Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Boomers vs Millennials” with Dr Jean Twenge

Transcript

“Boomers vs Millennials” with Dr Jean Twenge · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
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Here's a dangerous idea for you. A lot of what you think you believe about TikTok, about
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social media, about young people, about depression, about cancel culture, resilience, free
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range kids, about old people, and about how early you should get to the airport before
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your flight is a consequence of the generation that you're born into. Do you feel like
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you're part of a generation? Have you always felt like the generational definitions don't
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quite fit you? Well, today's guest is the world's leading expert on generations, on the
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differences between boomers and the silent generation, and Gen X, and Gen Z and Millennials,
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and she has all the data to back it up. She's been researching this stuff for 25 plus
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years, and we get into all of that and more. She will be appearing at the Festival of Dangerous
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Ideas in Sydney in August, where I will also be appearing on stage. At one of their flagship
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events, it'll be me and Coleman Hughes. I hope you know and love Coleman as much as I do.
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He's an incredible thinker. His latest book is The End of Race Politics, Arguments for
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a Colorblind America. If you Google Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Coleman, Zeps, Coleman
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Hughes, Josh, something like that, you will get to the ticketing page if you're in Sydney
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absolutely by a ticket right now. Please don't miss it. We will also be doing a Melbourne
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event. So if you're in Melbourne, you don't have to fly to Sydney for it. The event in Sydney
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is on August 25th at Carriage Works as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. The one
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in Melbourne will be independent. We are doing this ourselves. We are funding it ourselves.
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Your assistance in proving to us that these things are viable would be greatly appreciated.
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The best way to get pre-release sale, which will be going on sale within the next week
1:51
or so, is to subscribe to Uncomfortable Conversations on Substack. You don't have to pay
1:54
for it. But please go to Uncomfortable Conversations.substac.com. Sign up for a free subscription.
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You'll be alerted 24 hours before anybody else has the ability to buy tickets. That'll
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be on Wednesday, August 28th at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne. Coleman Hughes, Josh
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Zeps, Uncomfortable Conversations Live. Please go and buy your ticket now. Without further
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ado, Dr. Gene Twingy is a psychologist author, consultant, public speaker. She specializes,
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as I said, in generational differences about work values and life goals and social attitudes
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and, importantly, mental health. She's a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
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She's written a book called Eye Gen, Generation Me, the narcissism epidemic. She's been covered
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in Time Magazine and Newsweek in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Her latest book is
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called Generations, the Real Differences between Gen Z Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silence.
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That is the silent generation. What they mean for America's future, going by tickets to
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Coleman Hughes and me. That's festival of dangerous ideas. Carriage works on August 25th in Sydney,
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the Athenaeum Theatre on the 28th of August in Melbourne. You can't buy tickets there yet,
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but you can get a heads up about the pre-release by subscribing for free to Uncomfortable Conversations.substac.com.
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Please enjoy it. As much as I did this chat with the one and only, Gene Twingy.
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What exactly is a generation? Because I was playing a game with my six-year-old daughter
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last night over dinner and we sometimes do a what person am I thinking of game and you have to
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ask us no questions. I asked her what generation is the person you're thinking of. In one particular
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family, it's usually pretty easy because there's like Nanor and Pop generation and then there's
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Daddy's generation and then there's her generation. But I'm married to a guy who's nine years younger
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than me who is the eldest in his family and I'm the baby in my family and my parents had kids
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late in their 30s and his parents had kids early in their 20s. So his mom is only 10 years older
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than my eldest brother and like 20 years younger than my eldest parent and so my daughter was like,
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well hang on, what generation exactly is it? Like people keep having babies every year, right?
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It's not like we reach a 20-year point and then everyone's like, okay, let's start a new generation
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again. So why is there a generation from 1965 to 1980 but not 1975 to 1990?
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Yeah, so you're right. The classic definition of generations is within one family that you
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have, the kids and the parents and the grandparents and the great grandparents. But when we use the
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word generation these days we usually mean social or cultural generations and that's what I study
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and have looked at. And you're right that those birth year cutoffs are fairly arbitrary. In some cases
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there's good reasons for them. In others, well 15 or 20 years has passed and that seems like maybe
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it's the right time and it's just kind of where we're going to draw the line. Same thing with the
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labels, you know, there's not a commission that decides what each generation is going to be called.
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It's just kind of what the media settles on. And is it defined by a communal shared experience
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that that generation has or a changing arc of technology that they experience or some combination
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of both? So the traditional theory of generations is about big events. So wars, economic recessions
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and depressions, pandemics, things like that. The idea is that if you experience a certain event
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at a certain point in your life that that's why generations differ from each other. But that really
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falls short for explaining a lot of the generational differences that show up. It also doesn't explain
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why it's so different to live now compared to you 200 years ago or a hundred years ago or
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50 years ago or even 20 years ago. The answer to that question is technology. That's why it's
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different to live now. And that's why that's why it's different to live in 2024. But it may not
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be the main thing that was different about living in 2020. Well, that's true. So those shorter periods
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of time, especially when you have an enormous event like the COVID-19 pandemic is going to shift
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things a little bit that that is true. I'm not saying the major events have no impact just that
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their impact in terms of big cultural changes and big generational changes tends to be smaller
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and more limited and not as day-to-day in the long run as the effects of technology.
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And I suppose that COVID was huge too. I mean, arguably it was the biggest events in 12 or
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two. And I suppose the way that those big events manifest themselves and the ripple effects
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that they can have culturally is then mediated by the technology that we're all living inside.
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I mean, the sense that if COVID-19 happens without social media, maybe you don't get the racial
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reckoning of 2020 when George Floyd is killed. Maybe you don't get this or that.
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Well, you wouldn't have gotten a vaccine if it wasn't for medical technology. That's true.
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Another example. So the peaks of it probably would have been bigger and longer.
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Who knows we would have had the lockdowns and those mitigation measures if it wasn't for
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scientific studies? So yeah, there's definitely things that intersect. The other piece of it on
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the more negative side for technology is it's also why it spreads so fast around the world because
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of air travel lines. Yeah. And in terms of you mentioned lockdowns, in terms of compliance
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with state authority, I'm intrigued by the way that different cultures were able to do that.
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I'm particularly intrigued because I come from one of the few Western liberal democracies that
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seemed to have a more East Asian attitude towards authority, a greater obedience, a greater adherence
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to rules, greater tolerance of strict lockdowns than other certainly English speaking countries did.
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Do you think that technology and generations affect our relationship to
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a collectivism, communalism, authority? Yeah, definitely. So, you know, in the book I wrote about
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two, I call them daughters of technology. And individualism is one of those. So that's often
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understood as the opposite of collectivism. Basically, individualism is more focused on the self
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less on social rules. So here in the US, individualism I think is the most concise explanation
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for the people who did not want to follow vaccine mandates or mass mandates or lockdowns.
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I mean, you know, there's lots of arguments for why people didn't want to follow those,
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but one of the most fundamental was you can't tell me what to do. That's at base where most of
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the arguments were. And that's individualism in a nutshell. And that differs across cultures and
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countries, but it also is different over time. If that pandemic had happened in 1955 in the US,
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I think you would have seen a lot more compliance with those types of government mandates. There was
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more trust in government. There was a more communal feeling. There was much more of
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respect for the idea that we need to all follow certain rules.
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And is the erosion of that trust and the erosion of those norms? What do you put it down to?
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Many people point the finger at forms of technology, which would be consistent, I think,
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overall with your thesis that social media is playing some kind of role here. Are there other factors?
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There's lots of factors. I do think a lot of it does come back to technological progress
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that that allows people to be more independent and not have to work together as much.
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But there's certainly many factors you look at. Regional differences, as you pointed out,
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they're considerable in individualism and collectivism. So there are many factors, I think,
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going over time and seeing how individualism has increased over time. I think technology is
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one of the key factors. And individualism versus collectivism, this tension shows up, at least I
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first noticed it in your work when you first came across my radar when you wrote your book about
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Millennials, Generation Me, and your thesis with basically what marks this generation out,
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correct me if I'm wrong, is a sense of individualism, a sense about the importance of the individual
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I'm special. It's all about me, me, me. In the time since, it seems like a great deal of the
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worries that older people have about young people these days is that they're actually quite
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identitarian and quite tribal and quite group focused that they're very focused on, I suppose,
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redressing historical harms that have been done to marginalize communities, identifying with
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particular subcommunities. What do you make of that change, or am I getting that change wrong?
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Well, it's tough because there's not a whole lot of evidence suggesting, for example,
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that Gen Z is more collectivistic. I don't think I've ever seen anything necessarily showing that,
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but I know where you're coming from in that they are more politically active than Millennials
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wear at the same age, for example. They are putting a lot of focus on helping others,
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on correcting inequalities. However, that's individualism, too. It's just a different flavor.
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One of the core things around individualism is to treat people as equal regardless of their race
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or gender or sexual orientation or gender identity. That's where a lot of that comes from,
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and then Gen Z has taken that and said, okay, so silence and boomers worked on the race part
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and the gender part to an extent. So did Gen X, Millennials tackled sexual orientation,
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and then they're tackling gender identity, gender fluidity, being transgender, being non-binary,
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in a way that a lot of older generations are like, wait, I don't even know these words that
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you're using. It's a huge generation gap, and I think that that's just kind of like almost in
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some ways the next step. If you're going to look at equality movements and how where
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individualism takes you, I think that's at base where it comes from with Gen Z.
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Just because you mentioned the silence with a TS, not a CE, and Gen X and the boomers,
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let's do a quick definitional thing here. Maybe you just start with the greatest generation before
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the silent generation and just roll through the generations as you see them and what time period
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by Kava? Sure, so the greatest generation is those born roughly 1901 to 1924. So they are the
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generation you fought in one or two, whether that was on the front lines or on the home front.
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So that was their distinguishing experience and they tended to have a civic orientation and
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more collective orientation in their whole lives. The silent generation, or 1925 to 1945,
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starts to begin some of the changes that we now associate with our modern world, like the civil
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rights movement in the US, the feminist movement. Those are associated with boomers. It's really not
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true. If you look at the leaders of those movements, they were silence. So it's just two examples.
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Martin Luther King Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both silent generation. So it's really a misnomer
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that they're called the silent generation. They got that label because they did marry young,
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they did live rather conventional lives in some ways, but they started this change that the boomers
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started, that the boomers continued. So the boomers named after the demographic factors,
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a lot of babies being born after World War II and the decade after, born 1946 to 1964.
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And when I think about them in relation to silence, I think the silence changed the laws
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when it came to say race and gender and to some extent sexual orientation and quality.
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The boomers changed hearts and minds, but they lived those changes in a way that the silence
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often didn't hurt them. What's the causal directionality there, Jane? Because I would have
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assumed that maybe the silent generation was somewhat dragged, kicking and screaming into
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changing the laws because the kids, the boomers, were making such a ruckus about it, or if I got
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that backwards. Well, you think about the civil rights movement, that predated the silent, I mean,
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sorry, the boomers turning 18, the first boomers turned 18 in what, 1964? Right, four, yeah.
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Right. Right. So a lot of that was well on its way before that. So none of them even voted for JFK.
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There was no boomer who voted for JFK. That does my head in. Yeah, okay, that's cool.
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Well, especially because back then, the voting age was 21. It didn't change to 18 until the
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early 1970s. Right. And Kennedy died in 63. They turned 18 and 64. Now, are you doing a little bit of
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sort of cheeky math when you're talking about MLK being technically a silent generation person
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because my mum was born in 45, and I firmly put her as a boomer. I know that technically she's
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what she is. MLK was born in the 1930s. I can't tell you the exact date, but in the 1930s.
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Okay. So it's right against her. Got it. All right. So even if there's some fuzziness at the edges
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and we're thinking that my mum is being a boomer. Okay, great. So silent generation actually
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does the things that we usually give boomers credit for the civil rights movement, the revolution
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of the 1960s. At that time, though, presumably in the mid 60s and late 60s, those boomers are now
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coming of age. They're in their late teens. They're in their early 20s and they're vaulting this
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revolution into popular gear. Essentially, would that be fair? I think so. Although, you know, they
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were more the participants and the silent generation were more the leaders. So the feminist
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woman is a great example here in the US, kind of the peak, at least the peak of the media attention
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around it was about 1970. And so there were lots of boomer participants, but the people who were
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leading that movement or either greatest generation or silence. So Jermaine, Greer, Camille,
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Palia, these people are silent generation. Yeah. I don't know what kind of popular, but Jermaine
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Greer would be a 40s. Yeah. They're silence. Betty for Dan, greatest generation.
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Yep. Okay. And so where do you place like Woodstock? What is that? What is that doing?
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So that's a boomer event. And I would associate that a little more with boomers. Although
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Jermaine Hendrix also, at least technically by the definition, silent, Bob Dylan, silent,
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Joe Baez silent. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that they're in 1940. So there you, it's
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true. And people already had on the boomers for being lucky, the lucky ones, not only are they
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the lucky ones, they didn't even do the things that they claim to have done. I don't think,
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and I don't think they're necessarily the lucky ones. Okay. Great. We'll get to that. So moving
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on from the boomers, we then get to the forgotten generation generation X. That's right. So that's
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my generation. We are the middle child of generations, literally in a way, because we have those two
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generations of adults who are older than us and two who are younger than us, also the middle child
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because we get forgotten all the time. But we like it that way. We like to fly under the radar.
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It works. Jermaine Hendrix take pride in being tough, in being the last generation with
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solidly raised in the pre-internet age. Yet, familiar enough with technology that they
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founded a lot of the tech companies. So Google and Yahoo is two examples were founded by Gen
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Xers. Right. And you make the point that there's actually never been a Gen X president of the United
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States because you went straight from the silent generation in Reagan and George H. W. Boy. He
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was greatest. Reagan was greatest. George H. W. is silent. I assume. And then you go.
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Technically greatest. He's right on the edge in 1924. Okay. Great. Yep. Yep. I see. And then you jump
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straight to Boomers. And then from Boomers from the Boomers, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and George
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W. Bush, you jump back to and Trump, you jump back to the silent generation, Joe Biden. Now,
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if Joe Biden resigns, you might get you Gavin Newsom, who I assume is Gen X. He's a Gen Xer.
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Yeah. Right. 1967. Okay. But if not, you might just trial straight on to what would be after,
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what, okay, let's keep going because they're on Blinken. What's on Gen X? A millennial. Yeah.
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And I've realized I didn't say the year for for Gen X. So Gen X, there's various definitions. I
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use 1965 to 1979. Then millennials 1980 to 1994. Okay. So they are often the children of Boomers.
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They are known for self confidence and optimism growing up in the 1990s when there was a lot of
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child focus because the Boomers were raising their kids and kind of where the boomers such a large
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generation where the culture went was often dictated by them. So millennials had that protected
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childhood. And they were really the first to experience childhood analysis in the age of the
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internet. It's messaging is something they still talk about a lot. And all of those all of those
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experiences, social media, me and Mark Zuckerberg who founded Facebook now meta is probably the
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most famous for money. Right. And kids and also, I mean, it was a time of extreme sort of casual
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opulence, I suppose, at least in hindsight, where in the 80s and 90s, you have the fall of the
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Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union and it's morning in America and everything's swell
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and Bill Clinton's playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Wall Show. Signed for all this a show about
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nothing and all that. I don't think that when we were living in the 90s, my experience of living
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in the 90s wasn't that we didn't think, oh, this is going to be the best time ever. But in some
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ways, it really was. I mean, I thought it was because I was in school and it was great. There's
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nothing to worry about. And then when I started actually paying attention to things, 9-11 happened
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and everything seemed a lot more complicated. So after the millennials, you get
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Gen Z or Gen Z. Yeah. So that's, I define them as more 1995 to 2012. And what really distinguishes
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them from the millennials is Gen Z is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the
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age of the smartphone and a book with a social media. So millennials played around with social media,
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but it wasn't really mandatory in the way that it has become for Gen Z. And millennials tended not to
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get a smartphone in middle school or early high school. It was late high school at the earliest.
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So I realized there was this generational break when in the big series that I work with,
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suddenly things started to change in the data on teenagers around 2012. So that maps onto
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the mid-90s as a turning point for generations. Because I've gotten used to seeing changes that
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were big, but they take advantage of you to get there. There wasn't like a clear cutoff, say,
22:03
between Gen X and millennials, but between millennials and Gen Z, there was a very, very clear
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difference that happened around those birth years in terms of lots of stuff. But most prominently
22:17
mental health and happiness. And what about Gen Z and the subsequent generation?
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Well, so you mean the generation after Gen Z? Yeah.
22:27
So many people called them Alphas. I call them Polars after melting polar ice caps and political
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polarization. I think I'm going to strike out on this one. I don't think Polars is going to stick.
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I would love it if it did, because I really hate the letters. I think they're just boring and
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derivative. You know, and especially Alphas, like, oh, Z, that's the less sort of the alphabet.
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What are we going to do now? I guess we're going to start over at the beginning.
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It reminds me of when we were all learning about Greek numbers during COVID. And we're like,
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what comes after Omicron? What is it? I know. It's long, delta. Where are we?
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Right. Yeah. I know. Okay. So the Polars, I'm going to call them Polars here. You're the,
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you're my guest. Why not? Let's call them Polars. They start when?
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So they start with those born about 2013. And we don't know yet when they're going to end.
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I made a wild guess at 2029. But we will see. What I think is really, there's a couple of things
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that are very interesting about that generation. One is partially because of
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fairly young children already being on TikTok and in social media platforms.
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There's already a hate war between Gen Z and Polars on TikTok. Apparently, and I found
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this out from my own Gen Z children, Gen Z calls the next youngest generation Alphas or Polars.
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They call them crusty iPad kits because they are the first generation to never know world without
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the iPad. The iPad was introduced in 2010. And apparently, they don't wash their hands before
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they use it. I love it. I love it. I think it's actually fascinating that we have 11-year-olds
24:04
having generational debates, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, some of the most popular
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people who my kids like to watch on YouTube when I let them are children who are their age or
24:14
just older. Yeah. You know, they're Polars. They're eight-year-olds who have 100 million followers on
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YouTube and they make videos about themselves going to amusement parks. You mentioned that
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the boomers may not have been as lucky as we think they are. And so I just want to touch on
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boomers and millennials for a bit because this is a big, you know, this is a big cultural
24:32
rift. There are a lot of comics in their late 30s and early 40s who are millennials, whose
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whole stick is about how they were screwed by the boomers. The boomers managed to buy a house
24:43
for the price of an old shoe. The boomers climbed the ladder and then after they got up,
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pulled it up to the millennials. And then the drawbridge and now the millennials have absolutely
24:51
nothing. And the boomers are just clinging on to their multi-million dollar properties that
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they bought from, you know, whatever they could trade in at the thrift store. Is it true?
24:59
No. It's just not. Now, there's a little subtlety to that answer. But let me tell you why I just
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out-and-out say no. And I'm going to acknowledge some of this is going to vary depending on what
25:11
country we're talking about. I'm mostly focusing on the US because that's where I know the data
25:15
best and the culture the best. So if you look at US census data on median incomes, whether that's
25:23
household or family or personal, it doesn't matter. They are at all time highs for millennial
25:29
aged adults. They are making more money adjusted for inflation than boomers were at the same age.
25:35
So when I've written about this, even when I say adjusted for inflation in all caps,
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somebody on Twitter has to say, now show me adjusted for inflation because nobody believes it.
25:45
Right. Nobody believes it. But this is US census data. It's not like this is some survey that I did
25:50
through some company, you know, that got 1,000 people. This is the official data that we've got.
25:56
It's very solid. Okay, come on pushback. That's what it shows. What's that?
26:02
You cannot push back yet or do you want to finish that thought? I'll say a few more things
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and then you're welcome to push back. Absolutely. So median incomes very high. Home ownership rates
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are actually only a couple of percentage points lower for millennials at the same age compared
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to you gen-exers and boomers. Now on the first acknowledged last couple of years have been tough.
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But if you look at especially the first wave of millennials born in the 80s,
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most of them were buying their first houses in the 2010s. Well, that was the exact same time
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everybody's like, well, he was never able to buy a house. So we got totally screwed. If you look
26:43
at housing affordability, it was very high during that time in the US because housing prices had
26:51
crashed after the housing bubble burst during the Great Recession and more to trade for very low.
26:59
So they got the best of both worlds. So the millennials born in the 80s who bought during that time
27:05
are sitting pretty. Those who didn't, not so much. That was born in the 90s, not so much. But a big
27:13
two thirds chunk of the millennials did pretty well in the housing market because what people forget
27:19
is that when boomers are buying their houses in the 80s, mortgage rates were 17%.
27:25
So housing affordability was actually pretty bad. Right. But 17, 17% of a nickel and a
27:32
heipney is still not a lot. It's not that extreme. If you look at the actual mortgage payments,
27:40
it's not that extreme. Now, absolutely what has changed is the down payment. So millennials had to
27:47
come up with a bigger down payment than boomers did. That's absolutely true. Even adjusted for inflation,
27:53
absolutely true. A lot of their boomer parents helped them with that for one thing.
27:57
Yeah. And if you look at the month, the month cost, it's virtually at down.
28:02
Interesting. Okay. So I think the home situation may be different in the US than it is in Australia.
28:09
We didn't have a big property crash during the Great Recession. So there was a minor correction
28:16
after COVID and there was a minor correction then. But we didn't even, Australia didn't even
28:19
slip into recession during the Great Recession. I think not for more than one or two quarters.
28:24
And also in Australia, home loans are variable over the course of the, so you don't get to take
28:30
advantage of the low interest rates for very long. There's, yeah, you might get a fixed rate for
28:34
three years, four years if you're lucky, five years at the absolute most. But then you've still got
28:38
the remainder of a 30 year loan and it floats around. The US is a bit of an outlier in having fixed
28:43
rate, you know, very, very, very long fixed rate mortgages. I think that's because of Fannie Mae and
28:48
Freddie Mac, which I don't even know what they are or understand, but hey, there you go.
28:53
In terms of the incomes being comparable, even adjusted for inflation,
28:57
isn't there something to be said for the expectation that you're going to be able to
29:02
live a life of dignity and relative opulence compared to your peers and compared to what you see
29:10
reflected in the media around you such that what would have been a decent income
29:16
30 or 40 years ago will only provide you with the living standards of 30 or 40 years ago
29:23
today, which is just not going to cut it. I mean, your expectation today is that if you don't have
29:27
two television sets and you don't have, you know, devices and you don't have the iPads and so on,
29:33
then you're falling behind. So very little of our sense of well-being comes in absolute terms.
29:41
Right. I mean, there's a there's an online about how, you know, you're rich if you make more than
29:46
your brother-in-law. Exactly. So is that, you know, so in another way, in other words, millennials have
29:53
some right to feel like they're hard done by because they might technically be earning as much as
29:58
the boomers were at their age, but that doesn't get them as high on the totem pole as they'd need
30:04
to be to feel the same. So, and I think feel is the key or there because it does get some higher,
30:11
you know, objectively higher on an objective totem pole of like you start with the caveman
30:17
and then you go with the trajectory of like the caveman gradually evolves into into modern man.
30:23
But if you take a snapshot of 2024, they're not as high up that totem pole as their parents were
30:31
in 1995. I'm not sure I get the logic, but I mean, I think some of it is that one thing that people
30:40
forget is that yes, the price of some things like childcare and education and housing have outpaced
30:47
inflation, but other things are cheaper than they used to be or corrected for inflation.
30:52
Televisions are a great example. Any kind of computer or smartphone or electronic device
30:59
is much cheaper than it used to be. So, the whole thing about having two televisions, well,
31:05
yeah, it's much easier to do that because televisions are so much cheaper now than they used to be.
31:11
Yeah, but I do think that expectations piece does play in there, especially given the millennial
31:16
childhood of extremely high expectations, lots of optimism. How could those expectations
31:22
possibly have been fulfilled because they're so high that comes partially from individualism
31:27
and partially from parenting, but it's also again coming back to technology. Think about someone
31:35
in 1955, you know, say a boomer kid at that age, at that year, and when they looked around them,
31:44
maybe they would see things on TV that was usually fairly solidly middle class people.
31:50
Also, they're going to be looking around their town and they might see like the one or two,
31:54
you know, truly well off rich people in their town. Now, rich people are everywhere on reality
32:01
TV, on social media, everywhere, and it's very, very easy to consume that content and get the idea
32:10
that you're really poor, even if you're not. Got it. Yeah. I mean, just to tease out the point
32:16
that I was trying to make, if you parachute someone from today, out on an average income into the 1950s,
32:23
they're fabulously wealthy, that doesn't mean that they're going to feel fabulously wealthy on a
32:29
daily basis today. And you can make the reverse thought experiment. You can take a wealthy person
32:33
from the 50s and put them today, and they won't believe how wealthy, even, you know, the working
32:39
poor seem today in terms of their creature comforts. But yeah, and that is the other thing we have to
32:45
keep in mind like, and that poverty rates are way down. That's the other thing it's not acknowledged
32:53
often in this conversation is the number of people who are truly poor is much, much less than it
32:59
was say in the 1950s, at least in the US. It's gone way, way, way down. And it's, but, you know,
33:06
in terms of how you feel today, we're talking about immediate income. That means you're, that means,
33:12
you know, the 50% mark. And so that number is higher. Yeah. Or millennials than it was for gen extortion
33:19
boomers at the same age, not by a ton, but people think it's lower and it's actually higher. And
33:24
people seem to think that there are more poor people as well and that poverty is getting worse.
33:28
Yeah. I mean, I'm with you that yes, the data of there's not certainly in absolute terms,
33:35
but let me come back to the relative term again, as inequality grows and as our ability to
33:40
spy on people at the very top grows, you can certainly have a sensation of being left behind,
33:48
which translates as I am poor or there are lots of poor people around, even if those poor people,
33:54
yeah, are technically 50% richer than the poor people of 15 years ago.
34:01
And that, yeah, that may be true. A lot of it is, I think, in that, in that perception piece.
34:05
Yeah. So why has that perception changed?
34:10
I think social media, rally TV, a lot of those things have, have a lot to do with it.
34:16
And just individualism as well. That at base, that kind of builds up the idea of the self
34:23
as being very important. It's related. It tends to correlate with materialism,
34:28
it tends to correlate with high expectations. And those are all things that would make someone
34:32
and say has a median income feel like they weren't actually doing that well.
34:36
Right. I mean, I can hear economically leftist listeners listening to this and thinking,
34:42
yeah, but we're aligning the, you know, the the inability of modern liberal democracies
34:48
to share the wealth as well as they should have. And we're pretending that there's no there,
34:53
because everybody is supposed to be a perfectly rational, calculating machine about their own
34:57
well-being in comparison to some imaginary person who they never met in their grandparents'
35:02
generation. But the reality is we're very productive societies. We're not doing a very good job
35:07
of sharing it around. We're not doing a very good job of addressing the economic concerns of people
35:12
who then go on to vote for the far right in France or for Donald Trump in the United States.
35:17
And who find cultural excuses to release their anxiety and their sense of frustration about
35:23
the fact that the system is rigged against them is right. And that's a very, very Gen Z thing is
35:29
to say the system is rigged. And, you know, I think again, we have to take a little bit of a step
35:34
back that yes, income inequality is way too high. However, the biggest increase in income inequality
35:40
happened between 1980 and 2000. That was a long time ago. It has not, it has continued to
35:48
inch up, but not even close to the pace that it increased in the 1980s and 1990s. And were millennials
35:56
depressed and saying that the system was rigged when they were in high school, when in
36:01
income inequality was actually increasing faster, they were not. Gen Z says that even though they're
36:07
not witnessing as much change in that area, and they will say that very young that the system
36:13
is rigged and in those types of ideas. And I think that is rooted in that really pronounced
36:19
generational break between millennials and Gen Z from optimism to pessimism.
36:24
Have has Gen Z persuaded millennials of this point because now millennials seem to agree.
36:29
And in fact, many Gen X is agree, whether you're watching Russell Brand or, you know, Joe Rogan
36:35
whoever it might be, there is a relentless stick at the moment that the system is stitched up
36:41
against us all. Yeah. And I think you're exactly right. It may not be Gen Z necessarily convincing
36:48
millennials, but millennials growing up being disappointed and thinking I didn't get what I expected
36:55
to get. And then just the general push toward negativity that seems to be pervasive in the culture
37:03
and has been for about 10 or 15 years has started to move up the age scale to millennials.
37:10
So I, Gen, the subtitle of your book of your second to last book is why today's super connected
37:17
kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy, and completely unprepared for
37:22
adulthood and what that means for the rest of us. It's seven years since that was published,
37:28
therefore it's presumably a decade since you started thinking about writing it. Has anything
37:33
changed since then? In almost all cases, the graphs in that book, the line just kept going
37:40
in the same direction, whether it was up or down. So in generations when I worked on the Gen Z
37:47
chapter, I grabbed a lot of those graphs and just updated them and they kept going.
37:53
So Gen Z teenagers now, compared to seven years ago, are even less likely to have a
37:57
driver's license or have a paid job or drink alcohol. They are even more likely to be depressed
38:04
or to be admitted to the emergency room for self-harm. Almost all of the big trends have just kept
38:11
going in the same direction. So I recently spoke to the head of pediatric mental health at one
38:17
of the big hospitals in Australia about what's going on with the young people. I'm sure it's
38:22
the same in the States, but something like one in five boys between the age of eight and twelve.
38:28
His diet has a diagnosable mental condition. Then there are all the statistics that you cite
38:34
about self-harm among adolescent girls, Jonathan Heitz been banging on about this. And this mental
38:40
health pediatrician was basically saying, look, life is really tough for people. I see families
38:45
who are sleeping in tents in campgrounds because they can't afford a home because the cost of
38:49
living crisis is getting out of control because rents are very high because he's attributing this
38:55
to economic factors. You would presumably have a different explanation about what's going on with
39:00
youth mental health. What would you always be? Well, at least in the US, the economic
39:07
explanation doesn't fit the diet at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite that we had the
39:12
great recession. That did have a big effect on people. There were a lot of foreclosures.
39:16
The unemployment rate went way up. And all of that happened around 2007, 2008, 2009,
39:23
unemployment peaked in 2010. Then by 2012, things were finally starting to improve.
39:31
And between 2012 and when COVID hit, unemployment went way down.
39:36
It's just everything. Poverty very went down. Sheldon poverty went down.
39:43
Every economic indicator that you can point to improve between 2011 and 2019.
39:48
That's exactly when teen depression doubled in the US.
39:51
And that's true here as well. I mean, the Australian economy is good.
39:54
No, I can explain that. Yeah. We have solid growth, not quite as strong as America's,
39:59
our stock market is good, not quite as strong as America's, but on the counterpoint,
40:03
we have less inequality, we have higher median incomes, we have lower poverty rates.
40:09
So yeah, there's something going on about the interpretation. This is coming back to absolute
40:14
data, the binary that we were talking about before, with absolute data versus the feeling of how
40:21
we're doing. So let's talk about social media and devices and reality TV and wherever else you
40:29
want to go. What is shaping our feelings about how we're doing and how is that translating
40:35
into the mental condition of kids? Yeah. So we have to ask, given that 2012 is such a
40:42
turning point in the data in the US, and Australia, and the UK, and in countries around the world
40:49
for mental health. That's around when loneliness goes up, depression goes up, self harm goes up,
40:54
some countries and some groups, suicide goes up, we see that as a huge turning point
41:00
that early 2010's period. So what happened? So wasn't the economy? A lot of other explanations
41:07
that have been offered are US specific, like school shootings or the opioid epidemic,
41:12
or those are things that have infected the UK and Australia as much, for example. So that does
41:17
it fit. I have a subset called Generation Attack and I went one of them, I went through 13,
41:22
alternative explanations for why depression might have got out. None of them fit. What does fit
41:30
is end of 2012, that is the first time that the majority of Americans owned a smartphone,
41:36
pretty similar in the UK and Australia. Social media was at a turning point around that time as well,
41:42
because say 2009 only about half of teens in the US used social media every day.
41:50
Then it became more and more popular to use it every day. It became almost mandatory.
41:55
Facebook bought Instagram around that time, the algorithm started to become much more
41:58
sophisticated on social media. People on the platforms for longer, the iPhone that was
42:05
introduced around that time was the first with the front facing cameras to start taking more
42:09
selfies. We had much more image-based, much more mandatory social media that used much more
42:13
often and the ability of the smartphone right around that time too. So for teens, it's not just
42:23
the growth of these technologies. It's also around the same time that the decline in them spending
42:29
time with their friends in person began to rapidly accelerate. They also started to spend less time
42:36
sleeping. So you put this together, I don't think this is the whole explanation, but it's a good chunk
42:42
of it. It's interesting, less time sleeping, less time with their mates in person,
42:47
and more time alone looking at a small rectangle. That doesn't sound like a very good formula
42:52
for mental health. And sure enough, it's not. And then you get into all of the content and
42:58
cyber bullying and body image issues and everything on social media. There's so many different
43:04
mechanisms. That's why they get such a compelling explanation, not just that it happened at the same
43:09
time. That's still not enough. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Do we have any causal
43:14
obviously? This is the old conundrum of statistics about noticing correlations versus causations.
43:19
Is there any causal data here or is this a hunch? So, well, correlations are much more than a hunch
43:26
first. That people often misinterpret the idea that correlation is not causation. To me,
43:31
correlation is never causation and that's not the case. It just means that a causing b is only one
43:36
of the possibilities. So, I think there's a couple answers to this. So, first, we can take the
43:43
group level and the individual level. Take the group level that we're talking about that rise
43:47
in depression over time. Well, if we're going to say reverse causation, that it's kids who are depressed
43:53
and then they spend more time on devices, you'd have to say, okay, teen depression doubles for
43:58
some completely unknown reason around the world that nobody's been able to figure out yet.
44:02
And that's why they bought smartphones. That's why they start spending more time on social media.
44:06
It really doesn't fit that reverse causation argument.
44:10
And then the third factors that are often used to explain the correlation don't fit either
44:16
because you're looking at the average. Okay, so then on the individual level, let's a whole other
44:20
set of data that, for example, the more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely
44:26
it is he or she will be depressed. Often the difference between the non-users and the heavy
44:33
users, twice as many of the heavy users are depressed compared to the light one, so it's not a small
44:38
length, but correlational. So, how can we do experiments? You really can't randomly assign teenagers
44:46
to spend eight hours a day on social media versus not. Questionable and its ethics and feasibility.
44:54
So what people have done instead is kind of the opposite idea. They've asked usually young adults
45:00
often university age to cut back or give up on give up social media for a certain period of time
45:06
compared to those who just continue their normal use. Then they measure happiness and
45:10
loneliness and depression. And the majority of those studies, especially those that follow people
45:13
for two weeks or more, have found that cutting back or giving up social media has
45:20
meant at the end of that time more happiness and less depression.
45:23
Fascinating. Is there a collective action problem on addressing this? The sense that I
45:31
get is that not just that I get, I know that there's data on this in terms of opinion polls when
45:37
you poll people in their late teens in early 20s. If you ask them how much they value their own
45:43
presence on social media, they value it very, very highly. But when you give them the option of
45:48
the thought experiment of nobody being on social media, they vastly prefer that to the option of
45:54
either them being on it or off it, which raises then like a public policy question and a public
45:59
health question rather than an individual restraint question. Exactly. And that's what we have to
46:05
acknowledge. And that's, I think, why so many teens are struggling and so many parents are
46:10
struggling to help their kids because there's the idea of like, okay, we can put these restrictions
46:17
on. But then there's the fear of missing out. There's mom, everybody else is doing it.
46:21
There's what am I going to miss if I'm not on social media? And it's also the other collective
46:28
action problem is if a teen wants to act like it's 1985 and there is no social media and there
46:34
are no smartphones, who are they going to go out with when all their mates are on social media
46:41
alone in their bedrooms? Even if they're not going out, then they're not going to know about where
46:45
they're going out because they're not going to get the message about going out. No one's going to
46:48
text them individually to tell them where the party is. That's all being organized on what's
46:52
happening on the phone. They don't know. They won't. I know they don't. Like, had a cool idea.
46:57
It's crazy, Jean. You're such a gen X, you know, so are you picking up the telephone? Do you pick
47:02
up the telephone and call people or do you text? Both. But do you, you don't have this kind of
47:08
pathological fear, which I may just be young enough to have of like calling, I mean, calling
47:14
people unless it's unless someone's mother has died, I'm not calling you, you know, what's
47:19
then we have to do a stupid chitchat thing where we pretend to ask each other how the day was
47:23
and what we're up to and this and that. Well, social psychology suggests that you should be doing
47:27
that. It's actually good for your mental health. When people do that, they report
47:32
feeling happier and more connected to other people, even the same people who have
47:35
derided doing that to begin with, whether that's calling somebody or having a conversation with
47:40
someone on a train. Those are pretty cool studies. Do you call, do you call the takeaway joint or do
47:44
you order it on an app? Well, I tend to have my husband tends to do that. He's, he likes driving.
47:55
I don't, I mean, I'll do it, but he actually really likes getting in the car.
48:01
Yeah, I mean, I, this is an ongoing debate between my friends and I about people, you know, who
48:05
just have a, the idea of calling, you know, a Chinese restaurant to place my order for them to
48:11
deliver it. It seems like such a tremendous waste of time when I could do it on an app, but some
48:14
people kind of like that, you know, and sometimes the app will take longer. Yeah, sure. But then,
48:19
you know, you feel like I think I think it is easier for somebody to get the order wrong.
48:23
Yes, yes, but that's part of the messy reality of life, Jane. That's part of living with other
48:28
human beings on this crazy planet. That's true. I feel like the things that you were talking about in
48:34
Igen have suddenly made a resurgence in 2024, largely as a result of Jonathan Heights book,
48:40
the anxious generation. And we're all now ringing our hands about this. How do you feel? I mean,
48:45
you're probably partly gratified by this, but is there any sense of you that goes, dude, I was
48:50
writing about this, I published this seven years ago, man. Yeah, I have had that thought admittedly.
48:57
Yes, but this is a natural evolution of things is when you're first, and I don't know, I don't
49:05
I don't want to claim too strongly that I was first. There's certainly been many people
49:09
before me talking about the dangers of too much screen time and and but still the idea that this
49:17
rise and depression among teens might be linked to smartphones and social media. I was kind of
49:22
yeah, and when you're first, people always think you're wrong. And then the natural evolution is
49:27
slowly as time goes by and I'm biased here, but if you're lying on solid data from teens themselves
49:32
going straight to the source, you're not asking their parents or, you know, managers, what they
49:36
think of young employees, you actually got data from teens and young adults. There's a pretty
49:42
good chance you're going to be right. Yeah, right. And can you just tease apart when we talk about
49:46
screen time? I think they'll often I speak to people about this and they say, oh, this is just the
49:50
natural evolution. You know, people were worried about newspapers, they were worried about television,
49:55
they were worried about radio. Of course, we're worried about the new technology. There's nothing
49:59
wrong with my child playing some educational video games on the iPad. And I say, no, no, no,
50:05
we're not talking about educational video games on the iPad, we're talking specifically about
50:10
algorithmic social media, at least in my world. How do you divide up the different things that
50:16
we might be doing online? Yeah. So the tough part is the data that we've got is only okay
50:25
on that question. It's not great because the studies that have been able to really dig into what
50:31
exactly are people doing like more like content, like really atomized, not just that they're on
50:37
the iPad, not just that they're on social media, but like they're watching cat videos as opposed to
50:41
videos about being depressed tend to be small sample size if they exist at all. So the big
50:48
data sets, the national representative data sets that we've got are more of a blunt instrument.
50:53
They're asking how much time do you spend on social media? How much time do you spend watching
50:57
videos? How much time do you spend gaming? How much time do you spend online? And in a lot of
51:04
data sets, when you do that, particularly like one in the UK, the links between depression and
51:11
screen time are much stronger for social media and general internet use than for gaming and TV.
51:17
It doesn't show up in every data set though. And I think that has to do with the fact that the
51:22
lines have blurred, especially in recent years, because TikTok is that social media are watching
51:28
videos. It could be either one. It is algorithmic, algorithmic. So I think that's a difficulty.
51:36
And then we also don't know about the content that people are watching. Are they watching
51:42
educational videos on YouTube or are they watching misinformation and going down a negative
51:49
wormhole content? What's your suspicion, Jean, about the salience of social media versus the
51:55
salience of algorithms? Because my gut tells me that algorithms, I mean, I would put TikTok
52:03
as problematic because I think there's something pernicious about 22-year-old software engineers in
52:11
Silicon Valley designing the most addictive and efficacious, well, in TikTok's cases. Not
52:17
Silicon Valley, it's in the hallways of the Chinese Communist Party, but wherever it is,
52:21
trying to create a catnip that inexorably distracts your attention and holds you guys for as long as
52:28
it can, but what's your instinct? I think that the algorithms are definitely a big part of the
52:36
problem. I wouldn't say they were the only problem, but they are a big part of the problem because
52:41
then they are and there's just two big problems with the algorithms. Probably more, but
52:47
two come to mind. One is that they keep people on, they act for longer, and keep them coming back
52:53
more often. So then that amount of time that they're spending has a bigger chance of crowding out time
52:59
for sleep, time for face-to-face social interaction, time for exercise, all these things that are
53:04
much more beneficial for mental health. Then there's the problem that you can't reset the
53:09
algorithm. So on an app like TikTok where everything is basically the 4U page, if a teen starts
53:15
watching negative content, they just keep getting more and more and more negative content.
53:23
Jesus, when you put it like that, you have to delete your account, create an entire
53:27
new account, and then stop watching anything that resembles what you were previously watching,
53:32
and that is not going to happen. That's bracing and kind of alarming. What about the social media
53:43
downsides that we hear people talk about a lot that I have to do with bullying or comparison
53:49
between you and the hottest person in your school, fear of missing out. I'm not the one who's
53:55
currently on a vacation in Fiji with my wealthy parents, etc., etc. So that's often going to be
54:02
Instagram and met up back when it was Facebook, found that themselves. Their own internal research
54:10
that was leaked a few years ago found that Instagram led to body image issues and social comparison
54:18
and the academic literature shows the same that what happens with Instagram. I'm thinking
54:27
to have the internal research from meta and this page they showed which they literally called
54:31
a grief spiral about how it starts. Say a teen girl, you know, it's looking all the at all the
54:36
perfect bodies on Instagram starts to compare herself, feels wanting, then it becomes okay,
54:45
what do I do about that? Start searching for inspiration, content, which is a thing.
54:50
Even pro anorexia, very common on Instagram sites that will teach teen girls how to lose extreme
54:58
amounts of weight. And then it can in some cases end up in that spiral of just getting worse and
55:07
worse. Do you know anything about distractability and deep work and focus over the course of
55:16
generations? Many of us have an anecdotal experience inside our own heads of finding it harder
55:23
to read a long novel. And so just coming back to TikTok and Instagram reels and so on, this
55:31
quick jumpy dopamine, dopaminergic kind of flicker of attention grabbing. Do we know if that
55:40
actually has a different impact on the way that we can perform deep work and consume deep material
55:48
across generations? We do know that young adults for example tend to spend only a few seconds
55:57
on each thing on their phone. So a couple of studies have looked at this and they switch tasks
56:00
really, really, really quickly. And we also know that reading for pleasure has just plummeted
56:08
among teens. So when you're asking about books or asking about magazine articles or newspaper articles
56:16
or just online news articles, it's all of it has gone down. Books it's the most stark.
56:23
The percentage who say they read zero books for pleasure used to be almost nothing and now it's
56:29
like 40 percent among 18 year olds. So we definitely see that whether that's because they're
56:36
spending a lot of that time on TikTok or if it's because they can't concentrate, I suspect it's
56:40
some of both. Right. And do we know whether or not stretching all the way back to like the
56:45
greatest generation of the silent generation? Do we have any data about the ability to produce
56:50
deep work or to focus pre social media? Like does it wax and wind? Is it fluctuate?
56:55
Or have we been pretty sorry? Not that I know up. Now I'd be happy to be wrong about this. You
57:00
or many of your listeners find a study that has had looked at its attention span, you know,
57:05
across several generations say at the same age. I haven't seen that. I'm not aware of that.
57:11
But I hope it's out there. Yeah. Because I mean that you can imagine that as technology
57:17
improves in every era that it's old people feel like young people are distractable and
57:24
taskswitching way too fast. I mean, I was I probably taskswitched faster than my parents did
57:29
and they probably taskswitch faster than their parents did, right? As the world speeds up. And
57:33
I'm certainly more capable and adept at tap dancing and spinning a lot of plates at once
57:39
and showing up at the airport, you know, too late for my parents comfort and all that sort of
57:44
stuff. That's partially age. Right. It might be. Oh, I'm not sure. I think when they were my
57:50
age, they were showing up three hours before the plane to plane left. But I know by the way,
57:54
you're reminding me, I just noticed that there's a trend on TikTok at the moment, which valorizes
57:59
what young people are calling raw dogging on error planes, which is not a sexual act. It's
58:05
the idea that when you get when you get on a plane, you don't bring your phone and you don't
58:10
bring any electronics and you don't watch the seatback TV. You just might put on like the you
58:15
might just put on the map, the inflat map and you just look out the window for that whole flight.
58:19
Like this is a novel thing because this is the way that we flew in our generation. I mean,
58:23
in the 90s, I would go and visit my my grandparents in New Zealand and there was no seatback
58:27
television. Better bring a book. Yeah, bring a book or do some coloring in. But like this is this
58:32
like weird thing that young people are doing, which is like they're the first people in the universe
58:36
who've ever discovered the possibility of being on a plane without spending the whole time
58:39
surfing Instagram Reels and what's happening with your friends?
58:42
Right. Yeah, it's crazy. What about communal experiences and shared experiences? Because this is
58:48
another thing while we're on the subject of TikTok and Instagram Reels and algorithms.
58:54
When I was a boy, you could come to school and everyone would have watched Seinfeld or they might
59:00
have watched Letterman and there were common cultural touchstones, right? We all felt like we were
59:06
kind of consuming the same stuff. And now not only do we have lots and lots of things that we
59:12
can watch on streamers, but the things that we can watch on algorithmically devised platforms
59:19
like Instagram and TikTok, we can't even I mean, we're not even sharing from the same menu
59:24
of items because there's only one version of our feed in the world and there are billions of
59:30
different versions of that. Do we have any idea what that's doing or what the implications of that?
59:37
Yeah, I thought about that a lot in writing generations because as Gen X or I realized we were
59:42
the last generation to have a really unified pop culture experience. And I think that's something
59:48
that really brings Gen Xers together that Gen Z and Polars don't really have. I mean, there's a few
59:56
things that have become a phenomenon that they talk about that most of them have seen, but they
1:00:03
and they do have a common culture of certain memes that they talk about, but it's not the same
1:00:10
as everybody watching a show and then the next day talking about around the water cooler the way
1:00:14
it was common in the 80s and 90s. This is even bleeding into politics now in the sense that I was
1:00:22
thinking about the way that politicians will speak to their base and it'll sound like you don't
1:00:29
even I remember the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And Trump was just
1:00:36
saying things that I'd never heard. I didn't always talking about and you know, then I would
1:00:39
be explanatory thing. Oh, you know, okay, so QAnon thinks this and like they're there. But like
1:00:45
so many people are familiar with these touchstones that he's talking about and I was living in the
1:00:50
States at the time. So it wasn't because I was a foreigner. There are just these sub communities of
1:00:54
millions and millions of people who all have a common cultural experience that not only do I not
1:00:59
share, I'm not even aware of them having. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why we have
1:01:07
such big generation gaps now is because our communication platforms are completely different
1:01:13
based on ancient generation. For Gen Z, it's TikTok and very, very two boomers are on TikTok.
1:01:24
Yeah, right. What are they on Facebook? They're on Facebook. And so young people abandoned Facebook
1:01:30
when grandma was on Facebook. Yeah. That's right. It's all photos of grandchildren. I'm a
1:01:37
whole lot of days at the moment. Getting back to the trajectory of kind of justice and you know,
1:01:42
what old the last thing that I the one thing that I'm very mindful of not doing is being the old guy
1:01:47
on the porch waving his fist at young people are going like kids these days, you know, are broken
1:01:52
or stupid. That doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't ways in which kids these days are broken
1:01:57
and stupid and deserved to be called out for it. And so I'm trying to, you know, separate what
1:02:02
which is the one from which is the other. And at the beginning of this conversation, you said that
1:02:07
there's a legacy that Gen Z is building upon of, I suppose, justice. I mean, maybe this is the idea
1:02:14
that the arc of, you know, justice is long or whatever whatever about Muslim was it bends towards
1:02:20
justice, right? The arc of history. One of the things that I hear people of my generation and older
1:02:27
worry about in new social justice movements is the sense that actually social justice is being
1:02:35
derailed from a sense of the sanctity of the individual and individual empowerment and is becoming
1:02:42
what Coleman Hughes would call sort of neo-racist that, you know, I alluded to this before that there's
1:02:48
an identitarianism. There's a group thing. There's a fragility. There's a valorization of victim
1:02:54
hood that is actually less like Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Mandela and sort of in a way
1:03:02
more like an inversion of historical tribalisms that we might have previously associated with the
1:03:09
white supremacist movement. So something like that. Is it fair for us to worry about that? Do you
1:03:16
regard that as being a blip on the Gen Z radar? Like how do you interpret what's going on?
1:03:23
Yeah, it's a little bit of a mystery, honestly. But you know, I think it's kind of the illogical outcome
1:03:34
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