"you should really get on this thing called facebook like myspace sucks." - [kristen] before facebook was overrun by baby boomers and karens, it was an invitation-only collegiate social network created for millennials by a millennial. - now we're up to 575 or so schools expanding at about 65 schools a week. - mark zuckerberg had launched facebook at harvard. it was an extremely exclusive website. it took a few years for it to explode and become this kind of leviathan that it is today. what was really interesting to me was that that was the first time that i felt the need to curate my image. - facebook listed how many friends you had, which was an automatic sort of power move or hierarchy of like, "oh, this person has 400 friends. they're so popular and cool," or you only have 10 friends or whatever. so it's like quantifying how we view each other and making it a competition led to a lot of problems 'cause

you're not actually yourself. you're this weird performance of yourself. - you had this part of your life that was computer time and that was distinct from your real-life time, but all of a sudden those lines started to blur. - [kristen] pretty much every millennial remembers their first smartphone, whether it was this one or my personal favorite, or if you were really lucky... (crowd cheers) - all of a sudden you could bring facebook into your pocket at school. so that was a huge shift. - [reporter] technology has connected us in a way like no other generation. - you know with social media there's a lot of inherent, you know, status climbing. it's a place to say, look what college i got into, look what job i just landed. look at how successful and smart and great i am. it was really interesting seeing instagram, which was kind of the first platform that influencers were able to monetize and that was something

that millennials uniquely did. - now that's the baseline of any social media. it's like how can this be monetized? how can this help my brand? how can this like help me get discovered? things like that. - as time has gone on, we've begun to see all of the problematic things that the internet is and can be. - [reporter] the government accuses facebook of sharing users' personal information with third party apps. some shared with cambridge analytica, a political consulting firm that worked for the trump campaign. - being a millennial means being born in times of historic firsts, but also great upheavals. assumptions that all innovation's good or that change is always linear and things always get better, have really been questioned. - there is a negative and a dark side to social media, but i think that there is something to be said for the positivity that it serves in bringing people together. the "me too" movement wouldn't exist without social media.

the blm movement wouldn't exist without social media. i think a lot of the anti-war activism that we've all been involved in wouldn't exist without social media and i think for our generation we've lived in a much more interconnected society because of the internet.

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for city council, ended up winning. (crowd cheers) spent four years on city council representing the neighborhood i grew up in, so then i decided to run for mayor. i was 25 when i decided to run and then was elected mayor when i was 26. - i was born and raised in the bronx. i grew up in a public housing development right across the street from trump golf course. i'm richie torres and i'm running for congress because the bronx needs a fighter in washington dc. i was an improbable candidate, openly gay in a borough that had a socially conservative tradition, but i spent a whole year doing nothing but knocking on doors and i won my first campaign on the strength of door-to-door, face-to-face campaigning. - so i came to berkeley to attend uc berkeley and got involved in the issue of the day, which is still the issue of the day, which is the lack of affordable and available housing. being a political activist and pushing for change outside the system, it became very clear that you can make even greater change working within government.

- i'm berkeley mayor jesse arreguin, i'm proud to be joined by-- - i was very inspired by senator sanders and deeply honored that he endorsed my campaign for berkeley mayor. (crowd cheers) - we are going to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%. (audience cheers) - bernie started talking about things that no one else was talking about. eradicating student loan debt, medicare for all. - you can't be for wall street and for the working people of this country. (crowd cheers) - bernie came out of occupy wall street and people understand that they belong to the 99%, right? unfortunately, policymakers have not really been there to catch them and say that they've got their backs, which is one reason why bernie resonates in trump country. he did really well in trump country. - [interviewer] what do you think? i think every american citizen should have healthcare. (crowd cheers) - bernie showed that there was an american youth movement that was consolidating

around the idea that there's no relief for ordinary working class people who get screwed by finance. there were a lot of reasons people wanted him in and i think all of them look prescient now. - [reporter] this is the view at clinton headquarters and those faces say it all. - [tv host] clinton struggled winning over millennials, many of whom flocked to bernie sanders in the democratic primary. - [reporter] secretary clinton has conceded to donald trump. - we sort of have two anti-establishment movements now in the united states. the anti-establishment left, which is long been there and now there's an anti-establishment right, that also wants to tear it all down. i think young conservatives are far more anti-establishment than conservatives were in any previous generation. - the establishment media loves to attack republican women. - the election of donald trump pushed people into other forms of political engagement, not just showing up to local women's march,

but actually running for a local office, which i think is gonna be incredibly important for many years to come. - and make no mistake about it, change is coming yet again. (crowd cheers) - in the 2018 midterms, you saw a huge sweep of overwhelmingly democratic millennial women who came into congress and a lot of them unseated, long-standing, older congress people and one of those women was katie hill out of california. - i was talking to some people and eventually a couple people said, "you should run", and i'm like, "yeah right." but then you know, you think more about it and you're like, "if donald trump can run, there's no rules anymore on who should be able to do it." i'd never actually been involved with a political campaign before. we really just kind of built it from the ground up and it, you know, took off. (crowd chants "katie!") i was the third youngest woman ever elected to congress and

all three of us were in the same year. - the sheer number of women running overall smashing previous records. - we were in a moment for women and for young people and for people who had not previously been engaged politically but who were like, "holy shit, we need to do something." - one thing that i think is continually frustrating and disappointing about being a millennial is our lack of political power. that said, that's starting to shift. - every year you're seeing the number of millennials in congress grow. we have our first millennial senator in john ossoff from georgia. - i, i'm wishing you the best. i want you to succeed and i want to help you to succeed, to fix what's broken. - i'm excited to see a new generation of leadership, an infusion of new energy which is desperately needed in washington dc. - for the millennial generation, so many challenges have been really handed to us. (crowd chants) we can't wait to change the direction of our country.

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aching, stuffy head, power through your day, medicine. power through your day, (soft music) - if you wanted to watch an episode of a television show in the nineties, you had to watch it live. unfortunately i was signed up for these swimming lessons at the same time that she-ra princess of power was airing, and my parents essentially pulled me outta swim lessons because i wouldn't stop crying over missing she-ra princess of power. we would structure our lives around when certain television shows air. - there was something so special about cobbling together your own taste, like it was just whatever was on and that's what became your influence. you weren't curating it, you were just watching whatever you could because it was on. those are the building blocks i guess for my comedy career. ♪ it doesn't matter where you are, ♪ ♪ with nickelodeon there you are, better off by far ♪

♪ nickelodeon (nickelodeon) - [kristen] every generation grows up with tv shows that are intended for them. but millennials, we had our own channels. - nickelodeon like did a really good job of creating entertainment for kids that were centered around their experience. i loved watching, "hey dude". (country music) (laughter) - one of my favorite cartoons was, "hey arnold". i mean i loved helga pataki, she was the best. - what are you looking at, geek-bait? - she was just so mean and she was boy-crazy and i was, that was me. that was the first time i saw, i mean i'm wearing helga socks right now. - of course there was snick which was like, if you were like early teens you would like watch snick. "are you afraid of the dark?" i remember it was like the midnight society and they would

come together and they'd (blows hand). - i call this story "the tale of the quicksilver". - and they were super diverse, which was like very ahead of its time. it was like all you wanted to do was watch other kids who were your age or slightly your age go through life. - those shows created a lot of the stars that are dominating pop culture today. i mean we actually grew up with them. we still see like amanda bynes, we still see like kenan thompson. - oh, you think you bad, don't you? (audience laughs) - i think it's really fun to be able to kind of like grow up with these icons that we had that were just kids like us. (upbeat theme music) - tgif was like a huge part of my childhood. - stay tuned for more tgif. we haven't even broken a sweat yet. - i remember making sure i was there to watch it, especially when "boy meets world" came out 'cause i really felt like, "oh my god, this show they made this show for me." - okay, mister, drop my son's underwear.

(audience laughs) - mom it's me. - how do i know it's you? - who else would want my underwear? (audience laughs) - good point. - [kristen] as we got older and outgrew kids shows we like everyone else, fell for the next new thing, reality television. - i have this theory that part of the response to the trauma of 9-11 was creating an alternate reality. you could escape from these very upsetting things that were going on and there you could watch paris hilton and nicole richie try to live on a farm. here comes "the bachelor" and "joe millionaire" and probably some of the most ridiculous programming that has ever been on television. - well, the tribe has spoken. - in the aughts, this whole idea of attention as its own reward really came into focus. and suddenly it was like me, me, me, me, and i think we saw people getting rewarded for that

endlessly in reality television. so if you were a millennial at that time, you were being weaned on this stuff. you were being groomed watching this stuff in your adolescence. - we watched a lot of reality shows and a lot of them, okay, maybe most of them were guilty pleasures at best. - not to check 'cause i'm a surfer, i say bummer, i don't care if my ride is kind of whack. - [kristen] but it wasn't all trash. - i kind of lost the shape. - does it need to be full length? - no, but i just, i've done all this work on it. - i know, but sometimes you have to let it go. i mean, i'll put project runway and top chef into the category of shows that have real integrity and seriousness of purpose. (upbeat music) - [kristen] the example that took off the most was american idol. - when you entered this competition, did you really believe that you could become your standing on now the american idol? - yes sir. - well then you're deaf. - the key to the show was simon cowell

and his acerbic wit something i had never seen on american television before. someone being told in an audition that they're not good and told in a funny way. - best singer in america? oh yeah, right. i can honestly say you want the worst singer in america. - really? truthfully. that's my first audition, sir. - well, i'm not surprised and it should be your last. - the first finale was kelly clarkson and justin guarini and it was palpable how big it was. that's what i remember feeling with the kelly clarkson moment, which was, it was meaningful. - kelly clarkson! (audience cheers wildly) ♪ people wait a lifetime for a moment like this ♪ - you know that song, a moment like this was perfect and it was so meaningful and i thought this is amazing. ♪ for a moment like this... - [kristen] and the best part was if you missed that moment live, you could go back and see it again anytime you wanted thanks to a sick, new invention, the dvr.

- i no longer have to rush home or be at home at a certain time to watch my favorite shows. (engine revs) - millennials changed television in the normalization of tivo and then dvr and then binge culture. but it goes even further than that. in general, we just have a greater awareness of how stuff is made and who makes it. (theme music x-files) growing up with the x-files, i remember how it shaped my perception of how television is made because i would start paying attention to who was the designated writer on an episode. oh hey, this is a vince gilligan episode. - i heard through the grapevine, fans of the x-files were were gathering virtually and talking every week after each episode and i thought, "oh, that's cool." - [kristen] suddenly shows didn't have to be broad anymore. they didn't have to appeal to everyone.

they could be niche and sometimes those niche shows became a really big deal and launched careers like mine, guys, i'm talking about mine. - wow, this is a little embarrassing. - veronica mars was a fantastic showcase of how great fan-focused writing can really build a fandom. - television just all of a sudden explodes and it becomes this whole different animal and so we were calling it prestige tv. - sopranos, first, the wire, you know, and you even had sex in the city. there's things that you would not have seen on network television. they're taking a lot more risks, there's a lot more violence, there's a lot more sex. care was being given to television dramas. it really changed the whole way that we started watching television. - you can't go home smelling like a meth lab. - yeah, you can. i do. - the idea of "breaking bad" is that this good man becomes a criminal because he has to. and it dawned on me and the writers pretty early in the run

of the series, we thought to ourselves, looking ahead, how are we gonna keep the good man good? and it dawned on us, wait a minute, who says he has to be that good? that was the eureka moment. (thud sound) there was a time in the past you couldn't have done any of this stuff. back in the the golden age, you know, so to speak of tv. how can you not love what's going on? when i was growing up, we had four tv channels and then cable tv came in. now you go from 500 channels to, i mean i don't even know if anyone even at netflix even knows how many shows they have, how many millions of hours of story they've got. it's amazing. (vo) you might be used to living with your albuterol asthma rescue inhaler, but it's a bit of a dinosaur, because it only treats your symptoms, not inflammation. treating both symptoms and inflammation with rescue is supported by asthma experts. finally, there's a modern way to treat symptoms and asthma attacks.

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(light music) - i have a big heart for millennials. they're the biggest generation in american history. that means that whatever they do matters. this was the first generation to say en masse, i don't wanna adult, adulting is scary.

prior to that, the rest of us were like, "yo, i'm an adult. isn't that awesome?" millennials were like, "whoa, wait a minute. i don't know." that's not a ding on them. something changed at a societal level that made millennials afraid. - which feels like we are a generation of folks who just hangs out in between world changing traumatic events. - they're taking longer to get married and have children. but even presenting it this way assumes that those are goals that we should aspire to in the first place. - i think it's great when we don't wanna participate in the status quo, but i think it's funny when the status quo is like, "you're not participating in this thing that we've literally made impossible for you to do and that's your fault." - i guess i don't look at it as a failure to launch. i look at it as a failure of theirs to inspire. it's not cynicism. reality is reality. i think our generation is lucky to have enough inspiration to say, "fuck this, i'm going home."

- i wrote an essay mother's day about having my first baby when i was 25, and there were a lot of reasons that i did that. for millennials, it is increasingly the case that we wait to get married later than our moms. we wait to have kids later than our moms and are in fact waiting the longest of any generation in history to have kids. it's very expensive to have a kid. a lot of millennials feel like they're not settled in their career yet. they don't know where they're gonna be living. they're either not really stably employed such that they have benefits that they could confer to a child as a dependent or they're still in a stage of their career because these major shocks like the financial crisis and the pandemic keep happening to the economy where they're moving around quite a bit and kind of having to take what they can get rather than progressing

in a linear fashion in a single career or company like our parents might have. - [kristen] here's the thing, we didn't fail to launch. it just took us a little longer. millions of millennials have gotten married, just at an older age than our parents did. we've started families and we've bought houses. of course, when we finally did, we were blamed for killing the housing market too. why did my generation wait so long? it wasn't because we didn't want all those things. it was because we were too busy working. - i am a workaholic. every one of my friends who is my same age, we all work insanely long hours in addition to taking care of kids, taking care of elderly relatives, volunteering in the community, and then also making time to like, cook a nutritious meal and exercise and practice self-care.

and so i definitely resist the stereotype that millennials are not working hard and are spending all their time growing silly mustaches and then going to brunch. they're either working three or four jobs at the same time or they have a full-time job and they're like driving uber on the weekends or something like that. - [kristen] unlike the boomers and generation x, our generation was defined for us, not by us. our elders decided who we would be. we were given a script and we stuck to it. but as we grew up and history smacked us in the face, we found ways to adapt to that script. it no longer mattered how those who came before saw us. we learned to define ourselves. so who are the millennials? we're teaching your children, providing your healthcare, programming your favorite websites,

trying to make this country better. the story of our generation? it's still being written. at the time we came of age, we were the most racially diverse adult generation in american history. gen-zers, bless them, are gonna do better than us on that measure. and as a result, i think that we are much more open-minded. we are much more progressive and millennial culture and the politics and art and literature and music and sports that we have created and have been at the forefront of really does reflect that truth. - to be a millennial is to have lived through almost nothing but institutional failure. it's to have lived through 9-11, to have lived through failed wars in afghanistan and in iraq, who have lived through a financial crisis in 2008. millennials are deeply disillusioned with institutions, with government, but what i love about millennials is that members

of my generation are intent on becoming the change that we wish to see in the world. you know, i have a simple philosophy: if we do nothing, then nothing will change, and millennials are willing to do something. (inspiring music) (inspiring music)

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