¶ Intro / Opening
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
¶ Podcast Opening and Generational Topic
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. Just a few gen xers hanging doing our thing, being too cool for you, drinking mountain dew code red and that's it.
Wow, look at you on fire already.
I don't know about that. I could have done a lot better, but that was off the dome.
Yeah, but well, off the dome, that's probably a millennial or gen Z saying I got that from you, Well, I got that from Nol. Oh.
Well, Nole's definitely a millennial. Yeah, he is a millennial through and through. As we'll see what the birth cohort that Nol and every one of his age cohort was born into are exactly alike, and they're different from everybody older and younger. And it's pure science that's proven that.
Yeah.
And by the way, we're talking about Noel co host obviously of stuff they don't want you to know, among other great things that he's done, including former.
Mini movie Crush co host.
Yeah. I didn't know if you were going to say that for a second. I was going to jump in and be like, uh, don't forget Movie Crush.
Yeah, yeah, he hosted those minis with me.
Yeah, for sure, Andy was he produced him too, right.
Yeah, he produced him for a while, and then I think Noel even took the reins and hosted two great episodes by himself. If anyone as a fan of John Cameron Mitchell, Oh yeah, Kesha?
Oh wow, like Kesha was on Yeah.
Two of the bigger gets on Movie Crush were nol episodes.
Wow, what was Kesha's favorite movie?
You know, I'm pretty great at remembering all of the guests that I had, but I don't. I don't remember Kesha or John Cameron Mitchell's.
Oh okay, well we'll look it up someday.
Yeah, it was something great.
Yeah.
I remember when Noel, when you made him producer, he let that go to his head. He started wearing like pastel blazers with the sleeves rolled up, and he was always like sniffing and like touching his nose. He was Uber producer for a while.
He got an ascot, which was a little much, but.
It started hanging with Bronson Pincho. So we're talking today about generations. That's why I mentioned that we're all Generation X, and I was being facetious earlier when I said this is all proven by science. Apparently it's not at all proven by science. It's really not particularly scientific. And the whole thing, actually, when you start to dig into it, was this sociological almost intellectual debate that got somehow manhandled and taken over by marketing who now use it to
make money. Essentially.
Yeah, see what I found interesting about this and I commissioned this one because it just the whole idea of generations fascinates me. But you know, you'll hear us say things like, well, it's all it was all a marketing thing basically to sell people stuff, and it's really people feel commonalities or there are commonalities and people around the same age because of these reasons. But that's also sort of being a part of the generation that you're dubbed.
Right, there are actual, like decent explanations that sociologists have come up with, but they're not. The problem is is that you can't paint an entire group of people with that same brush, and that's what people try to do. Yeah, and then also those same market researchers that always hype and their generational researchers, even though they're not really scientists.
They're market researchers. If they it would be so much more honest if they were, like, here's what a lot of kids, the cool kids are into today, start selling to them like that, not like this entire generation is like this specific group of well to do, white suburban kids essentially exactly. But it's so interesting to talk about, So let's talk about it a little bit, because there are generations that seem to have really like are paying attention to them? Really kind of started in the beginning
of the twentieth century. That's when people started thinking about this kind of thing.
Yeah, for sure.
So we're going to kind of go through since they've been dubbing generation specific generations here in the United States, we're going to go through them to begin with. And I think it's a good just sort of primer for when you're hanging out and talking about this kind of thing with other people. You'll know all this stuff. Because there was one or two that slipped in there that
¶ The Lost and Greatest Generations
I kind of forgot about, like the Lost Generation. Yeah, that was the first one, right, Yeah.
So they were born between eighteen eighty three and nineteen hundred. They came of age during World War One, which was like a massive catastrophe for the entire world for everyone, Like nothing had ever happened like that before in the history of humanity. Yeah, it was just a really big deal. And this was the group that came of age during that time, and they're called the Lost Generation. Gertrude Stein
called them that. But there's they had a loss of friends and family to death in the war, loss of limbs to land mines, loss of faith and institutions and the traditional values that got everybody to World War One. It was a big deal, and those kids were the ones who went on to become the rebellious jazz age people.
Yeah, and I'm glad we're saying where these came from, because that was one of the big kind of curiosities I had, was like, who even thinks of these names?
Right?
And in most of these cases we can trace it back to when a person said it first, like in print. Usually that doesn't mean they're the people who dreamed it up, sure, but specifically in this case, it was from the book The Sun Also Rises, and the epigraph Earnest Hymmingway quoted Stein saying, you are all a lost generation. So it looked that one looks pretty clear cut.
Yeah, the next sentence was too bad, So sad. Your dad, Hemingway had a way of turning a phrase. Yeah, who was next, Chuck? Who was after the Lost Generation?
Well, the Greatest Generation from nineteen oh one to nineteen twenty seven. Yeah, and you're also going to notice that the years are going to fluctuate a little bit, because there's not a set science to any of this. As you said, even though there's this one dude that will learn later is like, we should just make it fifteen years moving forward.
Right, Yeah, because the first show one was seventeen years and then this one's twenty six years.
Yeah, exactly. This is obviously the generation. I guess it would be like our grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and were, you know, defended freedom against the Nazis in World War Two.
And this is.
One name wise that came about. The name came about much later. Well, I'll go ahead and say who ended up naming it, and then maybe you can take what the original name was. But Tom Brokaw wrote the book The Greatest Generation, and that was nineteen ninety eight, and that really took off and kind of stuck.
Oh yeah, that was a big deal. I remember when that came out. I can hear Tom Brokaw saying I can't do an impression of it, but I can hear him saying it and talking about it. But essentially he wrote this book about just profiling different veterans, I think, mostly everyday people, and essentially collectively said like, these are the people who grew up in the depression. They faced
genuine deprivation in many many cases collectively too. And then they went on and were called to like, go fight the Nazis in World War Two, Right, so there's nobody before. Since that's done this kind of stuff, hats off to you, greatest generation. And they sat back and were like, we'll take this, sure, keep going, bro Caw.
That's right.
And since you didn't do what I set you up to do, I'll do that part. They were not always the greatest generation. There were these two generational theorists, theorists or theorists, Neil Howe and William Strauss, and they actually coined the term millennial, but they had previously labeled that generation the GI generation, the greatest generation. And then Brokaw came along. I used to do a bro call weirdly
can you try now, I don't remember. It was more about cadence than the actual voice, because he always sounded like he was just out of breath or something like that.
Oh, that's pretty good.
It was a breathing thing for him. It always felt like he was just about to inhale, but he couldn't quite get there, which is sad.
Enough of that GI generation though, stuff or the GI generation I said it wrong. Let's get back to brokawn his book.
I mean, what do you need to know?
It was a huge book, came out in nineteen ninety eight.
Yeah, I already said that.
Oh okay, kit, I just wanted to make sure all of our teas were crossed and our eyes were dotted.
Sure we could say it the third time, if that really you know, if you want to drive book sales.
Hit it up.
Nineteen ninety eight. Everybody very nice, still, dear.
¶ The Silent and Baby Boomer Generations
So let's move on to the next generation. This is called the Silent generation. This is where my dad was born. And he actually fits this bill pretty well.
Yeah.
I think my mom I can't remember the year, but I'm pretty sure she was this silent generation as well.
It makes sense. We're we're of that age that would that would make sense.
Yeah, I mean, just on the cusp of boomerdom. But silent Generation is I guess maybe so dubbed because they're between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, who got way more attention, and the Silent Generation was just sort of wedge there and like kind of quietly wedged there in the middle doing their thing.
Yes. Also though they I guess the whole thing comes from a Time article or essay written in nineteen fifty one anonymously weirdly, I guess, because this person was criticizing their own generation.
Yeah, maybe, but.
They said they called them the silent generation. They said, it does not issue manifestos, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the silent generation. And I think they mean by me, and like they were just basically saying, like that, our parents did all this amazing stuff and we're just we don't do anything. We're the silent generation. So that makes sense. And then also I guess the silent generation describes them. They're supposed to be cautious conformist.
That's another reason they're called the silent generation. So that's you know, I guess it all kind of adds up.
Yeah, But again there.
You know, I think Dave put this together and he points out, you know, Andy Warhol and Nina Simone and Gloria Steinem and Bob Dylan were all from this generation. So that's where the generation thin kind of falls apart a little bit, because you can always pick out individuals and say, well, they're nothing like they're categorized.
You know. Yeah, that's definitely going to be a recurring theme in here. Yeah. I saw there's this New York article by Lewis Minard It's time to stop talking about generations where he says essentially all of the most important figures in like the Flower Power, anti War sixties hippie movement, almost all of them were from the Silent generation. Yeah, you know, like almost one of the people who were the important figures driving this were actually Baby Boomers.
Yeah.
Well, of course that's an X from forty six to sixty four, pretty wide swath there. And this they have a pretty interesting distinction is they're actually recognized by the US Census Bureau, the only generation to be kind of
independently recognized, and they're the Baby Boomers. I think everyone knows this because there was a big baby boom after World War two, And this isn't something that was just like, oh, the media just got a hold of it, like there were a ton of babies born after World War Two. In nineteen forty five, there were two point nine million, went to three point four the next year, and by
nineteen sixty four they peaked. Oh actually they peaked in fifty seven with four point three but sixty four was the last year in the United States, which is kind of crazy to think about with more than four million births.
Yeah, it is, which is strange because I think the millennials didn't they have more than the boomers, or where they just barely second. Maybe they were second. Regardless, that is quite a baby boom. I think it's a fit. It's an apt Yeah.
I mean, there are more millennials living millennials now, but I think that's just because the boomer die off.
Gotcha. Okay, So there's we talked about this before. I don't remember when. Oh you know what, we did a whole episode on baby boomers. So I guarantee it was in that, did we Yeah we did. Huh. I think it was called Leave the Boomers Alone. I don't know. Oh wow, all right, I don't think that's what it was called. I think we called it how baby Boomers work, because I don't think we were in that mindset.
I think it was give them hell, right.
But there's like a whole the later section of boomers, because it's like a twenty year basically like eighteen year group. Yeah, a lot changed in between the sixties and the seventies, and the ones that were born later on in the Baby boom who grew up in the seventies had a much different formative age than the older boomers who came before them and were like dropping acid and everything. These are the people faced with like America becoming super cynical.
Yeah.
I mean, my sister is six years older than me, and she's a year she was sixty five, so she was a year off from being quote unquote boomer and she's I mean, she's solid Generation X if you ask me, right.
Yeah, that's another problem too. What about people on the CUSP, like xennials.
Yeah, I mean supposedly CUSP cus born people identify with both to a certain degree, but I don't know. My sister doesn't have much boomer in her right.
Right, So that group that your sister just barely missed the second half of the Baby Boomers. They have been dubbed Generation Jones by an author named Jonathan Pontel and Jones. He basically said that he dubbed them that because they're a large anonymous generation. That makes sense. Jones is kind of a common last name in the United States. That's
another thing too, we should say generations. The other reason why they seem kind of flibbertigibty is because we're talking almost exclusively about the United States here.
Yeah, of course at.
The most, the Western English speaking Western world at the most. Right, So it's a large anonymous generation Jones or this one's so weird that they they are the generation that's jones in after their unfulfilled expectations. They're jones in for meaning or whatever.
I thought it might have been keeping up with the Joneses.
That's another one too, But it's almost like every time he said one of these, he was like, h what do you think of that one?
Right? Yeah?
Testing the waters for sure? Who's up next, Chuck? Would you you say the best is up next?
¶ Generation X: The Cynical Individualists
Yeah?
I mean, here's the deal, man.
I feel like gen X is very much bordering these days on being labeled as obnoxious about how much we talk about.
How awesome we are.
Yeah, I think so too.
I think we're kind of tipping the scales in the wrong direction.
So I'm not gonna tout the benefits of being gen X because we've talked about it before.
Well, also, that's like that is that's super gen x to just be like, well, we're treading into uncool waters here. We better cool.
You're totally right. I don't even think about that. Yeah, that's as gen x as it gets.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean that's one of the thing things about gen X is we supposedly shunned and we did labels and were very sort of jaded and cynical and anti corporate. Obviously we think of the grunge era of the nineties and rejecting capitalism and stuff like that. Before a lot of them became capitalists. But there are still, you know, plenty of gen X true and true through and through
both of those who are still like that. I don't know if you've seen that great Netflix documentary The Secret Mall Apartment.
Have you seen that?
No? That sounds great, Yeah, And it's.
It's a pretty well known story that these gen xers built an apartment inside the guts of a shopping mall where they weren't found.
M H highly recommend it. It was a pretty cool story.
I remember reading about it kind of years later when it was I guess got a little more media attention. But the documentary is really good. But it could have been called ode to gen X because all of these people. I was like, man, this was these were my people. This like I could have seen my friends doing something like this.
Yeah, pretty creative breaking the rules but also not really doing anything that's genuinely anti social necessarily.
Yeah, breaking rules without causing harm.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Shock. Yeah. Yeah. We got our name Generation Next did from the Douglas Copeland book Generation X Colon Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which is a great read or everyone to read it. Copeland apparently one time said he named it after the Billy Idol Billy Idol's original band X.
Yeah.
Then he later took it back and said he got it from an obscure sociology book and that in the book it was a reference to a group that the sociologist labeled X, and this group wanted to basically exit the traditional American class pursuits and I guess preoccupations like didn't want to have anything to do with that, so he thought that was kind of a good name for it.
Yeah, and I think X has long been a stand in, whether it's Malcolm X or just signing your name with the X when you don't want to put your signature is just sort of a almost active civil disobedience of like, I don't this is not me, this is not my label.
I'm just going to put an X here.
Are you allowed to do that?
I mean, I don't know if it's legal, but that was always I mean I think it initially it was like if you did if you couldn't write, you would sign your name with an X as well.
But I don't know.
So maybe the gen xers are being ironic when they're doing that.
Maybe, But gen x is better than Babybusters, which was the original idea for our name, because after the post war baby boom, birth rates dropped a lot.
Yeah, it's a terrible name. I also saw, just like the Baby Boomers were divided into a couple of groups. I saw the older Gen Xers are called the Atari Wave, the later Gen Xers are called the Nintendo Wave. Oh yeah, that makes sense, And then carrying it on the Zennials, the ones who are on the cusp between Generation X and Millennials. They're also called elder Millennials. They're called the Oregon Trail Wave.
I love it.
I thought we could get through all these before our break, but there's still several generations to go, so maybe we should take a break and hit up the millennials after this.
Let's break it up, all right, we'll be right back.
That is Josh, I'm Chuck. When you came along and it was like, yeah, well we were work pals, all right.
¶ Millennials: Resilient and Evolving
Now we're on the millennials. I feel like this is a a great generation if you ask me, Yeah, I agree. Maybe not the greatest, but they're a great generations. They put up with a lot more than our generation, and more than Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I think they just had they took the brunt of recent history and they've just kind of plodded along and been like, fine, we'll be the ones. That's fine. You know, they haven't complained too much. Well, I should say they stopped complaining.
They used to complain a lot, and now they've just kind of grown into this respectable and I think self respecting group. As a whole, if generations were.
Real, Yeah, I totally agree.
That's people were born from eighty one to ninety six, and again there's a pretty big difference between And you can say this for a lot of the generations obviously, but you know, the ones that were on the cusp of either end. I think millennials may be the most pronounced as far as how different people born in eighty one and people born in ninety six are. But that might just be me, you know, in my brain.
Yeah, well, I think especially if you're coming of age in the time before computers or the time when computers are starting to be a thing. Yeah, yeah, that is definitely I mean, that's a pretty big dividing line for sure.
Yeah, I agree.
I think those elder millennials too. Yeah, I think there's something to say about straddling that line. I think it's a cool. It's just a neat thing to be able to have experience in both of those completely different realms of technological development. But even more than that, I saw that millennials are divided between whether as a younger person they watch say by the Bell or say by the bell at college years.
Well, there's definitely a thing you know, we ran wild in the streets and knocked on doors and called people on the phone. But were also can understand young enough to understand all the tech that we're explaining to our parents and grandparents. But I think elder millennials definitely sort of identify with that life as well. They were first dubbed the Echo boomers. Obviously it's the children of boomers.
They created a little bit of a baby bump on the population charts, and like I said, they're the largest living generation right now. They took over in twenty nineteen, took over the boomers at seventy two million millennials in twenty nineteen.
That's a lot of folks.
Yeah, And just a little bleak note on that statistic. It wasn't because they kept being born up to twenty nineteen, if you know what I mean.
They were originally Generation Why, or at least that was the early consideration.
At editors at ad age.
And as you'll see, there's a lot of marketing people that have their thumbs in the spy, but they were the ones that were going to trying to call them Generation hy as like a more extreme Generation X. But our buddies Neil Howe and William Strauss again. In nineteen ninety one, they published a book called Generations Colon the History of America's Future fifteen eighty four to twenty sixty nine, and that's where they came up with the Millennial generation. For pretty obvious reasons.
You left out the comma. There's a colon and a comma in there.
There is, Yeah, there's a comma after America's Future.
You're right, So we need a jingle for commas, the rare comma.
You know. They should have finished it off with fifteen eighty four to twenty sixty nine an exclamation boy, yeah, you're right.
And then the zero in twenty sixty nine is the ampersand let's just trip it going the what's the one in fifteen eighty four?
Has it got to be punctuation? Because the first thing I thought of was an eye with a heart above it. That's an eye.
Though they can actually program anything they want to into a keyboard. I found that out when Prince changed his name to a symbol the artist formerly known.
As Prince, and you could type that.
Yes. They sent it out to all of the media, impressed to basically insert it into their font catalog, so they can do that.
That was pretty funny.
They can make an eye with a heart above it if you want them to.
Yeah, I think so.
And by the way, I said, I think it's pretty obvious, but we'll say it out loud. It is the first generation to be the first to graduate high school after the year two thousand right there.
And sorry, I realized I'm being a little squarely today that you keep setting me up, and I'm like, no, let's talk about this instead.
That's a right.
So the other thing about it, I think the reason why Millennials stuck and overtook Generation Why, which I fully remember that was really close to being that generation's name, and I'm really glad it turned into Millennials. It has like an optimistic kind of hopeful feel to it.
Yeah, I think so.
So.
One of the things that characterized Millennials as far as generation researchers go, is that they came of age during nine eleven as young kids. That was an enormous thing to learn at a young age that things like that can happen in the world, and that an entire culture can lose its innocence in like one morning. And then
also as they started to enter the workforce. They got smacked with the Great Recession and couldn't find a job for five years, and they were the first generation to start moving back in with their parents because they had to. So who's up next, Chuck? After Millennials?
¶ Generation Z: Digital Natives and Socially Aware
Well, everybody knows gen Z. They're staring at you silently but not judging. I don't think, or maybe they are nineteen ninety seven to twenty twelve. The reason is gen Z is just from when it was supposedly going to be jen Y before them, lower case I was going to be the initial name because of obvious reasons.
Again for you know, Apple stuff.
There was the first one.
Digital natives is what they say that we're literally all born and raised in the Internet age.
Yeah, I like eye Jen that could have been good. I'm sure Apple was like, yeah, let's call him that.
Yeah, let's sue everybody as well.
Right. They were also almost called Generation K, which this is astonishing to me. Yeah, the K is for the K and Catonus Everdeen from the Hunger Games.
Who thought of that? I mean, I had to be the movie studio that made.
That, right, Probably probably were a publicists they secretly hired. But yeah, the reason why is because it's just such almost a dystopian era that these kids are are growing up in or grew up in. Yeah, you know, I mean, but still, first of all, you don't want to name an entire generation after the doomiest thing you can think of. Yeah, you want to kind of have at least it's some sort of a positive spin on it. And we'll see why it matters in a minute. Yeah, what about Generation CE.
Surely that's got to be upbeat.
Yeah, Generation COVID or coronavirus. That was a consideration for a little while as well. Luckily that didn't make it, and we got jen Z, who was known for what Dave calls quote being extremely online. Yeah, as opposed to just online a lot, I guess.
Yeah. They're also known for curating their online images. They were the first to really start paying attention to this. They also put a lot into a lot of stock into being authentic and socially conscious. They're also on the negative side, frequently called coddled and titled snowflakes that kind of stuff. Again, all of this stuff, you're like, yep, totally totally, one hundred percent to stop for a second and remember you're talking about millions of people from all
walks of life. They're all coddled, they're all snowflakes, they're all entitled. Like, think about what that's actually saying, right, So, and the idea is that this is all made up. So you just got to remember that because what was just cut into the chase real quick, right now, there's like a real harm that can be done, yeh in calling entire groups of kids, or dismissing entire groups of people as snowflakes or woke or whatever kind of hate that word, or.
You could barely even say it even sounded funny coming out of your mouth, right Like.
You can even deride their you know, focus on authenticity or whatever. You can take any of these in turn it negative, and that harms the group that you're talking about,
but it also makes that group present you. Yeah, probably the older person who's criticizing them and what they care about and what they're interested in because you weren't or it doesn't make sense to you and your values that there is actual individual harm, but also more importantly, a social harm that can be done because it allows for essentially a socially acceptable form of discrimination, which is agism. Whether it's going upward in age or downward in age,
it doesn't matter. It's still as harmful. Yeah.
It gives somebody permission to do something like that. Yeah.
Uh. And it's no different if you're if you're like, hey, you know what, You're not like other gen zs. You're you're the real deal. You're not like an entitled little snowflake. Like just stop. That's that's even worse almost.
It is stop being the uncle at Thanksgiving. Just stop. But simultaneously stop being the millennial who says like okay, boomer, although I know no one says that anymore. But that was harmful too, even though it's totally accurate.
Interesting thing about gen Zuh, they found some research on some of the politics.
Uh.
There was a survey on gender, and fifty three percent of Gen Z women apparently describe themselves as feminists, compared to only thirty two percent of Gen Z men, which is the largest gap I believe, I don't know about of any generation. That's a twenty one point gap compared to an eight percent gap same question for Gen X.
What I thought was super interesting.
Yeah, I'm very concerning too, And that's legitimate because they're they're using gen Z as just a shorthand for an actual age group that was legitimately surveyed. Yeah, so that is a that is a troubling value change in values.
I think, Yeah, what's next?
¶ Generation Alpha: Hyper-Connected Future
Next up, Chuck is the latest generation, not greatest latest who knows whether they're going to be great or not. History will tell us eventually. But that's Gen Alpha. And I think it's very reassuring that we were not on Gen Z anymore, because that's a little troublesome that you've reached the end of the alphabet as a group goes, like a population of human beings goes. Now we're back to alpha, and that's that's great. I'm glad for that.
Yeah.
Well, and earlier when I mentioned there's some guy that wanted to say, let's just make it fifteen years moving forward. That's a guy named Mark mccrindall. He's an Australian social researcher and he is the one who coined generation alpha again just starting over after Z. And he said and also he saunds a little grumpy, he's like, and also, can we just make him Greek letters from now on? And let go jen beta after this?
And everyone said, no, you're not the boss of us. We come up with our own willy nilly and we decide as a group what we like and what we don't like. So no, we'll go with your Jen Alpha for now, but don't get above your station. Mccrindall.
Yeah, yeah, it's slow year roll, buddy, although it'll probably be Jim Beta, which would be kids born this year starting this year.
Yeah, I predict it's not going to be Jim Beta. Chuck.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it's going to be. They'll start with that, and I think it'll be something else. I think humanity just wants to spite Mark mccrindall. Yeah.
And Beta such a negative connotation now, just from those alt right weirdos that you know, Beta male stuff.
Right, plus also Beta Max knowing like that.
Exactly Beta dine that stuff was the worst because that means you have a nasty.
Cut, right or Beta fish they're always fighting the mirror.
Yeah, he wants a Beta fish boring.
Yeah, I know. It's sad for the Beta fish though, because their prizes at Tony Fairs very frequently.
Yeah, that's true.
So apparently Jen Alpha is even more online than gen Z, so much so that they don't even really realize. Well, they're also still pretty young right now. They're born between twenty ten and twenty twenty five. They're cut off. Just happened last year. They're not even aware that there is anything, that there's other stuff out there from.
What Yeah, yeah, there's an alternative.
Yes exactly, thank you. That like this is just what people do because that's, yeah, what they grew up doing, and there's a lot of concern about what effects that's having on them. Gen Z. The big concern is social media and the devastating effect that can have on a developing mind. With gen Alfha, it's like all technology now is just gunning for those little tiny brains, and people are like, what's going to happen with this?
Yeah, trust me, I'm a parent one, and I wonder sometimes.
Yeah, I mean, it's got to be so preposterously hard to raise a kid these days compared to thirty, forty fifty years ago.
Yeah, I mean there's more raising of a kid, if that's what you mean, like more active parenting.
Yeah, oh definitely, for sure.
What I think is weird and you know, I'm getting a little off track, but gen X was like we were wild in the streets and our parents ignored us, but we were the first helicopter parents. Yes, g not of course, but that was kind of where it came from.
Right, gen z has turned out to be really weird and really weird as far as that goes compared to how we were raised and then how we're raising kids, our own kids. It's it is very surprising. It's a surprising turn of events if you ask me. Yeah, yeah, I guess that stranger danger finally got through to us, but not until we were like forty.
¶ Sociological Theories of Generations
So this generation thing is, like we said, mainly made up. I mean, the term generation obviously comes from a biology and like when a parent has a kid, that offspring is the next generation. But as far as like generations goes, as we're talking about him, there was a sociologist I think kind of the first guy to write about this.
His name was Carl Mannheim, and he wrote an essay in the nineteen twenties called The Problem of Generations, and he was just sort of trying to look at like how do groups of cohorts or groups of people change over time?
And that's where.
He and you know, he was in his book, and you know, I think generally when people talk about this stuff. They're talking a little less about like back then, the factory workers and farmers and a little more like intellectuals and writers and artists.
Yeah, one hundred percent. Manheim was like, people who aren't like intellectual or artistic, they're probably not changing that much as a group over time, but tastes in art and culture change, you know, pretty distinctly over relatively short periods, decade, two decades, that kind of thing. He's like, why, And I mean, I'm sure other people have noticed this too, but Manheim was the first to stop and try to
figure out what was going on. And what he came up with was essentially what most the average person believes generations come from today, average person on the street who thinks about this kind of stuff, and that is called the imprint hypothesis, and it essentially says that some event, some process, something big of historic proportions that happened during your formative years as a kid, made an impression on you, imprinted on you and made you kind of who you are,
gave you your outlook on life. And because there was a whole other cohort of kids your same age, the same thing happened to them and that's why people within a generation resemble one another in a lot of ways, especially with trends and values and outlooks and stuff.
Yeah, and we talked about all these as we've gone along, you know, the depression, COVID nine to eleven, all these things, those are generation shaping events, according to him, being imprinted with those.
Yep.
There are other sociologists that say, you know, it's not really outside.
Events that's causing this stuff.
It just sort of organically happens when groups of young people are all just hanging out and growing up together.
Yeah, so it's a chicken or the egg situation, like does society change because new people grow up and like just change society because there's new people, new ways of thinking. Or do people change because society changes, like eg through COVID or the Challenger disaster or something like that, or the fall of the Berlin Wall that has these huge imprints on people. And there's actually a guy named Morris Massey who basically combine the two. He said, that's values
that separate the generations. That that's really what it is, and that the reasons that the values are different among generations is because of that imprinting process. Happens to hit at a time when you are in a formative I guess a formative place where you're figuring out what your values are, and when that historic thing happens that helps
shape your values. That same historic thing isn't going to have the same effect on older people because their values have already been shaped, but it will on that one generation. So that's essentially what his jam was. He was kind of merging everything for sure.
¶ Criticisms and Marketing's Role
You know, we promised talk of average because that's in marketing, that's where a lot of this comes from. And it does because no one really talked about this stuff until the nineteen seventies when baby boomers were getting into their twenties.
And you know, if you know anything about just.
Marketing and selling things to people, that demographic of you know, eighteen to twenty four is what they always say. But you know, basically, people are in their twenties is a big That's when you have money to spend, maybe for the first time, if you're you know, out from under the thumb of your family and your parents, and you've gotten your first job maybe or at least in the old days, you probably did, and so they want to
sell to people They always have. They still do that are in their twenties, and those are also the people that are shaping the taste of generations and influencing people around them and age.
And when the baby.
Boomers were coming into their twenties and the nineteen seventies, companies went wild and they started doing all this sort of market generational market research that is a very big deal. I know this is an older stat but in twenty fifteen they found out that American companies alone spent seventy million dollars just on generational consulting.
Yeah, those people that essentially who've made up generations or say that it happens every fifteen years or something like that. Yeah, so yeah, you want to take a break and come back and talk about some criticisms of this.
Yeah, let's do it. That is Josh, I'm Chuck.
You came along and it was like, yeah, well we were work pals.
All right, we're back talking more about generations and we're going to talk about some criticisms. In a second, we should say that, you know, obviously the media plays a part in all this. It's not all just like a marketing scam. But when the media picks up on these names especially, and you know, all of a sudden, there's people writing books and technically that's selling something, but that's that's producing a you know, your take, Like everyone's got
their take on this stuff. So there's gonna be plenty of people writing books about all these generations, right, But the whole idea is like, is this even.
A real thing at all?
And sociologists look at three different effects that influence how people think and behave, and they're the life cycle effects, the period effects, and the cohort effects.
Yeah, the life cycle effects makes the most sense to me, and that you are likely to essentially not change your personality but change your outlook, your values, that kind of thing as you age, and so entire cohorts of people age generally the same, so they're all going through the same life stages at roughly the same time, so they like the baby boomers are a really pronounced example of this. When you're younger, you're more rebellious, you question the system,
you want to change things, hence the sixties hippies. As you get a little older, you become much more materialistic, you become say, more grounded, you abandon your earlier idealism. In a lot of cases, the yuppies of the eighties, and then as you get older and kind of get put out to pasture, one of the ways that you can make yourself more relevant is to become politically active.
Hence the older current today baby boomers. So like this, this whole idea is that we confuse that for generational effects, that people are actually just going through life stages together.
On mass yeah exactly, or that you know, millennials were like, now we're not having babies, and we're moving to the suburbs, we're living in the city, and we're staying single or at least getting married and shunning kids.
And while plenty of them did.
And still do as they got a little bit older, and this is the life cycle effect, a lot of them did get those kids and families, and a lot of them did get the house in the suburbs.
And it's just, you know, it's an age effect thing.
Right, the same thing with period effects. It's basically saying, no, there's no such thing as generations where we confuse the generational effects or differences for actual period effects. And what that is is that those same historic events happen, but they impact like everybody. We just happened to focus on the group that it tends to impact the most, the younger generation, because again, they're going through a formative time.
So COVID affected everybody in all sorts of very deep ways. Right, It affected like kids. People were preoccupied with kids because those kids, like basically had a whole year of very important schooling that they didn't get and that was a huge focus of society, and so that kind of became looked at, focused on, and kind of that was haung on that generation, whereas really everybody got affected by COVID in a bunch of different ways.
Yeah, for sure. And the last one cohort effects.
I don't really see the difference and why this is even broken out between. It sounds just sort of like the other two combined in a way.
That's exactly right. That was that Morris mass you thing basically, and this is what we think of as generational effects, combination of life cycle and period effects producing groups where you are different from people who are older than you and different from people who are younger than you. Yeah, that's generational differences or generational effects. That's what people are saying, Like, that's no life cycle effects. Sure, period effects sure, cohort effects, we don't really think so.
Yeah, exactly.
As far as criticisms go, you know, we've lobbed a few out there as far as what generally people think, how they think critically about dividing people up like this. But one big problem is that you sort of touched on it earlier that these are really broad generalizations, but it's from small sample sizes. So the media has a lot to do with this how this plays out. And
Dave makes a great point. If you're you know, when you talk about the nineteen sixties, like the first thing that comes to your mind is like woodstock and the hippies and sticking a daisy in the barrel of a rifle, And there were very few people like that if you look at like percentages and you base it on things like drug use and premarital sex and feelings like that, Like apparently almost ninety percent of Americans twenty somethings did not smoke pot in nineteen sixty nine, And if you
look at movies and TV and the media, you think, like, kind of that was what everyone was doing.
Yeah, like one hundred and twelve percent of right twenty some things in nineteen sixty nine exactly. And that's the thing, Like the media highlights the most extreme segment of the group of people, and that still happens today. The loudest people get the most attention, essentially.
Yeah, for sure.
Another big criticism is the when you and you touched on this a little bit too, Like when you group people up in these huge cohorts and say everyone's kind of like this, you're really really ignoring everything within that group of people, like all the little differences like oh, race and class and income and privilege and stuff like that.
And you really nailed it when you said, like when people talk about generations in broad terms like this, they're kind of talking because it's a marketing thing about like, you know, middle to upper class white America in a lot of cases.
Yeah, it ignores intersectionality essentially, which ironically is something that people say that gen Z is preoccupied with.
¶ Debunking Generational Stereotypes
Yeah, although you know, there's I totally believe this is a thing.
But I remember when I saw the movie Crooklynd, Spike Lee's great movie about his life growing up in the seventies in Brooklyn, New York. I remember watching that movie and being like, oh my god, that was my life growing up in suburban Atlanta in the nineteen seventies as a white kid, like, we're all the same.
Okay, right, right, So there were similarities, he also had much He faced a lot of differences that you didn't face too, I'm sure, and vice versa. You guys have, for sure, But that's more of like a society was like that at that time. That's what parents in general were like, Okay, this is cool. It's what we're doing. There's let's just have latchkey kids. That's what we have to do because both parents are working now and we're
still figuring it out. That's what society was doing. The question is did that have an impression on this whole group of kids the same way to make them unique in that way? That's what generations are saying.
Yeah, for sure.
And you know, one of the other criticisms you were talking about earlier is when you've given people permission to sort of drag and dunk on a whole generation for being like on your phone too long or addicted to your screens or this or that or snowflakes. If you dig down and look at actual statistics for some of this stuff, they found out and this doesn't surprise me at all. I've talked about the fact that baby boomers are on their phone, at least in my life, more
than anyone I know. Sure, people sixty five and over average ten hours of screen time a day compared to seven hours a day for eighteen to thirty four year olds.
And that is not just on your phone.
That's also due, you know, somewhat to the fact that when you know, very sadly, when some people retire, they like start watching TV during the day, which is the death knell if you ask me, it is.
You want to not watch TV during the day and not watching in bed at night?
Yeah, well I love watching TV in bed.
I do too, But in hotels, oh.
I love it. Mans nothing better than watching a movie in bed.
What do you, Oh, you watch movies in bed?
You don't watch whatever?
You don't watch Jimmy Fallon, No.
No, no, I don't watch any I mean, I love Jimmy Fallon, but I haven't watched late night talk shows since Conan left.
Well that's a pretty good reason to stop. Actually, yeah, I think so, Chuck, you got anything else? Because I'm hoping you say no. I feel like this is a nice little package that we put together.
¶ Conclusion and Podcast Information
Uh no, and that means long stuff is out.
That's right.
Oh hea, no, no, no, sorry, how do we end this thing?
We say it's time for listener mail.
That's right.
But instead of listener mail, we are going to reiterate that we are performing I believe tomorrow in Madison, Wisconsin.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, we're going to be there April sixteenth. So if this comes out April fifteenth, you're right on the money.
Now it's coming out on the fourteenth, so in two days we'll be in Madison.
Either way, if you're in the Madison area, come see us, or in Chicago, come see us Akron. I think it's like too late because we basically have sold out Akron.
Yeah, I gotta say Akron strong. That means a lot that Akron is one of our best selling cities on this tour. So we're looking at you Madison, We're looking at Chicago coming out and see us. No, we're at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago. Where are we in Madison?
The Orphium the Orphum, so.
Two great theaters. We're going to have a good time. It's a fun topic. Get to do some audience Q and A gonna share some laughs. You get to be in a big room with a bunch of cool, like minded, smart people.
Yes, we're reasonably sure that you will like having gone.
That's right.
And I think early showtimes. I think these are both seven o'clock ers, so yay, like responsible.
Aging gen xers. Yeah, we want to get everybody home in a decent hour.
Yes, we do, before your babysitter can even get in the frage. You're going to be home, that's right. Great, Well, if you want more info or tickets to come see us, we'd love it if you did. You can go to stuff youshould Know dot com and click on the tour button and that will bring up all the info you need and you can buy tickets through there, like I said, and I guess. In the meantime, you can also send us email send it off the stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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