Connecting The Millennial Generation with Josh Tickell

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TSP 158 | Connecting The Millennial GenerationEpisode Summary:

Parents often teach their kids that there are many ways to solve a problem. Whether its fossils fuels, climate change, or connecting the millennial generation, Josh Tickell will find a way to solve it. As America’s number one strategist for generational conflict, Josh has filmed many movies geared towards millennials. He creates a future and works around it backwards so everyone can tag along his non-linear journey. His concept of reverse engineering the concept of business is the future of storytelling and a great blueprint for success and scaling.

Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Josh Tickell, the author of Kiss the Ground. The foreword was written by the CEO and Founder of Whole Foods. He has an amazing story that he shares with us of how Whole Foods got started. The book is sold on Amazon who also owns Whole Food. Josh talks about how if we put the right food in our body, we’re not only healing our body but healing the planet. He said the real key is to figure out how you want to reverse engineer the future. He has some great insights on how he’s done that not only with this book, but other movies that he’s created. He’s been on all kinds of press. He has smart insights on reverse engineer something, tells a story, and then solve a problem, whether that problem is oil, climate change, or the generational conflict. He is literally an expert on knowing why the cultures don’t get along and have different work styles and values.

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Connecting The Millennial Generation with Josh Tickell

Our guest is Josh Tickell and he has been called America’s number one strategist for connecting with the millennial generation a.k.a. generation Y according to Inc. magazine. He’s also a film director that specializes in movies that are geared to the millennials. He grew up in Louisiana where he lived next to waterways that were polluted by petroleum refineries. In 1997, he captured national attention by driving a van powered by used French fry oil across the US. The Veggie Van, as it was called, became a viral sensation. Then four years later, after the first web browser was introduced, his website was receiving over a million unique visitors. Today, that would be equivalent to probably 100 million. He’s done so many other incredible things. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak. He’s got a great book called Kiss the Ground. Josh, welcome to the show.

Thank you, John. Thanks for having me.

It’s so exciting to see all the different things that people like you have created in their life. I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. Can you take us back to what it was like then? How that has led you to decide that you wanted to be a keynote speaker as well as an author and filmmaker?

It is not a linear journey as you might expect. I was born in Australia. I grew up there until I was nine years old. I grew up very much outdoors in nature, enjoying the beauty of planet earth. When I was nine, we moved to Louisiana. My mother’s mother, my grandmother, was sick and dying of cancer. We realized that all of the people that we knew were sick and dying of cancer. It’s no exaggeration to say that the lymphoma leukemia and cancer rate in what’s called Cancer Quarter is a thousand times the national average. There are 150 petrochemical facilities in a hundred mile stretch of land between Houston and Baton Rouge. That’s where we lived. It set me off at young age thinking, “There must be alternatives to everything we see. There’s got to be at least one other pathway.” My guiding light all these years is to find a solution to a problem. What’s the problem? Is it oil? Is it climate change? Is it generational conflict? Is it all of these things together? That’s led me on this distinct and non-linear path that has brought me through promoting alternative fuels, to making movies, to writing books on how to reverse climate change.

[Tweet “Reverse engineer your future.”]

You’re almost like the male version of Erin Brockovich. You see a problem, you’d become the voice of the people who don’t have a voice. That turns into a movie.

To some degree, yes. I don’t consider myself an activist. I don’t consider myself a front lines type person. What I try to do with my work, my team, and everybody I work with, is I try to create a future and work backwards. What does the future look like without fossil fuels? In 2006,we were filming Fuel which won Sundance, went to the White House, went to 150 countries, and was translated in all languages. When we were filming Fuel, we go, “What does the future look like?”We said, “We have a particular desire for this one fuel.” I was into biodiesel at the time. It definitely looks like plugs on electric vehicles. We found a company that would modify a Prius. They put a big battery where it previously used to have a little battery. They put a big battery in the Prius and they put a plug on the Prius. We filmed a Prius plugging into solar panels and we said, “This is the future that we see.”We got a letter from Toyota right away, “You can’t modify our Prius without our permission.”Fast forward six years and Toyota releases the plug-in Prius.

That’s what we try to do with all of our work, create the future and visualize the future. Tell the story and make sure it’s scientifically valid. Sometimes it does shame car companies, oil companies, and these big companies. They’re not organized around future vision. The exception is Elon Musk who I interviewed later for Pump, the third film that we made. His companies are organized around a future vision. You are seeing this with the new generation. You’re seeing this with millennials. You’re seeing this with a lot of the companies that are being formed today, which are B Corps, Benefit Corps. They are organized around future vision. That’s where we get powerful, where we can use the vehicle of corporation to make a big difference in the world.

I look for problems to solve, whether it’s oil, climate change, or generational conflict. If you’re a startup trying to figure out, “How am I going to scale my business or even get it funded?” I love this concept of, “No matter what business you’re in, how do I reverse engineer what I want to have happen?” This concept of reverse engineering this future, telling a story that is solving a problem, is such a great blueprint, whether you’re making your film, working on scaling your business, or growing your brand as yourself, no matter what it is you’re selling. Clearly, you’ve had some success there. It’s fascinating that you’re not an activist yet you have the results of one without possibly the controversy. Would that be fair?

Yes, sometimes there’s a little controversy.

TSP 158 | Connecting The Millennial Generation

Connecting The Millennial Generation: Food is the basis for society so we have a more peaceful, equitable planet.

It’s unintentional. You’re not approaching it from an antagonistic, “Let’s go out and scream and yell,” necessarily. You find your voice through your filmmaking. It’s even much less confrontational than someone like Michael Moore who also makes movies that get a lot of attention about pointing out disruptive concepts. Let’s talk about how you became an expert in Generation Y. What’s the problem that you see happening with the generational conflict? Is it baby boomers versus Generation Y? Tell us that story.

Let me answer that question after I talk about my journey to learn about millennials. The journey began with my first film, Fuel. Wed did over 100 college bookings with the movie, which is unheard of. You don’t go to 100 colleges. These were paid speaking engagements. As a filmmaker, you’re not going to say no. I did a lot of them with my wife who is a millennial. It was so interesting to see the generational difference between myself. I was born in 1975.A lot of the young people that we were speaking with were born after 1985, ten years’ difference but a totally different mindset. The more colleges I went to and the more we screened the film commercially in theaters, the more I saw the audience was such a clear linear divide in terms of age range. We had young people come in to see the movie.

We did not have Generation X-ers. We did not have baby boomers unless they were dragged by their millennial children. It was college age at the time. As that progressed three movies later, I went, “We got the same people showing up to all these films. We got the same people not showing up to all these films. What gives?” That’s when I decided to turn the camera the other way on the audience and really dive into what are the values differences. What is the core of the code of the millennial generation? That’s been an investigation that I’ve been on for four years now. It started by looking at corporate social value. Corporate social value came in when the millennial buying power came online.

What year was that do you think?

A lot of people are confused as to which generation is which. The other confusion is many people conflate the idea of a marketing segment and the idea of a generation, and they will mix them up. Asocial generation is a group of people born in the span of about twenty years who experienced the same touchstone moments. Have a birth rate either rise or fall. For millennials, we’re talking about people who came of age in the new millennium. They were born roughly from the end of the oil crisis and the financial crisis of the 1970s, at the end of 1979, beginning of 1980 until September 11th, 2001 when the birth rate dropped. Those two periods of time has the most intense rise of human births in the history of our civilization, 80 million people in the US and 2 billion worldwide.

That’s a big a-ha moment. A lot of baby boomers think, “We’re the biggest and we’re growing up be the biggest forever.” Everything’s been so geared to marketing and advertising world towards baby boomers because they had the money. The baby boomers are causing a lot of disruption. A lot of the values are different. I’m fascinated that it ended 2001 right when 9/11 happened. Is that a strange coincidence or is that what you were talking about when you mentioned big social marker?

No coincidence at all. We experienced social moments viscerally when they are huge. People have more babies when things are going well, less babies when things are not going well. Economically speaking, that factors in tremendously to people’s procreation numbers. When you look at the millennial generation and the baby boomer generation, they’re roughly the same size. There are 78 million baby boomers and 80 million millennials in the US. Millennials is a little bigger. Largely, the millennials are the children of the baby boomers. There is a generation in between, which was a dip in births. That’s Generation X. We’ve got these two massive generations. They’re like two weights on the end of the spring.

The baby boomers are known for creating great music. They set culture on its path. They’re moralists so it’s very much right or wrong. Abortion is right or abortion is wrong. There is no in between. That’s the way they are in many issues. You can see that in the presidential race of 2016.We had two baby boomer candidates. We had Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Everything was either morally right or morally wrong. There was no gray area for them. Then you’ve got somebody from a completely different generation, Bernie Sanders. You saw the radical difference in terms of view of the world. We also get our worldview from our generation. When you look at the boomers and you look at millennials, your question was, “What’s the generational conflict we see?”

I finished the manuscript for the book on millennials. We’re looking at The Revolution Generation. Most people seem to gravitate to it. The big a-ha, the big OMG in the book is when we look at wealth dynamics, at social dynamics, at class dynamics, race dynamics, all the way down the line. There isn’t a massive aggregation of income, not wealth, inside the baby boomer generation. This cuts across all developed nations, like eighteen developed nations. Australia is the only exception. Baby boomer income is growing. Millennial income is declining, meaning the money we make, not the money saved. You’ve got these economically disparate generations. What set the millennials apart was 2008, not 2001. 2001 changed the birth rate, but 2008 created the tenor of a generation.

TSP 158 | Connecting The Millennial Generation

Connecting The Millennial Generation: Create the future and visualize the future.

Social generation experiences touchstone moments together. All millennials were born by 2008. The youngest were about eight years old, the oldest were about 28. That middle range of those people were experiencing the workforce. They were experiencing college. They were experiencing debt. They’re experiencing parents being laid off in mass, coming home with their things in boxes, their photographs. Social security was a concept that was part of our social construct. That is not part of the construct of millennials. Now you’ve got an economic free for all generation that doesn’t believe in any of the economic principles that came before. They don’t believe in the patriarchy of the man making the money and the woman being the housewife. They don’t believe in corporate power. They don’t believe the corporate structure will be around. You see this explosion and disruption, Uber, Bitcoin, all of these things. That is a different universe than the one in which baby boomers grew up in.

Airbnb is classic. The fact that we work is going to create shared living space for that generation. The baby boomers would not be comfortable in that work or living space. This group’s whole shared economy concept is revolutionary to say the least.

When you put these two generations in a room together and you go, “You are going to accomplish tasks.”The baby boomers organize in a hierarchical manner. They begin to dole out who’s going to do what. There’s an alpha. That person gets established very quickly. All of the hierarchy gets established all the way down to the bottom level of bureaucracy where you’ve got people just sitting there, mouth breathing, drooling. Millennials are completely different. They create a team, they organize as a unit, then they begin to attack tasks together. It’s almost like parallel processing. The communication style is different. It’s dynamic. It’s constant communication. There’s information flowing back from all the points. If one person isn’t as strong as the rest of the team, the team compensates. You try to create a work style that’s going to work for a hierarchal military patriarchal model and an equitable teamwork model. When you put those things together in the workplace, there’s explosions, fireworks.

Baby boomers are like, “I’m not using Slack. I’m not going to give way. You better answer my email. I’m not answering your texts right back and forth.” I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. It’s quite fascinating. You said there’s a ten-year difference between you and your wife. You can’t believe how much difference there is. My youngest sister is five years younger than I am. I experienced a complete disconnect with her because we have completely different tastes in music. Her frame of references of what she remembers and what she doesn’t historically is very different. That’s why I like your book title, The Revolution Generation. Instantly, in my head I go, “You say you want a revolution?” that music. For some people, they don’t have that song as a reference guide so they wouldn’t resonate with it. For me, that was instantly what came up. Take a minute and talk about how music reflects what’s going on with this generational conflict.

Music is part of our shared value system. Part of how you know what generation you’re from is by the music you resonate to you. There is no way to grow up in a westernized culture without being inundated with music. I don’t care if you only go shopping once a year, you are going to hear that stuff coming in over the pipe, the canned speakers. I took a yoga class and the woman teaching it is about my age. All the music was the coolest stuff in the late ‘80s. I’m going, “This is such awesome music.”I’m thinking to myself, “All the twenty-year olds in this class, none of them even know who these musicians are.”Part of how you construct your identity is through your peer relationships, through what you speak about. Music is a generational expression of what’s going on in the world. Think about Billy Joel and how influential he was. Think about Billy Idol. The millennials are like, “That’s classic.” You’re like, “Who’s cool? Katy Perry is.” It’s a totally different world. That’s how you know what generation you’re in.

Let’s transition into Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body, & Ultimately Save Our World. That is amazing to think of all of those things being influenced by what we put in our mouth, whether it’s climate control, oil, what we put in our car, fuel. There’s a whole generational focus that’s very different than the baby boomers who grew up on Jolly Green Giant and Favita cheese. There was no concept of farm to table. Only the people who lived in a farm had that. Now, people living in urban areas want that.

TSP 158 | Connecting The Millennial Generation

Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World

That’s a very millennial concept. Health has come online hugely as they see their parents age, as they see a generation of people who are mired in a medical system that is about going after disease versus going after prevention. That is economic. When you have the money to have surgeries, do pills, and all of that stuff, you have a different mindset than when you grow up in an economy that doesn’t have money. If you don’t have money, you’re about prevention. You’re going to go to yoga classes, you’re going to run, and you’re going to try and eat healthier. That is a generational mindset. The two stories, Kiss the Ground and The Revolution Generation, are part of the same arc. We’ve talked about The Revolution Generation. It’s about the people who are going to change the world, hopefully save it. Kiss the Ground is the blueprint. It’s the how-to. If we look at all the dynamics of humanity right now, we look at all the great challenges that we have, we have huge geopolitical challenges with North Korea with the potential for a new nuclear threat. We’ve got bio-terrorism. Then we’ve got the dynamics that affect everyone. Food, water, climate. I’m not talking about, “Did humans create global warming?” We don’t even have to have that conversation.

We know stoic and metrically that if you burn a gallon of fuel, it creates 22 pounds of carbon dioxide. It is provable. It is absolute. There is no question. That’s 22 pounds of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere. What it does after that long-term, whether it heats or cools the planet, is a different conversation. We know once again scientifically, the majority of that carbon dioxide will go into the oceans where it acidifies the water. In that water is the phytoplankton and coral. The phytoplankton and coral creates 50% of the oxygen we breathe. We’re acidifying and killing the life forms that create oxygen for humans. This is a very simple conversation. If we want to have human life three generations from now, we have to deal with carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. I don’t care what you believe in, I don’t care what your system of understanding is, that is absolute. The best way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it in the soil.

Here’s what happens. When you bring carbon dioxide in the soil, you also bring water and nitrogen into the soil. The soil fertility goes through the roof. You can grow more food. The water that’s stored becomes part of the localized water cycle which diminishes drought. It reverses desertification and brings life back. Let’s look at the other human problem. A billion refugees by 2050 don’t have food, they don’t have water, and they don’t have a place to farm. That’s happening already. That’s what happened with Syria which expressed itself as a civil war. If we go back, what actually happened was serious. Farming intensified because they had to get water. Desertification was happening, which is a man-made problem. Now, Syria has a few million refugees. Let’s expand that to a billion. What does the world look like? The world looks dysfunctional with a billion refugees. If we’re going to deal with the biggest and most immediate threat to humanity, we have to address carbon dioxide. The way we do it is by building soil fertility. That’s what Kiss the Ground, the book, is about, which is on Amazon.com. You can order it. It is an incredible book. It’s a blueprint for the future.

[Tweet “Heal your body and heal the planet at the same time.”]

You also have the foreword by John Mackey. For those who don’t know, tell everybody who John is and what an interesting, impressive person to get to write your foreword.

John started a health food store in Austin, Texas. The store started about 30 years ago. It got flooded in a freak flood that totally destroyed it. He put his family’s money on the line. He put all his friends’ money into it. The store was gutted. He had nothing. No money. He was going to go bankrupt. The next day, the entire community of people that bought food from that store showed up. They began to mop, clean, and built. What that community built under John’s leadership is something called Whole Foods.

I never knew that story of origin. I love it. Thank you so much for that.

Whole Foods has been sold to Amazon.com. It’s an amazing testament to our society’s change in taste and what we value.85% of Americans will buy organic food this year. That is a huge vote for clean and healthy food for our children.

That generation who’s buying the organic food typically doesn’t have a huge disposable income compared to the baby boomers, yet they see the value in it for prevention.

It’s a value shift. Baby boomers were raised largely in TV dinner, Levitin, suburbanite explosion of the world, that everything could be George Jetson-ized, wrapped in plastic, and come out a machine. Fast forward 40 years and we realize that is the worst thing you can do for your health. That is the worst thing you could do for the planet. The values are shifting.

In the book, there are interesting and accessible interviews. You don’t have to be a scientist to want to read this book at all. You’ve interviewed celebrity chefs, farmers, and ranchers. It’s being turned into a documentary film narrated by Woody Harrelson.

I basically lived on the road for a year with the support of my amazing family. It was an incredible experience to go and meet these people, live with them, and see this whole other world. How we can heal our bodies and heal the planet at the same time? That’s the big lesson. If what you’re putting into your body is good for your body, it’s nutritionally dense, it’s full of life, and it’s also good for the soil, that is the big lesson.

[Tweet “Everyone who eats needs to read Kiss the Ground.”]

Talk about zooming out and thinking on a spiritual, philosophical look at life and everything being connected, that you’re not isolated from plants, trees, and animals. You’re putting that into your body as nutrition and fuel. It’s makes perfect sense, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody explain it quite the way you did in a very concise and compelling pinch. If you’ll hear your body, you’re healing the planet at the same time, even if that’s not your intent or goal.

One of the people who did a review of the book on Goodreads said, “Everyone who eat needs to read Kiss the Ground.” If you are interested in health and you don’t care about the climate, you don’t care about the future. You’re going to do what’s best for your body. That is agreed instinct that is, in this case, very good. We want people to do the absolute best thing for their health. As we show in the book, The Harvard Medical School has what they call The Healthy Eating Plate, the culmination of a thousand studies that they’ve done over decades. That is what we codify in the book as the regenerative diet, a diet that’s rich in plants and vegetables. We’re not saying don’t eat meat. We’re saying be very selective with the type of meat you eat. It’s a diet that eschews things that are made from corn syrup and things that are highly processed. It’s not a hard diet to follow because it’s a lifestyle. When you take that on with Kiss the Ground as your manual, you begin to transform inside and outside.

When we’re healed, we’re not healed alone. We’re healing not just ourselves but hopefully, our family and ideally the planet along the way. Are there any last thoughts you want to leave our audience with about Kiss the Ground or telling a good story?

Part of what we always try and do with our stories is in part reverse engineering the future. In Kiss the Ground, we went, “What does the future look like where the climate is balanced, where carbon dioxide is not in excess in the atmosphere?”The good news is that is achievable within your and my lifetime, and definitely within the lifetime of millennials. That is a world which has abundant food and abundant fresh water. Ultimately, food is the basis for society, so we have a more peaceful, equitable planet. When you look at that future, you go, “It’s too big. I can’t participate.” You go, “You do. You participate.” If you’re in America, you probably participated three times a day by what you put in your mouth. In terms of telling a good story, the biggest thing that I can leave as a takeaway is how do we get people to participate in creating the story? That’s what we’re doing with Kiss the Ground. That’s why the book is out there on Amazon and other places. We want people to take that story into their own lives, and then write their own story. Write the future because that’s what’s available.

That’s the ultimate summary. When you get a shared vision, you get a lot of customers, you get a lot of investors, you get the best people to join your team. Josh has given us that blueprint, not only in Kiss the Ground, but in this interview. Thank you so much, Josh.

John, thank you. Thanks to your audience.

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