- I don't trust the younger generation in terms of values
because I don't even think they know
what it is that they value.
- There's a term swirling nowadays, OK boomer.
- OK boomer.
- OK boomer trend.
- It's going viral.
- [Man] Almost like a demeaning term to older people.
- The millennials and Generation Z
have the Peter Pan syndrome, they don't ever wanna grow up.
- This grievance culture as you suggest that says
the world all owed something from the world
and if we don't get it
it's because the system has failed us.
♪ OK boomer ♪
♪ OK boomer, ♪ why can't you love me as much ♪
♪ As you love to share memes about minions ♪
(bright suspense music)
- My name is Mike Sifendofo, I'm 57 years old
from Bellflower California, I got four kids.
- My name is Toni Jackson Walker.
I'm from Los Angeles, California.
I'm 65 years old.
- My name's Jess.
I'm 20 and I'm from Ventura, California.
- My name is Corinne I'm 21 and I'm from East LA.
- Hi, my name is Stefan,
I'm also 21 and I am a student and artist.
- I'm Bill, I am a writer and a dad of two
and I'm a baby boomer.
- [Host] So can I get my baby boomers to line up
over on the left and my Gen Z over on the right.
OK boomer is ageist.
- I think the phrase, OK boomer is ageist
because the term in itself erases the entire experience
of a whole generation.
If we as Gen Z'ers were to get that same energy
from boomers, we would feel ostracized
and we would feel marginalized.
- I've never heard the term OK boomer.
- I feel like it's like dismissing something
that someone says
but implying to someone who's a baby boomer.
Like if someone were to say, "Oh, I don't like Starbucks."
You'd be like, "OK boomer."
- Oh, that's funny to me rather than insulting.
- Yeah.
- I personally don't think it's necessarily ageist
because being a boomer is more associated
with certain behavioral patterns and mindsets
and like potentially political views.
So it's kind of more about the characteristics of a boomer
rather than the age itself.
- It's kinda like the back in my day type right language
and our response to back in my day is OK boomer.
- Well, we said that to our parents too.
Do you have kids?
- Yes.
- Well, we all have kids,
so I wouldn't say something insulting
about my kids' generation because they're all Gen Z.
So I love my Gen Z kids so I wouldn't knock them for that.
They couldn't help when they were born.
- [Host] Older generations create problems
that younger generations have to solve.
- Speaking for like at least myself
and a lot of my close friends, I feel as though
there have been a lot of issues that we've had
to kind of take on such as the environment,
such as a lot of wars that we had nothing to do with
yet we have to end up with like the repercussions.
- No, I would agree.
And I do think that's sort of true of every generation.
You have to deal with the world that your parents gave you.
When my children were born, there were no cell phones.
My daughter was born in 2001.
And just in the 18 years, 19 years almost
that she's been alive,
the whole world has changed radically
and it's scary for us as parents because my generation
technically gave that to your generation.
And it has changed not only your generation but ours too
in terms of the time that we have for each other,
everybody sitting around doing this,
you know when you're all sitting in a room together
and that's us too.
If there were anything I wish we could dial back
a little bit, it would be that.
- Although older generations may have created
those problems, I don't think they did it on purpose.
Hindsight is 2020.
So once you see the effects of what you've done,
I don't necessarily think it's just the younger generations
cleaning up the problems.
I do believe that the older generations
offer support as well.
- I think historically, there are issues that are inherent
in each generation because there are certain things,
there'll always be war and there'll always be poverty
but it doesn't necessarily mean that a generation created it
and another generation is gonna come and solve it
because I don't believe it will ever be solved in essence.
It will be something that's perpetrated and ongoing.
- It's always gonna be this way.
My parents left problems for us to solve,
we're gonna leave problems for you to solve.
I think it comes down to what do we do about it?
'Cause it takes a lot of leadership to go,
I don't think what I've been doing
or been a part of has been very helpful
but I wanna try to earn the right to help fix it.
- [Host] I trust the values of the other generation.
- I cannot say that, nope.
- Oh yeah.
- I do, just as much as I may question some of the values
that they're talking about.
One of the things that personally bothers me
is we've allowed communism to become an acceptable
thought process in this country to govern us,
which also tells me we haven't done our job.
But yet when you look at, why is it brought up?
It's because people feel enormously frustrated
and we need to address the people in our age bracket,
why are they frustrated and how do we change some of that?
- They grew up in a different world than we did.
- Yes.
- When I got outta college, I got a job, I got an apartment,
I was able to live by myself and you could do that then.
Then the world that our children are coming into,
it's not nearly as easy to do
because of the price of housing,
because of the sort of wages they can get.
There aren't companies that you can go enter now
at 21 or two and know that you're gonna work for 40 years
for that company.
- When I grew up, I knew what my beliefs
and my values were gonna be because my mother passed down
the same ones that my grandmother had.
I passed down the same ones to my son.
Now I think somewhere in between the generations
between you all and us, things have changed.
We stopped talking.
We've stopped saying what we value.
I don't trust the younger generation in terms of values
because I don't even think they know
what it is that they value.
Do you value another person's life?
I tell my son, oh my God, one of the worst things
could happen to me is someone in this generation
would have to take care of me.
They don't understand me.
They don't know anything about me.
- That goes to the prompt which is,
do you trust the other side's values
and I think of the values that you may have grown up with
in terms of what you were taught about,
being homosexual and whatnot.
'Cause I grew up queer in a Black family,
that's a whole different dynamic and what they were taught
that was brought down to them intergenerationally,
it has been homophobia.
And it's like, that's what I think of when I think of values
of my elders and I can't trust it
because in terms of policy, it was your generation
that got it wrong so many times.
And that had put LGBTQ people into a second class status
and we're trying to get that back as our generation.
- I'm not really even sure what like,
the values of baby boomers are like,
what they would agree on are.
But I do appreciate all the work that has been done for us
by that generation.
Like civil rights, women's rights, like LGBT rights.
I was born with all those rights
but it was really the people that were a lot of them,
baby boomers in those protests that got us
where we are today.
- I was a young gay boy and couldn't even say the word
until I was in my 20s.
It was the most horrible thing you could imagine
growing up to be.
I couldn't talk to anybody about it.
- Yeah, I mean I'm gay and there's so much progress
that has been made but there's still so much to be made.
When I think of values of like baby boomers,
the first thing that I think of is kind of just the whole
like hard work gets you pretty much anywhere mindset
and I just feel like that's so toxic
because there are so many other barriers
that a lot of people don't talk about.
Like if you're poor, if you have like kids,
if you don't have opportunities for education
like those three just alone will inhibit your success.
- Well, I think that was true when we were young.
Hard work did get you very far.
My husband worked in a company which he started
in his 20s and worked there for many years.
It was just an established company with a retirement plan
and all this sort of thing.
And those don't exist anymore.
Your generation doesn't have those guarantees.
- And I think that is why you're seeing such a large scale
rejection of capitalism.
And I don't think it's communism,
I think what our generation is exploring now is socialism
which is not the same as communism.
You guys inherited a union economy
that worked for working people.
We are inheriting a gig economy for subcontractors
that only works for the rich and powerful.
What our generation is exploring is democratizing
the workplace and social justice,
things like that that are really for the people
which is at the core of what socialism is.
We are growing up in a different country
than you guys are growing up in and we are looking
for alternatives because we know this is not sustainable.
- [Host] I believe my generation will leave the world
a better place.
- [Bill] I hope you do.
- Me too.
- I plan on fighting to do our part,
that when I part that you've inherited things
that have improved.
And then I hope when you leave the earth
you've made it even better and handy 'cause if we don't,
game over.
And that may be a dramatic term
but I tell people my own age, we don't have a choice,
do we leave it better or worse,
it's an obligation.
- Let me put it this way.
You're gonna know we were here.
We laid a foundation for you all to come
and do bigger, greater things, civil rights, women's rights,
boycott, we fought for everything and we're still working,
we're still making changes.
- And I think this generation will leave
making a better place because of everybody else's work.
And my family always says like in terms of raising kids,
with your parents you take what you like
and you lose what you don't.
So I think we have such an advantage with the internet
being able to see what was done wrong generations ago
and what we can do now to fix it.
- We missed you.
- I want to believe that and I have a lot of hope
that we will and I feel like we have the potential
but knowing what I know about history,
a lot of what we're experiencing today
are just new renditions of what we've already experienced.
And we know that history repeats itself,
we just don't know when to call it.
And it's oftentimes when we call it, it's too late.
Knowing what I know about the environment
and what's really going to happen,
it's like, I can't realistically say in good conscious
I wanna like bring a new generation into this world
and knowing that it will be a better world for them.
- We can't save the world.
We can only say, guess what?
We were here, we made a change, we attempted to do good
and we attempted to help others and become more diverse.
And if we did that, you know what?
We did something.
Collectively, individually,
we made the world a better place.
- Okay.
(group applauding)
- [Toni] Yeah, you give me a hug
'cause I'm believing great things for you.
I told you to communicate to us so much.
(soft upbeat music)