Lemonade Stand - Who Is The Best Generation? | Ep. 028 Lemonade Stand 🍋
Episode Date: September 10, 2025On this week's show... Aiden scrolls on his phone, DougDoug buys a website, and Atrioc tells us what it was like back in his day We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bon...us episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 028 Recorded on: September 9th, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Who is the Best Generation? 1:24 The Greatest Generation 12:30 Gen Alpha 21:47 Gen Z 34:06 The Lost Generation 42:54 Millennials 53:06 Gen X 1:04:29 Boomers 1:29:54 Conclusion New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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A lot of people wish they were born in a different generation, right?
They talk about, oh, how much better would it be?
I'm an old soul.
And I wonder, right, if you could pick which generation, which would be the most advantageous,
the best life, if you had a sorting hat, if you will, that you could put on your head and
it would drift out of the generation that you were born in the last hundred years.
What generation would you pick?
I mean, I kind of like the generation that I was born into.
I've, you know, I've access to so many technologies.
I feel like I'm young.
How it's our technology.
And then you guys.
Can we frame this whole thing as a TikTok?
Like let's put him in a vertical frame.
We put subway surpers on the side.
How was that?
How about you two tell me how the dust bowl was?
How about that?
Dusty.
Did you even get the polio vaccine?
Stronger men.
It made us stronger men.
Weak men for weak times.
No, I get it.
You're still,
you were hanging on to that FDR first term.
I know it changed everything for you guys.
That's the question, Doug.
we're trying to answer today. And we have decided to look through the various generations that have
existed over the past hundred years of American history, the focus on America, but it's also
going to address the whole world broadly. And we're actually going to see as we pull generations
randomly, which do we think of the eight is the best? Like if you could pick one, which is the
greatest generation to have been born in? And I think we kick it off with the first one.
We can just start off. Let's pull one from the head. Okay. Pull it out, pull it up, put out.
All right, the first one is the greatest generation. Now, I'm just,
I would say the shittiest generation to be born in,
which is weird that they name themselves that.
They're the great,
apparently the name comes from something coined in the 50s
that these are the,
you know,
the hardest,
hardest working,
been through the most,
most capable generation because of what they came up.
I feel like they were trying to tap it in for this contest with that name.
Yeah.
Because they knew would be ranking the greatest generation.
Like we need,
we need good SEO in 70 years.
They read that there would be a podcast called Lemonet and say one day.
Yes.
And we have to stand up first.
on it. We're going to change my Twitch name to Greatest Scooter.
Well, the greatest generation, these are the people born between about 1901 and 1927. So I, which I think
when you're talking about times that far back, I think it helps a little. These are the people
who were on average living into anywhere in the 1950s to the 1980s. With some of these people
still alive now if they're in like their late 90s to like early hundreds. They're all
are people still alive from this generation?
President's recently.
Great they are.
And that's what they set goals still.
That's what makes them the greatest.
They say no matter my impediments
and my ability to think or speak,
I will still run.
That's so great.
That's honestly good.
Here's what I want to understand.
Okay.
Like we all complain about what's going on our lives
and we feel like it used to be better
maybe for specifically our parents
who were at a certain generation.
But I think it's like if you were born in the greatest generation,
was it actually that bad?
Was it good?
What's going on economically, what's going culturally?
Like, is that actually a shit time to be born or not?
I think the big marker for these people is that they were basically born into,
like they would be in the Great Depression.
They would be in their teenage or 20s during the Great Depression.
Was the Great Depression a good time, Edna?
Yeah.
Because I feel like when people are teens nowadays feel like they're in a great depression.
Yeah, you know, they're like they're very depressed.
It's actually the same.
It's the proliferation.
Were they on Discord a lot?
They were on a lot of short form video and didn't have a lot of real life friends.
I don't know what source I read, but that's what it says.
No, these people, I think they're primarily known for growing up during the Depression and either
coming of age or coming into their early adulthood during World War II.
And then, you know, if you were a man, fighting in World War II.
And I think a lot of changes in the wake of World War II are what defy
find this generation's
sort of success. I think the big
things we could look at here are like
life expectancy and
health care first. Like what was this generation
dealing with? Realistically,
pretty low
life expectancy
overall. Because they were shot
by a German's hold. Shot by Nazis.
So that's the first thing. It's like you had a
pretty decent chance of just dying
in World War II and then shortly
after, if you didn't die in World War II, a
decent chance of dying in the Korean War.
Right, right, right, right, right.
Which are two of the bloodiest conflicts in American history.
I think Korean War is like fifth and the World War II is like number one.
And I can be wrong.
I think even a lot of people around the world died in World War II.
In World War II, it was actually a lot of people around the world.
Actually, while America did suffer the most, I think actually many countries suffered.
It was over 400,000 American soldiers died in World War II.
Over 600,000 people wounded.
So over a million total casual.
Just American.
We're Americans on the low end there
compared to a lot of...
Nope.
Estimates for Russia are 50 million.
I'm pretty sure no Russians died in World War II.
I'm not 100%...
Sorry, Soviets.
Now that's a conspiracy.
I might be...
I mean, so, like, there's a broad range of things.
That's not like the very high end,
but, you know, jokes aside,
we didn't have it that bad.
Although, you know, the people who fought for America
had it pretty fucking bad,
and it is worth reiterating that, obviously.
And then in the Korean War,
36,000 deaths
and over 100,000 wounded.
So also a pretty,
I mean, pretty terrible outlook if you were
someone who joined the military for either
of these things.
This is after the depression, right? So you go from the worst
economic depression into your adult life
possibly fighting in a war, one of the bloodiest
conflicts ever. So the life expectancy
gap here is kind of strange for this generation
because when you're a kid, you grow up in a time period
where there's very few like antibiotics,
there's not a lot of vaccines, you're dying from
things like maybe measles,
maybe polio, tuberculosis, pneumonia,
you go straight into the bloodiest conflict
in our entire history.
But if you manage to come out the other side of that
and you're still in like your 20s, your 30s,
your life from there relatively good.
America is starting to build itself
during and in the wake of World War II
in this pretty incredible direction.
If, I'll put an asterisk on this,
if you're white.
And a man, usually.
And a man, mostly.
So that's the big asterisk on this.
So there's a really important bill that comes in the wake of World War II that people might be familiar with, the GI Bill.
And this gives returning soldiers, the white ones, unfortunately.
Is that true?
Black soldiers didn't give a deal.
A lot of these programs did not work in favor of Black soldiers in the wake of World War II.
And this was what helped expand the racial wealth gap that existed in the United States.
United States.
A lot of like,
wow, that is,
I did not know that straight up.
I did not know the GI Bill designed to assist all veterans,
systematically excluded black Americans.
Yeah,
yeah,
it's really.
Obviously,
I knew there was racism that time.
I just thought that GI Bill was one of the,
the things that.
I thought it was good old fashion racism,
not that they would modernize it.
Well,
I just thought that was the one thing.
In my mind,
that was like an anti-racist thing because people that came back from
the war.
No,
no, they made it racist.
No,
I made a racist.
That's crazy.
What this did, what this did,
and one of the criticisms of it is that it did help expand that racial wealth cap that already existed,
is payment and support for tuition to secondary education,
greatly expanding the number of people that were enrolling in colleges
and kind of help set the trend of college becoming more standard in average people's education,
or maybe going back to high school or getting vocational training.
It's helped support those things as well.
and then also helped people get into homes,
gave them very good mortgages with very low interest rates,
and a lot of people moved into the suburbs,
which was where a lot of building was expanding at the time.
And the other thing that they were doing was fucky.
They were doing a lot of fucking.
They were pumping out a lot of babies, just record amounts at the time.
Was this again mostly men or were women involved with this?
So presumably it was about either.
on their 50-50 split on that.
The gay generation.
And then things like home prices,
you know, if you're in the 40s,
and this is all in 20-24 dollars,
if you're in the 40s,
you know, the average home was like $64,000
in today's money, in today's money.
64,000 in today's money.
Isn't that crazy?
So what, it was like a nickel?
Dude, it was like a couple thousand.
Nichols.
Yeah.
And then in the 50s, in the 50s,
it jumps up to 93,000.
And then in the 60s jumps to about $120,000.
And that's all in today's in $24.
Which is crazy, right?
And you're also existing in a time period where a lot of common household technology is proliferating.
Things like in the decades that happened, you're getting access to like fridges, microwaves,
AC units, landline phones are becoming more common, TVs are becoming more common.
I would say maybe one of the downsides is through this period, it's declining, but food spend for families was a larger share of income.
But that's considerably offset by the amount of money you were saving on things like your home when they were so, so much cheaper.
And then also through the 40s, the 50s and 60s is medical technology is starting to catch up and vaccines are getting developed.
Antibiotics are getting developed.
I think the other big thing that people forget around this time is that there is a bit of a
a bit of a mental health crisis in the wake of these wars.
You know, mental health is not as well established of a field.
Things aren't as easily diagnosed or identified.
A lot of these soldiers are coming home and dealing with PTSD in like an environment that
doesn't know how to properly recognize that people are actually dealing with something like
that.
Health isn't viewed in the same way that it is now.
So I think there's this strange thing
If you're young, we're born into this generation
Manage to navigate your young life
Through one of the worst periods in American history
Through the Great Depression
And then also survive the war
You end up in a time frame
That is unprecedented success and wealth
If you're a white American
So would you guys go for the
Would you roll the crap dice there at this?
and go, all right, I'm gonna, I would be born
in the greatest generation.
Hopefully I survive the Great Depression.
Hopefully survive World War II.
Hopefully I was born white and hopefully I was born a man.
Would you take those odds?
Are you a betting man?
That's a risky roulette table,
I'll be real.
Stap for stat, this is a dog shit generation.
Yeah, this is one of the worst.
It is just so, because chances are,
like, if we're running the simulations,
so many of them are like,
I was 10 and died of measles.
And then a lot of them are like,
I was 18, went to
France and then died.
Died on Normandy Beach or whatever.
Or I was 20 and then I died
or I was 25 and then I died in the Korean
War. Like there's so many
of these people's stories just ended there
and then they were the
they're the generation that
sired the baby boomers
and the silent generation.
So that's a pro though.
I mean you get through it all. You're fucking like crazy.
You got some money. I would argue.
And this is maybe a spoiler for what I think
is the greatest generation,
that what if you were born right after the World War
and the Great Depression?
That would be even chiller.
Oh, nice foreshadowed.
I think if we're just gonna,
I'm gonna cleanly call it the greatest generation.
I'm sorry, you don't live up to the name.
I know you went through a lot,
and I don't need to apologize.
Most of you are dead and not listening to this podcast.
That's the part of your audience.
Yeah, I said bad.
That's the worst part of the coin flip.
Even if you survive at all,
Aidan calls you a piece of shit a hundred years later.
Not a great time.
Can you pull up this picture of the...
Don't do that.
You can't pull that up.
And if you look on your screens now,
you'll see a photo of three of the greatest generation.
Greatest to ever do it.
It didn't matter.
It didn't matter how long and hard
the world through it.
Next generation.
All right.
Let's rank these generations.
And the next one is...
Gen Alpha.
Gen Alpha.
Also, I would say...
We jumped right to the egg.
Very similar.
Wait, is this you again?
This is also me.
So we'll go me back to back here with Gen Alpha.
And I'll quickly say they have something,
they have a deep similarity
with the greatest generation.
I really explain that.
And it's that not a lot of them are taking measles vaccines.
Oh, that's good.
But the similarities, the similarities end there.
Let's get these Gen Alpha kids into an iron lung.
So, I,
I think part of my problem with evaluating Gen Alpha,
which is the generation that began being born in 2013.
And they're basically spanning until now, until 2013 until now.
Yeah.
And a lot of the statistics that I think will affect their lives the most haven't, you know,
haven't exactly played out yet.
Like I can't compare life expectancy.
The oldest one is 12.
A lot of them.
Yeah.
These are Ludwig viewers.
They watch a lot of Ludwig.
We don't know how that's going to play out in five years.
They're not queuing up to buy homes.
They don't have to buy the food.
They should.
They got to start that grind.
The lesson of their history has been buy homes when you're 13 years old.
Buy homes as soon as you fucking get because it'll get worse.
What do we know about them?
I'm genuinely curious.
Like when we talk about Jen,
other than they're obsessed with TikTok and Roblox,
like what do we know?
That's a huge part.
I mean, short form,
short form media is a big part of their diet.
tech is rapidly changing in their lifetime.
The school system they're coming up in is being upended by AI while they're in it.
Like they're the test case in the middle of it.
You know, their friendships are taking place on Roblox or on social media.
What else do we know about?
I mean, that's a lot of them are parented by the first generation parented by millennials.
So that's terrifying.
Yeah, I think part of the hard thing is like I could point to some of those things and make a
guess based off of a different generation that comes before them is that a lot of these things
will have significant effects on things like mental health or suicide rates.
They are also, genuinely, they are also the first, you know, generation that is prominently
within this pocket of time in America where I think things like vaccines are being questioned
so broadly.
It's not like, you know, it's not like the granola parent who was talking about ex,
vaccines causing autism didn't exist 25 years ago.
Yeah, but it's gotten.
But the popularity of that version of health and parenting is more common now.
And I think the issue when your entire sample size of people is either at the age of 12 or below it is that the data isn't, the data isn't amazing.
What are some pros?
What are some, like we're saying some negative?
What are some pros of being born right now in Gen Alpha?
I would argue, and we'll talk about Gen Z, millennials and whatnot.
But like Gen Z is, you know, had a, let's say, someone.
what normal
growth childhood
and then everything's
being upended now
as they're adults
and arguably I'd rather
be Generation Alpha
like of the couple of them
like I would rather be
grow up in a world
where AI has and is already
upended the education system
rather than it feels like
it's becoming obsolete
right as I'm exiting it.
I think that's how I feel too
is a lot of the trends
that are affecting Generation Z
in negative ways that we've even talked
about on the show I think by being
born a little later
you're at least coming up in a time where parents are more familiar with what's developing and playing out in the world.
Things like AI and its effect on education and the way it affects life in general, we get to have more time to react to those things.
I think the problem with Gen Z among many, you know.
We'll get to Gen Z, know what I mean?
They just exist.
They are the testing ground for a lot of these technologies that have broken through in recent years, right?
But Gen Alpha, Gen Alpha gets to potentially benefit from our reactions to those things and maybe
shifts in policy or approaches to the way that would otherwise affect their health negatively.
And then in a more solidly pro-direction, they might be at the precipice of how all of these
things benefit health care substantially.
So you might get to live long enough into a pocket of time that millennials or Gen Z doesn't
really get to benefit from where your lifespan,
is elongated by the quality of medical treatment available.
And so there, it's, I mean, yeah, it's kind of like, you know,
if you're the boomers, you dodge World War II right after it, right?
Right.
So if you're Gen Alpha, you're kind of praying for World War III happen, right?
You want Gen Z to go through all the, or whether it's World War III or whether it's...
You want to be the one right after.
You want to be the people who are young and right after and then all the previous shit.
The clanker wars happen over the next five to six years.
Yeah, Gen Zie dies.
Gen.
I mean, I honestly think there's truth to it.
And I think especially healthcare, you know, like we did a whole episode about this,
talking about the advances in healthcare with AI.
And I continue to believe, and there's a lot of evidence pointing that we are going to make
massive leaps in healthcare over the next couple decades.
And that some of the framing I've heard around it is just try to live long enough to get
to the point that that stuff happens.
And probably we will get to live through that of life spans dramatically extending.
You will almost certainly.
And then the gen alpha will, if you're 10 right now, if you're 5,
you almost certainly are going to have access to vastly better medical.
Can you pull up my screen, Perry?
It's not just us hoping this.
Or mine, yeah.
No, don't believe this.
There was this military parade in China,
and there was a hot mic incident where they caught Putin,
Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un of North Korea,
talking together about how they're all going to live to be 150 with the events.
They're all going to be able to, like, use harvested lab-grown organs
to replace their body.
cycle it out and live to be 150.
Whether or not they're actually right. It was very like Trump-esque where they're like,
I've heard that people are going to be able to live to 150 with organ donations and various
blood transfusions. It's like, none of them were like, this is happening.
There's like, I've heard that this is, it's all like hands up. I'm definitely not doing
this. These people are all 80 and they're talking about how they're going to live to 150.
So I think it's too late for, for boomers. Like they're not better.
Yeah, they might be cooked, but Chin Alfa is going to have something like this.
And you're going to, you're not going to be able to reverse the aging that has happened
these people, but maybe before we hit aging period.
We get to get to doge.
So what, you know, Gen Alpha, let's say you're 12 now.
You'll be 30 in 28 years.
What is that?
That sounds like 53.
Mike.
53.
That's, the world's going to be different.
I can't even visualize what 20503 looks like.
So they're going to be, you know, whether it's good or bad, they're going to be seeing
stuff that will completely out of our realm of our possible.
We can't even imagine it.
And I think a last note on the.
this is like we said at the beginning, this is framed around how these generations, you know,
exist with it.
You got to take it off.
You got to take it off.
You got to take away the lost generation.
I keep looking over and I keep seeing three men doing what?
They're making love.
Yeah.
That's what they're celebrating America.
You told me the greatest generation liked to do stuff like this.
Yeah, they got wild, dude.
But in an American context.
And I think there's also a world here where, you know, due to the, you know,
financial collapse of
America due to the crushing
amount of debt that we have.
You know, maybe American life
for this generation is poor, but
you know, this generation succeeds
somewhere else.
You're saying Gen Alpha and China
is really, they're rearing up.
Yeah, maybe they...
You know who? Gen Alpha, when the nuclear war happens,
Jen Alpha and New Zealand's going to be chilling.
Yeah. That would be...
Gabe Newell's bunker.
Yeah, there's...
If the sorting hat could also, you could pick which
country. That would be sick.
Gabe, who is going to live to 150?
I mean, counterpoint
once... And CSGO handsford and
once the boomers finally die and
we get into power, finally.
Maybe we can kick the debt problem down
the road just a little bit longer. Let the alphas
take care of it. Put it on to alpha?
That's a good idea.
We have the choice to make their lives
cutter back. God, we can punt it for like
30 more years. We could just punt. We just punt.
All right, well, why don't we get the next one?
Well, actually, quick ranking, so far.
Would you rather be Gen Alpha or Greatest Gen, if you had to pick?
I would definitely rather be Gen Alpha.
Absolutely.
I think so.
It's just not worth it.
You're the casino game.
I mean, we don't know the Great Depression or the wars to come.
Yeah.
But in one of those two, you know the Great Depression and Wars to come.
That's the difference.
The devil you know versus you take a risk.
Okay, all right.
I'll at least flip the court.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
You're right.
Okay.
Millennials.
Ooh.
Dude, we got to do a different.
I can't go three back.
Okay, all right.
Back to back, back.
We're back to millennials.
We are doing Gen Z.
Let's mix it up.
Let's do an older room.
Gen Z.
All right, fine.
All right.
Hit up with Gen Z.
Yeah, you and I'm going to listen to two older men.
Let's talk about Jen Z.
Speaking of three men, Aiden.
What did Gen Z love?
They love being whiny on podcasts.
They love working for Ludwig.
They do.
They love stupid.
haircuts. They love
cheating at basketball,
complaining about the
they love the environment.
They always try to talk about the environment.
Make me feel guilty about eating factory
farmed foods. Yeah, what's wrong with that?
Yeah, guys, keep telling me what it's like.
When I go dump crude oil
into the Los Angeles River, there's always some
Gen Z. There's always some woke Gen Z.
Holding up a sec, Greta Thunberg always yells
at me when I pour crude oil onto the
birds in the L.A. Harbor.
Genzy years, 1990s.
to 2012.
Though I, what,
you were you born?
97, baby.
You're such a fake Gen Z actually.
I'm the gatekeeper. I'm the gatekeeper.
Wait, so you're the oldest Gen Z.
You're the oldest.
Okay, I didn't realize that.
I will say there, it feels like to me
there's this weird 97 to 9-11 period of Gen Z
where they're really not.
They're so different.
They're like so,
because they still,
you guys still had VCRs and early Game Boys with batteries.
I was watching the Lion King.
Yeah, it doesn't,
like, because there's Gen Z doesn't.
now that are still in school. And you're like basically 30 and dead.
There's such a difference. There's such a difference in what I've seen from Gen Z.
but yes. Okay. So Gen Z, the tech you guys grew up with would be like the Nintendo DS, the Wii.
Indeed. Indeed. And we played Super Mario Galaxy. I think the key thing is that you grew up with tech.
Because like for us, there was still, I mean, like, yes, there were video game consoles, but they weren't
like ubiquitous in your life. And the really big thing is internet wasn't big yet. When we were in high
school. I mean, in high school, it was. I'll say phones, really. Yeah, so definitely phones. So internet was
like becoming a thing going into high school. I remember like, you know, in middle school,
it's still AOL is how we like talk to people, right? There wasn't really social media yet.
It was high school is when that stuff was kicking off. And even that it was still very immature.
There was no YouTube that anybody used really in high school. It was like coming to form towards
the second half of high school. But anyway, the big one being phones, right? I did not have a
smartphone in high school. And almost nobody did. And then, right? Right.
right after we exit is when smartphones become a thing.
And then that, as everybody knows,
has dominated society, has dominated society,
has dominated attention spans,
has dominated apps,
it dominates entertainment,
it's TikTok,
it's the gig economy,
like phones have,
in combo with the internet,
dramatically changed how people live their lives.
I would say like phones and social media
are the big things.
But phones are what made social media really
excelle, right?
Like Instagram,
the reason it took off is because of things,
because of phones, right?
And this impacted everything.
Everybody, right?
Every generation is hit by this.
But I think what you're saying is right,
was Gen Z is the first native.
Right.
They grew up with this.
They were immersed in it from,
shut the,
he's not even saying anything
and he's annoying me.
He's on his phone.
He's on his phone.
He's always with the phones
with this generation.
What's the good parts?
What's the pros of the generation?
They grew up.
I mean, it's like this.
Lutterwood gives you a job.
Almost certainly you get a job from Butler.
Oh, a good one.
They're all really depressed.
That's not actually,
this is a negative, Doug.
Well, okay.
But not in a great depression sort of.
Counterpoint, they're actually aware that they're depressed.
Because one of the things I often have heard by I talk to older people is like,
oh yeah, they're really depressed.
But like in Texas, you don't talk about that, right?
You don't bring it up.
You know,
so it's like there's certainly an argument that Gen Z is more anxious and more depressed
than any other generation.
There's also an argument that we just talk about mental health far, far, far more.
And there's more awareness.
And I think both of those presumably have truth to them.
That's a fair argument.
I would say they're also, you know,
they're more connected with,
people with similar interests online,
like in a way where you would be,
like, you know, if you lived in a certain area,
even when I would grow up and move on different military bases,
if I didn't have a friend that I could find in that school
who liked the same hobbies as me,
I just had to pretend they didn't exist
and try to conform a little bit more.
But now you really can find people with similar hobbies
and interest anywhere you want online
and build these communities, which is kind of cool.
It's fun like, it's Mario Kart Wii.
Gensi is kind of like a guinea pig
where we like injecting phones.
Okay.
How does that work?
And we just kind of squirted
in there and we see what, oh, it's like, hey, right is your finish up education? AI. Let's just
see what happens, right? I think Gen Z is very much the guinea pig and we're just,
oh, like, COVID, we're like, yeah, let's just see what happens. And then we hire a bunch
people and everybody gets laid off. Let's just see what happens. Let's see what happens. Crypto. Let's just
what happens, Gen Z. I think that's that, and the average home price is about $400,000 now.
Yeah, I think that's the other thing that's worth pointing out. And obviously, we'll get the
homes is just this is the generation where really the prospect of homeownership and even just
spending a reasonable amount of money on your living expenses is that's not the thing anymore.
You have to spend a crazy amount of money and it is incredibly unlikely you're going to be
able to buy a home and have that traditional American dream.
I think like with our generation, it's like half and half.
Half the people have a foot in that.
Half don't.
A lot of us have boomers who have, you know, accumulated all this wealth and we can lean on that.
And I think Gen Z is the first one where it's like, oh no.
I graduate from college or high school, whatever,
and I'm just planning on paying all of my money and rent for the rest of my life.
And that is depressing.
I think that the general downside of this generation is that you are the guinea pig generation in so many ways.
You're the generation that this technology has molded the heaviest at a time when it's the least regulated.
You have the least defined path of how to become successful.
like this general track record
that all of the generations prior of you
could pretty much follow
is starting to break.
This system of American success
that is modeled out for you
and you've been sold your whole upbringing
isn't translating into the things that it's supposed to.
And then you've also gone through the mind blender
of having a phone or an iPad
or the internet around you unmoderated
for your entire life.
And we're just going to kind of see
how that works out. And you sit in this little divot of time where I think this generation's
going to be wrestling with a lot of the consequences of just having been born and existing in this time
period in a way that I think Gen Alpha gets to be more reactionary to. Right. Or in millennials
didn't have to live through in quite the same way because it came at a tail end of their mental
development. I think it's still it's millennials, but I totally agree with what you're saying. And I really like
the point about this is one of the generations where you really cannot get advice from those older
than you. Like it is just that the old systems do not apply in any way they have fractured and
broken. And so you're kind of on your own in a unique way. And almost like a greatest generation
way, almost like a throwback. Things are changing so much that you are really thrown to the
wolves. That's interesting. I also just piggybacking what you're saying of the change in like,
So the old systems, like we know, we grew up with our parents and presumably most Gen Z kids do as well.
Their parents saying you got to go to college and you get a good degree and then you'll get a job and you'll be set.
And you buy a home and that's, you know, you're like told this dream.
And that's true has worked for many millennials, but many have failed.
I mean, there's a lot of resent.
It was already failing.
Right.
There's a lot of resentment in our generation.
And I, in college, was resentful of the fact that our colleges were giving my friends and people I knew these degrees that were not.
going to pay back at all. And they're putting themselves
$100,000, $200,000 in debt for an
English degree from some college that is just
not going to pay back, but they've been sold
this story over and over.
But it was still true for many people.
Like, you could go get a computer science degree
and just be good. And that was my experience, right?
And then it feels like now the stat that came out that's really
illustrative is that
college graduates are just as
unemployed as non-college graduates.
For men, yeah, but yes.
Okay, for men. But like that alone is like,
that's a total
It's never been like that.
The facade was still there,
but now it is a complete fracturing for Gen Z
of this is what you were supposed to do to succeed.
You know?
Two more things about this generation.
I think you're interesting.
We kind of mentioned the pandemic,
but you know,
in the way that like Vietnam would be a big deal
for previous generation.
The COVID is like the big defining event
of this generation so far,
the biggest world event.
And it really had,
it hit every member of Gen Z during schooling.
So,
and I think that's where it impacts the most.
You know, in studies, after study, it's shown that, like, people that were in school during COVID had markedly worse outcomes in the years following.
You know, it disengages you from the system you were on.
You get off of the treadmill and it's hard to get back on in the same way.
And so they all got hit with it, various ages, some older than some younger, but it's like, that's been a big thing.
And again, it shook the world in such a way.
Second thing is the creator economy.
It's like it never existed, really, prior to Gen Z.
and Gen Z has now become such as big cultural force,
not only from where they get information,
thanks for watching this podcast,
but also as like a path of, you know, a career path.
Like where you want to possibly,
it's the number one requested job among Gen Z
is like working in the creator economy.
So these are two weird things that didn't exist before
that are like big defining points this gen.
Yeah, you have such a comparatively outsized cultural impact now
because you're so well,
integrated and you understand all of these tools to like make videos and share them and you're so and you don't
have to go through the old media structure of like going through all these hoops to get you know broadcast a
television show for example right so young people get to be the at the forefront of like cultural
messaging in a way that they never were before i just saw a really interesting stat i'm not going to
spoil who the number one ranking generation was but it was ranking generations based on
like economic political power,
but then also had cultural power.
And what you said was so true
in that Gen Z was like massively
higher, outweighed on the cultural power
and had no financial or political power, like zero.
Like they have way more cultural influence,
but almost no.
That is very interesting.
So with all that said,
where do you think it stands?
I think this is an interesting one for me
because it is technically the pocket I'm in.
I do sit in a weird spot where I'm,
like you said,
I do think the people who are born in like 97 to like 99 are in.
It's like 0.1.
It's a little different for you.
But if I was, you know, take my survivorship bias out of the equation, I think I would rather be a millennial or rather be gen alpha.
I think Gen Z at the very least is worse than those two options.
I would agree with that.
Particularly because of COVID.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It does feel like it, they just get hit with everything first.
The world is changing rapidly. It feels like they are
the unprepared younger people
being thrust into it. So I do feel like it's a kind of
a unlucky dice roll.
COVID, yeah, anecdotally, COVID happened
and I was able to change my life to benefit
from it. Like I was mature enough
and had enough experience as a, you know, in my career
and in my work and everything to benefit from it.
Same with AI. And that would be totally
different if I was 16 when
this stuff is coming out or happening. Like it's
so just seems incredibly challenging.
That being said, would rather
go into the trenches
of TikTok and COVID than the trenches of World War II,
I still would rather be a Gen Z than a greatest generation.
Yeah, I agree.
I would still take Gen Z over greatest generation.
Any day to week.
Any day the week.
Dude, so far,
greatest generation is at the bottom of the list.
It just don't want to fight.
Honestly, for the first couple minutes,
you had me sold of like,
damn, you know,
they kind of had it okay.
And, you know what,
no, actually World War II suck bad.
No, it's really that great.
It's really that combo of no health care,
like shitty health care.
into Great Depression into World War II.
And it's, it'll be tough to top that right now.
Who's next?
Ahem.
The lost generation.
The lost generation.
The lost, I don't even know much about this.
What do we know?
Okay.
I mean, they're lost.
The lost generation, okay?
The defining thing is that they were born and they were young adults during World War I.
All right.
So we're shifting it before the greatest generation.
And as I looked into the lost generation,
they're like the character in a movie
that is only there to be kicked down
every time they show it's like the cabbages guy
and Avatar Last Ender vendor
it's like they start to grow up
and it's so sad because they would never see him
they'll never get to see Avatar last Air Fender
they're like oh world war one my cabbages
no and then World War one ends
and then they like get to gather their cabbages
during the roaring 20s but even then there's a lot
of disillusionment people are kind of like
upset over World War I and how it ruined
the whole sort of romanticized war and national unity.
There's also prohibition, a move towards cities.
There's just kind of this weird fraying of cultural society.
It's where you get like the great Gatsby coming out.
And then, oh, beans, the Great Depression, my cabbages again.
And so they're kind of like middle-aged adults during the Great Depression.
And then towards the final quarter of their life, they get to chill with World War II.
My cabbages!
They had it really bad.
So they had a pretty shit.
Some of those guys are in their 30s and 40s, and then they just, they had to
to go to World War II. Some people went
back to back World War.
Dude, back to back wars.
No, no, that's this generation
to be clear. And it's, I assume,
I didn't look at why they're called Lost,
but it's literally a sandwich, man.
It's World War I. So here's the question. There's four
quarters to the Lost Generation.
Yeah. Right? It's World War I
a good decade, and
then Depression. They did get the 20s.
They got to hang out with Leo to Cabrio
and zip the ship game. Greatest generation
starts with Great Depression, then World War II,
and then their final two quarters are pretty good,
which would you rather have, right?
Easily, easily greatest.
You'd rather have greatest.
You take the gamble of 100%.
Greatest for sure, because, look,
the best case scenario of lost generation
is like you go to a Gatsby party and get syphilis.
Like, there's, that's like the best case scenario.
Worth it.
Because you're pretty much,
you're pretty much dead by the time
all of the progress post-World War II is happening.
You're pretty much guaranteed to be dead by then.
Yeah, basically what you got is the 20s.
That's the one salvaging thing for the lost generation.
And like some interesting things about that.
We call it like the roaring 20s.
But as a reminder, people are still pretty poor in the 20s.
But at least from like the American perspective, this is where consumer culture starts to come up.
A lot of mass production.
Cars become a big thing.
Radios like 40% of people have radios by the end of the night, by 1930.
So like this is you are being connected to the rest of the nation.
More people are moving to cities.
There's like investing in the stock.
stock market and there's, you know, jazz and there's all this, like, kind of cultural stuff.
Jazz, Aiden.
And they got rid of that later.
Like, you're, you know, your life is pretty shit from the war.
And certainly if you're in Europe, right?
I mean, the World War I just absolutely devastates.
It decimates.
Everything, right?
It's like, it's pretty decent for, like, we should say, lost generation just sucks balls if you're
European.
Like, it is just truly awful.
If you're American, you at least get that 20s, where for a large number of people,
it was pretty chill.
I just read All Quiet on the restroom front for the first time.
I think maybe I had it in school, but I never, I never cared.
I read it while I was on a plane flying back from Arizona,
and I was tearing up on a plane.
It is so impressingly sad.
It is just young people being thrown to their deaths over and over
in this miserable, sad environment.
One thing I want to say on our point between Greatest Gen and this gen,
is I've seen a lot of studies on happiness that show,
even in poorer countries that have measurably worse outcomes than like a richer country,
As long as you feel like you are currently doing better than your parents,
that is a huge part of how,
if you feel like we're on the right direction,
people feel,
they get a lot of purpose out of that.
And so I think for the greatest gen,
the world around them got better their whole life.
They went through the bad times,
but it got better.
I think for lost,
like going through World War I and then going back to World War II
or Great Depression is like just misery.
I just feel like this is probably the worst.
This is, I mean, I don't see an upside.
This one seems to be a good.
The only upside is that if you're,
born in this, you're more likely
to get to
enjoy a decade.
With greatest generation, you have to survive
through two brutal decades to get.
And again, this is if you're American.
You kind of want to die of syphilis in the 20s.
It's a good time to go.
I mean, that's the thing.
Like, you know, if you're going to die,
let's say you're going to die in World War II either way.
You'd rather die in World War II as Lost Generation
where you at least got to enjoy the 20s.
You know, if you're looking at it, you know,
and what you were saying about war, so like one of the
defining things with Lost Generation, as much as you have the
20s and it's good. It's what you said. Everybody, again, particularly in Europe, but people are
coming back from the war scarred. And so, like, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scotch Fitzgerald are
like authors during this time. And they're, they're the great American authors. And their,
their whole thing is about like disillusionment. So Hemingway's quote, there's nothing as bad as war.
When people realize how bad it is, they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy.
There are some people who never realize. It's like, everybody just be going like, oh, this is
fucking awful.
And then they're distracting themselves with jazz.
It was a part in the book where he talks about,
he's like a 19 year old kid.
I mean, he's a German soldier in the state,
but this World War I.
Yeah.
And he's talking about how he's in school at like 16,
all his friends.
And the teacher is talking to him
and talking about how noble it is to fight for his country
and how great it is and how they're going to be
the iron youth and they're going to help.
And like him over the course of the book,
just having that all fall from his eyes
and realizing what a disaster this is
and being there when his friends around him die.
And I think
I cannot
Meganized War
which is World War I
That is probably
The most horrendous war
To have happened in the world
This war
I mean it's like truly
Just infinite amount of people
Being sent into a bloody
Trench War death
And I
Not that there's a comparison
But World War II
Is probably a better thing
To have gone through
You put on the cheer list
I'm not tier listing it
But like it feels like
This is the worst iteration
To me
This one I would not choose this one
Yeah
The more I think about it
Having to experience
If like I think
to put this differently, the worst possible experience to have is that you go through that in World War I. You watch all of your friends and family die. You come back for a decade. If you're in America and you're lucky, you get an okay generation and then depression and then you have to go back to war with Germany again. It's like, it's like, come on. I can imagine the scenario where you're coming out of the depression or you're in the Depression era where you're suffering and you're poor and unemployed and you're in your late 30s, early 40s, and you're in your like late 30s, early 40s.
you decide to enlist again because it's like
your only option. And then you cope back to
your house. Not necessarily decide, right?
Yeah. There's still conscription at this period. I think when you're
at that age, it has to be voluntary, right?
Or maybe not. For World War II, I'm not sure.
Maybe not. I might agree with that.
Anyway, that's, I'm imagining like the
worst track there. That with that.
Yeah. That's, uh, yeah. I'm down to put
lost generation. Dead last right now.
That is fair. And that's right around
1900 for people are clear. So right at the turn
of the century, if you were born, damn, your life
probably sucked.
Feel for you.
You get drafted up to 35 years, seven months.
So if they were born.
And if you'd ever enlisted or whatever,
then it could be up to 44.
So if you'd already...
What?
So it's worse for vets?
Dude.
I was going to say at least lost generation
wasn't drafted in the World War II.
And they were.
They needed...
Oh, my God.
What we got?
Next one.
Next.
Who?
All right, we got millennials.
Meladios.
Tell me about me, Aidan.
Tell us about us.
I will tell you.
You know what I'll tell you.
Charming?
Good smile?
No, actually, most likely to go bald.
Most likely to go bald.
Very good illegal legends.
Sunsetting in their YouTube careers probably can't keep it going for a much longer than right now.
Just because the viewership's been way down.
It says it.
No, it does say all that.
Wikipedia is crazy.
Our generation is more of a roller coaster.
We're building for the up, okay?
We're building for the slingshot.
Yeah.
We're falling back.
Okay, so with millennials, I,
this is an interesting generation to me
because I think you're starting to see the,
you're starting to see the trends turn against you,
but not fully yet.
You don't have the same quality of life
as the couple generations that came before you
in terms of like affordability of housing
or affordability of college.
but you do still have a pretty concrete track
like college
college enrollment in this generation
has like gone up from previous generations
you're like the most
you're like the most educated so far
you're also the most likely to inherit
the wealth of the two generations
prior to you especially the boomer generation
I think that's that's
you know that has to come later in your
later in your life you know maybe
you're struggling to buy a home
for instance but
you're set up to receive the wealth of the wealthiest generation previous to you.
I think you're also at the tail end of the, by the way, this is the generation that's born
1981 to 1996.
And you're seeing the benefits of modern medicine, vaccines.
You're at a time when there's like a max public, I would say, belief in these things.
You're also coming out of an era where we've achieved all these great scientific achievements.
I feel like you have the legacy of things like landing on the moon that you're like coasting off of.
You're also at the- Okay, hold on. I'm stopping you there. At no point if I thought, damn.
I'm coasting off the- No, no, no, no. Remember that thing that happened 40 years before I was born?
It didn't happen 40 years before you're born, right?
30. Okay, 30. I'm not coasting off World War II. Why would I coast off of the moon?
No, I think you just exist. We kind of are coasted off-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-you're not taking credit for the achievement.
you exist in an American time frame
where like belief
in scientific achievement
and like all of these things are core
tenets of your upbringing
and I would say they are real
in a lot of those ways
that they're being perpetuating.
There's still a real sense of American exceptionalism
like we are driving all these things
around the world and we're the center of culture
or the center of technology.
It was one of the defining things of my youth
because I was born in 91 which sounds so fucking old
it was the year.
We were born like three months apart or something.
It was the year the Soviet Union fell
and the Cold War ended.
Berlin Wall goes down.
And it sort of fell, especially when I was young,
especially living on a military base.
But it was like, we've done it.
It's the end of history.
America, global hegemon,
and now everything's going to be good forever.
That was the idea in the 90.
That was sort of the feeling that I had as a child.
Yeah, and that's the feeling that you grow up with.
And I think by the time,
the first big, I would say, hiccups,
or at least that you're realizing as a millennial
from my perspective are 9-11 happens
and then the reaction, the global reaction to 9-11,
especially America's reaction.
Okay, we invade Afghanistan
and we invade Iraq like a couple years later.
So now you, it's the, you know,
you might be enlisting in the military
as like a reaction to that event if you're old enough
and then you're leading straight
into the 2008 financial crisis.
which is also something you have to navigate.
You're coming out of college into that time period.
Which is, I think you're starting to deal with the first big economic problems
that have been set up by the policies of the generations before you.
So you're at this weird inflection point where you're not the testing ground for all of the
technology that is proliferating, exactly.
It's coming to access, it's something you're accessing when you're older.
You have this strong, like, belief and faith in American,
institutions and the legacy of American success that has come before you and existed for most
of your upbringing. But now you're starting to see the earliest parts of the system break around
you and realize that your path in life is not as easy as it was for your parents. You can't
afford a home as soon as your parents did. Maybe you're choosing to not get married and have kids
as early as your parents did. And all of those decisions are getting pushed a little later. But I would
argue, especially over the long run, and statistically this is more likely to be the case if you're, if you're white, when it comes to the inheritance of previous generation's wealth. But I think going into the next like century or, I don't know, 50 years, I think millennials are going to be a very large empowered generation. They are the largest generation by like population, right? Right now. The largest voting block right now just recently passed. So you're going to wield the most, the most power,
of like political power and the most wealth
as a voting bloc.
You, the millennials will be the generation
that will shape most of the next 50 years.
Thank you.
And you're welcome.
We'll spare him.
Yeah, something as you're saying that
that I hadn't thought about till right now
is it, you talk about like the American exceptionalism
and growing up where I was told over and over
America's the greatest country on earth.
Like you are, your privilege to be born here,
the greatest and you're just told over and over
how great America is.
Yes, with the sprinkles of it.
You know, here's the faults or whatnot.
But it is off the world wars and off the moon
and off of Soviet Union and all these things.
And then all of the major events
that have happened in our adult lifetime
or young adult lifetime have all felt like a fucking waste.
Like Afghanistan, all of the wars in the Middle East
felt pointless and wasteful and destructive
and they went on for 20 years.
We're $37 trillion in debt now.
That doesn't feel like it got us anything.
The Great Recession was boomers fucking up
the banking system and the loaning, like, we didn't do that, right? Like, the Great Recession started
when we were in high school. It's not like we were doing this. And so it's interesting to think about
like the defining elements of our generation. And all of them, I think, are this slow narrative that
is being unraveled about American exceptionalism as we just watch miss after miss after miss,
is my feeling. I think that's well said. I mean, my wife, same age as me, was more directly
impacted, but a lot of people have memories like this of growing up and seeing their parents
lose their home in the Great Recession or have to lose their job or, and then, and if you're
an older millennial, we just barely dodged it, I think, getting as a recovery was coming back,
but like most people, many older millennials had to graduate into the recession. And that
hurts your earnings for decades to come. So I do think that, I think that in general, I feel like
America kind of had this narrative into maybe say 1999. And then,
Ever since then, it's been sort of like a,
it feels like the crest of the wave.
But especially in 08,
it's felt like none of the old methods
or the post-World War II discussion has really fit.
It doesn't fit anymore.
And so being a little bit older as a millennial,
it's obviously easier, I guess,
than being native to it like Gen Z.
But it's the same,
you're getting hit again and again
with like different body blows,
different shocks to the system
of what you were told when you grew up.
One benefit of this generation, I think,
and you guys can speak,
more to this, but
I feel like this is the generation
that started to benefit a lot
from really positive
social changes.
Like the, like,
more, less discrimination
happening or more, a broader acceptance of like
different people and different walks of life
and different races and like that is,
you were a generation that ushered
in a lot of social change,
but I think is very important to
the way we live modern life.
I would agree that. Possibly the most, because there's a big shift, at least with the younger Gen Z, mostly the male side.
My understanding is they're becoming more radicalized socially. There's like the Andrew Tate and there's the, not even just in America.
Like I've seen in South Korea, you know, it's been off the cliff. And so this is like a thing that seems to have peaked with millennials, which is like trying for more equality among.
Yeah, I feel like it's, that was my thought too.
is like in a way, I feel like it's more of a core tenet
of the millennial generation than Generation Z
because of that radicalization.
Thank you.
But mostly Doug.
I'm going to just give you that so much credit.
But yeah, and I think this is actually
one of the most interesting ones to rank
on the list that we've made so far
because I would probably put, like I said,
I think I put millennials above Gen Z
and then Alpha is like the coin flip of
it could have so much potential
but your life could also,
be be shit depending on how things turn out, right?
I would put millennials personally at the top of the list so far.
I think this is the best generation to be born into overall because you have this,
while certain aspects of your life are worse,
like maybe homes are less affordable as an example,
or maybe it's less affordable to have a family,
you have access to a lot of modern amenities and technology that I think can push
your life and career in a lot of interesting directions, and also you're the beneficiary of a lot of things that
help with like life expectancy and general health.
A key thing, I'm just as we talk about this, is I think Gen Z, all of these new technologies and trends and shattering of American, you know,
this happened at pivotal moments in an unregulated way where you weren't equipped to handle it.
Whereas for us, it's like, we got to experience stability and then things start changing.
I think it's a huge advantage.
Like I would infinitely rather be a millennial than Gen Z for those reasons.
I can't imagine AI coming out when I'm in fucking sophomore year of high school.
Like that would be so disruptive for me and my friends and everything or COVID-Had
anyway.
Yeah.
I think about, you know, how I attempted I was to cut corners in college to play more
League of Legends.
And if I had had...
I don't think I would have gotten into a good college.
I just would not have learned a goddamn thing because I would have used to judge of me for
everything in order to play more league.
And the only reason I had to go to the library and focus and try to grind through it was because I would have failed otherwise.
Like I had to do it.
So, yeah, I soft agree.
I think the Gen Alpha coin flips an interesting question where they might have, you know, I think if this stuff gets solved, it could be really prosperous.
And I remember you saying off pod, AI will fix it.
I've been telling Doug to say the whole time.
He doesn't even like AI.
All right.
Okay, that's a fair.
That's a fair discussion.
Why don't we get on to the next one?
So right now we win.
Yeah, you guys are beating me.
Oh, I ripped it in half.
Oh, okay.
You don't need to get so angry.
Gen X.
Gen X, I have a little presentation about Gen X.
I'm so curious about Gen X because we never talk about Gen X.
It's just boomers are millennials, right?
We just pretend that they're almost silent, if you will.
Can I give my little guess as to why this is the case?
I think that the reason they're forgotten about a lot of the time is I think culturally,
we basically lump them in with baby boomers.
Like, I think that's the main reason
that we don't talk about the specifics
of their generation.
Let's show it.
Yeah.
So if you can pull this up,
this is Gen X,
also known as the, at least in America,
the MTV generation,
because that was such a dominant cultural influence
when they were growing up.
How old are they right now?
Just give a sense of it.
Because boomers are like 65 to 70,
or 60 to 80, something like that, right?
No, that's, you're digging of Gen X.
Oh.
Gen X is 65 to 82.
Oh.
Roughly.
Oh, damn.
Okay.
Boomers are right after the war, so 46 to 64.
Damn, okay.
So I have been lumping them together.
Yeah.
Well, so they get lumping them in a lot because there's because the way the population
curve went, there are so many more boomers that Gen X just wasn't big enough to have a cultural
impact, to have an economic and political impact the way that boomers did.
So they kind of got forgotten.
They're often called a forgotten generation.
65 to 80 is their numbers.
So when they were born,
it was like the Beatles and black and white
and when the earliest ones were born.
And when the latest ones were born,
it was like the 1980s.
Rubik's Cube just came out.
It's yuppies and it's Reagan and it's boom times.
So they were named after this novel
by Douglas Copeland about tales for an accelerated culture.
I think that's the main thing is
culture really began to accelerate in their time with mass media.
These are all some famous GenX people.
And a lot of them who have big,
cultural impact today.
Like Joe Rogan is the most popular podcast.
Or Dan,
Wayne the Rock Johnson,
didn't know he was...
That's Vin Diesel.
Will Ferrell.
Kurt Cobain died young,
but he's kind of like
one of the most famous
like Gen Xers,
the rebellious,
you know,
that's the kind of idea.
They were big of analog technology.
Like that,
that is their,
the Walkman,
the VCR,
early floppy disks in PC,
all of that is very Gen X.
They got to experience a lot of this stuff
before it became all digital.
One of the quotes they might say is like
when I was a kid,
because again, this is one of the first generations
to have two parents working.
So women started during the workforce.
So they were called the latchkey generation
because they could just leave home
and wander around and go on their bikes and do whatever.
So what's very funny is this generation
when I grew up, I could go play outside
until sundown without a parent or cell phone
or anything.
And now this generation is one of the most likely to have six tracking apps on all their children
and like Life 360 and, you know, watch everything they do.
So very interesting.
They, one of their big events was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Again, in the 1991, they were like, you know, in their 20s for this.
The admission of the World Wide Web happened for them.
9-11.
Again, it's also a millennial thing, but we were young.
They were like, yeah, we were, we really did not experience 9-11 to any meaningful degree.
So that's, that's, that's, that's, that's sort of Gen.
in a nutshell,
they,
what I would say is they got to draft off
a lot of things that the boomers had,
but again, are too small
to claim the full power of it.
They didn't have enough of voting block
to take it.
I did have a big con I wanted to show.
And this is what I found while researching,
so I can find it.
This is happening right now.
This is called the GenX career meltdown.
It's basically that GenX
came right after the boomers
and really wanted to emulate them
in a lot of these creative fields
like a talk.
graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV.
But unlike the boomers who got to finish their career,
make all the money and sort of retire while those things were still thriving,
Gen X is being hit with all of those things radically being disrupted by the internet
while they're still like 45, 50, like still needing to earn, still needing to figure it out,
and all of it's getting wiped out.
And so it's actually a really kind of deeply, it's kind of sad and dangerous time
because they can't change.
Like it's much more difficult to be like,
learning code.
Just to be like 45 or like, you know, 54 with three kids and to be, okay,
I'm just going to change my career radically.
Like, newspaper editor no longer exists as a career in a lot of places.
Like it's just wiped out.
Photography is all digital.
Like the things they spent their life doing don't exist.
Yeah, that's interesting.
A lot of the automation and stuff that, you know, like the trucking industry,
there's a lot of Gen X in there.
Yeah.
And, you know, as those jobs,
jobs get decimated, like who, who wants to retrain and hire a 65-year-old 20-year-old,
somebody who's been trucking for 20 years?
Yeah, I'm having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over, a 53-year-old
in film and TV director, talking people in their late 40s and 50 about who once imagined
they would be able to achieve great heights or at least a solid career are now more likely
to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can't get hired, or the
magazine journalist who isn't doing much of anything. Like, this is a, it's weird because
They don't have like a World War I or World War II.
Their biggest crisis is coming late in their life as the things they spent every, you know, their years doing are irrelevant.
Like that's, that's an interesting crisis to have.
It's kind of unique.
Is this your, because for me, this is my parents' generation.
Is this your?
I have one boomer, one, one Gen X.
Okay.
Yeah, I thought they, my parents were boomers, but they are GenX, but like late Gen X.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so, I mean, you know, and I see my parents are,
are pretty happy, pretty stable, enjoyed the prosperity of,
but my dad was in the military, which is not a career that got, you know, changed.
Yeah.
So, this is really interesting, because I still associate somebody who's, you know, 50 plus
as benefiting from the, you know, economic environment and everything that the boomers
really ushered in.
And it still feels like they are, they got a ton going for them.
And really the one downside is this like major transformation towards the end.
but I still think that the major,
they got to be there for genuine moments
of like American exceptionalism,
including the Soviet Union falling
and I would include 9-11
of like a moment of like the nation
really rallying together around this thing.
Whereas again,
we grew up when we're just in Iraq.
Like we didn't grow up, you know,
like being like, hey, we had this, you know,
big crisis that we had to overcome together.
We're just like, oh yeah,
we're killing tons of people every day in Iraq.
Yeah, you guys are younger.
It's worth noting that after 9-11,
America was like, we put 95% approval in George Bush.
Like, it's the most united America's ever been behind a president.
It was the most bipartisan, the bills ever.
Like, it was a brief period of, like, united as Americans, you know, unless you were Islamic.
But, like, we were united as Americans.
And, like, that's like foreign to us.
And right, and that same unification was then used to go start a war in Iraq and spend tens of
trillions of dollars.
Like, the stupidest possible use.
But, like, during that Gen X period, like, you had American acceptance.
exceptionalism. Yes, technology is starting to change, but they're still the generation that
really benefited from that. And the same way that you're saying, like, oh, these things have changed.
All of the TV and movie executives who are getting wealthy off all these things are gen X, right?
They're all. And so I...
It's very widely distributed. Like all generations are. So I would say it's a fair point.
And it's worth saying that by the rule of like, did you have a better time than your parents?
They did. They absolutely did. They had a way better time than a parent. They were in an era of actually
real peace and prosperity in America only near the end.
where it's starting to like fray and they're still active you know.
Oh, I think this one is interesting.
I figure this would be one of the harder ones to place.
For me, I take millennials over Generation X.
And I think because if you're in the millennial category,
you were just younger when the internet became super important.
and I think you are more likely to adapt
in how that fits into your life and career,
which I think is a very, very important thing
for how you succeed from there
and also the amount of options that you have
to take your life in.
I do think there's an economic argument
for choosing Gen X.
I would understand if somebody chose that generation
over millennials, but that's kind of my vote.
It's like I stand by millennials here.
I think I personally would take millennials
because I fear change
and I know the devil that I know.
But I think realistically,
if you're doing a marble out of the hat,
Gen X had a better chance.
You've a statistically a better chance of success.
I think this is the lowest risk option
of what we've talked about.
Millennials, like,
as we talked about,
like these new trends come in
and are crazy disruptive
and where adults and can handle it better,
but I'm sure we all know
plenty of millennials
who have not handled things well
and are dealing with lack of affordability
and lack of job prospects
and all these things.
And so I think just the gap
between haves and have-nots
really started to expand on millennials
and Gen X, it's still a lot of that.
Just you can follow the path
and have a good life kind of vibe.
Still existed.
I guess the way I would look at it is in a house.
Get a good career.
Go shake somebody's fucking hand to get a job.
Like, you know, go to medical school.
And medical school, my dad was,
had made more money after medical school
than when he went in because he would work on the summers.
Yeah.
Like that's a, education was affordable, is the point.
Right.
Like the stuff that boomers said still worked for Gen X.
It doesn't work.
All of our friends who became doctors are still,
in debt 10 years after graduating.
Like it's, yeah. If I was picking,
if I was picking this, like I was
some omnipotent being, I was dropping
a marble into the system of life.
Yeah. I would drop it into Gen X.
But for me personally, I would pick
millennials. Yeah, same.
And for me, it's like,
technology is
what makes me excited to be alive.
And if I was back then, I was like, oh, cool,
you hear about Pong? Like, I don't know.
You say Pong? They literally think
it's like selfish, but in my mind I'm thinking
of gaming, it's like they didn't have good games.
Right. When you get older,
like when you get older, there's arcades.
You're also in the time period.
Like, you're in the wake of the civil rights movement.
Like, there's so many interesting cultural things
happening in that time period too, like through your teenage
years to your 20s.
Yeah. I think it's, I don't know,
you have some sick video games.
You get Donkey Kong by the time you're like 24.
You don't get anything sick, really.
You don't think Donkey Kong's sick when you haven't seen anything else?
Goldman doesn't come out until 1997.
Bro, but you haven't seen it, Goldeneye yet.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Like, multiplayer, playing with, like, the things that I love about gaming.
No, no, it's because your dopamine receptors are fried, bro.
You can't even enjoy it.
Gen X.
The consumer is telling me my dopeemeter's everything.
No, no, obviously, put yourself in the Gen X body.
You have farmed a table dopamine receptor still, and you're playing Donkey Kong at the age of 25 in the arcade.
That wins.
That wins.
Yeah, relative.
Like that's got to be.
Hey, you make it a good case.
I bet the high for.
playing Donkey Kong when you're 25 is higher than any high you've had playing league.
That's what I actually, no.
I think that's, that's crack.
That's not true. That's not true.
All right.
Well, you know what it is and you know what we have to close out.
One left.
The champs.
The boomers.
Fuck you.
Boomers.
God,
I want to be born.
You hate him,
but you love them.
Yeah.
But you hate him.
Okay,
I want to do a little bit of a slide here.
Can I introduce the tone here?
I think that growing up,
there's always been a little chiding,
particularly the last five years around like, okay, boomer and a little resentment towards boomers and kind of chiding at the boomers.
And then the past, like, especially year, especially this year, as I've done more research in a variety of different factors around what is causing the various economic, cultural challenges, debt challenges, all of these different things.
I really keep coming back to, I think boomers fucked us up pretty hard.
I think they took a situation, took all the benefit from it, built lots of housing, and then stopped housing from being built, took all the political power.
and then stopped other people from having political power.
They took all of this stuff.
They put us $37 trillion in debt so they could go blow up half the Middle East.
And now we are stuck with all of these things.
And I have become really genuinely pretty resentful
towards the boomers.
And I would love for you to convince me otherwise.
I don't want to be an asshole.
So the boomers, 1946 to 1964.
World War II ends in 1945.
And it is a pivotal moment for the entire world.
It changes everything.
And again, we all currently live in the shadow
of how the world got reset up.
how boundaries got redrawn, how power dynamics shifted after World War II.
They are born starting in 1946, one year after.
Everyone gets home in the war, starts fucking, and begins this new world order.
So they have dodged the Great Depression.
They have Dodge World War I.
They have Dodge World War I.
Again, their cultural impact goes beyond what I could fit in one slider.
So this is Boomers, and this is a quote you might hear from Boomers nowadays.
And then I told him, just print out a resume and walk in and they'll give you a job.
couldn't quite get the laugh right.
You get the idea.
So this is boomers.
Famous boomers you might know.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama,
Michael Jackson, George Clooney.
Wide range of people who've had cultural impact recently.
Boomers are kind of like the TV generation
because when boomers were born in 1945 and onward,
TV went from zero percent of U.S. households to 100 percent so rapidly.
Literally in their lifetime,
they saw everyone around them get.
that a TV and it become a huge part of the cultural landscape and seeing radio is the
client.
That being said, those are rookie numbers.
We all got smartphones in like two years.
That's true.
It took it like two decades.
Even faster.
The greatest challenges they faced in their lives, we're not World War II or Great Depression.
They did have in the 70s, which there would be, you know, it would be somewhere between
20 or 30 that range.
Huge rise in inflation.
People had long gas lines.
They had, this is a beginning of some economic.
changes we did where we suspended the gold standard and all that stuff. It was 70s. And then
Vietnam. I'm sorry, I don't have an image here, but Vietnam was there, was there,
they were old enough to have fought and died in Vietnam. And in fact, many of them spent their
youth protesting. Protesting it. Yeah, Vietnam. And these, this is the jungles of Vietnam. This is not
the jungles of Vietnam. I think of the wrong picture. But it was Vietnam. Okay. So,
and I found, here, I'll go back to this. So the main thing about the boomers is that this is the
popular, the fertility rate in the United States. And you can see,
right after World War II, there's this massive spike.
And you can call it, demographers call it the pig and the python,
which is like if a python ate a big pig and it says, do you mean digested?
So in 1970, again, most Americans were between 5 and 23.
This is the boomers.
So over their lifetime, they have had outsized impact on everything
because they have been so much bigger than every other generation around them.
So people that have their beliefs and their worldview and where they grew up with
have just had this unprecedented amount of political power.
And again, shown here, they have, even today, even today,
when they're all relatively old,
have still the most political power.
When they were born in 1945,
they had about 20, 30 years of flat home prices,
right for them to get their jobs and get earning on the ladder.
Holy shit, I did not realize that.
And then right around 1970, when they hit around 30 years old,
boom, it skyrockets.
Do you think that has anything to do with the fact
they bought and built all the homes and then stopped other ones from being built.
Does that have anything to do with it, Brandon?
Just lucky, I guess, I think. Just lucky. Just lucky timing.
So yeah, right around here is when they started acquiring houses,
and that is when they went absolutely off the rails,
which is a huge part of why they have all the wealth today.
So this is a chart of U.S. wealth by generation starting right now.
So right here is basically when they started to get political power.
Like, when I have the arrow on the chart,
is when the first boomer president comes in.
Okay.
And you'll notice from there, their wealth skyrockets past the older generation,
silent generation.
And then it goes to unprecedented heights.
So we see now that they have more than, you know, Gen X,
silent and millennials combined.
Gen Z is not even on this chart.
They have almost no collective wealth generation right now.
So that arrow lines up nicely with this.
We've talked about us on previous episode, but I want to go into it.
This is Bill Clinton, the 92, the first boomer president.
Basically right when we're born, Bill Clinton takes over,
followed by a series of boomers.
You know, two terms of Bill Clinton, two terms of George Bush, two terms of Obama,
Trump, Biden, Trump.
Biden is the only non-boomer because he's too old.
He is three years to be a boomer.
Oh, no, he's great.
Yeah, I think he's great.
Or silent.
I think he's silent, actually.
Whatever it is, he's three years to old, so he's basically a boomer.
He's basically like the oldest boomer, or the oldest of the previous.
So essentially, our entire lives, 92 to 24, to now,
has all been boomer political power.
And that is when these massive wealth changes happen that has kept
assets like housing and stocks that were acquired before this time
growling and bubbling so that new people cannot get on the ladder
but they are rising up. And I wanted to show, most of the day we've been talking about
America. It's been mostly an American-centric lens of these generations because it's hard
because it changes so much better. But I just want to say the boomers, this post-war War II
like shaking up of the world are not just an American phenomenon. And so I have
extrapolated over the entire world right now who is still running the country. By the way,
by normal laws of generations,
which is mostly about 20 years long,
we should have been done with the boomers in about 2012.
It should have been 92 to 2012,
and then we move on to Gen X presidents.
That's the rough idea.
But they have kept hanging onto power,
and in fact, with Biden, got him older.
So right now, across the world,
these are boomer leaders.
Now, I'm going to go through this a little bit.
Donald Trump, obviously you know,
in North America, biggest economy in the world
and biggest company in North America.
But if you go to South America,
Brazil, biggest economy, South America,
America, boomer, Lula.
The four biggest economies in Africa are four boomers.
Which can make up more than the rest of Africa combined.
Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, boomer.
UK, one of the biggest economies in Europe, boomer.
I included Sweden to make fun of Aden.
Also a boomer.
No, no.
Also a boomer.
Valor Putin, boomer.
The two biggest economies in Asia, India and China.
Boomer, boomer.
Also, Japan, including got covered by Xi Jinping.
Australia,
Albanese, boomer.
In Antarctica, there's a really old penguin.
That's a lot of power.
So we are currently living in a truly,
and by the way, I added up the GDPs
of all these countries.
It's like, it's well more than half of the world population
and well, well above like 70% of the world economy.
So it's like we are in a boomer dominated world,
top to bottom, across all countries.
They have all of the wealth and all of the power.
No matter where you go, no matter which continent you're on.
And because of the dropping fertility rate in the world,
the idea is that the oldest generation will always be the most powerful going forward.
Like, because old people will live longer and we're not having enough new babies,
once the boomers die off, it will still, the next oldest will take over,
which, by the way, if you look at this little bump here, is millennials.
Yeah, let's go.
So, well, we should talk about how much boomers damage have done.
We're going to imprison anybody who's too tall.
Yeah.
We're too eight andy.
You got to engender yourself just a little more.
Okay.
Maybe we can say a millennial.
We are setting up for a millennial type situation.
And we should talk about what the boomers have done wrong so we can learn from it because
we're going to have a similar level of influence globally.
The millennial population bump is almost as.
Okay.
So, so is the millennials,
millennial population bump as big as the boomer.
Not even close.
Okay.
So that's...
Relatively it will...
Okay.
Because we're going to be the biggest.
We're going to have the most control technically,
but not in the way the boomers have where they have this unbelievably large just percentage
of people, right?
That's right.
Okay.
Yeah.
And again, Gen Zee's almost just as big as millennials, to be honest.
It's a little bit...
I think it's a little smaller.
Because we're, I mean, we're both way smaller than boomers.
Like neither generation is even close to how big they were.
So that's, that's boomers in a nutshell.
they really have, you know, one thing I want to say,
I had a little note about it here,
but I'll just sort of paraphrase.
The idea is that when boomers were young
and they had this big population bump,
the things they cared most about were like,
getting out of Vietnam, student protest, things like that.
And they got those things done.
They made impacts.
Then as they grew older,
they started to care more about like, you know,
housing affordability, whatever.
Like the things they cared about
have been priority number one for America
their entire lives.
And now as they get,
older. You're seeing this huge push to like eliminate all property taxes.
Yeah.
And that is the last gasp of boomers who have gotten all the real estate using their political
power to on the way out kick out the only tax they really are still paying.
Like it's, it really is just testament to how much they have, they have taken it over.
I wish I had the quote here.
Or even the incredibly wealthy boomers of which there are so many who have helped to drive
their housing prices just through the roof complaining about just screeching at the idea of
social security reform, which to be clear is a system where you pay into social security
throughout your adult life. And then when you retire, the government pays you back.
But we are bankrupt. We can't afford it. And it's becoming more unaffordable every year.
And the problem is that the boomers are living longer than any previous generation,
which makes the system even more distorted. So there needs to be something to change there.
The only way to not change it is to put America more.
or into debt to assure that they get Social Security until they die,
and then we are stuck paying for that bill.
It's just like, oh.
I think the general theme here, right,
is like as this cohort aged and because of their outsized impact,
they're able to make a lot of decisions that are most pressing
to whatever their generation is at the time,
successfully put that policy into place,
and they've been able to do that the whole way through.
So the world, as it's structured,
or the American, the American world,
it's structured, serves to benefit the boomer generation the most, whatever time period
you happen to be in. Can you guys think of any big downsides to their generation? I wanted to ask
you guys that because I figured from like a, you know, from an economic perspective, the boomers
were going to have kind of the best case here. But can you guys think of any big blights? I think
personally, like they came up in Vietnam. It's like the big down.
They had got drafted into Vietnam.
Many of them died.
It was a stupid, pointless war, height of the Cold War, arrogant.
You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, that, that, and that radicalized a lot of them,
and they were anti-war, though they, in later life often became pro-war.
So I would say Vietnam in their youth, it's like the biggest black mark of this generation,
but, but again, the death scale is so much smaller than World War II, World War I, Korean War.
and from an American POV,
I mean, they just had just decades of prosperity,
decades of like green lights.
Like even if you fucked up a little bit,
you're likely to have things bounce back
and go on the right track.
Because you can go to college.
You, it's very easy to fund yourself
to go through college
and then you have an incredible amount
of new prospects.
Housing was cheap.
You were more likely to be addicted to cigarettes.
Yeah, you know, higher rates of...
Yeah, health stuff is always a basic thing.
Yeah, health and technology, obviously were worse than.
And that's, I mean, I would,
still rather for that reason be a millennial. But, you know, they, yes, they had access to TV. And I think
maybe some people forget how shitty TV was when you had 10 channels and you just like hope something
was on. And it's not, yeah. And again, you know, we said at the beginning, but like this is a primary
like white male perspective or whatever. Because like being a boomer, it doesn't matter your
opportunities for housing or better if you can't get on the housing letter because you're a woman or
you're black or whatever in the in the 40s and 50s like that. Right. You're screwing that. But
They did get to see, like, so the thing about baby boomerers,
I think that's the truism about this thing is like,
everything was getting better.
Decade after decade after decade,
they were seeing new technologies make lives better immediately.
They were seeing like civil rights progress, make progress.
Things were measurably getting better.
Yeah, I was going to say, this is the generation leading the charge
with a lot of the, like, movements for equality.
Yeah, that's true.
They were the people.
Not as much as us, but yeah, they were not bad.
All right, all right.
I have this video from the currently leaving prime minister of France,
who is trying to pass a balanced budget, who could not get it past.
You couldn't get people to politically agree because they couldn't decide whether they should cut spending
or whether they should raise taxes and they tried to do a little bit of both and you couldn't get it through.
And he said this on the way out.
This is translated with, I don't know, some kind of technology, but so it's,
not his actual voice, but this is what it sounds like.
He's talking about boomers, and he is a boomer, by the way.
He's talking about boomers in France.
This is not just an American phenomenon, basically, this boomer thing.
They're the ones who are the victims.
They're the ones who will have to pay off the debt for their entire lives.
And we've managed to make them believe that it needs to be increased even more.
Don't you think that's brilliant?
All this just for the comfort of certain political parties and for the comfort of the boomers,
as they say, who, from this point of view, think that, well, everything is just fine.
Yeah. So we talked about all the fracturing that is going on for millennials and for Gen Z and for Gen Alpha.
But for Boomers, things are roughly fine because they still have all of these assets.
And so they are like on the way out the door, just making sure that no money goes towards solving any of these new problems and only goes to keeping what they had afloat.
Just keeping it afloat.
For example, the largest floating block in the United States is boomers.
And they voted to keep cutting taxes in the big beautiful bill and put us more in debt.
Well, I'll say we, none of them are going to deal with that.
We are, by the time that happened,
millennials are the biggest voting block in America.
However, we don't vote at higher rates.
Like we,
there's more millennial voters,
but boomers vote like way higher rates.
Right.
So they, yeah, yeah.
So with that being said,
where would you actually,
I think similar to Gen X and maybe even more solidly,
I think you could make an argument that this was the best generation
to be born into.
I'm on this list.
I think, you know,
obviously variations in circumstance
that I'd put an asterisk on that
but I think in a lot of ways you could argue
that this was the best generation to be born into.
Would you guys pick boomers?
It's hard to imagine giving up
what I have access to now.
I think definitively it's very hard to argue
that it was not the best generation to be born into.
If you are rolling a die
and you want to ensure you have the best outcome
and the highest likelihood of becoming wealthy
and having all these incredible benefits,
It is clearly the baby booner generation.
You have so much more power and influence.
And we have seen how they have made everything benefit themselves
and fuck everybody else and pull up the ladder.
That being said, me individually,
I have no interest in being alive in 1970.
I want to make videos and play video games
and build interesting creative things.
And the world is a million times more adapted for that now.
So like, no, absolutely not.
I would rather be any of the more recent ones.
I think it's tough.
So I looked it up and the, you know,
even though we do say that there's,
obviously more racism back then,
the racial wealth gap among boomers still,
like black boomers have all of the wealth
among black people in America.
Like it's still, so even if you were not white,
you're probably having a better economic opportunity
being born as a boomer.
And it's probably a difference to be women
who couldn't have the same access
to like bank accounts and jobs,
but so basically as a man,
either way, you're probably getting more economic opportunity as boomer.
I would say,
I wouldn't pick it, but again, for some reasons.
We adapted to these lives and I wouldn't change it.
It easily is the number.
I think it easily clears as like less chance of dying in a war,
less chance of a ton of a ton of.
You just have more likelihood that at the end of your life,
you're going to have some financial security.
And whether that's from your own assets
or whether it's from the government,
which is funneling it through Social Security
before it falls out of funding,
it's all to you for most of your life.
So yeah, I would say they, I would say for me,
it's an easy win.
And for someone like a white guy like me,
if I was born in this 50s or 60s,
very likely I would have easy career opportunities.
You know, someone has no major problem.
It would have been an easy glide for me.
I would be the standard boomer probably.
And the world was less polarized then.
America got more, you know, it would just be easier.
So for me, I think I would pick millennial,
is number one, but Boomer will be right second,
and I think it's easy actually first.
Or you put it all on red, you go,
Lost Generation, send it.
Just to see.
It's so crazy.
It's like Dark Souls, dude.
I like the hardest mode.
Yeah, start on Boomer's than you New Game Plus
into Lost Gen.
This is fun.
I think, I'm, I mean,
it's, I guess I'm excited
to see what the next, you know,
10, 20 years,
even though I think it could be,
doom and gloom in a lot of ways.
Just to have the answer of what
things are like for Generation Alpha, Gen Z,
I think those two especially have so much
of their experience of what we're evaluating here
yet to play out.
And even millennials, right?
Like, realistically, you guys have another, like,
10 years, you'll be alive.
I'm going to kill you.
Especially good job.
Yeah, I think about it, like, okay,
remember, I don't remember,
but like think about 20 years ago right now.
It's 2005.
Imagine 2005 in your mind.
Like YouTube has just launched.
Phones do not exist.
You can still watch Saddam Hussein being hanged on YouTube.
You cannot, by the way.
In 2005.
No, you cannot.
You could back then.
Was it one of the first videos or what?
Yeah, I watched it.
There's like 20 videos on YouTube at this time.
Look, it might have in 2006.
They were manually approving every video.
There's no way they're like, yeah, let's add this.
Let's have to be five percent.
The first two videos,
I went to the zoo
and Saddam Hussein execution.
Yeah, but that's
20 years ago.
And the whole world is different.
It's so dramatically different.
I can't even,
there's so little similar
between the world we're in now
in 2005.
What is 20 years from now
that look like?
We cannot picture it.
It's going to be drastically
unimaginally different.
So I do think
Gen Alpha is the massive
coin flip here
where we don't know
what the hell they're going to go through.
It could be better, it could be worse.
We literally don't know.
It could be the top or bottom of this ranking.
Yeah, I feel like so much of being able to evaluate
like the lost generation and the greatest generation in this, right?
We can literally see the whole timeline, right?
Yeah.
So you can be like, well, the greatest generation,
you can see the struggle at the beginning
and the benefits that the people who make it far enough get to see.
And you get to evaluate it so holistically.
But so much of this for the top four is guessing
what the ending is going to be.
people, which is dark. That's like the boy of the show. Do we're watching the news? We're figuring it out. Like, we're guessing what's going to happen? What is, what is the world we're going to live in? I think it's interesting. I want to just briefly pose something, which is just a crazy thing. Like, as an American, I think probably as a European as well. We used to build cities. The cities didn't exist forever. The baby boomers built the city. So you know when you see the skyline of American city? Like, the boomers did that in their lifetime. And then they stopped things from being built. Like in my lifetime of the major cities I've lived in, there's like one or
maybe two new skyscrapers that have, like, been put in my lifetime.
And you compare that to, like, San Francisco, for example,
was built by the boom primarily.
And I see a lot of those were built before the boom.
Like the silent generation, the greatest generation,
the great skyscrapers of like New York or of Chicago,
these were all built by,
was it like 50s, 60s, 70s?
No, I would say like, what you're talking about like New York.
Yeah, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, like all this stuff we think.
Is it like the golden, yeah, I think this is all earlier.
This is old.
It's like 20s, 30s.
Oh, I was, I was.
I was wrong.
I thought the Great Generation did everything.
Oh,
and then we're all coasting.
Oh,
I actually dislike the more now.
Interesting.
Okay.
Yeah,
the baby boomers got to...
I think the boomers just coasted.
They literally had the ultimate coast.
Maybe it's just the...
I don't know.
Everything was set up.
It still...
Man, shit,
bothers me, man.
It's really frustrating.
Anyway.
So two generations we didn't get to get to
were the missionary generation,
which is before lost.
Why was it called that?
The missionary generation?
Because they fucked,
they fucked basic?
I think it was...
They were only...
They never invented doggy.
And it was just, no, it was, and then the lost generation figured it out.
Yeah, that changed everything.
Yeah, which is probably one of the only pros for the last generation if you think about it.
And then the only thing you're going to talk about is gen beta, which just started this year.
January 1st, 2025 is the first gen betas.
By the way, what a terrible name.
You don't want to be a beta.
Right.
They're born to be cucks.
At least put another thing, like a beta alphas.
You know, let's add another.
title at the end.
They're just going to get mobbed by Alpha.
Wait, what, how are these
generations named?
Who got to pick greatest?
Greatest?
They picked it?
I think we win one more.
When you defeat Hitler, you get to name yourself.
That's fair.
That's fair.
Dude, by the way, I looked it up.
You're right.
The greatest generation built all the cities.
They're so great, man.
They're actually the greatest.
They did.
They had the tough times.
It's like the weak men, hard times thing, but they built it.
We had a generation that just like set everyone
else up.
God.
And the boomer screwed it, man.
I think it's, I was digging.
back because I wanted to see how many generations
we had named, like just how far
back we could go. And, you know, I
looked at the next three before the lost
generation, one of which is the missionary generation.
And the
outlook back then just wasn't good,
as it turns out.
It's like, before running water.
You're reaching back and it's like, it's
slavery, like no, no water,
civil war,
religious fervor, quote, unquote,
and just no
medical treatments available.
Everybody is a farmer.
You're just a farmer back then.
You're probably just farming.
It's pretty bitter back then.
It really starts to get,
it's really the boomers where it starts to get
fucking juicy.
Cool and fun.
Yeah.
It gets a fucking hang out.
I may deserve it.
Maybe they worked hard.
They were,
they were born, right?
They picked the right time to be born.
I'll say that.
Homey crazy, man.
I think my pick,
my pick is Gen X.
I'm not my personal pick, but I think
Gen X is, you
at least get to reap
some of the rewards of the interesting
entertainment that comes to fruition.
I think that's something that the boomers
don't get to, no matter
how much money they have, they never get
to be fully integrated to
in the same way. And I think
they're missing out on a cultural
window that exists
primarily for Gen X and after.
I agree with that, if only because when we
an end on this.
The worst part about being a boomer
is being old and having to
not understand Facebook.
Right now, this is
an AI generated image of a sand
castle dog that is obviously fake to any eyes.
Beautiful. You have every right to be proud of this awesome work of art.
I hope that you will create and share many more creations like this.
And there's just walls of boomers commenting on this.
Already,
mental cognition of that of Vicky there on the post.
And I'd say no.
Hold on. Hold on. That woman sincerely believes that's a real picture. I would love to have
my last few years. Are you serious? Your final year's, you're rich and you think that everybody's
making incredible things because you don't understand technology. That's fucking incredible.
Maybe it's coming for us all. And if you were to ask who was the best generation, the boomers
will tell you it was them. I found more quotes. I'm 59. I love being a boomer. Everything was better
when I grew up, I turned 65 today, and I still think we had the best of everything. Cars, music,
fashion, sense, and dance styles. We were the fortunate generation. We lived at the best years
the country ever had. And then Vicki Bloom here says, we had to pay out of the pocket for these
things when we were a kid, never had handouts like this. Why can't today's young people make
things work like we did? Because they're lazy. Biden has made them depend on the government
and it is sad to say they'll never know what a dollar's worth. It's funny because they call off the
messaging that if the lost generation
and greatest generation are flinging at me,
I can be like respect.
I think if you talk to somebody old enough,
especially when I was younger,
I remember there's a certain,
there's a certain air from like greatest generation era
people that's like not,
I had it so good growing up and I long for those times.
I had it so shit growing up and you don't know how hard it was.
And I can get behind that because when you do the Vod
review of what that generation was going through.
And you're like, shit, man.
It's like your friends in school died of measles.
Like, you got drafted into World War II.
It was like the advent of like machine weaponry and like the two world wars then.
Nuclear bomb.
Yeah, it's all horrific.
And then the baby boomers were like, I had to pay to go to school.
And then you find out how much it costs.
And you're like, yeah, I had to fucking pay too.
On that note, let us know which generation you would like to be born in in the comments.
Thank you for watching this week's Lemonade, Stan.
Bye, everybody.
Bye, everybody.
