>> most, the great majority of the airwaves are still squandered. they are allocated to things that we set aside 50 or 60 years ago. the technologies are gone, the applications are moot. we need to come up with better mechanisms. to talkingdevoted about things regulators can do to unleash even more of what we have shown. >> watch the communicators tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span two. >> coming up shortly live we will be hearing from president trump as he honors officials from the agency involved in border protection. we will take you there live.

3 p.m. eastern time. while we wait for their remarks here's a portion from today's washington journal. >> he a member of the wall street journal and serves as an associate editorial editor. he is also the author of the book "zero hour for gen x: how the last adult generation can save american from millenials." good morning. why is saving needed? guest: you can see every morning when you open up the newspaper. it is millennials this, millennials that. i use the term in the demographic term but as a proxy for what i see as the ill effect of technology on all of our lives. part of the reason i wrote the book was i noticed i was getting distracted all of the time by my phone in situations i do not want to be distracted in. i wanted to analyze that and what i found when talking to people my own age as there was a lot of anxiety about that.

and i spoke to younger people, people we call millennials, i did not detect anxiety about it so i wanted to explore that and see if i cannot figure a way back from the digital distraction that was plaguing me. host: aside from the digital part, you wrote this. this is a moment when members of generation x should be setting the national agenda. we should be entering political and national influence. if we do not act, the millennial generation will sweep generation x overboard. how did you come to that conclusion? function of a numbers. generation x is a small group of people compared to the generation before and after. i have this vision in my mind of , who have outrs stayed there welcome, let's put it that way. the president is a baby boomer. every major institution in the united states is run by baby boomers. i have vision of them passing

the torch to millennials. i'm speaking figuratively and i'm being dramatic for affect. in individual cases that is not what is going to happen. as a way of illustrating my approach to this issue, i thought that was a good visual. host: when it comes to current society, power millennial shaping it, what are the main concerns aside from the digital part of it? guest: i'm concerned about the changes in attitudes. the approach to technology is important and i do not want to skip it. i am concerned about paying for things. i'm concerned about waiting for things. these are the main things i've noticed have changed in american life in the last 10 years. host: give an example. guest: i work in the newspaper business. that has been well documented that newspapers are going away in part because people find it annoying to pay for the content they consume. 10 to 15 years ago we saw that

same revolution taking place in the music industry. you have a 25-year-old or a whyear-old, they do not see they have to pay for stuff when it is all online for free. that stuck me as a fundamental shift. i do not think anyone who grew up in the 1970's or 1980's would dispute the relationship between the quality of the media you consume and what you pay for it, c-span notwithstanding. host: notwithstanding. host: you're saying this is more of a mindset that has you concerned? guest: when i talk to them i do not get the sense they are at all concerned from the drift of society away from a face-to-face world or a handshake world to a digital world. they are comfortable moving every aspect of interpersonal and professional relationships online or onto the phone. sayings survey research millennials are far more comfortable texting, would much rather text someone than speak

to them on the phone and in person. that struck me as something worth commenting on. we note in our daily lives -- it is not in dispute. in some cases we are swept away with it as well. i do not have anything personal against millennials. not lovemy meals do this line of reasoning and i get pushed back and that is fine and i hope to get some this morning. there are a lot of people who say this is bogus. even discussing people in these terms is a waste of time. it is an artificial construct, this idea of generations, and i'm sensitive to that, and i make the point of saying i understand the limits of this kind of analysis but i do not see there is any less value in talking about issues this way that in discussing people in terms of their racial or socioeconomic -- their background. say at the election time

white working-class voters do this, college-educated voters do this, i am simply using the vocabulary. host: our guest is with us. "zero hour for gen x: how the last adult generation can save american from millenials." that is the topic for the remainder of our time. we have divided the lines differently. if you were born before 1965, (202) 748-8000, if you are born between 1965 and 1980, (202) , and if you're born after, and if you're born after 1980, (202) 748-8002. there's a lot of concern dater prior toe world war -- and the millennial generation is between 1980 at

the turn-of-the-century. that is the kind of -- a lot of people are concerned with them doing their job. the millennials, that is such a millennials, that is such a big -- they are gigantic.

you want to know what i meant by millennials don't want to pay for news online? the proof is in the pudding. thepapers all across country, magazines as well are shutting down and struggling to stay afloat because their content gets aggregated off of stolen, grabbed, newspapers that have a substantial pay wall online,ve to run around

making sure people are sharing the steps they invested in. if you took a look in the lobby at the pile of newspapers, it's in large part to do with the papersty to sell subscriptions. there's not as much money in it as you would think. commodified's and these large companies aggregate your going to see less and less of the good quality stuff. maybe you are satisfied with what you have at the moment. i'm looking ahead and i'm not in

-- i'm not convinced. >> before 1965, this is an from wisconsin. >> my comment is i hear this all the time. don't like the baby boomers because you just said a comment for earlier about you are the last generation not to be cut from it. i think the boomers were the last generation that when you school yourat parents made sure you were responsible for what you did. they blame the teacher, not you. and you are not right about the representation of gen x. there are far more people in than are born in 1958. we were sick of next in.

generation. x.n president obama is a gen be glad for what you have. the millennials aren't the first ones that had technology. the baby boomers are. think a lot of people would disagree that barack obama is a gen x. i'm not entirely sure what here he was born. i'm sorry to tell you paul ryan is leaving the house and scott walker is in electoral trouble. when i talk about the torch being passed, the majority of the stories you will read about

the rising trend of younger politicians who are millennials. ending told president obama was born in 61. her recent victory, does she qualify? how does she fit into the picture? >> she's a millennial. absolutely a millennial. the book publishing cycle is much slower and longer than the news cycle and she popped out of nowhere. she's a useful example of the kind of energy and fervor and interest around there is a new generation on the scene. who knows how it's ultimately going to play out. when you openat

up the new york times in the morning, you're going to see three stories over the next few months. countryces around the in which young people in their 20's and early 30's are unexpectedly making good progress. it's a very salient storyline at the moment. i'm not calling for generation x server -- x to put a flag down. i'm making much more modest suggestions. a mostly have to do with your personal life and self-regulating, ways you raise your children. i'm not making a formative case sweeping thewave political tables or anything like that.

from california, born after 1980, this is dave. >> you are mentioning millennials don't feel efficient have to put -- have to pay for music online or news online. the bernie sanders rallies were all most exclusively millennials and bernie was telling them they shouldn't have to pay for health care, the shouldn't have to pay theyollege education, should be entitled to basic national income. me that one of the reasons bernie is so attractive to them as he is telling them they are entitled to all the stuff you and i had to work for in life. that is why they are so attracted to socialism, despite the fact that what is happening in venezuela, for example, where the country is collapsing.

you just have to take a trip down to venezuela to see the ism.lts of social the results have always been the same. everybody ends up poor and people lose their freedom. the government destroys the incentive for people to be industrious and enterprising. guest: i don't disagree with most of what you said. into a want to turn this left and right thing. we know the story about younger people. they tend to be like more to the left. as you get older, you tend to drift to the right. into a left and right thing. not in all cases. it is so popular among people who are millennials, people

around the age of 30 and below. i tie it to the ease of which problems can be solved online, on the internet, via all of the gizmos and gadgets silicon valley has been offering young people in the all immersive way that it has shaped their lives. if you grew up in a world in a problemcould solve at school or a problem in your personal life, or you could text your parents instantly, you are constantly in touch, you had all of this ability -- and more than just the ability, the faith that some sort of technology could solve their problems, i think you become impatient with problems that are difficult, and that will require a longer time. to solve.

-- time period to solve. if i'm going to diagnose anything with millennials in the political system, that is what i tie it to. all-encompassing belief that problems should be solvable. what is being called socialism looks to be too young people like a solution that all we need to do is flip this button. care,ollege, free health all of this is possible because we are just spending the money on other things. we could have all the good things we want. i think there is an element of conditioning that has gone on. remember -- there was afraid when i was a kid -- the divorce rate peaked in about 1980, a lot of my friends came home to empty houses. there were a lot of

single-parent families. you ended up with this generation of people that knew how to take care of themselves. knew how to go out into the neighborhood on a saturday morning or a weekday after school and their parents wouldn't necessarily know where they were. if you had a quarter in your pocket, you could find a pay phone, but your parents may not have been home. i think that fostered in people like me a kind of reliability and adaptability and resiliency that it is not just me who is saying it, but it has been remarked upon in great detail, has kind of gone missing among the generation that is now moving through their 20's. host: matthew with us. say, in my to ers have little-x loyalty to the people who built

their careers, and that is ok. guest: i think that is ok, too. we are all so familiar with this stereotype of a millennial who is really impatient with the jobs they are given to do, constantly wondering, when am i getting promoted? i know a nonprofit leader who said they had a performance review with a young millennial employee, and the in person said, what have you got planned for me? it is the kind of thing that makes you laugh, if you think about it, but it is so widespread that it has become an issue. i know that there are plenty of hard-working,ic, patient to millennials out there. the military is filled with millennials. they are all around the world and doing wonderful things, and they know how to take orders and do jobs.

they're going to come back and reintegrate into their communities and wonderful and positive ways. i am making broad claims for the purposes of gaining people's attention. hello, matthew. the previous caller took a lot of my thunder away. i want you to comment on the fact that so many of these a freeials believe that college education and free medical care and all of this, they don't seem to realize when they are 40 and 50, they are going to be paying for it instead of supporting their own kids. guest: i work for the editorial page of the wall street journal, so you're not going to hear me advocating for socialized medicine or free college tuition on this program. host: from maryland, angela is next. caller: thanks for writing a book on gen-x.

we are not talked about at all in books or online, from what i have researched. i know the baby boomers went from protesters of war, to feminism and their rights, come the 80's, they turned into the me generation. i will also include the thoughts of kurt this morning. once: i have a friend who said to me the baby boomers went to war on the institutions of the united states of america. on the institutions of the united states of america. that is an extreme statement. i understand what he meant. in a lot of ways, i see a lot of resonance with the impatience of the millennials. millennials have the benefit of that great size and with that

same attitude of disruption, welcoming disruption in every the new york city taxicab industry to the hotel industry to the media industry to hollywood to just about every industry you could think of that is being disrupted because of technology or because of connectedness or because of social media. they appear to welcome it. there is very little in the way of expressed concern. i have been happy this year to note that a lot of people in my pullingeem to have been back a little bit from their gadgets. the steady trickle of news -- that does not always have our best interest at heart. i know a lot of people saying i am not sure this is moving in

the direction we thought it was moving and we ought a pump the brakes. i've been pleased to see that. host: when it comes to military power, only 43% of money was believe that is an important goal. when it comes to american exceptionalism, millennials are less likely to embrace the idea. is that what you're seeing in your writing? chance togives me an make an interesting point which is infrequently remarked upon with regard to generation x. we grew up the ante with the cold war. we do not live in the 1950's .etting under your desk it was there and that anxiety was hanging over us. foraw a red dawn and rocky

and there was no doubt in our mind that there were good guys and bad guys out there. miraculously we saw the good guys win in the berlin wall fall and the collapse of communism. i'm not suggesting we were walking around thinking about it all of the time but it naturally fed into our approach to the world. this basic understanding that not all systems are equal and not all outcomes will be equal in unequal systems. when we see companies like google or apple playing footsie with china and agreeing to do re that we interpret as censorship of the -- or the limiting of information on the nurse -- on the internet, it bothers us deeply

i really don't know how to answer that. >> let's hear from ian here in washington, d.c. the just want to comment on millennials wanting free stuff. or, born right around 1980 and i'm from southern appalachia. many public universities in state university systems for decades now that have been providing scholarships basically free college, free university educations for their populations , i think usually you have to

maintain a grade point average usually of three points, which is doable. the reality is that these type of programs are sustainable, they have been going on, so it is easily done. , i barelyennessee paid anything for my undergrad. for law school which i had a lot of luxury in being able to do that, school paying private for my preschooler right now but i would wager that i'm paying more for a private preschool than many of these older people who are talking about people wanting free stuff paid -- paying for their entire education. >> i'm a hunter college of the

tuitionnew york and there when i graduated was roughly about $3000 a semester, so that's $6,000 at year. during my first few semesters there, i had almost no income. i was not living in my parent's home, no one was supporting me, and i paid almost nothing through a variety of grants and subsidies and things like that that are already in place. i think what you're pointing at is this sort of confusion that older people tend to have when they hear demands for free college in the sense as you were pointing out that it's almost free now, if you're willing to go to a state school or city school if you have those kinds of systems where you live. up,ou work hard and show

it's almost impossible to not be able to find an affordable undergraduate education. , askingrite in the book a political to critique or the -- pointing out the flaws and shortcomings of the wired up way we now live is like inviting him to commit treason. you go on from there, but expand on that. , ito hear you say treason sure sounds like i'm not being very nice. what i found is that in talking to people about this, you get different reactions, depending on how old you are. when i talk to baby boomers about this, the sense i get is that they are mostly resigned, the sort of sense that you would expect among older people, like we don't really get it, we don't understand what's happening. we don't know why we have to live in a world where the

toaster can talk -- is connected to the internet, or why these kids are wearing fitbit's that are connected to the computer that sending data on them back to silicon valley. why is that? i don't know, i guess it's going to work out in we will just leave it be. among the older generation there's a fair amount of resignation about this. in the future everyone will be in driverless cars and shuttling from here to there with google glass sending thought mail and all sorts of futuristic things. it will be the jetsons, and that will be fine. s who remember the way the world was before the internet came along or feeling that displacement very deeply in an emotional kind of way. like i notice myself changing, i'm not capable of doing the

used to be able to do quite easily, and i'm not true that i love it. i don't think that i want my kids to grow up this way. that's where i'm at. then when you talk to millennials, there is a sort of -- blitheness about technology in their lives. of course these big companies know everything about me, what's the problem? they're just trying to get me a better user experience with apple or when i'm online. i don't care if they know what my deodorant preferences. i don't even care if they are listening to me at the kitchen table when i'm talking with my roommates about the stuff we're going to do that day, if it means that later on in the day i won't be bombarded with irrelevant ads, if they can target me with the stuff that i really want and figure out how to help me live better, faster,

cheaper, and easier, then what is the big deal? part of the reason i wrote this book is that i wanted to address this sense of "what's the big deal?" here use strong leg which because i think the threat is dire.dyer -- i speak for myself, not for the wall street journal, but i not true that people have fully taken on board how quickly we have gone from the sort of brick-and-mortar world that i grew up in to this always connected, always on, always .istening world it's been about a decade, which is actually a very short time. , i'm that short time attesting to this personally, and i think a lot of people will relate, i feel like i've had the wiring of my brain sort of shifted around. first thing in the morning, i

checked the phone. last thing before i go to bed, i checked the phone. when i'm trying to make pancakes with my kids on saturday morning, i'm checking the phone. when i'm not supposed to be at work, i'm at work. all of these kind of things that i think would've shocked my grandfather, for instance, and have him shaking his head saying , why would you want to live that way? i understand there are many great benefits to the internet, to these kind of devices, i know that disabled people are able to interact and connect with the world in a way they never had before, all good. -- i'm askingt of people to consider the downsides a little more critically than they have. >> from new york, eric is next. >> thanks for taking my call. in 63 so i'm on the tail end of the baby boom generation. , talkingr growing up

about this whole socioeconomic dimension. it took one income in a family to pay the bills. one parent had the freedom to stay home and take care of their kids. it was a different world. parents and kids spend more time together. families were intact. 1970's, early 1980's, all of that had changed. after reagan and trickle-down economics, you have a situation where the middle class began to shrink rapidly. low-wage service jobs, it took two incomes, parents working two or three jobs each just to pay the bills. i think these millennials are the product of that. i would call that socioeconomic decline of the middle class. >> that's a little bit outside the purview of my book, which is really a critical look at the way technology is messing with our heads, but i take your

point, it certainly was a different time. when you said parents and children spend more time together, i immediately thought, you probably seen on the highway, a family on the road trip and all the kids in the back seat with her eyes on their devices, or you've seen those kids in a restaurant where they are staring at their devices. one of my targets in the book is the amazon alexa, the echo, which is obviously a very popular consumer product and is in a lot of homes. i was thinking in the green room before i came on here that a kid only needs to be around one of these things once. the first time they encounter an ipad or an iphone or amazon alexa, and you see how incredibly they change. almost instantly, and the addictive potential of these devices is really extraordinary.

we frequently referred to millennials as digital natives, i think you've heard that term, the idea that they are uniquely equipped for the modern world or for the future by virtue of their upbringing, and the digitization of it, how they just grew up these devices and they know them intimately and they shape and guide their thinking, where is a guy like me to have a little trouble with snapchat are not understand the latest edition of some app or why they are all obsessing over that i've seenis my kids around and amazon alexa can have seen how they flip out. i don't mean to throw them under the bus, i think it is very common phenomenon. treating these devices like they are a servant. in ate a woman in the book magazine article who said people talk to the amazon alexa, you

wouldn't talk to a dog that way. so it's not bringing out the best in us, let's just say. i think if you are to bring a device like that into your home, you're asking for trouble. digitalion of, like, nativity is an extremely and i'm not sure how --put it, of these qatari obfuscatory. if you set i'm going to bring an addictive drug into your house and give it to your kid and we will call them digital junkies, you might think twice before bringing some of these devices into your house. >> more can be found in the book . the author, matthew hennessy of the wall street journal, serves as a features editor. thanks for your time.

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here from the white house. president trump will be honoring officials from the agencies that cancel -- handle customs and border section. homeland security secretary kiersten nilsen and also vice president mike pence to make remarks as well. just waiting here in the room as people are gathering for the president and vice president. >> ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states, accompanied by the secretary of homeland security. [applause] >> good afternoon. thanks, everyone, for being here. it's my great honor and pleasure to join you at the white house today. we are here to salute the very brave