On Children, Meaning, Media and Psychedelics

I feel that there’s something important missing in our debate over screen time and kids — and even screen time and adults. In the realm of kids and teenagers, there’s so much focus on what studies show or don’t show: How does screen time affect school grades and behavior? Does it carry an increased risk of anxiety or depression? And while the debate over those questions rages on, a feeling has kept nagging me. What if the problem with screen time isn’t something we can measure? In June, Jia Tolentino published a great piece in The New Yorker about the blockbuster children’s YouTube channel CoComelon, which seemed as if it was wrestling with the same question. So I invited her on the show, and our conversation ended up going places I never expected. Among other things, we talk about how the decision to have kids relates to doing psychedelics, what kinds of pleasure to seek if you want a good life and how much the debate over screen time and kids might just be adults projecting our own discomfort with our own screen time. We recorded this episode a few days before the Trump-Biden debate — and before Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate. We then got so swept up in politics coverage we never got a chance to air it. But I am so excited to finally get this one out into the world. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention” by Jia Tolentino “Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?” by Jia Tolentino How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell Book Recommendations: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry In Ascension by Martin MacInnes When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Jeff Geld, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  And now for something completely different. We recorded this episode right before the first presidential debate. And there's been such a crush of political news since then that there hasn't really been a moment that felt right to release it. But I loved this conversation. And in a funny way, it's more relevant now, given how much the election has come to revolve around the reasons people do and don't have children and the meaning of that choice. So a few months ago, Giia Tolentino published a big piece in The New Yorker on Cocamelon. Cocamelon, if you do not have a two-year-old, is a show that every really little kid really

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  loves, and every parent has a more complicated set of emotions about. But it's something Tolentino wrote at the end that was what really caught my eye. She said, "I found myself wondering if we'd be better off thinking less about educational value in children's media and more about real pleasure, both for us and for our kids." In a way, this is an episode about real pleasure, which is not what I went into it thinking it would be about. It's about the tension between pursuing pleasure, or what I might call meaning, and pursuing the kinds of achievements we spend most of our lives being taught to prize. Honestly, I think this gets much more to the heart of the questions people ask about

• 1:46Ezra Klein?

  having children than all this political rhetoric about cat ladies and extra votes and tax rates. And I don't think it's an accident that in this conversation, as we're trying to talk about the value of what we can't measure against the value of what we can, we end up finding ourselves in the language of religion, of psychedelics, of emotion. These are questions where I think we've culturally lost some of the vocabulary that we used to have to talk about just what it means to live a good life. Not to have a higher income or a better job, but what is a good life? Jia Tolentino is the author of the great book of essays Trick Mirror, one of my favorite books about being alive in the age of the internet. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. And as always, my email is ezra kline show at nytimes.com.

• 2:36Ezra Klein?

  Jia Tolentino, welcome to the show.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me back.

• 2:40Ezra Klein?

  So you told me that you came to a new understanding of why you had children on your way to tape today outside the Port Authority. And you would tell it to me when we were on the show. So why did you have children?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I was thinking on the train up here about that question, like, why did I have kids? And I was thinking about my trepidation beforehand. And, you know, I feel like I bring back every conversation about children to a conversation about psychedelics, unfortunately. But the idea seemed scary and overwhelming in the same way that doing acid seemed scary and overwhelming before I did it for the first time. It was like, oh, this is going to last for so long. There's going to be part of it that's so intense and so difficult. And I didn't do it until I felt like I know that the person that I'm going to do it with, I'll have fun with. I can trust that I'm doing it in kind of like a safe and right environment where I will get the thing that I want out of it.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  But the thing that made me decide to do acid for the first time is like not dissimilar to the thing that made me decide to have kids, which is like, I think it'll be fun. I think on the whole, I think it'll be fun. I felt that there would be real lasting, kind of destabilizing, kind of boundary dissolving pleasure in it that would kind of scare me in the way that true pleasure kind of does. And I really hadn't thought about it that neatly until you said that we wanted to talk about this. Like, I don't think I understood that really the thing that drove me to this was probably the thing that drives me to a lot of things, which is pleasure seeking.

• 4:14Ezra Klein?

  It's funny, because I sometimes use the psychedelics and parenthood analogy, but I use it in a very different way, which is people will tell me they're struggling with the decision and they're reading the parenting books. And I always say that to read the parenting books is, it's like the difference between reading about doing psychedelics and doing psychedelics.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:34Ezra Klein?

  And that the fun is not the point. I have this discomfort with the discourse around fun and parenting, as if the way to measure any experience in your life is whether, when you're filling out a time use survey, you're having a lot of fun doing it.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:51Ezra Klein?

  When I've done psychedelics, I don't necessarily think they're fun. Sometimes they are, but what brings me to them is meaning.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:56Ezra Klein?

  And I feel like what brought me to parenting, or what attracted me to it, what made it seem like not even a question to me, was that I want meaning in my life.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:05Ezra Klein?

  And I mean, what is a more fundamental sense of human meaning than continuing the sort of human chain?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Well, I should say too, when I say fun, I mean, I think that's why I corrected myself. Like, what I think of as fun is, it's much less like enjoyment and more like pushing the limits of what I, I don't know, can stand or I'm capable of. Like, it's, I have a kind of arduous idea of fun. Like, I, like, something that I long to do constantly is, like, go to Antarctica and completely lose my mind. Like, that sounds like one of the most fun things I can imagine. And so, doing psychedelics, it is extremely challenging sometimes and not always fun, but that is a specific kind of pleasure that, the definition of which is very close to finding meaning.

• 5:53Ezra Klein?

  One thing that's very clear to me, as your work has shifted towards thinking a lot about parenting, I think since you've become a parent, is that you find it really interesting. Like, it's very intellectually generative for you. I find that's true for me. I think that the thing I always say to people about parenting that was surprising to me is how interesting it is. It was really undersold to me, how just kind of it would focus my mind on things I would have never thought of, or never thought of at that depth before. You've written one of my favorite lines about parenting. And you wrote it in this piece about Angela Garbus book and about your own experience hiring a nanny. And you wrote, quote, "We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of emails than she can to do a job

• 6:35Ezra Klein?

  so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they're crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability." Tell me about the choice of the word "holy" there.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  You know, it's the only, the part of this is because the way I was raised, deep in the evangelical church in Texas, but it, that's the only word for it. You know, it's, um, we were talking about fun, we were talking about pleasure, now we're talking about this idea of the sacred, right? And I think that for me, the thing connecting all of those is like some sort of submission and disappearance into something, right? Like, it's the total submission to someone else's body, really, in your baby, you know? That I found, there's no other word for it. And to their body's needs and to the, the mess of it and the, yeah, there's no other word.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  And it also feels the same way with the parts of parenting that are, in fact, tedious and repetitive and, and so mundane, which is often the exact same stuff, right? Like wiping a butt over and over again and like wiping spit up from somebody's mouth and washing tiny little hands, right? Like it's, these things are so often tedious and they are holy. And the thing that connects them both, like it's, it's submission. And I've found that like the transcendent moments in parenting and the really like just objectively boring ones, you know, where I'm like laying on the floor of my living room wishing I could read a book instead of just like stacking little plastic eggs on each other. It feels like the same project. And I have found parenting really interesting and I-

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I think by the time I decided to try to do it, I figured it would be, right? Like, figured it would be in the same way that I was like, no matter what, like, as with my first acid trip, I was like, no matter what, this will be interesting. Like, no matter what, this will be extremely difficult in a way that is interesting. How could it not?

• 8:37Ezra Klein?

  I think there's so much tension and energy and guilt in this connection between the sacred and the mundane. The sense that you often should be feeling you're so close to this transcendent experience, you're doing the most meaningful thing, and you're so bored or so tired or you so want to be somewhere else. What do you do when what you're trying to do is escape the thing you should be paying attention to? And it's such a profound, constant experience in parenting, but also in life, right? To be alive is also holy. To be alive, to be able to experience this at any moment, right? The possibility of connection, of experience, of just being in this world,

• 9:22Ezra Klein?

  it should be so overwhelming. And instead, I am staring at my phone.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I started laughing when you were talking about that because I was just thinking about, you know, like, my little baby's about to turn one. And so it's like, I just instantly thought back to, I don't know, days when she was like four months old. And you know those days when it's like 9:30 a.m. And you're like, I wish everyone would go to bed. You know? Anyone? Anyone ever have those days? And I would feel, when I had that thought, right? Like, you'd be tired from getting up in the middle of the night, whatever it was. And I was just like, can everyone just go to bed now so I can, you know, like, not speak and not do anything and not learn and not play or whatever? And I would, I would have the thought, like, I'm abrogating my, the whole purpose of being alive, right?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Like, I, I could actually just enjoy this pushing the swing in the sun giant over and over and over. But instead, I just want to look at some dumb shit on my phone and, you know, whatever. And I don't know. Have you ever had this experience? I, I think back to when I was little and, you know, I would read books while I was on roller skates. Like, I don't think that the quality of wanting to leap out of the texture of the present is something that's specific to the smartphone era. Like, I remember, you know, I read in the bathtub. Like, I, you know, I just always, you memorize the shampoo bottles. Like, you're always kind of looking for a narrative to take you out of the present. And I remember that being something that was true for me as a really little kid,

• 10:51Speaker 01

  even as I was someone and remain someone that like, I mean, I was very present and I did have a great time all the time, pretty much. But I do think that the way that the smartphone has sort of deformed and, you know, put that desire like quivering in our pockets, like beckoning to us. Like, I, I was gonna say, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I have this sort of symptom of this brain disease that's particularly troubling to me, is like pre-kids, back when I had enough alone time to have like original thoughts, you know, more than once every five months or something. Like, I would think something and I would have the sense of, like, this is an idea that is like shimmering with movement in some way, you know?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  And then it would be too much for me and then I would be like, I can't, I can't deal with it. Like, I'm gonna write it down and then I'm gonna scroll for five minutes. Like, I would very frequently have that response. And that terrified me, even though I kept having it. And it sometimes feels to me, not that we're turning away from the like mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that it's precious. I kind of feel something within me sometimes that it's, it's too precious. It's too much. Being present is, is work in a way that it's, it's this like rawness and it's, it's this mutability. It requires this of us and a, and a presence. Like, that- Is something that I have sometimes found myself like flexing away from because

• 12:20Speaker 01

  of all the reasons that it's good in a weird way. Do you have you ever, do you know what I mean at all?

• 12:24Ezra Klein?

  I absolutely know what you mean.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:26Ezra Klein?

  In a million different ways. I mean, I was a kid, why do I read? I mean, now I think it's almost a leftover habit, but I read to escape. I read to escape my world. I read to escape my family. I read to escape things I didn't understand. And I read because obsessively, constantly, all the time in cars, in the bathroom, anywhere.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 12:48Ezra Klein?

  Because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:53Ezra Klein?

  And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading. One of the things I was thinking about while you were saying that was we have, there's more spiritualism in this conversation than I expected, but I'm enjoying it. And, and it feels a little bit like our metaphors are shaped by different traditions, right? I know you grew up deeply Christian and there's a sense in the way you think about it and write about it, the holiness, the awe of all creation, right? This sort of the external world that requires something of you. And a lot of my experience of this or thinking about it is shaped more from meditation and mindfulness. And so the thing that I was thinking about while you were saying that was what always feels limited

• 13:37Ezra Klein?

  to me is my attention. And a lot of the need to escape is a need to rest my attention and recharge it.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:45Ezra Klein?

  And what allows me to access the transcendence of my children, of the world, is honestly how rested and how awake and aware I am. I mean, I spent some time in a coffee shop before coming here to talk to you, and I just needed that time listening to music and reading so my attention could recover, so I could be present here with you. So in that way, I think escape is under theorized. That escape, it can be good or bad. I think we have trouble with this question of are we distracting ourselves? Or are we recovering?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:20Ezra Klein?

  Are we getting a kind of necessary contemplation? So that we can come back and experience a world and process what we've experienced and seen? Or are we running from it? Are we trying not to feel from it? Are we trying to be anywhere but here?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Or are we looking for something, right? Like, are we, are we looking? Because I think that a lot of what takes people to screens is like, it's, it's, you know, it looks like escape, but I think it's also pursuit. A friend of mine was watching my baby when, like, you know, it was one of those, like, school's off, whatever, Andrew's out of town, whatever. And, and I was saying like, okay, before you put her down for a nap, like, rock her in the rocking chair, you know, give her a couple of minutes. And then once she's, you know, once you see the eyes blink really heavy, just dump her. And they were like, oh, it's, that's her phone scrolling time. And I was like, yeah, that's her phone scrolling time, you know? Like, her brain just needs to, like, sometimes we're just putting our brain on the sort of, on the static signal.

• 15:12Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a place where there's so much self judgment, right? Are you escaping? Are you recovering? And then we put that judgment also on our children. And this gets us to Cocohellen. Why don't you describe for someone who has never seen it? And has no idea what that word means? What is Cocohellen?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  So Cocohellen is one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time. Like, not just for children. And yet it's something that like, if you haven't changed a diaper in the last four years, you probably have no idea that it exists, you know?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  How to put this, it's this, the backdrop of Cocamelon is that major children's animation companies did not make entertainment for babies and young toddlers because this was seen as sort of unethical and kids can't really learn from a screen at that age, so we're not going to do it. And then YouTube was invented and then the iPad was invented and suddenly iPad parenting, of which I certainly take part in, was instantiated as the way that suddenly we were all living. I think half of two to five year olds have their own mobile devices, which again, my four year old is one of them. And then so just this land was wide open, this pristine farmland of just millions and millions and

• 16:47Speaker 01

  millions and millions of children, whose attention could then be captured and monetized. And then you get all these things, like if people know Miss Rachel, probably.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Hi. Hello. Can you say mama? Mama. Mama. Let's sing it. Mama. Let's clap it. Mama. Let's sign it. Mama. Good job.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  But then there were all of these nursery rhyme channels where you would get just sing song nursery rhymes and kind of squeaky looking mesmerizing uncanny animation of just giant bobble headed, like eternally smiling babies in like perfect little worlds where the sun is always shining and the parents are always around and it's rainbow popsicles and it's fort building and just smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles and the same words repeated over and over and over and over and bright clanging noises and like these things that are torturous for adults, but basically heavenly to whatever is going on in our babies' brains.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Cocamelon is like, it's so popular that, you know, as of some time ago, the daily viewers, there was like 80 million daily viewers, which is as many people as watched the 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. Like, and that's just everyday viewers. And I think a conservative estimate would be that it's watched for 200 billion minutes a year. And it's just, you know, all the more remarkable because many of those viewers are, most of those viewers are basically pre-verbal. I've learned much more about Cocamelon than I ever thought I was going to.

• 18:46Ezra Klein?

  There's something interesting in Cocamelon, and I assume this maybe partially motivated your inquiry into it. There are two of them, I think, really Cocamelon and Blippi, but we'll focus on Cocamelon, that exist at this absolute tension point of children adore it and adults hate it. There are other things adults don't mind, right? Sesame Street, actually, most adults like. They remember it, we remember it, I enjoy it. You can't really get that many kids to watch Mr. Rogers now, but if you can. But, but parents like Daniel Tiger. There's, there's all kinds of stuff that parents will love Bluey. I think in general, parents like Bluey more than their kids like Bluey.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:24Ezra Klein?

  But Cocamelon is this one where from a very young age, your children go, and I feel like you could describe this two ways, completely vacant or completely focused in front of it.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:35Ezra Klein?

  Right? It's either an experience of being totally filled or totally empty, and I can never quite tell which. And parents just, it drives them mad. Why this one? Why, why do you feel like there's this like unfathomable divergence between what the kids want here and what the parents want here?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think, as far as I can make sense of it, it's, this is the first sort of, like Cocamelon ushered in a paradigm where children's entertainment is not configured as entertainment, but as just raw attentional capture. And I think that that's why, right? Like, it's the people that work on it or that worked on it, they've been laying people off like crazy despite these viewing numbers and the $3 billion like parent company valuation. But, you know, I do think that the people that created are interested in providing like pleasure and entertainment for the people that watch it. But the project of this company is attentional capture. And obviously, there's significant overlap between attentional capture and entertainment. But I do think that we can and

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And now I kind of think we should meaningfully differentiate them, maybe especially for kids. And I think that's why, like, I think you can feel it in the sort of bones of the stuff and the reaction parents have to it, you know? Like even like Teletubbies, like, college students love like coming down from drugs and watching Teletubbies, like even like silly baby entertainment. It can provide delight, which is not saying any of this has ever been pure, right? Like it's, children's television has basically always existed as like an eternal toy commercial. But even like G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, these basically, you know, way back, Mickey Mouse Club, whatever, all of these things, they were configured as entertainment first. And there's something about this that doesn't feel like it's configured as entertainment first.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  It feels like it's just eyeball capture, like just mining attention with a pickaxe into the parents' eyes, yeah.

• 21:25Ezra Klein?

  How much do you think the parental anger at Cocamelan, and I will very much include myself here, is a kind of self-loathing, though?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  100%.

• 21:33Ezra Klein?

  I love the line you said, not, not entertainment, but raw attentional capture. And two things really jump out at me from that. One is that when you're putting an 18-month or two-year-old in front of Cocamelan, you're usually doing it for a reason. You desperately have to get something done around the house, their older brother is sick, you're on a plane, right? There's a reason you're doing it. And what you're doing is trying to create raw attentional capture. If it did not completely capture them, it would not be serving the instrumental purpose you are using it for. I mean, they're too young for entertainment, really, at least in the way we think about it in culture. So, one, it's like, we have asked this thing to provide a service and we are mad at how

• 22:18Ezra Klein?

  well it provides it.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:20Ezra Klein?

  And then, two, there is this creepy analogy to ourselves. I mean, how much that we absorb and consume is not entertainment but raw attentional capture? How well does that describe parts of Instagram or TikTok or even television that we binge, knowing that it has almost no... Nourishment to it.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:40Ezra Klein?

  But we just don't want to think. We are asking to provide an instrumental service, which is make the time go faster and make me disembodied because I don't want to be here right now having my holy life. I want to be completely absorbed in, you know, something else, something outside of myself.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, so one thing about Cocamellon, right, it's not, like you said, they're not doing anything new. It's just that the audience is new, right? Like it's, I talked to former writers who were telling me that they got a spreadsheet of all of the search words that toddlers were making their parents type in on YouTube Kids or whatever. And they would write episodes to those search terms. Right, it was extremely SEO targeted operation. And everything that I see has been algorithmically tailored to exactly what I want to be looking at as well, you know? And I think, I will say like, I don't have that much screen time anxiety about my kids, right? I'm like, y'all have plenty of resources, you know? Like you were creative class children in Brooklyn. Like you are luckier than 99% of the global population. Like you're gonna be fine.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  I don't care about your like specific like language. I don't know, like, I don't worry about screen time in a very specific way, but I have a, like a preemptive sorrow about the way that like any ill can be instantly evaporated by putting my phone in front of my toddler and letting her, or not my toddler anymore, like my four year old and letting her text emojis to my partner all day. You know, like another one of my distraction tactics. I get the sense that you're gonna be looking at screens so much. You're gonna be, you're gonna be doing everything that I'm doing, but probably by hours and hours worse. And you, like me, are gonna be unable to be just present without reaching for your phone after a certain

• 24:26Speaker 01

  number of minutes, probably, right? And you are gonna, your conception of what is possible is gonna be limited to what is presented to you on that screen and your conceptions of, of what you want. And, you know, I, I feel like all of that screen time anxiety that I feel about her comes from my own sense that screens have already foreclosed a lot of that, you know, negative capability in my own life.

• 25:13Ezra Klein?

  I want to expand on a line you gestured at there when you talked about, "What are we afraid of?" And this is one of the places your piece really connected for me. I have this feeling, as I said earlier, that we're underspecified on what we want and what we don't want. And you write, "When it comes to the shows we allow our children to watch, we are afraid of what exactly? That our kids' capacity for deep thought will be blunted by compulsive screen use, that they'll lose their ability to sit with the plain fact of existence, to pay attention to the world as it is, to conceive of new possibilities, that they'll grow up to be just like us, only worse." And those all feel like things we're afraid of, and also maybe that they will never know any different. And I wonder about this, right?

• 25:58Ezra Klein?

  I mean, my kids, they will never remember a time before YouTube Kids, right?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:03Ezra Klein?

  They didn't exist in a time before YouTube Kids. There's always been escape. There's always been distraction. And the fact that it was not that good, I think, was important.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:15Ezra Klein?

  And I have trouble describing this. And I have trouble then making the distinctions based on it. But it's like, I want my children to be able to escape the difficulty of reality. I think it's important. I do it too. But somehow, I know when I do it in certain ways, it's bad for me, and when I do it in other ways, it's good for me. Like, I don't know why it is bad for me to look at my phone and good for me to read a magazine, but it is. And I can't put it on a chart for you.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Can you not? It's because one is surveilled and the other, isn't it, right?

• 26:44Ezra Klein?

  I don't think I care about the surveillance.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  You don't? But don't you think that's why one feels better than the other? You feel freer doing one than the other? Like, you don't feel your choices being sort of actively manipulated and shaped and constrained by like, you know, an extremely...

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Bald like profit structure like that to me feels like you said the the escape was worse, but it also was an escape, right? Like we were in our books in the back of the car and nobody knew what was happening and what we were reading except for us. Our parents would never know. There was no machine record of it whatsoever, even like if we were writing, right? Like if we were doing the equivalent of sort of what is, I think widely and rightfully configured as unhealthy, like the 11 year old girl on Instagram, right? Like the way I was processing my life in narrative or whatever, where the way I was writing my life into its existence was in a notebook where no one could see it and no one whatever profit from escalating or distorting it

• 27:44Speaker 01

  or testing it against anything. And so much of that seems tied for me to the lack of silent, invisible, constant surveillance.

• 27:56Ezra Klein?

  So, and I mean this completely sincerely. I love how much that doesn't resonate for me at all.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 28:01Ezra Klein?

  Because it means that there are that I'm having such a different experience of this. And so I want to have them both here because one, I'm, I'm so close to a phone vegan. I'm so unbelievably annoying about what I have on my phone. So virtually nothing on my phone even can surveil me at this point.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Do you not have a browser?

• 28:19Ezra Klein?

  I have a browser, but I don't use it that much, except literally to look at Pitchfork Music Reviews, which is one of my favorite time wasting activities.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 28:27Ezra Klein?

  But I have a lot of, you know, like I have the New Yorker app. I'm unbelievably annoying as a person. But for me, the, the thing that I notice about a magazine, which I think is my favorite form of media, like full stop, is there is room for me to get interested and absorbed and let my attention move away from where I am at that moment. But it is not so absorbing or so grasping that my attention can't shift back, that I've fully lost track of my body or my surroundings. And I think this is one of the things that I want to get at. I am unnerved by how much we feel the need to net everything out, whether

• 29:10Ezra Klein?

  culture is good or bad, to these very measurable outcomes about, you know, school achievement or income in 20 years or teen mental health. And it feels to me like we've just lost the ability to make judgments based on sort of virtues and values about when things are good and bad, like whether it is better to read a book or look at TikTok irrespective of whether that shows up into-

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Studies of learned educational achievement, yeah.

• 29:38Ezra Klein?

  Exactly. I feel like we have lost self-confidence in making cultural judgments, like for ourselves, for society, as parents. We are so achievement oriented, I feel like you see this in the debate about John Height's book, The Anxious Generation, that if we cannot show something on a chart, it's like we cannot have the self-confidence to make a judgment about it.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, I was gonna pitch you another possible reason why the magazine feels different from the phone, which is that, you know, I mean, the phone, it is always entwined with usefulness and like your work email lingers. I mean, you are reachable to be useful to someone when you were looking at your phone, even if you're just reading the same book on your Kindle that you would be reading off of it, right? Like, I think real pleasure, you're not, like, there is nothing quantifiably achieved in it. Like, you are not just unsurveilled, but you are not being useful to a goddamn person, you know, except the person directly in front of you, if there is one, right? Or the people, the many people. And that has to do with what you're talking about,

• 30:45Speaker 01

  this sort of Emily Oster-esque, you know, not knocking her, I subscribe to her Substack, like, the reduction of everything to like, what does the data say? And, you know, what are the outcomes? And that's the choice, right? It's sort of a, maybe like an intellectual inadequacy in my own life that causes me to come back to this, but it's like, does it feel good or does it not? And we kind of, I think we still know what feels good and bad. And I think that that's like, that's a good of a metric to judge anything on for ourselves and our kids to some extent, right?

• 31:14Ezra Klein?

  I think that really helps me describe or realize something. I want to go back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, this question of, what are you afraid of? Afraid of for your children specifically? And I think maybe that gets at it. The reason I like magazines and don't like my phone is not surveillance or anything else, it's that I feel better when I read a magazine. There are a million reasons for that, and I would probably describe it as my attention is more collected and centered and stable afterwards. And so I can then attend to other things in my life better and with more joy. But it's just I feel better. I like it. It's more pleasurable. And I think the thing that I worry about, the thing that I'm afraid of is, you know,

• 31:58Ezra Klein?

  I wanted to bring children into the world, not because the world is perfect, or it's, but it is beautiful. And I want, I feel like I got this gift of getting to experience it, and I want them to have this gift of getting to experience it, you know, in its wonderful dimensions and its horrors. And I am worried that I have unleashed a set of technologies upon them, and that we've done this socially, that is going to structurally and permanently degrade their capacity for that experience, in the way that I notice it degrading mine in the moment. And I'm frustrated at myself for not being better at policing. But them, you know, they're young, and they're getting tuned and trained

• 32:39Ezra Klein?

  and wired, or whatever metaphor you want here. And I think the thing I am afraid of is not like their grades will be bad because they watched Ninjago, or Ninjago. It is that their experience of the world will be thinner and more scattered, because they will have been trained on these hyper-stimulating things that somehow absorb you at the same time they make you feel bad. And that will just become the sort of baseline of what attention is supposed to be like.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  So they'll be like us, right? Like, they will have their experience of the world curtailed by the desire to check a device every however many seconds, right? Like, they will. There's just no doubt about it. It'll probably be a lot worse for them. But hopefully, like us, too, they will have found the things in the world that they can be devoted to in a way that supersedes at least a certain amount of time, the screen, right? Like, we, the only way that I see out of this for my children is the same, the only way that I see out of this for myself is like, I can't be disciplined. I can't spend X amount of minutes less per day on my phone because I know it's bad for me how much I'm on there already. I can't, like, it's only when the real, physical world is...

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Brighter and more colorful and full of surprises. And luckily, I found something that holds my attention more than phones do. I found a certain set of things that, you know.

• 34:06Ezra Klein?

  Psychedelics.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Well, certainly psychedelics, going out dancing, being face to face with a friend, you know, like, reading, writing, right, listening to music. Actually, this extremely limited set of things that are more mesmerizing to me and more pleasurable to me than the than the screen. That's and that's like one of my very few concrete hopes that I have for my kids is that they find something that makes the world's dimensions enlarge in a way that overmatches what however the world enlarges or seems to enlarge through a screen.

• 34:40Ezra Klein?

  I want to get at how you're getting there because I think there's something very deep in this question between attending to pleasure or attending to some joyful or meaningful dimension of experience and attending to, you know, some of these these other ends. You talk in the piece about a researcher, and this is to cast no aspersions on the work she does, which sounds both necessary and annoying, who has done all this research trying to rate these different children's shows according to how educational they are. And so you have Daniel Tiger, and that gets a two. It's a very weird zero to two scale, but you have something like Daniel Tiger, which is an offshoot of the Mr. Rogers cinematic universe, which gets a two, or maybe Blue would probably get a two.

• 35:25Ezra Klein?

  You have something like Cocoon Melon, which gets a one, not very educational, but not actively meant to be harmful and frightening. And then you have the strange underbelly of YouTube kids, this sort of computer generated, AI animated, often kind of horrifying, like dream logic crap CGI, and that's like a zero. And I was thinking, reading that, about what is implicit in the scale, which is that the best thing should be the most educational thing. And I don't really believe that for myself. I'm not sure I believe it for, for children, but, but I think there is this, this question we face of, well, what is our, our measure?

• 36:05Ezra Klein?

  But what, what for you helps orient the tuning fork, both like for Gia or for, or for your children?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I think within this question and this calculation, whatever I did in my own life and whatever part of that calculation led me to the idea that having kids is going to be a part of this pleasure seeking. And it was indicative that the idea of pleasure had like shifted a little for me, right? Like, it wasn't the like pure hedonism of 12 years earlier or whatever, you know? It was something that was deeper and harder and, and more prolonged. And, and I think part of it is like, when I think about wanting my children to be oriented around pleasure and like, that's what my idea of a good life for them entails.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Like it, it also involves like them learning to conceive of pleasure as the things in life that make them feel more human. I guess maybe that's one of the ways I've clarified it for myself, right? Like the things that bring me pleasure are the things that make me feel more human and not less.

• 37:11Ezra Klein?

  I think it's interesting to say, maybe we should be searching for pleasure as opposed to achievement. But that, that also, you know, there's a lot of things one might want, right? Pleasure is one of them, but, but I mean, achievement is a reasonable one too. And, and then there are all these-

• 37:26Speaker 01

  If you find pleasure in it, right?

• 37:28Ezra Klein?

  Maybe.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:29Ezra Klein?

  Right? Or maybe not, right? Maybe pleasure isn't the, the, the point of life or maybe, I mean, there's all kinds of things that I do that I think are important or that I think are socially useful that I genuinely don't find pleasurable.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  But you don't find a kind of like hard pleasure in them, like a hard sort of durational? You know what I mean? Like, do you ever, like these things that, have you not sort of like fooled yourself into?

• 37:52Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes somebody in the middle of a podcast will just press on a point and be so sore that I have to spend a minute to be like, am I really going to go here? I will, I'll say, I guess this, I am struggling with this question quite a lot lately in my own life, where I am so driven sometimes by internal pressure that things that I think are pleasurable have been drained of their pleasure. And literally this morning, when I was getting, you know, ready for my day, like, I just like have this note in my notebook about the things I need to do today. I'm just like, can you try to be driven by some,

• 38:33Ezra Klein?

  by something other than, than this internal pressure? When I began writing about politics, I was a blogger in college before blogs were like basically even a thing. There was no thought of it being a career. It was done for nothing but a kind of pleasure, right? A kind of delight in being engaged in the world and trying in some small way to understand it and even in some even smaller, completely inconsequential way to influence it. And now that I have, you know, this much bigger platform, it's so much less pleasurable. And so I think it's interesting that this idea you're, you're getting out of, of expanding pleasure.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  I think, well, back to the thing that you were talking about where the researcher was coding stuff about what was educational or not, and that was sort of the unspoken good, right? I think it's definitely not coincidental that the things that were coded as maximally educational are also the things that parents find pleasurable to have on in the background and that it's not coincidental that stuff that was not educational is videos where Minnie Mouse's head falls off and rolls down a mountain and that the middle ground was like this sort of cocomelon blippy thing that the, like, I think there's something about kids probably can learn more when they are experiencing some sort of delight.

• 39:49Ezra Klein?

  I hate blippy. Like, I just find blippy completely unnerving. If you have never watched blippy, go enjoy yourself on YouTube. But my kids like it.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Whoa, and look at what you rode up on? A police bicycle. Can I look at it? Of course you can, blippy. Oh, cool. Okay, now look at this. A helmet.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Wow, this keeps you nice and safe. Okay, and ooh, look up here. Do you see that? It's a light. Beep, beep, boo. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew.

• 40:21Ezra Klein?

  I do go back in front of it a little bit. Maybe the reason they like it is that I don't like it. Like, they are different than me. They're not supposed to like what I like. It gets to this broader sense of structuring everything around education and achievement. It's like, we're already thinking about this when they're two? Like, everything has to be educational? Like, they can't put on pants? Like, they can't put on shoes? And already, we are stretching out the tarp of their consciousness across a scaffolding of the adult world, right? Achievement and education, and are you bettering yourself? And are you improving? And I both get it, but it does feel like a transmutation of like what we've done to ourselves onto them at a younger and younger and younger age.

• 41:04Ezra Klein?

  Just this movement of like a kind of what was once an elite adult culture, right? The sort of self-improvement culture, Dale Carnegie culture, you know, lifelong education. To now, it's like, your babies are supposed to be doing it. It feels odd.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Well, and I also think like, to me, it disturbs me less because it is indicative of this like broader culture of optimization that I abhor and participate in and find really pernicious. And I'm terrified of how it might advance itself upon my kids. Like, I'm afraid of that. But it also, nothing's educational at this age, anyway. Like, I've never, most of the cocomelon audience is not learning shit. You know, I was wading through a lot of literature and research about this. Tiny little babies can process TV more than we think they can, but they can't really learn anything, anyway. And I think that absolutely the, it feels kind of like overtly like a veneer that everyone is just pretending that we can talk about what is going to be good for them and what is like healthy and what is not,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  while completely avoiding just, there's a big giant spotlight on what's on the tablet and the whole world, the whole world, and all of the ways that the actual world will change the trajectory of their lives is kind of out of focus.

• 42:40Ezra Klein?

  The child psychologist Alison Gopnik, and I probably wouldn't have brought this into conversation except that we've already been circling psychedelics a couple of times, has made this point. She's at UC Berkeley. There's been a lot of psychedelic research there. And so there's been this interesting cross pollination in those departments. And she's made this point that the child's brain looks a lot like the brain of an adult on psychedelics.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  So it really does.

• 43:03Ezra Klein?

  It really does. You have a lot more disorganization in the way the neurons are connecting, a lot more. We learn as we get older to filter the world, right? And that's not just a conceptual skill. It's actually how our brains are organized. Psychedelics disorganizes the brain, which is why people make a lot of unusual connections and they're absorbing like an overwhelming amount of experience because they're not filtering it out. There are other ways to get there, too. I remember when I came back from a silent meditation retreat, I was so unable to filter out visual information that I felt like I wasn't safe to drive because just trees were too overwhelming. But what is making me think about the reason I bring it up here is that, both in my own experience and people I've known, it's like people when they're, they've had a psychedelic experience,

• 43:47Ezra Klein?

  when they turn on the TV at the end of it to kind of come to rest, if they decide to do that, they tend to watch cartoons. They watch Pixar. They watch, you know, they don't go for thoughtful adult movies. And I think there's some interesting analogy to that in this conversation about children's shows. Like if a child's brain is more psychedelic, more disorganized, more open, then in the same way that adults who've gone through those experiences want something more colorful, beautiful, safe, et cetera, that their orientation may be in that direction, too. Like, you know, maybe there's something valuable in it, right? Like, at the end of that experience, I don't want something highly educational. And in the experience a two-year-old is having, like wide-eyed in this completely overwhelming world,

• 44:32Ezra Klein?

  maybe they don't and shouldn't.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  I think that's why, like, but it comes down to pleasure. I'm also, I once did an iconic. Three movie come downstream of, I think it was like Ponyo, then Pocahontas, then Mambi or something, you know? And I was like, this is living, you know? And this is pre-kids. But I think that the idea that anything kids watch should be one thing or another. I think we're both kind of in disagreement with kids. Like let, let something just exist without a purpose, maybe, you know, for, for a little bit. But I also, like, for this reason, I think that just basic ideas of beauty and pleasure, they're not that different from kid to adult. I mean, obviously there are limits to this, right? Like I was thinking about having a pacifier in your mouth all day long or whatever.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  But I think, you know, little children find the same things beautiful. Like they're, you know, you, we've experienced, we experience this every day, right? Like they are stunned by a leaf, like a beautiful flower, like looking at an animal, a picture of an animal, thinking about a whale. Like they're oriented towards these things that we most, we get to most readily, like in the psychedelic zone. But this is maybe an argument for kids TV. We can maybe want it to just be beautiful. And I think we can want them to have an experience of beauty in a way that is not instrumentalized and has nothing to do with achievement. If you're going to be in front of a screen, escaping or looking for something

• 45:56Speaker 01

  or just zoning out, like, why not have it just be like legitimately delightful? And, you know, maybe blippy is that for some kids. But I think that I came out of thinking about Cocamellon for months with that idea in my mind. Like I was like, I think now that it might be a legitimate thing for me to want them to be looking at beautiful, stupid cartoons. You know, the same ones that I would want to watch coming down from a hallucinogen.

• 46:22Ezra Klein?

  There's a way in which you manage what you measure. And I think the main way we have been taught to measure this or think about this question is it's always called the screen time question, right? The question of screen time. Do your kids have screen time yet? How much screen time? And something it feels to me like you're getting at is it, that's just maybe the wrong way to think about this entirely. I feel completely unbothered by quote unquote, "screen time" when I am there with my kids. If we're watching The Incredibles together, I do not think that is any less good of an experience for them for almost any definition of the word "good" than if we go to Target together, or if we go to, like, "we're just having fun together." Like, that's a good experience. Do you think that we have just sort of lost the plot on this sort of altogether, maybe

• 47:07Ezra Klein?

  for kids and adults, in sort of making this about almost like the existence of the screen, rather than the experience of the person?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the experience of the person, I mean, right. So all of, if you actually get into the studies on the actual effects of screen times, like, it is like the, the screen itself is almost a red herring, right? Like, the, people think about screen time as it correlates with achievement and verbal abilities and like, self-regulation and language abilities at grade level seven, you know, all these things that are tracked longitudinally. And the correlation is much more strongly between the kind of life the kid has and those things, right? Like, we all kind of sense that. It's not like, the screen is not the singular determining factor, it's just that we put screens in use in ways that reflect the life of the child holistically, and the kinds

• 47:58Speaker 01

  of opportunities they have, and the kind of household they're raised in, and the, the freedom that they have to, you know, not be thinking about basic needs and to flourish in these other realms that we call achievement. There are researchers that argue that children's screen time use should be reframed as an indicator of parental distress, you know what I mean? It's the life that matters, I think. And I think that applies to us and our smartphones, too. You know, I always, like, when I was... Kind of required for one job or another to be constantly paying attention to the news as it was like scrolled out on Twitter all day long. Like, I was glued to social media kind of by requirement. And I think the way I thought of it then was like, this

• 48:43Speaker 01

  is bad, but it's okay as long as my real life is bigger than it, you know, as long as, as long as I self-evidently always feel that the physical world is more inviting to me than my screen, then I'm not gonna spend one second worrying about my brain rot because there's nothing I can do about it. You know, like, I think as long as the world is winning out most of the time, I think that's like a reasonable, it feels like a reasonable metric to me.

• 49:13Ezra Klein?

  I think so much of why parents hate cocoa melon is a kind of self-loathing, often born of a kind of fatalism. It's like, I don't like this, but I'm doing it anyway because other parents do it, because I need it, because I can't think of an alternative, because I don't have the energy to structure things differently, which is, I'm not saying this is a thing true for other parents and not me, this is a thing true for me. And I think that one reason I'm so interested in this conversation is that the conversation for kids feels, not exactly, but in many ways, like a miniature and clarified version of the conversation for adults. And weirdly, we're better at having the conversation for kids because at least there, we can imagine making judgments about good and bad and

• 49:54Ezra Klein?

  about using paternalism and cultural pressure. Not that many people I know are truly happy with their digital lives. They're in a constant state of irritation and aggravation with themselves above all. But there's something about the fact that everybody else is there or feels like everybody else is there that makes it impossible to imagine or effectuate a different reality, even just for yourself, even when such a reality is possible.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I also think there's something about what you're saying where You do something on your phone and it's unsatisfying. And you're dissatisfied with the way that you're doing it. But the smartphone has become the repository for all possible dissatisfaction and yearning. Civic dissatisfaction routed through the smartphone, like social. You feel lonely, you go to the thing that's making it worse, right? Like it's, I do think that we're kind of in the grip of the loop where the dissatisfaction with the thing itself presents it as the answer, right? Like if you, if you lack money, be it TaskRabbit or Drive for Lyft or Deliver. You know, like there's, there's a way that the phone is the catchall solution for any sort of discontent. Let's say someone is still using Twitter and they're miserable and they want to get

• 51:08Speaker 01

  off of it, probably like they're still going to be looking for a source, a replacement that exists on the phone, you know? Okay, maybe not that one, but what about Reddit, you know, or something like that?

• 51:19Ezra Klein?

  What I think is so hard about that is that what makes it impossible to have alternatives to a bad status quo is the continued investment in the status quo. But because it maintains like just enough staying power, like that is energy people are not being able to put in to creating things that are, that are different, you know? And I think there are things that are different out there, or certainly things that are different that could be imagined. And again, I think this ends up being true for kids too. Like we are very social creatures and what everybody else does really ends up mattering. I mean, kids see other kids in a restaurant and the other kids are allowed to watch a

• 52:03Ezra Klein?

  phone during the meal and that makes it harder to resist your kids wanting to do that, right? I mean, there's this whole pressure about getting kids smartphones in school because their friends have smartphones. And again, there is something so contagious about everything and there's something that is so. True, in the way that the existence of something fairly totalizing or fairly central, the fact that you have to participate in it, particularly if it's something that drains your attention and creative energy, the fact that you have to participate in it at all, or certainly if you have to participate in it a lot, it makes it that much harder for other things to emerge, because they would need to emerge in that same space with that same energy. I had television growing up. I don't think it was terrible for me, but

• 52:48Ezra Klein?

  I do wonder about how different it is that my kids can watch anything at any time, whereas like I was at least a little bit prisoner to what was on when, you know, including like I had it easier. I had Nickelodeon, which had a lot of kids programming, right? You know, I didn't only have to watch it on the kids hour on network television. I just, with all these things, it feels like there's some balance that makes sense, right? Some point where it's enough and not too much, enough escape, but not too much escape, right? Enough choice, but not too much choice. And just in a lot of things, it feels like we've, to me, like hit too much. Maybe that's just me getting old and I just think like when I was a kid, it was enough and now it's too much. But I also think there has to be, conceptually, too much has to be a possibility. And maybe we've reached it.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think, again, I mean, you know, it's like my, my dumb ass keeps bringing this all back to pleasure, but I think that feels like that line, right? Like when we were, you know, once you'd had enough of watching six episodes of Pete and Pete in a row, which I certainly did, you know, once you were feeling severely diminishing returns, you would walk away from this machine that was not watching you and was not altering its behavior to get you to watch it more. And we were able to do that. We were able to have this like, kind of unadulterated physical cognitive instinct about what was the right amount of escape and what was the right amount of engagement, because we just followed what we wanted to do. Like, we weren't walking away from six hours of Pete and Pete because it was good for us, you know, we were, it would be better for our language abilities

• 54:17Speaker 01

  in the seventh grade if we did so. We were just like, I'm bored. I'm no longer getting pleasure from this. I've actually not been getting that much pleasure out of the last two episodes. I'm, you know, I'm just gonna go do something else for a while. I feel like every time I write about children's or anything, any sort of media, it's like everyone has been having these exact same worries. I was even thinking with this conversation, you know, the, the concept of asidia?

• 54:40Ezra Klein?

  No.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is like, there's a joke, one of me and my friends have a joke that it would be a beautiful name for a girl, where it was this medieval conception of depression that to me feels like exactly like what we talk about when we talk about smartphones. I looked it up, I looked it up on Wikipedia last night to make sure that I was, and there was this beautiful description on Wikipedia as ascidia, of ascidia as a flight from the divine that leads to not even caring that one does not care. It's like this listlessness, this disengagement from the world, this like boredom, and then you start not even caring that you're so bored, like this total inability to act upon your life. You know, as with the example of like, we walked, we were able to walk away when we weren't having fun anymore. We didn't

• 55:24Speaker 01

  have the option of the TV just being like, wait, wait, wait, try these 45 other things. I'll hypnotize you again in 45 seconds if you just give me the chance, right? I can feel it interfering with my own ability to understand when something's fun and when it's not. And I think that I am worried about that with my children, and I think that's one of the reasons that I'm like, the only, the only way out is a set of experiences or desires that will clean out and clarify your radar for what is actually, what actually feels good and what actually doesn't. And yeah, feels good in any of the ways, the meaningful ones, the not meaningful ones. But it seems to me like one of the things that that responsive surveillance mechanism does is it mixes all of those things up so

• 56:07Speaker 01

  that even if you're no longer having fun on Twitter, there's still some part of you that feels like you are just because of the mechanism itself.

• 56:14Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a place where the surveilled language and fear really does hit for me. Surveillance, it sounds so creepy, and it is, and it's part of it. But I actually feel like it masks the reason we give ourselves over to it, because it feels good to be learned about. We all have experiences of the algorithms. Coming to know us or predict us and recommending a book we'd never read before that actually was really great, or music that we'd never heard before that brought us into a whole new genre or a whole new artist that we would have never found on the radio necessarily, or tweets that we are glad we saw. But it's that way of being learned.

• 56:58Ezra Klein?

  So it is able to continuously recommend things that are more and more alluring. And it makes that experience of the diminishing marginal return more distant. Right? That place where it's like, well, I've already watched two episodes of Pete and Pete. I don't want to watch three. That's a lot of episodes of Pete and Pete. Instead, it knows better what you want and is better at giving it to you. It's why I'm, I find I really try never to leave my kids alone with a recommendation algorithm. Right? YouTube or anything like that. It's much scarier and where they end up is much worse. But it is like learning them at every second and like how to give them the thing they actually want that will keep them clicking. And again, I think this is where Coco Melon feels weird. I mean, Coco Melon, to bring it back to that, it's one of the first successes in children's television

• 57:43Ezra Klein?

  or video entertainment, I guess you'd call it, that doesn't come out of television. It comes out of YouTube. It comes out of recommendation algorithms. It's built around recommendation algorithms. And I feel like it feels like recommendation algorithms, right? It feels like it knows the kids too well. It feels too tuned to, you know, their short attention spans. Like, the whole thing is just overly optimized. And on one level, that makes it very effective as a babysitter or an attentional harvester, or just maybe it's better as entertainment for them. But it creates in this very clear way, because you're watching it happen to a two-year-old, this feeling of what it looks like when culture is built because it knows you and it knows how to predict you.

• 58:26Ezra Klein?

  And that scuzzy feeling that we have in a vaguer way, I think with ourselves when we're older, we get in this very intense way with them and they're younger. But it's the same thing in a way to me, like all up and down the age ladder.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  I also think that, again, this is a thing where the thing that you get through the smartphone, like you were saying, this experience of being learned. And being known very, very deeply, right? It's like, it's a really human desire that has made this so effective as like a, you know, an addictive technology, right? Like, we, of course, we want to be learned and we want to be known. Like, that's so much of the entire pleasure of being alive interpersonally, right? Like, people, we want that for good reasons, but, but it's like, yeah, it's part of why Cocamelon and So Much on the Phone, it feels frictionless. It's been designed for frictionlessness. And I think that's part of, I mean, maybe this is helping me understand how I delineate,

• 59:21Speaker 01

  like, good pleasure, meaningful pleasure, from meaningless pleasure, which is that I think there's friction in all real pleasure. And in the, in the kind of pleasure you learn to get in the real world, there's friction in it. There is like true surprise. And I think that when someone is learning us in the real world, when they're coming to know what we would like and, and they're seeing things about us that we don't even see, right? Like, all of these things that the algorithm is doing. When another person is doing that for us, they change us in ways that the algorithm doesn't, right? Like, they, that experience contains sharp edges in a way that the algorithmic one never can.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  And that's why it's almost the same thing, but it's why the real world version, it feels infinitely more meaningful than Spotify learning what song I want to listen to next. Because even as good as the algorithm genuinely has gotten at, like, giving me, you know, what I want to listen to, the total removal of friction. And I think that's one of the reasons that all the YouTube stuff feels just instinctively bad. Again, like, it's one of those things where maybe it's easier to see with Cocamelon. It's easier to see that the, like, sort of seamless, micro-targeting, endless stream of giving you exactly what you want. I'm certainly guilty of understanding that it's good for my kids

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  to have a little more friction in their life and not being, just get everything that they wanted, a touch of a button, and then me pursuing that as soon as they're in bed.

• 1:00:54Ezra Klein?

  This maybe gets at another thing that I'm afraid of. Because one of the things I was thinking about while, while you were saying that is, I decided a couple of months ago I'd sign up for a bunch of the AI relationship apps, right? Like, Kindroid and Character AI and things like that, where, where these... Language models are built to create a kind of AI you'd be friends with, or a lover with, or it'd be your therapist, or whatever. And I tried them out for a while, and, you know, they're, they're pretty good now. I mean, they're good at texting, what they write sounds and feels realistic. I always tell people they're much better texting than most of the people I know.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Would it have fooled you?

• 1:01:34Ezra Klein?

  Like, it doesn't fool me. Yeah, definitely have fooled.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  It would have like successfully catfished you if one of them had started texting you.

• 1:01:40Ezra Klein?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Okay, interesting, yeah.

• 1:01:42Ezra Klein?

  I would not have known it's not a person. But I never could keep myself coming back to them.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:49Ezra Klein?

  Because there was no meaning in the interaction, right? So I've, you know, I, since moving to New York, I've been making new friends. And, and I was thinking about how, you know, one of the friends I made, we, we text a, a lot, just sort of during the day. And they're not interesting texts necessarily, sometimes they are. But it is meaningful to me that he's giving me that attention back, right? The message of the text is that I am being chosen for somebody else's attention. It's a kind of meta text about a, a relationship that is emerging. And I didn't end up writing the piece on this, though, because I can see the character AI usage numbers that are being released. And this is a, a sort of AI system used much more by younger people. And they're logging in a ton of times a day and spending huge amounts of time on it.

• 1:02:34Ezra Klein?

  So to go to the point of what I'm afraid of, right? This question of the retraining. For me, who grew up, you know, before large language models, the kind of unkindness, the, what I would call the meaninglessness of that interaction is very front and center, right? It's very noticeable. But if you're younger and your social dynamics are way less formed, and your discernment of social dynamics is much less mature, and your choices are more limited because of, you know, who you know, and how you can see them, and how you can be in touch with them, maybe it actually doesn't feel that way. Or maybe you get trained out of it feeling that way. I do think you can lose the sense of and taste for friction,

• 1:03:17Ezra Klein?

  and that that is a loss, and that it does foreclose forms of pleasure, just as you were talking about.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Hugely, I, there's this like old. Kurt Vonnegut thing where he was talking about like the pleasure of mailing a letter and it's like how the whole point of it is not that like you're doing something efficient, the whole point of it is that you go for a walk and you like wink at a girl and you, you know, pet a dog or whatever. I, I mean, but yeah, I get used to, I used to, pre children, I had a years long streak of never using Amazon and a personal policy of if it was within walking distance of me in like downtown adjacent Brooklyn, then I could not order it online. I had to physically go out and get it. And I have backslid on all of this since having my second child, like significantly, you know? And it's also partly because the experience of having children, wonderfully, it is the source of

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  all that friction. Like it's sort of like back to what we were talking about at the beginning. I think that as our world orients itself increasingly towards frictionlessness, children can seem exclusively like a form of friction and then, and that friction can seem exclusively like something that's undesirable. When in fact, like, I think my sense that I wanted some of this specific kind was one of the things that made me think it would be fun. And I do think that like a total lack of impediment, the ability to pick up and go anywhere you wanted the drop of a hat, which is a wonderful way to live, which I'm not, you know, anyone who has it and wants it, I'm jealous of you and good for

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  you. I mean, it's like everything that we've been talking about is, those are values that have been inculcated by the same form of ultra advanced capitalism that created the smartphone and created all these things that make us so depressed in the first place. And I think that part of me wanting, feeling ready to try to have kids four years ago, five years ago, whatever it was, was a sense that I wanted to undo these things in me, like this sense of exceptionalism, which children really took out of me, you know? We were texting like about the thing where you're playing with your kids and I'm, and you're like, I'm probably not particularly good at, you know, being the horsey right now, but the thing that matters to you is that I am the person being the horsey.

• 1:05:33Ezra Klein?

  The most common way I feel like I fail as a parent, and it's where I fail both my kids and myself, is by trying to

• 1:05:44Ezra Klein?

  Really control and optimize the experience and treat it like other things in my life. You know, we're going to do this at this time and then we're going to go here and you know, you gotta get your shoes on by this moment. And to your point about being the horsey or you know, finding some joy in submission, like parenting is so unpleasant when you are, when you feel like it is a distraction from the thing you would prefer to be doing, right? Like looking at your phone or taking a nap or, but it's also, I think unpleasant when you are trying to treat it like other things in adulthood and control it. It's most pleasant for me when I have like the resources inside myself and also the wisdom to just kind of be around. They're running around and occasionally playing with me and I'm sitting on the couch and occasionally playing with them.

• 1:06:27Ezra Klein?

  And it's like you could just do a lot less. We've made parenting really, really hard, you know, and we've put a lot of pressure on ourselves as parents to try to do a great job of it and you know, be achievement oriented and the kids should be watching only educational shows and really they should be watching no shows at all. And there's a million things we've done that are not really anything that the kids ever asked us to do.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:52Ezra Klein?

  Right? They would like you to sort of be around a bit more or you know, a lot and be attentive, but also like not overtake their experience with your own. And like, that's really hard. Like I would like to get better at that.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  I think that people know this though. I think that when I had my first kid, the thing that I found most difficult, but now I think I've smooth brained my way into finding really pleasurable is that like when you're with your kids, at some point you just have to completely surrender to not, the time just really can't, you can't really do anything else. You know, you are just gonna like, this is your weekend now, you know? This is what weekends are going to be like now. And there's like a removal of choice in that, that is the thing that I was afraid of and I think a lot of people are afraid of, but also the thing that is like arguably the most freeing, like I remember also like I had read How to Do Nothing, like right before, right around and I was like, yeah, this might be a shortcut to the, the kind of outside

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  the clock time, you know, where you were just not being useful to anyone but the people in front of you. This thing that I was trying so hard to do in other ways that now I have to do every single weekend, whether I like it or not. And I don't, I no longer feel that as a loss, I'm realizing, like I used to. I used to think like, oh, I could have done so many things with these weekends. And now I'm like, ah, you know, it's, it's time to go to the playground, you know, time to go to the playground again.

• 1:08:19Ezra Klein?

  We've ranged a lot here, but, but to go back to, in some ways, like the article that led to this show, if a kid watches an hour of Cocumel in a day, should you feel bad? Would you feel bad?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Should I go on?

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:08:37Ezra Klein?

  I got to lovely place to end. So as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  I forgot about this question until I was on the train here. And I was like, okay, I got to think about the last, the last three things that I was just texting people about because I really loved. Okay, so I was extremely late to becoming Lonesome Dove-pilled. I was like, six months pregnant and I was on a work trip to Thailand and I had 48 hours of alone time on the end of that work trip. And I was like, I, this is the most important, like, the books I bring are the most important books. Like, this is the only time I'll be alone for 48 hours all year, you know? And I was like, I need to bring the perfect book, like, the book that will make me feel like I'm a kid again, will give me just this sort of wildly disproportionate emotional attachment, you know, I want to be sobbing, you know, by the end of this book. And I read Lonesome Dove,

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  and it was all that and more. I have been lonesome dove pilling many of my friends as the year has gone on. If anyone hasn't read it, truly recommend it. I really like this book, In Ascension, that our friend Max Reed recommended to me. It's sort of, if anyone is in the sort of Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer kind of thing, it's like that kind of grounded, beautiful, enigmatic, slightly schematic sci-fi. Really loved it. Another one that I've been texting a lot of people about. The third one is When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, one that I feel like I've been texting friends about, like, every month since I read it. It's about scientific discoveries that bring people to the brink of madness. And there's a really interesting thing that

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  goes on where the book starts off almost entirely nonfiction and then ends almost entirely fiction. And the gradations in between are amazing.

• 1:10:16Ezra Klein?

  And I'll just note, because you mentioned in the last answer, you said, talked about reading How to Do Nothing, which is by Jenny Odell, and I still think it's the best book about attention and habits of mind in this era. I've enjoyed this so much. Jia Tolentino, thank you very much.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:10:51Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klans Show was produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristen Lynn. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Sami-Luski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Amy Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.