Pod Insights Search Engine What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones? About this episode A group of teenagers agrees to allow a filmmaker to record the things they do on their phones for a year-long experiment. To see the world they see through their phones, to encounter their algorithms. The results are honest, at times pretty upsetting, and tell us a lot about the internet that Gen-Z finds itself on. In the middle of our big, confusing, national argument about teenagers and their phones, a few answers.
Lauren Greenfield's documentary series, Social Studies https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/social-studies
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Transcript 8,409 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:42 PJ Vogt? you will slowly bankrupt your favorite podcast-turned-stylish-apparel company. Also, if you're an incognito mode subscriber, we may have accidentally resent you your welcome email this week. I am sorry about that. We switched backend providers and there were some hiccups. If you're having any trouble with your feed, any interruption, any unusual emails, just please shoot an email to [email protected] . They're super responsive. They'll get you sorted. We'll include a link to their email in our show notes as well. All right. After some ads, here's the show. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income
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3:55 PJ Vogt? I was watching this documentary series the other day and caught this bit that felt at first like maybe the most normal scene in American life since the invention of the teenager. Sydney, who is 18 years old, is in her bedroom, sort of listlessly scrolling on her phone. She thumbs, she swipes, she puts it down, picks it up again, puts it back down, calls out to summon her mom.
4:18 Speaker 01 Mom!
4:21 PJ Vogt? There's a vibe. If you've lived in a house with a teenager, their moods can feel like these mysterious, rolling weather patterns. We can tell here that a storm front is coming in. Although, maybe we're not yet sure why.
4:36 Speaker 02 Mama!
4:38 PJ Vogt? Sydney's mom shows up, from whatever she'd been in the middle of. As for the question parents always ask when someone's this way.
4:45 Speaker 02 What's going on? I can't find an outfit.
4:48 PJ Vogt? She can't find an outfit.
4:49 Speaker 02 Do you want to look in my closet? No.
4:54 Speaker 02 What about this? Push it down on your shoulders. I wouldn't even know where to look in this pile. Let's see.
5:04 PJ Vogt? Even I, a person who often misses subtext, can pretty much tell what's going on here. This is not about choosing the correct fabric. Sydney, who is pretty, is not feeling pretty. Her mom is trying to help her feel pretty. Help her find the right outfit, the magical combination of clothes that might allow her to leave the house.
5:23 Speaker 02 I think jeans. No, no, I think flannel jeans. You don't. You do not. I actually think that's gonna look really good.
5:36 PJ Vogt? I grew up in a house with three sisters. This moody tug-of-war, "Does this look good?" "No, it doesn't." "Yes, it does." Conservatively, I watched it happen probably 15,000 times. But here's what's different. In this documentary series, which is called Social Studies, the director, Lauren Greenfield, has somehow persuaded a bunch of teenagers to record the contents of their phones for a year and share those contents with her. And so while this conversation's going on, you actually know, for once, what Sydney, the teenager, is really seeing.
6:11 PJ Vogt? As her mom holds up different, to me, indistinguishable, pieces of fabric, we know, from the view we've just had into the phone, what's on Sydney's mind. An infinite scroll of these impossibly fit women, wearing architectural outfits that flatter them perfectly. Sydney's mom does not know entirely what she's up against here. She, unlike us, cannot see into her daughter's phone. So she isn't imagining, like we are, these women from the internet invisibly filling up the room. She tries her best.
6:41 Speaker 02 It's more that you have to feel good in, you know, it's gotta, you gotta just feel good, boo, and you gotta be, it's gotta start in here and.
6:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm gonna just try maybe this with the skirts and then or jean shorts.
6:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:56 PJ Vogt? I was watching this series because I was hoping for some help, any guidance with a question I've been struggling with. On this show, sometimes we chase down usually little questions, questions that can be answered with a phone call or five, maybe some research. But the real questions that haunt me, actual me in my own life, don't tend to be resolvable. They're not quests you get to go on. They're places you just have to live for a while.
7:22 PJ Vogt? I grew up on the internet. I grew up on my phone. I've had all sorts of thoughts and feelings about what I got from that and what I lost. But now I'm helping to raise kids and I'm seeing them on their phones, on their internet, and I'm not sure what to make of it. There's been a big roiling debate nationally about this. One of the biggest bestselling books for the past year has been The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. He believes that the high rates of anxiety and depression in this generation of teenagers might be caused by smartphones and social media. I, like I think most people, am more convinced that something is going on than I am convinced that I know exactly what that something is or what the right thing to do about it might be.
8:05 PJ Vogt? Which is why I found myself watching this documentary experiment. And it was strange. I don't think I've ever watched someone else's internet for very long, heard their algorithms whispers, the people it wanted them to envy, the products it wanted them to buy. Someone can tell you, for instance, that the internet makes some teenage girls feel bad about how they look, and you'll nod, imagining you think you know what that means.
8:31 PJ Vogt? It's an entirely different experience to be sat in front of a teenage girl's internet, thrown into her phone, forced to see things from her perspective for many hours. I had to talk to the filmmaker who pulled this off.
8:50 Speaker 03 I think one of the things that a parent and a filmmaker has in common in modern society is that you're missing like 50% or maybe 75% of what's going on nowadays.
9:04 PJ Vogt? Lauren Greenfield, she's covered the very wealthy. She's tried to understand the NIS culture among teenage girls. Her power is she lets us, her audience, into worlds that are typically hidden.
9:16 Speaker 03 I remember when I started making documentaries, I was so excited by something called a phone tap, where when you were filming with a character and you had permission from both sides, you would film their conversation on the phone and then you could make a scene out of it because you could hear the other side. And now people are looking at something or typing in something and there's a whole dialogue going on and you're just left out of it, both as a filmmaker and as a parent. So it was really exciting to get inside.
9:47 PJ Vogt? So I want to ask you a lot of questions about just how you made this. I'm just curious even, it's a very ambitious project. Like where did the idea from this come from? Like where did you even start to think about this?
9:58 Speaker 03 I mean, I had this idea that I wanted to look at how social media was impacting kids. And I came to social studies as a mother of two teenagers and saw this really distinct difference in my two boys. One was 14 and one was 20. And the 20-year-old just kind of like used social media, talked to his friends, you know, used the internet to get information. But he was a reader. It wasn't like a huge part of his life. It didn't make up his sense of his identity. Whereas my younger son, we would have constant battles over screen time. He got all his news from TikTok. It was important and it was a part
10:38 Speaker 03 of his identity and it was secret. He didn't want me in his phone. And that gave me the idea for doing this social experiment.
10:49 PJ Vogt? Lauren actually got this idea during COVID, when we were all stuck at home, when her kids, when many kids' screen time went totally stratospheric. COVID itself, a series of social experiments. Many of those experiments, in retrospect, about the internet. What happens to our culture when you put even more of it online? But Lauren, seeing how this was affecting her son, starts to think how she would ask her questions as a documentary series. She really wants to figure out how you'd basically film two overlapping documentaries at the same time. Both capturing the events happening in these teenagers' real lives and the events happening simultaneously in their phones, in their digital imaginations.
11:31 Speaker 03 There were months and months of development, trying to figure it out. First of all, there was the technical part. How do you capture the media in real time? How do you get it technically? Which was also a whole can of worms. Some of the apps disappear intentionally. And so how do you capture that? And we hired an engineer and could not figure out how to capture some of the apps in real time.
12:01 PJ Vogt? Wait, and so what you're saying is on an iPhone, there's something called screen recording. This is exactly what it sounds like. Where you can just say, "Everything that happens on my screen, record it and make a video file." I use that sometimes, like when my mom in Pennsylvania has a question about how to delete something. I'll go through the process on my phone and I'll send it to her. But what you're saying is something like Snapchat, which has disappearing images as part of its architecture. When you try to screen record that, it just won't show up?
12:28 Speaker 03 It tells the other person that you're screen recording, which for a kid is very awkward. So yeah, it's hard to record Snapchat. The engineer could not figure it out. For me, my son, who was 14, figured out the hack eventually. And I won't say what the hack is, because every time there is a hack, it gets shut down.
12:53 PJ Vogt? Oh my god.
12:57 Speaker 03 I wanted the social media to be layered on top of the live action so that you could have that experience of multitasking, having to ingest information at the same time.
13:14 PJ Vogt? I mean, it's totally hypnotic to watch. You mean that basically you're seeing like one of the opening scenes, they're doing the welcome assembly.
13:25 Speaker 04 Good morning, everybody. Make some noise.
13:31 Speaker 04 It's been a crazy year. You guys weren't able to be on campus and you had to do your whole freshman year.
13:39 PJ Vogt? Like it's a big assembly, all the kids are there. And the school administrator is talking about the luminaries who have gone to the school and he refers to, I think, like a basketball coach or basketball owner, Steve Kerr.
13:52 Speaker 04 And we want you to have a vision, kind of like Steve Kerr.
13:58 PJ Vogt? And one of the kids mishears it as Steph Curry. And in their mind, they're like, Steph Curry really go here? And you see a kid pull their cell phone out and then superimposed on the screen is them pulling up Google, Googling Steph Curry, seeing that he, Steph Curry didn't go to high school, whispering to the person next to them.
14:17 Speaker 05 Steph Curry? He didn't come here. I looked at her. They're lying.
14:23 PJ Vogt? She says, I looked it up, but they're lying. And like, it feels so private and strange that you're watching, because these things are like second mind views and you're watching someone's mental work where they're making an error, superimposed over the scene that's happening. And it's very, I'd never seen anything like that before.
14:43 Speaker 03 When I was filming that, I actually had no idea what Ella was writing.
14:50 Speaker 03 So that was a discovery in the edit where, you know, all of a sudden we, I mean, I could hear her, I had headphones and I could hear her talking, but I didn't know that she was making a mistake. So I thought it was funny because she was like, they're lying to us. But I didn't know that really she had the misinformation, which is such a perfect comment about social media.
15:15 PJ Vogt? Yes.
15:16 Speaker 03 And kids like thinking they're smarter than everybody and then like researching it and then not getting the right information.
15:23 PJ Vogt? It's a surprisingly intimate feeling, even just seeing a routine Google search on someone else's phone. Lauren said negotiating just the access took months and months. Finding the right teenagers, getting permission from them and from their parents, getting everybody comfortable with the process of filming and screen recording. Pre-production started in 2021, and then she started capturing the teenagers as they returned to school for their post-pandemic semester.
15:51 Speaker 03 I started at a school called Palli High in Pacific Palisades, actually famous recently for getting burned down in the fires. So the school's currently closed, unfortunately. It's a really interesting school because it's a public school, a charter school that draws from more than 100 ZIP codes. So it's incredibly diverse, although it's centered in the West Side of LA in a very wealthy area. But I work in a very organic way. And I started at Palli High. But by the end of it, we had kids coming from 10 schools all over LA. So it was a mix of public and private, of schools in different neighborhoods. I mean, LA has a wealth of diversity,
16:35 Speaker 03 and it was really important to me to have diversity in our group as kind of this case study. And the diversity wasn't just socioeconomic or in terms of race or class. It was also in terms of relationship with social media. Like, there's one kid, Jonathan, who never posts about himself. And there's another kid, Ellie, who had a viral fame incident when she was very young. So a lot of the kids had different kind of stories and relationships around social media. And they came from geography that was all over the map. And one of the really gratifying things has been
17:17 Speaker 03 that kids don't relate to the person that's from their class or race. They really bond based on the social media story and not the background. And I think that says something about this generation.
17:31 PJ Vogt? You mean that the kids that have viewed the person they identify with, it's like, did they get wounded by the internet in the same way? Or have the same nice experience?
17:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's what I found.
17:48 PJ Vogt? There's a lot of small takeaways that I found myself absorbing watching this. In the series, Lauren doesn't tell you what she thinks. She doesn't really make an argument. You're just allowed to notice things. And you do. I don't really know what podcasts are supposed to be for right now. But this week, with this question, I found myself wishing that instead of a podcast, Search Engine was a book club where somewhere in America, in a cozy living room at a convenient time, we just watch this thing and then talk about what we'd seen. In the conversations I've been having about the series with my friends here, I keep referencing this one party scene, this section about porn, and then this discussion at the series ending. Maybe I'll just walk you through those parts. So, part one, the party.
18:35 Speaker 05 I wanted to throw a party with Jack Schwartz because Jack has like a ton of friends, a ton of connections.
18:42 Speaker 06 Definitely every kid in LA knew about it. I'm pretty well-known, I guess, on the west side of LA.
18:48 PJ Vogt? This is Jack, the teenager throwing the party. Jack wears a lot of designer clothes. He has, I think, Givenchy sunglasses? He's very precocious about building his brand online. If you'd met him in high school in the 90s, I think you would call him a party promoter. But in this teenage world, he's more like a mogul, a person who's making money and gathering power by creating the spaces that other teenagers want to be seen in.
19:14 Speaker 06 I kind of did the marketing side of the party, which got a lot of people there. I don't want high schoolers to think like it's a random rager. I wanted to have that more like exclusive feeling. So we made it Instagram.
19:24 PJ Vogt? Jack explains how he strategically ginned up hype for the party through his private Instagram account. You could only see it if you'd been accepted.
19:31 Speaker 06 And we didn't accept everyone at the beginning. Each day, we accepted a few more people. They were texting me like, yo, can you accept me to your party? And then the week of, we told everyone. And that's just when it went crazy.
19:42 PJ Vogt? You see in the footage from the phones, all the requests from teenagers trying to follow the account for Jack's party. Lauren shows us on the phones the infinite queue of requests to get in, to follow Jack's account, and then we see as they start to get accepted.
19:58 Speaker 03 And Jack was charging kids for the parties. So they're paying for the party and he's making bank.
20:08 Speaker 06 And we had a line like going down the block. Even if it wasn't my party and I went to it, I would be like, damn, this is a fire party.
20:16 Speaker 07 Jack is the GOAT.
20:20 PJ Vogt? And now, we're at the party itself. Lauren's documentary crew is there. For a second, I wondered, why are these kids so comfortable being filmed? And then remembered, kids are always being filmed.
20:31 Speaker 05 The mosh pit was sweaty and it was just so claustrophobic, which is definitely euphoria vibes. And the drinking, the smoking.
20:43 PJ Vogt? A lot of what's happening here always has. The underage drinking, the hookups, the drug use. But weirdly, none of that's really the point. This party, which 20 years ago would have been a private place for these teenagers to do things that worry adults, now, the party's doing something new.
21:03 PJ Vogt? It's a place for them to continue this conversation they're having with the audiences they imagine await them online. Did they get into the party? Did they look hot at the party? Were they hanging out with the right people at the party?
21:18 Speaker 07 Where we at right now? We at Jack's motherfucking party. Where we at? Hey, are you late? Hey, fuck.
21:24 Speaker 06 Everyone was just showing off, like, oh, I'm at Jack's birthday party.
21:28 PJ Vogt? If you couldn't see their phones, you'd mistakenly think that the point of the party was to be there. In fact, the point, I was entirely, was to be able to broadcast online that you'd been there, ideally having done something outrageous. Normal behavior for celebrities, I think somewhat new behavior for teenagers. One teen at the party buys bad pills, Percocets supposedly. He overdoses, ends up in the hospital. He later posts from the hospital to Instagram to make a joke out of it, which really amuses Jack.
22:00 Speaker 06 He's OK now. He actually posted a photo on his story the next day. And then he did an Instagram post and he wrote this funny caption. "I knew that perk was fake, but I still ate it because I'm a gremlin." That was his caption.
22:20 PJ Vogt? It's hard not to notice how the algorithm rewards the teens as they demonstrate more extreme behaviors, how it reinforces their bids for attention, whether or not that attention is even positive. The logic of the system is familiar. Teens being deranged by TikTok and Instagram, like boomers got deranged by Facebook, or Gen Xers and millennials by Twitter. I asked Lauren about this.
22:46 PJ Vogt? I was struck watching it when you say, like, oh, these are teenagers who are making, what are teenage mistakes? I kept watching being astounded because I felt like they were having problems that I associate with fame, but they were just having them as essentially ordinary teenagers.
23:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:05 PJ Vogt? The other thing that I really felt was that, like, I felt like mostly what you were trying to do is just capture something true. But if your work was making an argument to me, the argument I felt that I was hearing as the story unfolds is that essentially teenagers are creatures who learn through comparison. The internet is a device that encourages and amplifies comparison, and that when you put these two things together, you get something that has a kind of nuclear energy to it.
23:37 Speaker 03 That's exactly right. And when you think about the crises that I've documented in the pre-social media age, like eating disorders, these are already things that thrive on social contagion. And when you add that to addiction and you add that to an algorithm designed for maximum engagement, it's a dangerous place for kids. And I think that party definitely felt very chaotic in a way that's scary in the sense of, like, you don't feel the moral
24:20 Speaker 03 covus of what's going on. But on the other hand, I feel like they're also, like, they were incredibly wise and they had strong ethics and judgment. And so it's kind of a contradiction.
24:39 PJ Vogt? It's what's so confusing about teenagers. They're not kids, they're not adults. They can be deeply intelligent. They can shock you with their thoughtfulness. There's a teen in social studies who works at a call center, supporting other teenagers who are having a hard time online. Another is just deeply obsessed with trying to get into a good college. These would be adults. They're on their paths. It's just that the internet is often steering them in the wrong direction. We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, pornography.
25:25 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character-driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands. Another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability.
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27:45 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show.
27:50 PJ Vogt? The second part of social studies I wanted to tell you about has to do mostly with teenagers' relationship to pornography and to sexually explicit content online more broadly. Watching social studies actually confirmed a suspicion I've had for a while, which is that we just don't talk about porn nearly enough. It's a part of our culture, and culture, we know, shapes our real-life behavior. And every other piece of culture we watch online, whether it's reality TV shows, White Lotus, even individual SNL skits, just gets endlessly dissected, overly dissected. It's politics weighed across far too many blogs and podcasts. But the values and culture of porn, like anything else, change, except here, we're
28:34 PJ Vogt? all a little too shy to remark on it. We couldn't talk about what we've seen without revealing that we've watched it at all, so we mostly just don't. New York Magazine, The Ringer, they're not analyzing the most-streamed porn this week. It's somehow the only thing that we don't want to recap. So, Social Studies is one of the first places where I've seen a group of people, teenagers, talking about the porn they watch and their feelings about it in public. You learn a lot, fast. Like, for instance, how it's become somewhat routine for these high school students to sell pictures of their bare feet online to adult strangers.
29:09 Speaker 08 There's like so many old men on social media that are like looking for feet pics. My friends have made a lot of money.
29:15 PJ Vogt? In the documentary, you see one of the teenagers Lauren's been following, Ivy. Ivy's lying on her bed, scrolling her phone. She encounters a foot fetish video on Instagram. And in the next screen, we just see how many accounts there are, on Instagram, on X, offering to buy feet pics. There's demand, and Meta's algorithm and X's are bringing the marketplace to the teens of Pally High, who can be, if they want, suppliers.
29:41 Speaker 08 My friends have made a lot of money.
29:43 PJ Vogt? There's group discussions among the teens in the show, and this is one of the things they talk about.
29:47 Speaker 08 We just kind of laugh about it. We're like, oh yeah, I made like $75 selling feet pics to some old guy. We don't judge each other for it, but we also don't like feel super empowered.
29:56 PJ Vogt? To the students, the feet pics thing, they seem to process it as something that's mostly harmless, but that also leaves them with a kind of psychic hangover. Watching these teens talk through this, though, a question formed in my mind. What even is a job of a teenager? We expect them to push boundaries. They're there to discover their autonomy, to learn, for instance, how to make their own money. When you're a teenager, really, you're wandering around the world, asking, pretty vulnerably, what about me is valuable? Another thing these teenagers, like all teenagers, want to learn is sex. What is it supposed to look like? How am I supposed to do it? And so, they turn to the internet, of course, we all did.
30:41 PJ Vogt? But I didn't understand that what they see and how it shapes them might be different from what I saw and how it shaped me. Here's director Lauren Greenfield.
30:54 Speaker 03 Teenagers have probably looked at girly magazines or some kind of book from their parents' library or whatever that sexy thing was. But now, the kids talked about, as early as third grade, seeing hardcore pornography and not just being available on computers or on their phones. And that was a revelation to me that the new sex education was actually pornography and social media.
31:27 PJ Vogt? I have to say, some of my core values, privacy, pre-speech, tell me to try not to be overly concerned about teenagers looking at pornography online. But I don't think I've appreciated that these teenagers are reporting finding this stuff earlier in life than they actually wanted to and seeing things when they were very young that really disturbed them.
31:50 Speaker 09 I'm serious, I can't fail. Let me hit me.
31:53 PJ Vogt? Again, we're seeing for once their algorithms. So we see the phones of these older teens. We see them watch a parade of BDSM influencers from TikTok. They're to teach their audiences some pretty questionable choking and slapping techniques, which then become a real-life norm. The students talk about this, too, in their group discussion.
32:12 Speaker 01 If you tell a guy, "Oh, I have kinks," they automatically assume that you want to be choked or slapped or something, and that's not what...
32:18 Speaker 10 And it's like, it's so, it's so dangerous. And then I also had friends being like, "I feel uncomfortable saying that I only like vanilla sex" because everyone was like, "You have to be kinky, you have to like all this stuff." And it totally, otherwise you're boring, you're lame. You don't want to get choked. There was this whole thing about, like, you had to be like a freak and you had to like, like all these things that are really dangerous if the guy just don't know what they're doing. And they don't, we're only like teenagers. We have no idea how to properly like choke someone or tie them up or anything.
32:49 PJ Vogt? What this adds up to that feels so new to me is that, crucially, these teens at Pally High, they're not describing the internet as a place that's helping them make sense of themselves and of their latent desires, the way it did for me and many of my peers. What they're saying is that their internet is pressuring everyone towards the sex they see online. And what we all see online, whether it's opinions or sex acts, is always going to be tuned towards the most outrageous, the most attention grabbing. What sticks out becomes popular. What's popular becomes the norm. I asked Lauren to help me make sense of all this. Now, you have this behavior that between two consenting adults might be one thing,
33:29 PJ Vogt? but like, asking a teenager to responsibly choke another teenager feels dangerous. Like, it feels like we've accidentally backslid into something that we didn't mean to because we wanted to make the phones as interesting as possible, so there could be ads for toilet paper on them, or whatever.
33:45 Speaker 03 Absolutely. I mean, that was one of the things that really shocked me, as a parent, but also just as a human, to see that BDSM was a trend. And not just like, a trend among some, but something that all of the kids were familiar with. Like, that was the thing about our group discussion, is you could really tell when something was in like, the minds of the whole group. And like, the BDSM thing was one. Not that everybody was participating, but everybody knew about this trend, and knew that it was a trend, and had been exposed to it in some way.
34:28 Speaker 03 And I remember going home and saying to my boys, like, "These kids are talking about this. Like, is this just in my group? Is this just in the school?" And they were like, "No, we know about this. This is what we hear girls like." And then I asked the 20-somethings in my office, and they were like, "Yep, that's what's happening." And I think what's really scary in episode four, which is the sex episode, is you start to see a connection between the violence depicted in these sexual scenes in social media and in pornography, and real violence among kids.
35:16 PJ Vogt? It's weird, though, because it's like they're watching.
35:23 PJ Vogt? I swear to God, I'm not nostalgic and conservative for a pre-internet era. I like the internet, I use the internet. I will defend the internet to many people. But, you know, if it was 1982 and this PG-13 movie came out that was all about the joys of BDSM, or an R-rated movie that teens were sneaking into, like, that's what would have actually happened. Then, like, you know, there would have been a Concerned PTA meeting, and people would have been like, teens are seeing this, you should have a conversation. Some parents would try to restrict it, others would have had the talk, whatever. But you would kind of know the media environment that the smaller people you're trying to help guide into bigger people were in.
36:05 PJ Vogt? And so you just have an idea about what conversations you wanted to even try to have. Instead, it's like the teenagers are just in their own internet.
36:12 Speaker 03 I agree with you that it's really unbelievable that adults allow this unregulated world when everywhere else in the world, TV and movies, you know, there's ratings and there's restrictions. And should we or should we have sex ed in school? And meanwhile, we're not in control of it anymore. And nobody is taking care of that. And even they don't want to see what they're seeing, and they can't control what they're seeing.
36:50 PJ Vogt? I really never appreciated the absurdity of this. Every month, I skim past another idiotic story about a book ban fight at a library somewhere. Some politician making hay about a children's book with a trans dad or something. We're fighting about libraries, as if libraries in 2025 are the average kid's go-to source of information. Meanwhile, the smartphone that anybody over 13 needs to participate in the class group text also contains an infinite library of pro-anorexia guides, Manosphere tutorials, BDSM misinformation. Conservative parents, progressive parents, most people have ideas about what they think is appropriate for kids and at what age.
37:33 PJ Vogt? Right now, though, if your kid is on the internet, they're effectively on their own. Which is not to suggest I know the answer to any of this. If there's some policy that could balance free speech online against the industrial smelting of our teenagers' egos, I'd support it. I just don't know that our current crop of politicians is gonna find it. But what I like about social studies, the reason we wanted to make a whole episode about it this week is because I think most parents just don't fully know what their kids see on the internet. And a series like this, the reason it's valuable, it's not because of its craft or because of which side it supports in the great national phone debate. It's valuable because a teenager and their parents can watch it together.
38:18 PJ Vogt? And afterwards, they can just have a conversation about what they saw.
38:24 PJ Vogt? What has the reaction been like to your work? Like, do you feel like it is being used as evidence in an argument? Do you feel like it's being used as the beginning of conversations? Like, how are you seeing it getting taken up?
38:35 Speaker 03 I think there's a really big difference between how adults and parents respond to it and how young people respond to it. Parents are really disturbed by what they see and kind of scared to watch. In the show, in episode one, Sidney's mom says, "I don't know if I even want to know what's on her TikTok." And she kind of knows that Sidney's being very sexy on her social. When young people watch it, they're a lot less surprises. They feel seen and they feel like their world is represented. The kids in Greece were like,
39:18 Speaker 03 "It's the first time I've seen a show about us."
39:21 PJ Vogt? Lauren had just been in Greece, where she'd screened the documentary for teenagers there.
39:25 Speaker 03 They're, you know, obviously not LA kids, but they're seeing the same kind of media. They're dealing with the same kind of issues. I think one of the things that's been really exciting is young people really want to talk about it. And they really want their parents and adults to know. Like, after we premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, this 22-year-old and her mom came up to me. The 22-year-old said, "My mom doesn't know anything about my life, and I'm really glad she does now."
40:01 Speaker 03 A friend of mine just said she watched it with her teenage daughter. And when they got to the sex episode and somebody said they saw pornography in third grade, she was like, is that really true? And her daughter was kind of like, yeah. It's like, it's hard if you don't know what to ask.
40:21 PJ Vogt? I've been trying to understand how much the generations after me are experiencing an internet like the one I saw versus one that actually might be very different. And it's been interesting, like, in the research I've done for other stories involving teens, we've talked to academics privately, what they will often say is that they're upset about how politicized talking about this stuff has become. Like, that because teens and cell phones is a polarized issue, they feel like worried about saying the wrong thing, getting blown up online. I was wondering if you felt, as you talk about your film, do you feel sensitive to that?
40:58 Speaker 03 No, because our project wasn't political at all in that sense. It was like completely experiential. We were just filming what was happening and the kids were so incredibly honest.
41:13 Speaker 03 I mean, there weren't any pros and cons. There were no arguments. It was just like discovery.
41:24 PJ Vogt? This was the last part I wanted to talk about in our episode today. Part three, discovery.
41:30 Speaker 01 It's very clear, even in this small group, like, Gen Z is not doing well because of this.
41:37 PJ Vogt? Through the series, the teenagers have been doing these group discussions with Lauren. And in the last episode, there's a conversation where they're just reflecting on what they think of this year-long experiment.
41:46 Speaker 03 And they say, you know, after all of this looking, after all of this exploration, after all of this discussion, could we just get off of our phones?
41:58 Speaker 01 I think we all need to delete our social media.
42:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
42:04 Speaker 03 Like, could we just all throw away our phones? And then one of them says, but would we exist if we're not on social media?
42:13 Speaker 01 How do you get off social media without it like? Without not being invited to things anymore? Exactly. It's like, how do you get off social media without people forgetting you exist? They do kind of forget. It's so strange.
42:26 Speaker 03 It's like the new existential question. And they were like, no, people forget about you. And I think that's where the quandary was. Like, you can't live without it, you can't live with it. Like Jonathan says, it's our lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun.
42:49 Speaker 03 I think, from my point of view, it's not a binary. Like, there are, of course, a lot of great things about social media and technology. But we also would not allow loaded guns around either, where people could just pick them up and accidentally fire them off. And I think that we have to remember that these apps are engineered to do exactly what they're doing, and they don't have to be that way.
43:22 PJ Vogt? I mean, you're describing what feels so classically like a collective action problem. Like, and not to say, like, we just all have to get off this, they all have to get off this, but rather, it's a system that's hurting people in obvious ways, where no individual can really change their behavior in a way that makes it better. And I don't know what that calls out for, like, if it's different school policies, if it's regulation, if it's different social norms. But like, watching the work, I feel like the thing almost any person would come in and walk out with is, you're watching a very gentle...
43:58 PJ Vogt? Documentation of an unsolved problem and just sitting in the problem. You feel like there's no way that this can't get better because there's no way it could stay like this.
44:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, a lot of the kids in the show say they're worried about their siblings and they would not let their kids be on social media. And of course, we've all heard stories about in the tech world, like in Silicon Valley, a lot of tech professionals sending their kids to schools where they're not allowed to be on social at all, or like not letting their kids have phones at all. Because they know exactly how it's engineered. I think that, yeah, they point to a problem. They also point to some solutions. And I think that's what is happening with this collective discussion that's going on.
44:52 Speaker 03 And I think all we have to do is listen to the kids in the show and they're saying exactly what's going on and it's empirical. They're not doing it from a study, but it's very clear. Now, we're seeing a lot of schools ban phones in schools. We're seeing groups of parents decide that they're going to wait for their kids to have phones and they all say that when there are big groups doing it, it's fine. Like, they love being without a phone in our discussions. I thought that was going to be a big deal. I thought they were going to be like tweaking for their phones. And by the end, they were like,
45:34 Speaker 03 wouldn't it be amazing if we could have this kind of space outside in the real world? Like, if we could just talk to each other?
45:46 PJ Vogt? Part of the curiosity that drove this project for you started with you wondering about your own son. Has this changed your parenting at all, this project?
45:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think it did. I mean, I think there's a tendency to blame kids when they're on their phones too much. And I learned that it wasn't about that. Like, it was, I still wanted to get my youngest off more. And I did that with like a lot of intentionality.
46:22 Speaker 03 So I think we just, it just became like more our problem together and how to deal with it rather than pointing a finger and being like, oh, the kids of today.
46:36 PJ Vogt? But the kids of today.
46:50 PJ Vogt? Lauren Greenfield. Her series, Social Studies, is up now on FX and Hulu. We'll include a link in our show notes.
47:00 PJ Vogt? Lauren, thank you. This is, it's so nice to get to talk to you about this.
47:03 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me.
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50:55 PJ Vogt? Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamenei. Our senior producer is Garrett Graham. This episode was spruced by Kim Kubel and fact-checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bosarian. Additional production support on this episode by Sean Merchant and Noah John. If you'd like to support our show, we could use it, and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus episode, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perillo, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran,
51:39 PJ Vogt? Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Scheff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.
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