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Generational Characteristics · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome to Why we do
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  what we do? I am your consumerist SKA kid host Abraham I think I
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  am your angsty hardcore kid host Shane Sure or psychology podcast. We talk about
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  all the things that people do and understanding why they do those things and looking
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  at them and periods of time and when they're born and how their birth then
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  their generation relates to previous generations and that sort of thing, and it just
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  helps us us learn about each other. I guess maybe maybe not. Yeah,
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  And every now and again we do episodes that instead of asking why we
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  do what we do, that is one question, but another question we have
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  is why we are who we are? Yeah, and why are we the
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  age that we are? Huh? You know? Yeah, sometimes that's because
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  of birth. Yeah, because that's how time works. I guess it's how
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  time works, y'all. Anyway, if you're joining us for the first time,
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  welcome. We're so happy to have you here. And whether or not
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  you're here for the first time, we can wish all of you for joining
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  us a happy card reading day. Yes, it's also International Mother Language Day
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  and National Grain Free Day. For you Celiac people's and people who just don't
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  want to have grains. Yes, but for those of you who do want
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  grains. It's also National Sticky Bun Day, which you know, I think
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  of the sticky buns I had in Hawaii on a weekly basis. Weirdly,
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  it's also Real Bread Week, so I'm not sure how to square all of
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  those things. But bread is happening. Either it doesn't have grains, or
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  it does and it might be sticky. Yeah, it might not. Who
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  knows it's bread is happening. I wonder if Real Bread Week was a response
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  to National Grain Free Day. Somebody was like, no, yeah, it
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  does feel targeted, right, Yeah, it's or it was big Bread,
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  you know, like there's the big bread industry that's like really trying to get
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  you in there. Could be. One of my favorite things is that it's
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  my daughter's eighteenth birthday. I have as a of today. Congratulations Riley.
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  I have raised a child to an adult and kept them alive for eighteen years,
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  which in itself I think is a feat. That is that is an
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  accomplishment. People who don't have kids don't know how difficult it is to pull
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  something right out. Yeah, I mean it's common, but it's a lot
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  of work. Yeah, a lot of people do it and a lot of
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  people fail at it. So you know, yeah, here we are anyway
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  related to raising children is that it is Future Farmers of America week or day.
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  I don't remembers. It is a celebration of the future farmers of America.
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  Were you ever part of that group? I was not. Oh it
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  is weak, Okay, I was able to double check. I kind of.
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  I had this experience that's probably worth talking about in an episode about when
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  we grew up in the things that we experienced. But I had this experience
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  early on that like I kind of at the point that I would have become
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  a part of certain communities, it was too late for them for me to
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  be like joining and like, as an example, my family didn't really go
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  to church very often, and I was all I felt the call at some
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  point when I was very young. I was like, we need to go
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  to church. And we went and they're like, what is this outsider doing
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  here? Like we don't want you in our church. I was like,
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  all right, I guess I won't come to your church then. Yeah.
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  Bye. Not big on recruiting, y'all, and that happened like in multiple
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  sectors. And I think the Future Farmers of America was another one that by
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  the time I found it, they were sort of like, we kind of
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  have our crew now, so you can just not come over here. You
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  can't hang out with our pigs. Yeah, that was a lot to say
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  about that, just saying that that was a holiday. Yeah. Sorry,
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  I was just curious because we had one here and I was just like,
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  I never got to be a part of it either, So it was just
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  oranges anyway. Yeah, it's just oranges and alligator farms. So it's also
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  National Condom Week, all right, Yeah, which is fun. Yeah,
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  celebrate their contraception. It is Alzheimer's. I was gonna say this is related,
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  but it's not. I don't think Alzheimer's disease and dementia Staff Education Week.
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  Yeah, this is also completely unrelated. It is Bird Health Awareness Week,
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  m M, take Care of your Boats Love Teaching Week, which I
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  do so I'm good with that me too. And it's National Sauna Week,
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  so stay toasting, my friends. And finally, through with the chew,
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  which is to say, chewing tobacco Week if you're trying to quit now is
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  the time. Make this your week and stop chewing tobacco maybe if you want
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  too. Oh my gosh. You know, playing baseball in the South,
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  there were so many people that, like, so many kids on our baseball
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  teams that would do chew and have dip and I was like, you're fourteen,
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  what are you doing the critical part of the sport. Can't swing a
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  bat if you can't chew on mulch. Yeah, exactly. Oh well,
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  we're actually not talking about all of the holidays or tobacco or anything like that,
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  although in a way we kind of aorrow. We are talking about the
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  history of the United States, or more specifically, the people in the United
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  States. This is going to be an unfortunately kind of American centric episode,
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  although we will touch on how and if this relates to other countries around the
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  world. But we're talking about the generations of people that have lived over the
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  last century or so in the United States, and with those generations come specific
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  labels, and many times a lot of their personalities and their behaviors are attributed
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  to the time that they were born, specifically looking at generations, So we
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  were going to talk about those generation characteristics, I think a little bit,
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  so maybe I guess we just dive in. So a generation, just just
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  for the sake of this episode, a generation is a group of people born
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  around a similar time period, and that similar time period is about fifteen years.
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  We see generations kind of account for about fifteen years of time these groups
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  of folks, Yeah, kind of fifteen to twenty And I think that part
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  of it is they look at that as being twenty years. A lot of
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  people historically were becoming parents right around that point, and so then their children
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  were the next generation of the family. So that's kind of how it's dissected.
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  It's not exactly that, but that's more or less how it was broken
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  up in anyway. These ideas of generations, these fifteen year periods in history
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  that are kind of relatively static. Actually they're pretty static. The idea of
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  this is that each generation is characterized by a set of world events and circumstances
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  that sort of shapes the behavior of everyone who lived during that time period such
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  that they have some we can talk about them as belonging to that group,
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  if you will, right, So, hypothetically, this means that people of
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  each generation will have characteristic behaviors, values, and work ethic specific to that
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  generation, and you'll see kind of what we mean when we begin to unpack
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  that. But the idea is that every person in that group has had at
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  least major world events that have kind of led to how they behave, how
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  they act, how they interact with the world around them, and also kind
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  of related to what their parents had and what they grew up with and how
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  that would then affect how their parents behave toward their children. And so the
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  point I guess, or the sort of working thesis for the generations and how
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  they to be identifiable by their characteristics is that these are people who grew up
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  during a point where society and economic pressures and the prevailing technologies that we'll get
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  into are ubiquitous for almost all people, particularly inside of a single country.
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  Even if there's sort of at varying degrees of intensity and accessibility to that country,
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  you know, they are more or less available. So like when the
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  internet became available, not everybody had the internet, and it's still not everybody
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  does, although almost everybody does, so that would have affected people differently during
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  that time. But just as an example of how the circumstances once they become
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  more widespread and they affect a lot of people. How that then comes to
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  influence or define or be related to the sort of understanding that is applied to
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  that generation. You know, I think about the Internet a lot in relation
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  to my kids because I think of, like I remember, and I'm sure
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  and you remember too, growing up without it, Like there was a period
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  of time where the Internet did not exist in our worlds, and so like
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  they say, like our generation is like the last generation that lived without internet
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  before like it became so ubiquitous. Because my kids were born well after the
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  Internet was established and they have never known a life without it. It's really
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  fascinating to kind of dive into. And I think every generation has something like
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  that, and we'll kind of maybe get into those, but I do think
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  it is is important to kind of note that these lines that we're talking about,
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  these generational lines and divides, are completely arbitrary, and it's well understood
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  that they are the choice to delineate one generation from another includes such variables as
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  demographic attitudes, historical events, pop culture, prevailing consensus. Among researchers,
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  those are kind of the things they look at and as a result, and
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  this is a direct quote from the demographics part I, apologize As a result,
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  the lines that define generations are useful tools for analysis, but they should
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  be thought of as guidelines rather than hard and fast distinctions. So these are
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  not hard and fast rules. They are just kind of like a general overview
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  and like just a kind of an accounting of contextual variables for these folks.
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  Yeah, that's how a lot of people talk about it and how they see
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  it, and so in thinking about the fact that these people are sort of
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  going through these major world events at particular times during their development, it sort
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  of begs the question, then, can this macroscopic zoomed out analysis of circumstances,
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  global circumstances, sort of current pop culture circumstances. Can they tell us
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  so much about the variables that impact human behavior that we can reliably expect from
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  people of that generation to act a certain way or have certain values, or
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  have an anticipation of how they're going to show up in their work and work
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  ethic. Can we do that? Like? Is that something that is afforded
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  by even diving into this analysis? I think the other question I have is
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  like, is it useful? We will get into that, Yeah, and
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  we are going to talk about whether or not it's useful. So I'm so
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  glad that we are. So what we're going to talk about and what we're
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  going to unpack now are what those generations are currently that we have been kind
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  of discussed quite a bit. What are those characteristics, like what that generational
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  gap is, and also what does skeptics say about it? Because I think
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  it's important to know kind of the questions and I think I tend to be
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  one of the skeptic side of this too, kind of being like, well,
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  what does this even mean or how is this useful? And so we're
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  going to kind of dive into all that. So Abraham, what are the
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  generations? Well, first I'll actually before I reveal them, and we'll go
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  through them all one at a time. But I will say that what's kind
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  of interesting is most of the places that I looked said we're at seven generations
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  in the United States. That's it. And I think that what this has
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  to do with and I think this is a really we'll see this as we
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  unpack these generations, But I think what this has to do with is because
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  it's really over the last century that they've identified these generations. Yeah, that
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  at no point in history has the world changed as rapidly as it has in
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  the last century. And we were talking about this a little bit off air
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  before we before we hit record, that like the difference between the country,
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  the United States from eighteen twelve to nineteen twelve had a couple of really substantial
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  major events, but right, that was kind of it. It was like
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  there was a few really big things that happened over that hundred years from eighteen
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  twenty to nineteen twenty. Nineteen twenty to twenty twenty was incredible difference. I
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  mean, yeah, it has gone through major, massive, cataclysmic shifts such
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  that we've never seen anything quite like it before. Yeah, we went from
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  Jinkos the skinny jeans to back the jinkos. It's it's been a boomerang of
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  sorts. Well, and like if you think about like women suffered as barely
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  a century old, Like, right, we went from basically having no international
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  travel to frequent, regular international travel, that by itself was a huge change.
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  We went from like technology being as complicated as like basically a lamp,
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  a butter turn. Yeah, from nineteen twenties, I mean, I guess
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  technically as complicated as like we had refrigerators back then. To AI right now,
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  our refrigerators talk to us. That's right. Even seventeen twenty to eighteen
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  twenty, not that much, like a lot changed, but not that much
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  change, not relative to today. So every time you look at a century
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  going back, like all of them had their turmoil and their changes and their
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  shifts and major political and social upheavals, like all those things happened, but
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  now they're happening at exponential rate. So all that I could really find and
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  looking back on this is that most people draw generations is starting around the turn
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  of the twentieth century, right around nineteen hundred, okay, and so then
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  from there they've outlined these generations, and I'll just quickly go through. There's
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  the Greatest generation and then the Silent generation. Both of those can be grouped
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  together to be called the Traditionalists as a generation. So there's a little confusing
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  in there, uh huh. Then you have the more well recognized Baby Boomers,
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  Generation X Millennials also called Generation Y, Generation Z or gen Z,
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  and then the most recent one is JED Alpha, which is we're in the
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  midst of that birthwave. And we'll talk about all the sort of time periods
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  that those are meant to encapsulate. But that's just a list of what they
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  are. I think it's gonna be really fun and I'm so excited a we're
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  covering this topic. I will say, though, what is not fun is
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  something that was created by the Greatest Generation. It feels like it was,
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  and that is advertising, all right, So we had the effect of those
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  earlier generations, that is, advertisements that have become inescapable in so many places.
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  Fortunately, at the time of this, you probably still have your skip
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  ahead button on your listening device fingers crossed, hopefully. But let's start with
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  the Greatest Generation or the Traditionalists, depending on how you want to slice it,
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  and we'll talk through them. Yes, so this group was born either
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  from nineteen oh one to nineteen twenty four or nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five,
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  but we're going to focus on that slice of nineteen oh one to nineteen
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  twenty four. Specifically, that generation, the Greatest Generation is characterized by optimism,
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  belief in the American dream, value of community, personal responsibility, and
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  there was there was a theme I saw of just generally respect for authority as
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  a characteristic value in the Greatest Generation, right, And so there were a
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  couple defining circumstances that would have led to maybe some kind of general behaviors for
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  these folks. There was World War One, that's kind of a big deal.
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  There was the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, also a big deal. People
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  at this generation came of age during the Great Depression. Most of the Americans
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  who served during World War Two were from this generation. They experienced the once
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  in a lifetime social, economic, and political upheaval. There's a lot going
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  on during that time. And Tom Brokaw said of this generation, quote the
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  greatest generation of Americans, men and women who fought not for fame or recognition,
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  but because it was the right thing to do end quote. And apparently
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  this is where that generation gets its name is from Tom Brokaw. Yeah,
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  that's what it found in the resources that I was looking for in the preparation
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  of this. And just remember again that like in this generation, this greatest
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  generation that is so so hailed by those nostalgists, is that this was still
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  largely during reconstruction. And like Jim Crow, this is prior to civil rights.
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  Women gained suffrage only at the very tail end of this period of time.
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  When we're talking about that nineteen o one to nineteen twenty four, and
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  so just like keeping in mind that things weren't so good back then, right,
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  I think that's really important, Like when people kind of like romanticize certain
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  decades and stuff, it's like, y'all know that it probably wasn't as good
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  as it seems, right, Like, Yeah, it probably wasn't that great.
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  So further to understand a little bit more of what was going on at
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  that time, interstate travel was still pretty uncommon. Lead was starting to be
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  added to gasoline and paint, which was a problem. Hows this costs about
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  six thousand dollars. Smoking was considered normal. Movies were just barely getting started,
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  as was recorded music, and people were still enamored with the invention of
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  the telephone. So there were even places where municipal plumbing wasn't available. So
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  this is still there's a lot going on, and people are still fairly isolated
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  in this space, and there's still some just kind of like needs for advancements
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  in other areas. Yeah, I think that at this point we just barely
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  had elevators like showing up fairly. I mean, I think that the elevators
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  had debuted well before this, but they weren't really building buildings in mind with
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  elevators right until like the late eighteen hundreds. I think I could have my
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  history wrong there, so like they just weren't even that common still in the
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  nineteen twenties, Okay, So that was the greatest generation or so overlapping with
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  this idea of the traditionalists, followed by then the Silent generation, which also
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  then overlaps with the idea of the traditionalists, because the silent generation would be
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  people who were born between nineteen twenty eight and nineteen forty five, or again,
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  the traditional is born between nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five. So there's
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  that overlap thing there, right, And so this generation, some of the
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  common values that are listed are communication, collaboration, teamwork, stability, and
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  loyalty. So those are some or there are some other folks that say dedication
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  and sacrifice, discipline, adhering the rules, delayed reward, respect for authority,
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  patients, patriotism, hard work, responsibility, and so when you kind
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  of break it all down, there's a lot of like I think, really
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  great buzzwords for like the upstanding citizen. Yeah, and traditionalist value loyalty and
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  subservience to their benevolent employer and seek to clearly understand their place in the hierarchy
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  of things, which I think actually explain a lot about like careerists. Yeah,
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  or at least there's like a discussion around careerists in there, you know.
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  Yeah. Yeah, So that was and I mean that's kind of because
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  there was that overlap. But so the fighting circumstances of this, and will
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  start by the term silent generation was apparently coined in a Time magazine article in
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  nineteen fifty one, and they said, quote, by comparison with the flaming
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  youth of their fathers and mothers, today's younger generation is a still small flame.
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  It does not issue manifestos, make speeches, or carry posters, and
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  has been called the silent generation end quote. And so that's they're sort of
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  like saying that relative to the previous generation, these are people not making as
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  much of a splash. They're not really trying to make their voices heard.
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  They're trying to get by. Now, again, put this into context,
• 18:45
  because this is people born between nineteen twenty and nineteen forty five. These are
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  largely children during World War Two, and they're the children of vocal, loud
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  parents who fought in the war who suffered through the depression. So that's sort
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  of where they're parents were coming from, and they saw sort of all that
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  upheaval and then they didn't have that going on for them, at least not
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  in the same way. And so at this point the country was experiencing an
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  era of relative stability and economic growth. Besides the persistence of Jim Crow era
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  bigotry. More people were experiencing an unprecedented level of equality with it, with
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  people having access to voting as well as people were you know, women had
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  gone into the workforce during World War Two, so there was more employment to
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  go around, and also they were all suffering from brain damage from all all
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  lead that was in everything. Yeah, microwaves were just invented, and during
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  this time, the first freeway is built in the United States, right,
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  And I think when you go back and you watch some of the news stories
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  and some of the advertising and some of the things that were going on around
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  this time, like or for this generation, there's so much idealism going on.
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  There's so much like American Way, there's so much like the future of
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  the Uonitored States, and like there's so much that voice. I feel like
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  that voice comes from the silence generation, even though they were the silent generation,
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  because there were so much of like you know, like you said,
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  they were children during the war, so they were dealing with the results in
• 20:07
  the aftermath of the war, right Like when they were coming up, they
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  were dealing with a lot of their caregivers not really coping with their own traumas
• 20:15
  from the war and some of that type of stuff. I mean, there
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  were so many unique things that were impacting them as they were coming up.
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  And I think that's an important thing too. The characteristics and the experiences of
• 20:27
  the previous generation are going to influence the next generation heavily. If you fought
• 20:33
  in World War Two, then your experience is going to heavily influence how you
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  interact with human beings after you come home from World War Two. Yeah,
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  And it's a great point to keep in mind as we go through this is
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  the fact that part of the circumstances, even if we don't explicitly say it
• 20:48
  every time, will be what the previous generation's sort of circumstances were and how
• 20:53
  that shaped how they may or may not have behaved toward the subsequent generation,
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  and how the subsequent generation sees, feels and feels the effects of the struggles
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  from the previous generation, because you know, we have language, so we
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  can sort of pass those things on and remember with wisdom the things that went
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  wrong terribly in history that we should not repeat. Just as a through line,
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  I think this and this is something that like, I don't think it
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  can be attributed to generations specifically, but I do think it's important, like
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  some of the language narratives that occur, you know, when you talk about
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  traditionalists and then you talk about the Cold War, like the Cold War as
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  a direct result of people being afraid of communism, which started in this like
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  American like isolationist kind of viewpoint, this type of patriotism that occurred during the
• 21:40
  Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation type of time period. Right, Like,
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  there was so much isolationism going on and so much red scare going on that
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  it makes perfect sense of the Cold War would have happened later. Speaking of
• 21:51
  the Cold War, we get to the generation that I think most people recognize
• 21:56
  as a generation, and that's the Baby Boomers. Yeah. Yeah, So
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  the Baby Boomers were born between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty four, and
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  their values include personal growth, optimism, anti war, don't trust people over
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  thirty, personal gratification, personal growth, team oriented, spend now, worry
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  later, work, make a difference, and question everything. Yes, So
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  I found this sort of document that outlines all the various values, and they
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  were a little bit silly, but I sort of tried to pull in where
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  I saw common themes across multiple resources and also throw a pepper and a few
• 22:30
  of the ones that I thought were a little more eccentric and specific to that
• 22:33
  document. But so, as you said, the circumstances of people in this
• 22:37
  generation were kind of the Cold War. I mean, we had the Cold
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  War during this although it would have started with their old babies, but baby
• 22:42
  boomers. They were called the baby boomers because there was the sudden, rapid
• 22:47
  increase in the number of children as soldiers came home from the war were eager
• 22:52
  to start their families and then abandon abuse, neglect, and beat their families.
• 22:56
  With some exceptions. Sure, joke, joke, joke, joke,
• 22:59
  but I mean it was legitimately that they came home and were like starting their
• 23:02
  families and so like, once everyone came home from the war, there was
• 23:04
  this massive influx of babies everywhere, and because of this unpreceded increase in citizens,
• 23:11
  resources were stretched thin, and competition for jobs, education, and opportunity
• 23:17
  became fierce. And that meant that because there were so many people who were
• 23:21
  trying to get into the workforce when they started becoming adults, employers had their
• 23:26
  pick of employees, and employees would have to fight like hell to keep their
• 23:29
  jobs, which I think is a big deal coming from a generation before where
• 23:33
  everybody was loyal to their career, loyal to their companies, and like having
• 23:37
  that kind of career as type of viewpoint where now it's like an employee could
• 23:41
  pick and choose or an employer could pick and choose whoever they wanted and send
• 23:45
  somebody packing. And now it's like you start, I could see, I
• 23:49
  could imagine that there is probably kind of the seeds of anti corporate anti that
• 23:56
  kind of like anti careerist viewpoints like well, I can't trust that I'm going
• 23:59
  to be here forever, so I'm not going to be loyal or subservient to
• 24:03
  this employer. You sort of hit it as like there was I'm not gonna
• 24:07
  say distrust, but there was a little bit of anti establishment attitude that started
• 24:10
  to build, but also because they were so often afraid of losing their job,
• 24:15
  they might be very fiercely loyal to their employer. Right, There was
• 24:18
  definitely some resentment that built, but you'd also have people who would like really
• 24:22
  really try, like they worked really hard to keep their job, which meant
• 24:26
  loyalty and subservience, and so we'd see some sort of repeated themes I think
• 24:30
  across these generations. Yeah. Absolutely, Nevertheless, or perhaps because of some
• 24:36
  of this stuff, this generation led kind of like the all the stuff that
• 24:38
  we're talking about led to progressive anti war movement, civil rights activism, and
• 24:42
  we're the first generation to grow up with technology in the form of calculators.
• 24:45
  Just kidding there, there's other technology before that, but they actually had the
• 24:48
  first video game that came out in this generation. They also had vinyl records,
• 24:52
  they had movies that were starting to get better, they were starting to
• 24:55
  get more accessible. Smoking was allowed on planes or birth control became a available,
• 25:00
  and there were photocopiers. Also, Drugs were pretty abundant at the time.
• 25:04
  People were really stoked about drugs, so there was that going on too.
• 25:08
  That was definitely a thing, and the term baby boomer can actually be
• 25:11
  traced back to an article in The Daily Press, which is a apparently still
• 25:17
  active Virginia based newspaper, and a headline that read baby Boomer's grown up storm
• 25:22
  ivy covered walls. And this really was an article which lamented the substantial increase
• 25:29
  in college enrollments by students who were, as it was described in the article,
• 25:33
  they lacked experience, determination and clearly defined goals a paraphrase, but close
• 25:40
  to a direct quote. And I think it's really important to highlight this particular
• 25:45
  generation because I think that there is inside the kind of like current tensions,
• 25:49
  like cultural generational tensions, like the oka boomer baby boomer, like that generation
• 25:55
  does not sound like what we just described, Like currently, they don't sound
• 25:59
  anything like what we just described. But this is kind of an interesting thing
• 26:03
  as you kind of moved through history. I think it's kind of funny in
• 26:04
  this article to say that these college enrollment, like these students who are enrolling
• 26:10
  in college for the first time, lacked experience. I was like, do
• 26:12
  a lot of freshmen have a lot of college experience prior to this, right
• 26:18
  exactly? It's so it's such a bizarre thing. Yeah, Like that I
• 26:22
  felt like an odd thing to point out, like these college students aren't even
• 26:25
  college students yet, Like, yeah, that's why they enrolled. Isn't that
• 26:30
  the trope with psychology too. It's like I need experience, but I can't
• 26:33
  get experienced because nobody will hire me to give me experience. So true.
• 26:37
  Now I'm gonna go back to, uh working at Starbucks. Just have to
• 26:41
  work for free or for insanely cheap, you know, for somebody for a
• 26:45
  while. Yeah, that's fine or free or you know, or you pay
• 26:48
  somebody or whatever. Yeah, you might pay them to work there. Yeah,
• 26:52
  yeah, dentured servitude. Speaking of getting paid, here's some ads.
• 27:03
  Okay, So so far we've covered the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation,
• 27:07
  the traditionalists, that is, both of those generations, and the Baby Boomers,
• 27:11
  and then we get into the next big era that I think less well
• 27:17
  known by its name, but people often talk about this, and this is
• 27:21
  Generation X or Gen X. And these are people born between nineteen sixty five
• 27:26
  and nineteen eighty. These are my parents, right, My parents are Gen
• 27:29
  xers, which explains my general sardonic sense of humor and cynicism towards the world.
• 27:34
  So mine, we're both baby boomers. Oh, now there you go,
• 27:37
  and look we're the same. Look at us. It's so strange how
• 27:41
  that works. It's because we're both millennials now, the Generation X, not
• 27:45
  the band, but the generation themselves. Their values include things like being a
• 27:48
  workaholic, independence, autonomy, balance, diversity, fun, my parents had
• 27:52
  too much fun, entrepreneurship, education, pragmatism, life balance, self reliance,
• 27:57
  skepticism, and technoliteracy, which is really fascinating. Yeah, well,
• 28:02
  in the defining circumstances, if you're thinking about what's going on during nineteen sixty
• 28:06
  five in nineteen eighty and reiterating the point that like they're going to be influenced
• 28:11
  by the parents who grew up with all the circumstances of the previous generation,
• 28:15
  and that how that may have influenced their attitudes and their behaviors and that sort
• 28:18
  of thing. But in the Gen X circumstances, you had drugs in the
• 28:22
  Vietnam War and the Cold War. Those are the big ones. Those are
• 28:26
  the big things. They also had the first person to land on the moon
• 28:29
  happened when they were kids. This was nearly at the peak of serial killer
• 28:33
  activity. Toward the end of this the serial killer activity in the US,
• 28:37
  you know, before violent video games really started taking off, and right after
• 28:41
  Lead Paint was a real hit. Yeah, Increasingly both parents were working during
• 28:45
  this time, which meant that kids took care of themselves. For pop culture
• 28:48
  references, the movie Jaws introduced the concept of the summer blockbuster, which had
• 28:52
  not been a thing before this. Lead had As you said, Lead had
• 28:56
  finally been banned from Paint. At the end of the seventies, sort of
• 29:00
  right in the middle of this, rock and roll was the predominantly popular music
• 29:03
  style. The US was about to experience some of the worst economic policies of
• 29:07
  all time, and the subsequent generation, the AIDS epidemic was preparing to launch
• 29:12
  into a furious onslaught that would claim the lives of tens of thousands of Gen
• 29:17
  xers as they reached adulthood. And yeah, so they had a lot going
• 29:21
  on. Yeah, so, no wonder Nirvana was big in the nineties,
• 29:25
  Like, I mean, this was a time where grunge was rife for like
• 29:29
  coming up. Like, there's no way it was not gonna happen. Everybody
• 29:32
  was really bummed out. I mean, this generation is very bummed out.
• 29:34
  So Robert Kappa was a photographer who was trying to capture what life was like
• 29:38
  for people who grew up after World War Two. He dubbed these folks this
• 29:42
  generation were talking about Gen X, which was later solidified in the nineteen ninety
• 29:45
  one book called Generation X Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Canadian author Douglas Copeland
• 29:51
  or coupland Douglas Cooplan's written all kinds of Copeland's written all kinds of stuff.
• 29:55
  Now, other people called this the post boomer generation, the latch key generation,
• 29:59
  and the thirteenth generation, which I think is really fascinating, But I've
• 30:03
  always known them as Gen X, right, Yeah, and Gen X was
• 30:06
  the one that really stuck the most. I could see why post boomer would
• 30:10
  sort of work, and the latch key kid thing that was the reference to
• 30:14
  the fact that you had more working parents and so kids were kind of taking
• 30:17
  care of themselves and just kind of running around doing whatever and getting snatched up
• 30:19
  by serial killers. Yeah, that was sort of where where that term there
• 30:23
  came from A wild time. Yeah. All right, Now we get to
• 30:26
  the dreaded Millennials, also called gen Y, and it's us hey is people
• 30:33
  born between nineteen eighty one and nineteen ninety six. We're definitely in that period.
• 30:37
  Yeah, we won't tell you exactly when though, which we've probably said
• 30:41
  a couple times on the episode. So we're late stage millennials. So our
• 30:45
  values include achievement, civic duty, consumerism, fun, fun, extreme fun,
• 30:51
  morals, confidence, competition, personal attention, extreme technology, savvy,
• 30:55
  optimism, street smarts, and spiritualism. Now I was reflect on this and
• 31:00
  going through this list and having the thought that I'm like, it's actually eerily
• 31:06
  accurate. I feel like, to myself, how much of that I do
• 31:08
  identify with? Yeah, except the spiritualism part. I relate to spiritualism part
• 31:14
  in terms of, like not necessarily a religion, but like just feeling like
• 31:18
  a oneness with the universe and feeling like connected, Like that's probably where my
• 31:22
  spiritualism comes in. I also find a lot of spiritualism and like the experience
• 31:25
  around music. But sure, okay, but that's about as far as that
• 31:27
  goes. Okay, all right. Defining circumstances of the millennials, who again
• 31:33
  were the sort of early to mid nineties here, there's kind of a lot
• 31:37
  going on. The AIDS epidemic really went into full swing and reached a zenith
• 31:41
  of slaughter. During this period, international politics began escalating quite a bit as
• 31:48
  we got more policies and just more interconnected as various countries men like our shipping
• 31:55
  and political and economic policies started to really influence one another internationally. Also,
• 32:00
  computers, I think yay, this became the era of personal computers. We
• 32:06
  also had the initial development of mobile phones that started to become popular and people
• 32:09
  had them beepers, yeah, beepers right. In pop culture, we had
• 32:14
  Queen Michael Jackson, Pantera, Nirvana, Tool Metallica. For movies, we
• 32:19
  had e t Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Starting, Empire,
• 32:22
  Strikes Back, Diehard, Jurassic Park, Fight Club, Titanic, Forest Gump,
• 32:27
  and The Shawshank Redemption, just to name a few. And the most
• 32:30
  violent video games ever were released during this time, or at least the most
• 32:35
  violent video games up to this point, and we finally saw a decrease in
• 32:39
  the rate of active serial killers during this time. Also, fun enough,
• 32:44
  underground music became successful enough to fund itself and became sort of an individual enterprise,
• 32:50
  and that's how we got punkin Ska into their second, third, and
• 32:52
  fourth waves. Ah, the best time. I think every generation probably feels
• 32:57
  like this, But I feel like this era, like that era for music
• 33:02
  is some of the best ever, from like the beginning of the eighties until
• 33:06
  like the mid to late nineties is like the best. That's just the best.
• 33:09
  So but I even forgot to say, you know, Fleetwood Mac was
• 33:13
  in this time too, and Ninja Turtles, Oh, that's right, and
• 33:15
  Ninja Turtles Man and Beetlejuice. Did you say they're putting a sequel out to
• 33:20
  Beetlejuice. It's called Beetlejuice Beetle Juice. I did not. I'm very curious
• 33:22
  about that. Brilliant. So what happens when you released the third one?
• 33:28
  Oh no, I was going to ask you though, as someone who is
• 33:30
  so avidly familiar or avid lee is maybe not the word, but more familiar
• 33:35
  with the history of punk, like when we're talking to nineteen eighty one,
• 33:38
  sort of what wave of punk are we end at this point? Oh,
• 33:42
  that's like the first wave of punk. I mean you're talking like end of
• 33:45
  the seventies. People are getting real sick of like glam rock, Like people
• 33:50
  are getting real tired of like Foreigner and Boston and Aerosmith and all that nonsense,
• 33:54
  and so you started finding bands that were kind of coming up with a
• 33:58
  harder edge, and like the late Seven Knees, you saw the Ramones show
• 34:00
  up. Okay, the Ramones started touring late seventies, like the beginning of
• 34:05
  the eighties, and basically they were considered the Johnny apple Seed of punk rock,
• 34:07
  and so they would go to whatever city and they would play and people
• 34:10
  would be like, hey, I could do that too, and they would
• 34:13
  go get guitar, and that's when you ended up with like all these punk
• 34:15
  bands all over the country. If you read about the history of punk inside
• 34:19
  New York, it was so interesting because New York itself was like this kind
• 34:22
  of really dangerous space, sure, and punk rock was kind of like the
• 34:25
  flagship for that. But it really started with the Stooges in the late seventies,
• 34:30
  and then right at the beginning of the eighties you had Ramones, Black
• 34:34
  Flag, Bad Religion, you had like seven Seconds Uniform Choice SSD. You
• 34:38
  had all these bands that started coming up in everywhere and it was like it
• 34:43
  burned real hot, Like that was the thing about that time. It burned
• 34:45
  real hot, it burned real quick, and then like shut down like by
• 34:50
  like nineteen eighty five, and then there was a revival like in the late
• 34:52
  eighties, and that's when you started seeing grunge and like the pop punk boom
• 34:55
  in like early nineties, right, because I mean, actually, you know,
• 35:00
  well even Blink on eighty two was like they started during this period,
• 35:05
  like yeah, yeah, their first sort of demo and Buddha came out I
• 35:08
  want to say in like ninety three or something like that. It was like
• 35:12
  ninety three or ninety four, yeah, because Dude Ranch was ninety seven,
• 35:15
  right. Yeah, Punk and rock were kind of the way to go.
• 35:19
  But anyway, pop culture really fun. I think prior to like there being
• 35:22
  the access to this kind of underground music, like bands that weren't really syndicated,
• 35:28
  they didn't really have albums. It was kind of expected that you'd you'd
• 35:31
  join a band, you'd play at clubs, and like people would go to
• 35:34
  see live music, and that was perfectly fine. Like people just kind of
• 35:37
  did that thing, and then they're sort of like, we're really going to
• 35:39
  do our own thing. We're going to tour, we're gonna make our own
• 35:42
  albums, we're gonna go out and this diy version of a music industry started
• 35:46
  to creep up, and with it came this sort of counter culture revolution.
• 35:51
  I mean, like every every group of people had some rebellion against their parents
• 35:55
  go on in some version or way, but this really hit its stride when
• 36:00
  you had these groups of people that were connected by their music and how that
• 36:07
  shaped their values and their community, that just became much stronger I think during
• 36:10
  this time. Yeah, and it was just like nothing that people had really
• 36:14
  seen before. You're right, I think that's where like that street smarts value
• 36:17
  comes in because you have, like, as an example, Uniform Choice was
• 36:22
  like one of the first bands to start doing their own merch, their band
• 36:23
  merch, like for themselves. They weren't like shipping that off to go get
• 36:28
  shirts printed for tours and stuff, like, they were doing it in their
• 36:30
  houses, in their in their homes, putting them in their trunks and like
• 36:34
  going on tour. Or Brett Gerrowitz from Bad Religion starting Epitaph Records in the
• 36:37
  eighties was absolutely a response to record industries like just like you know, screwing
• 36:43
  over bands and stuff. Same thing with Ia McKay and Discord records. Like
• 36:46
  Minor Threat is a perfect example of how like that DIY culture that self reliance
• 36:52
  culture started in the music industry, especially in underground music, right around that
• 36:55
  time, Like it was kind of there, but it didn't like blossom until
• 36:59
  like the eighties, which is really really interesting. I mean that's why you
• 37:01
  know, you had so many punk bands that are kind of doing their own
• 37:05
  thing for so many years, like because they could and they could make a
• 37:07
  pretty decent living off of it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean before it
• 37:09
  just really was not accessible. You could not set up some kind of recording
• 37:15
  outfit without having like tens of thousands of dollars to invest prior to this,
• 37:20
  and all of a sudden, technology gave god good enough that you kind of
• 37:22
  could, and I mean it wasn't necessarily always cheap, but you could get
• 37:27
  access to the stuff you needed and for at least good enough that you'd be
• 37:30
  able to make semi listenable records. And then as they reinvested the money that
• 37:37
  they made from their self funded project where they got to keep all the money
• 37:40
  that was an output of their work, then they could get better and better
• 37:44
  equipment. And so yeah, you actually did have, as you said,
• 37:45
  those record labels could afford then to support these little indie projects, and you
• 37:51
  get this weird blend of like these are actual businesses that do actually make money
• 37:57
  off of their bands and their super small right, just like little little operations.
• 38:02
  But it's enough that like it has its own little economy and built into
• 38:07
  it, which was really interesting, super fascinating, super super cool. That
• 38:09
  was a huge pump culture. Signed Tangent about that, I will wrap up
• 38:14
  with the millennials by talking about another really critical feature. As I said,
• 38:16
  computers were huge. I mean, they were such a disruptive catalyst of events.
• 38:23
  And this is even before we really move into how they become more disruptive.
• 38:29
  But that was a pretty big game changer at that point. And also,
• 38:31
  this is the point at which like computers had been around prior to this,
• 38:35
  Like, let's make sure we're really clear that like this wasn't when computers
• 38:37
  were developed, but this was the point at which you got personal computers and
• 38:42
  where computers became user friendly enough that most lay people could learn them. But
• 38:46
  they were complicated and not user friendly enough that we all sort of had to
• 38:52
  learn how to overcome their failings and shortcomings and figure out how to sort of
• 38:55
  repair them kind of on our own. Yeah, and also this is a
• 39:00
  quick side note, this we had a rare moment of economic triumph during this
• 39:05
  generation, when we temporarily in the United States had a budget surplus during the
• 39:10
  Clinton administration. Yeah, Also, you could fly planes without having to endure
• 39:15
  hours of security screenings. That was also just the thing. What a strange
• 39:19
  time. I remember being in school and I think this was the first time
• 39:22
  that I had become acutely aware of politics because Clinton was running and everybody was
• 39:27
  like, he's the cool one. He plays saxophone and he's McDonald's and I
• 39:30
  was like, yeah, I'll vote for him. Like, not knowing anything
• 39:32
  about politics or how any of it worked, I was like, I'll vote
• 39:35
  for him. Because I also remember George H. W. Bush being on
• 39:38
  The Simpsons and being a villain on the Simpsons. So like he had moved
• 39:43
  in across the street from the Simpsons and Holmer got in a fist fight with
• 39:46
  him. So like I remember being like boo Bush, yay Clinton at the
• 39:51
  time when I was like five. Yeah, Like, that's when Homer accidentally
• 39:55
  destroys his memoirs of paper He's been typing diligently on a little typewriter. Huh
• 40:02
  uh huh, yep, that's the one that's the episode Okay, yeah,
• 40:06
  Simpsons, another huge cultural, culturally relevant icon that occurred during this point.
• 40:10
  Well that's when they started. Obviously they are still going on South Park.
• 40:14
  I think started during this time. It may have been a little laughter because
• 40:15
  it was the late nineties, mid to late nineties when that started. I
• 40:20
  want to say it was like ninety five or ninety six, maybe even ninety
• 40:22
  four. That feels about right. That fee was about right. I actually
• 40:25
  remember because I remember I went to I'd never heard of South Park before,
• 40:29
  I'd never seen an episode, and I show it at elementary school one day
• 40:32
  and everyone's like, Kenny didn't die? And I was like, was he
• 40:36
  was that? Me? Was he supposed to? Yeah, that's a big
• 40:38
  deal. I remember when that. I remember what happened that was. Yeah.
• 40:40
  Yeah, it was like is that a thing that we say about people?
• 40:43
  Sometimes? I'm confused? Oh man, what a time to be alive?
• 40:50
  Yes, speaking of times to be alive, not during ads. We're
• 41:00
  back and we can punctuate these generations with ads, apparently because that's how long
• 41:05
  we're taking. Yeah, I think that one in particular. I think we
• 41:07
  have a very particular bias for the millennial time period. Yeah, Yeah,
• 41:12
  there's a lot to say about that one. Yeah for us, for us
• 41:14
  at least, Yeah, But following gen y comes gen z, right,
• 41:19
  if we're following alphabet, the alphabet and all that. So sometimes you'll hear
• 41:22
  them referred to as xenioles. I've heard xeniols as another term for them,
• 41:25
  which I feel like gen z is fine. They were born between nineteen ninety
• 41:29
  seven and twenty twelve, and their values include empathy, progressiveness, diversity,
• 41:34
  inclusion, flexibility, teamwork, professional growth, tech nativism in social and political
• 41:38
  awareness. Yes, with tech nativism largely, it's like these are people who
• 41:45
  are born during a point where they don't know a world without noble phones and
• 41:47
  internet that has only ever been around as a matter of fact, if you
• 41:52
  think about it, like there are people who are around now who are like
• 41:55
  going into middle school who have never lived in a WARLD that did not have
• 42:00
  iPads. That is the thing. Some of the defining characteristics here I think
• 42:05
  are going to stand out. Like there was a major world event, or
• 42:07
  at least United States centric, but also world events that took place. We
• 42:10
  had nine to eleven one of the big ones YEP in two thousand and one,
• 42:14
  because of that, and because of how politics are progressing, you had
• 42:17
  a rise in xenophobia and jingoism, the fourth ever instance of a president winning
• 42:22
  the electoral vote while losing the popular vote, a trend that would become comically
• 42:27
  and depressingly common from then into the foreseeable future. We had a broader understanding
• 42:32
  of global climate change as an issue that was becoming made aware to the people
• 42:37
  of the gen Z generation. We had the rise of the gig economy.
• 42:40
  We had the takeover of Amazon in just regular retail marketplaces. We have the
• 42:46
  rise of cryptocurrency starting to at the end of this. We have the transition
• 42:52
  to smartphones, which I think also one of the most significant disruptive technologies we've
• 42:55
  ever had. We had and pop culture the rise of the MC. You
• 43:00
  also had music moved to streaming, technology reached a point, and computers specifically
• 43:06
  reached a point where they became so user friendly that no one knows what to
• 43:08
  do if it breaks right, and more sort of pop culturey things. Yeah,
• 43:15
  I mean, you also had Netflix in the red box, those types
• 43:16
  of services that end up kind of shutting down rental stores, sending them into
• 43:22
  functional extinction. You've got Star Wars comes back kind of You've got Lord of
• 43:25
  the Rings, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Twilight, The Office, which
• 43:29
  are all, you know, I think, important works of art, and
• 43:32
  you've got musicians kind of give up and just start releasing the same three songs
• 43:36
  over and over again from then until the foreseeable future. I mean you can
• 43:39
  kind of overlay literally every pop song and they all sound the same. Yeah,
• 43:43
  they just they just gave up. They're like, well, computers can
• 43:45
  do our work now, and yeah, that's it. That's what. It's
• 43:49
  a wild time. It's a wild time for music in terms of like stagnancy,
• 43:52
  the underground is is doing just fine. Just so I was going to
• 43:55
  say, like there are still video music stores that out there, or video
• 44:00
  music video rental stores that are out there that you can still go and rent
• 44:05
  and rent movies from. And there are still musicians who are out there learning
• 44:08
  how to play instruments and writing songs. That still is a thing. And
• 44:13
  most of what's out there is like streaming services from movies, and most of
• 44:16
  what's out there is just the people who just say make me song computer,
• 44:22
  or I'm just gonna make that same song, but I'm gonna do it in
• 44:24
  this chord instead. Yep, and that's what's happened absolutely. Okay, Well,
• 44:30
  what comes after Gen z ors Millennials? I guess you might wonder those
• 44:35
  a little little. Well, essentially, the idea of what happened next is
• 44:38
  that you have the next generation that was the first generation born during the twenty
• 44:44
  first century. And this is called because of that gen Alpha Jen Alpha,
• 44:50
  which you know, I think about my son in this situation, and I
• 44:52
  don't know that I would describe him as an alpha. He's so like kind
• 44:57
  and sweet and fun. So they're more between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty eight,
• 45:01
  and their values include technological intuitiveness, global citizenship, adapting the change,
• 45:06
  and individualism so far at least, Yeah, yeah, So that's again this
• 45:09
  is sort of being defined as it comes along. But I think, you
• 45:13
  know, so defining circumstances of this that seem relevant to this generation are still
• 45:17
  kind of TBD. As I said, the first generation born in the twenty
• 45:22
  first century, so whatever that might mean. But also we have some obvious
• 45:24
  ones. The COVID pandemic, everything moved to streaming, and then we had
• 45:29
  this, We have the ongoing streaming wars, music, music live performances everything.
• 45:35
  We have the rise of AI, which I think will be no small
• 45:37
  impact on the next generation. We have the rise of influencers, which actually
• 45:43
  had been around before that. We did a whole episode on that. But
• 45:45
  the major popularity, I think in the word becoming much more well known.
• 45:50
  CGI reach has begun to reach photorealism and escape the uncanny Valley, which I
• 45:54
  think a lot of people did not see coming. Nope, everyone seems to
• 45:58
  be at war right now or around the world, and the wars going on
• 46:01
  all over the place. Unfortunately, we have a major housing crisis, with
• 46:05
  housing prices that have outpaced people's living wage by a just laughably large margin,
• 46:10
  I mean depressingly large, but also like it's so ridiculous, it's kind of
• 46:15
  funny kind of thing, right. We have proliferation of education around the globe,
• 46:19
  which also revealed that we have a failing of education around the globe.
• 46:22
  And as it continues to expand, we have had substantial medical breakthroughs. There
• 46:28
  was the Internet of Things. I don't know if people remember that term from
• 46:31
  a few years back, but how like our dishwasher, our microwaves, and
• 46:37
  refrigerators are now all on the Internet, that we are seeing the rise of
• 46:43
  the resurrection of fascism and authoritarianism around the world. And also we're moving into
• 46:49
  a period where there's the very visible and tangible effects of climate of global climate
• 46:53
  change are becoming as predicted, much more realized. Right, So that kind
• 47:00
  of I think altogether breaks down what each generation for the last one hundred or
• 47:06
  so years has been experiencing. But I think the reason we wanted to talk
• 47:08
  about this is because so often people will use and describe a certain set of
• 47:14
  behaviors as being a generational thing, rather than looking at maybe a circumstance or
• 47:20
  even just kind of understanding why that group of people or somebody from that group
• 47:23
  might have a certain set of characteristics. And so I think it's worth maybe
• 47:27
  going into a little bit of the skeptical viewpoint of these generational characteristics specifically,
• 47:31
  Yeah, I mean, yeah, we should always be skeptical about these things.
• 47:35
  And although we've more or less talked through them, I think fairly successfully
• 47:38
  in a way that did not necessarily paint a huge amount of bias over it,
• 47:43
  it's worth asking, like, are these even real? Is this actually
• 47:45
  a thing? Like is there a point to any of this? As you
• 47:49
  had asked right at the front. Although like we sort of identified that this
• 47:52
  is arbitrary, many have elected to define and name these generations for practical reasons,
• 47:58
  the baby Boomers, etc. The idea these generations are not at all
• 48:01
  scientifically validated. We can't actually specifically draw a line in the sand and say,
• 48:06
  like, no, this is it's really clear where the shift took place.
• 48:08
  It's completely like this seems like a logical place to say that there was
• 48:13
  a major change that we'd call this a separate generation. And another point too,
• 48:16
  is that people on the fringes of the define group, like people who
• 48:20
  are born early in that generation versus people who are born later in that generation,
• 48:22
  they tend to feel disconnected from the people on the opposite ends. So
• 48:25
  people born in nineteen ninety six they belong to pretty different circumstances and experiences than
• 48:30
  people born in nineteen eighty one. And I think that that is a fair
• 48:32
  conclusion. I think we are we'll say in the mid eighties, well,
• 48:36
  we're not going to give away our ages. But like when I talked to
• 48:37
  somebody who was born in like the like the mid nineties, it's a very
• 48:40
  different conversation. Because of my just just from a pop culture experience, just
• 48:45
  having those conversations and what we remember absolutely, like I remember when Jurassic Park
• 48:50
  came out. Yeah, I remember when my family got our first cell phone,
• 48:52
  right, I remember when we got hooked up to the internet and my
• 48:55
  mom was trying to explain email to me. Like, those are things that
• 49:00
  someone who was born in like nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety six, that
• 49:04
  stuff's done. Like we're past all that people have cell phones, Drastic Park
• 49:07
  has sequels. Email is a relatively regularly accessible thing to most people at this
• 49:13
  point. So I do feel like someone who was who was born in the
• 49:17
  earlier part of that swing of generations. I don't feel a lot of connection
• 49:21
  to someone who was born in the nineties, and I feel more connection to
• 49:24
  someone who was born just a few years before me in the previous generation,
• 49:28
  right in the late seventies, because not as much separates me from them as
• 49:32
  separates me from someone born in the same generation of me fifteen years later or
• 49:37
  later ten years later, you know, Right, for people our age,
• 49:39
  I think that we tend to have more shared experiences with people who are ten
• 49:44
  years older than us than ten years younger than us. Yeah, that's a
• 49:45
  good way to say, so. I think another part of this that's really
• 49:49
  important to unpack is that treating people as belonging to a group, it ends
• 49:52
  up oversimplifying their experience and their unique behaviors and the complexity of individuals and also
• 49:59
  a stereotypes members of that group. While group identity can be useful in some
• 50:02
  circumstances, they might be preferred in some circumstances, and it might be empowering
• 50:06
  to some, it can distract a way from understanding each of that person's unique
• 50:09
  circumstances, their own unique personalities, their own behavior sets. There's a lot
• 50:14
  of stuff that it kind of discards by overgeneralizing the characteristics of a generation and
• 50:19
  just the idea of the generation, Like some have pointed to, like because
• 50:22
  we know these are arbitrary, we know that there is a lot of overlap,
• 50:27
  and like it's not scientifically valid, but nevertheless we're going to say that
• 50:30
  these are generations. It can actually create some unnecessary division and for some people,
• 50:36
  some strife between those generations, even when they're fairly close, you know,
• 50:40
  Like is that people who are born just the generation before us, that
• 50:44
  we're like closer to an age that the people who are born at the end
• 50:46
  of our generation, like seeing them as belonging to a different group of people
• 50:51
  because we've said that they belong to a different group of people by identifying them
• 50:54
  as being part of a generation that's seemingly distinct from ours. And again I
• 51:00
  think that's that's just unnecessary. And places where we other people, we see
• 51:06
  problems. So like anything that sort of enables that is something to be wary
• 51:09
  of. Absolutely, So treating other people can be a problem, and that,
• 51:13
  like based on the generations, can be a problem. And in the
• 51:15
  book The Generation Myth, why when you're born matters less than you think,
• 51:20
  Bobby Duffy, who is a UK researcher, argues a couple different points.
• 51:22
  First, he says this is somewhat of a marketing ploy too, like so
• 51:27
  we're othering people based on just kind of a marketing scheme, which I think
• 51:30
  is an interesting take on this. Companies will hire quote unquote experts to consult
• 51:34
  about hiring and policies of a quote unquote multi generational workforce, So basically they're
• 51:39
  hiring people to make it so that they can account for the different characteristics of
• 51:45
  different generations instead of just like looking at good organizational policies. Yeah, Basically,
• 51:50
  this is a group of people who've come together to say, we are
• 51:52
  experts in generational characteristics. Hire our firm to help your business best support an
• 52:00
  account for the multi generational workforce that you will or may have. Right in
• 52:05
  an example of this, most of the websites when I was looking for information
• 52:09
  about this, and often as a behind the curtain sort of thing, I'll
• 52:14
  just sort of type some things into Google just to see what shows up.
• 52:16
  Like I'm usually have some places I'm gonna go look, but I'm also just
• 52:20
  gonna say what randomly populates when I just do a general search just to see
• 52:22
  if there's something that I might miss, Right, And one of the things
• 52:27
  that popped up pretty much the first like entire page of search results, no
• 52:31
  matter how I wrote this, were websites for firms who are like, these
• 52:37
  are what generations are, this is why they matter, This is how we
• 52:39
  can help you leverage your business to account for these generational characteristics. Like that
• 52:45
  was almost every single website that I saw right out the game, even from
• 52:49
  a couple of universities who sort of seemed like they were also pushing this idea.
• 52:53
  So it does seem like this is like a follow the money thing,
• 52:59
  a racial characteristics real or is it something that people use to make money by
• 53:04
  saying hire me so I can tell you how this thing impacts your business,
• 53:07
  whether or not it's real, And so just not to say that, like
• 53:12
  we pointed out earlier, the people who describe this acknowledge like this is arbitrary,
• 53:16
  and we know it's arbitrary. And here's like we feel like it's worth
• 53:21
  unpacking these and identifying these circumstances, and so they do and still saying like,
• 53:27
  yeah, but does it really matter though, Like it seems like again,
• 53:31
  if you're just trying to work as a consultant, right, maybe not.
• 53:36
  You know, we've kind of said it already where I think it's important
• 53:39
  that we can understand the circumstances of somebody's life to explain like maybe how they
• 53:45
  might have developed certain skills or certain opinions and stuff. I do think that
• 53:46
  that is important, But I think to apply that in a generational like kind
• 53:51
  of a generational like handwaving like well, YadA, YadA, YadA, they're
• 53:54
  a boomer, like isn't really useful in that context, right, That's kind
• 53:59
  of my general thought now also in this book that we're talking about here from
• 54:02
  Bobby Duffy, every generation seems to follow an eighty year cycle of being characterized
• 54:07
  as idealist, reactive, civic, adaptive, and then it resets. And
• 54:12
  it's not unlike a horoscope er in like kind of looking at the months of
• 54:15
  the year, like it's very kind of easy to follow cyclical patterns, And
• 54:20
  that's really kind of how it gets recharacterized, even if it is not necessarily
• 54:22
  a cyclical pattern in place. Yeah. Well, and then if you think
• 54:27
  back to and I should have pointed this out as we were going through,
• 54:30
  how it seems like some words kept being used for different generations teamwork, They're
• 54:36
  like the teamwork came up a lot, Optimism came up a lot, loyalty
• 54:40
  came up many times. But there was also like this progressive idealism came up
• 54:45
  pretty much every generation, right, and definitely not one where we look on
• 54:49
  some of those past generations and say those are very progressive people. They're not
• 54:53
  by today's standards, but back then and when they were young, they seem
• 54:57
  to have been. And that sort of I think speaks to some other points
• 55:00
  we'll get to in a moment. After the ads, we were talking about
• 55:09
  this book, The Generation Myth by Bobby Duffy, and he sort of says
• 55:14
  like, rather than thinking of the generational characteristics as being important, there are
• 55:20
  sort of these three factors that might better explain how we talk about and understand
• 55:25
  where people sort of come from over these generations. And I think he makes
• 55:29
  some really good points that we'll have to sort of unpack as we go through.
• 55:31
  Right, So, the first thing is this idea of a life cycle.
• 55:34
  People changes the age, which makes perfect sense. You get more experience,
• 55:37
  you get more exposure, you change as you grow. Another one is
• 55:42
  period events, war, recession, disease, outbreaks. Those are going to
• 55:45
  drastically influence how you respond to the world around you. And there's also world
• 55:51
  events that happen during crucial personality development points, like early adulthood. I mean,
• 55:54
  I think of nine to eleven specifically as a turning point for me and
• 55:58
  my experience. I think that that is the time where I grew up because
• 56:01
  that was such a reality exposure to reality for me, and that was a
• 56:05
  major world event. I mean that I think influenced me so absolutely. But
• 56:08
  that again, that's how I took it and how everybody reacted around. That
• 56:13
  is a different conversation. But those three factors, life cycle period events,
• 56:16
  and world events that happened specifically during personality development points, all three of those
• 56:21
  could drastically influence the majority of people inside a generation. And that's exactly it.
• 56:24
  So in reading this, I think you could take away, well,
• 56:28
  he's just trying to explain generation using different words. But I actually think that,
• 56:32
  as you said, the point that he was making is when the first
• 56:37
  of all people changes the age, and they always like that just as the
• 56:39
  thing that happens, right, but also like all these things happened to all
• 56:43
  people when they happen, meaning that someone who was of two generations behind where
• 56:49
  around people who are like from the silent generation. It was that far back
• 56:53
  in time, and they're here experiencing AI with us. They've been through the
• 57:00
  various diseases, at outbreaks and wars that have happened. So like if they're
• 57:05
  shaped by those things, then they're shaped by those things at the same time
• 57:08
  that everyone else is. And it just so happens to be the case that
• 57:13
  like these things that happen, like oftentimes when we look at these generations,
• 57:17
  they're hitting these people during their development when they're getting into early adulthood, which
• 57:22
  is actually after the generation in which they were born, and so they're kind
• 57:25
  of being shaped by factors as as again into adulthood that really push their their
• 57:30
  opinions and beliefs in a certain direction that are actually not really relevant to the
• 57:35
  time that they were in. But again, like those world events happened everybody
• 57:38
  all at once, right, and so like, no matter what we've been
• 57:40
  through, I whant to continue to change and be influenced by our current circumstances,
• 57:45
  no matter what generation we're in, right. And then I think another
• 57:47
  part too is like looking at this kind of general cycle of how society just
• 57:52
  generally progresses, what ends up happening is society progresses towards increased social justice.
• 57:58
  Most generations start off as ideal. They're principled youths who push for more and
• 58:01
  greater social equality at first and then turn into integal bigots. I mean,
• 58:06
  you see that happen time and time again, and hopefully that cycle does start
• 58:08
  to break. But I think that's a pretty consistent thing that you start to
• 58:12
  see. It does feel like we're getting out of that. It seems like
• 58:15
  we're getting more firm and widespread pushes for kind of social justice issue as time
• 58:22
  goes on. But like that is, society just does that. It moves
• 58:25
  towards this progressive, egalitarian sort of worldview, aside from these weird like moves
• 58:34
  into authoritarianism and to like murder genocidal things that seem to go on sometimes,
• 58:42
  Like in general, the overall trend sort of tends to go that way.
• 58:45
  So it's sort of like every generation feels like really progressive, particularly when they're
• 58:49
  young, and for at the time when they were young, like they were
• 58:52
  being very progressive, and that just keeps going, like and so no matter
• 58:55
  where you slice it, like you're gonna find that sort of thing. Right.
• 58:58
  The other thing here is the shifts in circumstance are sort of broader and
• 59:01
  more circuitous than one generation. So, for example, if you look at
• 59:05
  like trends in the economy, trends in the economy can span decades that are
• 59:09
  going to influence people across many of these so called generations, such that like
• 59:15
  those impacts will continue to affect them as they grow and change well into their
• 59:20
  late adulthood and the younger generation and as they move into adulthood and so like
• 59:25
  those are just things that influence everybody. And there's also going to be the
• 59:29
  sort of political boogeyman topics that also span these large generations. Like the right
• 59:34
  has been trying to scare people about the immigration boogeyman for like a long time
• 59:38
  now, right it hasn't always been their main talking point, but it's been
• 59:43
  successful enough that, like xenophobia piece has been successful enough recently that they kind
• 59:47
  of just keep returning to that well as their main sort of fear mongering tactic.
• 59:52
  And I think like that's just like a thing that happens that again spans
• 59:57
  multiple generations, is that you're going to have these sort of politically expedient feared
• 1:00:01
  tactics that keep working for a while at least until they don't and then they
• 1:00:06
  shift to a new boogeyman. But for right now, that's one of the
• 1:00:08
  big ones. So many boogeymen. There's also this kind of general increase in
• 1:00:14
  secularism. There's a lot of people moving away from religion and organized religion and
• 1:00:17
  kind of moving towards a space where this idea of spirituality is kind of shifting
• 1:00:22
  and changing and growing in so many different ways. And so that shift in
• 1:00:27
  general is going to influence a whole lot of people. I don't want to
• 1:00:30
  say it's very unlikely. The chances are never zero, but I have strong
• 1:00:34
  doubt that there's ever going to be another inquisition. Yeah, it does seem
• 1:00:37
  like we have moved away from the possibility of that, sure, the total
• 1:00:42
  collapse of society. Sure, yeah, I think, yeah, what way
• 1:00:46
  to fall back into this really isolated techno desert sort of world, mad Max
• 1:00:55
  World, Mad Max World. Then it's very possible we'd see that kind of
• 1:00:59
  thing again. But it seems at the rate that we're going unlikely that we'll
• 1:01:04
  ever move back to that sort of thing, Right, But I've been surprised
• 1:01:08
  by world events recently, so who knows. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:13
  And there is I think another thing too. You mentioned it. With the
• 1:01:15
  advancement of technology and stuff, there is a radically unprecedented social media use that
• 1:01:20
  has started to kind of lead up to this like greater global community where there's
• 1:01:24
  more interconnection, more powerful echo chambers than at any other point in history.
• 1:01:29
  And you could see this happening at least in the United States politics, where
• 1:01:31
  people are becoming galvanized and radicalized inside their parties and becoming so divisive. I
• 1:01:38
  mean, it is a distinctly two party system in the United States because nobody
• 1:01:42
  wants to talk to each other. And it's bizarre, but it is.
• 1:01:45
  That's exactly what's happening. Is people are gathering information that's not accurate information from
• 1:01:49
  their echo chambers and getting reinforced in these spaces, and now you're creating kind
• 1:01:52
  of these like pockets of people who are experts but not experts, and it's
• 1:01:55
  a mess. It's really a mess. My point is is that human beings
• 1:01:59
  are mess right now. We need to tighten up. We need it better.
• 1:02:04
  Well and sort of, yeah, the there has been the effect that
• 1:02:07
  communities are kind of no longer geographical, or at least they don't have to
• 1:02:12
  be. You can have really tight knit communities that are spread around the world.
• 1:02:16
  It can allow people to connect to cultures they're not used to, to
• 1:02:20
  ways of talking, I'm thinking about things that they're not used to, and
• 1:02:22
  that definitely happens as an outcome of social media on the Internet. But the
• 1:02:28
  other thing that happens is that they tend to find these communities and then sort
• 1:02:31
  of wall themselves off and turn into a self reinforcing momentum machine of usually some
• 1:02:38
  kind of fear about something or advocacy about something or whatever. But it then
• 1:02:44
  just creates the like we're not listening to anybody else think. And I think
• 1:02:46
  both of those happen in various capacities. You have some you know, little
• 1:02:50
  column, a little column, b, et cetera. So that is a
• 1:02:52
  thing that definitely is shifting and is nothing like that's ever happened. Like,
• 1:02:57
  we don't have anything to compare this to. Yeah, so we don't really
• 1:03:00
  know what to expect. This is the first time we've had this technology available
• 1:03:02
  to us, right, Like, we're at this stage now where people are
• 1:03:06
  starting to realize it's kind of like the whose line is that anyway? Rules?
• 1:03:08
  But when it comes to geopolitics is the borders aren't real and the politicians
• 1:03:13
  don't matter. That's a very good reference for anybody who's ever watched whose line
• 1:03:19
  is it? Ah, Millennials, you'll get it all right. I think
• 1:03:23
  the last thing here is just talk about sort of, as we said,
• 1:03:25
  this is largely American centric, and so I was kind of curious, as
• 1:03:30
  you're worth looking around and seeing what others have said about how this relates to
• 1:03:34
  global issues. And other countries around the world. And one thing that I
• 1:03:37
  sort of found and that was pointed out is that to an extent, these
• 1:03:42
  generations do still apply kinda to other countries in the world, largely because some
• 1:03:47
  of these major events affected everybody. So we have World War One that actually
• 1:03:52
  did not affect everybody, It did have quite a few countries involved, more
• 1:03:55
  so than you would normally expect. World War two had a lot, I
• 1:03:59
  think larger of a global impact. We were definitely at a point where trade
• 1:04:02
  was more global at this point. The nineteen eighteen flu affected many people and
• 1:04:08
  many countries around the world. COVID shut down the whole world. What are
• 1:04:13
  the rare circumstances where it was like, Wow, there is nobody who is
• 1:04:15
  not touched by this in some way, right that pandemic everybody around the world.
• 1:04:20
  We went from like having no international air travel to having common international air
• 1:04:26
  travel. Like that was a really big game changer that will have affected everybody.
• 1:04:30
  We have the rise in exponential growth of technological complexity, and that includes
• 1:04:35
  things like the Internet that all countries got. Again, they were touched by
• 1:04:41
  these in some way, and that was one that I think touched all countries
• 1:04:44
  are the vast majority of them. And then of course the big one that's
• 1:04:47
  affecting everyone is climate change. Like it doesn't matter where you live, this
• 1:04:50
  is going to affect you more so, and I think places that are at
• 1:04:55
  the extremes of the globe, but we're seen it everywhere. Now, those
• 1:04:58
  are factors to consider, like if there's anything to this in terms of the
• 1:05:01
  fact that I said it's very American, like some of these things everybody experienced
• 1:05:05
  and so like the and those will be pivotal moments during someone's development, but
• 1:05:10
  again they do happen to everybody around the world. So there's that, right,
• 1:05:14
  And there's also just considering what we've seen in the last century when it
• 1:05:16
  comes to geopolitics, Right, there's the rise and fall of the Nazi Party
• 1:05:19
  in Germany, There's the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the beginning
• 1:05:21
  of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. China established the People's Republic of China,
• 1:05:26
  Communist Dictatorship party, you know, and several countries have had civil wars that
• 1:05:30
  have resulted in independence from their host countries. Some countries saw economic booms and
• 1:05:35
  collapses from oil, some just saw booms, others just saw collapses, and
• 1:05:40
  that is everyone was experiencing different hardships and struggles at different pivotal times throughout the
• 1:05:45
  last century. So I think it would be irresponsible to apply generational values and
• 1:05:51
  generational characteristics internationally only because in some circumstances those contexts are so unique, so
• 1:05:59
  different. I mean talking about Japan experiencing a long period of isolationism as a
• 1:06:03
  result of part of itself imposed and part of it being mandated by everybody after
• 1:06:10
  World War Two, and that creating its own unique culture where every generation has
• 1:06:14
  its own characteristics and stuff. I mean, there's so much to unpack.
• 1:06:17
  Australia as an example, where Australia has really only been able to connect with
• 1:06:23
  everybody pretty recently due to the Internet. For a long time, they were
• 1:06:27
  very isolated because they were effectively the Lost Continent for up until like the nineteen
• 1:06:31
  sixties. They were like almost a very difficult to access space compared to other
• 1:06:36
  parts of the world. And so you've got these different hardships that exist in
• 1:06:40
  different places, and I think it's really important to acknowledge that piece too.
• 1:06:44
  Yeah, And just as you said, like there are some that like we
• 1:06:47
  don't even really talk about because they didn't affect as directly the United States that
• 1:06:54
  were major major events for others. North Korea going super isolationist was another one.
• 1:06:59
  Right. Partitioned India when Britain sort of left India was a major upheaval.
• 1:07:03
  That like to them, was like there was a time before this and
• 1:07:06
  a time after this, and this was a period in the history books or
• 1:07:12
  the history of this country that was a major dividing point in the social structure
• 1:07:16
  of India, and that was nineteen forty seven. Like that was again just
• 1:07:21
  within the last century. So like to them, that was a huge shift.
• 1:07:26
  I mean we're talking apartheid and apartheid. Yeah, in South Africa,
• 1:07:30
  You've got the civil war in Rwanda and Congo, like all these places that
• 1:07:32
  this is happening, that there's like uncivil unrest and the effect that it has
• 1:07:38
  had on so many people. I mean, you know, and this is
• 1:07:41
  not a world history lesson by any means. Well what it is is looking
• 1:07:45
  at I mean, it kind of is. I mean, for those of
• 1:07:45
  you who didn't know, there's a lot going on out there just from a
• 1:07:49
  geopolitical standpoint, The amount of change that has happened for specific people in individual
• 1:07:55
  countries, for changing governments, for the rise and fall. I mean this
• 1:07:59
  is happened for centuries and decades, well before we established the boomer generation was
• 1:08:02
  a thing. But it's really important to know that that does influence and characterize
• 1:08:09
  and galvanize a certain group of people, because, like you said, that
• 1:08:12
  experience for whoever is in that space is happening to everybody in that space,
• 1:08:16
  right, Yes, yeah, very important point. And again it doesn't even
• 1:08:19
  matter sort of whether at age wise like that will be a thing that affects
• 1:08:24
  their ability to navigate their world for the rest of their lives or until the
• 1:08:28
  next major cataclysmic sort of thing happens. So that that's a really important piece
• 1:08:32
  to just think about, like how we talk about generations and how that relates
• 1:08:35
  to the rest of the world, which they're just going through different stuff.
• 1:08:38
  I mean, we all go through some of the similar stuff, and then
• 1:08:41
  everybody goes through different stuff, and now you have to go through ads.
• 1:08:51
  I think we've sort of hit all the things that we wanted to talk about
• 1:08:55
  with this. Is there anything that I missed or anything you'd like to add
• 1:08:58
  about the generational characteristics before we sort of start to wrap up here. I
• 1:09:02
  think for people who maybe subscribe to a contextual or circumstantial worldview, this is
• 1:09:09
  probably not anything surprising in terms of like kind of landing on Like, Yeah,
• 1:09:13
  circumstances matter, and this is probably going to lead to other episodes like
• 1:09:15
  birth order that will probably have to have a conversation about It's on some point
• 1:09:17
  in time too. Yay, that's a good point if you didn't pick it
• 1:09:19
  up from us. I think at least my thesis is that, like analyzing
• 1:09:23
  anybody's behavior, understanding anybody's behavior requires a circumstances worldview, not necessarily a generational
• 1:09:29
  worldview. Yeah, it's not going to tell you much about anyone. And
• 1:09:31
  you know, I was kind of thinking about I forgot to mention this earlier,
• 1:09:34
  so I'm glad we took a moment to reflect on if there was anything
• 1:09:38
  left to add and something I had sort of thought about in talking about these
• 1:09:41
  these world events and these pivotal moments of like as you're sort of coming into
• 1:09:45
  adulthood and you're forming your independent personality out on your own, that's common in
• 1:09:49
  the United States around you know, eighteen twenty years old. The major events
• 1:09:54
  that happen during that period are going to be things that might be they're going
• 1:09:58
  to influence sort of how you out, but again, it won't be predictive
• 1:10:00
  enough that it will be able to say anything about who you are or what
• 1:10:03
  you actually value or what you're ever going to do. Like it's it's way
• 1:10:08
  too imprecise for anything even kind of close to that, And if you think
• 1:10:12
  about it too, like it would also force people in to be a part
• 1:10:15
  of the groups that were affected during that during sort of those critical development periods
• 1:10:19
  to be fairly short, Like you're looking at windows of like four ish years
• 1:10:24
  of like you know, someone born between twenty twelve and twenty sixteen have kind
• 1:10:30
  of a more shared history there, going all the way from like twenty thirteen
• 1:10:32
  to twenty twenty six it's pretty different, right, Like, Honestly, a
• 1:10:36
  lot of people say, and I think understandably, we think about before the
• 1:10:40
  pandemic and after the pandemic, the pandemic being at one of those big punctuation
• 1:10:44
  marks and world history that radically shifted things, and the gen alpha or the
• 1:10:48
  supposedly general for people, they span the before and after of that. Yeah,
• 1:10:53
  that's like a mile marker in there. Yeah. Pragmatically, the sort
• 1:10:57
  of three years where that sucked all the air out of the room. Like
• 1:11:00
  people who were coming into adulthood during that, they were trying to get married
• 1:11:03
  during that, they were having babies during that, they were like just entering
• 1:11:06
  the workforce during that, and then not able to get a job because they
• 1:11:09
  had no experience and couldn't leave their house. Like, right, that is
• 1:11:13
  going to be a thing that it's going to be more memorable for them than
• 1:11:15
  the people who were born and experiencing later adulthood after that. So I was
• 1:11:20
  just thinking that, like, if there were to be generations, I think
• 1:11:23
  that the time period for which they could have a major influential event is like
• 1:11:29
  right at that sort of early adulthood piece is going to be very short window.
• 1:11:31
  Yeah, absolutely one. Okay. We do like to recommend movies,
• 1:11:36
  music, events, activities and things sometimes and just often just completely unrelated to
• 1:11:43
  the topic that we were just discussing, but they're fun we like to share
• 1:11:45
  them with people, So we will do that now. But first what we
• 1:11:47
  need to do is say thank you so much for joining us today. If
• 1:11:51
  you like to support the show, you can leave us a rating and review,
• 1:11:54
  subscribe, join us on Patreon, pick up some merch, tell a
• 1:11:57
  friend. Then if you do do the whole join us on page thing,
• 1:12:00
  then we will read your name. We will say hey, everybody who is
• 1:12:03
  listening to this, you should know that there's this awesome group of people to
• 1:12:06
  which you could belong and I will say your name. And that includes Mike,
• 1:12:10
  m Megan Leyla, Mike T, Justin, Kim, Joshua, Brad,
• 1:12:14
  Stephanie, Olivia, Brian Ashley, and Kiara. Thank you all so
• 1:12:17
  much, forever and for allays. We really appreciate you. We love y'all.
• 1:12:21
  Thank you for being here. In addition, I could not do this
• 1:12:24
  without my team of people who really allow me to do this fun project that
• 1:12:28
  is The Silly Little Podcast, and that includes our audio production and editing from
• 1:12:31
  Justin Greenhouse, fact check in and writing from Shane and myself. Thank you
• 1:12:35
  again so much for recording with me today. Shane, Hey anytime, Thanks
• 1:12:39
  for having me. I know, of course, Emma Wilson is our social
• 1:12:42
  media coordinator, And of thanks to everyone who is listening. We appreciate you.
• 1:12:45
  Is there anything that I miss or anything that you'd like to add to
• 1:12:48
  that part before we get to our recommendations. No, I think we're good,
• 1:12:51
  perfect, All right, join us on Patreon. Anyway, let's recommend
• 1:12:54
  some things. Yay, recommendations. I would like to recommend a conference,
• 1:13:08
  but it's not any sort of conference. You know. I am somebody who
• 1:13:12
  is a great appreciator of all things nerd media. And I say that in
• 1:13:17
  the most loving way. Oh yeah, this is a good thing. Yeah.
• 1:13:19
  Yesterday, as of this recording, I got to go to MEGACN twenty
• 1:13:24
  twenty four, which is like the Orlando, Florida version of Comic Con,
• 1:13:28
  and all the actors come and they visit. Tom Hidleston was there yesterday.
• 1:13:32
  Rain Wilson was there, Geena Davis, damn Never long Bottom. I can't
• 1:13:35
  remember what his name is right now, but he was there. I got
• 1:13:38
  to see him up close and personal. Wow. I got to meet Roger
• 1:13:42
  Lima from Lesson Jake by accident and he gave me a yeah. I ran
• 1:13:45
  into him and he swiftly out of his pocket pulled out a garbage pail,
• 1:13:49
  like a Lesson Jake version of a garbage pail kids trading card. That was
• 1:13:53
  him and his name's Rotten Roger. And I was like, okay, this
• 1:13:56
  is great, Like what a great collectible that I didn't expect to get a
• 1:13:58
  fabulous but you know, if you've never been, it's a very big,
• 1:14:01
  like almost like a showcase where you've got vendors that are selling their wares,
• 1:14:05
  their art. There's a whole artist alley, you can get tattooed. It's
• 1:14:09
  in people cause playing and it's just a really wonderful experience. It was very
• 1:14:13
  busy yesterday, but it was still a very great, wonderful experience. And
• 1:14:16
  getting to see all people in costume and doing some really cool work, and
• 1:14:20
  seeing all the different games that are out and seeing it was just really a
• 1:14:24
  great experience. So I recommend if you've never been to like a comic book
• 1:14:27
  convention, go to one, because you are going to have the best time.
• 1:14:30
  I feel like maybe we should just do a like an episode that's like
• 1:14:33
  the history of comic con or maybe comic book conventions more generally, or yeah,
• 1:14:39
  or maybe a survey of like the existing conventions that are sort of these
• 1:14:43
  nerd slash pop culture convention type things. Yeah. I think that'd be fun.
• 1:14:47
  That'd be great. I would love that sort of Speaking of that,
• 1:14:50
  I guess is I'm recommending a movie. This movie came out I believe in
• 1:14:54
  twenty twenty one or twenty two, maybe before that. It's not that recent.
• 1:15:00
  It's a fairly newer movie, but not that new, like not in
• 1:15:02
  the last year. Yeah, definitely not in the last year. I'm gonna
• 1:15:04
  look up really quick because now I want to know twenty twenty one, so
• 1:15:08
  it's a few years old at this point. This is an a twenty four
• 1:15:11
  film. It's called The Green Night, based on the story Sir Gawain and
• 1:15:14
  The Green Knight, which is a book, a very old book, which
• 1:15:16
  I would also recommend. But the movie The Green Knight really interesting a movie
• 1:15:20
  in a good way. It's weird, but it is so beautifully beautifully shot.
• 1:15:26
  I mean, just incredible camera work. The acting is great. It's
• 1:15:30
  got this very surrealist quality to it that I think it actually really works with
• 1:15:34
  how they tell the story. It's one of those where you do have to
• 1:15:36
  pay attention to know that going into it. It's not like I'll look up
• 1:15:40
  from your phone every once in a while and see what noise is happening on
• 1:15:43
  the screen, like you should kind of be sure watching. But it is
• 1:15:45
  a really interesting film. I really enjoyed it, So I think if you're
• 1:15:48
  interested in things like that, the sort of very artsy, very beautifully shot,
• 1:15:51
  well made, sort of weirdish movie. I think you could do a
• 1:15:57
  lot worse than The Green Knight. And I think that that's currently available in
• 1:16:00
  Amazon Prime. That could be wrong, but it's out there, so if
• 1:16:02
  you want to go look for it, it should be available. You know,
• 1:16:05
  A twenty four Films is doing some really cool stuff and so they're probably
• 1:16:11
  my favorite studio right now because they are doing that weird stuff. Everything everywhere,
• 1:16:15
  all at once is on A twenty four. So yes, full backing
• 1:16:18
  of this one. I think they've got to be one of the most reliable
• 1:16:23
  studios for their like quality. Yeah, you probably won't like every movie that
• 1:16:28
  they put out, but every movie that they put out feels like it was
• 1:16:30
  like, no, we wanted to make a good film and we tried our
• 1:16:33
  best to do that right, versus so many studios who are like, we
• 1:16:36
  just needed to get something out the door so that we could you know,
• 1:16:39
  call it for tax purposes or you know, shot bottom line or satisfy investors.
• 1:16:43
  A twenty four feels like they're really trying to do it right. They're
• 1:16:45
  very intentional about what they put out. Yeah, yeah, so I guess
• 1:16:50
  Bonus recommends three twenty four. Yeah, I love it. Well. If
• 1:16:54
  you'd like to tell us about your generation, generational characteristics, your skepticism,
• 1:16:58
  or your belief in what those things mean, you should reach out to us
• 1:17:00
  directly. You can email us at info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com, where you
• 1:17:04
  can also talk to us about the Green Nighter, your favorite comic con like
• 1:17:09
  convention, and we enjoy hearing those things. We want to hear from you,
• 1:17:12
  even if it's just to say hi, we enjoy that too. Reach
• 1:17:14
  out to us on social media as well. You will talk to Emma or
• 1:17:16
  you will talk to us, and all that works really well, so please
• 1:17:19
  do that. We look forward to hearing from everyone, and I think those
• 1:17:23
  all that I have. So I think I'm going to say that this is
• 1:17:27
  Abraham and it's a Shane. We're out. See ya. You've been listening
• 1:17:30
  to Why We Do what We Do. You can learn more about this and
• 1:17:33
  other episodes by going to WWD wwdpodcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and
• 1:17:41
  we hope you have an awesome day