set your own goals. figure things out. so if i had any words of advice, don't wait for the praise. go do it. i don't know, figure it out. (orchestral music) (orchestral music) (upbeat orchestral music) (crowd cheering) - i'm a millennial. - i'm a proud millennial. (upbeat orchestral music)

- i'm a millennial. - solid millennial. - i'm a millennial, definitely. (laughs) (upbeat orchestral music) - i am a millennial. - i'm a millennial. - i was born in 1988, i'm 33, so i feel like i'm safely inside the bounds of millennialism. - i was born in 1980, i am either the oldest millennial, or the youngest gen x member. so i claim both, for advantages. - you cannot talk about being a millennial without talking about malls. - you could not get on the internet and the phone at the same time. (dial-up modem beeping) - as soon as you ask me about my generation, the only thing i can think of is the stupid tamagotchi eggs. (chuckles) we were obsessed. - playing with pogs. - [millennial] i remember cds. - [millennial] i think we are the generation that really sits between that line of analog and digital, before social media, and sort of the way modern content is made. (upbeat orchestral music)

- our generation is very much influenced by the wars that we have been engaged in and fighting. (explosive detonating) - there's something unique about the millennial experience. we were coming of age at a time where because of war, because of the recession, the myths that america told about itself were being debunked in real time. - we got named millennial. it's always a little derogatory, 'cause whoever did that, they're older than you, (chuckles) and they probably kind of look down on you a little bit. - we're in this period where you're not quite your parents, even though you might have kids, but you're also not like, the youngest, prettiest thing at coachella. so we're talking, you're in your mid to late thirties, very, very late thirties, like the latest of thirties. - that means you're like a full adult. you might have a kid, you might be married, you might be buying a house. - go get a job. - there's this idea that millennials are perpetually children. - there's a sense of entitlement,

and everyone gets a trophy. - you do have to speak to them a little bit like a therapist might speak to a patient. - i do like avocado toast. i don't know, i'm probably entitled. - these millennials are spoiled, they're coddled, - they have climbed mount everest, but they've never punched a time clock. - millennials don't like to work. they need a lot of praise. - millennials might be more likely to live with their parents, - hey mom. - [millennial] than to kind of delay various points of their lives. - many of us are probably gonna go our whole lives without buying a house, because no one can afford that. - quote, unquote, "adulting" became really cost prohibitive. - we're struggling with the crushing cost of housing, and healthcare, and higher education. - millennial has now just become like a word people use to describe young people that they don't like, (chuckles) you know? - and in some case ignorantly, they'll call you boomer, which is insane. i was born in 1983, not 1949. so if you're gonna insult someone, get your timeline straight.

youngster. (inspiring music) (person slurping coffee) (ipod clicking) (phone dinging) (whooshing sounds) (inspiring music) (contemplative music) - [kristen] we are millennials, the 70 plus million americans born between 1980 and 1996. our story actually begins with our parents. you know them, the baby boomers. we covered them two episodes ago. they were the biggest generation, until we came along. they were the wealthiest generation, and they still are. - [newscaster] the dow is up almost a thousand points this year. - [kristen] and once they had built a prosperous and secure world for themselves, they focused on their next big accomplishment, ♪ a b c d ♪ e f g - [kristen] us. - baby boomers really were the first like, therapy generation.

they're a real self-improvement generation. and so all of that got folded into baby boomer parenting of the millennials that they raised. - when they were young, they put young-ness on the map. they demanded that teenagers and young adults have a voice, and be heard. they took on the systems, whether it was the vietnam war, or women's rights, or civil rights, they demanded to be heard. they questioned authority. and then very ironically, they became the people who undermined the voice of their own children. they were the first helicopter parents. they were the first to question authority on behalf of their kids, rendering their kids helpless at advocating for themselves. - boomer parents were told by pretty much everyone that they needed to promote self-esteem in their children, and they took that to heart. they came up with the idea of, you know, when our kids play soccer, everybody should get a trophy, whether they win or lose.

- that doesn't come from us. that comes from boomers, who felt insecure that their kids weren't winning, and decided to create the participation trophy in order to feel good about what their kid was doing. ♪ one little, two little... - [newscaster] after graduating from gymboree and mommy and me, they've been shuttled to play dates and soccer practice with barely a day off, (cheering and whistle blows) by parents who felt their kids needed structure and a sense of mission. - there is something that was really lovely growing up and having my parents so invested in what my sister and i were doing, in our future, too invested, invested to the point where you're like, please, i can't breathe. - [kristen] they told us we were special, and we believed it. (inspiring music) - (interviewer) why do they consider themselves special? - because they came along at a time when we started revaluing kids, the culture vaunts kids, it celebrates them.

- [kristen] after generation x, a smaller generation that was skeptical of marketing, came millennials, the biggest generation yet, and we said, give us all the things. - i think that in the '90s, it was very much about the kid experience, and like toys. - run, run, run. (laughs) ♪ crossfire. - [river] i feel like the '90s was just like the toy explosion. - [announcer] more furbies, more fun! ♪ the toy you can wear on your feet ♪ ♪ skip-it, skip-it that was cool. i just like the... i like the... it was so hard. skip-it is really hard, and it really hurts your ankles. - i remember watching these commercials, toy commercials, clothing commercials, and it wasn't just, oh i want that because it's fun. ♪ pretty princess crown ♪ to place upon your head - it was, i want that because i'll be like that girl, - the crown! - [ashley] or oh, i can live that life and have that experience.

- [kristen] we were the first generation to have cable channels, multiple, with programming just for us, to enjoy sitting crisscross-applesauce in our oshkosh b'gosh, we had snacks and lunch foods customized for our fickle palates. crust-free, chock-full of preservatives and attitude. empty strip malls got retrofitted with padded walls and foam floors, just so we could have a special place to be, you know, special. every industry and corporation, each thread on the fabric of american life made it crystal pepsi clear that our tastes, interests, and our parents' income were priority number one. - you know, millennials have a reputation for being obsessed with nostalgia, for talking about the television shows of our youth, and you know, the message board culture of our youth,

and i wonder if some of that has to do with the last time there was a monoculture, this sort of, you know, prelapsarian, pre-internet. the last time the world was old-fashioned. (light music) - had very doting parents that sort of took care of a lot of things for us, and there was such an emphasis put on education, and specifically higher education, and going to college, and sats. but i don't know that the same emphasis was put on life skills. like this is how you make a budget, or this is how you fix a tire, or something. - as older millennials like me were coming of age, we really were in boom times. you had the tech boom, you had a really, really healthy economy, you had this pretty great sense of optimism, and i certainly never questioned that i was gonna do better than my parents.

as long as you follow this path, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a good job, then you too can live in middle or upper middle class comfort. and that sense of optimism really did filter through the childhoods and adolescences of millennials, which i think made it an even ruder awakening when things didn't quite work out that way. - in the very title of our generation is this promise of seismic change, and sort of epic, era-shifting fulfillment. and instead what we got was like 9/11, and the great recession, and then facebook. dry eyes still feel gritty, rough, or tired? with miebo, eyes can feel ♪ miebo ♪ ♪ ohh yeah ♪ miebo is the only prescription dry eye drop that forms a protective layer for the number one cause of dry eye:

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(kids laughing) the world seemed like it was headed in the right direction, the economy was booming, the internet was starting. there was a real sense that things worked. i remember, you know, watching tv. - [kids] she played with her goat in her house. - and president bush is reading a children's book with like a bunch of very young, either kindergarten or elementary-age kids, and, - get ready! - must. - [teacher] yes, must. we'll see if we can read lesson 60 on page 153. - andrew card, i believe, goes and whispers in his ear, and you just see his face (camera shutters clicking) just has no idea really what to do with the information, is processing it. - [kids] the girl had a pet goat. - at the time, the children had all been raised in a very peaceful time,

it looked like nothing serious was gonna happen to them. and then suddenly, (tower exploding) (siren wailing) (crowd shouting) - at the time of 9/11, i had just turned 21. that morning my roommate and i both wake up to this loud explosion. a bomb just went off in the the world trade center. it's like, it's unbelievable. i just happened to have my camera. we were goofing off the night before and filming each other and i just had it right there and i said, i think i'm just gonna film this. and ended up filming the entire morning. - [roommate] what is that falling? is that a person? - where? - [roommate] falling. - and for me, even after my roommate said there are people jumping out of the building, my first thought honestly was that it was the bermuda triangle over new york city,

and planes were being sucked into it, you know like that was a fleeting thought that i had. (witness screaming) - [witness] oh my god! - [witness] oh my god. - for better or worse, that lens finder, that literal clip that comes out that you can view things through was protecting me from the reality that was happening six blocks away. (students screaming) (sirens blaring) (crowd shouting) - i remember the news anchors not having answers. i remember people being like, we're hearing there could have been another attack. - we just heard one more explosion. - they say there's a bomb in the school here. i was told by firefighters. - it was the uncertainty for me that made me realize like, why don't people know what is happening? like how can they not know? - [newscaster] most of the nation's schools stayed open through the tragic day, students watching terrorism on their own shores for the first time.

- not only had planes crashed into those two buildings, they crashed into the field in pennsylvania, they crashed into the pentagon. and i think there was a tangible sense of fear that has not existed since. - you start to think, is this happening? because you saw a plane, so you're like, is this happening to every plane? is this happening to us? are we unsafe? and you, for the first time just as a suburban kid, like felt like rattled, like what's happening? (somber music) - this was our pearl harbor moment. and then when president bush got on the rubble, 'cause he kind of had an uncertain start, but then he gets on the rubble of the world trade center and there's this indelible moment where he's speaking, and people are yelling, "we can't hear you." and i remember this moment well, when he says, - i can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people... (crowd cheering) and the people who knocked these buildings down

will hear all of us soon. (crowd cheering) - [crowd] usa! usa! usa! - that moment electrified the nation, he emerges from that with this incredible sense of national momentum and national unity. it's morbid that it's uniting, 'cause it is a tragedy. but the silver lining is that you can still feel something that happened to your country that you care about. - [newscaster] from coast to coast today, there were demonstrations of patriotic fervor. - and that happened to all of us, and we can feel that together. ♪ oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave.. ♪ - [kristen] in the days and months following the attacks, young americans saw the adults around them make concerted efforts to seek and usher in comfort through volunteerism, benefits, and community alliances.

anything they could do to salvage the promise that our home was one nation, indivisible. - there's a sense i think in that reaction to the fear that if we stick together we can get through this, but obviously that proved short-lived. - [newscaster] he is one of the most dangerous terrorists on the planet. - i want him, hell, i want, i want justice. and there's an old poster out west, as i recall, that said, "wanted: dead or alive." - i remember going to a gas station and i bought this, which i'd probably buy again, and it was a picture of osama bin laden with a crosshair over him and it just said like, "locked and loaded." this was a huge part of our culture, and it really emboldened a lot of people who already probably wouldn't like someone that didn't look like them. (gun firing) i knew that the world was gonna be totally different, for all of us, it changed. but for muslim and arab americans, it changed a lot.

- [newscaster] as a nervous nation goes on guard against terrorists, there's growing concern about discrimination and acts of violence against innocent people of middle eastern descent. - the first hate crime after 9/11 was against balbir singh, a sikh indian man in arizona. - [newscaster] his temple fears anyone who even looks like america's new enemy is a target. - bigots aren't nuanced. i'm 20 years old, i'm at uc berkeley, i get hate mail for the first time in my life, and i get told, why did i bring down the towers, and why do i hate america? i'm like, why did i bring down the towers? i'm 20 years old, i'm born and raised in this country. - [voice on phone] hello muslims. why'd you kill at least 5,000 people at the world trade center today? you just woke up a sleeping giant with the americans who are gonna kick your (bleep) ass now. - you overnight become osama, you become al qaeda, you become the country's boogeyman. - [newscaster] the backlash against muslims, arab americans, and anyone thought to be middle eastern

now so extreme, even murder cases are under investigation. (children talking) - a lot of families were advising their daughters to take off their hijab. there were a lot of men who were cutting their beards off. a lot of people were trying to change their muslim-ness, so that people wouldn't attack them, and they wouldn't experience hatred. - i do, do give it a second look when i do, you know, get on a flight myself. - if some degree of profiling was necessary, i mean, i think it makes sense. - it became the see something, say something era, where it truly started to feel like muslims were an exception to the rule. - [newscaster] the fbi confirms that after 9/11, the government secretly tested for nuclear devices at hundreds of mosques. - we were an exception to the constitution, we're an exception to due process rights. and we had to take it and not even complain about it, and just fall in line and be a good muslim. - they still think of us as,

even though we're americans, and you know, they still think of us as foreigners. - we were terrified. and you realized just like that, the country can turn on you. so at that time, at the age of 20, i kind of figured out, i'll hit them with something different. if i'm cool and i'm calm and collected, and i give 'em some humor, that might be the most subversive thing i could do. i'm gonna be the muslim cultural representative of 1.7 billion people. and the question then is why do you keep doing it? because i don't want my kids to go through what i went through. that's why we keep doing it. (intense music) sometimes jonah wrestles with falling asleep... ...so he takes zzzquil. the world's #1 sleep aid brand. and wakes up feeling like himself. get the rest to be your best with non-habit forming zzzquil. ♪ ♪ since starting the farmer's dog, bogart has lost so much weight. and he has so much more energy. he's like a puppy again.

♪ (banjo playing) ♪ c,mon bo! this is a before picture of bogart. such a big boy. pre-portioned packs makes it really easy to keep him lean and healthy. and look at him now. he's like a show dog. [silence] bogue, can you give daddy a break here? he's having a hard enough time. i've been worn by celebrities, athletes, and world leaders. but i've always felt most comfortable up here, with the folks that made me who i am. i'm right at home, out here on the land. and i'm in my lane on the shoulder of the interstate. because this is where i come from. i've been showing up here for nearly 200 years. and i can't wait to see what's next. hats off to the future. nothing runs like a deere™ over 400,000 people with afib have left blood thinners behind with watchman. a safe, one—time implant that reduces stroke risk

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- to allison, can you explain what internet is? in theaters now. no, she can't say anything in 10 seconds or less. oh, allison will be in the studio shortly. what does it mean? - [crew member] it's a giant computer network made up of- - [kristen] this is the part of the documentary where we show you old news reports about this brand new thing called the internet. - in the brave new world,

fantasy and the future come together. - [kristen] it all seems very quaint now. - we can duplicate reality on the internet in just about every way. - [kristen] but the thing you have to remember is, millennials were the last generation to remember a time when the internet was new. - everyone has access to this new revolution called the information superhighway. - [kristen] and we made it our own. sure it was available to everyone, but we knew the truth. the internet was made for us. (inspiring music) - i think the first computer i had was when i was in 10th grade, my dad got us a dell computer. - dude, you're getting a dell. - that was the family computer that everybody shared. we got those aol disks to get on the internet. - you had to wait for dial up, you'd hear all these crazy sounds. (dial-up modem whirring) (imitating dial-up modem)

- [jimmy] and then people can't be on the phone at the same time. - [ashley] i remember my mom being like, "get off, i need to make phone calls." (laughing) - [newscaster] what do president clinton, conservative radio personality rush limbaugh, and rockstar billy idol have in common? they've all got electronic mail addresses on computer systems linked to the internet. - i remember the first time i ever sent an email, like a friend of mine was like, you know you can get an email address, and like send electronic messages. i was like, what? - what's the little mark? with the a, and then the ring around it? - at. - see, that's what i said. katie said she thought it was "about." - yeah. - oh. - i had unfettered internet access, and i remember like loving this communal aspect. i could actually like get in aim chat rooms and talk to people. - the internet was this place where you could develop your sense of like teenage interests, and hobbies, and identity. i was a tween fan girl of the band no doubt.

and i remember that i could go online and find out everything you could ever wanna know about no doubt, about gwen stefani. and it was just a very independent diy world at that time. - this is a news group, which would allow you to post a message, and there's people all over the world putting their two cents in about these topics. - i remember when i kind of started to realize i was queer, because i was like going in these lesbian chat rooms where i'd be like, why am i interested in this? why do i wanna see what these people are saying? and i found community that i wasn't finding in my little northern illinois, midwest town. - i was raised a conservative evangelical in southern appalachia, where everyone pretty much looked like me, talked like me, and thought like me. and on the internet, i learned about books that i wanted to read. - [presenter] you just click on impressionism, go to claude monet. here's a whole description of the impressionist movement. - i learned about places i wanted to go when that was completely foreign to the way that i grew up.

i don't know that i would be the person i am, for better or worse, without the internet. - chat rooms forever were these like salacious places where perverts gathered. i met my husband on an app now, but for the longest time, we remember it was a place that creeps went, and weirdos went. - there is wide disagreement on how to protect children from the dark side of cyberspace. - i mean, people say they'll give you what you want, they just want one thing and that's just, they want you. - at the time, it seemed a lot more innocent and safe than it probably was. i was probably always on the verge of being sex trafficked or kidnapped or something. - now everybody online is the creep and the weirdo, as opposed to before, you were scared of the creep or the weirdo. now we are all the creeps and weirdos. (upbeat music) - [kristen] still, for the most part, the early days of the internet were, at least compared to today, pretty innocent. now i don't wanna imply that millennials mapped out

what the internet could be. we totally did. but we were the first generation to experience what the implication of constant, unfettered access to every piece of information to ever exist would have on our developing minds. for this generation of students, it felt like we were dropped on a treadmill, running at full speed. in a sense, the internet broke our brains. - we now expect immediate results. we expect an immediate reply, we expect immediacy. this is all tied into our technology, where we are not on that slow change schedule anymore. we are out for the quick fix. we're living in a very, very distracted state. you are bombarded every day with constant distraction, and expectation that you can switch from one thing to another. it's completely understandable to think i need help paying attention.

- [newscaster] adderall. it's a drug widely prescribed for attention deficit disorders. - adderall hit the american market in 1996, almost the exact same year that the internet burst into american life. and these two phenomena have been on the same timeline ever since. these drugs are so often sought after by people who are not interested in getting high or rebelling. they're interested in achievement and success, right? adderall is a drug for people to work better. it's a drug for people who want a gold star next to their name. i arrived at college in the year 2000, and i did not even know what adderall was. and i went to a friend's dorm room my freshman year, and i said to her, "ugh, you know, i have an essay due tomorrow. i haven't even read the book."

and she said, "try this." i took this pill and i just had a revelatory night. i was up all night. i was immersed in the text in a way i'd never experienced. there's a rush of euphoria to this feeling of adderall focus. i wound up getting my own prescription for adderall right after i got out of college, and remaining on adderall through my entire twenties, truly believing that my natural born attention was insufficient. (synth music) oh... stuffed up again? so congested! you need sinex saline from vicks. just sinex, breathe, ahhhh! what is — wow! sinex. breathe. ahhhhhh! power e*trade's easy-to-use tools, like dynamic charting and risk-reward analysis, help make trading feel effortless. and its customizable scans with social sentiment

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are being destroyed. - like, okay, you told me osama bin laden is hiding out in afghanistan. i can kind of see why we're going in there. - thank you, thank you! - very, very quickly, the war in afghanistan succeeded. the taliban was overthrown, osama bin laden fled, but the drumbeat started advocating that the war in afghanistan, that had been finished, should be expanded into a broader global war on terror. - secretary of state colin powell presented at the u.n. security council. powell was the man. mother teresa was the only person who had higher poll ratings than powell. - leaving saddam hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-september 11th world. - i saw the polls in america had climbed in terms of support for the war, and i realized immediately it was cause colin powell was the spokesperson, and i'd been part of that. later i would come to rue that greatly. (intense music) - i joined the military in 2005, 2006.

for me, there was this tremendous sense that there were huge problems in the world, and there weren't enough people to help. - i was very much against the war in iraq, didn't agree with that, but i felt honor bound to be part of that. i felt honor bound to serve. - boomers had the draft, millennials had an unofficial draft. after 9/11, you started to see military recruiters going to the high school, and they would really kind of sell us on the gi bill, and your college being paid for. and you'd look at that sort of like a stepping stone in order to create this better life for yourself. right after high school, i went to basic training, and less than six months later, i got orders to go to iraq for 545 days. - [kristen] more than a million american soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines were deployed to iraq. (soldier shouting) the vast majority were millennials.

- when we went to war, i was a kid in an nyu dorm, and national news is broadcasting it live, and they called it shock and awe. - shock and awe. - [newscaster] shock and awe. - [reporter] the air campaign of shock and awe continues. - we thought we would just go in there, bomb them for five days, and we'll show them who's boss, and we'll leave. and i remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if we got out of this without any u.s. soldiers dying? (explosive detonating) - [reporter] into the very heart of baghdad, the stars and stripes have come to town. saddam hussein's reign of terror is over. this is what regime change looks like. (crowd cheering) - the united states and our allies have prevailed. americans want nothing more than to return home, and that is your direction tonight. (crowd cheering) (guns fire)

- then 2004 it became apparent it wasn't just get rid of saddam hussein and come home. (bombs explode) it was gonna be a long-term bloody and very incompetently orchestrated occupation. (bombs explode) (guns fire) - there's no weapons of mass destruction. this is a false war. this is a propaganda. i would never think the government would be lying to us or stretching the truth or anything. just wouldn't, not us. we're the good guys. - before they hit the press, powell walked into my office and he threw a couple of photos down on my desk and he said, "these are from a place called abu ghraib in iraq and they're going to be a disaster." (haunting music) yes indeed, we did horrible things in vietnam. we did horrible things in every war we ever fought, but we never had a state sponsored, presidentially approved torture program.

- where i'm from questioning the invasion of iraq was tantamount to questioning america. you grew up with this notion that america is this beacon of democracy to the rest of the world. but their conflicts in iraq and afghanistan, how they were conducted, what was done in our name really started to dispel that idea and i ended up being quite politically formative for me because it was the first time i'd really broken with my community on any major question. (dramatic music) - i didn't realize it until i got older that i was a child watching this unfold. i was just a different person back then who was living in fear, who was traumatized, and just wanted to be protected. i had to grow up and sort of educate myself and be exposed to the real world to say, "you know, we're wrong about this." - [kristen] in the end, the war in iraq lasted over eight years and over 4,000 americans didn't come home.

- i served in the unit that does the funerals in arlington cemetery, would carry caskets and fold flags and then really see these families mourn. mostly young people my age who were lost in iraq and afghanistan. - [kristen] my generation volunteered to fight the war on terror. (bomb explodes) - take cover! come this way! - [kristen] and we were forever changed by it. many of us learned lessons we should have never had to learn about living with disabilities, about trauma, about how we see the world, and how the rest of the world sees us. - i had a license to drive a tank before i had a license to drive a car. at the time i remember just thinking terrorists are like the enemy. i didn't think of a human being. i didn't realize until i witnessed my first death and it was somebody that was on the iraq side that they were human beings and i was fighting a war that wasn't something that i believed in.

- i think many of my generation, we look back at so-called greatest generation, we see world war ii. we knew the nazis are evil and we knew they needed to be fought because there was no peaceful way of stopping them. many people who joined the military want to fight that war. that so-called, good and just war. (guns fire) this is not a just war. (somber music) sometimes jonah wrestles with falling asleep... ...so he takes zzzquil. the world's #1 sleep aid brand. and wakes up feeling like himself. get the rest to be your best with non-habit forming zzzquil. ♪ ♪ for more than a decade farxiga has been trusted again and again, and again. ♪far-xi-ga♪ ♪far-xi-ga♪ ask your doctor about farxiga. everywhere but the seat. the seat is leather. alan, we get it. you love your bike. we do, too. that's why we're america's number-one motorcycle insurer.

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- i grew up in a house that had a lot of different tastes. when i started to form my own taste, and try new vaposhower max for steamy vicks vapors. it was at the peak of mtv that shaped who i was when i was a kid. - each video took you into a different world. ♪ work them hips ♪ run girl - you can go from a david banner dirty south music video to a britney spears pop video and it's totally different colors. it's like walking into like different lands in disneyland. - oh my god. i would love to explain to "trl" to you. - my name is carson daly. nice to have you guys all here. (crowd cheers) - "total request live" was a countdown show

that relied on votes to decide what was the number one music video in the country. gosh, now talking about it, it literally sounds like i'm talking about the '50s. - mtv and "trl" provided space for genres to coexist. you know, you have evanescence in the top 10 at the same time that justin timberlake was. - [kristen] we know what boomers and generation x say about millennial music. that it was disposable. we don't care. to us it was everything, literally everything. it was eclectic. and the way we discovered it and listened to it, changed music for everyone. (dramatic music) (clicking sound) (internet dial tone beeps) - we were a generation that grew up on the internet. we had way more avenues for music discovery than before. we started to explore music through music piracy.

(dramatic music) - you'd easily spend hours and you would just download and download. that really transformed my taste growing up. - i found so many bands that i didn't have access to before. - we were tired of paying $15 to $20 for a cd and we only really want one or two songs off of it. (dramatic music) - there's no question napster affected the record industry and it was a negative effect in a lot of ways, but not for me. my records came out on a small label. it had limited distribution. if you had found out about my band, there wasn't any place you could go get my music if you wanted to. if it hadn't been for people having had a way to share my music, i wouldn't have a career of any kind. (crowd yells) - people were illegally downloading music and there was really no way to control that. - one line. if you could all form just one line. - [crystal] and now we have the world in our pockets. - and i remember, "man, you don't have to listen to

the tracks on the albums anymore. you can mix and match however you want." - if you look at the charts, it's crazy what would be in the top 10 at that time. like there was as many great rock acts as there were incredible rappers and bubblegum pop stars and country artists. - i don't think country music had fully crossed over into the mainstream the way it did until the '90s. artists pushed the genre boundaries and they weren't going to submit to an idea of what we thought we had to be any longer. - [kristen] when our generation got access to all the music all the time, the idea of sticking to a genre, well that was hella basic. (clicking sound) (justin laughs) - bubblegum pop was the first stuff that i was obsessed with n'sync and backstreet boys and brittany and christina and mandy. (fans scream) it was just fun. like it was just music meant for young people to enjoy and dance too and scream until their vocal chords are just like completely worn out at concerts. (girl screams) - oh wow. - it's not meant to say anything more than

like you're having a great time. ♪ hit me baby one more time (clicking sound) ♪ and will you tell all your friends ♪ ♪ you've got your gun to my head ♪ - the emo scene came up from a need to dig deeper inside yourself. the young people that are suddenly grappling with a world that has now changed forever. - a terrorist attack could happen at any point. you suddenly have a lot of people who are fighting a war that you don't fully understand. there's just like a lot of angst developing from that. ♪ i'm not okay - [brittany] lot of emo music is very, very anxious. fall out boy songs are just like loaded with anxiety. ♪ i'll be your number one with a bullet ♪ - the darkness wasn't going anywhere for our generation so we had to find a way to break bread with it. - the band that like brought it all together was paramore. - i freaking love paramore. are you kidding? i think "misery business" was like the main character theme song for all of us.

(amani laughs) ♪ we were never meant to break - we never really loved being called emo, but we also never loved being called pop punk. we never wanted to be called pop. we never thought we were rock, you know? and then of course paramore was on mtv and we changed the rules for ourselves. (crowd cheers) thank you. (clicking sound) - in the '90s, hip hop felt dangerous. people would have legitimate conferences talking about the dangers of hip hop and what is this doing to our kids. but by the early 2000s, instead of talking about the realities of the street. ♪ you can find me in the club ♪ bottle full of bub' - [ashley] it's actually a reflection of the american dream. - jay-z, who would've been seen as too urban or too violent, has now become this major mainstream pop artist winning grammys. - people who loved hip hop were kind of sad to see it watered down, but at the same time that happening allowed other hip hop scenes to grow. you had the south that like,

was finally able to get attention. you know, you had timbaland, ludicrous, missy elliot. (hip hop music) - we're seeing rap music and r&b become even more mainstream. mariah carey's "fantasy" remix was the first time that we got a pop artist featuring a rapper on a song. ♪ keeping it real son - justin timberlake, britney spears, and christina aguilera even integrated rap music and black music specifically into how they presented themselves. and rap and pop, they were completely intertwined now. and you got like tim mcgraw and nelly doing "over and over." you have jay-z and linkin park releasing an ep together. - we started to mix more like pop and r&b and destiny's child. - [kristen] and out of destiny's child and the melding of genres came an artist that would go on to win a record number of grammys, our queen, beyonce. - i feel good for the generations after me 'cause they don't know a world without beyonce. like we had a world without beyonce. - one of the best live performers of all time, one of the best dancers and singers of all time.

just like the epitome of everything. she's someone that we've seen in real time build a legacy that is almost unquestionable. - every single black girl my age has looked at beyonce as an older sister, as someone who we inspire to be in a lot of aspects, to write songs that were danceable, but also spoke from a good place of self. for her to talk about what type of partner she wants, what type of lifestyle she wants. as i was learning about black feminism, she was also doing it the same in real time too. - she's moved with the culture and moved with the changes in the music industry with such ease. we've literally seen someone grow into an icon before our eyes. - i think millennials, we definitely contributed to the great music of these last 100 years. i'm not gonna argue with boomers on that one very much, honestly. - music piracy ended up being a source of

music discovery for kids who didn't subscribe to the idea that you had to stick to one subculture, one way of dressing, one way of doing things. - there was a time that i probably wouldn't have admitted to listening to n'sync, but let's be real, i wouldn't have learned five part harmony or how to structure a vocal arrangement had i not grew up on pop music that had complex vocal arrangements. to this day, i think back on those memories. i'm like, "that's why i'm here." (upbeat music) it's time. yes, the time has come for a fresh approach to dog food. everyday, more dog people are deciding it's time to quit the kibble and feed their dogs fresh food from the farmer's dog. made by vets and delivered right to your door precisely portioned for your dog's needs. it's an idea whose time has come.

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black friday football. only on prime. (saxophone plays) - i'm an eighth generation new orleanianprime. and i just grew up surrounded by that sort of joie de vivre that people talk about when they talk about new orleans. family, friends, love, like everybody, i think my mom has the best gumbo,

but actually my mom does have the best gumbo. (band plays) (background chatter) (fast paced violin music) so i was 11 when katrina hit. - this is since a large hurricane. it's going to impact a large area. - we're expecting a morning time landfall tomorrow morning. - for the city of new orleans, it is the doomsday scenario. the mayor of new orleans declared a mandatory evacuation. - when you think of hotels, gas, evacuating costs thousands and thousands of dollars. - [reporter] new orleans famous superdome was dubbed the city's shelter of last resort. - on the eve of katrina, the median black family made about $30,000. - hanging out. how am i gonna get out? - that further complicated the ability of vast majority of new orleanians to find their way to safety. eventually we saw the consequences of that play out in a really ugly fashion. - as one official told me, if you're planning to go, now is the time. if you're staying, god help you.

(hurricane wind blows) (dramatic music) - no power, no water, no food, no fuel. the extent of the destruction is just today really becoming clear and it didn't help this morning when some major levies gave way and flooded parts of the old new orleans french quarter. - my family left mostly everything assuming that we'd be back. - [reporter] from the air you can see this was the catastrophe that so many along the coast had feared. - our house got eight feet of water, completely submerging the first floor and ruined the second floor. i never moved back to that house. (helicopter flying) - i remember watching the video of these families on the roof and going into the superdome.

- [crowd] help! help! help! help! help! help! help! help! - you know, so many people didn't understand what we'd been saying this whole time. - [reporter] thousands of people stranded, refugees in their own hometown. - we're suffering here with no water. here i fought for my country for years. - things that happened to black folks, the rest of this country just simply does not care about. (haunting music) - back up. we're not going anywhere until all of you back up! - the hurricane didn't just appear. you know, it wasn't like the hurricane just like at 9:00 pm just like emerged, right. - [reporter] why has it taken so long to get more national guard troops, helicopters, and boats to new orleans? - i remember, i didn't know what a levee was. i'm doing research on the army corps. - [reporter] critics say money to reinforce the levies that failed to stop the flood waters has been cut from the army corps of engineers budget year after year.

- and it's like y'all knew. like this wasn't like a, it wasn't a secret that the levees weren't strong. the government is ill-equipped to support and it's poor black people who are left hanging. - you know your fed america goes out and we help people, we liberate people, we save people, and then you see something like this in real time and the government was doing so little, it's impossible to hold onto that belief as a kid. you know, we're not idiots. - the storm didn't target black americans. it was all of the structural inequities. we are often victimized by housing inequities, environmental racism. it's all right there. you could do a whole entire textbook on how katrina showed this country what the differences were between black folks and white folks in america and you could do another textbook on the fact that this country learned exactly zero things from that. - over 1800 people died. and we're all left watching television

as corpses floated by. citizens themselves, not coast guard, not from any formal agencies, just took it upon themselves to do what they could and help out their neighbors. - the activism of this moment makes total sense to me as a millennial. when we got older and like finally had like an analysis of everything we lived through, we realized like wasn't fair, wasn't right, completely avoidable. people had the power to make different decisions and didn't. - i just saw through all of this like bullshit of the excuses i felt we'd been given as a generation and i think for a lot of people, hurricane katrina was like that last thing that was just like i can't any, like i've had enough with this system. - we don't feel the need to follow rules because there's been no rules. the rules have been broken for us and we're gonna continue to break them, so what has defined the millennial generation is watching all of the structures that we were told to believe in

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- how you doing, man? - good to see you, sir? - how are you? you doing all right. it is thrilling to see all of you guys here, just looks like a great crew. to have, especially, all these young people involved like this, willing to sacrifice a little bit of time on a saturday. it's just spectacular. - i got politically active in 2004. and i found this old picture of the two of us recently and we both looked so young. (laughs) but before he was even a senator, i campaigned for obama. - thank you very much. i appreciate it. sorry to interrupt your meal. how you all doing? - hey, obama. - good to see you all. - i remember when he was running for the senate and then when he gave his keynote speech at the 2004 democratic convention. - there is not a liberal america and a conservative america. there is the united states of america.

- i knew watching him on tv that this person was destined to be in a position of great leadership. (crowd applauds) - i remember coming home and actually saying out loud to my parents, "i met someone that i think is going to be a president." (dramatic music) - [reporter] obama joins a democratic field crowded with contenders, including senator hillary clinton and john edwards. he's got charisma and an everyman appeal. - you know what, i'd love to have your guys support if you're gonna caucus on january 3rd. - [reporter] yet he's trailing in early polls. - hello, everybody. - i remember at the very beginning i think many people thought this guy had been in the senate for two years and his name is barack obama and could he win? - and i am absolutely convinced that we will not just win a caucus, we will not just win an election. thank you. thank you. i appreciate you, thank you. (crowd cheers)

- i think we were a generation that wanted to be politically educated and involved and engaged and we wanted to find solutions and answers, but we felt like, you know, we wouldn't be heard. - maybe this year, this time can be different. - it was like this perfect storm of angst against our current president and me being like, "yes, they're right. i can change my city. i can change everything. i can change the world." - yes, we can! yes, we can! (crowd chanting) - i have a very, very vibrant memory of listening to "yes we can" by will i am on repeat. ♪ yes we can, yes we can - and just being literally on the brink of tears because of how emotional i was getting, imagining what the next chapter of america could look like and i think that's what obama stood for for so many of us. - [reporter] that barack obama image, it's everywhere it seems this year. when i met obama, he said, "i love this image

and how did you get it spread around so fast?" - the obama hope poster, it took off online. i made the image that just provided the symbol that immediately said, "i back the human being, barack obama." - when i see it, you can tell that it's like, it's strong and like you feel it. - it makes you think of change and something different and positive and new. - the posters, i remember like putting them up at my school. (chuckles) i remember buying obama merch. i had never bought presidential merch in my life or cared about it until then. - [kristen] over 20 million millennials turned out to take part on this historic day. - it is now 11 o'clock on the east coast and keith, we can report history. [keith] barack obama is projected to be the next president of the united states of america. - [brian] an african american has broken the barrier as old as the republic, an astonishing candidate, an astonishing campaign,

a seismic shift in american politics. (crowd cheers) - [crowd] obama! obama! obama! obama! - it's my first time voting and i got to vote for this. and i mean it just feels so good. (dramatic music) (crowd cheers) - i definitely remember exactly where i was when he won in 2008. (car horn beeps) and i remember like everybody just pouring out into the streets and like standing on cars and jumping and screaming and dancing and people playing music and strangers hugging each other. - i feel like the country is united finally. how many hundreds of years did it take? you know? but i feel like everyone is celebrating. (crowd cheers) - i remember my grandmother breaking down into tears because she was the descendant of sharecroppers in the american south, so she never ever would believe

that an african american man would go to that position of office. that's a once in a generation thing that i'm glad that i was alive to experience that. - those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. yes, we can. thank you. god bless you. and may god bless the united states of america. (gentle music) (crowd cheers) - there was this sense of mania and fandom about obama. - i, barack hussein obama do solemnly swear. - and people came to expect extraordinary transformative things from him and he kind of promised extraordinary transformative things. - today i say to you that the challenges we face are real. they are serious, and they are many, but know this america, they will be met. (crowd cheers) - but i think a lot of that changed

in the course of his presidency. - [kristen] for millennials who had anticipated the election of obama as a unifying moment in american history. - madam speaker, throw out this bill. (crowd cheers) - [kristen] the next eight years would show the country as divided as ever. - the tea party was in some sense a precursor to the kind of populism that you see on the right, now. - $1.47 trillion in additional spending this year by the obama administration is too much. - [abe] it was in response to particular democratic policies. - don't ask, don't tell works. - the bailouts, the stimulus packages, the revamping of the american healthcare system. - people know there's no fix for obamacare. we need to repeal this law and start over. - and there were people that said, "wait a minute, i didn't sign on for this." - i remember like my friends voting for him

and them being like, "he is gonna do the everything and i believe him and oh my god, this is different." and i was like, "he's a politician." - how is that hoping changing thing working out for you? - obviously, it's not everything i'd like, but you know, change takes time. - i voted for barack of course, mostly because it was like, "what are we doing? what are we gonna keep doing wars?" and of course we did keep doing wars. - president obama has already promised to send an additional 17,000 troops to afghanistan. - like we expected so much more or we expected change to happen so suddenly that it brought us face to face with the limitations that the framework we exist in holds us back within. - this is a very slow process i've been noticing, which hasn't made me too happy. - well, i'm wondering how... - for our generation, at least, like for a young person like me witnessing that, it really made me question like, "okay, even if we do break into the system, how much progress are we actually capable of

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plus, free home delivery beds when you add a base. shop a sleep number store near you. (audience applauds) shop a sleep number store near you. - the graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. (dramatic music) you have technology that members of my class never had. - when i was in high school, it was assumed that i would go to college. there was no talk of finances. it just was you're gonna go. - millennials were really sold this idea that college was the route to success. you had to go to college in order to get a good job. (students cheer) - [reporter] what's the best way for somebody to get ahead into the middle class and to get a better paying job? it's to go to college. we know that works. - we went to college. we went to grad school and we tried to get all of the degrees and experience and skills necessary. and what we were met with was the great recession. (dramatic music)

- i was a young man, 27 who had graduated law school. - we've been talking for months about the ailing economy, but now it is getting incredibly serious. - i moved back to my home with a law degree from uc davis, with an english major from uc berkeley trying to figure out why i'm broke, living in my parents' home in my old bedroom. and not only do we get this recession, the architects who were responsible for this recession get bailed out. awesome. - [kristen] 2008 ushered in the end of the bush dynasty, brought glittery vampires to the cineplex and lil' wayne's "the carter iii." all of these things should have been the standout memories from this year, but lady luck, or lack thereof, had something else planned for our generation. (dramatic music) - [reporter] even after the aig bailout, the dow tumbled another 450 points. - you have job loss, you have wage stagnation,

rising cost of living, all of these things happen and millennials feel like the rug was pulled out from underneath them. - so all of the sudden this idea that we were going to go to college, get our degree, get a good job, and be able to pay back those loans and do all of these other things that was being asked of us, get married, have kids, buy a house, "adulting," became really cost-prohibitive. and then we were mocked mercilessly for that being the case or for returning to our parents' home because financially that's all that we could afford. (dramatic music) - [reporter] the occupy wall street protests are gaining ground as the movement enters its third week. - occupy wall street was just this fascinating kind of experiment that unfolded in real life. there were a lot of stories like, they govern themselves by consensus and these weird kids are behaving like weird hippies. what's going on? - what are they protesting? nobody seems to know, from their books, banjos, bongos, sports drinks.

- an editor came to me and said, "you know, we're looking for someone to write about the millennials in the recession." at the time i was pretty young, i was in my mid 20s, and they were looking for someone who could speak of that generation, what it felt like to have graduated into this terrible recession. and so in the summer of 2011, i went down for a couple of afternoons to zuccotti park. it was actually a really small park. (background chatter) and it was amazing to think that the whole world was talking about this encampment. - you see there's tons of people here, thousands of people here. can't ignore this many people who are all here for similar reasons. - there were a lot of people my age who had been good students. they had tried so hard and they just could not get any professional traction. - i'm an underemployed massage therapist. i'm under employed because i bag groceries.

i know every muscle in the human body, but i'm only qualified to bag groceries right now. - part of the big shock of 2008 was that that promise, the "american dream" is gone. millennials were the first generation to believe that they would not be better off than their parents. - people don't really see a future right now, and i think that's something new in american society. for most of american history, people sort of felt like their lives were gonna be better than their parents' lives. - and i think for a lot of people, the occupy wall street movement was a reaction to feeling some sort of powerlessness to make change within the system. - to many of the protestors, the student loan crunch symbolizes the growing gap between rich and poor. college tuition is rising twice as fast as inflation, leaving a college education for many increasingly out of reach. - [tv anchor] the average college graduate this year has more than $27,000 in student debt, a record high. - the cost of education was rising exponentially

and they had to pass the cost onto somebody and that somebody was students. it was millennials who were entering college. - as a result of these tuition hikes, you have these huge protests throughout the university of california system. - [protester] stand your ground! - you have this image of students at uc davis seated protesting the tuition hikes and then you have this police officer leisurely spraying them in the face with a chemical weapon. - shame on you, shame on you! that was a very dramatic image and i think set the tone for the whole period. - [reporter] across the nation, the police crackdown is creating striking images of a once faceless movement. - you see young people protesting in ways that seemed very familiar, non-violent, chanting, marching. - [reporter] 80 protesters were arrested while marching at union square. some were even pepper sprayed in what protestors called blatant brutality and police justified as necessary force. - you see police responding extremely violently,

aggressively with these debtor protestors all around the country. - it was a similar scene in chicago. - cpd, shame on you! - [reporter] where overnight at least 175 were arrested. some literally carried out as police tore apart a tent camp in grant park. - it was very easy for the media to sort of paint and label the protestors as homeless kids who didn't have an agenda. - [reporter] unlike most populous movements, there's no consensus on demand. - but they had an economic demand. they were urgently making the case that another world would be possible and i think that is when there needed to really be a concerted effort to crush the movement. - the nypd moved into lower manhattan before dawn and they emptied the park of those "occupy wall street" protestors

who've been living there for two months. - occupy was the beginning of 10 years of protests. there was a a germ there. - to me and i think to a lot of other people, occupy wall street did encourage a sense of activism in millennials. - only way to get the message across is to disrupt normal life and if we don't do that, it's just gonna be like another cookie-cutter protest. - all of those steps on the path to adulthood that previous generations took didn't feel like they were available to us. those were policy choices that people older than us made that we had to then live with. it's been characterized as a sense of entitlement in millennials and i don't think that's true at all. it's a sense of political awareness. (dramatic music) when i was younger my calling was to play football. but as i grew older i realized life isn't about how many people you can knock down. it's about how many people you can lift up.

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oh... stuffed up again? so congested! you need sinex saline from vicks. just sinex, breathe, ahhhh! what is — wow! sinex. breathe. ahhhhhh! - [reporter] several times a day, olivia walker, a california high school sophomore logs onto a website called myspace. - it's a way to instant message or learn something more

about somebody that they didn't know previously. - our generation witnessed the rise of social media and everybody feeling like they have a place to voice their opinions. - we were the generation that was always trying to kind of seek positive affirmation. you're trying to get that gold star, that trophy and social media, there's seemingly this like endless just pool of affirmations that you can get of notifications of likes, but there's also the flip side of that. - social media is an unprecedented experiment and there's no telling what the long-term consequences will be. (dramatic music) (keys clacking) - i had kind of like heard about this website called friendster where you could go and like add your friends online, but i didn't really pay it much attention. it wasn't until myspace launched in 2003.

that's when all of a sudden social media as a concept started to exist. - before there was facebook, instagram, and tiktok, there was a man named tom and he wanted to be your friend. - [interviewer] how many friends do you officially have now? - i think we're up to 175 million. - myspace was where you went for your social media. before we were really using the term "social media". - most of the kids in my school use myspace. you put pictures up, you meet girls and meet guys. - it was just incredibly, incredibly disorganized. - [kristen] myspace was, well, it was kind of janky. a lot of people's pages were hard on the eyes or on your ears. (loud music) - but, and this was the key, it was customizable. myspace was your own little corner of the internet with all your favorite stuff on it and at the top of your page, your eight best internet friends. - we all remember like the top eight.

put them in these little frames like these are my top friends and sometimes you'd include like a big celebrity hoping like it would matter. - i remember myspace days vividly. we tour all over the world now and i know that that would not happen had we not built this sort of community that we built online and so we would post our photos and change our profile photos often. we would change our top eight to sort of reflect what bands we were listening to or touring with at the time and we would just answer every myspace message that we could. - somewhere in that like myspace era was when we saw the very beginnings of people becoming rich and famous through social media. - now we're just so used to this concept of influencers, but myspace really was like the early version of that. the cobra snake was this hardy photographer and he was super active on myspace. he had all these socialites and up and coming models and djs and i would just look at their party photos and be like, "this is so cool, i want to be like them." so everyone i knew had a myspace and all of a sudden

this girl in my class tells me, "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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- i am jesse arreguin. with non-habit forming zzzquil. i'm the mayor of berkeley, california. ♪ ♪ - i'm ilhan omar. i'm a congresswoman representing minnesota's fifth congressional district. - my name is michael tubbs. i am the former council member and mayor of the city of stockton, california. - i'm congress member ritchie torres. i became a member of congress at age 33. i'm a millennial. - i'm a millennial. - i'm part of the millennial generation. - i am so proud to be a millennial. (uplifting music) - i know we're all really excited about electing this man to be the next district 6 city councilman. (crowd cheers) - in my senior year in college, i decided to run

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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and try new vaposhower max for steamy vicks vapors. (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.

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our lowest price of the year, (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) (upbeat music) - i'm told i'm a baby boomer. - okay, boomer. (upbeat music)