Boomers, Burners, and Flying Cars with Cal Newport | GoodFellows

We're going to go on a journey that takes us to Western Europe and Russia and Ukraine.

Let's start in Western Europe, France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and civil unrest over what we're told are school conditions, expensive housing, and the cost of living.

I'm not quite sure what this has to do with setting buildings on fire, looting air mazes, and Louis Vuitton shops in the name of better schools.

Perhaps Sir Neil Ferguson has the answer.

Neil, you recently wrote a column for the Free Press entitled Why Europe is Burning.

Tell us why.

And hey, Neil, I'm in awe of what you do, man.

I'm telling you.

You impart so much understanding on what's going on on such a consistent basis on a short timeline, man.

It's a fantastic essay.

Well, you, as Henry Kissinger used to say when people complimented him, aren't you sweet or aren't you nice? I...

I think since I wrote that column, which is just over a week ago, things have clearly escalated in French cities.

And not only in France, there are copycat riots occurring in other European cities.

And the point I was making is that the stated objectives of the protesters are strangely heterogeneous.

In France, it's the quality of investment in schools.

In Spain, the cost of housing in Madrid.

We've gone now very quickly, because of the violence of the recent protests, to what I'll call the X interpretation.

If you spend a lot of time on X, then what's happening is, in fact, that migrants are running amok and it's the sack of Rome all over again.

This is the new narrative, which I think is misleading.

You can see, if you look closely, that the crowds are actually not homogenous.

More recent riots about which we know more in France show, and here I'm going to do my best to generalize accurately, that there's a radical left element that is responsible for at least some of the organized protests.

And those are mostly white students, or we would call them anti-far types in the U.S., Then there clearly are people from immigrant communities, but mostly second and third generation.

These are not people that arrived in 2015 in Europe who are involved as well.

And then there's some clearly outright criminal elements that are interested in looting rather than the kind of vandalism that led to the destruction of historic buildings recently.

And so you have to see that all of these things are going on simultaneously.