From New York Times Opinion, This is The Ezra Klein Show. And now for something completely different. We recorded this episode right before the first presidential debate, and there has been such a crush of political news since then that there hasn't really been a moment that felt right to release it.
But I love this conversation, and in a funny way, it's more relevant now given how much the election has come to revolve around the reasons people do and don't have children and the meaning of that choice. So a few months ago, Geotolentino published a big piece in the New Yorker on Coco Mellon. Coco Mellon, if you do not have a two year old, is a show that every really little kid really loves and every parent has a more complicated set of emotions about.
But it's something Tolentino wrote at the end that was what really caught my eye. She said, I found myself wondering if we'd be better off thinking less about educational value in children's media and more about real pleasure, both for us and for our kids. In a way, this is an episode about real pleasure, which is not what I went into it thinking it would be about.
It's about the tension between pursuing pleasure or what I might call meaning, and pursuing the kinds of achievements we spend most of our lives being taught to prize. Honestly, I think this gets much more to the heart of the questions people ask about having children than all this political rhetoric about cat ladies and extra votes and tax rates.
And I don't think it's an accident that in this conversation, as we're trying to talk about the value of what we can't measure against the value of what we can, we end up finding ourselves in the language of religion, of psychedelics, of emotion. These are questions where I think we've culturally lost some of the vocabulary that we used to have to talk about just what it means to live a good life, not to have a higher income or a better job, but what is a good life?
Gia Tontino is the author of the great book of essays Trick Mirror, one of my favorite books about being alive in the age of the internet. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker, and as always, my email is as a client show at NYtimes.com. Gia Tontino, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me back. So you told me that you came to a new understanding of why you had children on your way to tape today outside the port authority, and you would tell it to me when we were on the show.
So why did you have children? I was thinking on the train up here about that question, like, why did I have kids? And I was thinking about my trepidation beforehand. And I feel like I bring back every conversation about children to a conversation about psychedelics, unfortunately. But the ideas seemed scary and overwhelming in the same way that doing acids seemed scary and overwhelming before I did it for the first time. It was like, oh, this is going to last for so long.
There's going to be part of it that's so intense and so difficult. And I didn't do it until I felt like I know that the person that I'm going to do it with I'll have fun with. I can trust that I'm doing it in kind of like a safe and right environment where I will get the thing that I want out of it. But the thing that made me decide to do acid for the first time is like not dissimilar to the thing that made me decide to have kids, which is like, I think it'll be fun.
I think on the whole, I think it'll be fun. I felt that there would be real lasting, kind of destabilizing, kind of boundary dissolving pleasure in it that would kind of scare me in the way that true pleasure kind of does. And I really hadn't thought about it that neatly until you said that we wanted to talk about this. Like I don't think I understood that really the thing that drove me to this was probably the thing that drives me to a lot of things, which is pleasure seeking.
It's funny because I sometimes use the psychedelics and parenthood analogy, but I use it in a very different way, which is people will tell me they're struggling with the decision and they're reading the parenting books. And I always say that to read the parenting books is it's like the difference between reading about doing psychedelics and doing psychedelics. And that the fun is not the point.
I have this discomfort with the discourse around fun and parenting as if the way to measure any experience in your life is whether when you're filling out a time you survey, you're having a lot of fun doing it. When I've done psychedelics, I don't necessarily think they're fun. Sometimes they are, but what brings me to them is meaning. Right. And I feel like what brought me to parenting or what attracted me to it.
What made it seem like not even a question to me was that I want meaning in my life. And I mean, what is a more fundamental sense of human meaning than continuing the sort of human chain? Well, I should say to you when I say fun. I mean, I think that's why I corrected myself. Like what I think of as fun is it's much less like enjoyment and more like pushing the limits of what I don't know, can stand room capable of. Like it's, I have a kind of arduous idea of fun.
Like I, like something that I long to do constantly is like go to Antarctica and completely lose my mind. Like that sounds like one of the most fun things I can imagine. And so doing psychedelics, it is extremely challenging sometimes and not always fun. But that is a specific kind of pleasure that the definition of which is very close to finding meaning. One thing that's very clear to me as your work has shifted towards thinking a lot about parenting.
And so what I think is that you've become a parent is that you find it really interesting. It's very intellectually generative for you. I find that's true for me. I think that the thing I always say to people about parenting that was surprising to me is how interesting it is. It was really undersold to me. How just kind of it would focus my mind on things I would have never thought of or never thought of at that depth before. You've written one of my favorite lines about parenting.
And you wrote it in this piece about Angela Garbis book and about your own experience hiring in Nanny. And you wrote quote, we could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of a computer and send a bunch of emails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy to clean, excrement, off the body to hold a person while they're crying to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.
Tell me about the choice of the word holy there. You know, it's the only part of this is because the way I was raised deep in the evangelical church in Texas, but it that's the only word for it. You know, it's, we were talking about fun, we were talking about pleasure. And now we're talking about this idea of the sacred right. And I think that for me, the thing connecting all of those is like some sort of submission and disappearance into something, right?
It's the total submission to someone else's body really in your baby. You know, that I found there's no other word for it. And to their body's needs and to the the massive it and the yeah, there's no other word. And it also feels the same way with the parts of parenting that are in fact tedious and repetitive and and so mundane, which is often the exact same stuff, right? Like wiping a butt over and over again and like wiping spit up from somebody's mouth and washing tiny little hands, right?
Like it's these things are so often tedious and they are holy and the thing that connects them both like it's submission. And I found that like the transcendent moments in parenting and the really like just objectively boring ones, you know, where I'm like laying on the floor of my living room, wishing I could read a book instead of just like stacking little plastic eggs on each other. It feels like the same project.
And I have found parenting really interesting and I think by the time I decided to try to do it, I figured it would be right? Like figured it would be in the same way that I was like no matter what, like as with my first acid trip, I was like no matter what, this will be interesting. Like no matter what, this will be extremely difficult in a way that is interesting. How could it not?
I think there's so much tension and energy and guilt in this connection between the sacred and the mundane, the sense that you often should be feeling. You're so close to this transcendent experience. You're doing the most meaningful thing and you're so bored or so tired or you so want to be somewhere else. What do you do when what you're trying to do is escape the thing you should be paying attention to? And it's such a profound constant experience in parenting, but also in life, right?
To be alive is also holy. To be alive to be able to experience it at any moment, right? The possibility of connection, of experience of just being in this world, it should be so overwhelming. And instead I am staring at my phone. Yeah. I started laughing when you were talking about that because I was just thinking about my little baby's about to turn one. And so it's like I just instantly thought back to, I don't know, days when she was like four months old.
And you know, with those days when it's like 9.30 a.m., and you're like, I wish everyone would go to bed. You know, anyone, anyone ever have those days? And I would feel when I had that thought, right, like I'd even be tired from getting up in the middle, then I, whatever it was. And I was just like, can everyone just go to bed now so I can, you know, like not speak and not do anything and not learn and not play or whatever?
And I would, I would have the thought like I am abrogating my, the whole purpose of being alive, right? Like I, I could actually just enjoy this pushing the saying in the sunshine over and over and over. But instead, I just want to look at some dumb shit on my phone and, you know, whatever. And I don't know, have you ever had this experience? I, I think back to when I was little and, you know, I would read books while I was on roller skates.
Like I don't think that the quality of wanting to leap out of the texture of the present is something that's specific to the smartphone era. Like I remember, you know, I read in the bathtub, like I, you know, I just always, you memorize the shampoo bottles. Like you're always kind of looking for a narrative to take you out of the present.
And I remember that being something that was true for me as a really little kid, even as I was someone and remain someone that like, I mean, I was very present and I did have a great time all the time, pretty much. But I do think that the way that the smartphone has sort of deformed and, you know, put that desire, like, quivering in our pockets, like, beckoning to us.
Like I, I was going to say, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I have this sort of symptom of this brain disease that's particularly troubling to me is like pre-kids back when I had enough alone time to have like original thoughts, you know, more than once every five months or something.
Like I would think something and I would have the sense of, like, this is an idea that is like shimmering with movement in some way, you know, and then it would be too much for me and then I would be like, I can't deal with it. Like I'm going to write it down and then I'm going to scroll for five minutes.
Like I would very frequently have that response and that terrified me even though I kept having it and it sometimes feels to me not that we're turning away from the, like, mess in the wonder of real physical experience despite the fact that it's precious. It kind of feels something within me sometimes that it's too precious. It's too much. Being present is work in a way that it's this, like, rawness and it's this mutability. It requires this of us and a presence.
Like that is something that I have sometimes found myself, like, flexing away from because of all the reasons that it's good in a weird way. Do you have, do you know what I mean? I mean, at all. I absolutely know what you mean. Yeah. In a million different ways. I mean, I was a kid. Why do I read? I mean, now I think it's almost a leftover habit, but I read to escape. I read to escape my world. I read to escape my family. I read to escape things I didn't understand.
And I read because obsessively, constantly, all the time and cars in the bathroom anywhere totally because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone. Right. And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading. One of the things, I was thinking about what you were saying, that was we have, there's more spiritualism in this conversation than I expected, but I'm enjoying it. And it feels a little bit like our metaphors are shaped by different traditions. Right.
I know you grew up deeply Christian, and there's a sense in the way you think about it and write about it, the holiness, the all of all creation, right? This sort of the external world that requires something of you. And a lot of my experience of this or thinking about it is shaped more from meditation and mindfulness. And so the thing that I was thinking about what you were saying, that was what always feels limited to me is my attention.
And a lot of the need to escape is a need to rest my attention and recharge it. And what allows me to access the transcendence of my children of the world is honestly how rested and how awake and aware I am. I mean, I spent some time in a coffee shop before coming here to talk to you. And I just needed that time listening to music and reading so my attention could recover. So I could be present here with you. So in that way, I think escape is under theorized that escape, it can be good or bad.
I think we have trouble with this question of are we distracting ourselves or are we recovering? Are we getting a kind of necessary contemplation so that we can come back and experience a world and process what we've experienced and seen or are we running from it? Are we trying not to feel from it or are we trying to be anywhere but here? Or are we looking for something? Are we looking?
Because I think that a lot of what takes people to screens is like, it's, you know, it looks like escape, but I think it's also pursuit. A friend of mine was watching my baby when, like, you know, it was one of those like schools off, whatever, Andrews out of town, whatever. And I was saying, like, okay, before you put her down for an app, like rock her in the rocking chair, you know, give her a couple minutes and then once she's, you know, once you see the eyes blink, really have each dump her.
And they were like, oh, it's, that's her phone scrolling time. And I was like, yeah, that's her phone's scrolling time, you know, like her brain just needs to, like, sometimes we're just putting our brain on the sort of, on the static signal. I think this is a place where there's so much self judgment, right? Are you escaping? Are you recovering? And then we put that judgment also on our children. And this gets us to Coco Mellon. Why do you describe for someone who has never seen it?
There's no idea what that word means. What is Coco Mellon? So Coco Mellon is one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time, like not just for children. And yet it's something that like, if you haven't changed a diaper in the last four years, you probably have no idea that it exists, you know? How to put this, it's this.
The backdrop of Coco Mellon is that major children's animation companies did not make entertainment for babies and young toddlers because this was seen as sort of like unethical. And you know, kids can't really learn from a screen at that age. So we're not going to do it. And then YouTube was invented. And then the iPad was invented. And suddenly iPad parenting of which I certainly take part in, you know, was instantiated as like the way that suddenly we were all living.
I think half of two to five year olds have their own mobile devices, which again, my four year old is one of them. And then so just this land was wide open, this like pristine farmland of just millions and millions and millions and millions of children whose attention could then be captured and monetized. And then you get all these things like it. People know Miss Rachel probably. Hello, can you say mama? Let's sing it. Mama. Let's clap it. Mama. Let's sign it. Mama. Good job.
But then there were all of these nursery rhyme channels where you would get just sing song, nursery rhymes and kind of squeaky looking, mesmerizing, uncanny animation of just giant bobble headed like eternally smiling babies and like perfect little worlds where the sun is always shining and the parents are always around.
It's rainbow popsicles and it's fort building and just smiles and smiles and smiles and the same words repeated over and over and over and over and over and bright clanging noises and like these things that are torturous for adults but basically heavenly to whatever is going on in our baby's brains.
Coco Mellon is like it's so popular that you know as of sometime ago the daily viewers were like 80 million daily viewers which is as many people as watch the 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. And that's just everyday viewers and I think a conservative estimate would be that it's watched for 200 billion minutes a year. And it's just you know all the more remarkable because many of those viewers are most of those viewers are basically preverbal.
I've learned much more about Coco Mellon than I ever thought it was going to. There's something interesting in Coco Mellon and I assume this may be partially motivated your inquiry into it. There are two of them I think really Coco Mellon and Blippi but we'll focus on Coco Mellon that exist at this absolute tension point of children adorate and adults hate it.
There are other things adults don't mind right Sesame Street actually most adults like they remember it we remember it I enjoy it you can't really get that many kids to watch Mr. Rogers now but if you can but but parents like Daniel Tiger there's all kinds of stuff that parents love blueie I think in general parents like blueie more than their kids like blueie.
But Coco Mellon is this one where from very young age your children go and I feel like you could describe this two ways completely vacant or completely focused in front of it right it's either an experience of being totally filled or totally empty and I can never quite tell which and parents just it drives the mad why this one what why do you feel like there's this like unfathomable divergence between what the kids want here and what the parents want here.
Well I think as far as I can make sense of it it's that this is the first sort of like Coco Mellon ushered in a paradigm where children's entertainment is not configured as entertainment but as just raw attention capture and I think that that's why right like it's the people
that work on it or that worked on it they've been laying people off like crazy despite these viewing numbers and the three billion dollar like parent company valuation but you know I do think that the people that created are interested in providing like pleasure
and an entertainment for the people that watch it but the project of this company is attention capture and obviously there's significant overlap between attention capture and entertainment but I do think that we can and now I kind of think we should meaningfully differentiate
them maybe especially for kids and I think that's why like I think you can feel it in the sort of bones of the stuff and the reaction parents have to it you know like even like teletubbies like college students love like coming down from drugs and watching teletubbies
like even like silly baby entertainment it can provide delight which is not saying any of this has ever been pure right like it's children's television has basically always existed as like an eternal toy commercial but even like GI Joe my little pony these basically
you know way back Mickey Mouse Club whatever all of these things they were configured as entertainment first and there's something about this that doesn't feel like it's configured as entertainment first it feels like it's just eyeball capture like just mining attention
with a pickaxe into the parents eyes yeah how much do you think the parental anger at cocoa melon and I will very much include myself here is a kind of self-loathing though I love the line you said not not entertainment but raw attention capture and two things really
jump out of me from that one is it when you're put in 18 month or two year old in front of cocoa melon you're usually doing it for a reason you desperately have to get something done around the house their older brother is sick you're on a plane right there's a reason
to doing it and what you're doing is trying to create raw attention capture if it did not completely capture them it would not be certainly instrumental purpose you are using it for I mean they're too young for entertainment really at least of in in the way we think about
in culture so one it's like we have asked this thing to provide a service and we are mad at how well it provides it right and then two there is this creepy analogy to ourselves I mean how much that we absorb and consume is not entertainment but raw attention capture how well
does that describe parts of Instagram or TikTok or even television that we binge knowing that it has almost no nourishment to it right but we just don't want to think we we are asking to provide an instrumental service which is make the time go faster and make me disembodied
because I don't want to be here right now having my holy life I want to be completely absorbed in you know something else something outside of myself yeah you know so one thing about Kokomo and right it's not like you said they're not doing anything new it's just that the audience
is new right like it's my talk to former writers who were telling me that they got a a spreadsheet of all of the search words that toddlers were making their parents type in on YouTube kids or whatever and they would write episodes to those search terms right there's an extremely SEO targeted
operation and everything that I see has been algorithmically tailored to exactly what I want to be looking at as well you know and I think I will say like I don't have that much screen time anxiety about my kids right I'm like you all have plenty of resources you know like you were
creative class children in Brooklyn like you are luckier than 99% of the global population like you're going to be fine I don't care about your like specific like language I don't know like I don't worry about screen time in a very specific way but I have a like a preemptive sorrow
about the way that like any ill can be instantly evaporated by putting my phone in front of my toddler and letting her or not my toddler anymore like my four-year-old and letting her text emojis to my partner all day you know like another one of my distraction tactics I get the sense
that you're going to be looking at screens so much you're going to be you're going to be doing everything that I'm doing but probably by hours and hours worse and you like me are going to be unable to be just present without reaching for your phone after a certain number of minutes
probably right and you are going to your conception of what is possible is going to be limited to what is presented to you on that screen and your conceptions of of what you want and you know I I feel like all of that screen time anxiety that I feel about her comes from my own sense that
screens have already foreclosed a lot of that you know negative capability in my own life I want to expand on a line you gestured at there when you talked about what are we afraid of and this is one of the places your piece really connected for me I have this feeling as I said
earlier that we're underspecified on what we want and what we don't want and you're right when it comes to the shows we allow our children to watch we are afraid of what exactly that our kids capacity for deep thought will be blunted by compulsive screen use that they'll lose our ability
to sit with the plain fact of existence to pay attention to the world as it is to conceive of new possibilities the growth to be just like us only worse and those all feel like things were were afraid of and also maybe that they will never know any different and I I wonder about this
right I mean my kids like they will never remember a time before YouTube kids right they didn't exist in a time before YouTube kids there's always been escape there's always been distraction and the fact that it was not that good I think was important right and I have trouble
describing this and I have trouble then like making the distinctions based on it but it's like I want my children to be able to escape the difficulty of reality I think it's important I do it too but somehow I know when I do it in certain ways it's bad for me and when I do it in other ways it's
good for me like I don't know why it is bad for me to look at my phone and good for me to read a magazine but it is and I can't put on a chart for you can you not it's because one is surveilled and the other isn't right like I don't think I care about the surveillance you don't but don't
you think that's why one feels better than the other you feel freer doing one than the other like you don't feel your choices being sort of actively manipulated and shaped and constrained by like a you know an extremely bald like profit structure like that to me feels like you said the
the escape was worse but it also was an escape right like we were in our books in the back of the car and nobody knew what was happening and what we were reading except for us our parents would never know there was no machine record of it whatsoever even like if we were writing right like
if we were doing the equivalent of sort of what is I think widely and rightfully configured as unhealthy like the 11 year old girl on Instagram right like the way I was processing my life in narrative or whatever the way it was writing my life into its existence was in a notebook where
no one could see it and no one whatever profit from escalating or distorting it or testing it against anything and so much of that seems tied for me to the lack of silent invisible constant surveillance so and I mean this completely sincerely I love how much that doesn't resonate for me at
all means that there are that I'm having such a different experience of this and so I want to have them both here because one I'm I'm so close to a phone vegan I'm so unbelievably annoying about what I have on my phone so virtually nothing on my phone even can surveil me at this point
do you not have a browser I have a browser but I don't use it that much except literally to look at pitch fork music reviews which is one of my favorite time wasting activities uh-huh but I have a lot of you know like I have the New Yorker app I'm unbelievably annoying as a person but for me the
the thing that I notice about a magazine which I think is my favorite form of media like full stop is there is room for me to get interested and absorbed and let my attention move away from where I am at that moment but it is not so absorbing or so grasping that my attention can't shift back
that I've fully lost track of my body or my surroundings and I think this is one of the things that I want to get at I am a nerve to buy how much we feel the need to net everything out whether culture is good or bad to these very measurable outcomes about you know school achievement or
income in 20 years or teen mental health and it feels to me like we've just lost the ability to make judgments based on sort of virtues and values about when the things are good and bad like whether it is better to read a book or look at TikTok irrespective of whether that shows up into studies of
alert educational achievement yeah exactly I feel like we have lost self-confidence in making cultural judgments like for ourselves for society as parents we are so achievement oriented I think you see this in the debate about John Heitzbuck the anxious generation that if we cannot show something
on a chart it's like we cannot have the self-confidence to make a judgment about it well I think you know so I was going to pitch you another possible reason why the magazine feels different from the phone which is that you know I mean the phone it is always entwined with usefulness
and like your work email lingers I mean you are reachable to be useful to someone when you were looking at your phone even if you're just reading the same book on your Kindle that you would be reading off of it right like like real pleasure you're not like there's nothing quantifiably
achieved in it like you are not just unsurveiled but you are not being useful to a goddamn person you know except the person directly in front of you if there is one right or the people the many people and that has to do with what you're talking about the sort of Emily Oster asked you know not
knocking or I subscribed to a sub stack like the reduction of everything to like what is the data say and you know what are the outcomes and and that's the choice right it's sort of a maybe like an intellectual inadequacy in my own life that causes me to to come back to this but it's like
does it feel good or does it not and we kind of I think we still know what feels good and bad and I think that that's like a that's a good of mometric to judge anything on for ourselves and our kids to to some extent right I think that really helps me describe or realize something I want to
go back to what we're talking about a few minutes ago this question of what are you afraid of a afraid of for your children specifically and I think maybe that gets it it the reason I like magazines and don't like my phone is not a surveillance or anything else it's it I feel better
when I read a magazine there are a million reasons for that and I would probably describe it is my attention is more collected and centered and stable afterwards and so I can then attend to other things in my life better and with more joy but it's just I feel better I like it it's
more pleasurable and I think the thing that I worry about the thing that I'm afraid of is you know I wanted to bring children into the world not because the world is perfect or it's but it is beautiful and I want I feel like I got this gift of getting to experience it and I want them to
have this gift of getting to experience it you know in its wonderful dimensions and its horrors and I am worried that I have unleashed a set of technologies upon them and that we've done this socially that is going to structurally and permanently degrade their capacity for that experience
in the way that I notice it degrading mine in the moment and I'm frustrated myself for not being better at policing but them you know they're young and they're getting tuned and trained and wired or whatever metaphor you want here and I think the thing I am afraid of is not like their
grades will be bad because they watched Ninja Go or Ninja Go it is that their experience of the world will be thinner and more scattered because they will have been trained on these hyper stimulating things that somehow absorb you at the same time they make you feel bad and that will just become
the sort of baseline of what attention is supposed to be like. So they'll be like us right like they will have their experience of the world curtailed by the desire to check a device every however many seconds right like they they will there's just no doubt about it will probably be a lot worse for them but hopefully like us too they will have found the things in the world that they can be devoted to in a way that supersedes at least a certain amount of time the screen right like we
the only way that I see out of this for my children is the same the only way that I see out of this for myself is like I can't be disciplined I can't spend X amount of minutes less per day on my phone because I know it's bad for me how much I'm on there already I can't like it's it's only when
the real physical world is brighter and more colorful and full of surprises and you know luckily I found something that holds my attention more than phones do I found you know a certain set of things that you know psychedelics well they certainly psychedelics going out dancing being you know
face to face with a friend you know like reading writing right listening to music like the actually this extremely limited set of things that are more mesmerizing to me and more pleasurable to me than the than the screen that's and that's like one of my very few concrete hopes that I have
for my kids is that they find something that makes the the world's dimensions enlarge in a way that over matches what however the world enlarges or seems to enlarge through a screen I want to get at how you're getting there because I think there's something very deep in this question between
attending to pleasure or attending to some joyful or meaningful dimension of experience and attending to you know some of these these other ends you're talking the the piece about a researcher and this is to cast no aspersions on the works she does which sounds both necessary and annoying
who has done all this research trying to rate these different children's shows according to how educational they are and so you have Daniel Tiger and that gets a two it's a very weird zero to two scale but you know somebody like Daniel Tiger which is an offshoot of the Mr. Raju's
cinematic universe which gets a two or maybe blue you probably get a two you have some like Coco Mellon which gets a one not very educational but not like actively meant to be harmful and frightening and then you have the strange underbelly of YouTube kids this sort of a computer generated
AI animated often kind of horrifying like dream logic crap CGI and that's like a zero and I was thinking reading that about what is implicit in the scale which is that the best thing should be the most educational thing and I don't really believe that for myself I'm not sure I believe
it for for children but but I think there is this this question we face of well what is our measure but what what for you helps orient the tuning fork both like for Gia or for for your children I think within this question and this calculation whatever I did in my own life and whatever
part of that calculation led me to the idea that having kids is going to be a part of this pleasure seeking and it was indicative that the idea of pleasure had like shifted a little for me right like it wasn't the like pure hedonism of 12 years earlier whatever you know it was
something that was deeper and harder and and more prolonged and and I think part of it is like when I think about wanting my children to be oriented around pleasure and like that's what my idea of a good life for them entails like it it also involves like them learning to conceive of
pleasure as the things in life that make them feel more human I guess maybe that's one of the ways I've clarified it for myself right like the things that bring me pleasure are the things that make me feel more human and not less I think it's interesting to say maybe we should be searching for
pleasure as opposed to achievement but that that also you know there's a lot of things one might want right pleasure is one of them but but I mean achievement is a reasonable one too and and then there are all these fun pleasure in it right you maybe yeah right or maybe not right maybe
pleasure isn't the the point of life or maybe I mean there's all kinds of things that I do that I think are important or that I think are socially useful that I genuinely don't find pleasureable but you don't find a kind of like hard pleasure in them like a hard sort of durational you know what
I mean like do you ever like these things that have you not sort of like fooled yourself into sometimes somebody in the middle of a podcast will just press on a point and be so sore that I have to spend a minute to be like am I really going to go here I will I'll say I guess this
I am struggling with this question quite a lot lately in my own life where I am so driven sometimes by internal pressure that things that I think are pleasurable have been drained of their pleasure and literally this morning when I was getting you know ready for my day like I just
like have this note in my notebook about the things I need to do today I'm just like can you try to be driven by some by something other than than this internal pressure when I began writing about politics I was a blogger in college before blogs were like basically even a thing there was
no thought of it being a career it was done for nothing but a kind of pleasure right a kind of delight in being engaged in the world and trying some small way to understand it and even in some even smaller completely in consequential way to influence it and now that I have you know this much
bigger platform it's so much less pleasurable and so I think it's interesting that this idea you're you're getting out of expanding pleasure I think well back to the thing that you were talking about where the researcher was coding stuff about what was educational or not and that was sort of the
unspoken good right I think it's definitely not coincidental that the things that were coded as maximally educational are also the things that parents find pleasurable to have on in the background and that it's not coincidental the stuff that was not educational is videos where
mini-mass his head falls off and rolls down a mountain and that the middle ground was like the sort of coconut blippy thing that the like I think there's something about kids probably can learn more when they are experiencing some sort of delight I hate blippy like I just find blippy completely
unnerving if you have never watched blippy go enjoy yourself on YouTube but my kids like it whoa and look at what you wrote up on a police bicycle can I look at it of course you can't would be cool okay look at this I helmet wow this keeps you nice and safe okay and oh look up here
do you see that it's a light beep beep I do go back and put it a little bit maybe the reason they like it is that I don't like it like they are different than me they're not supposed to like what I like it gets to this broader sense of structuring everything around education and
achievement it's like we're already thinking about this when they're two like everything is to be educational like they can't put on pants like they can't put on shoes and already we are stretching out the tarp of their consciousness across the scaffolding of the adult world right
achievement and education and are you bettering yourself and are you improving and I both get it but it does feel like a transportation of like what we've done to ourselves onto them at a younger and younger and younger age just this movement of like a kind of what was once an elite adult culture
right the sort of self-improvement culture Dale Carnegie culture you know lifelong education to now it's like your babies are supposed to be doing it feels odd well and I also think like it to me it disturbs me less because it is indicative of this like broader culture of optimization
that I abhor and participate in and find really prenicious and I'm terrified of how it might advance itself upon my kids like I I'm afraid of that but it also nothing's educational at this age anyway like I've never most of the co-comment audience is not
learning shit you know I was waiting through a lot of literature and research about this tiny little babies can process TV more than we think they can but they don't really learn anything anyway and I think that absolutely the it feels to kind of like overtly like a veneer
that everyone is just pretending that we can talk about what is going to be good for them and what is like healthy and what is not well completely avoiding just there's a big giant spotlight on what's on the tablet and the the whole world the whole world and all of the ways that the actual world
will change the trajectory of their lives is kind of out of focus the the child psychologist Alison Gopneck and I probably wouldn't have brought this into conversation except that we've already been circling psychedelics a couple times has made this point
she's a UC Berkeley there's been a lot of psychedelic research there and so has been this interesting cross-pollination in those departments and she's made this point that the child's brain looks a lot like the brain of an adult on psychedelics so it really does it really does you have a lot
of you have a lot more disorganization in the the way the neurons are connecting a lot more we learn as we get older to filter the world right and that's not just a conceptual skill that's actually how our brains are organized psychedelics disorganizes the brain which is why people make a lot
of unusual connections and they're absorbing like an overwhelming amount of experience because they're not filtering it out there are other ways to get there too I remember when I came back from a silent meditation retreat I was so unable to filter out visual information that I felt like I
wasn't safe to drive because just trees were too overwhelming but what is making me think about the reason I bring it up here is that both in my own experience and people I've known it's like people when they're they've had a psychedelic experience when they turn on the TV at the end of it
to kind of come to rest if they decide to do that they tend to watch cartoons they watch Pixar they watch you know they they don't go for um you know thoughtful adult movies and I think there's some interesting analogy to that in this conversation about children's shows like if a child's brain
is more psychedelic more disorganized more open then in the same way that adults who've gone through those experiences want something more colorful beautiful safe etc that their orientation maybe in that direction too like you know maybe there's something valuable in it right like at the end of
that experience I don't want something highly educational and in the experience of two-year-old is having like wide-eyed in this completely overwhelming world maybe they don't end shouldn't I think that's why like but it comes down to pleasure I'm also I once did an iconic
three-movie come-down stream of I think it was like Ponyo then Pocahontas then Mambi or something you know and I was like this is living you know this is pre-kids but um I think that the idea that anything kids watch should be one thing or another I think we're both kind of disagreement
for kids like let let something just exist without a purpose maybe you know for for a little bit but I also like for this reason I think that just basic ideas of beauty and pleasure they're they're not that different from kid to adult I mean obviously there are limits to this
right like I was thinking about having a pacifier in your mouth all day long or whatever but I think you know little children find the same things beautiful like they're you know you we've experienced we experience this every day right like they are stunned by a leaf like a beautiful flower like
looking at an animal a picture of an animal thinking about a whale like they're oriented towards these things that we most we get to most readily like in the psychedelic zone but this is maybe an argument for kids TV we can maybe want it to just be beautiful and I think we can want them to have
an experience of beauty in a way that is not instrumentalized and has nothing to do with achievement if you're gonna be in front of a screen escaping or looking for something or just zoning out like why not have it just be like legitimately delightful and you know maybe blippy is that for some
kids but I think that I came out of thinking about coconut for months with that idea in my mind like I was like I think now that it might be a legitimate thing for me to want them to be looking at beautiful stupid cartoons you know the same ones that I would want to watch coming down from
a hallucinogen there's a way in which you manage what you measure and I think the main way we've been taught to measure this or think about this question is it's always called the screen time question right the question of screen time do your kids have screen time yet how much screen time
and something it feels to me like you're getting at is it that's just maybe the wrong way to think about this entirely I feel completely unbothered by quote unquote screen time when I am there with my kids right if we're watching the Incredibles together I do not think that is any less good of an
experience for them for almost any definition of the word good then if we go to target together or if we go to like we're just having fun together like that's a good experience do you think that we have just sort of lost the plot on this sort of altogether maybe for kids and adults in sort
of making this about almost like the existence of the screen rather than the experience of the person yeah the experience of the person I mean right so all of if you actually get into the studies on the actual effects of screen times like it's it is like the the screen itself is almost a
red herring right like the people think about screen time as it correlates with achievement and verbal abilities and like self-regulation and language abilities at grade level seven you know all these things that are tracked longitudinally and the correlation is much more strongly between
the kind of life the kid has and those things right like we all kind of sense that it's not like the screen is not the singular determining factor it's just that we put screens in use in ways that reflect the life of the child holistically and the kinds of opportunities they have and the
kind of household they'll raise then and the the freedom that they have to you know not be thinking about basic needs and to flourish in these other realms that we call achievement there are researchers that argue that children's screen time years should be reframed as an indicator
of parental distress you know what I mean it's the life that matters I think and I think that applies to us and our smartphones too you know I always like when I was kind of required for one job or another to be constantly paying attention to the news as it was like scrolled out on Twitter
all day long like I was glued to social media kind of by requirement and I think the way I thought of it then was like this is bad but it's okay as long as my real life is bigger than it you know as long as as long as I self evidently always feel that the physical world is more inviting to me
than my screen then I'm not going to spend one second worrying about my brain rot because there's nothing I can do about it you know like I think as long as the world is winning out most of the time I think that's like a reasonable I think feels like a reasonable metric to me I think so
much of why parents hate cocoa melon is a kind of self-loathing often born of a kind of fatalism it's like I don't like this but I'm doing it anyway because other parents do it because I need it because I can't think of an alternative because I don't have the energy to structure things differently
which is I'm not saying this is a thing true for other parents and not me this is a thing true for me and I think that one reason I'm so interested in this conversation is that the conversation for kids feels not exactly but in many ways like a miniature and clarified version of the conversation
for adults and weirdly we're better at having the conversation for kids because at least there we can imagine making judgments about good and bad and about using paternalism and cultural pressure not that many people I know are truly happy with their digital lives they're in a constant state of
irritation and aggravation with themselves above all but there's something about the fact that everybody else is there or feels like everybody else is there that makes it impossible to imagine or effectuate a different reality even just for yourself even once such a reality is possible
I also think there's something about what you're saying where you do something on your phone and it's unsatisfying and you're dissatisfied with the way that you're doing it but the smartphone has become the repository for all possible dissatisfaction and yearning civic dissatisfaction
routed through the smartphone like social you feel lonely you go to the thing that's making it worse right like it's I do think that we're kind of in the grip of the loop where the dissatisfaction with the thing itself presents it is the answer right like if you if you lack money be a task
rabbit or drive for lift or deliver you know like there's there's a way that the phone is the catch all solution for any sort of discontent let's say someone is still using Twitter and they're miserable and they want to get off of it probably like they're still going to be
looking for a source or replacement that exists on the phone you know okay maybe not that one but what about Reddit you know or something like that what I think is so hard about that is that what makes it impossible to have alternatives to a bad status quo is the continued investment
in the status quo but because it maintains like just enough staying power like that is the energy people are not being able to put in to creating things that are that are different you know and I think there are things that are different out there certainly things are different it could be
imagined and again I think this ends up being true for kids too like we are very social creatures and what everybody else does really ends up mattering I mean kids see other kids in a restaurant and the other kids are allowed to watch a phone during the meal and that makes it harder to resist
your kids wanting to do that right I mean there's this whole pressure about getting kids smart phones in school because their friends have smart phones and again there is something so contagious about everything and there's something that is so true in the way that the existence of something
fairly totalizing or fairly central the fact that you have to participate in it particularly if it's something that drains your attention and creative energy the fact that you have to participate it at all or certainly if you have to participate in it a lot it makes it that much harder for other
things to emerge because they would need to emerge in that same space with that same energy I had television growing up I don't think it was terrible for me but I do wonder about how different it is that my kids can watch anything at any time whereas like I was at least a little bit prisoner
to what was on when you know including like I had it easier I had Nickelodeon which had a lot of kids programming right you know I didn't only have to watch it on the kids that are on network television I just with all these things it feels like there's some balance that makes sense right
some point where it's enough and not too much enough escape but not too much escape right enough choice but not too much choice and just in a lot of things it feels like we've to me like hit too much and maybe that's just me getting old and I just think like when I was a kid it was enough and
now it's too much but I also think there has to be conceptually too much has to be a possibility and maybe we've reached out well I think again I mean you know it's like my my dumb ass keeps bringing this all back to pleasure but I think that feels like that line right like when we were
you know once you'd had enough of watching six episodes of Pete and Pete in a row which I certainly did you know once you were feeling severely diminishing returns you would walk away from this machine that was not watching you and was not altering its behavior to get you to watch
it more and we were able to do that we were able to have this like kind of unadulterated physical cognitive instinct about what was the right amount of escape and what was the right amount of engagement because we just followed what we wanted to do like we weren't walking away from six
hours of Pete and Pete because it was good for us you know we were it would be better for our language abilities in the seventh grade if we did so we were just like I'm bored I'm no longer getting pleasure from this I've actually not been getting that much pleasure out of the last two
episodes I'm you know I'm just gonna go do something else for a while I feel like every time I write about childrens or anything any sort of media it's like everyone has been having these exact same worries I was even thinking with this conversation you know the concept of Asidia
no okay so this is like there's a joke one of me and my friends have a joke that it would be a beautiful name for a girl where it's it was this medieval conception of depression that to me feels like exactly like what we talk about when we talk about smartphones I looked it up I looked
it up on Wikipedia last night to make sure that I was and there was this beautiful description on Wikipedia as Asidia of Asidia as a flight from the divine that leads to not even caring that one does not care it's like this listlessness this disengagement from the world this like boredom
and then you start not even caring that you're so bored like this total inability to act upon your life you know as with the example of like we walked we were able to walk away when we weren't having fun anymore we didn't have the option of the TV just being like wait wait try these 45 other things I'll hypnotize you again in 45 seconds if you just give me the chance right I can feel it interfering with my own ability to understand when something's fun and when it's not and I think
that I am worried about that with my children and I think that's one of the reasons that I'm like the only the only way out is a set of experiences or desires that will clean out and clarify your your radar for what is actually what actually feels good and what actually doesn't and and
and yeah feels good in any of the ways the meaningful ones the not meaningful ones but it seems to me like one of the things that that responsive surveillance mechanism does is it mixes all of those things up so that even if you're no longer having fun on Twitter there's still some part of you that
feels like you are just because of the mechanism itself I think this is a place where the surveilled language and and fear really does hit for me surveillance it sounds so creepy and it is and it's part of it but I actually feel like it masks the reason we give ourselves over to it because it feels
good to be learned about we all have experiences of the algorithms coming to know us or predict us and recommending a book we'd ever read before that actually was really great or music that we never heard before that brought us into a whole new genre or whole new artist that we would have never
found on the radio necessarily or tweets that we you know are glad we saw but it's that way of being learned so it is able to continuously recommend things that are more and more learning and it makes that experience of the diminishing marginal return were distant right that place where it's like
well I've already watched you episodes of Peter and Pete I don't want to watch three that's a lot episodes of Peter and Pete instead it knows better what you want and is better giving it to you it's why I'm I find I really try never to leave my kids alone with a recommendation algorithm
right you do or anything like that it's much scarier and where they end up is much worse but it is like learning them in every second and like how to give them the thing they actually want that will keep them clicking and again I think this is where cocoa melon feels weird I mean cocoa
melon to bring it back to that it's one of the first successes in children's television or video entertainment I guess you'd call it that doesn't come out of television comes out of YouTube it comes out of recommendation algorithms it's built around recommendation algorithms and I
feel like it feels like recommendation algorithms right it feels like it knows the kids too well it feels too tuned to you know their short attention spans like the whole thing is just overly optimized and I want to that makes it very effective as a babysitter or an
attentional harvester or just maybe it's you know better as entertainment for them but it creates in this very clear way because you're watching it happen to a two-year-old this feeling of what it looks like when culture is built because it knows you and it knows how to predict you
and that's scuzzy feeling that we have in a a vaguer way I think with ourselves when we're older we get in this very intense way with them and they're younger but it's the same thing in a way to me like all up and down the age ladder I also think that again this is a thing where the thing that
you get through the smartphone like like you were saying this experience of being learned and being known very very deeply right it's like it's a really human desire that has made this so effective as like a you know an addictive technology right like we of course we want to be learned and we
want to be known like that's so much of the entire pleasure of being alive and are personally right like people we want that for good reasons but but it's like yeah it's part of why co-comal and in so much on the phone it feels frictionless it's been designed for frictionlessness
and I think that's part of I mean maybe this is helping me understand how I delineate like good pleasure meaningful pleasure from meaningless pleasure which is that I think there's friction in all real pleasure and in the kind of pleasure you learn to get in the real world there's friction
in it there is like true surprise and I think that when someone is learning us in the real world when they're coming to know what we would like and and they're seeing things about us that we don't even see right like all these things that the algorithm is doing when another person is doing that for
us they change us in ways that the algorithm doesn't right like they that experience contains sharp edges in a way that the algorithmic one never can and that's why it's almost the same thing but it's why the real world version it feels infinitely more meaningful than Spotify learning
what song I want to listen to next because even as good as the algorithm genuinely has gotten that like giving me you know what I want to listen to the total removal of friction and I think that's one of the reasons that all the YouTube stuff feels just instinctively bad again like it's
one of those things where maybe it's easier to see with Coco Melon it's easier to see that the like sort of seamless micro targeting endless stream of giving you exactly what you want I'm certainly guilty of understanding that it's good for my kids to have a little more friction
in their life and not being just get everything what they wanted at touch of a button and then me pursuing that as soon as they're in bed this maybe gets at another thing that I'm afraid of because one of the things I was thinking about while you were saying that is I decided a couple
months ago I would sign up for a bunch of the AI relationship apps right like Kendroid and character AI and things like that where where these language models are built to create a kind of AI you'd be friends with or a lover with or it'd be a therapist or whatever and I tried them out for a
while and you know they're they're pretty good now I mean they're good at texting what they write sounds and feels realistic I always tell people they're much better texting than most of the people I know what it have fooled you like it doesn't fool me yeah definitely a fool it would have like
successfully catfished you if one of them had started texting you a hundred percent easily I would not have no way it's not a person but I never could keep myself coming back to them right because there was no meaning in the interaction right so I've you know I've since moving to New York I've
been making new friends and and I think about how you know one of the friends are made we text a lot just started during the day and they're not interesting texts necessarily sometimes they are but it is meaningful to me that he's giving me that attention back right the message of the text
is that I am being chosen for somebody else's attention it's a kind of meta text about a relationship that is emerging and I didn't end up writing the piece on this though because I can see the character AI usage numbers that are being released and this is a sort of AI system used much
more by younger people and they're logging in a ton of times a day and spending huge amounts of time on it so to go to the point of what I'm afraid of right this question of the retraining for me who grew up you know before large language models the kind of unkindiness the what I would call
the meaninglessness of that interaction is very front and center right it's very noticeable but if you're younger and your social dynamics are way less formed and your discernment of social dynamics is much less mature and your choices are more limited because of you know who
you know and how you can see them and how you can be in touch with them maybe it actually doesn't feel that way or maybe you get trained out of it feeling that way I do think you can lose the sense of and taste for friction and that that is a loss and that it does foreclose forms
of pleasure just as you were talking about hugely I there's this like old Kurt Vonnegut thing we was talking about like the pleasure of mailing a letter and it's like how the whole point of it is not that like you're doing something official the whole point of it is that you
go for a walk and you like wink at a girl and you you know pet a dog or whatever I mean but yeah I get used to I used to pre-children I had a years long streak of never using Amazon and a personal policy of if it was within walking distance of me in like downtown adjacent Brooklyn then I could
not order it online I'd to physically go out and get it and I have backslid on all of this since having my second child like significantly you know and it's also partly because the experience of having children wonderfully it is the source of all that friction like it's sort of like back
to what we were talking about at the beginning I think that as our world orients itself increasingly towards frictionlessness children can seem exclusively like a form of friction and then and that friction can seem exclusively like something that's undesirable when in fact like I think my sense
that I wanted some of this specific kind was one of the things that made me think it would be fun and I do think that like a total lack of impediment the ability to pick up and go anywhere you wanted the drop of a hat which is a wonderful way to live which I'm not you know anyone who has it
and wants it I'm jealous of you and good for you I mean it's like everything that we've been talking about is those are values that have been inculcated by the same form of ultra advanced capitalism that created the smartphone and created all these things that make us so depressed in
the first place and I think that part of me wanting feeling ready to try to have kids four years ago five years ago whatever it was was a sense that I wanted to undo these things in me like the sense of exceptionalism which the children really took out of me you know we were texting like about
the thing where you're playing with your kids and I'm and you're like I'm probably not particularly good at you know being the horsey right now but the thing that matters to you is that I am the person being the horsey the most common way I feel like I fail as a parent and it's where I felt both my
kids and myself is by trying to really control and optimize the experience and treat it like other things in my life you know we're gonna do this at this time and then we're gonna go here and you know you gotta get issues on by this moment and to your point about being the horsey or you know
finding some joint submission like parenting is so unpleasant when you are when you feel like it is a distraction from the thing you'd prefer to be doing right like looking at your phone or taking an app or but it's also I think unpleasant when you are trying to treat it like other things
in in adulthood and and control it it's most pleasant for me when I have like the resources inside myself and also the wisdom to just kind of be around they're running around in case you play with me and I'm sitting on the couch and occasionally playing with them and it's like you could
just do a lot less we've made parenting really really hard you know and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as parents to try to do a great job of it and you know be achievement oriented and the kids should be watching only educational shows have been really they should be watching no shows at
all and there's a million things we've done that are not really anything that the kids ever asked us to do right they they would like you to sort of be around a bit more or you know a lot and and be attentive but also like not overtake their experience with your own and like that's
really hard like I would like to get better at that I think that people know this though I think that when I had my first kid the thing that I found most difficult but now I think I've smoothed brain my way into finding really pleasurable is that like when you're with your kids at some point
you just have to completely surrender to not the time just really can't you can't really do anything else you know you are just gonna like this is your weekend now you know this is what weekends are gonna be like now and there's like a removal of choice in that that is the thing that
I was afraid of and I think a lot of people are afraid of but also the thing that is like arguably the most freeing like I remember also like I had read how to do nothing like right before right around and I was like yeah this might be a shortcut to the the kind of outside the clock time
you know where you are just not being useful to anyone but the people in front of you this thing that I was trying so hard to to do in other ways that now I have to do every single weekend whether I like it or not and I don't I no longer feel that as a loss I'm realizing like I used to
I used to think like oh I could have done so many things with these weekends and now I'm like you know it's time to go to the playground you know time to go play around again we've ranged a lot here but but to go back to it in some ways like the article that led to this show
if a kid watches an hour of Cocoa Melon a day should you feel bad would you feel bad no should I go on no I don't think so I got to lovely place to and saw as our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience I forgot about this question until I was on the train
here and I was like okay I got to think about the last the last three things that I was just texting people about because I really loved okay so I was extremely late to becoming loan some dovepilled I was like six months pregnant and I was on a work trip to Thailand and I had
48 hours of a loan time on the end of that work trip and I was like I this is the most important like the books I bring or the most important books like this is the only time I'll be alone for 48 hours all year you know and I was like I need to bring the perfect book like the book that will
make me feel like I'm a kid again will give me just this sort of wildly disproportionate emotional attachment you know I want to be sobbing you know by the end of this book and I read loan some dove and it was all that and more I have been loan some dovepilling many of my friends as the year
has gone on if anyone hasn't read it truly recommend it I really like this book in ascension that our friend Max Reed recommended to me it's sort of if anyone is in the sort of Ted Chang Jeff Vander Mirror kind of thing it's like that kind of grounded beautiful andigmatic slightly schematic sci-fi
really loved it another one that I've been texting a lot of people about the third one is when we cease to understand the world by Benjamin Labatute one that I feel like I've been texting friends about like every month since I read it it's about scientific discoveries that bring people
to the brink of madness and there's a really interesting thing that goes on where the book starts off almost entirely nonfiction and then ends almost entirely fiction and the gradations in between are amazing and I'll just know because you mentioned the last answer you said talked about reading how to do nothing which is by Jenny O'Dell and I still think it's the best book about attention and how incredible in in in this era I've enjoyed this so much geotolentino thank you very much thank you
this episode of the Ezra Clancho was produced by Annie Galvin fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary March Locker or senior engineer is Jeff Gald with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota our senior editor is Claire Gordon the show's production team also includes Roland
Who, Lys Eiskuth and Quistin Lin we have original music by Isaac Jones, Odin Stragi by Christina Samiluski and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is an introestroser and special thanks to Sonia Herrera