This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation.

My guest is Bobby Duffy.

Bobby Duffy is the director of the Policy Institute at King's College London and the author

of a new book, Generations, Does When You're Born Shape Who You Are?

And I should point out that I'm also a member of Bobby's Policy Institute.

So first things first, Bobby, could you please explain for the benefit of our listeners the different categories of generations you've been talking about in your book that can be quite confusing to the non-expert?

Yes, you're right. It's important to define which ones we're talking about. So the generations that I look at in the book are the five ones that you would see most commonly discussed in the media, which I start with pre-war

generation who are born before 1945.

Then we move on to baby boomers, who are a very large cohort born between 1945 and

1965.

Then it's Gen X, who are born 1966 through to 1979 my generation

then it's Millennials 1980 through to 1995 and finally Gen Z who are born

1996 and after although there's still discussion about whether we've got a new

generation coming through Generation Alpha, people that are already starting to talk about,

whether it's like kids aged 11 and under. So I don't really look at that in the book.

But what spurred you to write the book in the first place? Was it a feeling that there was a

kind of growing and inaccurate sense

of intergenerational warfare out there you were determined to try and prove it but then since your

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