TED Radio Hour - What's driving generations apart—and ideas to bring them together

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z seem to be more divided than ever. But why are tensions running high now? This hour, TED speakers explore new reasons for this generation gap—and how to bridge it. Guests include professor and author Scott Galloway, social entrepreneur Louise Mabulo, advocate Derenda Schubert and writer Anne Helen Petersen. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From TED and NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. The United States has long pitched itself as the land of opportunity. A place where if you work hard, sacrifice, you can build a better life for yourself and for your children and your children's children. I think that's right. I don't even think you thought about it. It was just a given. This is Scott. When my parents came to the U.S. on a steamship, 150 quid each, and there was just a natural assumption that, given the opportunity that America offered, that you would just inevitably end up doing better than your parents. That was just part of the American compact.

It was definitely the case for Scott. He's now a professor at New York University, a popular podcaster, and bestselling author. And he's written a lot about the success. of America's brand of capitalism, the rise of the middle class through the last century, the spread of wealth and financial stability to more people. But now, Scott says,

that American compact, that each generation will prosper more than the previous one, it is broken. At the end of World War II, about 92% of children did better than their parents

by the time they were 30 economically. For the first time, it dipped to 50%. So now, It's a coin flip. So for the first time in our nation's history, it's no longer a given that someone, that your kids will be better off than you at the same age or at the age of 30. The latest generation of young adults, Gen Z, have come of age with crushing student debt, unattainable housing, and stagnant wages. And my thesis is that these have been purposeful decisions, that the economy has actually been incredibly robust the last 30 or 40 years. Our growth has been consistent, if not remarkable.

And every year, we figure out a way for the markets to go up in value. But we have purposely transferred wealth and opportunity from young people to old people. So who owns stocks and houses? People my age. Who makes their money from current income or working at a job and rents young people. That's nothing but a naked transfer of wealth and prosperity from young to old. You're constantly working and for what? You can hear the anguish playing out all over social media.

I cannot envision ever owning a home. Increasingly between random cute dog videos, there are clips of young people who are deeply distressed. I can't even afford like the chicken is going to struggle to survive. That so much of the economy seems stacked against them. Every day for the past eight years has been nothing but an absolute living nightmare. Of course, the young and old have always had misunderstand. understandings and tension.

But many of us are left wondering, has that disconnect gotten worse? Today on the show, Generation Gaps, ideas about sharing wisdom and prosperity, and the unexpected benefits of building compassion between Gen Z, boomers, and everyone in between. So back to Scott Galloway. Okay. I start us with a question. Do we love our children? Here he is on the TED stage.

Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I'm going to try and convince you otherwise. Essentially, as we go down generations, we're seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education continues to skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity is inversely correlated to age. Simply put, as we get younger, we're taking away opportunity and prosperity. from our youngest.

As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts to our society end up becoming opportunistic infections because, generally speaking, young people have a warranted envy, they're pissed off, and they're angry

that they don't enjoy the same spoils and prosperity that were provided to our generation. A decent proxy for how much we value use labor is minimum wage, and we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it'd be about $23 a share, but we've decided to purposely keep it low. Out of reach, median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was $1,100. It's now $2,300 because of an acceleration in interest rates, and the fact that the average home has gone from $290,000 to $420. Why? Because guess what?

the incumbents and own assets of weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants to ever get their own assets thereby elevating their own net worth. This has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth where people over the age of 70 used to control 19% of household income versus people under the age of 40 used to control 12. Their wealth has been cut in half. This isn't by accident. It's purposeful. Consciously purposeful? Or how did this happen? Well, the demo and democracy is working really well, and that is old people vote for even older people who vote themselves more money. So the child tax credit, which would positively benefit not only children but working-age mothers, say in their 20s or 30s, get stripped out of the infrastructure bill. It would have cost somewhere between, you know, probably about $30 billion.

but the $145 billion per year fixed increase cost of living adjustment in Social Security flies right through. So we now spend about 40% of our total government spending on programs for seniors. That's the greatest it's been in history. But way to get worse, in 10 years at the current rate, it's going to be over 50%, meaning the majority of our government spending and tax revenues will go to programs supporting seniors. And this crowds out investments in technology and in education, and things that are a little bit more forward-leaning show a greater return on investment and, quite frankly, benefit younger people. So our democracy, if you will, is working well, but it's a series of older people voting themselves more money. Old people vote.

I guess what I find confusing about this is I recently read in The New Yorker that since 2020, U.S. growth per person has been more than 2%. And that actually people in their 20s are richer than prior U.S. generations were at their age. So why doesn't it feel that way for younger people? So I think the study you're referring to is the following. There's some nuance here. And that is we have basically kind of the zeitgeist, and this goes to cultural moors, we have decided to embrace a winners and losers' economy or a hunger game like economy. And that is the good news is, if you think it's good news, is that there are now millionaires in their 30s.

When I was growing up, and I imagine when you were growing up, you didn't really hear about that. So the actual number of people in the top 10%, that number's got much higher. But if you look at the quote unquote bottom 90, the vast majority of these individuals, two things have happened. Their purchasing power has gone down. Inflation in housing, inflation and education, two things that young people save for and need to get ahead have skyrocketed. And their wages on an inflation adjusted basis have consistently gone down.

I used to make on an inflation-adjusted basis, people my generation made $85,000, then 20 years ago, 65,000. This is at the age of $25,000. Now it's about $55,000. And so you have a lot of young people who've essentially given up on buying a home. The travel industry is booming. And my thesis is that people have just given up on saving for a house. And so they pick up and head to Thailand for a month. They go to Coachella. So live events and travel have never been stronger. But people are struggling to kind of cover, I think, the basics or the essentials, whether it's getting a college degree, paying off their student debt, saving for a home, or deciding to have a child. The great intergenerational theft took place under the auspices of a virus. I know let's use the greatest health crisis in the century to really speedball the transfer. This is the NASDAQ from 2008 to 2012. We let the markets crash. And by the way, you need churn, you need disruption because it seeds and recalibrates advantage in wealth from the incumbents to the entrance. It's a natural part of the cycle.

But wait, lately, no, a million people who would die would be bad, but what would be tragic is if we let the NASDAQ go down and guys like me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again increased the massive transfer of wealth. The best two years of my life, COVID, more time with my kids, more time with Netflix, and my value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has to pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who will have to deal with an unprecedented level of debt.

Key to getting wealthy or establishing some wealth as a younger person is that in 2008, as an example, we allowed the markets to fall. We bailed out banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. And guys like me who were coming into the prime income earning years got to buy Netflix at $12. It's at $600 now. Got to buy Amazon at $8. It's at $180 now. So when you bail out the boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old recent graduate of a culinary academy who wants her shot to buy a restaurant

on the cheap. Disruption is a cycle and a churn that seeds advantage from incumbents to entrance. And what we've decided is to borrow young people's credit cards to ensure that the incumbents stay rich. And so it seems like my generation of the people in power have lost a general view that it's their responsibility to invest in the future and invest in the middle class. I think politics have become very much, I need to get mine. This happens across the entire ecosystem. In my industry, every year we take pride in rejecting more and more applicants, meaning that the incumbents who already have degrees see the value of their degrees go up. When I applied to UCLA, it was a 76% admissions rate. This year, it'll be nine. When you own a home, you get very concerned with traffic and you show up to the local review board and make sure no new housing permits are approved. We have one and a half million fewer homes than we need for household formation, which again has taken the value of homes way up. So we have embraced this rejectionist exclusionary culture that crowds,

out the opportunity for entrance. But at some point, all the old rich people are going to die. Is there going to be a redistribution of wealth happening then? So a lot of people will say, but Scott, you're about to see the most massive transfer back to young people in the form of inheritance. Yeah. I would argue that's a really unhealthy way to live life and build a society. What you're talking about is Downton Abbey, that, oh, you don't need to work or worry because you're going to inherit this estate. Waiting around for your mother and father to die so you can buy a home and have a family is just not a way to live a life. Two-thirds of billionaires are self-made. 78% of new millionaires are self-made, and that's one of the wonderful things about America. So this notion that,

oh, don't worry that I'm getting my undue spoils, that I've gotten wealthier on your credit card as at some point you will get it, I just think that's a terrible excuse, does not build a healthy society and quite frankly doesn't work and just results in dynastic dynamics that the American culture has tried to avoid. When we come back, Gen Z protests online and across college campuses. Scott Galloway claims they're ultimately fueled by deep economic uncertainty. And he has solutions. On the show today, Generation Gaps.

I'm Anish Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Be right back. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to tell you about our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus. If you have a garden or a backyard, these days that means you think about how it can survive extreme weather. So this week, I talked to Ted Speaker Anika Goss. She heads up an organization in Detroit that helps people make their neighborhoods and green spaces more resilient to the elements. And she has got some design and planting tips for you. That is coming on Wednesday. Not a Plus supporter yet. Please join your fellow listeners for bonus content and all our episodes sponsor-free. Just go to plus.npr.org

slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thanks. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. On the show today, Generation Gaps. What older and younger generations can learn from each other and what seems to be tearing them apart. We were just talking to NYU professor Scott Galloway. Scott says younger generations can't afford to pay off their debt, buy a home, invest in retirement, and he blames older generations for withholding financial opportunities from them. The effects, he says, are more than just economic. Well, the repercussions are at a very basic level, disappointment and rage. A lot of these folks are living at home. A lot of them have been told the whole life they can do anything. And then that 210 times a day,

they get a reminder of their failure on their phones with a series of notifications where people vomit their personal possessions and amazing lives that they're supposedly leading. And they're reminded every day that they're not doing well. And also, there's a false impression out there that everyone is vacationing at the Amman Hotel and owns a Ferrari. And if you don't have all of those things that you're somehow failing, it creates incendiary that is poured over every issue. So I would argue in large part what's happened on campuses in the United States isn't about the Middle East. It's about America. Whether it's the Me Too movement, whether it's Black Lives Matter, all of these movements have righteous justification for concern and engagement among our youth.

But what turns every cut into an opportunistic infection and then gangrene is the fact that young people aren't doing as well. And I think it just creates a general level of rage. I'm curious, you know, what young people think when you link their dissatisfaction with life and what feels like really big gaps between the generations. How do they respond when they hear these things? I get a lot of support for young people. I'm not sure they appreciate me telling them that the reason you're protesting is you're angry about your economic situation. I think that sometimes that feels like I'm infantilizing or patronizing them. But what I generally, the feedback is, you know, thank you.

You said the quiet part out loud. And who I really hear from is parents. If you're a boomer or if you're, say, not even boomer, but you're Gen X and you've done well. And you see your kid. Your kid's a good kid. She's worked hard. She's graduated from the right schools. and her and her fiancé have been saving for a house for 10 years, and they just have given up.

They can't buy a house. They're thinking about not having kids. It's just not viable for them. I mean, this is what you want. The whole point of an economy is to create a middle class. The whole point of a middle class is to create a thriving society, a democratic society that's prosperous. But the reason we all want prosperity at the end of the day, when we get a little bit older, is we want our kids to do well. What can we do? Nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with it.

We got the hard stuff figured out. We have the money. Things are doable. We increase minimum wage at 25 bucks an hour. It goes into the economy. The wonderful things about low and middle income households is they spend all their money. We have to have a restore or a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals. We need to refund the IRS. We need to reform social security. It should be based on whether you need the money, not on how old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed up a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI,

he should got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax. We need to eliminate the capital gains tax deduction. When did we decide that the money that capital earns is more noble than the money that sweat earns? Shouldn't it be flicked? We need universal pre-K. We need to reinstate the expanded child tax credit.

We need income-based affirmative action. Expand college enrollment and vocational programs, mental health, band phones in schools, investment third places, big brothers and sisters programs. We need national service. We need to tell people in the United States and Canada that they live in the greatest countries in the world, and we need to remind them of that every day by exposing them to other great Americans where they feel connected tissue. We can do all of this. We can do all of it. We have the resources. The question is, do we have the will? This is my last slide. It is an emotionally manipulative slide to try and get you to like me more.

There's a moment in your TED Talk when you put up a slide of yourself and one of your boys at a sporting event. But it does have a message. This is the whole shooting match. Anybody here without kids, ask someone with kids. Your whole world strings to this. And you got pretty emotional up on stage. And you laid a lot of guilt on the people in the theater. You asked them, you know, do we love our children, implying that if we do, they need to make changes. Well, Manus, do you have children? I do. So without knowing you or your children, I'm fairly confident that you love your children. I bet you are fairly confident I love mine.

The question I ask is, do we love our children? And that is, have we entered an economy where it's sort of a winner-take-most attitude and everyone's grabbing for their own? We ignore because we're all, believe we're going to be in the top 10% that's never done better than previous top deciles that will be in that top 10% and we're not willing to make the sacrifices and the hard decisions

such that other people's children who might be in the bottom 90 do better. I think that America has kind of lost the script and that is what is the point of any of this? You know, on your radio hour you're going to talk about AI, you're going to talk about the environment,

you're talking about the climate, anyone who has kids, something comes off the tracks with one of your kids, you're not thinking about the quality. climate. You're not thinking about AI. You're thinking about that kid. And economic anxiety is someone who went through economic anxiety as a kid. I can tell you, we aren't treating our children well. We aren't treating other kids well. The resting blood pressure of kids in low-income homes is tangibly higher than kids in middle and upper-income homes. There are more kids depressed,

more admissions of self-harm, more anxiety. So the question is, What is the point of any of this if your kid is anxious or depressed? And people have this feeling, well, I'm going to be successful. I can take care of my kids. Okay, I know you love your kids, but do we love our kids? That was Scott Galloway. He's a professor of marketing at New York University and the host of Pivot and the Professor G. Pod. His latest book is called The Algebra of Wealth, a Simple Formula for Financial Security.

On the show today, generation gaps. We want to go now to another problem that younger generations are inheriting. Climate change. In many places, a warming planet means finding new ways to grow food that can survive extreme weather. So our next speaker assumed that today's farmer has little use for the agricultural wisdom of old. Until the science proved her wrong. Our story starts in a kitchen in the Philippines. My grandma, she is an incredible cook, and we treat the kitchen like it's a living room.

That's where we talk. And that's why I fell in love with cooking. Louise Mabulo is 25 and an award-winning chef and entrepreneur. She grew up in a small farming town and started learning about cooking and food at a young age. My grandparents would serve me a nice steaming cup of hot chocolate that they'd grown from their farms. And my dad would be like, well, it came from this. this gorgeous bright red pod. And then your grandmother sucks on the seeds individually and dries them in the sun.

And then we would roast it and turn that into chocolate. So my grandparents grew things intuitively and how they've learned from their own grandparents and all that ancestral knowledge has been passed down to them. Some of the things she learned struck her as kind of ridiculous. My grandfather would be in a rice field and be whistling because it's a hot day and he would say, you know, the whistle attracts a good breeze. Or they grow like, wow, you have so many harvests of cacao today. And they'd be like, yes, it's because, you know, we planted this tree during the full moon,

and that makes a lot more fruit. Another odd piece of advice was planting a rock under your root crops and sweet potatoes or even under your trees. Over the years, I was like, why do we do that? It makes no scientific sense. And they just be like, I don't know, every time I just do that, It's sweeter. And at the time when I heard these things, it was always, oh, this is just something that my grandma,

grandpap would say. You know, it's, well, grandma's just crazy. Some other wives tale. At the age of 12, Louise didn't care much about farming, but she started entering cooking competitions and winning. She went on TV cooking shows. By 17, she was a trained chef, hosting dinners in cities around Asia, and building an online following. I became a farm-to-table type of chef where I would highlight where these ingredients

came from and the stories of the people who brought them to your tables. And then after some time, I started growing ingredients myself. And that was when I started really getting into farming and caring about how food was grown. But in 2016, Louise learned how unpredictable the life of her fellow local farmers was when a typhoon struck the Philippines and her hometown. Her family was safe, but the farmlands surrounding them were decimated. We lost 80% of our agriculture lands and its productivity. The farmers that I've been working with, most of them were impacted. And I thought to myself, this is a huge, disastrous existential crisis for my community

and for so many people across the Philippines. How can we address this? And I had a platform and the ability to do something. So first it was, you know, providing seeds and vegetables and plants that the farmers could use to start making an income again and rebuild their farms. But over time I thought, you know, this kind of aid system is just very temporary. Louise wondered if she could turn this emergency into an opportunity for herself and those farmers. There's a root cause of this and it's climate change and weather disasters. How can we build resilience within these livelihoods so that there's a result.

not experiencing storms every year and recovering from them every year. They noticed some native plants, like cacao, had no trouble recovering. They were also very resilient to these storms. And so she wondered whether doubling down on cacao as a crop was a longer-term solution. There were so many pathways and opportunities for people to build resilient livelihoods from different steps of growing cocoa. of wild cacao trees grow easily in this region. Local people, like Louise's grandma,

harvested them to make hot cocoa and chocolate. But no one there was making money off of cacao. These farmers were selling more fragile crops like rice, coconut, and corn. Right. And over time, I realized with these conversations that many of these farmers were just growing these because that's what they knew how to grow.

And they hadn't thought of maybe expanding. or trying other things. And so that's when I built the cacao project to build sustainable and resilient livelihoods for farmers in the Philippines. The cacao project's goal was to help local farmers integrate cacao into their usual crop rotation. The first step, giving farmers cacao tree saplings

and convincing them to be part of her idea for a cacao business. So we created farmer field schools where we trained farmers on building resilience And so far we've worked with over 200 farmers and have planted more than 250,000 trees across our municipality. What did local people, farmers think when you started getting into this whole agriculture thing? Were they like, you know, who's this young hot shot? Or are they like, great, let's have some fresh blood in this?

I'm so curious. Well, people were very skeptical. I came in, no one wanted to believe a young person getting into the agricultural field. I didn't have the type of agricultural background that would give me the credibility to be like, you need to start changing the way you farm. It was a slow process. I started a little bit egotistical thinking, I think I know a thing or two, and I might know a little better. And then we made a lot of mistakes along the way where it doesn't grow as productively as it could be.

But then that's when we started talking to farmers. Like, how would you normally farm these things? And they were like, okay, these are the practices that I know. And a lot of these practices that my grandparents were teaching me were coming up over and over. They were like, yeah, no, no. We just do these things. It'll work out. Louise Mabulo continues from the TED stage. And as I was talking to these farmers, these crazy stories started resurfacing.

And I said, okay, hang on, hang on. Maybe they're onto something here. So together with our farmers, we started trying it out. Okay, let's plant some rocks here and see what happens. Okay, let's plant according to the lunar cycles. And for some reason, every single time that we would do that, it would work when we plant rocks and recipe potatoes. They were better, sweeter, just more delicious.

Every time we planted according to lunar cycles, we'd have delicious harvest. And I thought maybe what if all of these weird stories are just kind of decades of peer review that was passed down from grandmother to grandson, from father to daughter, in the ways that they best knew how. And maybe grandma wasn't so crazy after all.

Now, over the years, I've trained with farmers, and we make sure that learning is a two-way street, where we look at the ways that we can marry practical, traditional knowledge techniques with modern science and know-how so that we could put a spotlight on those simple, practical, solutions that react effectively to climate change.

And so I like to say I'm more of an intermediary translating the way that our farmers have grown to the modern world and also translating the modern world. All these policies and science and ideas to farmers in a way that they understand. So did you get the science behind these ancestral methods? For the most part, yes. So when we were doing these farmer field schools and these trial and errors, sometimes we would have visitors from universities and agricultural schools. And some of them would explain to us why, like planting seeds during lunar cycles at a full moon would give you better harvests because insects that were mating during those times are also our pollinators for cocoa plants.

And in terms of sweet potatoes, it would be because the rocks were moist, wet environments that attracted worms and all of these little critters and biodiversity that were beneficial to our soil. And it was just natural fertilizer. And we would just talk about this in circles over what was the correct way. And true enough, the aunties and the elderly ladies had the best outcomes every single time and proved this wrong. So they weren't surprised when you came back to them and said, actually, you were right. No, they were not surprised at all. And they were very smug about it. And I never stopped hearing it for months.

You know, it's interesting. When we started talking, I thought that we were mostly going to discuss. how ancestral knowledge gets passed down through generations. But really what I've learned also is that younger people are carving out roles that didn't exist. Like you, for example, are on the global stage telling the story of how climate change is affecting these farmers and how they are surviving, building businesses in innovative ways. That feels very new. Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm trying to do is be this person that tells the stories of on the ground, but also be able to crack that system for our farmers. And it's looking back at

that knowledge of how we used to farm circularly in a way that was good for the community, but also marrying it with modern day technology and science and understanding. There seems to always be a gap between high-level policies or the concepts of climate change and what we know inherently on the ground. I was wondering, why does that gap exist? And I realized maybe it's my role to start connecting those two parts. All of this knowledge exists in countries and communities and traditions and stories and stories within our families.

And as a young person who works in the environmental field, I think it is so cool to have that kind of responsibility to carry this knowledge onto the next generation. Because maybe the solutions to our climate crisis, maybe the next big fix-all. Maybe it exists in the soils under our feet. Or maybe it exists in the crazy, wild stories of our grandmothers. And it is such an honor to build something that embodies the wisdom

of our communities, of our families, and of our landscapes over years and generations. That was the founder of the Cacao Project, Louise Mabulo. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Generation Gaps. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumeroody.

On the show today, ideas about why generations seem to be drifting farther apart and how we can bring them closer together. And so now we want to visit a place in Portland, Oregon, that is trying to do so by design. I am the oldest person living here. I'm 91, almost 92. And basically, at the age of 80, I had pretty much lived up my retirement income,

and so it was important to me to be in a place where I knew the rent wouldn't be raised. This is Ruth Green. And it's very important to me to be able to have children in my life. and this offered me that. Ruth lives in a community called Bridge Meadows for families with children and seniors, where each generation looks out for the other.

We have 28 apartments for seniors like myself, and we have nine homes for families. Those aren't just any families. They have children who were once in foster care and now live here with a relative or adoptive parents. But they also get a small army of elderly. who want to be part of their lives. In turn, the elders get a community of younger families who are invested in caring for them. And especially for me, I'm not alone.

If I need to go to the doctor, I can call on five or six different people. And it's difficult to explain. But you're accepted just because you're here and the friendliness of the people here. It takes a village. You know, I know we kind of overuse that statement, but it truly is the truth. It takes a village.

This is Dorenda Schubert. She runs Bridge Meadows and is a pioneer in the field of intergenerational living. 17 years ago, when I would say the word intergenerational, people's eyes would glaze over. And some folks have said, oh, you're social engineering things together. And I'm like, well, okay, that's a way to think about this. So you'll see young ones. from babyhood all the way up to 18, wandering through our communities. You'll see parents from 30s to their 60s.

And then you'll see elders being a part of the community. Townhouses for the parents and apartments for the elders. And then they all circle this beautiful courtyard. It's the green space. It's everybody's backyard. Durenda says all these generations living together, It's the norm in many countries, but not in the U.S. There is a huge group of people in our country who have been separated from their families because we're able to be mobile.

We're able to go seek economic betterment in other places than where we grew up, or perhaps where we grew up wasn't a great situation. And so we needed to find our own chosen family. Bringing together a chosen family made of multiple generations, Dorenda believes it's the solution to a problem these young people are facing. 25,000 kids a year leave foster care without a family. That means they have nothing. They're 18 years old. They have no family.

They have no guidance. They have no housing. They have nothing. Here's Dorenda Schubert on the TED stage. Now, I want you to think about yourselves at 18 years old. without a safety net. Could you do it? Let's talk about what this costs our country. It costs $300,000 per kid.

But what's the bigger loss? The bigger loss is their gifts that they could give to us. Their gems of wisdom, their gifts, their talents, their experiences that we could all learn from. They end up unemployed and uneducated and in poverty. And that's just unconscionable, everybody. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a place that had the open arms of elders to welcome these children home? There is.

I mean, I live very close to a number of housing complexes and looks like all different ages of people live there. But it's not intentional. What's the difference with what you do? First and foremost, people know that the reason we exist is to support the children to live safe and abundant lives. So everybody who comes to live at a Bridge Meadows community knows this is our glue. This is why we gather. But this isn't add water and suddenly it exists, right? This is a situation in which we create opportunities for families and elders and kids to come together.

So there'll be things like an evening meal that happens on some. regular basis. There'll be activities in the courtyard and over time those relationships deepen and then people tend to flourish. It's like a circle. And then when things go awry, you have to have an opportunity for people to repair. We come with our biases. We come with our life experiences. And sometimes it's really tough. Sometimes there's homophobia. Sometimes there's racism. Sometimes there's ageism going on. So that is the importance of having therapeutic staff on hand to address conflict resolution. You know, one of the kids said it's not always, you know, rainbows and cupcakes. And it's true.

And that's okay because that's what real life is. Tell me a little bit more, you know, we've heard the stories of being shuffled from foster home to foster home. What is the situation that makes it so important for these kids to get. stability in their lives. We've really lost a generation to drugs, methamphetamine, and now opioids, and fentanyl. And so these children are ended up being in what we'd say neglectful situations because of substance abuse issues of their parents. The other reason is mental health conditions that their parents may have that have gone untreated because they don't have access to mental health care. And the third reason why children remain in foster care is because their parents cannot find

adequate housing. And we know from research that all it takes is one person caring about a child or carry about any of us. And that can make the difference between making it and not making it, having a successful life or not having a successful life. One of the very, very first families to move in 13 years ago was a grandma who was raising three of her grandchildren. And the fourth one was about to be born. And the home she was living in was not large enough to take the fourth child. You can't tell a grandma.

You can't take this other child, right? You cannot say that. And so she found Bridge Meadows with the help of a caseworker. and that baby came home three weeks later, and the elders were on a mission. They were marching across that courtyard to pick up that baby, make food, pick up the house, so that grandma could take showers and get ready. And then she had three other ones who needed to get ready for school and preschool and all that. And so she had this army.

I called them the Grandma Brigade. She had this army who eventually became like grandmothers to these children. They cooked, they clean, they held their kids. baby. And at one point I said, okay, somebody needs to put that baby down. He will not know how to walk if you all keep carrying that baby around. So y'all need to put that baby around. Now he's 13 years old. They've had two high school graduates. One of my favorite pictures is the most recent graduate standing proudly with a grin. He's just glowing with pride in his graduation regalia. And his brothers are all hanging on him, all with joy. And then these elders are holding on to him tight with

the biggest grins like, I did that. I helped with that. And now he's off to college. So what would you like to see happen? What's the next step that you want when it comes to intergenerational living? I would like that we all on a personal basis look around and say, what does my friendship circle look like? How are my people in my life of different ages? We watch the elders say to us, wow, these kids, it's really difficult to be. be a child. These kids have a lot of things to face that I never could think of. And you see the empathy. And then you see kids who are like, wow, it's really hard to take out your garbage when your arms and your arthritis are hurting you. I'm going to go do that. We watch ageism diminish

in our communities. And we also watch relationships happen across difference. Wouldn't that be great? That's Dorenda Schubert. She's the executive director of Bridge Meadows. There are now three Bridge Meadows communities across Oregon, and you can see her full TED Talk at TED.com. On the show today, Generation Gaps. So earlier we heard Scott Galloway explain why he thinks society has made younger people feel less secure, more anxious. But writer Anne Helen Peterson has a different take. In a beautiful essay she wrote in response to the recent campus protests,

she posits that young people have experienced profound grief. over the last few years, and that we should actually be heartened by some of their activism. The essay is called The College Students Keep the Score, and we asked her to read an excerpt for you. I've read dozens of pieces on the protest against the Israeli war on Palestine, on campuses across the United States. The best, like a recent piece from Lydia Polgren in the New York Times, includes significant time on the actual ground doing actual reporting, both talking to protesters and working to discern who's part of the protest and who's an anti-Semitic crank shouting on the corner. But there are also pieces, like a recent one from the Wall Street Journal titled,

They Entered College in Isolation and Leave Amongst Protest, the class that missed out on fun, that situate the protests as a depressing bookend to a ruined college experience. The conclusion, quote, college students today are lonelier, less resilient, and more disengaged than their predecessors' research shows. The university communities they populate are socially fragmented, diminished, and less vibrant. The pandemic bruised the psyche of a generation. The politics seared it, end quote. Faculty feel like the overall campus vibe is less, well, collegial. Despite the current protests on some campuses, in recent years, college quads have lost their town square feeling. University cafeterias at

Some schools, once universal gathering spots for students, now mostly serve students with bagged lunches they take back to their room to eat. Orley Meyer, who is the class president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, said a lot of institutional knowledge within student clubs was lost during the pandemic. One such tradition was a walk members of the student government would take as a group before a meeting. After COVID, someone brought a rope, and now they walk connected, like a group of preschoolers, she said. The infantilization is striking, but it's also the point. Readers of the Wall Street Journal already think this generation is a bunch of anxiety-riddled babies. This piece simply confirms that colleges are making it worse. They indulge students' worst tendencies.

They make them packed lunches. They hire wellness coordinators. The piece gives scant attention to the sources of all this isolation, social anxiety, and disengagement. Instead, it glosses over stark realities. It's worth remembering. Some of these students ended up on campus in the fall of 2020. But others had to start college from their bedrooms, on Zoom, still terrified. When they did return to campus, it was to a quasi-surveillance state, with well-meaning but often arbitrary rules about how many people could.

gather and for what? They learned that the best way to keep healthy and out of trouble was to hang out by yourself in your room. They burned out the same way so many of us did, their hours marked by switching from smaller screen to slightly larger ones. How did you feel in the fall of 2020? I was struggling mightily to concentrate on anything, and I had the benefit of figuring out how to best concentrate for 20 years. And here these students were, experiencing their first college lectures over Zoom. They had to find new ways of creating intimacy and community and fun and how to fall in love or how to even figure out what they love. And they did it under significant prolonged duress with very little grace extended their way. When institutions did extend

grace, providing the sort of mental health services that save lives or accommodations for students battling their own anxiety, it became evidence that college was the source of the problem instead of the backdrop for it. There's been so much hand-wringing about the current state of students, the source of all this disengagement, the causes of such sustained learning loss. The answer has always been right there. It's the grief. Grief for their weird, high school graduations, of course, and for the family members they lost and the college experience they imagined. But they're grieving their inherited reality. I find people will name it the same way they'll name a hurricane without actually acknowledging its force, as if you could

separate the storm from the devastation it caused. So if these students are less resilient, it's not because they're not resilient. It's because they were forced to expend so much of that resiliency over the last five years. Here is a microgeneration that if we're to listen to the commentariat is detached and antisocial thanks to smartphones and disillusioned by coming of age in the middle of multiple economic, social, political, and viral disruptions. By that logic, these students should be removed from the world to the point of nihilism. But what we're seeing in these protests is the near opposite.

It's not nihilism. It's activism. These protests aren't taking place on forums or social media. They're happening in physical space. It's not a disengagement from the world that has largely left them defend for themselves. It's a brave, angry, and frequently messy engagement. I look at the protests and see students funneling their grief in a way that disrupts the narrative of their own disengagement. And I see them using the tools they were given to fund for themselves during the pandemic.

the surgical mass, to fight surveillance. I see adults, not children, furious about the inhumane Israeli assault on Palestine, and advocating for their institution's disinvestment in that war. If you listen closely, they're also mad, righteously so, about so much else, including the idea that peacefully protesting is ruining their college experience.

I hope students see the headlines about their college experience and understand them for what they are. Attempts to trivialize righteous anger and grief, of course, but also a displacement of shame. There is so much we older adults could have done to make these students' lives more survivable. During the pandemic, sure, but also over the course of the last two decades. We did not.

Blaming them comes so much easier than blaming ourselves. That was writer Anne Helen DeLis. Peterson. We'll link to her full essay at npr.org. Her newsletter is called Culture Study. Thank you so much for listening to our show about generation gaps. This episode was produced by James Delahousie, Chloe Weiner, Harshanahada, and Fiona Girin. It was edited by Sana's Meskampore and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, and Katie Montalione. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineer was Carly Strange. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewey. Special thanks to

Aaron Scott and Lisa Steenson. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne High Lash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Manusse Zameroody, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.