Speaker 1: Flex and Frooms, Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex
Speaker 1: and Frooms catch up podcast.
Speaker 2: We've got a main character epidemic. And I know what
Speaker 2: you're thinking. This is a new thing. People are just
Speaker 2: coming into themselves. Let people feel confident. Know it's worse
Speaker 2: than that. It's been an issue since twenty seventeen. I
Speaker 2: didn't realize that there was a study that came out Viacom,
Speaker 2: they own MTV and stuff. Anyway, they did this study
Speaker 2: and over fifty percent of the millennials that they surveyed
Speaker 2: believe that a movie could be made about their life.
Speaker 1: Oh dear, oh dear.
Speaker 2: And you might think that's kind of like it holds
Speaker 2: no bearing or it's not that strange, but like, the
Speaker 2: average person lives quite a mundane life, even if you
Speaker 2: get near on the weekend and you've been to Europe
Speaker 2: a couple of times in your life. We create movies
Speaker 2: about exceptional people, and even the most exceptional people in
Speaker 2: the whole wide world will never have mo who's made
Speaker 2: about them and you. But it gets worse, right, I
Speaker 2: don't know if it gets worse or better, But it's
Speaker 2: really interesting that when this article was made, they were
Speaker 2: tying this like shift in self concept of the rise
Speaker 2: in instagram about getting being able to self publish so
Speaker 2: frequently and so heavily, and to be able to curate
Speaker 2: and edit your persona so specifically gave people this kind
Speaker 2: of like internal director, as in, instead of living life
Speaker 2: more intentionally, it gave people this feeling that they were
Speaker 2: living an exceptional life by being able to choose how
Speaker 2: when people saw them fascinating anyway. Some of the other
Speaker 2: findings were that sixty one percent of millennials believe they
Speaker 2: can influence pop culture.
Speaker 1: In me Lousiza. These stats are crazy.
Speaker 2: Eighty six percent of millennials believe that fans have some
Speaker 2: ownership of the things they're fans of. Terrifying but also
Speaker 2: very indicative of the way people like behave with things
Speaker 2: that they like and appreciate. I'm sure the majority of
Speaker 2: Taylorswood fans would feel like they're somewhat responsible for her
Speaker 2: level of success.
Speaker 1: Definitely, which like is that true?
Speaker 2: If you had to remove one thing from Taylor Swift,
Speaker 2: like her voice, her looks, her fans, her law, what
Speaker 2: could she live without her looks? Taylor stood would always
Speaker 2: be Tailor Swift without fans. Oh the thing that got
Speaker 2: her fans, is her law, her looks, her personality, her music,
Speaker 2: Hi lyricism, I think she came.
Speaker 1: First firstly is her lyricism? This wasn't in order?
Speaker 3: Oh she's Shakespeare. This is say, becoming a Shakespeare.
Speaker 2: And I would love to see how these findings have evolved,
Speaker 2: for like the life we live now, because there is
Speaker 2: no way a millennial in twenty seventeen could have even
Speaker 2: imagined the life they'd be living in twenty twenty three
Speaker 2: post the internet.
Speaker 1: The Internet was around in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but post this internet, Oh okay, TikTok is a
Speaker 2: different kind of internet.
Speaker 1: We jumped timelines.
Speaker 3: Can you just explain to me or explain to the audience,
Speaker 3: what is this jumping to TikTok? What about TikTok is
Speaker 3: different compared to the Internet that we had in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: The Internet we had in twenty seventeen was the first
Speaker 2: wave of TikTok. It showed you that regular people could
Speaker 2: achieve some kind of celebrity for a little while. There,
Speaker 2: they were seen as being exceptional because they could do
Speaker 2: so right. In twenty seventeen, influencers were seen as exceptional
Speaker 2: because how are you amassing this much popularity and this
Speaker 2: much allure, you're just a regular person. And what ended
Speaker 2: up happening was that influencers had to start living exceptional
Speaker 2: lives for it to be justified. So you weren't just pretty.
Speaker 2: You had to be the prettiest, or you weren't just
Speaker 2: well if you had to be the most well off,
Speaker 2: or the most connected or the most clouded up. Right,
Speaker 2: But it was still a very small percentage of people.
Speaker 2: Not everyone could do it. The price of admission to
Speaker 2: that lifestyle was a lot you had to pay to play.
Speaker 2: People couldn't afford it. Then you fast forward almost ten
Speaker 2: years later or like, I don't know, five years later.
Speaker 2: Now literally every single person can experience a level of
Speaker 2: fame and virality and clout from TikTok. We're not prepared
Speaker 2: for a world where everyone can be a celebrity and
Speaker 2: everyone can be a main character. If we think about
Speaker 2: the fundamentals of movies, the fundamentals of literature, the fundamental media,
Speaker 2: there's always a protagonist, main person.
Speaker 1: And a love story.
Speaker 3: Yes, I realized that's why I didn't like Barbie just
Speaker 3: came to me in a flash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no love story.
Speaker 2: I was always like, what are you guys gonna they
Speaker 2: never did?
Speaker 3: Kid?
Speaker 1: Can I say? Yeah? Of course.
Speaker 3: I think that The Rise, which is kind of on
Speaker 3: the same timeline as like twenty seventeen Dan Data was
Speaker 3: mumblecore movies and like hyperreally sick TV programs because art
Speaker 3: imitates the life.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Rise of the Normal mm which was just
Speaker 2: like I think it's like, I don't think it's the
Speaker 2: worst thing to happen to media, but I don't think
Speaker 2: it's good that we can't discern between what is real
Speaker 2: and what's fake, and that we can't separate ourselves from fiction,
Speaker 2: and that we see these like constrived and constructed narratives
Speaker 2: and we're like, wait, that's me.
Speaker 1: I chew them like that.
Speaker 2: It's like good Ever, anyone thinks their favorite celebrity is relatable.
Speaker 1: It's to you, it's not possible.
Speaker 2: I feel like Instagram was the first wave, TikTok is
Speaker 2: the second wave, and we're seeing the issue with that
Speaker 2: because people can't discern between what voices are worth listening to,
Speaker 2: what information is worth hearing. I how to discern between
Speaker 2: people who are thought leaders and who are trustworthing people
Speaker 2: who aren't. But also when everybody is aiming to create.
Speaker 2: We forget the role of the consumer. You know, the
Speaker 2: consumer holds a lot of merit. You get decide what's important,
Speaker 2: what's not important, what's worthy watching. But now everyone's just
Speaker 2: fighting for any type of eyeball. I don't think it's
Speaker 2: inherently bad. I just think that, like where to from here,
Speaker 2: I think if people thought that Hollywood and fame was
Speaker 2: gate kept before, it's gonna be worse now because even yeah,
Speaker 2: because I think that right now people are going to
Speaker 2: be like poisoned or like led astray by this fake
Speaker 2: exceptional It's like when regular people are taking up exceptional places,
Speaker 2: exceptional people are gonna become more and more rare, and
Speaker 2: then things become more gate kept. Like it's not going
Speaker 2: I feel like, right now it's enough to just be
Speaker 2: it's enough to be mediocre, and it gets to a
Speaker 2: point where it's like, no, it's not enough to be mediocre, babe,
Speaker 2: like we should be better. For example, right the one
Speaker 2: thing that's trending on the internet is this MPC streamer
Speaker 2: thinky she just makes noises all day and here she'd
Speaker 2: be like, look ice cream ice cream, delicious, delicious ice cream,
Speaker 2: ice cream, Wow, wow ice cream and she's making bank.
Speaker 2: What is this and like she's really good at it,
Speaker 2: Like it's.
Speaker 1: Hardway MPC is the platform, or she's non that's like
Speaker 1: that's the archetype of what she's doing.
Speaker 2: Like she's not being herself, she's being just like this
Speaker 2: shamaugas board of characters.
Speaker 1: Okay, she needs a joke or it's fetish content.
Speaker 2: Really she's a sex worker, so she's got like a
Speaker 2: pipeline to take her audience down to. So like people
Speaker 2: are seeing that, they think it's sexy, they go to
Speaker 2: her only fans, they subscribe. It makes sense right right,
Speaker 2: and she's making bank from that. She goes viral. Now
Speaker 2: a bunch of people are trying to imitate what she's
Speaker 2: doing and doing it poorly, hoping for their moment of fame.
Speaker 2: So like it's like this exceptional person starts this thing exceptional,
Speaker 2: not in the sense that what she's doing is amazing,
Speaker 2: but how she's doing it, the fact that she can
Speaker 2: make money from it is exceptional. Everybody following it in
Speaker 2: a mediocre sense it ruins the exceptional thing, and then
Speaker 2: people get disillusioned. Why couldn't it be me? He was
Speaker 2: never gonna be you.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I was just so interested to see.
Speaker 2: Like, what what happens after fame, what happens after celebrity,
Speaker 2: what happens after exceptional because people don't like normal, and
Speaker 2: people aren't aspiring to be the best regular people they are,
Speaker 2: They're aspiring to be mediocre exceptional.
Speaker 3: I think we are renaissance of the normalcy along with
Speaker 3: the renaissance of community and religion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's coming.
Speaker 2: It's like, what was that guy saying that futurist He's
Speaker 2: like in the eighties, he did this whole monologue. He's like,
Speaker 2: the world is on track to get exponentially weirder in
Speaker 2: a way that you could never imagine. And he's like,
Speaker 2: it's going to be really really hard for everyone to
Speaker 2: get back to get back to default, because it's like
Speaker 2: you're gonna have to reprogram, rebuild and redoctrinate everyone to
Speaker 2: figure out what is neutral Hammond Tale.
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Speaker 1: Froom's daily podcast.
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