Hey, everyone, it's Anna. Before we get started, I want to explain why this episode appears to be very long. But first, a little background. You know, this year we've been celebrating 20 years of the modern Love column. And this podcast, the one you're listening to right now, is almost ten years old. In those ten years, the Times has added so much to its podcast lineup. You probably know that daily, every morning, they help us make sense of these truly historic times. The same with the run up, which has been essential listening for understanding the upcoming election, the Ezra Klein show, too. Then there's the interview, which has some of the deepest conversations with some of the biggest names in the world, and hard fork, a show that somehow manages to make all the news about tech and AI actually fun and not so scary. Or even more recently, the Wirecutter show, which is a true delight and absolutely crucial for my own shopping. And of course, I can't forget serial. They basically kicked off the entire podcast craze, and they're still here telling richly reported stories week by week. All of this is to say we have a huge amount of audio reporting and storytelling with range, all the breadth and depth you expect from the New York Times.

And now we're asking you to support this work by becoming a subscriber. As a New York Times subscriber, you'll get full access to this whole slate of shows, including past episodes, bonus content, and early access to new shows. If you're already an eligible subscriber, you'll get all of that with your subscription. And if you don't subscribe, you'll still be able to listen to the latest few episodes of our shows. But the full archive will only be available to time subscribers. I'd like to ask you to support this work because it helps us make sense of our lives and the world. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, we're going to try something new this week. Weve chosen a great episode of another time show from our colleagues. In opinion, itll play directly after modern love. You dont have to do anything. Just listen to modern love and then stick around. If youre on the fence about subscribing, we hope that hearing even more perspectives from the times will help convince you. Thank you for listening, and thank you for subscribing. You can do so on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Go to nytimes.com podcasts to learn more.

Love now and did you fall in love last time?

Love was stronger than anything, and I love you more than anything. There's love, love.

From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is modern love. Every week we bring you stories and conversations inspired by the modern love column. We talk about love, lust, heartbreak, and all the messiness of relationships. And today, I'm talking to comedian Amelia de Moldenberg. For the past ten years, Amelia's been producing and starring in a viral YouTube series called Chicken Shop Date. In each episode, she takes a celebrity guest, like, say, Sabrina Carpenter out for fried chicken and a bit of light flirting.

Do you find it easy to fall in love? Such a great question to spring on.

Me in this chicken shop.

Well, we're on a date.

Amelia's been on dates with everyone from SZA.

I just realized that I'm undesirable.

I think you're, like, very attractive. I think that's more like that's a fact.

To Billie Eilish.

I got you vegan chicken nuggets and chips for your lunch.

I heard.

Cause I'm not available on the menu yet. Damn.

I was really hoping that it could be you. To Jack Harlow.

Have you reached peak cuteness?

No.

I know. You're still getting cuter by the hour.

You are funny.

I know.

I mean, of course, these aren't regular dates. They're celebrity interviews disguised as dates. But that doesn't stop Amelia from putting herself out there.

I'm like a really good flirter, as in, that's one of my special skills that I can do.

Today, Amelia reads an essay about a dating induced anxiety spiral and then tells us how we can find a little more joy and humor in dating.

I just think with every date, it's like a fun story for the group chat. It's like a new person with an interesting life that you could talk to. It's something to do instead of doom scrolling on your phone. Think of it as fun and more fun will happen.

Amelia, I want to start by asking you about chicken shop date because I've watched so many episodes, I think maybe every episode. Honestly, when I watch it, I'm like, am I interrupting something? Because you have such a vibe with everyone on the show. What makes that happen? Like, where does that chemistry come from?

I don't really fully know. I feel like maybe the audience is better judged at that. But in my opinion, yeah, maybe it's this confident woman that is, like, equal parts desperate as they are, like, totally uninterested. And it's that kind of mixture that I think creates this kind of unique character. Because sometimes I'll be, like, obsessed over them and be like, so when am I gonna see you next? Or can I get married to you? Or just propose? And then they'll say something flirty and I'll be like, can you stop flirting with me, please? And I think that it's a. That confidence that maybe we don't see so often that I think people are attracted to. Confidence is key.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, you are, like, so confident on the show. Were you always like that growing up?

When I was in primary school, so elementary school, I was really popular, and I had lots of friends, and I really enjoyed it. And I felt very confident as soon as I got to secondary school. When I was, what, twelve years old, I didn't have any friends whatsoever. For the first nearly three years of school, I had no friends. And I feel like that kind of created the person I am now. Like the mixture of the confidence and then feeling very isolated and feeling very uncool and not popular at all. I know that I'm this confident person and that's really who I am. And then sometimes there are voices that come into my head and they tell me otherwise. And then I forget about that truth. And I think maybe that's something that happens to all of us, is that, you know, deep down that you're hot, you're great, you're funny, you're, you know, you have great belief in yourself, but there are certain things that always crop up. And there's this person on your shoulder that sometimes comes in and they tell you otherwise. I think self confidence is a constant work in progress.

I mean, I'm glad you brought up insecurity, because it's something I want to talk to you about. A part of the modern love essay you're gonna need.

Oh, yeah, please.

A few nights ago, I was feeling insecure myself because I'd gone on this amazing first date walk in the park. Guy was hot, he was tall, he was a photographer. We all know the type. And then the date ended, and I was like, oh, my God, what do I say? I felt so confident on the date. Like, sparkly and funny and hot and whatever. A little sweaty, but that's all fine. After the date, I was like, what do I say? So I texted him a picture of something we talked about, and then a full 20 minutes 24 hours after this date, I'd, like, spun out. And he hit me with this. We know these texts, right? This text that was like, you're great. It was such a nice date, but I think we're in different places. That text, your heart sinks, doesn't it? Your heart just sinks.

It's so true. Cause you think why I thought that went so well. And it's just not your. It's nothing what you wanted to hear. I also think that we have a tendency to fantasize about things, and as soon as something goes well, you know, you're thinking about the next day, the next week, and all of these things that can happen, and the fantasy feels so good. And when the reality hits and it's not what you've dreamt about, which, by the way, it will never be, because that's the purpose of a fantasy. It's not real that you're disappointed and it hurts. But I think it's all about your resilience to moving on to the next thing. You need to, like one, put yourself out there, not be afraid to go on these first dates and to be open and to say how you feel and be yourself, and that's how you should live your life. But you just need to get better at being resilient. It's like pulling yourself back up and remembering that confidence. That's the thing that can be hard and that it needs to be worked on, I think.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, like I said, the modern love essay you're going to read is about all of this. It's about insecurity. It's about the kind of rollercoaster of confidence that dating can put us on. And specifically, it's about the very particular anxiety of the post date follow up text. I have experience with these types of texts, like, with that park guy from hinge. And I want to ask you, like, how do you approach sending those follow up texts? Do you send them, what's your vibe?

Oh, I'm really into. I'm really into them. So if. But more like, if a date doesn't go well, like, if a date doesn't go well and I don't want to see them again, I will tell them. I will literally write a message and I'll say, thanks for a lovely evening. I'd like to leave things there for now, like, and stick to being friends. Like, I will just get it done because I don't want the admin and the wait. I'm of thinking about it. I want a clean break and just to move on to the next thing. So I 100% will always send the message if I don't want to see them again, and then if I do want to see them, I often will probably wait for them to text me first. That's. I mean, why not, like, why not wait a bit and if they don't text me, I probably will text them, right? Even though I know it's probably not going to end up as a good idea, but I definitely still will.

I mean, yeah, sometimes you just gotta send that text. When we come back, Amelia reads the modern love essay, the five stages of ghost and grief, about a woman who sends a risky post date text and then panics.

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Of Ireland hi, I'm Robert Vinlewen from.

New York Times games, and I'm here talking to people about wordle and showing.

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What are some of your like habits for playing wordle? I wake up, I make a cup of coffee, I do the wordle and I send it to my friends in a group chat. Amazing.

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The five stages of ghosting grief by Rachel Fields at 06:30 a.m. i was blow drying my hair, getting ready for work, and accepting the demise of my two week relationship. The nail in the coffin was that at ten the night before, I had texted him something vaguely sexual, and he hadn't texted back. The morning had become a quick but emotionally turbulent journey through the five stages of grief. First, denial. It was entirely possible he hadnt seen the text. He could have been in a deep sleep. He could have dropped his phone in the toilet. He could have died. Any of these options were comforting. He wasnt really a texter anyway, so his lack of response didnt necessarily reflect the weirdness of my text. It was probably normal for non texters to see a text and not reply to it. They saw it, found it charming or not, but didn't think it required a response. Totally standard. Anyway. Was the text even that weird? If you went on a date and got vaguely physical during a make out session on a bench in a secluded area of a public park, wouldn't it seem natural to text something vaguely sexual?

A few days afterwards, I opened my messages to remind myself what exactly I had sentence there it was at 10:02 p.m. i can't stop thinking about what I'm now referring to as quote unquote bench time. Okay, so it was a little confusing. Deep into my third glass of wine I thought I was being coy, but the result was somewhat inscrutable. It wasn't even clear I had enjoyed the experience. Was it possible he thought I was traumatized? Did he think I was accusing him of something? No, that was ridiculous. He probably had noted my text, smiled, felt as aroused as you can be by a text, as vaguely sexual as mine was, and gone to sleep dreaming of me. But all the same, isn't it a little rude to get a text from a woman you've been dating for two weeks and to not even acknowledge it? How hard can it be to fire off a blushing smiley emoji or a four word answer? He didnt even need to reciprocate the sexual innuendo, though it would have been appreciated. He could have just said nice scrap that nice would have been way worse if he had texted nice.

I would have thrown myself into the sea. I didnt care if he was a non texter. And what does that mean anyway? In this day and age, for a friendship to exist these days, people need to know they can text ugh. I love oysters at 215 pm on a Friday and get a response by 230. Of course, there would be pathetically little at stake if he failed to reply to a Friday afternoon ugh. I love oysters text, but this was my first flirtatious text after our physical encounter. By not responding, he was essentially shouting into the universe, you are overly sexual, way too forward, and deeply, deeply unattractive to me. But honestly, if he was offended, I didn't want to be dating him anyway. You can't engage in an open shirted makeout session and then get offended when the woman texts you a vaguely vaguely sexual follow up. Maybe if I didn't look at my phone for the next five minutes, he would text. Yes, that was the answer. I would blow dry my hair like a casual, confident, independent woman. I would think about work and my friends and whether I should make an appointment for seriously, had he still not texted?

I put my phone face down with the ringer off. Now I couldn't see if he texted. I could only start living my life. I was single, empowered, and ready for anything. No, that wouldn't work. If the ringer was off and the phone was face down, I wouldn't know if he did text. The best solution was to keep the phone face up, ring off so I could see the phone light up if he texted but not be bothered by the ringer. The ringtone was jarring and anyway, I was blow drying my hair so I wouldn't hear it. Two minutes later, still no text. I started thinking about my life and what it would look like from the outside. Two nights before, he and I stood gazing at the Chicago botanic gardens, much discussed corpse flower, which had been due to bloom that evening but hadn't. This plant looks fake, he had said. It looks like a plant from a 1930s movie about prehistoric jungles. How do we know this thing is real? I laughed. Maybe it's just a ruse to get visitors and the plant is made of plastic. No one would know. Dusk was nearly upon us and a strong rainstorm had kept away the evening crowds.

Happiness stole over me, the quiet joy of standing in the dark in front of a six foot tall plant, talking in unnecessary whispers. What if it blooms right now? I said. What if it blooms and we're the only ones to witness it? The thought made me shiver as rain pounded the walls outside. I wanted nothing more than for the corpse flower to bloom for us alone. The security guard at the door interrupted my fantasy. He peered into the room and glared at us. Closing time. He barked. You would have been locked in here all night. Sorry, sir, I said as we followed him out, suppressing our laughter. I thought it had gone well. When we parted on the train platform, I had felt sure we would go out again. It was early to feel so confident. Yes, but in the happy haze of our 4 hours together, I had imagined him really liking me. But as I surveyed my apartment, towel still on the bed, Walmart lamp from college in the corner, I started to reconsider. I am messy, lazy, and selectively kind. Other women have white sheets that are actually clean and little bowls fill with decorative stones.

Other women keep orchids. Other women do yoga. I told myself this wasn't true and we all have flaws. But I doubted other women's flaws were as bad as mine in the past. When I asked my friends about their faults, they said things that didn't count. They got frustrated sometimes or work too much. These conversations inevitably ended with me saying those aren't bad enough and storming away. They didn't say what I wanted to hear, that deep down they weren't sure if they were likable, that they were so irresponsible they couldn't imagine being mothers. They didn't say they craved attention but had trouble giving it to others. They didn't say how cruel they could be. These were surely the flaws he had seen in me. Switching the blow dryer to the other side of my head, I took a few deep breaths. What if he had seen my flaws and hadn't texted because of them? What if he had seen who I was and hadn't liked me? I tried to get beyond my immediate response. If he doesn't like me, nobody likes me. I am unlikable. And really think about it. If he hadn't texted because he didn't like me, was that so bad?

Relationships shouldn't be about suckering people in with some sanitized version of yourself only to spring the real you on them later. Maybe he had seen the real me and decided it wasn't for him. Plenty of things aren't for me. Running action movies, owning a dog. None of those things are bad because I don't like them. And if he hadn't liked me, why would I want to be with him? I wanted a relationship with someone who thought I was wonderful. Messy, maybe, prone to leaving towels on the bed? Yes. Bad with money? Absolutely. But wonderful. Maybe he had seeds of doubt and realized what it takes a lot of other people years to figure out that those seeds of doubt can spread tendrils through your body until they eventually strangle your heart. And then five years later you're having dinner together and all you can think is this isn't right. But by then it's too late. It was better to take notice now and bow out gracefully. Better to save us both years of indecision, resentment, and desperation. Maybe by not texting, he had given me the gift of the rest of my life. I put down my blow dryer and checked the time.

715 am. Outside, the breeze was lifting the leaves on the trees and traffic was starting to pick up. There was only so much life to live and no time to spend it with people who weren't the very best fit. And then he texted.

Oh my God, of course he texted. Of course he texted. Do you know what I mean?

I love that. I love the last line. Oh my God. When I first read it, it was losing me. I thought, she's really overreacting here and she needs to get a grip. And then the last line, wow. Then I was like, this is genius.

So good. And it really is like this crazy cosmic thing where the person you're interested in will wait until quite literally the second that you've given up on them to reach out again. Like, what is that? It's like a law of the universe.

Oh, my goodness. It's that same feeling of surprise that you got when you're reading it, that you feel when the thing happens to you, when they message you. It's just a mirror of the relationship because you talk yourself out of liking someone totally, and then they text you and you're like, well, here we go back again.

I'm in love. Absolutely.

That's what happened with me with the writer. I took myself out of liking them. And then here you go. I'm calling them a genius.

We'll be right back.

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Amelia, we just heard you read the essay the five stages of ghosting grief, and the author of this essay, Rachel Fields, was pretty confident when she said sent her text. It was flirty, it was a little bit risky, all about the bench time. But then obviously, you know, the whole piece is about the excruciating hours waiting for him to reply. Have you ever been in that situation?

For sure, I've been there countless times. And I think it goes back to what we were previously talking about, about feeling confident and thinking. This is a text I would send. I'm feeling funny, I'm feeling confident, and I felt an energy. So I'm going to message something that's flirty because that's what I feel like doing and that's who I am. And then when you don't get the response you want or you get radio silence, you, then the self doubt starts seeping in and it turns you into this person that you're not, which I think is what happened here in this situation. So, yeah, I really relate to that and I think that. But again, it's just that confidence you once had just sort of kind of being sucked out of you. And it's. It's a shame.

I mean, the guy does text rachel fields back, but it takes him a few hours. Takes him 9 hours. She sent the text at 10:15 p.m. and he responded at 07:30 a.m. in the morning. Maybe it was 715. Anyway, 9 hours. And I feel like the way you see those 9 hours is very telling. Some people see that response time as a clear sign. Like, this guy hates me. He took 9 hours. And other people are like, what's the problem? Like, he was probably just sleeping. Like he's at work, whatever. It's like the early morning. That seems like a much more peaceful way to think about things. Have you reached that kind of enlightened place in terms of dating? Or do you see that text as like a referendum?

Well, I think it's like if it becomes a pattern, then there's something off. I have been in the most high pressure environments on the red carpet of the oscars, and I was dating someone and they messaged me. I reply, I replied straight away, wait, is that real?

Did you actually do it from the red carpet?

Yeah. Like, there is no, like, if he.

Wanted to, he would.

Yeah, exactly. There is. Sorry. Everyone's got their phone on them at all times. They're glued to it. I do think that there's a lot to be said for, like, taking note of how the communication goes. But I also think that often it's actually not about you. And, like, decentering you can help a lot because you have no idea what they're going through. You have no idea if they're just not in the right headspace to date. And even if you are great, like, it's actually not about you. And maybe just if you just stop thinking about you for a moment, you might feel better.

Yeah, I mean, the author of this essay, Rachel Fields, really tries to calm herself down while she waits, but she was pretty unsuccessful. What do you do to chill yourself out if you're, like, waiting for a text to arrive? What are your tactics?

Text someone else.

That's good.

Have multiple options. I think having multiple options is always good. Easier said than done, but it actually does work if you're chatting to multiple people. Easier to not get invested in one person. And for, like, everything to be the be all and end all like that. I just do think that works. However, getting multiple options is hard. So when that doesn't happen, I think that you have to distract yourself. And it's really like, I've spent so much of my life being single. Like, for the majority of my life, I'm single. I date, but, like, my last proper relationship was four years ago. So I just spend most of my time in this limbo of, like, waiting for messages back or knowing if they're interested or knowing if I'm interested in that other person. And I think it's just part and parcel of being single. But at the same time, like, I have so much other things going on in my life that I'm grateful for that. Like, actually romantic love, even though I want it so badly, there's so many more types of love that I have in my life. And so I probably would say, like, my advice would be to lean into the other types of love that you have and to know that romantic love is not the best kind that you can get.

And I mean, that bell hooks taught me that and all about love, baby. Yes. Yeah. So. So I think that's probably what I try and do is remember all the other great things that I have going on that aren't to do with this guy that's not texted me back.

I am going to play your audio back the next time I'm sitting there in my apartment sweating, waiting for a text back. It's so true. I love what you're saying. Obviously, like, text someone else, build the roster, which I think is very practical advice. But then the sort of, like, broader emotional approach of being, like, listen, romantic love in my life is maybe a little bit of a question mark right now, but look at these amazing friends and family and my love for myself, my love for my dog, whatever. Like, focusing on those different types of love, I think that's incredibly smart and incredibly hard to do, is it not?

It's so hard to do. Like, I. Like, I find myself being sad, like, a lot of the time because I'm single and, like, I'm going into my thirties and I'm in my friendship group. I'm the only person that's not in a relationship.

Yeah.

And it is hard, but, like, I also just have to remind myself, like, why am I wasting time being sad? This is a waste of my energy. And I feel like my friends probably look at me and they think, I wish I had that element of Amelia's life. And I'm looking at them and thinking, I wish I had that element of theirs. But it's really tough all the good ones are taken. I'm sorry? All the good ones are taken. Like, that's the issue I have.

Wait, please don't tell me that, because I'm, like, really hoping that the situation is different across the pond, and it's not.

This is what my theory is. Most of the good guys are in relationships, okay?

Crap.

When. Okay, they are. And when they are not in relationships, they're out of their relationship for maximum six months. So it's all about timing, about meeting someone at this moment when they're, like, out of a relationship and they're ready to meet someone. And the windows, like, two weeks, it's literally. And it's crazy, but sometimes you got to maybe see that. Now I'm trying to see that as a positive. And, like, it's not about me. Like, it's literally. It's the timing and, like, it's not to do with the fact that I'm not lovable or I'm not a good person or I'm not a catch. It's. It's literally that just. That's the way it is. It's just there's not that many single, dreamy guys available. Like, it just.

Okay. It's simultaneously, like, so good to hear you say that. And I'm like, dang, I kind of hope that things were different in the UK, and I'm not sure why it's.

Different, but I also have hope. Like, I'm not a cynic at all. Like, even though I've said that, I truly believe that I will meet someone. Like, I have to. Like, I do, too. I have to. It has to happen.

I do, too. I fundamentally believe that.

Yeah.

Amelia de Moldenberg, what a treat. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you so much. I feel so much better now. I feel like I literally need going through it, like, this morning as well.

Wait, are you being real? Because I really am.

Yeah. And also, hopefully some people listening to this, too will feel a little bit better.

Totally. Hey, before we go.

Hi, modern love.

Hi, there.

Hi. Hey. Anna at modern love.

In our last episode, you may have heard us ask what the modern love column means to you. Hello, modern love team. Happy 20 year anniversary. This month is officially the 20th anniversary of the print column, and we were so thrilled to hear how modern love has become a part of your life.

I've been listening to modern love for a long time, maybe half of the 20 years.

So maybe I've been reading modern love since I got to college. So about four years, I heard a modern love story seven or eight years ago.

Well, my husband and I have a little ritual on Sunday afternoons.

I make tea and I put on a modern love story.

The podcast from last week on fighting. We had this really long and deep conversation and it led to a fight, or what we would call a fight. But it certainly did bring us a lot deeper, and I think we have a really kind of renewed perspective on what conflict looks like in our relationship.

I am just over 50 years old and now divorced and single and falling in love with me for the very first time. And it's been because of the countless columns and podcast episodes that have painted just such a meaningful picture of the different forms that love can take. I think it's really made me realize how important platonic love is in my life.

I guess self love as well.

If I'm aggravated with someone or something doesn't work out for me, or somebody.

Doesn'T quote unquote love me anymore, relationship.

Ends and I return to all of.

The different types of love from this column. Thank you for making me feel seen and connecting with me. Really appreciate it.

It was so amazing to hear all of your messages and thank you to everyone who called in. But guess what? This is just a preview of what modern Love is doing to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Keep an eye out for a bunch of special features online and in print. Seven lessons in Love from Modern Love editor Daniel Jones, or a story from Mia Lee, with more on how the column has changed readers lives. We've also got former modern love essayists writing letters to their younger selves. You will not want to miss it. Okay, now we have a different question for you. We're working on an episode about egg freezing. If you're thinking about freezing your eggs, what are you considering as you make your decision? What feelings is it bringing up for you? And if you have frozen your eggs, how did things turn out? How do you feel about it now? Please leave us a message on the modern love hotline. The number is 212-589-8962 that's 212-589-8962 include your name and a number where we can call you back and you might just hear yourself on a future episode of the show. Modern Love is produced by Reva Goldberg, Davis Land, Emily Lang, and Amy Pearl.

It's edited by our executive producer Jen Poyant, Reva Goldberg Davis Land and Lynn Levy. Production management by Christina Joseph the Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music by Dan Powell, Aman Suhota, Carol Saburo Rowan Nimestow, Pat McCusker and Diane Wong. This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez studio support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pitman Digital production by Mahima Czablani the Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of modern love projects. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.

From New York Times. Opinion this is the Ezra Klein show. And now for something completely different. We recorded this episode right before the first presidential debate, and there has 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, Gia Tolentino published a big piece in the New Yorker on Cocomelon. Cocomelon, if you do not have a two year old, is a show that every really little kid really 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 having children than all this political rhetoric about cat ladies and extra votes and tax rates. And I dont think its an accident that in this conversation, as were trying to talk about the value of what we cant 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 weve 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? Gia 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 Kleinshoe, times.com. chia Tolentino, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me back.

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?

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 gonna last for so long. There's gonna be parts 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 gonna 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. 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. 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.

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 the difference between reading about doing psychedelics and doing psychedelics 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.

Right.

When I've done psychedelics, I don't necessarily think they're fun. Sometimes they are, but what brings me to them is meaning. 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. And what is a more fundamental sense of human meaning than continuing the sort of human chain?

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

One thing thats very clear to me, as your work has shifted towards thinking a lot about parenting, I think since youve become a parent, is that you find it really interesting. Its very intellectually generative for you. I find thats true for me. 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 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 Garba's 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 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.

You know, it's the only part of this is because the way I was raised deep in the evangelical church in Texas, but that's the only word for it. You know, 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 some sort of submission and disappearance into something, right? It's the total submission to someone else's body, really, in your baby that I found there's no other word for it. And to their body's needs and to the mess of it and the, yeah, there's no other word. And it also feels the same way with the parts of parenting that are, in fact, tedious and repetitive 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 submission. And I found that, like, the transcendent moments in parenting and the really 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, like, stacking little plastic eggs on each other.

It feels like the same project. And I have found parenting really interesting. And 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, as with my first acid trip, I was like, no matter what, this will be interesting. No matter what, this will be extremely difficult in a way that is interesting. How could it not?

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 are so bored or so tired or you so want to be somewhere else. What do you do? And 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.

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

Yeah, I started laughing when you were talking about that because I was just thinking about, my little baby's about to turn one. So 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 09:30 a.m. and you're like, I wish everyone would go to bed, you know? Anyone ever have those days? And I would feel when I had that thought, right, like, you know, being 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 have the thought, like, I am abrogating the whole purpose of being alive. I could actually just enjoy this, pushing the swing in the sunshine over and over and over, but instead I just want to look at some dumb shit on my phone and whatever. I don't know. Have you ever had this experience? I think back to when I was little and I would read books while I was on roller skates.

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, 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. And put that desire quivering in our pockets, beckoning to us. I was going to say, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I have. This symptom of this brain disease that's particularly troubling to me is pre kids, back when I had enough alone time to have original thoughts more than once every five months or something, I would think something and I would have the sense of, this is an idea that is shimmering with movement in some way.

And then it would be too much for me. And then I would be like, I can't deal with it. I'm going to write it down and then I'm going to scroll for five minutes. 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 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 too precious, it's too much. Being present is work in a way that it's this rawness and it's this mutability it requires this of us and a presence that is something that I have sometimes found myself flexing away from because of all the reasons that it's good. In a weird way. Do you know what I mean at all?

I absolutely know what you mean 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, totally. Because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone.

Right.

And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading. One of the things I was thinking about, what you were saying that was, there's more spiritualism in this conversation than I expected, but I'm enjoying it. 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, 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 to me is my attention. And a lot of the need to escape is a need to rest my attention and recharge it. 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?

Right?

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?

Or are we looking for something? Right? Like, are we looking? Cause I think that a lot of what takes people to screens is like, you know, it looks like escape, but I think it's also pursuit. A friend of mine was watching my baby. Like, you know, it was one of those, like, schools off whatever. Andrew's out of town, whatever. 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 minutes, and then once she's, you know, once you see the eyes blink really heavy, just dump her. And they were like, oh, 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.

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 cocomelon. Why don't you describe for someone who has never seen it, who has no idea what that word means, what is cocomelon?

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

Beans, beanstar.

It's time to eat your beans.

Yes, yes, yes. I want to eat the beans.

Good, good. Beans are good for you. Yay.

I love them.

How to put this? It's this. The backdrop of cocomelon is that major children's animation companies did not make entertainment for babies and young toddlers because this was seen as sort of, like, 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 millions and millions of children whose attention could then be captured and monetized. And then you get all these things, like people know Miss Rachel, probably.

Hello.

Can you say mama?

Mama, mamade. Let's sing it, ma. Let's clap it, mama.

Let's sign it, ma.

Good job.

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, bobbleheaded, eternally smiling babies. And 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. Wash my hair.

Wash my hair.

Wash my hair.

Doo doo doo doo doo doo wash.

My hair, wash my face. Cocomelon is like. It's so popular that, you know, as of some time ago, the daily viewers, it was like 80 million daily viewers, which is as many people as watched the 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. 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 all the more remarkable because many of those viewers are. Most of those viewers are basically pre verbal. I've learned much more about Cocomel than I ever thought I was going to.

There's something interesting in Cocomelon, and I assume this maybe partially motivated your inquiry into it. There are two of them, I think, really, Cocomelon and blippi. But we'll focus on cocomelon 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 Mister Rogers now, but if you can. But parents like Daniel Tiger, there's all kinds of stuff that parents love. Bluey. I think in general, parents like Bluey more than their kids like Blueye. But cocomelon 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. 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 do you feel like there's this unfathomable divergence between what the kids want here and what the parents want here?

Well, I think, as far as I can make sense of it, this is the first sort of like, Cocomelon 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 create it are interested in providing, providing 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 now I kind of think we should meaningfully differentiate them, maybe especially for kids. And I think that's why I think you can feel it in the sort of bones of the stuff and the reaction parents have to it, even like teletubbies. College students love coming down from drugs and watching teletubbies. Like silly baby entertainment, it can provide delight. Which is not saying any of this has ever been pure.

Right. Children's television has basically always existed as an eternal toy commercial. But even Gi Joe, my little pony, these basically, 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. It feels like it's just eyeball capture attention with a pickaxe into the parent's eyes. Yeah.

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

100%.

I love the line you said, not entertainment, but raw attentional capture. And two things really jump out at me from that. One is that when you're putting 18 month or two year old in front of Coca melon, 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 well it provides it. 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, but we just don't want to think.

We are asking it 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 observed, absorbed in something else, something outside of myself.

Yeah. So one thing about Cocomellon writer, like you said, they're not doing anything new. It's just that the audience is new. Right. 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. It was extremely SEO targeted operation. Everything that I see has been algorithmically tailored to exactly what I want to be looking at as well. And I think I will say, I don't have that much screen time anxiety about my kids. I'm like, y'all have plenty of resources. You were creative class children in Brooklyn. You are luckier than 99% of the global population. You're going to be fine. I don't care about your specific language. I don't know. I don't worry about screen time in a very specific way. But I have a preemptive sorrow about the way that any ill can be instantly evaporated by putting my phone in front of my toddler and letting her, not my toddler anymore, my four year old, and letting her text emojis to my partner all day, another one of my distraction tactics.

I get the sense that you're going to be looking at screens so much. You're going to be doing everything that I'm doing, but probably, 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 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 what you want. And, you know, 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.

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're right. 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 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? I mean, my kids, they will never remember a time before YouTube kids, right? 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, right? 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. 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.

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

I don't think I care about the surveillance.

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. You don't feel your choices being sort of actively manipulated and shaped and constrained by an extremely bald profit structure. That to me feels like you said 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 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 eleven year old girl on Instagram, right? 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 or testing it against anything. And so much of that seems tied for me to the lack of silent, invisible, constant surveillance.

So, and I mean this completely sincerely, I love how much that doesn't resonate for me at all, because it means that I'm having, having such a different experience of this. And so I want to have them both here. Because, one, 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.

Do you not have a browser?

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. But I have a lot of. I have the New Yorker app. I'm unbelievably annoying as a person, but for me, 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 culture is good or bad, to these very measurable outcomes about school achievement or income in 20 years, or teen mental health. And it feels like we've just lost the ability to make judgments based on 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 studies of educational achievement.

Yeah, 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 Haidt's book the anxious generation, that if we can show something on a chart, it's like we cannot have the self confidence to make a judgment about it.

Well, I think I was going to pitch you another possible reason why the magazine feels different from the phone, which is that, I mean, the phone, it is always entwined with usefulness. And your work email lingers. You are reachable to be useful to someone when you were looking at your phone, even if you're just reading the book on your kindle that you would be reading off of it. Right? I think real pleasure. You're not like, there is nothing quantifiably achieved in it. You are not just un surveilled, but you are not being useful to a goddamn person, except the person directly in front of you, if there is one. Or the people, the many people. And that has to do with what you're talking about, the sort of Emily Oster esque, not knocking her eyes. Subscribe to her substack. The reduction of everything to, like, what does the data say and what are the outcomes? And that's the choice, right? It's sort of 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 a good of metric to judge anything on for ourselves and our kids to some extent. Right.

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 joyous. 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 I wanted to bring children into the world, not because the world is perfect, but it is beautiful. And 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 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, they're young, and they're getting tuned and trained 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 watch ninja go or ninjago, it is that their. 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 baseline of what attention is supposed to be like.

So they'll be like us, right? They will have their experience of the world curtailed by the desire to check a device every however many seconds. They will, there's just no doubt about it, 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. Like, it's only when the real physical world is 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 psychedelics? Well, certainly psychedelics. Going out, dancing, being face to face with a friend, reading, writing, listening to music. Actually, this extremely limited set of things that are more mesmerizing to me and more pleasurable to me than the screen.

And that's 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. However the world enlarges or seems to enlarge through a screen.

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 some of these other ends. You talk in the piece about a researcher, and this is to cast noispersions 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 Mister Rogers cinematic universe, which gets a two, or maybe Bluey would probably get a two. You have something like Cocomelon, 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, dream logic crap, CGI. And that's like a zero. And I was thinking, reading that, about what is implicit in the scale 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 children, but I think there is this question we face of, well, what is our measure? But what for you helps orient the tuning fork both for GIa or for your children?

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 shifted a little for me. Right. It wasn't the pure hedonism of twelve years earlier or whatever. It was something that was deeper and harder and more prolonged. 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. Like, 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 nothing less.

I think it's interesting to say maybe we should be searching for pleasure as opposed to achievement, but that also, there's a lot of things one might want. Pleasure is one of them, but achievement is a reasonable one too, if you.

Find pleasure in it, right?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe pleasure isn't the point of life. Or maybe 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.

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

Sometimes somebody in the middle of a podcast will just press on a point in me so sore that I have to spend a minute to be like, am I really going to go here? I'll say, I guess this. I am struggling with this question quite a lot lately in my own life, 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 ready for my day, I just have this note in my notebook about the things I need to do today. Can you try to be driven by something other than the situation? Internal pressure. When I began writing about politics, I was a blogger in college. Before blogs were 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 this much bigger platform, it's so much less pleasurable.

And so I think it's interesting, this idea you're getting out of expanding pleasure, 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 to the stuff that was not educational. 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 blippi thing that the. Like, I think there's something about kids probably can learn more when they are experiencing some sort of delight.

I hate blippi. I just find Blippi completely unnerving. If you have never watched Blippi go enjoy yourself on YouTube. But my kids like it. Whoa.

And look at what you wrote up.

On a police bicycle. Can I look at it? Of course you can, Blippi. Oh, cool. Okay. Look at this.

A helmet.

Wow.

This keeps you nice and safe.

Okay.

And, ooh, look up here. Do you see that?

It's a light.

Beep, beep.

Bewildered.

I do go back and forth 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 to. 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. Everything has to be educational. They can't put on pants, they can't put on shoes. And already we are stretching out the tarp of their consciousness across the scaffolding of the adult world. Achievement and education. Are you bettering yourself and are you improving? And I both get it. But it does feel like a transmutation of what we have done to ourselves onto them at a younger and younger and younger age. Just this movement of what was once an elite adult culture, the self improvement culture, Dale Carnegie culture, lifelong education to now it's like your babies are supposed to be doing. It feels odd.

Well, and I also think, to me, it disturbs me less because it is indicative of this broader culture of optimization that I abhor and participate 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 cocomellon 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, it feels kind of 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 healthy and what is not, 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.

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 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.

So it really does.

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, that'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've had a psychedelic experience, when they turn on the tv at the end of it to come to rest. If they decide to do that, they tend to watch cartoons, they watch Pixar, 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.

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, etcetera, that their orientation may be in that direction, too, maybe there's something valuable in it at the end of that experience. I don't want something highly educational and in the experience a two year old is having wide eyed in this completely overwhelming world. Maybe they don't end. Shouldn't.

I think that's why. But it comes down to pleasure. I once did an iconic three movie come downstream of. I think it was like Pawnee, then Pocahontas, then Bambi or something. And I was like, this is living. 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 through kids, let something just exist without a purpose. Maybe for a little bit. But I also, for this reason, I think that just basic ideas of beauty and pleasure, they're not that different from. 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. But I think little children find the same things beautiful like they are. You know, 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 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 gonna be in front of a screen escaping or looking for something or just zoning out, why not have it just be legitimately delightful? And maybe blippi is that for some kids. But I think that I came out of thinking about cocomelon for months with that idea in my mind. 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, the same ones that I would want to watch coming down from a hallucinogen.

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

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, it is like the screen itself is almost a red herring. Right. People think about screen time as it correlates with achievement and verbal abilities and self regulation and language abilities at grade level seven, 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. 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 of opportunities they have and the kind of household they're raised in, the freedom that they have to 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.

I always, when I was kind of required for one job or another to be constantly paying attention to the news, it was scrolled out on Twitter all day long. I was glued to social media, kind of by requirement. And I think the way I thought of it then was like, this is bad, but it's okay as long as my real life is bigger than it. 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 1 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, feels like a reasonable metric to me.

I think so much of why parents hate cocomelon 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 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.

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 a task, Robert. Or drive for Lyft or deliver, you know, like, there's a way that the phone is the catch all solution for any sort of discontent. Let's say someone is still using Twitter and they're miserable and they want to get off of it, probably like, they're still going to be looking for a source or replacement that exists on the phone, you know, okay, maybe not that one, but what about Reddit or something like that?

What I think is so hard, 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 just enough staying power, that is energy, people are not being able to put in to creating things that are different. And I think there are things that are different out there, certainly things that are different that could be imagined. And again, I think this ends up being true for kids, too. 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 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 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. Do wonder about how different it is that my kids can watch anything at any time, whereas I was at least a little bit prisoner to what was on when including I had it easier. I had Nickelodeon, which had a lot of kids programming. I didn't only have to watch it on the kids hour on network television. With all these things, it feels like there's some balance that makes sense. Some point where it's enough and not too much. Enough escape, but not too much escape, enough choice, but not too much choice. And just in a lot of things, it feels like we've, to me, hit too much. Maybe that's just me getting old. And I just think 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.

Well, I think again, I mean, it's like my dumb ass keeps bringing this all back to pleasure, but I think that feels like that line, right? I. And 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. Cause we just followed what we wanted to do. Like, we weren't walking away from 6 hours of Pete and Pete because it was good for us. You know, we were. It would be better for our language abilities in the 7th 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 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 concept of no, okay, so this is like, there's a joke. Me and my friends have a joke that it'd 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 of Acedia as a flight from the divine that leads to not even caring that one does nothing care. It's like this listlessness, this disengagement from the world, this boredom. And then you start not even caring that you're so bored. Like this total inability to act upon your life. As with the example of, we were able to walk away when we weren't having fun anymore. We didn't 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 way out is a set of experiences or desires that will clean out and clarify your radar for what actually feels good and what actually doesn't. Yeah. Feels good in any way 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 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.

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 matters. 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 never read before that actually was really great, or music that we 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. 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 find I really try never to leave my kids alone with a recommendation algorithm, 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 how to give them the thing they actually want that will keep them clicking. And again, I think this is where Cocomelon feels weird. I mean, Cocomelon, to bring it back to that, it's one of the first successes in children's television, 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. Knows the kids too well. It feels too tuned to their short attention spans. 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. 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.

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, it's a really human desire that has made this so effective as an addictive technology. Of course, we want to be learned and we want to be known. And that's so much of the entire pleasure of being alive interpersonally. Right. We want that for good reasons, but it's part of why Cocomelon 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 good pleasure, meaningful pleasure from meaningless pleasure, which is that I think there's friction in all real pleasure. And in the kind of pleasure you learn to get in the real world, there's friction in it. There is 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 they're seeing things about us that we don't even see, all 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.

That experience contains sharp edges in a way that the algorithmic one never can. 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, giving me 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, it's one of those things where maybe it's easier to see with Cocomelon, and it's easier to see that the 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 to have a little more friction in their life and not being just get everything that they want at touch of a button, and then me pursuing that as soon as they're in bed.

This may be gets at another thing that I'm afraid of, because one of the things I was thinking about while you were saying that is I decided a couple months ago I'd sign up for a bunch of the AI relationship apps, like kindroid and character AI and things like that, where these language models were built to create kind of AI you'd be friends with or a lover with, or it would be your therapist or whatever. And I tried them out for a while, and 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 at texting than most of the people I know.

Would it have fooled you?

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

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

You 100% easily, I would not have known it's not a person, but I never could keep myself coming back to them because there was no meaning in the interaction. So since moving to New York, I've been making new friends, and I was thinking about how one of the friends I made, we text 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 relationship that is emerging. And I didn't end up writing the piece on this, though, because I can see the character aethereze AI usage numbers that are being released. And this is 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. So to go to the point of what I'm afraid of, right, this question of the retraining, for me, who grew up before large language models, the kind of uncanniness, what I would call the meaninglessness of that interaction, is very front and center, right, 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 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, and that that is a loss and that it does foreclose forms of pleasure. Just as you were talking about hugely.

There'S this old Kurt Vonnegut thing where he was talking about the pleasure of mailing a letter. And it's like how the whole point of it is not that you're doing something efficient, the whole point of it is that you go for a walk and you wink at a girl and you pet a dog or whatever. 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 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 significantly. And it's also partly because the experience of having children wonderfully, it is the source of all that friction. It's sort of 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 that friction can seem exclusively like something that's undesirable. When in fact, 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 want at 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 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 you're like, I'm probably not particularly good at being the horsey right now, but the thing that matters to you is that I am the person being the horsey.

The most common way I feel like I fail as a parent, and it's the way I fail both my kids and myself, is by trying to really control and optimize the experience and treat it like other things in my life. We're going to do this at this time, and then we're going to go here and you got to get your shoes on by this moment. And to your point about being the horsey or finding some joy in submission, parenting is so unpleasant when you feel like it is a distraction from the thing you would prefer to be doing, like looking at your phone or I taking a nap. 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 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 and it's like you could just do a lot less. We've made parenting really, really hard. And we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as parents to try to do a great job of it and 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. They would like you to be around a bit more or a lot and be attentive, but also, like, not overtake their experience with your own. And that's really hard. I would like to get better at that.

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 brain my way into finding really pleasurable, is that 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 gonna 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 kind of outside the clock time, you know, where you are 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 no longer feel that as a loss. I'm realizing I used to. I used to think like, oh, I could have done so many things with these weekends. And now I'm like, it's time to go to the playground. Time to go to the playground again.

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

No. Should I go on? No, I don't think so.

I got a lovely place to end. So that was our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

I forgot about this question until I was on the train here, and I was like, okay, I gotta think about the last three things that I was just texting people about, because I really loved it. 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, 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 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 Reid recommended to me.

It's sort of, if anyone is in the sort of Ted Chang 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 Labattut. 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 goes on where the book starts off almost entirely nonfiction, then ends almost entirely fiction. And the gradations in between are amazing.

And I'll just note, because you mentioned you lost answer. You said talked about reading how to do nothing, which is by Jenny O'Dell. And I still think it's the best book about attention and having a mind in this era. I've enjoyed this so much. Gia Tolentino, thank you very much.

Thank you.

This episode of the Ezra Klein show is 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 Amin Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samielewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Roy Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.