# How Gen Z Girls Were Turned Into Objects - Freya India | #78

An episode of [The Next Generation](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1772698742), 10 May 2026, 1 h 28 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO7901339112.mp3

Are girls’ standards too high or too low? Has growing up with p*rn damaged us? How can we even know what’s normal in a relationship? I welcome back Gen Z writer Freya India to discuss these questions and more. Is our generation cooked or are things starting to turn around? Freya’s book, ‘GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything’, is out now! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250442222/ Freya’s Substack: https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/ Try Jamie AI and use my code ELLIOT to get 20% off: https://www.jamie-ai.com/ CHAPTERS 00:00 Girls have transformed from people into products 00:58 Freya’s experience growing up 02:54 Is this phenomenon unique? 08:54 How normal is cheating? 12:00 Gen Z don’t have language for what they’re going through 14:45 Shouldn’t liberal girls hate being commercialised? 17:33 Influencers are way more extreme than ever before 22:32 How can you tell which influencers to trust? 27:20 Are we over-entertained? 29:21 What’s been the most disturbing secret you’ve uncovered? 31:44 Growing up with p*rn 38:11 Elliot overshares about his p*rn… mishap 41:25 Snapchat trends 42:42 Filters made us feel ugly 48:45 Will there be a Gen Z backlash? 55:55 Our standards are not too high, they’re too low 1:01:16 Reality now reflects social media 1:06:28 What’s been the reaction to your book? 1:10:21 The most harrowing thing to write about 1:12:26 Social media is turning everyone into teenage girls 1:14:42 Women use brashness as a defence mechanism 1:17:55 We can’t handle imperfect 1:21:53 What would be your advice to a 10 year old girl? 1:24:25 Which emotions should we lean into? 1:26:58 What’s next? ABOUT THE NEXT GENERATION: In a world saturated by social media and marked by skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and ADHD among Gen Z, young people are growing up in a landscape of chaos and contradiction. While protests swell in city streets and activists hurl soup at famous artworks to demand climate action, a quieter crisis unfolds within - the mental and emotional battles faced by a generation trying to make sense of it all. The Next Generation is hosted by 20-year-old Elliot Bewick, offering a raw and honest look at the world through the eyes of those living in it. Bringing together insight from professionals and young people on the ground, this podcast isn’t here to complain or chase clout. It’s here to bend the arc of the modern world towards solutions, truth and a love for the beautiful adventure of life itself.

## Transcript

[0:00] For India, welcome back to the next generation.
[0:01] Thank you for having me. Your book got released May 5th
[0:04] in America, so everyone should go out and buy it.
[0:06] What is it? It's an argument that girls have
[0:09] transformed from people into products.
[0:12] It basically came, as you know, from my experience growing up
[0:16] and feeling very anxious and insecure and like, mostly like,
[0:22] there was something wrong with me.
[0:24] And then the point of the book is basically to argue that I
[0:26] think the world has changed drastically and that if you are
[0:31] a girl right now or you're a young woman my age and you can't
[0:34] cope or you've had struggles, they make complete sense.
[0:38] And so the book was sort of to reassure me, but reassure other
[0:41] young women as well, that there's nothing actually wrong
[0:44] with them. They're just human in a world
[0:46] that's trying to turn them into products.
[0:48] Can we talk about your personal experience growing up?
[0:51] You're Gen. Z like me.
[0:53] Yeah. What made you so passionate
[0:55] about the subject of girls? Well, I tried writing about
[0:59] other things. I always wanted to be a writer,
[1:01] and so I tried that, and I felt that I couldn't be an expert in
[1:05] anything, and I didn't want to be the type of young writer who
[1:08] tries to explain how the economy should work or anything like
[1:11] that. I wanted to kind of stick to
[1:14] something that I felt I really knew and could speak with
[1:16] authority on. And at the same time as I was
[1:19] trying to pursue a career in writing, I was starting to feel
[1:22] all of these things very intensely, which was that I
[1:27] didn't have anywhere to belong. I didn't feel like I knew what
[1:31] to do with my life or that there was sort of a road map to
[1:33] follow. And so I was just working in a
[1:36] Cafe and basically trying to map out what was going on with me.
[1:40] And so I would draw these, like, my maps of, OK, what are all the
[1:44] things that make me anxious? Is there something tying them
[1:46] all together? And it only really became a book
[1:49] when I started to realize there were actually threads tying all
[1:52] of these things together. So in every area that I was
[1:56] anxious, there was an industry sort of exploiting and
[1:59] magnifying that particular vulnerability.
[2:02] So the mental health industry, the beauty industry, the dating
[2:05] industry. And then I was also very
[2:07] interested in why those industries were so powerful.
[2:12] And my argument sort of became that we had a lot of things
[2:17] missing in our generation. So, for example, my family fell
[2:21] apart. You know, I didn't have
[2:23] community, I didn't have neighbors.
[2:25] And so my argument basically became that we have these really
[2:29] exploitative industries magnifying anxieties that we
[2:33] already have and filling that gap of things that we never
[2:37] experienced and basically selling substitutes and
[2:41] simulations for things that previous generations had.
[2:44] How unique do you think this moment is in history?
[2:47] Obviously we've got rapid advancement in technology.
[2:51] Putting that aside for a second, if we look at society as a
[2:54] whole, are the things that we're experiencing unique novel?
[2:59] Or is this kind of a fourth turning where stuff happens
[3:04] cyclically and we can predict what's going to come next?
[3:07] One motivation for writing the book is that everyone kept
[3:10] saying to me, this is nothing new.
[3:11] And so all the adults in my life trying to reassure me, basically
[3:15] saying this is girlhood, this is growing up and you'll grow out
[3:18] of it. And I was looking around
[3:20] thinking, this is not girlhood. You know, there's, there's young
[3:23] girls working with me at the Cafe who can't look someone in
[3:26] the eye. And then 17, you know, there's
[3:28] girls at my school who were like cutting themselves and starving
[3:32] themselves. And I just, I really felt like
[3:34] there's something different about this generation.
[3:37] But I also was very sympathetic to the argument that Gen.
[3:40] Z was snowflakes and we needed to grow up.
[3:43] And so I was kind of wrestling with the two things, which
[3:45] actually is it? And I kind of realized that we
[3:50] do lack resilience compared to previous generations.
[3:54] We are more anxious. But there's an entire context
[3:58] explaining that. And so basically, I wanted to
[4:01] get across in the book that, yeah, we maybe are socially
[4:04] anxious. We maybe are struggling in a way
[4:06] that previous generations weren't, but there's all of this
[4:09] context as to why that's happening.
[4:11] We've grown up in a different world.
[4:13] And the argument of the book, people often think it's me
[4:16] saying this is the hardest time to grow up ever, ever, which I
[4:19] don't think is true. It's just very different and I
[4:22] think that makes it even harder to talk about because it's so
[4:26] new. It's not that we're weak, it's
[4:28] that we've been crippled by genuinely difficult
[4:31] circumstances and we're reacting rationally to a world that
[4:36] doesn't set us up for success. Yeah, so that was the main
[4:40] message of the book is that I think if you, if you in this
[4:44] current moment, feel lonely, anxious, stressed, hurt by a lot
[4:50] of things in modern life, I think it's completely rational.
[4:54] And I don't think young women get that message very often.
[4:57] The message is often there's something wrong with them
[4:59] specifically. What do you mean?
[5:01] So if you struggle with relationships now you have an
[5:05] attachment disorder or an anxiety problem or you're
[5:09] insecure and it's something you need to fix within yourself
[5:12] rather than looking at the context of dating apps and
[5:16] online porn and influences on Tiktok telling you how to have a
[5:20] relationship. So there's all of this context
[5:23] that's missing. And I felt, for me at least,
[5:27] seeing all of these things laid out in a book, each stage of
[5:32] where things have got to since the 20 Tens gave me that immense
[5:36] comfort. Even though the book is quite
[5:38] bleak and disturbing, it's, it really is a declaration of
[5:43] there's nothing wrong with you. You know, obviously you feel
[5:46] this way. What context is missing?
[5:49] Because I look at something like a breakup and a childhood love
[5:54] that you've had for the last five years going to end, and
[5:58] you're almost mourning the death of a person that's still alive.
[6:02] That's going to destroy you, that's going to put you down in
[6:04] the dumps. You're not going to be able to
[6:05] focus at school. You're going to be upset, not
[6:09] necessarily depressed. That seems like a pretty normal
[6:13] reaction to adversity. And when you're young, you're
[6:17] probably living in the most turbulent time of your life.
[6:20] Whether you're nine years old, ten years old, eleven years old,
[6:23] starting puberty, or if you're 20 and you're at university
[6:27] deciding what you're going to do next.
[6:28] Thinking about the fact that you've almost got your degree
[6:31] but you have no idea what job you're going to go into.
[6:34] That's a stressful period in your life.
[6:37] You're going through your first loves, first breakups, feeling
[6:41] slightly anxious or even majorly anxious.
[6:45] That's a pretty common sense reaction.
[6:49] Did we have that in the past? And if we did, and we don't now,
[6:54] where did we go wrong? Yeah, there's, there's like
[6:58] there's sort of two things happening.
[6:59] So 1 is that I think these things are in some way they're
[7:05] different and in some ways harder than previous
[7:07] generations. So for example, I was talking to
[7:10] my nan the other day. I bought her this book where you
[7:12] can fill out your memories and then she can sit back to me.
[7:16] So she writes out like her childhood and everything.
[7:18] And it has all of these questions and massive space for
[7:21] you to answer. And one of the questions was,
[7:24] have you ever had your heart broken?
[7:26] How many times can you explain how you felt and everything?
[7:28] And she just put, no, no, I was just looking at it thinking that
[7:35] is different. You know, I don't know any young
[7:37] woman my age who has not had their heart broken multiple
[7:40] times, like heart wrenched from situationships or boyfriends or,
[7:46] you know, just betrayals online and all of this sort of cheating
[7:50] that can happen on social media that didn't used to happen
[7:52] before and the paranoia and insecurity that comes with that.
[7:56] And so I do think it's harder now to deal with some of these
[8:00] things because age-old rites of passage like dating, they're
[8:03] more complicated. But then I do think we have, we
[8:08] have anxiety as a result of that.
[8:10] But then that anxiety, we don't push through it because another
[8:15] industry, the mental health industry will tell us that
[8:17] that's a sign of something really serious.
[8:20] And so my argument is not that, you know, Gen.
[8:23] Z are just making up that they're anxious or insecure.
[8:26] I actually think they're feeling it so strongly and maybe
[8:30] stronger than previous generations.
[8:32] But another part of the issue is there's an industry telling them
[8:37] that any sign of anxiety needs to be solved, diagnosed,
[8:41] controlled in some way. To steel man the other side
[8:45] here, I can imagine that before, even though relationships might
[8:50] not have been as complicated, they wouldn't have been any
[8:52] better. Cheating was probably just as
[8:55] normalised, but men having four girlfriends or whatever because
[9:01] women were more degraded in the past.
[9:04] Now we've gone in the opposite direction where everyone cheats
[9:07] on everyone because the relationship means nothing.
[9:10] Is it the case that we've just gotten more sensitive now to
[9:15] relationships going wrong and that in the past people were
[9:18] perhaps less sensitive and should have been more sensitive?
[9:23] Women would put up with guys cheating on them because that
[9:26] was just the way it is. Now we're in a teething period
[9:30] where we've worked out that certain things are wrong and
[9:33] we're trying to find our feet and where we go next.
[9:37] So it's not good that we're suffering, but at least it's
[9:40] programmed on putting up with things that shouldn't be put up
[9:43] with. In a way, but I also think the
[9:48] temptation towards things like cheating is much stronger in our
[9:54] world than it used to be. I saw a survey the other day,
[9:57] yeah, and I think it was only 1000 Gen.
[9:59] ZS in America, but 93% of them had been in a relationship where
[10:04] cheating was involved. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me.
[10:08] That's absurd. Well.
[10:10] More than 9 out of 10 people. But that but the argument is not
[10:14] that this never happened before. I think it's more that there's
[10:21] so there's far fewer guardrails now to protect people from that
[10:27] happening. And you can never be fully
[10:29] protected from someone cheating on you.
[10:31] You know, you can never be not vulnerable in a relationship,
[10:35] but I think there's there's a multitude of things.
[10:37] One is the technologies encouraging, you know, giving
[10:42] you endless options, encouraging you to look at what's out there
[10:47] and which I talk about in the book, features that hide
[10:51] messages, you know, all of these ways that you can cheat on your
[10:54] partner or at least make them feel paranoid and insecure.
[10:57] So there's that. But I also think we live in a
[11:00] more morally relative culture now where the the stigma and the
[11:04] shame and also the seriousness with which we take heartbreak
[11:10] has changed. And so you have 18 year olds
[11:14] that have had a series of serious relationships.
[11:17] You have people in their 20s who've lived with people over
[11:20] and over. And that the heartbreak that
[11:22] that causes I think is of a similar magnitude to like a
[11:25] divorce. But they're experiencing it at
[11:27] such a young age. And I don't think that's
[11:29] something previous generations dealt with because they had
[11:33] different social norms, which is that, you know, you don't move
[11:36] in with multiple partners. You don't often have a constant
[11:39] string of boyfriends. And so I just think young women
[11:44] and young men are just put in more of a vulnerable position to
[11:47] get hurt now than in the past. You've spoken about the fact
[11:51] that we're growing up in this novel time history, where it
[11:55] might not be the hardest time to grow up, but what we're facing
[11:59] is unprecedented, especially as a younger generation.
[12:03] And you said we don't really have the words or language to
[12:05] describe what's happening. Yeah.
[12:07] What would be some useful language for us to pick up to
[12:11] describe what's actually going on?
[12:12] The thesis of the book of people turning into products really
[12:16] helped me to see what was going on because it gave me a sort of
[12:23] lens with which to see all of these things.
[12:26] And so I think it's true of the beauty struggles that girls have
[12:30] worrying they don't look good enough.
[12:31] That is being that is the pursuit of being a perfect
[12:33] product. The relationship struggles is
[12:36] often wanting other people to be perfect products.
[12:40] The mental health industry I think is diagnosing yourself
[12:43] every time you have a human feeling or reaction and again,
[12:48] needing to feel perfect, need to present like a perfect products.
[12:52] And so I think the language of commodification really helped me
[12:57] to be able to see, you know, what is a behavior that makes me
[13:02] feel anxious, degrades me, that I don't want to do.
[13:07] So I think that helps seeing the industries that are involved.
[13:10] But I also think just having the context.
[13:14] So I would say this about my own book, but I do think it really
[13:17] helps having it all mapped out. So when I was a teenager, I just
[13:22] felt anxious and I could not pin down what is causing this.
[13:26] Whereas in the book I sort of separated it into, you know,
[13:30] beauty struggles, relationship struggles, mental health
[13:32] struggles and having them all in one place.
[13:35] It's not necessarily that the book is like groundbreakingly
[13:38] new. It's just having it together and
[13:41] being able to follow the timeline from the 20 tens to
[13:44] now. It, it arms you with the
[13:47] language to describe what's happening.
[13:48] It's, it's these products, it's these influences, it's the
[13:52] algorithms. And so maybe there's not
[13:53] specific words that help, but being able to zoom out and see
[13:58] everything really helps, I think.
[14:00] You've given a generation of blueprint in a time where we're
[14:03] lost, we're confused, and the navigation is broken, mainly
[14:09] because it was set up for a world that looked completely
[14:12] different 20 years ago. It's interesting that you've
[14:15] honed in on commodification in an era where I completely agree
[14:20] with your thesis and I'm indebted to you for so much in
[14:23] terms of the way I see the world and the the topics that I cover
[14:26] on the podcast. The thing I notice is,
[14:29] especially young girls that you write about, they're usually
[14:33] classically very liberal left-leaning, which you'd think
[14:37] would come with a scepticism towards big industries
[14:41] exploiting people. Yeah, yeah, they'll run and pop
[14:45] some hot girl pills and get diagnosed by big Pharma or
[14:49] they'll lap up the newest make up released by Kylie Jenner or
[14:53] whoever. Why do you think that there's
[14:56] that kind of cognitive dissonance that's so strong?
[15:01] I think for most of the assumptions of liberals and
[15:06] progressives is they don't want to be controlled, so they don't
[15:10] want any authority imposing itself on them.
[15:14] They don't want to be told right and wrong.
[15:15] And it's generally speaking the pursuit of freedom from limits
[15:21] and restraints of any kind. My argument in the book is that
[15:25] if you pursue that, you will always have an authority.
[15:30] There will always be a right and wrong.
[15:31] You're just changing who sets it.
[15:34] So my argument in the book is if you have this vacuum, it then
[15:37] will become companies, industries, influencers who said
[15:41] right and wrong, advertisers who tell you what to believe, who
[15:46] give you like you say that road map and blueprint of how to live
[15:49] your life. So I think sometimes the sort of
[15:54] where you end up as a liberal in the modern world is following
[15:59] the market, ironically, because you don't want to listen to
[16:04] basically any other authority because you think maybe religion
[16:08] is too restrictive and oppressive or, you know, even
[16:11] adults in your life. You know, the liberal assumption
[16:15] is that you should just let children be their authentic
[16:18] selves and, you know, tell you who they are.
[16:21] But that means that there's no, you're not getting told right
[16:24] and wrong. And my argument in the book is
[16:27] it's very dangerous to say that to a generation that is spending
[16:30] all this time learning from influencers.
[16:33] And so I conclude the book saying, you know, if you don't
[16:37] teach your children about relationships, then Tinder will
[16:41] or Pornhub will. You know, if you don't teach
[16:43] them right and wrong and Instagram influencer will.
[16:46] And so I think that's where liberals have basically ended up
[16:50] is that they have a vacuum and the market fills it.
[16:54] Yeah, I was raised on YouTube and Reddit forums and Pornhub as
[17:00] my education. I kept on looking around for
[17:02] women hanging out washing machines and therefore never go
[17:05] into a relationship. Stick with me on the influencer
[17:09] point of big companies selling these products to unknowing
[17:14] adolescents. How much did you trust
[17:17] influences you were watching when you were growing up?
[17:20] Well, I think trust was a lot stronger when I was younger.
[17:24] So one of the examples I use in the book is Zoella.
[17:28] When Zoella was talking about beauty, she was very trustworthy
[17:32] because she was just a woman in her 20s who loved makeup and she
[17:36] was talking to the camera. I also talk about her.
[17:39] She was one of the first to say she had anxiety.
[17:43] She did this whole video like guys, I have this alter ego to
[17:47] tell you about. Like it's a huge thing.
[17:49] It might change how you view me and have millions of views.
[17:53] And the big reveal was just that she had anxiety.
[17:56] But at the time, it felt so vulnerable and intimate for an
[18:00] influencer to tell you that because they were all pretending
[18:02] to be perfect all the time. And so I think our generation
[18:06] actually had the most trust because when this all began,
[18:11] influencers were normal people. So you look at influencers now,
[18:14] it's very easy to see through, oh, they're selling you
[18:16] something. But that's because it's become
[18:18] much more explicit, you know, beauty influencer.
[18:21] Now I think people are slightly more sceptical because they
[18:24] think, you know, she's telling me something, she's sponsored,
[18:27] she needs to get views. Whereas before you couldn't make
[18:29] money off YouTube for a long period of time, and all of these
[18:32] OG creators like Zoella, like PewDiePie, like KSI, that are
[18:37] now legacy figures, they were doing it for the love of the
[18:40] game. And I think that's the
[18:42] difference. I look at who pulls on my
[18:44] heartstrings when I see that they get married because they're
[18:47] much old now and have kids. It's all the Youtubers that I
[18:51] watched before they could make money.
[18:54] And I don't know if it's me kind of mapping on an explanation
[18:56] from reading your book, but I do genuinely feel that it's because
[19:01] I know subconsciously they were doing it to have fun, to pass
[19:05] time when they were at college or at school.
[19:07] They weren't like these current influencers who are basically
[19:11] just striving for an income. They're striving to get views,
[19:16] accolades, status and it's so polluted now.
[19:19] All of these people don't make valuable content.
[19:22] They make content that's optimised.
[19:25] There's been this Mr. beastification of the online
[19:28] world and people are followed to in all industries, whether it's
[19:32] make up, whether it's fashion, whether it's fitness.
[19:35] There's this performative aspect now I think, and you're always
[19:39] going to grapple with this. We're on camera now in a studio
[19:42] with lights, but I think it's just a case of where your values
[19:46] lie. You're always going to be a
[19:48] little bit different on camera because you're conscious of the
[19:51] fact that people are watching, but you can still be driving at
[19:55] a specific goal. There's an end purpose to your
[19:58] book, to this podcast versus I want views, I want money, and I
[20:03] see that a lot. It feels like before social
[20:07] media there was that awareness. Of a performance, but it was
[20:11] through something like Saturday Night Live or these big TV shows
[20:16] because it was so overproduced. And what the democratisation of
[20:21] content did is it gave these big companies a Trojan horse to put
[20:27] these influences in and sell their products with.
[20:30] Yeah, and I think that's a big part of the book is to show the
[20:36] competition, the the amount of competition influencers facing
[20:39] in, in every arena, as you say. So beauty, mental health,
[20:42] fitness, politics, you know, there's so many influencers now.
[20:45] Everyone has a podcast. Everyone's on TikTok, Instagram.
[20:48] Hate people with podcasts. It's.
[20:49] The same but they they all need to compete and so the incentives
[20:54] are so bad compared to before. Zoella was not really competing
[20:59] against hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other beauty
[21:02] influencers doing the same thing.
[21:05] But now you need to stand out. And the way that you stand out
[21:08] is very often becoming more extreme clickbait, you know,
[21:13] targeting vulnerable people because they're the ones that
[21:17] are going to click because they feel insecure or they feel
[21:19] anxious. And so I think the even when we
[21:24] were growing up, it was a lot healthier to get your dating
[21:28] advice or beauty advice from influencers.
[21:30] I don't think influencers are just bad in general.
[21:35] You know, I think there are plenty of like, thoughtful,
[21:37] measured people, but I don't think it's the nature of the
[21:41] platform anymore. I think that the incentives have
[21:44] changed so much that it's the exception now to be like that.
[21:49] In an ideal world, we'd maybe outlaw being an influencer
[21:53] completely. It's funny, 100 years ago we had
[21:55] the influenza crisis and people died all across Europe.
[21:59] Now we have the influencer crisis, it's much worse.
[22:04] So in an ideal world we'd maybe just wipe out all influencers
[22:07] and I'll take one for the team and wipe myself out if it means
[22:10] all the other influencers go. We're not going to get to that
[22:13] point anytime soon I think. What would some pragmatic hands
[22:17] on advice be for people watching this for vetting the influencers
[22:21] that they are following? How do you know what to trust,
[22:24] what not to trust? I suppose focus on are you being
[22:30] sold something? So it's very easy to think that
[22:36] influencers want to just give you friendly advice and
[22:39] everything. I think it's very helpful just
[22:40] to remember that they are essentially advertisers, so they
[22:44] are selling something. So bearing in mind, you know, if
[22:49] someone's giving you relationship advice, do they
[22:52] want you to take that relationship advice, feel
[22:54] satisfied and never look at their channel again?
[22:57] No, they want you to feel a bit uncertain about your
[23:01] relationship and keep coming back and keep needing more.
[23:05] So again as well thinking about the incentives.
[23:08] So what is the incentive of this channel?
[23:10] And I think, you know, a sad part of the Internet now is
[23:14] everyone sort of has to become an influencer.
[23:16] And so, you know, in some ways I have to become an influencer.
[23:19] Writers have to become influencers, and so it's not
[23:22] about, you know, writing everyone off who's telling you
[23:24] something on the Internet, but looking at the format they're
[23:27] using, are they explicitly selling you something?
[23:30] So are they sponsored? But also, what behaviour are
[23:35] they encouraging with their content and what behaviour do
[23:37] they need for their channel to keep growing?
[23:40] You gave me a great piece of advice a year ago, which was to
[23:43] keep doing other stuff to fund my channel as long as possible
[23:47] because it means that the incentives aren't skewed towards
[23:50] making a living from this. And now I have jumped ship after
[23:54] a good period of funding the channel with my other
[23:56] videography businesses, and I'm funding everything through the
[23:59] podcast. I notice all of these things
[24:02] cropping up. You have sponsors, you have a
[24:05] certain guest on, and you don't want to put the cans on the
[24:08] table of the product that you're sponsored by because it might be
[24:11] a bit of a controversial episode and it might make them look bad.
[24:14] OK, well I need to put the cans on the table to get my money.
[24:18] So I'm just going to dial back the way I conduct this
[24:20] interview. And I find myself coming across
[24:24] these thoughts and pushing them down because I would rather go
[24:27] broke and have to fund this with something else than compromise
[24:30] on my integrity. But I'm noticing all of this
[24:33] stuff and I'm like, fuck, if I didn't have a goal with this
[24:38] podcast and it was just to make money.
[24:40] There are so many different avenues that you can go down
[24:43] where you compromise on integrity, where you click bait,
[24:46] where you polarise people, where you take on fake sponsors that
[24:49] sell shit products that don't actually do anything for people.
[24:53] And I think even though it's getting into the weeds a little
[24:55] bit, it's something that I would have wished people spoke about
[24:59] before I made content because they don't get to go into the
[25:03] side of marketing and sponsorships.
[25:06] I don't want us to get too deep into it, but I think it's worth
[25:09] discussing a little bit how things actually work when you
[25:13] are on camera and how sponsorships work.
[25:16] How in the industry you're constantly going for mixers and
[25:20] lunches and dinners with other people that you would prefer not
[25:24] to piss off. There's every incentive there to
[25:28] compromise, and it feels like to me, I'm actively fighting.
[25:32] I'm swimming against the tide and the current to keep my
[25:36] morals in a world where it feels like success is incredibly
[25:42] difficult to do without losing the best parts of yourself.
[25:45] Yeah, it does. And I feel like that's something
[25:48] we all struggle with. I mean, it's part of the reason
[25:52] I've never pay all to my sub stack because I the thought of
[25:56] my rent being dependent on my sub stack terrifies me because I
[26:01] think that's not a good incentive.
[26:04] You know, I've got to get something out.
[26:05] It's got to do well. It's got to be engaging enough
[26:08] for people to keep paying. And so, you know, I do defend
[26:14] having a side job and other income, especially if you're
[26:18] creative so that you can actually preserve what's good
[26:21] about your work. And I often see people when the
[26:25] thing that they love becomes their only form of income, as
[26:28] you say, those temptations become very difficult to manage
[26:35] easy, you know. So I think it's, it's a very
[26:37] different and hard time to be creative and to try and do, as
[26:43] you say, something meaningful because the incentives are so
[26:46] warped. But I do think there are ways to
[26:49] do it, but it might mean not pursuing income and subscribers
[26:55] at all costs. And as you said, pursuing a
[26:58] mission, having a mission in mind and a goal of what you want
[27:01] to achieve with your work do. You think we're over entertained
[27:06] as a culture now? I look at these Youtubers that
[27:08] are following these perverse incentives and they might be
[27:11] speaking about politics or society, something that's got
[27:15] genuine impact on the way we live our lives.
[27:18] But it's all through the lens of entertainment, and the classic
[27:21] example is American politics. You see the debates on TV,
[27:25] everything so curated to get people grabbing for the popcorn,
[27:29] sitting down with their mates, watching someone destroy the
[27:32] other person. Are there certain areas of life
[27:35] in the world that kind of should be protected against
[27:38] entertainment and should be taken more seriously?
[27:41] Yeah, I think everything's been cheapened and sort of
[27:45] trivialized. I've noticed that a lot with
[27:48] sort of political debates where the people involved almost seem
[27:53] to have an awareness that it's going to be turned into YouTube
[27:56] Shorts like that. You can see as they're
[27:58] communicating, they're communicating in that format.
[28:00] And I think it happens with every social media platform.
[28:03] So on sub stack, there's a lot of incentive to write your sub
[28:07] stack where certain lines might get restacked and shared.
[28:11] And so I noticed in my own writing, when I'm freelancing
[28:15] for a publication, I write much more fluidly, and I have a sort
[28:19] of sub stack brain when I'm doing it for sub stack, where I
[28:22] sort of know what format works on sub stack and have to fight
[28:26] against that. And so I do think the platforms
[28:28] incentivize, you know, yeah, a constant shift toward
[28:34] entertainment and trivializing things, which makes what we were
[28:38] speaking about earlier more slightly more sinister, which is
[28:41] that young people are learning about relationships, about the
[28:46] world through a platform that is designed to be entertaining
[28:49] above all. And if that's the first place
[28:53] they're learning about these things, that's very worrying to
[28:56] me. Yeah, you're learning how to go
[28:59] about getting married from a 62nd YouTube short.
[29:03] Yeah. What's been the most disturbing
[29:07] secret you've uncovered to do these social media platforms?
[29:11] Secret. I don't know about secret.
[29:17] I guess the the most, the least attention is paid to porn sites
[29:27] versus social media. So a porn site is essentially
[29:30] like a social media platform. It has the same incentives, but
[29:33] I don't think people discuss that very much, which is that
[29:37] everything the social media sites do, the infinite scroll,
[29:41] these, you know, adverts for upselling, you know,
[29:45] subscription fees to things, the sort of casino noises and sounds
[29:50] and everything being very addictive.
[29:53] All of those things are happening on porn sites and that
[29:57] were actually very often pioneered on the porn sites
[30:00] before the social media platforms.
[30:02] Things like algorithms recommending you content based
[30:06] on what you've watched previously.
[30:07] This is all happening on the porn sites and that, that's
[30:09] something I hadn't actually really thought about.
[30:12] So I knew that the porn sites were damaging, but I didn't
[30:15] quite realise it's, it's the exact same problems.
[30:20] And and then you apply it to like violent sexual content.
[30:23] And it's, it's a terrible combination of things.
[30:26] Well, if you put violent content aside, why is it so bad that
[30:30] people are being recommended their favorite porn by an
[30:33] algorithm? Well again, there's incentives
[30:37] to keep you on the platform, so it has to become has been
[30:40] gauging for you. And so much like a beauty
[30:44] influencer has to then apply more makeup or show you a
[30:48] slightly more extreme tutorial or vlog herself getting cosmetic
[30:53] surgery to get the views up and keep you watching, it's the same
[30:57] incentives on porn sites. So you may get desensitized to a
[31:00] certain form of porn and then you're recommended more based on
[31:06] maybe a flicker of interest in something.
[31:09] And So what you then find attractive can change and it's
[31:13] being served to you, again, based on entertainment and
[31:17] engagement. And so I think that's dangerous
[31:22] road to go down, especially if you're thinking about young
[31:25] people who haven't had normal sexual experiences yet.
[31:28] Yeah, I first go exposed to porn when I was like 8 years old and
[31:33] I was speaking about this with a girl called Cataclysm who
[31:36] rallies against porn. She wants it banned in the UK
[31:40] and telling her how I didn't get exposed to porn through
[31:44] searching it myself. It was through youtubers that
[31:50] would bake all of these sexual innuendos.
[31:52] People like the side men. They were grown guys, young guys
[31:57] who were maybe 20 at the time, obsessed with all the Dick jokes
[32:02] and porn jokes in the world. I would be watching that as an 8
[32:05] year old, feeling excluded from this parasocial relationship
[32:08] because I couldn't relate. It wasn't that I had a sex drive
[32:12] because I was prepubescent, I just wanted to be involved with
[32:16] the in joke. So I ended up scrolling through
[32:19] porn because of that. And it's so odd to look back on
[32:24] how I was 8 years old and I was exposed to the craziest shit,
[32:29] the weirdest looking bodies where I was like, is this what
[32:34] girls look like? Like one of the girls in my
[32:36] class looked like this or any of the adults that I see walking
[32:39] around. And more than anything, I think
[32:42] the overwhelming feeling was that of me being weird, me being
[32:48] different and kind of not being attuned to the real way the
[32:53] world works. Yeah.
[32:55] And now I look back, I'm like, no, those were a bunch of
[32:58] plastic models who were, like, dieting like crazy with fake
[33:02] body parts everywhere. Yeah, I can't imagine what it's
[33:06] like for Gen. Alpha now to grow up exposed
[33:09] upon at that age and also lacking the ability to go out
[33:13] and socialize and try and reverse some of the impacts from
[33:16] that. I at least didn't grow up in as
[33:18] chronically of an online era where I was able to go out and
[33:23] get my first girlfriend and speak to girls and realise that
[33:26] they're just humans. But it feels concerning looking
[33:30] at Gen. Alpha where those social skills
[33:32] completely neutered their iPad kids.
[33:35] There's a Gen. Z stare.
[33:36] I can only imagine how bad the Gen. alpha stare will be.
[33:40] Yeah, well, that part of the book was like pretty harrowing
[33:45] to research because I was going on Reddit forums where people of
[33:50] our generation were talking about their first exposure to
[33:53] porn, and some of them were like 6 years old.
[33:55] And so often it's accidental. And so loads of the surveys show
[34:01] that the first time kids are exposed, they don't mean to be
[34:04] exposed. It's it's another platform.
[34:06] It's like Twitter or Instagram that's that's starting, maybe an
[34:10] addiction. So yeah, that was alarming to me
[34:13] because in my head, and I think in a lot of parents heads, they
[34:16] think my child will never go on Pornhub.
[34:19] But like the vast majority in the statistics in the book, it
[34:24] was coming from Twitter or Reddit or these other platforms
[34:28] where they're exposed by accident and sometimes they're
[34:31] exposed at school, on school owned devices.
[34:36] And so when you put that in context, especially when you put
[34:39] that in context of Gen. Z adults dating far later than
[34:45] previous generations and putting off serious relationships, but
[34:50] then maybe having like a decade of watching porn before that.
[34:54] And again, not looking at magazines, looking at content
[34:58] that's gradually escalating and they're being recommended more
[35:02] of I think we we seriously underestimate the impact that
[35:07] would have on relationships. And, you know, there's all this
[35:10] discourse about why Gen. Z, you know, aren't settling
[35:13] down, why they don't want to have kids, why they don't want
[35:15] to get married in the future. It's barely ever mentioned that
[35:19] we were all raised on porn, the men and the women and the the
[35:23] assumptions that gives you about relationships and about
[35:26] yourself. I think I'd struggle to sit to
[35:30] agree with the argument, which is that you can grow up with
[35:33] that and then you can sort of file it away and just be a
[35:35] normal, productive, healthy partner.
[35:37] How do those struggles differ between the sexes?
[35:40] I think for women it's, you know, an assumption that you're
[35:46] an object and you have to be the way to be loved is to be a
[35:49] better object and the obsession of your looks and being like a
[35:53] sort of thinking a body needs to be like a porn star.
[35:57] So I think a lot of it is appearance anxiety also just an
[36:00] assumption that all men are predatory and insatiable and
[36:05] monsters essentially because you're watching sort of rough,
[36:09] violent men who aren't treating the women like human a lot of
[36:14] the time. So I think for girls, it's
[36:16] mostly insecurity, paranoia and a warped view of men and men's
[36:23] capacity to love them and be loyal to them.
[36:27] And then I think for men, I think it's some insecurity, as
[36:31] you say, looking at the bodies of other men.
[36:32] And you know, I think some of that will play into like the
[36:37] looks maxing and having to be perfect and everything, but just
[36:40] thinking you have to be perfect in order to be loved.
[36:44] But also difficulty relating to him.
[36:47] Even seeing women I think is more sometimes more promiscuous
[36:51] than they actually are. So sometimes I get comments on
[36:54] my sub stack, which is like, well, every woman's an only fans
[36:57] creator and like they all have body counts of 200.
[36:59] I just don't think I think that's a sort of porn brained
[37:03] view of it. I don't think that's actually
[37:04] true. So I think it shapes us in so
[37:08] many ways that actually quite hard to measure but are playing
[37:12] out in the dating scene. I've even seen some theories
[37:15] around how people who are migrating to the West from
[37:19] countries that don't have white women, who you'd see in porn
[37:23] predominantly think that when they come over to the West,
[37:26] women are going to be that promiscuous because they've been
[37:29] watching porn in their countries.
[37:31] They're like, oh, this is what Western women are just like.
[37:34] So then they push the boundaries way more.
[37:38] And often times they run into the line of consent and cross it
[37:42] because they've grown up watching all these Westerners
[37:45] thinking this is what they do. This is how they have sex.
[37:48] That's a really interesting theory and it makes sense if you
[37:52] haven't been exposed to that culture and then you get
[37:54] immersed into it. I'll tell you about story I have
[37:57] with insecurity from porn because I started watching it at
[38:01] such a young age. I was prepubescent and I used to
[38:06] have this loft bed in my bedroom that was from IKEA.
[38:10] My mum built it for me and I would literally be lying like up
[38:13] by the ceiling, had to climb up a ladder.
[38:15] So I'd sneak up at night past my bedtime, I'd have my iPad with
[38:19] me, and I'd be watching this porn and I wouldn't finish
[38:25] because I couldn't. So I would just orgasm and I'd
[38:29] be firing blanks, as they say. And in between, I started to
[38:33] build up this insecurity about the fact that I was maybe
[38:37] infertile and I'd never be able to have kits because all of
[38:41] these guys, they're doing the money shot in porn, which is
[38:45] kind of the centerpiece of porn. It's this game and it's this
[38:48] crescendo and it's this big finish.
[38:50] Literally, I'd be lying there in my bed.
[38:55] I wouldn't be able to ejaculate. I was like, wow, there's there's
[38:58] something wrong with me. This is terrifying.
[39:00] So I started going online and looking at all of these forums
[39:05] to do with not being able to ejaculate.
[39:08] And I even started booking a consultation with an online
[39:12] doctor that you could do you. Could have ended up on
[39:15] medication. And I kept on trying to consult
[39:18] people. I kept on Googling, you know,
[39:20] why can't I ejaculate? Really confused.
[39:23] I'm about 9 years old at this point.
[39:24] In 10, she hadn't hit puberty. And it got to the point where I
[39:31] was desperately trying to. So I climbed up one night and I
[39:36] was like, tonight's the night I'm going to ejaculate for the
[39:39] first time and this ladder watch porn.
[39:44] And I'm like Pat Climax and I came to the conclusion that
[39:48] night that what you have to do is you have to push really hard.
[39:53] That's what makes you finish, otherwise you don't So and
[39:58] pushed really hard and then ended up just pissing all over.
[40:04] You know, I talk in the book about influences over sharing.
[40:08] Is this one of those moments? I'm happy to overshare if it
[40:12] means that someone can relate to an embarrassing experience.
[40:15] But an embarrassing story aside, and having to then climb down
[40:18] the ladder with pistol at me, I could have been put on some
[40:22] meds. Yeah.
[40:23] Yeah. Consulting an online doctor
[40:25] simply because I was at an age where I hadn't even hit puberty.
[40:29] That's so messed. Up Well, that's a good example
[40:32] of the impulse I was describing at the beginning, which is the
[40:35] impulse to turn inward and diagnose yourself what is wrong
[40:38] with me. Because it gives you clarity.
[40:40] Yeah, and I don't think an 8 year old would ever think, you
[40:44] know, why is our society structured like this?
[40:46] You know, why am I exposed to platform?
[40:47] You just don't think that. And I think that it's a good
[40:50] example because it's just like a such a core message of the book,
[40:53] which is that I think in all areas of life, young men and
[40:58] young women are doing this, which is.
[41:00] Pissing all over themselves. Yeah, feeling so inadequate for
[41:07] having a human reaction to something I remember.
[41:10] Paired with that, there are all of these status games going
[41:13] online, going on online, especially on Snapchat.
[41:16] That was like the hub for me was speaking to everyone on
[41:19] Snapchat, posting stories. It wasn't Instagram at a younger
[41:22] age that was kind of an accessory, whereas Snapchat felt
[41:24] more personal. So we'd be talking with our
[41:28] friends and probably because of our pornified brains, because of
[41:32] Instagram influencers all coming together, we would be covering
[41:36] up our faces. When we'd send each other
[41:38] pictures of ourselves, it would be your eye and a little line
[41:43] drawn. It would be stories where people
[41:47] would be trying to flex cash that they found in their dad's
[41:50] office at 12 years old and put on a balaclava and listen to
[41:54] some rap music. And it was all so odd.
[41:57] I actually found a picture of myself from I must have been in
[42:02] year 6. It was like 10 or 11 years old
[42:05] and I'll show you we'll put it up on screen.
[42:09] I posted on my story new haircut is that.
[42:11] You. That's me.
[42:14] But why am I covering my face? Why you're not even?
[42:17] Covering and it's not even covered, but it's like this
[42:19] performative trend setting thing of squiggling over your face
[42:24] because I saw other girls doing it.
[42:26] The dog ear filter or something? What's that for anyone that
[42:29] doesn't? Know so I talk about in the book
[42:32] because it was so seemed so harmless at the time, which that
[42:35] just gives you a pair of dog ears and like a dog knows, but
[42:39] it also like chiseled your face, smoothed your face, made your
[42:43] eyes bigger, so it really subtly make you look prettier.
[42:47] And I remember girls in my school getting obsessed, like
[42:50] addicted to using the filters so that there was like a dog one,
[42:54] it was like, you know, a flower crown, but it's changing your
[42:58] it's like beautifying your whole face.
[43:01] And I actually think that started a lot of the addiction
[43:03] toward using filters and maybe even cosmetic surgery down the
[43:06] line because you're using a filter like age 10, as you're
[43:12] going through puberty, that's changing your face, and then
[43:15] you're getting more used to that version of you.
[43:18] Because I remember, like, I would take every picture with
[43:20] the dog ear filter. And if it accidentally turned
[43:23] off, I would look horrifying. You said you felt disgusted when
[43:26] it would turn off. Like repulsed by myself because
[43:30] it sort of evens you out and it took me so long from sort of
[43:35] giving up. I mean, face tune is the worst
[43:37] where you actually can go in and edit, but from giving that up to
[43:40] then accepting slight like imperfections in your face
[43:45] because you're growing up having them corrected for you.
[43:48] So the app is literally telling you where a problem is that you
[43:52] may not have ever noticed before.
[43:55] And so I think that plays a huge part in young women's sort of
[44:00] appearance anxiety now is growing up with filters like
[44:02] that. Is it true that the Snapchat
[44:05] camera softens your skin slightly?
[44:07] Yeah, there was also something about TikTok where I don't know
[44:10] if it's still happening, but TikTok would sort of
[44:12] automatically beautify you. And people didn't notice for a
[44:17] while because it was so subtle. But it would be like, yeah, like
[44:20] whitening your teeth, like sharpening your jawline.
[44:24] And it's it's on a lot of platforms now.
[44:25] You can do it on Zoom, sort of like perfect your skin.
[44:29] I think that plays into a huge part of why women think they
[44:34] need to be perfect products because they've essentially
[44:38] lived a big chunk of their life as an online avatar that is
[44:42] perfect. And so the actual version of
[44:45] them feels more and more repulsive.
[44:47] I remember I had to turn it off on TikTok.
[44:50] The filter that beautifies you. I guess it's more maybe designed
[44:53] for young girls. So it made me look quite
[44:55] feminine. Yeah, really gay.
[44:57] So nothing changed and I turned it off.
[45:01] And the difference is crazy. And I even remember
[45:04] predominantly girls, when we'd go out to McDonald's or
[45:09] something like the cool kids would do when they first got
[45:11] freedom, they would refuse to take pictures on their camera.
[45:15] It would have to be on Snapchat. And now reading your book,
[45:19] realising that these filters are on there, and also that the
[45:22] actual Snapchat camera softens your face, I can see why they
[45:26] were so adamant. Yeah.
[45:28] Yeah. Because they felt bad looking at
[45:30] their normal face. I remember girls, when I used to
[45:34] go out with girls as a teenager, you would fight over whose phone
[45:38] was taking the picture because whoever had the phone with the
[45:40] picture could edit him. Because it's like, I want the
[45:43] original 1 so I can control what's going out there.
[45:47] And I make the argument in the book that that's essentially
[45:50] like looking back, that's like 13 and 14 year olds worrying
[45:54] about their brand and how they're marketing themselves and
[45:57] how they're coming across. And like, it seems so young now
[46:01] to be worrying about that type of thing.
[46:03] You know, when you're 12 or 13, you should not be caring about
[46:06] the angle of your face. I think that's that's definitely
[46:11] done something to a generation of young women that people don't
[46:14] don't really know. I mean, my mom just read the
[46:17] book and she's like, what's face tune?
[46:18] And I'm like face tune some core memory from my childhood.
[46:22] But it was all happening, as I said, so fast.
[46:25] It was so new that I feel like our generations parents just had
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[48:13] off. Do you think there'll be a swing
[48:15] where Gen. Z is?
[48:18] See, I'm saying Z now. I I.
[48:20] Always think yeah. I hate it.
[48:21] Gen. Zelda sound way better.
[48:22] I can't do it now. I've spent so much time around
[48:24] Americans. I'd always say Z.
[48:27] They're speaking the King's English, which is English, so
[48:29] Gen. Zelda's.
[48:31] I wonder if there'll be a swing back where we'll be much more
[48:34] prudent with social media use because we actually understand
[48:38] the impact. We grew up with it and therefore
[48:41] we want to protect our kids from it as much as possible because
[48:43] we know how much it's messed us up.
[48:45] Yeah, I think there will be. That is my one optimistic take
[48:49] as I do actually think our generation is way more equipped
[48:54] to deal with that. And I think speaking to people
[48:57] my age now, that is what motivates them more than
[49:00] anything. If you say to them, you know,
[49:03] how do you feel about your future daughter face tuning
[49:05] herself at 12 for strangers on Instagram or your son going down
[49:09] these rabbit holes and feeling this way about himself because
[49:12] of porn? And it's horrifying to them for
[49:15] them to think of their future children going through the same
[49:17] thing. And so I think there will be a
[49:20] huge shift for our generation. And that's why I don't actually
[49:23] think the answer necessarily needs to be banning social media
[49:28] platforms. I think the cultural shift is so
[49:30] big and the stigma is so different from when we were
[49:34] young that there'll actually be a cultural change without much
[49:38] intervention. What do you think that cultural
[49:40] change will look like, and what do you hope it looks like?
[49:44] Stigma, stigma and shame. No, I think it will be somewhat
[49:51] stigma toward certain things, like if your daughter has
[49:57] Instagram at 13, other parents will judge that and think that's
[50:01] abnormal. It will be more stigmatized
[50:04] within the culture, I think compared to our generation.
[50:08] I think that there were loads of 13 year olds with Instagram when
[50:11] I was young and it just wasn't. It was viewed neutrally and I
[50:16] don't think it will be viewed as neutrally anymore.
[50:18] I think there's a lot more judgement.
[50:21] And that's not to say, you know, we need to go around shaming
[50:25] individual parents, but. That'll probably help.
[50:27] Yeah. But I think what is more likely
[50:29] to happen is that groups of parents will sort of mimic each
[50:35] other and they'll just be unspoken norms about what you do
[50:39] and what you don't do. And yeah, it will be viewed like
[50:43] a 16 year old. You're like a 15 year old going
[50:46] out to buy cigarettes. It'll be the same thing, you
[50:48] know, Obviously your 15 year old is not on TikTok.
[50:51] Well, Jonathan Height speaks about this a lot.
[50:53] Who you work with really closely, that it's a collective
[50:56] action problem that we have. The fact of the matter is, you
[50:59] can imagine that you'll raise your kids.
[51:01] Now, say you're a millennial parent or a Gen.
[51:04] Xer going, you're not getting ticked tock until you're 16.
[51:09] That's a really nice fantasy, but it's that and nothing more.
[51:12] It's not going to actually happen because your kids are
[51:15] going to come home from school, they're going to be thirteen
[51:17] years old and they're going to go, I want TikTok because
[51:20] everyone else has it. And you're going to feel like a
[51:22] bad parent if you don't let your kids engage in what's keeping
[51:26] everyone else together because they're not socializing in the
[51:28] real world. They're just online.
[51:30] And that's why we've been so hyper digitised, I think is
[51:35] because our parents have buckled time and time again.
[51:37] And I see it with family members, with friends, they get
[51:40] asked for something and their gut instinct is no, this is
[51:44] fucking demonic and horrible. But they get overcome by pity
[51:49] for their kids being the left, the ones that are left out.
[51:52] It's also the same inclination we spoke about earlier, which is
[51:57] that parents don't want to impose on their children.
[52:01] They don't want to tell them what's right and wrong, order
[52:06] them what to do that that there's more of an impulse to be
[52:08] their best friend and to be likable.
[52:10] Why? Because I think as a culture, we
[52:15] view telling people what to do as harmful.
[52:20] It's restricting their freedom. But sort of throughout history,
[52:26] that is the role of parents, to tell you what to do and to set
[52:29] you straight. And I think a lot of
[52:31] well-intentioned parents stepped back because they didn't want to
[52:34] be the strict. It's funny because Jonathan
[52:38] Height talks about overprotection, which is
[52:41] happening, which is coddling children, helicopter parenting.
[52:46] I think there's sort of two things happening once, which is
[52:48] you're overprotecting them in terms of physical safety, but
[52:52] don't want to step in, in terms of what is morally good for this
[52:57] child, what's right and wrong. And so you have a lot of
[53:00] children who were not allowed to go out and play because they
[53:04] might injure themselves physically, but they could get a
[53:07] boyfriend very young, that they could have sex very young,
[53:11] because the parents don't want to impose on what is morally
[53:14] right and wrong. And so I think there does need
[53:18] to be with our generation, the next generation of parents, a
[53:21] willingness to step up and assume the role of a parent.
[53:24] And I think that's actually loving toward the child.
[53:28] I think with our generation, we're actually seeing a lot of
[53:32] people who wish they had more guardrails when they were
[53:34] younger. And I think that's quite new.
[53:37] Often it's, you know, my parents were so strict, you know, I wish
[53:40] that, you know, I wasn't raised religious or these things.
[53:43] And I'm now actually seeing the opposite, which is that I wish
[53:47] I'd had a bit more boundaries and rules and wasn't on social
[53:51] media even people saying they wish they were religious or
[53:55] raised in some sort of community.
[53:57] And I think that's a new thing, and that's the result of a lot
[54:00] of parents stepping back, you know, well-intentioned or not.
[54:03] Yeah, I don't regret many things about my childhood and the way I
[54:06] was raised, and I'm really grateful to my parents.
[54:08] One of the things I would change is having higher standards for
[54:14] spending organized time with my family.
[54:17] Everything was floating around eating dinner on the couch or in
[54:22] my own room and I'd get away with it.
[54:25] It didn't help that my parents were split up because it's much
[54:28] harder to organize a dinner with or it's easier to organize a
[54:31] dinner with just your mum, but it's not as big.
[54:34] It's not socially normed thing to do.
[54:37] Whereas in the past you would have families that were together
[54:40] and they eat dinner at the dining table every day.
[54:44] I never had that, and I regret that I didn't have it because I
[54:48] missed out on so many stories from my mum or my dad.
[54:53] And also just practicing basic manners and dinner table skills.
[54:57] Like, now I eat like a pig because I'd always be by myself.
[55:03] Exactly. I just have a bucket of KFC
[55:05] watching. What's the big fat guy's name?
[55:07] That Nick Avocado. Yeah.
[55:11] But I think the useful framing on all of this is it's standards
[55:15] that we hold for ourselves. Yeah.
[55:17] And Erica Kamasar says, you know, kids rise or fall to the
[55:20] standards that you give them. And I think it's so true.
[55:24] A lot of people would still look at what we're going through now
[55:27] and say, well, I've got high standards for myself.
[55:30] I'm going to live a great life because the relationship I get
[55:33] into, I've got this, this and this metric for what my man or
[55:37] what my wife should look like. You make this flip that's really
[55:42] counter intuitive that I love, which is saying that people
[55:45] actually don't have too high standards.
[55:47] That's not the reason that relationships aren't working
[55:51] out. It's not the reason that no
[55:52] one's having sex. Actually, people have too low
[55:56] standards for themselves. Can you talk to me more about
[55:59] that? Yeah, I think it's it's sort of
[56:02] the similar thing to parents protecting over physical injury
[56:06] and not sort of giving moral guidance.
[56:08] It's that we have superficial standards a lot of the time, but
[56:13] lower standards than previous generations for a lot of other
[56:17] things. So, for example, commitment, you
[56:20] know, a lot of young women and young men, I guess, will put up
[56:24] with people dating lots of other people at the same time or being
[56:28] flaky or, you know, not committing to them, not
[56:31] proposing to them for years and years.
[56:33] And I think that's a lower expectation.
[56:35] It's an expectation of people, you know, have a right to pursue
[56:38] their options. You know, I can't be too
[56:40] controlling or overbearing. And again, it becomes a you
[56:42] problem where you don't want to be the insecure 1.
[56:46] So I think there's a bit of that going on.
[56:48] I talk in the book actually about how I think we're fighting
[56:52] like, outdated problems quite a lot.
[56:54] And so in relationships, people will say things like, oh, you
[57:00] know, there's so much pressure to settle down and to marry
[57:03] someone. And I think actually the
[57:04] pressure is the opposite. It's to stay single as long as
[57:08] possible for a lot of people. Same with the mental health
[57:10] industry. You know, people say the issue
[57:13] is stigma, but I don't think that's quite the issue,
[57:15] especially for the sort of demographic of girls I'm talking
[57:19] about. I think our issue is
[57:20] pathologizing and diagnosing and relying too much on experts.
[57:24] And so I think, as you said, I sort of had an inversion of what
[57:29] people usually think. And I think that was sort of the
[57:31] message of the book is that we're often telling young people
[57:35] that their problem is the opposite of the problem we have
[57:37] now and giving them advice that is that is outdated.
[57:41] So maybe, you know, the main issue for young women a few
[57:45] decades ago was stigma around their mental health and opening
[57:49] up. I don't think that's the main
[57:51] issue now. And so I just think we need to
[57:55] update some of these conversations.
[57:57] Why they're not being updated if it's what would be most useful?
[58:00] I think we have a sort of natural tendency to again, be
[58:09] skeptical of any authority, any restriction or any limitation.
[58:13] And so that becomes the sort of nightmare scenario.
[58:16] So the only nightmare scenario that young women grow up with is
[58:21] you will settle down too young, meet the wrong person and not
[58:25] sort of fully self actualize. So that was like the Horror
[58:29] Story that I was told, which is like the, you know, that's the
[58:32] threat that could happen to you. Same with the mental health
[58:35] industry. It's a similar thing.
[58:37] You know, the threat is restriction and, you know,
[58:41] repressing something and being too closed off.
[58:44] And I think we've developed that worldview that the threat we're
[58:50] fighting is closing things down. Whereas my argument in the book
[58:54] is that the new threats are about opening things up too
[58:58] much, whether it's being open to all of these disorders, opening
[59:03] up about your mental health all the time, or being open in
[59:08] relationships, you know, not wanting to close it off with
[59:10] commitment. So Rusty Reno, one of my
[59:13] favourite writers, talks about the post war consensus, which is
[59:17] that this is essentially an impulse from after the war,
[59:21] which is that, you know, you can't have any strong passions
[59:26] or commitments. Everything has to be open.
[59:30] And I think that is the worldview that we come at all of
[59:33] these problems with and we don't want to consider that maybe
[59:38] sometimes we need to we've overcorrected and we need to see
[59:42] where we're, we're being too open.
[59:45] And then you slack on top of that, the fact that you're
[59:48] sedating a generation with pills and making them less prone to
[59:53] have strong convictions at all, you can kind of just drag them
[59:57] around and play by your incentives as a big company
[1:00:01] profit more than ever. How much is it that TikTok and
[1:00:04] these big companies are worth? It's billions of dollars, right?
[1:00:08] They're raking it in, and it feels like it's only getting
[1:00:10] easier and easier. Feels like we're not digging
[1:00:13] ourselves out of the hole, even if in the future we might be
[1:00:17] more averse to these technologies with our kids using
[1:00:20] them. She was like, we're kind of more
[1:00:22] entrenched than ever in a different way, where it's not
[1:00:25] that we've stopped analysing the problems, it's that it's
[1:00:30] literally a closed book that we don't even dare to open.
[1:00:33] We've kind of lost the wood from the trees a little bit.
[1:00:36] And it's so ingrained in our everyday life that it's kind of
[1:00:41] like trying to see the label on a jar from the inside.
[1:00:44] You can't. So help me understand this
[1:00:48] because I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think
[1:00:51] it stems from you on the Modern Wisdom podcast like a year ago
[1:00:54] or two years ago. And it just hasn't left my mind.
[1:00:56] And I don't really have an answer for it.
[1:00:58] And that's another flip that you make, which is saying that
[1:01:01] social media used to reflect reality, and now reality
[1:01:05] reflects social media. I think that's so powerful and
[1:01:08] it's so difficult to navigate because I'm like, what happens
[1:01:13] next when people are spending 12 hours a day on their phone?
[1:01:16] Yeah, Is the world just going to be completely optimised around
[1:01:21] social media for the rest of time?
[1:01:23] Yes, yeah. I think, you know, young people
[1:01:29] are spending most of their waking hours on screens.
[1:01:31] And so I'm I have no patience for this argument that, you
[1:01:36] know, the real world, you know, the online world doesn't matter.
[1:01:40] So sometimes I use like, extreme crazy Tik Toks in the book or in
[1:01:44] my sub stack, and people will say, well, that's just TikTok.
[1:01:46] And I'm like, well, yeah, But that's where young women are for
[1:01:49] hours and hours a day. And so my belief is that social
[1:01:53] media is not just a bad habit that we have.
[1:01:55] It affects everything. It affects how you see yourself,
[1:01:59] how you see other people, how you treat other people, how you
[1:02:01] understand the world, how you understand how you value things,
[1:02:07] which is why I think protecting children when their brain is
[1:02:12] forming, you know, I've said it so many times, but as they're
[1:02:14] going through puberty, I think that is very important because I
[1:02:17] think that is when your your worldview is most shaped.
[1:02:24] It's very difficult to change how you think when you get
[1:02:27] older. And I think that is really a key
[1:02:30] time, whatever sort of happening to you at that time sticks.
[1:02:33] And so I sort of don't really have an answer for it other than
[1:02:40] making sure that your chart, your child's formative
[1:02:43] vulnerable years are not spent online because I do think that
[1:02:47] is the real world. It's increasingly shaping how we
[1:02:50] relate to each other in the real world.
[1:02:52] And the longer you can delay that, the better.
[1:02:55] I always find it so confusing and it was the same with
[1:02:58] countries that had a culture that emerged not from this
[1:03:02] natural development. Where take England, you'd have
[1:03:06] Stonehenge Bill, and then people would start discovering how to
[1:03:09] build houses with different materials and they'd make better
[1:03:12] tools and eventually you get the Industrial revolution and then
[1:03:15] you get World War One, World War 2, blah blah blah.
[1:03:17] Like there's this progression that makes sense because you can
[1:03:20] follow it. Other cultures that pop up
[1:03:23] somewhere like Dubai, it kind of just spawns out of nowhere and
[1:03:29] copies everything, imports it from America.
[1:03:32] Then the best example I can give is actually when I was in Saudi
[1:03:34] Arabia, I was in the middle of the desert and there was this
[1:03:37] tiny village. The population couldn't have
[1:03:39] been more than, you know, a couple of 1000 people.
[1:03:41] And they had a massive Burger King in the corner with these
[1:03:45] neon signs that were trying to seduce people into buying a
[1:03:48] burger. And I'm like, who are you
[1:03:51] competing with, bro? Like this advertisement should
[1:03:54] come from the form of competition, right?
[1:03:57] Where you're trying to outdo each other.
[1:03:59] The signs are getting bigger, the lights are getting brighter,
[1:04:02] but it was just there because they were copying what they had
[1:04:05] seen and what felt right. It felt like the norm for a fast
[1:04:09] food restaurant. I see the same in a weird an
[1:04:13] indirect comparison here with social media where people start
[1:04:17] speaking like influencers, not because they have a big
[1:04:21] audience, but because that becomes the norm set by others.
[1:04:25] They start opening up their Instagram, they record a little
[1:04:28] video and they're like hey guys, it's so nice to see you drop any
[1:04:33] questions below to like 5 of their friends.
[1:04:37] Why are you talking like that? Have you read Amusing Ourselves
[1:04:41] to Death? I've started reading it.
[1:04:43] Oh well, a great line in that is he says postman says we began to
[1:04:48] speak one persistent voice, the voice of entertainment and he's
[1:04:51] talking about TV that as we said earlier, every format begins to
[1:04:56] speak in the same like kids TV presenter, you know like
[1:05:00] entertaining and that that happens online.
[1:05:03] We all begin to speak with the same voice and the same
[1:05:07] mannerisms and even, I would argue, veering toward the same
[1:05:12] temperament. You know, there was a study in
[1:05:14] the Financial Times showing that young adults personalities are
[1:05:17] becoming more neurotic and less conscientious.
[1:05:21] And I think we're actually being dragged sort of not only toward
[1:05:25] the same content, but toward being the same type of people
[1:05:29] speaking the same way, acting the same way, being neurotic the
[1:05:33] same way. You know, I wrote a piece
[1:05:34] recently about how I actually think the sort of person it's
[1:05:41] forming us into is an insecure teenage girl because it's all
[1:05:46] about how do you look? How do you come across
[1:05:49] overthinking your reputation in a way you are in the social
[1:05:52] hierarchy. And Mary Harrington, Louise
[1:05:55] Perry have spoken about, you know, it's indirect aggression
[1:05:59] because it's online. And that's a teenage girl
[1:06:02] tactic. You know, you destroy each
[1:06:03] other's reputation. You're passive aggressive.
[1:06:05] You don't hit each other. And I think that's what's
[1:06:09] happening. We're speaking in the same
[1:06:10] voice, and it's like an adolescent girl's voice.
[1:06:14] What's the reaction be like to you writing about all of this?
[1:06:19] What that piece in particular? No your book.
[1:06:24] It's very polarized. It's either the most hateful,
[1:06:28] evil, you know, poorly written, poorly researched book ever.
[1:06:31] It's like really vilified or I get messages saying that it's
[1:06:39] exactly their experience growing up and it really helped them.
[1:06:41] And so it's kind of difficult to navigate those two things at the
[1:06:47] same time. But I do think I have such a
[1:06:51] strong conviction that it is speaking to at least a portion
[1:06:58] of women who grew up feeling like me.
[1:07:00] And I think that's what I wanted to achieve with it, so I'm
[1:07:03] happy. Is there a certain character
[1:07:06] type that slates the book? Yes, I think people were very
[1:07:15] hesitant to criticize the mental health industry or read
[1:07:19] criticism of the mental health industry.
[1:07:21] People who also, as we were saying earlier about not having
[1:07:26] convictions, I think people read the book as very strong because
[1:07:32] basically I don't like to constantly caveat and include
[1:07:35] all these disclaimers in my writing.
[1:07:37] I just think it slows it down. And so I do sort of a caveat at
[1:07:40] the beginning, you know, this is not all girls.
[1:07:42] There will be exceptions, but I'm not going to caveat
[1:07:45] convictions. I have.
[1:07:46] So for example, divorce, I talk about divorce and I don't say
[1:07:51] the usual throat clearing thing of like, you know, in some
[1:07:55] extreme scenarios it's a good thing.
[1:07:57] And I think that gets read as a very suspicious because it's,
[1:08:03] it's staking yourself to something and it's not hedging.
[1:08:06] And so I think some of the backlash is toward that.
[1:08:10] But I think it's necessary because I read so many books
[1:08:14] where I'm desperate for, as we were saying, the other side of
[1:08:18] the story, the actual problem that we're facing.
[1:08:21] And I, and I don't think we need the constant caveat because we
[1:08:24] know the this, you know, we know the story about mental health
[1:08:27] stigma. We know the story about, you
[1:08:30] know, divorce, helping children. Sometimes, you know, it's
[1:08:33] necessary. But I feel like we're missing
[1:08:36] the other side of the story. And so that's what I tried to do
[1:08:39] with the book. And I knew it was going to get
[1:08:41] backlash as a result. What are some of these people
[1:08:44] saying? They're criticizing it.
[1:08:47] Well, that it's conservative, so it gets branded immediately is
[1:08:53] one thing. And so even though the book,
[1:08:55] it's a most of it is a book against consumer capitalism and
[1:08:59] the excesses of that and advertisers and industries.
[1:09:02] But because I, you know, have sort of socially conservative
[1:09:07] instincts and end up at those conclusions, the whole book is
[1:09:10] written off as a political book with a political agenda, which
[1:09:15] it's not, you know, it's it's a book about how girls are feeling
[1:09:20] and trying to answer that honestly.
[1:09:23] But one sort of side effect of social media is that everything
[1:09:28] gets categorized. So in all the interviews, they
[1:09:32] immediately want to know what type of products I am, you know,
[1:09:35] how they're going to market me, how to describe me.
[1:09:39] And so you come with a complex answer and it just gets
[1:09:42] distilled right down to the most caricatured version of you.
[1:09:47] I think that's really hard, especially if you're young and
[1:09:50] trying to genuinely trying to figure these things out.
[1:09:54] I think it's really difficult to do that when you're already
[1:09:58] branded in some way. And I feel like that's that's
[1:10:01] happened a lot with the book where it's just been pushed into
[1:10:04] one category. Was there part of the book that
[1:10:08] was hardest for you to write emotionally that resonated with
[1:10:11] you the most? I found the porn section hard to
[1:10:15] write just because it was horrifying.
[1:10:18] But I think the the chapter diagnosed, which is about the
[1:10:22] mental health industry, really got to me because I was very
[1:10:29] prone to withdrawing inwards when I was younger and again,
[1:10:35] worrying about what was wrong with me.
[1:10:37] And so I talk in the book a lot about women who think there's
[1:10:41] something wrong with them and go down that rabbit hole basically.
[1:10:45] So actually one part of the porn chapter, there's a load of young
[1:10:50] women online who talk about their partners being addicted to
[1:10:52] porn. And the way they write about it
[1:10:55] is so heartbreaking because they will say, but again, constant
[1:10:59] disclaimers of I know I, I have a problem.
[1:11:02] I know it's me, but I feel heartbroken that he's doing
[1:11:06] this. I know I've got to get used to
[1:11:07] it, that sort of thing. And there was one post where a
[1:11:10] girl describes a relationship she has where he's just
[1:11:13] essentially cheating on her by being addicted to porn.
[1:11:16] And he's telling her sort of, I watch girls Like You and stuff
[1:11:20] to kind of reassure her, like. That makes it all right, really.
[1:11:23] Yeah, really hurtful things for a young woman to hear.
[1:11:28] And she writes out this really sensitive post acknowledging his
[1:11:33] feelings, acknowledging his desire, acknowledging that she's
[1:11:35] not going to be good enough for him completely and everything.
[1:11:38] It's just like, and all she's saying is please could you give
[1:11:41] me some advice for me to be able to cope with this addiction?
[1:11:45] All of the top comments are you have a problem, you have an
[1:11:48] anxiety disorder. This is an attachment issue.
[1:11:52] And I think that's happening with a lot of young women is
[1:11:55] that they feel hurt by something real in modern life.
[1:11:58] And then their their natural tendency is to go inwards and
[1:12:02] analyze and examine and then they have an industry telling
[1:12:05] them to do that. And so I found that hard to
[1:12:07] write about in the book because I feel like that was my sort of
[1:12:10] proclivity. I've noticed being in America
[1:12:14] for three months now, the girls here feel way more masculine
[1:12:19] than in the UK. It feels like there's always
[1:12:21] this protective front put up a little bit.
[1:12:24] And again, this is anecdotal, this based on a few experiences,
[1:12:28] but it feels like they're more worried to let their guard down
[1:12:34] and let a guy in emotionally. And, and when I speak to them,
[1:12:38] they're like, Oh yeah, I've been cheated on, all of my friends
[1:12:40] have been cheated on. We've had such bad experiences
[1:12:42] with guys. They're all scumbags, yadda
[1:12:45] yadda yadda. Like, oh, OK, that makes sense.
[1:12:47] It feels like the problems, not just girls here, it's actually
[1:12:52] that guys need to raise their game too.
[1:12:55] And we're all dealing with our own shit.
[1:12:57] There are problems that have been engineered into us, in my
[1:13:00] opinion by older programmers and people trying to profit.
[1:13:04] But I do think there is a strong case for men needing to not play
[1:13:09] into this race to the bottom that's currently going with
[1:13:12] looks maxing or whatever. And these labels get thrown
[1:13:16] around of looks maxing, all these trends that the majority
[1:13:18] of guys aren't engaging in in a serious way.
[1:13:23] But I think we are dipping into all of these different things,
[1:13:26] trying it on, seeing how it fits, doing a little bit of gua
[1:13:30] shying every day and it all stacks up.
[1:13:33] Even if you're not going the full clavicular meth in your
[1:13:36] cheeks approach, people are dipping into all of these
[1:13:39] different habits and traits and skills competing, and even
[1:13:46] though they're not going all in, it stacks up to still make you
[1:13:49] the same person that's superficial that cares about
[1:13:52] status A. Teenage girl.
[1:13:54] A teenage girl, we're all turning into them.
[1:13:56] Well, and also my argument in that piece is not to slate
[1:13:59] teenage girls, is to say it's hard to be a teenage girl.
[1:14:03] And if we're all turning into teenage girls on social media,
[1:14:06] that is hard. It's a it's a mostly miserable
[1:14:09] time. And I think a lot of young women
[1:14:11] look back at it with horror. You know, it's, it's full of
[1:14:15] anxiety and self consciousness and insecurity.
[1:14:18] And I think that's, that's my argument is that it's an awful
[1:14:22] stage of life to be trapped in. And yet we're all being
[1:14:25] encouraged to act that way. But it's funny what you say
[1:14:28] about American women sort of having this bravado because I
[1:14:31] think that's often when I've tried to talk about the book,
[1:14:35] people will say something like, well, women are so confident
[1:14:37] now. You know, they're so brash and
[1:14:39] they're they'll talk about their sex lives and they're just
[1:14:41] throwing men away and they'll be really, you know, sort of
[1:14:44] toxicly masculine almost in their behavior.
[1:14:48] And part of the argument of the book is that is a defense
[1:14:51] mechanism. I think.
[1:14:52] I think that, you know, obviously there are exceptions
[1:14:55] that are women that are just like that naturally.
[1:14:57] But I do think if you grow up with what women have grown up
[1:15:02] with, you do feel like need to have a bit of defense.
[1:15:07] You know, you need to protect yourself by being the strong,
[1:15:10] independent, never jealous, never insecure women.
[1:15:14] And I think this sort of two things going on at the same time
[1:15:17] where women are putting on that front massively that they're
[1:15:20] never bothered by anything. And yet, but we can see the
[1:15:24] rising rates of anxiety. We can see the medication that
[1:15:26] they're on. We can see that they are they
[1:15:28] are actually struggling. And I think that's, I'm trying
[1:15:31] to urge girls not to do that, you know, to be actually
[1:15:35] vulnerable and open and sensitive.
[1:15:38] And I think, and men would respond to that more as well if
[1:15:41] that young woman had gone to her partner and said, you know, I'm
[1:15:45] a human being and I'm I can't deal with you being addicted to
[1:15:49] porn. You know, we need to talk about.
[1:15:50] I think that's that would invite a better response than, you
[1:15:55] know, I don't care what he's doing.
[1:15:56] You know, I'll just do whatever to make him jealous.
[1:15:58] And I think we've sort of got into a trap of both sides trying
[1:16:04] not to be vulnerable by putting on this defence.
[1:16:08] It's boundary setting, right? Yeah, but the thing with
[1:16:11] boundary setting is you're not working toward anything.
[1:16:17] You're closing something off. It's like, I don't like this
[1:16:20] behaviour, rather than what behaviour do we want?
[1:16:23] How can we work together to create something good and
[1:16:27] replace the thing that we don't like?
[1:16:28] I think a lot of relationship advice for women is just set
[1:16:33] boundaries, walk away. And again, sort of an outdated
[1:16:37] problem. We need to know how to now lean
[1:16:40] on each other and depend on each other and trust each other.
[1:16:43] And I think we've done enough of the sort of like red flags
[1:16:47] boundary setting and we need to actually be more vulnerable with
[1:16:50] each other. Boundary setting inherently
[1:16:53] infers a negative approach to analyzing behaviours,
[1:16:57] categorizing them, just like everything else gets
[1:16:59] categorized, and it means that you're constantly closing
[1:17:02] options off. That's the classic thing of what
[1:17:05] you seek. You will find if you're looking
[1:17:08] for problems, you will find them because there are problems in
[1:17:10] everyone, in everything. And I feel like there's this
[1:17:13] illusion of perfection. There's, especially in
[1:17:16] relationships, that romantic worldview that's been thrust
[1:17:19] upon us by Hollywood and books and whatever else, and songs
[1:17:23] that promises the perfect partner existing out there
[1:17:26] somewhere if you look hard enough, if you set enough strict
[1:17:29] boundaries and cordon off everything.
[1:17:33] But the reality is that at some point you need to settle, right?
[1:17:38] Well, I think. For certain things.
[1:17:41] Yeah, I think we are turning into products, and we also want
[1:17:44] other people to be products. So part of it is perfectionism
[1:17:48] toward ourselves, but another part is, yeah, everything
[1:17:51] becomes a red flag. Everything becomes a boundary
[1:17:53] that you set. But I think that's sort of
[1:17:57] incomplete. So you can set boundaries, but
[1:17:59] if you're raising a generation not to have a moral world view
[1:18:03] and a right and wrong, all they can do is constantly try and
[1:18:06] close off behaviour rather than knowing what they want.
[1:18:10] So for example, with the corn issue, I think part of the issue
[1:18:12] is young women don't have the words to say to their partner.
[1:18:16] This is wrong because they can't refer to God because they're
[1:18:20] just get laughed at, you know, they can't refer to moral, what
[1:18:26] is moral? Because morality is just a
[1:18:29] personal preference, you know? And so This is why I worry about
[1:18:34] sort of sensitive young women because it could be turned back
[1:18:37] on them. So someone's doing something to
[1:18:39] harm you, but it's their personal choice.
[1:18:42] You are then the insecure, controlling one who has a
[1:18:45] problem. And so part of the argument of
[1:18:49] the book is your don't let your moral instincts be reframed as
[1:18:53] insecurity. And I think that's happening a
[1:18:56] lot with young women. You know, they're going down
[1:18:58] rabbit holes thinking that they're anxious.
[1:19:00] They have like relationship OCD because they're stressing about
[1:19:04] their relationship so much that they have anxiety disorders.
[1:19:08] And I think it's about and realising what you're actually
[1:19:11] feeling and being brave enough to say that to someone.
[1:19:14] We're governed by our instincts now, I think more than ever.
[1:19:16] We're so animalistic. And to me, at least in my world
[1:19:21] view, that kind of runs counter to what it means to be a human.
[1:19:25] The peak creations and moments as a human, they're kind of
[1:19:30] fighting our animalistic urges to some extent in place of
[1:19:35] creating something bigger, transcending our whims and our
[1:19:38] desires. Whereas now, I think because
[1:19:41] we've grown up in such a safe period of time, everything
[1:19:45] that's slightly uncomfortable gets categorized as bad and a
[1:19:49] glitch in the system. Actually, what life should be is
[1:19:53] being sheltered, being coddled, and not having to face any ounce
[1:19:57] of discomfort when actually it's part of life.
[1:20:00] It's inevitable that you're going to run into challenges and
[1:20:03] actually those are going to be the most formative experience.
[1:20:05] It's funny because it's, it's sort of young people putting up
[1:20:09] with things, thinking they're part of life when they don't
[1:20:11] have to be, but they're not being able to cope with things
[1:20:14] that are part of life. So it's like social anxiety is
[1:20:18] part of life. You're going to have to go out
[1:20:19] there, you're going to have to try.
[1:20:20] You know, there's, there's no getting around it.
[1:20:23] Your partner being addicted to porn is not a part of life.
[1:20:26] And I think this is the issue is that a lot of young women and
[1:20:29] young men as well, getting gas lit on what is actually a real
[1:20:32] problem versus a part of life. And I think that's because we've
[1:20:36] grown up again, all our formative experiences on these
[1:20:39] new platforms, these totally new ways of relating to each other.
[1:20:43] And we're now in the stage where we're trying to figure out, OK,
[1:20:45] what is a problem, what isn't a problem, What is normal.
[1:20:48] You know, a lot of the, the popularity of the relationship
[1:20:52] advice online is a desperation to know what is normal.
[1:20:56] Is it normal? Is it right that my partner's
[1:20:59] doing this? Am I controlling?
[1:21:00] Are they the one that's hurting me?
[1:21:02] Am I jealous? Is it OK to be jealous?
[1:21:04] And I think that is, again, adults step back, did not want
[1:21:08] to say what right and wrong is, did not want to give any sort of
[1:21:11] road map. And then you have a generation
[1:21:14] of young people desperately asking ChatGPT and TikTok, you
[1:21:17] know, is this normal? Is this OK?
[1:21:19] What do I put up with? So I often look at, you know,
[1:21:24] what are people flocking toward online?
[1:21:27] And usually there's something previous generations had that's
[1:21:31] been lost and we're now filling it with asking their
[1:21:36] relationship influences what to do.
[1:21:40] If you could give a 10 year old girl one piece of advice now
[1:21:44] growing up in 2026, what would it be?
[1:21:50] I would actually say it's, it's good to aspire to be a bit
[1:21:54] mysterious and a bit different. So and when I was growing up, I
[1:21:59] actually had a natural aversion, believe it or not, to social
[1:22:02] media, but I pushed through it because I thought, again, it's
[1:22:06] anxiety. And so I forced myself, myself
[1:22:10] to sort of take selfies and be part of the Instagram culture
[1:22:14] and, and keep my profile updated, even though it gave me
[1:22:18] such anxiety, like I hated doing it.
[1:22:20] I felt so expected. I'm shy, so posting, I'm shy to
[1:22:24] even post myself online. Just don't enjoy it.
[1:22:27] So I categorize that as like I'm insecure and need to get over it
[1:22:30] sort of thing. And people would say to me, you
[1:22:32] know, you look fine, you know, composed it and it became an
[1:22:35] insecurity issue rather than it's an aversion that I have.
[1:22:39] And I think as I've gotten older, this sort of natural
[1:22:43] tendencies that I have worked that are maybe different to the
[1:22:45] trends and whatever's going on now, I view that as a way to be
[1:22:50] interesting. You know, it can be different.
[1:22:52] And I actually argue in the book that you should aspire to be
[1:22:55] different because you will stand out massively, you know, if
[1:22:59] every young woman is addicted to their Instagram and how they
[1:23:02] come across and you don't feel that desire, you don't have to
[1:23:05] force yourself to be like that. And actually it can be a
[1:23:09] valuable thing about you. And I think the same with,
[1:23:11] again, if you have, if you're uncomfortable about something,
[1:23:15] not actually putting on a self protective defense mechanism, if
[1:23:20] you are a rare young woman who can actually speak openly,
[1:23:24] honestly, completely let your guard down.
[1:23:27] Yeah, you might get some men who you know, don't want to play up
[1:23:30] with that, but you'll attract the right type of person.
[1:23:34] And so I think not forcing yourself to be something that
[1:23:38] you're not and being actually vulnerable, not like opening up
[1:23:44] about your mental health on TikTok, but genuinely using your
[1:23:48] words to describe how you're feeling and not not caveating
[1:23:53] it, not adding a disclaimer, not pretending that you're this
[1:23:57] never jealous, never insecure perfect product.
[1:24:01] Well, if we can take a couple of steps back and you really
[1:24:05] carefully guide me through this because I think this is the most
[1:24:07] important certainly thing to answer in this podcast.
[1:24:12] How do you make sure that you're leaning into your natural
[1:24:15] tendencies without letting them be weaponized by these big
[1:24:20] corporations? If we are slightly more
[1:24:22] sensitive than usual to anything in the outside world, that's
[1:24:27] uncomfortable, but it's part of life, Yeah.
[1:24:30] How do we make sure that we don't overcorrect and go?
[1:24:33] I feel uncomfortable with this, this, and this, so I'm just
[1:24:35] going to shelter myself off and discard everyone else?
[1:24:40] I guess is it natural? You know, if it's, I feels, I
[1:24:43] feel anxious to go on a date with a woman, you know, that's
[1:24:48] been happening throughout history.
[1:24:49] You're going to have to connect with the opposite sex if you
[1:24:52] want love and you want a relationship.
[1:24:53] And so if you're feeling intense social anxiety about that,
[1:24:57] that's something to push through.
[1:24:59] It's human. It's natural.
[1:25:01] What isn't natural is if every time you watch porn, you feel
[1:25:06] intense shame and guilt and anxiety, I think that's telling
[1:25:10] you something. And part of my argument in the
[1:25:12] book is people say, like, you know, women are so emotional,
[1:25:16] they're always going on about their feelings.
[1:25:18] I don't think they actually are. I think that they're denying
[1:25:20] their feelings constantly because they're told that they
[1:25:24] should feel a certain way. So for example, Face Tune says
[1:25:29] you will feel so confident and empowered when you use our app.
[1:25:33] No one feels like that when they face tune themselves.
[1:25:35] Like you finished facing face tuning yourself.
[1:25:37] You maybe get like a hit of dopamine when your selfie does
[1:25:40] really well, but you feel that repulsed feeling towards your
[1:25:45] actual self. You feel ashamed.
[1:25:48] No one wants to be face tuning themselves in front of someone
[1:25:50] else. Like it's an innately sort of
[1:25:52] embarrassing thing to do. And so I argue in the book,
[1:25:56] like, how do you actually feel versus what these companies are
[1:26:00] telling you? You should feel same as social
[1:26:03] media. If sitting inside watching
[1:26:05] YouTube makes you feel lonely, that is something worth
[1:26:09] listening to, even if it's constantly telling you, you
[1:26:12] know, connect with people, you know, you'll feel better as a
[1:26:16] result. And the same with, you know, if
[1:26:17] you're watching porn and you feel ashamed after, that's
[1:26:19] something to pay attention to. And so I actually think girls
[1:26:24] and young women, I think men as well, but, you know, speaking
[1:26:27] terms of the book, they really need to actually tap into how do
[1:26:31] I feel? And yeah.
[1:26:33] And if it's if it's a natural human thing, you might have to
[1:26:36] push through it. But I don't think you should
[1:26:38] push through things that emerged in like the last decade that
[1:26:42] people are telling you are normal and great and amazing and
[1:26:44] you don't feel that way. Freya, what's next?
[1:26:46] You've done the book. I feel like I've said everything
[1:26:50] I need to say about social media, like I poured my heart
[1:26:53] and soul into the book, everything I was feeling about
[1:26:56] these companies, and I almost feel like it would.
[1:26:59] It became a sort of two-part argument.
[1:27:01] So it was the social media platforms, but like I said, it
[1:27:05] was the loss of these foundations, family, community,
[1:27:08] religion. I'm really well versed in the
[1:27:12] platforms. I'm not as well versed in faith
[1:27:15] and belonging and community. You're becoming a pastor.
[1:27:19] Am I is that? What you're about to say no, OK.
[1:27:24] Well, maybe no. It's actually trying to figure
[1:27:30] out when all of this began really, because I think in the
[1:27:34] 20 tens the platforms emerged, but they were able to destroy a
[1:27:38] generation because these foundations had crumbled.
[1:27:43] And so I'm, I'm very interested in now looking at what's
[1:27:47] happened even decades before we grew up and reading about what
[1:27:53] was lost and when it started. And so I guess more of the
[1:27:57] cultural side rather than the technology.
[1:27:59] Fuck yeah, Frey India everyone. Buy the book, 5 star the
[1:28:03] podcast, subscribe, and we'll see you in the next episode.

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