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Meet Kari Bandle, a professional psychic, medium, empath, healer and owner of Sacred Whispers Studio. This podcast dives into the messy, magical and meaningful parts of being human. Each episode blends science with spirituality to explore real life topics along with techniques for empowerment and healing. Sign up for your weekly energy forecast along with the podcast topic in Kari's emails on the main page at: sacredwhispers1111.com
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These empowering podcasts help you navigate life with more clarity, knowledge, and solution-based compassion for your life's journey.
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Hey, you. Happy fourth of July. I'm Carrie, your host of Medium with a Mic. And today, since you're probably either sitting in a lawn chair right now or desperately wishing you were, we're doing a fourth of July episode, but not the kind you're thinking. You know me.
Kari Bandle:We're not going to talk about hot dogs. Well, I mean, we might talk about hot dogs, but no promises. But mostly, we're going to talk about things that made your history teacher nervous. We're going to talk about the absolutely wild, unhinged, brilliant, and sometimes deeply petty people who started this country. And then we're going to zoom all the way back out and talk about the eighty year cycle, the four turnings.
Kari Bandle:Have you heard of this? The theory that history doesn't just repeat. It rhymes on a schedule and that we are sitting smack in the middle of one of the most significant turning points in that entire cycle. So grab your iced tea, your sparklers, your lawn chair, and let's go. So 07/04/1776.
Kari Bandle:What do you actually know about it? If you're like most people, you know, declaration of independence, John Hancock signed it in big letters, Something about tea in a harbor, freedom, fireworks, done. Let me give you some of my favorite obscure facts about the American Revolution because I think when you know these, the whole thing becomes more human and more relatable. These weren't mythological superheroes. They were stressed out, squabbling, complicated people doing something that terrified all of them.
Kari Bandle:No wonder they drink... Drank a lot of beer. But here's fact number one. July 4 was almost not the date we celebrate. The Continental Congress actually voted for independence on 07/02/1776, not the fourth.
Kari Bandle:John Adams, was arguably the most obsessive notetaker in... Of the... All of the founding fathers, wrote to his wife, Abigail, and and said July 2 would be celebrated with fireworks and festivities forever. He was so sure the second was the day, but he was wrong. The declaration was adopted and dated on the fourth, and the rest is history.
Kari Bandle:Adams was reportedly a little salty about this for the rest of his life, which feels very on brand for him. Sometimes the footnote becomes the headline, and the person who was sure they had it figured out has to watch history go a different direction. I find that deeply relatable. Most of the founders were absolutely terrified. When they signed the declaration of independence, they were not signing a document of triumph.
Kari Bandle:They were signing what could have been their own death warrants. Treason against the crown was punishable by death, specifically being hanged, drawn, and quartered, which I will not go into detail about. But I will say these men knew exactly what they were risking, and they signed anyway. The bravery it took to put your name on that document is something I think we genuinely underestimate. We look back at them as legends, but in the moment, they were just people who had reached the point where the cost of not acting felt greater than the cost of acting.
Kari Bandle:That is a very human calculation, and it's one a lot of us face in our own lives. The Boston Tea Party was not really about tea. Well, it was about tea, in that tea was the thing that got thrown in the harbor, but it was actually about a monopoly. The British, East India Company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the British government gave them exclusive rights to sell tea directly to the colonies, cutting out all the American merchants who had been selling Dutch tea. The colonists who dumped the tea were a lot of them, the merchants, the businessmen, who were being economically strangled by corporate monopoly backed by the government.
Kari Bandle:The revolution was in many ways a reaction to a giant corporation being given preferential treatment at the expense of regular people. I'll just leave that there. The declaration of independence was not signed all at once on July 4. Most of the delegates didn't sign until 08/02/1776, nearly a month later, and some signatures were added even after that. The famous moment you're picturing, everyone gathered around quill in hand on the July 4 is largely a myth.
Kari Bandle:It was a more drawn out logistically complicated process. It's not like they had a cell phone to get ahold of each other. Hey. Get over here and sign this thing, which honestly tracks for any big group decision ever made by a committee of humans. Now Benjamin Franklin suggested the turkey as a national bird.
Kari Bandle:Well, not exactly. It's a slight oversimplification. What he actually did was mock the bald eagle in a letter to his daughter, saying it was a bird of bad moral character because it steals fish from smaller birds and is generally lazy. He wrote that the turkey was actually a more respectable bird, a true original native of America, courageous in defending its territory. Whether he was entirely serious is debated by historians to this day, but I love this story because it's Franklin being Franklin, iconoclastic, irreverent, and making everyone else slightly uncomfortable.
Kari Bandle:That's classic. Did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on 07/04/1826? Fifty years. Exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted to the day. Jefferson died in the morning.
Kari Bandle:Adams died in the afternoon. His last words were reportedly Thomas Jefferson survives, not knowing that Jefferson had already passed hours earlier. Whether you call that coincidence, fate, or something else entirely, I will leave that to you. But I will say, as someone who believes there are no accidents, that one gives me chills every single time. The universe has a flare for the dramatic, and I can respect that.
Kari Bandle:The Star Spangled Banner was not our original national anthem, and it wasn't officially designated until 1931. For most of American history, there was no official national anthem. Various patriotic songs were used at different times. Hail Columbia, my country tis a thee. But it wasn't until Congress passed a resolution in nineteen thirty one, one hundred and fifty five years after the founding, that the Star Spangled Banner became official, which means that for almost the entire history of this country, we just kind of vibed no official anthem.
Kari Bandle:Make of that what you will. Okay. One more. The liberty bell cracked, and nobody knows exactly when. The liberty bell, one of the most iconic symbols of American independence, has a crack in it that everyone knows about.
Kari Bandle:What most people don't know is that historians genuinely are not certain when the crack appeared. It may have been cracked during testing when it first arrived from England in 1752. I just got, like, a vision in my head of some dude playing with it and hitting it and cracking it and going, oh god, and running. Anyway, it was recast twice. It may have cracked again in the eighteen forties.
Kari Bandle:What we know is by 1846 when they tried to ring it for George Washington's birthday, the crack was severe enough that it couldn't be rung anymore. A cracked bell that can no longer ring but still endures as a symbol of freedom. Honestly, as metaphors go, that one does a lot of heavy lifting. So before I get into the big history theory I wanna talk about, I need to take a quick personal detour because it's irrelevant, and I think some of you could relate to this. I remember the bicentennial in 1976, America's two hundredth birthday.
Kari Bandle:I was just a little kid, but I remember how big it felt. There was this collective energy in the air that I don't know if I felt quite the same way since. The whole country felt like it was celebrating something together. And I held on to some of the memorabilia from that time, little pieces of it, things that were made to commemorate the moment, pins, tokens, little paper cups, and that kind of thing. Objects meant to mark the occasion and say, we were here and this mattered.
Kari Bandle:I think about that now because in 1976, the country was also not in a great place in a lot of ways. Now, I don't remember most of this, but we had just come through Vietnam, Watergate, the civil rights movement had shaken everything up necessarily, righteously, but the shaking had been painful. There was a lot of national uncertainty and exhaustion. And yet there was this moment on the two hundredth birthday where people put some of that down and just said, we are still here and this is worth celebrating. So America turns two fifty this year and I find myself thinking about my little kid self holding those bicentennial cups and wondering what this generation, the ones who are little right now, will hold on to from this moment.
Kari Bandle:What will the memorabilia of be of 2026? What objects will they tuck into a drawer and pull out 50 from now and say I was here for this. I don't know the answer but I believe it will be something worth holding and I hope you share that with your children. Okay now the big theory because it all connects. In 1997, two historians named William Strauss and Neil Howe published a book called The Fourth Turning.
Kari Bandle:And what they laid out was a theory of history that the more you look at it, the harder it is to ignore. The basic idea is that history moves in roughly eighty to one hundred year cycles, each made up of four roughly twenty year seasons. And those seasons corresponded predictable shifts in the mood and values of society. They called these seasons turnings, and just like the seasons of the year, each one has a different feeling, a different purpose, and a different role in the larger cycle. Let me walk you through all four of them because I think once you understand what each turning actually is, you'll start recognizing them in history and maybe even in your own life.
Kari Bandle:The first turning is called the high. This is the spring of the cycle. It comes right after a major crisis has been resolved. The old order that collapsed has been swept away, and now a new order is being built and consolidated. Institutions are being strengthened.
Kari Bandle:There's a broad social consensus. People are largely aligned on what they're building toward. Individual expression tends to be suppressed in favor of collective unity. It feels optimistic, energetic, and constructive. The last first turning in America was roughly 1946 to 1964, what we know as the post World War II boom, the GI generation came home.
Kari Bandle:The suburbs were built. The economy expanded. There was this strong sense of national purpose and shared culture. People were con... Conformist by today's standards, yes, but there was genuine civic energy and optimism.
Kari Bandle:Baby boomers were born into this world and it shaped them. The second turning called the awakening. This is the summer of the cycle. The institutions that were built and consolidated in the high are now challenged from within. People, especially the young, start to ask, okay, we built all this stuff, but why?
Kari Bandle:What does it mean? There is a spiritual and cultural rebellion against the conformity of the previous era. New ideas and new movements, new consciousness floods in. It feels liberating and chaotic all at the same time. The last second turning was roughly 1964 to 1984.
Kari Bandle:The civil rights movement, the counterculture, Vietnam protests, the women's movement, the sexual revolution, the spiritual seeking of the seventies, the new age movement beginning to take root. Individual authenticity becomes the highest value. People are pushing outward against institution, every convention. It's an era of awakening and of fracture. The third turning called the unraveling.
Kari Bandle:This is the autumn of the cycle. The institutions that were challenged in the awakening are now weakening and fraying. Public trust in government, media, corporations, and civic organizations start to fall. There's no shared consensus anymore. Culture is fragmented.
Kari Bandle:Individualism is at its peak, and people are retreating into their own tribes and communities. It doesn't feel like a crisis yet. It just feels like a slow loosening, like things are coming undone, but no one has quite said it out loud yet. The last third turning was roughly 1984 to 2008. Think about that era, the rise of cynicism about institutions, the culture wars beginning, the decline of shared civic life, the explosion of individualism and identity, the feeling that the center wasn't holding, but nobody was quite ready to reckon with what came...
Kari Bandle:What that meant. Cable news, the Internet, the fragmentation of shared reality, all third turning energy. The fourth turning is called the crisis, and this is where we are. The fourth turning is the winter of the cycle. It is the reckoning.
Kari Bandle:The institutions that have been fraying finally fail or are forced to transform entirely. Old orders collapse. New alignments form. There's usually, historically speaking, a major external threat that galvanizes people and forces collective action. It feels dangerous, urgent, and in many ways apocalyptic in the moment, but it is not the end.
Kari Bandle:It is the clearing. It is the labor before the new birth. And here is the piece I want you to really sit with because this is what makes the fourth turning framework so striking, the timing. The fourth turnings in American history are not shattered randomly. They cluster around roughly eighty years apart with an almost uncanny precision.
Kari Bandle:The first major fourth turning in American history was the revolution itself. Roughly 1773 to 1794, the colonial order collapsed. Something entirely new was built from scratch. Eighty years later, the civil war era, roughly 1860 to 1865, and its brutal aftermath. The nation tore apart along with a wound that had been ignored since the founding.
Kari Bandle:Over 600,000 people died. The old order, when built on a monstrous foundation of slavery, was forced to crack open, however, incompletely. Eighty years after that, the Great Depression and World War two. Roughly 1929 to 1946, the global economic order collapsed. Fascism rose across Europe and Asia.
Kari Bandle:A man named Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany by exploiting the fear, economic despair, and cultural humiliation of a people who felt that their institutions had failed them, that outsiders were to blame for their suffering, and that a strong authoritarian leader could restore their greatness and their pride. Millions of people went along with it. Millions of people died because of it. The world had to fight the most catastrophic war in human history to put that particular fire out. And when it was over, a new order was built.
Kari Bandle:The United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the postwar boom, a new first turning began. Now add eighty years to 1946, and you land at 2026. Strauss and Howe, writing in 1997, predicted the next fourth turning would begin somewhere around '20... Or 2005 to 2010 and reach its climax, its most intense point, around 2025 to 2030. I want to be extremely clear.
Kari Bandle:I'm not going to draw political lines for you. That is not what this show is about. And frankly, I think that you're all smart enough to look at the historical pattern and look at the world around you and make your own connections. What I will say is that the hallmarks of a fourth turning are recognizable. The collapse of shared reality, the erosion of trust in institutions, the rise of strong authoritarian figures who exploit collective fear, the sense that the old rules no longer apply, the fracturing of alliances that once seemed permanent, the feeling that something enormous is happening even if you can't quite name it.
Kari Bandle:Does it sound familiar? I'm not saying this to scare anyone. I'm saying it because I believe with everything I have that understanding where you are in the cycle changes how you experience it. You are not crazy. You're not imagining things.
Kari Bandle:The ground really is shaking, but it it has... It's shaken before. And the people who lived through the last fourth turning, who survived the depression, who fought the war, who rebuilt afterwards, they did not know in the middle of it that there was a plan. They did not know the cycle would complete and a new era would begin. They just endured and they built.
Kari Bandle:That is what this generation is being asked to do. One more layer of this framework, and I promise I won't go too deep in the weeds here, is the idea of generational archetypes. Strauss and Howe argued that each turning doesn't just produce a different mood, it produces a different type of generation. And those generational types cycle through four arch types in order every time. The generation that comes of age during the fourth turning, the ones who are young adults during the crisis who actually fight the battles and do the rebuilding, they call, they're called the hero generation.
Kari Bandle:Think of the greatest generation, the ones who were in their twenties during World War two. They didn't ask for the crisis. They were born into the unraveling and came of age right as the crisis hit, and they rose to meet it. The hero generation of this earth turning, The theory would suggest it's the millennials and the younger end of generation z. The ones who are now in their twenties and thirties, the ones who grew up with school shootings and a financial crisis and a pandemic and a planet on fire, the ones that older generations have sometimes dismissed as soft or entitled, the same way every generation in history has initially dismissed the ones who come after them.
Kari Bandle:And yet, the theory says, watch them. When the crisis demands heroes, the hero generation shows up. I find that extraordinarily hopeful, and I wanted to name it out loud. I want to bring this home in a way that feels personal because that's what I do here. Independence Day, July 4 is ostensibly about political freedom, but I want you to think about it energetically for a minute.
Kari Bandle:What does it mean to declare independence? It means looking at a system you were born into, a system that had authority over you, that you didn't choose, that you maybe never question and saying this no longer serves me. It means accepting the discomfort and the danger of stepping away from the known thing even when the known thing is oppressive because it is at least familiar. The colonists lived under British rule for over a hundred and fifty years before the revolution. The grievances built slowly.
Kari Bandle:The tolerance wore thin gradually, and then it didn't, then it snapped. Most of the biggest changes in our personal lives work the same way. The marriage that ends, the career that finally gets left behind, the belief system that cracks open. These things usually don't happen in a single dramatic moment. They happen after a long slow accumulation, and then suddenly they happen all at once.
Kari Bandle:The revolution happened when enough people reached the same threshold at the same time. This is not reformable. We have to build something new. Sound like anything you've been working on personally? I think a lot of you listening to this show are in your own fourth turning, a personal one.
Kari Bandle:Whether that's a relationship, a career, a belief system, a family pattern, you may be in the part of the cycle where the old structure is coming apart and it's terrifying and it doesn't yet look like what it's going to become. It just looks like rubble. It just looks like loss, and it might look like January when nothing is blooming yet the ground is frozen and you're just trying to remember what spring felt like. The founding fathers did not know in 1776 that they were going to build a republic that would last two hundred and fifty years. They knew that they were signing their potential death warrants and throwing tea in a harbor.
Kari Bandle:The vision came later. The order came later, and the meaning came later. You do not need to have the new thing built yet. You just need to be honest enough to say the old thing is over. That is the spiritual work on the fourth turning, personally and collectively, the old order go, not clinging to the structure just because it's familiar, trusting that the building comes after the clearing even when the clearing looks like destruction.
Kari Bandle:And here's what I want to leave you with. The people who lived through the last fourth turning, who survived the depression, who fought the war, who came home and built the suburbs and raised the baby boomers and started the post war boom, they did not know it was going to be okay. They hoped. They endured. They acted.
Kari Bandle:And the world they built, flawed as it was, became the foundation for everything they came after. We are not cursed to be alive right now. We are alive in one of the most, one of those important moments in history when what individual people choose to do actually matters enormously. When the collective consciousness is in flux and genuinely up for grabs, when the ground is soft enough to receive something new. I was a little kid in '17...
Kari Bandle:Or in in 1976, holding my bicentennial pins, feeling the collective electricity of a country that was celebrating itself despite everything it was going through. And I believe, I genuinely believe that there are children alive right now who will one day hold their version of those pins, who will look back at this moment and say, that's when everything changed. That's when the turning turned. I want to be part of that building something worth holding on to, and I think you do too. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't be here.
Kari Bandle:America is 250 years old this year. She is complicated and messy and unfinished, and she is in the clearing. And I love her anyway. Happy birthday, America. If this landed for you, please share it.
Kari Bandle:Tell a friend. Leave me a comment or subscribe. And if you want to support the show, I've got a buy me a coffee link in the show notes. Every cup keeps the lights on here, and I'm genuinely grateful for every single one. I'm Carrie.
Kari Bandle:This is Medium with a Mic. Go watch some fireworks, hug somebody you love, and until next time, keep listening to those whispers of wisdom.