Do You Know About The Billion Dollar "Good Morning" industry? - Future IQ

4,296 views Wait, is this logic right? • Dec 12, 2025

Slog Reference: Why do WhatsApp Uncles exist

Description

Why do “WhatsApp Uncles” exist? Why do they send endless Good Morning images, emotional stories, and “forwarded as received” messages that are often… not true? In this episode, we go far beyond the jokes and memes to uncover the real psychological and social forces shaping this behavior.
You’ll discover how older Indians went from living in tight-knit communities joint families, neighbors, colleagues, constant social contact, to a world of loneliness, nuclear families, and shrinking offline connections. And how WhatsApp quietly stepped in to become Tribe as a Service and Status as a Service for millions of people who suddenly had no tribe and no place to feel important.
We’ll explore why Good Morning messages became a billion dollar industry, how political groups learned to weaponize these behaviors, why echo chambers grow louder, and why directly correcting misinformation often backfires. Most importantly, we’ll discuss what you can do: how to protect your relationships, when to push back, how to gently guide people toward better thinking, and when to simply let go.
This episode is not just about WhatsApp Uncles it’s about the unseen effects of technology on human psychology, and what it reveals about the modern world we’re all struggling to adapt to.

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Videos you may like / referenced in today’s episode:
You Can Only Have 150 Friends - Dunbar's Numbers Explained: https://youtu.be/ekAtODyfkyw
Truth or Lies, Facts or Fiction - Fighting Misinformation: https://youtu.be/_NVtf7-GNAg

Books referenced in this video: https://taap.it/MadeToStick

Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
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Source / References:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/older-indians-drive-millennials-crazy-on-whatsapp-this-is
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-internet-is-filling-up-because-indians-are-sending-millions-of-good-morning-texts-1516640068
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03344-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

#futureiq #goodmorningstatus

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- Why do WhatsApp uncles exist? And when I say WhatsApp uncles, all of you know what I mean, right? The people who are sending good morning every day. The people who are sending insane forwards and getting into arguments, right? And it's not necessarily just uncles, okay? Even young people doing that behavior. I'm going to call them WhatsApp uncles. Are we actually trying to solve the problem of WhatsApp uncle? No, we primarily we are going to understand why they exist, right? Why are there so many of them? Why is it so widespread? And uh you know the idea is to under once you understand then you can forgive a little better be kinder to them but also know what is the right

0m 43s point how to change things by just doing the right thing at the right time right but also in the process I think you are going to understand what is missing from your own life because of modern technology and smartphones and social media and so on right okay I can sense where this episode is going I'm not really sure about the first part that you said but I'm very curious about the second part that you've said. So let's start with a very simple question, right? What is WhatsApp?

1m 11s It's a messaging platform where I get to send you No, it is not a messaging platform. It is a tribes as a service platform and a status as a service platform. Tribes as a service. Okay. What is tribes as a service? Okay. Uh every episode on future IQ has to talk about the fact that we evolved in the African savana, right? Yes. We are going there early today. One of the most fundamental human needs is to be part of a tribe right a small tribe less than 150 people nonear number exactly now Indians right of a certain age we grew up being always surrounded by people right joint families the families were larger our houses were smaller

1m 56s closer together you get out of the house and they were like you're surrounded by your neighbors everybody's doors used to be open and uh you know much more public transport you will have stories of people uh traveling by bus and sharing food and so on right stories we we ourselves have done it I mean uh a lot of kids today probably won't identify with this but I could literally walk into my neighbor's house have lunch without being invited and come back and tell my mother that I already have had lunch and she'll be okay with it so now two things have happened right one is 1991 happened India got richer And as a result, we just imported a lot

2m 36s of western culture. Families are nuclear. We live in tall buildings. Our doors are closed and so on. Right? That's one. Second is that the people who grew up with the old India, they have gotten old. They are retired, right? Plus they're not able to go out as much. They're not able to meet people as much. Uh traffic is terrible. So that makes it even more difficult, right? So bonding with groups of people has suddenly reduced, right? So those people have lost their tribe. Okay, youngsters don't have this problem because they didn't know they didn't have a tribe in the first place, right? Their tribe is like the likes on Instagram.

3m 20s Uh as is online basically. Exactly. They're good at using social media as a substitute which the old people never quite grabbed. Right. And so old people find life a little hard, understandable and WhatsApp is the solution. Okay, is the solution, right? First of all, WhatsApp is easy to use compared to Instagram, compared to Discord, any of the apps that the younger people use. I remember how hard it was to get my dad to try to use uh Gmail and so on, right? Whereas WhatsApp was so much easier. What swoop was designed to be easy to use. Everyone and their grandmother can use WhatsApp.

4m 01s Okay. The second thing is that it is so widespread especially in India that everybody is on WhatsApp and it is very easy to create groups and as a result everyone has their groups their family group their extended family group classmates from you know literally 60 years ago are on WhatsApp groups right so uh your ex-work colleagues your neighborhood uh people interested in classical music people interested all kinds of things right I mean there are organized groups Those are our ad hoc groups. Everything and anything can become a group. Just two people can be in a group.

4m 36s I get what you mean. And so now you have a tribe and so these people especially the ones who are retired can spend hours hanging out with their tribe, right? Which is what they used to do in the old days. They would retire and they would sit on a kata outside the house. Now there are no katas. Yeah. In a way WhatsApp is the kata and on a kata you would go say good morning, hi, hello, happy birthday, what not and now they have become forwards. But why so many of them? And why is why are there so many mad forwards on WhatsApp?

5m 03s I'm coming to that. Right. So far I explained WhatsApp is tribe as a service. Yeah. Now let me talk about status as a service. Okay. Okay. So you have your tribe now. Okay. The second most important human drive from the African savana is to have high status within your tribe. Right. The high status person is the one who got all the cool things. Correct? So now that you have a tribe, your instinct is to try to increase your status within the tribe. Now if you are on a WhatsApp group, how do you increase your status?

5m 36s Right? Ideally, you could do this by starting the best conversations and saying the most intelligent things and so on. But that is hard. Okay. It is much easier to forward intelligent comments that somebody else wrote. Yeah. Um there is a discussion in the WhatsApp community where someone else Karthik Shrar also pointed this out that forwards are very easy. Correct. So forwards is very easy and then you find a forward. Somebody put a lot of effort into writing a forward and composing it in just the right way where it sounds very intelligent. It might or might not be intelligent. It sounds very intelligent, sounds very convincing, sounds very surprising. uh you know there is an entire book called how to

6m 21s make something stick and there is an acronym called SIMPL right so all of those things are true of a WhatsApp forward okay and that is what you do you look at the forward and you say I need to be the first person to bring this cool nugget of information to my people my tribe discovery leads to status and that is why you need to be the first one to post those makes sense makes absolute sense do you know about the good morning industry Sorry, what? The good morning industry.

6m 50s Yes. So in 2018, right, Google researchers ran into a major problem with Android phones, right? They noticed that large number of Android phones were freezing up in the middle of the night. Middle of the night. Okay. Yes. After they looked into it, they realized that it was middle of the night for them in the US. It was morning in India and so many phones were freezing because people were just sending each other good morning messages. Okay. And Google searches for good morning messages had gone up by 10x. Okay. Okay.

7m 25s What happened was that Indians sending each other good morning were clogging up their phones taking up all the space and just it was insane. Right now there is data. Okay. Like I said, wait before that, before the industry, right? Let's just understand the situation. Google searches for good morning went up by 10x. Okay. Pinterest had to add an entire new section just for good morning visuals. Okay. And a 2018 article live mint points out that even Modi used to send good morning and once scolded lawmakers for not responding to his good morning.

8m 05s So in fact, Google had to implement an entire app which you download on your phone and that would automatically figure out which images saved on your phone are good morning messages so they can be deleted after a few days. Okay. Okay. I didn't know about this app, but now I'm curious. I'm actually going to go and look for it. But hold on. What does this have to do with status as a service? Okay. So you wish your tribe good morning. That's a normal thing to do.

8m 34s What started happening is that people started putting their good morning message on a really nice photograph or an image, right? Yeah. Then they started putting that along with a thought for the day, right? And then now there is obviously a status competition for who puts the best good morning message uh out there, right? So many people literally spend the first minutes of their day not searching for good morning images. Okay, there are multiple companies, websites, apps to create good morning messages. Many of them with 10 million plus downloads.

9m 10s Okay, there is a company called wish good morning.com where the founder himself spends 45 minutes every morning sending and responding to good morning messages, right? And uh I mean you know like I said this kind of started in 2018 it became a big thing. Even in 2025 it remains true. Like I said, the live mint which was you know they have an article saying 20 unique good morning messages like a mainstream media house has an entire article on 20 unique good morning messages. Okay, slight sidebar I'm going to do here and uh the sidebar is not in defense of these people of these industries but uh listen any business that you start the first thing you look

9m 52s for is TAM total addressable market and in case of India even if a small slice of the population does it it's still a huge TAM it's still a huge addressable market and if you serve it and you get money why not do it people at the end of the day do business for money so I understand the industry aspect of it. So, you know, coming back to status as a service, you can see how this is status, right? No, maybe you can't see. Young people don't understand how this is status. Young people find this cringe.

10m 22s Okay. Problem is that young people have their own different status games inside Instagram and inside Snapchat and their streaks and so on, right? Absolutely. You never realize which status games you are playing. You only see other people's status games and you find that cringe, right? But there is a lovely article called status as a service by Eugene Wei uh who has said that pretty much all social media is status as a service. LinkedIn is status as a service. Twitter is status as a service for intellectual.

10m 51s Insta is for teenagers and so on. Right? Twitter is a status as a service for a lot of different kinds of people not just intellectuals but that's another topic another day. The good news is that all of this is still better than watching TV news. Okay, TV news is toxic. It will eat your brain. Whereas good morning messages are healthy and wholesome. I I would have agreed with you if the forwards were just good morning and happy birthday and hi, how are you and all of that. But the forwards are not just those. There are there is a lot of misinformation in those forwards. There are people sending forwards like uh UNESCO has declared the Indian national

11m 33s anthem or the Indian national flag as the best flag in the world and all kinds of misinformation. So I agree this is a problem right? This is because savvy political parties and leaders have weaponized WhatsApp. They know that people want to play status games and they are using that and feeding people with tools that they can use in this particular game. But keep in mind this is not just WhatsApp. All of social media, all of media is being weaponized like this by political parties. And the reason for this is something we covered in why news is toxic. Right? The idea is that fast forwards, virality, ability of a small number of people with tools to

12m 15s reach really large number of people. Right? This is ideally suited for getting people angry, getting people uh you know uh shouting at each other and for weaponization. So let's not just blame WhatsApp uncles for this. I'm not blaming just WhatsApp uncles but I am blaming WhatsApp uncles. The other problem I have with those forwards is that those forwards contribute to dissemination of information and the dissemination of information essentially translates into a form of broadcast and I don't want to sit idly when misinformation or disinformation is being disseminated like this.

12m 55s Yes, absolutely. I agree. Right. Uh I mean you do want to push back especially with people close to you. Okay. And this is a tough problem. Maybe the most important problem of our times, right? I don't have a great answer, but maybe you know I can suggest a few small steps we can take as a beginning, right? If you can suggest steps that can help sort of reduce the noise in an ecochamber, I am all yours. Yeah. So my small steps consists of four parts. Okay.

13m 27s Okay. So part one, Prana T7 on our WhatsApp community points out that if you try to fight misinformation by giving them the true facts, it just takes way too much time. Yeah. The amount of effort required to refute BS is an order of magnitude larger than the BS itself. Absolutely. So if you try to do this, it is just too much. You will burn out, right? So instead, pick who you want to fight, right? You can't fight everybody all the time. What you want to do is the closer a person is to you be more willing to engage right because it is more important for you and there is a higher chance that they will

14m 08s pay attention and the further out the person is let it be someone else's problems right the problem there is if you engage with that principle in mind in family groups that that usually causes kales and that kalesh I think karthik also pointed out in the WhatsApp community that uh because People try to avoid that kalesh those groups tend to become ecochambers. Exactly. So it is more important. I mean in family groups you're trying to avoid fighting and then they become worse. Whereas if you do fight like you point out it'll just be bad for the family.

14m 41s Right? So that's why other thing to do is don't be rude. Be polite. Okay. And avoid frontal attacks. And this is not just you know I'm not saying it to be nice. There is research showing that direct contradiction actually results in strengthening of the belief. Right. Backfire effect. The backfire effect. Exactly. And instead of that, you gently nudge them in a particular direction. Instead of just saying you are wrong, ask them clarifying question. Try to understand where they're coming from. Right? And then try to question the premises instead of uh questioning the actual forward itself. Right? We will go into the backfire effect in depth one of these days because it keeps coming up in

15m 26s a lot of discussions but it makes sense. Go on please. Right. Part three is don't do it all the time. Right? If you do it they'll just brand you as a you know negative person and ignore you. Right? Plus you will burn out like I said. So instead pick which things you want to actually fight back on. Right? Pick the things which are actually going to have an impact. So for example, if they want to say that UNESCO says Indian national anthem is the best, let them say it, let them believe it. If they want to say that Sanskrit is the best language for programming, let them believe it. Right?

16m 03s But if they start spreading misinformation about a particular religion, then that might be a problem, right? And you know, I'm not saying this is exactly what you should be doing. You should have your own list of what is important, what what is not, but have 3% things in the really important list and then let everything else go. The 973 rule and yes, the 973 rule can be different for different people. So if somebody wants to push back on the yinus thing or the Sanskrit thing, please feel free to do it. Make that your 3%.

16m 33s Not not arguing, not debating that at all. Yeah. So related part four okay is that again based on research research shows that most misinformation forwarding happens because people forward it quickly without thinking they wanted to believe that it is true because of their ideology and they just forward it right if you make them think if you make them question is this really true most people do realize that this is likely to not be true and they also reduce the number of times they forward it right there is actual uh research there's a link in the description go take a look at it so try to remember what you're trying to achieve right the forwards a lot of them are necessary

17m 22s daily dose of their tribe and status right so only fight the important ones and there try to create a culture of wanting to think about is this really true h That part is actually brings it back nicely to the thing we began with tribe as a service and status as service because every time we push back we are actually challenging their status in the group and that leads to an alpha dominance uh quarrel fight whatever and the alpha dominance quarrel fight whatever then with the backfire effect will lead to more entrenchment.

18m 00s Yeah. So this just brings up a thought for me. I haven't thought of it. it was not there in my notes but maybe uh push back privately instead of doing it in public so that they can back off without losing face right I don't know if that works I don't have research on it but worth trying right it's an interesting experiment so bringing everything together WhatsApp serves an important purpose especially for older people it is their tribe it is their family it is status right and never forget that you are doing the same thing in different areas in different ways. So you know be kind, be more accepting of their things especially the things like happy

18m 42s birthday and all that which is not really harming everybody. Yeah. You find it cringe but you are doing cringe behavior according to them. Okay. The other thing you can do is that large groups of people where there just lots and lots of people uh you can leave those groups. Okay. A lot of people just hang out there because they feel it'll be rude to quit the group and then they are exposed to all the toxicity and negativity and it spoils their day. But I know enough people who just very politely said that I am just quitting all large groups. I am happy to engage one-on-one and in smaller groups and it has worked out well for them. Okay. No no no

19m 22s significant long-term issues, no problems with their relationships and so on. So that is something you can do. And for the smaller groups where you are sticking around, where you do want to do something and change, do it gently and kindly. Do it more for the people who are closer to you. Do it only for the forwards that really really matter. And don't try to prove them wrong. Right? Just try to get them to think before they forward. They will themselves reach the correct conclusions. All right?

19m 54s That's an interesting set of uh tasks ahead in front of you. As for leaving the groups that he talked about, he actually has a template for it. Uh a link to which we will leave in the description. But overall, this is a very interesting perspective on the concept of WhatsApp as not just a messenger but something more as a way to establish status as a way to build your tribe. And with this new lens, if you start looking at the groups that are becoming ecochambers, hopefully you'll find ways to deal with this ecochamber and reduce the noise in that eco chamber. In fact, the WhatsApp community that we have started for future IQ. We are also

20m 36s trying to figure out how not to turn it into our own eco chamber for which he has come up with a very interesting method called adversarial collaboration. If you want to know more about it, join the group. QR code is on your screen, link is in the description and conversations are happening here, there, everywhere. Shriant Naven, Future IQ and you might want to check out our episode on fighting misinformation that will help with this process.