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In this excerpt from today's episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, which is different from yesterday's episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, which is all about the comedy album that Muhammad Ali got nominated for a Grammy for recording in 1964, which birthed rap music, and also Muhammad Ali himself. That was yesterday. It's really good. It was Justin Tinsley. Check that out. This is different from that. It's also just an excerpt from today's episode. You should know that, too. In this excerpt, this taste, I give you Mina Kimes and Dan Levitard and a way better Elmo than Jeff Passon. That's right. Fuck you, Passon. We got a new Elmo.

You will forgive me after we've talked about discipline and organization that the article I was supposed to have in front of me to tell you who wrote it and what it's about is not in front of me because I left it near a sandwich outside. However, the article points out in the New York Times that what happened when Elmo simply asked the Internet on what used to be known as Twitter, How is everyone doing out there? The response, the clingingness of the Internet Internet responded with a sadness, an acidic well of unhappiness that basically told Elmo that everyone is in a deep, deep acid pit of despair. And I know that this isn't surprising. I know that many people on the Internet are not merely addicted to the Internet, but are also addicted to the ability to show some of their personalities on their Internet, have a voice they might not have in other parts of their life. And the part I wanted to talk to you guys about, because I believe social media is the single largest untreated addiction that we have in the globe, where people aren't paying attention to the fact that we like this thing, even though it makes us unhappy.

And if you live in this thing and addicted to your devices, you will find more and more unhappiness. Why are you laughing, Mina? Because this is a story about Elmo, and I've gone dark on it.

No, because while you were talking, I picked up my phone to look at the article because you didn't remember it. Then my fingers, literally, it was like an out-of-body experience, switched over to Twitter.

Just your addiction.

I literally just instinct drove them.

This is a podcast and also an intervention.

But I want to talk about what's happening all over the globe in a way that we all understand. If we were all wandering around addicted to heroin, we would understand that there was a health consequence to this. If When you're wandering around addicted to something that foments so much unhappiness that it metastases when an Elmo character merely asks how you're doing, this has to be treated. Unhappiness, mental health combined with an addiction, all of this, even through a cartoon character, should alarm us on what's happening in the world right now where people are everything from broke to broken. I just find it all disheartening, and I have found, because I can't frisbee my iPad into the ocean and just be done with it, that I am consistently with a feeling of a film of anxiety on me that's not normally there. Are you doing it again, Mina? Are you back in?

You're the only person I know who uses their iPad to look at social media.

I'm the only person.

He's talking about frisbeeing your iPad into the ocean.

Dan is at a concert videotaping it with an iPad. He is that guy. Absolutely.

It's just a bigger I need a bigger screen. I need a bigger screen because I'm not just old. I'm not just old technologically. I need a bigger screen with bigger fonts. The phone's too small. My hand's too big.

Whenever he sends text and It's always an adventure to what account is it going to come from? I assume if it comes from your email, you've typed it on your iPad.

All you got to know about his email.

This is not what this is about.

This is not what this is about. Is that the AOL?

Oh, stop it. I've got a MetalArk Media email now. I've got a metal like, I've graduated from AOL, but occasionally I'll slip in there if I'm on the iPad.

That's not what this is about. That's not what this is about..

Stay on point. Do not point your finger at me and laugh at me. Do not point... Aol, God damn you.

We're interrupting Dan's presidential campaign speech by laughing at him.

Am I wrong? Did you not read the story? No, but- Almoat stories don't make me sad. They don't make me sad. This one made me sad.

It's just very on the nose. All of this is clearly the thing that I talked about sports before is sometimes you do something often enough such that you immediately know what's bullshit or not. You don't have to fake being informed about it. We all know this is real. It does take a cartoon character to be like, Yeah, the what? The accidental therapist where everybody's actually saying the truth while joking?

Earlier, I was talking about time management. I think we have to say everyone has to be very... Everybody. If you are concerned about time management, you have to explicitly reckon with the way time management affects your... Or, sorry, social media affects your productivity and strategize around it. I think the same thing applies with mental health, sadness, the way being on our phones affects our brains. There needs to be more education around this. We need to be strategic around it. It feels like for the last 15 years or so, it's been the Wild West where this thing has slowly taken over our lives, but we haven't had that many conversations about how to deal with it, how to regulate it, how to be more careful with it. I feel like now it feels like we're beginning to think about it. Pablo, I have a kid now. I hope that in school, this is taught. I hope that teachers are thinking about it. I hope that mental health people are thinking about it because everything is different now. You can't just take it for granted that you can go on living your life the way we did before when the way we interact with the world is so different.

Well, Dan, the scariest thing that happens as the father of a daughter is just how immediately obvious operating an iPad is to her. It's old people and little kids who love tablets, and it's just intuitive. It's intuitive, and that belies, I think, the larger truth, which is that human beings, despite that ease, were not meant, you're biologically to consume information like this. I just can't come up with any other answer other than, We weren't meant to be like this. You were the most time-managed people like Mina. We're not meant to manage all of these morsels of information. I think that's revealing about who can handle this.

Beyond that, though, right? Because if you have a parenting blind spot, and I don't have kids, but I would imagine that these devices are excellent babysitter sitters, and you should be disciplined about how early you put this in a child's hands. But when we were talking about this a moment ago, and I was thinking of the effect that it has had on me as someone from the AOL age who is a formed adult, if it's this corrosive and contaminated to someone who knows what he wants and needs at this age, what is the impact of this thing on teenagers? What is the impact of this thing on younger people? When you talk about not having the tools, the education to properly identify this. If I told the audience right now, do you realize that everyone listening to this that you know is addicted to something we know is, at least in in part, unhealthy. If it was anything other than social media, there would be alarms going off all across the globe on this is a huge crisis. This is a crisis for future generations because this is so corrosive and it is so unknown in spots that we are rotting our young people because I'm telling you, I have difficulty with it when I'm an otherwise confident formed adult that finds myself plagued by certain anxieties that weren't there before.

They just weren't there that this thing is responsible for.

It is still unappreciated, I think, how significant of a problem it is to your point, Dan. And just speaking for myself, Like, I... There have been points... There was a point last year where some people were making videos about me or whatever, and I was looking at it and I broke down in tears. I remember I was about to go for a run and I sat down and I opened my phone and I looked at it and I started crying. And then I remember I called my friend Michael Jr. And he talked me down. And after that, I changed it so I could no longer see what people I don't follow say about me. I, check you not, it probably increased my happiness from that point on by 25% in real life. I bring up this example to, I guess, get at where I think we have to go, which is we need people, experts, teachers, parents, whatever, to develop these types of strategies for everyone. That's just a concrete example of something I had to have an intervention in how I use the internet because it was affecting my mental health. I think those sorts of strategies are needed for children, teenagers, adults, because it feels like a crisis to me.

It makes me long to come full circle here for the days of AOL, where there were walls around our audience. One of the issues, of course, is that everybody's perpetually talking to people they don't mean to talk to. We're now also overhearing conversations that in Mina's case, were deliberately meant to torture her. But even the ones that aren't targeted at us can be exhausting and affect how... There is that chart recently that was staggering about Gen Z, men and women, boys and girls, just the political divergence of boys becoming conservative, girls becoming liberal along these standard political axes. I have to imagine that just the way that the algorithm is sorting us like an evil sorting hat, we don't want that. We don't want that degree of difference. It reminds me that Mike Oleg Jr is a great person to call in that circumstance. He may be second only to this person.

Elmo wants to know why everyone is so angry. Elmo has been pondering the secret sadness hiding in beside everyone living in modern society. And what Elmo wants is everyone to be happy.

But we live in a dystopia where everyone assumes everyone is lying.

And the only thing I believe is that everyone is sad. It makes Elmo regret capitalism. Elmo wants to burn capitalism to the ground. Who will join Elmo in the revolution?

Because Elmo is tired of this shit.

Whoa. Whoa.

Chris, nail that. I'm sorry, Elmo. Yeah, thank you. My bad. Yeah. That was really good.

That was shockingly good. Shockingly good.

Not as good as my Cookie Monster.

Ten takes. It only took 10 takes.