Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with Baby Boomers?

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

Baby Boomers are probably the most talked about generation in American history. But who are these people and how did they help shape the country we know today? Find out all about the big boom in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Noel over there,

so this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, Noel like to sit in on this one and not just sit record and run screaming. Yeah, we were kind of surprised. Yeah. It's weird though, it's been so long since we had someone in here with us. I know, it's been at the studio that time forgot.

Yeah, like we have to suck in our guts again. Yeah, I gave up on that. Sit upright, I have to lick my fingers and then straighten my hair with them. Sure. So Chuck, you are a Gen Xer, did you know that? Yeah, so are you. Yeah, that was my next point.

Oh, okay, sorry. I am too. Yeah. Noel I think is a millennial. Noel, were you born? 83. Noel's a millennial. Yep, God knows what Jerry is, no idea.

Yeah, she's of her own time. Sure. So, what none of us are, Jerry might be, I don't know, are baby boomers. No, Jerry, you know Jerry's a Gen Xer. I'm just teasing. Yeah, one thing that this inspired me to do was to do a show on generations, period.

I find it fascinating how people are grouped and also a little frustrated when once I got into the subgroups, it helped me. Sure. But when I looked at like, especially the baby boom generation, there's such a clear difference in the, which we'll get to the early and the later part of that.

Right. Well, why don't you just call them two different generations? Some people do. Yeah, well. Some people do, but for the most part they don't. For the most part, people say the baby boomers are people who were born from 1946 to 1964,

is the general definition of them. Yeah, it's just weird, like my mom missed out on it just by a couple of years, but then my sister just missed out on it by a couple of years. Right. So, it just doesn't seem like, I know they're not the same generation, but this is not even close. It shouldn't be.

No, it's not. And like, so we'll get into it a little bit more, but some people say that's just too wide of a swath. And more to the point, which this is the basis of generations, the life experience of those, of the people on either end of that 20 year or so spectrum are so, we're so wildly different that, yeah, they don't, they can't be in the same generation.

It just doesn't make sense because the point of a generation is that it is a group of people born around the same time who all shared some sort of major life experience, a collective life experience. Yeah, whether it's culture or ideologies. Yeah, usually an event though, like the assassination JFK is a big go-to for baby boomers, that in the event was so enormous

that it shaped their worldview for the rest of their lives. Yeah, like ours would be the where's the beef commercials. Right. Exactly. Uh, well, we do share that though. Oh no, I was dead serious, were you not? Well, I don't know if that's the identifying. For millennials, especially older millennials,

it would be like 9-11. Sure. It would be for ours, maybe Challenger. The Challenger explosion is the one I always go to. Does it always have to be a disaster? No, it's just got to be an enormous event that enough people are aware of and impacted by, that it shapes who they are.

So it's almost like a group of people all about the same age, all being touched in relatively the same way at the same time, so that their worldview has changed forever by that event. So where's the beef? Yeah. Okay, how do we agree?

Yeah. So the reason there were a lot of, well, the deal with the baby boomers as you'll see is that there are a lot of them and birth rates rose quite a bit in 1946 and stayed that way for about 20 years. And it's interesting when you look at the reasons. The most obvious thing you can point to is to say like,

yeah, dudes came home after the war and had a lot of sex. Eat, or eat, or eat. Pretty much. Right. That has something to do with it, but this article points out something I never considered, which was sort of a convergence of that. And then not just wanting to have a lot of sex after the war,

but the promise of prosperity to come after the war. And things are gonna be great, so let's go all in on the family. But that converging with a bit of an older generation of parents post-depression that may have waited to have kids for various reasons, and that kind of all happening at the same time. Yeah, younger families having kids not postponing,

the older generation that had postponed having the kids all at the same time. Huge, huge population increases. From 1950 to 1980, the American population increased by 50%. That's nuts. From 1946 to 1945, the number of babies born year over year increased by 20%.

That's a lot. Yeah, so in 1946, millions, I think about an average of four million and change babies started being born every year. And it kept going and going until, I think, 1957, when it plateaued and stayed high for a while, and then it dipped again, starting in 1964 or 65, which coincided with the widespread availability of the pill.

Right. One reason I think the baby boom generation is so interesting and endlessly talked about and studied is because it just, the shift, the ideological shift that they were presiding over is, it was just massive. This article kind of sums it up nicely, like they created the youth movement of the 60s.

When they were in their 20s, it was that culture excess of the 70s. And then in the 80s, they became the yuppies, and now they're entering retirement or in retirement. Running the world. Running the world and then as- Into the ground. And then as you'll see,

a lot of them are rebuffing the excess of, hey, let's make and spend tons of money and concentrating on giving back, which was originally inspired by the Kennedy administration, volunteerism. Yeah, that asks not what your country can do for you thing. That whole thing. Right.

But it's interesting, this one lady, the first, I'm sorry, the first boomer, born just after midnight in New Jersey. Kathleen K.C. Kirschling is widely regarded as the first baby boomer. Yes, she was born January 1st, 1946. Yeah, and as you'll see, if you look at her life, she really is like a symbol.

And of course, you know, that's kind of the problem with generations is you lump them all in as this. And of course it varies from person to person. Well, that's one criticism of even studying generations at first place. Yeah, yeah. But she was married for a time, got divorced,

has a self-made pension that she accrued over the years, like I'm gonna take care of my own retirement. Doing appearances as the world's first baby boomer. She missed out if she didn't. Slash bearded lady. And then had a career, a successful career as I think like a corporate trainer. Then in the early 90s, left corporate America

and became a high school teacher for like 15 or 20 years. She, yeah, she basically read a book on how to be a typical baby boomer. It's interesting. And now like splits time between Maryland and Florida and has concentrated on volunteerism in her retirement. That's really neat.

Yeah, it's like she's kind of the prototypical boomer of if you wanna buy into that thing. Yeah, traditional into non-traditional family, structure family life, right? Yeah. Career, took care of her own retirement. And then during retirement, she chose not to actually just retire,

but to stay active and engaged. That is pretty typical boomerism. Boomerism. Yeah. Should we hit people over the head with some of these stats? Yeah, I mean, they were pretty interesting. Like I guess just because they came at a really interesting time in America's history,

like the boomers started to be born at the same time as the suburbs. Yeah. The consumerism, American consumerism all really started with the baby boom generation. Yeah, like they felt really good about spending money on themselves. They were the first children targeted by advertisers.

Remember the advertising of kids that started with the boomers? Yep. Everything changed around that time. And in part because of the baby boomers. So they're probably the most studied generation in American history. Yeah, so there are more California boomers

than any other state. I think Utah has the fewest amount of boomers. But they still had like 23% of their population was baby boomers. Yeah, but they're the only one that was under 25%, right? Right. What else? 12.6% of boomers never got married,

which is from their parents generation, only 3.9% never got married. So that's a pretty big increase in shunning nuptials. I wonder what it is now I couldn't find it. I don't know. It's just increasing, I'm sure. What, people getting, oh, choosing not to get married? Right, or living a non-traditional,

maybe it's traditional now, even. Right. Like, we're just together, we're just not married. Right. Partnerships. What else? I mean, we could read out stats all day, but that's boring. I thought you loved doing that.

Yeah, I'm not great. Okay, fine. Well, there were two things that really stood out to me, though, and they go hand in hand. 40% of baby boomers expected their adult children to move back in with them. And then 30% expect their parents to move in with them. And for some of those people, that overlaps.

One of the precarious positions that some boomers find themselves in is caring for adult children and aged parents at the same time under the same roof. Yeah, and I posted something a while ago on Stuff You Should Know's Facebook page, and something about kids moving back in and people were like, oh, what a bunch of losers. And then so many people from all over the world

were like, you know, America's like the only country that feels that way, like that family should leave at a certain age and not come back. And they're like, all over the world, people are like, you know, we think it's a great thing, family's huge. And we welcome family to live with each other and into their 20s or 30s if they want to. That's bizarre.

They help each other, rely on each other. Yeah, and it weird. Because I mean, I guess the rest of the world doesn't know. In America, when you turn 18, they have a see you in hell party where you leave and you're not allowed to come back into the house until your parents are dead. Well, we call that a hit the bricks party.

Oh, well, you were bad to this family. That's right. Now that we're making stuff up, do you think we should take a break? Yeah, let's do some real research and come back and do this again. For my sake. Ow.

Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Ow. Ow. Ow. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

This is a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, Chuck. So the baby boomers were until very, very recently, the biggest generation, population-wise, to ever, um, ever hit America. And they hit America by, they hit us like a brick, ton of bricks. Yeah, but millennials are, they're taking over now, right? Yeah. Millennials just surpassed, um, the boomers in number from what I understand. Yes.

Millennials, uh, as of 2015, of course that number has grown now, uh, 75.4 million, uh, just edging out 74.9 million baby boomers. But here's the thing, millennials are still being born. Boomers are dying. Yeah. The boomers, actually, here's, here was something, um, that I just thought was amazingly interesting. The, uh, baby boomers peaked fairly recently as far as their numbers go. They peaked in 1999, at 78.8 million.

Wow. Right? And our generation is going to peak next year. Ooh. So if all the signs and symptoms that you personally are dying, and I'm dying, weren't enough. Yeah. Our whole generation's now dying.

Yeah. We're going to decline after next year. Yeah. I think more and more about that. But our generation peaking in 2018? No, about me dying. I know what you mean. Like, I never thought I would be that guy that, um, you know, that just sort of like,

that whole Woody Allen obsessed with your own death thing. Are you obsessed? No, but. It's healthy to think about the fact that you're going to die. Probably so. But some people believe, including me, that accepting, genuinely accepting your own death is the key to living fully. Yeah.

I agree. I think that's the struggle. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, you can throw that on a t-shirt, but. Sure. No, I know.

Sometimes I'm like, I wonder if, if it just hasn't fully sunk in yet and one day down the road, I'm going to be like, I'm going to die. I think, uh, this has come more and more for me in the past five years, so I'll check back in with you in five years. Okay. If I'm alive. That'd be, that'd be really sad. Um, yeah.

It'd be sad for at least three people that I know, and you're one of them. Thanks, man. Um, so I was talking earlier about the boomers that age range is too big and it needs to be split up. It turns out it has been, uh, generally if you look at 1946 to 54, people will refer to that as the leading edge of the boomers and 55 and 64 as shadow boomers or generation Jones. Yeah.

Did you look into that? Yeah. I mean, the name was the first thing I was like, well, where did that come from? And apparently there's a few different things either like, uh, they were Jonesing for prosperity of like days to come more so than the, the leading edge. Yeah. They had just as high expectations if, if not higher than the first, the first batch, but fewer resources available to them.

Yeah. It's a weird name. So they, they apparently were considered to be more cynical, more bitter than the first batch of baby boomers. Yeah. And then, um, also their life experiences, again, like we were talking about earlier are so different that, um, that there, it's just a different generation. Everybody's just being stubborn and wants baby boomers to be this 20 year generation

rather than 10. Well, yeah, but you were talking about the, the life events or whatever, the binding life events. Uh, these two writers, uh, Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott in the mid eighties kind of did a little bit of research on what they feel like is the, what people feel like is their defining thing from their generation and it is sharply divided. When you have the leading edge, you've got obviously, uh, JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, a lot of assassinations, right?

The moonwalk, uh, Vietnam war, civil rights movement. And then the more cynical, um, shadow boomers or, or Jones's, uh, you're talking Nixon and Watergate, the Cold War, the oil embargo, it, it sort of makes sense. It's definitely too like, those are two pretty starkly different sets of events. They totally, yeah, they are. It's like almost a different world that happened that took places along that change, along that divide America, switch gears in large part. Oh yeah.

Agreed. And you asked earlier if it always has to be a disaster. Yeah. I mean, all of these basically are pretty glum and gloomy. I think disaster unite, so that's probably a big thing. But also, I think it leads to a loss of innocence, which happens on a personal level as well. Right. Right.

And that's kind of when you grow up is when you realize, oh my God, everything isn't totally stable and my parents can't solve every problem in the world and there's like real strife and hardship and injustice and, and, and bleakness. Yeah. And when you realize that suddenly say something like this president, you idolize being assassinated. Yeah. And it can have a real solidifying effect on your, your life, your outlook. Yeah.

First, you mentioned the challenger for us and I'm in no way like downgrading that. But for me personally, it might have just been the way I received the news even. It wasn't like, uh, I don't feel like it like was the big defining thing. Oh, okay. It was obviously a big deal, but did you see it happen? No, I don't think I saw it happen live, which probably is a big factor. Um, but like Reagan being assassinated is rings more in my head at least as a memory. I'm not saying it affected me as much personally, but like when I think back, like what big

thing in the childhood happened on an international stage, like I like remember where I was when Reagan was shot. Yeah. And I don't remember the challenger as much, which is weird cause it was later. Yeah. I was only like five when Reagan was shot. I don't have any memory of it whatsoever. Right.

You didn't care. I didn't know. I was like, yeah. I didn't know what was going on. Five year old didn't care. I guess not. You're playing with your G.I. Joe's.

That's right. Uh, but as the article points out, one thing that united all boomers was TV. Yeah. Okay. So if we're talking about how, and we shouldn't, we should give credencer, um, props, I guess to the guy who came up with the concept of generations, it was a sociologist named Carl Mannheim, and he wrote The Problem of Generations, um, back in 1923. Oh, wow.

And basically said, this is the thing now, I'm Carl Mannheim, good night. And in it, he says, like I was saying before, that the generation is, is held together by the shared experience that they all go through together. Um, and up until television, I mean, you had radio, you had newspaper, you had a guy on horseback running around from town to town, shouting news or whatever. But when, with the invention of television, like now you have this really powerful way for people to share the same thing at the same time, because they were getting the news in exactly the same way through television, where a generation really could be solidified

and defined into an actual group that had a lot in common because of this event. Well yeah, not just news, but just culturally, like the first generation that sat around and watched TV shows together, like that and music were like the two biggest things culturally. I mean, you can, I mean, obviously you can talk about the Frisbees and Hula Hoops and Barbie dolls and stuff like that. But TV and music, like the birth of rock and roll, and the birth of television are like the two hugest things for sure, Elvis the Beatles. Those were very much in the wheelhouse of the boomers.

So you've got those things, you've got the, what they were like you were saying, you've got the fact that they can be shared easily by a number of far flung people all over the country of the same age. You got yourself a generation buddy. Yeah, and then the final little piece there is the skepticism of that generation, I think was a really big uniting factor, like boomers were the people who said don't trust anyone over 30. Yeah.

And the whole Nixon Watergate, the Vietnam War being played out every night on TV. It was like that led to like political revolution in this country, I think because of that skepticism. Yeah, but it's interesting rather than saying like their generations of parents before them, well, this is just the way things are, can't do much about that. This generation was among the first to say, no, we reject this way of looking at things and we seek to rebuild these institutions in a way that more reflect how we think the world should work. That was a huge hallmark of the baby boomer generation.

Yeah, it's weird though when you look at all this stuff like they were the most selfless in a lot of ways, but also the most selfish generation in a lot of ways at the same time. Oh yeah, like the whole 80s yuppie thing. Yeah, the me generation and the consumerism like was hand in hand with the birth of feminism or maybe not birth, but at least rebirth of feminism and the civil rights movement. It's really interesting that all those things like were wrapped up in this one generation. Well similarly though too, they were also very political and then apolitical depending on the decade, like they were members of organized student groups in the late 60s.

And then by a decade later, they were all doing coke and turning their back on politics while they were like disco dancing. You're like, hey, money, that's actually kind of cool if you have it. Right, yeah, they've gone through huge ships and sociologists have run after them studying them the whole time. Yeah, politically, it's sort of hard to lump the baby boomer generation politically because and I think this could probably set up most generations, but they're really hard to pin down.

So this is an old survey, but in 2004 AARP did one that found out that baby boomer supported abortion rights and gun control, stem cell research, but they also supported the death penalty and being more conservative fiscally and like sort of all over the map politically. What's funny is I saw like there's this actual sentence in this article, it's very difficult to pin boomers down as being either liberal or conservative and I went, huh, and typed into Google, found immediately a 2014 Gallup poll that said, nope, 44% conservative, 21% liberal. Oh really?

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Self-reported on a poll. So that's what? 2014. 65% total. Yeah.

So the other don't work. The other rest were like, if you can remember the 60s, you weren't there and the pollster was like, sir, I didn't ask you about the 60s. That's funny. And we talked a little bit about consumerism, but that was also a really big uniting factor was this was the first generation that really went all in on saying, it's okay to spend money on yourself. You don't have to feel bad about it.

You know, those previous generations were of that depression era where like, you know, you don't just do things like that. Don't throw that safety pin away. You can fix that. Yeah. It's not broken. Penny saved as a penny earned. Whereas the boomers were like, a penny saved is when you could be spending on something

cool, right? What's interesting is that it's come back again. Like that level of thriftiness, we're in the we're in the midst of right now. You think I didn't live through the depression. True. Yes. But I yeah, compared to even 10, 15 years ago, pre pre recession mentality, what we're in right now is definitely thriftier.

Interesting. Yeah. And yeah. Same thing though. Depression. Great recession. Yeah. Has a tendency to bring out the thriftiness in people.

We were talking about politics though too. So the first baby boomer president was Bill Clinton. Yeah, Billy. And then George W was the second baby boomer president. And then it went to Generation Jones with Obama. Right. Yeah. He was the first Joneser.

But baby boomer. Yeah. But really Generation Jones. Okay. Really? So Billy and George were in the out right the leading edge. Yeah. They're both born in 1946.

Okay. Obama's Generation Jones. And then the next guy is he was born in 1946 as well. So it went back to baby boom after Obama. Oh, interesting. And this, well, I don't know. You never know what's going to happen in 2020, but you would think that not even just a presidency, but in all of politics that they will, obviously they will be phased out with time.

But I wonder if there will be another president from that generation. I don't know. Although Joe Biden just said don't count him out for 2020 and he's, he'll be 80 then. Really? Yeah. He's got a lot of Vim and Vigor though. He does. But boy, 80.

I mean, not to knock any 80 year old listeners out there. Well, Bernie was 81. I think he would have been just fine. Yeah, that's true. 80's the new 60. Well, I hope so. All right, let's take a break and maybe continue with this afterward, huh? I think we should.

All right. We've got to finish. Let's do it. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay.

I see what you're doing. You think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

But you know, in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, one of the things about a baby boom is that, um, there's significant in that it's

a sudden influx of a lot of kids being born at the same time. Yeah. And the reason it's significant is because previous to that, and then usually after that, there's fewer kids being born. So it's a bulge in your population, right? Yeah. So that means that that population is eventually going to grow old. And as they grow old, they are going to need more social services that you have reserved

for the elderly, for the aged in your population, right? Yeah. I mean, not only that, the other side is, is the healthcare sector period, whether or not it's, we're talking like Medicare and social security and stuff, but just healthcare period in the private sector is like licking their chops, that the money to be made and is being made. It's going to be a big boom for the healthcare sector. And it has been booms for all these, for several other sectors along the way as they've aged

and matured, and then now they're looking to healthcare more and more. It's not going to be just like a sickness bonanza for the healthcare industry, because the one of the hallmarks of the baby boomer generation is they were one of the first to like really take care of themselves. Yeah. Much healthier. Like I remember when we were younger, like a 65-year-old was like an old person, like they might be on oxygen.

Yeah. They were not in good shape by their mid-60s. Yeah, like eight states every day. Oh, 60s, like they're doing one-handed push-ups in the street and stuff like that. That was the result of the baby boomers doing things like taking up jogging, like eating vegetarian, like just generally taking better care of themselves, having an emphasis on that. Yeah.

So they're not going to just all start getting sick on mass. Yeah, like the boomers, or I'm sorry, previously the boomers, they were like, well, what kind of steak do you want tonight? It's like what cut of beef? I want steak stuffed with steak. Oh, man, I just listened to a Mark Marin episode with David Spade, and he's talking about Farley. And he said that Chris Farley would put a new full pat of butter on every bite of steak

that he ate. Oh, that doesn't sound very tasty. Well, butter on steak is delicious. Yeah, but that much butter on each bite, that's too much. You might even say that's excessive. And Spade would get on and be like, dude, you can't do that. And he said Farley would look at him and go, he's like, but each one eats its own hat. He's like, you couldn't help but laugh because he was just so adorable.

But each one eats its own hat. Man, what a loss. Oh, I'm just so sad, man. He talked a lot about it. It was really interesting. Yeah. I'll have to check that one out. Yeah.

Yeah. I love those two together. Yeah. Very sad. Yeah. But you did. But we were talking about them aging and being healthier. Yeah.

They are aging in a much healthier manner than previous generations, but they still will need healthcare and these social services that are available, specifically like Medicare for healthcare and Social Security for retirement pensions. Yeah. So what's the deal? They're scared. They're like, no. No.

I started to look into it, but I got depressed. But then I also saw that like, no, we saw this coming, so they have taken measures. Yeah. I saw it in a couple places that it's the most predictable train wreck in American history. Okay. Well, that's good and bad. So here's the thing. When you're working, you're contributing to Social Security.

It comes out of your paycheck, right? Yeah. That goes into a poorly managed fund that loses money very quickly, right? So it was in grave danger of really running out in the not too distant future decades back. In the not too distant past. And in 1984, there was a payroll tax increase that created a reserve fund. And 1984 means that it was a Ronald Reagan tax increase, right?

So this reserve fund is still around. I think there's like $2.6 trillion in it, but we are depleting it each year and it makes up the shortfall that Social Security is lacking, right? So as we deplete it more and more, well, we have less and less money to provide for people down the road. They think by 2034, we'll just be back to just Social Security. The reserve fund will be depleted and we'll be able to offer something like 70 to 80% of the benefits that's coming to each person.

That's a big shortfall. In other words, hey, what you thought you were going to get, you're going to be short 20 to 30%. Yes. Right. Exactly. Okay. So people are like, what did we do?

Right. It turns out there's a lot of very not painless, but not painful at all measures that you can pick from and put together, I saw this great Forbes article on it. They had like an infographic, so it really drove it home. Yeah. But it was like, pick three of these, pick two of these, pick five of these, pick ten of these and they were just increasingly smaller and smaller, less noticeable measures that you could take and make up 100, 120, 130% of the shortfall in Social Security.

Just by moving money around? Yeah. Yeah. Or just slightly increasing these taxes, slightly slashing benefits, slightly making the age of retirement a little longer or a little older. But altogether, the average person wouldn't even notice really, right? So I'm sure that we're going to be able to figure it out in a way that's not going to just ruin everything.

That's good. The thing that's keeping it from really going downhill though is that the baby boomers seem to have said, I can't retire. Right. So in 2008, that great recession that happened, there was a massive transfer of wealth out of the real estate holdings and the stock portfolios of Americans. A lot of them were baby boomers who were poised to retire. They lost a lot of money.

It went elsewhere. Yeah. Right? And as a result, the baby boomers just said, well, I have to go back to work. Or well, I was going to retire, but I'm going to have to keep working for five more years. And that mentality seems to be keeping social security from being further strained. They're just not, they're working longer than they normally would be expected to under social security.

Yeah. It says here, the congressional budget office said that 25% of boomer households don't have enough savings put away to retain their standard of living upon retirement. So there's that. There are also a large set of boomers that want to stay active and keep working. Like I think it said something like 17%. Only 17% are expected to fully retire and be done working. And not all of them are because they need the money.

It sort of depends. I mean, it's kind of sad. Some people have been forced out of their jobs and at a late stage in life or later stage in life have to go back to like these hourly jobs and other people are choosing to, they're like, you know what? I want to go work in a wine shop and make, you know, 12 bucks an hour. Or like the first baby boomer chose to go teach high school as her second career. Yeah.

And is now full in on volunteerism. Right. So, yeah, there are, there's definitely both going on. Again, you can't paint that generation with just one brush, right? Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for using that metaphor. What?

You don't like that? No. Painting with a brush? No. Why do you hate art? We're that one guy. Yeah. Man.

But there are plenty of people who just simply can't afford to. That to me is just really, really sad, especially if the reason is that their 401K is just lost value or their house isn't worth what they were planning on and that was their nesting. That is really sad to me. It is. We don't give advice much, but I think millennials are much better about trying to think about their long-term financial future than our generation because I didn't think about that stuff till it's just far too late.

But I'm taking it very seriously now, but my advice to younger people is just like, just start early dudes and do debts with small contributions even, talk to someone who knows what they're doing, who knows what's going to happen. Don't depend on social security. Take care of yourself with safe investments and I'd be like, yeah, dude, I got it covered. My brother's going to open up some paylots, I'm going all in on his parking lots. I think that might work out, but try some nice safe investments, long-term stuff. Well, diversify.

Yeah. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Or in that paylot. Right, exactly. Which now just occurred to me, that was the fargo. That was what he wanted. Oh, is that what it was? Yeah, he wanted to buy some parking lots.

Yeah. Real rich deal stand. Yeah. Man, what a good movie. So I have, I know you're off of stats these days, but I have some that I feel are worth sharing. Okay. I'm just going to go sit outside.

I got these from the Miley Fool and they're depressing. So 59% of baby boomers expect to rely heavily on social security. 59? That's up from 43% in 2014. So more are counting on that now? Yeah. I would thought that would go down. No, things are not going well right now.

45% have no retirement savings. Wow. None. Anymore. They may have had it before, they don't have it now, they never saved whatever. That's up from 20% who said that in 2014. Wow. So things are tanking for the baby boomers right now.

26% expect to wait until 70 to retire, 30% stopped adding to the retirement assets in 2016. Yeah. 16% had taken premature withdrawals, 44% were in debt with a median debt of $24,500. Man. Yeah. This is not how we should care for our aged population. No.

You know? It's not. And then you couple the facts with like, that's great, you're going to expect to rely heavily on Social Security, you're going to be disappointed. But do you just go ahead and report that to any guy who asks you with the poll? Yeah. Yeah. The other big misconception is that the boomers work harder than millennials or Gen Xers.

Yeah. They're a Protestant work ethic that they're famous for. Yeah. And you found this cool thing. This guy at Wayne State, Keith Zabel. He examined 77 studies comprising 105 distinct measurements of work ethic. And he basically said, that's all just a bunch of junk that you read in Salon or Slate. He's like, if you look at the numbers and the stats, there is no difference in work

ethic between the generations. Yeah. Which is interesting. It is interesting. And it feels right. You know? Like it just feels like just something that some editor wants to write about and assigns it.

That's a big topic. Well, apparently that's a big human resource thing, too, is figuring out how to structure a corporation to squeeze the most out of each of the generations working there. And this guy is saying, don't even bother. They all work the same. Yeah. Although they did say that baby boomers tend to thrive more in, well, they subscribe to organizational structure more.

Yeah. And there are keys, whereas millennials and Generation X are more like, let's do some more work from home. Yeah. How about that? Or how about a big, huge cavernous office with no walls? Right. We're all the same.

Can we get some butter for our steak around here? How about a standing desk? You know what? A sitting is for chumps and Gen Xers. You remember that whole period? What do you mean? Here in our own office? Yeah.

Yeah. And people still do that. The weirdos. Yeah. But I've also seen more stools in here than ever before. Gross. Oh, I see. I see.

Tall stools. Sitting stools. I see. What else? Apparently the boomers are really the first big generation to robustly opt for cremation upon death and not have this morose open casket traditional, sad funeral and be more like, I want to die as I lived with Verve and Vigor and let's have a party, man, scatter my ashes on the White House lawn.

Yeah. How much does it cost to hire Gallagher? I wonder. I'll bet he's still tours, too. Oh, I'm sure he does. I bet he's got his own place in Branson. He's a little too hip for Branson. Right between Yakov and Inkelberg, Humperdink.

Yeah. You got anything else? I don't think so. Oh, well, I did think it was interesting, the big suburban boom that came with the millennials or with the... I keep saying that. I don't know why. I'm skipping Ginex altogether.

Well, that's the curse of our generation. The big suburban boom with the boomers, in the 1950s, it became cheaper basically to move outside the city in a tiny apartment and buy an actual home with a backyard and that's when the suburbs really boomed and apparently it had quite a deleterious effect on women. The women who moved to the suburbs, they were in a weird way taught like, hey, go back to that thing where you don't want to work, you want to just be a mom out in the suburbs and raise your kids.

Yeah, I see. That's the thing to do. I mean, Revolutionary Road, I know you're talking about. It's a pressing movie. Oh, my God. But apparently it generated that dissatisfaction is what led to the women's rights movement, like that dissatisfaction turned it into feminism of the 60s. Right, right.

Because I mean, there were plenty of women's rights movements before like with suffrage and... Oh, yeah. Well, with suffrage. Yeah. They revived it big time just living in the suburbs that it had such a crushing effect on women living in the suburbs, isolated from the city, from other people, from social networks and living in this place where they were expected to just basically raise kids

and keep the houses clean. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty neat how things like produce like equal and opposite reactions, you know? Yeah. So Betty Friedan in 1963 in her book The Feminine Mystique said that the suburbs were burying women alive and it's a very harsh way to put it, but it certainly drives it home.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I find that interesting. We need to do a feminism one sometime. I do have one more on Baby Boomers' smoking grass. Okay. Apparently they like it. It was one of the three things you could give for a ride. Yeah.

Gas and one other one. That's still to me one of the all-time great bumpers. It's just so good. This man, Benjamin Hahn, he's a doctor, geriatrician and health services researcher at the Center for Drug Use and he led a study called The Demographic Trends Among Older Cannabis Users in the United States, 2006 to 2013, it's kind of wordy, but he evaluated close to 50,000 adults, 50 and older and found that 71% increase in marijuana use among adults age 50 and older between 2006 and 2013, which makes sense.

These hippies getting older and it says here that they didn't start like they just kept smoking grass. Right. They just aged into another age group. Yeah, they're not new users, but that fell off a lot after 65, significantly lower prevalence of use, but still two and a half times higher with that eight-year period. So yeah, it's pretty interesting. I've seen the same thing with STDs as well.

There's higher rates of STDs among older populations than before and again, it's because the Baby Boomers are aging into these new age brackets. Bring in all of their vices with them. Yeah, my friend, well, I won't say any names, but I have a friend and his wife has, her family in South Carolina has an island, just one of these old coastal, it's not like an island like you would think. It is an island, but it's not some big, huge thing, just a small area of land on the waterways there.

Yeah, get an island. On the outer banks. Got you. Yeah, but I mean, you got to see the place. I think it's land, but it's surrounded by water and all that. No, but when you think like someone owns an island, you think of this big thing with like houses everywhere and like ponds. Well, the outer banks is like just tons of little islands.

Tons of little islands. So they own one of them. Right. And they have a little retreat there, which is basically a cabin with like eight bunk beds and then this huge, just picnic area, like a covered picnic area. And they have this retreat every year a couple of times a year and I've been on it. And all of these old South Carolina hippies are all these kids' parents and they put us to shame.

Do they all get naked? They like getting naked that age group. It was too cold to get naked, but they, like we were in bed before they were. They were up again the next morning before we were. And I remember like literally waking up, hung over and like walking out to the fire and there was like seven, 60 year olds with like three joints being passed around between them. Oh my gosh. You know, nine in the morning.

Did you leave? And everybody else was asleep and I was just like, what world have I stepped into here? And these are the boomers. These are these like, these cool old hippies. Yeah. Martin Moll. Still fighting the power, you know? Yeah.

Martin Moll. Yeah. It was interesting. They're a fun group. I gotta say. Still fighting the power. Yeah. Yeah.

Pretty much. Well, we could probably sit here and talk smack about baby boomers for a year or more. I love them. Yeah. They're great. But we're going to stop. Right? Okay.

Okay. So if you want to know more about baby boomers, well, stop a baby boomer in a grocery store and ask them about what it's like to be a baby boomer. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this English sayings of sorts. Hey, guys. Love the show. Enjoy the way you have a go at pronouncing things.

You seem to be enjoying being corrected on these. So hold on tight. I was listening to the podcast on fleece orcises and you mentioned Hurtfordshire, England. A couple of pointers. Hurtfordshire is pronounced Hartfordshire. Oh, we were way off. I admit it. It isn't spelled H-A-R-T, but then that is just the English language for you.

The legendary, oh, that has many sounds like tough, cough, though, through, it can be a royal pain in the butt for everyone learning English, but it must be a nightmare to learn English at a later age. Oh, yeah. My free tip for you is if you ever have to discuss a place called Lochborough in Leicestershire, Leicestershire, it's pronounced Loughborough in Leicestershire. Okay. Got it?

Cambridge is not on Hurtfordshire. It's in Cambridgeshire. That's a bit like saying Boston, New Hampshire, close, but no cigar, so I guess we messed that one up, too. No, no. That guy got it wrong. I was saying it's spelled like Hurtfordshire, so I'm sure it's pronounced Cambridge. Oh.

He wasn't listening. He didn't get the joke. No. Gotcha. He's a little American. Anyway, guys. Love the podcast. I'm currently going through your back catalogue, which he spelled with a G-U-E, and it wiles

away the boring drive to work each day across Cambridgeshire. Our differences are so vast. How will we all ever get along? That's Ian Rose. Thanks, Ian. Or Ian Rose. Or Ian Rose. Rose, there you go.

If you want to get in touch with us like Ian or Ian did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathousestuffworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

Get a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.