Hello, Search Engine listeners. We have some exciting announcements about merchandise and about incognito mode for you. We are offering a very stylish selection of hoodies and t-shirts for sale for one week only. This is a flash sale. We've got a variety of different designs. These came out great. We printed them on very nice actual apparel. They feel very high quality in person.
If you want to see what they look like, maybe even buy one, there's a link in the show notes. And if you're an incognito mode subscriber, you will have an email with a discount code, a pretty good one for searchers, and even bigger discount for finders. Please do not share these discount codes. We've designed them to only work once, but if they do work twice, you will slowly bankrupt your favorite podcast turned stylish apparel company.
Also, if you're an Incognito Mode subscriber, we may have accidentally re-sent you your welcome email this week. I am sorry about that. We switched back-end providers, and there were some hiccups. If you're having any trouble with your feed, any interruption, any unusual emails, just please shoot an email to support at supercast.com. They're super responsive. They'll get you sorted. We'll include a link to their email in our show notes as well. All right. After some ads, here's the show.
This episode is brought to you in part by Viore. A new perspective on performance apparel. Perfect if you're and tired of traditional old workout gear. Viori clothes are incredibly versatile and comfortable, perfect for whatever your day brings. They're designed to look great beyond the gym, whether you're running errands, heading to the office, or meeting up with your friends.
specific Viore item I would recommend is the Core Short. This is the short that started it all for Viore. It is one short for every sport, whatever sports you play. It's ideal for fitness, running, and training, but also genuinely stylish and comfortable enough to just wear all day. Viore is an investment in your happiness. For Search Engine listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at viore.com.
That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash P-J-Search. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S. orders over seven days. And discover the versatility of Viore clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. I've been working with a nurse dietitian for the last six months and it's been life-changing.
I've lost weight, healed my relationship with food, and have way more energy. Working with a dietitian online to create a personalized nutrition plan was so easy thanks to Nourish. The best part? I paid $0 out of pocket because Nourish accepts hundreds of insurance plans. 94% of patients pay $0 out of pocket. Find your dietician at usenourish.com. That's usenourish.com.
I was watching this documentary series the other day and caught this bit that felt at first like maybe the most normal scene in American life since the invention of the teenager. Sydney, who is 18 years old, is in her bedroom, sort of listlessly scrolling on her phone. She thumbs, she swipes, she puts it down, picks it up again, puts it back down. calls out to summon her mom. Mom!
There's a vibe. If you've lived in a house with a teenager, their moods can feel like these mysterious rolling weather patterns. We can tell here that a stormfront... is coming in. Although, maybe we're not yet sure why. Mom! Sydney's mom shows up from whatever she'd been in the middle of. Asks her the question parents always ask when summoned this way. What's going on?
I can't find an outfit. She can't find an outfit. Do you want to look in my closet? No. What about this? Push it down on your shoulders. I wouldn't even know where to look. Look in this pile. Let's see. Even I, a person who often misses subtext.
can pretty much tell what's going on here. This is not about choosing the correct fabric. Sydney, who is pretty, is not feeling pretty. Her mom is trying to help her feel pretty, help her find the right outfit, the magical combination of clothes that might allow her to leave the house. I think just, I think jeans. No, I don't like flat in jeans. No, you don't. You do not.
I actually think that's going to look really good. I grew up in a house with three sisters. This moody tug-of-war, does this look good? No, it doesn't. Yes, it does. Conservatively, I watched it happen probably 15,000 times. But here's what's different. In this documentary series, which is called Social Studies, the director, Lauren Greenfield, has somehow persuaded a bunch of teenagers to record the contents of their phones for a year and share those contents with her.
And so while this conversation is going on, you actually know for once what Sydney, the teenager, is really seeing. As her mom holds up different, to me indistinguishable, pieces of fabric, We know from the view we've just had into the phone, what's on Sydney's mind. An infinite scroll of these impossibly fit women wearing architectural outfits that flatter them perfectly.
Sydney's mom does not know entirely what she's up against here. She, unlike us, cannot see into her daughter's phone. So she isn't imagining, like we are, these women from the internet invisibly filling up the room. She tries her best. It's more that you have to feel good, you know, it's got to just feel good, boo, and you got to be, it's got to start in here. I'm going to just try maybe this with the skirt.
I was watching this series because I was hoping for some help, any guidance with a question I've been struggling with. On this show, sometimes we chase down usually little questions, questions that can be answered with a phone call or five, maybe some research. But the real questions that haunt me, actual me, in my own life, don't tend to be resolvable. They're not questions. you get to go on. They're places you just have to live for a while.
I grew up on the internet. I grew up on my phone. I've had all sorts of thoughts and feelings about what I got from that and what I lost. But now, I'm helping to raise kids, and I'm seeing them on their phones, on their internet, and I'm not sure what to make of it. There's been a big, roiling debate nationally about this. One of the biggest best-selling books for the past year has been The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
He believes that the high rates of anxiety and depression in this generation of teenagers might be caused by smartphones and social media. I, like I think most people, am more convinced that something is going on than I am convinced that I know exactly what that something is or what the right thing to do about it might be. Which is why I found myself watching this documentary experiment.
And it was strange. I don't think I've ever watched someone else's internet for very long, heard their algorithms' whispers, the people it wanted them to envy, the products it wanted them to buy. Someone can tell you, for instance, that the internet makes some teenage girls feel bad about how they look, and you'll nod, imagining you think you know what that means.
It's an entirely different experience to be sat in front of a teenage girl's internet, thrown into her phone, forced to see things from her perspective for many hours. I had to talk to the filmmaker who'd pulled this off. I think one of the that a parent and a filmmaker has in common in modern society is that you're missing like 50% or maybe 75% of what's going on nowadays.
Lauren Greenfield. She's covered the very wealthy. She's tried to understand thinnest culture among teenage girls. Her power is she lets us, her audience, into worlds that are typically hidden. I remember when I started. making documentaries, I was so excited by something called a phone tap.
where when you were filming with a character and you had permission from both sides, you would film their conversation on the phone and then you could make a scene out of it because you could hear the other side. And now people are looking at something or typing in something and there's a whole dialogue going on.
And you're just left out of it, both as a filmmaker and as a parent. So it was really exciting to get inside. So I want to ask you a lot of questions about just how you made this. I'm just curious even... It's a very ambitious project. Where did the idea from this come from? Where did you even start to think about that? I had this idea that I wanted to look at how social media was impacting kids.
And I came to social studies as a mother of two teenagers and saw this really distinct difference in my two boys. One was 14 and one was 20. Just kind of like use social media, talk to his friends, you know, use the internet to get information. But he was a reader. It wasn't like a huge part of his life. It didn't make up his sense of his identity. Whereas my younger son...
We would have constant battles over screen time. He got all his news from TikTok. It was important, and it was a part of his identity, and it was secret. He didn't want me in his phone. That gave me the idea for doing this social experiment. Lauren actually got this idea during COVID, when we were all stuck at home, when her kids, when many kids, screen time went totally stratospheric. COVID itself, a series of social experiments. Many of those experiments, in retrospect, about the internet.
What happens to our culture when you put even more of it online? But Lauren, seeing how this was affecting her son, starts to think how she would ask her questions as a documentary series. She really wants to figure out how you'd basically film two overlapping documentaries at the same time, both capturing the events happening in these teenagers' real lives and the events happening simultaneously in their phone.
in their digital imaginations. There were months and months of development trying to figure it out. First of all, there was the technical part. How do you capture the media in real time? How do you get it technically? Which was also a whole can of worms. Some of the apps disappear intentionally. And so how do you capture that? And we hired an engineer.
and could not figure out how to capture some of the apps in real time. Wait, and so what you're saying is on an iPhone, there's something called screen recording. That is exactly what it sounds like, where you can just say everything that happens on my screen. record it and make a video file. I use that sometimes like When my mom in Pennsylvania has a question about how to delete something, I'll go through the process on my phone and I'll send it to her. But what you're saying is,
something like Snapchat, which has disappearing images as part of its architecture. When you try to screen record that, it just won't show up. It tells the other person that you're screen recording, which for a kid is very awkward. So yeah, it's hard to record Snapchat. The engineer could not figure it out for me. My son, who was 14, figured out the hack eventually. And I won't say what the hack is because every time there is a hack, it gets shut down.
I wanted the social media to be layered on top of the live action so that you could have that experience of multitasking, having to ingest. information at the same time. I mean, it's totally hypnotic to watch. You mean that basically you're seeing like one of the opening scenes, they're doing the welcome assembly. Everybody make some noise. it's been a crazy year you guys weren't able to be campus and you have to do your whole freshman year like it's a big assembly all the kids are there and
The school administrator is talking about the luminaries who have gone to the school, and he refers to, I think, like a basketball coach or basketball owner, Steve Kerr. And we want you to have a vision. And one of the kids mishears it as Steph Curry. And in their mind, they're like, does Steph Curry really go here? And you see a kid pull their cell phone out. And then...
superimposed on the screen is them pulling up Google, Googling Steph Curry, seeing that he, Steph Curry didn't go to high school, whispering to the person next to them. Steph Curry? He didn't come here. I looked it up. That liar. She says, I looked it up. It feels so private and strange that you're watching, because these things are like second minds views, and you're watching someone say, mental work where they're making an error superimposed over the scene that's happening. And it's very...
I'd never seen anything like that before. When I was filming that, I actually had no idea what Ella was writing. So that was a discovery in the edit where, you know, all of a sudden we, I mean, I could hear her. I had headphones and I could hear her talking, but I didn't know that she was making a mistake. So I thought it was funny because she was like, they're lying to us.
But I didn't know that really she had the misinformation, which is such a perfect comment about social media. Yes. And kids like thinking they're smarter than everybody and then like researching it and then not getting the right information. It's a surprisingly intimate feeling, even just seeing a routine Google search on someone else's phone.
Lauren said negotiating just the access took months and months. Finding the right teenagers, getting permission from them and from their parents, getting everybody comfortable with the process of filming and screen recording. Pre-production started in 2021, and then she started capturing the teenagers as they returned to school for their post-pandemic semester. Bye.
I started at a school called Pali High in Pacific Palisades, actually famous recently for getting burned down in the fires. So the school's currently closed, unfortunately. It's a really interesting school because it's a public school, a charter school that draws from more than 100 zip codes. So it's incredibly diverse, although it's centered in the west side of L.A. in a very wealthy area.
But I work in a very organic way. And I started at Peli High, but by the end of it, we had kids coming from 10 schools all over L.A. So it was a mix of public and private, of schools in different neighborhoods. I mean, LA has a wealth of diversity, and it was really important to me to have diversity in our group. as kind of this case study. And the diversity wasn't just socioeconomic or... in terms of race or class, it was also in terms of relationship with social media.
Like there's one kid, Jonathan, who never posts about himself. And there's another kid, Ellie, who had a viral fame incident when she was very young. So a lot of the kids had different kind of of stories and relationships around social media. And they came from geography that was all over the map. One of the really gratifying things has been that kids don't relate to the person that's like
from their class or race. They really bond based on the social media story and not the background. And I think that says something about this generation. You mean that the kids that you have viewed, the person they'll identify with, it's like, Did they get wounded by the internet in the same way or have the same nice experience? Yeah, that's what I found.
There's a lot of small takeaways that I found myself absorbing watching this. In the series, Lauren doesn't tell you what she thinks. She doesn't really make an argument. You're just allowed to notice things. I don't really know what podcasts are supposed to be for right now. But this week, with this question, I found myself wishing that instead of a podcast, search engine was a book club.
We're somewhere in America in a cozy living room at a convenient time. We just watch this thing and then talk about what we'd seen. In the conversations I've been having about the series with my friends here, I keep referencing this one party scene, this section about porn, and then this discussion at the series ending. Maybe I'll just walk you through those parts. So, part one, the party.
I wanted to go to a party with Jack Schwartz because Jack has like a ton of friends, a ton of connections. Definitely every kid in LA knew about it. I'm pretty well known, I guess, on the west side of LA. This is Jack, the teenager throwing the party. Jack wears a lot of designer clothes. He has, I think, Givenchy sunglasses? He's very precocious about building his brand online. If you'd met him in high school in the 90s, I think you would call him a party promoter.
But in this teenage world, he's more like a mogul. A person who's making money and gathering power by creating the spaces that other teenagers want to be seen in. I kind of did the marketing side of the party, which got a lot of people there. I don't want high schoolers to think like it's a random rager. I wanted to have that more, like, exclusive feeling. Jack explains how he strategically ginned up hype for the party through his private Instagram account.
You could only see it if you'd been accepted. And we didn't accept everyone at the beginning. Each day we accepted a few more people. They were texting me like, yo, can you accept me to your party? And then the week of, we told everyone. And that's just when it went crazy. You see in the footage from the phones, all the requests from teenagers trying to follow the account for Jack's party.
Lauren shows us on the phones the infinite queue of requests to get in, to follow Jack's account, and then we see as they start to get accepted. And Jack was charging kids for the parties. They're paying for the party, and he's Cash or Venmo? Cash or Venmo? And we had a line going down the block. Even if it wasn't my party and I went to it, I would be like, damn, this is a fire party. Jack is the GOAT! Jack is the GOAT! And now...
Lauren's documentary crew is there. For a second, I wondered, why are these kids so comfortable being filmed? And then remember, The mosh pit was like sweaty and like it was just so claustrophobic, which is definitely like euphoria vibes. And the drinking, the smoking. A lot of what's happening here always has. the underage drinking, the hookups, the drug use. But weirdly, none of that's really the point.
This party, which 20 years ago would have been a private place for these teenagers to do things that worry adults, Now, the party's doing something new. It's a place for them to continue this conversation they're having with the audiences they imagine await them online. Did they get into the party? Did they look hot at the party? Were they hanging out with the right people at the party?
Everyone was kind of just like showing off like, oh, I'm at Jack's birthday party. If you couldn't see their phones, you'd mistakenly think that the point of the party was to be there. In fact, the point almost entirely was to be able to broadcast online that you'd been there. ideally having done something outrageous. Normal behavior for celebrities, I think somewhat new behavior for teenagers.
One teen at the party buys bad pills, Percocets, supposedly. He overdoses, ends up in the hospital. He later posts from the hospital to Instagram to make a joke out of it, which really amuses Jack. He's okay now. He actually posted a photo on his story the next day. And then he did an Instagram post and he wrote this funny caption. I knew that perk was fake, but I still ate it because I'm a gremlin. That was his caption.
It's hard not to notice how the algorithm rewards the teens as they demonstrate more extreme behaviors. How it reinforces their bids for attention, whether or not that attention is even positive. The logic of the system is familiar. Teens being deranged by TikTok and Instagram, like boomers got deranged by Facebook, or Gen Xers and millennials by Twitter. I asked Lauren about this.
I was struck watching it. When you say like, oh, these are teenagers who are making, what are, you know, teenage mistakes? I kept watching being astounded because I felt like they were having problems that I associate with fame. but they were just having them as essentially ordinary teenagers. Yeah. The other thing that I really felt was that, like, I felt like mostly what you were trying to do is just capture something true. But if your work was making an argument to me...
The argument I felt that I was hearing as the story unfolds is that essentially teenagers are creatures who learn through comparison. The internet is a device that like encourages and amplifies comparison. And that when you put these two things together, you get something that has a kind of nuclear energy to it. That's exactly right. And when you think about the crises
that I've documented in the pre-social media age, like eating disorders, these are already things that thrive on social contagion. And when you add... that to addiction and you add that to an algorithm designed for maximum engagement, it's a dangerous place for kids. And I think that party definitely felt very... chaotic in a way that's like
In the sense of, like, you don't feel the moral compass of what's going on. But, you know, on the other hand, I feel like they're also, like, they were incredibly wise. They had like strong ethics and judgment. And so it's kind of a contradiction. It's what's so confusing about teenagers. They're not kids. They're not adults.
They can be deeply intelligent. They can shock you with their thoughtfulness. There's a teen in social studies who works at a call center supporting other teenagers who are having a hard time online. Another is just deeply obsessed with trying to get into a good college. These would-be adults, they're on their paths. It's just that the internet is often steering them in the wrong direction. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, pornography. Welcome back to the show.
The second part of social studies I wanted to tell you about has to do mostly with teenagers' relationship to pornography and to sexually explicit content online more broadly. Watching social studies actually confirmed a suspicion I've had for a while. which is that we just don't talk about porn nearly enough. It's a part of our culture, and culture we know shapes our real-life behavior. And every other piece of culture we watch online, whether it's reality TV shows, White Lotus, even...
individual SNL skits just gets endlessly dissected, overly dissected. It's politics weighed across far too many blogs and podcasts. But the values and culture of porn, like anything else, change. Except here, we're all a little too shy to remark on it. We couldn't talk about what we've seen without revealing that we've watched it at all.
So we mostly just don't. New York Magazine, The Ringer, they're not analyzing the most streamed porn this week. It's somehow the only thing that we don't want to recap. So social studies is one of the first places where I've seen a group of people, teenagers, and their feelings about it in public. You learn a lot, fast. Like for instance, how it's become somewhat routine for these high school students to sell pictures of their bare feet online to adult strangers.
feet pics. My friends have made a lot of money. In the documentary, you see one of the teenagers Lauren's been following, Ivy. Ivy's lying on her bed, scrolling her phone. She encounters a foot fetish video on Instagram. And in the next screen, how many accounts there are on Instagram, on X, offering to buy feed pics. There's demand, and Meta's algorithm and X's are bringing the marketplace
the teens of Pali High, who can be, if they want, suppliers. There's group discussions among the teens in the show, and this is one of the things they talk about. We just kind of laugh about it. We're like, oh yeah, I made like $75 selling feet pics to some old guy. We don't judge each other for it, but we also don't feel super empowered. To the students, the feet pics thing, they seem to process it as something that's mostly harmless, but that also leaves them with a kind of psychic hangover.
Watching these teens talk through this, though, a question formed in my mind. What even is the job of a teenager? We expect them to push boundaries. They're there to discover their autonomy, to learn, for instance, how to make their own money. When you're a teenager, really, you're wandering around the world, asking pretty vulnerably, what about me is valuable? Another thing these teenagers, like all teenagers, want to learn is sex. What is it supposed to look like? How am I supposed to do it?
And so they turned to the internet, of course, we all did. But I didn't understand that what they see and how it shapes them might be different from what I saw and how it shaped me. Here's director Lauren Greenfield. for decades, for generations. teenagers have probably looked at girly magazines or some kind of book from their parents' library or whatever that sexy thing was.
But now the kids talked about as early as third grade seeing hardcore pornography and not just being available on computers or on their phones. And that was a revelation to me that the new sex education was actually pornography and social media. I have to say, some of my core values, privacy, free speech, tell me to try not to be overly concerned about teenagers looking at pornography online.
But I don't think I've appreciated that these teenagers are reporting finding this stuff earlier in life than they actually wanted to. And seeing things when they were very young that really disturbed them. Again, we're seeing for once their algorithms. So we see the phones of these older teens. We see them watch a parade of BDSM influencers from TikTok. They are to teach their audiences some pretty questionable choking and slapping techniques. which then become a real-life norm.
The students talk about this, too, in their group discussion. If you tell a guy, oh, I have kinks, they automatically assume that you want to be choked or slapped or something. And it's so dangerous. And then I also had friends. being like, I feel uncomfortable saying that I only like vanilla sex because everyone was like, you have to be kinky, you have to like all this stuff. And it totally, otherwise you're boring, you're lame, you don't want to get choked.
There was this whole thing about, like, you had to be, like, a freak, and you had to, like, like all these things that are really dangerous if the guys just don't know what they're doing, and they don't. We're only, like, teenagers. We have no idea how to properly, like, choke someone or tie them up or anything.
What this adds up to that feels so new to me is that crucially, these teens at Pali High, they're not describing the internet as a place that's helping them make sense of themselves and of their latent desires the way it did for me and many of my peers.
What they're saying is that their internet is pressuring everyone towards the sex they see online. And what we all see online, whether it's opinions or sex acts, is always going to be tuned towards the most outrageous, the most attention-grabbing. What sticks out becomes popular. What's popular becomes the norm. I asked Lauren to help me make sense of all that.
Now you have this behavior that between two consenting adults might be one thing, but like asking a teenager to responsibly choke another teenager.
feels dangerous. It feels like we've accidentally backslid into something that we didn't mean to because we wanted to make the phones as interesting as possible so there could be ads for toilet paper on them or whatever. Absolutely. I mean, that was one of the things that really shocked me as a parent, but also just as a human to see that BDSM was a trend and not just like a trend among some, but something that
all of the kids were familiar with. Like, that was the thing about our group discussion is you could really tell when something was in the minds of the whole group. And the BDSM thing was one. Not that everybody was participating. But everybody knew about this trend and knew that it was a trend and had been exposed to it in some way. And I remember going home and saying to my boys, like, These kids are talking about this. Like, is this...
Just in my group? Is this just in the school? And they were like, no, we know about this. This is what we hear girls like. And then I asked the 20-somethings in my office. And they were like, yep, that's what's happening. I think what's really scary in episode four, which is the sex, is you start to see a connection. between the violence depicted in these sexual scenes in social media and in pornography and real violence among kids. It's weird, though, because it's like...
They're watching... I swear to God, I'm not nostalgic and conservative for a pre-internet era. I like the internet. I use the internet. I will defend the internet to many people. But... You know, if it was 1982 and this PG-13 movie came out that was all about the joys of BDSM, or an R-rated movie that teens were sneaking into, like, that's what would have actually happened. Then, like, you know, there would have been
And people would have been like, teens are seeing this. You should have a conversation. Some parents would try to restrict it. Others would have had the talk, whatever. But you would kind of know the media environment that the smaller people you're trying to help guide into bigger people were in. And so you just have an idea about what conversations you wanted to even try to have. Instead, it's like...
that teenagers are just in their own internet. I agree with you that it's really unbelievable that Adults allow this unregulated world when everywhere else in the world, TV and movies, you know, there's ratings and there's restrictions. Should we or should we have sex ed in school? And meanwhile... we're not in control of it anymore. And nobody is taking care of that. And even they don't want to see what they're seeing, and they can't control what they're seeing.
I'd really never appreciated the absurdity of this. Every month, I skim past another idiotic story about a book ban fight at a library somewhere, some politician making hay about a children's book with a trans dad or something. We're fighting about libraries, as if libraries in 2025 are the average kid's go-to source of information.
Meanwhile, the smartphone that anybody over 13 needs to participate in the class group text also contains an infinite library of proanorexia guides, manosphere tutorials, BDSM misinformation, Conservative parents, progressive parents, most people have ideas about what they think is appropriate for kids and at what age. Right now, though, if your kid is on the internet, they're effectively on their own. which is not to suggest I know the answer to any of them.
If there's some policy that could balance free speech online against the industrial smelting of our teenagers' egos, I'd support it. I just don't know that our current crop of politicians is going to find it. But what I like about social studies, the reason we wanted to make a whole episode about it this week, is because I think most parents just don't fully know what their kids see on the internet.
And a series like this, the reason it's valuable, it's not because of its craft or because of which side it supports in the great national phone debate. It's valuable because a teenager and their parents can watch it together. And afterwards, they can just have a conversation about what they saw.
What has the reaction been like to your work? Do you feel like it is being used as evidence in an argument? Do you feel like it's being used as the beginning of conversations? How are you seeing it getting taken up? I think there's a really big difference between how... adults and parents respond to it and how young people respond to it. Parents are really disturbed by what they see and kind of scared to watch. In the show in episode one, Cindy's mom says,
I don't know if I even want to know what's on her TikTok. And she kind of knows that Sydney's being very sexy on her social. When young people watch it, there are a lot less surprises. they feel seen and they feel like their world is represented. The kids in Greece were like, it's the first time I've seen a show about us. Lauren had just been in Greece, where she'd screened the documentary for teenagers there. They're, you know, obviously not LA kids, but...
They're seeing the same kind of media. They're dealing with the same kind of issues. I think one of the things that's been really exciting is young people really want to talk about it. And they really want. their parents and adults to know. Like after we premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, this 22-year-old And her mom came up to me. The 22-year-old said, my mom doesn't know anything about my life. And I'm really glad she does now.
A friend of mine just said she watched it with her teenage daughter, and when they got to the sex episode and somebody said they saw pornography in third grade, she was like, is that really true? And her daughter was kind of like, yeah. It's like, it's hard if you don't know what to ask. I've been trying to understand how much the generations after me are experiencing an internet like the one I saw.
versus one that actually might be very different. And it's been interesting, like in the research I've done for other stories involving teens, we've talked to academics. Privately, what they will often say is that they're upset about how politicized talking about this stuff has become. Like, that because teens and cell phones is a polarized issue, they feel like... worried about saying the wrong thing, getting blown up online. I was wondering if you felt
As you talk about your film, do you feel sensitive to that? No, because our project wasn't political at all in that sense. It was like completely experiential. We were just filming what was happening, and the kids were so incredibly honest. I mean, there weren't any pros and cons. There were no arguments. It was just like discovery. This was the last part I wanted to talk about in our episode today. Part three, discovery. It's very clear even in this small group.
Like, Gen Z is not doing well because of this. Through the series, the teenagers have been doing these group discussions with Lauren. And in the last episode, there's a conversation where they're just reflecting on what they think of this year-long experiment. And they say, you know, after all of this looking, after all of this exploration, after all of this discussion, can we just get off of our phones?
I think we all need to delete our social media. Yes. Delete our social media. Like, could we just all throw away our phones? And then one of them says, but would we exist if we're not on social media? How do you get off social media without it, like... Without not being invited to things anymore. Exactly. It's like, how do you get off social media without people forgetting you exist? It's so strange. It's like the new existential question. And they were like, no. People forget about you.
I think that's where the quandary was. Like, you can't live without it. You can't live with it. Like, Jonathan says, it's our lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. I think from my point of view, it's not a binary. Like, there are, of course, a lot of great things about social media and technology. But we also would not allow loaded guns around either, where people could just pick them up and accidentally fire them off. And I think that we have to remember that these apps...
engineered to do exactly what they're doing, and they don't have to be that way. I mean, you're describing what feels so classically like a collective action problem. And not to say, like, we just all have to get off this, they all have to get off this, but rather... It's a system that's hurting people in obvious ways where no individual can really change their behavior in a way that makes it better. And I don't know what that calls out for.
if it's different school policies, if it's regulation, if it's different social norms. But watching the work, I feel like the thing almost any person would come in and walk out with is you're watching a very gentle... documentation of an unsolved problem. Just sitting in the problem. You feel like there's no way that this can't get better because there's no way it could stay like that.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the kids in the show say they're worried about their siblings and they would not let their kids be on social media. And of course, we've all heard stories about... in the tech world, like in Silicon Valley, a lot of tech professionals sending their kids to schools where they're not allowed to be on social at all or like not letting their kids have phones at all because they know exactly how it's engineered.
I think that, yeah, they point to a problem. They also point to some solutions. And I think that's what... is happening with this collective discussion that's going on. And I think all we have to do is listen to the kids in the show and they're saying exactly what's going on. It's empirical. They're not doing it from a study, but it's very clear. Now we're seeing a lot of schools ban phones in schools. We're seeing groups of parents.
decide that they're going to wait for their kids to have phones. They all say that when they're big groups doing it, it's fine. Like they love being without a phone in our discussions. I thought that was going to be a big deal. I thought they were going to be like tweaking for their phones. And by the end, they were like... Wouldn't it be amazing if we could have this kind of space outside in the real world? Like if we could just talk to each other?
Part of the curiosity that drove this project for you started with you wondering about your own son. Has this changed your parenting at all, this project? Yeah, I think it did. I think there's a tendency to blame kids when they're on their phones too much. I learned that it wasn't about that. I still wanted to get my youngest off. more and I did that with like a lot of intentionality.
our problem together and how to deal with it rather than pointing a finger and being like, oh, the kids of today. But the kids of today. Lauren Greenfield. Her series, Social Studies, is up now on FX and Hulu. We'll include a link in our show notes. Lauren, thank you. It's so nice to get to talk to you about this. Thanks for having me.
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's tax season and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to hear. $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamineni. Our senior producer is Garrett Graham. This episode was produced by Kim Kubel and fact-checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Buzarian. Additional production support on this episode by Sean Merchant and Noah John. If you'd like to support our show, we could use it and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus episode.
please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perillo, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.