Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Gen Z Sees the World

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, has a unique economic, political, and cultural identity. In the 2024 election, Gen Z shifted strongly to the right. They are less likely than any previous generation to expect they’ll achieve the American Dream. Most of Gen Z graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years.They have record-high rates of anxiety. They use their phone ... a lot. Defined by the forces of scarcity, phone-driven media, and global crisis, they are different. And their differences will drive the future of U.S. economics, politics, and culture. Today’s guest Kyla Scanlon is 27 years old, making her an older Gen Z representative. As a financial commentator on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack, she’s coined several terms—like the vibecession—that have made their way into the New York Times and federal economic reports. For a long time, I wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn’t make me subject to a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Buscemi holding the skateboard asking, “how do you do, fellow kids?” I wanted to get somebody smart, who was a member of Gen Z, and who also had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z. I’m very honored to have Kyla tell me about how young people today think and what they want. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kyla Scanlon Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons letting you know that we are covering the White Lotus on the Prestige TV podcast and the Ringer TV YouTube channel every Sunday night this season with Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson. Also, on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app. Subscribe to the Prestige podcast feed. Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can also watch these podcasts on Spotify. White Lotus. Let's go. Today, what does Gen Z want?

In December of last year, the Wall Street Journal's Rachel Wolf published a wonderful essay that was entitled, What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up? Wolf reported that American 20-somethings and 30-somethings today are bypassing the traditional milestones of adulthood, dating, marrying, having a kid, buying a home. they're less likely in many cases to be doing any of this. This delay of adulthood, or the delay of these adulthood markers, let's say, begins quite early. Teens in the 2020s are now less likely to date than previous generations. 20-somethings are more likely to live with their parents.

30-somethings are less likely to be married, and 40-somethings less likely to have kids. something seems to be happening that is pushing off what we've historically thought of as the definition of this state that we call adulthood. I think understanding this phenomenon of delayed adulthood

requires us first understanding the shifting realities and psychological preferences of America's young people. Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, are less likely than previous generations

to say, they'll achieve the American dream. They have record high rates of anxiety. They often graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years, defined by forces of scarcity and phone-driven media and global crisis. This generation is different.

And for a long time, I've wanted to understand how different. Today's guest is Kyla Scanlan. She's 27 years old, but that's the least important thing about her. As an older Gen Z representative, she is also quite brilliant. As a financial commentator on TikTok and Instagram and Substack, she's coined several terms like Vibe Session

that have made their way into the cultural lexicon, the New York Times, and even federal economic reports. For a while, I've wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn't make me the subject of a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Bouchemey holding the skateboard above his head, asking how do you do fellow kids? I wanted to talk to somebody smart who was a member of Gen Z

and who had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z and very honored to have Kyla tell me how young people today think and what they want and what that means for America writ large. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Kyla Scanlan, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me. You have published several essays recently on how Gen Z thinks about the world that I think are pretty exceptional. And they really cover just about everything, young people's relationship to finance, media, politics, romance, dating, work, psychology. And we're going to try to run through all of that

with the upfront proviso that every time somebody says, this generation is like X, they're engaging in some massive, unforgivable overgeneralization. So let's start actually by addressing that generalization problem head on. Let's get specific. When we say Gen Z today, that means everybody born between the late 1990s, early 2010s.

That is to say, all teenagers 13 and up and most 20-somethings today are in this category of Gen Z. You write that the best way to see Gen Z clearly is to divide this generation into three subgroups that you call Gen Z 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. Break that down for us. Yes. So this list was inspired by a graphic that I saw from Rachel Janfaza. And she broke Gen Z down into Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. So basically graduating high school pre-COVID and then graduating high school post-COVID.

And I was like, okay, I think COVID definitely had something to do with like the splitting of the generations. But I also think technology had a really big part to do it. with it, like the digital reality. And so in the piece, I talk about, you know, Gen Z 1.0 being this bridge generation. And so I'm part of that generation. I'm an ancient Gen Z. I just turned 27. And for me, like, I grew up in a world where I remember where there were phones, but I graduated into the pandemic. And so, like, my first interaction with work was entirely online. And it's kind of been that way ever since. And so in summarizing that segment of the population, I talk a little bit about how they view technology as a tool rather than an environment,

because they're able to navigate digital spaces fluently, but it doesn't dictate their whole reality. And then there's Gen Z 1.5, which is the COVID cohort. And so that was the group that was in maybe high school or college during COVID. And that completely shaped how they think about technology because they had to do learning online. For a lot of them, it created a pretty complex relationship with institutions, but they were able to see sort of the powerful nature of digital infrastructure and how that sort of kept society functioning. And then the final generation is Gen Z 2.0, which is the first group that will graduate

into this new digital economy, like how AI is going to shape them. and they've never really known a world without smartphones. And social media to them could just be like another layer of reality. Like it's really difficult, I think, for that group just based on my travels and talking with them for them to kind of separate. It's not their fault, but for them to separate, you know, what happens on the internet versus what happens in real life. I love this distinction between the smartphone as a tool and the smartphone as an environment.

the air you breathe, something is invisible and boring, it's just like oxygen. How does that distinction, even within Gen Z, shift the relationship they have to their phones? You know, one observation that you've made in some of your essays is that even young people have a very complicated relationship with, say, TikTok and Twitter. About half of young people wish those social media apps didn't even exist. is there a way in which we can look inside this generation and say the group that sees smartphones as a tool think this way about technology and the group that see smartphones as the oxygen they breathe see it as a different force in their life yeah i mean i think it comes down to optionality

so i think for a lot of younger people like the specific gen z 2.0 cohort what i've noticed and talking with them is it just feels like the technology is all consuming. Like when I was growing up in middle school, like there wasn't really Instagram, like quite yet. Like it was there, but like a lot of people weren't on it. But like when you're this age right now, when you're young and social media is kind of the forcing function and it was the forcing function for your social life during the entirety of COVID, I think for them it just feels almost inescapable. There's a news segment interviewing this group of students who are like no phones, like they're anti-phones. And they're these young people who are so sick of like having to swim in this water technology all the time. And a lot of

researchers have written about this. Like the phones are, you know, really hurting the kids. But I definitely think it feels like there's just no optionality to the technology and they're really able to see the negative consequences of it. I think it's really interesting to think about bringing to the foreground these two forces of the smartphone and the pandemic, and thinking about ways that not only is this group shaped by them, they're also shaped by the backlashes against those forces. You describe the 1.5 generation as being more distrustful of institutions, having maybe spent all four years in college or many of their high school years in schools that were shut down or schools that limited their mobility. So it's not just that they were

shaped by the pandemic, they're shaped by the politics of backlash against the pandemic response. And then with the smartphone, what I'm hearing you say is that they're not just shaped by the technology itself. They're shaped by their negative relationship with it. They're maybe more inclined to feel like my life might be better if I weren't cursed with the inevitability of having to deal with these technologies. Before we move on to investing, maybe just dilate on that a bit, the fact that, you know, maybe we think about young people being shaped by the forces that engender them in a positive way, but it can just as easily happen in the other direction, that they're shaped negatively by their formative environments.

Yeah, I mean, I think that with, so I am a huge hypocrite, and I have to, like, just say that because I make social media videos, like, that's part of my job. And I think social media can be a tool. And I think a lot of young people see it in that way. Like you're able to connect. You're able to learn. You're able to do all these things. But I think the environment that it creates, the trust in institutions or the lack of trust in institutions, as you've highlighted, like a lot of young people are just seeing all of this dismay, this dismantling.

And I think most people are able to connect the dots that it's like clearly technology that's causing some of these problems. And then when you talk about the gigantic question mark that is AI, you have young people who are in college right now. And that was like a big thing when I was traveling was talking to these students who were like, I don't even know if a career path for me is going to exist. Like I don't know if technology is just going to totally take it away. And so I think for somebody my age, so 27, I was able to kind of really grow with technology. Like, you know, the word processors were great. The beginning stages of AI were really great. Everything was very efficient with technology.

But now, instead of it becoming efficient, we're like, oh, it's actually going to replace you. And so I think young people are seeing like this social media aspect of technology where it's, you know, taking over their lives, maybe making them feel not so good about themselves. And then on top of that, you have AI where it like could totally destroy like your dreams. And so I think that's kind of what they're really. really, I know this what they're wrestling with just based on the conversations that I had. Let's look at finance and investing for a minute. The Atlantic's Annie Lowry is written that young people and young men in particular seem unusually drawn to novel forms of high-risk betting. They are the largest owners of meme coins, cryptocurrencies. They're the largest buyers of meme

stocks. Rates of sports betting are rising. I think this ties into one of one of my favorite Kyla coinages, which you've described as the emergence of Pfaphonomics, Fafo, Fafo being an acronym for Fuck Around and Find Out. What is Fafonomics, by your definition, and what makes it a particularly Gen Z phenomenon? Yeah, so Fafonomics is that I, you know, FFing around and finding out, it's like essentially chaos is the strategy. So you're just going to throw everything at the wall, see what sticks, and, you know, you know, perhaps make some mistakes, but you're just going to find out. And we're seeing that at

the governance level, too, with like Elon Musk's doge. But for young people, I definitely think when you look at the crypto universe, when you look at sports gambling, and a lot of people have written on this idea of financial nationalism, but there's a truth to that where people are just effing around because it doesn't feel like that predictable progress path is there. And of course, for every generation, there's been significant headwinds, but I think this is the first time where we've seen political creative destruction happening at the same time as technological creative destruction. And so young people are taking all of that into account and indeed effing around and finding out, especially young men who have had all sorts of economic headwinds

over the past couple of years. What if someone comes along and says, look, I, I, I, I, I, I look at the statistics of, you know, real income growth, not over the last four years, where inflation has definitely warped the picture, but over the last few decades, America's richer than it used to be. Young people are richer by various measures and they used to be. Where does this sense of, or possibly reality, of financial nihilism come from? It's housing. I think it's, yeah, it's like such a boring answer, but that's really, you know, in these conversations,

that I've had in the policymakers that I've talked to, everybody is like, yeah, nobody can afford housing. And so it does create, like that is a foundational way to interact with the economy, right? Like being able to afford rent or being able to buy a house, like if you can't solve for that problem in your economic equation, it's going to be a real uphill battle. And so I think a lot of young people are looking around. And the returns on education are much, they're not, as predictable as they once were. So it's not, it never was a guarantee that you'd have a job out of college, but now it really doesn't feel like you will at all in some instances. And of course, I'm generalizing. Housing is a big thing. Career progression is a big thing. Like you just don't stay

at a company for 40 years anymore. And so I think young people are looking at what used to be this, you know, relatively predictable path where things sort of smoothed out to one layer over time. And like you could kind of figure out where you were going and it just doesn't feel like that exists anymore. And of course, it could smooth out for young people in the long run. But as I said, like the political creative destruction at the same time as the technological creative destruction is creating more questions and answers and leading people to that financial nihilism and fafinomics. There's two themes that you're touching on that I want to be very clear about is I'm hearing them. And it's risk versus attention. So you've pointed out the fact that

that young people today can look at the economy and recognize that there is more risk in terms of the rising cost of housing. Maybe there's anxiety about career progression, anxiety about artificial intelligence, or the fact that at the moment, as Roche Karma has written for the Atlantic, the job market is quite frozen, unusually frozen right now. There's not as much hiring as you would expect. But I also want to bring media economics into this as well. There's this concept of meme coins or meme stocks. And to a certain extent, you know, investing has always been somewhat memetic. We can tell ourselves that people bet on stocks because they're doing this very fancy calculation

of future cash flow potential. But fundamentally, people allocate and have always allocated their income towards certain assets because they think that asset price will go up faster than other asset prices. But there does seem to be something distinct about this general. generations pension for investing in cryptocurrencies and stocks where there really is no case for the asset to go up in value other than that it's really obvious that a lot of people are talking about it right now? I think for, like, just for young people in general, maybe, I think that for what I've

heard and like what I see in my comment section and, what I see in my DMs is people just feel like the path is murky. And so the meme coins and the sports gambling and the AMC and the GME, all of these things that made no sense are essentially reliant on attention, right? Like that's the whole premise of a meme coin is if you can gather enough attention, the coin will run up in price. Ideally, you sell out before everybody else notices that too many people are paying attention. You capture your winnings and you go home. And so all of those things are predicated on these sort of fabrications of communities that you can create online. Like there's entire discords that are dedicated to meme coins and sniping meme coins and

getting in fast and getting out faster. Same thing with like GMC and AMC when that was happening. And so I think that's the thing is like people are really aware. that attention is extraordinarily valuable. And so the things that command attention are going to be the things that make money from more people paying attention to them, which just so happens to be meme coins in this instance. And young people are very tuned into that. Last fall, you wrote about a memo that was written by the YouTube megastar Mr. Beast

titled How to Succeed in Mr. Beast production. This was a 30-page account to how to work with Mr. Beast, and you called it a guide to the Gen Z workforce, thinking of it as the first Gen Z corporate leader manifesto. And what's interesting is that Mr. Beast is clearly not, I would say, the handsomest man in the world. He's not the most charming. He's not the most talented in terms of some talent show competition.

He's not the best singing or best dancing. But he does seem to be singular, absolutely singular, at the ability to attract and sustain this currency that you're talking about, attention. What is it that you think Mr. Beast understands about attention? I mean, the whole memo, I really encourage people to read it because it is astounding. Because he just lays it all out. You know, if you wanted to become the next Mr. Beast, you definitely could, just based off. that memo. But what he is really good at is just maximizing metrics. So on YouTube, you have this retention graph and like a views graph and you can see when people stop watching your video or when

they tune out. And so for him, he was laser focused for a very long time at making sure that people just stayed on the video longer and longer and longer. And the way that you make people stay on a video longer and longer and longer is by doing, you know, wild things. So I think the very first thing that he got famous for was counting to maybe a hundred thousand, maybe a million. He was on a video just counting for hours and hours and hours and hours. And people were like looking at that. And they were like, this is crazy. And so all this attention was directed towards him. And so this whole memo was, I think, the best encapsulation that we have from the leader and sustainer of the attention economy on the economics of the attention economy, on how

it really is taking advantage of human psychology and perhaps a way that will look back on in 50 years and be like, oh, that wasn't good for us. But he's just, I mean, he's a master of his craft. And you definitely have to give him credit for that. Like, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game. And he's a very good player at this game. I'm going to hate the player just a little bit here. But I'm willing to have you push back against my even minor hatred of the player. You compare the Mr. Beast memo to other famous corporate leader memos like Jeff Bezos Day One philosophy and Steve Jobs owed to simplicity. In those letters, there was a virtue that was communicated that existed outside of the ecosystem of the business.

Jeff Bezos was saying there is something special about having a day one mentality to refresh one self of, to a fresh one sense of curiosity day by day. And you could take that idea and pour it to other parts of life and say, oh yeah, that's, that's a way to live. Or you could take Steve Jobs' oaths simplicity and say, there's something beautiful here that I could transport to music or to visual arts. But there's a section of the Mr. Beast quote that really to me nails the distinction between him and previous corporate leaders. He says, quote, your job here is to make the best YouTube videos possible.

It's not to make the best produce videos, not to make the funniest videos, not to make the best-looking videos, not the highest-quality videos, it's to make the best YouTube videos possible. End quote. I think I could talk about this excerpt for an hour. I don't think we have an hour.

but let me tell you what I hear there. I think most people in creative industries have values that exist in tension between art and commerce. I want to produce podcasts that many people listen to. I also want to learn something. A musician wants to sell at a stadium. They also want to make music they're proud of.

Am I unfair in suggesting that this memo very cleanly obliterates that tension? The job here is very explicitly not to make anything resembling art. The job is to satisfy the YouTube success gods. Clicks, duration, the end. I think it's honestly kind of painful. Like, I remember Jules Terpak and I,

who's another person who does social media stuff, we actually had a phone call about this document because we were both like, what? And it's just, you look at that and you're like, whoa, like, where's the room for the creative expression? Like, where's the room to experiment? And, you know, I've been doing social media for almost four years now, and I've definitely noticed the algorithms are closing in on us. Like, there's less and less room. There's less and less

air to experiment, to be creative, because everything is so mathematically driven and, like, it's all about views and retention. And, like, you can try new stuff, but, like, Mr. Beast isn't. He's trying to do gigantic things, like his Amazon TV show that, you know, I think people were getting hurt on. And he's trying new ways to kind of do sort of scary things that are morally questionable. And that's sort of what works. People look to him making these not the best YouTube, but like the most videos that retain people the most, the videos that attract people the most, they're not going to be the most beautiful. They're not going to be the most intellectually stimulating, they're going to be

kind of like this weird crossover between reality TV and a game show, because that's just what our brains kind of like. We like the spinning numbers. And so I think it's very, very sad, and it makes a lot of sense to me that that was what he

said. But I think it could be quite dark if we don't work on that as a society. And I don't even think that Mr. Beast is a bad person, or that this memo is somehow unusually demonic in some kind of way. I am more interested in it as an artifact of Gen Z work psychology. What do you think we learn about the forces acting on this generation

by reading this memo and taking it seriously? I mean, I think you can really get into the attention stuff and like how people are very co-opted by that. In the article that I wrote about the memo, I get into like, you know, that the younger generation is going to be more focused on work quality, overwork quantity, something that Mr. Beast does talk about. Like boomers slash Gen X are very focused on putting in the hours, like being at the office. Gen Z, like there was that whole quiet quitting thing that happened back when the economy was booming. And I think for Mr. Beast too, like there was a focus on flattening the hierarchy. He was very informal in his language throughout the document, which is great. I got my first job. I got trained in how to send emails, because there was a certain

style of communication. And so I think for Mr. Beasts, like, it was very much like, look, we have technology. We know what we're doing. We don't have to work all the time on it because essentially what we're doing is we're playing into a system that already exists. There's nothing to creatively stretch here. Just do your job and go home. And so I think that's definitely what you see in some of Gen Z ears, not all, of course, we're generalizing. But that is definitely, I think, what we've seen and how they work and how they choose to approach certain issues. That answer pulled together a lot of ideas for me that I hope I'm able to communicate in this response. I think one of the obvious but sneakily profound facts of the Internet is that it makes outcomes.

clear. We know how many people a tweet reaches or a post reaches. We know how many people upvote our Reddit comments. And it's impossible to forget these positive and negative feedback loops. We are shaped by them in ways that we haven't been so explicitly shaped by a numerate feedback system in previous generations. And it seems to me that this makes people who are participating in the online attention economy, more explicitly outcome-oriented, less focused on process and more focused on what are the numbers. And there's a way in which this approach deadens art, I think, because it fixes our attention solely on the final question of how many people clicked on this link and how many seconds did they remain on the browser tab. But there's actually, I think, in your

answer a really smart opposite side of the coin here, which is that if work is seen as explicitly about outcomes rather than inputs, then people can have a very different relationship with, say, how hard they work. It's not about the number of hours that you're sitting at a desk. It's purely about what did you make this week and what are the numbers. And there's something deadening about that to a certain extent, I think creatively, but there's also, I think, something maybe capitalistically freeing about an attitude toward work that isn't so fixated on were you here for 40.0 hours in the previous five days? Maybe just last thoughts there before we move on to politics. I mean, it might not be a great example, but Doge, you know, Elon sent

that email just being like a questionable email, but, you know, five things that you did this week. It wasn't like how many hours everybody worked. And so I do think like some of the Sometimes you can see that happening at the managerial level. But I also think for Gen Ziers, like, it is kind of project-based. It's like, why would I put on all these hours? There was a document floating around from, I think some analysts at Morgan Stanley, maybe it was Goldman Sachs, one of the investment banks. And it was this whole deck about like that we're working way too many hours and the final

product isn't getting any better. They're like, just let us make a good final product instead of focusing so much on how long we're in the office. And so I think that deck, which explained, you know, their plate and they do work too many hours, it makes no sense how much they work. Plus, you know, what we did see from Elon Musk and Doge, plus the Mr. Beast memo, it's a shift and work for sure. I want to talk about politics for a bit. It is universally assumed and possibly even universally true that young people today have lost their trust in institutions. before we talk about the way in which that is inflecting politics,

what do you think this loss of institutional trust really means? And why do you think institutions, so to speak, have lost the trust of young people? I think you've linked to this poll, the spring 2024 Harvard youth public opinion, yeah, yeah. So that's the thing where I was like, oh, no, we're in trouble. But yeah, the institutional trust down across the board, except for the United Nations. And I think it goes back to, it feels like a lot of times there's kind of gridlock politically.

Like the stuff that does make it through the media, it's like, oh, they're not agreeing. Oh, the debt ceiling is like once again being negotiated. And now we have kind of what's happening with President Trump's administration. And then I think, too, like the loss of trust does come from that established. path, even though it was never certain, that established path just sort of disappearing, right? Like pensions disappearing, career path progression disappearing, perhaps a chance to buy a house one day disappearing.

And so I think younger people look at all that and they're like, okay, that's not very good. I don't really trust those institutions. And then I think, too, social media can really do a number on what people trust and what they see misinformation as a massive problem. And at this point, we do have, you know, people at the highest levels of government just sharing misinformation left and right. And if you're just a casual news consumer, that's going to be extraordinarily confusing, and it's likely going to reduce your trust even more. So I think it's all of those things. People just are not happy with the outcomes, and then they don't feel like they're able to move forward with their own life. I'm always interested

this question of how much of people's unhappiness with the world is about the world versus the inner psychology of people. So, for example, I can name all sorts of ways that the institutions that have lost trust might deserve some of that lost trust. You know, if progressives no longer trust the Supreme Court because of the Roe v. Wade decision, I understand that. If there are moderates that don't trust public health institutions because they think that they recommended COVID policies that those moderates or conservatives don't agree with, I understand the way at the institution's decisions ended up eroding trust. At the same time, I think it's no defense of public health or city governance institutions to point out that young people today

are plugged into attention ecosystems on their phone where we know for certain that negativity goes viral, that outrage goes viral, that outgroup animosity goes viral, that outgroup animosity goes viral. And when you put those things together, it seems like a perfect recipe for smartphone users always finding some reason to hate the establishment. So when you talk to young people and when you think about this clear across the board collapse in institutional trust, how much of this is actual institutional failure versus a technologically. determined outcome due to the dynamics of media economics. Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely both.

Like, you have institutions who are really caught between a rock and a hard place, you know, trying to provide some semblance of stability most of the time. Then you have algorithms that offer all sorts of opportunity, but without any real sense of security. Like, once you do lose the attention game, you're gone. And so I think for a lot of people who are maybe playing that game, that can be quite scary. And then for young people who are watching all of that,

you can probably absorb some of it. And then I think, too, the other part of it is the nature of self is redefined. There's a really good research paper that talks about the algorithmized, the algorithmic self. And it's all about how you kind of create this new personhood when you interact with a digital reality. And so I think it definitely has something to do with people just being on the phone,

you know, rage is an excellent monetization machine, and a lot of people have taken advantage of that over the past couple of years. It's kind of, we've had the WWEification of politics in a really big way. Young people are absorbing all of that. So I definitely think it's some element of the phones, it's some element of institutions, maybe not doing what they're meant to be doing or not promising some semblance of stability. But I do think, like, people are trying to. to redefine themselves amidst those two things too. I'm like, who am I in a world where institutions don't maybe provide or I'm not seeing the ways that they can provide? Who am I if like algorithms take over my whole life? Like literally who are people outside of algorithms? They're making

decisions for them pretty much every day. There's a very alarming statistic that I think John Oliver shared on one of his shows where I think it's eighth graders are going to spend 93% of their lives online, like in technology, 93%. Yeah. Of their waking hours inside of technology in some way. Yeah. Exactly. When it comes to Gen Z politics, I feel like there are several claims that people often make that are conflated, and I want to disentangle them as best I can and present them to you for your evaluation. Claim number one is that young people are shifting right overall. So in

In 2024, for example, young men and young women shifted at least 10 points toward the Republican Party. The second claim is that young men and young women are polarizing away from each other. So by some survey measures, young women today are more liberal than they used to be, and young men today are more Republican than they used to be. In your writings and your research and you're talking with young people, what's real here? Are young people really becoming more conservative or does it only seem that way maybe because older generations are struggling to pin down their political identity? Yeah. I mean, so what I gathered

as I traveled to, you know, 20 plus states over the last eight months and having these conversations like in red states and in red cities with people who identified as Republicans or people identified as Democrats is a lot of people did swing conservative, but it wasn't because they were like wanting immigrants out of the country. It was like, I just really want the economy to stabilize. And so for a lot of young people, for whatever reason, they looked at the Biden economy and they're like, this is not good. I want something different. And so I'm going to choose the other option, which just so happens to be conservative. And so I think that's what we saw with a lot of young people. swinging Republican in the United States, specifically young men, is that there was, for some of them,

like, I just really want the economy to be different. I'm quite worried about my path, as we've been talking about throughout the recording here. And then I think with regards to young women, the election results out of Germany were quite interesting because, you know, young men did go conservative, but not any faster than the rest of the population. Like, it was quite in line. But young women definitely swung through the left. And I think there you can sort of figure out why. A lot of the conservative talking points are rollbacks on protections for women in terms of abortion access and things like that. It just can feel like an attack on autonomy. And so I think young women are seeing that and, okay, we're going to go a different direction now. But from what I gathered in my

conversations, the conservative shift was mostly about the economy. There's a kind of outsized fear that young people in the U.S. because of the schism between young men moving into the Republican Party while young women, by some measures, are becoming more liberal year by year, there's some fear that the U.S. is going to retrace the gender politics of, say, South Korea, where you have this 4B movement, no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children. This is a radical movement.

This is not reflective of the general population, but what is reflective of the general population is that Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. And so I think that's partly why it's highlighted this concern for what could happen if gender politics really go out of whack. Do you think this is a completely overblown fear? year of older people who don't know what they're talking about? Or do you see signs of real political frustration among young people that goes beyond the sort of routine, I should say here,

do you see signs of real political frustration between young men and women that goes beyond the routine frustrations of just dating when you're 23, 24 years old? Yeah, I think, well, so the thing with politics at the moment is that it is tribalism to a certain extent. And I think for a lot of people, you know, there's not interest in dating outside of the tribe. And so in my conversations with young people across the country, that was one thing that kind of did come up. It's like, I can't find anybody who matches my interest and my interests are very, very important to me and my values and my beliefs and my morals. And so I think it'll all potentially realign in terms of everything working out okay. I don't know if we're headed toward a South Korea type situation,

but I think we do have a massive demographic crisis looming. And I don't think the reason that people maybe aren't having kids is because they're not coupling. I think a lot of people are just waiting on coupling because of the cost of living and the cost of childcare and sort of that path again to buying a house. And perhaps because I write on economics, I see everything as an economic problem. But that's just what I've noticed as people are like, it doesn't make sense to get married. Like, what are we going to do next? And I think, too, you could also point to the digital reality consuming people and they don't meet as many people and therefore they don't date as much. Let's do both of those topics as a follow up. I want to get to,

the antisocial century and the state of Gen Z romance in a second. But I don't think I've given you a chance to really give me your full-throated thesis statement on how housing supply and high housing prices and the rapidly rising age of the first-time homebuyers in America is playing a role in shaping the psychology of Gen Z. You've brought it in through the back door for some of my questions that didn't mention housing, but let's bring it in through the front door. How is housing and the question of housing anxiety shaping Genzi? Yes. Yeah, sorry that I was like every question. I was like, housing's the problem. You should not, I should be the one apologizing for not having made it the first question. No, no, no, it's okay. I mean, like, again, like it's what I spend time thinking

about and it's what I've done, you know, several. I've interviewed former deputy secretary of the treasury, Wally Eddie Amo about housing and like what the U.S. was doing with housing policy. I've interviewed Fed presidents about housing because that's just like as I am a person on the internet where people kind of tell me their economic woes, like the thing is housing. It's forever and always housing. And like I said at the beginning, like the housing is the foundation for how we interact with the economy. And so a lot of people will look at our current housing environment and be like, oh, well, we just need to build more housing. But, as you and I know, like, it's not that easy. Like, there's zoning. There's all sorts of

permitting and regulations, creating a lot of headwind. People at the Atlantic do a great job, you know, writing about this as well. A lot of people do a great job writing about this, actually. Like, everybody kind of talks about the problems that we're facing, and a lot of it is policy and regulation. But I think for Gen Z, it's like if you can't have that seminal moment of buying a house or being able to properly afford rent, it just feels like you're not able to really get your economic life started. John Byrne Murdoch over at the FT, who's fantastic, of course, has a fantastic chart talking about how young people are living at home longer, partially because of economic circumstances. And so I think housing is kind of the root of a lot

of the economic problems that young people are facing, because again, it is that foundation into the economy. And I'm not the first person to say this. I'm probably like the one millionth person to talk about this. But it is, I think, the biggest issue of our economic moment right now for living in the economy. You've been a lot written about delays in adulthood and delays in what some people unfortunately call adulting,

which is to say in previous decades, there was a certain expectation that by a certain age, the vast majority of Americans will have bought their first house, gotten married, had their first child, and the age at which the typical American is meeting those old-fashioned milestones for adulthood is going up and up and up. A part of that, I think, is absolutely a housing story. Another part of it is, I think, a story about isolation. I think young people are dating less in part because they're just seeing other human beings less. I wrote a cover story called the anti-social century about this phenomenon, but I want to talk about it with you in the context of

dating. So I met my wife on the dating app Bumble back in 2015. I've read in several places that the apps are really struggling to retain users. Bumble in particular, I've learned this from you, is down 90% since it's IPO. And when you look into why, it turns out that young people just aren't dating at nearly the rates that previous generations were at this age. Just 56% of Gen Z adults have been in a romantic relationship during their teen and early 20-something years compared with over 70% of baby boomers and Gen Xers. That's according to the Survey Center on American Life, which you quoted in your Substack essay. Kyla, why do you think Gen Z doesn't date? I mean, I think part of it is like the anxiety and just how to,

do you get past that initial interaction? I think part of it is sort of the political environment, too, where there feels like there's more polarization and isolation. A lot of people just aren't looking today. Like, you know, they're living their best single life. There's a big focus on like self-care, finding yourself. That'll take the rest of your life if you try to find yourself. And so I think everything is being delayed and young people have zero interest in paying for apps. I actually interviewed my little brother who's a 25-year-old trying to navigate Hinge, and he paid for Hinge, and it worked. And then he was like, I'm never doing that again. And then, you know, he broke up with the person he was dating, sadly. But I just think, like,

there, for young people, it is such a point of friction to date and to be rejected and to have to try again. And one thing I wrote about in the article was this idea of, the convenience contradiction, where it feels like everything should be pretty easy. Like, it doesn't make sense that this is so hard. Other people are quite complex. And people have been talking about dating for, you know, 10 years. I think tender and the dawn of the dating apocalypse was actually written about 10 years ago. And so dating apps have really taken on the form of the, like, you know, trying to make

something very hard, easy. And so it creates this cognitive. disconnect, I think, and young people just don't want to mess with that and who can blame them. Do we have evidence that young people, even into their 20s, are dating significantly less than previous generations? Or do we not yet know that to be a fact? Because there could be a story that teenagers are dating less, but by the time the typical American is 25, 26, 27 years old, they're more or less as likely to date as any previous generation. It's just that we've set back or delayed the average first age of first boyfriend girlfriend, right?

Do we have any evidence here suggesting that there's a clear story for the state of dating in people's mid-20s? Yes. I don't know if it's specific to mid-20s, but Pew Research has an article called nearly half of U.S. adults say dating has gotten heart. for most people in the last 10 years. And that article has a statistic that half of singles are just not looking to date. I do believe that's higher than it was, you know, a decade ago. 80% of women not interested, according to morning consult. And so I think we're seeing some higher numbers than we used to. But like everything kind of evens out in the long run. But anecdotally, when you talk to people who haven't figured it out, past like this certain age, it can get quite stressful, I think. And you definitely see that where people get, they either never try or they give up

past a certain age, yeah. You mentioned that one reason why young people might be more loathe than previous cohorts to date is that there's higher rates of social anxiety. And as you've written about, there's higher rates of overall anxiety. Gen Z adults are consistently more likely than older generations. and Gen Z-T's in particular, to say that they experience negative emotions almost or all of the time. There's been a big, frothy debate about why this is happening.

How much of this is smartphones? How much of it is young people just depressed about the state of the world? How much of it is memes being shared online that are essentially spreading depression like a kind of silicon-based plague? what do you think is going on? What would be your your full explanation for why Gen Z has such higher rates of anxiety than previous generations? I mean, yeah. So the phone debate, yes,

Jonathan Hay has, you know, there was a big debate with him and Tyler Cohen on Tyler's podcast where they went back and forth on the data and like what actually happened with that research paper. So, but like when I, when I just take myself and I take my friends and I take my little brother as an example, you definitely notice a difference in yourself when you spend a little bit too much time online because it creates this, again, like that rage bait cycle machine. There's that constant availability problem too, where it feels like you're always having to respond. Like there's, I don't know, I just think for a lot of young people, it goes back to that economic path situation I was talking about earlier. It's like,

where am I going? What am I doing? Who am I? And then, too, with the algorithms, it's honestly quite difficult. And this is something that can be developed with a sense of agency. But it is difficult to find yourself. And so I think for a lot of young people, some of that anxiety can stem from being like, okay, I'm being fed this algorithmic content. But like, what do I actually like? Who am I underneath all of this? There's just, again, that, you know, maybe not so much room for experimentation as there used to be. but it's just a speculation. I want to do some summing up here and give you a chance to tell me what you think we missed that's big. But one effort at arriving at a kind of concluding statement is that I hear you saying that Generation Z

is shaped by this three-headed hydra of anxiety. The first head, the first wave is the arrival of the smartphone. The second is the arrival of the smartphone. The second is the arrival of the pandemic. And the third is economic reality. Housing today is a source of anxiety, and AI is at the edge of being a source of anxiety. And so you have this sort of three-headed hydra of smartphones, pandemic, and economic realities. I'm also trying to take to heart this idea that there's been this loss of institutional trust,

which has nudged young people toward individual sources of authority. And that includes their preference for high-risk investment strategies, what you call Fafonomics, taking on high-risk investments, meme coins, meme stocks, day trading, sports gambling. These ways of making money are gamified, and they are in some ways a replacement for institutional means of investing and saving money. And the last bit that I'm trying to remember for myself is this idea that young people are shaped by this tension between social anxiety in the physical world and in the digital world, the difficulty of constructing an algorithmic self. I love this term that you introduced me to,

an algorithmic self. I don't think we are meant to have to discover algorithmic selves. I think this is kind of bullshit. I don't think people are meant to discover who they are in front of an audience of thousands of strangers they can't see that doesn't seem evolutionarily fit to the species. it seems kind of effed up. And so I can absolutely see how that would really scramble young people's sense of who they are and what they're for. What have I missed that you think is really important if a middle-aged guy like me is trying to get his head around, not the instrumental question of, is this generation more conservative

and more liberal, but rather like the forces shaping this generation? What is that summary statement miss? No, I think that touched on most of it. I would say like one thing I tried to really caveat, and we've spent some time caveatting throughout the conversation, is like it is a generalization. And so a lot of the comments I got on my piece were like, Kyla, you didn't think about this and like, come on,

everybody's had problems all of the time. But I think I would really ask people who are saying that kind of stuff to sort of look at what you've described, where like you're dealing with again like this technological aspect and the physical aspect and like for the first time ever you have to navigate these two different realities and like I feel like we've been kind of being like oh not woe is me but kind of like oh you know bummer but it is a bummer right like where you're having to figure out like this stuff like the technological stuff on top of the real world stuff and that's just life but it is immense. complicated. There is no rulebook. There's never a rulebook. But of course, there's going to be some element of anxiety, some element of depression, because we are trying to figure out how stuff works, and that is a painful process. And young people are leading the charge because they have to with it.

Carla Scanlon, thank you so much. Thank you.