9B: Episode 3: Generational Cohorts

Generational Cohorts: how they spar, work, and interact with one another, and what happens next. 

This business and BS is hashed over a beer, a bourbon, and a Boulevardier cocktail by our three bombastic, bloviating blokes in Bryan, TX — the 9B’s.

Work with us  Fidelis Creative Agency 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

9B. Okay, I just want to start by saying whoever's in charge of craft services and makeup should be fired. Yeah. I second that emotion. All right.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Craft services pretty good. We got we got kickers.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

So we should say that this entire thing is 9B, which is beer, bourbon, and Boulevardier. Of course. Batched with business and BS from three bloviating bombastic bros. Brothers. Oh, come on now. Yeah. 9B. So today's topic is generations and how they work together and how they don't work well together. We've got two of them represented here right now.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Gen X, Millennial, and also Gen X. We had a we had the Millennials, we had a meeting and they said that I was their president. So I'm I can speak from a place of authority today.

SPEAKER_03 1:00

Of course. I prefer to be part of Gen X with I.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Great. All right. Um let's start with uh this opening, okay? Uh generally, I don't like intergenerational warfare. No. The idea that we're gonna that we're gonna like hammer on boomers or whatever it is, and then they hammer on the millennials. This is like bad blood, and it feels like we get none of the benefits or the honor that needs to be like shown to people who try to do their best and they were born into the context that they were born into. That's not anything that anybody can control, right? So we just learn, yeah, there's peculiarities with these kinds of folks, and that's okay. So we're I just want to say that at the beginning to say there's gonna be broad brush strokes. It's also a topic that has been, I mean, so much ink has been spilled about these generational cohorts that I don't want to say the same old stuff again and again. I hope that we can actually get to some new insights.

SPEAKER_03 2:06

Yeah, and I'd just like to buoy you up in what you've said. And I think we're standing on the shoulders of giants. I really believe in that kind of an adage and that kind of an outlook on the past. And let the little children come to me. You know, we're supposed to care for and and have give grace to the younger generation and help develop them. Right? So I think those are two good watchwords for thinking about generations.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

It's good with with the exception of my own parent. Uh I'm pretty comfortable kind of beating up on the older generations. I'm I'm all right with that. I I can be that voice today. I know that about you. Yeah, yeah. But I just wanted to set the tone so that reputation precedes you. Yeah. They've they've sat in their ivory towers long enough.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

I think we can So your point, be gracious even if they come to eat you. Yes. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

I assume I also will probably be eaten one day by my grandkids.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

Yeah. We can happy, happy. All right. Generational warfare and work. All right. I don't think that there was intergenerational warfare 300 years ago. I posit there wasn't. You know this thing where boomers say mean things about millennials and millennials gripe about boomers, and Gen X makes comments about Gen Z's blank stare and their vocal fry at the Starbucks. I don't think that that was happening 300 years ago. This stuff is completely overhyped, fixated upon, and parodied to death for two reasons. One, the internet, and two, marketers who do demographic psychographic research professionally. Dicing and splicing generational cohorts is their full-time job, and it's become a part-time fixation for everyone else as a result. As Americans, we're primed to think in terms of audience and markets and trends and common subgroup classifications. Now, as I said 300 years ago, there were really just really old people and kids and then everybody else. So really old people, kids, and everybody. You know how I know this? I know this because uh I knew my grandparents and my great-grandparents, and they didn't frame up the world this way. There was just youngsters and old farts, and then people. Nowhere is this more hashed and mocked than the work style and sensibilities and business life, specifically as the generations sort out their work ethics. And so maybe we ought to take a second and review the cohorts uh and broad brush sort of treatment, and then we can get a little bit more specific from there. And that's when the commentary will happen. So I'm kind of the everyman cultural commentary. You approach it from the bourbon, more business. I like to say practical. Practical. Yeah. And the boulevardier over there is the history, historical context. Okay, so the silent greatest generation isn't really in the workforce any longer. I know there's exceptions, but they're in the dotage phase of their lives. The gray eminence phase. Honored, of course, happy to have Bill in the room and thankful for his 46 years of experience in the industry, likely the founding generation, etc. But for them, work was like breathing. It just was just breathing or breathing. Breathing. Breathing, okay. Breathing. It's just something you woke up and did every day for decades. And you retired with a gold watch and a fat pension. Stability, no complaining, grind it out and build a prosperous nation, was their thinking. I knew a lot of these guys. I think we all did. And there's something admirable here. I don't see a lot of this being uh exalted or mimicked any longer. I don't think that there's people who look to that generation and go, that's what I want. I want to grind it all out day after day until I'm pulverized and I have extreme allegiance to the corporation. I don't think that we see that. I could be wrong.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Okay, so these these this generation gets their name because they went to war. Right? The greatest generation does, yes.

SPEAKER_03 6:20

The greatest generation does. That's who we're talking about, right? Well, we've got two generations going on there. Greatest generation, then following them was the silence. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Uh however, I think it I think it should be noted that anytime that you are doing something sacrificial, if you're doing something amazing in the world, it's typically for somebody else's benefit. And I so I this generation kind of gets uh I know the least about them, but they get my Pledge of Allegiance here. They get the gold stamp of thank you.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Yeah. So remember, these are the these are the people who came into young adulthood, their whole childhood was like in the Great Depression.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

They go to World War II, where they bleed out in foreign sands, right? Come back, and they are the top dog on the planet for the American GI. They have an American GI bill, and they can go and remake the world in their image. And it the sky was the limit. They have these like ideas that you just march yourself into the corporate headquarters and say, I want a job. Verb, I won't disappoint you. Yeah. Take it, take a risk on me. That's who we're talking about. That's pretty good. And so they were hard. They were hard people who experienced a lot of hardship and then they went and they worked hard. Why silent? Well, the silent generation sort of bleeds into the greatest generation. So that was the inner war generation, so they had maybe seen World War I.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Okay. Yeah. So silent came before the greatest. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

But there's there's some blending there. Okay. Okay. That's good. Any other thoughts on silent greatest?

SPEAKER_03 8:08

Oh, I just was gonna offer that I think a good touchstone for greatest generation that's relevant to uh to us is George Bush 41. I mean, he's a paramount example of uh of a greatest generation, you know. Born 1924, um volunteered to fight in World War II, Navy pilot, comes home, goes to Yale, plays baseball there, then goes into um gets gets into politics. Yeah. But first does oil industry does it all over the world in the in the Gulf of Mexico, now the Gulf of America.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Okay, so as we're talking about, while this generation is in the most productive years of their life in the later part of their uh middle age, they start having kids, and now these kids are like free love, 1960s, flower child. Uh you're getting into the boomers. That's the boomer generation. Those that generation's kids are now the boomers. And we call it the boomers because giant population explosion? Yes. Okay, all right. Thanks, teachers. I'm learning stuff here.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

They came back from World War II and then they had a lot of babies.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Yep. Yeah, so you want to get into the boomers here? Great all right, boomers. By the way, I should say my father's phone is like Vietnam. You can go in there, but you will be changed. So my father is a boomer, and they are currently part of the silver tsunami. TK may may explain a little bit more about the silver tsunami. Oh, yeah, I can get into that. Uh, this was the hippie and then the yuppie generation. There, they were called the Mi generation. Born from 1946 to 64, they inherited the world. They paid the least for the college degrees that meant the most. And that translated to significant lifetime earnings. They enjoyed a narrative that they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, but they were surfing Honolulu-rated waves in the best conditions possible. So the world was sort of open to them. And I always kind of think that there were two versions of the boomer. There was like the conservative crew cut boomer. So that would have been most of the alumni from, say, Texas AM. And then there was the the hippie version of the boomer, which was the Haight Ashberry flower power hippie version. And those two things kind of converged at times, but there was also a lot of cultural tension that that I think we still see played out. Like this is sort of uh Fox News boomers versus CNN MSNBC boomers. There's still a lot of cultural friction that I think we still see played out today.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

So this is like uh Texas versus California. This is Yeah. Okay. This even your description is kind of hard to listen to without getting a little like I know. Take a look at a little frustrated. The the the there's a little bit of hubris that's uh attached to this where it's like, well, you should just try harder. You should just shake more hands and it'll be great for you.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Yeah. I don't know what the kids are graming about these days. You know, we all had it tough. Bunch of complainers. Right. But if you actually look at, you know, what they were paying for housing and what was viable for them, it's a completely different ball game.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

The job market, all of that.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

I got my first house with two sticks of bubblegum. You should be able to do the same. That sort of thing.

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Yeah. I think also it's important to bear in mind that that uh baby boom generation, um they came of age, they were born on the heels of some really important uh cultural and social transformations that had preceded them, like advertisers creating the definition and the category of teenager. Right. Um, the juvenile delinquency epidemic that was supposedly plaguing the United States in the 1940s and during the war when uh men were largely absent, and you that's when you first had uh latch key kids, but that these were unsupervised youth, and then even before that in the 1920s and the 1940s, through the 1940s, you have the rise of compulsory secondary education across most of the country. Yeah, so you've got what we call now teenagers uh together five days a week, creating their own kind of um culture, youth culture. Uh they're in a peer group environment, largely away from their parents and under the supervision of teachers who teachers as a societal cohort at that time were were pretty tradition-minded and pretty much about upholding the the forms of order in the society. Um, but that will change over time, and then that has compounding effects on youth culture. Um but so the the baby boomers, that huge cohort of youth, it it comes of age in the United States, it appears in American society at a time when we are poised through all those earlier societal uh trends to think in terms of, oh, the youth are a thing unto themselves. They are a creature uh of the of their own, and they have no relationship, nor do they want to have a relationship with the generations that came before them, and they increasingly uh will have lack of appreciation and really skepticism for the values of their previous generation. And that that was a that was a new largely a new phenomenon in American society.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

The boomers like the one thing you can say is that they inherited a whole lot of culture shift that they didn't see coming and nobody in the world had ever seen before. So, for instance, um a the invention of a credit card. Like just that consumer credit was a thing nobody had ever taught them how to do. They're still learning it. Uh being uh being told that they should retire, that was new for them. Um and these are advertisers and government kind of pitching them some new ideologies. You also get uh the TV, like from the lowest income family to the president in the White House, they're all watching the same programming. And so now you get this like uh national culture thing that really kind of starts to evolve a little bit of the family culture.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Mass media.

SPEAKER_03 15:22

Mass media as a whole, and that whole idea that really world the TV, the sh the shows that are on there are really just about they're really just vehicles for the advertising. That's right. It's really about the advertising and the aspirational consumerism that's on display.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Yeah, like so Hot Point Corporation referred to their ads as the content, and the Ozzy and Harriet show was filler. Yeah. That's you just need to create enough to breathe. Enough of a thing to draw attention, and that's how we deliver the payload. All right, I there was one other paragraph here about the boomers. Go for it. They prioritized the maximization of personal freedom and liberty and wouldn't endure any sort of self-reflective critique. I can't think of any better example of this mindset than Rick Rubin's interview with Neil Young. And I have a two-minute clip, we might try and put that in here. Essentially, Neil Young is like this perfect version of a late-in-life hippie.

SPEAKER_03 16:22

He's the most keep on rocking in the world.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

That's right. And Rick Rubin is asking him why he just sold his entire music catalog, and he says, because now nobody can ever tell me what to do. I have total money, and every decision I make from here on out is mine and mine alone. And unless it hurts somebody, in which case I'll have to think about it. And I'm thinking, yeah, I'll have to disregard it eventually. I'll I'll put that aside in my own unique way. Uh, they so the boomers, they engendered this freedom is the goal, maximize your quality of life in the generations that followed them, but they didn't prioritize doing the work or putting in the long hours. They uh they weren't looking for maximum flex time in their careers the way other uh generations will. Others, that would be spouses and children, may be forced to suffer uprootedness or absenteeism for long hours at the office, but they gave themselves to their careers in ways that modern millennials or Gen Z simply cannot imagine. They were much more loyal to their employers than today's generation, even if they weren't rewarded with the same loyalty in return. Older boomers today in their mid to late 70s made Gen X, and younger boomers early to mid-sixties today made the millennial generation.

SPEAKER_03 17:45

I I think there's some interesting things going on between the boomer generation, the parents, and the children. So they came home and we defeated fascism, we stopped the Holocaust. Now we're in a leadership position, we're fighting you know, worldwide communism, right? And Vietnam. Right. Right. But I think there was that sense of okay, if America can defeat fascism and Japanese imperialism and take on the red menace, well, surely we can solve poverty so we can have a war on poverty. That but that was inspirational for that baby boom generation. Right. And Kennedy's call for ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, and his founding of the the Peace Corps. Right. Uh, that drew a lot of of 20-something baby boomers into its ranks. It also the a sim it's interesting, and a a similar kind of elite unit or organization, the Green Berets, that was that was very exciting and aspirational for young baby boomer males. Yeah. Right? Two different go out and to go out and change the world, to go out and fix the remaining ailments of of the world, right? To right. And then let's, you know, we've defeated fascism and we're gonna stop poverty. Well, surely we can fix racism and discrimination. Right. Right? And so there's there's so much idealism in that in that generation.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Okay, there is. And fast forward to 2025, and now we have the silver tsunami. Like, even with all the idealism and all of the like um proactive, we want to heal the world realities, right now uh there's the concept of the silver tsunami is essentially that they are throwing off, kind of in that Neil Young sense of it, I don't want to be told what to do. They're throwing off their businesses. They've built these things, but they didn't train up uh uh children or generations after them to go and find it, figure it out. They didn't uh plan for because they gave so much of their time to their careers, often it would leave those careers as unwanted by the coming generations.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Yeah. A mark against them is that they are not known as a generation that trains up and hands off well and then step off the stage. Right. This has not been true of them. Not not even close. They will hold on clutching until the very end when you have to pry their hands off the keyboard and keep moving. It's true. Are you talking about the White House?

SPEAKER_01 20:42

I didn't say I don't know. But all right, when I well, I got one. So I we rook, I rook with this guy, and he was telling me that um yeah, a majority of his world is talking to he he's uh in insurance, but longer business, bigger commercial stuff. And he was telling me, yeah, to a man, to a person, nobody will talk about their coming death. It is a marker. None of the boomers will ever acknowledge that it is a reality that is coming for them. They hate that conversation. So if you're selling insurance, that makes it very difficult because they don't want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

Again, I would rather die in in my office and potentially risk the company because it won't matter because I won't be here. Now, Gen X, born 1960. Oh you guys. Easy, 1965 to 1980, knew they were on their own very early. This is this is what is typically referred to as the latch key generation that you hear about. Self raised, formed friendly cohorts easily, and figured out life very much on the fly. These were sort of Free-range kids that navigated all the dangers in the world with their friends, the last of the fully pre-digital generations. They view work very differently. They were the first to figure out there is no corporate loyalty and none should be given because it isn't reciprocated. And they were the first to realize that the old trusted institutions were in decay. Ironically, they're now in the positions of authority. So think about this: the same authority roles they disliked and distrusted, they're in. It's awkward. They don't want to be the bosses they disliked. What you ought to do is think of Ron, I think Livingston in office space, only he's no longer the hypnotized protagonist. He is the boss Lumberg. So there is a built-in conflictedness about Generation X as they're like the boomers are leaving the stage of leadership, and now Gen X is assuming that like um DeSantis in Florida is Gen X, and it just kind of think of that. That is the new generation. Uh JD Vance. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:13

1990, 1991, maybe somewhere in their um independent film, Slacker. Yes. That was very much for a long time, that was sort of the uh the motif for Gen X. Lack of ambition, serious lack of ambition. Um Evis and Buddha. Really a really the first generation kind of accused of having lack of ambition, no plans, no desire to, certainly not like the boomers who wanted to change the world. We apparently had no interest in that at all.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Kurt Cobain, Kurt Cobain, grunge music, all of that.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

So much cynicism. So much cynicism. Sort of a trope.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, I don't want the dream you're selling me. I see your world, and I don't want that world. And so where there is shortcoming in Gen X, and there's a lot of shortcoming in all the cohorts, one of them is their um sort of sin as a cohort is an abdication of responsibility. Like, I didn't ask for this, I don't want this. This is I didn't sign up. I didn't sign up for it. I it's not authentically me, authentically me. Um, and hey, you do you. It's kind of like the natural offs offspring of the hippie generation.

SPEAKER_03 24:36

I've I've read about Gen X also being uh sort of charged with always having some kind of uh like an alternate uh plan or an exit strategy. Like if hey, if this doesn't work out, I'm gonna make sure that I can I can optionality jump over to the over to this and and kind of keep on moving, you know, be flexible, yeah. Not really ever commit to a to a particular path, which I I mean I live that out in spades in my employees.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

I'm gonna say you don't want people to like kind of always have a plan B. Right. So I you know, I when I would talk to uh all the millennials last week at the meeting, uh we kind of we term you guys kind of the scary big brother who's always kind of angry, but also if you get them to laugh, you've really won the day. My kids say that I'm the scary big father who's always kind of angry. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_03 25:36

You're welcome. You're welcome, kids.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

It's gonna it's gonna do you good. Millennials 1981. The best generation. No, no sins here. 1981 to 1996. Um, I'll let TK speak to millennials a bit, but in general terms, what do you want to know? Their almost innate digital ability set, natives, they call this, was quickly championed by the boomers. And their youthful enthusiasm in the workforce was co-opted by the boomers and deployed.

unknown 26:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

And so they would be like, hey, you know, cast big vision, and the millennials were like, yeah, and they went and they worked really hard for the boomers. Yeah. And not ever really knowing these boomers are taking you to the bank. Yeah, the boomer.

SPEAKER_03 26:25

I want to stick up also for the millennial generation. Okay. 1981 is typically their starting birth. Sure. So 2001, 20 years old, okay. They grew up as kids. Oh, we won the Cold War, and we're the greatest superpower, and there's the peace dividend, and everything's just hunky-dory. And then they get to young adulthood, and it's like WTF. And now we got to go fight a war in Afghanistan. Now we got to go fight a war in Iraq.

unknown 26:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:58

Um never-ending war. Talk about, I didn't sign up for this in terms of what was sold to them, you could argue, culturally, as they were coming up as kids. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

So the the millennials, we we often like to brag, I think, a bit about the financial crash of the 2008 crash. And then we saw uh like that was never supposed to happen, the great global crash, and then the banks were too big to fail, so we had to bail them out. And then and then we also had uh a pandemic that was never supposed to happen, and then we had another financial crash that was never supposed to happen, and then we had uh I mean we've we've just lived we had Donald Trump who was never supposed to live. He was never supposed to happen. You had to watch Malcolm in the middle. We saw that we also lived uh we got Seinfeld, so that was cool. But you grew up with Barney as a kid should be. That's right. I mean he Okay, hang on to that.

SPEAKER_02 27:52

Let me finish this. So it wasn't long, however, that the Millennials figured out what the boomers had long known. They aren't going to promote you because you're good with tech, not good with systems or coding or tools. You will likely be used and don't expect allegiance.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

The boomers love to use us.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Yes. Work habits and trends among millennials. Work life balance is huge. Prize experience over finances, so they would rather have less money and more liberty and more good experiences and fun coffee drinks. Until recently, they could afford to be very choosy and very non committal, noncommittal, even quiet quiet quitting if the conditions weren't just right. They want the company to champion their ideals and philanthropic causes to be values aligned, and they want to work remotely and also as little as possible.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Whoa, whoa, whoa. All right, hold up. Millennials, we got a great work ethic here. We kept these companies afloat throughout the whole thing. Yeah, we had to pivot to the remote, but we got it figured out. You sure did. We more efficiently.

SPEAKER_02 28:59

More efficiently. Okay. Maybe. Gen Z, 1997 to two to 2012. Um I don't know what to make of Gen Z workforce because it's only just now emerging. They enter the workforce on the heels of the pandemic, and they've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media. The youthful optimism and zeal seem somewhat curved by their hardened economic realities or the realities facing them. See, they face a world that is probably best described as an inversion of the boomer world. Never has a degree been more expensive, worth so little. Okay, we're way past degree inflation. Many are electing to simply not go to college entirely instead of getting in instead of getting into the trades. And debt has been more costly, um and they're emerging in a soft American job market. The ones that came from good families with great work ethics are doing fantastic. Uh they yeah, this this section, this slice is doing doing wonderfully. They have a huge leg up on their peers, but most of them didn't have that structural advantage. They're going to have a rather difficult time. And so, how does how do the rising generations afford housing, especially if inflation keeps climbing and the housing market never catches up or the bubble burst? That first starter house is north of 200,000 in most markets, much more in most markets. How does that work out for them? Are boomers going to be unlocking their vault-like wallets and pushing resources down the lines?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

So the picture you're painting here is essentially that a majority of capital is locked up still in a generation that is figuring out how to live longer, uh, who has not figured out how to hand it off, has not really been interested in handing it off.

SPEAKER_02 31:00

A lot of times they have a mentality that says, burn it all so that my last check bounces.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

Yep. And so now you have Gen Z.

SPEAKER_03 31:09

I think I think Gen X, I think So you're saying the rallying cry of our society should be die already? No. No, essentially what you're saying, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 31:17

No. Uh what I am saying is that Gen X and Millennials have been in the game long enough to figure it out for ourselves. I don't think um there's any uh hope. I don't want to say hope like it's hopeless, but there's any uh disillusionment that we're going to get a big windfall from the boomers. I don't think that's how we operate our our worlds. I will say Gen Z is going to have a very difficult time of it because um rightfully that's where that windfall ought to hit. It ought to be cast off and in inheritance down to a Gen Z generation. But we have figured out how to live long, we figured out how to AI, we figured out how to have a tiny workforce doing three times as much work, and now you have these universities throwing off more and more workforce. This is gonna be hard. Speaking of housing, I don't know. I don't know how they're gonna figure that out. I mean, inflation rates besides the point, just the cost of the houses are insane.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Yeah, the first rung on the housing ladder.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

A starter house? Starter house is still unbelievable. Quarter million is a low, small offer. Um, and it reminds me of 2020 where uh the world economic powers that be were talking about the globe and saying we're moving to a time where people will own nothing and rent everything and be happy about it. And I'm like, well, I mean, we're that's what we're fighting. We're moving into a subscription life. Yeah, everything's a subscription.

SPEAKER_02 33:02

Yeah. And it will require people to actually fight to be able to move past that. I think and downline investment.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Yeah. I think that uh uh speaking specifically economically, not talking spiritually or otherwise, uh I think that economic salvation is going to come from small businesses. Hey. I think I think that's where the solution lies. Small businesses are gonna figure out how to negotiate deals, they're gonna have to negotiate deals with an older generation to acquire to get to some sort of terms with that generation to get those businesses in whole where the value is not lost in that transaction, get them in hand and start operating them. I think we're gonna have to start creating jobs, and we're gonna do that through not starting new businesses, but acquiring ones that are about to fizzle. That's my hope. I think that's I and you start to see that you see this in social media with like uh Hormozy and Cody Sanchez, and you see this like uh Michael Gurdley is another big name. Like people are like, oh, actually, I don't have to start a business, I can buy one. And you start to see these 20-year-olds that are buying businesses, that's very exciting. I think that's so good for our economy. Get it out of the hands of of people that just want to run it into the ground to kind of throw another little aspersion on a generation.

SPEAKER_02 34:35

Right. Well, we try we tried to keep it uh sorry light and affirming, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

I got a little I got a little fight in me on this one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:45

Well, that's very good. I I I think that we we shouldn't again we shouldn't lose sight of um the contributions that every one of these generations made positively to the society that we live in today. It's not as if one generation was all bad and one generation was was great. I think we have I think we have an obligation in terms of intellectual honesty to just recognize that, like Mark said, um there's warts on all of these generations. 100%. And there's things that we can take from all of them and their and their historical experiences moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

To go back to to go back to and to be more gracious to the boomer generation. Graciousness to the Gen X. Well, they don't even want it. But it's true. But uh they were dealing with a whole new playing card deck. They I mean, even just just alone uh shad carpeting. I mean, that was lazy. Just just consumer credit as a set of tools, even just that was like world changing and nobody trained them. So I I do give a lot of grace there.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

All right. And with that, we conclude our episode on generational cohorts and the workforce.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 36:11

Nine B.