September 17, 2025 • 29 mins
This week, we take a deep dive into why Gen Z isn’t having sex. Karah talks with Carter Sherman, a reproductive health and justice reporter for The Guardian, and author of the book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. They unpack how tech factors into the “Sex Recession,” sex as a proxy measure for empathy and human connection, and how all of this is a lot more political than you might think.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to tech stuff. This is a story. I'm os
Voloshen here with Cara Price hi Oz.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Today I want to talk to you about something that
is very unsexy, and that is the sex recession.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Sex and money, I guess together, but not in a
good way. What does this have to do with technology?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Before I get to technology, I want to ground us.
The sex recession refers to a documented decline in sexual
activity among younger generations. So apparently Gen Z, which is
the generation born between ninety seven and twenty twelve, is
having sex later in life and less frequently than previous
generations like ours, truly millennials.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I definitely heard about the less frequently, but I also
always want to see these kind of like trendle think pieces.
I'm a little bit confused as to how we actually know.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Well, at least in this case.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Part of the reason we know is because of people
like our guests today. Carter Sherman is a journalist who
covers reproductive health and justice at the Guardian, and she
actually just wrote a book called The Second Coming, Sex
and the Next Generation's Fight over its Future. And in
writing the book, she not only leaned on years of
her reporting, but she also conducted over one hundred interviews
with young people, and what she found is that there
(01:31):
is a sex recession going on. The Kinsey Institute says
that one in four gen Z adults has never had
partnered sex. But that doesn't mean gen Z doesn't think
about sex.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
So if we're saying that young people are not horny
these days, I can tell you they are horny. That
is my expert opinion. Young people are horny, and they
would like to have more sex oftentimes. But I think
that they feel like the obstacles to sex are higher
these days than they have been in the past.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
So I'm curious about these obstacles. And I'll ask you
again why.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
This is an episode of tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Well, she said there are a lot of factors, and
she gets into it more in the interview, but some
of the major ones have to do with what you'd
expect social media, smartphones, and internet pornography, which are all
kind of changing and warping the way we connect with
one another. But Carter told me, for her, at least,
the concern is less about whether or not gen Z
is having sex. It's more about what sex represents to them.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
I will say honestly that I actually don't care that
much if gen Z has sex or not. What I
care about is whether or not sex is approximy measure
for people's willingness to be vulnerable, or their willingness to
be in relationship with other people, to have connections with
other people, to be empathetic to other people's point of view.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
This is actually a brainteresting idea sex is a kind
of almost like an antidote or a corrective to living
in an entirely virtual world.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, you know, for Carter, this actually goes way beyond sex,
and at the heart of her book are questions about
the consequences of life in a world where face to
face communication, which could be sex or just chatting with someone,
is eroding.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
Not only is having empathy, having connection, being willing to
risk rejection and risk grown ability. Not only is that
important to people's personal growth and ability to live a
whole life, but I do actually think it has political implications.
We have to be willing to build bonds with other
people in order to have a cohesive democracy, and I
think a lot of people are kind of worried about
(03:27):
the state of our democracy at this time. And I
don't think we can take away what's going on with
sex and what's going on with intimacy from the questions
of the future of our democracy.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
So, as you can tell, we get into some heady stuff,
but we also talk about how gen z's access to
things like online fan fiction have made them actually kinkier
and more LGBTQ friendly than previous generations. And I actually
started this piece by asking Carter what compelled her to
write this book in the first place. So here's the
rest of our conversation.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
Well, so I've covered gender and sexuality for eight less
years now, and I have spent a lot of time
thinking about the ways that current events shape people's relationship
with sex. So I've covered me too, I've covered the
overturning over a v. Wade, I've covered changes in internet
law around things like pornography. So I was compelled to
(04:17):
write the book because I wanted to understand what it
was like for young people to live through all of
these kinds of changes and how they understood their own
relationship with sex, because I think we're really obsessed with
telling young people all the time that they're doing sex wrong.
Either they're having too much sex or they're having too
little sex, or they're having the wrong kind of sex.
(04:37):
And I wanted to know what young people themselves thought
about their sex lives and thought about the discourse and
the politics around their sex lives, because there's just so
many ways in which young people are much more progressive
when it comes to sex. They have much more inclusive
ideas around sex and gender, and they're much more accepting
of premarital sex.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
They're much more accepting of same sex sex.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
But what I found is that young people are actually
still harboring quite a bit of shame, particularly if they
feel like they haven't had sex at a time when
they should have had it.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Well, there have been so many articles in the last
few years about how gen Z isn't having sex, Like
is this true or is this just like a grabby headline.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
It is true that gen Z is having less sex
than past generations, and that they're having sex on average
later than past generations. One in four adult members of
gen Z has not had sex with an other person.
Only about a third of high school students have had sex,
which is down from about fifty percent when I was
in high school. Even masturbation is on the decline, which
is shocking to me. Because masturbation is free, and so
(05:37):
there is clearly something going on here around young people's
relationship with sex. I think what is oftentimes lost in
the headlines is that the sexer session did not actually
start with gen Z. It started with people like me,
late millennials. So we started to see evidence of the
sex or session by like the mid to late twenty
tens among millennials. And so we can't blame things like
(06:01):
the COVID pandemic for the sex recession. There is clearly
some underlying thing that is going on before we were
all locked down.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
So how did you try to get to the bottom
of this?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Like how I guess was your methodology different from just
panics clickbait?
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Like I like how you assume that it is different
than panic clickbait. But I do think, well, one of
the things I did is I interviewed more than one
hundred young people under thirty about their thoughts on sex
and their experiences with it and their approach to it.
And these were conversations that lasted on average ninety minutes,
(06:38):
and I found people from all across the country, from
all walks of life. I wouldn't say it is scientifically
representative of the United States, because there was in particular
an over indexing on activists, people who are involved in
fighting for abortion rights, against abortion rights for LGBTQ plus
rights against sexual assault. Because I wanted to understand what
drives young people to want to shape the sex lives
(07:00):
of other people in their peer group and to shape
the policies and practices around sex. I also just dug
very deeply into the research that exists on young people's
relationship with sex, and on their relationship with things like
social media objectification, and on their relationship with porn. And
then the final thing I would highlight that I think
sort of makes the book rise above like a sex
(07:23):
panic or a moral panic, is that I spend a
lot of time, frankly, talking about something that is kind
of unsexy, which is policy, because I think that we
tend to think about what's going on with young people
as being a private matter. It's something that sex in
general is something that happens between two people in a bedroom.
But in reality, the terms of sex, and particularly the
terms of what happens when sex goes wrong, those terms
(07:45):
are set for us in courtrooms and school board meetings
and congress and state legislators and the White House, and
so I wanted to peel back the curtain on the
ways that, even if you don't realize it, policy is
impacting your ability to live out your sex life the
way you want to.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So, you know, you spoke to one hundred people, like
what are the factors stopping gen Z from having sex?
Speaker 5 (08:08):
There is definitely no one answer to this. Unfortunately, I
wish there was. I wish I could say this is
the issue, and this is what we need to address.
But I think some of the biggest culprits behind the
sexor session are definitely smartphones on social media. We can
trace a lot of trends in young people's mental health
back to twenty ten, which is around the same time
that we all got smartphones that had social media on them.
(08:31):
I think we can look at things like the overturning
of Roe V. Wade as actually having quite a big
impact on young people's sex life. Sixteen percent of gen
z ers are now more reluctant to date since the
overturning of A V. Wade, which is a huge number.
And I think we also have to look at the
things like sex education we have had over the last
two decades, an enormous amount of money being directed towards
(08:55):
absence only sex sit by the federal government. The federal
government has in fact spent more than two billion dollars
on apps it's only sex education. And the thing about
absence only sex said is it doesn't tend to work.
It doesn't actually tend to lead people to delay sex.
People who undergo federally funded sex said tend to have
sex at the same time as people who didn't undergo
that sex said, and I should say absence only sex
(09:16):
said and have as many sexual partners. But it can
very much pathologize sex, and it can create this constant
sense of anxiety around sex. And I think that that is,
if anything, maybe the greatest culprit here is that all
of these things have combined to create this miasma of
anxiety around sex and to make sex incredibly fraught and
make people just not want to engage with it.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And so it's not even so much like abstinence as
it is deferring sex just because it seems too complicated now.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
Yeah, or going without sex over time, because there are
young people are going without sex for longer periods of time,
They are spending more time absent between sexual partners. And
I think you know this is if you look at
sex said and what's gone on there. You know, since
only sex, I cannot deal with all the things that
have happened in sex over the last twenty years. It
(10:05):
can't talk about the spread of internet porn because it
wants a percent of that internet porn doesn't exist.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
It can't talk.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
About how social media might affect your body image because
it doesn't want to even address the fact that young
people have bodies that lead them to have wants and
desires and needs. And so we're creating a system where
the education that young people are receiving in schools is
increasingly untethered from reality and makes them more vulnerable to
not know just how to handle anything that has to
(10:33):
do with sex, let alone.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
The act of sex itself and having safe sex.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
So this is a tech podcast, so I have to
go a little bit deeper into this idea of you know,
smartphones and social media as having an impact on the
sex recession. Are there any stories that you heard while
reporting for this book that exemplify how social media and
smartphones have contributed to this trend or to this recession.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
Yeah, there are lot of stories I heard, in particular
about how young people were feeling about their bodies because
of social media, because I think one of the main
things that social media does, particularly for young girls and women,
is it makes you see your body as a sexual
object that's being evaluated. So you're constantly measuring your desirability
(11:21):
by things like likes and follower counts and matches, and
it really lays bare a lot of the dynamics that
have always got on dating, but that we can now
quantify because we're seeing it play out on apps. So,
for example, one young woman talk to me about how
she is of Indian descent and had seen videos where
(11:41):
men were asked questions like what race wouldn't you date?
And it was first black women, she said, and then
it was Indian women, and it made her feel ugly.
It made her feel terrible about herself. And in fact,
this young woman, at least by the time I spoke
with her, had not had sex. And the ultimate reason
that she hadn't had sex and that she hadn't dated,
even though she is straight and she's interested in having sex,
(12:04):
is because she was afraid that the men she would
encounter would be in cells. She felt like the Insul
ideology has so permeated the ways that men and women
interact and the ways that she's seen them interact online
that she just feels like she can't trust men at
this point, and so she's opting out of dating entirely.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
And the reason she knows what an in cel is
is because of the Internet, correct.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
Right, Yeah, I mean in cells are very much a
subculture that has come to prominence because the Internet gives
them places to lurk. And I have, as I've said,
I've covered sex and gender for eight plus years. I
have seen some really horrendous things said online about women
through doing that work, and I have to say that
in cel forms are the most gruesome place on the Internet.
(12:50):
But the thing is that I also think the ways
that insuls talk has permeated the larger.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Lexicon at this point.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
Like if you think about things like max you know,
the thing that Insul's talk about is looks maxing, which
is that you change the way you look so that
you can be more stereotypically attractive. Now we just say
things like maxing. Or I was talking to another friend
the other day and talking about La Boo Boos, and
I said that I had been labooboo pill and then
I was like, wait, I'm using in cel language because
(13:19):
Instel's talk about being red billed, they're black piled, And
this is just how we talk now, and I think
we don't think critically about the fact that we have
normalized this manospheric language and what it means that we
now treat these ideas and attitudes as just being an
everyday thing.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
So I'm remembering, like when I was in must have
been fifth grade, that internet pornography seemed to be everywhere.
And I was in fifth grade, you know, around the
year two thousand. In what way does just the insane
accessibility of pornography and that just the existence of it
(13:56):
affect this sex recession at all?
Speaker 5 (13:59):
For gen Z, that is a great question, And the
answer is that we don't really know, because the science
on porn is so muddy. You can find studies on
porn that say basically anything you want to hear. And
so one of the things I was really interested in
doing in this book is understanding not necessarily what porn
does from a scientific perspective, but what people think porn does.
(14:21):
And I had originally thought that young people on the
left be more warm towards pornography, would have sort of
more tolerance of it. And I thought that people young
people on the right would be very anti porn, But
what I found is that in general, young people are
profoundly anti porn, and they feel like porn has very
much warped their sexuality. In particular, they feel like it
(14:42):
is normalized quote unquote rough sex and actions like choking.
If you were under forty, you were twice as likely
to have been choked during sex compared to people who
are older, and oftentimes that choking is not done consensually.
And I should also say, you know, porn is not
a monolith. There is plenty of pretty violent porn. But
there weren't a sizable number of interviewees, particularly who were
(15:05):
young women or who were queer, who really enjoyed written porn.
And they had come to written porn through online portals
like what pat They got really into fan fiction, and
then they found erotica, and then they found romance novels,
and they felt like, because that kind of porn is
typically written with the idea that it's not for a systemail,
(15:26):
straight audience, that that kind of pornography much more closely
mirrored their desires and made them feel much more accepted,
And so I do think the Internet is not bad
for sex in general. I think it can be really
great for making people who have not typically been in
power feel like their desires and their identities are much
(15:47):
more common and much more accepted than they might believe
from their immediate community.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
But it's also not leading to them having more sex.
It's leading to them sort of reading more erotic fan fiction.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
Yeah, I mean why most young people do end up
having sex, to be clearer, but it is interesting that
they're sticking with porn, and I think part of this
comes down to questions of willingness to be vulnerable, willingness
to take risks, willingness to potentially be rejected, because porn
will never reject you. Porn is going to portray the
most perfect It's going to give you just the best
(16:22):
possible sexual experience because no one else is involved with it.
And that's true of both video porn and romance novels,
because they're both selling this fantasy of this partner who
knows exactly what you do with your body to make
you have a screaming.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Orgasm after the break is tech robbing us of the
ability to be vulnerable stay with us. In your book,
(17:03):
you talk about how vulnerability and empathy are essential to
developing an open and honest connection. What is it about
gen Z's tech environment that makes that kind of vulnerability
and empathy difficult.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
Well, they're surrounded by tech in a way that past
generations were not. Most people were not constantly able to
go onto the internet at all hours of day and night,
and so on one level, they're simply spending more time on
their phones and online than past generations. But the other
thing that I think is going on in young people's
tech environment that makes them reluctant to be vulnerable is
(17:42):
the extent to which they are constantly aware of the
persona that they're selling online. We've all grown up with
this idea. And I say we because I think late
millennials have grown up with this too. I was in
high school when Facebook came a thing, and I had
Facebook for my entirety of my high school career. But
you are constantly aware of the story that you're selling online,
and the story that you're selling online about yourself, the brand,
(18:04):
the persona that is like a happier, healthier, more sexy
version of yourself and you don't ever want cracks in
that to show. But there is research that shows that
the higher you score in self objectification measures, which is
to say, the more you think of your body as
an object, which social media tends to make people do.
It tends to make them basically constantly surveil themselves and
(18:27):
constantly see themselves from the outside, constantly be gauging their
sexual attractiveness. The higher you score and self objectification, the
more likely you are to not want to have sex
because you've viewed sex as yet another chance for you
to be judged and found wanting.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
That's really interesting.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
There was one young woman who I was talking with
who was talking about how she felt compelled to post
bikini photos of herself on Instagram when she was in
high school, and when she would take these photos with
her friends, her friends would constantly say things like, your
boobs look so good, your hips look so good, your
legs look so good. And on one hand, that might
seem complimentary, but on the other what it's really doing
(19:02):
is it's really comparing. It's really making her aware of
what she has or what she doesn't have in comparison
to other people, and how to portray it to the
best advantage. And there's a ton of research, some of
which has been conducted by Meta and was kept secret
from the general public, that shows just how much being
on Instagram can erow young people's sets of self esteem.
(19:24):
And the thing was this young woman as we were talking,
she was originally saying, I don't know why I felt
so compelled to post these photos, and then she said
it was for men. I realized now it was for men.
I wanted men to see me and to desire me.
And the thing is that it works. She's not crazy.
I was talking to another young man who was telling
me about how he'd be scrolling through Instagram and he'd
(19:44):
see one girl clothes and then he'd see another girl
who's in a bikini, and he was probably gonna like
that girl in a bikini more. And so it's this
constant sense of comparison that is rooted in reality that
is making young people feel like, oh, I can never
ever be vulnerable because I have to be better than
everybody else. And everybody else isn't just your peers. It's
also celebrities who have glam teams who we just cannot
(20:05):
compete with.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
And we're just exposed to so many more images now
than we were before. I mean, yes, people have always
been exposed to images of celebrities or models, but it's
the kind of accessibility of images and the volume of
images that has changed.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
It seems, yeah, you're just ambiently being fed these images,
even if you're not necessarily going to look for it.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
If you're just scrolling the news, you're.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
Probably going to see ads four things that are tailored
to you, by the way, so they're going to probably
show you things that you would want or how you
would want to look in a way that past generations
just did not have to contend with. And of course
there's also dating apps, which is you're very literally trying
to sell yourself as a desirable person. And everybody does
that all the time in dating, but you think about
(20:51):
it so much more when you're constructing a dating app profile.
And so people are increasingly aware of their place in
a sexual hierarchy and then trying to jockey with one another,
and we can see that online and that's unfortunate because
I think all of us would really like to live
in a place where we don't have a sexual hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
You talk about this a little bit, And I think
it's true that gen Z, more than other age groups,
are very aware of the politics of sex. How much
does that have to do with the Internet.
Speaker 5 (21:16):
There's no way to separate the Internet from young people's
political awareness. I think in particular that's because of Me Too,
which was an Internet born phenomenon. I asking people to
tell me about cultural political events that shape their proach
to sex, and almost all of them said me too,
and said that scrolling through those stories about women's experiences
really opened their eyes to the ways that the personal
(21:39):
is political. What I found really interesting about the Me
Too movement if you look at what happened afterwards, is
the main legal reforms that really came out of it
were changes to NDA laws and better HR trainings, and
those are things that benefit millennial and gen X women
more because we are working. But the thing that filtered
(22:01):
down to young people gen Z people who aren't working
was just the sense that sexual assault and harassment is everywhere,
which is unfortunately true, But they didn't actually have a
lot of institutional resources that came out of the Meta
movement that gave them the ability to fight back when
things went wrong, and that created a sense of anxiety,
because then you're walking around feeling like the world is
(22:23):
incredibly dangerous and feeling like no one cares and no
one's here to help you. And that was a really
unfortunate thing I think that I encountered in my research,
and I was shocked and saddened by the fact that
the vast majority of the young women I interviewed had
been sexually assaulted in some way.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
That was not a question I asked.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
It just came up over and over and over again,
that young women had endured some kind of sexual violation.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Obviously, your book is pretty centered around gen Z, but
all of these factors that we're talking about, you know,
social media, Internet, pornography. I just know for my friends
and myself, and I also know for older generations who
have now become more incrementally aware of what you can
do on Instagram, what you can do with Phase two,
and what you can do on zoom filters in the workforce,
(23:13):
these sorts of things have to be affecting older generations
as well.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
It's not just gen Z.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
No, I think gen Z might be particularly vulnerable because
they've grown up with it and because they are just younger.
And I think when you're younger, you tend to spend
more time obsessing over your appearance.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
But absolutely this affects older people. So you know, you've
done all of this research on gen z.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Is there anything that kind of keeps you up at
night after writing this book?
Speaker 5 (23:39):
The thing that keeps me up at night is the
direction of our policy around sex, or the abdication of
policy around sex. You know, what kind of legislation have
we even seen around social media? The Surgeon General under
Biden talked about the fact that we had basically just
(24:00):
let people start driving without a license by letting young
people go on social media, and we have not put
any guardrails up. We haven't even really tried to study
what's going on on a federal level. And so the
fact that politicians are not seemingly interested in figuring out
this issue, and frankly seemed to be oftentimes too old
to grasp what's going on or to be interested in
(24:21):
what's going on, that keeps me up at night. I
have been reporting on abortion rights since twenty sixteen, and
I think I've been telling people that roev Wade was
going to be overturned since twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
And what did they say? To you, they didn't believe me.
Speaker 5 (24:35):
Why not They just thought it wasn't possible, or they
said oh yeah, like you're right, But then they didn't
factor that information into their lives. And if people agree
with roe v Wade being overturned, that's one thing that
is totally people's right to believe that.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
But most people don't agree with rov Wade being overturned.
Speaker 5 (24:55):
And what I wanted to do in the book was
outline the fact that the overturning of Rovi Wade was
not an outlier event. It was part of a crusade,
a campaign by particular right wing actors to make it difficult,
if not dangerous, to have sex that isn't straight, that
isn't mary, that isn't potentially procreative, because it's being practiced
(25:15):
without access to abortion and with subpar access to birth control.
And most people, I think are accepting of sex beyond
that pony. Most people think premarital sex is okay. Most
people think same sex sex is okay. Most people want
more than absence only sex education for their children. Most
people believe that there is a First Amendment right to
(25:37):
some extent to access porn or to make porn, and
so what I really wanted to do with the book
is lay out the way is that the policy that
we're seeing on sex, particularly online, with things like porn bands,
or particularly with things like abortion, those policies are unfolding
right now, and we are heading towards more kinds of
(25:57):
seismic events like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and
people just aren't paying attention.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
What are some of the positive things you learned from
doing all of this research and were there moments in
your research that were very heartening or very hopeful for
the future of this generation aging into the sort of
predominant family creating, job inhabiting demographic.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
Yeah, there was a lot that I found to be
very heartening in talking to young people about their relationship
with technology. For people whose desires or bodies don't match
what we traditionally think of when it comes to romance
and sex, who don't necessarily look like Hallmark movie leads,
the Internet has been so key to making them feel
(26:41):
like they were normal, to making them feel like they
could be accepted, to making them feel like they could
come out and be loved and find acceptance, and you know,
particularly as sex ed in schools, really profoundly fails queer
and trans young people. The Internet has stepped in to
provide an alternate sex education that is so helpful to
(27:02):
them not only understanding themselves, but to practicing safe sex.
You know, young people learn about things like prep pre exposure,
post exposure prophylaxis, which products against HIV AIDS from the internet.
They learn about how to put condoms on from the Internet.
So the Internet has provided a sex education that we
are increasingly not seeing in schools. And some of that
(27:24):
sex education is negative, but a lot of that sex
education is critical and very helpful, and it's the only
place to find it is online at this point. The
other really positive thing that I think I found through
talking with young people about the Internet is I do
think that it is very much contributed to their political mobilization.
It helped them organize, It helped them see the political
(27:46):
valance of their sex lives, and it helped them take
action against it. Whether that was through setting up Instagram
accounts that collected stories of sexual violence and urged people
to act on them, whether that was through social media
call outs to set up marches and protests, or it
was through basically seeing videos of things like police brutality.
(28:08):
The Internet makes it much more possible for young people
to be aware of the world around them and to
be able to act on what they think is wrong,
and I think that we cannot discount how important that
has been to shaping young people's view.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Of the world.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Well, Carter, thank you so much. I really appreciate this.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
This is fun. Absolutely for text Stuff.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
I'm caar Price and I'm as Amusian.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
This episode was.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Produced by Eliza Dennis, Julia Nutter, Malis Slaughter, and Tyler Hill,
who was executive produced by me ozwa Oshin and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Kyle
Murdoch mixed this episode and wrote our theme song. Join
us on Friday for the weekend tech Oz and I
will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
Please rate, review, and reach out to
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Welcome to tech stuff. This is a story. I'm os
Voloshen here with Cara Price hi Oz.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Today I want to talk to you about something that
is very unsexy, and that is the sex recession.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Sex and money, I guess together, but not in a
good way. What does this have to do with technology?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Before I get to technology, I want to ground us.
The sex recession refers to a documented decline in sexual
activity among younger generations. So apparently Gen Z, which is
the generation born between ninety seven and twenty twelve, is
having sex later in life and less frequently than previous
generations like ours, truly millennials.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I definitely heard about the less frequently, but I also
always want to see these kind of like trendle think pieces.
I'm a little bit confused as to how we actually know.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Well, at least in this case.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Part of the reason we know is because of people
like our guests today. Carter Sherman is a journalist who
covers reproductive health and justice at the Guardian, and she
actually just wrote a book called The Second Coming, Sex
and the Next Generation's Fight over its Future. And in
writing the book, she not only leaned on years of
her reporting, but she also conducted over one hundred interviews
with young people, and what she found is that there
(01:31):
is a sex recession going on. The Kinsey Institute says
that one in four gen Z adults has never had
partnered sex. But that doesn't mean gen Z doesn't think
about sex.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
So if we're saying that young people are not horny
these days, I can tell you they are horny. That
is my expert opinion. Young people are horny, and they
would like to have more sex oftentimes. But I think
that they feel like the obstacles to sex are higher
these days than they have been in the past.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
So I'm curious about these obstacles. And I'll ask you
again why.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
This is an episode of tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Well, she said there are a lot of factors, and
she gets into it more in the interview, but some
of the major ones have to do with what you'd
expect social media, smartphones, and internet pornography, which are all
kind of changing and warping the way we connect with
one another. But Carter told me, for her, at least,
the concern is less about whether or not gen Z
is having sex. It's more about what sex represents to them.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
I will say honestly that I actually don't care that
much if gen Z has sex or not. What I
care about is whether or not sex is approximy measure
for people's willingness to be vulnerable, or their willingness to
be in relationship with other people, to have connections with
other people, to be empathetic to other people's point of view.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
This is actually a brainteresting idea sex is a kind
of almost like an antidote or a corrective to living
in an entirely virtual world.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, you know, for Carter, this actually goes way beyond sex,
and at the heart of her book are questions about
the consequences of life in a world where face to
face communication, which could be sex or just chatting with someone,
is eroding.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
Not only is having empathy, having connection, being willing to
risk rejection and risk grown ability. Not only is that
important to people's personal growth and ability to live a
whole life, but I do actually think it has political implications.
We have to be willing to build bonds with other
people in order to have a cohesive democracy, and I
think a lot of people are kind of worried about
(03:27):
the state of our democracy at this time. And I
don't think we can take away what's going on with
sex and what's going on with intimacy from the questions
of the future of our democracy.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
So, as you can tell, we get into some heady stuff,
but we also talk about how gen z's access to
things like online fan fiction have made them actually kinkier
and more LGBTQ friendly than previous generations. And I actually
started this piece by asking Carter what compelled her to
write this book in the first place. So here's the
rest of our conversation.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
Well, so I've covered gender and sexuality for eight less
years now, and I have spent a lot of time
thinking about the ways that current events shape people's relationship
with sex. So I've covered me too, I've covered the
overturning over a v. Wade, I've covered changes in internet
law around things like pornography. So I was compelled to
(04:17):
write the book because I wanted to understand what it
was like for young people to live through all of
these kinds of changes and how they understood their own
relationship with sex, because I think we're really obsessed with
telling young people all the time that they're doing sex wrong.
Either they're having too much sex or they're having too
little sex, or they're having the wrong kind of sex.
(04:37):
And I wanted to know what young people themselves thought
about their sex lives and thought about the discourse and
the politics around their sex lives, because there's just so
many ways in which young people are much more progressive
when it comes to sex. They have much more inclusive
ideas around sex and gender, and they're much more accepting
of premarital sex.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
They're much more accepting of same sex sex.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
But what I found is that young people are actually
still harboring quite a bit of shame, particularly if they
feel like they haven't had sex at a time when
they should have had it.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Well, there have been so many articles in the last
few years about how gen Z isn't having sex, Like
is this true or is this just like a grabby headline.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
It is true that gen Z is having less sex
than past generations, and that they're having sex on average
later than past generations. One in four adult members of
gen Z has not had sex with an other person.
Only about a third of high school students have had sex,
which is down from about fifty percent when I was
in high school. Even masturbation is on the decline, which
is shocking to me. Because masturbation is free, and so
(05:37):
there is clearly something going on here around young people's
relationship with sex. I think what is oftentimes lost in
the headlines is that the sexer session did not actually
start with gen Z. It started with people like me,
late millennials. So we started to see evidence of the
sex or session by like the mid to late twenty
tens among millennials. And so we can't blame things like
(06:01):
the COVID pandemic for the sex recession. There is clearly
some underlying thing that is going on before we were
all locked down.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
So how did you try to get to the bottom
of this?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Like how I guess was your methodology different from just
panics clickbait?
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Like I like how you assume that it is different
than panic clickbait. But I do think, well, one of
the things I did is I interviewed more than one
hundred young people under thirty about their thoughts on sex
and their experiences with it and their approach to it.
And these were conversations that lasted on average ninety minutes,
(06:38):
and I found people from all across the country, from
all walks of life. I wouldn't say it is scientifically
representative of the United States, because there was in particular
an over indexing on activists, people who are involved in
fighting for abortion rights, against abortion rights for LGBTQ plus
rights against sexual assault. Because I wanted to understand what
drives young people to want to shape the sex lives
(07:00):
of other people in their peer group and to shape
the policies and practices around sex. I also just dug
very deeply into the research that exists on young people's
relationship with sex, and on their relationship with things like
social media objectification, and on their relationship with porn. And
then the final thing I would highlight that I think
sort of makes the book rise above like a sex
(07:23):
panic or a moral panic, is that I spend a
lot of time, frankly, talking about something that is kind
of unsexy, which is policy, because I think that we
tend to think about what's going on with young people
as being a private matter. It's something that sex in
general is something that happens between two people in a bedroom.
But in reality, the terms of sex, and particularly the
terms of what happens when sex goes wrong, those terms
(07:45):
are set for us in courtrooms and school board meetings
and congress and state legislators and the White House, and
so I wanted to peel back the curtain on the
ways that, even if you don't realize it, policy is
impacting your ability to live out your sex life the
way you want to.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So, you know, you spoke to one hundred people, like
what are the factors stopping gen Z from having sex?
Speaker 5 (08:08):
There is definitely no one answer to this. Unfortunately, I
wish there was. I wish I could say this is
the issue, and this is what we need to address.
But I think some of the biggest culprits behind the
sexor session are definitely smartphones on social media. We can
trace a lot of trends in young people's mental health
back to twenty ten, which is around the same time
that we all got smartphones that had social media on them.
(08:31):
I think we can look at things like the overturning
of Roe V. Wade as actually having quite a big
impact on young people's sex life. Sixteen percent of gen
z ers are now more reluctant to date since the
overturning of A V. Wade, which is a huge number.
And I think we also have to look at the
things like sex education we have had over the last
two decades, an enormous amount of money being directed towards
(08:55):
absence only sex sit by the federal government. The federal
government has in fact spent more than two billion dollars
on apps it's only sex education. And the thing about
absence only sex said is it doesn't tend to work.
It doesn't actually tend to lead people to delay sex.
People who undergo federally funded sex said tend to have
sex at the same time as people who didn't undergo
that sex said, and I should say absence only sex
(09:16):
said and have as many sexual partners. But it can
very much pathologize sex, and it can create this constant
sense of anxiety around sex. And I think that that is,
if anything, maybe the greatest culprit here is that all
of these things have combined to create this miasma of
anxiety around sex and to make sex incredibly fraught and
make people just not want to engage with it.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And so it's not even so much like abstinence as
it is deferring sex just because it seems too complicated now.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
Yeah, or going without sex over time, because there are
young people are going without sex for longer periods of time,
They are spending more time absent between sexual partners. And
I think you know this is if you look at
sex said and what's gone on there. You know, since
only sex, I cannot deal with all the things that
have happened in sex over the last twenty years. It
(10:05):
can't talk about the spread of internet porn because it
wants a percent of that internet porn doesn't exist.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
It can't talk.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
About how social media might affect your body image because
it doesn't want to even address the fact that young
people have bodies that lead them to have wants and
desires and needs. And so we're creating a system where
the education that young people are receiving in schools is
increasingly untethered from reality and makes them more vulnerable to
not know just how to handle anything that has to
(10:33):
do with sex, let alone.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
The act of sex itself and having safe sex.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
So this is a tech podcast, so I have to
go a little bit deeper into this idea of you know,
smartphones and social media as having an impact on the
sex recession. Are there any stories that you heard while
reporting for this book that exemplify how social media and
smartphones have contributed to this trend or to this recession.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
Yeah, there are lot of stories I heard, in particular
about how young people were feeling about their bodies because
of social media, because I think one of the main
things that social media does, particularly for young girls and women,
is it makes you see your body as a sexual
object that's being evaluated. So you're constantly measuring your desirability
(11:21):
by things like likes and follower counts and matches, and
it really lays bare a lot of the dynamics that
have always got on dating, but that we can now
quantify because we're seeing it play out on apps. So,
for example, one young woman talk to me about how
she is of Indian descent and had seen videos where
(11:41):
men were asked questions like what race wouldn't you date?
And it was first black women, she said, and then
it was Indian women, and it made her feel ugly.
It made her feel terrible about herself. And in fact,
this young woman, at least by the time I spoke
with her, had not had sex. And the ultimate reason
that she hadn't had sex and that she hadn't dated,
even though she is straight and she's interested in having sex,
(12:04):
is because she was afraid that the men she would
encounter would be in cells. She felt like the Insul
ideology has so permeated the ways that men and women
interact and the ways that she's seen them interact online
that she just feels like she can't trust men at
this point, and so she's opting out of dating entirely.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
And the reason she knows what an in cel is
is because of the Internet, correct.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
Right, Yeah, I mean in cells are very much a
subculture that has come to prominence because the Internet gives
them places to lurk. And I have, as I've said,
I've covered sex and gender for eight plus years. I
have seen some really horrendous things said online about women
through doing that work, and I have to say that
in cel forms are the most gruesome place on the Internet.
(12:50):
But the thing is that I also think the ways
that insuls talk has permeated the larger.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Lexicon at this point.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
Like if you think about things like max you know,
the thing that Insul's talk about is looks maxing, which
is that you change the way you look so that
you can be more stereotypically attractive. Now we just say
things like maxing. Or I was talking to another friend
the other day and talking about La Boo Boos, and
I said that I had been labooboo pill and then
I was like, wait, I'm using in cel language because
(13:19):
Instel's talk about being red billed, they're black piled, And
this is just how we talk now, and I think
we don't think critically about the fact that we have
normalized this manospheric language and what it means that we
now treat these ideas and attitudes as just being an
everyday thing.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
So I'm remembering, like when I was in must have
been fifth grade, that internet pornography seemed to be everywhere.
And I was in fifth grade, you know, around the
year two thousand. In what way does just the insane
accessibility of pornography and that just the existence of it
(13:56):
affect this sex recession at all?
Speaker 5 (13:59):
For gen Z, that is a great question, And the
answer is that we don't really know, because the science
on porn is so muddy. You can find studies on
porn that say basically anything you want to hear. And
so one of the things I was really interested in
doing in this book is understanding not necessarily what porn
does from a scientific perspective, but what people think porn does.
(14:21):
And I had originally thought that young people on the
left be more warm towards pornography, would have sort of
more tolerance of it. And I thought that people young
people on the right would be very anti porn, But
what I found is that in general, young people are
profoundly anti porn, and they feel like porn has very
much warped their sexuality. In particular, they feel like it
(14:42):
is normalized quote unquote rough sex and actions like choking.
If you were under forty, you were twice as likely
to have been choked during sex compared to people who
are older, and oftentimes that choking is not done consensually.
And I should also say, you know, porn is not
a monolith. There is plenty of pretty violent porn. But
there weren't a sizable number of interviewees, particularly who were
(15:05):
young women or who were queer, who really enjoyed written porn.
And they had come to written porn through online portals
like what pat They got really into fan fiction, and
then they found erotica, and then they found romance novels,
and they felt like, because that kind of porn is
typically written with the idea that it's not for a systemail,
(15:26):
straight audience, that that kind of pornography much more closely
mirrored their desires and made them feel much more accepted,
And so I do think the Internet is not bad
for sex in general. I think it can be really
great for making people who have not typically been in
power feel like their desires and their identities are much
(15:47):
more common and much more accepted than they might believe
from their immediate community.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
But it's also not leading to them having more sex.
It's leading to them sort of reading more erotic fan fiction.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
Yeah, I mean why most young people do end up
having sex, to be clearer, but it is interesting that
they're sticking with porn, and I think part of this
comes down to questions of willingness to be vulnerable, willingness
to take risks, willingness to potentially be rejected, because porn
will never reject you. Porn is going to portray the
most perfect It's going to give you just the best
(16:22):
possible sexual experience because no one else is involved with it.
And that's true of both video porn and romance novels,
because they're both selling this fantasy of this partner who
knows exactly what you do with your body to make
you have a screaming.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Orgasm after the break is tech robbing us of the
ability to be vulnerable stay with us. In your book,
(17:03):
you talk about how vulnerability and empathy are essential to
developing an open and honest connection. What is it about
gen Z's tech environment that makes that kind of vulnerability
and empathy difficult.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
Well, they're surrounded by tech in a way that past
generations were not. Most people were not constantly able to
go onto the internet at all hours of day and night,
and so on one level, they're simply spending more time on
their phones and online than past generations. But the other
thing that I think is going on in young people's
tech environment that makes them reluctant to be vulnerable is
(17:42):
the extent to which they are constantly aware of the
persona that they're selling online. We've all grown up with
this idea. And I say we because I think late
millennials have grown up with this too. I was in
high school when Facebook came a thing, and I had
Facebook for my entirety of my high school career. But
you are constantly aware of the story that you're selling online,
and the story that you're selling online about yourself, the brand,
(18:04):
the persona that is like a happier, healthier, more sexy
version of yourself and you don't ever want cracks in
that to show. But there is research that shows that
the higher you score in self objectification measures, which is
to say, the more you think of your body as
an object, which social media tends to make people do.
It tends to make them basically constantly surveil themselves and
(18:27):
constantly see themselves from the outside, constantly be gauging their
sexual attractiveness. The higher you score and self objectification, the
more likely you are to not want to have sex
because you've viewed sex as yet another chance for you
to be judged and found wanting.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
That's really interesting.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
There was one young woman who I was talking with
who was talking about how she felt compelled to post
bikini photos of herself on Instagram when she was in
high school, and when she would take these photos with
her friends, her friends would constantly say things like, your
boobs look so good, your hips look so good, your
legs look so good. And on one hand, that might
seem complimentary, but on the other what it's really doing
(19:02):
is it's really comparing. It's really making her aware of
what she has or what she doesn't have in comparison
to other people, and how to portray it to the
best advantage. And there's a ton of research, some of
which has been conducted by Meta and was kept secret
from the general public, that shows just how much being
on Instagram can erow young people's sets of self esteem.
(19:24):
And the thing was this young woman as we were talking,
she was originally saying, I don't know why I felt
so compelled to post these photos, and then she said
it was for men. I realized now it was for men.
I wanted men to see me and to desire me.
And the thing is that it works. She's not crazy.
I was talking to another young man who was telling
me about how he'd be scrolling through Instagram and he'd
(19:44):
see one girl clothes and then he'd see another girl
who's in a bikini, and he was probably gonna like
that girl in a bikini more. And so it's this
constant sense of comparison that is rooted in reality that
is making young people feel like, oh, I can never
ever be vulnerable because I have to be better than
everybody else. And everybody else isn't just your peers. It's
also celebrities who have glam teams who we just cannot
(20:05):
compete with.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
And we're just exposed to so many more images now
than we were before. I mean, yes, people have always
been exposed to images of celebrities or models, but it's
the kind of accessibility of images and the volume of
images that has changed.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
It seems, yeah, you're just ambiently being fed these images,
even if you're not necessarily going to look for it.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
If you're just scrolling the news, you're.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
Probably going to see ads four things that are tailored
to you, by the way, so they're going to probably
show you things that you would want or how you
would want to look in a way that past generations
just did not have to contend with. And of course
there's also dating apps, which is you're very literally trying
to sell yourself as a desirable person. And everybody does
that all the time in dating, but you think about
(20:51):
it so much more when you're constructing a dating app profile.
And so people are increasingly aware of their place in
a sexual hierarchy and then trying to jockey with one another,
and we can see that online and that's unfortunate because
I think all of us would really like to live
in a place where we don't have a sexual hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
You talk about this a little bit, And I think
it's true that gen Z, more than other age groups,
are very aware of the politics of sex. How much
does that have to do with the Internet.
Speaker 5 (21:16):
There's no way to separate the Internet from young people's
political awareness. I think in particular that's because of Me Too,
which was an Internet born phenomenon. I asking people to
tell me about cultural political events that shape their proach
to sex, and almost all of them said me too,
and said that scrolling through those stories about women's experiences
really opened their eyes to the ways that the personal
(21:39):
is political. What I found really interesting about the Me
Too movement if you look at what happened afterwards, is
the main legal reforms that really came out of it
were changes to NDA laws and better HR trainings, and
those are things that benefit millennial and gen X women
more because we are working. But the thing that filtered
(22:01):
down to young people gen Z people who aren't working
was just the sense that sexual assault and harassment is everywhere,
which is unfortunately true, But they didn't actually have a
lot of institutional resources that came out of the Meta
movement that gave them the ability to fight back when
things went wrong, and that created a sense of anxiety,
because then you're walking around feeling like the world is
(22:23):
incredibly dangerous and feeling like no one cares and no
one's here to help you. And that was a really
unfortunate thing I think that I encountered in my research,
and I was shocked and saddened by the fact that
the vast majority of the young women I interviewed had
been sexually assaulted in some way.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
That was not a question I asked.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
It just came up over and over and over again,
that young women had endured some kind of sexual violation.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Obviously, your book is pretty centered around gen Z, but
all of these factors that we're talking about, you know,
social media, Internet, pornography. I just know for my friends
and myself, and I also know for older generations who
have now become more incrementally aware of what you can
do on Instagram, what you can do with Phase two,
and what you can do on zoom filters in the workforce,
(23:13):
these sorts of things have to be affecting older generations
as well.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
It's not just gen Z.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
No, I think gen Z might be particularly vulnerable because
they've grown up with it and because they are just younger.
And I think when you're younger, you tend to spend
more time obsessing over your appearance.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
But absolutely this affects older people. So you know, you've
done all of this research on gen z.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Is there anything that kind of keeps you up at
night after writing this book?
Speaker 5 (23:39):
The thing that keeps me up at night is the
direction of our policy around sex, or the abdication of
policy around sex. You know, what kind of legislation have
we even seen around social media? The Surgeon General under
Biden talked about the fact that we had basically just
(24:00):
let people start driving without a license by letting young
people go on social media, and we have not put
any guardrails up. We haven't even really tried to study
what's going on on a federal level. And so the
fact that politicians are not seemingly interested in figuring out
this issue, and frankly seemed to be oftentimes too old
to grasp what's going on or to be interested in
(24:21):
what's going on, that keeps me up at night. I
have been reporting on abortion rights since twenty sixteen, and
I think I've been telling people that roev Wade was
going to be overturned since twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
And what did they say? To you, they didn't believe me.
Speaker 5 (24:35):
Why not They just thought it wasn't possible, or they
said oh yeah, like you're right, But then they didn't
factor that information into their lives. And if people agree
with roe v Wade being overturned, that's one thing that
is totally people's right to believe that.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
But most people don't agree with rov Wade being overturned.
Speaker 5 (24:55):
And what I wanted to do in the book was
outline the fact that the overturning of Rovi Wade was
not an outlier event. It was part of a crusade,
a campaign by particular right wing actors to make it difficult,
if not dangerous, to have sex that isn't straight, that
isn't mary, that isn't potentially procreative, because it's being practiced
(25:15):
without access to abortion and with subpar access to birth control.
And most people, I think are accepting of sex beyond
that pony. Most people think premarital sex is okay. Most
people think same sex sex is okay. Most people want
more than absence only sex education for their children. Most
people believe that there is a First Amendment right to
(25:37):
some extent to access porn or to make porn, and
so what I really wanted to do with the book
is lay out the way is that the policy that
we're seeing on sex, particularly online, with things like porn bands,
or particularly with things like abortion, those policies are unfolding
right now, and we are heading towards more kinds of
(25:57):
seismic events like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and
people just aren't paying attention.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
What are some of the positive things you learned from
doing all of this research and were there moments in
your research that were very heartening or very hopeful for
the future of this generation aging into the sort of
predominant family creating, job inhabiting demographic.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
Yeah, there was a lot that I found to be
very heartening in talking to young people about their relationship
with technology. For people whose desires or bodies don't match
what we traditionally think of when it comes to romance
and sex, who don't necessarily look like Hallmark movie leads,
the Internet has been so key to making them feel
(26:41):
like they were normal, to making them feel like they
could be accepted, to making them feel like they could
come out and be loved and find acceptance, and you know,
particularly as sex ed in schools, really profoundly fails queer
and trans young people. The Internet has stepped in to
provide an alternate sex education that is so helpful to
(27:02):
them not only understanding themselves, but to practicing safe sex.
You know, young people learn about things like prep pre exposure,
post exposure prophylaxis, which products against HIV AIDS from the internet.
They learn about how to put condoms on from the Internet.
So the Internet has provided a sex education that we
are increasingly not seeing in schools. And some of that
(27:24):
sex education is negative, but a lot of that sex
education is critical and very helpful, and it's the only
place to find it is online at this point. The
other really positive thing that I think I found through
talking with young people about the Internet is I do
think that it is very much contributed to their political mobilization.
It helped them organize, It helped them see the political
(27:46):
valance of their sex lives, and it helped them take
action against it. Whether that was through setting up Instagram
accounts that collected stories of sexual violence and urged people
to act on them, whether that was through social media
call outs to set up marches and protests, or it
was through basically seeing videos of things like police brutality.
(28:08):
The Internet makes it much more possible for young people
to be aware of the world around them and to
be able to act on what they think is wrong,
and I think that we cannot discount how important that
has been to shaping young people's view.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Of the world.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Well, Carter, thank you so much. I really appreciate this.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
This is fun. Absolutely for text Stuff.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
I'm caar Price and I'm as Amusian.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
This episode was.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Produced by Eliza Dennis, Julia Nutter, Malis Slaughter, and Tyler Hill,
who was executive produced by me ozwa Oshin and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Kyle
Murdoch mixed this episode and wrote our theme song. Join
us on Friday for the weekend tech Oz and I
will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
Please rate, review, and reach out to
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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