I'm Monty Cornish, and this is the assignment. And today I'm bringing in a friend, Sam Sanders,

host of the Sam Sanders Show, which is a pop culture podcast from KCRW. But the reason why is because

2026 marks a milestone for Sam's generation. My godson called me Unk a while back.

And I thought it was a compliment for a few days. I'm unk vibes. I'm unk.

I was just thinking about that.

The millennials, the youngest of that cohort, finally turns 30.

And with the new year, there's been this wave of nostalgic social media posts and throwback photos and looking back to quote unquote the simpler times of 2016.

So Sam is here to help me make sense of this trend, to help me make sense of the politics of millennial culture then and now.

Like does a generation raised on virality still believe anything online can change the world. Stay with us.

When you started at NPR, you had like, you had a young person title, like in the politics job. Oh, yeah. When I covered politics at NPR,

I covered the 2016 elections. I was on the trail, 15, 16. My beat was the intersection of pop

culture and politics. And it was like, you're going to get the memes. I had a weekly column

called meme of the week where I talked about memes. And I was just like, you know, the young kid who gets the internet. Okay, well, guess what? You guys are the old people now. And what's crazy is, like, how quickly it happened. Yeah. I think I went into COVID lockdown, feeling still very much that young reporter who was professionally young.

And I tell you what, once Fauci said, go back outside, I was, I was aged.

So before we get started, let's just do the like delineation.

Yes.

And Pew Research says anyone born between 1981 and 1996 is considered a millennial.

I'm 84.

You're 84, whereas I'm like late, like late 70s, like the last two years of the set, which is how I ended up feeling like an elder millennial, but not making the cut quite literally.

Yeah, yeah.

And I was looking at the markers that they suggested.

One was being between the ages of like five and 20 during the 9-11 attacks.

...