The following is a transcript of a two-minute discussion from an interview the Risk-Monger gave for the Euro Health Podcast in May, 2023. Watch the full interview here. This passage, slightly edited, came at time: 24:07 to 26:19.

We’re in a rather interesting period right now where we have four active generations (the Baby Boomers are still very active in a lot of these debates) and each generation has had a different approach and a different way of dealing with (risk policy decisions).

The GenX generation is what I’ve called “Generation AIDS”. They grew up with AIDS just at the time of their sexual coming of age so they have learned via fear and precaution. That’s their main policy tool and that’s the generation that’s making decisions now (why precaution is very popular, because when you were 16, 17 years old and AIDS became a big crisis, it changed the way people thought).

Millennials are the Internet generation. They’re the ones that were basically taught not to trust.

And then we see now the GenZ generation coming in. I saw, in my university, a complete shift again. They’re the ones that are social. With social media, they grew up together and they will not trust what I say in class, but they’ll get together with seven or eight other students and decide what they should or shouldn’t do.

So these four generations now have completely different ways of making decisions and it’s quite interesting to see when you put this into the soup of how policies are being made. For the GenZ’s, if we just take the case of climate change, you can see that they’re not willing to listen to anybody in my generation. I mean … just forget it.

You have then from that a really interesting question: How do people make decisions? How do they manage risks? And policymakers can’t really make a decision easily when you have different audiences approaching things so differently.