SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, we got a great show for you today. First, we're going to talk about Shopify's proposed 10 to one stock split and why the board wants to increase CEO and founder Toby Lookie's control from 34% to 40%. And should these companies public ones even have this kind of

SPEAKER_01: founder control? Yeah, what is even private versus public anymore? And then we have an unexpected guest because we're obsessed with this topic. We're joined by Derek Thompson

SPEAKER_02: from the Atlantic. And we had him want to discuss his article in the Atlantic, why American teens

SPEAKER_01: are so sad. Yeah, it is four forces evidently that are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people, including as you might imagine, social media, but not exclusively social

SPEAKER_06: media. Yeah, it's a really deep, deep discussion, an important discussion, a rambling discussion, but one you're not going to want to miss. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_11: for Dell for Startups and save up to 45% off on select items. All right. And our first news story

SPEAKER_12: today looks like we have more stock splits and governance to talk about Molly. Shopify has some

SPEAKER_01: plans. Shopify has some plans to not have a Dow style takeover apparently. Hmm. I mean, I don't think that's exactly what's happening here, but since we have been having this ongoing conversation about founder control and what can happen when someone comes in with a disruptive stock buy, Shopify just probably coincidentally is currently planning evidently a 10 to one stock split that would also increase CEO and founder Toby lucky's control from 34 to 40%. Now Shopify, of course, provides e-commerce software that helps people start online businesses IPO in 2015 at a $1.2 billion valuation has had a tough post COVID drop pre COVID. It was trading at $60 billion roughly market cap. They peaked at $212 billion in November, 2021. And since then, Shopify has been down 64% off its

SPEAKER_24: COVID peak. So no, wait, where is it trading above its previous pre COVID peak? Is that? Yes. So it's still trading about, so it's still trading a little bit of solid $18 billion above. Yeah.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. So I think what we're coming to is like what we saw during COVID of the stocks going up was directly related to market participation and by maybe new entrants and people just buying their favorite names independent of price earnings ratios. Mm hmm. And now it's kind of like if you draw the

SPEAKER_32: line, we'll just take out the, the peak that maybe was artificial. But if you were to draw the line from 2019 2020 listen, I'm not into like stock chart ology nonsense. I don't necessarily believe in that. But he's like a similar line, right? Like we'd have this through line that was like, yeah, that was weird.

SPEAKER_35: A bunch of people bought the stock meme stock that whatever because it was kind of a meme stock, right? Everybody's gonna stay home. Everybody's gonna shop. We're never gonna leave our homes again.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, I'm not sure that's a meme thing so much as it is a old crap. Everything about commerce has changed things. And Shopify actually, I think the thing that Shopify did during the pandemic that was really promising and smart was to just basically create mechanisms for consumer sources, pop up ecommerce shops like overnight, make it super, super, super easy to onboard previously brick and mortar shops that needed to go online in a hurry. And so I think they got a lot of attention there. However,

SPEAKER_43: okay, wait, wait. So to say that, just to build on that, you're a co you're a store in the real world

SPEAKER_32: COVID happens, people can't leave their homes, you need to put set up an ecommerce shop to sell what's in the store. Yeah, and you're starting to do deliveries through whatever Lyft and Uber and Postmates.

SPEAKER_47: So yeah, that could have been part of the trend. But they also during this time had spectacular growth.

SPEAKER_50: Yes. So there was legitimate, spectacular, world class growth here. Yeah. And so as a result, Shopify is

SPEAKER_01: saying effectively, and it sounds like the board is saying, Hey, you know, who's awesome? Toby Lutke, you know, should have essentially unchallenged control over this company forever? Toby Lutke. So they're doing this 10 to one stocks split split, lowering the share price to make it easier to add stock compensation potentially to employee pay packages. That's one thing that the Wall Street Journal speculated on also increased liquidity liquidity, but hold on a second. Let me ask a question. Yeah. So what is it? What's the

SPEAKER_12: stock trading at? What's the number today? Not the market cap, but the actual number. So it's going to

SPEAKER_32: go from what a share to what a share if it's trading at, you know, $60 is going down to six or something. Okay, so trading at 605 while we're taping this. So it goes to $60.50. This is because most modern brokerages let you buy a fraction of the share. This is like a psychological thing. And then even with employees, it's, it would also be a psychological thing. Because if I gave you a tenth of a $605 stock, or I gave you, you know, if I made the stock worth a tenth as much and gave you one of them,

SPEAKER_58: it'd be the same thing. It's the same amount of money and value. So this is largely a psychological

SPEAKER_01: phenomenon, right? I don't know if I don't know, I genuinely don't know if companies issue fractional

SPEAKER_62: shares as stock as competition. Oh, for compensation. Yes. We know Robin Hood and E-Trade let you buy

SPEAKER_63: fractional shares. So the question is, which I think is somewhat uncomfortable. Like if I wanted to if I hadn't really thought that much about it's psychological in the sense that it'll work, if I hadn't thought that much about buying Shopify at 605, I might still be like 60. Hell yeah,

SPEAKER_67: I'm loading up a bunch. So in that case, big sale at the stock store. And so I think the

SPEAKER_01: psychological part gets people to buy and then you have liquidity as a result.

SPEAKER_71: Oh, I just always found it weird. We might be more interesting then to go 100 to one, why don't we go all the way and make it a $6 share again. And then everybody's like, Oh, it's only $6 a share. It's on sale. Even though it's not true. There's 100 times as many shares.

SPEAKER_69: Oh, absolutely. Isn't it all? I mean, isn't the whole stock market just ultimately like it's all

SPEAKER_71: like mostly feelings. Well, feelings do drive a lot of it, right? But hopefully this underlying,

SPEAKER_32: I mean, the revenue on the company is real. Right? Exactly. So people know the GMV in 2021 was 175 billion. That's the gross merchandise volume. So everything sold from the store is worth 175. But the revenue for Shopify, they get a percentage of sales and they get software fees was 4.6 billion. So about

SPEAKER_12: just, you know, just over 2% of that, or 2.7%. To be precise, their net income was 2.9 billion in

SPEAKER_76: that same period. So they're at price earnings is 27 times. That's pretty high price earnings,

SPEAKER_01: but it's a high growth company. So anyway, just put some numbers on the board. It's a real business. It's a real business. Um, employees do not think you producers get partial shares and compensation packages. So presumably they could then get issued a much bigger basket of shares, maybe have increased liquidity themselves. I don't really know. Okay. That makes sense then. But I think what's super interesting about this is that Shopify's board is also proposing a founder share that would increase CEO Toby Luke's voting power from 34% to 40%. One analyst interviewed by the Wall Street Journal said his increased control would allow him to block any attempts at a hostile takeover and Robert Ash, the independent lead director of Shopify sports said, quote, the company is looking to get the influence of our future in Toby's hands. Hmm. So a whole new, is this a whole new type of share a new founder share? They say that combined with his existing super voting class B shares will increase his voting power. I guess, you know, the mechanics of this

SPEAKER_32: are not exactly clear, but the the concept in the, you know, this might just be ways of just saying

SPEAKER_12: super voting shares. That doesn't seem as scary. So founder share sounds like optically, oh, it's

SPEAKER_86: founder shares. Oh, but they're super, super voting. They're super, they're super shares. Basically,

SPEAKER_12: it's my shares are voting. We have the same number of shares. Mine are just more valuable than yours.

SPEAKER_32: So this has nothing to do with the Twitter stuff, because this would, this has to have been in, you know, these kinds of things take a long time to, you know, architect like a year.

SPEAKER_12: Um, so this is probably something that's been in the works for a year or two.

SPEAKER_01: Well, it may not have anything to do with the, the today's Twitter stuff, but it could have to do with the last Twitter stuff, right? When you had activist investors who were really putting a lot of pressure on Jack Dorsey to make changes. Like, you know, I think you are seeing some moves to for, for publicly traded companies to have a little bit more Mark Zuckerberg style control.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. And from the article, John Phillips, one of Shopify's first investors and a mentor to Mr.

SPEAKER_05: Luque will be converting his class B shares class A, which will boost Mr. Luque's voting power to 40%. Ah, so wait, John Phillips is converting his shares, which I guess he's pledged to Toby to vote.

SPEAKER_98: If I'm reading that correctly.

SPEAKER_100: I, I read it as he's decreasing the total amount of shares in the class B stock, which will increase Toby's percentage to 40%. Hmm. So anyway, long story short here,

SPEAKER_32: mechanics aside, um, founders want to control their companies and not deal with, uh, they want the benefits of being public. Uh, but they want the power of being a private controlled company.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. And we have this now zone between public companies that operate with, you know, a, a traditional

SPEAKER_32: voting structure that are susceptible to management being voted out for performance or for how they're running a company and then privates. And then in between now you have this public private hybrid, where if you don't like the governance, I guess you can opt out and not buy the stock would be one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is should we allow these companies to be public, uh, and get the benefit of the public buying in pensions, buying in people's retirement,

SPEAKER_12: buying in, and then giving a just promote or a disproportionate amount of power to the person in charge. This is analogous to a sports team, letting LeBron James pick the coach and the players. Like what could go wrong? Yeah. And we just saw that went wrong. Um, and then other times you

SPEAKER_106: could see what could go right. You know, Michael Jordan's like, I want Rodman. I, you know, we're

SPEAKER_32: going to deal with him and sorry if you don't like it, but he's, he's joining the team because I want somebody to get rebounds and I don't want to have to rebound and get beat up and under the

SPEAKER_109: basket. The end. So live by the gun, die by the gun, live by the sword, die by the sword. I don't

SPEAKER_01: know exactly how I feel about it. I don't know either. Uh, it feels contrary in some ways to, you know, just like you said, to the idea of a public market and the idea of, uh, of a board and governance. And we have seen already, you know, lack of accountability across industries. I mean, I don't know why the Activision CEO still had a job, but I also don't know why like United

SPEAKER_44: CEO, you know, sort of like, you see over and over all of these scenarios in which there, there is not.

SPEAKER_32: If the founders have board control, here's an idea. If they truly do have board control, then they shouldn't have to have a board. We should just call it what it is. Instead of putting this like ridiculous farce that like Facebook has a board. If Zuckerberg truly can just do whatever he wants. Right. Why put the window dressing of a board there? Why, you know, pull the wool over everybody's eyes and slip them the Mickey and bamboozle them. Just call it what it is. You're buying the God Kings company, buying the God Queens company. That's it. You, you, you have given all power to them and they answer to no one. And your only option is to sell the stock so they can lose your

SPEAKER_76: faith and you could sell the stock, but you cannot have a reasonable board discussion that results in

SPEAKER_01: them listening to what you're saying. Cause they don't have, I feel like that would be more honest. It would be more honest, wouldn't it? You know, it would be more honest to both investors and consumers. Like, look, the only accountability that there's ever going to be, because I think, you know, consumers like look at people, look at Facebook and the things that it does in the world. And they think there's no, you know, there have no recourse. And the recourse is like one, get it out of your portfolio. And two, don't use it. Like have a super honest conversation. There is not some secret governing body. That's going to come in and like, fix this. Yeah. It's only you.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah, you're on your own. It's an interesting rub here. I think, you know, what will determine this is what institutional holders, uh, believe is the right thing to do. Yeah. Uh, I have seen this go both ways up close and personal. Um, you know, there are some people who are so supremely talented that just letting them have the reins and keeping them less distracted and not having to worry about a hostile takeover, not having to worry about activist investors means the company goes up and to the right. And it's, you know, there's nothing that says a company has to be a democracy with one vote for one person. Yeah. We can make all kinds of variations of corporate structures and the market will decide which one it wants to invest in. And if too many of these, you know, hyper control companies don't perform and their stocks don't perform, people will not buy it. If the New York, the New York times, I Google to a lesser extent, Facebook to the pinnacle extent, and now Toby, if these companies perform, then perhaps it is the better model. The results would

SPEAKER_12: say it is the better model. And if they go off the rails and the stocks go sideways, then it's not the

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SPEAKER_01: save 20% off. I guess what I don't understand is like, what is Shopify worried about? Like they're doing fine. Right? They're putting up great numbers. What what is the concern? Why not just pay Toby more? Like, I don't really understand why you then also have to create a new special super super voting class of shares to make sure that everything's okay, and nobody's going to come in and take them over.

SPEAKER_32: Never. Yeah, I would say it's things are going well. So pressure advantage. So if you're at the poker tournament, you're building up a big chip stack. And somebody raises preflop. You got so many chips, they're short stack. You've got a, you know, whatever 40% chance when they have a 60, you know, you might try to pressure them to fold two ways to win, you know, so it's like, I think he's just kind of pressing his advantage. Everybody knows he's, you know, world class CEO, everybody knows it's a world class company. So why not push the envelope here and see if you can consolidate power, when things are good, you're not gonna be able to consolidate power if the stock's going down more, or if it's the company's not growing. So maybe people aren't paying attention instead of, you know, and they like Toby. And so it's a good time for him to consolidate more power. Yeah, why not try? I mean, I mean, I might do the same thing in his position, you know, okay, I'm gonna make this my life's work. I want to consolidate more power. Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, you could have activist investors come in and tell them like, stop doing, you know, cut costs, you know, if you looked at Google, if if Google was subject to activist investors who only cared about profits and dividends. I, I heard some statistic, like Google could run with like 10% of the employees it has, and none of the systems would go down, the company would be the exact same. So you could literally cut some very large percentage.

SPEAKER_01: If what's so interesting is that in theory, that's all investors ever care about. Like in theory, what's so fascinating about this is that it gives, I doubt that the play here is that Shopify is going to be like, Hey, we're gonna, I mean, even though that was Amazon's play for years and years and decades, right to sort of say like, Yeah, we're gonna lose money. We're not here to maximize your shareholder value right away. We're here to slowly grow and build a long term business. And most investors don't care for that. But it is sort of an interesting idea that one of the reasons you might want to consolidate control as a founder is so that you could have more flexibility to be like, Yep, we're gonna lose money for a while because we want to, I don't know, make a more climate friendly operation and that takes investment or we want to pay our, you know, like Costco's Costco stock is always like going down because investors don't want them to pay their employees so much. Yeah. Um, go figure. Yeah, go figure. We gave everybody a raise. They're happier. It's

SPEAKER_106: like, I'm selling the stock. I'm selling this terrible investment, terrible investment in your

SPEAKER_145: people like who, you know, are the front line. Yeah, this is, uh, you know, and then there's some

SPEAKER_32: investors who are like, listen, if Amazon had not made the other bed of AWS, it would not be the company it is. That's the thing that throws off the money. Yeah, 100% true. You know, uh, we might look back and say, you know, Google doing autonomous cars, if that actually works and becomes a giant business for them, it might be like, okay, that was it. They did 20 other bets and none of them went anywhere. Google Fiber, nothing worked, Loon, all these projects, Google Glass, nothing worked, but you

SPEAKER_76: only need one to work. And if one works like AWS, well, gee willikers, you know, you're sitting on a

SPEAKER_150: powder keg. Gee willikers. Gee willikers. Gosh. Gosh, gee willikers. You nailed it.

SPEAKER_152: Gee willikers, pal. Let's go fishing. Hey fella. There's an AWS somewhere in there. Somebody's dad

SPEAKER_155: is in here right now. Yeah, I just am going grandpa actually. Uh, so anyway, uh, if you look at it,

SPEAKER_32: it's a, here's the thought experiment. What could Google's yearly net profit be if they cut all unnecessary staff and other bets? Let's say 60% of all employees, 257 billion in revenue 2021, 76 billion in net income. Maybe who knows what Google spends on all those employees. There must be a line item somewhere, but you know, could they increase their net income by 25 billion a third? I mean, what would that do to the stock? Because then you, you start looking at the price earnings ratio. If the earnings spike, well, then the price earnings ratio goes way down, which means the stock can go up. So if Google was trying to make the stock price go up, they would do to a certain extent what Apple does, which is buy back shares, increase the price of their products and don't do any other bets.

SPEAKER_71: Like Apple is famous for being like, yeah, we're not going to buy anything. We're not going to build anything new. Like we'll do one new thing every decade. I mean, if you take away like,

SPEAKER_162: you know, like washcloths for your phone and, you know, adapters, they're like, you know, watch,

SPEAKER_164: you know, iPad, watch, AirPods, maybe the phone that ate the entire business. The phone is the

SPEAKER_100: entire business. I don't know how many DeepMind employees there are, but I remember reading something like the average DeepMind salary is like 500k. It's something insane. Oh, no, DeepMind

SPEAKER_62: salaries. I mean, AI engineers are, you know, closer to seven figures at the peak when this battle was

SPEAKER_32: going on because the downstream impacts of a world class AI engineer are enormous. And there are so few of them. And if you get them, the other person doesn't get them. So just think about this. If you were to tweak Facebook's algorithm and Facebook makes, you know, or here, you know, we're looking at 257 billion in revenue. If you tweak the algorithm and made it 1% more efficient for advertisers, it's, uh, $2.5 billion. If you were to do 10 basis points, you know, a tenth of 1%

SPEAKER_28: It's two, it's two Redfin's 250 billion. Yeah. I mean, it's, it, that's the thing about these networks. That's why you're like, how do they have 8,000 engineers working on this project? And it's like, look at how big the number is. If one little tweak, you know, gets some, you know, 1% more people to click. That's why they study the position, the font size, the color, you know, and then a million other variables. And that's what AI machine learning does. You don't, you set it up. You don't even know what it's doing. It might be on rainy days that a different font color, you know, because the average person's computer, you know, because of the sunshine needs a different color, makes you click on the ads 1% more. And then when it's a hazy day, like that's literally what could be going on in the algorithm. And we don't even know. Yeah, because a lot of these algorithms are set up and they're

SPEAKER_125: pulling in every piece of data. They might know your screen brightness, you know, and on your phone

SPEAKER_109: and be able to your experience, right? Like, yeah, absolutely. They certainly know the weather in

SPEAKER_32: your neighborhood, maybe on rainy days, people click on more ads. So on those days, you should sell five ads per search. And on non rainy days, it was not raining in your neighborhood too. I mean, I'm making an absurd, you know, example here, but you know, but maybe not exactly. And like you said,

SPEAKER_01: it's a matter of volume. It's sort of like how, I mean, the simple analogy is like spam. You know, you get, you send out 100 million spam messages, and you only need 1% to click or less 0.001% to make it worth your while because it's like a fairly inexpensive thing to do. And so at Google scale,

SPEAKER_32: like listen, if you're running a restaurant, Molly, and you put a hamburger on the menu, people come to the restaurant, they're tired, they had a long day. They can just, you know, I just have a burger. It's easy choice. I know I love a burger. There's no downside. It's a bad burger is a good is decent. So you do that. And now you got all the 20 to $35 entrees, including the

SPEAKER_125: steak are now subservient to the $14 hamburger. And then, you know, you just killed your margin

SPEAKER_32: because half those steak people probably would order at the New York strip. And so you got to think things through sometimes. If you have a, you know, restaurant at scale, that's why my dad didn't want to have a hamburger on the menu. Fascinating. Yeah. You put a Caesar salad on the menu and a hamburger and mozzarella sticks. Like all of a sudden you watch the tickets. It's going to be 80%

SPEAKER_76: of the tickets in the 80s are going to be, I'll take a Caesar salad and a burger and let's get a side order of mozzarella sticks. You know, like nobody's going to eat the other, nobody's going

SPEAKER_39: to have the steak tata. Side note. I really like how you call it mozzarella sticks.

SPEAKER_188: Mozzarella sticks. What did I say? He said that basically said mozzarella sticks. Like it was a whole Brooklyn situation.

SPEAKER_12: Speaking of Brooklyn, hearts and minds to thinking about Sunset Park. There was a shooting this morning at the 36th street station. Yeah. Which gave me a little bit of a cold feeling in my body because I used to take the R train, get off at 36th from 77th. And yeah, then I would transfer it to the end where back in the day it was the B. So you would take the R or

SPEAKER_47: the N, which, you know, Molly stands for the rarely or the never. I live. We could take the

SPEAKER_124: rarely or the never. Wow. Then you take the beat, which was the better trend. Listen, when you're a

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SPEAKER_125: slash twist for $1,000 off. We've got a guest today, I was reading stories, I was reading tweet storms. And I saw one of these rare moments in the late stage media of self reflection. And we're part of

SPEAKER_28: the late stage media, of course. And I've always liked Derek Thompson. He's like a very considered guy. Like he also has good prose. You know, that's kind of a lost thing, Molly. A lot of these folks who are at the Atlantic. But yes, not at the Atlantic. But, you know, I like to have, I just like when somebody puts a little bit of effort into the prose, as opposed to like, just, you know, the content mills that a lot of these journalist outlets have been and I understand people have like, they got a file every day or every two days, enough time to even think about it. But Derek's a good writer. And he had some like, reflective thoughts. Welcome to the program, Derek

SPEAKER_62: Thompson. Great to be here. Thank you so much. So and of course, you know, Molly, what I assume? Absolutely. Nice to see you.

David Friedberg: You know, our game from the Hall of Fame here. So, Derek, you can congratulate Molly on

SPEAKER_204: being taken to the podcasting Hall of Fame. Oh, congratulations. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_32: Thank you. Yes. Derek, you wrote a story. It was kind of reflective, you hit on four points about why

SPEAKER_28: this generation, this younger generation, suffering from depression, anxiety, etc. And I bet you before we get into the story, why'd you write the story? What was the origin story of

SPEAKER_209: the story? The origin story of the story? Honestly, it was just seeing an article on Twitter, which is where I live. In addition to this podcasting cave, which is where I also live. And the CDC just announced

SPEAKER_210: that the share of teenagers of high school students, this is a high school survey that said that they feel persistent sadness or hopelessness had reached an all time high. And this is a trend that I followed for a bit. I follow Jonathan Haidt. I follow a couple other researchers like Gene Twenge that have looked at the impacts of social media and teenage depression, anxiety for quite a long time. And basically, the number was going up, up, up, up, up. And then during the pandemic, teen hopelessness, anxiety, sadness, depression, everything just starts completely spiked, right? The pandemic as it did to so many other trends, economic trends, business trends accelerated that which was pre existing. And I just thought this was fascinating. It was fascinating for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's just incredibly important that teenagers are sad. Like that is that is itself in in a nutshell, and an important fact sadness is important. But I'm also so interested in

SPEAKER_211: in the fact that this is a trend that's going to slam into the so called real world. Sadness in high school will become sadness in college will become sadness in the workforce will become sadness in

SPEAKER_210: adulthood like this is a trend. Now I was just talking to someone about about how companies are handling the rise of anxiety among the younger employees. They're talking about how CEOs are now chief empathy officers. And a lot of these big companies are hiring chief wellness officers as well. CWOs, like people are paying incredibly close attention to this frankly, unignorable phenomenon of of of youth

SPEAKER_212: anxiety. And I really wanted to figure out what the hell is going on here?

SPEAKER_92: Yeah, so you identified four factors. Social media use, sociality being down the isolation of the

SPEAKER_01: pandemic, the world is stressful. And there's more news about the world stressors and and modern parenting strategies. There's like, I want to unpack all of those. That's good. Yeah. Well, somebody like took my sad teenager to school this morning. Can we start with parenting strategies,

SPEAKER_210: please? Sure. Well, look, I mean, first off, I have to, you know, from a responsible journalist standpoint, begin with the fact that I do not have a teenager much, much less one that is sad. So I am not speaking from a place of intelligent experience here. But I did talk to a bunch of psychologists. My wife is a PhD in clinical psychology. So I've learned a lot from her about CBT and the therapy that is being used across the population, but cognitive behavioral therapy. Thank you. Yes, cognitive behavioral therapy, right? I don't want to depart into acronym land here. And, you know, the parenting part is really important. There is a theory, and I would love to talk about the degree to which you find this accurate or total BS. There is a theory that modern parenting is to the buzzword is accommodating. That is to say that a part of growing up is being sad. It's really difficult to grow up, you don't know exactly who you are, you don't know what you want, you don't have a lot of authority, you have to go to school, you have to do your homework. Um, it's it's hard. And one thing that good parenting theoretically or good upbringing should do is help people build the resiliency that they will inevitably need in order to overcome the inevitable stresses of life. And today, by contrast, a lot of modern parenting, according to, uh, to these experts, um, is accommodating, which is to say that if a kid doesn't like broccoli, they'll get turkey loaf for lunch and dinner every day of their life for four years. That was an actual story from a cover, uh, from a, from a cover story in the Atlantic a few years ago. If a child is afraid of dogs, rather than do what psychologists would call exposure therapy, introduce this child who's afraid of dogs to a bunch of really, really cute puppies, so that over time, they'll be less afraid of this general species of dog, you instead accommodate the fear of dogs, you say, I am never going over to anyone's house who has a dog. And then over time, this kind of accommodating strategy bubble wraps kids, and you can sort of think by extension of the bubble wrapping metaphor, they don't grow the skin thickness that is necessary in order to survive a world or live in a world that is full of stressors. And so that is the, that's the critique of not just helicopter parenting, not just being present too much, but accommodative parenting,

SPEAKER_227: giving in to pathologies and fears rather than trying to build resiliency.

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SPEAKER_230: this Molly, right? A toughen up strategy. So I mean, Molly and I are both parents. I have a 12 year old and

SPEAKER_06: your son's 15 or 16 now, 15, still 15. Right in the middle of it. Yeah, I mean, we're both in the middle of

SPEAKER_32: it. I also have six year olds. And there is this thing where it's like, I don't like that food. And you know, at a certain point, as a parent, you have to say, this is what we're having for dinner. You don't get to choose the restaurant. There's five people who live in this household. And tonight we're eating Chinese food. And if you love Japanese, that's fine, you know, and there might be a, you know, a day of the week you get to pick, but the other is if you don't eat what's on the plate, that's fine. You have three choices. You can have a yogurt, you can have a banana, or I can toast to a bagel, whatever, you know, like I kind of give them like three choices. And if you if you opt out of this, there's like three simple choices here. But that's it, you don't get dessert, obviously. And I mean, it, I think his reaction, Molly, you tell me, we had a generation of parents who maybe were too hard in their kids. We had capital punishment, I think we're the last, I don't know if you experienced capital punishment, and you must have like, not talk about your parents, but people in your contemporaries, there was still capital punishment. I mean, I remember teachers hitting kids in school. So we have this like, well, that's not cool. And now we have this like, way overreaction to like, Oh, you don't like dogs? Well, then we'll just have

SPEAKER_124: a dog free world for you, which is nonsensical. I don't know, Molly, what do you think about

SPEAKER_39: certainly we see that you handle it? Yeah, certainly, like, we all know those parents, right? Everybody knows those parents who are like, I got to keep my kid away from your dog the whole time

SPEAKER_01: we're at this party and ruin the whole party. And it's just gonna be not saying I was at a party like that recently, but it was. And there is, I think, a lot more and you note this in your piece that there's a lot more anxiety, you have more awareness of anxiety. And then you have parents talking about this with their kids. And I certainly have some, you know, people in my social circle who I'm like, Are you convincing your child that they have anxiety, you know, see, you know,

SPEAKER_47: on the other day, they're inducing it, Molly is like, they're basically like, you'll get more

SPEAKER_71: attention will dote over you more if you're acting moody or whatever, right? You're kind of enabling,

SPEAKER_01: what do you think of that there? But isn't there like, but wait, hold on, I'm in the middle of that thought. However, at the same time, for years and years and years, we said our kids are toughening up, they're resilient. I read this great tweet the other day where it was like, you know, this woman is talking to her therapist, and the therapist says kids are really resilient. And she goes really, well, then why do so many adults need therapy? So like, we don't know for sure what the long term impact of the economy, there are some people who over accommodate, but do we really think that that is causing these issues? Or are we more aware? I would say two things. First off,

SPEAKER_209: I think that what's happening is ironic, because it is the parents attempt to prevent their children

SPEAKER_210: from feeling anxious in the short term, that is hurting their ability to deal with stressors in the long term. That is the irony of the bubble wrapping strategy, right? By accommodating now, you hurt their ability to accommodate for themselves to protect themselves in the future, they don't grow the resilience, the skin thickness that they need, because you're taking care of absolutely everything for them and designing a world in which they never have to feel deeply the anxiety, the distress that they feel, right? Like, we don't need to go all the way back to like Marcus really a stoicism, but like a part of stoicism to which I subscribe, like, you know, to a bit of I think there's there's wisdom there, a part of this logic into a certain extent, the logic of Buddhism as well, is that life is suffering, life is pain. And you have to just stare that fact nakedly in the face, life has suffering, and it is pain. And it is our responsibility to determine our emotional reaction to the inevitable pain and suffering that is life. And if you're going to raise your children in a way that sort of protects them from having to feel those negative stressors, then they won't be prepared in the kind of, you know, stoic or Buddhist way that Marcus Aurelius or Buddha would have told you to. That's, I guess, point number one. Point number two, and I didn't want to sort of lean on this too hard, because to a certain extent, this is a this is a bit of a classed argument, not every I'm trying to, I'm describing what is a global phenomenon among American teens, not just among upper middle class teens. But the following is, I think more of a classed argument. Valerie Ramey is a as an economist who wrote this very famous paper on the rug rat race. And this was a paper looking at time use surveys of upper middle class parents. And it's showed that upper middle class parents, especially college graduate parents, started in the 1980s to spend much more time with their kids when they were teenagers, that time spent with kids started to go up and up and up and up the 1980s, 90s, 2000s. Valerie Ramey's thesis is that this is about parents becoming much more obsessed with getting their kids into college, and that the college achievement rat race might be another layer of this stress cake that we're trying to disentangle, right? That in addition to being sort of posited and bubble wrapped from everyday stressors, like I don't like dogs, I don't like broccoli, I don't like Brussels sprouts, you also have this enormous pressure on your back to get into Williams. And if you don't get into the school that has an acceptance rate of like 5.1%, then you're a failure. And that combination of I never have to feel this kind of I'm protected from these anxieties, my everyday life, but also I'm given this unbelievably difficult achievement expectation for my parents and for my world. I think the combination of that is unbelievably stressful to a lot of upper middle class kids. And it should be said that while income is not asked about in the CDC survey, ethnicity is enforced in this country, a relatively close proximity for income, and the fastest growing anxiety rates, the fastest growing sadness rates in the country were among white kids more than Hispanics, more than black kids more than any other demographic. Sadness and

SPEAKER_250: hopelessness is rising fastest for white kids. Is that a way of saying that the privileged kids can

SPEAKER_28: afford to be sad? And you know, the maybe the kids who have less privilege are experiencing a little

SPEAKER_255: more hardship, perhaps a lot more hardship and getting more resilient. Like is this actually just testing bias? Like do we just know that these kids are anxious because we're able to ask them? That's a really, really great question. And it is absolutely a question that my wife asked. So

SPEAKER_210: there's a I would say two things. One, I think it is well understood within the clinical psychology world that there is a testing bias a representative bias that that higher income people are more likely to use language like I suffer from generalized anxiety disorder versus just feeling like well, my life is objectively difficult, I make minimum wage salaries, and it's difficult to pay rent. But I but I don't I don't tell pollsters that I have generalized anxiety disorder. So to a certain extent, there's a representation angle here. But how do we know that this isn't just representation? Well, look at the objective data, suicides are going up hospital ER admits for teens who self harm is going up. Suicide attempts are girl are going up eating disorders are going up in places that treat eating disorders are seeing more cases. So it's not just a polling answer that we also have objective data that

SPEAKER_256: seems to indicate that this is a real world phenomenon, and not just a representative phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01: Mm hmm. I feel like that's, this is where we should make the turn into some of these other stressors too, because the parenting is one of the four. So you've got a certain segment that has like this bubble parenting, and they can't kind of figure out how to like function in the world, then you have all of these other factors. I know that Jason is super passionate about the conversation around social media. That's listed as your number one. Do you think that's like the actual number one? How big a factor is that for kids?

SPEAKER_209: To be totally honest with you, I listed them by how frequently I heard them offered as answers.

SPEAKER_210: Um, I'm pretty ambivalent myself on on what the big story is, I do think that it's a jambalaya, the very last paragraph of my article, I think the article might have been shared in the in the stream, but very last paragraph. My article is my attempt to synthesize all the answers. I think there's, there's no question you have to look at social media, all of these subjective and objective measures of negative teen mental health started to increase in 2011 2012. What was happening then? This is Gene Twenge's big argument. What was happening in 2011 2012? Was it the Great Recession just started? Nope, it was over and actually unemployment was starting to decline. Was it some big other cultural trend? No, it really was smartphone penetration passing 50% and the mainstreaming of social media plus smartphones. And I think that if you look at the culture that is created by the internet, it's a culture that there's there's some studies that have shown that the kind of emotions that go viral on the internet are high arousal negative emotions. So not just mere sadness, but

SPEAKER_211: outrage, anger, fear, absolute, they're deplorable, and they're horrible. And everyone give me 1000 likes for saying so. If you go to therapy, and get CBT, have a have someone give you cognitive behavioral therapy, they will push back against every high arousal negative emotion that comes to you. So we have on the internet a world that is essentially the hellscape for clinical psychologists like if clinical psychologists were going to design a world that was like, perfectly imperfect for mental health,

SPEAKER_210: they would design social media and the internet, it's just a terrible place to be for mental health. And you see this over and over and over again. And so I think it's impossible to fully disentangle the effect of social media, then finally, and I'll stop talking and throw this back to you guys in a second. But um, you know, you can just believe Instagram, you know, Instagram has done its own internal surveys, which has basically said, my summary, our product is like alcohol, lots of people love it. And it's good for them. And it's pro social for them. And they have a fine time with it. But there is a minority that finds that this stimulus makes them dependent and depressed. That's social media.

SPEAKER_211: I love Twitter. But like it absolutely makes some people dependent and depressed. And I think we need

SPEAKER_210: to be sort of sophisticated in our analysis of social media to say, this is not rat poison,

SPEAKER_266: it's alcohol. Fine for many. Terrible for some.

SPEAKER_267: Well, and if you combine it with the sushi, this, the socializing factor that you mentioned,

SPEAKER_32: and you can actually dovetail it with parenting, a lot of parents, you know, will say like, okay, you can use your device, this becomes like, um, a substitute for parenting, or, you know, them going out and experiencing hardship in the world, they just put their device in front of their face, and they just consume whatever's on YouTube or Instagram. And so it's not just that they're going into social media. And that's the hellscape. I think it's pretty good description of it. Um, they're removing socialization. So it's what it's taking away at the same time. So it's like double, it's just, it couldn't be a more horrible combination. And I guess this leads to, if you were the person making the decision, and let's say the government had the ability to regulate uses of social media and smartphones, what would be the minimum age that you would set reasonably for social media

SPEAKER_247: for kids and teens? Yeah, as someone as someone without kids, and who really doesn't research kids,

SPEAKER_210: I definitely, I don't have a confident answer. Um, I think you'd probably want to start by making it harder for tweens to use a product that they're not supposed to use, right? Like, my understanding is that it's widely understood that kids who theoretically shouldn't be able to get onto Instagram are utterly on Instagram, and all their friends on Instagram. And it's like, you know, it's I don't know, it's like drinking in some rural county where absolutely everybody is drinking by the time they're 17 or something, or urban county, I don't want to be rural or something. Um, and

Chamath Palihapitiya: so I think you have a totally different way of looking at it. I can take that bullet for you, Derek, you're 100%. I was like, oh, yeah, no, that's my cat. These hell bellies are just cracking

SPEAKER_276: cases of Bud Light. They love it. Yeah, right. Accurate. Accurate. So I do think that a minimum

SPEAKER_210: age is probably appropriate. Um, beyond that, you know, I wrote an article called social media is attention alcohol. And I made two points in that article. Point number one is that we have a minimum age for a relatively strongly kept minimum age for alcohol. And we should have one for for social media as well. A legal limit, not just let Snapchat and Instagram decide for themselves what the bottom line is. Um, the other and this is a little bit more touchy feeling. So maybe you can like sort of help me unpack this. But um, we have like a language, and like a sort of social infrastructure

SPEAKER_211: around alcohol dependency, we say, Hey, man, um, you need you like, maybe you should give me your keys tonight. I think you've had too much. Hey, you should you should have a water. You know, I think we've had enough today. Cup of coffee time. Yeah, we have interventions for people. And it's not it's not it's, it's not weird to have an intervention for a friend. It's it's a it's a part of culture. But we don't have these things for social media, really. We don't really have like

SPEAKER_210: a norm of like friends texting each other saying you need to get off Twitter. We don't really have

SPEAKER_282: like, I mean, I mean, maybe we might, you know what we don't eat. Well, yeah, you have what we don't have I would say later in the space, you're the you're the bleeding edge. But I think what we

SPEAKER_01: don't have actually is widespread agreement that online activity causes offline harm. Like we don't,

SPEAKER_63: you know, we have not come to because there are too many people making too much money and getting too

SPEAKER_01: much attention on social media for us to say at a blanket level, this is bad for people. Like, we still don't necessarily agree on that. And so the idea that we would somehow translate that, that seemingly obvious harm into parenting or policies for our kids, it feels like we're still

SPEAKER_210: pretty far away from that. Yeah, we are. And just and just to finish the social infrastructure like list because it's a lot of things like, yeah, I love whiskey. I collect wine. Like, I love alcohol. But I also like, not through any like, incredible intelligence just know that I shouldn't like have x amount of whiskey like on a Tuesday, right? Like if I want to try some whiskey and like, you know, drink it while watching basketball, I don't feel that bad. But like, if I'm dipping back and back into the whiskey on Tuesday afternoon, when I'm alone, I'm like, no, I shouldn't be doing this. This is this is clearly me enjoying the whiskey a little bit too much.

SPEAKER_294: It's a little challenging when you're a Knicks fan, but continue.

SPEAKER_218: Um, yeah, easy for you to say. Banning Knicks fandom might actually be a really good pro-social policy from the federal government. That solution for depression.

SPEAKER_298: The depression charts are receding. What happened?

SPEAKER_210: Um, so but I, but we've been like this. So there's that understanding. We don't have like a similar understanding. I think about social media use. Like there's no search in general warning. That's just like Derek, you know, Jason, Molly, if you guys have like posted three times today, by the time by your fourth post the day, like you should really start to reconsider your posting behavior. Like there's just, there's just no, again, I call it social infrastructure and that's a little broad, but it's just because like, we just don't have a model. You were just, you were right on this. We don't have a communal sense of like, what behavior is good? What behavior is bad? What's pro-social and what's maladaptive?

SPEAKER_01: Well, and we know that tobacco and alcohol will kill you on a physical level. And yet we don't necessarily think of the brain as a part of the body, right? So it's, it is doing the same kind of damage. We just haven't quantified it in the way of like lung cancer or liver, you know, cirrhosis, right? Um, but now let's talk about the news. This I think is what Jason meant by the self-reflective

SPEAKER_299: part of this. Yeah, that was the part I thought when I read your tweet storm, I retweeted one part of it and I was like, you do like the news is obsessed, right? Like with bad news.

SPEAKER_301: Mm hmm. Yes, it is. Uh, and there's, and there's a couple layers to this first layer.

SPEAKER_209: Um, the news has a bad news bias. We, we, we know this. I mean, you know, like here we are

SPEAKER_203: talking about teen sadness. Um, like news has a bad news bias. If it bleeds, it leads like this is an old,

SPEAKER_210: old adage. We don't need to, uh, to go too deeply into that. One layer down is that, like I said, news now travels through social media distribution streams and social media has a high arousal, negative emotion bias, right? Outrage, anger, uh, fear. So you have a product with a bad news bias, traveling through distribution streams with a high arousal, negative emotion bias. Then I think you have like the readers, you have people who read and share. And I, I unfortunately think that people go online for the purpose of like, dipping into maladaptive feelings. They want to go online to feel that like frisson of anger and outrage. They're like, who's the enemy? Who's the, the, the antagonist of Twitter today? And how can I jump on a quote tweet and make fun of them? Like we, I think if we're, if we're reflective, like we often are our worst selves when we're online participating in the discourse, capital T, capital D, the discourse, we're often our worst versions of ourselves. And if you put it all together, I just think that. People, especially teens are like more aware of the news than they used to be. Uh, my wife and her friends, uh, who are, who are clinical psychologists say this, like kids will come in to the therapist's office and they'll say like, I'm depressed about climate change. I'm depressed about the American homicide rate. I'm depressed about enter some huge global unsolvable problem here. And I think that's new, I think it's kind of new, like being, being obsessed with, with the news is, is, you know, we just call them news hounds, but now we don't even like, you know, we're like, we're like media junkies. We don't even use those terms anymore because it's kind of assumed that everyone's a media junkie. Everyone's swimming in the news currents all the time. And I'm just not sure it's good for us. It's possible that news is like social media is like alcohol. A little bit can be good. A lot is pretty consistently pernicious. And so I think that the, that there's something about the, the quality of the news cycle that might be a contributor here.

SPEAKER_01: They know, I mean, kids know everything I can speak from experience here. My kid knows everything. And there are times when that, you know, it's like, I see him and the first thing in immediately in the morning is him like talking about some terrible, I mean, I have had to be like, dude, I can't take this like buzzkill first thing in the morning, like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And on top of that, they have immature frontal lobes. Like they can't then they and they're not very old. They have no sense of context, no sense of sort of historical perspective, the idea that that this might have happened before, let alone the ability to sort of sniff out the misinformation.

SPEAKER_209: Yeah. And this is this is not the you're right, like teen brains are different. This is a point

SPEAKER_210: that Lauren Steinberg quite interviewed, both for a book that I wrote called Hitmakers, which is there. Um, and for this article, uh, Lauren Sandberg makes this really important point, which is that teen brains, unlike children's brains, and unlike adult brains, are extraordinarily sensitive to peer influence. And he's done a lot of studies on this, but basically, teens care more about what their peers think about them. than any other age group. So why is that important with social media? Well, it means that teens are choosing to dip into this world, where people are constantly up and down voting every aspect of people's lives, it seems like a perfect environment for them to develop all sorts of negative social comparison disorders. And that's just another reason why social media might be sort of particularly pernicious for teenagers.

SPEAKER_28: In in the good news column. Um, it feels like the country, uh, is becoming aware of this. We have politicians becoming aware that social media is driving politics, not always in a good way. We have podcasting, uh, which we're soaking in right now. And you have a ringer podcast as well. Mm hmm. Our pockets on the ringer network. You look at, uh, I think a reaction to this people taking social media diets, people opting out of social media. And I really think podcasting has become. Like the antidote for it. It's like, you know what? Binge drinking, not fun, but you know, hey, doing this, uh, podcasting thing and people getting addicted to long form, authentic discussions seems to be a correction to it. I also think the Instagram leak could have been like the tipping point of, you know, society being like, yeah, this stuff is not good. Uh, and you have

SPEAKER_32: certain countries banning it and you have China, you know, it's an authoritarian country. They can do things like this. We can't because we have this concept that people have choice and free will, but they're just like, yeah, you're not playing video games during the week and you get two hours of video games and, um, as heavy handed and as insane as like how they run their country can be at times. Um, they might be right. They might be right about the time limits.

SPEAKER_210: Uh, they, yeah, they are, you know, there's, there's a dollar of truth even to, uh, Chinese authoritarianism. I think, I mean, it comes from, it doesn't, it is, it's directionally accurate. It's just like the vector is way too strong, right? They recognize the time limits would be good, but rather than like suggest it, uh, they, they, they mandate it, which probably is itself, uh, uh, not, not very good, but I, I, I agree with you. I think that, you know, it, there are lots of answers to the questions that we are posing that really are a matter of like ancient wisdom. Like, I mean, to go back to just Buddhism and stoicism, um, but even like, even like existentialism and all sorts of like Judeo-Christian philosophies, like, you know, what's the serenity prayer, right? Like understand the difference between what you control, what you can control and what you can't like. These are ancient ideas. And I feel like, like being more aware of our own limits and of the limits, uh, of, of certain tools in our life would just be good for people. So maybe to a certain extent, this is, this is just about like a, a return at a national level, parental level and individual level to some of that ancient wisdom.

SPEAKER_310: I think it's such a great point. I, I, I have really thought about this deeply because, you know,

SPEAKER_06: raising kids and you'll be there soon. I'm sure Derek. Um, I, I came up with some simple rules, uh, and I, I actually talked to my kids about parenting, like six-year-olds and 12-year-olds

SPEAKER_28: have six-year-old twins. And I told them, I was like, you know, as your parent, I need you to be bored sometimes because all the great ideas I had in my life came when I was bored. And if you're using a device, it's just giving you entertainment constantly and you never experienced boredom. Therefore, you never have a creative idea. And so, you know, when we're skiing or whatever, there's no devices during the day and we'll watch a movie at night. It's a family discussion as to

SPEAKER_32: which movie we make a list of movies we want to watch. We talk about the movie, we talk about the director, we make it a little more of a ceremony to like watch it together and discuss it. And then, yeah, no more iPads in the morning. And then if we're at, you know, the ski house, it's, there's no devices, no screens until after the sun goes down and boy, was that a change. Yeah. And then a little bit of grit goes a long way. So one of the things I love about skiing has, you know, but one activity is it's hard. It's hard to get your ski equipment on. It's hard to get on the lift. It's

SPEAKER_125: like, it's arduous. It's a schlep. Yeah, it's a schlep of schleps of all schleps. And but once you get on the mountain, it's exhilarating. And then you have this like, okay, there was a reward for the

SPEAKER_06: schlep. It was worth the schlep and hiking and all that stuff. So I think, you know, we were free range kids, Molly and myself. I don't know about you, Derek. I think you're a little bit younger than us. We're Gen Xers. You're a millennial. I'm a millennial. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you

SPEAKER_316: got that. I saw the participation trophies behind you. That's right. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_317: And I'm like, it's really you guys passing all this anxiety on to the, I mean, congratulations. You filed this week. I get this. That's why you get a paycheck, Derek.

SPEAKER_320: Every week, every week you get a little trophy from the Atlantic.

SPEAKER_01: I don't know. Like, I will say, I don't know that I would recommend like, I think there's a, there is truth to the ancient wisdom. There is, there is a lot of truth to the, to the idea that what we need to do is acknowledge that our kids are sad and their brains are sick and work on that problem. I do not know that I would recommend my own childhood. Like, did it make me the mayor of apocalypse? Absolutely. Right. Like, yes, I did raise myself and everybody around me. And now I'm very tough as a result. Not ideal. Wouldn't necessarily give my kid that, right? Like, I, I don't, I think there's, I, I would be wary of bringing all the nostalgia. But wait, wait, wait, wait, but Molly, don't you think sometimes we live in a different

SPEAKER_125: world now. Molly, don't you think sometimes when you see these kids who are entitled and you're like, okay, they have it a lot easier than me. They've got all of this privilege that, you know, parents are going to pay for college. They don't have to have another school job. Don't sometimes you look at them and look at the outcome and say, I'm actually a happier person

SPEAKER_47: because I suffered more as a free range kid. Like this, this, I don't know what their

SPEAKER_01: outcome is going to be. I don't let's be, let's be honest about one thing. We don't know what their outcome is going to be. I was very sad all by myself, right? Like being a free range kid. And now I'm fine. We don't know what the, we know that there are higher rates of, you know, everything that you said objectively is a hundred percent true. We know that there are higher rates of suicide. We know there's terrible drug use. We know that there is like real concern and depression. We also don't know for sure that those kids are all going to be sad in college and be sad in the

SPEAKER_209: workforce. And right. Like I'm not sad now. Yeah, I think, you know, we're asking, we're touching on what are essentially some of the most important, but also deepest and, you know, hardest to answer

SPEAKER_210: questions of like the human condition and like, not to, you know, end us in like the most highfalutin possible way. But, um, you know, I think the goal can't be happiness. The goal can't be like permanent happiness because that like, that doesn't really exist, right? We don't want to make the North star something that we're never going to achieve. The goal is how do we keep persistent sadness from growing 85% for a gen over a 10 year period for generation, right? Like that is the goal. How do we stop the inexorable rise of persistent sadness? And there I think, you know, you just have to take all the ingredients and like put it in the jambalaya, like overuse of social media has to be important. One thing we didn't talk about, but I'll just quickly mention, go right through the decline of sociality and the increase of loneliness is a huge deal. Like it just seems like kids are physically phenomenologically alone a lot alone with a screen a lot. Like they don't go on walks with their parents. They don't work. They don't drive. They go on dates less. They hang out with their friends in physical world environments less. They are alone with an Apple screen for, or Google, uh, for a lot of Samsung, a lot of their life. Just want to make sure I got all the manufacturers. Well done. 87% market share done. And there we go. Um, so, and then on top of that, you want, you want to, I think, think about the downsides of accommodative parenting. And you want to think about the fact that people in my industry are filling the interwebs with a lot of negative, scary, sad, including, frankly, this article. So, but like, I think that you, if you put it all together, you have the beginning of the understanding of, okay, this is why persistent hopelessness and sadness

SPEAKER_337: is increasing. And maybe if we just pull down in each of these ingredients, that line will just

SPEAKER_28: bend a little bit. Normalize. Yeah, it feels like you can normalize it just by dialing back each of these 20%. I guarantee you're going to see a compounding effect. It's very hard to say no screens. It's very hard to say, you know, you got to suffer more, you know, you got to socialize 100% of the time. But if you do a little bit of each, I bet you, you know, it will turn around. And

SPEAKER_125: then how this is like this crazy narcissism, where everything is about the person and nothing is about, you know, helping the rest of the world or going out and working like, I think people not

SPEAKER_13: working or not, I literally I'm like, we need church. Well, I mean, church was like about

SPEAKER_01: helping, or synagogue, or synagogue. Yeah, exactly. I mean, what we and I guess what I mean by that is community and a sense of duty. Like, if something other than yourself, like, I mean,

SPEAKER_125: something really gets super narcissistic when you're like, I'm posting to tick tock and Instagram, my feelings, my score on the video game, like, everything is about the person nothing's about, hey, I'm on the chess club, I'm in the theater club, I'm going out with my crew, we're doing things together. I'm on the ski team, whatever, like, it can't always be about this individual, which I think is the parents create, which we saw here, I won't say the specific town, but this example you gave of the pressure to get into these colleges is so pernicious in the Bay Area, that we had so many suicides going on in a particular area that we had to do a media blackout, because they felt we were now getting into induced suicide territory, Contagion effect. Contagion was happening and two or three people would be jumping in front of the train. They had to put a security guard in front of the train. And it was all based on these insane parents were like, if you don't go to Harvard, Stanford, whatever, like, you know, how do you

SPEAKER_47: succeed and then you look around you and everybody's a CEO or venture capitalist who went to Harvard or

SPEAKER_50: Stanford because like Hollywood, all the beautiful people go to Hollywood, all the Stanford Harvard grads come

SPEAKER_47: here. And all the kids can't statistically be the same as the most successful people they see in their orbit, just like every kid in Hollywood cannot become Tom Cruise.

SPEAKER_209: I think that you know, as soon as I wonder whether, um, whether people in positions, it's so typical for people in positions of power or success to give graduate school speeches about sort of the path to

SPEAKER_210: their success, like, here's the ladder to walk up to get to where I am, it might sometimes just be useful to have them give graduate speeches about what's still hard in their life, to make the point that

SPEAKER_211: like, there is no, this isn't 100 meter dash, there's there's no marathon, there's no finish line, like people who you think have succeeded have passed like the final threshold of success,

SPEAKER_210: they still feel stress, they still feel sadness, they still feel occasional hopelessness, they still feel everything that's like endemic to the human condition. So like, you're thinking about like, oh, if I get into Stanford, I'll be happy. And then you get into Stanford, and you're like,

SPEAKER_211: holy, this is really stressful. But if I get into like Stanford MBA school, then I'll be happy. Yeah, you get into the graduate school of business. And you're still like,

SPEAKER_356: Oh, well, if I get my series A, I'll be happy. Exactly. And it never in and it never caught like

SPEAKER_28: that. By the way, it's quite the opposite. You literally have to, you know, as best I can see having, you know, being a kid from Brooklyn, who now is, you know, seeing it up close and personal. It's it really is about that foundation of childhood and then defining success for yourself and actually understanding yourself enough to know what makes you happy. And then constructing a life around, hey, you know, what makes me happy? I like doing my podcast. I like going skiing with my kids. Okay, I'm going to do more of that. I like going to this. I like this music. I like the sports team, I'm going to indulge in that I like playing basketball, I'm going to do that like, you actually have to take some amount of agency in your life. And I think the problem with social media is you're giving up all agency, you're just like, whatever's on the screen is what I'm doing. You're not constructing a life. You're just being programmed by an algorithm. All these devices right in the garbage. That's my advice for parents.

SPEAKER_125: Honestly, I like garbage. And it goes for you to journalists.

SPEAKER_365: Enough with the Twitter. What did you think?

SPEAKER_262: Yeah, Twitter is how you found me. I do think there are some good things that happened.

SPEAKER_368: Yeah, what did you think? Of the New York Times. Tweet less, Derek. Tweet less, maybe. There's more wood behind the arrows.

SPEAKER_209: There's no question that I think he's directionally right. I think I think he's directionally right that a lot of journalists use Twitter in a pernicious way. And that

SPEAKER_210: specifically, I don't just mean that like being online is pernicious. I mean that it essentially serves as a kind of shelling point or like contagion device for journalists who arrive at the same opinion. Like I just see this so many times that like for all sorts of reasons, because you constantly have to externalize, you constantly have to publish what you think about everything, that well, once everything is externalized and published, it's easier for everyone to understand where like their peers are, and so they come around the same ideas. But like the way that you understand the way that the world works is by experimenting, having a diversity of views. And it's really difficult, I think, to have like a group that understands itself to be a single peer group, publishing a diversity of views without arriving at sort of a single point. And so I think that social media is like probably pretty bad for that, because it hurts our ability to understand reality. At the same time, like I love Twitter, like Twitter is how I taught us how I learned about the around about everything, I try to do a very purposeful job of following people who I agree with and disagree with, who are conservative and libertarian and liberal and leftist, I tried to expose myself to all these few points. And then I also tried to not react when I'm angered. Because inevitably, if you have a lot of different viewpoints in your stream, you're going to see something that's outrageous. You're like, Oh, that's so stupid. How can I think that? But you're like, wait, that is by design. I did that I purposely exposed myself to like whatever a paleo conservative Marxist, because I wanted to understand what a Marxist would think about problem XYZ. So if I'm reacting with anger, I'm reacting to my own mistake, like this is what the service is for. And too often, I just see that people are like, just going online to have a food fight that the metaphor that I use sometimes for Twitter is that Twitter is a library with a with a food fight in the lobby, like you walk into the library in order to like learn about the world. But then you just like see a bunch of people throwing tomatoes. And you're like, that looks fun. And you just end up throwing tomatoes at someone. But if you just pass the lobby, you can get in the elevator, go up the go up the floors, and there's a beautiful library of information and views beyond it. But getting out of that lobby is

SPEAKER_06: really hard. Yeah, sure. The curation you're doing is critically important. I listened to a range of podcasts with people I vehemently disagree with, because I like to be more informed and understand

SPEAKER_32: their position. Something happened where you had to pick a side. And I think that's like one of these very weird things that has happened because like a second order effect of social media is like if

SPEAKER_125: you're not picking a side, well, you don't get the rewards of retweets and likes and followers. So it's just so much easier. And it happens to media outlets, too. It's just easier to be the New York Times and be like, we're the anti Trump and then Fox where the pro Trump and okay, you know,

SPEAKER_28: Rachel Maddow, Ben Shapiro, you're going to get more ratings than if you're the Atlantic and you're like, let's be thoughtful and think this through or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Hey, let's let's try to find reality here. It just doesn't result in as many subscribers, which is sort of a weird thing.

SPEAKER_210: I think you're probably right. I think there's probably a business, a business incentive to pick a side and monetize anger and outrage all those emotions that go aerodynamic online.

SPEAKER_365: Um, and it's pretty hard, but important. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, don't you think Trump, Molly really exacerbated it? It felt like the New York Times was just like,

SPEAKER_32: hey, this is gonna work. Let's go deep into this Trump thing. And then MSNBC and then Fox and other

SPEAKER_01: folks went the other way. Yes or no, right? Like I think that things got more polarized without a doubt. And so and and that sold like there's a whole conversation we can have about incentives and media incentives and the question of what brings you money and gets you attention and makes you a brand and all of that is still wrapped up in social media and what happens on Twitter where you know, I was actually I got distracted because I was looking up this old interview that we did with George Lakoff, the neuro linguist. Yeah. Um, and one of the things he talks about is that actually this I'm derailing us a little bit, but that, um, when you go and seek out, uh, opinions that oppose yours, often it has the opposite effect of what you think. You think that it's exposing you to those opinions and making you think about them, but because the brain is physical, and what you think and believe is a groove in your brain, then you have a response to the thing that you don't agree with that actually causes you to

SPEAKER_07: entrench your own beliefs more strongly. Huh? Right? Yeah, it was actually go,

SPEAKER_209: you have to go into it wanting to challenge your beliefs. If you just want to defend your position,

SPEAKER_210: if you go into it with a defensive mindset, and then read a point of view, it's the opposite of yours,

SPEAKER_203: then you're, you're just sort of prepared to punch back against it. I think that there's

SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think what he's saying is like, what he's saying is that there is a degree to it like that thoughts change your brain, he's talking about the physiology of it. And so if the thing that you like, there's the mindset part, I would love to go in and say, my brain doesn't have any grooves, and I don't have any lifelong opinions. But that's just not true. Like physiologically, information goes in is altered by the makeup of my brain. And then I like may or may not reject it. I'm not saying we should give up on finding different information. But it was just an interesting side note to the idea that exposing yourself to other ideas. Yeah, always makes you more considerate of them. Because in some ways, sometimes, especially now, when what we see is people radicalizing in opposition to each other. I think you could make the argument that the more

SPEAKER_07: seeking out a radical opinion doesn't necessarily make you more open minded.

SPEAKER_203: Yeah, I think that there's definitely something to the fact that like, there's been a couple studies that seem to indicate that as people gather more knowledge,

SPEAKER_210: they become more polarized. So rather than more information, moving them towards like some imaginary middle of the spectrum, gathering more information essentially gives them the sort of arsenal to feel like they can stake out one of the polls on that position.

SPEAKER_18: Yep. Side note, though, that was a total side note to the parenting thing. Sort of, except that

SPEAKER_01: understanding I think like, it goes back to this idea that understanding what kids are feeling now, understanding how the brain works, how we respond to social media, thinking of it as a physical condition, a part of our health is what fundamentally is going to give us solutions.

SPEAKER_394: Yeah, I agree. It's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: Such a good piece.

SPEAKER_28: Great, great job on the piece. I give you a and I think there is a special carve out. If you're writing about depressing things with the intent, intent matters of creating deeper understanding to

SPEAKER_06: help people solve the problem, you're not, it's not it bleeds, it leads, you weren't click baiting, you were trying to help the situation.

SPEAKER_209: Right. I appreciate that. And I'm going to inscribe it on the participation trophy just behind my shoulder over here. Absolutely. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_06: We're sending you an official this weekend starters participation trophy. You can follow

SPEAKER_28: Derek Thompson on the Twitter. DKTHOMP. And he's a staff writer at the Atlantic host of Plain English. I didn't know you had a podcast program. So sorry. What is Plain English? What

SPEAKER_400: do you talk about?

SPEAKER_210: Plain English? It's a podcast about four months old. It's with Bill Simmons Ringer Podcast Network. And it is a news podcast where I believe next week, we're going to talk about this article. So for those of you who are listening who think you know, 50 minutes isn't isn't quite enough for me to talk to listen to Derek talking about teenage anxiety, I would like another 45. There will be

SPEAKER_251: product for you.

SPEAKER_403: No, it's, it is literally, I'm exactly more the better.

SPEAKER_125: Here's the thing, you know, you have so much time when you're walking or on the treadmill, previously commuting, whatever. I think like, there's people are like, Oh my god, 40 minutes, it's like, 40 minutes is a great discussion over appetizers. Yes, there is. People have five hours a day. They watch video TV traditionally, I think it like four of them, three of them are going to go to podcasting because it's just such a better conversation for people. And it is, you get more voices that have time. And you're multitasking. Yes, you can listen while you're playing a video game, cooking dinner, whatever it is. And he's a contributor to here and now Mondays on NPR, and author of the book, which I actually have read, I forgot that that was your book. I really enjoyed your book hit makers, the science and popularity, the science of popularity in an age of distraction. Derek, we have to have you on again. You're a great guest. All right. Yeah, we'll talk soon. Bye bye. Thank you both. Thanks. Thanks.

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