transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:23] Welcome to Two Percent, I am your host, Michael Easter, and today we have a really great episode, and we're gonna be talking vices. Yes, vices. Everyone's got one, whether it's drinking, smoking or using social media, way too much. I guarantee if you are listening to this right now, you have a vice. Now, in this podcast, and in general in all of my work, I argue that the path to improving your life, it requires embracing short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. All of the things that help us in our life are usually tough in the short-term. But the thing about vices is they are the opposite. They give us short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term growth. So how should we think about vices in a world where there are so many things that we can fall into that give us a little hit of pleasure, but maybe hurt us in the long run? To talk about this topic, we're going to be taking a very nuanced view. Because the thing about vices is if you can learn to leverage them for good, get all the good things from them, but avoid the downsides, they can actually enhance your life. We do not have to live like monks in order to live a good life. So we're going to be bringing on two people. First, we're going to bring on Dean Stattmann. He is a reporter at GQ magazine, and he had a very interesting and counterintuitive New Year's resolution that is totally opposite of dry January. After that, we're going to bring on Taylor Lorenz, who argues that social media is actually not addictive, but the information she gives you might help you use it in a way that helps you in the long run rather than hurt you. And then finally, I am going to open the curtain into my life, and I am going to tell you what my number one vice is. Now, if you listen to social media, you will think this thing is killing me. But if you actually look at the science, there is no harm in this vice I have. So I'll tell you what that is. Let's get into it. There have been a lot of conflicting reports about drinking and health over the past few years. So for most of time, scientific bodies said, if you have one or two drinks a day, that could actually help your heart health. But in the last handful of years, that has totally been flipped. And now a lot of people are saying no alcohol at all, that is gonna vastly improve your health. Now, I do think there is a bit of nuance in this topic. For example, take me, I do not drink at all. I've been sober for 11 years. And the reason for that is because my favorite drink, it was always the next one. And if you drink like that, you can rack up some life problems. But on the other hand, most people are having one to two drinks every now and then. And I think a big question is, is that enough to really hurt health? Well, a lot of people are arguing that it is, and it is affecting people's behavior. So I'm gonna read a couple stats here. Gallup recently found that drinking is at an all time low. So when the 70s up through about 2020, between 60 to 70% of the population drank. Now the figure is 54%. We also have wineries that are closing in Napa Valley because not enough people are buying wine. And I recently spoke to a friend who owns a restaurant in LA. And she said that a lot of LA restaurants are struggling because no one is drinking anymore and restaurants make a lot of money from alcohol sales. So big question here. Is drinking bad or can it be even good? I have a friend. His name is Dean Stattmann. I used to work with him at Men's Health Magazine. Very fitness minded, healthy guy. And he saw all this stuff out there about how not drinking is the answer to health. So we decided to jump on the wagon. He lasted about three months because he found that although his health scores on his fitness tracker did improve, a lot of really interesting things happened to his mental health and his social life. He wrote a piece about it in GQ. It is called Why My 2026 Resolution Is to Start Drinking Again. So we're going to bring on Dean, and we're going to talk about how his thinking on alcohol has evolved and what he learned in reporting this piece. All right, Dean, thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2:
[04:38] Pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1:
[04:39] So let's back up a little bit. It's summer of last year, and you decide you're going to stop drinking. Now, I think the context that's important for this is this wasn't like, oh, I got a DUI, I got arrested, I'm going through a divorce. What prompted all this?

Speaker 2:
[04:58] No, none of those things, thank God. I've been a journalist, a magazine editor for literally my entire career.

Speaker 1:
[05:07] That's how we met because we both worked at Men's Health and overlapped there.

Speaker 2:
[05:11] Yeah, and as you know, you can work in wellness, but it's not like, I guess, I don't know, like maybe accounting or something where you really do have this constant. It's every day is different. As these wellness trends come and go, you're covering them, you're learning about them. A lot of the time, you're actually trying things out yourself. And I think I had just seen the space evolve so much as it continues to do. There's so many ways you can optimize your wellness.

Speaker 1:
[05:44] Totally. And you also have, I will point out, because of your work, you work out all the time. Like a lot of your Instagram feed is like you're at the gym, you're doing like all these classes. And you really have to live this. So it's not like you, I mean, you weren't drinking that much, but then offsetting anything you did drink was like a thousand really good habits.

Speaker 2:
[06:05] Yeah. A lot of hit classes, a lot of running. And then there's the stuff that I just sort of personally love, you know, playing soccer every week. I got, again, just by virtue of covering this stuff, got like really into meditation for a while, got really into like sauna, cold plunge, red light therapy. I've been doing a bunch of high rocks races recently. And this is all throughout, you know, also just drinking like an ordinary person. But at a certain point, I just, you know, I did, I kind of got swept up in this like aura around the NA movement where you've got, you know, Tom Holland's beer row and Lewis Hamilton has like a tequila or agave or whatever. And then plus the other dozen plus celebrities that have like non-alcoholic beers and spirits and things now, you know, it's back in the day, it was like everyone had their like vodka, but now it's with a lot of these celebrities.

Speaker 1:
[06:58] Now it's no alcohol vodka. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[07:00] Yeah. I think at one point, actually the situation from Josie Shore had like a protein infused vodka, which was, which is quite funny if you pay attention to nutrition science.

Speaker 1:
[07:09] Did you drink it?

Speaker 2:
[07:10] Anyway. Oh, hell no. No, no, no. I mean, no shame. No shame to him. I think he actually is sober now.

Speaker 1:
[07:17] Yeah, he's sober now. Too much of the protein vodka.

Speaker 2:
[07:21] So I guess sort of point being, I just thought like, why not give this a try? I'm already doing so many other things for my health, for my wellness. Why not just sort of add this? The science, I think, has moved past the point now where it's like, it's healthy for you to drink a glass of red wine a day or whatever. We know now that that's really not true.

Speaker 1:
[07:44] From a physical health perspective, yeah, there was the...

Speaker 2:
[07:48] Physiologically, it's not a plus. It's likely a minus if you're sort of, I guess, going past a certain point, or probably in any quantity, really. Which is also really interesting, just by the way, about the new nutritional guidelines that the FDA just came out with, because they actually removed specifying the number or the amount of alcohol that is considered healthy, opting, rather, to just say drink less, which is quite interesting, because if you're already drinking an absolute shitload, like, what is less?

Speaker 1:
[08:19] If you're having 15 drinks a day, you're like, you know, 14. All right, I'm following the guidelines of 14.

Speaker 2:
[08:24] Yeah, yeah, you're just following the FDA's guidelines. Yeah, so I decided to just give it a try and see. I lasted about three months, which is not very long. And the reason, really, at its core, was that I didn't realize going in how alcohol is not just about alcohols. You might be pulling one lever, but it affects so many other things. It's not just like my night's gonna be exactly the same, except my beer didn't have any alcohol in it. It's got sort of roots that just goes so much further than I had imagined. I was noticing how it was affecting, not drinking, was affecting my friendships, my marriage even, and kind of just my general mood, outlook. You could maybe even go so far as to say mental health, maybe had I done this for longer.

Speaker 1:
[09:17] You said like you were, I can't remember exactly how you put it. It was good though. But basically you found yourself, you weren't as happy. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:
[09:24] Yeah, 100%. I'm someone who, I work from home, I'm writing most of the time, which is, as you know, it's a very solo activity. And so I used to really look forward to those times when I would go play, pick up soccer with the guys that I had in New York, and we'd go grab beers afterwards, or just going out on a weekend, whether it's a Friday night, going out for dinner with friends and then going to a bar afterwards, or just going to bars and bar hopping, someone's birthday, or you go out and then you decide like, hey, let's go somewhere else after this instead of just going home. That just got kind of decimated.

Speaker 1:
[10:06] Yeah, I feel like the big point here is that I think there's a massive difference between drinking alone at home, watching Netflix or whatever, and the context in which you were doing it in, which is I have a group of friends, we're going to this dive bar, or we've just finished this game of soccer. And in the piece, I liked how you got into the fact that in the context of a bar, when you're drinking, the conversation's almost changed. Where you had a great example where you're like, after the first beer, I'd be like, hey guys, we should all go to this music festival in Virginia. Let's roll, I got this, right? And those moments didn't happen as much when you stopped drinking. You did say that you would still occasionally go to bars, but you were like, the non-alcoholic beer, and it just kind of, it just changed things. So what was that like? And how did that manifest itself in those actual situations?

Speaker 2:
[11:01] Yeah, I mean, I'll give a great example just from a couple of days ago even, because now obviously that I'm not doing that experiment anymore. So my wife and I were out in the sort of like area of Zurich that we hadn't been to before. It's a sort of like industrial part. It's very much like like Shoreditch in London, kind of like a little Brooklyn sort of. And we were out looking for furniture. It was sort of a long day. And then we were about to go home and we saw this like just interesting sort of mysterious, most looking bar from the outside. It looked like almost like a little sort of warehouse, but it was like clearly marked like as a bar and had some cool like neon in the windows. And we were just passing by on the way to the train. And I was like, do you want to just grab a beer before we go? And she was like, yeah, let's do it. So we go inside and it turns out it's actually this huge, like badminton hall. And there were like eight games of badminton, like full court badminton going on in this like giant hanger. And in the front, there was this bar and it was so weird. It was almost like a kind of like, like Nashville, like honky tonk kind of theme. But it also had this like Japan sort of inspo. It was very, and visually it was very like, it was very cool. It was sort of like Wes Anderson meets like Kill Bill kind of aesthetic is the best way I can put it. And I was just like, I'm so glad we found this spot. And then we started talking to the bartender about the badminton, and turns out it's this like badminton club. And we ended up booking a corp for the next weekend, and that was last weekend that just passed. And so my wife and I went and played badminton, and we've never done that with each other before. We've never really done anything like that with each other before. And so had we not gone in for a beer, we wouldn't have found this cool badminton place, and we wouldn't have done this like great activity together as a couple. I would have never said you want to stop for a beer before you go home. Because like, in my mind, at least, I'm sure other people disagree, like, what's the point?

Speaker 1:
[12:56] I think for me, so I don't drink. I've been sober 11-something years. And the important point is that this was not prompted by, like, I listened to a four-hour podcast that told me alcohol is associated with all these risks. I was like the guy who would wake up and go, where did I park my car? And when you drink like that, that can come with some repercussions, obviously for your health, but obviously for your life, for your social relationships and things like that. I rarely miss alcohol. When I first got sober, I thought I missed alcohol. What I eventually realized is I didn't actually miss alcohol because I knew that if I have one drink, it's going to lead to X number more and that's not going to be good. What I missed was the setting of bars in the sense that you walk into a bar and everyone's relaxed. It levels this playing field. People have a warmness and it's not awkward if someone's sitting next to you to just start talking to the dude next to you. Whereas if you're like, I don't know, a counter of a Wendy's or like sitting, like you start talking to the dude at the Wendy's next to you, he's going to be like, why the hell are you talking to me, dude? But it's in that bar setting, it's like people, there's like a certain sort of social comfort there. There's a warmth, there's a sense of like, with my work obligations, I could just be like, okay, now I can just finally relax. And I do think that bars are unique in giving us those situations where like, I would just feel like I let off. And so for me, like after getting sober, I've been like, okay, where can I find that that isn't a bar? That's not always easy. And so I'm trying to say is like, bars have this like unique sociality to them that doesn't necessarily come from a place that isn't serving alcohol. And it sounds like you realized eventually through this experiment, oh, I was getting something akin to that as well. And then when that got removed, you go, well, why the hell is my mental health weird? Like, why am I not having these wacky conversations with my friends? Why are we not like connecting as much? And it all went back to the fact that you had a beer in your hand and you were the type of person that would just have one or two.

Speaker 2:
[15:12] Right. I mean, you described the bar kind of environment perfectly. And then in a very stark contrast to that, like during that three month stint, I ended up in a couple of situations where I was standing in, you know, typical literal social circle of, you know, five, six people talking, no one's drinking. And this wasn't just like people happen not to be drinking in that moment, but like people who aren't drinking. And for health reasons, to me, or whatever reasons really. But it felt like there was just this sort of, in the piece I called it like a LinkedIn coded coldness, because it almost felt like we were like waiting in a room before going into like a job interview. Like, I felt like everyone had their kind of PR face on. And it just, it just felt weird. And maybe it made me sort of in the moment, feel like, well, I don't like this whole drinking thing. But I found that people, a lot of the time, the people I was encountering who, who were specifically sober in the wellness scene, were like people who, it felt like that was like an important part of their personality. Like it seemed like very few conversations went by without people announcing in some form or fashion that like, or like making it known that they don't drink. I just think that it made things, conversations just feel a little more like edited. Guarded is a good word. Guarded, yeah. I think this really clicked for me when I connected with an anthropologist for the piece, Ben Tannenbaum, who looks into this stuff for a living, and he told me about this concept of costly signaling, where you do something to inflict, incur a cost, quote-unquote, upon yourself, do something negative to yourself, as almost as a social buy-in, so that people trust and see that, oh, this person's let their guard down. So in this case, it's alcohol because alcohol is something that's not necessarily good for you health-wise. But it's one of the ways we subconsciously or subliminally let people know like, hey, I'm just here to hang out. You know what I mean? I just want to chat to you, get to know you, there's no ulterior motives here. I think that's one of the reasons why alcohol does serve as this social lubricant and then in the absence of that, you really feel it when you're paying attention to that.

Speaker 1:
[17:46] Yeah. There's a book that I love, it's called Little Chapel on the River. It's written by this lady whose name is Wendy Bounds. She's a friend and after 9-11, she moved up the Hudson River to a town called Garrison, and she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and she took a job at this bar called Guinan's. It's like this old pub in this town, and the book really focuses on the relationships that were built in this bar in this little town and how it was really the focal point of the town. So you would have people come in, there were regulars, the place didn't serve any hard alcohol, it was beer only. And she wrote about how people would come in who had totally different viewpoints politically, totally different backgrounds. But in that setting, any disagreements were really dropped. Like people would give each other shit, they'd rib each other about whatever, but it was like people would just connect who otherwise would have never connected, and that could really only happen in that bar setting. And I think that that, to your point about the anthropologist you spoke to, it goes back to that idea you pointed out of costly signaling. And I think when you look at for most of time, bars were these places where people would go to connect, and people have been drinking less, but I do feel like since 2020, the rise of sort of the health wellness podcast sphere, which granted I'm part of, I think that's tapered off, and we're realizing that in the sort of quest for optimal health, and you pointed out like the perfect whoop score, which tracks a bazillion different data points.

Speaker 2:
[19:25] Yeah, 100%. And look, I still wear the golden handcuff over here. I maybe don't check it as often as you're supposed to.

Speaker 1:
[19:36] Nothing you're drinking, you're like, yeah, I can't look at that score.

Speaker 2:
[19:39] Dude, I mean, everyone who's ever worn a whoop and has had a beer in their life knows that the effect is, it's incredible. It'll drop your recovery score faster than anything. I think part of this too was, again, being in this space, you obviously also come across a lot of people who are kind of taking things to the maximum and spending most of their time doing things that are optimizing their body. And at a certain point, I was like, we're all, not to get grim or anything, but we're all going to die. We haven't gotten to the point yet where immortality is something we've discovered. And so with the assumption or the understanding that we all do have a sort of limited time here, it's like, do I want to be spending most of my time in the garage tuning the car and washing the car? Or do I actually want to be out there fucking driving it and enjoying it? And so I think I got to a point where somewhere in those three months when I just realized kind of cost benefit here. What am I gaining by not drinking? And absolutely I was gaining things. I mean, whoop could tell you that. I was waking up feeling great, no more hangovers, I saved so much money. I just was more clear headed in the mornings. I could have an earlier start to the day. But on the other hand, everything that I was trading off and it's not like I stopped getting invited to things. It was more like I started actually removing myself from things. I don't want to go bar hopping with friends if I'm not drinking alcohol. Like it's so boring. And you're just watching your friends get absolutely slushed, the conversation becomes increasingly annoying for you. And yeah, it's like there's just so many better uses of my time in that situation. And I think ultimately I kind of waited out and I was like, you know, I'm not going to stop doing other things. I'm literally just going to reintroduce drinking. And, you know, not like claiming or having the illusion that this is like a good thing for my health. But I just felt that ultimately net-net, it actually was positive when I factored everything in. And I think that's maybe just one thing good to consider in wellness generally, that you don't have to do everything. And it's important to, you know, manage your priorities as well and still have fun, because otherwise, what's the point?

Speaker 1:
[22:07] I think you could argue that it was a net positive for your health. I mean, when you just look at the data on the importance of being social and having strong social connections, if that thing is enhancing that, like, that's a really important part of overall health and lifespan. And I think your analogy to a car is perfect. Because you were not, now that you're back drinking again, it's not like you're just redlining all the time. You're not just, like, ripping that thing around 24-7, redlining, never changing the tires, never changing the oil. You're living in a way that you're doing all these things to maintain the car. It goes in the garage every day. You top off the oil. You make sure the tires are looking good. It's aligned. But you also are willing to, like, go out and drive it. That's why you have the damn car. So it's really like, I think the takeaway of the average person is like finding a balance between those things, where people can get so caught up in health practices, optimizing, that you forget to actually ask yourself, well, why am I doing all this stuff in the first place? And a lot of times it's like, well, so I can live better. And then you look at all those things and you go, is this actually making me live better or is this just making me a slave to all these routines for this possible tomorrows and my whoop score? And you just like forget to live in the process.

Speaker 2:
[23:23] Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And something that I also find myself keeping in mind is wellness is a big business right now. You see categories just being absolutely blown up by one product takes off and now you've got seven competitors. You're seeing brands that did one thing really well now coming out with their line extensions and the version 2.0 and the pro and whatever. And so I think part of it is also just remembering that this is a business and people are trying to sell you things.

Speaker 1:
[23:52] I think what's interesting too is when you really look at the data on alcohol and health, obviously some people say any amount is toxic, never do it. But a lot of those studies are not actually that great. There's a guy Vinay Prasad and he was an MD. You might've heard of him. He was the former Director of the Center for Biologics and Evaluation of Research and he did this deep. He's like kind of one of those guys that really peels back studies and goes, okay, what's really going on here? He asked a lot of questions. When he looked at the research, he was like, yeah, drinking a lot isn't good for us. We know that. At the same time, if you're having one or two drinks every now and then, there's really nothing we can say that's going to tell you that is going to take time off your life or really affect your health in a way that's going to change your lifespan. So we had this really great quote in a Substack post, which I will link to. They said, advising people who don't drink to start drinking daily is silly and unproven. And advising people who are drinking a little bit each day to stop is silly and unproven.

Speaker 2:
[25:07] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there's actually another piece that I wrote recently, also for GQ, which kind of touches on something very similar, which is basically it was looking at the data. And this was very good data. This is from like a decades long study that's been going on. And they were sort of looking at like, what is a more effective lever to pull when it comes to longevity? Is it starting to work out or is it stopping drinking? And overwhelmingly, it's fitness. If you're going to change one thing, like if you're a relatively, if you're a sedentary person that's drinking, and again, drinking like within sort of the bounds of common sense, you're going to do a lot more for your longevity and your health span by upping your activity than you will by reducing or stopping alcohol consumption.

Speaker 1:
[26:02] When your GQ piece came out, because there is so much information out there about how people shouldn't drink now, what was the reaction you got? Was it like a collective everyone thought, oh God, thank God someone said this, because I've been thinking it, or was it like the Brian Johnson followers got their pitchforks from their labs?

Speaker 2:
[26:24] No, I think they'll be mad at me for other stuff that I've written more recently. But it's interesting that you asked because the response to that piece has been at least five fold. I mean, that's a conservative estimate more than anything else I've ever written that's gone online, like in a positive way. I don't think I got a single negative comment or DM. I normally don't even really get DMs for stories that I write, to be honest with you. Maybe if GQ or whichever outlet I've written it for, posted on social, there'll be comments there. But personally, I don't normally get a ton of direct feedback. For this piece, I did, I got a ton. And it was all just like, some of it was just like, hey, nice story, I enjoyed how you reported it and wrote it. But a lot of it was like, like, dude, like, I hear you, like, I also kind of tried, like, I felt the same thing. There was a lot of like, I feel the same way, I had the same or a similar experience. There was also some really kind of funny feedback. Someone reached out to me with a, so I'll say I got at least three or four people get in touch and say that they were forwarded the piece by people in the beverage industry, and that someone went out of the way to tell me that the story has actually been making the rounds in corporate beverage America and being kind of being like waved as a flag of like, we still have a fighting chance. I mean, the Gallup data that came out last year, drinking being down or self-reported drinking, which is always self-reported, you never know exactly, but down like 53 or 54 percent. But I mean, really, I'm just one person. I wasn't reporting on a trend necessarily. But yeah, I mean, not that I'm gonna sort of say like, more people should like just start like drinking more again.

Speaker 1:
[28:15] Yeah, I feel like my big takeaway from this piece, given what you've written, your experience, my own experience, not drinking, is the way that I figured out that I had a drinking problem was that literally every problem in my life was caused by my drinking. So if that is you, probably don't drink. If you're more like Dean, where you are doing a hundred healthy behaviors, you go out, you have a couple of drinks in the context of friends, you have great conversations, you meet new people, you find badminton courts embedded in old railway stations of Zurich, that seems like it's probably adding to your life. So I think it takes a little bit of introspection to figure out where am I on that spectrum. But I think if you're more in the Dean spectrum, you maybe don't have to get super caught up in this idea that removing alcohol is going to vastly improve my health. I think it might actually do the, it'll either be neutral or it'll do the opposite.

Speaker 2:
[29:16] Yeah. And I think another takeaway for people too should be that, if you're not drinking, you don't have to start drinking in order to get the benefits of a more fluid social life, you know? Like I find that it's something that helped me kind of explore life more fully and open more opportunities, more doors that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. But every personality is different. I'm also like quite an introverted person. I think if you are not drinking and you find that you are just like thriving anyway, it's not like, oh, well, let's see what this could unlock for me. Like that guy said that it worked. Like you don't need to do that. Like I don't think any sort of KPI from like a fitness tracker is going to be what ultimately is what makes you make a certain decision here. Because when my whoop scores were at their best, I was probably at my like least happy. I think that it's more just doing like a holistic inventory of your life, a very honest, taking a very honest look at yourself and saying like, am I happy? What are the sort of roadblocks that I feel are sort of standing in my way from being happy? And then just sort of like chisel away at those based on what's causing them.

Speaker 1:
[30:32] Yeah. Feels like a great place, Dan. Thanks a lot for coming on, man. I'm glad you wrote the piece. I thought it was really smart. I think it was a good read in the context of all the information about this today. And I think you approached it really fairly and with a good, I'll call it sober head on. Thanks.

Speaker 2:
[30:50] I appreciate that. And yeah, great, great to be on here. This is definitely a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:
[30:56] All right. So maybe you don't smoke, you don't drink, you don't gamble, but you may have a certain vice as I do. And that is social media. The average person today spends more than four hours on average on their phone. Probably a lot of that is going to social media. So you are seeing a lot of attention being put on this idea that we are on social media way too much and it is causing us harm. Probably hearing about kids who are getting depressed from using social media too much, probably even adults as well. And in order to unpack this issue of whether social media is addictive or not and whether it hurts mental health, we have a really great guest. Her name is Taylor Lorenz. She's been reporting on this topic for a very long time. She is the author of a book called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet. She also has a podcast called Power User. It's a really good one. But the thing about Taylor is she does not think social media is addictive. And this has become a big debate in particular right now with some new rulings out of California and New Mexico that have deemed social media addictive. So we are going to bring Taylor on. We're going to ask her to defend her position of social media not being addictive. She's also going to talk about the real science behind social media use and mental health. Some of the underlying questions that need to be answered before we could even say social media is addictive. We recorded this about a week ago when some big news came out of the online look smacks in community. So we're going to unpack that as well. And I think in the course of this conversation, you will find that my mind shifted on a lot of these topics. For a lot of my career, I thought social media is a complete bane against society, that it is addictive. But she changed my opinion on some of these topics. So let's welcome Taylor right now. Taylor, thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 3:
[32:52] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[32:53] All right. First things first, what's your favorite social media platform?

Speaker 3:
[32:57] Oh, gosh, it's such a hard question. I honestly I love TikTok. I just could go down a rabbit hole forever. But this is toxic as a news junkie. I have to say, I still like X. It's very bad. It's full of misinformation since Elon took over. It's not a great platform. But for breaking news, there's just nothing better.

Speaker 1:
[33:19] I agree. Have you done the Blue Sky thing as well?

Speaker 3:
[33:22] I'm on there. Yeah. And I'm on Mastodon and Threads. I'm on all of them.

Speaker 1:
[33:27] How does Blue Sky compare to Twitter?

Speaker 3:
[33:31] Blue Sky has a lot of, and same with Threads, honestly, it has a lot of progressive people that quit over Elon. So it's like this kind of self-selected group. But there's also a lot of people that believe in open protocol technology on Blue Sky, which I appreciate. What does that mean? It's like developers. Well, so Blue Sky and Mastodon, they're both built in this federated model of social media, which is really different than how we think of it. It's kind of like how you have your phone number now, but if you switch, maybe you have AT&T, but if you switch to Verizon, you still have all your contacts and your service doesn't change. You could quit Blue Sky tomorrow and join a competitive service that's on the same federated network, and you would take all your followers with you.

Speaker 1:
[34:14] Oh, you take them.

Speaker 3:
[34:15] So that's kind of different than the rest of social media.

Speaker 1:
[34:18] OK, I like that. All right, I might have to dabble. All right, so what we're here to talk about is social media and whether or not it is addictive. So I think a lot of people would agree drugs, alcohol, those get lumped in the vice addiction category. And now recently, there's an argument that social media should be put in that category as well. What is your take on that?

Speaker 3:
[34:43] Yeah, so this is something that they've tried to argue for over 100 years before social media even existed. We had this idea of being addicted to media and communication as far back as the day of novels. There were novels that were banned for being too addictive. They tried to ban radio shows, soap operas, television, comic books, you name it. Also, just any form of new technology. I was reading some old articles from the 90s about Walkman and people listening to CDs. They were saying that actually listening to music as you walk through the world would fundamentally rewire your brain, and this was very dangerous. We needed to take the Walkman away from kids. I think a lot of these arguments made are not, I'm not a believer in them, honestly. That doesn't mean that I don't think social media is highly compelling and that people can't have extremely problematic compulsive use. It's just really important to distinguish that from addiction.

Speaker 1:
[35:42] Yeah. How do you see addiction then? Where's the difference?

Speaker 3:
[35:45] Yeah. Addiction is, I mean, there's a whole clinical definition of addiction, which just you cannot become addicted to consuming media, whether it's music, books, internet videos, etc. You can really enjoy it. You can do it compulsively, but you don't have a lot of symptoms of addiction. So for instance, a physiological withdrawal. You're not detoxing from social media. I mean, we use the language of addiction so colloquially, and I understand people using it as a shorthand, but it also does have a real clinical meaning. When we're writing laws around this stuff, we shouldn't rely on that clinical designation to write policies around speech and communication.

Speaker 1:
[36:34] Yeah, that makes sense. I have a question. Do you think that gambling can be addictive?

Speaker 3:
[36:38] The thing with gambling addiction, according to the people that I've spoken to about it, is you are constantly raising the stakes. There's a lot of compulsive behavior related to money, spending, et cetera. Really the reason that gambling is addictive is you are fundamentally losing money, which puts you in this economically precarious state and makes you increasingly desperate. People will be like, but what about you get dopamine from social media? Okay, you also get dopamine from listening to music. Are you a music addict because you listened to Nine Hours and you got nonstop dopamine from it? It's different. I think gambling is mostly considered a vice. The reason it has a negative outcome is because of our economic system. If we had a completely different economic system and nobody cared, money wasn't structured the same way, like could people gamble all day and not have a lot of harm? Yes, but a lot of it comes from our economic system.

Speaker 1:
[37:33] So the problem is that you could, in theory with gambling, when you push that to the most extreme degree, it ends in complete financial ruin and effectively the downsides are much higher than social.

Speaker 3:
[37:46] I think we need to talk about the downsides, right? And how realistic these downsides are, because I think a lot of that stuff is overblown. For instance, there's this, you know, a lot of very hyperbolic claims about social media and mental health, that widespread social media usage is leading to some sort of mental health crisis among children. That's just not borne out by data. Now, if you are, what we do know that is borne out by data is, it's not so much that social media is affecting your mental health as the way that you engage with social media is shaped by your mental state. If you're very depressed and you listen to really sad songs for five hours or go on social media and engage in a healthy way, that can make you sadder. Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you're to blame. Sometimes that content is given to you algorithmically. But I was talking to a friend recently who's going through a divorce, and her Spotify discoverer playlist has been very depressing. She was like, I feel like it knows that I'm going through a divorce, and it's feeding me this stuff. And we all feel the push and pull of these algorithms. And I don't want to discount that. What I would argue is that the way to counter that is through data privacy legislation so that these platforms cannot hyper-target us with highly engaging content rather than censorship of all content that we consider harmful.

Speaker 1:
[39:04] Yeah, I do think the fact that someone needs some sort of underlying, let's say, discomfort when they fall into overuse, it's almost like they have a pre-existing state, and then that gets filled by whatever thing. And you see that even with drug addiction. So things like, there's a reason why the opioid epidemic really hit Appalachia. It's because you had all these towns that were decimated by the loss of different industries. People couldn't make money. It was a depressing situation. And then you have this sort of influx of a substance that gives you this sort of short-term relief from these, from the circumstances that you find yourself in. And then you see this thing bloom.

Speaker 3:
[39:46] Which is, ironically, like this argument was really kind of made most famously about novels. So novels in the 1800s were a massive hit. I mean, parents were freaking out. There were these novel addictions, and they were trying to get young people treatment for their novel addictions because, you know, life was not great in the 1800s. And a lot of young people would escape, you know, to these novels. And I think, you know, reading about novels, it's funny because a lot of those claims are the same ones being made about social media today, where it's like young people are, they see everyone else leading these amazing lives, and it makes them depressed. And that's probably true in a sense of like engaging with media. I mean, I grew up in the 2000s as a teenager, like looking at Cosmo magazine being like, why don't I look like the models in this magazine? Why am I not living this great life of like these reality TV stars, right? Like we all engage in this stuff, but I think we just have to be careful at sort of like what we're deeming cause and effect.

Speaker 1:
[40:45] Yeah, that makes sense. So do you think that there is actually a growth in mental health problems among young people?

Speaker 3:
[40:52] I mean, what we see around the data, it kind of varies a lot and has actually backtracked the past two years. A lot of mental health problems that these people on Twitter will go and say, well, look at the declines in mental health since 2010 or whatever. But if you look at it since the 1980s, it's significantly up. We're living a better life than our parents, and our parents lived a better life than their parents. So there's a lot of things around that. Now, did we have a financial crisis in 2008 that radically affected the younger generation and left devastated the family lives of millions of people? Same thing with 2020. Hundreds of thousands of children lost a primary caregiver to COVID alone. Losing your mom or dad, them dying of COVID traumatically, that's a lot more traumatic and life-shaping than watching too much Instagram for three months while you were on remote Zoom school or whatever, and not to mitigate it. But it's interesting also that suicides dropped when kids were most online in that year of 2020. So I just think these things don't always correlate so neatly. And there's a lot of people, I mean, people, every single top researcher actually on this topic came out together in 2024 and issued this big report on this exact topic and said, you know, you guys keep claiming effectively that social media causes this. We at UNC, Princeton, Duke, etc. all study this for a living. We can tell you social media is not causing it. It's a mix of economic and socio-political sort of factors. And you guys need to address those things. If you want to address kids mental health, you know, address the fact that a significant amount of kids is growing up below the poverty line, all these other sort of things that matter a lot more.

Speaker 1:
[42:35] Yeah, I think there's also been a shift in how people live day to day in a way that may not be always positive for mental health. I think people spend less time together. I think people spend less time outside. I think people are less physically active. And I think those all correlate pretty strongly with mental health, especially in young people. So when it's in the context of social media, you could argue, oh, well, it was the social media. Or you could say, well, what was the person not doing because they were on social media? So it's not that social media causes these other things weren't happening as well. I think the overall point you're trying to make is that it's really complicated.

Speaker 3:
[43:12] Yeah. And I've interviewed hundreds and potentially thousands of kids at this point over the years. And one thing that they all say is, I want more free time. Kids today have hours and even just I'm shocked at talking to teenagers compared to like I'm a millennial. So like I haven't been in high school in a while.

Speaker 1:
[43:29] But like I'm here guilty.

Speaker 3:
[43:30] Yeah. Like 15 years ago, schoolwork was radically different. Kids today have significantly more homework. They're also more likely to participate in the economy. So they have jobs. They feel this pressure to, to make a living, to be interning in high school. Colleges have gotten more competitive. The economic situation has gotten more intense. So there's all these pressures. And then we have the, just the geographic landscape of America, where there's no longer third places, malls, which I grew up going to, like have shuttered. You know, you mentioned sort of like physical activity. A lot of young people today don't get that. They don't participate in, you know, team sports have been sort of bought out by private equity.

Speaker 1:
[44:08] Yeah, the third spaces thing is interesting because I'm also a millennial. And when I was in high school, it's like, oh, you go to the mall, you do, you have these places you could just go and hang out with other people. And I feel like that happens a lot less often for whatever various reasons it is with young people.

Speaker 3:
[44:24] Yeah, I think parents are also more nervous. You know, one thing that I found was really interesting too is kids today are a lot less likely to have a trusted adult in their lives that's not their parents. So 30, 40 years ago, they were more likely to have a coach, a teacher, a mentor. They're more likely to, you know, engage with adults that weren't directly their family members. And I think, like, for whatever reason, and I was talking to researchers about, you know, there are many reasons this is, like, kids and adults are becoming much more stratified. So we're seeing this world of, like, the kids' world and the adult world. On the Internet, everybody is together, but IRL kids don't necessarily have people to go to. And so I think they turn to these online spaces for support.

Speaker 1:
[45:06] Why do you think the blame has been put nearly entirely on social media?

Speaker 3:
[45:11] Well, listen, social media companies do a lot of bad things. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about, like, you know, these are profit-maximizing tech companies that have done a lot of harm in the world. Like, no one's going to, you know, go out there and be like, Metta really cares about the world. You know, these are companies that have helped facilitate atrocities in places like Myanmar, you know, like, and they've been really irresponsible. They're ultimately profit-driven platforms that don't, they're not optimizing for, like, our societal well-being. But I think we need to understand that, like, companies are, you know, we have, we live under capitalism, that is the economic system that we live in. Companies exist to make a profit. We shouldn't punish them for making their products so good that people want to spend so much time on them, but there are ways that we can curb the type of negative business practices that Metta engages in that actually degrade our internet. We have no data privacy laws, and now, unfortunately, if we pass these social media addiction laws, they're going to have even more power, and our internet's going to get even worse for everyone, and that's going to suck.

Speaker 1:
[46:22] Do you think part of it is just because it's so visual as well? Is if we think, okay, mental health among teens and maybe even adults is going down, we go, okay, that thing, and you go, I wonder why, and then you look at everyone, and everyone's looking at their phone, that sort of becomes the end. It's like, oh, it's obvious, it's the phone.

Speaker 3:
[46:44] We also have massive, multi-billion dollar messaging, political propaganda campaigns aimed at pushing the idea that this is the phone. Like, there are these nonprofits and special interest groups and groups like the Heritage Foundation and ENCOs, formerly known as Morality and Media. These are a lot of organizations that are affiliated with the religious far right, that are religious fundamentalists, that have been pushing the idea that the Internet is the downfall of society since the 90s. They're responsible for what was originally known as the Communications Decency Act, which was probably significantly overturned. But they've put this idea forward forever. And I think it was after Donald Trump's election that a lot of the mainstream media got on board with that. I worked at the New York Times at the time. And it was this idea of like, well, Donald Trump is in office and everything is bad because of Facebook. And the media had been too, like they hadn't been critical of tech enough, but I think they flipped and they just started sort of feeding into this stuff. And you have to also note that like the New York Times and a lot of these mainstream media companies also directly compete with Meta and Google. These companies have obliterated their business models. And they are also part of these political action groups that go out and intentionally kind of put forward the idea that the Internet is bad and we need sort of mainstream media. So I think there's just a lot of competing interests at play.

Speaker 1:
[48:07] Yeah, and you've been covering the trial that recently happened in California. There was another one in New Mexico that looked at this question of, is social media addictive? And can companies be held liable if someone has bad outcomes due to social media? Can you walk us through kind of what that trial was all about? What the arguments were and what it ultimately ended up finding?

Speaker 3:
[48:31] Yeah, so first of all, it was this poor 20-year-old girl who I feel horrible for. This girl had a horrible, horrible life. She grew up with an abusive mother and abusive father. Her father abused her and abandoned her when she was quite young. Her mother also physically abused her, emotionally tortured her. We witnessed videos of the abuse in court. The abuse was so bad in her home that her sister tried to take her own life as well. And effectively, this girl used Instagram and YouTube as an escape. So, you know, she was having this really difficult home life. Her mother also weighed her daily, told her she was fat. Her father told her that she was fat and ugly and all this stuff. So and kicked her out of the house at one point. This girl was struggling. She went and saw a therapist. In her years of therapy, and the therapist testified too, you know, she wasn't mentioning social media. She was mostly like, hey, I'm growing up in this abusive home. Can you help get me out of my home? And they didn't. She stayed there. So this girl was really failed by the system, I would argue. So now, conveniently, she's kicked out of the house. Suddenly, there's all these ads in class action lawsuits saying, hey, you can make a lot of money, actually, for the, you know, if you were a victim of social media. Now the mom, the abusive mom comes back around. Suddenly, the daughter's living a home again, and she's like, you know, we're going to sue, we're part of this class action law, or, you know, this big group sort of suing Metta. At the trial, I mean, what we saw was like, what I saw was this girl, first of all, going through, you know, being put through hell again, where you imagine having growing up in this horrible and then having your therapist testify to the embarrassing stuff that you said. And ironically, she's pursuing a career as a social media manager right now, because she really did fall in love with Instagram and making these video fan edits.

Speaker 1:
[50:28] And she was claiming that Instagram, was it Instagram specifically had hurt her mental health? This was the reason why she was having mental health problems all the time she was spending on social media effectively.

Speaker 3:
[50:39] Exactly. They said they were arguing that she wouldn't have had, that being on social media contributed to her mental health problems. Now, it's important to remember, in this lawsuit, what the jury found wasn't that it was totally responsible, but if it even contributed 0.0001% to her mental health, that could be found, that was sort of the questions that the jurors were given. And what they found was, or what they determined, again, these are just nine random people, right, that said through this emotional trial, and they found, yes. You know, great, that girl got, you know, 6 million, they were rewarded $6 million. I think what's really scary is that this girl is just being exploited over and over and over again by like, you know, multiple systems here, but the people that are involved in this trial that put forward, are this reactionary political movement, and their goal is to dismantle something called Section 230, which is the really tiny piece of Internet law that guarantees user-generated content and free speech online. This case was not just notable because they were like putting Mark Zuckerberg on trial or whatever. It was notable because it established this really novel legal precedent that will be used to enact mass censorship and surveillance online, and they do it, you know, they did it through this like kind of using this girl's case. I would argue honestly that girl, I think the mother should have been on trial personally, but you know, we have Mark Zuckerberg instead.

Speaker 1:
[52:15] So the fear is that more censorship arises because of this more or less, and how would that actually play out?

Speaker 3:
[52:23] They're using it. Yeah. So as soon as the verdict was read, the parents and political groups involved in this case went outside in the steps of the court and held a press conference. They asked for three pieces of legislation. They were like, great, we just got this big win. Now we want to repeal Section 230, pass something called the Kids Online Safety Act, which would give the government the power to effectively mandate the removal of any content deemed harmful for children, which the Trump administration has said is going to be any LGBTQ content, reproductive justice content, etc. So they were advocating for that, and then they were advocating for national ID checks, so complete removal of the anonymity from the internet. All three of those things are very scary, and I would argue don't keep kids safe at all. In fact, in danger, we know, in danger, thousands of immigrant kids, LGBTQ kids, kids that are seeking mental health support, and they're already using these to pass these laws. Ironically, those laws are also laws that Metta is lobbying for, and Metta is already using this case to push for the App Store Accountability Act and all these other laws. And Metta, of course, has been running ads. They want to repeal Section 230 as well. That will actually allow Metta to consolidate power.

Speaker 1:
[53:40] Why is that? Walk us through how that benefits Metta.

Speaker 3:
[53:43] Yeah, so Section 230 guarantees, it effectively puts the liability for online speech on the speaker. So if you go on the internet and you say something bad, you should be held responsible. You know, say you say something hateful in a chain email. I forward that chain email to my mom. Section 230 allows me to forward your email without being held liable for defamation if what you said in the email was bad or wrong. So it's really important. It allows us to have retweets. It allows us to leave a negative review on Yelp. If you were to remove Section 230, basically every single platform would have to prescreen content and ensure that it's not sort of any legally dicey stuff. So you would not be able to leave a negative review on Yelp because the restaurant might sue Yelp and Yelp doesn't want to have that. Now, because of AI, these tech companies, the really big ones, are actually kind of fine removing Section 230 because they are confident that they can prescreen everything with AI. Yes, we'll have mass censorship. Yes, we won't be able to criticize power online anymore. But that's how it is in a lot of authoritarian countries. And they still have a thriving internet ecosystem. Ultimately, these business, these giant tech companies, they rely on harvesting data. They don't rely on free speech. And censoring every single piece of content actually allows them to harvest even more data than they previously do now. So they don't really care about that. What it would also do, though, is decimate the broader internet, remove forums, remove grassroots free speech.

Speaker 1:
[55:21] Interesting. So I can see an argument for some sort of, I don't know, guardrails. I can see a case where when I think about when are young people most sort of, I guess, at risk of potentially developing what we talked about with excessive overuse that could cause harm. So if you look at, I'm sure you're familiar with this, but just for the listeners, if someone, say, takes a substance like alcohol or marijuana when they're 15, their odds of becoming addicted grow to like 50 percent. Whereas if they wait till they're 21, then the odds are 10 percent. That's because people are finding comfort and trying to figure things out when they are younger. So if something relieves short-term discomfort, the brain sort of remembers that and it can lapse into some sort of misuse. So I could see someone's argument for saying like, well, maybe we need some guardrails on this, especially for young people.

Speaker 3:
[56:25] How do you think about that? We have centuries of speech law in America. Section 230 does not protect platforms from illegal content. Section 230 also allows platforms to moderate content differently. So a gardening forum can be moderated differently than a BDSM forum. Section 230 is actually what allows children's spaces to exist on the Internet, because they can be moderated differently. If we remove that, it's all the same. It's basically all or nothing. You bring up alcohol or cigarettes, etc. What I would say is that those don't provide benefits. Those don't provide like-

Speaker 1:
[57:05] I would argue differently.

Speaker 3:
[57:05] What I mean is that we're talking about access to information. Ironically, that example that you just gave of exposing someone at verse 21, it's actually much more harmful to expose young people to the entire Internet later, because they don't develop the media literacy skills, that it's so crucial for them to develop actually as young as possible. So it's really important to expose kids to the Internet at a young age, under supervision and with guardrails, because you want them to be able to operate in the media and information and technology landscape of their time and not fall for misinformation and not fall for scams the minute they turn 18. But to do that, you have to introduce them to this stuff really young. That's why when we grew up as millennials, we had computer class, we learned about these things. People should be learning about this stuff in civics class, in social studies, et cetera. We should say, here's what misinformation is. Here's how you can look at this platform. Here's some tools to navigate. Instead, we're going the opposite way and we're trying to ban kids completely and then we know that the later they get on, the more likely they are to fall for scams, the more likely they are to fall for misinformation, et cetera.

Speaker 1:
[58:18] This would explain why boomers are always falling for fake news on Facebook.

Speaker 3:
[58:24] Yes, literally.

Speaker 1:
[58:26] Is there data behind that?

Speaker 3:
[58:28] Yes, definitely. Yes, and there's a lot of media educators that have tried to talk about this repeatedly, journalists, others. I think what's hard is that a lot of these parents feel like, I can't do a media studies class with my kid. Why is it my job? They don't have the time. A lot of them are working two jobs. A lot of these kids are growing up in households where both the parents work. They see them for an hour. What I would argue is for some sort of public education system, especially with AI, we're seeing this a lot with AI. Say you ban social media tomorrow, we're about to see this on steroids with AI. We need to reform our public education system. We need national educational things and maybe make the tech companies pay for it. Make the tech like tax them more. There are so many things that we can do to fix these problems. We can also pass comprehensive data privacy reform laws so that these young people are not getting, as you say, addicted to whatever you want to say. We know that this content is highly engaging. Part of the ways that these feeds are made so engaging is because they can hyper-target you. There's that famous story where Target knew a girl was pregnant before her own father. If we take that away, the content gets a lot less engaging because they can't target kids as aggressively.

Speaker 1:
[59:44] So do you think that maybe the algorithms need to be changed? What's the solution, I guess? Or maybe there's not even a problem to solve. I don't know.

Speaker 3:
[59:56] No, there are definitely problems to solve, big problems. There's a lot that we could do to, I think, address all of the very legitimate concerns that parents have when they talk about this stuff because it's really hard to raise kids today. I'm totally empathetic about that. We don't want top-down government control of algorithms. That's very silly. The Trump administration has said what they would do with that and it's not good. But we do want to give users more control. So ironically, we were talking earlier when I first joined about Blue Sky or Vaxelon. There's this other model for the web that actually is gaining popularity, which is the Fedaverse model. It's this model where essentially there's interoperability between platforms and there's a lot more user choice. With Blue Sky or some of these other services, you have control over the algorithm. You can tweak the algorithm. You can put a lot more user control and parents can set a lot more controls. Things that these big tech platforms don't allow. There's no advertising as well on a lot of those alternatives. So they're just inherently less predatory. We could mandate that all of these social media platforms federate, that you don't have to use Instagram. You know, maybe these kids like they don't want to be left off totally socially, but maybe they use an alternative to Instagram, but they can still access certain parts, you know, certain content from Instagram that's fed into this alternative app, that's in total gray scale and doesn't, you know, just has a reverse cron feed or whatever. But it's about giving people choice, because I don't think we want the government controlling content, and I don't think we want parents, every child is different. What's appropriate for one child at 15 is not appropriate for another child at 15, and we should trust parents and families to make those decisions.

Speaker 1:
[61:32] Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I hadn't heard of that different model, but that seems logical, that parents should have some say in like, what is being fed to my kid? Because right now it's just kind of like you log in, and it's just what's going to happen happens.

Speaker 3:
[61:45] Well, it's like, does your kid have Instagram? Yes or no, it's this binary thing. And yeah, you can set teen accounts, but it's like, there's not choices. What if we had 20 choices instead of Instagram that were all really similar? And kids could all connect, they could have the same social network on all of them. We can mandate, you know, changes to these companies. We can also say, hey, Metta, you continue to use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to shut down any and all competition. You can't do that anymore. We're reforming that law. That law was written in the 1980s, you know? So, I think there's just so many, not to mention data privacy. There's just a lot that we could do that would, that would, you know, fix pretty much almost all of these problems, I'm willing to bet, that parents kind of, you know, think. But putting, making this dumb show trial, where Metta pays $6 million, something they can make up in an instant, and an abusive, you know, parents are rewarded for nothing. Like, we don't get any meaningful change from that.

Speaker 1:
[62:36] One of the big things that was highlighted in the case, and the argument was made around dopamine, which I feel like parents hear that. Dopamine has become the scary word. It's like, you gotta do a dopamine detox. We're a dopamine nation. Walk us through some of the problems with that.

Speaker 3:
[62:53] It's very silly. You know, I was talking to a big time safety researcher recently about this idea of dopamine, and she was saying, like, it's not based on anything. And like, dopamine is actually pretty good. Like, you know, you get a lot of dopamine from snuggling puppies. If you were snuggling puppies for 10 hours, you know, would that be harmful? No. She was saying that, like, what she sees from her research is primarily that the sort of response that's elicited when people scroll through these feeds is actually—sorry to say it, Clavicular. I feel like the Clavicular guy, but, like, it's a cortisol spike. So it's spiking your cortisol, which is keeping you hyper-engaged. And what that is, is actually a stress response. And I think we all feel that when we use our phone. I think if we were getting dopamine, which is, like, what we get from listening to a pleasurable song or, like, a great album, right? That's why there's not the same moral panic about Spotify as there is, you know, meta, when Spotify actually has more of the addicting features that we put on trial, you know, that put meta on trial for. But I think we're getting this stressful content, we're getting this stress response, and we want to mitigate that. But that's not dopamine, that's something else.

Speaker 1:
[63:56] Yeah, and so it's like, if we're penalizing anything that alters dopamine, all of a sudden, we've penalized every single thing we do in life, because dopamine keeps us alive in many ways. I mean, it motivates you to eat. It's also, people who have Parkinson's, have Parkinson's because they don't have enough dopamine. So if we're like, oh, we got to bring those dopamine levels down, now we're all going to have Parkinson's.

Speaker 3:
[64:18] It's very silly. And it doesn't fix the fundamental problem, which is that we have these big structural issues with the internet that we could fix. We could build a more open, equitable, less profit-driven internet that's more competitive, that puts users back in control. But instead, we're down this other weird path. And we've been down these paths before, too. Again, we see it with every new form of technology. I just think we're at a very scary point right now because these people have gotten pretty far in their political effort, and there are some pretty scary laws that they want to pass.

Speaker 1:
[64:49] All right. So we've talked a lot about kids and social media. How is it affecting or maybe not affecting adults?

Speaker 3:
[64:56] Yeah, I think when we look at adults, often adults have more unhealthy behavior around the internet than children. This goes back to this idea of people didn't grow up native to this technology, often struggle to navigate it and navigate it in a healthy way. This is why you have a lot of boomers that are on Facebook all the time, oversharing, using it in bad ways. Or parents, they'll chastise their kids for being on their phones, but they're also on their phones. It's so hard for a lot of adults to stay off their phones. So same with children. There is no evidence that social media or the internet is causing some sort of widespread mental health crisis among adults at all. But a lot of adults do use it in unhealthy ways, and I think exacerbate whatever issues they have, whether it's insecurity or having bad mental health or whatever. Sometimes they're just wasting time on it, and it feels like a time suck. It's like you watched TV for five hours. I remember before the days of social media, I would watch a lot more television, and it's like you feel like you just lost eight hours. So I think the good thing about being an adult is that you have a lot more control over your life, and so we can take steps.

Speaker 1:
[66:08] With the boomer thing, my mom and my wife's parents use their phones way more than anyone else I know. And I think, isn't there data that shows that older people spend the most time on their phones?

Speaker 3:
[66:24] Yes, yes. Older people spend an inordinate amount of time on their phone and social media, and are a lot more likely to overshare. They overshare a lot. I think they don't have a good idea of boundaries. So yeah, gotta get the old people. Maybe we need an over 60 ban on the internet. Maybe let's pass that before we ban everyone under 16.

Speaker 1:
[66:43] There you go. That should be your next big piece. Why we should put age limits on boomers on social media.

Speaker 3:
[66:52] No one in Congress will be able to access the web.

Speaker 1:
[66:55] And with the research on social media and mental health, whether it's kids, whether it's adults, I think a lot of people see headlines about study fines, social media use, does XYZ. But a lot of those studies have flaws.

Speaker 3:
[67:08] Yeah, there's this great headline of a story that came out years ago that was not every study on depression in social media is bad, only most of them. And it was actually talking mostly about these teen studies, but it's kind of true universally. There was this book called The Anxious Generation, written by this man, Jonathan Haidt, that used effectively almost entirely debunked or deeply mischaracterized studies. So there's a lot of bad stuff out there. You can make a study that finds anything. I hate when people are like, but what about this study? And it's like, well, there's tons of limitations and that's a bad study. But what we know from the meta-analysis, which are basically studies that study all the studies, is that there is no causal effect. So it just goes back to the same thing that we're seeing with teens. Social media use is like a symptom of whatever underlying root issue is that you're having. Or maybe you're using it in a positive way, right? But if you're using it in a negative way, it's the behavior that you're engaged in because of some root issue. And I think that's what's so important to note, is that cause. Because this has been a very studied area. Again, there are people like Alice Marwick, Candice Rogers, who people can look up. I highly suggest reading their work on this. These are people that have studied this stuff for literal decades since the early 2000s.

Speaker 1:
[68:25] So when you talk to anyone about social media, and they feel like they use it too much, and they've got a problem with it, and I know you're not a clinician, but I feel like you've talked to enough people that I can trust your advice here. What do you tell them?

Speaker 3:
[68:39] So I think of this guy, Ian Anderson, who is a habit researcher at Caltech. And it's him, and I can't remember his colleague. They did this great big study that came out last fall, where they studied this idea of addiction. And they studied how it was affecting use. And again, this is a guy who has a PhD in habit behavior. There are people that studied this stuff for a living, and they were really interested in this. And what they found is that, actually, the more that a user believed that they were addicted to a platform, the harder it was for them to moderate their own use. And so I think that we get all these narratives, and we convince ourselves, oh, I'm so addicted to Instagram. I'm so addicted to Instagram. What I would tell people is that narrative you're telling yourself actually makes it harder for you to take control. We all have bad habits. We all have unhealthy behaviors, things we want to change. We want to go to the gym more. We want to eat less sweets. We want to whatever. But we need to start looking at those things differently, making micro changes. I mean, I would argue that those people should get involved in politics and fight for some of these laws. But in the meantime, do what you can, but view it as a habit like anything else. But there are a lot of other people that install these sort of like blockers, these attend, you know, there are a lot of like apps that can help you kind of mitigate, maybe you get a different phone. I know people also even have like these weekend phones now that they activate, the flip phone only in the weekend. Like, you know, figure, do kind of the best that you can. But it's harder and harder. I mean, I talk to parents too, where like, I think of that viral tweet of the girl, you know, she was banned from her, her mom took away like her iPad, so she started tweeting from her smart fridge. We have Vapes now, the Swipe Vape, which has the little screen, which lets you go on social media from your Vape.

Speaker 1:
[70:21] Oh wow, I mean, why do one Vice when you could just layer on another one? Like, let's just pack them on. Maybe we could turn that into a cup, you can fill it up with booze.

Speaker 3:
[70:31] It's bad, but it's like, we're living in this like internet enabled world, and it's getting harder and harder, and like parents, I know it's so hard, and it's so unfair that so much is falling on parents right now, but what I would say is like, expose your kids to this stuff in like, healthy ways when they're young, and teach them to moderate their use when they're young. Don't stigmatize it. When you talk to kids too, the primary way that young people use social media, and I know that like everybody thinks it's scrolling short form video, according to Adam Massari at Instagram, it's actually DMing each other. It's chat. That's why Snapchat is so popular. It's chat. So these kids are desperate for social connection. They're desperate to feel belonging. They want to explore their interests. Give them other avenues to do that, and they won't be on their screen so much.

Speaker 1:
[71:14] Yeah, and I think when I've thought about my own relationship with social media, what's helped me is to pull back and go, what about this do I think is not helping me? What about this is actually a positive in my life? And for me to sort of line up with what you just said, positives are the DMs. It's like I've met awesome people on Instagram that I would have never met in real life, and we've got these crazy long DM chains. I've never met these people in real life, but I'm like, oh, this person's a great friend. Yeah, we just share, like we got a niche video, like, you know, that we share. It's more just the problem becomes when I get out of the DMs and then I start swiping mindlessly and I go, oh my God, 20 minutes have gone by and you're on a deadline, dude. Like, don't do that. But I think sort of observation is the first step to changing something. You got to be aware of where the problem lies because I think these things are, they come with benefits or else we would never use them. There is no benefits behind social media, no one would be on it. So drilling down, okay, well, what is the benefit I think can be useful?

Speaker 3:
[72:20] A hundred percent. And what are you actually seeking out of it? And what content isn't serving you? What are you reacting to in the minute? And changing your algorithm a little bit. We've all kind of learned these behaviors of like, when I see a bunch of bad stuff, it's like, okay, I got to go like some XYZ videos and hopefully get some of that on my feed. But use the tools that you can, mute the people that you need to mute, do the best you can. It's very hard. That's why I would argue we need sort of some of these top level fixes. But until we get those top level fixes, I very much support people kind of just doing whatever they can.

Speaker 1:
[72:53] Totally. All right, we're going to start to land the plane, pivot into a totally new lane. You've covered the Internet, online worlds, your entire career. Looks maxing is a thing. And just last night, Clavicular, is kind of the looks maxing king, supposedly might have OD'd. What is your sense on the looks maxing community and what is going on there?

Speaker 3:
[73:15] Yeah, I think it's, you know, this outgrowth of broader trends in culture towards sort of self-optimization, documenting, live streaming every aspect of your life, tracking like the Brian Johnson, kind of like tracking everything too. Also, you know, I've seen people just be like, Clavicular is just sort of appropriating women's culture. Like, we've been looks maxing forever, or like gay male culture. Like, it's just being brought to straight men now. You know, for him specifically, I feel very sad for him because this guy is a 20-year-old, you know, he's spoken about being like extremely neurodivergent and having a really hard time finding friends. And I think the bad thing about the current, like algorithmic internet that we all live in now that rewards attention and over everything else is like, I don't think that this kid is served by live streaming like 24-7 with these other like kick streamers. I feel like I hope his parents can like get him out of whatever system that he's in. But yeah, he's gotten, I mean, he talked, so he got out of the hospital this morning. He talked about the fact that he basically takes drugs to cope with being neurodivergent because it's hard for him to stream 14 hours a day with the way he is. And so he took this sort of toxic cocktail of drugs. He's also on peptides. He's also talked about doing meth, things like that.

Speaker 1:
[74:36] That almost feels, that almost goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where most, I mean, we'll just use the word addiction because it's easy.

Speaker 3:
[74:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[74:44] Most addiction stems from trying to solve an inherent underlying problem in a person's life.

Speaker 3:
[74:51] Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I talked to a lot of people in the LookSmaxxer community and a lot of people that were actually taking courses from people like Clavicular and smaller people, and so many of these young men, like the reason they're turning to LookSmaxxing is because they feel like they don't have any sort of economic mobility, they don't feel any sort of agency over their lives. And so taking agency over the way that you look is this way to kind of like establish autonomy and feel a sense of control. This is also how a lot of women end up with serious eating disorders. It's this like desire for control and autonomy and like exerting that control in unhealthy ways. And I think that like if we want to address like the looks maxing and all of these sort of like unhealthy things, we need to have like, again, broader conversations about like what is it that is making these men feel so hopeless and nihilistic about the world? And how do we mitigate that? Because it's like, yes, social media exacerbates it, but actually the worst sort of places where these places, you know, the places where these men get radicalized and all of this hate is fomented, are forums like looksmax.org that are not algorithmic. They're like old school forums. And so it's like you could ban social media and stuff, but they're actually getting radicalized in this like very 1990s kind of like format. So you can't just blame the algorithms. Like you need to go a little deeper and be like, what is making young men turn to these coping mechanisms? And like you said, unhealthy stuff, whether it's, I think, drugs, alcohol, going, you know, bone smashing, whatever. You know, it's all sort of like maladaptive.

Speaker 1:
[76:27] Yeah. And that's where it gets really complicated. And so with what we've just been talking about now, it's easier for politicians, these different groups to just be like, oh, it's the social media. It's not all these million other things happening in people's lives.

Speaker 3:
[76:41] Yeah, it's not the fact that young men, you know, have seen like average wages decrease for so many years or they watch their parents struggle economically. Their entire childhood was defined by the financial crisis. I feel, you know, I did a bunch of stories back when I was at the New York Times in 2021 on Wall Street bets and crypto and speculative kind of, I mean, effectively gambling, I would say, with these like meme coins and meme stocks. And a lot of those kids have ended up in the looks maxing sort of community and adjacent communities. And they're all, there's a lot of overlap between the like meme coin crypto world. And it's just nihilism. It's basically like the entire economic system in America is a lottery anyway. What's the point of investing? There is no such thing as like working for 40 years for a stable company. There is no stability in the world. And I get it. Like these are kids that grew up, Donald Trump has had a political career for like 10 years. So they sort of have primarily known him as our president. They had COVID. They have, it's like there's a lot of upheaval that they've witnessed. And so I think they just, this is how they're kind of reacting to that.

Speaker 1:
[77:51] Yeah. All right. Final question. This is a more positive question. You've been a vegan for a long time, right?

Speaker 3:
[77:57] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[77:57] What have you learned from that?

Speaker 3:
[77:59] You know, it's given me a lot of empathy. Like I was thinking of this recently. I used to be extremely militant about it when I was young and like really moral, like really annoying. I was like the one that was like, most people, I'm surprised that you know, I actually like bringing up sometimes, but I don't have it like in my bio and stuff. And if you want to go talk about toxicity on the Internet, nothing is more toxic than like the vegan communities online. And like so much of my early Internet experience was being that person online that was like the 14 year old, like, you know, being like, you're a murderer, you're doing genocide of the chickens and you should die. And, you know, and I think like the older I got, the more I realized that like we all just make these sort of like ethical trade offs and decisions in life and how to live life. And you kind of just have to do the best you can and accept that like, I'm flawed, I'm not living perfectly, this other person isn't living perfectly, but like, let's just all kind of like work together to have a better society and not be so black and white. And you know what, if you want to eat 20% less meat, like that's good for the world, I would argue. So.

Speaker 1:
[79:07] That's a positive note to end on. I like that. Empathy for people and being accepting and open.

Speaker 3:
[79:14] Yeah. Try not to rage tweet, you know.

Speaker 1:
[79:16] Try not to rage tweet. That's a good rule to live by. Well, Taylor, I appreciate you coming on. This was awesome.

Speaker 3:
[79:23] Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Speaker 1:
[79:26] All right. Let's land the plane here. We heard from Dean Stattmann about why alcohol in moderation can be a good thing in some circumstances. And we talked to Taylor Lorenz who told us that maybe all of this moral panic over social media is overblown and there are ways to use social media to improve your life. So now I'm going to talk about one of my own personal vices. It is my absolute favorite thing in the world, besides my wife, my dogs and a good trail run. But if you listen to the internet, they would tell you that this habit I have is completely ruining my health. This is going to give me cancer. It is going to end me early. It is going to do all these terrible things for me. But if you listen to science, turns out it may not be that bad. Here I am talking about diet soda. And I'm going to crack one right now because it is so delicious. Now I will say this about diet soda. I am not the Trumpian 12 diet cokes a day consumer, but probably have maybe five a day. Probably five seems about good. Now diet soda gets a bad rap. And a lot of the bad rap came from the studies that were conducted in mice in the 70s. So what happened is that they fed mice a bunch of aspartame, which is the no calorie sweetener that is found in diet soda and makes it so delicious without the sugar. And they found that these mice developed more tumors than mice who didn't have that. Now the problem with this study though, is that the amount of aspartame that they fed these mice, it was a ridiculous amount. There was no way a human being could ever eat that much aspartame. In fact, if you were to try and get all that aspartame from diet soda, you would literally die from all the liquid you had to drink to get that aspartame. The liquid, the water would kill you first. And then follow up research also found that the way that these tumors were created, the aspartame, that same mechanism does not apply to humans. So it turns out you do not have to worry about getting cancer from drinking your diet coke or diet Dr. Pepper or diet Pepsi or diet insert anything. There's a new fear though. So the cancer thing that was in the 70s, it persisted for a while. You probably still hear it out there. Now a big target is that aspartame and other artificial sweeteners might disrupt your gut microbiome. Sounds very spooky, like, oh no, my gut microbiome, I don't want that to be bad. But here's the thing, we do not know a lot about the gut microbiome and it takes a lot to change it. So researchers will throw all sorts of fiber, all sorts of vegetables at the gut microbiome and it does nothing. In fact, one of my favorite nutrition thinkers, she is a columnist at the Washington Post, her name is Tamar Haspel. She wrote about aspartame, artificial sweeteners and the gut microbiome in general. And she said the following, the gut microbiome has become the conspiracy theory of nutrition. It's where people go to prove something's dangerous when there's no evidence that it really is. So you don't have to worry about gut microbiome. Now, some people will say, oh, just drink water. Why don't you just drink water, idiot? That'd be so much better for you. It's like, yes, I do drink water. Water is great. I drink plenty of it. But here's the thing, water is not as delicious as diet soda. So I think about it this way. Diet soda is a good alternative instead of drinking sugary soda. Because we know if you drink a lot of sugary soda, you're probably going to end up with some bad health outcomes. So what diet soda does is it comes in and goes, hey, I'm going to give you that same deliciousness, the sweetness, the bubbles, the cola flavor, the root beer flavor, whatever it is. But you're going to have very few downsides. So it is a very reasonable alternative to real soda. If we followed that water logic too far, it would be like, yeah, we'll never drive your car when you could just walk. Yeah, never have dessert when you could just eat a grilled chicken salad all the time. It's like, no, we need to have times where we have things that we really enjoy. And if they have very few side effects like diet soda does, I think that is a good bargain. I also saw a thing online the other day where RFK was supposedly going to ban diet soda. Now it turns out that was not real. But when I first saw it, I was like, this is why we have the Second Amendment. Out of my cold dead hands, my man. I love my diet soda way too much for that. So the takeaway for you is really, one, diet soda is fine. And two, if you got something that you love and it's not causing you any clear health problems, lean into it. You're only going to live once. Enjoy yourself. Cheers to that. Thanks for listening to my rant. Thanks for checking out the show. New episodes drop twice a week. So make sure to subscribe so you will get those directly in your feed. And we are always open to your questions. Feel free to send them to our email or to put them in the comments. And we will try and answer as many questions as humanly possible. I'll say it again. Don't forget to subscribe. It really helps us. And as always, in closing, as we always do and as we always will, have fun. Don't die.