The Problem With Millennials | Theo Watt & Eve Young

Theo Watt and Eve Young are the hosts of the Socials Minds Podcast and Copywriters at Social Chain. We talk about millennials and Gen Z like homogenous groups, but technology and innovation have made it problematic to index generations by 15 year gaps. A person who is 12 will have little in common with someone who is 27, as will a person who is 25 have little in common with someone who is 34. And yet, despite online platforms allowing you to target by age, world view and even household income now, there are those that still tar all millennials, all Gen Z – or worse – millennials and Gen Z together with the same brush. Theo & Eve lay out their issues with the current classification system for young people as a whole and explain exactly why it's not only inaccurate but also damaging to the members of that group. Massive thanks to Social Chain and Video Guy Ollie for letting us use their beautiful studio & podcast setup. Extra Stuff: Follow Eve on Instagram - https://instagram.com/evelilyyoung Check out the Social Minds Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/social-minds-social-media-marketing-answered/id1382785203 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Eve and Theo from the Social Minds podcast. So what are we going to talk about today?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Millennials.

• 0:05Speaker 02

  Millennials, we have to. If you believe everything you've read, if you fall into that bracket, you are lazy, you're very narcissistic, you're probably not doing very well for money, you'll never be able to afford a house.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Eat too much avocado toast.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Exactly. Being millennials, we feel that millennials are less defined by the situations around them, stuff like nine 11 and whatever. They're less defined by these situations and more defined by this boom of innovation that has happened between, say, 1982 to present day. You know, what defines a millennial is the people who have lived through a vast speed of technological change.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  All this media attention that millennials are getting and the reputation that they've got just refers to the snowflake generation, which people assume is like teens and 20 some things, when it's actually not. So I think the majority of the time when people are saying, oh, millennial, millennial, they just mean young people and they don't actually realise it stretches up to the age of 38.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Eve and Theo from the Social Minds podcast here in my beautiful new studio. Welcome.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Hello, hello. Good to have you back again.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  This is your studio.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, today, it's an adopted studio for me, this, of course. How are you? You good?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, really, really good. We've got you something, haven't we?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Got you a saurine because I know how much of a fan you are.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  Look at that.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  It's actually from Manchester as well, I believe. Saurine, yeah. It's a Manchester cake. I suppose you could call it a squidgy loaf.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  It is. So let me tell you, let me tell you about the difference between a cake and a biscuit. So cakes are not that applicable. Biscuits are. And I think the reason for that is that cakes are not seen as a luxury item because you would inevitably have to buy birthday cakes presumably throughout the year. And Jaffa Cake had to prove that they were a cake and not a biscuit to avoid the tax. And the way that you prove whether you're a biscuit or a cake is cakes, when they're left out, go hard and biscuits, when they're left out, go soft.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know where you go on from there.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Did you know that burgers from McDonald's have to have the pickles in, otherwise, because of the amount of sugar, they would be classed as a cake?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Are you kidding?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Who told me that?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  I feel like it was me.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  It was you.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I don't wanna brag, but I think I was the one who said it, yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  It was you.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  But I think I heard it off a guy who heard it off a guy who heard it off a guy who heard it from his brother.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  I've taken it as gospel now.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Fine, truth. It's on the internet now, which means it's the truth. Yeah. So what are we gonna talk about today? Millennials. Millennials. We have to. We have to talk about millennials in a way that we don't talk about millennials at the moment. Uh, we need, we need to see millennials differently, basically. And, well, I suppose we could take it from the beginning. Um, the theory around at the moment is that if you were born into nineteen eighty-two or nineteen eighty-one, between then and nineteen ninety-six, let's say, you are classed as a millennial. So right now, the oldest, uh, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, uh, the youngest, say, about twenty-four, twenty-three.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  It depends on which definition you look up as well, which is another massive issue. Because no one knows exactly where the timeline starts and where the timeline ends, which is causing a lot of confusion. So it centers bureau starts at nineteen eighty-two to two thousand and Pew Research is nineteen eighty-one to nineteen ninety-seven. So the youngest millennial could be twenty-three or twenty-four.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  It shifts, yeah.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  And the oldest one could be like thirty-seven or thirty-eight and no one really knows where the boundaries lie.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  And if you believe everything you've read, if you fall into that bracket, you are lazy, you're very narcissistic, you're probably not doing very well for money, you'll never be able to afford a house.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Eat too much avocado toast.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's all these stereotypes that have come along that we, you know, whenever you see the word millennial that you see. Um, and it's, and it's as simple as that, really. And our argument with this is that, you know, in what other context would you group the sort of behaviours of a thirty-eight-year-old or thirty-four-year-old or whatever with that of somebody fifteen years younger than them? Because that's how long the millennial generational span is. It's about fifteen years.

• 4:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, I definitely count towards the top end. I'm thirty one and I would count myself as a millennial. But you are right, there seems to be a negative connotation. So what what defines a millennial then, do you think, in terms of their behaviours, in terms of what they, how they act and stuff like that?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Well, this is this is something that we've thought a lot about and we've thought about in a way that if you tell the millennial story, it's you've got this, you've got this group of people that fall into this generation who have been affected by major events. So you've got things like people will always list the financial crash, they'll list nine eleven, they'll list this stuff like that. And also the way parents have been with their children, the millennials are seen to be very, there's the term that goes around, snowflakes, that we always use.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Like, because that's a good point you brought up about, like, so things like the financial crash and nine eleven, the launch of the first iPhone all happened right in the middle of the millennial timeline. So they're meant to be a little bit more savvy with career routes, they don't follow traditional paths, they're more likely to go into entrepreneurship and things like that, they're less likely to get married. They're just a little bit more easygoing in some aspects than their than their parents were.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  And like, yeah, like you said, a bit narcissistic and a little bit self obsessed.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And if we focus on that snowflake angle, that is always sort of tied with millennials, it's basically because I'm sure you and a lot of your listeners would have seen the video that Simon Sinek did. So he was a, he still is an author, I should say, on YouTube and he put out videos saying millennials in the workplace where for about fifteen minutes, he basically tied millennials with this brush and said they are like this because of this. And one of the main points on that was that millennials are our parents, they were very, very safe of us, you know, they wrapped us up in sort of cotton wool and we were given medals and trophies for coming last because it's about the participation that counts.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So, you know, if you look at millennials, the the idea is that we're very sort of, you know, a little bit self effacing, we're very much wrapped in cotton wool. We're very kind of, you know, butter wouldn't melt in some ways, but you don't wanna, you know, every, we take everything very much to heart in a way. So that's where this whole snowflake idea comes from.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  They're just stereotypes though.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Like you said, like, the, the main problem is because it spans like fifteen to eighteen years. There's no, there's no way in hell, all of those people are the same, like, they're all narcissists, or like, none of them wanna get married, or ni- like, none of them can afford a house. Like, they are just sweeping generalizations, but the problem is that, like, no other generation, our industry has sort of taken those stereotypes as gospel. And because they don't understand the generation, because no one really knows, uh, like, what they want or how to speak to them. They take the stereotypes as gospel and they're using them to target them, but they're just completely wrong.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we've got, well, we've, we've, we've got a completely different take on it in a way, and that is, uh, you know, we're probably skipping forward a little bit, but it's, uh. We've, we feel that millennials, you know, be- being millennials, we feel that millennials are less defined by, uh, the situations around them, stuff like nine eleven and whatever. They're less defined by these situations and more defined by this boom of innovation that's happened between, say, nineteen eighty-two to present day, really, so. Uh, if we can list it off, we, we, you know, the first Nokia phone I remember came in the mid nineties, and then from there it was, you know, it took way before the iPhone.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Putting cameras into phones was a massive thing, then video phones came, and then you go on from there, and you've got stuff like Windows, dial-up, broadband, so.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Um, it was like every year, you can remember it, like, we're probably all about the same age where we can literally remember a world before all of that, and so we watched it happen.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Um, like, literally year, year on year, I was a little bit younger, I think I went into secondary school when I got my first flip phone. Uh, and I remember my sister getting a Nokia when I was still in primary school and being really, really jealous because her and her friends were playing snake and I wasn't allowed one. It was a, it was a whole, it was a whole saga. But, yeah, like, uh, literally every single year after that, that when I was in year eight, someone brought in the first iPhone three and everyone was like cooing over that. By the next year, everyone had iPods and the next year after that, like, there was something else.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  And then that big thing, social media, happened.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Halfway through that. So to sort of answer your question in kind of a succinct way, it is, you know, what defines a millennial is the people who have lived through a vast speed of technological change.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Unprecedented.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Rocketed. Exactly. Unprecedented. And there's stats that, you know, there's stats to say and and sort of opinions around that there's been more innovation in the last five years than there has in the last thirty years. Believe that to some extent, because if we take,

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Say that last ten.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Forget about pre ninety nine. If we take, you know, let's take nineteen ninety five, let's sort of say dial up as we remember it. The period between that and present day has seen unprecedented change.

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  In technology.

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  I mean, the world is evolving faster than our minds can to cope with it. It's evolving faster than our um social uh causes, our understanding of how society works, uh our laws. Like to be whoever a lawmaker is, if that was, I don't know how it works, I'm going to guess it'll be the sort of thing which is actually done through the government. But if you were a private firm that was able to write laws as new technologies come along, like you're probably one of the richest companies in the world. Like, because all you had to do is go, oh, my God, first we have to work out what's happening with this internet thing.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, shit. Now they've got it in their pocket. Oh, my God. Now they're downloading music illegally. Like, do you know what I mean? It's just this monster that's grown so many different limbs. Um. So have you read The Coddling of the American Mind?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  So that book is about as seminal by Jonathan Haidt. It's about as seminal for what you're talking about now as you can get. And for anyone who is listening, go back and listen to Jonathan Haidt on Joe Rogan, fantastic podcast. And he talks about uh links between depression and anxiety and suicide in young girls and the advent of social media. There's this line around about two thousand and eight and then another one around about two thousand and twelve, where there's marked differences in behaviour and stuff like that. But one thing that you mentioned was to do with the um awards for coming last, this participation, this kind of coddling, right? That's what Jonathan refers to it as. And.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  Personally, for me, as someone who was born in eighty eight, I never saw any of that.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:17Chris Williamson?

  I feel like I, and I didn't hear about any of that until four or five years ago. So I think lumbering the millennials as they are, as they've been defined by the, the studies that you guys have looked at, into the snowflake generation, I think is erroneous. Like for me, there was, there was none of that. So a perfect example of this is where you said people become hypersensitized, they take a lot of things to heart. If you have a look at purposefully exposing children who have a predisposition to allergies, to types of treats that have peanut dust coating.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:00Chris Williamson?

  You reduce the chance of them having anaphylaxis in later life by twenty five to fifty percent. What that means is that if you purposefully expose young children to a small dose of something which potentially is uncomfortable for them, later in life, they benefit.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:17Chris Williamson?

  What it means is that by, the, the same thing goes for there's higher rates of asthma in cleaner households. If you disinfect the shit out of your house.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Like vaccinations?

• 12:26Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:27Chris Williamson?

  Um, whereas you go to places like Africa, almost no asthma. Because the houses expose children to low doses of what it is that is going to protect them later in life.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  You're not meant to wash everything that you give to a newborn baby.

• 12:41Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Like every, or new parents are always like, oh my God, make sure everything's really clean.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  Covered in alcohol.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  You meant to leave, you meant to leave some germs on.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the point.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So that they build their immune system.

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  Socially, the same thing occurs, right?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  This is, but this is exactly it. At the root of this problem is this need to uh, put these conditions on what we call millennials. I mean, let's, let, you know, let's make no bones about it. It's very easy to use the term millennials and stuff like marketing. And, and you know, when a marketer says.

• 13:09Chris Williamson?

  Sounds trendy, doesn't it?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Ex- exactly. It's, it's also, you know, we can, and we, and we do define demographics, you know, in the same way that you've got Gen Xs, you've got boomers. The problem seems to be with the focus on millennials.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Under the spotlight and that is setting a precedent for we we were speaking about it in terms of that. You know, now now that we've done the whole millennial thing, let's call it that. And we sort of, you know, what do they want? What are they like? Why do they feel like this?

• 13:37Chris Williamson?

  Where do they shop?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yes. And all of that. And grouping sixteen year olds, you know, what it would have been back then, grouping sixteen year olds with thirty four year olds. And saying they are exactly the same.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Just wildly wildly unhelpful.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  They're they're, you know, if you've got people at the start of their, you know, before they reach spending power and they're going to university, you've got people who are, you know, you're you're telling me you're putting them in the same boat as people who are thirty four.

• 14:01Chris Williamson?

  Two kids, two dogs, mortgage.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yes.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Do you know what it is? When you said before about, so there's millennial stereotypes, which you say don't apply to you. Uh, maybe because you're on the older end of that spectrum. And then there's the snowflake generation. But I think the problem is that the entire general public, and it may be like, it's not so bad in the marketing industry, because if if you know it, then like, you know, we're putting it to good use. We know what the actual boundaries are. But all this media attention that millennials are getting and the reputation that they've got just refers to the the snowflake generation, which people assume is like teens and twenty somethings.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  When it's actually not. So when I think the majority of the time when people are saying, oh, millennial, millennial, they just mean young people.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  And they don't actually realise it stretches up to the age of thirty eight.

• 14:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, especially seen as like me and Dom were discussing this earlier on. There is a an equivalent of a self-awareness menopause that you go through between the age of around about twenty two and sort of thirty. Some people never go through it, but the majority of people do tend to go through it. Dom said, um, when he was twenty three and he was sober, going out, his friends would give him grief. When he's twenty six and sober, his friends look at him with admiration.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Because there is this flipping of consciousness.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  From the egocentric to the more mature.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  And the there is a a formative, the formative years, as they're referred to. The end of that, like the final boss is a reduction in ego.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  For most people, if you have a, I guess, a healthy progression through it.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  I could see that, yeah.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  Um, and.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  What that means is that, and the other thing as well, millennial is such a, it's just such a buzzwordy term, right? It's the sort of thing that you can throw out.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:50Chris Williamson?

  And now it is Gen Z.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  Like probably most people that read the news, that pick a typical person on the street in Manchester. And most people are gonna know what a millennial is.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  They'll go, yeah, like, young, young people.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, right, okay. But if you said Gen Z, they'd be like, is that a new computer game? Like, is that?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  And this is it. And this, this, this is one of the, this is another one of the interesting byproducts of the millennial generation is that because, you, you know, if I could sit from my point of view, and I'd imagine many others, because there was so much emphasis on working out millennials, what makes them tick? That was, that was the headline you'd say, what, what makes them tick? What do they actually want? That we've used this as a precedent to question Gen Z, even to the point where we see reports questioning Gen A. Now, technically, Gen As are about probably seven, five years old, and we're already making assumptions about what they are like, the kind of world they would grow up with. We've got the world of augmented reality, virtual reality, voice.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  It's because people are trying to like, we're trying to like, get ahead of ourselves this time.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Like, well, we don't want the same mistakes to happen again that happened with the millennial generation where, you know, we spent so long trying to figure them out that by the time we've actually figured it out, we were already on the back burner. They're spending power and going, yeah, they are all like, there's another one already. But I think we're making a mistake there because like we were saying earlier about the speed of innovation that happened in the millennial timeline is not gonna happen again. It's already slowed. If you look at before the millennial generation, innovation was more invention and it was quite slow. You know, you had the computer and then the first Apple Mac and then all of a sudden it was like boom, boom, boom, new products for consumers. And now it's like, okay, now we're expecting voice to kick off, we're expecting VR to do the same thing, but it's not going that quickly. It's, it's taken a little bit of a dip.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  So I don't think it'll have the. You know, the same, the same effect as the millennial generation did.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  You think it's been like a, a real state shift through the millennial generation?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:48Chris Williamson?

  And now it's just different flavours of the same cake.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's why they were so hard to figure out because nothing like that had ever happened before. All the new technology that came in, that's what shaped their mindset and opinions, like slap bang in the middle. It's why older millennials differ so much from younger millennials because if you grow up with the influence of a smartphone and social media.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  You know, you can't underestimate the effect that that's gonna have on you.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  You, you could, you could put a, you know, you could get an empty room and put a bit of masking tape down. Uh, down the line of the room and say, right, everybody born in the twentieth century, stand on this side of the room. Everybody's drawn on twenty first century, stand on this side of the room. Um, or, or sorry, I should say anybody who sort of grew up formatively in the twenty first century, stand on this side of the room. And that is what we are, that is what we are looking at. And like, like we said, you know, we, we covered briefly on the innovations that happened, just to sort of reiterate that, I mean. Okay, so we had smartphones. So, so sorry, let's start second from the beginning. We had, uh, mobile phones. Uh, you know, that, that were bricks back then in the mid nineties.

• 18:48Chris Williamson?

  Car phones.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, they, they, you know, and they were still on wires and we still called them mobile phones.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  And then you had camera phones and you had video phones and you had MP3.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Sony Ericsson, who remembers that one?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Sony Ericsson.

• 18:59Chris Williamson?

  MiniDisc, don't forget MiniDisc.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  MiniDisc.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Motorola.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  So while, so we've got this innovation that's happening rapidly in communication, which, you know, extends to broadband. Uh, social media, because let's not forget, you know, before Facebook and Instagram, it was Bebo and MySpace and, and whatnot, and it was all of that. So while all this is going on. You've got changes in media, so DVD, VHS, which became Blu-ray and then audio as well. So it's all. You know, this, this rapid period of change is what has shaped this generation. The problem when we talk about millennials. Is we always talk about a disconnect between millennials and brands or millennials and other generations. You know, we put the spotlight on them, we sort of push them into the, the sort of corner of the room and say, you are this, this, this, this, this because of this.

• 19:43Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  And I think essentially, like, like we thought, what we're saying is that it's not, you know, it's not about. The, the millennial generation had nine eleven, we had atrocities like nine eleven. Gen X had, uh, you know, the invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, you know, before that we had world wars, the Vietnam War.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Gen Z will have Trump.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Every, every generation has their sort of societal kind of catastrophes, financial crashes, what, whatever. It doesn't, I, I, I, you know, I cease to believe that that plays such a part in the millennial construct as it does the Gen X construct, as it does for any other generation.

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I agree.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  And how you are.

• 20:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I do agree. I think, um.

• 20:29Chris Williamson?

  When you're talking about millennials and you lump them in a corner, it, it does, it does hark a little bit as like a derogatory term.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Which is, which is, which is probably not, not very nice, like considering that that's where you come from. And that Simon Sinek thing, uh, it will be in the show notes below. The video that you're talking about, it just lambasts anyone who's part of that group and says that you've got this incredibly kind of transactional value that everyone's very easy come, easy go, like that they treat careers like they treat Tinder, um, and like swiping left and right on it. And there's something about, there's something that romanticizes, um, the old ways that things are done, like having a job for life, staying with a partner for life. I did a podcast with Daniel Sloss, Netflix comedian. Um, we talked about, he,

• 21:17Chris Williamson?

  he talked about the fact that back in your parents' generation, you would have only known, you know, apart from the people at work, you'd maybe only known 50 people, like you'd have had a connection with 50 people.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  So really, like if you were having a bad time with your partner, like you've got to stick it out and make it work. You don't know where the fuck anyone else is. Like, where the fuck, where am I going to find an alternative? Like, I don't know. Like, there's no one else at church.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Like, and that's it. And you're like, well, if there's no one at church, I'm screwed. So the same thing occurs for that. But obviously, one of the, one of the key factors has been the, this serendipitous communication where you, you have a, a greater reach that's always on.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  Um, and what that's enabled people to do is to be able to, they're emancipated and they're freed from the previous constraints geographically, um, temporarily as well. Like, you can speak to someone who's in America, who's in Australia, who's got instant communication, all these sort of things. Hmm. And it's allowed people to be freed from the previous confines that they had. But also, we don't.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  We don't know what that, we didn't know what that meant for people. We didn't know what it was going to enable people to be able to do. And there was no model that was pre-written. So you're right, like it does feel a little bit like the old guard, that usually the people that push the millennials have a poor degree, a poor moral compass rhetoric. Yeah. That old guard that are pushing it on us were the people that were supposed to guide us through it. Exactly, yeah. And they didn't. And you're like, okay, was there a point at which social media came along? Where you came before Instagram and said, you should maybe stick to trying to post virtuous and things that represent your integrity as opposed to displaying your life in a way that is a highlight reel. No one ever said that to me. No.

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  No one ever said you should, from the beginning that you have a smartphone, consider your time and your attention and look at the cognitive tricks that are being played on you. No one ever said that to me either. Like, you know, it took ages for the internet to be around for people to even start to talk about like chat services like MSN for being like an area that children should be safe around. Yes, yeah. Are you like? It does feel a little bit like the people that pushed the, the narrative of millennials are this kind of the squalor sewage of, of low virtue narrative are, they were the people that were supposed to guide.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  They were the ones who raised it.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, absolutely. Like you, all that you're doing basically is Frankenstein's monster. Like you were supposed to be the people that helped us through this. And on top of that as well, like, it sounds, it just smacks massively of bitterness, I think, a lot of the time. Interesting point, yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  I think that happens with every generation though.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Not thing like. Jealous of the youth.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, every, every single generation will look at the generation below them and think, ugh. What are these ones doing now, like your kids these days?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  We've started doing it, we've started doing it with, you know.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, everyone is guilty of it.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  You know, the people who are younger than us.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Everyone's guilty of it. The only, the only difference, I think, with um Gen X's opinion of Gen Y, so Gen Y is millennials. Gen X's opinion of Gen Y has spread out to everyone. So now even millennials are like criticizing other millennials, like their peers. I have friends who, they probably know that they are in the millennial generation, but they'll go, oh, I'm not a millennial. I'm not like that.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  I'm not a snowflake, I don't go out for brunch.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  That, that kind of stuff. And it's like, well, you're actually stereotyping yourself and actually you are a millennial.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  And we're talking about this over brunch.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  It's because, exactly.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  No, you're, where's the lie though? That's so true.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I'd take a hard line stance on this in a way because I feel, uh, you know, it's exciting, this, if, if we, I'd sort of wanna use the word millennials sparingly, but young people at this time of technological change, this was an exciting time. And this was us finding it out for ourselves. It was like, you know, your parents' generation or their parents' generation discovering rock and roll. This was our rock and roll moment. It was like, wow, I could be anybody I want to be and post on my Facebook and post on my Beeper and do whatever. Now, the problem I see with, from my own observations with the millennial generation is that past generations have been able to define who they are themselves, in a sense. So, uh, we think about Gen X, Gen X is, Gen X is the, you know, they're the alternative generation.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  It was MTV and it was this and that. Now millennials, they've sort of had this label just put, put on them, pushed on them.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  You know, unwillingly. Um, and that's sort of stuck to the point that, you know, a millennial can, we, we, we can't shift this reputation that's been put on us.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  But you won't see that with boomers, you won't see that with Gen X. I doubt you'll see it with the generation that comes after, Gen Z.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  That's why people get so disillusioned with it as well. They've become like so. Separated from their own generation because they feel like these labels and these stereotypes have been put on them against their will. No one wants to be categorised against that well. And of course, yeah, like everyone, like, we like belonging to groups, don't we? We feel, you know, affinities to certain like nationalities or football team or a hair colour. But all of a sudden, like, someone tells you, oh, you're a millennial, which means you're this, this, this, this, and that. You go, well, wait a minute, why are demographers and marketers deciding who I am? Um, so a lot of people have, yeah, gotten a bit fed up with that, haven't they?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  I think that's the irony of it in advertising is that the disconnect with this generation, in a sense, has come from the fact that it's not about, you know, let's find out who they are. It's about, let's find out who they are among ourselves and tell them who they are.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Imagine like a boardroom.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  Let's dictate who they are.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you imagine like a boardroom where everyone's talking about them and there's not a millennial in sight and they're all over there watching going, are they, are they talking about us?

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  Some guy, some guy in a smoking jacket sat on a Chesterfield sofa somewhere.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  Telling.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Is it that?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 27:16Chris Williamson?

  Like accusing people of not having any moral virtue and, and like being snowfla. Yeah, you, you are totally right. But the, the worst thing is they say that the, the best lies are the ones that have some truth in them. And there is degrees of truth, like we all know that friend.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Who treats relationships and their career very transactionally, has junk values, doesn't spend enough time outside, like the, and it's the fact that there are elements of truth. But by exaggerating it, by exaggerating this rhetoric, it means that everybody can cast it off and say, well, that's not me. Because it's so overblown that even the most cutting and accurate statement will still have a couple of bits that don't apply to you.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Um, and that doesn't help people to understand themselves. And it's why I think. One of the reasons potentially why you're seeing this resurgence now of introspective work of the headspace meditation, Sam Harris's waking up app and you know, next door to the offices that we're in is the Manchester Buddhist Compassion Centre.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:21Chris Williamson?

  Where you can go and meditate. It's like that's city centre of Manchester, right next to a trendy office and all this sort of stuff. Because I think that when people are being dictated poor values about themselves that they don't think that they align with, it's very messy signals. And what they're trying to do is work through, okay, well, maybe I am this. Oh, hang on. And then before you know it, you have to go away and find out yourself. Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think what's really bad, like a bad side effect of that, especially for our industry is what a lot of marketers and brands haven't realised is that all of that has bred like a subgroup of this generation of people who actively do the opposite of what their generation is stereotyped to do. So people who are of the millennial age but don't use social media, the people who, you know, started buying vinyl records and they'll do things very sustainably and they'll act similarly to how their grandparents did because that's the new call. And it's like the people who are targeting like this age group are doing so by like the majority of the stereotypes. And actually, there's a

• 29:26Speaker 01

  really, really large portion of them that are acting completely oppositely.

• 29:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Because they don't want to be targeted the same brush.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  But there is a caveat to all of this as well. And that is that the, whether we like it or not, the stereotypes still work.

• 29:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  In advertising. And I know this was something you touched on in a past episode, Chris, I think with Rory Sutherland. And let's take one campaign, for instance, the, a lot of people I'm sure would have seen it, the British Army's campaign that, you know, Snowflakes, We Want You, that went, that went around, play on the Lord Kitcher status that he did. And it was that the, after they broadcast this advert, that, you know, it was appealing to the gamer who stays up for 48 hours at a time. And these people, you know, your agility, your endurance. The army actually found that their recruits doubled.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Within a month, basically.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  That really surprised me because I absolutely hated the campaign.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  There's a massive backlash to this campaign. Snowflakes, we want you to join the army, you know, come to the army. We we need millennials. And it worked. And.

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, that's just, it's one of the circular mad things about advertising, right? Like that you can do something that's inflammatory. So I I have no idea. I would love for to see Gillette in whenever their next earnings goes.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  After they, after they did the um, the most recent advert. Um, and it is

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  going down that risky route of kind of a meta cognizant look at what culture is. And the manipulation of culture by it, like a culture for culture's sake, almost, looking at it with a pure bird's eye view.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  It's a high risk strategy. And like, that's evidently worked. But then you think, okay, so it's doubled recruits. But what's it done for the British Army's standing in society as a whole? Long term, is there potentially going to be some downstream effects of this that are a little bit more negative? That might not be so clever. And then the Gillette thing as well. I'm sure that sat around that boardroom table, someone said, and maybe half the room would have gone, yes, I love it. Men are gonna really connect with this on a deeper level. And it could have gone well. But it got ten to one ratio of dislikes to likes on YouTube. So what does that say? I I don't, again, I don't know what that's translated to in terms of sales.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, the manipulation of the meta narrative about millennials is a dangerous game to play. Um, so what what do you think's gonna happen as we move forward then with Gen Z? Because that's, is that people after ninety six, ninety eight?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Gen Z, they say ninety six, ninety seven. Yeah, born after that. So I make the oldest Gen Z about coming up to twenty two.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  That is twenty two or twenty three, depending on your definition. Because as I said, there's like a few different research um, things you could listen to.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  As well, on, just, just to, just to add on that, the US, I can't remember who, an organisation in the US, uh. Only class, only really recognise boomers as a official generation, as an official demograph. It's just boomers, just the, and the, well, the word boomers comes from that everybody was having kids after the, after the world war. So it said, this was the population boom, these are the boomers.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  You've lumped like fifty years of people in together.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  Difference, difference between someone being born today and someone that's fifty years old.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  You, you can see the flaw in the system. Like to answer your question, for Generation Zed, I don't know what's gonna happen. But what we're trying to make happen and what we hope will happen is basically learning from the mistakes that were made with the millennial generation. We don't wanna assume that just because, let's say, a group of people spanning fifteen to eighteen years are exactly the same. Just because of their age. So what marketers should be focusing on now is their mindset and their behaviour. So if you look at things like Facebook pixels, ability to track absolutely everything you do, based on a click, based on a purchase, based on your cookies.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  They know everything, whether like it's your plans for the weekend or, you know, what play you wanna see next week. They know absolutely everything. And when there's that much detail out there that tells you, you know, who your customers are and what they're doing, why are we still paying attention to how old they are? Like that says anything about the way that they act and the way that they behave. Like we can still, we can still use demographics loosely. But the point is, it's not the most important thing that we should be focusing on.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  There's, there's, I, I, yeah, there's, I, I agree in ways. There's still a place for age, definitely in, in, in marketing. And there will be that, I think, you know, what we're talking about more is that focus on targeting more narrowly, aren't we?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Just, just not, just be like smarter with it. It's like, don't just blanket target everyone. Don't. Pay attention to stereotypes. It's all about your unique audience. And age will always play a part, but I don't think it should be the most important.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  But for me, the wider theme as well with Gen Z is I, to answer the question as well, I don't think there's going to be much change. I think we're all, you know, as a society, this goes outside of marketing and advertising. I think we're waiting for Gen Z to be completely different. And they're going to be this, and they're going to be that, and they're, but you'll see a lot of the traits that, you know, supposedly in Gen Z crossover to the millennial traits. You know, they are entrepreneurial, they are ambitious. Of course they are.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  It's because that innovation has slowed. Like, so we were, we were saying yesterday, if you, you know how we were saying earlier about like every year for the millennials, there's a different piece of technology. Now, every single iPhone regeneration, or Samsung, depending on if you're Android or iPhone, every single regeneration is pretty much the same.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  They just, you're charging a lot more for like not much innovation. And because even they have no room to grow.

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  The biggest software hardware companies are forced to just slow down the old models so that you buy the new ones. Because there just isn't that much, like innovation is happening, it's just not happening as quickly as it was before. So when we expect Generation Z to be completely different to us, we're assuming that something massive is going to happen, like another, another digital revolution, and it's just not the case.

• 35:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, you are right. That's a really, really good point. I think social media was a, I guess you could call it a technological revolution, but it was on existing hardware, right?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Um, but certainly for me, one of the things that I am most concerned about and as a good avatar for someone who's regularly in contact with people that are eighteen to twenty one. And some of them I'm heavily, heavily invested in, especially our managers that work for Vudu Events. I want them to be the most efficient, the best that they can be, not only for the fact that it makes us more money. And but also just that I take personal pride in creating these monsters of their age who go out into the workforce and just walk all over everybody else because they've had this crash course in intensity on how to be efficient and how to behave and how to have discourse with professionals and customers and all this sort of stuff.

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  And what I see from a lot of them is that social media, forget the technology, the technology was simply the root, it was a delivery mechanism for the virus. But the virus itself was social media. And I know that that's an inflammatory term to use for it. There's a lot of good that comes from social media. But I think that for the vast majority of people, at least at the moment, I think it's netting a negative. I think that one of the podcasts I've done recently, someone analogized Instagram as swimming through sewage, looking for a diamond. That you have this serendipitous connection with people. And once every couple of months, you might make a really, really good connection. And you're like, that's exactly why I do it. But it's a gambler's fallacy.

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

  It's like, how much cost have you sunk into this in order to turn this around? And you think, well, can I have my cake and eat it too? Can I have the serendipitous connection and have the things that I want, which is keeping up to date with my family and knowing the real stuff, whilst evading all of the sewage? And I think that that overall situation, that environment for people's formative years to be growing up in, I know certainly, and it may be different for yourselves, Theo, I know that you're a little bit less on your phone than I am. But for me, certainly, my capacity to be able to read and focus on a book,

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  which is low stimulus versus 11 years old to now, it is so much less.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that, yeah.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  So hard to sit there and not even just not fidget, because my body is conditioned to a particular level of stimulus that a piece of paper with non-moving words that are in black and white, it can't match up with. And it's been, the last year's basically been spent on a morning, retraining myself to be able to sit and look at something that's not triggering dopamine every couple of seconds.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  So on our most recent episode of Social Minds, we had a guest in from Iceland, who's a CBT therapist called Dr. Fiona Helga Dotia.

• 38:55Chris Williamson?

  Nice, well done, well done.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  It's a good name, isn't it? But hard part over. No, but she was telling us about some research that came out in January that actually says. You know, we always say that social media is causing depression. It's earned that reputation. Because there's been like an uplift in reports of people, more people being diagnosed and half of that's because more people are aware that it's happening. They're more open about, you know, reporting it or like going to the doctors. And and half of it probably is to do with social media. But she said that what they found is that people were more likely, especially young girls, were more likely to turn to social media. When they were already diagnosed with depression.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  So it wasn't actually, there's a correlation there for sure, but social media wasn't actually the cause, it was the symptom.

• 39:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Um.

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  Coping mechanism.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. But like you were saying about being able to, you know, stop and focus and read a book. I've noticed that myself. It because you're so used to just being switched on all the time. And Dr. Fiole actually said that it's very important for our brains to have idle time. Um, like we need to be bored for the brain to develop properly, especially in young people. Like we just need time to do nothing. And it's something that no one gets these days because we just, I don't know about you, but I feel guilty when I'm doing nothing and just sat there. Because you're expected to always be switched on.

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  The rhetoric that's been pushed and I mentioned on the podcast to do with Dom, we mentioned Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk. Um, and Gary, if you're still listening, first off, I'm very surprised after what I said about you in the last episode. But then on top of that as well, like the hustle and grind mentality. Mixed with always on communication is a dangerous combination. Like industriousness can be taken to an extreme. Now, um, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that's my difficult one to get out. In the book Flow, what he talks about is the fact that human beings have the greatest sense of satisfaction.

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  When they are doing something which pushes them physically or mentally and is both challenging and worthwhile. So those are the things that you need to be able to do. You push yourself to the limits of your competence, doing something challenging and worthwhile.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  And that's why he says that people who have a propensity towards being industrious find going away on holiday very difficult. Because at work, you have inherent challenge. You have a feedback mechanism that tells you how well you're doing and you have goals. Those are the three main things that you need. On holidays, just completely unstructured. Like, you don't win an award for being the best sunbather. Or like, and I think, I think that this is why a lot of people, when they go away on holiday, especially young guys who feel like they have something to prove, will turn towards some form of game. Who can drink the most drinks tonight, who can like kiss the most girls tonight?

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  Or like, girls could do it in a slightly more different way, whereas like who looks the best tonight? Who's got the nicest dress? Who's got the best?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I'm like, how many landmarks can we hit in one day?

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, do you know what I mean? Because you want to try and provide this sort of structure. But obviously what happens when you have what could be maneuvered towards a very virtuous goal, which is I'm gonna constantly be looking at assessing myself and finding out where I can improve and this, that and the other. It's very easily twisted and bastardized into constant self-reflection with negative mind talk,

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  inability to switch off and a desire to always have stimulus. Like, if you go, I think the, the study that I heard recently was that 75% of people take their phone to the toilet and the only thing I could think was, I can't believe it's that low. Like, do you know what I mean? It's what you do when you're on the toilet. Like, but it shouldn't be. And the time, the time on your own is, is super, super important. Deep Work by Cal Newport is the bible on this. We'll be doing a book review on Deep Work and Digital Minimalism coming up soon. But if you want to check it out, the link will be to the Amazon shop in the show notes below. But Deep Work's just the bible on this, about the fact that it is psychologically,

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  neurologically and philosophically, a good thing to do to focus on one task for a significant period of time. And it's a skill that's increasingly being missed in the 21st century.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  You think it's just like common sense? So that's why we're being ogled by older generations? Because they, they can see like the what's gone wrong and they're watching us.

• 43:24Chris Williamson?

  I, I agree with this to an extent, but I feel, and here's where I'll coin the generations again. I feel this bastardization of social media.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Well, well, relevant at times, I feel this is the same as sort of saying, you know, the the the counter argument to that will always be, well. You know, the people who are on their phones twenty four seven are going to make them the best coders in ten years, time when it matters and stuff. So. And while I agree with the fact that maybe there is less of a focus on books, I feel it's still, you know, the medium of getting information and getting knowledge has changed. And I think one of the things that we do are open eyes to campaigns and, you know, in all sort of areas is that. Social media, you know, for all its wrongs, has allowed us to act. In a meaningful way, if you can take it at face value, there is the whole sort of narcissistic element to it, you know, you see.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Influencer marketing and you and you sort of think, oh, you know, narcissism, narcissism, narcissism. But I'd have to question that without social media, would we be as in tune to the world? Would we care as much about the environment? Would we be? Uh, would we get to this point now where we are so, uh, you know, that sense of connection with society where we are so aware. So hyper aware of that there are many different walks of life, however people feel. I think it's. I think it has, you know, while while you could look at the person on the bus who's just looking in their phone, I think it has turned us into better communicators in a way it made us more open.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  It's how you use it as well. I think we are becoming more aware to the mistakes that we've maybe made. Like you said, like we were failed like by our our parents or by the people who created this technology, no one educated us on safe use of it. And now we're sort of getting to grips with it, teaching ourselves. And I like to think of it like a car, like the first car, like how long was it before they got seat belts installed? And like you wouldn't, you wouldn't do that now, would you? You need to learn how to drive the car. You need to, you know, put your safety measures in. Like I know if I'm gonna feel shit about myself, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna follow people who are posting things that are gonna make me feel shit. You just have to curate your feeds and know how to use it and turn to it for positive things. And like, it can be so helpful for like productivity.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  And like you said, awareness about so many like causes, we just have to.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Train ourselves to use it for good.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  I think, I think young people, I think young people definitely do. I think it, you know, to answer the question in a way that, that, that as well is, I think a characteristic of Gen Z. It, it, it's funny, the irony of it has become a very millennial thing to say, you kids, you know, you're, you're addicted to social media. All you do is watch, you know, YouTubers and wrapping toys and who wants to do that? You play with fidget spinners, what are you doing? And that's, that in itself has almost become a kind of millennial trait. So we are just, you know, going back.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we're already bashing the ones younger than us. I get it. Well, I mean, to go on to what you said about the, um, about the car analogy, it's perfectly correct. And what really there should be given for people who were the patient zero avatars for the advent of all of these technologies, where the technology came before the best practices for healthy use did, and before the legislation did. We should be given compassion. There should be a degree and I, I feel that myself. Like I have, because for me, my mobile phone was a, a conduit for my business, which meant that I started to get into the rhythm of using it. And then the tactics which are used by particular social media apps to keep you on infinite scroll, autoplaying videos,

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  red notifications, et cetera, et cetera. I've now

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  become a victim of those particular cognitive tricks and I'm now having to undo the work that was done. But if you're someone who's coming through in Gen Z, screen time on an iPhone only came out six months ago. Where you, where it, um, allows you to track the time that you've spent on individual apps. If you haven't got it turned on, I, I, I urge you to do so just so that you can have a look. Go into your settings, have a look at screen time and it'll be very revealing as to where you've spent your time. Crazy revealing, right? But then, so perfect example here, and this is within the same window, right? We're talking same device. Did you have an iPhone when you needed to download an app that allowed you to use a flashlight?

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  So you didn't, it wasn't always in the dock at the bottom. You needed to download an app.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  Or you had to turn your video camera on with the flash activated.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  And then it took them a while to realise, hang on, this is something which people need. This is a feature which we need to add. You think now, like, why would you not swipe up from the bottom to turn your flashlight on? Whereas in the past, you had to scroll, find like flashlight app dot I O S.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  And press that. And then it was like a little flashlight and you press that. So even within the window that we're talking about of technology, we have seen something come about which was needed and then be uh internalized by the company that's creating the technology. And the same thing is occurring with social media that it was this monster that's come about and before, you know, Tristan Harris and the human side that center for uh human technology. And all of this movement towards uh understanding what the attention economy is and how it manipulates people. That's only just starting to catch up with what's actually been going on for a long time.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  And people in the industry knew it's just starting to trickle down, isn't it?

• 48:48Speaker 02

  It's the same issue with governments at the moment, isn't it?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've just got wind of it and they're like, hang on. Yeah, everyone's playing to catch up. And you're so right. It's because the innovation comes before the rules around it. Like, people are constantly playing catch up. It's like, here's a new thing. Okay, we've got to regulate that and here's something else. And now we have to put rules on that. We're just constantly catching up with ourselves.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Although I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Sometimes I think it's that experimentation phase is what makes innovation so exciting.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Like, I I like to compare it to literally anything that we've invented. It's always had flaws and it's always had dangers before people figure out, oh, actually that we need to amend that bit and we'll make changes here and make it better. It's literally like anything else.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, and I don't think it's a bad thing. If if rules had been put in place beforehand, if someone was able to predict, oh, this is going to be this big. Uh thing that's gonna come along and change everything and it's gonna like make people sad and like steal all their attention and steal their data. They'll be like, okay, that's not allowed to happen.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  And we wouldn't be where we are. We'd have lost out on so much.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  On on the social point, I wanna throw something at you, Chris. Um. How much of that manipulation, you know, of social media? How much of the development, innovation, whatever you wanna call it, how much of that do you think is placed on it by the platforms? And how much of it do you think is just us as a society sort of placing our own needs and wants and desires on this technology? It's been able to.

• 50:14Chris Williamson?

  Like believing that the technology is an oracle or some panacea.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  Fix to all of our problems. Um. I, because of where my mindset is at the moment, I I do have quite a negative view of um Silicon Valley and and what they've done with regards to manipulating technologies. Um. Anyone who has read much of Tristan Harris's work will understand just how subversive and malicious some of the strategies are that people have that have been used. The guy that created Infinite Scroll says it's the single greatest regret of his life.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Hmm hmm.

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  Because you think about just how many, so a perfect example of this, have you seen the film The Big Short?

• 50:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Parts of it.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so on the film, on the film The Big Short, um it's about the two thousand eight financial crisis uh crash. It is a um, it's a fictional adaptation of what actually happened. And in it, this guy says that before he came to work on Wall Street, he uh built bridges. And he said he worked out, um he built this particular bridge which shortened a very highly congested route. And over the lifetime of this bridge, which was about a hundred years, he'd saved billions of hours for people. That's how long he'd saved. And I often think about what converse has been done through social media.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  And you think, right, okay, like if you were to look at how much time has been spent on that, and again. There are positives which come out of it. But in in my belief, we are netting a negative. And the problem is that in ten years' time, I believe that there will be more control in place. That may either be in terms of best practices that are socially enforced. That may be in terms of legislation. That may be in terms of the way that the platforms actually self-manage and self-regulate or whatever it might be. But the problem is that millennials and Gen Z, they've been the canary in the coal mine for this. So they've been the people that have gone in first.

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  They're the vanguard, they're they're point, they're on point in this particular invasion into a new realm of technology that no one's ever seen before. And I think that really calls for a lot more compassion for some of the problems that people are are dealing with. Like, my mum and dad don't have a problem with social media. Like, my dad's got the largest font, sorry, dad. My dad's got the largest font available on his phone and he loves to, he'll send me photos of the dogs and stuff like that. But like, I have no concerns about whether or not my dad is up on Facebook until or YouTube until two in the morning. Yeah. But my business partner's two-year-old son, who has an Amazon Kindle to watch Despicable Me on,

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  I get nervous when I see him around it. Because I think I wonder downstream, and I'm constantly like tapping on Darren and Colleen, business partner and his wife, about like, make make sure you're being careful, like the unbelievable parents. But I it's a powerful technology that I think we need to be, we need to be careful as we move forward with.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  I think one positive thing that will come out of that, like, my my sister's recently had a baby and she's the same. She's always asking me like, oh, like, when when should we let this child have, you know, an iPad? Because you see them, don't they, like, playing with iPads? And it's like, when do they get their first phone? Like, should they be allowed social media when they're like pre-teenage? And it's one of them, like, you're right, like, we went in first. We're definitely the guinea pigs.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  Patient zero.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Exactly, but hopefully we'll have something then to learn from. And we'll just have to, like anything else, teach our kids how to use it, how to use it responsibly, to use it in moderation.

• 53:57Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And like how, how to like reap its rewards without, um.

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be a luddite about this either. I don't wanna be saying like there, there are fantastic benefits, but it's at what cost and can we mitigate the costs? And to look back, you know, we spoke about people that had gone to war. It wasn't that long ago that there was conscription into the army.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 54:16Chris Williamson?

  Like, I'm complaining about the fact that this oracle of all knowledge in my pocket that's always on and allows me to connect with anyone at any time, sometimes saps my attention. Like, I'm aware that there is, relatively across all of time, probably not that big of a problem.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:34Chris Williamson?

  But as we close towards what we want to be an ideal society, we need to narrow down the fidelity and the resolution at which we're looking at the problems. So saying, wow, it was, this is much better than it was fifty years ago, isn't an argument.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  How much better could it be?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  Because if you're comparing stuff to how it was fifty years ago, you're doing what you, your, um, census people did and you're just lumbering all of this, not only all of the people, but the entirety of the world.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  Companies publish year on year profits. They don't publish like century on century profits because it, it wouldn't be comparable.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's so right.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  I think it's, it's interesting. I think we are, you know, and going back to that point about Gen Z, I think we're starting to see, I don't wanna say pulling the reins on innovation a little bit.

• 55:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  But like we said, where there's been so much technological change, I mean, the innovations we talk about nowadays are very much to do with artificial intelligence and stuff like that, you know, which has been around for a lot longer than we think. And for me, a very big difference with that is they are not as consumer facing as social media once was, I suppose. It's, it's, you know, not, not, everyone's not going around saying, oh, I'm just doing a new A I thing. Oh, man, have you seen this? This is A I.

• 55:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's, it's less and less so.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Uh, like that. Yes, it's being served to us in more sort of guerrilla ways, you know, chatbots and stuff like that. But um, no, I do, I do agree with your point. I've, for me, I feel, you know, something else that represent Gen Z and definitely Gen A is just like we became the sort of canary, you know, in the coal mine, as you can say. We, we found a way to regulate this ourselves, I think. And I think that's, that's, that's not what we must not get away from too much is that yes, there's going to be casualties, there's going to be a lot of problems with this. But I think Gen Z and Gen A's greatest benefit will be

• 56:40Speaker 02

  them finding their way into the world and regulating this technology how they want it to be. And I think you are seeing a shift where platforms and, you know, governments and whatever, then, you know, maybe they are not necessarily right about everything. And I think consumers are starting to see that. And, you know, that's, that's displaying itself in many ways. I think consumers are taking back a degree of control.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Definitely. It's, I, I think it's a bit of a, um, a multitude of factors, like the platforms are having, they're being forced to make new features like screen time. Um, and, you know, all the, the new guidelines around safe use and usage policy and stuff like that. They're being forced to put those changes in place. So while that's going on, consumers, as you write, they're also getting a little bit savvier because they've watched, they're going to watch, uh, all the consequences happen. They're going to watch it happen to us.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  And a funny, and, and another funny thing is as well is that you're seeing features that have come out, you know, that somebody, you know, a group of sort of directors or whoever work at, you know, Facebook have sort of dreamed up and said, oh yeah, the world needs this.

• 57:45Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  You see a lot of consumers saying, oh, actually, fuck off.

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember when Instagram, do you remember when Instagram?

• 57:49Speaker 01

  No, we don't. I'll take that feature and I'll hack it to do that.

• 57:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you remember when Instagram updated a bunch of people's apps? Did you see this? It must have happened in here. And it, it, did you see this?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I know what you're gonna say.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  So Instagram, Instagram sent out an update. I think it was to around about 10% to 20% of users. And it completely, imagine the app's completely gone and imagine a stories feed that you have to move through individually, one by one. And you can't navigate.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:18Chris Williamson?

  And they released this update to like ten or twenty percent of users and just all hell broke loose.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  It was meant to be a very, very, very small task to like less than one percent of users. It came out over the Christmas break and I was on our Twitter and I had to report on it. And about an hour later, I had to amend the report. Cause I said, oh my God, Instagram massive update. It's changed its entire interface. It's gone from a scrolling feed.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Saved by the bell.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Stop talking about the update.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  Excuse me, Mark.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Adam Missouri.

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  Listen, Mark, mate, we don't care. Talk about this update.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it it went from a scrolling feed to scrolling that way. Another speculation that we've been doing about, you know, will stories overtake the news feed? It felt like it was happening. Literally within the hour, it had been taken down.

• 59:11Chris Williamson?

  Pulled and then you went again.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I'm really sorry. That test was not meant to go out to as many people as it did. And then we were all left going, is that, is that what they're gonna change? Is it, is it happening? It was like, thumb doesn't go that way. What, what are you doing?

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Snapchat redesign. It's like Twitter brought out this new public beta. Testing thing where they've actually invited everyday people, you know, not just tech insiders who are connected to every single beta.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Twitter's actually being really positive. If you wanna look at a platform that's making changes for good, take a look at what Twitter's doing. Cause they're being so inclusive of their updates and they're not just blasting people with horrible spam stuff.

• 59:46Chris Williamson?

  Did you listen to Jack Dorsey on Joe Rogan?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  I didn't. No, I will. I will. It's definitely on the to watch list.

• 59:53Chris Williamson?

  He's done a second one. He came back on a second time.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Oh, did he?

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  So he did a first one and Rogan doesn't usually. What I particularly like about Joe Rogan, the reason that I think he's a good podcaster is he just puts his stuff out. Like he's effective at what he does. The reason that he's the best podcaster in the world is because he asks the question that you would have asked. If you'd had half an hour to prep for that one section. And then he asks it straight away by riding the crest of now at all times and constantly asks the best questions.

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  But one of the other reasons I think he's so good is the fact that he just doesn't care what people think, doesn't check the comments on YouTube, doesn't really respond to stuff like that. But one of the few times, Alex Jones was one of them and Jack Dorsey was another one, he got so much backlash because people wanted him to go after Jack Dorsey about why are people getting banned, why is Milo Yiannopoulos banned, why is Saigon of a card banned, why are you deplatforming these people? There appears to be a left-leaning bias and all this sort of stuff. So he's like, right, fuck it, like, we're gonna have Jack back on again. Then Jack brought his head of the safety team, which is basically the woman that presses the ban button. Sure. And he brought in Tim Poole, who is like the Ben Shapiro or he's like the

• 1:01:06Chris Williamson?

  Hoist Gracie of cutting people down in fast debates, like a scalpel precision, how he's able to deploy this stuff. And he came fully armed, like, study after study after example after example after example. And during the conversation, sometimes with this, especially when you see Silicon Valley in there, you wanna like, yeah, stick it to the man, like, fuck the machine. Yeah. And part of me wanted that, that kind of cathartic pleasure that you get from seeing someone who's successful just get smashed all over by someone who's witty. Like, there's something that I enjoy about that. Weird. But what ended up happening was a very, Tim continued to be militant throughout, like, his parting words were, I still don't like you

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  guys, I still don't believe that what you're doing is for the greater good, and I still hope that Twitter goes down, but thank you for your time in coming on. That was essentially what he said. But throughout the whole conversation, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and the woman whose name I can't pronounce, I'm not gonna try, who was his head of the safety team, they basically said, we don't understand what this technology really needs, and we are learning as we go the same way that you guys are. Can we have a little bit of compassion back? And there's some things that seem like there's maybe some double standards that are maybe a little bit more critical. But this degree of compassion overall. I think for people that have had to deal with high degree of technological change, a lot of financial ups and downs.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Um, and the advent of social media, you also, I can't say that I want that for us. Whilst not also allowing the executives and the people who were in the marketing departments to also be given the same.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  Amount of freedom. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  I think like it's it's harder to um forgive some more than others. But I, yeah, like I said, I'm a really big fan of what Twitter's doing because they'll admit that they're not perfect. And the whole time they're just being transparent. They just, they are really trying to be like open and honest and inclusive with their users. And yeah, they'll they'll get things wrong, but they, I I believe have better intentions than some others.

• 1:03:11Chris Williamson?

  Who goes on Joe Rogan to speak into millions of people as the CEO of a company twice? And then the second time, knowing that Joe's basically bringing in your arch, your your kryptonite.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  Um, with another person who's the person that is like public enemy number one, essentially, to just have discourse.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  And to try and be as open as possible. I mean, that that for Twitter will have done more than any advertising campaign can have done. And obviously, what did we say before? High risk strategy? Yeah. Like you could have gone on and just fluffed it because especially at the beginning, the being very, very militant, it's it's quite sort of frictiony. And they're just constantly having to swallow this stuff from Tim as he's just unloading stat after stat after stat. And you think after a while, you begin to see that they're they're just human beings again, the same.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what I mean? Like the Jack Dorsey didn't know what Twitter was going to become. And I, to a degree, I don't believe that Mark Zuckerberg did. Like you look at him in uh the those senate hearings and he's just. A guy that made a website and is now like. Oh my god, like just looking up at the sky. I made this joke earlier on.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  He looked like a lizard, not a man. He turned from man to lizard.

• 1:04:25Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, maybe that's what that degree of fear does.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like clammy and so pale and scared.

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  Very damp.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. With this as well, I go back to my point because you're completely right. And my stance on this will still be, okay, like you said, you know, this is the medium of delivery. This is the media. This is the technology. This is whatever. Society, you know, for the large part, we have sort of put, you know, what we want to see onto this. You know, we, the endless news feed, for instance, you know, and the scrolling, for instance. Probably started off as a good idea. We thought, right, we'd make a bit of money on it, but.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  The problem is that the features wouldn't have stayed if they weren't effective.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  It's natural evolution for the features that exist on the technology.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  Um, the same thing for the reason that the next episode countdown happens on Netflix is that it improves retention. So more people watch the rest of the series if the countdown occurs than if it doesn't. If it was the other way around, if it was the other way around, they wouldn't put it on.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:05:28Chris Williamson?

  So your own choices determine the root of the technology. I think the criticism is we didn't choose our own cognitive biases and you are triggering something that's there in the back of the brain when I want to be able to be thinking about it with this bit. And you're like, okay, so, but guys, it's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  So next time I will be on that couch.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  And do you both sit here? Is that the way it works?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sits on my lap.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  Between, you know, sort of the Roman mark.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're like tiered that way.

• 1:06:08Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Guys, link to Social Minds podcast will be in the show notes below. Link to all of the stuff for social chain will be there as well. Don't forget to press share if you enjoyed this. And if you've got any comments about what we've brought up today, fire them in the comments on YouTube. Really appreciate it. Guys, thank you again.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.