 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are in New York City, New York. We are currently at the Susie offices. We are talking to Matt Britton. What's up, man? What's up, man? Good to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming by. Yeah, it's such an honor because Matt is, in my opinion, the world's leading millennial and Gen Z expert. And just a plethora of insight around consumers and consumer insights and where we're moving. And I'm super grateful for this conversation. We're gonna be taking it all over the place. Another little bit on Matt's background is he also has consulted for over half of the Fortune 500 companies over the last 20 years. He's the author of The Best-Selling Youth Nation, which was number one on Amazon Business Booklist. He's an entrepreneur in the Digital and Social Media Marketing Services with MRY, which was acquired and now Susie, a consumer intelligence software platform. And we're gonna talk about getting these real-time consumer insights. We're gonna talk about what's going on in this hockey stick of exponential technology and population that's going on. So let's jump into it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, Matty B. Yes. Tell us about your current thoughts on humanity because we're human animals. We found ourselves as stewards of Earth. Current thoughts on humanity? Wow, okay. Starting off with very existential place. Yes. I mean, I think, you know, I often get asked about millennials. Are they more socially conscious than Gen Xers, right? Are they more apathetic than Gen Xers, narcissists, et cetera? And my whole take on consumers in general is that people don't necessarily change over time. The world surrounding them has. And so I think, you know, Gen Xers, like millennials have incredible people and there's laggards and there's people who are narcissistic and there's people that are altruistic and everything in between. I think the stakes are higher now because if a kid sends out an email and air an email or a bad social media post, it could affect him or her forever. And that wasn't the case with Gen Xers. So I think that humanity isn't a place where the stakes are higher, where change happens at a rapidly accelerating pace. And I think that the impact of people's actions have reverberating impact and reverberating consequences far beyond what they ever had before. Holy cow, the change is moving very, very fast now. It's only going to attend to you. The rate of change is only going to accelerate. It's only going to accelerate. So it's so important to have an open mindset to change and to adapting and iterating our own skill sets to adapt to this exponential technology that's going on. But we're not going backwards. Totally not. That's the thing. It doesn't, how it used to be means nothing because we aren't going backwards. People aren't going to stop staring at their phones. Data isn't going to become less important. Right, these things aren't going to change. So a lot of times I get businesses saying, well, isn't that awful that kids are refreshing their social media posts with the fervor of a Fortune 500 company? And I was like, well, was it awful that somebody felt the need to have a Platinum AMEX versus a Gold AMEX so they could show everybody else that they were wealthier or having a Lexus versus a Toyota, which is made with the same engine by the same company, except it showcases that you have more wealth. Well, that was driven in the 80s and 90s. So it's not what's right or wrong. It's just where we are. And when I put my business hat on, it's not up to me to tell people to be the moral cop. I'm telling people where things are and what you can do about it from a business perspective to move your business forward, which is what most people come to me to really achieve. And I really like your analogies are so powerful because you get tied into the trajectory of technology impacting civilization. You go back to like 80s and we can even jump right into this because I think this is so important. There's a big push that's happening right now. You make this the similar point that Gen X was super interested in having a house in the suburbs, super interested in the 3,000 square foot house of the cars and anything. Millennials and Gen Z are rushing into metropolis as the creative class, they're living in shoebox of apartments on top of each other. And actually in your post that you made on LinkedIn, I thought it was so interesting that you even went as far as to be like, yo, McDonald's moved to the suburbs. And then they were like, oh shit, we're not getting any of the talent that we need. So then they relocated a brand new headquarters in the West Loop in Chicago. And now they're gonna be able to attract that talent. That's exactly right. Or you have Kimberly Clark out in Nino, Wisconsin, slowly starting to realize, how are we gonna get millennial talent out to Nino, Wisconsin? So they created an innovation hub in Chicago. And at first what starts to happen is a lot of their younger employees that live in Nino saying, well, I wanna work out of Chicago for a month. And then they're like, well, I actually wanna work out of there permanently. And I think companies really need to take heed. So yeah, urbanization is a thing. I don't think it's going away anytime soon. It's reflected in the real estate prices across America. It's reflected in gentrification. I live in Brooklyn, real estate prices are up over 100% in a 10 year span. Neighboring suburbs are up two to 5%. The reason why is, when you were a Gen Xer or you were a baby boomer, you really didn't have a way to see what people that were 20 years younger than you were doing. So because of that, you were essentially in a rush to grow up like your contemporaries and you didn't have any elements of youth to hang onto because you didn't know what those elements of youth were. But now I have a 13 year old daughter. I know the type of music her and her friends like, because I follow people who influence them. So when I'm in the car with them, I'm gonna know what to put on the radio and I'm gonna know what their friends are gonna like and not only that, I'm gonna wanna hold on to that because I know it's gonna impact the business relationships I get into and my career trajectory to be in touch with where things are headed and where things are evolving isn't in the suburbs. It's in the cities. So social media, the access that we have on our mobile device has really allowed people to understand where things are headed and that drives where they live and how they act and where they work and how they play and a lot of it is headed towards the cities. I often talk about my keynotes. People, young kids grow up quick but then adults grow old slow and they're growing up quickly kids because they've access to so much information but they're growing old slow because they don't really find a need to get old in the traditional sense anymore because they can hang on to what those elements of youth are whether it be the trends or the entertainment acts or the TV shows or the fashion and style. All those things you can hold onto it because you understand you have actually a veer into what those things are. And I wanna also make this a geopolitical picture because we're seeing the same urbanization happening in the major cities in China. Oh yeah, I just came back from Europe. I was keynoting SAP Global Conference of Barcelona and it's happening all over the world. I mean now obviously when you talk about places like China and Russia with the state-owned media that happens there, a lot of times they throttle that cultural growth. North Korea is another area where more developed markets more democratic markets like areas of Western Europe and even some of the emerging markets like Brazil and South Korea and India, you are seeing that that element that we're seeing here in the States become replicated. So when you talk about China and Russia it's not necessarily the case because state-owned media wants to throttle some of the elements in which I'm talking about. They don't want youth to have the power, right? So right now in America, youth has the power, right? You look at TV networks, they don't have the eyeballs that individual influencers do, right? I would argue that LeBron James has more power over the future of his sneakers than Nike does who makes the sneakers, right? So those younger people have the power and that scares a lot of the countries that don't believe in a true democracy and because they are throttling these things that make this element come true here in the United States. That's a huge shift that we went through over the last couple of decades where it was so that if you wanted to give any news that you had to go through an outlet and now it's this instantaneous media outlet, a newspaper, magazine, whatever, TV, radio. But now it's you have your own Twitter, your own YouTube, you have your own way to disseminate to billions of people potentially if it goes viral and whatnot. And so that's a huge transition but then you also identified at the beginning of the conversation how crazy things are like what happened with Kevin Hart as well where people can just dig back 10 years and throw up some sort of a, oh, your ethics were bad back then and it's like yo, I evolve. Sticks with you forever, right? I evolve as a human, we all evolve as humans. That's stupid shit that I said 10 years ago. We all do. I'd love to see them. Yeah, I mean, I think it's that and I think that it's happening from the tops down and bottoms up perspective. Bottoms up meaning in the 80s and 90s young people couldn't really formulate their own brand preferences because the whole family would gather around and watch cheers or friends on TV, right? And they would see the same TV spots that were, they were targeted towards an older demographic because the parents were making the buying decisions. Kids couldn't go on the Amazon and see the sneakers or the things they actually wanted to buy. So a lot of those buying decisions were actually made by parents. Of course, over time you had Michael Jordan representing Nike and you had kids wanting to gravitate but their brand preferences didn't really, change or drive the shopping habits where today kids are building their own taste and sophistication and they're actually adopting technology and products that their parents will one day adopt and they're actually becoming the influencers of purchasing in the household. So that's bottoms up and then tops down like you're talking about, they now have no longer death rule on soapboxes in town square to shout to people how they feel about things. They have YouTube where they can actually from a top down perspective with scale that competes with the network drive the trends themselves so they can adopt them and they can drive them and really the adults so to speak are really following and that's why I call it youth nation. That's why I call my book Youth Nation. It's that premise and it's not just about age either because you can be any age and adopt these tendencies. It's just that the younger generation especially the millennials grew up with the internet in the household, their brains are wired differently and Gen Z the same. The difference between Gen Y to Gen Z is gonna be nowhere near as stark as if it's in Gen X to Gen Y because there's not gonna be another internet invented anytime soon and people who grew up with the internet in the household, they just have different brains and that's a huge divide. Huge difference between growing up with the internet and not. Yeah, that's a big divide. I'm happy that you're identifying that. We have so many things to talk about. I would love to stay on that but I'm sure we're gonna touch on it as we keep going. Matt has this really fun way of explaining things to people and he's giving this really profound and it kind of like hits you a little bit because cash has been such an important part of civilization and all of a sudden the coinage and the dollar billage poof, gone. And we're seeing it through like you pointed out 12 years ago, we had Citibank and Bank of America and these massive conglomerates had the biggest cap, market caps. Now the Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple's have the biggest market cap and they all offer payments, right? And they also have more trust. If you ask consumers who they trust more, now that may have changed with companies like Facebook over the last six months where now maybe it shifts because I had this whole graph I put on stage where the tech companies have more trust with consumers and the banking companies but there's been a wave of negative publicity with the Facebook's and the lesser extent Googles of the world where maybe consumers don't trust them with knowing where they spend and how they spend their money anymore. So it'll be interesting, things change so quickly that even that point from six months ago may or may not exist but regardless, a notion of cash is definitely going away. The notion of having a physical credit card is going away because you look at Apple Pay and you're entering your credit card in your phone and you just tap your phone so your credit card becomes your phone. So notion- We chat too. Yeah, we chat, yeah and you can pay with the over I message and of course there's memo and now there's cryptocurrency and where that's gonna happen which I think I make the analogy of cryptocurrency almost like the .com like in 2000 pets.com and all these companies they collapsed. I remember being at the first company I worked for who had bought my initial start saying, oh the internet we told you it was just sort of a fad and then it just came roaring back and I think that the same thing is gonna happen with cryptocurrency at the market wasn't ready governments weren't ready, big business wasn't ready but sooner or later blockchain's gonna have better adoption, more understanding the market will be ready for it and it's gonna roar back and in what form who knows? Will it be Bitcoin? Will the blockchain just power the way that financial institutions interact with consumers? Who knows but it's not the last year gonna hear about that for sure. Yeah and you made this really clear point about the internet being this profound shift in people in the way that not only are neural networks in the way that we behave all around society but then you said that there might not be another one for a little bit, blockchain and decentralization may in fact be this new set of protocols for the internet of things, for fintech for all different ways of ensuring safety. Yeah but I look at that as a layer. I look at blockchain as a layer on top of the internet. You know what I mean? I mean before the internet I couldn't send people an email, right? I couldn't share content, I mean you think of all the things the internet has replaced and even to a lesser extent the iPhone has replaced. You know blockchain will impact commerce and it will impact authentication, all these things but it's not gonna have that C change of effect that the internet itself did in my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong, I mean it remains to be seen but that's why I believe we've seen a change unlike no other with this gap from Gen X to Gen Y and what's interesting about millennials is I see a lot of companies saying oh we're moving on to Gen Z. I was like well wait a second, millennials, their oldest millennials are 38 years old they're just starting to enter the C suite. They're just starting to make business buying decisions. They're just starting to become the CFO of the household. Now millennials actually have the real power, spending power and influence. They're actually to move markets in a way that they never did 10 years ago. So the millennials are just starting to exert their will and power on the future of business, the future of society, the future of culture. And that's what we continue to see. You're identifying this really interesting way that the people in their teens and their 20s end up taking leadership positions at companies later on in their lives when we see the fabric of society change. What happens when P&G gets taken over by millennial? What happens when Ford Motors gets taken over by millennial? Right, like we don't know yet, but that's gonna happen. We're gonna be there closer than we think and that's when these big companies are gonna, someone's gonna walk in and say not doing this anymore, not spending 80% of our media budget targeting 18 to 34 year olds. We wanna go programmatic, right? We need to figure out how to go direct to consumer. We need to figure out ways to get first party data. We need to have a real sustainability initiative in the companies, not just throw a pink ribbon onto something and saying that we're cause-based, I mean, that's gonna happen. And when that happens, we're really gonna start to see that shift from a top down standpoint when today it's really been much more bottoms up at corporations. Yeah, you also pointed out that this is this, and I don't know how far back this goes in history, but that the cycle, there's now, it's the amount of Fortune 500 companies that are just eight to 10 years old versus the ones that have been there 50 or 60 years, it's crazy how many, it's a half of them? Yeah, the average age of a company in a Fortune 500 was 50 to 60 years old in the 60s, and now it's eight to 12 years old because there's just so much disruption in M&A happening where these companies aren't necessarily gonna be around forever anymore because of all this disruption, because big tech companies are coming in and buying and disrupting institutions that have been around for centuries. So that just shows you how the rate of change is adapting. I mean, who would've thought that companies like MySpace would just become and go like a bullet up in Snapchat will probably be the same thing. There was a time when no one thought that Facebook was invaluable. Who knows? I mean, it could be broken up by the government just like how Microsoft had antitrust issues in the 90s. I mean, you're gonna start to see with all these companies what happens to Google and the world of voice, which I know you wanna get into when I'm searching for the nearest pizza place on my phone, but since Apple has the last mile of the device in my hand, they can control who delivers the search so they can put commercial pressure onto Google because I'm not logging in to google.com anymore. What does that mean for Google? So there's just so many questions that are gonna be arisen by all these new... I love it. Okay, one quick step before we get to voice. You pointed this out, this is really important, is that we're seeing thousands of cryptocurrencies be born and we're only gonna see a couple left down the line to check after the .com. And then I also want to say that this is very interesting because it's also affecting in ways, the way that countries that are now developing into the internet age markets. They skip over. They skip, they do the leapfrog. They don't have landline phones everywhere that they have to tear down. Phone poles, they're going right to wireless mobile. They're going right to 5G. So these countries are gonna be very underdeveloped in some aspects from an infrastructure standpoint but it developed in a much more advanced way in terms of their fiber optics and how data gets spread and it's a crazy dichotomy. Yeah, that's super interesting to see them doing the leapfrogging. And then it's also crazy to see populations like the United States and Japan and other places around the world that have been developed for a period of time. Now their population is stabilizing because millennials and Gen Z are choosing to have just one kid, a prime couple. They're living in cities, they're getting married later to having children later. Yeah, and even then it's only one, maybe two if you're lucky. So the replacement fertility rates actually below two versus in Africa in many places, it's still five or six per couple, which makes Africa's population pyramids just skyrocketing in their youth. So they're gonna be a big part of the creative class. And the growth for large companies. Exactly, and so this is what I wanted to ask. Do you see a fight between the Amazon and Alibaba to supply Africa with socks and toothpaste? Of course. Yes, tell us about it. Yeah, I mean on a global basis, I was in Sweden last week and Amazon's just launching in Sweden, right? And it's mind blowing because I was speaking to some people there and they're saying, well, the culture here isn't like what's working on a 24 seven basis. We don't need deliveries the next day. We're not in a rush. We don't need deliveries coming at five o'clock at night because we're staying down with our family and we leave work at four 30. So is Amazon gonna change the culture of a place like Sweden or a place like Australia or just launched in 2017 when I was there on the speaking tour? It's gonna be really interesting to see. So you have one aspect where you have Amazon which has changed culture, right? Like I can't go into a retail or anymore like Best Buy and stand there more than five minutes because I would just start doing the math in my head. I'm like, oh, Prime now can have it there an hour. I'm leaving, right? I'm just not gonna go there anymore. So change the way I look at almost every business and look to the way, change the way I look at my time. So I think there's a notion of the companies like Amazon changing culture based upon them entering a country. And yes, I mean, where are they gonna get their growth from? Right? I mean, they're finding ways to gain new growth from Prime members, affluent Prime members in the US but like most companies, they're gonna hit a wall in the US wanted to have enough saturation and in order to appease their massive multiples on Wall Street, they're gonna have to go to emerging markets and it's gonna be a battle to go to places like Africa, South Africa, you name it against the Alibaba's who has really come up with a very strong footprint overseas. Yes. Whoa, okay. Okay, let's move into Difty. This is such a cool acronym. Do it for the Instagram. We did it for the Instagram. And we see a lot of millennials and Gen Z moving towards this experiences. The status update is the new status symbol. And that's such a cool phrase because we now see private jets that have never taken off. They just take photos in front of the private jets or that people go and get a $24 Sunday or they go to the, they go to a rent-to-runway or the black tux where they can just rent it for a short take. Yeah, return to the next day. Sure. But that's also simultaneous. I want you to talk about the benefits of that because that's the shared economy and that's a big benefit instead of everyone owning that I end up enjoying. But then there's this obsession with the perfect image and the trillions of photos of our own faces. It's a little bit of narcissism, mental health issues, suicide rates, all this type of stuff. So tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, I think, well, first of all, what Difty stands for is that for the Instagram and what that means is that your online persona is now so important and it's driven by experiences over the buying of things, right? Cause it's a much better portray of the society about your individual tastes and interests that people are now pursuing experiences not only so much to enjoy them but the proof that they're actually there. So they are going through a checklist of places around the world to actually travel to like Machu Picchu or the Eiffel Tower, right? Or the Great Wall of China and really what they're doing when they go there is they look at the most influential people where they've taken photos and that's where they wanna go. And that's also impacting the hotels as they stay at the restaurants that they eat at, et cetera. Now the reality is that in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s people would lean into brands as a way to showcase who they were all about. You know, American Express membership has its privileges, right? Or people rushing towards brands like the Gap or Fubu and Benetton in the 80s is sort of like entrance into a club, right? If you wore it or adorn that brand. So in my opinion, it was no different. It just manifested differently. People basically use brands as their social currency that they would go after those brands which drove the rise of consumerism down from the luxury market to everyday street corners and the birth of shopping malls, et cetera. Now brands are so accessible, you know, through things like Amazon and they're becoming cheaper and cheaper with offshore development that people have moved towards experiences which if you think about before Instagram you couldn't share experiences with anything but a photo album. So they weren't scalable as a social currency, now they are. So people are now prioritizing experiences over the accumulation of physical things which is driving them to travel more never before which is driving them to say if I'm gonna spend my time and my money it needs to be something that's an experience that I can actually capture. What are the downsides? To me, it's no different than the downsides of people working hard so they can get, you know, a name brand piece of clothing versus a store brand piece of clothing so other people would think that they're fashionable. So I don't necessarily, now the difference is it's more instant, it's more accessible and there's long-term reverberations, you know, the instant gratification dopamine of how many likes that you get, that's something that we never had before. So as I mentioned earlier in this interview the stakes are higher than ever before. So it's more of the same and I would argue that if Gen Xers had Instagram they would be trading it the same way. So it's not necessarily the generation but it's this technology. You look at the airplanes, people said that the airplanes would take people away from their families, right? Because before it, you couldn't travel. I have two brothers that live on the West Coast. It sucks, right? But they were able to pursue their dreams and actually move out there and allowed you to come travel here and interview me today, right? So I think with every evolution of society there's gonna be negativity, right? But I think ultimately progression in a civilized humanity isn't gonna stop. Driverless cars are going to kill people so do car traffic accidents every day. It doesn't mean we don't pursue it and that's my general thought on that. Yeah. And that's super powerful. We're very grateful for the fact that there's almost 200,000 of these commercial flights that happen every single day around the world. It took people a long time to see a bird, make a plane, and nowadays people ride the plane and they throw the idea away like a coffee cup. Or we complain that the Wi-Fi's not good enough. It's ridiculous. And okay, you highlighted a bunch of important stuff so I just want you to tell us about what do you think about the struggle with the mental health issues, yeah? So I think the struggle with mental health issues is real and it's something that both corporations and more importantly parents need to get their arms around and it's not easy. Speaking of a father of two children that are Gen Z's, Gen Zers, I can say that when you take their phones away from them their argument, which is a good one is you're taking me away from my friends, you're taking me out of social circles, you're disabling my ability to become part of groups and friendships and it's hard to make an argument against it. At the same time, there's real addiction, there's real personal validation that comes across with how you post a picture and how people actually pursue it. There's not really a magic bullet. Some parents and educators say the magic bullet is saying take their phones away from them, right? But I would make the argument if you did that by the time they get in the college they're gonna be so far behind in terms of the things that they know, right? And their ability to actually intuitively use this technology to further their career, right? There's some parents and educators that will say let them do whatever they want, but I would argue that these young developing emotions and brains really can't deal with such a powerful tool. So it is about moderation. It is about tools like Apple has Screen Time which allows you to manually block what people or kids are seeing and how long they're seeing it for. And it's really about the schools embracing it. I think that the education system is so far behind and I think that the kids know more about technology than the teachers do and I think that they're not in a position to be able to properly educate kids on how to really use this powerful tool and it is creating a lot of mental health issues especially with Gen Z. Because Gen Z, it's evolved more and more as basically the center of their world where it may have been a powerful tool for Gem Y and that's why you're saying depression rates and things like that is really skyrocket with this younger generation and it's a real problem that we need to deal with just like how cigarettes were a problem that we need to deal with when they came out and I think that there's gonna be a low point as there was with lung cancer and cigarettes and there'll be a turning point and there'll be regulation and things like that that will come into play and that's how I see this thing going but it's not going away anytime soon because unlike cigarettes, arguably, which I believe there's way more benefits for society for mobile devices and the internet and connected devices and I think that businesses are relying on them and it's trying over our economy. I mean, without Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon, where's the U.S. economy right now? That's right. Right, where's the growth coming from? Where the job growth coming from? Where's the tax base growth coming from? So that's why we can't just pull that out. Totally, totally. Shout out to organizations like the Center for Humane Technology where we're literally trying to figure out how to make the best ethical designs. Mark Benioff's been a big proponent of handling the inequality that we see in our daily lives and this is a lot being propagated by the entrance of major corporations into heavily populated areas by normal, everyday retail workers and yeah, et cetera. So, okay, I wanna jump into this directly ties to the big land grab that's happening right now in the attention economy. So, the kids have to be on the devices because they have to be growing their audiences because they know there's a zero sum game that's being played. There's 7.7 billion people, about 16 waking hours per day for every person. That's just over 120 billion hours of collective human attention per day. That's a zero sum game. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon. Everyone's 10 cent, all right, they're all trying to get big pieces of the cake and then the YouTuber performers are trying to Netflixers. So, what do we do with this attention, the race for? Right, well yeah, so the 120 billion hours is true but as a business person I could say there's probably 300 hours of attention that if I achieve running my startup will make the difference between having an amazing year or just an okay year. So, I don't need the world's attention. I need the attention of the people who are potential buyers of my software. That's right. I think that gets lost in the narrative of just trying to collect. I remember somebody on Twitter once said to me like, oh, you don't have a big presence on YouTube. You only have 500 subscribers but I know that the average view time of my videos on YouTube is eight minutes and those 500 people are people who can make or break my year. I don't need tens and thousands or millions of subscribers. I'm a very niche business person and that's where I actually, I'm trying to win a popularity contest. So I think that everybody can look at it in that way. So it's not about, so it's about who matters and what's the real scoreboard that matters to you in the day. And in business, obviously some people think it's freedom or financial success. Personally it's deep and meaningful relationships. It's usually, people don't usually derive true happiness from having more and more followers I don't even know and I think that narrative needs to be completely reinforced. If my best 25 friends in the world really care about something that I'm sharing that's meaningful to me, that matters way more than having 5,000 people who I'll never see like it, right? I mean, that's the reality. This is a crucial point. You're tying into the Pareto principle into the attention economy and into our friends, our relationships, everything that we should be parsing all of the existing information, identifying the 20% of customers or information and knowledge. Yeah, it's 80, 20 will, right? Yeah, that we need to find that 20% and find those 20% of customers of meaningful relationships, et cetera and go for those. So it's not actually about trying to build up millions of followers that don't even care really. It's more about identifying the ones that don't care. Now there's some people, like if you're Coca-Cola and you service all of humanity you do need the biggest audience as possible, right? And you have the resources and time to actually dedicate towards that. If you're Matt Britton consultant, right? Or Matt Britton CEO, well you don't. If you are a pharmaceutical sales person there's probably 300 doctors out there that will make or break your year. You need to focus on having them follow you and see how you can add value to them because if you're doing it for business purposes that's just gonna move the needle, right? And I like how Instagram actually just launched like the close friends feature because that's a good example of it is I don't wanna share my intimate parts of my life and my family life with everybody who follows me. There's probably 200 people that I do wanna and I think that's kind of a step in that direction. I'm literally playing piano or watching a video on YouTube of someone playing a piano. They have the data to say you have three friends in your city that play piano, that can teach you how to play piano. There's so many ways to design the tech to be better for humanity, human values. Okay, future of technology. This is crazy that we don't even, the kids aren't learning handwriting as much anymore. We're learning typing. Well they still are learning handwriting. They're learning handwriting. But it's not as core of the curriculum as at once. There's no cursive. There's way less cursive, that's for sure. And now, yeah, the core of the curriculum is typing, coding, designing, art, science, et cetera. But even you say typing is going away because we're going to voice, we have the Amazon Alexa, the Google Homes, et cetera. And then- Siri. Siri, exactly. And furthermore, what's crazy is that then, for example, if I Amazon order batteries, there's Amazon Basics and then there's Duracell and all the other companies. So now they get to choose if they want to put their products up forward. So voice is very interesting. We can control our lives by voice. Yeah, I mean, you touched on a couple of different points. One, you talked about education, right? And as I mentioned earlier, I mean, I think education is probably the sector that's in the most dire need of reinvention. Moving forward, you look at the categories that have been laggards in terms of disruption, it's healthcare, it's financial services and education. And I think that financial services is getting there. I mean, one of the positives coming out of the Trump administration and I'm not gonna get into politics, but he definitely was very strong at the regulation, which has had positive and negative impacts. But one of the positive impacts is to really open up a lane for FinTech to come in and actually disrupt that category a lot more quickly, which is interesting to see. But in terms of education, there's been no such regulation and there's been no such change. And largely we're teaching kids the same things that we were 20 years ago. Does it make sense to teach kids algebra when I can actually just ask Susie to compute a problem for me? Now the proponents would say, you have a going through the notion of the problem makes more sense. And I would say, well, you can do that on a macro basis and stitch problems together that can come up with a bigger answer versus getting into the context of that one individual equation because you don't need to do it anymore, right? So it's almost a notion where I can drive a car, but I don't know how to actually assemble a vehicle, because I don't need to. That's actually done for me and I just need to know how to drive it, right? So I think a lot of the things are based upon what people need it to know how to do before technology was here. And in the more developed markets, they're skipping over that, right? And kids are learning things that are gonna put those students in a globally competitive environment far ahead of students in America because we are holding on to the past of what it means for education. And I think that, you know, I think college is in so many ways harming kids from pursuing their dreams. They look at how things were done and they're pursuing four year education, but they're getting in debt to do it. And then they leave and they realize, wow, I can't pursue my dream. I need to try to get a job at Goldman Sachs or a white shoe law firm so I can pay back my student loans. They get married, they have a mortgage or they have like a high overhead and that dream's gone forever, right? They can never do it. So what's it all for, right? And I think that really needs to change as well. In terms of voice, I think voice is very powerful. I think that that last mile effect where whoever has that hardware device, I think hardware is gonna have a renewed importance in 2019 and beyond, you know, the dissemination of Alexa devices in the home has put Amazon in the real position of strength when it comes to branding and brand equity. You know, when you try to order well-involved items, whether it be cell phone chargers or batteries or you have it, you can essentially ask Amazon and they're gonna revert to their own products where they have higher margins and a lot of consumers are just gonna buy it because they trust Amazon, just as much as they trust P&G and it's much easier to order from a device where you don't even have to pick up your phone than just actually log into something and search for Tide, right? And now all of a sudden what happens with the brand equity of a door seller energizer who spent billions of dollars in goodwill and building their brand equity, it kinda goes away. So what does that mean for the future of branding? Do a lot of these companies need to get into hardware? Like I say all the time if you make dishwasher detergent, right? Or laundry detergent, you should buy a company that makes laundry machines and instead of trying to sell the P&G, try to sell your laundry machines which are smart and only order your Tide product, sell those to the big developers of buildings in major cities. And you have an intravenous sales model because you don't have to rely on people going to Walmart and actually picking out your brand from a slew of other brands and oh by the way, Walmart is its own private label brands. So I think that's where a lot of this needs to change. I think the job of the CMO is no longer really even about brand building anymore. It's about really building ecosystems and where their product can actually thrive in a way that's just beneath the surface not basically trying to send down sales. People get a couple inches of shelf space at Target or Walmart. And that's a huge change. Huge change, yeah. And you also referenced the huge change of having the massive iPads on the walls, touch design engineering all up on the walls. Television. Big televisions up on the walls, even projections and spatial intelligence, spatial computing with companies like Magic Leap and all of the XR, the VR, AR tech that we see emerging that we are totally, we're human animals that love to be able to move and play with the space in front of us to send the emails and to build things here with an augmentation in our vision and our touch ability. So we're totally moving into that space as well. And that's cool because it makes, it furthers that location agnosticism. That's right. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you touched on a couple of points, I think, but television, I think we're gonna start to see a change. I mean, at CES this year, earlier this month, you saw Apple for the first time kind of tear down its walls and say, okay, Samsung, you can now integrate AirPlay and iTunes right into your devices. Cause what they're starting to understand is that especially in developed markets like here in America, they've really hit a saturation point with the sales of iPhone. How are they gonna drive growth? What's through data and content and how are they gonna do it by actually distributing their data and content, not just through their iPhones or not just people who buy their add-on Apple TV device, but for the 10s or hundreds of millions of people out there who have Samsung TVs. Now, all of a sudden you could distribute to them. And when that happens, you're gonna start to see the power and programmatic nature of iTunes actually start to integrate seamlessly with television devices, which at what point I think you're gonna see TVs become a giant iPad on your wall. Cause kids go up to TVs and they try to swipe them. And they don't know what a TV network is. You ask them what ABC is, they'll tell you alphabet. You ask them what Fox is, they'll tell you it's an animal. They're not tuning in to TV networks, they're tuning in to people. People are brands, friends are people. And in that world, what happens when P&G wants to spend $6 billion on television around the world, where are they gonna wanna spend it? Because they can no longer buy into these broad 18 to 34 Nielson based demographics. They're gonna have to go after little pieces of consumers, that's what their competitors are gonna be doing, and they're not built for it. So I think that's super interesting in terms of what's gonna happen with television and the media and marketing and advertising space, which I know quite well. But yeah, I mean, you talked about spatial technology and spatial computing and the phone itself, I think, is gonna start to go away in the next five to seven years. I don't think the notion of all this carrying a phone around is gonna be something that is gonna be commonplace with citizens of this country because if you think about the Apple Watch, you already announced that you can walk out and take a phone call just with your watch, right? I think that contact lenses with 5G and the power of computing, where I can basically see information about you by just telling my lens, hey Siri, show me where that guy went to college and having an overlay on top of you or when I'm driving, which way do I turn and the map overlays over your eyes? I think that's the future of the phone. It's gonna be interesting to see where that goes as well. The way that the technologies are entering our world and the way that we're preparing ourselves for the entry of these technologies is really important. The way that we aim to equalize, make the baseline of equality of opportunity high for everyone around the world to enable their full creative potential so crucial. Matt, here we are at Suzie's offices. I love what you're doing with Suzie and I think so many other people are gonna be really excited about this. I was, you know, a really good way to just introduce this is how cool is it to be able to, as an organization, send a poll to a diverse 1.2 million people right now, our consumers on Suzie, which are actually getting paid for answering these questions. We'll tell you in a moment. And that there's a question from an organization that gets launched, maybe it's a question like which music streaming services do you use and then they will reply to that organization in real time with it just instantly, they'll get a reply, then the organization will know, okay, well it looks like a majority of people are using Spotify in this country. There's something like that. And for granular, it's not just in this country, it looks like people who chose Spotify or 18 to 34 live in a major market and have a household income of X. That's right. Or they also like Nike, you know, or the people who like Spotify also tend to like this logo better than that logo. So the beauty of the super pound that we built is we have dozens and dozens of pieces of first-party data on these people. You know, we know their household income, we know their brand preferences, we know where they live, their mail status, their, you know, the education status, et cetera. So we can overlay that data as well as the data of third-party companies. And we also don't share any first-party data. So in a world of privacy concerns, when our clients get the results, it says Joe, 18 years old from Minnesota, but you don't see Joe's last name, you don't know who Joe actually is. So we don't share any PII but we share that anonymous audience profile which enables that decision-making. This is so the future of getting real-time, actual data. You have a funny, it's the highest hippo. Yeah, hippo, highest paid person's opinion. Yeah, I mean, that's what I experienced in the agency world running, Mr. Youth slash MRI for 12 years is, I saw these CMOs make decisions based upon their own personal guesses or their own personal myopic experiences, their daughter likes his band, so let's sponsor his band. These multi-million dollar decisions and tiny decisions built to multi-million dollar decisions were made with no data behind it. They were just made by hunches and guesses. And in a world where all these big companies are stressing data-driven decision-making, this is something that can very easily empower that. So you have the voice of your consumer at every step of the way. And as these companies currently are run by non-millennials and are trying to cater to a new world, it's more important than ever before that they have the voice of consumers in their mind at every decision. And it doesn't mean they need to listen. You know, it's like the whole notion that Henry Ford said, if I listen to consumers, I would have sold a faster horse. Like I get that, but I think there's so many instances where consumers will actually make you rethink things or are going to a new direction that you haven't gone into in the past. And it's what Susie is, is really just the voice of the consumer encapsulate it in a very easy tool that you can deploy. And we're deploying it. We have over 130 organizations large and small, big companies like Microsoft, P&G, J&J are using it. And smaller, mid-market, and even startups are using it to really drive the decision-making. And it's been a great ride. Yeah, and it's really interesting that you can both poll and ask audiences about things like what kind of packaging design do you prefer for our item? And then they can give you an answer to that. They can also submit written replies. You can ask for open-ended replies. We also can have them reply to actually physical product to stimulus. So companies could send 200 product samples that aren't on the market yet and actually have people respond in terms of would you buy this product? And then once you get that feedback, you can see what are the correlations between the people who do want to buy it? Where do they live? What are their other preferences you can start to build? That really deep segmentation or if you're going to go to market with? And market research has been something that hasn't really evolved. It's been very expensive and time-consuming to conduct. And because it isn't accessible, a lot of people just don't use it at all. So you're kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Now actually we have a way, it's very lightweight and intuitive that allows people to really deploy this tool to get, again, the voice of the consumer behind their decision-making. This is instantaneous A, B, C, D testing and it's also cool because you can retarget the profiles. That's exactly right. And the speed, you get UO, you get statistical significance during the same meeting you're in. So I can ask a question, have 500 people respond before the meeting's up. So that's how quickly, because we actually want to have this tool deliver at the pace of business and the pace of culture, the pace of decision-making. And then since all the data is our own first-party data, if Joe Smith says, I like this product but I feel like that the leather actually sticks to my ankle, so I wouldn't buy the sneaker. We'd actually go back to Joe Smith and dig in deeper. Yeah. We target those exact same people. And also every question's completely anonymous. So you can do competitive testing and things of that nature as well. So it's been a great ride. I mean we have an amazing team and our team is super dedicated and believes in what we're doing and obviously we have our work cut out for us competing against major multi-billion dollar companies like Qualtrics which is sold to SAP for $8 billion. I mean, those are companies that really paved the way for us which we credit with respect but we think what we have is really unique and we're really excited about our prospects for 2019. And then let's quickly mention that they also, the consumers that answer these questions, they earn points. And then they're able to redeem the points. For charity or products. Yeah, it's a gamified system. I mean, like all market research or like any time a company engages with consumers for feedback, their time is valuable. They need to compensate them for them. You know, the rub with us is making sure that people are also giving the honest feedback and they're not just doing it for the points and we've developed a lot of game mechanics behind it as well as quality control measures to ensure that the answers are statistically significant and are representative of the broader population. So we'll test our answers against other tools that might take 30 days to deliver the same results. And as long as our results match, right? Then we have a better mouse trap, so to speak. And we're doing a lot of work on that right now as well. Man, that's so tough. That actually puts you into a category that I think is similar to Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and whatnot where they actually have to go and make sure there's not videos up of someone killing someone else with a gun or fake news or things like that. Yeah, we have a whole team that's on quality control. Yeah, we do. Tell me about it. I still have time for you though. Hopefully we'll have some good results. Last thing I'll say about Susie, the results are gonna be great. We have over 80% renewal rate with our clients, so clients who've used it for a year, over four out of five times, they're renewing and they're renewing for one or two more years, which is a great sign as a software company. And it's also a sign I use for myself for all my thought leadership, my blog postings. I wanna understand about the consumer. Susie's my best friend in helping me understand where the consumer's headed, which has been great. And will we be able to pull our individual audiences as content creators soon? Yes. As in we can ask the audience to feedback. Yeah, bring in your own audience and have feedback come in. Interesting. Absolutely. So like a little simulation, ask Susie and have people come in. Yeah, just closing our product roadmap to the millions of people that watch our show. But yes, absolutely. To the hopefully couple of people. It just needs to be the right people, right? Yeah, that's right, that's right. It needs to be the right people that help move it along, that's right Matt. Okay, I wanna ask quick about this. What's up with the, we talked about this a lot during the show but I wanna get maybe a concrete principle from you in this sense. What would be a crucial principle for children and for parents to teach their children about the future of work with the gig economy and automation, AI, biotech, neurotech, blockchain, all these explosive fields. What's a couple core principles? Sure, I mean it's interesting. CNBC had a story in December that Google, Alphabet Corp, the parent company that owns Google actually had more independent contractors working on their business than employees. And that's really fascinating because it shows that Google, one of the obviously most forward thinking companies on earth is saying, we don't need to actually have a full-time workforce to drive our business because we have seasonal fluctuations and we have varying needs over time. So we need to tap into different resources at different times. And we wanna be lightweight as an organization, we wanna be able to be dynamic. You see Microsoft starting to do the same thing and I think most progressive companies are gonna start to realize that just having a team of full-time employees isn't the solution and you need to actually have an augmented resource pool of people that can fit very specific needs at very specific times. And that's why you see this gig economy really exploding. That's why you see we work value of the $20 billion because individuals are learning at the same time. Maybe my best path out of college isn't to go work for a big company and work my way up the C-suite especially because the average age of a company, the Fortune 500 is going down. Maybe I need to actually go very deep into a specialized skill set which I could offer to these companies, work out of we work and redefine a new version of the American dream which is I can work from anywhere I want and I have unlimited income opportunities. No boss is gonna decide my future, I am gonna decide my future and you're starting to see this really take off and I would definitely have my kids focused on that because it really puts the power in their own hands. You see people that have worked the companies for 20 years and then the company has a bad year and there's nothing to do with them and they get laid off and they're back at square one. How's that, right? And that's not the power in your own hands. So I think you need to have a specialized skill set. What I often say is go deep into an art or deep into a science, go deep into an art, learn how to be a writer, learn how to be a designer, learn how to be creative in ways that machines never can or go deep into a science, learn how to build code and operate the machines. But if you are a jack of all trades, master of none, your job's gonna be outsourced or offshore to India or Costa Rica or China and you're gonna find yourself stuck in the middle with no real opportunity for expansion in this new world. Couple quick cutters to that last part. It's interesting on the writing side of things. We're already seeing machines writing, which is kind of interesting. Then on the polymath side, I'm knowing a lot about a lot of different things. I think what's interesting about that is it really enables the multidisciplinary weaves across industries that a lot of other people that are deep in industry can't see how biotech and blockchain actually have a lot of significant overlap in relating DNA. But if you're an expert in either? Yeah. I mean, in other words, some people just know a little bit about everything and not anything deep. And if that's the case, you're not gonna be able to monetize or go deep into anything. You can maybe think about it like if you are two at the surface level versus if you're at the cutting edge, but if you know a lot about a lot of different cutting edges, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, because I think a lot of people think they can leave college just saying, oh, I studied a little bit of everything. It's like, well, if I'm a company, it's like, well, you're telling me that you have to wait for me to tell you what to do every single day. Well, you know what? I'm gonna tell somebody in Costa Rica to do every day because they're a tenth of your price. And if they're just gonna follow directions, I'll just tell them to do it. You gotta have initiative. This is a big point. Okay, on the way out, a couple of questions. This one's about the geopolitical situation with millennials and Gen Z. Do you see something different at all formulating in the Middle East, China, South America, Europe in terms of millennials and Gen Z? Well, I just think they feel empowered. You look at the Arab Spring, you look at all these revolts against government. The Turkish coup d'etat, I mean, it's happening, or the attempt at coup d'etat in Turkey, it's happening everywhere. Is that people using technology, as people say, it's spread people further apart. I'd make the argument more so. It's brought people closer together. It's empowered people. It's exposed the truth. And it's made younger people think that they are in control of their future. Now, sometimes it has drastic negative consequences, because there's only so much they can do against big government. But in truly democratic societies, it does empower people. And it does empower people to have a voice. You see these huge women's marches or gun violence marches that happen in Washington, D.C. with the Parkland students. I mean, that would never have happened 10, 15 years ago. So I think it's a great thing. But the question is, especially in America, it's great you do these things, but are you gonna come out and vote? Are you actually gonna, what else are you gonna do about it? Are you just gonna become an entrepreneur? Yeah, are you gonna newsjack and actually just jump on things that are interesting at the time? Or are you really gonna become somebody who's an activist? Yeah, and actually continue to drive and try to drive change where you live. Because a lot of people just go very surface in that as well. It seems like with data, we're moving with this big data silos. We're moving more into letting the data flow. So decentralizing the data. And maybe that comes with some encrypting. So that way it's anonymized and whatnot. But at the same time, there's a big movement for this radical transparency in data saying that I don't really care if you know that I'm in New York right now. You can know that I'm in New York and I'm 26 and that I make this much money a year. I don't really care. My heart rate, you know, you can have this data about me. Until it gets hacked by somebody who knows that you're outside of your house and they go rob you, right? So it's like the problem with that is transparency in data works until it gets transparent to people who you didn't intend for it to be transparent to. So we have to then build trust first. So we have to evolve our own ethics and morals first to not commit malevolence against each other. And then we can have that radical transparency. But I don't think that's realistic. Human animals can get there. I think there's good and bad people. And I think that there's gonna be people, always bad actors. And I think it's more about data security. I think you look at GDPR and you look at UPSAC and you look at all these initiatives to basically protect people's data. And I think that, you know, blockchain's gonna be a big part of that. I think that's more important because there's always gonna be bad actors. You're always gonna need locks on your front door. I believe. Interesting. Let's see if maybe if we didn't hockey stick up so fast in population where there was this massive inequality with education and ignorance that we could have potentially kept it at we're evolving trust and ethics over time. Maybe. You know, it's a little idealistic because throughout time I feel like it's always been that way. Interesting. Who knows where we'll get. I like that point. Okay, now what would you say has been the core driving principle of your life? Of my life. Yeah. I think I embrace risk and I think I invest in myself and trust the future. So there's many decisions I've made that at that time many outsiders looked as probably not the smartest move at that time but I knew that if I actually put in the work that it would pay off in the future. And I think I'd rather go down investing in myself than take the easy road and playing it safe. And that really has impacted all aspects of my life. I just I'm confident about my impact on people and on business and the commercials and everything else that comes out of it that I will always take risks, like go work at a startup and leave a cushy position at a big company. I'll always make that choice because I want to make the best impact and I don't want to leave anything on the fields when it's all said and done. I love that. Okay. How about if you could rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it? It's interesting. Cause there's one question I heard the other day if you redistribute all the wealth equally how long would it take for it to get back in the same people's hands, right? And I actually believe it would ultimately work its way. Maybe not Jeff Bezos would have what he has, right? But I think that those he would be on the wealth your side and other people wouldn't. The baseline would come up. Yeah. There's a lot of things I would do. I mean, I believe that I would redesign the way that weapons are available to people cause I think that's a major issue. I would redesign the healthcare system. I would redesign the education system. I think those are things that are changing humanity very quickly. And obviously from a much broader perspective how countries work with each other and how countries can get along and try to solve bigger issues like war. You know what I mean? I think that cancer is a huge issue. Like what's the role of technology in creating a cure for cancer and where do technologies like CRISPR come into play? I mean, that's a huge existential question obviously but it's just some of the things that came off the top of my head. And would you say that this is a simulation? This life? Yeah. You know, I'm back and forth on that. You know, I don't know if we're just a bubble that's part of a larger, larger bubble. I think that, you know, we only know what we know and we are very likely to only know what we know until we're no longer on this earth. So I think in some ways it almost doesn't matter because likely it's not gonna change the way that we act every day. Maybe for some people it does where they think that we're just a speck in something larger so it's gonna, they will be more risk-taking, they will be more loving, they won't take things as more seriously. But I think ultimately we're never probably gonna know in our lifetime if it is a simulation or not. So all we can do is try to live our ideals while we're here and see where it takes us. We're hacking it. We're hacking into the code to figure it out. And we're gonna make our own simulations of what it's like for a rock to evolve civilization and then we'll see our own selves potentially. Last question. What do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? I guess love, I guess like human interaction and interpersonal relationships. I think people going out of their way to help other people for the love of humanity is probably the most beautiful thing in the world. With no monetary gain or no personal gain, just people helping just to help, I think it's probably it. If we can all dose up on love, we can get to that unity more easily together. Right on. Matt, Matty B, Matt Britton. This has been such an honor, such a pleasure. It's been amazing. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for coming by. Thanks for coming on the show. You're always welcome here, Susie. Thank you, thank you. Everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the things that we talked about. Check out the links. Let us know, exactly. Check out the links in the bio. I would love for you to check out Matt's YouTube channel because he's got really powerful one minute long plus also longer form videos for you to check out there. And also check out the asksusie.com or just susie.com link also below. And go and use it because it is super insightful. Go and check it out. We could maybe do some sort of a code potentially. We'll explore that. We'll let you know. And also go and build the future, everyone. Go and manifest your destiny into the world. Go and create. We love you so much. Keep supporting epic people like Susie, like simulations so we can continue doing cool things like coming onsite and doing these interviews. Much love and we'll see you soon. Take care. Peace. That's it, my man. Great, that was awesome. I'm glad you had a good time.