Why Do Young People Seem So Fragile? - Dr Jean Twenge

and then the one that really knocked me out of my chair was the pull of U.S adults that said do you believe that the founders of the United States are better described as heroes or as villains and four out of ten gen Z said villains there's only one out of ten for Boomers and that's interesting because that's that's offense 250 years in the past it's not even an assessment of the current moment and there's that very very strong negativity why write another book about Generations so my previous books were on one generation a piece and a lot of it was about the effects of technology and I give talks on on teens and young adults and people say but hasn't this technology affected everybody and that got me thinking and it realized of course the answer is yes and there's all kinds of other big cultural changes and I thought it'd be great to look at all of the living generations and see where they are and how they're different one of the first ones that you wrote was generation me which was back in 2006. given that you've been tracking my generation for quite a while what are your thoughts or what's the story of how Millennials have done in your opinion did your predictions come to light you know in a little bit um but not entirely so my prediction was one prediction was that Millennials would find adulthood somewhat challenging and I think that has been borne out Millennials after all were the ones who coined adulting as a verb um and certainly there's there's been you know a good amount of negativity um online from from Millennials about you know many topics but Millennials have actually done really really well economically so there's this idea that kind of started especially around the Great Recession of Millennials being broke and all knitting side gigs and will be a first generation to not do as well as their parents and so that was one of the first things that I looked at and found actually while Neils are making more money than gen xers and Boomers were at the same age is there something different or particularly unique about the behavior and the views of gen Zed than the most recent generation is it just a step-by-step iteration continuation of what came before or is there something particularly different about this one you know I I think there is because you know if you look at a lot of the other generational progressions say from Boomers to gen xers to Millennials around things like individualism it was a pretty linear progression but then something kind of broke between Millennials and gen Z or igen as as I call them there is a just a really big increase in teens starting to say they felt left out they felt lonely they felt like they couldn't do anything right they felt like they weren't enjoying life and those are classic symptoms of depression this all started to rise with teens around 2012 and those increases just just kept going it's really the most fundamental generational break I had ever seen in decades you know of doing this research it was just this very sudden shift from self-confidence to depression and from optimism from Millennials to pessimism for Gen Z well you mentioned before the fact that Millennials can sometimes be victims themselves a little bit and that there was concerns about whether or not they were going to do worse than their parents and you know this adulting thing which suggests that you've got this sort of long life strategy where you're becoming a an adult infant for maybe a little bit longer than you should have done how do we know that gen Z isn't just yet another generation which the one before it feels like is a complete catastrophe but in however many years time is going to flourish and it's going to be another Millennial situation and maybe that'll happen you know I think there's a couple things I have that has me worried um and then one is that that increase in depression has now spread up the age scale to younger Millennials to 26 to 34 year olds they were actually doing pretty well until about 2015 so a few years later than we saw the big upticks for teens so there's something going on in the culture that is slowly creeping up um to affect a lot of people so that you know I think is not a good sign the other as we know from Clinical Psychology that the younger you experience your first episode of depression the more likely it is to reoccur later in life and with the rates not being so high among gen Z if that's concerning but even with that said sure we don't know what the future is going to bring in every way and it there they could end up doing very well absolutely what would you say is the story of mental health across the generations then yeah so it's it's kind of a complex story so we start with the silent generation so those are the generation before the Boomers they actually look very good in mental health compared to the generation before them the greatest Generation who fought World War II and then the Boomers after them and these are also people who are all older now who uh went through the covid-19 pandemic who were the most vulnerable and yet actually the best mental health so that's where we start then with Boomers mental health starts to look worse um across the board um days of of you know feeling more more stressed and in poor mental health suicide rates everything and starts to look worse for Boomers um Gen X kind of continued the Boomer Trends actually improved them a little bit after as teens having a lot of struggles with mental health in middle age Gen X is actually done relatively well Millennials did really well as teens very happy optimistic but then that depression has started to come for them as well and then for Gen Z is where we see unfortunately the most consistent downturn with pretty much every indicator depression self-harm suicide everything um going in the wrong direction is it a challenge doing studies over such a long period of time in different environments with different people potentially using different methodologies longitudinally trying to compare them all maybe across multiple territories how accurate can you be with the data for this sort of stuff yeah it is definitely a challenge so what I've tried to do in the book is rely on the data sets that have been consistent for the longest period of time so there's a survey of 18 year olds in the U.S that goes back to 1976 and has used the exact same questions there's a lot of poor mental health that has measured that since 1993. there's the General Social Survey which has stuff on on politics and sexuality a lot of other things it goes back to 1972 because you're right that's what you have to to try to find is that data that has been consistently measured so you can make those comparisons the most concerning statistic that I've seen which has been floating around the internet for the last couple of months the CDC found that nearly one in three high school girls considered suicide in 2021 a 60 increase since 2011 more girls also now report feeling so sad and hopeless they couldn't engage in their normal activities for at least two weeks in the last year why what's going on with this why is it girls why is it not boys there's also a liberal conservative split here what is your reading of digging into all of the data so it is happening for boys as well the increases in say depression and suicide are not as large 14 boys as they are for teen girls but they are absolutely still there so we can't ignore our boys you know in this conversation so that CDC data is just one data point out of many that pretty much all show the same pattern that Teen Mental Health started to get worse after about 2011. that's when when that increase began to happen and it just kept going and just for context teen depression doubled between 2011 and 2019. in other words before the pandemic so it's clear the pandemic is not the original cause um of these Trends they started more than 10 years ago so then we have to say okay what happened in 2011 that then kept going and reverberated across the decade that had the biggest impact on teen's day-to-day lives and it's clear that that's new technology smartphones social media the end of 2012 was the first time the majority of Americans owned a smartphone it's also around the time that social media use moved from optional to virtually mandatory among teens also in social media itself changed it's around when Facebook bought Instagram for example when you know the like button showed up and the retweet button on on Twitter all these things happen around that same time period and that's when teen Depression started going up and it's it's not just the phones it's not just social media it's also that those had Ripple effects teens also started spending less time with their friends face to face around that same time they also started spending less time sleeping around that time and those are both things that are likely linked to that increased technology use so that's not a good picture for mental health when you are sitting in your room alone scrolling through social media at 2 am are there some types of screen time that are worse than others it looks like that's the case so for example there's a big data set of teens in the UK and the link with depression is higher for social media use than it is for TV time or gaming right that's interesting why do you think that is what is unique about social media that is causing that to stand out yeah I mean you know to be fair it's spending too much time on anything is usually not the best of ideas but social media does have some unique qualities so one is that its algorithms are designed to keep people on those apps for as long as possible and coming back as often as possible because that's how they make the most money and teens are especially susceptible to that because their self-control is just not as developed most adults have a hard time you know putting down social media it it has that quality to it plus uh you know Facebook's own research showed these big issues with body image for teen girls and and young women on Instagram everybody looks perfect everybody's life is more glamorous everybody is always on vacation on on Facebook it distorts reality you know we are comparing ourselves to others but we're not comparing ourselves to others you know in real life we're comparing ourselves to others the way they're presented on social media which is which is Warped and that's also not good for self-esteem or for mental health why is there a difference between boys and girls so I think one of the reasons one of the reasons the increase has been you know bigger for girls is that girls spend more time on social media and girls are more impacted by social media so the link between depression and Social Media use is stronger for girls and for boys and probably because of a lot of the body image issues that come up also just the way teen girls in particular relate to each other it's often around you know emotions and um Bullying happens with words rather than physically more often and social media is like a perfect storm for those things yeah I've been doing a lot of learning over the last couple of months about intersexual competition the way that female friendships work and this very very highly attenuated understanding of social groups hierarchies Dynamics you know we always think about men as being the hierarchical status driven group but it seems like both uh in terms of genetic predisposition and in terms of behavior females are much more socially attuned they understand body language facial expressions much more they use gossip as Weapons rather than fists etc etc and yeah I can see how a Quantified metric of popularity essentially which is what you could see social media as especially if you're not using it for to be content creator but just to kind of keep in touch with your friends and see who's popular and who's in and who's out a girl I've never once been um told off because I've unfollowed a guy but it has happened a couple of times because I've been following a girl yeah and you're absolutely right I mean popularity has always been really important for teen girls and now it's quantifiable how many followers do you have how many likes did you get on that post of yourself in a bikini I mean that's the other thing you have to really think about when it comes to this I mean Instagram's a platform where young women and teen girls post pictures of themselves and ask people to comment you're Outsourcing your sense of self-worth to the world to the internet how much of this is present outside of the US you mentioned that there was a study there in the UK but I did see some stuff online saying that the link between social media and depression doesn't seem to be quite so strong outside of the US is that right um not not that's not my understanding of the literature um plus we now have more and more data on those mental health Trends over time uh particularly for for loneliness but also for self-harm and for depression that particularly in English-speaking countries it's very very consistent pattern that depression loneliness start to rise among teens after about 2012 and keep going I mean the the pattern is virtually identical to that in the United States and for adolescent loneliness we see it in 36 out of 37 countries around the world is social media affecting each generation or each age cohort differently I think so um you know I think the impact on teens is is very clear and you know arguably more more negative um but with you know with mental health issues starting to go up the age scale it didn't used to be there was those any increases in depression for 26 to 34 year olds and starting after about 2015 it started to spread to that group as well so maybe that's social media maybe that's other other pressures it's I think it's a more complex picture there but there there is especially sense you know the mid-2010s just with cancel culture and um on online culture and negative news gets clicks it's just toxic soup you know that we all seem to be living in that I think is having an impact on everybody yeah one of the most interesting things that I learned recently was the increase of suicides in pretty much all age and gender categories over the last few years suicides for middle-aged white males are five times that of teen girls and they show a similar pattern as well I think that the other highest group of suicides is mid-20s Native American men what do you think is going on there that that can't be smartphones and social media surely right because you need depression suicide any of these things are multiply determined really not the question I'm trying to answer though I'm not trying to figure out what are all of the causes of mental health issues or suicide but why have they increased and at least in the U.S suicides among middle-aged people are actually down and they're up among young adults and teens so they're starting to converge even though yes you're right that is generally where the suicide rate is the highest it's starting to equalize oh in terms of the trend how they're both moving together yeah yeah that's that's interesting okay so let's say that you've got the the smartphone addiction the use of social media all of the ways that that gets interpreted by uh both males and females even more so what else is contributing to this I'm sure that as you say this is contributing in a a chunk of it but what else is going on outside which is causing this Mental Health crisis so you mean for teens yes well you know I think a lot of it is the Ripple effects that yeah that the way teen socializes has fundamentally changed that it's moved online and then teens are spending less time with each other face to face which is much better for for mental health than scrolling through social media you know and they're also spending less time sleeping that is also really bad um for mental health huge links between sleep and mental health outcomes so it's it's like a perfect storm with the way teens spend spend their time outside of schools fundamentally shifted and has shifted in a way that they're spending more time on activities that tend to lead to unhappiness and depression and less time on activities that are protective against mental health issues yes so it's not just the fact that you're using social media it is what that time on social media replaces so you're losing some of the positives and then you're adding on some of the negatives and you've called that the ripple effect yeah I mean that's that's how I think of it that I mean it's sometimes I've I've said that the technology is you know the warm at the core of the Apple that it it kind of all comes back to that that it it ripples out from there and you know that's also the theory that I talk about a lot in in the new book is that technology has all of these wide-ranging effects that it's not just we use different technology it's how has that changed our behaviors how has that changed our values that you know it's just one example technologically developed times and societies tend to be more individualistic more focused on the self and less on others and what you get from that is you know a mix of what's sometimes considered good and bad you get more equality but you also get more disconnection yeah you said that uh the drive is for generational differences uh individualism technology and a slow life strategy what's the dynamic that's going on there why is that important yeah so technology is linked to individualism because technology makes individualism possible um it makes it possible to live by yourself and not depend on as many people because we have all these labor-saving devices and communication and everything else and Technology also leads to the life cycle slowing down so at times and places when people live longer and education takes longer to finish people have more time to grow up and more time to grow old so the whole developmental trajectory from infancy to old age has slowed down so children are less independent teenagers are less likely to do adult things like get their driver's license right away or have a paid job or go out on dates young adults Mary later had children later settle into their careers later middle-aged people look and act younger than their parents or grandparents did so 50 is the new 40. older people enjoy longer lives and Better Health so that's the slow life strategy it has a huge impact on how each generation has lived their lives leads to a lot of misunderstandings you know the grandparents are like why are my Millennial grandkids not married yet but this is something all the generations have seen it has kept going for quite a long time and you know my goal in the book is to help Generations understand each other better and I think understanding the slow life strategy and how that's played out is one big step in that direction one of the things that I become fascinated by over the last couple of years has been behavioral genetics and the level of heritability of anxiety and depression is pretty high but what we've seen is conditions of anxiety and depression rates of that increase a lot in the last 10 years how do you square that Circle the fact that we do have this massive biological predisposition it is incredibly heritable and yet we've been able to almost beat our genes in a bad way um with with the last 10 years yeah because there are environmental effects so um in in the classroom personality psychology is what is what I teach so anxiety very similar to neuroticism in the big five like a lot of personality traits it's about 50 heritable well more accurately it explains 50 of the variation you know in a group of people that it's probably due to to genetic heritability that still leaves us 50 some of that's error in how we're measuring it but I think it's it speaks to just how big these environmental changes are that there is such a large genetic component yet we have still seen these enormous changes because yeah some some people are going to maybe never be depressed in any environment some people are going to be depressed in any environment they're in then there's a big middle group where the environment is going to have an impact and and it does and you know you see this over time but you also see it in um you know other cultural comparisons so depression is virtually unknown among the Amish and it's not because they don't know where it is you know what it is or that they don't get treatment for it it's because their sense of community and how tight-knit they are in their sense of purpose is is so strong and if anyone is feeling sad they you know immediately get support it's almost the opposite of an individualistic Society yeah I am I think one of the most difficult things that people have to swallow when they first learn about behavioral genetics is the fact that a good chunk of the outcomes that they're going to get with their self-development their personal progress is um predisposed in One Direction or another that they they have constraints they don't have unlimited degrees of freedom which in a meritocratic society is something that kind of feels uncomfortable you know you want to be able to be anything that you that you can be and you want to be able you don't want to feel like people are starting off on different footings especially with conversations about equity and equality but this is one of those scenarios where you actually think well [ __ ] the fact that there's only 50 that you have control over with your depression and anxiety in an environment that might be engendering more of that is actually almost a prophylactic it's kind of almost protective in this way if you had control over 100 this would allow the environment to rag you around however much it wanted yeah you know I I sometimes say this when I when I give talks on this that if new technology is the cause of this huge rise and teen depression that might actually be good news because we might be able to do something about it because we cannot change the genetics we were born with we can't change what happened to us in the past it would be really hard to solve poverty or discrimination overnight but we can set some reasonable limits on technology and maybe solved at least try to solve this problem and we might actually have an impact what are some of your proposals for how both people uses parents Etc should try and protect themselves and do this from it so there's two big things so as individuals one thing that we can do no phones in the bedroom overnight yes we are from the same team Gene we are from the same team yep and that you know parents hear that and they're like oh I can do that for my kids but I don't know I think I have to have it I'm like nope it's for you too and I mean just just so many studies from sleep Labs we notice that you're gonna get a better night's sleep but most people have their phone on their bedside table within Arm Street some people even sleep with it like it's a lover right so what people say next is well but I have to have my phone in my bedroom overnight because it's my alarm clock to which I say I have some advice for you buy an alarm clock radio alarm clocks have been around for like 100 years come on yes you can buy that alarm clock on Amazon on your phone and then put your phone away and get a good night's sleep so that's that's the number one that's what individuals can do it's the research is very strong on it and it's very straightforward and relatively simple as opposed to say you know how much time should I spend on a screen that's a lot harder um so that's the first thing and then you know as um as a society and individual countries and so on is to try to put some limits particularly on social media particularly for children and young teens so for example let's raise the minimum age for so social media to 16 and actually do age verification to enforce that let's let's get it out of that age of you know the 12 to 15 year olds which is already such a difficult time developmentally let's get that social media out of that equation personally for me even for the people that are skeptical about the link between the social media use and the current increases in teenage depression and anxiety I don't understand I I'm struggling to steal my case for this makes teenagers lives fundamentally better messaging apps fine things like YouTube also seems to be fine for me but when you're talking about Tick Tock there is literally nothing coming out of that app which is Expediting some Young Person's development in the world it's not showing them things around the world which are going to expose them to new ideas it is it it is the biggest waste of time that I can think and I do understand that I am now sounding like the Boomers that probably were criticizing whatever cartoon I was watching on Nickelodeon when I was 13 or 14 years old but I I I struggle to see why this isn't a uh a policy and also when you think about the fact that these Technologies still are very new tenures to be able to work out just what are the sort of effects um I don't know I I I would be in support of a policy like that you mentioned there that you are teaching in the classroom so you have had experience interacting with 18 year old Millennials and 18 year old Zoomers what are the differences that you have noticed personally yeah um you know as you know I'm a data person I I like relying on on what the what the generation says about themselves a lot more and that tends to be you know what I emphasize in the books um but I have I have been teaching undergraduates for uh quite a long time since I was a grad student you know myself in the in the 90s and I've been a faculty member since 2001. so probably the biggest shifts are um with with Millennials a lot more self-confidence which has advantages that you're more likely to raise their hand in the classroom also more likely to be entitled and say things like um I need to take the final late because I'm going to Vegas for my birthday really what is your boss going to say in six months when you're like I can't do the break presentation because I'm going to Vegas for my birthday so yeah so that type of that type of entitlement is much less common among gen z um but they they also you know downside are much more reluctant to talk in class but they're very nice they're very nice they're very helpful they're very sweet people um they you know each each generation has their strengths and weaknesses and I'm obviously generalizing here and it's obviously my one experience but that does sort of fit the data that you see self-esteem you know go down between Millennials and and uh and gen Z and gen Z is more likely to say that they really want to help others um why are young people much more risk-averse than yeah so that that's one of the things that really that really surprised me in looking at at gen Z is they they are they're less likely to say they want to take risks um and there's a big culture around safety and not just physical safety but what they call emotional safety so it's a phrase I had never heard before I started you know talking to a lot of young adults and they don't just want to be protected from physical dangers but they often seem to want to be protected from bad experiences and I can understand that impulse but as many people have observed that I can Veer into just never being wanting to never be uncomfortable which isn't realistic and especially as young adult you're thinking specially say a university student that's often how you learn and having difficult discussions is necessary sometimes when you're talking about complex topics what are some of the ways that this risk aversion has shown up in Behavior so gen Z's less likely to get into physical fights with each other they are less likely to get into car accidents um and then there's around the kind of emotional safety piece I think that is why there has been the call for safe spaces why there's been more of the disinvitations of speakers um but there's been much more of the idea if you can't say that of we can't even have that that person come to campus uh you know that words can hurt so this really big focus on speech and language as harmful or even violent and that kind of the kind of concept creep of of uh words like trauma um and and hurt and violence what's driving that I think but part of it is you know safety was hugely emphasized with this generation when they were young and they did not rebel against that they embraced it so you know expect teenagers and young adults to rebel against a safety culture and they really didn't you know they they took it seriously and there were lots of upsides to that that safety culture so I think it comes from that and then it of course also comes from the way people are interacting with each other online because you know think about if you're 16 years old um today you know how are you more likely to be hurt um often it's going to be online that's where people are going to be nasty to each other not to your face and that's partially just the way the medium Works be a little more aggressive um verbally when they're Anonymous and when they're not seeing the look on the other person's face and that's what online culture is and that's where so many teens are spending so much of their time now why was there more of an emphasis on safety and less of a pushback I I can't work out I remember being told from my parents you know we as every young person is you they're concerned about your health and your well-being what changed yeah you know it's it's it's it's hard to say I mean I think there was there clearly was a fundamental change though because um gen Z teens fight with their parents less than especially Gen X teens did at the same age so you know you think your parents are like safety safety safety um that did the rebelling against that by by fighting about it and that just just hasn't happened and I think it it it's partially because they're they are just don't they're not as likely to want to say you know go and drive around and do crazy things because they can do crazy things online um so I've got uh uh a bunch of interesting uh cottage industry obsessions at the moment and one of them has been trying to work out why young people are having less sex than ever before yep um socio-sexuality uh openness to new experiences risk aversion um all of this to me seems to be driven uh by partly the ripple effect I think which is what you mentioned earlier on and it seems that there are just so many other things that are convenient and comfortable to do that get in the way and the reason that I like this is an explanation is that it seems to cover so many of the different bases that each individual person can find in their online use their own targeted version of an anesthetic or an analgesic that will be allow them to not need to go out into the real world to face rejection from a partner to deal with the discomfort of making up and breaking up the risk of having sex uh you know we are in a post metoo world it's no surprise when was me too 2013 something like that so 2018. was it me too it's 2018. oh my God uh anyway my point being we have these things have converged right they've all converged together and it seems like what a lot of people especially guys that are the ones that will face the most rejection women also face their own massive security risks in the dating Market but I think um more frequent low-level rejection would be something that is felt by men and if you are in an environment and a society which is more risk-averse which has perhaps coddled and and coaxed young people to not have to deal with these sorts of things stepping out and facing the fear of approach anxiety and rejection and all of that um when you do have Tinder online porn video games all of these things are potential distractions what is your view on the current approach of young people to relationships Family Life casual sex long-term marriage all of that yeah I mean you know life isn't safe and sex and relationships you know don't feel safe either I mean describe for it for young men and then for for young women there's you know the fear of sexual assault um there's also a lot of complaints from young women that you know young men watch so much porn they think that's how real life sex is going to be you know that's all all of all of these things um but it you know those those certainly there are those fears previous generations kind of looked at those fears and said well that's the price of doing business and I think a lot of gen Z because they have these Alternatives have said well forget it you know because I have I have there's all of these other things I I can I can do you know for for a sexual Outlet um and I think that goes a long way toward you know explaining you know what's going on um and not just as a sexual Outlet just you know there's more things to do at 10 pm now you know when there were three TV channels it was all boring now you can binge watch almost whatever you want on Netflix or other platforms was slowly distracting ourselves outside of human nature I think that's that's kind of true you know and we're really seeing this in the surveys with teens as well that the number of teams you say want to get married or at least want to have a long-term partner has been was steady since the 1970s until the transition between Millennials and gen Z about 10 years ago that's when started to go down same thing for saying that they're likely to want to have children so I think we're going to see really big chefs in in family life as gen Z is of childbearing age that the birth rate might never come back up and then probably the marriage rate is May uh suffer as well that's another pet Obsession of mine the birthright uh Global birth rate declines but this is global right you're looking at South Korea 0.8 Japan I think just above One China right down in the bottom of the ones as well uh us is what 1.7 1.8 something like that also not particularly good the UK Germany absolutely ruined at the moment um and yeah you know everyone remembers the r naught number from covid you know if it's above one for every person there is more people giving more people but if it's below one for birth rates or below 2.1 actually it's two yeah two point one but yeah if you have the equivalent which is there are fewer people having fewer people which makes fewer people to have fewer people and so on and so forth right um I I spoke to someone um that added another Wing into this because I like that sort of demographic explanation um but their uh point was that females are very um easy to sort of have social contagion and the mimetic nature to their behavior and if motherhood is less seen it is less inculcated in themselves so you almost get in the same way that uh Birthright Decline and demographic collapse occurs in this kind of spread out step by step way you also get an equivalent here which is kind of like a psychological uh contagion too that spreads out well there's fewer mothers around which means there are a few mothers influencing young girls to become mothers which means that they're refuted all the way down yep yep yeah yeah it builds on itself um and you know it I think it's especially to kind of guessing that it's it's that uh you know we're not going to see much of a turnaround because the birthright really started to go down with Millennials well Millennials as 18 year olds said yeah I want to have kids gen Z isn't even saying it at 18. have you seen The Tick Tock trend of girl with the list do you know what this is no it's bad so I wrote a newsletter about this a couple of weeks ago um there was a girl who printed out on a piece of paper 350 reasons as to why she didn't want to have kids and it ranged from everything from literally growing a parasite inside of you to uh like um vaginal prolapse and or all manner of obscure uh complications that can occur during during childbirth one of them was not being able to wear cute heels as much as I want and it was I think it ended up she's printed it out so visually it's a very very kind of impressive and long um but it it showed to me just how much the individual their own Freedom themselves is a priority it takes precedent that you are pedestalizing your own ability there was a recent Street interview that just went up yesterday using a ton of clips from my channel um which I really loved and a bunch of uh women mostly being asked do you want to have kids if not why not etc etc and the answers I know that these Street interviews get very heavily edited I'm very I'm always hesitant of using these as as evidence but you don't put words in people's mouths these people are saying it for themselves and it was stuff like uh I go to music festivals every weekend and uh if if that happens that means that I can't I don't have time for a kid um I'm working on myself right now and I don't feel ready oh how old are you I'm 38 and you know I the evidence that I've seen from a meta-analysis from Professor rinska Kaiser says that 8 out of 10 women who don't have children after they break through the fertility window didn't intend to not have children I wonder how that's going to change that was 2011. so you you know you're catching that tail end I guess um I really wonder whether that's going to change I wonder whether the biological clock is basically going to stop ticking for Gen Zed women in at least psychologically when they look back and think okay I'm now going to spend the remainder of my life without without children for the people that like to throw around well it does millions and millions of children that need to be adopted in the USA there are 30 pairs of parents for every one child that is available for adoption the number of Hoops that you need to jump through is unbelievably high so adoption isn't some sort of Panacea to to this you know the same as like why buy a new dog when you can adopt from a home like it's just the numbers aren't there to support this but one of the other things that I don't understand is some of the claims that get made and I think that this is indicative of both my generation and the generation coming after which is that we hate to be wrong because being wrong on the Internet is uh tantamount to Ego destruction everybody's always been like this but I think it's got even worse recently if you ask people why it is that they don't want to have kids they'll say that it's due to income but I know that you have some statistics that show if the problem was income even adjusted for living even etc etc that's bollocks so what what is the story of income over the last couple of generations uh comparatively yeah so first you know I had to mention there's been several recent polls of young adults who don't have children um and then asked those who said yeah I don't want children why personal freedom was almost always at at or near the top of the list yeah exactly what what you saw in these on the street interviews um you know income certainly comes up um but it's often you know not the primary thing um so yeah the story of of income is interesting uh Millennial young adults actually make more money than gen xers and Boomers did it the same age uh they're wealth building um has also caught up uh that wasn't true for a little bit there but it's now caught up so there is a little bit of Truth to the income idea though because most of those income gains have been from women so you think about a heterosexual couple and you know maybe the woman makes a little less than the guy but they're both making a good amount of money which is why those numbers are so high you know for for Millennials now well if they both keep working full-time then you have to pay for child care child care has always been expensive and is even more expensive now so there is you know a little bit truth to it that that is it's more challenging than the old days when you know the old bad days in a lot of ways when women were not making hardly anything and so if they quit their job the family wouldn't really lose that much income yeah yeah if you stayed home with the kids um so there's that but there's also some economists have looked at the stat uh they look in the U.S at counties that had a lot of income growth well you think okay it was income then you should get a big increase in the birth rate in those counties that had the big economic growth it actually went completely the other way the birth rate went down in those counties that had the big economic growth and they think it's because young women were taking those career opportunities instead of having kids so plus there's a if if it took so much income to have children why do people who are lower income have more kids than people with more income and they do so the income explanation you know people have priorities they make choices um and yes you know certainly there are big problems with housing and child care and so on but it is not the only explanation it's probably not the primary one I found that so fascinating uh there was a study done recently looking at uh lottery winners and if a man wins a lottery it seems like he's more likely to get married if a woman wins at the lottery she's more likely to get divorced and I I think that the it seems like in a modern world where you can be afforded all of the different opportunities and experiences that can be placed in front of you there are lots of things to do and having children seems basic just seems boring it's like I don't want to do this uh talking about the gender pay Gap and the changes there one of the the insights I got from you was Millennial women's incomes are much higher than the incomes of women of previous generations as a result of both higher wages and more hours worked in 2021 Millennial women aged 35 to 44 made roughly twice as much as Boomer women in 1980 and over 20 more than Gen X women in 2005 women 25 to 34 made similar gains men's incomes have fallen since 1970. how it would have fallen much I mean that's that's the way it balances out women's incomes have just gone way up there aren't gone down by a little bit and you average it out and what you get is pretty solid incomes why do Millennials still feel poor then sorry this one is what we just described that in heterosexual couples you're going to get that challenge of okay is somebody gonna quit or go part-time or are we going to pay for the expense of child care I think that's one one reason um another reason that's often mentioned is housing okay but housing is so much more well those income statistics that I've been talking about correct for inflation and housing is one of the main pieces of that inflation calculation plus if you look at the data at least up to 2020 afterwards got even harder but up to 2020 Millennials homeownership rate was very similar to gen xers and Boomers of the same age it was last but it was less by a couple of percentage points it really wasn't as much and given that more went to more Millennials went to college that make sense that in that 26 to 39 group that you might have a little bit of tapering off but it's really small you know you think given the way people talk about it online that it would be you know the homeownership rate would be like half in Millennials compared to Boomers and it's not so I think that you know that explanation falls apart a little bit um I think a lot of it is the social comparison that people do online that you know it who goes on Twitter and says my income is great my generation is doing awesome that's not the norm it's just not the way people you know discuss these things online and the same thing with news articles you know it's so often this you know Boomers were the ones who got are all successful which isn't true either you know and then they pull they pulled up the ladder after they climbed up it so the Millennials couldn't go up I mean that gets clicks uh so I I I think I think there's this again this toxicity and this kind of negativity you know that have have driven a lot of it and I think partially it also got stuck because you know Great Recession times Millennials were really pummeled by that that is absolutely true it's just that they roared back really well um say between about 2011 and 2019 in particular but even during the Pandemic those incomes were were doing very well for for people in that Millennial age range even if it's not as well as the people they follow with blue ticks on Instagram uh showing one of the really interesting Dynamics I've just considered there is if women of the primary Breadwinner in the household and on average uh overall household earnings are looking pretty good but the woman needs to take time off work in order to raise the kid you are taking a a larger hit a larger proportion of the overall household income is being exactly that's right yeah and I think I think that that's one of the big dilemmas um and you know it's also something to think about you know in in terms of of uh of the birth rate because even though you know you're honestly and on the same page a lot of this is around personal freedom there is an economic component and that's what the economic component is it's the challenge of child care so um you know if you're going to concentrate policy maybe that's where the policy should be around Child Care what's happening in education college degrees and high school graduates lumped together what's happening uh you mean in terms of income no just in terms of people completing college degrees people completing High School yeah it's it's really really amazing I think we forget that it was really only a few Generations ago say greatest Generation born in the early 20th century where it wasn't even really the norm to complete High School many of them didn't I was very very common and then very few went to college so with the silent generation those were in 1925 to 1945 it started to become much more common to finish high school and go to college and then that kept growing and it really really um came to fruition with Millennials who are the most college educated of the generations that's probably why their incomes are higher by the way because they more of them did you know get that college degree so um you know that's that's just a really huge change that the people forget about about how large that has been what about the uh didn't didn't I see something that the number of people completing high school has dropped recently aren't there more High School Dropout people that aren't getting high school diplomas not that I know of I mean it now it's possible that there were some weird things going on in the pandemic yeah that that might be what you're what you're thinking of but at least up to that point it had been absolutely in the other direction that dropping out of um High School uh was a lot less common for say gen Z versus uh gen xers in the 90s that you know the high school completion rates used to hover you know in the 80s and and now they're well into the the upper 90s yeah one of the interesting stats I learned from Richard Reeves last year with his book of boys and men was that seven times more males than females dropped out of college during covet and you know you've got this massive Retreat this huge imbalance it's going to be two to one females to males completing a four-year us college degree by 2030 that's going to worsen the earning potential down the line that's going to worsen there um imbalance within the home in terms of who's contributing income which is going to make having children even more of a burden in terms of the Lost income from the female uh yeah it's uh A Perfect Storm it is and you know maybe there will be more men who are the stay-at-home parent that's already happened but you know is that is it ever going to be 50 50 a lot of people have their doubts yeah I think plug there is people can be what they want there are ways to have unconventional household setups uh that that will work out fantastically but on average I think that women's attraction is going to wane if they have a man that isn't contributing in the protector provider role that typically that's what happens this is more than just cultural archetypes as far as I can see this is genetic predisposition you know like status accounts for an awful lot make value isn't something that we just make up it's mediated through culture for sure but it is rooted in biology right and and these things can be bent maybe even a good amount but they can't be broken and I do think that there are some challenges there so what about changes to approaches in Korea uh the workplace younger employees why are they different how are they different yeah so you know the workplace changed a lot of course you know with um especially with virtual work um that's starting to shift you know post pandemic but you know I think the the most interesting changes are are with Gen Z you know the by my calculations the oldest of gen Z are 28. so they're not just new Young employees at accounting firms they're now the new Young employees at the law firms and you know in medicine and in the faculty and you know a lot lots of other professions so you know I the most important thing is the most simple do not assume your young employees are millennials anymore they're not in there and gen Z is fundamentally different from from Millennials but you know I we're gonna see I think a lot of the things that have come up on college campuses are already in the workplace are gonna even more so and I think that's what we're already grappling with and we'll continue to do so in the in the next few years of um are there going to be demands for safe spaces is um everyone going to need to State their pronouns not just in their email signature but verbally you know and I I don't think these things are all bad there's some very you know good practical things to to both of those but a lot of older Generations are gonna yeah wrestle with them I think that's a good that's a good verb um and then there's there's other things you know we've already really seen so one example I use in the book is just how it has become so common for University presidents to release statements about political events and I think that's also now why young employees are demanding or asking that CEOs release statements about a political political events and CEOs are kind of reluctant to do that they don't want to alienate half of their customers but then their young employees are demanding it and they're caught between a rock and a hard place I I don't think that's going to go away oh so the person is political but the professional is also political now as well exactly very interesting yeah have you seen uh maybe getting out over my skesia have you seen the newest season of South Park I have not there is one episode that I implore you to watch and in this episode Butters gets a job at an ice cream parlor and kotlin is jealous because Buddhist has a job and it means that he's earning money so Carmen decides that he'll ask about us to get him a job but this Paul's a favor and Carmen starts working there within the first couple of minutes Cartman says that he needs to take a mental health break then he works from home for the remainder of the day because it's mindful Mondays and then it's uh like work from home Wednesdays and it's finish early Friday and it like he keeps on needing to take a mental health day and he's being overworked then he tries to get Butters to work in a Co-op thing with him because he says why are we working for this owner he doesn't even do anything meanwhile the joke is obviously that Cartman hasn't done anything at all or contributed to it um and yeah I it really hits the nail on the head I think of of one of the stereotypes that we have about this industry or this this sort of current generation of people who in Industry don't want to work particularly hard but then there also seems to be some truth in this the fact that there are uh increasing rates of of mental health problems um have you seen any data to do with uh sick days Days taken on leave for mental health absence stuff like that yeah I haven't seen that but there there are um some interesting questions you know around this for you know what are the the big surveys uh in the US of 18 year olds it's a great great place to sample you know they're either going to get a university or under the end of the workplace uh and so things are on work ethic like are you willing to work overtime is a great example so that one had actually been going up so it had been on the decline for quite a long time with you know from Boomers to gen X's to Millennials younger people saying uh that's not what I want to do I don't really want to work that hard and I don't want to work overtime and then about 10 or 15 years ago it actually started to come up you know with with Gen Z started to be more likely to say yeah you know I'm going to do that I'm willing to work hard and then in 2021 it went just like a huge big Decline and who knows maybe that's a blip I don't know but that was also you know around the time of the idea of The Quiet quitting and the great resignation and yeah some of some of these ideas of you know somewhat real unrealistic ideas uh you know why why should we have to work for a living I don't know I don't think I get this um yeah that's kind of how it works are you familiar with Nicholas abistat do you know him um I recognize the name yeah so he did men without work and then he did men without work a post covet Edition he was on the show a couple of weeks ago fascinating you would love his stuff I think you you should really dig into it um so there is this cohort of seven million men aged 22 to 55 in the UK and they are not in work and not looking for work only 10 of them are students they spend an average of 2 000 hours a year per year Watching screens probably video games half of that time is on either prescription drugs or weed one-third of them live in a household which claims at least one uh disability benefit and yeah that you know hiding in low unemployment data is this cohort of prime working age men and when you actually drill it down to it's that particular group of that particular gender of that particular age cohort with these partic it's massive it's a huge huge group of people uh and they they have absolutely no desire to do it and I put this episode out with Nicholas and it performed really well on YouTube and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from guys saying you know why why should why should I bother working you know that you know the the the the world hasn't offered me anything um cost of living is so high that it's easier to work from home or they would say um corporate employers don't value you in any case so I don't need to do this uh that because women uh too full of themselves and because girls that are four out of tens believe that they should be getting with a millionaire that there's no point in me even working if girls don't give us the uh the incentives to do it and it felt like a fever dream if literally felt like a [ __ ] fever dream reading this thing and going did it either I there's some very very appropriate chat GPT bot has been deployed on my YouTube channel all with the same personality to try and control me into believing in this is true or I've managed to find a a cohort of these guys that I you know not not even work skeptical work negative um and I I it made me reflect I wrote again another newsletter um that reflected on a couple of conversations one I had with David Goggins who's this Navy SEAL hard guy and Dana White uh the the president of the UFC a video that I'd seen of him and David Goggins looked me in the eyes a couple of months ago when we were doing this episode and he said it's so easy to be great nowadays because most of the world is weak and David Dana White says to his to his kids uh if you are even remotely a Savage you will run these people over because nobody has any work ethic at the moment and it really made me reflect on those two things and I understand that people don't want their greatness to stand on the shoulders of a failing Society right you don't want to capitalize on what you feel like is increasing fragility that is spreading out around you but for the people that listen to the stuff that we're talking about today and kind of Despair and think oh God you know what what's going on yes civilizationally this is a massive problem but individually if you are the sort of person that is concerned about this you're probably not the sort of person that is going to actually be affected by it so what that means is that the bar for greatness has never ever ever been set lower it is so easy to decide and and put a five five percent of work in and a tiny bit of talent and you are already ahead of almost everybody else because the bar is set so low so that was me trying to turn a white pill out of um a relatively negative a bunch of stats that I'd learned at the same time what a lot of people would answer to that especially in the US is yeah but it's so much harder to get into these competitive colleges which is true but more people are going to college overall so you could argue it's easier to get into college period maybe um but it you know it is it is true that there is a lot of competition more people to apply to the most competitive places so I think that would I I'm guessing if gen Z heard that that would be their answer they'd be like nope you know you're being delusional it actually is more competitive and that's what they have they have been heard um and there there's some truth to that but I I also do think it's true maybe in particular getting to the workplace yeah if if you're somebody who's really going to put in that that that hard work that maybe that is a little more unusual we've got the stats on overtime you know what I mean yeah like it's there in front of you if you're able to work on your mental health if you're able to spend as much time off social media go outside and touch some grass a little bit that should be pretty protective and again the easiest thing to do to separate yourself out from any group is to look at what most other people are doing and avoid those things that you know that are negative toward them like it's not hard does this mean that Elon Musk tweeted about a year ago that I fell in love with and it's this sort of um traumatized illustration of a man with sunken eyes and scraggly hair and he's sort of looking down at the floor and he says um dear Lord why are you testing me so much and then on the other side there's this sort of Chad Jesus illustration that says you literally need to put your phone down and go outside and it just makes me think like look again the bar is set relatively low yes these things are incredibly compelling they're limbically hijacking they're purpose built to try and get you to come back variable schedule reward all of that stuff right I I understand I have my own problems with my mobile phone too but just a tiny tiny little bit of wrangling you know finding a group of friends who also want to better themselves to that also want to kind of push back against comfort and convenience and and ease and this isn't to say that you need to live an uncomfortable or inconvenient life but that there are ways to do this so one of the other elements that we haven't spoken about yet but is a massive contributor is political stances how has that wobbled and waned over the last few Generations yeah so you know the really the biggest overall change is just a lot more polarization and you see this among young adults to the more identify on the extreme left or the extreme right and uh that there's in the in the US you also get much more of an association over the last few decades um with being liberal and being Democrat and being conservative and being Republican people forget that that used to not be as as Stark uh and it's just become this environment where it's not just oh I disagree with that other party but I hate them and not only I disagree with that other person but I hate the person and we're there um some people refer to it to it as effective polarization affect meaning emotion and that's what's really stunning there's a big survey that that's uh been done for decades and decades and it asks people to say you know on a temperature scale you know how warm do you feel towards certain groups and Democrats about Republicans or Republicans about Democrats is in frostbite territory now and it used to be maybe oh mid-50s and now it's like 20. um so there's just uh you know a lot of negative feeling it's almost like it's replaced religion or you know even more um you know something else where it's just like that's the other that's how we're dividing each other now is is it's based on politics a sort of study that showed one-third of Democrats worry about their son or daughter marrying a Republican exact same thing yeah is it true so you mentioned earlier on uh gen Z from college coming into the workplace and needing the CEO or president to comment on current cultural events something tells me that if you are conservative or republican this is not going to be the sort of thing that you're pushing therefore does this suggest that gen Z is more liberal that they are voting more progressively well young the younger Generations tend to be more Progressive and older people tend to be more conservative it's the basic idea is that when you're young you see the problems in the world you want things to be changed then you get to a certain age in midlife where you say Hey you know there's actually a lot of these things have changed that's enough we can stop there you know so I think that that's part part of the dynamic there but you know people do sometimes stereotype and think you know all of gen Z is you know liberal and Democrat and that's not the case you know there's a good third of them who voted for Trump but even the conservatives like Trump a little bit less so there's there's some generational break there's actually probably one of the reasons why he lost in in 2020 was that he lost the support of more young conservatives is that evidence to suggest that this aging out of liberalism is happening more slowly or less you know that there's there's not and it's you know it it the the one thing we've we've kind of learned in the last five years or so is a really cool paper that uh made the case that your politics are at least somewhat shaped by who was president when you or a teen and young adult and whether that president was popular so the Millennials who were young when Obama was President a relatively popular president well probably this this data suggests tiltmore liberal and Democrat their whole lives so then if you look at that for Gen Z it's a little bit more it's a little harder to predict because neither Trump nor Biden said particularly great you know popularity ratings so it's a little harder to see you know what what direction they're gonna go in the future and it it is interesting because although they are a very Progressive generation across a lot of social issues they also in terms of their behaviors are almost more conservative in an odd way like they're less likely to drink alcohol and have sex for example but their views on a lot on most issues are pretty Progressive on average why are these young people so much more negative about their country I think that's one of the biggest questions that we have to try to answer and I think one possible explanation you know obviously there's a lot of toxicity online and it has a lot to do with it but I think kind of the other piece of the puzzle that has not been discussed as much is it this is another Downstream effect of more depression and mental health issues because depression isn't just about feeling it's not just about emotions it's also about how you think and how you think about things and by definition depression means you view the world in a negative light so that's why there's more that's why there's more pessimism that's why there's the view of you know everything is unfair and thus we need to change things and then the one that really knocked me out of my chair was the poll um of um U.S adults that said do you believe that the founders of the United States are better described as heroes or as villains and four out of ten gen Z said villains there's only one out of ten for Boomers and that's interesting because that's that's offense 250 years in the past you know it's not even an assessment of the current moment and there's that very very strong negativity and it's you know the other items too you know things whether things are fair or whether you know they should be changed young adults much more likely to say yeah you know we need to tear the whole thing down and start over and negative videos isn't always bad you know we don't want people to have Rose Colored Glasses and see if everything is positive but if that negativity is combined with hopelessness and nihilism which it seems to be that's not good for a stable democracy this is probably my least favorite part about the internet at the moment I have many things that I like about the internet despite the fact that we've been very critical today um my least favorite part it took um a conversation with my friend Michael malice to actually give a word to it it's so funny you know you spend all of this time reflecting on things and introspecting and oh I'm going to link all of these different concepts together and then you realize that something that you thought was a an unbelievably difficult web to put together already existed and it had a word that you'd learned since you were age 12 or something and it was cynicism I realized that the culture that I hate the most on the Internet is cynicism that everything sucks that everything's rubbish that it's not going to get better that the people who believe that it can get better the ones that are actually the problem they're the ones that did a delusional or conspiratorial or have been silverspooned or coddled or been given unfair advantages in life and I realized that that as far as I was concerned was the worst trend that I was seeing online um so outside of the uh distaste and negativity for Country uh is there evidence that shows that there's a uh how could you say like generalized cynicism disorder that this is just being spread out elsewhere too yeah yeah so this is the thing you're describing on the internet I call it the hellscape narrative you know and that's that's what you see um and yeah things are worse than ever are they really I don't know uh and yeah in the survey data 18 year old is more likely to say I don't have any hope for the world I can't have hope given the given the situation um locus of control become has become more external meaning you know I don't think there's anything I can really do about it yeah things are so unfair all of those have have have have spiked in the last 10 years so drawing this back to my current pet Obsession of the mating crisis um I see a lot of people doing that externalizing in terms of locus of control that it's because of whatever that's out there all men are going uh potential rapists and assaulters or all women are too full of themselves or whatever it might be um another sort of interesting I guess consideration there too is the cynicism and the negativity that we see amongst young people is it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy that if they don't try to step outside of whatever it is that they're doing they give themselves proof that the world is like that because if you don't go and do something to change it then what do you think's what's going to happen The World Isn't just going to deliver you change especially not to just your life um and again with the climate change things something we were talking about earlier on but with regards to having kids it's almost like some of the social change movements that are happening are used as excuses you know how many how many gen Z is genuinely understand anthropological impact on climate like you really really understand what's going on it it is incontrovertible that humans have an impact on the climate but let's talk about you know exactly how much of a difference is it going to be in Downstream etc etc I see so much because I talk about the sort of declining birth rates a good bit people saying why it is fully unethical to bring a child into this world when it's already overpopulated and we're destroying the planet like you do understand that's like just straight up antenatalism right like it's just it's just the most anti-natalist position that you can hold and do you really think like if you think that living on a planet that's got too many people which we don't at the moment is bad wait until you live on one that's got too few wait until you live on one that is trying to desperately hold on to an embedded growth obligation to continue the GDP to grow when the population is dropping by 10 20 30 per generation wait until that happens and I'm like [ __ ] screaming this from the rooftops saying look how can you be focused on climate change something that may slightly inconvenience your great great great great great granddaughter's life if that isn't going to be born if you don't have any kids and within the space of 50 years within the space of 30 years China's population is going to be halved they're going to go from 1.2 billion to 650 million people Korea is having a 96 Extinction rate over the next hundred years for every 100 Koreans that exist now there will be four great-grandchildren for every 100 Koreans there are four great-grandchildren wow climate the oppression in the world and you just think [ __ ] like I've turned into the Boomers I've turned into the Boomers that I railed against for so long listen to me I can hear it just falling out of my paws so I don't know I I want to be able to Discount a lot of the stuff that we've said today as you know every generation rails against the one that is coming next and says that it is so on and so forth I wonder whether there is such a thing as such a difference of degree that it becomes a difference of kind that it almost locks in a uh a longer term trajectory which is so much more sub-optimal that it almost stays a difference of kind and there have been some difference of kind things as well as difference of degrees and intensities too um what what ways could you be wrong about this stuff if you considered that yeah I mean absolutely um you know what what has really been the kind of Lifesaver of of that my whole career has been I've tried to draw from these you know big nasty representative data sets often of young people and that you know you're listening to what the generation says about itself not what older people's observations or some tiny pocket of people are doing that helps a lot but things can change it's very hard to predict the future that's just the way it is so you know does this mean that gen Z is going to be negative their whole lives well I hope not and I think there there are some some positive signs I mean one thing is that voter participation is way up among young adults so if you are hopeless and negative that's pretty bad if you're negative but then you vote and try to change the things that you think need to be changed that's a better outcome so that's where I do have have some hope is that political activism in this generation um where I do have you know a little bit of fear and bias maybe also just given my my uh life stage is uh I would prefer that we didn't completely overthrow the government burn it all down and start over and I think there's a there's there are a good number of um gen Z who do want to do that what are your predictions for the future we've got you call them the the polar generation or generation polar or gen a generation Alpha coming through what do you think is happening next yeah so we don't have that much data yet on this generation but this this is those born 2013 and later so yeah a lot of people call them gen Alpha um I call them polars after melting polar ice caps and political polarization so two things you know that will be talked about and perhaps have an impact on them um you know we the the little data that we do have um is troubling a lot of childhood obesity um a lot less of playing outside and exercise probably because of screens so hopefully we can turn that around um I'm I'm I'm less pessimistic about the fact that you know a lot of them went through the pandemic when they were young because a lot of generations say the silent generation went through the Great Depression in World War II when they were young and they turned out pretty well so Generations can grow from adversity what I'm afraid of is if they get stuck with problems that they can't get rid of as children and teens and I have the same worry about gen Z especially if there is something pathological perhaps about seeing challenge as a negative as opposed to something which is to be overcome you can only really grow from it if you decide to go through it as opposed to be completely split in half by it uh Gene this is really fascinating I really appreciate your work where should people go they want to keep up to date with the things that you do what should they head yeah you know so the the new book Generations about all six living American generations and uh just tons of tons of data and conclusions in there so my website is Gene twangy.com so j-e-j-e-a-n-t-w-e-n-g-e see after 90 minutes I can't even spell my own name um but that has stuff about the books I also have a frequently asked questions about Generations um stuff about speaking engagements and all the good stuff Jane I really appreciate you thank you thank you very much what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe face foreign