Welcome to “Ear Biscuits”, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time, I’m Link. And I’m Rhett, this week at the round table of dim lighting we’re gonna be ♪ Talking ’bout my generation ♪ We’re gonna be talking about generations, y’all. We’re gonna be talking about what generation we come from, which might be in some dispute, we’re gonna to be talking about the generation that most of our employees come from, we’re gonna be talking about the generation that our kids are a part of, our parents. Okay boomer. We’re talking about. The dynamics, man We’re talking about Xennials. Well, Xennials would be, you got millennials, you got Generation X, you got Xennials, which is in between, you got Generation Z. Which is supposedly us, Xennials. I don’t know. I can tell. Okay. No. You can tell me, or you can tell I don’t know? Kiko did some some boop, de boop, boop, boop, boop research, kind of pulled up some different perspectives that people have on, like, what makes, first of all, we’re gonna kind of go through what the generations are, just if you need a refresher on that, but we’re also gonna talk about what makes an Xennial, an Xennial. And I think it’s kind of remarkable, once you start thinking about what makes us not really a part of Generation X and not really a part of the millennials, and it’ll bring up some memories, I’m sure. Some trauma? And also the way that we’re seeing the relationships in our lives. Okay, I’m up for that. But I wanna talk about the fact that you got a haircut. I did. Which was obviously not self-imposed. Yeah, this is a more drastic cut because this is a professional cut. Yesterday, I experienced someone else cutting my hair for the first time since. Since COVID. Since March. Yeah. Since March. Boy, it’s strange when something’s been out of your life so long and then it’s like, wait, this is back in my life. Now, it was weird ’cause it was, I mean, Anna, who would always come in and cut my hair, some people call her Annalyn. I just call her Anna, ’cause I ain’t got time for long names when you accept the shorter version. Well, you know, one of the sweetest people on the planet. She is. Super talented and very gracious, and she enjoys working with us, even though. She works on much bigger and better things. She works on “American Horror Story”, she’s working on “Dear White People”. Yeah. She’s got her hands in lots of places. Lots of people’s heads. Just got back from her homeland of Guam, where she was hunkered down because of COVID, so she wasn’t even here, but I was like, trimming my own hair. But yeah, she came up, we set up a tent outside, I’m wearing a mask, she’s wearing a mask, she’s been thoroughly tested, I’ve been thoroughly tested, let’s make this happen! She said she gets tested, six times a week. I mean, we get tested once a week. She gets tested six times a week. Six is a lot. Well, she’s working on two different shows that require three tests a week and so she just, you show up and they test you, so she ends up getting tested six times a week. There’s only seven days in a week. She might be the most tested person on earth. What’s that doing to her nasals? Some people are being tested daily, I guess, but she’s basically being tested daily. Imagine being constantly swabbed in the nose. Constantly would get old. But daily, I’ve gotten used to it, man, we get tested weekly and got tested today. Sit down in the tent, one person at a time, just a guy in full protective garb shoving a, basically a bottle brush, up my nose. It’s a cotton swab. It’s not, it’s a bottle brush. You’re not making eye contact with it. Oh, I never look at it. It’s not a pipe cleaner. Well I’m telling you what it feels like. It is a long Q-tip. It’s a pipe freaking cleaner. It is a long Q-tip, it is a cotton swab. Yeah, but it’s got. Nothing else on it. It’s got something abrasive on the end of it. It doesn’t have anything abrasive on it. I’ll look at it next time. Okay. Are you telling me, do you watch it go in? Yeah, when somebody’s about to stick something in my nose, I look at it. I mean, who knows? He could get confused, he could get mixed up, he could put yours in mine. I mean, we got a professional outfit doing this. That’s not gonna happen. It’s super professional. First of all, watching it go in your nose has nothing to do with yours and mine. I would be able to tell if it was wet, whoa, whoa, yeah, you got a wet one! Hold on, hold on, this is not a fresh one! Oh God. You’re not gonna know that. If he’s double-dipping? Yeah, he’s not, again, I’m not trying to cast dispersion on the person who’s doing this for us. He’s double dipping from my right nostril to my left. Do you have a conversation with him? I’ve just quit talking, I say good morning. I say, good morning, here we are again, sometimes I’ll say here we are again. I feel bad that I’ve kind of, there was one week where we kind of talked, he saw me pull up. Small talk. In my new car. And he was like, oh, let’s talk about that. No, he don’t talk, it’s all business. I think he leaves it up to you, but I’m just like, he’s so efficient, it happens so quickly that I’m just like, mornin’, how you doing? He’s like, good, and then it’s just like, and I’m like, thank you, and then I get up and go. He does the second swab so rapidly after the first insertion, that I’m reacting to the first one after the second one’s done, so he’s got a good technique. ‘Cause my head shakes and you don’t want your head to shake when you got a bottle cleaner. The first test I ever got was at my doctor, my regular doctor, and they had a parking lot kind of thing. Yeah, roll your window down, stick your nose out. That guy, not my doctor, but a doctor at my doctor’s. Went deep? Not only did he go deep, first of all, I was like, now I have a deviated septum, the right nostril is pretty difficult to get in. Oh gosh. But my left nostril is susceptible to bleeding if you irritate it. You told them all this? Yeah, ’cause he was like, okay, well I’ll try on the right. And he goes into the right, and this is back in the early days of COVID the testing was deeper and more invasive, and now I think they’ve learned that, okay, we just gotta get in there a little bit. But he shoved it in there and he hits whatever the deal is, you know, I’ve never broken my nose but a majority of the population has a deviated septum, naturally. You could feel him hit something? He’s hitting the septum that’s deviated and he can’t get through ’cause it’s, you know, it is not a bottle cleaner, it is a Q-tip. I think he needs to get a hammer and start chiseling. And so he’s like, oh, can’t do it, can’t get in there, pulls it out, goes in the left side, and I swear he hit my brain. Oh yeah, yeah, first one. It was so far back, it went all the way through and was in the back of my throat, and then he said “Okay, now that I’m in there, I have to turn it slowly for seven seconds.” Yeah, I had one of those. Seven seconds! They don’t do that anymore. They don’t do that anymore. So when dude out here, does he hit your septum? I don’t think so. He doesn’t go deep enough to hit the septum. That’s what I’m saying, I don’t think they do that anymore, I don’t think they go as deep anymore. I wonder if he’s deviated from the. It’s uncomfortable. Procedure enough to not hit the deviated septum. Well, I had a ENT one time when I was dealing with my onset of allergies a couple of years ago and I was like, I don’t know what’s going on with my throat, the first time we went on tour and I was having all those throat issues, and it was allergies and I hadn’t diagnosed myself yet. He was like, okay, let me look at your throat and he did the thing that you got done at the plastic surgeon, when we made the commercial in Newport Beach. A scope. So he went into my right nostril, the deviated one, and I guess, because the camera’s flexible, it went around the deviation and he got back there. Okay. And examined things, everything was fine, don’t worry. It is a disconcerting feeling. But a year later, I went to a different ENT as a follow-up, but a follow-up with a different doctor. Okay. He couldn’t get in, he could not get through the deviation. I think some people have the courage to just do that extra, just really get it in there. We’re losing people, we’re losing people. And some people don’t. Including me, but the haircut. Yeah, let’s talk about that. It was nice, but, you know. It’s a good hair cut. My hair had gotten so bushy that I was just doing maintenance on the bush. And the bush on the sides was getting pretty bushy. Everywhere, it was getting really big, but I just don’t like doing a drastic cut, myself, because, you know, on the back it’s all guesswork. Yeah. She’s a pro, she did a great job, but it’s not just a trim, it’s a little bit more and I just have flashbacks to when I was a kid, and whenever you’d go in and get a haircut as a kid, it would be so drastic and be like, oh gosh, I have to go to school the next day and it looks so different. I hate it when people are like, d’you get a haircut? It’s like, you either know I did, or you didn’t, don’t ask me if I got a haircut, just say. Nice haircut. Nice haircut. I think sometimes people are legitimately curious though. D’you get a haircut? You styling it differently or is it just cut? It’s still longer than it ever used to be, but it now feels so much shorter and I’m in this transition period where I’m trying to get used to it. What you’ve done, my assessment of it is that it is the same length on top that you used to reset at, but it’s a longer length on the side than you used to reset. Yeah, I don’t want it to be too short on the sides, I want it to be a little longer on the sides. Well, but you have slowly gone away, I mean, I don’t know when it was, but it’s one of those things that you watch old episodes where we see ourselves in montages and we’re like, whoa. It was so tight, so tight on the sides. There was a point where you went full, I don’t even know what you would call it, but. You could see skin on the sides. Yeah. And I don’t like that. It was getting almost, it’s almost like a Nazi cut, honestly. What? No it wasn’t. I don’t look back at montages and say, damn, I look like a Nazi, what? No, but I’m saying, the Nazi dudes, they have a haircut where they do it really really short on the sides. It never got to that point. I’m saying you were approaching that, if you had actually gotten there, I would’ve said hey man, look, there’s a bunch of racists on the internet that look like this, but you never got there, but I’m saying you got close. But people know that’s not who you are, so I didn’t have to say anything. I’m not doing that anymore, but now, especially with your hair being so long and shaggy, I’m kind of taking that into account, because. You don’t wanna be too buttoned up? The kids saying it’s the businessman and the boy on that old react video, they called you the businessman, called me the boy. Now I don’t want it to be the caveman and the businessman. But I don’t think you can do anything. Caveman and the boy. I think that what I have going on is so far removed from anything that we would have considered normal. But it makes anything, this fresh cut makes me seem clean cut which, in a normal situation, I would just seem like I don’t have a really clean cut haircut. Like if I had the haircut that you were talking about before, that would be too big of a contrast between the two of us. I don’t know, maybe it would be what we need. Maybe you should go full newscaster. I’m not going newscaster. No, what if you went as tight, what if it was like hair sprayed and it was a little bit lower, and it kind of swooped? What if it was like, you could see the part, what if you just went full, like, this is so locked in? That would be an interesting sort of contrast, you might wanna do that one day. I don’t want to do that. You might do it before you die, I might do it before you die. You can do it. Before you die. Before I die, yeah, I want you to clean up. Well, one thing I didn’t ask Anna, that I was gonna ask her and I was kind of just gonna see if she was gonna say something about it, because when I saw her yesterday, when she came in to cut your hair, I had my hair tied up and, of course, me not cutting my hair for over a year, the person who has cut my hair, if my hair is going to be cut, is gonna say something, she was like, your hair, wow. And so, because I know how she thinks about hair, I know that if I had made the decision to grow my hair out and COVID had not have happened, and she had continued to be around, she would have said, now, when you grow your hair out, you still need me to cut your hair as you grow it out, because for the sake of the health of the hair and for thickness and all this stuff. Yeah, I get it, so you thought she was gonna say something? I thought she might say, you know. You could still use a trim. You could use some thinning or whatever it was. Or a trim. A trim, or, like I noticed the other day. Get rid of the burnt ends. I don’t know if you can see this, but I don’t think that this is really supposed to happen, ’cause all my hair was like it was and then I just started growing it, and no attention to anything, right? And so if you see this. That’s like the mullet area. There’s a mullet area that’s way longer, just because the hair’s lower on my head than this area. But I think that she would be like, let’s get that all the same length, but she didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. But if she did, what would you have said? I would’ve been like, I’m cool, I’m good. Yeah, you can’t do anything to seem like. There’s no corrective measures that can be made to the hair. You can’t do anything to try to make it seem prettified? Right. ‘Cause, trust me, when you put it in that, oh, you know what, I’m staying out of this, that’s actually what I decided, you’re trying to draw me in to give an opinion and I’m not doing it. Oh, I don’t want an opinion. I know you’re not, but you are, but you’re tempting me and I’m not, that’s the thing I’ve committed to doing, is I’m not going to talk about your hair. Here’s the only opinion that I’m interested in from you, as it relates to my hair, is when you think that, do you think that there would come a moment in the next months or years in which you would be like, hey, I think you should cut your hair? Like so, for instance, if I went full Rapunzel. Or has there been a point? Has there already been a point? I don’t know, you know, everybody’s got a terminal length, do I go to terminal length? I mean, that could be years away, I don’t know. I mean, somebody messaged me on Twitter, not messaged me, but just added me on Twitter, and said, she was like, I’m sorry to say my mom has stopped watching “Good Mythical Morning” because of your hair. Really? She’s like, she even met you when you came to so-and-so town and showed me the picture, put the picture of us with them, a mother and a daughter. She’s like, my mom will not watch the show because of your hair. So the only reason she was watching the show is because of your previous hair? I guess, or whatever’s happening with your hair is not enough to keep her around, but maybe now that you got a professional cut, she’ll come back, maybe that’s enough for her to overlook whatever she doesn’t like about my situation. Pulling your weight. So you’re saying that you’re not gonna to tell me when you think I should cut my hair, and that you would have already told me if opinions were open? See, you’re tempting me, man. I haven’t told you what I’ve thought about your hair or what you’ve done to it, because that was the decision I made, I’m just staying out of it. Oh, you made a decision? Yeah, I was like, you know what, I’m gonna stay out of it, he’s got his reasons, you know, who am I? Okay, nothing has compelled me to say, listen, I gotta intervene. Oh okay, well there’s still time for that. But yeah, I reserve the right to intervene for the good of the brand. But I’m not happy with getting a haircut, myself, it’s like I didn’t know what to do with it, but I hate getting a haircut, that’s why whenever I used to come, it would just be like this maintenance, a little bit of trim, I don’t like that type of change. Are you saying that it was on the table for you to do something new and different? No, just not to cut as much. But you didn’t cut as much. I feel like I still cut too much, I don’t like what’s happening on the sides. What do you want to happen on the sides, more? A little more, yeah. Just let it grow. A little shaggy, yeah it’s headed in the right direction. Let it grow, I mean, it’s longer than it has been. Yeah, but not as long as it was yesterday. You know, we could continue to talk about this for the entire hour, but we’re not gonna do that, we’re gonna move on to even more interesting things. But first, you know what? You got a phone, you’d like to be able to stand it up so you can watch things on it without holding it. Or hold it, like hold it suspended. Yeah, anti-gravity. Get a pop socket from mythical.com. Yeah, we got those now, we’ve had ’em for a while, actually. Sometimes when I go in for physical therapy, she lays me down on my back and then she does some neck adjustment here, ’cause I’m working on this. The first rib situation is a little too tight, it’s under the collar bone and it goes. There’s a rib up there? Yeah, the first rib. So she’s working on that and sometimes she’ll get to talking about something, and she’s the one that said. Party? My rib needed to be invited to the party. Sometimes she’ll be talking about something and she’ll show me a picture or a video from her phone, and I’m looking up at the ceiling, and all of a sudden, I’ll see a hand with a phone come over. And then she’s showing me something and I’m like, she’s gonna drop this phone on my face, but then I realized she got a pop socket. She had a pop socket. Has she got one of ours? No, but she needs one, I gotta give her one. Can you pay her in pop sockets? Yeah, yeah. Like coins? I’ll be paying you in pop sockets. Come out like a bag of coins and it gets a lot bigger. So if you wanna suspend your phone over someone’s face while they’re receiving physical therapy, then. Only one place to go. Get a Mythical pop socket. All right, so we’re gonna dig into the generations here. So again, let’s just go through what the generations are. There was a comment from a Mythical Beast that got us thinking about this, I don’t think we have that anymore, sorry. Was there? We’ll credit it on the video right down here, the video version’s gonna shout that person out, we don’t have it in front of us. Quick breakdown of the generations, just for refreshing, or maybe this is introducing it to you for the first time. According to the Pew Research Center. Pew, pew, pew, pew! There’s a whole research center, they’re constantly beep-a-de-beeping. that’s what they do. Yeah, they sell it to marketers who sell it to brands. I gotta tell you that I did not know that the generation before boomers, which my parents are technically a part of. Busters? Is the silent era. Oh, that sounds sad. Born 1928 to 1945, so they are 75 to 92, so my parents are just in that generation on the younger side. Okay. I don’t have any information about them, but they’re silent, it makes sense. Yeah, they wouldn’t give it to you if you asked. Yeah. Next one’s boomers. Boomers, we know the boomers as 1946 to ’64. So tell me how old they are now? Between 56 and 74. Okay. So your mom is a boomer, she’s not as old as my parents. Your dad is a boomer, your parents are boomers. Yeah. I always thought I would’ve just called my parents boomers, but they’re actually just outside of it. Here’s a couple of facts about them, they grew up as television expanded dramatically, changing their lifestyles, and connections to the world, in fundamental ways. Oh. They live to work, their self-worth is their worth ethic, loyal to their employer, competitive, goal centric, process oriented, focused, disciplined, need to know they are valued, wanna make a difference. Hopefully retired at this point? Yeah, that’s how they thought. Not really having to work, hopefully. And they, the population boomed after, what, World War II? Yep. So that’s where the boom comes from, it’s a population boom. And it was the largest. Come back from war, you’re completely traumatized, you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you make babies and you hope that makes it better. Until a year ago, this was the largest generation, most people in America were boomers, bigger than any other generation until 2019. So, second boomers? And I’ll tell you who that was that replaced them, of course, Generation X, which we are, technically, a part of, this is people born between ’65 and 1980, so they’re between 40 and 55. Okay, so we’re the front-sided Gen X. I don’t wanna get into the details of the generations until we come back and start explaining, I think it’s gonna be a better conversation, that’s Generation X. Okay. Then you got millennials. When I think about Generation X, I think about alternative rock. I think about Eddie Vedder. Yeah. You know? Yeah, Nirvana. Yeah, actually, when I think about Generation X, I picture Eddie Vedder with a flannel shirt on. Okay, cargo shorts. Yeah. Backwards hat. Yeah, and I’ve always felt a little disconnected from that, like that’s not me, which is interesting, as we’ll get into. Millennials, born between ’81 and ’96, so they’re between 24 and 39 and we’re just on the outside of that, and I definitely, the interesting thing is when I think of a millennial. Yeah. I don’t think of myself. No. I think of many who work for us, you know? Okay, and then you’ve got our children, Generation Z, born between ’97 and 2012. So all of our kids are in Generation Z, all five of them, your three, my two, are between eight and 23. Gen Z. And then you got, what we’re calling or what is being called, Generation Alpha. Oh, the next one, the next one’s out? Basically, early 2010s and onward. You don’t have to start talking about them yet, though, you don’t have to really talk about them yet, they haven’t become fully fledged people yet. Yeah. And then, okay, and now you’ve got. Generation Alpha. You’ve got the generational cuspers, the generation cuspers, this is people who are born in the cracks between the generations. Again, this is all just observational stuff based on trends. Right. There’s no math in this. There’s not a hard switch, so if you’re on the cusp. There’s no real science in this. Okay. But, I think that there’s something really interesting about the difference between the Xers and the millennials, and why we could be considered, what they call an Xennial, which is between ’77 and ’83, I’m born in ’77, you’re born in ’78. Xennial. My wife’s born in ’80, your wife’s in ’78, so we’re all right in that group. So it’s a subset of Gen X, or does it cross over? Well, Xennial means some X, some millennial. Oh yeah, what’s the crossover again? ’77 to ’83. Okay. So ’80 would be the cutoff point, so it’s around 80. Okay. Now, all right, let’s talk about this, I’m gonna come over here to the Xennial breakdown. ‘Cause I think, for us, we’ve interacted with culture because of our jobs and our relationship with YouTube, and internetainment, we’ve kind of, we’ve aged ourselves down, we’ve done a lot of work from the beginning. When I say internetainment, I mean streaming video, YouTube, and all those other platforms that were competing with YouTube, we were committed to being to being an active part of that development, that revolution, and I think that’s a big factor for us. I think you’re over personalizing it, because I think that while that’s true of us in our jobs and the thing that we decided to do, we got a job in social medias, actually. But I think that the reason that this is gonna be applicable to people who are plumbers, they don’t have to be YouTubers, is because the way that social media and technology has impacted everyone’s life, that’s the interesting thing to explore here. Yeah, but I think about if you’re 45, let’s see, what’s the oldest you can be and be considered, 45? 43, ’77. Okay, 43, a 43 year old plumber, I just don’t think that they use YouTube. I think that many of them do, I disagree. Well, Facebook and Instagram. But let’s talk about the cutoff, the thing that makes makes the cutoff so interesting and makes me, personally, not feel at home in either place, right? So, and like I said, Kiko gathered all this information and I kinda synthesized it down into this, I’m just kinda taking a couple of points and dropping them into one. And that, basically, what defines an Xennial is your adolescence was social media and largely mobile phone free, but the onset of your adulthood coincided with social media and widespread mobile phone usage, right? So as you were becoming an adult, as you were becoming independent. That’s when you first start texting. I got engaged and got a mobile phone for me and my wife, all in the same week. Oh. So we’re getting married, now we have to have mobile phones. Can it have that push to talk technology? I never did the Nextel thing. Can I have the big Nextel? Never did it. Yellow and black, and bloop, bloop! that’s what I had. But the other thing that was happening, is at the same time that we were experiencing a new level of connectivity, both through our phones and through the internet, and the way that the internet was rapidly becoming just, a part, like, again, when did you get your first email address, when you showed up at NC State, right? Just like I did, rjmclaug@eos.ncsu.edu, don’t send an email to it ’cause you’ll probably get it returned to you. But, so we were connected to the internet, now, some kids, the rich kids, had a computer at home, we didn’t get that. Yeah, like Trent. Trent had a computer computer at home. Had a computer in high school. So he’s chatting in high school, parents didn’t do that. Talking shit in chat rooms. I did go into his room and get in the chat rooms and talk shit to people, I don’t know why my first inclination was to troll when I went into a chatroom. Well that’s because that’s what he did, so that’s what he showed you, you could do. Right, I thought that was the limit of the possibilities. It was fun for him. So you got this connectivity. He also had a bathroom. In his room. In his room, well, not in it, he had his own bathroom connected to it, he had a freaking master bedroom, bath. His room was so big. His room was so big, he had a couch in his bedroom. My room and your room, I don’t know whose room was smaller, but both of them were very tiny. Your room was smaller. And you had a bathroom, it was the guest bathroom. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I had a Jack and Jill. You didn’t have a Jack and Jill, a Jack and Jill goes to another bedroom, you had a guest bathroom that could be entered, exit. I had a Jack and exit. Yeah, it could be entered from the hallway. Well, I guess, that is how I used it in high school. No, I would enter from my bedroom and then there would be another door and I’d exit out that door, and I could go out another door into the carport. Right, yeah. I don’t know where we were going with that. You didn’t even have a carport, my friend. No, first of all, you had a brick house. Yeah. That had a car port and you had your own bedroom, I mean bathroom, I had to share a bathroom with my brother, my room was super tiny, in fact it was actually, it had a slant in it that I couldn’t even stand up in half of it. Yeah, I said your room was smaller. And we didn’t have a garage or a carport and we had vinyl siding. Vinyl siding, you took a lot of pride in that. But we had a second story and we live closer to the country club, and so it felt richer. You had steps. It felt like, I can see the country club, so we feel rich. You had a deck, I didn’t have a deck. You had a courtyard, almost. I had a concrete patio, I had a slab. Oh yeah, yeah, I was thinking about your other house, where you had the nice courtyard. Yeah, but I’m talking post-divorce. You had a big deck, but you never. Spent time on it? Spent time on it. What are you talking about? I spent all kinds of time on that deck. No you didn’t, when I would go out on that deck it would be covered in tree refuse. Well they didn’t do a great job of cleaning it up, but I went out there a lot. Acorns and twigs. My dad grilled out there. It was dilapidated, man. You didn’t know what you had. I think you’re remembering it late in the cycle. A tree fell on it, one time, and they left it that way for much too long. Well that should tell you something, yeah, see? It was neglected. But see, that’s why we’re Xennials, man, because our parents let trees fall on the deck and just left it. Here’s the thing, not only did this sense of connectivity happen as you were becoming an adult, which, we’ll explore what that feels like and what that means, but also, the feeling that we were no longer safe, happened when we were adults. 9/11, for most Americans, represents the moment in which you were like, whoa, whoa, hold on. I grew up thinking that the chances of something outside of our country affecting us was literally foreign, it was like, this can’t happen, what are you talking about? We’re totally safe and protected. 9/11 happened, it changed security around the world, but for Americans, there was lots of places in the world they were already like, yeah, welcome to the party, guys, it’s not safe, but for us, it was like, hold on, I just got married, I got married in June of 2001, 9/11 happened September of that year. So you’re thinking you’ve moved into this part of your life where you’re thinking about starting a family and bringing children into a world that no longer feels safe and secure. And so I think that those two things are what makes Xennials feel like they don’t connect, ’cause millennials, of course it’s not safe, they knew that from the beginning, 9/11 happened when they were kids, they’ve grown up in the midst of a never ending war, so violence is just an accepted part of the way the world works. But also, that violence and exposure to it is enhanced because of the connectivity that they had as kids, they got cell phones as kids, they’re on the internet, they’re fluent in internet connectivity from the very beginning, so they see it all happening. They have friends in other countries. Right. Because of video games. And we may have had a pen pal through school, but they didn’t do that at Buies Creek Elementary. And it does make me think, is there a pre and post-COVID thing that’s gonna happen with the. Alphas? Well, with our, what are our kids called? Zs. Yeah, Generation Z. Yeah, I’m sure that’s impacted them in some way, yeah, because, hate to break it to you, but COVID-19 is just the beginning of global pandemics happening on a regular basis. And unfortunately, there’s just, I was gonna get into the climate change of it all, but it’s just not acute enough to speak of it that way. Yeah. It is for some people in some places. Right. Dependent on the connections that you make, yeah, but for COVID, I mean, I think about Lando, the youngest of both of our kids, as an 11 year old, he’s gonna process things as, I know what it was like for things to be taken away, I know what it was like for my school to be taken away, for my friends to be taken away and he’s rolled with it, but it’s absolutely gonna stick with him. Oh yeah. And for that to happen when you’re a kid, things impact you in a completely different way. It’s just like oh, for kids in 9/11, it’s like oh, the world is a dangerous place, and it’s a replay of that. But it still felt, 9/11 still felt distant, though, as somebody who was in rural North Carolina it was like, well, this ain’t going to happen in Fuquay, but it felt too close for comfort. I was working at IBM, at the time, the research triangle park, there was so much technology focused there in, kind of, a Silicon Valley kind of way, that there were active discussions about not going to work because it could be a terrorist target, so we were talking about not going to the office for that reason and it really changes your thinking. But, as a kid, I think it changes a lot, I also think with the COVID of it all, for our kids, also translates more directly into politics. Of course, with Generation X, with the experience of 9/11, everything was much more partisan, as a result of that. There was an understanding of politics through the lens of 9/11 and now, I think, for our kids, there’s an understanding of politics through the lens of COVID, because it’s so partisan. Right. Versus, when we were growing up, politics was just, we would have mock elections and it would be cool to pretend we were voting for president, but we didn’t feel the impact of a decision the governor made have any direct impact on you, as a person. And the combination of those things, the combination of feeling less safe and then the awareness of what contributes to feeling less safe because of the access to information. I talked about it in my deconstruction story, that the biggest thing that impacted me, and this is impacting lots of people who come from, sort of, any kind of ideology, any sort of religious ideology, political ideology, that you were raised in a certain set of principles that may or may not necessarily reflect the truth, but they are the truth, capital T, to you and your community. And for most of human history, you’ve been able to maintain an adherence to that capital T truth for your entire life, without it being challenged or examined. So you point to the internet. Unless you go to get a graduate degree in a particular thing, but yeah. College was really that place where it’s like, well. And I’m talking less about college and I’m saying that now you get access to that level of information, just by going on the internet. We’ve got a friend who did not go to college, who I consider my most educated friend, because that information is available online, at this point, you gotta be good at navigating that, but I think that that, sort of, was the beginning of my personal deconstruction. But I think that that is what, I was doing some reading as a lot of people see millennials, and I have been guilty of this, on my own, millennials as entitled, right? They seem entitled, they expect too much and they don’t wanna work as hard, and I don’t necessarily think that that’s true, but I think they have that reputation and I have found myself falling into believing those stereotypes. But I was reading this article in Inc. magazine and, basically, this person was explaining this from this perspective, “The connected world has empowered millennials to take ownership, to take ownership, Glassdoor and LinkedIn allow ownership of one’s career, YouTube allows ownership of one’s content, Instagram and Snapchat allow ownership of one’s personal brand, Netflix allows ownership of one’s content consumption.” You could go on and on, Spotify, you got your own music, et cetera. “The internet has offered millennials personalization and customization at every turn of their lives and now they expect the same control at work and in their careers.” So if you, ’cause, again, if you go back to Generation X, they grew up where they had three channels, you watch the movie that your parents decided to rent, you may or may not have had any say in it, depending on the structure of your family. I remember getting 34 channels but, still. You had cable, brick house, cable, bathroom. Yeah, you didn’t have cable? No, my parents got cable when I went to college! I remember coming home after my freshman year and they had gotten cable, I was like, what is this? And then I was flipping through the channels and I got to a channel that was scrambled. You know what, Rhett? You had a brother. Let me explain this. Okay, okay. I went back home. I had cable, I had Nickelodeon. And there was a scrambled channel, and there was a pair of boobies in the corner. Boobs in the corner? And it was scrambled, but I could hear the sounds of a woman. Okay. Period, that’s it, I’m not gonna say what she was doing, but you can imagine. And I was like, well, what is this? Who do I call to unscramble this? This is when you came home from college? Yeah! And then I figured out that if you watch this particular channel at a certain time, they would put on a movie that was not family friendly and then they would scramble it, and sometimes the guy who was making the scramble decision would be two minutes late, and you’d get two minutes of unscrambled boobies. If they were the beginning of the movie. And they were pretty immediate with the particular movies that I was watching. As a college freshmen. I think that was it, it was shortly after going off to college, they got cable and they got the scrambled booby channel. Yeah, you talk about the level of access now, it’s like. Yeah, think about how easy it is to see boobies if you wanna see ’em now, right, it is so different. And so I think, I’ve got into discussions, my dad is now retired, he was a law professor for many years, he retired this year and I really enjoyed going home and talking to him about the students. Now, he had a reputation for being a very difficult, but very good, professor, most students really liked him but if you were not on top of it, you might hate him, because he was a difficult professor. But he always, from the very first time I ever talked to him about the exams that he would be grading over Christmas or around the holidays, he was always complaining about, it didn’t matter what year it was, he was always like, ah, they just don’t understand. And every year it felt like they just, they really don’t understand, he was becoming an old man and his classes were staying the same age, and he was seeing the generations, through X and through Xennials into millennials. And we had some interesting conversations, ’cause I was like, yeah, you might get frustrated that your students don’t seem as committed to understanding this particular thing in this way, or they don’t seem as capable of this, but have you thought about how they can actually see things in this way, because they’re more connected thinkers, or whatever. The generations just change, but I find myself sometimes thinking like, yeah, they are entitled, they just think that they should get whatever they want but you gotta understand, you gotta gotta pay your dues, you gotta work for what you get. And I think this is an interesting theory, you live in a world of customization, where it’s just my phone, if you pull up my phone it represents my tastes in everything, my digital world is curated, my apps are curated according to my tastes and that’s a fascinating way to think about now, how does that not transfer over into the way that you see the world? Yeah, absolutely, it ironically, and we talked about this recently, technology enables a level of connection, but then it’s increasingly incentivized to set up a customized experience, just for you, that creates insulation and isolation, and that’s happening more and more, algorithmically, right? We talked about “The Social Dilemma” documentary, we don’t have to go back there, the early internet, it was just more of volitional connection, now it’s volitional isolation, because that’s the internet that we experienced, and then you realize the ways you’ve been hoodwinked. Again, I’m just thinking out loud at this point, becoming an adult before you had those opportunities for customization and isolation through your connectivity, ’cause I think that Xennials and even Generation Xers, and even boomers, for that matter, might be more susceptible to addiction to their phones. I know everyone’s kind of addicted to their phones, but I don’t necessarily know, ’cause I feel like the older you are, the more it kind of snuck up on you. If you’re a Generation Xer, it’s not that you’re not completely consumed by your phone, it just means you can remember a time that you weren’t, but does that mean that you’re less susceptible to it? Are our kids gonna have better tools to manage and to deal with? I was saying that every 43 year old plumber in America. Has an iPhone? Yeah, but they’re not all equally addicted to Facebook or Instagram. But that’s why it’s a cusp, there’s a gradient and at 43, you’re technically into Generation X, and so you may not be, but I’m just saying that a very high percentage of 43 year old plumbers have a curated digital experience, just like anybody else. Yeah and I’m thinking the technology has such an impact on who we are as people, it has defined these generations in a lot of ways. I think about, even if you look at something like our parents, trying to teach our parents about using a phone, or even using computers, they didn’t have computers in the house, there was this distrust of it, I’m not gonna put my banking information on there, I’m actually not even gonna click on this thing, because what if it’s messed up? And you’re just like, anything you click on, you can undo, they didn’t even understand that, so there was this suspicion associated with it. But then, with our generation, we were the ones who had to make the decision to start trusting and to give more of ourselves over to the internet, and now the generation after us reap the problems and the benefits of once you do give yourself over to it completely, what can happen. And then there starts to be, I think there’s now another wave of, hopefully, pulling back and saying, okay, maybe I’m not gonna accept all these cookies and I’m gonna know how these ads are working, I’m gonna get beyond the magic of this in order to know what proper boundaries are for myself. There’s a level of skepticism that, I think, is coming back in now. Is that skepticism coming from the millennials or the Zs themselves? I don’t think so, I think if you watch “The Social Dilemma”, most of this pushback and sort of gut check that’s happening around social media. Is from us. It’s happening from the millennials and the Xennials, and the Generation Xers who developed the platforms. Yeah. And are seeing what’s happening to their children and getting very worried about their own children, and just getting worried about the state of the world. I can’t remember where I saw this, but somebody was talking about how there’s this sort of trope that these Generation Zers are so tech savvy, and this was a millennial who was saying this, and they were like, actually, they’re not, being able to make a TikTok video and operate an app on your phone, is not tech savvy, it’s app savvy. Tech savvy is knowing about the underlying features of the thing that you’re interacting with, knowing how to write code, that kind of thing, obviously, that’s happening across all generations. But there was this little bit of like, guys, they’re not actually that tech savvy, they actually don’t care about specifications and technology as much as people who are a little bit older than them, their apps and their phone is an extension of themselves. Think about the way that you interact with your kids, if there’s a computer issue at home, who addresses the computer issue, you or your kids? Who is the most equipped to deal with something happening with a computer at home? Lincoln started building his own computers and then he broke his computer, he fried his motherboard, and I was in the room when he did it, it was quite a learning experience, the sound that he made when he realized that he had touched his motherboard and fried it. Did it smoke? It didn’t smoke, no, it just ceased to work entirely. When was this? And he was like, a month ago, and he looks at me, and I’m just like, I’m just in here to pet the dog, dude, I got nothing. So he’s building a PC? Yeah, like a gaming PC, but he had to figure that out on his own, yeah, but I still had to teach him a little bit, you have to Google what just happened. I think I just fried my motherboard, Google that, you know? Yeah, Locke almost got into the computer building phase, I don’t know if I encouraged it or discouraged it, I don’t remember, but he thought he was gonna do that, I was like, okay, good, just let me know when you want to do it, then it never came to fruition. Lincoln’s saving all his money for the next component now, that’s what he’s into. Okay, well. And I thought that was a good thing. Yeah, for sure. Because I can’t help him and he’s so into it, that he’s gotta figure it out himself, it’s ironic because I worked for a company that built computers. When I worked for IBM and we would refurbish every type of computer that they made, they would refurbish Dell computers and then resell them to businesses, strange, laptops, servers, desktops, everything, even peripherals, peripherals. Did you learn anything? Is that what you’re getting at? I just designed the conveyor belts and stuff, computers were still so new to me. I didn’t understand, they gotta zap the ram and then they gotta clean the hard drive. Gotta zap that ram. I had no clue what this stuff was. Well, I guess what I’m saying is, if you have an interaction with your parents and I have an interaction with my parents, about a computer, there is clearly someone who is the expert and someone who is not. Yeah. But when it comes to our kids, I just don’t think it transfers, it’s not as clean cut, it’s not like. No it’s not. Oh, they’re younger, so, therefore, they know more. I thought that’s what you were getting at, but you’re not. I’m saying that’s not the case, that’s one of the things We’re still burdened with IT issues, you and I, in our homes, is what you’re saying? Yes. Whereas, my dad’ll call me and I literally talked to him for 30 minutes about his his cable internet. You know what it’s like? When I was 16, 17, 18, I got my first truck, I didn’t know how to fix anything in it, but it seemed that my dad and my granddad knew how to fix everything with the car. And so if something went wrong with the car, I’d be like, well, you’re supposed to take it to a shop and they’re supposed to fix it, or we’d get a new one, if it’s too messed up. That’s how our kids are with computers and phones, my phone doesn’t work anymore, well have you reset the computer, have you restarted it? Have you wiped your phone clean? Things that we know how to do because we came up having to figure out all of that stuff, ourselves. Just last week. They just want to throw it away and get a new one. But our parents, our parents could fix cars. Fix stuff, yeah. They could fix cars in the same way. So Locke did the same thing, he comes to me, my phone screen is just blinking, it won’t turn on, and, of course, he ended up getting a replacement because we’ve got insurance on it. But the diagnosing of that issue and getting on the phone with tech support is Daddy’s job, right. Again, I think that that’s a generational thing that my parents would have made me figure it out, probably, and I probably should’ve also done the same thing, but I digress. We had to learn how to change the oil, you change the oil in your car yourself, right? A couple times. At least a couple of times. But the point you’re getting at. I change the oil in my truck all the time. There’s an observation that somebody made, which is one of the things that has, and I don’t know exactly the cutoff for this, but for the majority of human history your parents, the generation before you, was wiser about everything that you could be wise about, everything, you know what I’m saying? You were basically an apprentice to the next generation because technology was introduced so slowly, there were certain exceptions, but it wasn’t moving like it is right now, there were not these seismic shifts in technology and the way that people live. And so, as a younger person, an older person had all the knowledge that you could ever hope to get was contained in a person who was older than you, now. You get an app and then all of a sudden, this app becomes, kind of, the center of your life. Well, the source of the knowledge is not a person. Just as an example. The source of knowledge is not people, the source of knowledge is the internet, it’s something that you can access. And so that’s why, again, I feel this way about the way that I interact with my doctor, I respect my doctor and I think my doctor is schooled and intelligent, and I’m not one of those people that goes in and thinks that I know more about medical things, period, than you, but there are times, and I’m a hypochondriac, so if there’s a specific thing that I’m experiencing, I have this temptation to believe, right or wrong, that I might know more, are you okay? Do I need to diagnose you? Do I need to take you to my doctor? I’m sorry. It looked like you threw water into your mouth and forgot to swallow, that was my experience of what happened, it was like this. I’m sorry, I coughed and then water came out my nose, I’m glad I don’t have a deviated septum. Actually, it could protect you, in that case. I’m just gonna wipe my face. As I was trying to say. Did I break your concentration? Oh gosh. I tend to think that I can know more about a specific thing than my doctor, because I’m like, I don’t know, I don’t know if he’s done this particular research that I just did. And I could be wrong about that, of course, and I’m sure it’s annoying, at times, but that’s why your kids can seem more knowledgeable and smarter than you. And the point that the same article is making is that it creates this interesting sort of contradiction, because, as a millennial or as a Generation Zer, you can have access to this knowledge, but what you don’t have, is you don’t have the lived experience that somebody older than you has, but you have the knowledge that they don’t about a particular thing. That creates this weird dynamic, especially between employers and employees, ’cause you’re like, okay, as an employer, technically have authority over you, to a certain degree, I can say that you get fired, or I can say who gets hired, I can change your job description, or whatever. But you’re coming from the perspective, this is the case with us, it’s like by design, most of the people who work for us know more about the thing that they’re doing for us than we do, right, by design. Yeah. But we’re older, we’ve been doing this for longer, and we’re technically their boss, so it just creates this, and I don’t think it’s that big of a deal in our company, because I think we sort of just, and this is where I think what you were talking about earlier, comes into play, with us being in this particular business, that we sort of move in the world and function day to day within our company, as if we’re also millennials, right? Right, yeah. We don’t walk around like Generation Xers, whatever that would be, but I think that there’s just this reality that probably comes out more in stuff like personal discussions like this, which is we grew up without technology, we had to say, I’m gonna meet you at 3:00 pm, at the graveyard and you just better be there at 3:00 pm, and if you don’t show up, I wait for you, and then I go back home and I call your landline. That does something to you, I’m gonna go camping tonight, I cannot get in touch with my parents, my parents do not know where I’m at, I cannot call them, I cannot contact them. I did not wear a helmet on the way to the river while I was on my bike and my parents don’t care, that does something, when you grow up like that, it does something to you. They just couldn’t care, they worried, all they did was worry. But they didn’t worry that much, they didn’t worry as much as we would worry. If Shepherd’s like, I wanna go walk outside in the neighborhood, I’m like, sure, go do it, but while he’s gone we’re thinking about the fact that he’s gone. You think my parents were thinking about me when I was gone? No! It does something to you, I don’t know what, we’re discovering it as we go. And now with the constant barrage of new technology, tomorrow could present something, and I’m not just talking about all the TikToks of it all, but there’s kind of this spry interaction with anything, anything could happen that could change everything. Stability is, I think, is much more of an illusion. But from a technological perspective, it feels like the thing that will usher in the most change is a physical connectivity to the internet. So like what Elon’s working on with the Neuralink, which I don’t even really understand, you should know, ’cause it’s got link in the name. I don’t really understand how it works and what the potential is, and when that kind of thing could happen, but I just feel like the moment in which you’re interacting with another human and you don’t know whether or not they’re accessing information from their own brain, or immediately accessing the hive or the cloud, again, I don’t know if that’s a hundred years away or whatever, but I feel like that’s gonna be the seismic shift. That’ll be a great divide. Yeah. All right #EarBiscuits. We’ll probably be dead. Let us know what you think. Well, I gotta make a rec, man. I know you gotta make a rec, I’m just saying I wanna know what you think, especially if you’re not an American, we filter all these labels, are very. Oh, for sure. It’s very Amera-centric. Yeah, if you grew up in a place that there was no stable government and you didn’t feel secure from the beginning, it’s like, this is very, and then there’s lots of people who never got access to the technology. I guess they have it now, if they’re listening to this podcast, but yeah, that happened at different times in different places. Let us know, #EarBiscuits, what you think about that? Give me a rec, baby, rec, baby, one, two, three, four. I’m gonna give you a one song rec and this is a band that came up. The thing I love about listening to music with some AI built in, like Spotify, is the suggestions, man, you get a band that you like and the next thing you know, you’re finding another band that you didn’t know about, that you like. Discover the band, Mt. Joy. Were you using Spotify or Apple? Have you switched? Spotify. You switched. Yeah. I’m surprised they haven’t come up for me because I have not listened to Mt. Joy, M-T space Joy? Mhm. Okay. And Philadelphia is where these guys are from but I think they’re LA based now, but the song that I’m going to suggest as a nice introduction to the band Mt. Joy, is “Julia” or Julia, as they say in the song, “Julia”. It’s not their most popular song, according to Spotify, it’s their sixth most popular song, so that’s actually good. Okay, yeah, listen to the sixth most popular song from Mt. Joy, “Julia”. “Julia”, all right, I’m gonna add that to my thing right now. Talk at you next week. Add it to your thing. To watch more “Ear Biscuits”, click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous episode of “Ear Biscuits”, click on the playlist to the left. And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. If you prefer to listen to this podcast, it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms, thanks for being your mythical best.