at the time, I think we figured it out, but he was very famous player. But it cemented in my head that unlike baseball players and other athletes that I, you know, have met or seen up close or whatever, football players were like a species.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

Their own. And the mystique of football has held for me ever since.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Christine, you have anything?

[Matthew Continetti]

I do. I have a. As our listeners know, I've played the bassoon since I was eight. I went to a music camp for four summers in Vermont. I think I've mentioned I might have shared a version of the story before, but the reason it is, it has continues to leave an impression is not for the random fortune of having met this person, but because of the world. It opened up for me once I figured out who he was. And that's one of my best buddies. I was 12 years old at camp. I just turned 12 while at camp. And one of my best buddies was another. Was kind of a absolute prodigy of a piano player. Young, young man I knew as Iggy. So when concerts happened, you could have. The parents would come sometimes if they lived nearby and listen to our concerts. And so I. Iggy's like, my father's coming. You should meet him. You know, he's going to play. So I go, I know it is.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Oh, my God.

[Matthew Continetti]

I. So after the concert, I go up and I shake this guy's head. I'm like, man, Iggy's dad is kind of austere, and he's old and. But whatever he was, you know, he's perfectly friendly. Said hello, said he enjoyed the playing. So I then tell this story on a pay phone. Abe. I could call my parents, like, once a week. So I call my parents, and I'm explaining, oh, I met so and so's parents. Met so and so's parents. My dad says, wait, who? I said, my friend Iggy. His dad, he, like, has a. He has. You know, I think he's Russian. I don't know. And my dad instantly knew that this was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which it was. And I'm like, yeah, Iggy's dad. He goes, do you know who this is? And I was like, iggy's dad. So he. Then he's like, okay, well, when you get home from camp, we're gonna have a conversation about this. And you know what it led to? Me starting to read Solzhenitsyn's work. And I was at this perfect age where, you know, when you're 13, 14 years old, your world starts to broaden, if you're lucky, and you start to see yourself as part of a nation, as part of a. You know, I just had never really thought through the dynamics of the world I was living in. And that was that opened this door into this entirely new universe of morality, of geopolitics, of history, and a door I hope never closes. But it all began because of this chance meeting with my goofy buddy at camp, who went on to have quite a really productive and wonderful musical career as a conductor and a pianist. But, yeah, that left an impression. But retrospectively, because I really didn't know who movie was at the time.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, I. Nothing I can say can top that. So I think we'll end. We'll end there. So great stories. So for Christine, Matt, Seth and Aba, I'm John Pot Horitz.

[Unknown Speaker]

Keep the candle Bur.