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This is the Ted Radio Hour.
Each week, groundbreaking Ted Talks.
Our job now is to dream big. Deliver it at Ted Conferences.
To bring about the future we want to see.
Around the world. To understand who we are.
From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
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Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves why is it not worthy?
And even change you. I literally feel like I'm in different verses.
Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.
From Ted and NPR.
I'm Manouch Zomerodi.
The United States has long pitched itself as the land of opportunity.
A place where if you work hard, sacrifice, you can build a better life for yourself
and for your children and your children's children.
I think that's right. I don't even think you thought about it. It was just a given.
This is Scott Galloway.
When my parents came to the US on a steamship, 150 quid each.
And there was just a natural assumption that given the opportunity that America offered that
you would just inevitably end up doing better than your parents, I was just part of the American
Compact. It was definitely the case for Scott. He's now a professor at New York University,
a popular podcaster and bestselling author.
And he's written a lot about the success of America's brand of capitalism,
the rise of the middle class through the last century, the spread of wealth and financial stability
to more people. But now Scott says that American Compact that each generation will prosper more
than the previous one, it is broken.
I'm at the end of World War II. About 92% of children did better than their parents by the time
they were 30 economically. For the first time, it dipped to 50%. So now it's coin flip.
So for the first time in our nation's history, it's no longer a given that someone that your kids
will be better off than you at the same age or at the age of 30.
The latest generation of young adults, Gen Z, have come of age with crushing student debt,
unattainable housing and stagnant wages.
And my thesis is that these have been purposeful decisions. That the economy has actually been
incredibly robust the last 30 or 40 years. Our growth has been consistent if not remarkable.
And every year we figure out a way for the markets to go up in value. But we have purposely
transferred wealth and opportunity from young people to old people. So who on stocks and houses?
People my age. Who makes their money from current income or working at a job and rents young people.
That's nothing but a naked transfer of wealth and prosperity from young to old.
You're constantly working in for what? You can hear the anguish playing out all over social media.
I cannot envision ever owning a home. Increasingly between random cute dog videos,
there are clips of young people who are deeply distressed, angry,
struggle to survive right now. That so much of the economy seems stacked against them. Every day
for the past eight years has been nothing but an absolute living nightmare.
Of course, the young and old have always had misunderstandings and tension.
But many of us are left wondering, has that disconnect gotten worse? Today on the show,
Generation Gaps, ideas about sharing wisdom and prosperity and the unexpected benefits of building
compassion between Gen Z, boomers, and everyone in between. So back to Scott Galloway.
Okay, I start us with a question. Do we love our children?
Here he is on the TED stage. Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well,
I'm going to try and convince you otherwise. Essentially, as we go down generations,
we're seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation
adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education
continues to skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated.
To age, simply put, as we get younger, we're taking away opportunity and prosperity from our
youngest. As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than
one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary.
Righteous movements cuts to our society and end up becoming opportunistic infections,
because generally speaking, young people have a warranted envy, they're pissed off,
and they're angry that they don't enjoy the same spoils and prosperity that were provided to our
generation. A decent proxy for how much we value use labor as minimum wage, and we've kept it
purposely pretty low. If it had just kept basic productivity, it'd be about 23 bucks a share,
but we've decided to purposely keep it low. Out of reach, median home price,
the skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average
mortgage payment was $1,100. It's now $2,300, because of acceleration and interest rates,
and the fact that the average home is gone from $290,420. Why? Because, guess what, the
incumbents and own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrance to
ever get their own assets thereby elevating their own net worth.
This is resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth, where people over the age of 70 used to
control 19% of household income, versus people under the age of 40 used to control 12.
Their wealth has been cut in half. This isn't by accident, it's purposeful.
Consciously purposeful, or how did this happen?
Well, the demo and democracy is working really well, and that is old people vote for
even older people who vote themselves more money. So the child tax credit, which would
positively benefit not only children, but working age mothers, say in their 20s or 30s,
gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill. It would cost somewhere between, you know,
probably about $30 billion, but the $145 billion per year fixed increase cost of living
adjustment and social security flies right through. So we now spend about 40% of our total government
spending on programs for seniors. That's the greatest it's been in history, but way to get
worse in 10 years at the current rate, it's going to be over 50%, meaning the majority of our
government spending and tax revenues will go to program supporting seniors. In this crowd's
out investments in technology and in education and things that are a little bit more forward,
leaning show a great return on investment and quite frankly benefit younger people. So our
democracy, if you will, is working well, but it's a series of older people voting themselves more
money. Old people vote? I guess what I find confusing about this is I recently read in the New
Yorker that since 2020, US growth per person has been more than 2% and that actually people in
their 20s are richer than prior US generations were at their age. So why doesn't it feel that way
for younger people? So I think the study you're referring to is the following. There's some nuance
here. And that is we have basically a kind of design guys in this goes to cultural moors. We have
decided to embrace a winners and losers economy or a hunger games like economy. And that is the good
news is if you think it's good news is that there are now millionaires in their 30s when I was growing
up and I mentioned when you were growing up that you didn't really hear about that. So the actual
number of people in the top 10% that numbers got much higher. But if you look at the quote-unquote
bottom 90, the vast majority of these individuals two things have happened. Their purchasing power has
gone down inflation and housing inflation and education to things that young people say for and
need to get ahead have skyrocketed and their wages on an inflation adjusted basis have consistently
gone down. I used to make on inflation adjusted basis people in my generation made 85,000 and 20
years ago 65,000. This is at the age of 25. Now it's about 55,000 dollars. And so you have a lot of
young people who've essentially given up on buying a home. The travel industry is booming. In my thesis
is that people have just given up on saving for a house and so they pick up and head to Thailand for
a month. They go to Coachella. So live events and travel have never been stronger. But people are
struggling to kind of cover I think the basics of the essentials whether it's getting a college
degree paying up their student debt, saving for a home or deciding to have a child.
The Great Intergenerational Theth took place under the auspices of a virus. I know let's use the
greatest health crisis in the century to really speedball the transfer. This is the NASDAQ from 2008
to 2012. We let the markets crash. And by the way you need churn you need disruption because it
seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from the incumbents to the entrance. It's a natural
part of the cycle. But wait, lately no, a million people would dying would be bad but what would
be tragic is if we let the NASDAQ go down and guys like me lost wealth. So we pump the economy
which again increased the massive transfer of wealth. The best two years of my life, COVID,
more time with my kids, more time with Netflix and my value of my stocks absolutely exploded.
And who has to pay for my prosperity? Not me, future generations who will have to deal with an
unprecedented level of debt. Key to getting wealthy or establishing some wealth as a younger person
is that in 2008 as an example we allowed the markets to fall. We bailed up banks but we didn't
bail out the economy. And guys like me who were coming into the prime income earning years got to
buy Netflix at $12. It's at 600 now got to buy Amazon at $8. It's at 180 now. So when you bail out
the boomer owner of a restaurant all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26 year old
recent graduate of a culinary academy who wants her shot to buy a restaurant on the cheap
disruption is a cycle and a churn that seeds advantage from incumbents to entrance. And what we've
decided is to borrow young people's credit cards to ensure that the incumbents stay rich.
And so it seems like my generation of the people in power have lost a general view that it's
their responsibility to invest in the future and invest in the middle class. I think politics
have become very much I need to get mine. This happens across the entire ecosystem in my industry.
Every year we take pride in rejecting more and more applicants meaning that the incumbents who
already have degrees see the value of their degrees go up when I applied to UCLA was a 76%
admissions rate this year. It'll be nine when you own a home you get very concerned with traffic
and you show up to the local review board and make sure no new housing permits are approved.
We have one and a half million fewer homes than we need for household formation which again
has taken the value of homes way up. So we have embraced this rejectionist exclusionary culture
that crowds out the opportunity for entrance. But at some point all the old rich people are going
to die. Is there going to be a redistribution of wealth happening then? So a lot of people will say
but Scott you're about to see the most massive transfer back to young people in the form of
inheritance. I would argue that's a really unhealthy way to live life and build a society. What you're
talking about is down the abbey that oh you don't need to work or worry because you're going to
inherit this estate. Waiting around for your mother and father to die so you can buy a home
and have a family is just not a way to live a life. Two thirds of billionaires are self-made. 78%
of new millionaires are self-made and that's one of the wonderful things about America.
So this notion that oh don't worry that I'm getting at my undue spoils that I've gotten wealthier
on your credit card as at some point you will get it. I just think that's a terrible excuse
does not build a healthy society and quite frankly doesn't work and just results in
dynastic dynamics that the American culture has tried to avoid.
When we come back, Gen Z protests online and across college campuses. Scott Galloway claims
they're ultimately fueled by deep economic uncertainty and he has solutions. On the show today,
Generation Gaps. I'm Manouch Zomerodi and you're listening to The Ted Radio Hour from NPR. Be right back.
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It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manou Shzumarodi. On the show today generation gaps. What older
and younger generations can learn from each other and what seems to be tearing them apart.
We were just talking to NYU professor Scott Galloway. Scott says younger generations can't
afford to pay off their debt by a home, invest in retirement and he blames older generations for
withholding financial opportunities from them. The effects he says are more than just economic.
Well, the repercussions are at a very basic level disappointment and rage. A lot of these folks
are living at home. A lot of them have been told the whole life they can do anything. And then
that 210 times a day they get a reminder of their failure on their phones with a series of notifications
where people vomit their personal possessions and amazing lives that they're supposedly
leading and they're reminded every day that they're not doing well and also there's a false
impression out there that everyone is vacationing at the almond hotel and owns a Ferrari. And if
you don't have all of those things that you're somehow failing, it creates incendiary that is
poured over every issue. So I would argue in large part what's happened on campuses in the United
States isn't about the Middle East. It's about America. Whether it's the Me Too movement, whether
it's Black Lives Matter, all of these movements have righteous justification for concern and
engagement among our youth. But what turns every cut into an opportunistic infection and then
gangrene is the fact that young people aren't doing as well. And I think it just creates a general
level of rage. I'm curious, you know, what young people think when you link their dissatisfaction
with life and what feels like really big gaps between the generations. How do they respond when
they hear these things? I get a lot of support for young people. I'm not sure they appreciate me
telling them that the reason you're protesting is you're angry about your economic situation.
I think that sometimes that feels like I'm infantilizing or patronizing them. But what I've
generally the feedback is, you know, thank you, you said the quiet part out loud. And who I really
hear from is parents. If you're a boomer or if you're say not even boomer, but you're Gen X and
you've done well and you see your kid, your kids are good kid. She's worked hard. She's graduated
from the right schools and her and her fiancee have been saving for a house for 10 years.
And they just have given up. They can't buy a house. They're thinking about not having kids.
It's just not viable for them. I mean, this is what you want. The whole point of an economy is to
create a middle class. The whole point of a middle class is to create a thriving society, a democratic
society that's prosperous. But the reason we all want prosperity at the end of the day when we
get a little bit older is we want our kids to do well. What can we do? Nothing wrong with America,
the can't be fixed with what's right with it. We got the hard stuff figured out. We have the money.
Things are doable. We increase minimum wage to 25 bucks an hour. It goes into the economy.
The wonderful things about low and middle income households as they spend all their money. We have
to have a restore or a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and
wealthy individuals. We need to refund the IRS. We need to reform social security. It should be
based on whether you need the money, not on how old you are. We need a negative income tax. My
friend, Andrew Yang screwed up a great idea. He branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI,
he should got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax.
We need to eliminate the capital gains tax deduction. When did we decide that the money the
capital earns is more noble than the money that's sweat earns? Shouldn't it be Flix? We need universal
pre-K. We need to reinstate the expanded child tax credit. We need income-based affirmative action.
Expand college enrollment and vocational programs, mental health,
ban phones and schools, investment third places, big brothers and sisters programs. We need
national service. We need to tell people in the United States and Canada that they live in the
greatest countries in the world. We need to remind them of that every day by exposing them to other
great Americans where they feel connected to you. We can do all of this. We can do all of it. We have
the resources. The question is, do we have the will? This is my last slide. It is an emotionally
manipulative slide to try and get you to like me more. There's a moment in your TED Talk when you
put up a slide of yourself and one of your boys at a sporting event. But it does have a message.
This is the whole shooting match. Anybody here without kids, ask someone with kids. Your whole
world sings a string to this. And you got pretty emotional up on stage. And you laid a lot of guilt
on the people in the theater. You asked them, you know, do we love our children in applying that
in the theater? If we do, they need to make changes. Well, minutia of children. I do.
So without knowing you or your children, I'm fairly confident that you love your children.
I bet you are fairly confident. I love mine. The question I ask is, do we love our children?
In that, is have we entered an economy where it's sort of a winner take most attitude and everyone's
grabbing for their own? We ignore because we're all, believe we're going to be in the top 10 percent
that's never done better than previous top death styles that will be in that top 10 percent.
And we're not willing to make the sacrifices and the hard decisions such that other people's children
who might be in the bottom 90 do better. I think that America has kind of lost the script. And that
is what is the point of any of this? You know, on your radio hour, you're going to talk about AI.
You're going to talk about the environment. You're going to talk about the climate. Anyone who has
kids, something comes off the tracks with one of your kids. You're not thinking about the climate.
You're not thinking about AI. You're thinking about that kid.
An economic anxiety is someone who went through economic anxiety as a kid. I can tell you,
we aren't treating our children well. We aren't treating other kids well. The resting blood
pressure of kids in low income homes is tangibly higher than kids in middle and upper income homes.
There are more kids depressed, more admissions of self-harm, more anxiety. So the question is,
what is the point of any of this? If your kid is anxious or depressed, and people have this feeling,
well, I'm going to be successful. I can take care of my kids. Okay, I know you love your kids,
but do we love our kids? That was Scott Galloway. He's a professor of marketing at New York University,
and the host of Pivot and the professor G Pod. His latest book is called The Algebra of Wealth,
a simple formula for financial security. On the show today, Generation Gaps,
we want to go now to another problem that younger generations are inheriting. Climate change.
In many places, a warming planet means finding new ways to grow food that can survive extreme weather.
So our next speaker assumed that today's farmer has little use for the agricultural wisdom of old,
until the science proved her wrong. Our story starts in a kitchen in the Philippines.
My grandma, she is an incredible cook, and we treat the kitchen like it's a living room. That's where we talk,
and that's why I fell in love with cooking.
Louise Maboullo is 25 and an award-winning chef and entrepreneur. She grew up in a small farming town,
and started learning about cooking and food at a young age.
My grandparents would serve me a nice steaming cup of hot chocolate that they'd grown from their farms,
and my dad would be like, well, it came from this gorgeous bright red pod,
and then your grandmother sucks on the seeds individually and dries them in the sun,
and then we would roast it and turn that into chocolate.
So my grandparents grew things intuitively, and how they've learned from their own grandparents,
and all that ancestral knowledge has been passed down to them.
Some of the things she learned struck her as kind of ridiculous.
My grandfather would be in a rice field and be whistling, because it's a hot day,
and he wouldn't say, you know, the whistle attracts a good breeze, or they'd grow like,
wow, you have so many harvests of the cow today. And they'd be like, yes, it's because, you know,
we planted this tree during the foaming, and that makes a lot more fruit.
And another odd piece of advice was planting a rock under your root crops and sweet potatoes,
or even under your trees. Over the years, I was like, why do we do that?
It makes no scientific sense. And they just feel like, I don't know, every time I just do that,
it's sweeter. And at the time when I heard these things, it was always, oh, this is just something
that my grandma, a grandpa would say, you know, it's, well, grandma's just crazy, some other wives' tale.
At the age of 12, Louise didn't care much about farming, but she started entering cooking competitions,
and winning. She went on TV cooking shows. By 17, she was a trained chef, hosting dinners in cities
around Asia, and building an online following. I became a farm to table type of chef, where I would
highlight where these ingredients came from and the stories of the people who brought them to your
tables. And then after some time, I started growing ingredients myself. And that was when I started
really getting into farming and caring about how food was grown. But in 2016, Louise learned how
unpredictable the life of her fellow local farmers was when a typhoon struck the Philippines
and her hometown. Her family was safe, but the farmlands surrounding them were destined.
The marine ashore is now under a state of calamity. We lost 80% of our agriculture lands and its
productivity. The farmers that I've been working with, most of them were impacted. And I thought to
myself, this is a huge disastrous existential crisis for my community and for so many people across
the Philippines, how can we address this? And I had a platform and the ability to do something.
So first it was providing seeds and vegetables and plants that the farmers could use to start
making an income again and rebuild their farms. But over time I thought this kind of aid system
is just very temporary. Louise wondered if she could turn this emergency into an opportunity
for herself and those farmers. There's a root cause of this and its climate change and
weather disasters. How can we build resilience within these livelihoods so that they're not
experiencing storms every year and recovering from them every year?
They noticed some native plants, like cacao, had no trouble recovering.
They were also very resilient to these storms. And so she wondered whether doubling down on cacao
as a crop was a longer term solution. There were so many pathways and opportunities for people
to build resilient livelihoods from different steps of growing cacao.
Wild cacao trees grow easily in this region. Local people, like Louise's grandma,
harvested them to make cacao and chocolate. But no one there was making money off of cacao.
These farmers were selling more fragile crops like rice, coconut and corn.
Right. And over time I realized through these conversations that many of these farmers were
just growing these because that's what they knew how to grow. And they hadn't thought of
maybe expanding or trying other things. And so that's when I built the cacao project to build
sustainable and resilient livelihoods for farmers and the Philippines.
The cacao project's goal was to help local farmers integrate cacao into their usual crop
rotation. The first step, giving farmers cacao tree saplings and convincing them to be part of
her idea for a cacao business. So we created farmer field schools where we train farmers on
building resilience. And so far we've worked with over 200 farmers and have planted more than
250,000 trees across our municipality. What did local people farmers think when you started
getting into this whole agriculture thing? Were they like, you know, who's this
young hot shot? Or are they like, great, let's have some fresh blood in this. I'm so curious.
Well, people were very skeptical. I came in, no one wanted to believe a young person getting
into the agricultural field. I didn't have the type of agricultural background that would give
me the credibility to be like, you need to start changing the way you farm. It was a slow process.
I started a little bit, you go to stick a thinking, I think I know a thing or two and I might know
a little better. And then we made a lot of mistakes along the way where it doesn't grow as
productive as it could be. But then that's when we started talking to farmers. Like, how would you
normally farm these things? And they were like, okay, these are the practices that I know. And
a lot of these practices that my grandparents were teaching me were coming up over and over.
They were like, yeah, no, no, we just just do these things. It'll work out.
Louise Mabulow continues from the Ted State. And as I was talking to these farmers,
these crazy stories started resurfacing. And I said, okay, hang on, hang on. Maybe they're onto
something here. So together with our farmers, we started trying it out. Okay, let's plant some
rocks here and see what happens. Okay, let's plant according to the lunar cycles. And for some reason,
every single time that we would do that, it would work. When we plant rocks under sweet potatoes,
they were better, sweeter, just more delicious. Every time we planted according to lunar
cycles, we'd have delicious harvest. And I thought maybe what if all of these weird stories
are just kind of decades of peer review that has passed down from grandmother to grandson,
from father to daughter in the ways that they best knew how. And maybe grandma wasn't so crazy
after all. Now, over the years, I've trained with farmers and we make sure that learning is a two-way
street where we look at the ways that we can marry practical traditional knowledge techniques
with modern science and know-how so that we could put a spotlight on those simple practical
solutions that react effectively to climate change. And so I like to say I'm more of an intermediary
translating the way that our farmers have grown to the modern world and also translating the modern
world. All these policies and science and ideas to farmers in a way that they understand.
So did you get the science behind the these ancestral methods? For the most part, yes. So when we
were doing these farmer field schools and these trial and errors, sometimes we would have visitors
from universities and agricultural schools. And some of them would explain to us why, like planting
seeds during lunar cycles at a full moon would give you better harvests because insects that were
mating during those times are also our pollinators for cocoa plants. And in terms of asleep potatoes,
it would be because the rocks were moist wet environments attracted worms and all of these little
critters and biodiversity that were beneficial to our soil. And it was just natural fertilizer.
And we would just talk about this in circles over what was the correct way. And true enough,
the aunties and the elderly ladies had the best outcomes every single time and proved us wrong.
So they were surprised when you came back to them and said, actually, you were right.
No, they were not surprised at all. And they were very smug about it. And I never stopped hearing it
for months. You know, it's interesting. When we started talking, I thought that we were mostly
going to discuss how ancestral knowledge gets passed down through generations. But really what I've
learned also is that younger people are carving out roles that didn't exist. Like you, for example,
are on the global stage telling the story of how climate change is affecting these farmers
and how they are surviving building businesses in innovative ways. That feels very new.
Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm trying to do is be this person that tells the stories of
on the ground, but also be able to crack that system for our farmers and it's looking back at that
knowledge of how we used to farm circularly in a way that was good for the community. But also
marrying it with modern day technology and science and understanding. There seems to always be a gap
between high level policies or the concepts of climate change and what we know inherently on the
ground. I was wondering why does that gap exist and I realized maybe it's my role to start connecting
those two parts. All of this knowledge exists in countries and communities and traditions and
stories within our families. And as a young person who works in the environmental field,
I think it is so cool to have that kind of responsibility to carry this knowledge onto the next
generation because maybe the solutions to our climate crisis, maybe the next big fix all,
maybe it exists in the soils under our feet or maybe it exists in the crazy wild stories of our
grandmother's. And it is such an honor to build something that embodies the wisdom of our
communities, over families and of our landscapes over years and generations. That was the founder
of the Cacao project, Louise Mabulo. You can see her full talk at Ted.com. On the show today,
Generation Gaps, I'm Manouch Zomerodi and you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.
We'll be right back.
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It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR, I'm Manouch Zomerodi. On the show today, ideas about why
generations seem to be drifting farther apart and how we can bring them closer together.
And so now we want to visit a place in Portland, Oregon that is trying to do so by design.
I am the oldest person living here. I'm 91, almost 92. And basically at the age of 80, I had pretty
much lived up my retirement income. And so it was important to me to be in a place where I knew the
Ratton wouldn't be raised. This is Ruth Green and it's very important to me to be able to have
children in my life. And this offered me that. Ruth lives in a community called Bridge Meadows
for families with children and seniors, where each generation looks out for the other.
We have 28 apartments for seniors like myself and we have nine homes for families.
Those aren't just any families. They have children who were once in foster care and now live here
with a relative or adoptive parents. But they also get a small army of elders who want to be part
of their lives. In turn, the elders get a community of younger families who are invested in caring
for them. And especially for me, I'm not alone. If I need to go to the doctor, I can call on five or
six different people. It's difficult to explain, but you're accepted just because you're here and
the friendliness of the people here. It takes a village, you know, I know we kind of overused
that statement, but it truly is the truth. It takes a village. This is Duranda Schubert. She runs
Bridge Meadows and is a pioneer in the field of intergenerational living. 17 years ago, when I
would say the word intergenerational, people's eyes would glaze over. And some folks have said,
oh, you're social engineering things together. I'm like, well, okay, that's the way to think about this.
So you'll see young ones from babyhood all the way up to 18 wandering through our communities.
You'll see parents from 30s to their 60s. And then you'll see elders being a part of the community.
Townhouses for the parents and apartments for the elders. And then there's all circle, this
beautiful courtyard. It's the green space. It's everybody's backyard.
Duranda says all these generations living together, it's the norm in many countries, but not in the US.
There is a huge group of people in our country who have been separated from their families,
because we're able to be mobile. We're able to go seek economic betterment in other places
than where we grew up. Or perhaps where we grew up wasn't a great situation. And so we needed to
find our own chosen family. Bringing together a chosen family made of multiple generations,
Duranda believes it's the solution to a problem these young people are facing.
25,000 kids a year leave foster care without a family. That means they have nothing. They're 18 years
old, they have no family, they have no guidance, they have no housing, they have nothing.
Here's Duranda Schubert on the TED stage. Now I want you to think about yourselves at 18 years old
without a safety net. Could you do it? Let's talk about what this costs our country. It costs
$300,000 per kid. But what's the bigger loss? The bigger losses, they're gifts that they could
give to us. They're gems of wisdom, they're gifts, they're talents, their experiences that we
could all learn from. They end up unemployed and uneducated and in poverty. And that's just
unconscionable, everybody. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a place that had the open
arms of elders to welcome these children home? There is. I mean, I live very close to a number
of housing complexes and looks like all different ages of people live there, but it's not intentional.
What's the difference with what you do? First and foremost, people know that the reason we exist
is to support the children to live safe and abundant lives. So everybody who comes to live at
a Bridgmentos community knows this is our clue. This is why we gather. But this isn't ad water
and suddenly it exists, right? This is a situation in which we create opportunities for families
in elders and kids to come together. So there'll be things like an evening meal that happens on
some regular basis. There'll be activities in the courtyard and over time those relationships
deepen and then people tend to flourish. It's like a circle. And then when things go awry,
you have to have an opportunity for people to repair. We come with our biases, we come with
our life experiences and sometimes it's really tough. Sometimes there's homophobia, sometimes there's
racism, sometimes there's ageism going on. So that is the importance of having therapeutic staff
on hand to address conflict resolution. You know, one of the kids said it's not always, you know,
rainbows and cupcakes and it's true and that's okay because that's what real life is.
Tell me a little bit more, you know, we've heard the stories of being shuffled from foster home
to foster home. What is the situation that makes it so important for these kids to get stability
in their lives? We've really lost a generation to drugs, methamphetamine and now opioids and
fentanyl. And so these children are ended up being in what we say neglectful situations because
of substance abuse issues of their parents. The other reason is mental health conditions that
their parents may have that have gone untreated because they don't have access to mental health care.
And the third reason why children remain in foster care is because their parents cannot find
adequate housing. And we know from research that all it takes is one person caring about a child
or caring about any of us and that can make the difference between making it and not making it
having a successful life or not having a successful life. One of the very, very first families to
move in 13 years ago was a grandma who was raising three of her grandchildren and the fourth one
was about to be born and the home she was living in was not large enough to take the fourth child.
You can't tell a grandma, you can't take the cellular child, right? You cannot say that. And so she
found Bridgmeadows with the help of a caseworker and that baby came home three weeks later and the elders
were on a mission. They were marching across that courtyard to pick up that baby, make food,
pick up the house so that grandma could take showers and get ready. And then she had three other
ones who needed to get ready for school and preschool and all that. And so she had this army.
I called them the grandma brigade. She had this army who eventually became like grandmothers to
these children. They cooked, they cleaned, they held the baby and at one point I said, okay,
somebody needs to put that baby down. He will not know how to walk if you all keep caring that baby.
You all need to put that baby around. Now he's 13 years old. They've had two high school graduates.
One of my favorite pictures is the most recent graduate standing proudly with the grin. He's
just glowing with pride in his graduation regalia and his brothers are all hanging on him all with joy
and then these elders are holding on to him tight with the biggest grins like I did that. I helped with
that. And now he's off to college. So what would you like to see happen? What's the next step that you
want when it comes to intergenerational living? I would like that we all on a personal basis,
look around and say, what does my friendship circle look like? How are my people in my life
of different ages? We watch the elders say to us, wow these kids, it's really difficult to be a child.
These kids have a lot of things to face that I never could think of and you see the empathy and
then you see kids who are like, wow, it's really hard to take out your garbage when your arms and
your arthritis are hurting you. I'm going to go do that. We watch ageism diminish in our communities
and we also watch relationships happen across difference. Wouldn't that be great? That's Dorenda
Schubert. She's the executive director of Bridge Meadows. There are now three Bridge Meadows
communities across Oregon and you can see her full TED Talk at TED.com.
On the show today, Generation Gaps. So earlier we heard Scott Galloway explain why he thinks society
has made younger people feel less secure, more anxious, but writer Anne Helen Peterson has a
different take. In a beautiful essay she wrote in response to the recent campus protests,
she posits that young people have experienced profound grief over the last few years and that we
should actually be heartened by some of their activism. The essay is called The College Students
Keep the Score and we ask her to read an excerpt for you. I've read dozens of pieces on the protest
against the Israeli War on Palestine on campuses across the United States. The best,
like a recent piece from Lydia Paul Green in the New York Times, includes significant time on
the actual ground doing actual reporting, both talking to protesters and working to discern
who's part of the protest and who's an anti-Semitic crank shouting on the corner.
But there are also pieces, like a recent one from the Wall Street Journal titled The Entered
College in Isolation and Leave Amongst Protest, the class that missed out on fun, that situate the
protest as a depressing bookend to a ruined college experience. The conclusion, quote,
college students today are lonelier, less resilient and more disengaged than their predecessors'
research shows. The university communities they populate are socially fragmented,
diminished and less vibrant. The pandemic bruised the psyche of a generation. The politics
seared it. And quote, faculty feel like the overall campus vibe is less, well, collegial.
Despite the current protests on some campuses and recent years, college quads have lost their
town square feeling. University cafeterias at some schools once universal gathering spots for
students, now mostly serve students with bag glenches they take back to their room to eat.
Orlé Meyer, who is the class president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut,
said a lot of institutional knowledge within student clubs was lost during the pandemic.
One such tradition was a walk members of the student government would take as a group before
a meeting. After COVID, someone brought a rope, and now they walk connected, like a group of
preschoolers, she said. The infantilization is striking, but it's also the point.
Readers of the Wall Street Journal already think this generation is a bunch of anxiety-riddled babies.
This piece simply confirms that colleges are making it worse. They indulge students' worst
tendencies. They make them packed lunches. They hire wellness coordinators.
The piece gives scan detention to the sources of all this isolation, social anxiety, and disengagement.
Instead, it glosses over stark realities. It's worth remembering, some of these students ended
up on campus in the fall of 2020, but others had to start college from their bedrooms on Zoom,
still terrified. When they did return to campus, it was to a quasi-surveillance state,
with well-meaning but often arbitrary rules about how many people could gather and for what.
They learned that the best way to keep healthy and out of trouble was to hang out by yourself
in your room. They burned out the same way so many of us did. Their hours marked by switching
from smaller screen to slightly larger ones. How did you feel in the fall of 2020?
I was struggling mightily to concentrate on anything, and I had the benefit of figuring out how
to best concentrate for 20 years. And here these students were, experiencing their first college
lectures over Zoom. They had to find new ways of creating intimacy and community and fun,
and how to fall in love, or how to even figure out what they love. And they did it under significant
prolonged dress, with very little grace extended their way. When institutions did extend grace,
providing the sort of mental health services that save lives, or accommodations for students
battling their own anxiety, it became evidence that college was the source of the problem,
instead of the backdrop for it. There's been so much hand-ranging about the current state of
students, the source of all this disengagement, the causes of such sustained learning loss.
The answer has always been right there. It's the grief. Grief for their weird high school
graduations, of course, and for the family members they lost, and the college experience they imagined.
But they're grieving their inherited reality. I find people will name it the same way they'll name
a hurricane without actually acknowledging its force, as if you could separate the storm from
the devastation and cost. So if these students are less resilient, it's not because they're not
resilient. It's because they were forced to expend so much of that resiliency over the last five
years. Here is a micro-generation that, if we're to listen to the commentary, it is detached
and anti-social thanks to smartphones and disillusioned by coming of age in the middle of multiple
economic, social, political, and viral disruptions. By that logic, these students should be removed
from the world to the point of nihilism. But what we're seeing in these protests is the near opposite.
It's not nihilism. It's activism. These protests aren't taking place on forums or social media.
They're happening in physical space. It's not a disengagement from the world that has largely left
them to fend for themselves. It's a brave, angry, and frequently messy engagement. I look at the
protests and see students funneling their grief in a way that disrupts the narrative of their
own disengagement. And I see them using the tools they were given to fend for themselves during
the pandemic, the surgical mask, to fight surveillance. I see adults, not children, furious about
the inhumane Israeli assault on Palestine, and advocating for their institution's disinvestment in
that war. If you listen closely, they're also mad, righteously so, about so much else,
including the idea that peacefully protesting is ruining their college experience.
I hope students see the headlines about their college experience and understand them for what
they are. Attempts to trivialize righteous anger and grief, of course, but also a displacement
of shame. There is so much we older adults could have done to make these students' lives more
survivable during the pandemic, sure, but also over the course of the last two decades.
We did not. Blaming them comes so much easier than blaming ourselves.
That was writer Anne Helen Peterson, willing to her full essay at npr.org. Her newsletter is
called Culture Study. Thank you so much for listening to our show about Generation Gaps.
This episode was produced by James De La Housie, Chloe Weiner, Harshana Hada and Fiona Gehran.
It was edited by Sana's Mechkin Poor and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel
Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier and Katie Montellone. Irene Ngucci is our executive producer.
Our audio engineer was Carly Strange. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablui,
special thanks to Aaron Scott and Lisa Stinson. Our partners at Ted, our Chris Anderson,
Roxanne Highlash, Alejandra Salazar and Danielle Bellorezzo. I'm Manouch Zomerodi and you've
been listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. On this week's episode of Wild Card,
comedian Taylor Tomlinson explains how you can use fear as a motivating force.
I was afraid that I would get years down the road and go, man, I really wish I had pursued that or
I wish I had developed this town that might have taken me somewhere.
I'm Rachel Martin. Join us for NPR's Wild Card Podcast, the game where cards control the
conversation. I'm Rachel Martin. After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news
can wear you down. So we made a new podcast called Wild Card, where a special deck of cards and
a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful. It's part
game show, part existential deep dive and it is seriously fun. Join me on Wild Card wherever you
get your podcasts, only from NPR. This message comes from crooked media featuring offline with John
Favreau. The former Obama speech writer lets his innate curiosity guide his exploration around
internet culture and its effects. Listen to offline with John Favreau every Sunday wherever you
get your podcasts.
