Most Replayed Moment: Tim Dillon’s Brutal Truth About Gen‑Z

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Tim Dillon: Podcasting, yeah, it's taken on a life of its own. What do you think of podcasting? I mean, it's been on a bit of a journey. Obviously, there's the OGs of podcasting like Rogan, Adam Carolla, Joe Rogan, and then Keith and the Girl, a show in New York City, Marc Maron. Those guys were in the very early days before it was cool, before anyone was really into it, before the money was there. That's right. Then the celebrities showed up, and it was like a bit of an experiment for a couple of years. It seems Spotify has kind of rolled back from that experiment.

Steven Bartlett: Yes, because they have nothing to say. Most celebrities don't. A lot of them are invented people created in a laboratory. The laboratory is CAA, my agency. They create a person and get public relations people, lawyers, all these people, business managers, agents. They come in and say, "This is who you are. This is what plays. These are the things you highlight about your past. These are the things we don't talk about. Let's leave the Confederate flag at home." They create a person. That person then goes and they're now famous. It's a terrible idea to give that person a microphone and tell them to talk for an hour. It's terrible. You know, many of these people aren't that talented. Some of them are. Some are amazingly talented. Some are very banal people.

Tim Dillon: People tend to think of Hollywood as this place where it's all satanic pedophiles eating children. Now, undoubtedly some of that is true, but a lot of it is just very banal, boring people created by corporations. When you realize how boring they are and then you look at how much money they have and where they live, that's what will drive you crazy. That's why podcasting is a really bad idea for these people. They should be kept somewhere, have very managed things where they come out on the red carpet and say, "How are you doing?" And they just go, "Climate change," and then walk into the auditorium and get an award. They should be allowed to speak two to three words at once, and they should know what those words are beforehand. It's a terrible idea to give someone these people who have all their interactions with other famous people, all their thoughts filtered through corporate lawyers before they can say anything. This is not what podcasting is in my estimation.

Steven Bartlett: Is there any celebrity podcast that you think is good? I'm sure there are some that are really good. This isn't everyone, right? I'm sure there are people who have really good podcasts, but if we're just talking in general, giving actors a microphone is probably not the best idea.

Tim Dillon: Which is probably not the best idea. You know, because I know they gave Meghan Markle money. They give a lot of people money there at Spotify. And, you know, I don't know that that's a good idea. But then they came out and said, "We made a mistake. We shouldn't have given these people money." Do you think you should have gotten the money instead? Of course. I absolutely believe that. But I can't compel them to give me the money. I can't get a member of the royal family to marry me, and I would have stayed in that castle no matter what was said. But I can't have that happen, so I can't. Oprah doesn't interview me, so you got me.

Steven Bartlett: What's your assessment of these different generations—Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers?

Tim Dillon: Well, we've given up on the children. The future is not the children. The future is AI. The future is robotics. We're very clear on that. We don't even talk about the children anymore. We talk mainly about AI. No one's even said anything about the children in months, years, really. We've given up on the children. They're dead-eyed little monsters. They're running around, killing each other. We can't deal with it. It's very traumatic. I've even stopped thinking about what they're doing because it's crazy. I'm more excited about AI than the children, just like anyone else. Who's reviving the economy of San Francisco? The children? No, AI. So AI's next. We don't know what we're going to do with the children. Build prisons. That's what I say for children. They're crazy. They're being raised by algorithms. They're all on fentanyl. They're all on drugs. They're running around, trying to kill each other and record it. There was a case in Phoenix, Arizona—these rich white kids running around, beating up kids at random, filming it, and putting it on TikTok. No motive, nothing, just for clout, just for things. And they killed a kid. And finally, now, because they're all white, of course, the cops didn't do anything for a year. And they were like, "Wow, just a couple of kids having fun killing the other kids." This is how people grow up. So this Gilbert, Arizona police department does nothing about the whole thing. Finally, they just arrested these kids because they killed somebody. But this is not only there. I mean, it's kind of an epidemic where, all over the place, you see young people, unfortunately, these crazy acts of violence that are now being uploaded for clout. People go and look at what I did. And what they did was like, you know, assault someone or kill someone. This is a real problem. So we have to deal with the kids in some way—jail them. I don't know what to do with them. But AI is big. Robotics is big. That's what's next.

Steven Bartlett: The Boomers—I have a book coming out about them. I love the Boomers. They're a selfish generation of people. The state of the Boomers—these paranoid people who refuse to leave their McMansions, they will not leave. They will not retire. They lord around their houses. They diminish their children. They say, "I can't believe you don't own something like this." They like holding these houses over their kids' heads. They retire to bigger houses. They have thousands and thousands of square feet. They're very sick people. They refuse to give up their jobs. They're dying in the Senate. They're collapsing in Congress. They will not leave. They will not cede any of their power. They're emotional terrorists. And I grew up with them. They're very interesting people. They've proven the lie of the '60s. These hippies that everybody thought were like progressive—they're actually not. They were always just selfish drug addicts. They never cared about anything they purported to care about. They just wanted to get high and roll around in the mud. And then, as soon as the drugs changed from, you know, whatever, from acid to money, they became this very materialistic, soulless group of people. But the funniest generation that has ever lived. Nobody's funnier because to be funny, you kind of have to just not care about anything. And there's no generation of people that have cared less about the future of this planet, about their children, about anything than the Boomers. They're all little islands, and they're all about themselves forever and ever. And there's something actually refreshing about that, funny. And they're holding the planet hostage. They won't die. They won't leave. I've suggested they be forcibly evicted from their homes and committed to mental institutions. Legally, we have some problems—that's not easy to do. I've spoken to some lawyers; there are problems doing that.

Steven Bartlett: And then the Millennials were this very shitty generation of, "Pin a metal on me. Pin a ribbon on me. I'm right. I went to the right college. I got the right internship. I believe the right things. I tweeted the right thing. I did the right thing. I have all the right beliefs. I have the good politics. I have this shower me with—tell me I'm good because my Boomer parents, they don't care about me, but you tell me I'm good." The world needs to fill the void that exists inside of me. And these Millennials are these kind of ambitious people that want to constantly be patted on the back and told how great they are. So they're kind of shapeshifters that conform to any popular sentiment. They crowdsource all of their opinions. They just want, whereas the Boomers just kind of didn't care about anyone or anything. You have the Millennials who are kind of like, "I am good. And you tell me that I'm good because they're not—they're good to be told to be good." Their politics are aesthetic. They want everyone to look at them and to tell them how great they are. And then the Zoomers are the younger generation after the Millennials. They seem to be, you know, somewhat like they're self-starters. They're very skeptical of institutions or a little more cynical. That's some of their positive qualities. The negative qualities are the aforementioned murder and the filming of the murders and the killings and the drugs and the fentanyl vapes and all of that. That seems to be less. I mean, we need a draft, to be honest. Now that I'm kind of older and fat, now we need a draft. Young people should probably just go into the military. I know that's going to be a controversial thing to say, but if they're just going to do fentanyl and attack each other in malls and put it on TikTok, they can go die in Ukraine so that Boeing can make some money.

Steven Bartlett: Are we still on YouTube? So, you, um, would you consider yourself to be optimistic about the future? There's a lot going on in the world. No. No, I don't. I think there are good things happening, but I mean, optimistic about the future overall? I don't know. That's tough to be, maybe right. I mean, you've got elections coming up this year as well here in the U.S. Well, we all know elections solve everything. We all know that's where the real power lies—the elections. Now, yeah. When you're talking about refusing to relinquish control and power, the Boomer generation, I was thinking a lot about Biden there. Sure. Because it seems like your presidents are getting older and older and refusing to leave. Yeah. I mean, Biden seems to be a bit old. Trump's old. You know, Biden seems to be in a stage of mental decline, though. He was really good at the State of the Union. They gave him something. They shot him up with something, which is great. We have no new talent in the country. Nobody wants to be a politician anymore unless they're psychotic. You need young people that care about the country and that want to change it. And what you're getting now more and more is, you know, all of the interesting people in our country are—and the people that are ambitious and the people that have talent—they don't want to be in politics. They want to be somewhere else. It's more fun to go to Miami and trade Bitcoin on a yacht. You know what I mean? They just don't want to be in politics. They don't want to do it. So you end up with these octogenarian, uh, drooling, somewhat, uh, you know, like dementia-ridden elderly people who are incapable of even understanding what's happening in it. They barely know what TikTok is. TikTok is something their grandchild shows them at some party they're having in Maine. They're sitting on a hill in Maine, eating lobsters, falling out of their mouth, and they go, "Look, grandpa, look at the TikTok," and then they have to go into Congress and hash this out. No, so I mean, the problem really is we just don't have young people that care enough about the country because the press is going to rip their lives apart. Right? They're going there's so much more money elsewhere. There's so much more, and the system's so toxic and so corrupt, they go, "I don't want to get involved in that." They're gonna ban TikTok, aren't they? They're talking a lot about it. They're talking about it. I have no followers on it, so I'm for the ban. You know, for personal, completely personal reasons, I'm for them. And I also think it's probably, I don't know, I don't know anything about it. I just know that people are making a lot of money on it. And so if I say I'm for the ban, people get angry with me. It's not a good cultural force. But what is? And you said at the start of this, you said the phrase that like you can, that it's bad advice that you can do anything and be anything. But to us, that's always been like the American dream. Is you come here and then you can do anything and be anything. That's what we see as the American dream in the UK, like the land of possibilities. You can become anyone and you rise to the top. Well, yes, we market that quite well. And sure, I mean, listen, yeah. I mean, could you? Yeah, but the reality of the situation is that journey is a bit more involved than people say. When you go, "Oh, you can be the president of the United States." When you tell a kid who's an eighth-grader or whatever, "You can be the president." Yeah, but the attorneys have been involved. You leave out a lot. You leave out a lot about the compromises that you have to make to become the president of the United States. It's kind of like telling someone they can be a superhero. Yes, I'm sure that you can be a version of that, but there's a little bit you're going to have to do. I think it's a very bad overall thing to tell masses of people that they should, without regard to reality, without regard to their own limitations or their own—without regard to their own tolerance for work and how much work they want to make, without regard for any of that, telling them that they can just be anything they want to be. It's such a deeper conversation and it's such a, it's a catchphrase. It's a license plate. It's something to put on a shirt. It's a bumper sticker. It's not a philosophy for life because there's a lot more. There's a lot more that goes into that statement. And I think that's what I mean. Not that people can't do great things. People can absolutely do great things. I think people can do great things in the UK too, right? People can do things in the UK. I mean, maybe the class systems are more stratified there than it is here. But I just think that like, you know, what we mean when we say you can be whatever you want in America is you can make as much money as you want. That's what we're really saying. We're really pushing this idea that the only route to happiness is this upwardly mobile vertical where you have to grab everything and be a boss and be an entrepreneur and run an empire. And that the way to happiness. That not the way to happiness. That what we're pushing. We're not telling everybody they can be anything they want to be so that we have a lot of challenges to like our ideas and stuff. We're not, we're not looking for that type of feedback. We just want people going out and working themselves to death. That's what we really want. When we say that you can be anything you want to be, the translation is work yourself to death. I'm going on my boat, but this younger generation aren't apparently working themselves to death if you observe things like TikTok where they're having like the mocha chocca frappa lattes and doing the yoga and they're working at the big tech company and quiet quitting. Some of them have figured out that the country's a scam, and here's the good news—they're not wrong. And when you figure out the country's a scam, you can approach it the way a con artist or a scammer would approach it, which is what a lot of them do. They invent mental health ailments they don't have. They take days off on end. They terrify their superiors into respecting their mediocre, shoddy quality of work. This is something that Gen Z has latched on to. This is something that I fully support. This is their way of rising through the ranks. They're taking advantage of people that they work with and, you know, making them tolerate less and less work and work of a lower and lower quality because they've realized that a lot of this is bullshit. So they're like, "Why shouldn't I get in on it?" And there's obviously the remote work now as well. That's a big thing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We've realized over the pandemic, I think a lot of people that a lot of the things that we thought were guarantees aren't. And a lot of the things we tended to believe in fervently, we at the very least right now question. I think young people like, "Why in the hell should I spend 40 hours doing a job I hate when I can pretend to do it and threaten my boss if they try to fire me and fake a mental illness that I don't have and demand everybody conform to what I want and then use whatever diversity chips I have to go out and throw a scare into anyone that tries to call me to account for any of my behavior." And I think that's a beautiful thing. I mean, it's very interesting. It's really destabilizing a lot of society. You know, now obviously the same thing is to shut those people up and say, "Shut up. You have to do these things or get out," but nobody's gonna do that. They found the flaw in the system. They've kind of exposed the scam. And once the scam is exposed, it's for all to be seen. And now everybody can kind of just approach it the way it is. Everybody now is kind of like, even big companies, everybody's like in it for themselves and just trying to figure out like, "How do I get the most?" And there's nothing wrong with that. That's the most American thing ever, right? Is to try to get something for yourself. There's no, there shouldn't be any hate for that. It's a bit silly, ridiculous, and crazy how they do it, but they're only taking the tools that you've given to them and that you've allowed them to use, right? So they use these things, you know? Smart. They go, "Why are you late today?" They go, "I'm gay." You go, "Don't worry about it." You know, like, it's the most American thing ever to use the playbook that someone hands you and goes, "Here's the playbook." And you go, "Great. I have anxiety. I have anxiety. You keep coming into my physical space. Great words. You keep coming into my physical space. You're using volume right now. I have anxiety. I need time right now. This report is not ready, but I need time right now." And I have, and you know, what I need right now is just to be a little quiet. So it's great. I mean, I'm for it. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. It takes a little bit of time to realize this as a founder, but once you do, it's something you can't unsee—that having the right systems in place with your business is critical. 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