Plain English BEST OF: How Gen Z Sees the World

If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name is Matt Bellanyam, Founding Partner at Puck, and the writer of The What I'm Hearing Newsletter. And with my show The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamers on the brink of collapse, and which executives on the hot scene. Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who'll never eat lunch in this town again. Follow the town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Hi everybody, Derek here. In December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world. I'm going to be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays. So we're going to be rearing some of our favorite episodes from the last 12 months, a kind of best of compendium. And this list includes interviews that really stuck with me and others that really stuck with you. And you had lots of feedback and thoughts on including this one. I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then happy holidays and happy new year. 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 Scanlon. 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 Buscemi holding the skateboard above his head, asking how do you do fellow kids. I wanted to talk to somebody smart, who's 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 "Plan English." Kyla Scanlon, 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, 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 over generalization. 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 John Faza, 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 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 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 there is really difficult, I think, for that group just based on my travels and talking with them for them to kind of separate as 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 isn't visible 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 that are 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 see 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. It's a news segment interviewing this group of students who are like no phones like their antiphone's 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 in the pandemic and thinking about ways that not only is this group shaped by them, they're also shaped by the back lashes against those forces. They 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 with 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 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 on 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, 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 that's 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 has 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 my favorite Kyla coinages, which you've described as the emergence of Fafo nomics, Fafo, Fafo being an acronym for Fuck Around and Find Out. What is Fafo nomics by your definition? And what makes it a particularly Gen Z phenomenon? Yeah, so Fafo nomics is that I, you know, I figure 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, 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 look at the statistics of, you know, real income growth, not over the last four years where inflation is definitely worth 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 talk 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 and 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 and 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. Of course, in 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 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, more questions and answers and leading people to that financial nihilism and faffonomics. 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 pointed out the fact 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 is 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 mimetic. 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 I've 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 generation's pensions for investing in cryptocurrencies and stocks where there really is no case for the asset to go up and 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 the 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 discord that are dedicated to meme coins and sniping mean coins and getting in fast and getting out faster same thing with like GMC and AM or GME 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 was just so happens to be meme coins and 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 and 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 you know 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 handsomeest man in the world he's not the most charming he's not the most talented in terms of like 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 want 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 like 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 and 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 out maybe a million he like 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 the 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 hate the player just a little bit 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 stay 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 this there is something special about having a day one mentality to refresh oneself of to a fresh one sense of curiosity day by day and you could take that idea and port it to other parts of life and say oh yeah that's that that's a way to live where you could take Steve jobs oats is 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 Mister 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 and 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 would I hear there. I think most people in creative industries have values that exist in tension between art and commerce right I want to produce podcasts that many people listen to I also want to learn something I'm musician wants to sell at a stadium they also want to make music they're proud of. Am I in fair 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. Click duration the end I think it's it's so it's honestly kind of painful like I remember just her pack and I who's another person who does social media stuff we actually had a phone call about this document because we're 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 and try new stuff but like Mr. Beast isn't he's trying to 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 more totally questionable and that's sort of what works is like you have to people look to him making these not the best YouTube but like the the most video the 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 in 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 like 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 in 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 over work quantity something that Mr. Beast has talked about like boomers slash genetics 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 to like there was a focus on flattening the hierarchy he was very informal in his language throughout the document which is great like I got my first job I got trained and how to send emails like because there was a certain style of communication and so I think for Mr. Beast 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 years not all of course we're 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 pull 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 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 a capitalistically freeing about an attitude toward work that isn't so fixated on were you here for forty point zero 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 those you know Elon sent that email just being like a question will email but you know five things that he did this week it wasn't like how many hours everybody worked and so I do think like sometimes you can see that happening at the managerial level but I also think for Jen's ears 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 that Morgan Stanley really 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 is explained you know their play 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 is a shift in 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 so that's 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 to social media can really do a number on what people trust and what they see misinformation is 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 these 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 in 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 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 are conservatives don't agree with I understand the way that the institutions decisions end 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 out group 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 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 like 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 WWE a vacation 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 elements 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 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 or I think it's eighth graders are going to spend 93% of their lives online like on technology 93% yeah of their waking hours inside of technology in some way yeah 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 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 I 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 you know 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 was 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 you know 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 to 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 like 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 US because of the schism between young men moving into the Republican party while young women by some measures are becoming more liberal. There's some fear that the US 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 it's 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. 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 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 these sort of routine I should be 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 and dating outside of the drive and so in my conversations with young people across the country that was one thing that kind of did come up is like I can't find anybody who. Much is 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 real line. 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 to 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 anti social century and the state of Gen. C. Romance in a second but I don't think I've given you a chance to really give me your full throw to thesis statement. On how housing supply and high housing prices and the rapidly rising age of the first time home buyers in America is playing a role in shaping the psychology of Gen. C. You brought it in through the back door for some of my questions that didn't mention housing but how is housing and the question of housing anxiety shaping Gen. C. Yes, yeah, sorry that I was like every question I was like housing's the problem you should not about I should be the one about dressing for the first question. No, no, it's 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 interviewed former deputy secretary of the treasury while I get a game about housing and like what the US Treasury 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 they're 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 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 they're 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. C. 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 Bernmurdoch 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 million person to talk about this but it is I think the biggest issue of our economic moment right now for living in the economy. It's 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 learn this from you is down 90% since its IPO and when you look into why it turns out that young people just aren't dating nearly the rates that previous generations were at this age. 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 and American life would you quoted in your sub stack 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 do you get past that initial interaction I think part of it is sort of the political environment to 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. I think everything is is being delayed and young people have zero interest in paying for apps I actually interviewed my little brother who's you know 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 it goes 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 think and young people just don't want to don't a 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 doing 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 there more or less as likely to date is 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 been 20s but Pew research has an article called nearly half of us adults say dating has gotten harder 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 low 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 teens in particular to say that they experienced negative emotions almost or all of the time. There's been a big for all the 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 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 hate has you know there was a big debate with him in Tyler Collin 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 that like that rage bait cycle machine. There's that constant availability problem to where it feels like your content is 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 to like with the algorithms it's honestly quite difficult and this is something that can be developed with a sense of agency but like it is difficult to find yourself. And so I think for a lot of young people some of the anxiety can stem from being like okay I'm being fed this algorithmic content but like what do I actually like like who am I underneath all of this. Just again that you know maybe not so much room for experimentation is there used to be but it's just speculation. I want to do something up here and give you a chance to tell me what you think we miss 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 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 there are there are some ways of replacement for institutional means of investing and saving money and the last bit that I'm trying to remember and for myself is this idea that young people are shaped by this. The potential 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 F up. And so I can absolutely see how that would really scramble young people 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 the generation more conservative and more liberal but rather like the forces shaping this generation. What is what is that summary statement miss. I know I think that touched on most of it I would say like one thing I tried to really caveat we've spent some time caviating 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 said problems all 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 well with me but kind of like 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 immensely complicated there is no rule book there's never a rule book 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. Kyla Scanlan thank you so much. Thank you. [Music]