Transcript of AE 1182 - The Goss: Why Won't Gen Z Pick Up the Phone

G'day, you mob! Pete here! And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Whether locally down under here in Australia or non locally overseas in other parts of the world.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in the Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at www.aussieenglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes. The PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, So if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time, keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird, let's get into it.

Alright, so, "Call Declined: Why Gen Z won't pick up the phone".

Gen Z.

Gen Z. Gen Z. Gen Z.

Gen zed.

Gen Z. I don't know. It just rhymes with it. Everyone always asks: "why is it 'zed', not Z? The Americans say Z and Australians, they use zed like Brits." I'm like, it doesn't fucking rhyme. A B C D E F C H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W, X, Y and Z. It's like 'y and z'. It rhymes. W, X, Y and Z. Z B C, D, E. Like where are the other letters that end in -Ed? Yeah. Anyway.

So, "Imagine you're having a busy day between meetings, a haircut and the dentist appointment. You've already cancelled three times. You can barely stop to sip your coffee. Suddenly your phone rings. Without even checking who it is, your body involuntarily cringes. The audacity to call you on your very busy day! What can't be said in a text? Call declined."

So, this was an interesting article that was, I guess, talking a lot about Gen Z. So people, I guess, what, under the age of 20? Today, maybe 25, I don't even know, I'm not...

Well, I think-.

I'm going to look up what.. we should have done that. (overtalking) Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that.

Don't do this.

How can I help? Ah, let's see. Gen Z. Um, okay. People- researchers and popular media use the mid, the mid- to late nineties as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years.

What if somebody who's born after that?

I don't know.

Z plus one.

You would have to tell me. Yeah. Gen.. Gen Theta? Who knows. It'll probably go into the Greek letters.

Exactly.

Yeah. So it was an interesting article talking about how the younger generation people..

People in their early twenties.

And the most recent batch to get iPhones, no longer answer the phone or at least it's becoming a less and less common trend and they instead will use social media apps like WhatsApp and everything to communicate with voice messages and potentially call themselves on that. But they usually schedule the calls and everything. And this was something that was really interesting to chat about with you. Because I think you and I are sort of in a similar situation, where we've gone through those stages of mobile phones. Came about probably as I was born, and my early years, where you- I remember the first one you had was this huge Nokia brick thing, right? Like..

Yeah.

You know, it looks like what you would get as a home phone nowadays.

Pretty much..

You carry that around in your pocket.

And then the second one was a little Nokia what, 3310.

Yeah.

And your first phone, I had...

Yeah. I know. That was a winner. Those things were..

They- and there was..

.. were like cockroaches.

They actually...

..survived the apocalypse.

They brought them back.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That'll be what I guess..

.. only had two functions. Phone and text.

And Snake.

Yeah, Snake.

I probably used...

'How come the battery's flat?' 'I was playing snake all day.'.

I know, I think I probably played Snake on it more than I texted.

Yeah.

But I remember. So yeah. Those phones came through when I was, I remember, I think you gave that to me when I was in Year Eight, Year Seven, when I was in high school..

Yeah, start of high school. When there was- you couldn't just walk home.

And it was prepaid. So you couldn't just abuse the hell out of it with calling people. It cost actual money when you were calling, right?

Yes, so, back in the days when a call cost money.

And a text to be like $0.50 was 25 cents?

$0.25.

Whatever it was. And then a reply I think was $0.15 or something..

Imagine that today. And sending only a single text and it being like 'that's $0.25'.

Ting!

Yeah.

Ka-ching!

Twing! Ka-ching!

$0.50.

Yeah.

$1. Boom. But I remember, I think back then, you would have phone calls with friends for hours. Sometimes you'd be up late or people would call and you'd be excited, you'd be excited to answer the phone and be like, Who is it? And there's this famous, there's this famous skit of this guy. I think he's from New York. And he's this Italian New Yorker, and he has that accent. And he's kind of- he's, he's very funny. But he's making this joke about how back in the 80s and earlier, people would ring the doorbell and he'd be like, 'Fuck, it's people! Come on in, who's here? It's people. Open the door, Come on here, we're having dinner. It doesn't fucking matter. Sit down and have dinner with it.'

And then he was like, And then the 90s and everything roll by and you were just like, 'Fucking shut the blinds, lock the door. Who the fuck is ringing the doorbell at 7 p.m.? Why didn't they call?'.

Yeah.

And it's sort of like that nowadays with the phone. Where if you get a phone call out of the blue, most of the time now, I find myself cancelling it if I don't know who it is. Because it's almost always spam. It's almost always spam.

Yes.

And they've learnt to reroute through numbers that are Australian numbers. Again, just totally eroding my trust and not wanting to answer the phone at all. Even if I see an area code that is near me, and it even says sometimes underneath the area code, it will give you the location. Queenscliff!

Yeah.

Which is down the road. And I'm like, (laughs).

Wait, one second. Bairnsdale? I don't know anybody been..

I know..

Nothing is in Bairnsdale. Again, apologies to the people who live in..

Perth!

..that lovely place.

Like, who's calling me from- I don't have friends in Perth! No one with my number.

I know.

They got my email.

And yeah, look. All right. (Pete laughs).

That's Dad's..

Open- open, grumpy old fart rant.

Put your helmet on. Dad's about to drop some knowledge bombs.

Well, firstly, I think there's- I don't know that there are too many people. And certainly this article didn't mention the 'spam excuse'.

No. No, no.

And that's legit. I'm the same. I will often answer even though I know it's spam just in case it's a real person and not a- not a robot. So that I can. 'Oh, what do you- got nothing else? Hey, I'm retired.' And you know me, I quite enjoy. I, I have this egotistical view of the world that I'm actually more intelligent than any person who's going to be ringing me in one of these spam calls. And I can actually twist them around and you get some perverted sort of joy out of that. And I told you I won about a year ago. I actually- I won a spam call.

Yeah.

When the person in the end swore at me and hung up. And-.

That's- Dad, that's going to be on your tombstone.

That's right. Yeah. Spam caller swore at me and hung up. I win. Yeah. And, and so yeah. So ignoring the spam side of things, I actually sit there now and I read this sort of thing and think. You self-opinionated, self-centred little twats. Like, really? I'm not going to- even if..

..some spam calls or..

.. but even and the person- yeah, interesting, this guy was from Barwon Heads, you know the next town from us. I feel like walking around Barwon Heads calling out this guy's hashtag name. Hey, come out here and argue with me! And he'd probably make a squillion dollars videoing it on TikTok. But.

He was a TikTok influencer, for reference. And..

Don't get me started on the..

.. he's the b

Biggest, apparently. Yeah. 7.8 million viewers on TikTok or something. And I just sit there and...

50% are bots.

Yeah, exactly. And the other 50% are wankers. But.

And then there's me.

But I just sit there and look at it and go, He had- the article was talking about that even when he knew the person.

Yeah.

He wouldn't answer it, but he takes them back and say, 'anything important?' Or anything, like-.

For context, though..

.. answer the fucking phone! But all you got to do is go, 'look, sorry' and, or, you hit the- and I have a friend who I absolutely adore and I won't mention her by name, who never..

He can't- he can't remember her name.

I can remember, you know. She never- and I congratulated her on this a while ago. I said, You know, you are my hero. You never answer your phone, but you never let it drop. If you're there, she'll actually hit it. And with a lot of, a lot of phones, certainly iPhones, you can go hit. And if you hit the 'I don't want to answer this', it'll give you text options of 'yeah, I'm in a meeting, I'll get back to you'. She always does that.

Yeah.

Alright. I've got a response.

Yeah.

Whereas when you just let it hang, and then you leave a message, a voicemail message..

People don't get back to you..

And people who never look at their voicemail because I- if, if it's too much trouble to answer the phone, how much trouble is that I've read a bloody- or listen to a voicemail message, I'd just sit there and if somebody is ringing you, either text them back and say, you know, can't make it, I'll call you back or I'll text you whatever, or just answer the phone.

Well, especially if you don't know who it is, I guess that's the caveat there, right?

I don't get it. And there is- there's a group of people, and I'm not going to- Yeah, I'm going to throw your mother under the bus. There is- he was lying. He knew this was coming. There are- there is a group of people, a small proportion of the population who just don't want to talk on the phone.

And then there are others that are only..

And I'll- I'll paraphrase a common conversation in our household. Are we going to pizza place for dinner tonight? This is your mum. Are we going to pizza place for dinner tonight?

Sounds like her.

I don't know. Can you text him and ask

? Oh, man.

And I just go, 'Just call him!' Like, you got to get an answer much quicker by, by calling him, than getting me to text him to ask you a question.

Oh, my God. Just throw Kel under the bus, too, my wife. And this isn't just a bitch sesh about our wives. My wife, she- she does that all the time to me as well.

.. 'can you do this?' I don't mind doing it.

She'll be. Hold it. She'll send me a text message saying, 'Can you text your dad and ask him?' And I'll be like, 'Are you fucking kidding me? You fucking kidding me?' We haven't-.

You've just spent more time. So you spent more characters in the text message to ask me because it starts off with, 'Can you ask your dad' Here's the message. Why didn't you just send your dad the message?

Did you just have, like, English amnesia or something like.

Why don't she send it to you in Portuguese? Yeah.

Well, but I'm like,

.. to me in Portuguese and I'll translate it.

We're in a group chat. Kel, you're asking me this in the group chat!

To which I then respond. 'No'.

That's it.

I know, it's funny, but. So, yeah, our our beautiful wives aside..

I'm like, you do know, we don't live in such a patriarchal, a patriarchal, patriarchal society where you don't have a right to talk...

I can't speak- I can't speak for Kel. Well, she talks to me all the time, but I can't speak for Kel in this. But Joe is just one of those people who just doesn't like talking on the phone. And it's not a fear or, you know, it's just..

Disgust.

I'd rather somebody else do it. And so there are, there are people like that. But mostly this sort of millennial-Gen Z sort of thing, I think is just it's, it's, it's self-centeredness. It's this, 'what I am doing now is more important'. And this is not a criticism. It's what I am doing right now is more important to me than anything that you can say.

Do you want to probably talk about what he brought up in- may not have even been him, but the, the person writing the article effectively said that Gen Zs don't like being, or at least, you know, broadly speaking, the idea that they were putting forward was that, when you just randomly call someone, you are demanding their attention instantly.

Yep.

And if you don't get it, they're the bad guy or no, so you're the bad guy and they're not. And I kind of understood that. Where, if I think it would depend on the person. And this is probably the thing that's changed. The, the circle of friendships has shrunk in terms of who I am willing to give that kind of personal attention to at the drop of a hat. And back in the day when I first had my phone, I was probably happy to talk to anyone and everyone on the phone just for the sake of using the phone.

Yeah, you got 'hey, somebody called me!'

But I think that's circle shrunk now where, if I'm getting a spontaneous call from someone who's a very, very close friend or family member. And very close family member. If it was just an uncle or something, again, I'd probably answer it if I could. But if I'm in the middle of something, I probably wouldn't drop it.

In the middle of something, I'm just watching- yeah, sucked into a YouTube vortex..

On the toilet. Yeah, that's it. But dunny, going for a walk, eating lunch? No, but if I was doing something and I felt like, you know, I just can't be bothered doing this right now, he'll leave a message. And if it's really important, I'll get back to him. Especially if it's unprompted and I'm not expecting- I'm not expecting this call for him to give me information that I'm waiting for or whatever, then I might be more likely to do that than probably someone in your age bracket. Or all of that, right. Like, I think my grandparents are probably still of the age where if they don't, if they can't hear it or see it, they're probably not going to answer it. But if they see someone calling, they're probably going to answer out of politeness because that's how they were raised. And it's a, you know, it's hard to, what would you say, un-teach dogs old tricks?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

It's- it's sort of like, yeah, there's a, there's a few of those examples I could give, but..

I'm a bit like..

That's how I am. I have a much empty a bucket in terms of where I am willing to put time, with my family and everything, and the amount that I have for less close friends or acquaintances, all the way to spam callers, is an an exponentially shrinking bucket.

Yeah, I think- I think those- and I accept that, and I agree with you mostly, I'm very similar to it. But I think from the perspective of the article, there was a component of that article that really was about saying, 'I just don't want to talk on the phone'.

Yeah.

And, and I look at it and for me, I ah, if I call somebody, it's because I think me, talking to them, will resolve whatever question or issue or whatever I have, much faster than a text message. Because if I send you a text message that says, 'Hey Pete, are we coming around for dinner tonight?'.

Yeah.

I am now completely out of the loop. Until you choose to respond.

Seen.

Yeah, exactly. Delivered.

10 hours later.

Then you get back to me the next morning going, 'Sorry, missed that! Would have been great to have you here!'

Oh man, the amount of people that have done that to me.

I know, and then- I know. But there's, so- and that's-.

'Am I still coming over tonight?'

Exactly. That's an extre- yeah. Yeah. Four in the morning, going 'Oh you missed a great party, man!' I think there's, there's an element of that. But there's- but it's more the- If I can ask you a question, you answer the question, we're done. It'll take 10 seconds of conversation over a phone call. Texting backwards and forwards. You can't clarify things without repeating a text. You can't go, Oh, no- well, or, if the answer is 'no', does 'no' mean 'no, can you come at six'? Or 'no, come tomorrow'? Now, I've got to come back to you and say, 'will 6 be okay' or 'will tomorrow be okay'? And and then you come back to me going, 'I don't know, what do you think?'.

And- which is all a natural conversation. And a 90% of the text conversations I have are like that. They're like talking face to face with somebody. And you sit there and go, This is taking me forever. So just, 'Are we going for dinner or not?' And so I think there's an element of that that is, it's just irritating. That, that people will be much happier to have a text conversation, or a WhatsApp group, or- and it doesn't matter whether it's WhatsApp or a text group or, you know, Facebook Messenger, or any of those things are ways of communicating.

The younger generation, and myself included. I think I'm in this generation too. We've just gotten used to social media becoming a 'you reply when you have time' or 'when you're in the mood' and you take that for granted and get used to that. You know, we've been sort of lulled into that, that sense of security of 'I don't have to respond if I don't want', 'I can respond when I want', and it's not up to someone else to force the response.

And so I think that's what they're getting at where- and it's interesting to see how younger generations treat social media, and how quickly this is evolving. Right. Because prior to, what, your generation getting the Internet, prior to that, it was like what phone calls on the landline and letters. And it was letters for thousands of years, you know, like there would have been letters, telegrams and then phone calls for a very long period of time, effectively. And that was sort of the limit. And then it's speeding up now..

Mobile phones became a way of carrying your, your telephone communication around with you. And then text messaging came in very quickly. Emails sort of tagged into letters as well, as a separate version of that.

Yeah.

Yeah. How many- what they didn't talk about was how many Gen Z or Zs would ever think about using email.

Yeah.

And yet email is still the standard business practice. Yes, you'll get a reminder from a company about you haven't paid your bill or can we talk about your account or something as a text message. But if you want formal documentation, it comes as an email.

Yeah.

And rightly so. And- but your average- but I'm not going to send somebody an email. Like, I'll use the example of we have a couple of friends of mine, who you know very well, I won't mention their names, but ..

Just leave me to try and work it out.

Ah, you'll work it out very quickly. We have a football, and football in the broad, generic sense, so it's mostly AFL, but also, you know, EPL soccer and NFL and college football in the US and so on, where we if we're sitting up, particularly the AFL, if we're watching on a Friday night, watching the Friday night game, we'll just be texting each other backwards and forwards. I'm never going to use email for that.

Or phone calls.

Or- yeah, we're not going to have a phone, a three way phone call open for 3 hours commentating on the game.

You could!

We could! And it would be funny, but it would actually interfere with watching the game. Whereas the text, you can- I can comment instantly or I can comment 5 minutes later. One of the challenges with that sort of text stream, whether it's- we use text messaging because that's just what we do. But you could use, yeah, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or whatever else. But the problem with those things is that the order of conversation is chronological. It's not- you actually have to actively choose to respond to something that happened 10 minutes ago, rather than five comments later. And you're just putting one in 'I agree'. What are you agreeing with? Are you agreeing with the last three things?

That's what you have to do, the quote response.

I know. Yeah, but you hold. Exactly. And you can do that. But so it's a bit more cumbersome. It's not instantaneous. But again, we choose to..

.. be like you having a personal conversation on the phone and then 5 minutes later just being like, (Pete laughs) 'Good joke!' And they'd be like, 'What?' Yeah, 'I just got it'. 'What did you just get?' But those sorts of things. That's where that to me is, where text actually works. Because it becomes an informal parallel to your own personal experience, whereas the version of that that would go somewhere else is to say, I'm going to sit here and not look at the phone for 3 hours, watch while I'm watching a football match, and then I'll email these two with my opinions of what went on during the football game. And mostly, it's 'well, that was a shit umpiring decision' and you're never going to say that in an email 3 hours later. So yeah, the instantaneous thing of it... Yeah. Yeah. Write a letter. Yeah. Pigeon.

Send a crow!

So there are- yeah, there are times I think where all sorts of different communication media work. But the fact that- and this, the article was, yeah, clearly, if you're going to write this article, you go out and find somebody who is screaming exactly what you want to tell.

Who you'd probably find on Tiktok. So you know...

... probably this person probably instigated the article in the sense...

But they'd love to be in the news.

Of course they would. Yeah. Yeah. They probably got another million viewers now. So I think there's, you know, there's some extremes, but I still have this sort of thing of sometimes it's just easier to say.

Oh, 100%. But then there are other times, like recently buying the house that we, Kel and I bought, and speaking to our, I don't know if it's our real estate agent, the real estate agent, the agent for the vendor..

For whom you, from whom you purchased the property.

He would always want to be calling me.

Of course I'd do.

And I would be feeling so uncomfortable because I can't- I know..

.. this in writing.

This guy is so well trained in his art of getting whatever he needs from you as the person buying that I didn't feel like I was on a level playing field. And so I would quite often just not answer and wait for a text message so that I had time to think about my response. Because I felt like, and I don't know if it's that controversy, you know, I don't want confrontation. You don't want to get into a confrontation on the phone where you are less well equipped or less practiced than they are at resolving it in your favour. That was what I was, at least in that example. That was one where, again, I was like, I'm more comfortable dealing with this in text than I am because I've got time to think I can write out what I want to say.

Funnily enough, with the you know, we've got, we, as in your mother and I have got paperwork involved in you buying this property. And I've been backwards and forwards with the bank a few times over that and we've had a, we, as in myself, the bank and your, your agent for purchasing the property have had this sort of three way, or four way now, that we're going to your, the bank, that's giving you the loan conversation.

And I ended up ringing my bank after about five email trails and just saying, 'Look, can we just talk about this? This is the situation by', and the guy said, 'Okay, this is what I need you to do. I need you to contact the Commonwealth Bank and tell them that they need to contact us'. Westpac Bank, who is my bank and send me this thing. And I said, 'Can you just send that to as an email to everybody'. Yeah. And he went, 'Oh, okay'.

But I actually- and it was very specific, because it was particular banks.

'Is this your first day?'.

I know. It was like, 'People?!' It was, it was very specific. You need to do this particular form and fill it and do this and the bank needs to ask. And I said, 'Can you just send that as an email to everybody' and went, 'Oh, all right'.

I'll just tag all of us.

Because he was just handing the responsibility over to me to do his job. And I just said, 'Hey, really?' Just send every- I have no idea what you're actually talking about. I'm going to misrepresent this and we're going to go remind...

Am I getting paid by the hour to do this, too?

And regardless, it was just like, it just, you send the- and sure enough, by this morning, he sent it at about 4:30 yesterday afternoon. By 9:30 this morning, it was resolved.

Sweet. So that's..

Three emails like...

... I'm hearing of. It is sorted out?

It is sorted.

Thank God.

Well, no, it's not sorted, but all the banks know what that is now. The two banks that have to talk to each other, and Ruth and you and I are out of the loop.

So. So for, for context, Dad is acting as a guarantor for me, so he's effectively got his testicles on the line for..

Not my testicles. Just a property that we own. A certain percentage of my loan..

.. is useless now, so the bank wouldn't want them.

Yeah, exactly. We can't cash these in, but effectively he's on the- he's on the chopping block until the house has enough equity in it that it's past the amount that you're on the chopping block for it. Yes. And so you've had to do all this organising with Ruth, who is my mortgage broker.

Yeah. We have to take out a effectively mock mortgage. It's a mortgage, but we don't pay anything.

Just legally. I pay for it. And you are on the chopping block.

I'm on, and we start paying if you don't. So yeah. And so it's one of those weird things. And look, I won't go through the details of the screw ups all around. Yeah, exactly. That was you out there in listener land by me telling you the details.

Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah. So pretty funny. Where do we start this conversation here?

... he's not answering the phone.

He's not answering the phone.

Well, it's going to be interesting to see.

Sorry, but that was, that was the issue. If I had responded to that email, then there would have been another five emails from people going, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Whereas I talk to this guy for 2 minutes, the fact that he asked me to solve it was neither here nor there, but if we'd gone for email, I'd still be emailing them backwards and forwards, and not having the conversation fixed it.

The key there, though, I would imagine, is that it's his job to answer the phone. He doesn't have an option of just 'fuck this, I'm not answering the phone'.

He made the mistake of giving me his personal phone number.

Yeah, you're like, 'Thank you, mate'. I'm going to sign up to that Britney Spears fan club with your details. Enjoy the next 20 years of..

My, but if I sign up to Britney Spears with his phone number, he'll get a text message saying, 'do you want to sign up to Britney Spears?' Yeah, and he'd go, 'I'd never thought of that!'

Yeah, that's it. Oh, yes.

Yeah. How did I get this message?

But yeah, it is funny to see how quickly the social media landscape is changing and the cultural behaviour around it because, yeah, I remember thinking when I first joined, I think it would have been MySpace would have been one of the. Well, it would have been MSN, was the first kind of social media thing where we could, we could directly chat..

MSN chat.

Yeah, MSN Chat. And we used to sit up late and you would have all your friends. It was effectively like the Facebook chat where you can see who's online and who's not online and you can just open up chats. And except I think people got back to you a lot quicker usually.

Well, if they were on there, if they were online and you could see there's a little green dot next to their name.

And you just hang out and talk shit. I remember those are the days, and I guess there were chat rooms before that, but it moved from yeah, chat rooms to MSN and then to, I think MySpace.

Yeah.

God, those were the days, we had like eight top mates or friends.

But you couldn't..

And you couldn't put your girlfriend is number one.

But there was no, there was no chat facility in there. You could message each other but it was, it was..

Delayed.

Delayed. Yeah.

But then there was Facebook and I remember joining that and being like, finally, you know, this is going to work well and thinking 'my parents are never going to join this' and 'my grandparents are never going to join this'. Like, older generation. And it's so funny now. What would it be, 15 years later after it was 2004? I think so. Even longer. Jesus, 17 years. 18 years. And it's now like the whole 'oh, only old people are on that social media platform'. Like, the Gen Z don't use it. And you're just like, 'What?!'

I joined Facebook and I probably use Facebook a lot more than you do other than the fact that you advertise on it. But but I probably use it more than you do. But I only joined when your sister turned 13, would have to be 13 in order to join.

Really? She joined at 13?!

Yeah, prob-.

No.

13. Or whatever she was. But yeah, but she was..

..had to go to university.

She was at least 13. But yeah, but she joined and she asked me, she said, I want to make you a friend on Facebook. You're going to have to get an account.

And you were like 'Pfffttt.'.

And I went, 'Okay'.

Make one. You never say that. You never say that 'no' to your child. When they say, I want you to be a friend on social media. So..

Dad's just in the background like, 'Lame!'.

No, Dad's in the background going, 'Thank you!'

Yeah, that's it. Just give me your password!

So yeah,

We need to talk about these messages..

And I guarantee you I use Facebook more than you and your sister combined.

I would imagine. You've got much more of an argumentative personality.

Well, no..

I had that originally, but I think.

I did.

I moved through that.

But now.

That was the atheist period..

.. and I basically don't I, I use it more as a way now of keeping up with people that I don't see. So, friends and family who are around the world. I post photographs because that's who I am. And you chat to people who I know, I used to, when I would only get involved in some rather heated discussions about things, but I can't be bothered anymore.

It's funny how quickly that changed over.

Yeah, now it's 90%..

Back in the day this would have been like 2010, when we were sort of heavily interested in that atheist community and, you know, science and all of this stuff that we were much more vocal about and overtly interested in. And having these long winded arguments online about, you know, this and this and that and whatever. And now it's just like, I honestly just don't give a shit. Like..

..people don't..

.. Or an age thing.. Now, just move.

And look it's, it's. It's a very difficult thing to comment on what Facebook is like, even if you're a frequent- I'm on Facebook one or two times a day. And I still-

6 hours at a time.

Yeah, exactly. 5 minutes.

.. goes to the toilet for a very long time.

I get Facebook notifications on my phone, so I'll... something.

Dude, turn that off.

Yeah, but. But I have 600 friends. And I belong to a bunch of groups that have a few thousand members.

I love-

Not like-.

I love how you're saying that you have 600 friends is actually a way of showing that you don't have very many.

Exactly. I know. 'I've got six friends! Woohoo!'

'I've only got 600 friends.'.

And some of whom I don't actually know personally. I've never met, but I know them well..

90% of them!

I know. No, no. For me, it's yeah, it's been less than 50%, but yeah, but, but I don't know what Facebook is like and nobody does. No individual user knows what Facebook is like anymore for them, for them because it is so 'artificially intelligenced', if that is a word, to the point where my view of Facebook is specifically designed for me.

Funny that.

So, I- but not just advertising. I sort of..

I keep seeing these ads for women's laundry. What the hell, dude!

You obviously...

Like, Mum? Have you been using my face?

You obviously get on to the wrong things, but I, I look- but not only that. But now I will only see probably 600 and something friends. And I only see comments or postings from about 20 of them.

Yeah.

Because they're the ones that I have commented on recently.

No, they're the ones that you scroll through your feed and hover over for the longest amount of time.

I know..

So it's even- you don't even have to like it..

But when they don't, no longer appear in your feed. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I look at this and go, Well, I've got a friend whose husband passed away last month.

Sorry to hear that.

Yeah, and you know them too, and I'll talk about it later. But but she, not the- I'm sure she commented on funeral arrangements or whatever on Facebook. I never saw it.

Yeah. Yeah.

They live in Florida. I sent a message to her last night because of the hurricane in Florida, which ironically is Hurricane Ian, and just saying, 'Hey, hope you and name-of-her-husband are okay'. And she came back going, 'Oh, God, I'm so sorry. I didn't tell you that he passed away a month ago', but she would have expected me to know.

Well, this- did I tell you this happened to me with my friend who committed suicide?

You did. Yeah.

And I was like, I wish them a happy birthday.

Oh, no.

And then my friend was like, 'Oh, they killed themselves six months ago'. And I was, and there were- there had been things, I guess, posted about them and everything. I don't think it was, obviously, they didn't post them, but I was just like, how do I not find out about this?

I know!

And to- I wish the person happy birthday, and then someone else had to see that.

Yes.

A mutual friend and say, 'Oh no, Pete, sorry', but.,

Because you would have missed that. And I had the same thing. I had an old teacher. He never taught me, but he was a teacher at the high school I went to and I had kept up with him for a long time. Obviously, it's 45 plus years since I was at high school, but and he died about a year ago. And just after he had died, I posted a happy birthday. And his daughter is obviously now running his his account came back to me and said, 'Oh, sorry, Dad died'. I went, 'How come I didn't see this?'.

Yeah.

Because she would have posted on his feed.

Yeah.

But because it doesn't appear to me. So that's the problem I have with that sort of thing now, where Facebook has become so big that not only are they, and I'm perfectly okay with them, it irritates the shit out of me, but I'm perfectly okay with them as a commercial organisation and make their money out of advertising. I pay nothing to use their system. I cannot complain. But..

You can unsubscribe at any time.

Exactly.

But when they are deliberately manipulating what I see from postings of people that I have indicated on their system that I am interested in interacting with, then..

Well, I guess it is..

.. really?

To play devil's advocate, you wonder how well the algorithm can work out those kinds of really important bits of information.

They don't need to.

Well, how otherwise would you, you know, the algorithm be able to pick them up to show you and show what's important?

I can choose and I have. I choose which friends.

Well, you have to follow them, right? Then you can probably get notifications.

But yeah, I can choose which of those friends I want to get notifications if they posted something on. That's my choice. But all the others, why can't I just see their stuff? If I scrolled forever, I'm not going to see these people because Facebook has chosen not to show them to me.

Well, they've chosen to maximise the amount of ads that they will show you.

Correct.

Through the content that will..

Correct.

.. keeps you on the platform for the longest period.

Exactly. So, and that's the thing that is irritating.

Well, the thing that's, I think most irritating about that, is not necessarily that. It's the fact that they're not transparent about that. That's how the program works. And it's even worse with TikTok. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at why TikTok don't get on it. Jesus Christ.

I never will.

Jeez, I deleted it from my phone.

I'm gonna be one of the last human beings on earth that has not, neither a TikTok nor a Twitter account.

If you, if you want nightmares, read the TikTok Terms of Service. Because, yeah, they pretty much instantly get access to every single contact on your phone. Their phone numbers. They get instant access to every single one of your photos. Yeah, it's horrifying.

The irony is that TikTok is one of the only things that will pass through the firewall between the universe and China.

Yeah.

Two way firewall.

But the bit that I saw that was horrifying was a journalist was doing some research into it because Tiktok's algorithm is like Facebook's but on steroids with showing what content it shows you.

Because it's instantaneous.

Yeah and he...

They can't afford to have something sit for 24 hours because it's gone.

He was effectively looking into whether or not the algorithm could be taught, if he just created a new account, to just show him underage nudity effectively. And he went on like live streams. And found out that TikTok has this system where you give certain little emojis which translate as money, and that it's training people under the age of 18 to do things on screen, on live chats, to get money.

..get kids. It's..

Yeah. And that once you start following them, you will see more and more and more. And the crazy thing was when he tried discussing this with the people who were on the lives, if they responded to his questions about have you, you know, do you know about people being exploited in this way on TikTok or whatever, or have you done these things? If they responded, they were banned.

Yeah.

And so TikTok is pretty much aware that they have an algorithm that is training people to effectively exploit young children sexually on their platform.

Which is only one of the things that they're exploiting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there was drug use, there was a whole bunch of these things that it effectively has no control over who sees it or what, and yet the algorithm can be used to manipulate.

Yes. So, yeah, well, Instagram is a good example of one that exploits young women who are perfectly happy to put photographs of them up,

Knowingly.

Knowingly. Knowing- if they do it, knowing..

They've done the internal studies to know that they're having a significant impact on the photograph side rates in young women. Yeah, and they still do it. This is Facebook being dark. You know, again, I went down a rabbit hole here recently, too, and I was like, 'Oh my God'.

Yet I choose to use Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Yeah, no. Well, that's it. You got to pick your poison, I guess. But yeah, TikTok was just too far for me. I was like,

I'm thinking of going, uh, switching off Instagram and going to Vero. But Vero is a, it's a photography sharing site. But, but at the same time, where is everyone? Where is everyone? I go, yeah, fine. If all I'm interested in is looking at other people's landscape and wildlife photographs.

Mm hmm.

That's fine, but. Not particularly. I'm more interested in discussing and talking and seeing what other people are interested in. And I put up photos of landscapes and wildlife and they go, 'Oh, that's cool'. And we comment or not. And so it's sort of really informal community. Whereas when you go into a community that is a pre-existing group of people, you know what you're going to get and it sort of becomes pointless. It becomes self indulgent. And that's not a problem if that's what you want to do. If what I want to do is go up and look at other people's landscape photographs and have them look at mine and comment, fine.

But it's not that's not the reason I put stuff on Instagram. If I was only ever being seen by people who are landscape photographers, it's sort of pointless.

And it'd be a lot more competitive. Right? And you probably wouldn't get that same. I don't know that, that feeling of just genuine appreciation, you would never know. You would never be able to pull it apart from 'Is this person just yanking my chain?' 'Are they trying to get clout?' 'Do they actually like it?' Yeah. Anyway, we've come a long way in this one.

We have. Where did we start?

But yeah,

Gen Z, Z,

It is going to be so interesting to see where things end up in another 20 years. Because you're like, 'This shit is moving so fast'.

It is.

And it's so you've got the social media aspect of things which is layered above the technology that we have. And is so reliant upon the technology. Like, I can't even imagine where things are going to be in ten years from now where you probably won't be using an iPhone the same way anymore. It'll be some other piece of technology, whether it's glasses or something else. That's..

Well, the iPhone will become redundant. I think we talked about this in another episode that your iPhone will become your watch. You wear your iPhone on your wrist or your phone or..

And it'll have these inherent things that change the way in which you interact with people on social media and for social media to change. And it is one of these things that just blows your mind and is sort of like, I can't anticipate where this is really going. Like you can. I wonder how far ahead the people at the forefront of these things, like, you know, you've got Mark Zuckerberg thinking about Meta now, and the Meta Universe and you've got the people at Apple probably thinking about a few years ahead. But how far ahead can they really? It's like the, it's like the cars headlights. When you're driving around at night, you can't really see an infinite amount of distance. It's like literally only a few hundred feet in front of the car and you're done.

I also think there's going to be a, a pushback watershed, at some stage, where major governments around the world and what Australia does is going to be irrelevant, but it will be the United States, China, some of the big European countries that will simply just say 'we're going to ban them'.

What? The devices or the social media,

.. social media platforms. 'We're just going to ban them.'

Well, I'm wondering how long it's going to take for TikTok to be banned in Australia..

Because, because they are they are so insidious that we think there is a national security. And as you mentioned, those two words, any country in the world they got, ooh, yeah, there's a national security issue. It's not frankly the Australian government, the US government, the British government, the German government, the Chinese government doesn't give a monkey's about what how 13 year old girls are being manipulated online. They might pay lip service to it and go, 'Oh, this is bad'. What they care about is the fact that arseholes can be manipulated.

Into acting against..

Interacting against the government.

Yeah.

And and that's going to be the- there will be a pushback somewhere along the line.

One of those things is why China- why don't you allow Facebook? Because we don't have control over what Facebook ends up doing and what..

..exactly right.

They can get the population to do against the government. So it's illegal.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure that will happen. They'll just push back and get and ironically..

.. end up more like China everywhere. Where they're just like, we're not allowing these platforms.

I don't think they will. Because I think what will happen is that it'll, it'll almost, it'll go back a generation, to say, okay we have to create platforms for that will allow people to communicate. With each other post stuff that they want to post, but we're not going to allow advertising on them. We're going to be a subscription one.

And the algorithm isn't going to favour one thing or another..

Because there is no algorithm. We don't care. If I'm paying $100 a year to have a Facebook 2.0 account. Yeah, Facebook are not allowed to have advertising on there, so they don't care what I do. All they have to do is make sure I'm not breaking the law.

Yeah,

And then. We're done. And they're not going to make a squillion dollars because nobody's going to pay $100 a year.

But this is the thing where you wonder how much people actually want to be free of ads. The amount of shit that we complain about in terms of.

I don't care if these ads.

I wonder how much people don't would actually want to be free of them, or even the algorithm manipulation. Where they probably, it is that thing of being in the matrix, or not being in the matrix, right. Where the red pill or the blue pill, and you're sort of like, there are a lot of people who are like, 'I want to get red pill' and 'I want the fuck out of here because reality sucks', but it's reality, you know? And I tend to think of myself as that sort of a person.

But there are a lot of people who are like, Well, I kind of like the, the reality that I, that I have, but and so I'm happy..

Where, it's where the- it's not artificial intelligence because it's actually deliberately created intelligence. It's where those algorithms are actually controlling what people see and do. And I think that's the dangerous and and insidious part of it that governments will eventually get fucked off. And it won't be up to people to decide. I don't care about it. Advertising is fine. I watch television. Mm hmm. I pay for television. For which there is also advertising, which is.

Like, Oh, you've been over a barrel both ways!

Which is bizarre in itself. But I pay for what was previously called cable television. But, you know, Fox. Fox Television, which originally when it came out, was this- you pay a service for it and you, it's on. And we won't have advertising. That lasted about a minute and a half. And now there's advertising on it and you accept that.

..just thinking about the same thing.

Of course I have,

Yeah.

You accept that there is going to be advertising because it helps them buy the content that you want to watch. Yeah, and I buy Foxtel mostly for the sport.

And Game of Thrones.

And Game- yes, House of the Dragon, etc.

Just that..

And a bunch of other..

More than that..

But mostly sport. And and so I understand that Fox pays billions of dollars to the AFL to put their games on TV. I'm happy to have advertising because otherwise I'm going to be paying $1,000 a year to watch it and I'm not going to do that.

I have to go specifically..

But what I don't want- what I don't want is the manipulation of what I see on there. I don't want to have to turn on the television using this analogy. I don't want to turn on the television, only be able to see the things that Fox thinks they want me to see.

But there are plenty of people. I guess my argument was there are plenty of people who want that,

But you can do that. Fox already does that.

They've got channels that are just ads.

No, they've got they've got the hey, here's the latest releases. Here's the things- based on the last five things you've watched, here's what we think you'd be interested in. So they're already using that shit. But what they don't do is block me from seeing everything that they have available.

Yeah,

I've still got- I can see everything that I'm paying to be able to see.

But I guess Facebook's argument here would be you can go on to any of these friends pages and see what they've got on there. You just kind of scroll through your wall.

Exactly.

That's heavily curated by us.

I know. I know. Of course, their argument will be that.

Yeah,

But that's where it's insidious.

Oh,

End of grumpy old fart rant.

And there are zero people still listening to the podcast.

If you're still listening, congratulations!

I know. You win a prize..

Yeah, the prize is? Yeah. What are we going to advertise? Hang on, hang on. Jetty Road Brewery Chlorophyll More Like Borophyll.

Borophyll.

No idea what that means. It's a beer.

Chlorophyll is the green, the green pigment in blah, blah, blah. Boring. Boring.

Yeah. And to be even more boring, Jetty Road in Dromana on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.

That's what this beer is, by the way,

..Is the road next to the shops and flat- we used to call it, now because an apartment above it that my grandfather owned.

Is that still there?

Yeah.

Wow. But your parents place isn't. That's crazy.

I know. My grandfather's old shops and apartment above it are still there.

Why don't we try and go there?

Um, I've spoken to the guys at the fish shop. It's one of the shops now and said, 'Hey, my grandfather used to own this building'. I said, 'Oh, that's interesting'.

'That's nice. Fuck off'.

'Can I go to the back and have a look?' 'Oh, we don't have access to that door'.

Oh, well, thanks for joining us, guys.

See you!

See you!