Episode 28 – Melissa Eshaghbeigi (Dark Futures 4/5)

This special episode is the fourth of 5 talks delivered on stage at StartWell's Event Space on King St W in downtown Toronto on November 28, 2019 for a globally roaming annual series called Dark Futures. This talk was presented by Melissa Eshaghbeigi,(https://www.linkedin.com/in/eshaghbeigi), a strategist at the Toronto design and experience agency JAM3, and is titled "It's 2039, you're either stressed, depressed or cancelled." *Dark Futures is presented by globally renowned Futurist, speaker, researcher, and author Nikolas Badminton. (https://nikolasbadminton.com/) [expand title="Podcast Transcript"] Qasim Virjee 0:20 Welcome back to this the 28th episode of The Star well podcast. I'm your host, Qasim Virjee, the founder and CEO of start well, and this episode is the fourth of five talks that we're broadcasting as recordings captured on November 28 2019. At an event called Dark futures y, y, z. This talk is by Melissa Chagny. And it's called it's 2039. You're either stressed, depressed, or canceled. Melissa Eshaghbeigi 0:56 Thank you. So I'm now I'm probably like most notorious for having this kind of last name. If you're curious. It's pronounced as Hawk baby. But truthfully, I didn't really know that for most of my life. I am a strategist at jam three, which is an experience and design agency. And the most interesting thing about me is that I spend a lot of time online, which I know isn't totally ownable. But I'm innately curious about people. And the Internet is a treasure trove of information. I've basically made a career out of reporting to other people and brands about what we're all up to online. So I'm going to kind of share with you what I've seen what I've noticed, and we'll talk about some future implications of the content that we consume. What I'm kind of investing a lot of time in right now is tic tock, which I fully believe to be the strangest place on the internet stranger than Reddit. I still haven't fully cracked why teens think this is cool. But you can find a lot of interesting things on tick tock I actually recently joined last night. So I say follow me but my username is like username 5236 Something for anyway. Anyways, before I talk about the future, I want to talk about the present. For those of you who might have been offline this summer, you might have missed the fried chicken frenzy of 2019. I'll do a really quick summary of what happened. But basically Popeye's released a new chicken sandwich. Big news story right? Up until Chick fil A felt like it was totally appropriate to sub tweet them and talk about how they actually have the best, the original and therefore the best chicken sandwich. What happened was the classic American bedtime story of war between brands, Popeyes quote, tweeted Chick fil A, Wendy's even got in on the mess. And from there, the internet went a frenzy. Everyone was talking about chicken sandwiches. But they weren't just talking about chicken sandwiches. They were buying chicken sandwiches. Popeyes ended up going out of him two months worth of inventory in the span of like 10 days. So the demand got even higher. There was hype for meat. From there. There was an announcement around the end of October that if you hadn't missed your opportunity to get a fried chicken sandwich well, on November 3, you'd get your chance. But then something really awful happened. In Maryland, a young man a 28 year old man by the name of Kevin Tyrell Davis was stabbed and later pronounced dead for cutting in line out of Popeye's that had rereleased the chicken sandwich. Chief of Police in Maryland said it best How does a confrontation lead to a homicide and 15 seconds, the internet makes us do weird things. It makes us impulsive. And it impedes a sense of urgency. And I don't think we always talk about it. But there are some people that are talking about it messed