This Week in Startups - Shopify Board proposes share restructuring + The Atlantic's Derek Thompson, Why American Teens Are So Sad | E1433

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

First we discuss Shopify planning 10-to-1 stock split & increasing CEO/Founder Tobi Luke’s control from 34% to 40% (1:42). Then, the Atlantic's Derek Thompson joins to discuss his piece “Why American Teens Are So Sad” (25:59), including the impacts of new-parenting styles (33:38), social media (44:10) and infinite news.  Check out Derek's piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/american-teens-sadness-depression-anxiety/629524/ FOLLOW Derek: https://twitter.com/DKThomp (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s show (01:42) Shopify planning 10-to-1 stock split & increasing CEO/Founder Tobi Luke’s control from 34% to 40% (14:31) Rocket - Go to http://getrocket.com/twist and use promo code TWIST for 20% off your first placement. (15:44) Is Tobi Luke pressing his advantage? (24:45) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (25:59) Talking to The Atlantic's Derek Thompson about his piece “Why American Teens Are So Sad” (32:14) Dell For Startups - Apply and get up to 45% off at http://dell.com/twist (33:38) How does parenting or over-parenting play into increased teenage sadness? (44:10) Should social media be regulated for kids similar to alcohol? FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. We got a great show for you today. First, we're going to talk about Shopify's proposed 10 to one stock split and why the board wants to increase CEO and founder Toby Looky's control from 34% to 40%. And should these companies, public ones, even have this kind of founder control? Yeah, what is even private versus public anymore? And then we have an unexpected guest because we are obsessed with this topic. We're joined by Derek Thompson from the Atlantic. And we had to want to discuss his article in the Lent. Atlantic, why American teens are so sad? Yeah, it is four forces, evidently, that are propelling the rising rates of depression

among young people, including, as you might imagine, social media, but not exclusively social media. Yeah, it's a really deep, deep discussion, an important discussion, a rambling discussion, but one, you're not going to want to miss. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Rocket. To hire in today's competitive market, you need to be a lot.

outstanding recruiting. Rocket's expert recruiters paired with ML candidate matching set them apart from the rest. Get 20% off your first placement at getrocket.com slash twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta.com slash twist. and Dell for startups visit dell.com slash twist to apply for Dell for startups

and save up to 45% off on select items. All right in our first news story today looks like we have more stock splits and governance to talk about, Molly. Shopify has some plans. Shopify has some plans to not have a Dow style takeover, apparently. I mean, I don't think that's exactly what's happening here,

but since we have been having this ongoing conversation about founder control and what can happen when someone comes in with a disruptive stock buy, Shopify, just probably coincidentally, is currently planning, evidently, a 10-to-1 stock split that would also increase CEO and founder Toby Lucky's control from 34 to 40%. Now, Shopify, of course, provides e-commerce software, that helps people start online businesses. IPOed in 2015 at a $1.2 billion valuation

has had a tough post-COVID drop. Pre-COVID, it was trading at $60 billion roughly. Market cap, they peaked at $212 billion in November 2021. And since then, Shopify has been down 64% off its COVID peak. So about $78 billion. Is it trading above its previous pre-COVID peak? Yes. So it's still trading above. So it's still trading a little bit above.

And they've had, yeah. Yeah. So I think what we're coming to is like what we saw during COVID of these stocks going up was directly related to market participation and buy maybe new entrants and people just buying their favorite names independent of price earnings ratios. And now it's kind of like if you draw the line, we'll just take out the the peak that maybe was artificial,

but if you were to draw the line from 2019, 2020, listen, I'm not into like stock chartology nonsense. I don't necessarily believe in that. But it probably would be a similar line, right? Like we'd have this through line that was like, yeah,

that was weird. A bunch of people bought the stock, meme stocked it, whatever, because it was kind of a meme stock, right? Everybody's going to stay home. Everybody's going to shop.

We're never going to leave our homes again. I mean, yeah, I'm not sure that's a meme thing so much as it is a, oh, crap, about commerce has changed thing.

And Shopify actually, I think the thing that Shopify did during the pandemic that was really promising and smart was to just basically create mechanisms for stores to just pop up e-commerce shops, like overnight. Make it super, super, super easy

to onboard previously brick and mortar shops that needed to go online in a hurry. And so I think they got a lot of attention there. However... Okay, wait, wait. So just say that, just to build on. that you're a store in the real world.

COVID happens. People can't leave their homes. You need to set up an e-commerce shop to sell what's in the store. And you're starting to do deliveries through whatever Lyft and Uber and Postmates. So yeah, that could have been part of the trend. But they also during this time had spectacular growth. Yes. So there was legitimate, spectacular world-class growth here.

Yeah. And so as a result, Shopify is saying effectively, and it sounds like the board is saying, Hey, you know who's awesome? Toby Lukie. You know who should have essentially unchallenged control over this company forever? Toby Lukie. So they're doing this 10 to one stock split, lowering the share price to make it easier to add stock compensation potentially to employee pay packages.

That's one thing that the Wall Street Journal speculated on also increased liquidity. But in addition. Hold on a second. Let me ask a question about that. Yeah. So what is the, what's the stock trading at? What's the number today? Not the market gap, but the actual number. So it's going to go from what a share to what a share. If it's trading at, you know, $60 is going down to six or something. Okay. So trading at $605 while we're taping this. So it goes to $60 at 50 cents. This is, because most modern brokerages let you buy a fraction

in the share, this is like a psychological thing. And then even with employees, It would also be a psychological thing because if I gave you a tenth of a $605 stock or I gave you, you know, if I made the stock worth a tenth as much and gave you one of them, it would be the same thing. It's the same amount of money and value. So this is largely a psychological phenomenon, right? Isn't it? I mean, I don't know if, I don't know. I genuinely don't know if companies issue fractional shares as stock as competition. Well, no, no.

The, oh, for compensation, yes. We know Robin Hood and E-Trade let you buy fractional shares. So the question is, which I think is still somewhat uncomfortable. Like if I wanted to, if I hadn't really thought that much about it's psychological in the sense that it'll work. If I hadn't thought that much about buying Shopify at 60. I might still be like 60. Hell yeah. I'm loading up on you.

So in that case, if it is psychological. And so I think the psychological part gets people to buy and then you have liquidity as a result. I just always found it weird. We might be more interesting then to go 100 to 1. Why don't we go all the way and make it a. $6 share again. And then everybody's like, oh, it's only $6 a share.

It's on sale. Even though it's not true, there's 100 times as many shares. Oh, absolutely. Isn't it all? I mean, isn't the whole stock market just ultimately?

Like, it's all like mostly feelings. Well, feelings do drive a lot of it. Right. But hopefully it's underlying, I mean, the revenue on the company is real. Right. Just so people know,

the GMV in 2021 was $175 billion. That's the gross merchandise volume. So everything's sold from the store is worth of 175. But the revenue for Shopify, They get a percentage of sales and they get software fees was 4.6 billion. So about just over 2% of that, or 2.7%, to be precise. Their net income was 2.9 billion in that same period. So they're at price earnings is 27 times.

That's pretty high price earnings, but it's a high growth company. So anyway, just put some numbers on the board. It's a real business. It's a real business. Employees do not. Thank you, producers, get partial shares and compensation packages. So presumably they could then get issued a much bigger basket of shares,

maybe have increased liquidity themselves. I don't really know. Okay, that makes sense then. But I think what's super interesting about this is that Shopify's board is also proposing a founder share that would increase CEO Toby Lukie's voting power from 34% to 40%. One analyst interviewed by the Wall Street Journal said his increased control would allow him to block any attempts at a hostile takeover.

And Robert Ash, the independently director of Shopify's board, said, quote, the company is looking to get the influence of our future in Toby's hands. So a whole new, is this a whole new type of share, a new founder share? They say that combined with his existing super voting class B shares will increase his voting power. I guess, you know, the mechanics of this are not exactly clear, but the concept in the, you know, this might just be ways of just saying super voting shares.

That doesn't seem as scary. So founder share sounds like optically. Oh, it's founder shares. They're super, super voting. They're super, they're super shares, basically.

It's my shares. We have the same number of shares. Mine are just more valuable than yours. Totally. This has nothing to do with the Twitter stuff, because this has to have been in, you know, these kind of things take a long time to,

you know, architect like a year. So this is probably something that's been in the works for a year or two. Well, it may not have anything to do with the, today's Twitter stuff, but it could have to do with the last Twitter stuff, right, a lot of pressure on Drac Dorsey to make changes.

Like, you know, I think you are seeing some moves to, for publicly traded companies to have a little bit more Mark Zuckerberg style control. Yeah. And from the article, John Phillips, one of Shopify's first investors and a mentor to Mr. Lucke, will be converting his class B shares, class A, which will boost Mr. Lucke's voting power to 40%. Ah, so wait, wait, John Phillips is converting his shares, which I guess he's pledged to Toby to vote. If I'm reading that correctly.

I read it as he's decreasing the total amount of shares in the Class B stock, which will increase Toby's percentage to 40%. So anyway, long story short here, mechanics aside, founders want to control their companies and not deal with, they want the benefits of being public, but they want the power of being a private, controlled company. and we have this now zone between public companies that operate with, you know, a traditional voting structure that are susceptible to management being voted out for performance or for how they're running a company and then privates. And then in between now you have this public private hybrid where if you don't like the governance, I guess you can opt out and not buy the stock would be one way to look.

look at it. Another way to look at it is, should we allow these companies to be public and get the benefit of the public buying in, pensions buying in, people's retirement buying in, and then giving a disproportionate amount of power to the person in charge. This is analogous to a sports team letting LeBron James pick the coach and the players. Like, what could go wrong? And we just saw that the season, what went wrong. And then other times you could see what could go right. You know, Michael Jordan's like, I want Rodman. You know, we're going to deal with him. And sorry if you don't like it, but he's joining the team because I want somebody to get rebounds. I don't want to have to rebound and get beat up and under the basket. The end.

So live by the gun, die by the gun, live by the sword, die by the sword. I don't know exactly how I feel about it. I don't know either. It feels contrary in some ways to, you know, just like you said, to the idea of a public market and the idea of a board and governance. And we have seen already you know, lack of accountability across industries. I mean, I don't know why the Activision CEO still had a job,

but I also don't know why like United CEO, you know, sort of like, you see over and over all of these scenarios in which there is not. If the founders have board control, here's an idea.

If they truly do have board control, then they shouldn't have to have a board. We should just call it what it is. Instead of putting this like ridiculous farce that like Facebook has a board, if Zuckerberg truly can just do whatever he wants. Why put the window dressing of a board there?

Why, you know, pull the wool over everybody's eyes and slip him to Mickey and bamboozle them, just call it what it is. You're buying the God King's company. Buying the God Queen's company, that's it. You have given all power to them, and they answer to no one. And your only option is to sell the stock. So they can lose your faith, and you can sell the stock. but you cannot have a reasonable board discussion that results in them listening to what you're saying

because they don't have. I feel like that would be more honest. It would be more honest, wouldn't it? You know, it would be more honest to both investors and consumers. Like, look, the only accountability that there's ever going to be because I think, you know, consumers like look at, people look at Facebook and the things that it does in the world and they think there's no, you know, they have no recourse. And the recourse is like, one, get it out of your portfolio and two, don't use it.

like have a super honest conversation. There is not some secret governing body that's going to come in and like fix this. Yeah. It's only you. Yeah, you're on your own. It's an interesting rub here. I think what will determine this is what institutional holders

believe is the right thing to do. Yeah. I have seen this go both ways, up close and personal. You know, there are some people who are so supremely talented that just letting them have the reins and keeping them less distracted

and not having to worry about a hostile takeover, not having to worry about activist investors means the company goes up and to the right. And it's, you know, there's nothing that says a company has to be a democracy with one vote for one person. Yeah. We can make all kinds of variations of corporate structures

and the market will decide which one it wants to invest in. And if too many of these, you know, hyper-control companies don't perform and their stocks don't perform, people will not buy it. If the New York Times, I Google to a lesser extent, Facebook to the pinnacle extent, and now Toby, if these companies perform, then perhaps it is the better model. The results would say it is the better model. And if they go off the rails and the stocks go sideways, then it's not the better model. And you only have one person to blame.

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

Yeah, I would say it's things are going well. So pressure advantage. So if you're at the poker tournament, you're building up a big chip stack and somebody raises pre-flop, you got so many chips, their short stack, you've got a, you know, whatever, 40% chance winning hand, they have a 60.

You know, you might try to pressure them to fold, get two ways to win, you know? So it's like, I think he's just kind of pressing his advantage. Everybody knows he's, you know, a world-class CEO. Everybody knows it's a world-class company. So why not push the envelope here and see if you can consolidate power

when things are good? You're not going to be able to consolidate power if the stock's going down more or if it's the company's not growing. So maybe people aren't paying attention and so they like Toby. And so it's a good time for him to consolidate more power. Yeah. Why not try? I mean, I might do the same thing in his position. You know, okay, I'm going to make this my life's work.

I want to consolidate more power. Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, you could have activist investors come in and tell them like, stop doing, you know, cut costs. You know, if you look at Google, if Google was subject to. activist investors who only cared about profits and dividends, I heard some statistic like Google could run with like 10% of the employees it has

and none of the systems would go down. The company would be the exact same. So you could literally cut some very large percentage. What's so interesting is that in theory, that's all investors ever care about. Like in theory, what's so fascinating about this is that it gives, I doubt that the play here is the choppifies and to be like, hey, we're going to, I mean, even though that was Amazon's play for years and years and

decades, right, to sort of say like, yeah, we're going to lose money. We're not here to maximize your shareholder value right away. We're here to slowly grow and build a long-term business. And most investors don't care for that. But it is sort of an interesting idea that one of the reasons you might want to consolidate control as a founder is so that you could have more flexibility to be like, yep, we're going to lose money for a while because we want to, I don't know, make a more climate-friendly operation and that takes investment. Or we want to pay our, you know, like Costco's stock is always like going down

because investors don't want them to pay their employees so much. Yeah. Go figure. Yeah. Go figure. We gave everybody a raise. They're happier.

It's like, I'm selling the stock. I'm selling the stock. It's a terrible investment. Terrible investment in your people like who, you know, are the front line.

Yeah, this is, you know, and then there's some investors who are like, listen, if Amazon had not made the other bet of AWS, it would not be the company it is.

That's the thing that throws off the money. 100% true. You know, we might look back and say, you know, Google doing autonomous cars, if that actually works and becomes a giant business for them, they might be like, okay, that was it. They did 20 other bets and none of them went anywhere. Google Fiber, nothing worked, Loon, all these projects, Google Glass, nothing worked, but you only need one to work. And if one works like AWS, well, gee Willikers, you know, you're sitting on a powder keg. G. Willickers. She will occurs.

Gosh. Gosh, G. Willikers. You nailed it, buddy. Willikers, pal. Let's go fishing. Hey, fella. There's an AWS somewhere in. Somebody's dad is in here right now.

Yeah, I just am going grandpa, actually. So anyway, if you look at it, it's a, here's a thought experiment. What could Google's yearly net profit be if they cut all unnecessary staff and other bats? Let's say 60% of all employees. $257 billion in revenue, $26 billion in net income. Maybe who knows what Google spends on all those employees. There must be a line item somewhere. But could they increase their net income by $25 billion a third?

I mean, what would that do to the stock? Because then you start looking at the price earnings ratio. If the earnings spike, well, then the price earnings ratio goes way down, which means the stock can go up. So if Google was trying to make the stock price go up, they would do to a certain extent what Apple does, which is buy back shares, increase the price of their products,

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

you know, like wash cloths for your phone and, no, adapters. They're like, you know, watch, iPad, watch, Airpods, maybe goggles. phone phone, the phone that ate the entire business. The phone is the entire phone.

I don't know how many deep mind employees there are, but I remember reading something like the average deep mind salary is like 500K. It's something insane. Oh, no, deep mind salaries. I mean, AI engineers are, you know, closer to seven figures at the peak when this battle was going on because the downstream impacts of a world-class AI engineer are enormous. And there are so few of them. And if you get them, the other person doesn't get them.

So just think about this. If you were to tweak Facebook's algorithm and Facebook makes, you know, or here, you know, we're looking at 257 billion in revenue. If you tweak the algorithm and made it 1% more efficient for advertisers, it's $2.5 billion. If you were to do 10 basis points, you know, a 10th of 1%. It's two redvins. 250 billion. Yeah. I mean, it's, that's the thing about these networks.

That's why you're like, how do they have 8,000 engineers working on this? project and it's like, look at how big the number is. If one little tweak, you know, gets some, you know, one percent more people to click, that's why they study the position, the font size, the color, you know, and then a million other variables. And that's what AI machine learning does. You don't, you set it up. You don't even know what it's doing. It might be on rainy days that a different font color, you know, because the average person's computer, you know, because of the sunshine needs a different color, makes you click on the ads 1% more.

And then when it's a hazy day, like that's literally what could be going on in the algorithm and we don't even know. Yeah. Because a lot of these algorithms are set up and they're pulling in every piece of data. They might know your screen brightness, you know, on your phone and be able to your experience, right?

Yep, absolutely. They certainly know the weather in your neighborhood. Maybe on rainy days, people click on more ads. So on those days, you should sew five ads per search. And on non-running days, it was not raining your neighborhood source, too. I mean, I'm making an absurd, you know, example here, but, you know. But maybe not. Exactly.

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

yeah, listen, if you're running a restaurant, Molly, and you put a hamburger on the menu, people come to the restaurant, they're tired,

they had a long day. They can expect, you know, I just have a burger. It's easy choice. I do I love a burger. It's no downside. It's a bad burger is a good,

is decent. So you do that. And, um, now you got all the $20 to $35 entrees, including the steak, are now subservient

to the $14 hamburger. And then, you know, you just killed your margin because half those steak people probably would have ordered the New York strip. And so you got to think things through sometimes if you have a restaurant at scale. That's why my dad didn't want to have a hamburger

on the menu. Fascinating. Yeah. You put a Caesar salad on the menu and a hamburger and mozzarella sticks. Like all of a sudden, watch the tickets. It's going to be 80% of the tickets in the 80s are going to be all take a Caesar salad and a burger

and let's get a side order of Mocherell sticks. You know, like nobody's going to eat the other. Nobody's going to have the steak, ta-ta. Side note. I really like how you call Mooterel sticks. What did I say? He basically said that. He basically said,

Mutzol sticks. Like, it was a whole Brooklyn situation that happened right there. Speaking of Brooklyn, lovely, lovely. Speaking of Brooklyn, hearts and minds to thinking about Sunset Park, it was shooting this morning at the 36th Street station. Yeah.

Which gave me a little bit of a cold feeling in my body because I used to take the art train, get off at 36th from 77th. And yeah, then I would transfer it to the end. Or back in the day, it was the B. So you would take the R or the N, which you know Mali stands for the rarely or the never. That's how far I'm doing to work when I lived.

We could take the rarely or the never. Wow. And then you take the B, which was the better trend. Listen, when you're a founder, it's fun to trade your craziest stories with other founders. Recently, Balloon CEO Amanda Greenberg, one of my portfolio companies told me how Vantas Sok 2 solution helped her save an important deal in the final hours. Yes, balloon sells SaaS products and collaborative software and when they needed 10 documents in place within 48 hours to close a deal, well Vanta saved the day by supplying customizable templates for Amanda to fill out and helping them through the process all the way to close.

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We've got a guest today. I was reading stories. I was reading Tweetstorms. And I saw one of these rare moments in the late stage media of self-reflection. And we're part of the late stage media,

of course. And I've always liked Derek Thompson. He's like a very considered guy. He also has good pros. You know, that's kind of a lost thing, Molly. A lot of these folks who are... Not at the Atlantic, but yes. Not at the Atlantic, but, you know, I like to have...

I just like when somebody puts a little bit of effort into the prose as opposed to like just, you know, the content mills that a lot of these journalist outlets have been. And I understand people have, like, they got a file every day or every two days. I don't have times to even think about it. But Derek's a good writer. And he had some, like, reflective thoughts. Welcome to the program, Derek Thompson. Great to be here.

Thank you so much. So, and of course you know Molly would, I assume. Absolutely. I know, Molly. Nice to see you. You know, our dame from the Hall of Fame here. So, Derek, you can congratulate Molly on being inducted to the podcasting Hall of Fame. Oh, congratulations.

That's wonderful. Thank you. Thanks. Derek, you wrote a story. It was kind of reflective. You hit on four points about why this generation, this younger generation, suffering from depression, anxiety, etc. and before we get into the story, why did you write the story?

What was the origin story of the story? The origin story of the story? Honestly, it was just seeing an article on Twitter, which is where I live, in addition to this podcast and cave, which is where I also live. And the CDC just announced that the share of teenagers of high school students, this is a high school survey that said that they feel persistent sadness or hopelessness had reached an all-time high. And this is a trend that I followed for a bit. I followed Jonathan Haidt. I follow a couple of other researchers like Gene Twengee that have looked at the impacts of social media and teenage depression and anxiety anxiety for quite a long time. And basically the number was going up, up, up, up, and then during the pandemic, teen hopelessness, anxiety, sadness, depression, everything just completely spiked, right?

The pandemic as it did to so many other trends, economic trends, business trends accelerated that which was preexisting. And I just thought this was fascinating. It was fascinating for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's just incredibly important that teenagers are sad. Like, that is, that is itself in a nutshell and an important fact. Sadness is important. But I'm also so interested in the fact that this is a trend that's going to slam into the so-called real world. Sadness in high school will become sadness in college, will become sadness in the workforce,

will become sadness in adulthood. Like, this is a trend. I was just talking to someone about how companies are handling the rise of anxiety among their younger employees. They're talking about how CEOs are now chief empathy officers. And a lot of these big companies are hiring chief wellness officers as well, CWOs. Like, people are paying incredibly close attention to this frankly unignorable phenomenon of youth anxiety. and I really wanted to figure out what the hell is going on here. Yeah.

So you identified four factors. Social media use, sociality being down, the isolation of the pandemic. The world is stressful and there's more news about the world stressors and modern parenting strategies. There's like, I want to unpack all of those.

That's good. Yeah. But as somebody who took my sad teenager to school this morning, Can we start with parenting strategies, please? I was going to go ahead. Sure. Well, look, I mean, first of, I have to, you know, from a responsible journalist standpoint, begin with the fact that I do not have a teenager, much less one that is sad.

So I am not speaking from a place of intelligent experience here. But I did talk to a bunch of psychologists. My wife is a PhD in clinical psychology. So I've learned a lot from her about CBT and the therapy that is being used across the population, but also specifically for teens. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Thank you. Yes. Cognit behavioral therapy. Right. I don't want to depart into acronym land here. And, you know, the parenting part is really important. There is a theory, and I would love to talk about the degree to which you find this accurate or total BS. There is a theory that modern parenting is to, the buzzword is accommodating. That is to say that a part of growing up is being sad. It's really difficult to grow up. You don't know exactly who you are. You don't know what you want. You don't have a lot of of authority. You have to go to school. You have to do your homework. It's hard. And one thing that

good parenting theoretically or good upbringing should do is help people build the resiliency that they will inevitably need in order to overcome the inevitable stresses of life. And today, by contrast, a lot of modern parenting, according to these experts, is accommodating, which is to say that if a kid doesn't like broccoli, they'll get turkey loaf for lunches. dinner every day of their life for four years. That was an actual story from a cover story in the Atlantic a few years ago. If a child is afraid of dogs, rather than do what psychologists would call exposure therapy, introduce this child who's afraid of dogs to a bunch of really, really cute puppies,

so that over time they'll be less afraid of this general species of dog, you instead accommodate the fear of dogs. You say, I am never going over to anyone's house who has a dog. And that over time, this kind of accommodating strategy, bubble wraps kids. And you can sort of think by extension of the bubble wrapping metaphor, they don't grow the skin thickness that is necessary in order to survive a world or live in a world that is full of stressors. And so that's the critique of not just helicopter parenting, not just being present too much,

but accommodative parenting, giving in to pathologies and fears rather than trying to build resiliency. Listen, if you know anything about this weekend startups, you know we love our Dell products here. We're a Dell shop. And right now, Dell has a semi-annual sale going on where Twist listeners can save up to 45% on select items. May I suggest the 39-inch ultra-sharp curved monitor that Jason sent me when I started this job? This thing is bananas. It's like watching a tennis match looking from side to side on this device. Now, Dell actually wants to helps startups scale their tech stack because the company is rooted in startup culture. I know it doesn't seem that way, but we had the founder, Michael Dell, on the show,

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Well, I mean, Molly and I are both parents. I have a 12 year old and your son's 15 or 16 now? 15. 15. Still 15. Right in the middle of it. Yeah. I mean, we're both in the middle of it.

I also have six-year-olds. And there is this thing where it's like, I don't like that food. And, you know, at a certain point as a parent, you have to say, this is what we're having for dinner. You don't get to choose the restaurant. There's five people who live in this household. And tonight we're eating Chinese food. And if you love Japanese, that's fine. you know, and there might be a, you know, a day of the week you get to pick, but the other days you eat this and I just tell my kids, like, listen, if you don't eat what's on the plate, that's fine. You have three choices. You can have a yogurt, you can have a banana or I can toast a bag or whatever. You know, like I kind of give them like three choices. And if you opt out of this, there's like three simple choices here, but that's, and you don't get dessert, obviously. And then I mean, I think it's a reaction, Molly, you tell me, we had a generation of parents who maybe were too hard in their kids. We had capital.

punishment. I think we're the last, I don't know if you experienced capital punishment. And you must have, like, not talking about your parents, but people in your contemporaries, there was still capital punishment. I mean, I remember teachers hitting kids in school. So we have this like, well, that's not cool. And now we have this like way overreaction to like, oh, you don't like dogs. Well, then we'll just have a dog free world for you, which is nonsensical. I don't know, Molly. What do you think about? I think certainly we see. How do you handle it? Yeah. Certainly, like, we all know those parents, right? Everybody knows those parents who are like, I got to keep my kid away from your dog the whole time

we're at this party and ruin the whole party. And it's just going to be like, I'm not saying I was at a party like that recently, but it was. And there is, I think, a lot more. And you note this in your piece that there's a lot more anxiety. You have more awareness of anxiety and then you have parents talking about this with their kids. And I certainly have some, you know, people in my social circle who I'm like, are you convincing your child that they have anxiety in OCD? and all of that, you know, on the other hand. They're inducing it, Molly. It's like, they're basically like, you'll get more attention.

We'll dote over you more if you're acting moody or whatever, right? You're kind of enabling. What do you think of that there? But isn't there like, but wait, hold on. I'm in the middle of that thought. However, at the same time, for years and years and years, we said, our kids are toughening up. They're resilient.

I read this great tweet the other day where it was like, you know, this woman is talking to her therapist and the therapist says kids are really resilient. And she goes, really? Then why do so many adults need therapy? So like, we don't know for sure what the long-term impact of the economy. There are some people who over-accommodate, but do we really think that that is causing these issues or are we more aware? I would say two things.

First off, I think that what's happening is ironic because it is the parents' attempt to prevent their children from feeling anxious in the short term that is hurting their ability to deal with stressors in the long term. That is the irony of the bubble wrapping strategy, right? By accommodating now, you hurt their ability to accommodate for themselves, to protect themselves in the future. They don't grow the resilience, the skin thickness that they need because you're taking care of absolutely everything for them and designing a world in which they never have to

feel deeply, the anxiety, the distress that they feel, right? Like, we don't need to go all the way back to, like, Marcus Ria Stoicism, but like a part of stoicism, to which I subscribe, like, you know, to a bit of. I think there's wisdom there. a part of this logic, and to a certain extent it's the logic of Buddhism as well, is that life is suffering, life is pain. And you have to just stare that fact nakedly in the face. Life has suffering and it is pain and it is our responsibility to determine our emotional reaction to the inevitable pain and suffering that is life. And if you're going to raise your children in a way that sort of protects them from having to feel

those negative stressors, then they won't be prepared in the kind of, you know, stoic or Buddhist way that Marcus Aurelius or Buddha would have told you to. So that's, I guess, point number one. Point number two, and I didn't want to sort of lean on this too hard because to a certain extent, this is a bit of a class argument, not every, and I'm trying to, I'm describing what is a global phenomenon among American teens, not just among upper middle class teens. But the following is, I think, more of a class argument. Valerie Ramey is a, as an economist who wrote this very famous paper on the Rugrat Race. And this was a paper looking at time use surveys of upper middle class parents.

And it showed that upper middle class parents, especially college graduate parents, started in the 1980s to spend much more time with their kids when they were teenagers. The time spent with kids started to go up and up and up and up the 1980s, 90s, 2000s. Valerie Ramey's thesis is that this is about parents becoming much more obsessed with getting their kids into college and that the college achievement rat race might be another layer of this stress cake that we're trying to disentangle, right? That in addition to being sort of causative, and bubble wrap from everyday stressors, like I don't like dogs, I don't like broccoli,

I don't like Brussels sprouts. You also have this enormous pressure on your back to get into Williams. And if you don't get into the school that has an acceptance rate of like 5.1%, then you're a failure. And that combination of, I never have to feel this kind,

I'm protected from these anxieties my everyday life, but also I'm given this unbelievably difficult achievement expectation for my parents and for my world. I think the combination of that is unbelievably stressful to a lot of upper middle class kids. And it should be said that while income is not asked about in the CDC survey, ethnicity is

in this country a relatively close proximity for income. And the fastest growing anxiety rates, the fastest growing sadness rates in the country were among white kids, more than Hispanics, more than black kids, more than any other demographic sadness and hopelessness is rising fastest for white kids. is that a way of saying that the privileged kids can afford to be sad and, you know, maybe the kids who have less privilege are experiencing a little more hardship, perhaps a lot more hardship and getting more resilient? Like, is this actually just testing bias?

Like, do we just know that these kids are anxious because we're able to ask them? That's a really, really great question. And it is absolutely a question that my wife asked. So there's a, I would say two things. One, I think it is well understood within the clinical psychology world. that there is a testing bias, a representative bias, that higher income people are more likely to use language like, I suffer from generalized anxiety disorder versus just feeling like, well, my life is objectively difficult. I make minimum wage salaries and it's difficult to pay

rent, but I don't tell pollsters that I have generalized anxiety disorder. So to a certain extent, there's a representation angle here. But how do we know that this isn't just representation? We'll look at the objective data. Suicides are going up. Hospital ER admits for teens whose self-harm is going up. Suicide attempts are going up. Eating disorders are going up. And places that treat eating disorders are seeing more cases.

So it's not just a polling answer that we also have objective data that seems to indicate that this is a real world phenomenon and not just a representative phenomenon. I feel like that's, this is where we should make the turn into some of these other stressors too, because the parenting is one of the four. So you've got a certain segment that has like this bubble parenting and they can't kind of figure out how to like function in the world. Then you have all of these other factors. I know that Jason is super passionate about the conversation around social media. That's listed as your number one. Do you think that's like the actual number one? How big a factor is that for kids?

To be totally honest with you, I listed them by how frequently I heard them offered as answers. I'm pretty ambivalent myself on what the big story is. I do think that it's a jambalaya. The very last paragraph of my article, I think the article might have been shared in the stream, but the very last paragraph of my article is my attempt to synthesize all the answers. I think there's no question you have to look at social media. All of these subjective and objective measures, of negative teen mental health started to increase in 2011, 2012.

What was happening then? This is Gene Twenge's big argument. What was happening in 2011, 2012? Was it the Great Recession just started? Nope, it was over, and actually unemployment was starting to decline. Was it some big other cultural trend? No, it really was smartphone penetration, passing 50% and the mainstreaming of social media plus smartphones.

And I think that if you look at the culture that is created by the Internet, It's a culture that there's some studies that have shown that the kind of emotions that go viral on the internet are high arousal negative emotions. So not just mere sadness, but outrage, anger, fear, absolute, they're deplorable and they're horrible and everyone give me a thousand likes for saying so. If you go to therapy and get CBT, have someone give you cognitive behavioral therapy, they will push back against every high arousal negative emotion that comes to you. So we have on the internet a world that is essentially the hellscape for clinical psychologists.

Like if clinical psychologists were going to design a world that was like perfectly imperfect for mental health, they would design social media and the internet. It's just a terrible place to be for mental health. And you see this over and over and over again. And so I think it's impossible to fully disentangle the effect of social media. Then finally, and I'll stop talking and throw this back to you guys in a second, but, you know, you can just believe Instagram. You know, Instagram has done its own internal surveys, which has basically said, my summary, our product is like alcohol. Lots of people love it, and it's good for them, and it's pro-social for them, and they have a fine time with it.

But there is a minority that finds that this stimulus makes them dependent and depressed. That's social media. Yeah, yeah. I love Twitter, but, like, it absolutely makes me. some people dependent and depressed. And I think we need to be sort of sophisticated in our analysis of social media to say, this is not rat poison, it's alcohol. Fine for many.

Terrible for some. Well, and if you combine it with the socializing factor that you mentioned, and you can actually duff-tale it with parenting, a lot of parents, you know, will say like, okay, you can use your device. This becomes like a substitute for parenting or, you know, them going out and experiencing hardship in the world. They just put their device in front of their face, and they just consume whatever's on YouTube or Instagram.

And so it's not just that they're going into social media, and that's the hellscape. I think it's a pretty good description of it. They're removing socialization. So it's what? It's taking away at the same time. So it's like double. It's just,

it couldn't be a more horrible combination. And I guess this leads to if you were the person making the decision, and let's say the government had the ability to regulate uses of social media and smartphones, what would be the minimum age that you would set reasonably for social media for kids and teens? Yeah, as someone without kids and who really doesn't research kids, I definitely, I don't have a confident answer. I think you'd probably want to start by making it harder for tweens to use a product that they're not supposed to use, right? My understanding is that it's widely understood that kids who theoretically shouldn't be able to get onto Instagram are utterly on Instagram and all their friends are on Instagram.

And it's like, you know, it's, I don't know, it's like drinking in some rural county where absolutely everybody is drinking by the time they're 17 or something. Or urban county. I don't want to be rural gist or something. And so I think you just have a totally different way of looking at it. I can take that bullet for you, Derek. You're 100% of it. I was like, oh, yeah, no, that's my county. Bellies are just cracking cases of but light.

They love it. Accurate. Accurate. So I do think that a minimum age is probably appropriate. Beyond that, you know, I wrote an article called social media is attention alcohol. And I made two points in that article. Point number one is that we have a minimum age for a relatively strongly kept minimum age for alcohol. and we should have one for social media as well.

A legal limit, not just let Snapchat and Instagram decide for themselves what the bottom line is. The other, and this is a little bit more touchy feeling, so maybe you can sort of help me unpack this, but we have like a language and like a sort of social infrastructure around alcohol dependency. We say, hey man, you need, like,

maybe you should give me your keys tonight. I think you've had too much. Hey, you should have a water. You know, I think we, we, We've had enough today. A couple of coffee time. We have interventions for people. And it's not, it's not, it's not weird to have an intervention for a friend.

It's a, it's a part of culture. But we don't have these things for social media, really. We don't really have like a norm of like friends texting each other saying you need to get off Twitter. We don't really have like, I mean, do, I mean, maybe we might, you know what I would argue. I don't. Well, yeah, you have. What we don't have, I would say. You are a leader in the space.

You're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you might, you might, you know, you're leading edge. I said that. I'm sure you about that one. But I think what we don't have actually is widespread agreement that online activity causes offline harm. Like we don't, you know,

we have not come to, because there are too many people making too much money and getting too much attention on social media for us to say at a blanket level, this is bad for people. Like, we still don't necessarily agree on that. And so the idea that we would somehow, translate that seemingly obvious harm into parenting or policies for our kids, it feels like

we're still pretty far away from that. Yeah, we are. And just to finish the social infrastructure like lists, because it's a lot of things. Like, I love whiskey. I collect wine. Like, I love alcohol. But I also like, not through any like incredible intelligence, just know that I shouldn't like have X amount of whiskey on a Tuesday, right? Like, if I want to try some whiskey and, like, you know, drink it while watching basketball,

I don't feel that bad. But, like, if I'm dipping back and back into the whiskey on Tuesday afternoon when I'm alone, I'm like, no, I shouldn't be doing this. This is clearly me enjoying the whiskey a little bit too much. It's a little challenging when you're a Knicks fan,

but continue. Right. I'm busy for you to say. Banning Nick's fandom might actually be a really good pro-social power of the federal government. The depressive. The depressing.

Charts are receding. What happened? So, but I, but like, so there's that understanding. We don't have like a similar understanding, I think, about social media use. Like, there's no surge in general warning that's just like, Derek, you know, Jason, Molly. If you guys have like posted three times today, by the time, by your fourth post the day, like, you should really start to reconsider your posting behavior. Like, there's just, there's just, again, I call it social infrastructure and that's a little broad. But it's just because, like, we just don't have a, Molly, you were just, you were right on this.

We don't have a communal sense of like, what behavior is good, what behavior is bad? What's prosocial and what's maladaptive? Well, and we know that tobacco and alcohol will kill you on a physical level, and yet we don't necessarily think of the brain as a part of the body, right? So it's, it is doing the same kind of damage. We just haven't quantified it in the way of like lung cancer or liver, you know, cirrhosis. Right. But now let's talk about the news.

This, I think, is what Jason meant by the self-reflective part of this. Yeah, that was the part I thought when I read your tweet storm, I retweeted, one part of it now is like, you do. Like, the news is obsessed, right? Like with bad news. Mm-hmm. Yes, it is. And there's a couple layers to this.

First layer. The news has a bad news bias. We know this. I mean, you know, like, here we are talking about teen sadness. Yeah. News has a bad news bias. If it pleads, it leads. Like, this is an old, old adage.

We don't need to go too deeply into that. One layer down is that, like I said, news now travels to social media distribution. streams and social media has a high arousal negative emotion bias, right? Outrage, anger, fear. So you have a product with a bad news bias traveling through distribution streams with a high arousal negative emotion bias. Then I think you have like the readers. You have people who read and share. And I unfortunately think that people go online for the purpose of like dipping into maladaptive feelings. They want to go online to feel.

feel that like frisson of anger and outrage. They're like, who's the enemy? Who's the antagonist of Twitter today? And how can I jump on a quote tweet and make fun of them? Like we, I think if we're reflective, like we often are our worst selves when we're online participating in the discourse, capital T, capital D, the discourse. We're often our worst versions of ourselves. And if you put it all together, I just think that people, especially teens, are like more aware

of the news and they used to be. My wife and her friends who are clinical psychologists say this. Like kids will come in to the therapist's office and they'll say like, I'm depressed about climate change. I'm depressed about the American homicide rate. I'm depressed about enter some huge global unsolvable problem here. And I think that's new. I think that's kind of new.

Like being obsessed with with the news is, you know, we used to call them news hounds. But now we don't even like, you know, or like, or like, or like, like media junkies. We don't even use those terms anymore because it's kind of assumed that everyone's a media junkie, everyone's swimming in the news currents all the time. And I'm just not sure it's good for us. It's possible that news is like social media is like alcohol.

A little bit can be good. A lot is pretty consistently pernicious. And so I think that there's something about the quality of the news cycle that might be a contributor here. They know, I mean, kids know everything. I can speak from experience here. My kid knows everything. And there are times

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

Yeah. And this is not, you're right. Like, teen brains are different. This is a point that Lauren Steinberg quite interviewed both for a book that I wrote called Hitmakers, which is there. And for this article, Lauren Sandberg makes this really important point, which is that teen brains, unlike children's brains and unlike adult brains, are extraordinarily sensitive to peer influence.

And he sent a lot of studies on this, but basically teens care more about what their peers think about them than any other age group. So why is that important with social media? Well, it means that teens are choosing to dip into this world where people are constantly up and downvoting every aspect of people's lives. It seems like a perfect environment for them to develop all sorts of negative social comparison disorders. And that's just another reason why social media might be sort of particularly pernicious for teenagers. in the good news column, it feels like the country is becoming aware of this. We have politicians becoming aware that social media is driving politics not always in a good way. We have podcasting, which we're soaking in right now, and you have a Ringer podcast as well,

a podcast on the Ringer network. You look at, I think, a reaction to this, people taking social media diets, people opting out of social media. And I really think podcasting has become like the antidote for it. Like, you know what? Binge drinking, not fun, but, you know, hey, doing this podcasting thing and people getting addicted to long form, authentic discussions seems to be a correction to it. And I also think the Instagram leak could have been like the tipping point of, you know, society being like, yeah, this stuff is not good. And you have certain countries banning it. And you have China, you know, it's an authoritarian country. They can do things like this.

We can't because we have to. concept that people have choice and free will. But they're just like, yeah, you're not playing video games during the week and you get two hours of video games. And as heavy-handed and as insane as like how they run their country can be at times, it might be right. They might be right about the time limits. Yeah, they are, you know, there's a doubt of truth even to Chinese authoritarianism.

I mean, it comes from, it doesn't, it is, it's direction. accurate, it's just like the vector is way too strong, right? They recognize the time limits would be good, but rather than like suggest it, they mandated, which probably is itself not very good. But I agree with you. I think that, you know, there are lots of answers to the questions that we are posing that really are a matter of like ancient wisdom. Like, I mean, to go back to just Buddhism and stoicism, but even like existentialism and

all sorts of like Judeo-Christian philosophies, like, you know, what's the Serenity prayer, right? Like, understand the difference between what you control, what you can control, and what you can't. Like, these are ancient ideas. And I feel like, like, being more aware of our own limits and of the limits of certain tools in our life would just be good for people. So maybe to a certain extent, this is, this is just about like a return at a national level, parental level, an individual level to some of that ancient wisdom. I think it's such a great point. I have really thought about this deeply because, you know, raising kids and you'll be there soon. I'm sure, Derek. I came up with some simple rules and I actually talked to my kids about parenting like six-year-olds and 12-year-olds have six-year-old twins and I told them I was like, you know, as your parent, I need you to be bored sometimes because all the great ideas I had in my life came when I was bored.

And if you're using a device, it's just giving you entertainment constantly and you never experience boredom, therefore you never have a creative idea. And so, you know, when we're skiing or whatever, there's no devices during the day and we'll watch a movie at night. It's a family discussion as to which movie.

We make a list of movies we want to watch. We talk about the movie. We talk about the director. We make it a little more of a ceremony to watch it together and discuss it. And then, yeah, no more iPads in the morning. And then if we're at, you know, the ski house, there's no devices, no screens until after the sun goes down.

And boy, was that a change. And then a little bit of grit goes a long way. So one of the things I love about skiing has, you know, but one activity is, It's hard. It's hard to get your ski equipment on. It's hard to get on the lift. It's like it's arduous. It's a schlep of schleps, of all schleps. But once you get on the mountain, it's exhilarating, and then you have this like, okay, there was a reward for the schlep.

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

So you got that I saw the participation trophies behind you. That's right. Congratulations. I'm like, it's really you guys passing off. all this anxiety on to the kid. I mean, but I will say, you filed this week.

I know. I get those. That's why you get a paycheck, Derek. Every week, every week you get a little trophy from the Atlantic. I don't. No. Like,

I will say, I don't know that I would recommend. Like, I think there's, there is truth to the ancient wisdom. There is, there is a lot of truth to, to the idea that what we need to do is acknowledge that our kids are sad and their

brains are sick and work on that problem. I do not know that I would recommend. my own childhood. Like, did it make me the mayor of the fucking apocalypse? Absolutely. Right? Like, yes, I did raise myself and everybody around me and now I'm very tough as a result. Not ideal. Wouldn't necessarily give my kid that, right? Like, I don't, I think there's, I would be wary of bringing all the nostalgia into solving the solution because we live in a different world now. Well, Molly, don't you think sometimes when you see these kids who are entitled, and you're like, okay, they have it a lot easier than me.

They've got all of this privilege. Parents are going to pay for college. They don't have to have an ever school job. Don't sometimes you look at them and look at the outcome and say, I'm actually a happier person because I suffered more as a free range kid. Like this, this concept that kids cannot be alone. I don't,

let's be honest about one thing. We don't know what their outcome is going to be. I was very sad all by myself. Right? like being a free range kid. And now I'm fine. We don't know what the, we know that there are higher rates of,

you know, everything that you said objectively is 100% true. We know that there are higher rates of suicide. We know there's terrible drug use. We know that there is like real concern and depression. We also don't know for sure that those kids are all going to be sad in college and be sad in the workforce. Right? Like,

I'm not sad now. Yeah. I think, you know, we're asking, we're touching on what are essentially what's some of the most important, but also deepest and, you know, hardest to answer questions of like the human condition and like not to, you know, end us in like the most highfalut and possible way. But, you know,

I think the goal can't be happiness. The goal can't be like permanent happiness because that, like, that doesn't really exist, right? We don't want to make the North Star something that we're never going to achieve. The goal is how do we keep persistent sadness from growing 85% for a over a 10-year period for a generation, right? Like, that is the goal. How do we stop the inexorable rise of persistent sadness? And there, I think, you know, you just have to take all the ingredients and, like, put it in the jambalaya.

Like, overuse of social media has to be important. One thing we didn't talk about, but I'll just quickly mention and go right through. The decline of sociality and the increase of loneliness is a huge deal. Like, it just seems like kids are physically, phenomenologically, alone a lot. alone with the screen a lot. They don't go on walks with their parents. They don't work. They don't drive. They go on dates less.

They hang out with their friends in physical world environments less. They are alone with an Apple screen or Google for a lot of Samsung, a lot of their life. Just want to make sure I got all the manufacturers. Well done. 87% market share. There we go. So then on top of that, you want to, I think, think about the downsides of accommodative parenting. And you want to think about the fact that people in my industry,

are filling the interwebs with a lot of negative, scary, sad, including, frankly, this article. So, Mayaclapa. But, like, I think that if you put it all together, you have the beginning of the understanding of, okay, this is why persistent hopelessness and sadness is increasing. And maybe if we just pull down in each of these ingredients, that line will just bend a little bit.

Normalize, yeah. It feels like you can normalize it just by dialing back each of these 20%. I guarantee you're going to see a compounding. effect. It's very hard to say no screens. It's very hard to say, you know, you got to suffer more, you know, you got to socialize 100% of the time. But if you do a little bit of each, I bet you, it will turn around. And then this is like this crazy narcissism where everything is about the person and nothing is about, you know, helping the rest of the world or going out and working. Like, I think people not working or not. Sometimes I literally am like, we need church.

well i mean church was like about helping other people or synagogue or synagogue yeah exactly i mean what we and i guess what i mean by that is community and a sense of duty like something other than yourself like i mean it really gets super narcissistic when you're like i'm posting the ticpac and instagram my feelings my score on the video game like everything is about the person nothing's about hey i'm on the chess club i'm in the theater club i'm going out with my crew we're doing things together i'm on the ski team, whatever. Like, it can't always be about this individual, which I think is the parents create, which we saw here, I won't say the specific town, but this example you gave of the pressure

to get into these colleges is so pernicious in the Bay Area that we had so many suicides going on in a particular area that we had to do a media blackout because they felt we were now getting into induced suicide territory. Contagion effect, yeah. Contagion was happening and two or three people would be jumping in front of the train. They had to put a security guard in front of the train. And it was all based on these insane parents who were like, if you don't go to Harvard, Stanford, whatever, bull, like, you know,

how do you succeed? And then you look around you and everybody's a CEO or a venture capitalist who went to Harvard or Stanford because like Hollywood, all the beautiful people go to Hollywood, all the Stanford Harvard grads come here. And all the kids can't statistically be the same as the most successful people they see in their orbit. It's like every kid in Hollywood cannot become Tom Cruise. I think that, you know, sometimes I wonder whether people in position, it's so typical for people in positions of power or success to give graduate school speeches

about sort of the path to their success. Like here's the ladder to walk up to get to where I am. It might sometimes just be useful to have them give, graduate speeches about what's still hard in their life to make the point that like, there is no, this isn't a hundred meter dash. There's no marathon. There's no finish line. Like people who you think have succeeded have passed like the final threshold of success,

they still feel stress. They still feel sadness. They still feel occasional hopelessness. They still feel everything that's like endemic to the human condition. So like, you're thinking about like, oh, if I get into Stanford, I'll be happy. And then you get into Stanford and you're like, holy shit, this is really stressful. But if I get into like Stanford MBA school, then I'll be happy. You get into the graduate school of business and you're still like, oh, but I get my series A, I'll be happy.

If I see, I feel I'll be happy. Exactly. And it never in and it never caught like that. By the way, it's quite the opposite. Yes. You literally have to, you know, as best I can see, having, you know, being a kid from Brooklyn who now is, you know, seeing it up close and personal. It really is about that foundation of childhood and then defining success for yourself and actually understanding yourself enough to know what makes you happy. And then constructing a life around, hey, you know what makes you.

me happy, I like doing my podcast. I like going skiing with my kids. Okay, I'm going to do more of that. I like going to this, I like this music. I like the sports team. I'm going to indulge in that. I like playing basketball. I'm going to do that. Like, you actually have to take some amount of agency in your life. And I think the problem with social media is you're giving up all agency. You're just like, whatever's on the screen is what I'm doing. You're not constructing a life. You're just being programmed by an algorithm. All these devices right in the fucking garbage. That's my advice for parents. Honestly, I like Twitter and garbage.

And it goes for you two, journalists. Enough with the Twitter. What did you think of it? And yet Twitter is how you found me. Wow, there are some good things that happen. Yeah. What did you think of the New York Times? Tweet less, Derek.

Tweet less, maybe. There's more wood behind the arrows. There's no question that I think he's directionally right. I think he's directionally right that a lot of journalists use Twitter in a pernicious way. And that specifically, I don't just mean that like, being online is pernicious, I mean that it essentially serves as a kind of shelling point or like contagion device for journalists who arrive at the same opinion. Like I just see this so many times.

Like for all sorts of reasons, because you constantly have to externalize, you constantly have to publish what you think about everything, that once everything is externalized and published, it's easier for everyone to understand where like their peers are, and so they come around the same ideas. But like the way that you understand, the way that the world works, is by experimenting, having a diversity. of views. And it's really difficult, I think, to have, like, a group that understands itself to be a

peer group publishing a diversity of views without arriving at sort of a single point. And so I think that social media is, like, probably pretty bad for that because it hurts our ability to understand reality. At the same time, like, I love Twitter. Like, Twitter is how I, Twitter is how I learn about everything. I try to do a very purposeful job of following people who I agree with and disagree with who are conservative and libertarian and liberal and leftists. I try to explain. myself to all these viewpoints. And then I also tried to not react when I'm angered. Because inevitably, if you have a lot of different viewpoints in your stream,

you're going to see something that's outrageous. You're like, oh, that's so stupid. How can I just even think that? But you're like, wait, that is by design. I did that. I purposely exposed myself to like, whatever, a paleo-conservative, a Marxist, because I wanted to understand what a Marxist would think about problem X, X, Y, Z. So if I'm reacting with anger, I'm reacting to my own mistake.

Like, this is what the service is for. And too often I just see that people are like just going online to have a food fight. The metaphor that I use sometimes for Twitter is that Twitter is a library with a food fight in the lobby. Like, you walk into the library in order to like learn about the world. But then you just like see a bunch of people throwing tomatoes and you're like, that looks fun. And you just end up throwing tomatoes at someone. But if you just pass the lobby, you can get into the elevator, go up the floors. And there's a beautiful library of information and views beyond it.

But getting out of that lobby is really hard. Yeah, the curation you're doing is critically important. I listen to a range of podcasts with people I vehemently disagree with because I like to be more informed and understand their position. Something happened where you had to pick a side. And I think that's like one of these very weird things that has happened because a second order effect of social media is like if you're not picking aside, well, you don't get the rewards of retweets and likes and followers.

So it's just so much easier. and it happens to media outlets too. It's just easier to be the New York Times and be like, we're the anti-Trump and then Fox, where the pro-Trump and, okay, you know, Rachel Maddow, Ben Shapiro, you're going to get more ratings than if you're the Atlantic and you're like, let's be thoughtful and think this through

or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Hey, let's try to find reality here. It just doesn't result in as many subscribers, which is sort of a weird thing. I think you're probably right. I think there's probably a business incentive to pick aside and monetize anger and outrage, all those emotions that go aerodynamic online.

And it's hard, but important. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, don't you think Trump, Molly, really exacerbated? It felt like the New York Times was just like, hey, this is going to work. Let's go deep into this Trump thing.

And then MSNBC. And then Fox and other folks went the other one. And just triple down on it. Yes or no, right? Like, I think things got more polarized without a doubt. and so and that's sold. Like there's a whole conversation we can have about incentives and media incentives and the question of what brings you money and gets you attention and makes you a brand.

And all of that is still wrapped up in social media and what happens on Twitter where, you know, I was actually, I got distracted because I was looking up this old interview that we did with George Lakoff, the neurolinguist. And one of the things he talks about is that actually this, I'm derailing us a little bit, but that when you go and seek out opinions that oppose yours, often it has the opposite effect of what you think. You think that it's exposing you to those opinions and making you think about them,

but because the brain is physical and what you think and believe is a groove in your brain, then you have a response to the thing that you don't agree with that actually causes you to entrench your own beliefs more strongly. Right. Yeah, it was super interesting. You have to go into it. wanting to challenge your beliefs.

If you just want to defend your position, if you go into it with a defensive mindset, and then read a point of view, it's the opposite of yours, then you're just sort of prepared to punch back against it. I think that there's another way to... What he's saying is that there is a degree to it, like, that thoughts change your brain.

He's talking about the physiology of it. And so if the thing that you, like, there's the mindset part, I would love to go in and say, my brain doesn't have any grooves and I don't have any lifelong opinions, but that's just not true. Like physiologically, information goes in is altered by the makeup of my brain.

And then I like may or may not reject it. I'm not saying we should give up on finding different information. But it was just an interesting side note to the idea that exposing yourself to other ideas always makes you more considerate of them. Because in some ways, sometimes, especially now when what we see is people radicalizing in opposition to each other, I think you could make the argument that the more like seeking out a radical opinion does. necessarily make you more open-minded. Yeah. I think that there's definitely somebody in the fact that, like, there's been a couple studies that seem to indicate that as people

gather more knowledge, they become more polarized. So rather than more information, moving them toward like some imaginary middle of the spectrum, gathering more information essentially gives them the sort of arsenal to feel like they can stake out one of the polls on that position. Yeah. Side note, though. That was a total side note to the parenting thing. Sort of.

Except that understanding. I think like it goes back to this idea that understanding what kids are feeling now, understanding how the brain works, how we respond to social media, thinking of it as a physical condition, a part of our health is what fundamentally is going to give us solutions. Yeah, I agree. It's fascinating. So good. You're a great, great job on the piece.

I give you a, and I think there is a special carve out if you're writing about depressing things with the, the intent matters of creating deeper understanding to help people solve the problem you're not it's not it bleeds it leads you weren't click baiting you were trying to help the situation i appreciate that and i'm going to inscribe it on the participation trophy just behind my shoulder over here absolutely we're sending you an official this week and service participation trophy you can follow Derek thompson on the twitter dk t h o mp and um he's a staff at the Atlantic host of Plain English. I didn't know you had a podcast per day.

I'm so sorry. What is plain English? What are you talking about? Plain English isn't, it's a podcast about four months old. It's with Bill Simmons and Ringer podcast network. And it is a news podcast where I believe next week we're going to talk about this article. So for those of whom want, for those of you who are listening who think, you know, 50 minutes isn't quite enough for me to talk to, listen to Derek talking about teenage anxiety.

I would like another 45. There will be product for you. No, it's, it is literally, I guess, the more of the better. Well, here's the thing. You know, you have so much time when you're walking or on the treadmill, previously commuting, whatever. I think like there's people are like, oh my God, 40 minutes. It's like 40 minutes is a great discussion over appetizers. Yes.

There is, people have five hours a day. They watch video, TV traditionally. I think it like four of them, three of them are going to go to podcasting because it's just such a better conversation for people. And it is, you get these voices that have time. And you're multitasking, yes. You can listen while you're playing a video game, cooking dinner, whatever it is. And he's a contributor to here and now Mondays on NPR,

an author of the book, which I actually have read. I forgot that that was your book. I really enjoyed your book, Hit Makers, the science and popularity, the science of popularity in an age of distraction. Derek, we have to have you on again. You're a great guest. All right.

We'll talk soon. Bye, bye. Thank you both. Thanks, sir. Hey everyone, producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, SAAAS to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate.

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