Who Is The Best Generation? | Lemonade Stand 🍋

A lot of people wish they were born in a different generation, right?

They talk about, oh, how much better would it be?

I'm an old soul.

And I wonder, right, if you could pick which generation, which would be the most advantageous, the best life, if you had a sorting hat, if you will, sure.

That you could put on your head and it would drift out of the generation that you were born in the last hundred years.

What generation would you pick?

I mean, I kind of like the generation that I was born into.

I've, you know, I have access to so many technologies.

I feel like I'm young.

I'm powerful.

And then you can, if you guys saw that.

I think it's a TikTok.

Like, let's put him in a vertical frame.

We put subway serpers on the side.

How was that?

How about you two tell me how the dust bowl was?

How about that?

Huh?

Dusty.

It was dusty.

Did you even get the polio vaccine?

Stronger men.

It made us stronger men.

Weak men for weak times.

No, I get it.

You're still, you were hanging on to that FDR first term.

I know it changed everything for you guys.

That's the question, Doug, we're trying to answer today.

And we have decided to look through the various generations that have existed over the past hundred years of American history to the focus on America.

But it's also going to address the whole world broadly.

And we're actually going to see as we pull generations randomly, which do we think of the eight is the best?

Like if you could pick one, which is the greatest generation to have been born in?

And I think we kick it off with the first one.

We can just start off with the first one.

Let's pull one from the bottom.

Hold up.

Hold out.

Pull it up.

Hold out.

All right.

The first one is the greatest generation.

Now, I would say the shittiest generation to be born in, which is weird that they named themselves that.

They're the great.

Apparently, the name comes from something coined in the 50s: that these are the, you know, the hardest, uh, hardest working, been through the most, most capable generation.

I feel like they were trying to tap it in for this contest with that name.

Yeah, because they knew we'd be ranking the greatest generation.

Like, we need, we need good SEO in 70 years.

They read that there would be a podcast called Lemonade Sand one Day.

Yeah.

And we have to stand up for ourselves on it.

I'm going to change my Twitch name to Greatest Streamer.

Well, the Greatest Generation, these are the people born between about 1901 and 1927.

So I, which I think when you're talking about times that far back, I think it helps a little.

These are the people who were on average living into anywhere in the 1950s to the 1980s.

With some of these people still alive now, if they're in like their late 90s to like early hundreds, there are people still alive from this generation.

for presidents recently.

That's how great they are.

And they're still.

And that's what they set goals still.

That's what makes them the greatest.

They say, no matter my impediments in my ability to think or speak, I will still run.

That's so great.

That's honestly great.

Okay, here's what I want to understand.

Okay.

Like we all complain about what's going on in our lives and we feel like it used to be better, maybe for specifically our parents who were at a certain generation.

But I think it's like, if you were born in the greatest generation, was it actually that bad?

Was it good?

What's going on economically?

What's going on culturally?

like is that actually a shit time to be born or not i think the big marker for these people is that they were basically born into the like they would be in the great depression they would be in their teenage or 20s during the great depression is the great depression a good time aiden is that yeah no because i'm really bringing down teens nowadays feel like they're in a great depression yeah you know they're like they're very depressed it's actually the same it's the proliferation

they were on a lot of short form video and like didn't have a lot of real-life friends.

I don't know what source I read, but that's what it says.

No, these people, I think they're primarily known for growing up during the Depression and either coming of age or coming into their early adulthood during World War II.

And then, you know, if you were a man, fighting in World War II.

And I think a lot of changes.

in the wake of World War II are what define this generation's sort of success.

I think the big things we could look at here are like,

you know, life expectancy and healthcare first.

Like what was this generation dealing with?

Sure.

Realistically, pretty low life expectancy overall.

At least they were shot.

by a German soul.

Shot by Nazis.

So that's the first thing.

It's like you had a pretty decent chance of just dying in World War II.

And then shortly after, if you didn't die in World War II, a decent chance of dying in the Korean War.

Right.

Right, right, right.

Which are two of

the bloodiest conflicts in American history.

I think the Korean War is like fifth, and then World War II is like number one.

And I could be wrong.

I think even a lot of people around the world died in World War II.

In World War II, it was actually a lot of people around the world.

Actually, while America did suffer the most, I think actually many countries suffered.

It was, it was over 400,000 American soldiers dying in World War II.

Over 600,000 people wounded.

So over a million total casualties, just American.

We're Americans on the low low end there compared to a lot of

estimates.

Estimates for Russia are 50 million.

I'm pretty sure no Russians died in World War II.

I'm not a hundred percent.

Sorry, Soviets.

Now, that's a conspiracy.

I might be.

I mean, so like you gotta, there's a broad range of things.

That's on like the very high end, but uh, you know, jokes aside, we didn't have it that bad.

Although, you know, the people who fought for America had it pretty fucking bad, and it is worth reiterating that, obviously.

And then in the Korean War, uh, 36,000 deaths and over 100,000 wounded.

So, also a pretty, I mean, pretty terrible outlook if you were someone who joined the military for either of these things.

Or the depression, right?

So, you go from the worst economic depression into your adult life, possibly fighting in a war, one of the bloodiest conflicts ever.

So, the life expectancy gap here is kind of strange for this generation because when you're a kid, you grow up in a time period where there's very few like antibiotics, there's not a lot of vaccines, you're dying from things like maybe measles, maybe polio, tuberculosis, pneumonia.

You go straight into the bloodiest conflict in our entire history.

But if you manage to come out the other side of that and you're still in like your 20s, your 30s, your life from there,

relatively good.

America is starting to build itself during and in the wake of World War II in this pretty incredible direction.

If I'll put an asterisk on this, if you're white.

And a man, mostly.

So that's the big asterisk on this.

So there's a really important bill that comes in the wake of world war ii that people might be familiar with the gi bill and this gives uh

returning soldiers the white ones unfortunately is that true black soldiers didn't get i think a lot of these programs did not work in favor of black soldiers in the wake of world war ii and this was what helped uh the expand the racial wealth gap that existed in the united states uh a lot of like uh wow that is i did not know that straight up I did not know the GI Bill, designed to assist all veterans, systematically excluded black Americans.

Yeah, yeah, it's really.

Obviously, I knew there was racism at that time.

I just thought the GI Bill was one of the

things that I thought it was good old-fashioned racism, not that they would modernize it.

Well, I just thought that was the one that, no, in my mind, that was like a

an anti-racist thing because people that came back from war, right?

No, no, they made it racist.

No, they made it racist.

So,

that's crazy.

What this did, what this did, and one of the criticisms of it is that it it did help expand that racial wealth gap that already existed, is

payment and support for tuition to secondary education, greatly expanding the number of people that were enrolling in colleges and kind of helped set the trend of college becoming more standard in average people's education, or maybe going back to high school or getting vocational training.

It's helped support those things as well.

And then also helped people get into homes, gave them very good mortgages with very low interest rates.

And a lot of people moved into the suburbs, which was where a lot of building was expanding at the time.

And

the other thing that they were doing was fucky.

They were doing a lot of fucking pumping out a lot of babies, just record amounts at the time.

Was this again mostly men or were women involved with this?

So presumably it was about EVED on their 50-50 split on that.

The gay disc generation.

And then things like home prices, you know, know, if you're in the 40s, and this is all in 2024 dollars.

If you're in the 40s, you know, the average home was like $64,000 in today's, in today's money, in today's money.

$64,000 in today's money.

Isn't that crazy?

So what, it was like a nickel?

Dude, it was like a couple thousand nickels.

And then in the 50s, in the 50s, it jumps up to $93,000.

And then in the 60s, it jumps to about $120,000.

And that's all in today's, in 2024,

which is crazy, right?

And you're also existing in a time period where a lot of common household technology is proliferating.

Things like

in the decades that happened, you're getting access to like fridges, microwaves, AC units.

Landline phones are becoming more common.

TVs are becoming more common.

I would say maybe one of the downsides is through this period,

it's declining, but food spend for families was a larger share of income.

But that's considerably offset by the amount of money you were saving on things like your home when they were so so much cheaper uh and then also through the 40s the 50s and 60s is medical technology is starting to uh catch up and vaccines are getting developed antibiotics are getting developed i i think the other big thing that people forget around this time is that there is a bit of a bit of a mental health crisis in the wake of these wars.

You know, mental health is not as well established of a field.

Things aren't as easily diagnosed or identified.

A lot of these soldiers are coming home and dealing with PTSD in like an environment that doesn't know how to properly recognize that people are actually dealing with something like that.

Health isn't viewed in the same way that it is now.

So I think there's this strange thing: if you're young, were born into this generation, managed to navigate your young life through one of the worst periods in American history, through the Great Depression, and then also survive the war,

you end up in a timeframe that is unprecedented success and wealth if you're a white American.

So, would you, would you guys go for the, would you roll the crap dice there at this and go, all right, I'm going to, I would be born in the greatest generation.

Hopefully, I survived the Great Depression.

Hopefully, I survived World War II.

Hopefully, I was born white, and hopefully, I was born a man.

Would you take those odds?

Just stat for a while.

Are you a betting man?

So, risky roulette table.

I'll be real.

Stat for stat, this is a dog shit generation.

This is one of the worst.

It is just so.

Because chances are, like, if we're running the simulations, so many of them are like, I was 10 and died of measles.

And then a lot of them are like, I was 18,

went to France and then died in Normandy Beach.

Or I was 20 and then I died, or I was 25 and then I died in the Korean War.

Like there's so many of these people's stories just ended there.

And then they were the, they're the generation that sired the, the, the baby boomers in the silent generation.

So that's a pro, though.

I mean, you get through it all, you're fucking like crazy.

You got some money.

I would argue, and this is maybe a spoiler for what I think is the greatest generation, that what if you were born right after the World War and the Great Depression?

That would be even chiller.

Oh,

nice foreshadowing.

I think if we're just going to, I'm going to cleanly call it the greatest generation.

I'm sorry, you don't live up to the name.

I know you went through a lot, and I don't need to apologize.

Most of you are dead and not listening to this podcast.

Yeah, it's a bad thing.

That's the worst part of the coin flip.

How can you survive it all?

Aiden calls you a piece of shit 100 years later.

Not a great time.

Terry, can you pull this picture of

the

don't do that?

You can't pull that up.

You can't pull that up.

And if you, if you look at your screens now, you'll see a photo of the three of the greatest generations.

Greatest to ever do it.

It didn't matter.

Somebody put the next fucking

generation.

Next generation.

All right.

Let's rank these generations.

And the next one is

Jen Alpha.

Jen Alpha.

Also, I would say they jumped right to the edge.

You know, very similar.

Wait, is this your game?

This is also me.

So we'll go me back to back here with Jen Alpha.

And I'll quickly say they have something, they have a deep similarity with the greatest generation.

Or really really explain that.

And it's that

not a lot of them are taking measles vaccines.

Oh, that's good.

But the similarities,

the similarities end there.

Let's get these Gen Alpha kids into an iron bug.

So

I think part of my problem with evaluating Gen Alpha, which is the generation that began

being born in 2013

and are basically spanning until now,

2013, until now yeah and uh a lot of the statistics that i think will affect their lives the most haven't you know haven't exactly played out yet like i can't compare life expectancy the oldest one is 12.

a lot of them

yeah yeah yeah these are ludwig viewers where they're like they watch a lot of ludwig

we don't know how that's going to play out in five years they're not queuing up to buy homes uh they're not they don't have to buy the food they should uh

grind these fucking the lesson of american history has been: buy homes when you're 13 years old.

Buy homes as soon as you fucking get it because it'll get worse.

Okay, what do we know about them?

I'm genuinely curious.

Like, when we talk about gen, other than they're obsessed with TikTok and Roblox, like, what do we know?

I think that's a huge part.

I mean, short form,

short-form media is a big part of their diet.

Tech is rapidly changing in their lifetime.

The school system they're coming up in is being upended by AI while they're in it.

Like, they're the test case in the middle of it.

You know, their friendships are taking place on Roblox or on social media.

What else do we know about it?

I mean, that's there.

A lot of them are parented by the first generation parented by millennials.

So that's terrifying.

Yeah, I think part of the hard thing is like, I could point to some of those things and make a guess based off of a different generation that comes before them is that a lot of these things will have significant effects on things like mental health or suicide rates.

They are also, genuinely, they are also the first

generation that is prominently within this pocket of time in America where I think things like vaccines are being questioned so broadly.

It's not like, you know, it's not like the granola parent who was

talking about vaccines causing autism didn't exist 25 years ago.

Yeah, but it's gone.

But the popularity of that version of health and parenting is more common now.

And I think the issue when your entire sample size of people is either at the age of 12 or below it is that the data isn't, the data isn't amazing.

What are some pros?

What are some, like we're saying some negative.

What are some pros of being born right now in Gen Alpha?

I would, I would argue, and we'll talk about Gen Z millennials and whatnot, but like Gen Z has, you know, had a, let's say, somewhat normal

childhood and then everything's being upended now as they're adults.

And arguably, I'd rather be Generation Alpha, like of the couple of them.

Like I would rather be, grow up in a world where AI has and is already upended the education system rather than it feels like it's becoming obsolete right as I'm exiting it.

I think that's how I feel too, is a lot of the trends that are affecting Generation Z in negative ways that we've even talked about on the show.

I think by being born a little later, you're at least coming up in a time where parents are more familiar with what's developing and playing out in the world.

Things like AI and its effect on education

and the way it affects life in general,

we get to have more time to react to those things.

I think the problem with Gen Z

among many, you know.

We'll get to Gen Z.

They just exist.

They are the testing ground for a lot of these technologies that have broken through in recent years, right?

But

Jenna Alpha gets to potentially benefit from our reactions to those things and maybe shifts in policy or approaches to the way that would otherwise affect their health negatively.

And then in a more solidly pro direction, they might be at the precipice of how all of these things benefit healthcare substantially.

So, you might get to live long enough into a pocket of time that millennials or Gen Z doesn't really get to benefit from, where your lifespan is elongated by the quality of medical treatment available.

And so there,

I mean, yeah, it's kind of like, you know,

if you're the boomers, you dodge World War II right after it, right?

So, if you're Gen Alpha, you're kind of praying for World War III to happen.

You want Gen Z to go through all the, or whether it's World War III or whether it's you want the post-World War III boom.

You want to be the one right after.

You want to be the people who are young and right after.

And then all

the previous.

The planker wars happen over the next five to six years.

Gen Z dies.

I mean, I honestly think there's truth to it.

And I think, especially healthcare, you know, like we did a whole episode about this talking about the advances in healthcare with AI.

And I continue to believe, and there's a lot of evidence pointing that we are going to make massive leaps in healthcare over the next couple of decades.

And that some of the framing I've heard around it is just try to live long enough to get to the point that that stuff happens.

And probably we will get to live through that of lifespans dramatically extending.

You will almost certainly.

And then the gen alpha will, if you're 10 right now, if you're five, you almost certainly are going to have access to vastly better medical.

Can you pull up my screen, Perry?

It's not just us hoping this.

Yes, or mine.

Yeah.

No, don't believe us.

There was this

military parade in China, and there was a hot mic incident where they caught Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un of North Korea talking together about how they're all going to live to be 150 with the advances.

They're all going to be able to use harvested lab-grown organs to replace their body and cycle it out and live to be 150.

Whether or not they're actually very like Trump-esque, whether they're like, I've heard that people are going to be able to live to 150 with organ donations and various blood transfusions.

It's like none of them were like, this is happening.

They're just like, I've heard that this is, It's all like, hands up.

I'm definitely not doing this.

These people are all 80 and they're talking about how they're going to live to 150.

So I think it's too late for boomers.

Like, they're not.

They're not going to be cooked, but Jen Alpha is going to have something like this.

And you're going to.

We're not going to be able to reverse the aging that has happened to these people, but maybe before we hit aging period, we get to.

I also say, like, so what, you know, Gen Alpha, let's say you're 12 now, you'll be 30 in 28 years.

What is that?

That's like 53, 53, 20, 2053.

That's the world's going to be different, bro.

I can't even visualize what 2053 looks like.

So they're going to be,

you know, whether it's good or bad, they're going to be seeing stuff that completely out of our realm of our possibility.

We can't even imagine it.

And I think a last note on this is, like we said at the beginning, this is framed around how these generations, you know, exist within.

You got to take it off.

You got to take it off.

You got to take it off.

All right.

You boy, fine.

You want me to take away the lost generation.

I keep looking over and I keep seeing three men doing what?

They're making love.

Yeah, that's what they're doing.

They're celebrating.

You told me the greatest generation liked to do stuff like this.

Yeah, they got wild, dude.

But

in an American context, and I think there's also a world here where,

you know, due to the

financial collapse of America due to the crushing amount of debt that we have, you know, maybe American life for this generation is poor, but

this generation succeeds somewhere else.

Here's the gen alpha in china is really they're rearing up yeah maybe they you know who gen alpha when the nuclear war happens gen alpha in new zealand is gonna be chilling yeah that would be Gabe Newell's bunker yeah there's there's if the sorting hat could also you could pick which country that would be sick Gabe who is going to live to 150 is I mean

Counterpoint once and CSGO Hans for die

once the boomers finally die and we get into power finally maybe we can kick the debt problem down the road just a little bit longer, let the alphas take care of it.

That's a good idea.

If we had a choice to make their lives good or

we could punt it for like 30 more years, we could just punt.

We just punt.

All right.

Well, why don't we get the next one?

Well, I'll choose a quick quick ranking so far.

Would you rather be Gen Alpha or Greatest Gen if you had a pick?

I would definitely rather be Gen Alpha.

Absolutely.

I think so.

It's just not worth it.

The casino.

I mean, we know you know the Great Depression or the wars to come.

Yeah.

But

in one of those two, you know the Great Depression and wars to come.

That's true.

That's the difference.

The devil, you know.

You take a risk.

Okay.

All right.

I'll at least flip the cold.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

You're right.

You're right.

Okay.

Millennials.

Ooh.

Dude, we got to do it different.

I can't go three back.

Okay, all right.

You're back to back to back.

Okay, back to millennials.

We are doing

Gen Z.

Let's mix it up.

Let's do an older one.

I don't know, Gen Z, yeah.

Gen Z?

All right, fine.

All right, you, all right.

Hit up with Gen Z.

Yeah, you and what?

Yeah, I'm going to listen to two older men.

Tell us about Gen Z.

Speaking of free men, Aiden,

what did Gen Z love?

They love being whiny on podcasts.

They love working for Ludwig.

Yeah, they do.

They do

like stupid haircuts.

They love

cheating at basketball, complaining about basketball.

They love the environment.

They always try to talk about the environment.

Make me feel guilty about eating factory-farmed foods.

Yeah, what's wrong with that?

Yeah, guys, keep telling me what it's it's like.

When I go dump crude oil into the Los Angeles River, there's always some Gen Z.

There's always some woke Gen Z.

Holding up a set.

Great of Thunberg always yells at me when I pour crude oil onto the birds in the LA Harbor.

Gen Z years, 1997 to 2012.

What year were you born?

97, baby.

You're such a fake Gen Z.

I'm the gatekeeper.

I'm the gatekeeper.

Wait, so you're the oldest Gen Z I don't know.

You're the oldest Gen Zeng.

Okay, I didn't realize that.

I will say, it feels like to me, there's this weird 97 to 9-11 period of Gen Z where they're really not.

They're so different.

They're like so.

Because they still, you guys still had VCRs and early Game Boys with batteries.

I was watching the Lion King.

Yeah, it doesn't usually like the, because there's Gen Z that's now that are still in school and you're like basically 30 and dead.

There's some.

I'm 28.

There's such a difference in this, in what I've seen from Gen Z.

But yes, okay.

So Gen Z, the tech you guys grew up with would be like the Nintendo DS, the Wii.

Indeed.

Indeed.

And we played Super Mario Galaxy.

I think the key thing is that you grew up with tech because like for us, there was still, I mean, like, yes, there were video game consoles, but they weren't like ubiquitous in your life.

And the really big thing is internet wasn't big yet when we were in high school.

I mean, and in high school, it was.

Outside phones, really.

Yeah, so definitely phones.

So internet was like becoming a thing going into high school.

I remember like, you know, in middle school, it's still AOL is how we like talk to people, right?

There wasn't really social media.

Yeah.

It was high school is when that stuff was kicking off.

And even then, it was still very immature.

There was no YouTube that anybody used really in high school.

It was like coming to form towards the second half of high school.

But anyway, the big one being phones, right?

I did not have a smartphone in high school and almost nobody did.

And then right after we exit is when smartphones become a thing.

And then that, as everybody knows,

this is Jen's nuts.

Dominated society.

It has dominated intention spans, has dominated apps.

It dominates entertainment.

It's TikTok.

It's the gig economy.

Like phones have, in combo with the internet, dramatically changed how people live in their life.

I would say like phones and social media are the big things.

But phones are what made social media really excel, right?

Like Instagram, the reason it took off is because of things, is because of phones, right?

And this impacted everybody, right?

Every generation is hit by this, but I think what you're saying is right.

Gen Z is the first native.

Right.

They grew up with it.

They were immersed in it from.

Shut the.

He's not even saying anything.

He's annoying me.

Why do you have to parent me?

He's on his phone.

He's always with the phones with this generation.

What's the good parts?

What's the pros of the generation?

They grew up.

I mean, it's like this.

Ludwig gives you a job.

Almost certainly you get a job.

They're all really depressed.

That's not actually, this is a negative, Doug.

Well, okay.

But not in a great depression sort of thing.

Counterpoint, they're actually aware that they're depressed.

Because one of the things I often have heard when I talk to older people is like, oh, yeah, they're really depressed.

But like in Texas, you don't talk about that, right?

You don't bring it up.

You know, so it's like,

there's certainly an argument that Gen Z is more anxious and more depressed than any other generation and there's also an argument that we just talk about mental health far far far more and there's more awareness and i think both of those uh presumably have truth to them it's a fair argument i would say they're also you know they're more connected um with people with similar interests online like in a way where you would be like you know if you lived in a certain area

even when i would grow up and move on to different military bases if i didn't have a friend that i could find in that school who liked the same hobbies as me i just had to pretend they didn't exist and try to conform a little bit more but now you really can find people with similar hobbies and interests anywhere you want online and build these communities, which is kind of cool.

Like it's Mario Kart Week sessions, right?

It's kind of like a guinea pig where we like inject phones.

Okay.

How does that work?

And we just kind of squirt it in there and we see what happens.

Oh, it's like, hey, right is your finished gift education?

AI.

Let's just see what happens, right?

I think Gen Z is very much the guinea pig.

And we're just, oh, like COVID.

We're like, yeah, let's just see what happens at remote work.

And then we hire a bunch of people and then everybody gets laid off.

Let's just see what happens.

Let's just see what happens.

Let's see what happens.

Crypto.

Let's just just see what happens, Gen Z.

I think that's that.

And the average home price is about $400,000 now.

Yeah, I think that's the other thing that's worth pointing out.

And obviously we'll get to homes.

It's just this is the generation where really the prospect of homeownership and even just spending a reasonable amount of money on your living expenses is, that's not the thing anymore.

You have to spend a crazy amount of money and it is incredibly unlikely you're going to be able to buy a home and have that traditional American dream.

I think like with our generation, it's like half and half.

Half the people have a foot in that, half don't.

A lot of us have boomers who have, you know, accumulated all this wealth and we can lean on that.

And I think Gen Z is the first one where it's like, oh no, I graduate from college or high school or whatever, and I'm just planning on paying all of my money in rent for the rest of my life.

And that is depressing.

I think that the general downside of this generation is that you are the guinea pig generation in so many ways.

You're the generation that this technology has molded the heaviest at a time when it's the least regulated.

You have the least defined path of how to become successful.

Like this general track record that all of the generations prior of you could pretty much follow is starting to break.

This system of American success that is modeled out for you and you've been sold your whole upbringing isn't translating into the things that it's supposed to.

And then you've also gone through the mind blender of having a phone or an iPad or the internet around you unmoderated for your entire life.

And we're just going to kind of see how that works out.

And you sit in this little divot of time where I think this generation is going to be wrestling with a lot of the consequences of just having been born and existing in this time period in a way that I think Gen Alpha gets to be more reactionary to.

Right.

Or in millennials didn't have to live through in quite the same way because it came at a tail end of their mental development.

I think it still is millennials, but I totally agree that you're saying.

And I really like the point about this is one of the generations where you really cannot get advice from those older than you.

Like it is just that the old systems do not apply in any way.

They have fractured and broken.

And so you're kind of on your own

in a unique way, and almost like a...

a greatest generation way, almost like a throwback.

Like things are changing so much that you are really thrown to the wolves.

that's interesting i i also just piggybacking what you're saying of the change in like so uh this the old systems like we know we grew up with our parents and presumably most gen z kids do as well their parents saying you got to go to college and you get a good degree and then you'll get a job and you'll be set and you buy a home and that's you know you're like told this dream and that's true has worked for many millennials but many have failed i think there's a lot of resentment already failing right there's a lot of resentment in our generation and i in college was resentful of the fact that our colleges were giving my friends and people I knew these degrees that were not going to pay back at all.

And they're putting themselves $100,000, $200,000 in debt for an English degree from some college that is just not going to pay back.

But they've been sold this

story over and over.

But it was still true for many people.

Like you could go get a computer science degree and just be good.

And that was my experience, right?

And then it feels like now the stat that came out that's really illustrative is that college graduates are just as unemployed as non-college graduates.

For men, yeah, but yes.

Okay, for men.

But like that alone is like, that's a total, like the facade.

It's never been like that.

The facade was still there, but now it is a complete fracturing for Gen Z of this is what you were supposed to do to succeed.

You know?

Two more things about this generation I think are interesting.

We kind of mentioned the pandemic, but you know, in the way that like Vietnam would be a big deal for previous generation, the COVID is like the big defining event of this generation so far, the biggest world event.

And it really hit every member of Gen Z during schooling.

So, and I think that's where it impacts the most.

You know, in studies, after study, it's shown that like people that were in school during COVID had markedly worse outcomes in the years following.

You know, it disengages you from the system you were on.

You get off of the treadmill, it's hard to get back on in the same way.

And so, they all got hit with it, various stages, some older than some younger, but it's like that's been a big thing.

And again, it shook the world in such a way.

Second thing is

the creator economy is like it never existed really prior to Gen Z.

And Gen Z has now become such a big cultural force, not only from like where they get information.

Thanks for watching this podcast, but also

as like a

path of,

you know, career path or like where you want to possibly, it's the number one requested job among Gen Z is like working the creator economy.

So that's, these are two weird things that didn't exist before that are like big defining parts of this gen.

Yeah, you have such a comparatively outsized cultural impact now because you're so well

integrated and you understand all of these tools to like make videos and share them and you're so and you don't have to go through the old media structure of like going through all these hoops to get you know broadcast a television show, for example.

Right.

So young people get to be the at the forefront of like cultural messaging in a way that they never were before.

I actually saw a really interesting stat.

I'm not going to spoil who the number one ranking generation was, but it was ranking generations based on like economic, political power, but then also had cultural power.

And what you said was so true in that Gen Z was like massively higher, outweighed on cultural power and had no financial or political power, like zero.

Like they have way more cultural influence, but almost no.

And I thought that was very interesting.

So with all that said, where do you think it stands?

I think this is an interesting one for me because it is technically the pocket I'm in.

I do sit in a weird weird spot where I'm, like you said, I do think the people who are born in like 97 to like 99 are in.

It's like 01.

It's a little different for you.

But if I was, you know, take my survivorship bias out of the equation, I think I would rather be a millennial or rather be Gen Alpha.

I think Gen Z at the very least is worse than those two options.

I would agree with that.

Particularly because of COVID.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It does feel like they just get hit with everything first.

The world's is changing rapidly.

It feels like they are, they're the unprepared younger people being thrust into it.

So I do feel like it's a kind of a unlucky dice roll.

COVID, yeah, anecdotally, COVID happened and I was able to change my life to benefit from it.

Like I was mature enough and had enough experience as a, you know, in my career and in my work and everything to benefit from it.

Same with AI.

And that would be totally different if I was 16 when this stuff is coming out or happening.

Like that's, it's so, just seems incredibly challenging.

That being said, would rather go into the trenches of TikTok and COVID than the trenches of World War II.

I still would rather be a Gen Z than a greatest generation.

Yeah, I agree.

I would still take Gen Z of our greatest generation.

Any day.

Greatest generation.

Any day of the greatest generation.

Dude, so far, Greatest Generation is at the bottom of the list.

I just don't want to fight.

Honestly, for the first couple minutes, you had me sold of like, damn, you know, they kind of had it okay.

And you know what?

No, actually, World War II sucked bad.

No, it's just, it's really that great.

It's really that combo of no health care, like shitty healthcare into Great Depression, into World War II.

And it's, it's, it'll be tough to top that.

Who's next?

The lost generation.

The lost generation.

I don't even know much about this.

What do we know?

Okay.

I mean, they're lost.

The lost generation.

Okay.

The defining thing is that they were born and they were young adults during World War I.

All right.

So we're shifting it before the greatest generation.

And as I looked into the lost generation,

they're like the character in a movie that is only there to be kicked down every time they show up.

It's like the cabbages guy in Avatar The Last Airbender.

It's like they start to grow up and they're like sad because they would never see him

last air vendor.

They're like, oh, World War I, my cabbages.

No.

And then World War I ends and then they like get to gather their cabbages during the roaring 20s.

But even then, there's a lot of disillusionment.

People are kind of like upset over World War I and how it ruined the whole sort of romanticized war and national unity.

There's also a prohibition, a move towards cities.

There's just kind of this like weird frang of cultural societies.

It's where you get like the great Gatsby coming out.

And then, oh, beans, the Great Depression, my cabbages again.

And so they're kind of like middle-aged adults during the Great Depression.

And then towards the final quarter of their life, they get to chill with World War II.

My cabbages.

They had it really bad.

So they had a pretty shit.

Some of those guys are in their 30s and 40s, and then they just, they had to go to World War II.

Some people people went back-to-back World War II.

Dude, back-to-back wars.

No, no, that's this generation, to be clear.

And it's, I assume, I didn't look at why they're called lost, but it's, it's literally a sandwich, man.

It's World War I.

So here's the question.

There's four quarters to the lost generation.

Yeah.

Right?

It's, it's World War I,

a good decade, and then Depression.

World War 20s.

They got to hang out with the people.

And so DiCaprio.

And so

here's the question, right?

Greatest generation starts with Great Depression, then World War II, and then their final two quarters are pretty good.

Which would you rather have, right?

Easily, easily, greatest.

You'd rather have greatest.

You take the gamble.

I'll take a hundred.

Greatest for sure.

Because look, the best case scenario of Lost Generation is like you go to a Gatsby party and get syphilis.

That's like the best case scenario because

you're pretty much dead by the time all of the progress post-World War II is happening.

You're pretty much guaranteed to be dead by then.

Yeah, basically what you got is the 20s.

That's the one, that's the one salvaging thing for the lost generation.

And like some interesting things about that, we call it like the roaring 20s.

But as a reminder, people are still pretty poor in the 20s.

But at least from like the American perspective, this is where consumer culture starts to come up.

A lot of mass production, cars become a big thing.

Radios, like 40% of people have radios by the end of the night by 1930.

So like this is you are being connected to the rest of the nation.

More people are moving to cities.

There's like investing in the stock market.

And there's, you know, jazz and there's all this like kind of cultural stuff jazz ate him so they got rid of that later it like you're you know your your life is pretty shit from the war and certainly if in if you're in europe right i mean the world war one just absolutely devastates decimates everything right it's like it's pretty decent for we should say lost generation just sucks balls if you're european like it is just truly awful

if you're american you at least get that 20s where for a large number of people it was pretty chill i just read all quiet on the restroom front for the first time i think maybe i had it in school but i never i was like never cared i read it while i was on a plane flying back from arizona and i was tearing up on the plane it is so impressingly sad it is just young people being thrown to their deaths over and over in this miserable a sad environment one thing i want to say on our point between greatest gen and this gen is i've seen a lot of studies on happiness that show even in poorer countries that have measurably worse outcomes than than like a richer country as long as you feel like you are currently doing better than your parents that is a huge part of like if you feel like we're on the right direction,

people feel they get a lot of purpose out of that.

And so, I think for the greatest gen, they're the world around them got better their whole life.

They went through the bad times, but it got better.

I think for lost, like going through War One and then going back to World War II or Great Depression is like just misery.

I just feel like this is probably the worst.

This is, I mean, I don't see an upside.

This one seems to be the only upside is that if you're born in this, you're more likely to get to enjoy a decade, right?

Right with Greatest Generation, like you have to survive through two brutal decades to get, and again, this is if you're American.

You kind of want to die of syphilis in the 20s.

That's a good time to go.

I mean, that's the thing.

Like, you know, if you're going to die, let's say you're going to die in World War II either way.

You'd rather die in World War II as Lost Generation where you at least got to enjoy the 20s.

You know, if you're looking at, you know, and what you were saying about war, so like one of the defining things with lost generation, as much as you have the 20s and it's good, it's, it's what you said.

Everybody, again, particularly in Europe, but people are coming back from the war scarred.

And so like Ernest Hemingway and F.

Scotch Fitzgerald are like authors during this time.

And they're, they're the great American authors.

And their, their whole thing is about like disillusionment.

So Hemingway's quote, there's nothing as bad as war.

When people realize how bad it is, they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy.

There are some people who never realize.

It's like everybody just be going like, oh, this is fucking awful.

And then they're distracting themselves.

There's a part in the book where he talks about, he said, he's like a 19-year-old kid.

I mean, he's a German soldier, but it's World War I.

Yeah.

And he's he's talking about how he's in school at like 16 with all his friends.

And the teacher is talking to him and talking about how noble it is to fight for his country and how great it is and how they're going to be the iron youth.

And they're going to have, and like him over the course of the book, just having that all fall from his eyes and realizing what a disaster this is.

And being there when his friends around him die.

And I think

mechanized war, which is World War I, that is probably the most horrendous war to have happened in the world thus far.

I mean, it is like truly just infinite amount of people being sent into a bloody trench war death.

And I

not that there's a comparison, but World War II is probably a better thing to have done.

You've already put it on the tier list.

I'm not tier listing it, but like, it feels like this is the worst iteration to me.

This one, I would not choose this one.

Yeah, the more that I think about it, having to experience, like, I think...

To put this differently, the worst possible experience to have is that you go through that in World War I.

You watch all of your friends and family die.

You come back for a decade.

If you're in America and you're lucky, you get an okay generation.

And then depression.

And then you have to go back to war with Germany again.

It's like,

it's like, yeah,

I can imagine the scenario where you're coming out of the depression or you're in the depression era where you're suffering and you're poor and unemployed and you're in your like late 30s, early 40s, and you decide to enlist again because it's like your only option.

And then you go to the next one.

And reminder, not necessarily decide, right?

There's still conscription at this period.

I think when you're at that age, it has to be voluntary, right?

Or maybe World War II, I'm not sure.

Maybe not.

I might now, I think.

Anyway, I'm imagining like the worst track there with that.

Yeah.

That's, yeah.

I'm down to put lost generation at the shittiest time to be born.

That is fair.

And that's that's right around 1900 for people who are clear.

So right at the turn of the century, if you were born, damn, your life probably sucked.

Feel for you.

You get drafted up to 35 years, seven months.

So if they were born.

And if you'd ever enlisted or whatever, then it could be up to 44.

So if you'd already what so it's worse for vets yeah dude that's I was gonna say at least lost generation wasn't drafted into World War II anything

oh my god

all right what we got next one

next

who

all right we got Melanio

tell me about me Aiden tell us about us I will tell you.

You know, I will tell you.

Charming.

Good smile?

No, actually, most likely people are.

Most likely to heads of hair.

Very good at legal legends.

Sunsetting in their YouTube careers probably can't keep it going for much longer than right now.

Just because the viewership's been waiting for it.

Oh, it's weird.

It says it.

No, it does say all that in Wikipedia.

We're crazy.

Our generation is more of a roller coaster.

We're building for the audience.

Yeah.

We're pulling back.

Okay, so

millennials,

this is an interesting generation to me

because I think you're starting to see the

you're starting to see the trends turn against you, but not fully yet.

You don't have the same quality of life as the couple generations that came before you in terms of like affordability of housing or affordability of college.

But you do still have a pretty concrete track, like college, college enrollment in this generation has like gone up from previous generations.

You're like the most, uh, you're most, the most educated so far.

You're also the most likely to inherit the wealth of the two generations prior to you, especially the boomer generation.

Uh, I think that's, that's, uh, you know, that has to come later in your, later in your life.

You know, maybe you're struggling to buy a home, for instance, but you're set up to receive the wealth of the wealthiest generation previous to you.

I think you're also at the tail end of the, by the way, this is the generation that's born 1981 to 1996.

And

you're seeing the benefits of modern medicine, vaccines.

You're at a time when there's like a max public, I would say, belief in these things.

You're also coming out of an era where we've achieved all these great scientific achievements.

I feel like you have the legacy of things like landing on the moon that you're like coasting off of.

You're also at the.

Okay, hold on.

I'm stopping you there.

At no point have I thought, damn, I'm coasting off the moon.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, remember that thing that happened 40 years before I was born?

It didn't happen 40 years before I was born, right?

30.

Okay, 30.

I'm not coasting off World War II.

Why would I coast off of the moon?

No, I think you just exist.

Okay, my point is more, you're not taking credit for the achievement.

You exist in an American timeframe where like...

like belief in scientific achievements and like yes all of these things are core tenets of your upbringing and i would say they they are are real in a lot of,

in a lot of those ways that

there's still a real sense of American exceptionalism.

Like we are driving all these things around the world and we're the center of culture.

We're the center of technology.

It was one of the defining things of my youth.

Because I was born in 91, which sounds so fucking old.

It was the year.

For context, we were born like three months apart or something.

It was the year the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended.

Berlin Wall goes down.

And it sort of fell, especially when I was young, especially living on a military base, but it was like, we've done it.

It's the end of history.

America, global hegemon, and now everything's going to be good forever.

That was the idea in the 90s.

That was sort of the feeling that I had as a child.

Yeah, and that's the feeling that you grow up with.

And I think by the time the

first big, I would say, hiccups, or at least that you're realizing as a millennial from my perspective, are 9-11 happens.

And then the reaction, the global reaction to 9-11, especially America's reaction.

Okay, we invade, we invade Afghanistan and we invade Iraq like a couple of years later.

So now you, it's the, you know,

you might be enlisting in the military as like a reaction to that event if you're old enough.

And then you're leading straight into the 2008 financial crisis, which is also something you have to navigate.

You're coming out of college into that time period,

which is, I think you're starting to deal with the first big economic problems that have been set up by the policies of the generations before you.

So you're at this weird inflection point where you're not the testing ground for all of the technology that is proliferating, exactly.

It's coming to access, it's something you're accessing when you're older.

You have this strong belief and faith in American institutions and the legacy of American success that has come before you and existed for most of your upbringing.

But now you're starting to see the earliest parts of the system break around you and and realize that your path in life is not as easy as it was for your parents.

Like you can't afford a home as soon as your parents did.

Maybe you're choosing to not get married and have kids as early as your parents did.

And all of those decisions are getting pushed a little later.

But I would argue, especially over the long run, and statistically, this is more likely to be the case if you're white

when it comes to the inheritance of previous generations' wealth.

But I think going into the next like century or I don't know, 50 years, I think millennials are going to be a very large empowered generation.

They are the largest generation by like population, right?

Right now.

And the largest voting block right now just recently passed.

So you're going to wield the most,

the most power of like political power and the most wealth as a voting block.

The millennials will be the generation that will shape most of the next 50 years.

Thank you.

And you're welcome.

We'll spare him.

Yeah, something as you're saying that I hadn't thought about till right now is it, you talk about like the American exceptionalism.

And growing up, I was told over and over, America is the greatest country on earth.

Like you are, you're privileged to be born here, the greatest.

And you're just told over and over how great America is.

Yes, with the sprinkles of it.

You know, here's the faults or whatnot, but it is off the world wars and off the moon and off of the Soviet Union and all these things.

And then all of the major events that have happened in our adult lifetime or young adult lifetime have all felt like a fucking waste.

Like Afghanistan, all of the wars in the Middle East felt pointless and wasteful and destructive and they went on for 20 years.

We're $37 trillion in debt now.

That doesn't feel like it got us anything.

The Great Recession was boomers fucking up the banking system and the loaning.

Like we didn't do that, right?

Like the Great Recession started when we were in high school.

It's not like we were doing this.

And so it's interesting to think about like the defining elements of our generation.

And all of them, I think, are this slow narrative that is being unraveled about American exceptionalism as we just watch miss after miss after miss, is my feeling.

I think that's well said.

I mean, my wife, same age as me, was more directly impacted, but a lot of people have memories like this of growing up and seeing their parents lose their home in the Great Recession or have to lose their job.

Or, and then, and if you're an older millennial, we just barely dodged it, I think, getting as the recovery was coming back.

But like most people, many older millennials had to graduate into the recession, and that hurts your earnings for decades to come.

So I do think that

in general, I feel like America kind of had this narrative into maybe, say, 1999.

And then ever since then, it's been sort of like a, it feels like the crest of the wave.

But especially in 08, it's felt like none of the old methods or the talk, the post-World War II discussion has really fit.

It hasn't fit anymore.

And so being a little bit older as a millennial, it's obviously easier, I guess, than being native to it, like Gen Z.

But it's the same thing.

You're getting hit again and again with like different body blows,

different shocks to the system of what you were told when you grew up.

One benefit of this generation, I think, and you guys can speak more to this,

but I feel like this is the generation that started to benefit a lot from really positive social changes.

Like the

less discrimination

happening or more a broader acceptance of like different people and different walks of life and different races.

And like that is, you're, you were a generation that ushered in a lot of social change that I think is very important to the way we live modern life.

I would agree that possibly the most generation because there's a big shift, at least with the younger Gen Z, mostly the male side.

My understanding is they're becoming more radicalized socially.

There's like the Andrew Tate and there's the, especially not even interested in America.

Like I've seen in South Korea, it's been off the cliff for, and so this is like a thing that seems to have peaked with millennials, which is like trying for more equality among

yeah.

I feel like it's that's was my thought, too.

Is like, in a way, I feel like it's more of a core tenet of the millennial generation than Generation Z because of that radicalization.

Thank you.

Um, but mostly Doug, I mean, I'm just giving you guys so much credit.

Uh, but yeah, and I think this is actually one of the most interesting ones to rank on the list that we've made so far because I would probably put, like I said, I think I put millennials above Gen Z.

And then alpha is, alpha is like the coin flip of it could, it could have so much potential, but your life could also be be shit, depending on how things turn out.

Right.

Yeah.

I would put millennials personally at the top of the list so far.

I think this is the best generation to be born into overall.

Because you have this, while certain aspects of your life are worse, like maybe homes are less affordable

as an example, or maybe it's less affordable to have a family.

You have access to a lot of modern amenities and technology that I think can push your life and career in a lot of interesting directions.

And also, you're the beneficiary of a lot of things that help with like life expectancy and general health.

A key thing, I'm just as we talk about this is I think Gen Z, all of these new technologies and trends and shattering of American, you know, this happened at pivotal moments in an unregulated way where you weren't equipped to handle it.

Whereas for us, it's like we got to experience stability and then things start changing.

I think that's a huge advantage.

Like I would infinitely rather be a millennial than Gen Z for those reasons.

I can't imagine AI coming out when I'm in fucking sophomore year of high school.

Like that would be so disruptive for me and my friends and everything or COVID.

Anyway, yeah.

I think that's all the time.

I think about, you know, how tempted I was to cut corners in college to play more League of Legends.

And if I had had

a would not have learned a goddamn thing because I would have, I would have used JPT for everything in order to play more league.

And the only reason I had to go to the library and focus and like try to grind through is because I would have failed otherwise.

Like I had to do it.

So, yeah,

I soft agree.

I think the gen alpha coin flip is an interesting question where they might have, you know, I think if this stuff gets solved, it could be really prosperous.

And I remember you saying off-pod, AI will fix it.

That's,

I've been telling Doug to say the whole time.

He doesn't even like AI.

Okay, that's a fair.

That's a fair discussion.

Why don't we get on to the next one?

So right now we win.

Yeah, you guys are beating me.

Oh, I ripped it off.

Oh, okay.

You don't need to get so angry.

Gen X.

Gen X, I have a little...

presentation about I'm so curious about Gen X because we never talk about Gen X.

It's just no troops are millennials, right?

We just pretend that they, they're almost silent, if you will.

Can I give my little guess as to why this is the case?

I think that the reason they're forgotten about a lot of the time is I think culturally, we basically lump them in with baby boomers.

Like, I think that's the main reason that we don't talk about the specifics of their generation.

Let's show it.

Yeah.

So, if you can pull this up,

this is Gen X, also known as the M, at least in America, the MTV generation, because that was such a dominant cultural influence when they were growing up.

How old are they right now?

Just give a sense of it.

Because boomers are like 65 to 70 or 65 to 80, something like that, right?

No, that's you're thinking of Gen X.

Oh, Gen X is 65 to 82.

Oh, roughly.

Oh, damn.

Okay.

Boomers are right after the war, so 46 to 64.

Damn.

Okay.

So I have been lumping them together.

Yeah.

Well, so they get lumped a lot because there's because the way the population curve went, there are so many more boomers that Gen X just wasn't big enough to have a cultural impact, to have

an economic and political impact the way the boomers did.

So they they kind of got forgotten.

They're often called the forgotten generation.

65 to 80 is their number.

So when they were born, it was like the Beatles and Black and White.

And when the earliest ones were born, and when the latest ones were born, it was like the 1980s.

Rubik's Cube just came out.

It's Yuppies and it's Reagan and it's Boom Times.

So they were named after this novel by Douglas Copeland about tales for an accelerated culture.

And I think that's the main thing is culture really began to accelerate in their time with mass media.

these are all some famous Gen X people, and a lot of them who have big cultural impact today, uh, like Joe Rogan is the most popular.

Yeah, Wayne The Rock Johnson didn't know he was.

Um,

that's Vin Diesel.

They're equal, yeah.

No, Vin Diesel's Will Farrell, Kurt Cobain died young, but he's kind of like a the one of the most famous like Gen Xers, the the rebellious.

Uh, you know, that's the kind of yeah, they were big of analog technology, like that, that is their the walkman, the VCR, early floppy disks and PCs.

All of that is very Gen X.

They got to experience a lot of this stuff before it became all digital.

One of the quotes they might say is like,

when I was a kid, because again, this is one of the first generations to have two parents working.

So women started entering the workforce.

So they were called the latch key generation because they could just leave home and wander around and go on their bikes and do whatever.

So what's very funny is situation where we see like, when I grew up, I could go play outside till sundown without a parent or cell phone or anything.

And now, this ratio is one of the most likely to have six tracking apps with all their children and like life 360 and you know, watch everything they do.

So, very interesting.

They, one of their big events was the fall of the Berlin Wall again in 1991.

They were like, you know, in their 20s for this.

The invention of the World Wide Web happened for them.

9-11, again, this is also a millennial thing, but we were young.

They were like, Yeah, we were.

We really did not experience 9-11 to any meaningful degree.

So, that's that's that's no way.

Sorry, I don't want to go over it.

So that's that's sort of Gen X in a nutshell.

They, what I would say is they, they got to draft off a lot of things that the boomers had, but again, are too small to claim the full power of it.

They didn't have enough of voting block to take it.

I did have a big con I wanted to show.

And this is what I found while researching.

Let's see if I can find it.

This is happening right now.

This is called the Gen X career meltdown.

It's basically that Gen X came right after the boomers and really wanted to emulate them in a lot of these creative fields like photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV.

But unlike the boomers who got to finish their career, make all the money and sort of retire while those things were still thriving, Gen X is being hit with all of those things radically being disrupted by the internet while they're still like 45, 50, like still needing to earn, still needing to figure it out, and all of it's getting wiped out.

And so it's actually a really kind of

deeply,

it's kind of sad and dangerous time because they can't change.

Like it's much more difficult to be like

just learning

to be like 45 or like, you know, 54 with three kids and to be, okay, I'm just going to change my career radically.

Like newspaper editor no longer exists as a career in a lot of places.

Like it's just wiped out.

Photography is all digital.

Like the things they spent their life doing don't exist.

Yeah, that's interesting.

A lot of the automation and stuff that, you know, like the trucking industry, there's a lot of Gen X in there.

Yeah.

And, you know, as those jobs get decimated, like who, who wants to retrain and hire a 65-year-old, 20-year-old truck, you know, somebody who's been trucking for 20 years.

Yeah, I'm having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over.

A 53-year-old in the film and TV director, talking to people in their late 40s and 50s about who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights or at least a solid career, are now more likely to hear about the photographer whose work's dried up, the designer who can't get hired, or the magazine journalist who isn't doing much of anything.

Like, this is a, it's, it's weird because they don't have like a World War I or World War II.

Their biggest crisis is coming late in their life as the things they spent every, you know, their years doing are irrelevant.

Like that's, that's an interesting crisis to have.

It's kind of unique.

Is this your, because for me, this is my parents' generation.

Is this your?

I have one boomer, one, one Gen X.

Okay.

Yeah, I thought they were my parents were boomers, but they are Gen X, but like late Gen X.

Okay.

And so, I mean, you know, and I say my parents are pretty happy, pretty stable, enjoyed the prosperity of, but my dad was in the military, which is not a career that got, you know, changed.

Yeah.

So this is really interesting because I still associate somebody who's, you know, 50 plus as benefiting from the,

you know, economic environment and everything that the boomers really ushered in.

And it still feels like they are, they got a ton going for them.

And really the one downside is this like major transformation towards the end.

But I still think that the major, the, they got to be there for genuine moments of like American exceptionalism, including the Soviet Union falling.

And I would include 9-11, of like a moment of like the nation really rallying together around this thing.

Whereas again, we grew up when we're just in Iraq.

Like we didn't grow up, you know, like being like, hey, we had this, you know, big crisis that we had to overcome together.

We're just like, oh, yeah, we're killing tons of people every day.

You guys are younger.

It's worth noting that after 9-11, the America was like, we put 95% approval in George Bush.

It's the most united America has ever been behind a president.

It was the most bipartisan the bills ever.

Like it was a brief.

The country was like united as Americans, you know, unless you were Islamic, but like we were united as Americans.

And like, and that, that's like foreign to us.

And right.

And that same unification was then used to go start a war in Iraq and spend tens of trillions of dollars.

Like the stupidest possible use.

But like during that Gen X period, like you had American exceptionalism.

Yes, technology is starting to change, but there's still the generation that really benefited from that.

In the same way that you're saying, like, oh, these things have changed.

All of the TV and movie executives who are getting wealthy off all these things are Gen X, right?

They're all sure.

And so I think.

It's very widely distributed, like all generations are.

So I would say it's a fair point.

And it's worth saying that by the rule of like, did you have a better time than your parents?

They did.

They absolutely did.

They had a way better time than their parents.

They were in an era of actually real peace and prosperity in America.

only near the end where it's starting to like fray and they're still active, you know?

Oh,

I think this one is interesting.

I figured this would be one of the harder ones to place.

For me, I take millennials over Generation X.

And I think because

if you're in the millennial category, you were just younger when the internet became super important.

And I think you were more likely to adapt in how that fits into your life and career, which I think is a very, very important thing for

how you succeed from there.

And also like the amount of options that you have to take your life in.

I do think there's an economic argument for choosing Gen X.

Like I would understand if somebody chose that generation over millennials, but

that's kind of my vote.

It's like I stand by millennials here.

I think I personally would take millennials because I fear change and I know the devil that I know.

But I think realistically, if you're doing a marble out of the hat, Gen X had a better chance, better

statistically a better chance.

I think this is the lowest risk option of what we've talked about.

Millennials, like as we talked about, like these new trends come in and are crazy disruptive and we're adults and can handle it better.

But I'm sure we all know plenty of millennials who have not handled things well and are dealing with lack of affordability and lack of job prospects and all these things.

And so I think just the gap between haves and have-nots really started to expand on millennials.

And Gen X, it's still a lot of that.

Just you can follow the path and have a good life kind of vibe.

Still existed.

I guess the way I look at it is get a house, you know, get a get a good career, go shake somebody's fucking hand to get a job.

Like, you know, go to medical school.

And medical school, my dad was had made more money after medical school than when he went in because he would work on the summers.

Yeah, like that's a education was affordable, is the point, right?

The stuff the boomers said still worked for Gen X.

It does work.

For us, all of our friends who work as who became doctors are still in debt 10 years after graduating.

Like, it's, yeah.

If I was picking, if I was picking this, like, I was some omnipotent being, I was dropping a marble into the system of life yeah i would drop it into gen x but for me personally i would pick millennials yeah same and i for me it's like i technology is what makes me excited to be alive and if i was back then i was just like oh cool you hear about pong like i don't know you say pong the literally thing that it's like selfish but in my mind i'm thinking of gaming it's like they didn't have good games right

when you get older like when you get older there's arcades you're also in the time period like you're you're in the wake of the the civil rights movement.

There's so many interesting cultural things happening in that time period, too, like through your teenage years to your 20s.

Yeah.

I think

it's, I don't know, you have some sick video games.

You get Donkey Kong by the time you're like 24.

I don't think you're anything sick, really.

You don't think Donkey Kong's sick when you haven't seen any of this?

It doesn't come out until 1997.

Bro, but you haven't seen it, Goldeneye yet.

But that's what I'm saying.

Like multiplayer, playing with franking, like the things that I like to do.

No, no, it's because your dopamine receptors are fried, bro.

Imagine you.

You stay in a joy.

My dopamine receptors are fried.

I'm saying put yourself in the Gen X body.

You have farmed a table dopamine receptor still, and you're playing Donkey Kong at the age of 25 in the arcade.

That rage.

That rage.

Yeah, relatively.

You're making a good case.

I bet the high from playing Donkey Kong when you're 25 is higher than any high you've had playing league.

Actually, no.

I think that does.

That's not true.

That's crack.

That's not true.

All right.

Well, you know what it is, and you know what we have to call it.

One left.

The champs.

The boomers.

Fuck them.

Boomer.

God, I want you.

You hate him.

But you love them.

But you probably hate him.

Yeah, I want to do a little bit of a slide here.

Can I introduce the tone here?

I think that growing up, there's always been a little chiding, particularly the last five years around like, okay, boomer, and a little resentment towards boomers and kind of chiding at the boomers.

And over the past like especially year, especially this year, as I've done more research in a variety of different factors around what is causing the various economic, cultural challenges, debt challenges, all of these different things, I really keep coming back to, I think boomers fucked us up pretty hard.

I think they took a situation, took all the benefit from it, built lots of housing, and then stopped housing from being built, took all the political power and then stopped other people from having political power.

They took all of this stuff.

They put us $37 trillion in debt.

So they could go blow up half the Middle East.

And now we are stuck with all of these things.

And I have become really genuinely pretty resentful towards the boomers.

And I would love for you to convince me otherwise.

I don't want to be annoyed.

Let's find out.

So the boomers, 1946 to 1964, World War II ends in 1945.

And it is a pivotal moment for the entire world.

It changes everything.

And again, we all currently live in the shadow of how the world got reset up, how boundaries got redrawn, how power dynamics shifted.

after World War II.

They are born starting in 1946, one year after.

Everyone gets home from the war, starts fucking, fucking, and begins this new world order.

So they have dodged the Great Depression.

They have dodged World One.

They have dodged World War II.

Again,

their cultural impact goes beyond what I could fit in one slide here.

So this is Boomers, and this is a quote you might hear from Boomers nowadays.

And then I told him, just print out a resume and walk in, and they'll give you a job.

Couldn't quite get the laugh right there.

Did you get the idea?

So this is Boomers.

Famous boomers you might know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, George Clooney, a wide range of people who've had cultural impact recently.

Boomers are kind of like the TV generation because when boomers were born in 1945 and onward, TV went from 0% of U.S.

households to 100%

so rapidly.

Literally in their lifetimes, they saw everyone around them get a TV and it become a huge part of the cultural landscape and seeing radio is the clone.

That being said, those are rookie numbers.

We all got smartphones in like two years.

That's true.

It took them like two decades.

Even faster.

The greatest challenges they faced in their lives were not World War II or Great Depression.

They did have in the 70s, which they would be, you know, it would be somewhere between 20 or 30 that range,

huge rise in inflation.

People had long gas lines.

They had, this is a beginning of some economic changes we did where we suspended the gold standard and all that stuff.

It was 70s.

And then Vietnam.

I'm sorry.

I don't have an imagery, but Vietnam was there was their.

They were old enough to have fought and died in Vietnam.

And in fact, many of them spent their youth protesting.

Protestant.

Yeah, Vietnam.

And this is the jungles of Vietnam.

This is not the jungles of Vietnam.

I think I have the wrong picture.

But it was Vietnam.

Okay.

So,

and I found, here, I'll go back to this.

So, the main thing about the boomers is that this is the population, the fertility rate in the United States.

And you can see right after World War II, there's this massive spike.

And you can call it,

demographers call it the pig in the python, which is like if a python ate a big pig and it's being digested.

So in 1970, again,

most Americans were between five and 23.

This is the boomers.

And so over their lifetime, they have had outsized impact on everything because they have been so much bigger than every other generation around them.

So people that have their beliefs and their worldview and where they grew up with have just had this unprecedented amount of political power.

And again, shown here, they have, even today, even today, when they're all relatively old, have still the most political power.

When they were born in 1945,

they had about 20, 30 years of flat home prices, right, for them to get their jobs and get earning a living.

Holy shit, I did not realize that.

And then right around 1970, when they hit around 30 years old, boom, it skyrockets.

Do you think that has anything to do with the fact they bought and built all the homes and then stopped other ones from being built?

Does that have anything to do with it, Brian?

Just lucky, I guess, I think.

Just lucky.

Just a lucky timing.

So, yeah, right around here is when they started acquiring houses, and that is when they went absolutely off the rails, which is a huge part of why they have all the wealth today.

So this is a chart of U.S.

wealth by generation starting right now.

So right here is basically when they started to get political power, like when I have the arrow on the on the chart, yeah, is when they be, when the first boomer president comes in.

Okay.

And you'll notice from there, their wealth skyrockets past the older generation, silent generation, and then it goes to unprecedented heights.

So we see now that they have way, they have more than you know, Gen X, Silent, and Millennials combined.

Gen Z is not even on this chart.

They have almost no collective wealth of generation right now.

So that arrow lines up nicely with this.

We've talked about this in a previous episode, but I want to go into it.

This is Bill Clinton in 92, the first boomer president.

Basically, right when we're born, Bill Clinton takes over, followed by a series of boomers.

You know, two terms of Bill Clinton, two terms of George Bush, two terms of Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump.

Biden is the only non-boomer because he's too old.

He is three years too old to be a boomer.

Oh, no, he's great.

Yeah, I I think he's great.

Or silent.

I think he's silent, actually.

Whatever it is, he's three years too old, so he's basically a boomer.

He's like the oldest boomer or the oldest of the previous.

So essentially, our entire lives, 92 to 24 to now, has all been boomer political power.

And that is when these massive wealth changes happen that has kept assets like housing and stocks that were acquired before this time.

growing and bubbling so that new people cannot get on the ladder, but they are, they are, they're rising up.

And I wanted to show most of the day we've been talking about America.

It's been mostly an American centric lens of these generations because it's hard because it changes so much better But I just want to say the boomers this post-World War II like shaking up of the world are not just an American phenomenon and so I have extrapolated over the entire world right now who is still running the country by the way by normal laws of generations which is mostly they're like 20 years long

we should have been done with the boomers in about 2012.

It should have been 92 to 2012 and then we move on to Gen X presidents or that's the rough idea, but they have kept hanging on to power.

And in fact, with Biden gotten even older.

So right now, across the world, these are boomer leaders.

Now, I'm going to go through this a little bit.

Donald Trump, obviously, you know, in North America, biggest economy in the world and biggest economy in North America.

But if you go to South America, Brazil, biggest economy in South America, boomer, lula.

The four biggest economies in Africa are four boomers.

which can make up more than the rest of Africa combined.

Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, boomer.

UK, one of the biggest economies in Europe, boomer.

I included Sweden to make fun of Aiden, also a boomer.

No,

no.

Also a boomer.

Valdar Putin, boomer.

The two biggest economies in Asia, India and China, boomer, boomer.

Also, Japan, I didn't include it.

He got covered by Xi Jinping.

Australia, Albanese, boomer.

And Antarctica, there's a really old penguin.

Has a lot of power.

So we are currently living in a truly, and by the way, I added up the GDPs of all these countries.

It's like, it's well more than half of the world population and well, well above like 70% of the world economy.

So it's like we are in a boomer-dominated world, top to bottom.

Across all countries, they have all of the wealth and all of the power, no matter where you go, no matter which continent you're on.

And

because of the dropping fertility rate in the world, the idea is

that the oldest generation will always be the most powerful going forward?

Like, it's because old people live longer and we're not having enough new babies.

Once the boomers die off, it will still, the next oldest will take over.

Um, which, by the way, if you look at this little bump here, is millennials.

Yeah.

Let's go.

So, well, we should talk about how much boomers damage have done.

We're going to imprison anybody who's too tall.

Yeah.

We're too Aideny.

You got to engender yourself to us a little more.

Okay.

You can say a millennial.

We are setting up for a millennial type situation.

And

we should talk about what the boomers have done wrong so we can learn from it because we're going to have a similar level of influence globally.

The millennial population bump is almost as well.

Okay, so

is the millennial population bump as big as the boomer?

Not even close.

Okay.

But so that's relatively it will.

Okay, because we're going to be the biggest.

We're going to have the most control technically, but not in the way the boomers have where they have this unbelievably large just percentage of people, right?

That's That's right.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I'm still telling you.

Gen Z is almost just as big as Millennials, to be honest.

It's a little bit, I think it's a little smaller.

Because we're, I mean, we're both way smaller than boomers.

Like neither generation is even close to how big they were.

So that's, that's boomers in a nutshell.

They really have,

you know, one thing I want to say.

I had a little note about it here, but I'll just sort of paraphrase.

The idea is that when boomers were young and they had this big population bump, the things they cared most about were like getting out of Vietnam, student protests, things like that.

And they got those things done.

They made impacts.

Then, as they grew older, they started to care more about like,

you know, housing affordability, whatever.

Like,

the things they cared about have been priority number one for America their entire lives.

And now, as they get older, you're seeing this huge push to like eliminate all property taxes in places like that.

And that is the last gasp of boomers who have gotten all the real estate, using their political power to, on the way out, kick out the only tax they really are still paying.

Like, it's, it really is, um,

just testament to how much they have they have taken it over.

I wish I had the uh the quote here.

Or even the incredibly wealthy boomers, of which there are so many who have helped to drive their housing prices just through the roof, complaining about just screeching at the idea of social security reform, which to be clear is a, is a system where you pay into social security throughout your adult life.

And then when you retire, the government pays you back.

But we are bankrupt.

We can't afford it.

And it's becoming more unaffordable every year.

And the problem is that the boomers are living longer than any previous generation, which makes the system even more distorted.

So there needs to be something to change there.

The only way to not change it is to put America more into debt to assure that they get Social Security until they die.

And then we are stuck paying for that bill.

It's just like.

I think the general theme here, right, is like as this cohort aged and because of their outsized impact, they're able to make a lot of decisions that are most pressing to whatever their generation is at the time,

successfully put that policy into place, and they've been able to do that the whole way through.

So the world as it's structured or the American, the American world as it's structured serves to benefit the boomer generation the most, whatever time period you happen to be in.

Can you guys think of any big downsides to their generation?

I wanted to ask you guys that because I figured from like a, you know, from from an economic perspective, the boomers were going to have kind of the best case here.

But can you guys think of

any big blights?

I think personally, like they came up with

Vietnam.

It's like the big downside.

They had gotten that drafted into Vietnam.

Many of them died.

It was a, it was a stupid, pointless war,

height of the Cold War, arrogant, you know, it's like, yeah, that, that, and that radicalized a lot of them, and they were anti-war, though they in later life often became pro-war.

So I would say Vietnam in their youth, it's like the biggest black market of this generation.

But again, the death scale is so much smaller than World War II, World War I, Korean War.

And from an American POV, I mean, they just had just decades of prosperity, decades of like green lights.

Like even if you fucked up a little bit, you're likely to have things bounce back and go on the right track.

You can go to college.

It's very easy to fund yourself to go through college, and then you have an incredible amount of new prospects.

Housing was cheap.

You're more likely to be addicted to cigarettes.

You need to have higher.

Yeah, health stuff is always healthy.

Yeah, health and technology obviously were worse then.

And that's, or I mean, I would still rather, for that reason, be a millennial.

But, you know, they, yes, they had access to TV.

And I think maybe some people forget how shitty TV was when you had 10 channels and you just like hope something was on.

And it's not, yeah.

And again, you know, we said at the beginning, but like this is a primary like

white male perspective or whatever.

Because like being a boomer, it doesn't matter your opportunities for housing are better if you can't get on the housing ladder because you're a woman or you're black or what in the in the 40s and 50s.

Like that, right?

You're screwing that.

But they did get to see, like, so the thing about baby boomers, I think that's the truism about this thing is like everything was getting better.

Decade after decade after decade, they were seeing new technologies make lives better immediately.

They were seeing like uh civil rights progress make progress.

Like things were things were measurably getting better.

Yeah, and their congress getting this is the generation leading the charge with a lot of the

movements for equality.

Yeah, that's true.

They were the people.

Not as much as us, but yeah, they were not bad.

All right.

I have this

video from

the currently leaving prime minister of France who is trying to pass a balanced budget, who could not get it passed.

He couldn't get people to politically agree because they couldn't decide whether they should cut spending or whether they should raise taxes.

And they tried to do a little bit of both and he couldn't get it through.

And he said this on the way out.

This is translated with the, I don't know, some kind of technology, but so it's not his actual voice, but this is what it sounds like.

He's talking about boomers.

And he is a boomer, by the way.

He's talking about boomers in France.

This is not just an American phenomenon, basically, this boomer thing.

They're the ones who are the victims.

They're the ones who will have to pay off the debt for their entire lives.

And we've managed to make them believe that it needs to be increased even more.

Don't you think that's brilliant?

All this just for the comfort of certain political parties and for the comfort of the boomers, as they say, who from this point of view think that, well, everything is just fine.

Yeah.

So we talked about all the fracturing that is going on for millennials and for Gen Z and for Gen Alpha, but for boomers, things are roughly fine because they still have all of these assets.

And so they are like on the way out the door, just making sure that no money goes towards solving any of these new problems and only goes to keeping what they had afloat, just keeping it afloat for example the largest voting block in the united states is boomers and they voted to keep cutting taxes in the big beautiful bill and put us more in debt well i'll say we none of them are millennials

we are by the time that happened millennials are the biggest voting block in america however we don't vote at higher rates like we there's more millennial voters but boomers vote like way higher rates right so they yeah yeah so With that being said, where would you actually, I think similar to Gen X and maybe even more solidly, i think you could make an argument that this was the best generation to be born into i'm on this list i think you know obviously variations in circumstance uh

that i'd put an asterisk on that but i think in a lot of ways you could argue that this was the best generation to be born into would you guys pick boomers it's hard to imagine giving up uh

giving up what i have access to now i i think definitively it's very hard to argue that it was not the best generation to be born into.

If you are rolling a die and you want to ensure you have the best outcome and the highest likelihood of becoming wealthy and having all these incredible benefits, it is clearly the baby booner generation.

You have so much more power and influence.

And they have, and we have seen how they have made everything benefit themselves and fuck everybody else and pull up the ladder.

That being said.

Me individually, I have no interest in being alive in 1970.

I want to make videos and play video games and build interesting creative things.

And the world is a million times more adapted for that now.

So like, no,

absolutely not.

I would rather be any of the more recent ones.

I think it's, so I looked it up and the, um,

you know, even though we do say that there is a

obviously more racism back then, the racial wealth gap among boomers still exists.

Like black boomers have all of the wealth among black people in America.

Like it's still, so even if you were not white,

you probably have a better economic opportunity being born as a boomer.

There's probably a difference between women who couldn't have the same access to like bank accounts and jobs.

But so basically as as a man either way you're probably getting more economic opportunities boomer i would say i wouldn't pick it but uh again for same reasons we we've adapted to these lives and i wouldn't change it it easily is the number i think it's easily clears as like less chance of dying in a war less chance of uh

of a ton of you just have you more likelihood that at the end of your life you're going to have some financial security and whether that's from your own assets or whether it's from the government which is funneling it through Social Security before it falls out of funding, it's all to you for most of your life.

So yeah, I would say they, I would say for me, it's an easy win.

And for someone like a white guy like me, if I was born in the

50s or 60s, very likely I would have easy career opportunities.

You know, as someone who has no major problems, it would have been an easy glide for me.

I would be the standard boomer probably.

And

the world was less polarized then.

America got more, you know, it would just be easier.

So for me, I think

I would pick Millennial as number one, but Boomer would be right second.

And I think it's easy actually first.

If you're or you put it all on red, you go lost generation, send it.

Just crazy emotion.

It's like Dark Souls, dude.

I want the hardest mode.

Yeah, start on boomers, then you New Day Plus into Lost Gen.

This is fun.

I think I'm ex, I mean, it's, I guess I'm excited to see what the next, you know, 10, 20 years,

even though I think it could be doom and gloom in a lot of ways.

Like, just to have the answer of what

things are like for Generation Alpha and Gen Z,

because I think those two especially have so much of their experience of what we're evaluating here yet to play out.

And even millennials, right?

Like, realistically, you guys have another like 10 years, you'll be alive.

I'm going to kill you.

Especially.

Dude, i think about it like okay imagine remember 20 i don't remember but like think about 20 years ago right now it's 2005.

yeah imagine 2005 in your mind like youtube has just launched phones do not exist you can still watch saddam hussein being hanged on youtube

you cannot

20 years ago in 2005 no you cannot and you could back then was it one of the first videos or what yeah i watched

2005 there's like 20 videos on youtube

look it might have been 2006 they They were manually approving every video.

There's no way they're like, yeah, let's add this.

Let's add

beheaded.

Yeah, it's like the first two videos.

I went to the zoo and Saddam Hussein execution.

Yeah, but that's 20 years ago.

And the whole world is different.

It's so dramatically different.

I can't even, there's so little similarity between the world we're in now and 2005.

What is 20 years from now going to look like?

We cannot picture it.

It's going to be drastically

unimaginably different.

So I do think Gen Alpha is the massive coin flip here where we don't know what the hell they're going to go through.

It could be better, it could be worse.

We literally don't know.

They could be the top or bottom of this ranking.

Yeah, I feel like so much of being able to evaluate like the lost generation and the greatest generation in this, right?

Is we can literally see the whole timeline, right?

Yeah, so you can be like, well, the greatest generation, you can see the struggle at the beginning and the benefits that the people who make it far enough get to see.

And you get to evaluate it so holistically.

But so much of this for the

top four is guessing what the ending is going to be for people.

Which is dumb.

Just like the boy you showed.

We're watching the news.

We're figuring it out.

Like we're guessing what's going to happen.

What is the world we're going to live in?

I think it's interesting.

I want to just briefly pose something, which is just a crazy thing.

Like as an American, I think probably as a European as well, we used to build cities.

The cities didn't exist forever.

The baby boomers built the cities.

So, you know, when you see the skyline of American cities, like the boomers did that in their lifetime, and then they stopped things from being built.

It's like in my lifetime, of the major cities I've lived in, there's like one or maybe two new skyscrapers that have like been put in my lifetime.

And you compare that to like San Francisco, for example, was built by the boom primarily.

And so I think a lot of those were built before the boom.

I think like the silent generation, the Gray's generation, the great skyscrapers of like New York or of Chicago, these were all built by was it in like 50s, 60s, 70s?

No, I would say like, you're talking about like New York.

Yeah, no, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, like all the stuff that we think, is it like the golden, yeah, I think this is all earlier.

This This is old.

It's like 20s, 30s.

Oh, I was wrong.

I feel like the Gray Generation did everything after, and they were all coasted.

Oh, I actually dislike them more now.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, the baby boomers got to.

I think the boomers just coasted.

They literally had the ultimate coast.

Maybe it's just the, I don't know.

Everything was sad.

It's still something.

Damn.

It shit.

It bothers me, man.

It's really frustrating.

Anyway.

So two generations we didn't get to get to were the missionary generation, which is before lost.

Why was it called that?

The missionary generation.

Fucked basic.

I think it was they were only fucking

doggy, and it was just no, it was.

And then the lost generation figured it out.

Yeah, that changed everything, yeah.

Which is probably one of the only pros for the lost generation if you think about it.

And then the other thing you're not going to talk about is gen beta, which just started this year, January 1st, 2025, is the first gen betas, which, by the way, what a terrible name.

You don't want to be a beta.

They're born to be cucks.

Let's Let's put another thing at the end, like beta alphas.

You know, let's add another title to the end.

They're just going to get mogged by alphas.

Wait, hold on.

How are these generations named?

Who got to pick greatest?

Greatest.

Greatest was great.

I think we win World War II.

When you defeat Hitler, you get to name it.

That's fair.

That's fair.

Dude, by the way, I looked it up.

You're right.

The greatest generation built all the cities.

That's what I'm saying.

They're so great, man.

They're actually the greatest.

They did.

They had the tough times.

It's like the weak men, hard times thing, but they built it.

We had a generation that just like set everyone else up what god and the boomer screwed it man i think it's that i was digging back because i wanted to see how many generations we had named like just how far back we could go and you know i looked at the next three before the lost generation one of which is the missionary generation and uh the the the outlook back then just wasn't good as it turns out

it's like it's before running water you're reaching back and it's like it's slavery like no no water civil war uh religious fervor quote unquote, and just no medical treatments available.

Everybody is a farmer.

You're just a farmer.

Yeah, you're probably just farming.

It's pretty bitter back then.

It really starts to get...

It's really the boomers where it starts to get fucking juicy.

Cool and fun.

Yeah.

It's a fucking hangout.

I think they deserve it.

Maybe they worked harder.

They were.

They were

born.

They picked the right time to be born.

I'll say that.

Call me crazy, man.

I think my pick, my pick is Gen X.

Not my personal pick, but I think Gen X is

you at least get to reap some of the rewards of the interesting entertainment that comes to fruition.

I think that's something that the boomers don't get to, they don't get, no matter how much money they have, they never get to be fully integrated to in the same way.

And I think they're missing out on a cultural window that exists primarily for Gen X and after.

I agree with that if only because we can end on this.

The worst part about being a boomer is being old and having to not understand Facebook.

Right now, this is an AI generated image of a

Sandcastle dog that is obviously fake to any eyes.

Beautiful.

You have every right to be proud of this awesome work of art.

I hope that you will create and share many more creations like this.

And there's just walls of boomers commenting on this already.

Yeah, is it really worth having, is it really worth having the mental cognition of that, of Vicki there on the post?

And I'd say no.

No, hold on, hold on.

That woman sincerely believes that that's a real picture.

I would love to have my last two years.

Are you serious?

Your final you years, you're rich and you think that everybody's making incredible things because you don't understand technology?

That's fucking incredible.

Maybe it's time for us all.

And if you were to ask who was the best generation, the boomers will tell you it was them.

I found more quotes.

I'm 59.

I love being a boomer.

Everything was better when I grew up.

I turned 65 today and I still think we had the best of everything.

Cars, music, fashion sense, and dance styles.

We were the fortune generation.

We lived through the best years the country ever had.

And then Vicki Bloom here says,

we had to pay out of the pocket for these things when we were a kid.

Never had handouts like this.

Why can't today's young people make things work like we did?

Because they're lazy.

Biden has made them depend on the government, and it is sad to say they will never know what a dollar is worth.

It's funny because they co-opt the messaging that if the lost generation and greatest generation are flinging at me, I can I could be like, respect.

I, you know, like, because, because the, the, I think if you talk to somebody old enough, especially when, when I was younger, I remember there's a certain, there's a certain air from like greatest generation era people that's like, not I had it so good growing up and I long for those times.

Yeah.

I had it so shit growing up and you don't know how hard it was.

And I can get behind that because when you do the VOD review of what that generation was going through and

you're like, shit, man, it's like

your friends in school died of measles.

Like you got drafted into World War II.

It was like the advent of like machine weaponry and like the two world wars then.

Yeah, nuclear bombing.

Yeah, it's all

horrific.

And then the baby boomers were like, I had to pay to go to school.

And then you find out how much it costs.

And you're like, yeah, I had to fucking pay too.

On that note, let us know which generation you would like to be born in in the comments that you're watching this week's Lemonade stand.

Bye, everybody.

Bye, everybody.