podcast
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Every Thursday on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish explores the animating forces of this extraordinary American political moment. It’s not about the horse race, it’s about the larger cultural ideas driving the conversation: the role of online influencers on the electorate, the intersection of pop culture and politics, and discussions with primary voices and thinkers who are shaping the political conversation.
The Millennial Internet, from Buzzfeed Quizzes to Filming ICE
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Jan 29, 2026
This year marks a milestone for Millennials: the youngest of the cohort finally turns 30. So what comes next for the first generation of true digital natives now that they have achieved “unc” status? Audie talks with Sam Sanders, host of KCRW’s The Sam Sanders Show, about the generation that watched media transform from Buzzfeed quizzes into AI slop. They also discuss Millennial activism taking over the generation’s Instagram feed as ICE protests continue in Minneapolis.
Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:00
I'm Audie 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.
Sam Sanders
00:00:15
My godson called me unc a while back and I thought it was a compliment for a few days.
Audie Cornish
00:00:19
Honestly, you have unc vibes.
Sam Sanders
00:00:20
I'm unc.
Audie Cornish
00:00:22
The millennials, the youngest of that cohort finally turns 30 and with the new year, there's been this like 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 make sense 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.
Audie Cornish
00:01:03
When you started at NPR, you had a young person title.
Sam Sanders
00:01:09
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 gonna 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
Audie Cornish
00:01:32
Okay, well guess what? You guys are the old people now.
Sam Sanders
00:01:35
And what's crazy is how quickly it happened. 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 aged.
Audie Cornish
00:01:51
So before we get started, let's just do the delineation. And Pew Research says anyone born between 1981 and 1996 is considered a millennial.
Sam Sanders
00:02:05
I'm 84.
Audie Cornish
00:02:06
You're 84, whereas I'm like late, like late 70s, like the last two years of the 70s, which is how I ended up feeling like an elder millennial, but not making the cut quite literally.
Sam Sanders
00:02:16
Yeah, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:02:17
'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.
Sam Sanders
00:02:25
I was a senior in high school.
Audie Cornish
00:02:26
Yes, exactly. I was in college, growing up in the shadow of the Wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, being between being like roughly voting age for the 2008 election. Like you guys are si se puede, like that's your
Sam Sanders
00:02:41
Oh my God, it was a foundational moment. The way young people did that election. It was a big deal.
Audie Cornish
00:02:47
And you were the most, you were, cause I say Gen Z is now, the most racially and ethnically diverse adult generation in the nation's history. And then lastly, of course, the economic recession. I think everyone remembers those news stories. I was like, they don't move out of their house. They spend money on avocados and coffee or whatever. That was sort of the knock on millennials. And now there's a whole other new round of knocks, which is cringe. The idea that as a generation you're sort of sincere in a way that is uncomfortable to the youngs.
Sam Sanders
00:03:19
Oh, totally.
Audie Cornish
00:03:20
Does any of that sound correct to you?
Sam Sanders
00:03:22
All of it sounds correct to me. And when I have to think about those timeline points of how we came of age, it's like, all right, we had a big foreign policy event with the Twin Towers, we had big financial event with The Recession. You know, things like that will continue to happen to all kinds of folks at all ages. But I think what separates us going through that from Gen Z going through that, is that they are always online consuming those big hits and having to perform in spite of it. It feels like there's a term a friend used, and now all the kids online use I guess, called the panopticon. This idea that everyone is existing in surveillance of everybody else all the time.
Audie Cornish
00:04:09
Even using the word surveillance, I think, is very particular. Whereas back when there was the, what I would say, the buzzfeedification of media, where the goal of a lot of media was to go viral, even whether it was silly or serious, like going viral was sort of a quaint and charming goal.
Sam Sanders
00:04:28
Well, and it's like we were surveilled then, but we didn't think it was that. We were just going viral.
Audie Cornish
00:04:46
That's right there. Yeah. Yeah. That's just right there!
Sam Sanders
00:04:49
Yeah, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:04:49
A simpler time. That probably is what we are seeing in this round of memes that have come up because, you know, it's 2026. 2016 is now firmly a decade away. And you have people looking back on it like it's a simpler, happier time. Tell me about this.
Sam Sanders
00:05:13
Yes, okay, so as soon as your team reached out and it was like, we want to talk about 2016 and all the memes, I said, wait, hold on. Let me refresh my memory. I think I actually wrote a piece for NPR
Audie Cornish
00:05:30
You did.
Sam Sanders
00:05:32
'called, this was December 28th, 2016, the headline was, should we all just stop calling 2016 the worst? So we've been saying everything is the worst for a very long time. My first lines in this piece are, oh, 2016 the year it all went to hell, the year nothing made sense, the year we lost track of reality, the year Merriam-Webster made surreal its word of the year. I'm always really intrigued by how we kind of sometimes put like new names on an ever-present phenomenon. Like the world's always burning, the world is always on fire. We find new language for it.
Audie Cornish
00:06:12
'And we should, let me just explain this to people. Yeah, so basically this is a social media nostalgia trend where basically you go onto your Instagram or whatever and you post a picture of yourself from that time. You got to dip into the camera roll and find yourself in 2016, showing the sort of pre-pandemic, pre-AI slop life that you were leading. And the thing that is crazy about it, the BBC was reporting. The search terms, basically. You had people on TikTok searching 2016, like, oh, what was it like? And on Snapchat, like oh, that's so interesting. And then the other thing that came up is, I don't know if you remember NPR's tiny desk concert with Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros.
Sam Sanders
00:06:57
I was in the building.
Audie Cornish
00:06:58
We were there.
Sam Sanders
00:06:59
I was on the building for that. And I'll never forget that same week that Edward Sharp and his team were doing Tiny Desk they were playing 930 Club. Somebody emailed the all staff to say, I got some Edward Sharp tickets, who wants them? Please reply just to me. I replied to the whole building.
Audie Cornish
00:07:13
Of course.
Sam Sanders
00:07:14
It was peak millennial.
Audie Cornish
00:07:15
We were very, yeah, y'all were very like loose with the all staff. Oh yeah. So the New Yorker described this single as the cranking furnace of the faux lumberjack, mustachioed, mason jar clutching, acoustic guitar strumming, hipster zeitgeist. The magnetic zeros were ubiquitous. This is significant because again, it became this conversation online where someone posted the clip and they were like, this is horrible. And all of these millennials came out of the woodwork to be like, no, it was a better time. This song is like full of hope and it reminds me of good things. And and people were piling on them. And it became a dialog, I think, that distilled this argument about sincerity, cringe, and the cultural posture of this generation.
Sam Sanders
00:08:05
Totally. I feel like the central tension here, when we're thinking about a millennial core and Gen Z core, it's like millennials are seen to be very earnest, Gen Z very jaded. And my thing is like having lived through being in that young generation and then going to now, at some point you'll be both. Like at some you will be jaded too. I have to remind myself of that.
Audie Cornish
00:08:31
'Again, I feel differently. I feel like the Gen X cynicism, the Gen Z version of that has curdled into nihilism and that we see it in their political movements, right? So whether it's their right-wing movements, which are very much rejecting multiculturalism, rejecting the liberal world order, reject, reject reject, or the left-wing version of that, which is when you're talking to a young person and they're like, oh, well, I mean, it is late stage capitalism. And you're like what? Like, wait a second, what are we saying? Like there, I feel like the social contract that was fraying with millennials feels fully ruptured for Gen Z. And they just have a completely different idea of like their relationship to society, what they're getting out of it, what they were promised. Like, I think, I feel like they're more than jaded. Like, they're really fundamentally disappointed.
Sam Sanders
00:09:25
What do you think are the biggest reasons for it? I have some theories.
Audie Cornish
00:09:28
No, tell me your theory first!
Sam Sanders
00:09:29
I feel like so much of it is the way that we absorb the world. I think that the internet that you and I were consuming 10 years ago, 15 years ago it seemed simpler.
Audie Cornish
00:09:41
It was. It was less populated. What color is this dress?
Sam Sanders
00:09:45
'Yeah, it was also less populated by so much content. I think the shift from text-based internet to video-based Internet to infinite scroll Internet. That's made us all feel overwhelmed perpetually. Our phones went from being a thing where we shared with just our friends to a platform where we experienced sensory overload amongst strangers all the time. And I'm not sure that we, our brains and our bodies have caught up to that big change. It's a very big shift. If you go online now and open Instagram, it's like you are at a music festival and you can hear everybody talking at the same time, but you still wanna hear the music.
Audie Cornish
00:10:35
It's interesting because even though TikTok is participatory, even though it feels like they have a voice, I feel like millennials grew up on, you know, Facebook walls and messenger and Tumblr and quizzes and things that actually were fundamentally more social. Like I, now when I'm on these things and I see comments, I'm like, is that a bot? Is that AI? Like I don't have any sense. It's like I actually feel like I watch social media now more than I am social on social media.
Sam Sanders
00:11:07
I really blame a lot of this on the decision, and Facebook led the charge, when they moved all of us over to a newsfeed.
Audie Cornish
00:11:17
You know who was behind that? Adam Mosseri came up with the newsfeed. He is now in charge of Instagram, fighting for his life. And it shows. For his life. And it shows.
Sam Sanders
00:11:25
But in the early Facebook days, you posted stuff and you only saw what you and your friends posted in chronological order. And that was it.
Audie Cornish
00:11:34
To people who wanted to see it, wanted to participate, and wanted to be in a conversation with you. Whereas now, rage bait means, by definition almost, the person paying attention to you might hate your guts.
Sam Sanders
00:11:46
And it's not even rage, but it's like half rage bait, half AI slot. So on top of all of this, yeah. It's like, I see so many videos every day that I send to friends and they write back and say, that's AI, bro. That's AI. I can't tell. So like that further complicates all of us.
Audie Cornish
00:12:02
I'm talking with Sam Sanders. He's host of The Sam Sanders Show, friend of mine. Glad you're back. Stay with us.
Audie Cornish
00:12:17
So I'm gonna turn to something that may not feel related, but is, okay? Which is the politics of this moment and the story around ICE in Minneapolis, the death of Alex Pretti, the death of Renee Goode for a couple of reasons. Number one, both of those people were like millennial age, like they're in their late thirties, right? The other thing is that the conversation around their deaths is so radically different if you're on TikTok and Instagram versus Facebook and X, right? So again, that sort of like, it doesn't feel like a socially cohesive media experience and that really shapes the dialogue. And then the thing I wanna put to you, and you could tell me if I'm wrong, if 9/11 was the millennial Pearl Harbor, I wonder if these deaths in Minnesota are your Kent State.
Sam Sanders
00:13:17
Probably yes, but I think the biggest difference between Kent State and now is that for most Americans in that era, if you wanted to find reliable information about what happened, there were a handful of news sources who most folks just trusted. And now we have seen a traditional news media diminished. We've seen these apps that are ascendant. Become more beholden to shareholders and also full of AI. And the biggest thing is that like now our version of the internet, if you think about it, it is unique for every single individual. I have my own algorithm, you have your own.
Audie Cornish
00:14:01
Yeah, it doesn't build consensus.
Sam Sanders
00:14:03
And the content that is the most prioritized is the stuff that's the most incendiary. You know, we talk about fixing healthcare and fixing our military, fixing our borders. I also want to have a conversation about fixing whatever our public square is. It's broken. It's broken.
Audie Cornish
00:14:24
Yeah.
Sam Sanders
00:14:24
Sorry, there's no answer there. Just more questions.
Audie Cornish
00:14:26
No, no, no. I mean, in a way, I'm asking that because like, you know, you you were that original professional young person in politics.
Sam Sanders
00:14:33
Yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:14:34
There's so much about this story that is that has to do with how this generation has grown up alongside its technology. I mean you have ICE officers wielding their own cell phones.
Sam Sanders
00:14:47
Mhm.
Audie Cornish
00:14:48
'Monitoring, observing through your phone has become one of the most specific and concrete acts of defiance and resistance in communities like Minneapolis and others. And it's also now being called violence or terrorism, right, by people like Kristi Noem and the state. It does feel like the generation that brought us virality-
Sam Sanders
00:15:13
'Mm-hmm
Audie Cornish
00:15:14
'-is still like relying on it somehow. Even though the system doesn't work the same way. Like virality doesn't make accountability.
Sam Sanders
00:15:23
Not at all. I remember, I was covering Black Lives Matter protests many years ago. There was this moment when that movement said, oh, we have video now. It will change everything. We have video now, once they see it, of course they'll stop. And I remember tracking this story years after those first big high profile cases of black people being shot by police on camera. Every year, the number of police involved shootings in this country either went up or stayed the same.
Audie Cornish
00:15:53
Right.
Sam Sanders
00:15:54
So you're totally right. Just because we see it doesn't mean we fix it.
Audie Cornish
00:15:58
But we feel like it's still possible. The act of holding up that phone means you feel like down the line, if it's not today, if not tomorrow, or even if it is the fact that there are going to be some people who believe what they see. And that did happen with the death of Alex Pretti, right? This administration was coming out hot, calling him an assassin, calling him a domestic terrorism, this, that. And there were just one too many phones out there for that to fly.
Sam Sanders
00:16:25
Yeah. Well, and we've also seen as much as newsrooms have been decimated in this new media climate, there has been, I think, a really good shift on the way that a lot of newsrooms cover incidents with the police, with ICE, with border patrol. When I first began...
Audie Cornish
00:16:44
With law enforcement.
Sam Sanders
00:16:46
Exactly like I first began covering these kind of shootings and anytime that we got a statement from the police we just believed it.
Audie Cornish
00:16:54
That is a really good point. Even now, as we have all these questions about Kash Patel and the FBI and this administration and who they investigate, we're all more comfortable with the idea of saying maybe law enforcement isn't always telling you the whole story.
Sam Sanders
00:17:10
Exactly, exactly. It's funny. I haven't been sleeping well this last week. The news has just been rough. I've been a little sick because it's that time of year. And one of the things I've had to do to just help myself get ready to sleep as I recover, I've have to delete a lot of these apps from my phone. Because especially in light of these ice shootings, you know, you open Instagram and immediately it feels like that app is punching you in the face. It is combative. And I think the worry and the challenge and the fear that I face is someone who was concerned about this. I'm like, oh, am I doing a good job if I'm not in that fray as well? Am I caring if I am not there?
Audie Cornish
00:17:52
Is that your millennial coming out though? Because if you were raised in the age of hashtag activism, Arab Spring rise and fall, and BLM and Say Her Name and all of these things, the performance was also considered a contribution.
Sam Sanders
00:18:08
Exactly.
Audie Cornish
00:18:08
That's been way diminished. Especially on the left, I think in a lot of ways.
Sam Sanders
00:18:12
Oh, for sure. For sure, for sure. But I also know that like, you know how all these marches get organized? On the apps. You know, they're also galvanizing tools. I think for me what I try to just keep as a central focus in my life as I navigate media and talking about the world, it's like how do I make my phone and these apps a tool that I use, not a device and a thing that uses me? It's like who's in charge? There's some days when I open my phone where it feels like the phone is in charge. I try to fight that.
Audie Cornish
00:18:45
Well, it is the algorithm, right? I was talking with someone today about the new TikTok ownership and I asked, so unknown unknowns. What do we know about how the new U.S. Trump aligned owners will retrain the TikTok algorithm? And he said, the truth is, we don't even know how the algorithm works anyway, even before the purchase.
Sam Sanders
00:19:05
That's right.
Audie Cornish
00:19:05
And so, yes, when you click on something, when you watch something, whether it was the attacks on people in Gaza or whether it's. The shooting of a protester, the algorithm serves you more. You'll get 50 more versions, like you said.
Sam Sanders
00:19:22
Exactly. And half of them might be AI.
Audie Cornish
00:19:25
That's the worst. That's the worst.
Sam Sanders
00:19:28
I think millennials imagined at the start of this social media internet age that this version of internet would bring us into a new world and save the world fully in the process. Right? And when I look at the data around consumption habits of the biggest platforms in the world right now, they don't feel like they're pushing towards a future. They all feel stuck in feedback loops and at best nostalgic. This is a kind of different tangent, but on Spotify, 70% of all listening is catalogue. That means old music, less than new music. When I look at TikTok, a lot of the trends that Gen Z is embracing are throwbacks to what we did 15, 20 years ago.
Audie Cornish
00:20:19
Yeah.
Sam Sanders
00:20:19
And I think when I see that happen, it's proof that all of us right now feel less secure about the world that lies ahead than the world we were seeing or saw through others 15, 20 years ago.
Audie Cornish
00:20:34
My controversial take on this is that post the awakening, post going after the authors of the 1619 project, post the sort of realignment of like history and framing of history around Black civil rights struggles, which all of these millennial Obama era reporters and columnists and writers all came of age being public intellectuals in a way that was enabled by online dialog, right? Your Twitter Roxane Gays, your whatever.
Sam Sanders
00:21:14
It was just like Black Twitter. It was a phenomenon.
Audie Cornish
00:21:16
'It was Black Twitter had an academic wing. But that academic wing actually undergirded a lot of the mainstream conversations in progressivism. With their retreat, I'll use the word retreat, or aging out, right, as they're off doing other things, they're professors now, they've written other books, they're on other topics. And with the anti-woke movement so powerful in the administration and in social media, I think the people who would have made the arguments you're talking about, their platform has been destabilized. They're scattered. And I feel like that's why your feed is not what it was in 2017.
Sam Sanders
00:22:05
'I think that a lot of how I've been changing as I get older, experiencing these things, as I have to say to myself, oh, it's a cycle. It's a cycle of progress and then retrenchment and then progress and then retrenchment. And when I remind myself of that, I feel a bit more fortified. This won't be the last time that this kind of wave happens. The activists will always be there. The folks thinking about these issues seriously will always be there. I think the biggest challenge in our moment is how we find a way to communicate those ideas to each other. And increasingly, when I talk with folks, they're saying it's going to happen offline. If the great awakening happened maybe some 10 years ago, we're about due for a great de-phoning. I think that the reality of what needs to happen in this country and how it needs to be done, it's gonna have to happen outside of the phone. And that makes me feel a little bit better because I'm tired of my phone, Audie.
Audie Cornish
00:23:07
This is how you got called "unc," by the way. This is, this is the youth to "unc" pipeline in action.
Sam Sanders
00:23:15
Youth to "unc" pipeline.
Audie Cornish
00:23:16
Yeah, when you're just like, you know it's a cycle.
Sam Sanders
00:23:19
It's a cycle.
Audie Cornish
00:23:25
Um, Sam, I'm so glad that I still know you, you have no idea, and it's, it's been so awesome watching your career. Tell people where they can find you these days. What are you up to?
Sam Sanders
00:23:37
Yes. So my show all about entertainment and fun things like movies, music, TV, books, etc. It's called The Sam Sanders Show. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. I'm also most active on Instagram. I still use that app at Sam Sanders.
Audie Cornish
00:23:55
That's Sam Sanders. All right, Sam, thanks so much.
Sam Sanders
00:23:58
Thank you! Appreciate it!
