Is Alcohol Actually Bad for You? The Truth About Drinking, Social Media & Diet Soda

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome to two Percent. I am your host, Michael Easter,
and today we have a really great episode and we're
gonna be talking vices. Yes, vices. Everyone's got one, whether
it's drinking, smoking, or using social media way too much.
I guarantee if you are listening to this right now,
you have a vice. Now. In this podcast and in general,

(00:44):
in all of my work, I argue that the path
to improving your life it requires embracing short term discomfort
to get a long term benefit. All of the things
that help us in our life, they're usually tough in
the short term, but the thing about vices is they
are the opposite. They give us short term pleasure at

(01:04):
the expense of long term growth. So how should we
think about vices in a world where there are so
many things that we can fall into that give us
a little hit of pleasure but maybe hurt us in
the long run. To talk about this topic, we're going
to be taking a very nuanced view, because the thing
about vices is if you can learn to leverage them

(01:25):
for good, get all the good things from them, but
avoid the downsides, they can actually enhance your life. We
do not have to live like monks in order to
live a good life. So we're going to be bringing
on two people. First, we're going to bring on Dean Statman.
He is a reporter at GQ magazine and he had
a very interesting and counterintuitive New Year's resolution that is

(01:46):
totally opposite of dry January. After that, we're going to
bring on Taylor Lorenz, who argues that social media is
actually not addictive, but the information she gives you might
help you use it in a way that helps you
in the long run than hurt you. And then finally,
I am going to open the curtain into my life
and I am going to tell you what my number

(02:07):
one vice is. Now, if you listen to social media,
you will think this thing is killing me, But if
you actually look at the science, there's no harm in
this vice I have. So I'll tell you what that is.
Let's get into it. There have been a lot of
conflicting reports about drinking and health over the past few years.

(02:28):
So for most of time, scientific bodies said, you know,
if you have one or two drinks a day, that
could actually help your heart health. But in the last
handful of years that has totally been flipped and now
a lot of people are saying no alcohol at all
that is going to vastly improve your health. Now, I
do think there is a bit of nuance in this topic.

(02:48):
For example, take me, I do not drink at all.
I've been sober for eleven years, and the reason for
that is because my favorite drink it was always the
next one. And if you drink like that, you can
rock up some life problems. But on the other hand,
most people are having one to two drinks every now
and then, and I think a big question is is

(03:09):
that enough to really hurt health? Well, a lot of
people are arguing that it is, and it is affecting
people's behavior. So I'm going to read a couple of
stats here. Gallup recently found that drinking is at an
all time low. So when the seventies up through about
twenty twenty, between sixty to seventy percent of the population drink.
Now the figure is fifty four percent. We also have

(03:31):
wineries that are closing in Napa Valley because not enough
people are buying wine. And I recently spoke to a
friend who owns a restaurant in La and she said
that a lot of LA restaurants are struggling because no
one is drinking anymore, and restaurants make a lot of
money from alcohol sales. So big question here is drinking
bad or can it be even good? I have a friend,

(03:54):
his name is Dean Statman. I used to work with
him at Men's Health magazine, Very fitness minded, healthy guy,
and he saw all this stuff out there about how
not drinking is the answer to health. So we decided
to jump on the wagon. He lasted about three months
because he found that although his health scores on his
fitness tracker did improve, a lot of really interesting things

(04:16):
happened to his mental health and his social life. He
wrote a piece about it in GQ. It is called
why My twenty twenty six resolution is to start drinking again.
So we're going to bring on Dean and we're going
to talk about how his thinking on alcohol has evolved
and what he learned in reporting this piece. All right, Dan,

(04:37):
thanks for coming on the show. Pleasure to be here.
So let's back up a little bit. It's summer of
last year and you decide you're going to stop drinking. Now.
I think the context that's important for this is this
wasn't like, oh I got a duy, I got arrested.
I'm going through a divorce, what prompted all this?

Speaker 2 (04:58):
No, none of those things, Thank god.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
I've been a journalist a magazine editor for literally my
entire career.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
And that's how that's that's how we met because we
both were we both worked at mental health and overlap there.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, and and as you know, you know, you can
work in wellness, but it's not like like I guess,
I don't know, like maybe accounting or something where you
really do have this this constant it's every day is different.
Like as the sort of wellness trends come and go,
you're covering them, you're learning about them. A lot of
the time, you're actually sort of trying things out yourself totally.

(05:33):
And I think I had just seen the space evolved
so much as it continues to do. There's so many
ways you can optimize your wellness totally.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
And you also have I will point out because of
your work. You work out all the time. Like a
lot of your Instagram feed is like you're at the gym,
you're doing like the all these classes and you really
have to live this. So it's not like you I mean,
you weren't drinking that much, but but then offsetting anything
you did drink was like a thousand really good habits. Yeah,

(06:05):
a lot of hit classes, a lot of running, and
then there's the stuff that I just sort of personally love,
you know, playing soccer every week. I got again just
by virtue of covering this stuff, got like really into
meditation for a while, got really into like sawn a
cold plunge, red light therapy. I've been doing a bunch
of Higher Rocks races recently, and this is all throughout,

(06:26):
you know, also just just drinking like an ordinary person.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
At a certain point, I just, you know, I did.
I kind of got swept up in this like aura
around the NA movement where you've got you know, Tom Hollands,
Biro and Lewis Hamilton has like a tequila or a
gave or whatever, and then plus the other dozen plus
celebrities that have like non alcoholic beers and and spirits

(06:51):
and things. Now you know, it's back in the day
it was like everyone had their like vodka, but now.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
It's worthout the celebrities.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Now it's alcohol.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
I think at one point actually the situation from Jersey
Shore had like a protein infused vodka which was which
is quite funny if you pay attention to nutrition.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Did you drink it anyway? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
No, no, no, I mean no, shade to him. I think
he actually is sober now now mute. So I guess,
sort of point being, I I just thought, like, why
not give this a try, Like I'm already doing so
many other things for my health, for my wellness, why

(07:32):
not just sort of add this. The science I think
has moved past the point now where it's like, you know,
it's healthy for you to drink a glass of red
wine a day or whatever, Like we know.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Now that that's really.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Not true from a physical health perspective.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
Yeah, that was Physiologically, it's it's not a plus, it's
it's likely a minus if you're sort of guess, going
past a certain point or probably in any any quantity really,
Which is also really interesting, just by the way, about
the new nutritional guidelines that the FDA just came out with,
because they actually removed specifying the number or the amount

(08:10):
of alcohol that is considered healthy, opting rather to just
say drink less, which is quite interesting because if you're
ready drinking an absolute shit load, like what is less?

Speaker 1 (08:20):
You're like, you know, fourteen, all right, I'm following the
guidelines of fourteen.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, yeah, you're just following the FDA's guidelines.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
So I decided to just give it a try and see.
I lasted about three months, which is not very long.
And the reason really at its core was that I
didn't realize going in how alcohol is not just about alcohols.
You might be pulling one lever, but it affects so

(08:47):
many other things. It's not just like my night's going
to be exactly the same, except my beer didn't have
any alcohol in it.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
It's it.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
It's got sort of roots that just go so much
further than I had an imagined. I was noticing how
it was affecting not drinking, was affecting my friendships, my
marriage even and kind of just my general like mood Outlook,
you could maybe even go so far as to say
mental health.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Maybe had I done this for longer.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
You said like you were. I can't remember exactly how
you put it. It was good now, but basically you found
yourself you weren't as happy. Is that correct?

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (09:25):
Hundred percent. I think you know. I'm someone who I
work from home. I'm writing most of the time, which
is as you know, it's a very you know, solo activity,
and so I used to really look forward to those
times when I would, you know, go play pickup soccer
with the guys that I had in New York and
we'd go grab beers afterwards, or or just going out

(09:48):
on a weekend, whether it's a Friday night going out
for dinner with friends and then going to a bar afterwards,
or or just going to bars and bar hopping it's
someone's birthday, or you go out and then you like, hey,
let's go somewhere else after this instead of just going home.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, I think that just got kind of decimated.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, I feel like the big point here is that
I think there's a massive difference between drinking alone at home,
you know, watching Netflix or whatever, and the context in
which you were doing it in which is I have
a group of friends, We're going to this dive bar,
or we've just finished this game of soccer. And in
the piece, I liked how you got into the fact

(10:27):
that in the context of a bar when you're drinking,
the conversations almost changed, where you you had a great
example where you're like, you know, on after the first beer,
I'd be like, hey, guys, we should all go to
this music festival in Virginia. Like, let's let's roll. I
got this right, and that those moments didn't happen as
much when you stopped drinking. You did say that you

(10:50):
would still occasionally go to bars, but you were like
the non alcoholic beer and it just kind of it
just changed things. So what was that like and like
how did that manifest itself in those actual situations?

Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, I mean, I'll give a great example just from
a couple of days ago, even because now obviously that
I'm you know, not doing that experiment anymore. So, my
wife and I were out in the sort of like
area of Zurich that we hadn't been to before.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
It's sort of like industrial part.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
It's very much like like Shortitch in London, kind of
like a little Brooklyn sort of, and we were out
looking for furniture. It was sort of a long day,
and then we were about to go home and we
saw this like just interesting, sort of mysterious almost looking bar.
From the outside, it looked like a almost like a
little sort of warehouse, but it was like clearly marked

(11:36):
like as a bar and had some cool like neon
in the windows. And we were just passing by and
on the way to the train, and I was like,
do you want to just grab a beer before we go?
And she was like yeah. So so we go inside
and it turns out it's actually this huge like badminton
hall and there were like like eight games of badminton,
like full court badminton going on in this like giant hangar,

(11:58):
and in the front there was this bar and it
was so weird.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
It was almost like a kind.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Of like like Nashville like honky Tonk kind of theme,
but it also had this like Japan sort of inspur
It was very and visually it was very like it
was very cool. It was sort of like Wes Anderson
meets like kill Bill kind of aesthetic. Is the best
walking for it. And I was just like, I'm so
glad we found this spot. And then we started talking

(12:23):
to the bartender about the badminton and turns out it's
just like badminton club, and we ended up booking a
court for the next weekend, and that was last weekend
that just passed, and so my wife and I went
and played badminton and we've never done that with each
other before.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
We've never really done anything like that with each other before.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
And so had we not gone in for a beer,
we wouldn't have found this cool badminton place, and we
wouldn't have done this like great activity together as a couple.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
I would have never said, you want to stop for
a beer before we.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
Go home, because like in my mind at least, I'm
sure other people will disagree.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Like, what's the point.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
I think for me? So I don't drink. I went
sober eleven something years And the important point is that
this was not prompted by like I listened to a
four hour podcast that told me alcohol is associated with
all these risks. I was like the guy who you
know would wake up and go where did I park
my car? And when you drink like that, that can

(13:20):
come with some repercussions, obviously for your health, but obviously
for your life, for your social for your social relationships
and things like that. I rarely miss uh alcohol. When
I first got sober, I thought I missed alcohol. What
I eventually realized is I didn't actually miss alcohol because
I knew that if I have one drink, it's going

(13:41):
to lead to X number more and that's not gonna
be good. What I missed was the setting of bars
in the sense that you walk into a bar and
everyone's relaxed, and it like levels this playing field. There's
not like like people have a warmness and it's not
awkward if someone's sitting next to you to just start

(14:02):
talking to the dude next to you, Whereas if you're like,
you know, I don't know an a counter of a
Wendy's or like sitting like you start talking to the
dude at the Wendy's. Next year, he's gonna be like,
why the hell are you talking to me, dude? But
it's in that bar setting, it's like people there's like
a certain sort of social comfort there. There's a warm
there's a sense of like with my work obligations, I
could just be like Okay, now I can just finally relax.

(14:26):
And I do think that bars are unique in giving
us those situations where like I would just feel like
I let off And so for me, like after getting sober,
I've been like, Okay, where can I find that that
isn't a bar? That's not always easy. Which I'm trying
to say is like bars have this like unique sociality
to them that doesn't necessarily come from a place that

(14:49):
isn't serving alcohol, and it sounds like you realized eventually
through this experiment, oh, I was getting something akin to
that as well. And then when that got removed, you go, well,
why the hell is my mental health weird? Like why
am I not why am I not having these wacky
conversations with my friends? Why are we not like connecting
as much? And it all went back to the fact
that you had a beer in your hand, and you

(15:09):
were the type of person that would just have one
or two.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Right, I mean you described like the bar kind of
environment perfectly. And then in a very stark contrast to that,
like during that three month stint, I ended up in
a couple of situations where I was standing in you know,
typical literal social circle of you know, five six people talking,
no one's drinking. And this wasn't just like people happened

(15:33):
not to be drinking in that moment, but like people
who aren't drinking and for health reas to me or
whatever reasons really, but it felt like there was just
this sort of in the In the piece, I called
it like a LinkedIn coded coldness, because it almost felt
like we were like waiting in a room before going

(15:54):
into like a job interview, Like I felt like everyone
had their kind of pr face on, and it just
it just felt weird, and maybe it made me sort
of in the moment, feel like, well, I don't.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Like this whole life about drinking thing.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
But I found that people a lot of the time,
the people I was encountering who who were specifically sober
in the wellness scene were like people who it felt
like that was like an important part of their personality.
Like it seemed like very few conversations went by without
people sort of like announcing in some form or fashion that.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Like or like making it known that they don't drink.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
And I just think that it it kind of made
things conversations just feel a little more like edited.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
Dard is a good word guarded.

Speaker 3 (16:44):
Yeah, And I think this really clicked for me when
I connected with an anthropologist for the piece, Ben Sannenbaum,
who you know, like looks into this stuff for a living,
and he kind of told me about this concept of
costly signaling, where you do something to sort of inflict
like a incur a cost quote unquote like upon yourself

(17:06):
to something like negative to yourself as almost as like
a social buy in, so that people sort of trust
and see that like, oh, this person's let their guard down.
So in this case, it's alcohol, because alcohol is something
that's like, you know, not necessarily good for you, like
he help wise, but it's one of the ways we
sort of subconsciously or subliminally like let people know, like, Hey,

(17:28):
I'm just I'm just here to hang out, you know
what I mean, Like I just want to like chat
to you, get to know you.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
Like there's an ulterior motives here.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
And I think that's one of the reasons why alcohol
does sort of serve as it's like social lubricant, and
then in the absence of that, you really feel it
when you're kind of paying attention to that.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, there's a book that I love. It's called Little
Chapel on the River and it's about It's written by
this lady whose name is Wendy Bounds. She's a friend
and after nine to eleven she moved up the Hudson
River to a town called Garatson, and she was a
reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and she took a
job at this bar called Guidance. It's like this old

(18:07):
pub in this town, and the book really focuses on
the relationships that were built in this bar in this
little town and how it was really the focal point
of the town, so you would have people come in,
there were regulars. The place didn't serve any hard alcohol.
It was beer only. And she wrote about how people

(18:27):
would come in who had totally different viewpoints, politically, totally
different backgrounds, but in that setting, any disagreements were really dropped,
like people would give each other shit, they'd rip each
other about whatever, but it was like people would just
connect who otherwise would have never connected, and that could
really only happen in that bar setting. And I think

(18:48):
that that to your point about the anthropology she spoke to.
It goes back to that idea you pointed out of
costly signaling, And I think when you look at for
most of time, bars were these places where people would
go to connect. And yeah, people have been drinking last
But I do feel like since twenty twenty, the rise
of sort of the health wellness podcast sphere, which grounded

(19:11):
I'm part of, I think that's tapered off and we're
realizing that in the sort of quest for optimal health.
Then you pointed out like the perfect Whoop score, which
tracks a but jillion different data points.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, one hundred percent and look, I still wear the
golden handcuff over here. I maybe don't check it as
often as not as you're supposed to do. Now that
you're dressing, now that you're drinking, You're like, I can't.
I can't look at that.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Score, dude.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
I mean, everyone who's ever worn a whoop and has
had a beer in their life notice that. Like the
effect is, it's incredible, Like it it'll drop your recovery
score faster than you know anything.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
I think part of this too was again being in
this in this space.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
You know, you obviously also come across a lot of
people who are doing who are kind of taking things
the maximum and spending most of their time doing things
that are like optimizing their body. And at a certain
point I was like, we're all, you know, not to
get like grimm or anything, but like we're all gonna die.
Like we haven't gotten to the point yet where like
immortality is something we've discovered. And so with the assumption

(20:18):
or the understanding that like we all do have the
sort of limited time here, it's like, do I want
to be spending most of my time in the garage
tuning the car and washing the car, or do I
actually want to be out there like fucking driving it
and you know, enjoying it.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
And so I think I got.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
To a point where somewhere in those three months when
I just realized, like, you know, kind of cost benefit here,
like what am I gaining by not drinking? And absolutely
I was gaining things. I mean, group could tell you that,
like I was waking up feeling great, no more hangovers.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
I say, gave so much money.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
I just was more yeah, clear headed in the mornings,
I could have an earlier start to the day. But
on the other hand, everything that I was trading off
And it's not like I stopped getting invited to things.
It was more like I started actually removing myself from things.
You know, I don't want to go bar hopping with
friends if I'm not drinking alcohol, Like it's so boring

(21:22):
and like you're just watching your friends get absolutely slashed.
The conversation becomes increasingly like annoying for you. And yeah,
it's like there's just so many better uses of my
time in that situation. And I think ultimately I kind
of waited out and I was like, you know, I'm
not going to stop doing other things.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
I'm literally just going.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
To reintroduce drinking, and you know, not like claiming or
having the illusion that this is like a good thing
for my health, but I just felt that ultimately, net net,
it actually was positive when I factored everything in, And
I think that's, you know, maybe just something good to
consider in wellness generally, that you don't have to do everything,
and it's important to manage your priorities as well, and

(22:05):
you still have.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
Fun, because otherwise what's the point.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
I think you could argue that it was a positive
for your help. I mean, when you just look at
the data on the importance of being social and having
strong social connections, if that thing is enhancing that, like,
that's a really important part of overall health and lifespan.
And I think your analogy to a car is perfect
because you were not Now that you're back drinking again,

(22:31):
It's not like you're just redlining all the time. You're
not just like ripping that thing around twenty four to
seven redline, never changing the tires, never changing the oil.
You're living in a way that you're doing all these
things to maintain the car. It goes in the garage
every day, you top off the oil, you make sure
the tires are looking good, it's aligned, but you also
are willing to like go out and drive it. That's

(22:52):
why you have the damn car. So it's really like
I think the takeaway for the average person is like
finding a balance between those things. Where people can get
so caught up in health practices optimizing that you forget
to actually ask yourself, well, why am I doing all
this stuff in the first place. And a lot of
times it's like, well, so I can live better, And
then you look at all those things you go, is

(23:12):
this actually making me live better? Or is this just
making me a slave to all these routines for this
possible tomorrows and my whip score, and you just like
forget to live in the process.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
And something that I also find myself keeping in mind
is like wellness is a big business right now, you know,
like you see categories just being like absolutely blown up
by like one product takes off and now you've got
like seven competitors. You're seeing brands that did one thing
really well now coming out with their line extensions and
like the version two point zero and the pro and

(23:46):
like the whatever. And so I think part of it
is also just remembering that, like, this is a business
and people are trying to sell you things.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
I think what's interesting too is when you when you
really look at the data on alcohol and health. Obviously,
some people say any amount is toxic, never do it,
but a lot of those studies are not actually that great.
There's a guy, vin I Prisad, and he was an MD.

(24:14):
You might have heard of him. He's the he was
the former director of the Center for Biologics and Evaluation
of Research, and he did this deep He's like kind
of one of those guys that really peels back studies
and goes, Okay, what's really going on here. He asked
a lot of questions and when he looked at the research,
he was like, yeah, drinking a lot isn't good for us.

(24:34):
We know that. At the same time, if you're having
one or two drinks every now and then, there's really
nothing we can say that's going to tell you that
is going to take time off your life or really
affect your health in a way that's going to change
your lifespan. So we had this really great quote in
a substec quot which I will link to. He said,

(24:55):
advising people who don't drink to start drinking daily is
silly and I'm proven, and advising people who are drinking
a little bit each day to stop is silly and unproven.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
And there's actually another piece that I wrote recently also
for GQ, which kind of touches on something very similar,
which is basically it was looking at the data, and
this was very good data. This is from like a
decade's long study that's been going on, and they were
sort of looking at, like, what is a more effective
LeVert to pool when it comes to longevity. Is it

(25:33):
starting to work out or is it stopping drinking?

Speaker 2 (25:36):
And overwhelmingly it's it's fitness.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
You know, if you're going to change one thing, like
if you're a relatively if you're a sedentary person, that's
that's drinking and again drinking like within sort of the
bounds of common sense, you're going to do a lot
more for your longevity and your health span by upping
your activity, then you will buying or stopping alcohol consumption.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
When your GQ piece came out, because there is so
much information out there about how people shouldn't drink, now,
what was the reaction you got? Was it like a
collective everyone thought oh god, thanks, Thank god someone said
this because I've been thinking it or was it like
you know, the Brian Johnson followers got their pitchforks from

(26:23):
their labs.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
And no, no, I think they'll be They'll be mad
at me for other stuff that I've written more recently.
But it's interesting that you asked, because the response to
that piece has been like.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
At least fivefold more.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
I mean that's a conservative estimate, more than anything else
I've ever written that's gone online like in a positive way.
I don't think I got a single negative comment or DM.
I normally you don't even really get dms for stories
that are right, to be honest with you, maybe if
like if GQ or whichever out there, I've written it
for pusted on social like, there'll be sort of comments,

(27:00):
but personally I don't normally get a ton of direct feedback,
and for this piece I did, I got a ton
and it was all just like you know, some of
it was.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Just like a nice story.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
I enjoyed how you reported it and wrote it, but
a lot of it was like like, dude, like I
hear you, like I also kind of tried like I
felt the same thing. There was a lot of like
I feel the same way I had the same or
similar experience. There was also some really kind of funny feedback.
Someone reached out to me with a so I'll say

(27:32):
I got at least three or four people get in
touch and say that they were forwarded the piece by
people in the beverage industry, and that like someone went
out of their way to tell me that, like the
story has actually been making the rounds in in like
corporate beverage America and being kind of being like waived
as a flag of like we still have a fighting chance.

(27:53):
I mean, you know, like the Gallup data that came
out last year drinking being down or self reported drinking,
which is always you know, self reported you never know exactly,
but down like fifty three or fifty four percent. But
I mean, really, I'm just one person. I wasn't reporting
on a trend necessarily. But yeah, I mean not that
I'm gonna sort of say, like more people should like

(28:13):
to start like drinking more again.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah, I feel like my big takeaway from this piece,
given what you've written your experience, my own experience not drinking,
is the way that I figured out that I had
a drinking problem was that literally every problem in my
life was caused by my drinking. So if that is
you probably don't drink. If you're more like Dean, where

(28:38):
you are doing one hundred healthy behaviors, you go out,
you have a couple drinks in the context of friends,
you have great conversations, you meet new people, you find
badminton courts embedded in like old railway stations of Zurich.
That seems like it's probably adding to your life. And
so I think it takes a little bit of introspection

(29:00):
to figure out where am I on that spectrum. But
I think if you're more in the Dean spectrum, you
maybe don't have to get super caught up in this
idea that like removing alcohol is going to vastly improve
my health. I think it might actually do the It'll
either be neutral or it'll do the opposite.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, And I think another takeaway for people to should
be that like you don't have to, like, if you're
not drinking not drinking, you don't have to just kind
of start drinking in order to like get the benefits
of a more fluid social life, you know, Like I
find that it's something that helped me kind of explore
life more fully and open more opportunities, more doors that

(29:39):
I otherwise wouldn't have seen. But every personality is different.
I'm also like quite an introverted person. I think if
you are not drinking and you find that you are
just like thriving anyway, it's not like, oh, well, let's
see what this could unlock for me, like that guy
said that it worked, like, you don't need to do that. Like,
I don't think any sort of KPI from like a

(30:00):
fitness tracker is going to be what ultimately is what
makes you make a certain decision here, because when my
whoop scores were at their best, I was probably at
my like least happy. I think that it's more just
doing like a holistic inventory of your life, a very
honest taking a very honest look at yourself and saying, like,

(30:20):
am I happy? What are the sort of roadblocks that
I feel are sort of standing in my way from
being happy, and then just sort of like chisel away
at those based on what's closing them.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, it feels like a great place. Dan, thanks a
lot for coming on, man, I'm glad you were at
the pace. I thought it was really smart. I think
it was a good read in the context of all
the information about this today, and I think you approached
it really fairly and with a good i'll call it
sober head on.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
Thanks, So I appreciate that, and yeah, great, great to
be on here. This is definitely a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
All right. So maybe you don't smoke, you don't drink,
you don't gamble, but you may have a certain vice
as I do, and that is social media. The average
person today spends more than four hours on average on
their phone. Probably a lot of that is going to
social media. So you are seeing a lot of attention
being put on this idea that we are on social

(31:19):
media way too much and it is causing us harm.
Probably hearing about kids who are getting depressed from using
social media too much, probably even adults as well. And
in order to unpack this issue of whether social media
is addictive or not and whether it hurts mental health,
we have a really great guest. Her name is Taylor
de Lorenz. She's been reporting on this topic for a

(31:42):
very long time. She is the author of a book
called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, influence, and
Power on the Internet. She also has a podcast called
power User. It's a really good one. But the thing
about Taylor is she does not think social media is addictive,
and this has become a big bit in particular right
now with some new rulings out of California and New

(32:04):
Mexico that have deemed social media addictive. So we are
going to bring Taylor on. We're going to ask her
to defend her position of social media not being addictive.
She's also going to talk about the real science behind
social media use and mental health, some of the underlying
questions that need to be answered before we could even
say social media is addictive. We recorded this about a

(32:27):
week ago when some big news came out of the
online lookzmax in community, so we're going to unpack that
as well. And I think in the course of this
conversation you will find that my mind shifted on a
lot of these topics. For a lot of my career,
I thought social media is a complete bane against society,
that it is addictive, But she changed my opinion on
some of these topics. So let's welcome Taylor right now. Taylor,

(32:51):
thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 4 (32:52):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
All right, First things first, what's your favorite social media platform?

Speaker 4 (32:57):
Oh gosh, it's such a hard question. I honestly, I
love TikTok. I just could go down a rabbit hole forever.
But this is toxic. As a news junkie, I have
to say, I still like X. It's very bad. It's
it's like, you know, it's full of misinformation since Elon
took over. It's not a great platform, but for breaking news,

(33:18):
there's just nothing better.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
I agree. Have you done the Blue Sky thing as well?

Speaker 4 (33:22):
I'm on there, yeah, and I'm on masted On and Threads,
I'm on you know, all of them.

Speaker 1 (33:28):
How does blue Sky compare to Twitter?

Speaker 4 (33:31):
Blue Sky, I mean, Blue Sky has a lot of
and same with Threads. Honestly, it has a lot of
like kind of progressive people that like quit over Elon,
So it's like this kind of self selected group. But
there's also a lot of people that believe in like
open protocol technology on Blue Sky, which I appreciate. You know,
it's like developers. Well, so you know Blue Sky and

(33:51):
masked On, they're both built in this like federated model
of social media, which is really different than how we
think of it. It's like kind of like you know,
how you have your phone number now, but if you
switch like maybe you have AT and T, but if
you switch to Verizon, you still have all your contacts
and your services and change. You could quit blue Sky
tomorrow and join like a competitive service that's on the
same federated network, and you would take all your followers

(34:13):
with you. Oh you take that's kind of different than
the rest of social media.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
Okay, I like that, all right, I might have to dabble,
all right, So, but what we're here to talk about
is social media and whether or not it is addictive.
So I think a lot of people would agree drugs, alcohol,
those get lumped in the vice addiction category. And now
recently there's an argument that social media should be put
in that category as well. What is your take on that?

Speaker 4 (34:43):
Yeah, so this is something that they've tried to argue
for over one hundred years, before social media, you know,
even existed. We had this idea of being addicted to
media and communication as far back as the day of novels.
There were novels that were banned for being too addictive.
They tried to ban radio shows, soap operas, you know, television,

(35:04):
comic books like you name it, also just any form
of new technology. I was reading some old articles from
the nineties about Walkman and people listening to you know, CDs,
and they were saying that actually listening to music as
you walk through the world would fundamentally rewire your brain
and this was very dangerous and we needed to take
the Walkman, you know, away from kids. So I think

(35:25):
a lot of these arguments made are not you know,
I'm not a believer in them. Honestly. That doesn't mean
that I don't think social media is highly compelling and
that people can't have extremely problematic compulsive use. It's just
really important to distinguish that from addiction.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah, so how do you see addiction then, Like where's
the difference.

Speaker 4 (35:45):
Yeah, addiction is I mean there are there's a whole
sort of like clinical definition of addiction which just you
cannot become addicted to consuming media, whether it's music, books,
you know, internet videos, et cetera. You can really enjoy it,
you can do it compulsively, but it's you don't have
a lot of sort of symptoms of addiction. So, for instance,

(36:07):
like a physiological withdrawal, Right, if you you know you're
you're not gonna go, you don't have to go to
like you're not like detoxing from social media. I mean,
we use the language of addiction so colloquially, and I
understand people kind of using it as a shorthand, but
it also does have a real clinical meaning, and when
we're writing laws around this stuff, we shouldn't, you know,

(36:28):
we shouldn't rely on that sort of clinical designation to
write policies around speech and communication.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, that makes sense. So I have a question, do
you think that gambling can be addictive?

Speaker 4 (36:38):
The thing with gambling addiction, according to the people that
I've spoken to about it, is like you are constantly
raising the stakes. There's a lot of like compulsive behavior
related to to kind of money spending, et cetera. Really,
the reason that that gambling is is addictive is you
are fundamentally like losing money, which puts you in this
economically precarious state and makes you increasingly sprit And people

(37:01):
will be like, oh, but but what about Like you
get dopamine you know, from social media? Okay, you also
get dopamine from listening to music. You know, are you
a music attic because you listened to nine hours and
you got NonStop dopamine from it? Like, it's just it's different.
I think gambling is mostly considered a vice. And the
reason it's it has a negative outcome is because of
our economic system. You know, if we had a completely

(37:22):
different economic system and nobody cared that, you know, money
wasn't like, you know, structured the same way. Like could
people gamble all day and not have a lot of harm? Yes,
but the harm a lot of it comes from our
economic system.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
So the problem is that you could in theory with gambling,
when you push that to the most extreme degree, it
ends in complete financial ruin and the effectively the downsides
are much higher than social.

Speaker 4 (37:47):
I think we need to talk about the downsides right
and how realistic these downsides are, because I think a
lot of that stuff is overblown. For instance, there's this,
you know a lot of very hyperbolic claims about social
media and mental health, that widespread social media usage is
leading to some sort of mental health crisis among children.
That's just not born out by data. Now, if you

(38:07):
are what we do know that is born out by
data is the it's not so much that social media
is affecting your mental health, as the way that you
engage with social media is shaped by your mental state.
So if you're very depressed and you listen to really
sad songs for five hours, or go on social media
and engage in unhealthy way that can make you sadder. Yes,
you're right, and that doesn't mean that you're to blame, right,

(38:30):
Like sometimes that content that is given to you algorithmically.
But I was talking to a friend recently who's going
through a divorce, and her Spotify Discover playlist has been
like very depressing, and she was like, I feel like
it's like it knows that I'm going through a divorce,
and it's like feeding me this stuff. And you know,
like we all feel the push and pull of these algorithms,
and I don't want to discount that. What I would

(38:52):
argue is that like the way to counter that is
through data privacy legislation so that these platforms cannot hyper
target us and with you know, with highly engaging content
rather than like censorship of all content we consider harmful.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, I do think the fact that someone needs some
sort of underlying let's say, discomfort when they fall into overuse,
it's almost like they have a pre existing state and
then that gets filled by whatever the thing. And you
see that even with drug addiction, so things like like
there's a reason why the opioid epidemic really hit Appalachia.

(39:28):
It's because you had all these towns that were decimated
by the loss of different industries people can make money.
It was a depressing situation, and then you have this
sort of like influx of a substance that gives you
this sort of short term relief from these from the
circumstances that you find yourself in, and then you see
this thing bloom, which.

Speaker 4 (39:46):
Is ironically like this argument was really kind of made
most famously about novels. So novels in the eighteen hundreds
were a massive hit. I mean, parents were freaking out.
There was these novel addictions and they were trying to
get you know, young people treatment for their novel addictions
because you know, life was not great in the eighteen hundreds,

(40:08):
and a lot of young people would escape, you know,
to these novels. And I think, you know, reading about novels,
it's funny because a lot of those claims are the
same ones being made about social media today, where it's
like young people or they see everyone else leading these
amazing lives and it makes them depressed. And that's probably
true into a sense, like in the sense of like

(40:28):
engaging with media. I mean I grew up in the
two thousands as a teenager like looking at Cosmo magazine
being like, why don't I look like this the models
in this magazine? Why am I not living this great
life of like these reality TV stars? Right? Like, we
all engage in this stuff. But I think we just
have to be careful at sort of like what we're
deeming cause and effect.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, that makes sense. So do you think that there
is actually a growth and mental health problems among young people?

Speaker 4 (40:52):
I mean what we see around the data, it kind
of varies a lot and has actually backtracked the past
two years, you know, like suicide, like a lot of
mental health problems that these people that you know, these
people on Twitter will like go and you know say, well,
like look at the declines and mental health since twenty
ten or whatever. But if you look at it since
the nineteen eighties, it's significantly up. Like we're living a

(41:14):
better life than our parents, and our parents lived a
better life than their parents. So you know, there's a
lot of things around that. Now, did we have a
financial crisis in two thousand and eight that radically affected
the younger generation and left devastated the family lives of
you know, these people, same thing with twenty twenty, hundreds
of thousands of children lost a primary caregiver to COVID alone,

(41:37):
you know, losing your mom or dad like them dying
of COVID traumatically. Like that's a lot more traumatic and
life shaping than like watching too much Instagram for like
three months while you were on remote zoom school or whatever,
and not to mitigate it. But you know, it's interesting
also that like suicides dropped when kids were most online
like that in that year of twenty twenty. So I

(41:58):
just think these things don't always coral so neatly. And
there's a lot of people, I mean people, every single
top research are actually on this topic came out together
in twenty twenty four and issued this big report on
this exact topic and said, you know, you guys keep
claiming effectively that social media causes this. We at UNC, Princeton,
Do et cetera, all study this for a living We

(42:20):
can tell you social media is not causing it. It's
a mix of economic and socio political sort of factors,
and you guys need to address those things if you
want to address kids' mental health, you know, address the
fact that a significant amount of kids is growing up
below the poverty line, all these other sort of things
that it matter a lot more.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
Yeah, I think there's also been a shift in how
people live day to day in a way that may
not be always positive for mental health. I think people
spend less time together. I think people spend less time outside.
I think people are less physically active, and I think
those all correlate pretty strongly with mental health, especially in
young people. So when it's in the context of social media,

(42:56):
you could argue, oh, well it was the social media,
or you could say, well, what was the person not
doing because they were on social media. So it's not
that social media causes these other things weren't happening as well.
It's I think the like overall point you're trying to
make is that it's like really complicated.

Speaker 4 (43:12):
Yeah, And you know, I've interviewed hundreds and potentially thousands
of kids at this point over the years, and one
thing that they all say is like, I want more
free time. You know, kids today have hours and at
even just I've shocked at talking to teenagers compared to
like I'm millennial, so like I haven't been in high.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
School in a while, but like, so I'm here guilty.

Speaker 4 (43:30):
Yeah, Like fifteen years ago, school work was radically different.
You know, kids today have significantly more homework. They're also
more likely to participate in the economy, so they have jobs.
They feel this pressure to you know, to make a living,
to be interning in you know, high school colleges have
gotten more competitive, the economic situation has gotten more intense.
So there's all these pressures. And then we have the

(43:52):
just the geographic landscape of America where there's no longer
third places. Malls which I grew up going to, like
have shuttered. You know. You mentioned sort of like physical activity.
A lot of young people today don't get that. They
don't participate in you know, team sports have been sort
of bought out by private equity.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah. The third spaces thing is interesting because I'm also
a millennial, and when I was in high school, it's like, oh,
you go to the mall, you do you have these
places you could just go and hang out with other people,
And I feel like that happens a lot less often
for whatever various reasons it is with your own people.

Speaker 4 (44:24):
Yeah, I think parents are also more nervous. You know,
one thing that I thought I found was really interesting too,
is kids today are a lot less likely to have
a trusted adult in their lives that's not their parents.
So thirty forty years ago, they were more likely to
have a coach, a teacher, a mentor. They're more likely
to you know, engage with adults that weren't directly their

(44:45):
family members. And I think, like, for whatever reason, and
I was talking to researchers about, you know, many reasons,
this is like kids and adults are becoming much more stratified.
So we're seeing this world of like the kids world
and the adult world. On the internet, everybody is together,
but but irl kids don't necessarily have people to go to,
and so I think they turn to these online spaces

(45:05):
for support.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Why do you think the blame has been put nearly
entirely on social media?

Speaker 4 (45:11):
Well, listen, social media companies do a lot of bad things.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about like, you know, these are
profit maximizing tech companies that have done a lot of
harm in the world. Like no one's gonna you know,
go out there and be like Meta really cares about
the world, you know, these are companies that have helped
facilitate atrocities in places like me and mar and you know,

(45:34):
like and they've been really irresponsible. They're ultimately profit driven
platforms that don't they're not optimizing for like our societal
well being. But I think we need to understand that
like companies are, you know, we have we live under capitalism,
that is the economic system that we live in. Companies
exist to make a profit. We shouldn't punish them for

(45:57):
making their products so good that people want up and
so much time on them. But there are ways that
we can curb the type of negative business practices that
Meta engages in that actually degrade our internet. We have
no data privacy laws and now, unfortunately, if we pass
these social media addiction laws, they're gonna have even more

(46:18):
power and our Internet's gonna get even worse for everyone,
and that's gonna suck.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Do you think part of it is just because it's
so visual as well as if we think, okay, mental
health among teens and maybe even adults is going down,
we go, okay, that thing, and you go, I wonder why,
And then you look at everyone and everyone's looking at
their phone. That sort of becomes it and it's like, oh,

(46:42):
it's obvious it's the phone.

Speaker 4 (46:44):
We also have massive, multi billion dollar messaging political propaganda
campaigns aimed at pushing the idea that this is the phone.
Like there are these nonprofits and special interest groups and
groups like the Heritage Foundation and enco's or formerly known
as Morality and Media. These are a lot of organizations

(47:05):
that are affiliated with the religious far right, that are
religious fundamentalists that have been pushing the idea that the
Internet is, you know, the downfall of society since the nineties.
They're responsible for this what was originally known as the
Communications Decency Act, which was probably you know, significantly overturned,
but they've they've put this idea forward forever. And I

(47:25):
think it was after Donald Trump's election that a lot
of the mainstream media got on board with that. I
worked at the New York Times at the time, and
it was this idea of like, well, Donald Trump is
in office and everything is bad because of Facebook, and
had the media had been to like they hadn't been
critical of tech enough, but I think they flipped and
they just started sort of feeding into this stuff. And

(47:47):
you have to also note that like the New York
Times and a lot of these mainstream media companies also
directly compete with Meta and Google. These companies have oblitted
rated their business models, and they are also part of,
you know, these political action groups that go out and
you know, intentionally kind of put forward the idea that
the Internet is bad and we need sort of mainstream media.
So I think there's just a lot of competing interests
at play.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, And you've been covering the trial that recently happened
in California. There was another one in New Mexico that
looked at this question of is social media addictive and
came companies be held liable if someone has bad outcomes
due to social media? Can you walk us through kind
of what that trial was all about, what the arguments were,

(48:28):
and what it ultimately ended up finding. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (48:31):
So, first of all, it was this poor twenty year
old girl who I feel horrible for. This girl had
a horrible, horrible life. She grew up with an abusive mother,
an abusive father. Her father abused her and abandoned her
when she was quite young. Her mother also physically abused

(48:54):
her emotionally tortured her. We witnessed videos of the abuse
in court. The abuse was so bad in her home
that her sister tried to take her own life as well,
and effectively, this girl used Instagram and YouTube as an escape. So,
you know, she was having this really difficult home life.

(49:14):
Her mother also weighed her daily, told her she was fat.
Her father told her that she was fat and ugly
and all this stuff. So and kicked her out of
the house at one point, just this girl was struggling,
she went and saw a therapist. In her years of therapy,
and the therapist testified to you know, she wasn't mentioning
social media. She was mostly like, hey, I'm growing up

(49:34):
in this abusive home. Can you help get me out
of my home? And they didn't. She stayed there. So
this girl was really failed by the system, I would argue.
Now conveniently she's kicked out of the house. Suddenly there's
all these ads in class action lawsuits saying, hey, you
can make a lot of money actually for the you know,
if you were a victim of social media. Now the mom,
the abusive mom comes back around. Suddenly the daughter's living

(49:56):
a home again, and she's like, you know, we're going
to sue. We're part of this class action law. You know,
this big group sort of suing meta at the trial.
I mean what we saw was, like what I saw
was this girl first of all, going through you know
that being being put through hell again where you imagine
having growing up in this horrible and then having your

(50:16):
therapist testify to the embarrassing stuff that you said. And ironically,
she's pursuing a career as a social media manager right
now because she really did fall in love with Instagram
and making these video fan adits.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
And she was claiming that Instagram was it Instagram specifically
had hurt her mental health. This was the reason why
she was having mental health problems, was a lot all
the time she was spending on social media, effectively.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
Exactly they said. They were arguing that, you know, she
wouldn't have had you know that these mental that that
being on social media contributed to her mental health problems. Now,
it's important to remember in this lass, like what the
jury found wasn't that that it was totally responsible, but
if it even contributed point zero zero zero, like one
percent to her mental health, that could be found like

(51:02):
you know, that was that was sort of like the
questions that the jurors were given and what they found
was or what they determined, Again, these are just nine
random people, right that said through this emotional trial and
they found yes, you know, great that girl got you know,
or six million. They were rewarded six million dollars. I
think what's really scary is that this girl is just

(51:25):
being exploited over and over and over again by like,
you know, multiple systems here. But the people that are
involved in this trial, that put forward, that put her forward,
are this reactionary political movement, and their goal is to
dismantle something called Section two thirty, which is the really
tiny piece of internet law that guarantees user generated content

(51:47):
and free speech online. This case was not just notable
because they were like putting Mark Zuckerberg on trial or whatever.
It was notable because it established this really novel legal
precedent that will be used to enact mass ship and
surveillance online. And they do it, you know, they did
it through this like kind of using this girl's case.
I would argue, honestly, that girl. I think the mother

(52:09):
should have been on trial personally, but you know, we
have Mark Zuckerberg instead.

Speaker 1 (52:15):
So the fear is that more censorship arises because of this,
more or less, and how would that actually play out?

Speaker 4 (52:23):
They're using it? Yeah, so as soon as the verdict
was read, the parents and political groups involved in this
case went outside in the steps of the court and
held a press conference. They asked for three pieces of legislation.
They were like, great, we just got this big win.
Now we want to repeal Section two thirty pass something
called the Kids Online Safety Act, which would give the

(52:45):
government the power to effectively mandate the removal of any
content deemed harmful for children, which the Trump administration has
said is going to be any LGBTQ content, reproductive justice content,
et cetera. So they were advocating for that, and then
they were advocating for national ID checks, so complete removal
of anonymity from the Internet. All three of those things

(53:06):
are very scary, and I would argue don't keep kids
safe at all. In fact, in danger, we know, in
danger of thousands of immigrant kids, LGBTQ kids, kids you
know that are seeking mental health support, and they're already
you know, using these to pacc these laws. Ironically, those
laws are also laws that META is lobbying for. And

(53:27):
META is already using this case to push for the
App Store Accountability Act and all these other laws, so
it and META of course has been running ads. They
want to repeal section two thirty as well. That will
actually allow Meta to consolidate power.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
So why walk us through how that benefits Meta.

Speaker 4 (53:43):
Yeah, so section two thirty guarantees the It effectively puts
the liability for online speech on the speaker. So if
you go on the Internet and you say something bad,
you should be held responsible. You know, say you say
something hateful in a chain email, forward that chain email
to my mom. Section two thirty allows me to forward

(54:06):
your email without being held liable for defamation if what
you said in the email was bad or wrong. So
it's really important. It allows us to have retweets. It
allows us to leave a negative review on Yelp. If
you were to remove section two thirty, basically every single
platform would have to pre screen content and ensure that

(54:28):
it's not sort of any legal, legally dicey stuff. So
you would not be able to leave a negative review
on Yelp because the restaurant might sue Yelp, and Yelp
doesn't want to have that now because of AI, these
tech companies, the really big ones, are actually kind of
fine removing section two thirty because they are confident that
they can pre screen everything with AI. Yes we'll have

(54:50):
mass censorship. Yes we won't be able to criticize power
online anymore. But that's how it is in a lot
of authoritarian countries, and they still have a thriving Internet ecosystem. Ultimately,
these business you know, these giant tech companies, they rely
on harvesting data. They don't rely on free speech, and
censoring every single piece of content actually allows them to
harvest even more data than they previously do now, so

(55:12):
they don't really care about that. What it would also do, though,
is decimate the broader internet, remove forums, remove remove actual
like remove grassroots free speech.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Interestingly, so I can see the I mean, I can
see an argument for some sort of I don't know, guardrails.
I can see a case where when I think about
when are young people most sort of I guess at
risk of potentially developing what we talked about with like

(55:43):
excessive overuse that could cause harm. So if you look
at I'm sure you're familiar with this, but just for
the listeners, if someone say, takes a substance like alcohol
or marijuana when they're fifteen, there are odds of becoming
addicted grow to like fifty percent. Whereas if they wait
till they're twenty one, then the odds are ten percent.

(56:06):
And that's because people are kind of finding comfort and
trying to figure things out when they are younger. And
so if something sort of relieves short term discomfort, the
brain sort of remembers that and it can lapse into
some sort of misuse. So I can see there, I
could see someone's argument for saying, like, well, maybe we
need some guardbrails on this, especially for young people. But
how do you think about that.

Speaker 4 (56:26):
We have, like we have centuries of speech law in America.
You know you cannot. Section two thirty does not protect
platforms from illegal content. Section two thirty also allows platforms
to moderate content differently, So a gardening forum can be
moderated differently than a BDSM forum. You know. Section two
thirty is actually what allows children's spaces to exist on

(56:47):
the Internet because they can be moderated differently. If we
remove that, all spaces are effectively moderate. You know, it's
all sort of like the same. It's basically all or nothing.
You know, you bring up sort of like alcohol or cigarettes,
et cetera. What I would say is that those don't
provide benefits, Like those don't provide like.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
I would argue, I would argue differently.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
What I mean is that, like we're talking about access
to information, and ironically that example that you just gave
of exposing someone at fifteen to to verse twenty one,
it's actually much more harmful to expose young people to
sort of the entire Internet later, because they don't develop
the media literacy skills that it's so crucial for them

(57:27):
to develop actually as young as possible. So it's really
important to expose kids to the Internet at a young
age under a direct like supervision, right, and with guardrails,
because you want them to be able to operate in
the media and information and technology sort of landscape of
their time and not fall for misinformation and not fall

(57:47):
for scams the minute they turn eighteen. But to do that,
you have to introduce them to this stuff really young.
That's why when we grew up as millennials, like we
had computer class. We learned about these things, Like you know,
people should be learning about this stuff in civics class,
social studies, et cetera. We should say, like, here's what
misinformation is, here's how you can look at this platform,
here's some tools to navigate, Like instead we're going the
opposite way, and we're trying to kind of like ban

(58:10):
kids completely. And then we know that the later they
get on, the more likely they are to fall for scams,
the more likely they are to fall for misinformation, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
This would explain why boomers are always falling for fake
news on Facebook. Yes, literally, is there data behind that?

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And there's a lot of like media
educators that have tried to talk about this repeatedly, journalists
like others. I think what's hard is that like a
lot of these parents feel like I can't do like
a media studies class with my kid, Like why is
it my job? You know, I don't I don't have
the and I totally they don't have the time. A
lot of them are working two jobs. A lot of
these you know kids are growing up in in households

(58:51):
where both the parents work, they see them for an hour,
you know. So what I would argue is for some
sort of like public education system, especially with AI. We're
seeing this a lot with AI, Like say you ban
social media tomorrow, We're about to see this on steroids
with AI. We need to reform our public education system.
We need like national educational you know things, and maybe

(59:11):
make the tech companies pay for it, you know, make
the tech like tax them more. There are so many
things that we can do to fix these problems. We
can also pass comprehensive data privacy reform laws so that
these young people are not getting as you say, like addicted,
whatever you want to say. We know that this content
is highly engaging. Part of the ways that that you know,
these feeds are made so engaging is because they can

(59:32):
hyper target you. You know, there's that famous story where
target knew a child, a girl was pregnant before her
own father. Right, Like, if we take that away, the
content gets a lot less engaging because they can't target
kids as aggressively.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
So do you think that maybe the algorithms need to
be changed, Well, we don't want the worst, that's kind
so I guess yeah. Or maybe there's not even a
problem to solve. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
No, there are definitely problems to solve, big problems, and
there's a lot that we could do you to, I think,
address all of the very legitimate concerns that parents have
when they talk about this stuff, because it's really hard
to raise kids today. I'm totally empathetic about that. We
don't want top down government control of algorithms, like that's
very silly. The Trump administration has said what they would

(01:00:17):
do with that, and it's not good. But we do
want to give users more control. So ironically, we were
talking earlier when I first joined about blue Sky or Vocalon.
There's this other model for the web that actually is
gaining popularity, which is the fetaverse model. It's this model
where essentially there's interoperability between platforms and there's a lot
more user choice. With blue Sky or some of these

(01:00:38):
other services, you can actually choose, you have control over
the algorithm, you can tweak the algorithm, you can put
a lot more user control, and parents can set a
lot more controls things that these big tech platforms don't allow.
There's no advertising as well on a lot of those alternatives,
so they're just inherently less predatory. We could mandate that
all of these social media platforms federate that you don't

(01:01:01):
have to use Instagram. You know, maybe these kids, like
they don't want to be left off totally socially, but
maybe they use an alternative to Instagram, but they can
still access certain parts, you know, certain content from Instagram
that's fed into this alternative app that's in total gray
scale and doesn't you know, just has a reverse crown
feed or whatever. But it's about giving people choice because
I don't think we want the government controlling content, and

(01:01:23):
I don't think we want parents. Every child is different.
What's appropriate for one child at fifteen is not appropriate
for another child at fifteen, and we should trust parents
and families to make those decisions.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And
I hadn't heard of that different model, but that seems
logical that parents should have some say in, like what
is being fed to my kid, because right now it's
just kind of like you log in and it's just
what's going to happen happens?

Speaker 4 (01:01:45):
Well, it's like does your kid have Instagram? Yes or no?
It's this binary thing and yeah, you can set teen accounts,
but it's like there's not choices. What if we had
twenty choices instead of Instagram that we're all really similar
and kids could all connect, they could have the same
social network on all of them. We can mandate, you know,
changes to these companies. We can also say, hey, Meta,
you continue to use the computer fraud and Abuse Act

(01:02:05):
to shut down any and all competition. You can't do
that anymore. We're reforming that law. That law was written
in the nineteen eighties. You know. So I think there's
just so many not to mention data privacy. There's just
a lot that we could do that would that would
you know, fix pretty much almost all of these problems.
I'm willing to bet that parents kind of you know,
think but putting making this dumb show trial where Meta

(01:02:28):
pays six million dollars something they can make up in
an instant and an abusive you know, parents are rewarded
for nothing, Like we don't get any meaningful change from that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
One of the big things that was highlighted in the case,
and the argument was made around dopamine, which I feel
like parents hear that dopamine has become the scary word.
It's like you got to do a dopamine dtox where
a dopamine nation walk us through some of the problems
with that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
It's very silly, you know. I was talking to a
big time safety researcher recently about this idea of dopamine
and she was saying, like, it's not based on anything,
and like dopamine is actually pretty good. Like, you know,
you get a lot of dopamine from snuggling puppies. If
you were snuggling puppies for ten hours, you know, would
that be harmful? No, she was saying that, like what
she sees from her research is primarily that the sort

(01:03:16):
of response that's elicited when when people scroll through these
feeds is actually, sorry to say it, clavicular. I feel
like the clavicular guy, but like it's a cortisol spike.
So it's spiking your cortisol, which is keeping you hyper engaged.
And what that is is actually a stress response. And
I think we all feel that when we use our phone.
I think if we were getting dopamine, which is like
what we get from listening to a pleasurable song or

(01:03:38):
like a great album. Right, Like that's why there's not
the same moral panic about Spotify as there is you know, Meta,
when Spotify actually has more of the addicting features that
we put on trial. You know that put Meta on
trial for But I think we're getting this stressful content,
we're getting this stress response, and we want to mitigate that.
But that's not dopamine, that's something else.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
Yeah, And so it's like, if we're penalizing anything that
alters dopamine, all of a sudden, we've penalized every single
thing we do in life. Because dopamine keeps us alive
in many way. I mean, it motivates you to eat.
It's also people who have Parkinson's have parkins isn't because
they don't have enough dopamine. So if we're like, oh,
we got to bring those dopamine levels down, now we're
all going to have Parkinsons, it's very.

Speaker 4 (01:04:18):
Silly and it doesn't fix the fundamental problem, which is that,
like we have these big structural issues with the Internet
that we could fix. We could build a more open, equitable,
less profit driven internet that's more competitive, it gives that
puts users back in control. But instead we're like down
this other weird path. And we've been down these paths
before too, you know, we see again, we see it

(01:04:39):
with every new form of technology. I just think we're
at a very scary point right now because these people,
these people have gotten pretty far in their political effort
and there are some pretty scary laws that they want
to pass.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
All Right, So we've talked a lot about kids in
social media. How is it affecting or maybe not affecting adults.

Speaker 4 (01:04:56):
Yeah, I think, you know, when we look at adults,
often adults have more or unhealthy behavior around the internet
than children. This goes back to this idea of like
people that didn't grow up native to this technology often
struggle to navigate it and navigate it in a healthy way.
This is why you have a lot of boomers that
are like on Facebook all the time, over sharing, using

(01:05:17):
it in bad ways. Or parents, you know, they'll chastise
their kids for being on their phones, but they're also
on their phones. It's so hard for a lot of
adults to stay off their phones, so you know, the
same with children. There is no evidence that that social
media or the Internet is causing some sort of like
widespread mental health crisis among adults at all, but a
lot of adults do use it in unhealthy ways, and

(01:05:40):
I think exacerbate whatever issues they have, whether it's insecurity
or you know bad you know, having bad mental health
or whatever they're you know, sometimes they're just wasting time
on it, right and it feels like a time suck.
It's like you watched like TV for five hours, you know,
I remember before, you know, before the days of social media.
I would watch a lot more television and it's like
you feel like you just lost dat out. So I

(01:06:01):
think the good thing about being an adult is that
you have a lot more control over your life.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
And totally with like the boomer thing. My like, my
mom and my wife's parents use their phones way more
than anyone else I know. And I think, isn't there
data that shows that older people spend the most time
on their phones?

Speaker 4 (01:06:24):
Yes? Yes, older people spend inordinate amount of time on
their phone and social media and are a lot more
likely to like overshare, Like they overshare a lot. I
think they don't have like a good idea of boundaries.
So yeah, got to get to old p Maybe we
need an over sixty ban on the internet, you know,
maybe let's pass that before we ban you know, everyone
under sixteen.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
There you go. That should be your next big piece
why we should why we should put age limits on
boomers on social media?

Speaker 4 (01:06:52):
No one in Congress will be able to access the web.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
And with the research on social media and mental health,
whether it's kids, whether it's adults, I think a lot
of people see headlines about study finds social media use
does X y Z, but a lot of those studies
have flaws.

Speaker 4 (01:07:08):
Yeah, there's this great headline of a story that came
out years ago that was not every study on like
depression and social media is bad, only most of them,
and it was actually talking mostly about like these teen studies.
But it's kind of true. Universally. There was this book
called The Anxious Generation written by this man Jonathan Height,
that used effectively almost entirely like debunked or deeply sort

(01:07:32):
of like mischaracterized studies. So there's a lot of bad
stuff out there. You can make a study that finds
anything right, and so I hate when people are like,
but what about this study, And it's like, well, there's
tons of limitations and that's a bad study. But what
we know from the meta analysis, which are basically like
studies that study all the studies, is that there is
no causal effect. So it just goes back to the
same thing that we're seeing with teens. Social media use

(01:07:54):
is like a symptom of whatever. The underlying like root
issue is that you're having or maybe you're having using
it in a positive way, right, But if you're using
a negative way, it's the behavior that you're engaged in
because of some root issue. And I think that's what's
so important to note, is that cause because this has
been a very studied area. Again, like there's this you know,

(01:08:14):
this is their people like Alice Marwick, Candas Adgers who
people can look up I highly suggest, you know, reading
their work on this. Like these are people that have
studied this stuff for literal decades, since the early two thousands.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
So when you talk to anyone about social media and
I feel like they use it too much and they've
got a problem with it. And I know you're not
a clinician, but I feel like you've talked to enough
people that I can trust your advice. Here, what do
you tell them?

Speaker 4 (01:08:39):
So I think of this guy Ian Anderson who is
a habit researcher at Caltech, and it's him and I
can't remember his colleague. They did this great, big study
that came out last fall where they studied this idea
of addiction and they studied kind of how it was
affecting use. And again this is a guy who has
a PhD and like habit behavior, Like there are people

(01:09:00):
that like study this stuft for a living and they
were really interested in this. And what they found is
that actually the more that a user believed that they
were addicted to a platform, the harder it was for
them to moderate their own use. And you know, so
I think that we get all these narratives and we
convince ourselves like, oh, I'm so addicted to Instagram, so
addicted to Instagram. What I would tell people is like

(01:09:22):
that narrative that you're telling yourself actually makes it harder
for you to take control. We all have bad habits,
we all have unhealthy behavior as things we want to change.
We want to go to the gym more, we want
to eat less sweets, we want to whatever. But we
need to we need to start like looking at those
things differently, making micro changes. I mean some of I
would argue that those people should get involved in politics

(01:09:43):
and fight for some of these laws. But in the meantime,
like you know, do what you can, but view it
as a habit like anything else. But you know, there
are a lot of other people that install these sort
of like blockers, these attend you know, there are a
lot of like apps that can help you kind of mitiga.
Maybe you get a different phone. I know people even
have like these weekend phones now that they activate on
the flip phone only on the weekend. Like you know, figure,
you do kind of the best that you can, but

(01:10:05):
it's harder and harder. I mean I talk to parents too,
where like I think of that viral tweet of the girl,
you know, she was banned from her or her mom
took away like her iPads, so she started tweeting from
her smart fridge. We have vapes now, the swipe vape,
which has a little screen which lets you go on
social media from your vape.

Speaker 1 (01:10:21):
Oh wow, I mean, why do one vice when you
could just layer on another one, Like let's just pack
them on. Maybe we could turn that into a cup.
You can fill it up with booze.

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):
It's bad, but it's like we're living in this like
internet enabled world and it's getting harder and harder. And
like parents, I know, it's so hard and it's so
unfair that so much is falling on parents right now.
But what I would say is, like expose your kids
this stuff in like young like healthy ways when they're young,
and teach them to moderate their use when they're young.
Don't stigmatize it when you talk to kids too. The

(01:10:52):
primary way that young people use social media, and I
know that like everybody thinks it's scrolling short form video.
According to Adam's right Instagram, it's actually dming each other.
It's chat. That's why snapchat is so popular. It's chat.
So these kids are desperate for social connection, They're desperate
to feel belonging. They want to explore their interests. Give
them other avenues to do that and they won't be

(01:11:13):
on their screen so much.

Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
Yeah, And I think when I've thought about my own
relationship with social media, what's helped me is to pull
back and go, what about this do I think is
not helping me? What about this is actually a positive
in my life? And for me to sort of line
up with what you just said, positives are the dms.
It's like, I've met awesome people on Instagram that I

(01:11:35):
would have never met in real life, and we've got
these crazy long DM chains. I've never met these people
in real life, but I'm like, oh, this person's a
great friend. Yeah, we just share, like we got a
niche video, like you know that we share. It's more
just the The problem becomes when I get out of
the dms and then I start swiping mindlessly and I go,
oh my god, twenty minutes have gone by and you're

(01:11:56):
on a deadline, dude, Like, don't do that. But I
think sort of observation is the first step to changing something.
You've got to be aware of where the problem lies.
Because I think these things are they come with benefits
or else we would never use them. If there was
no benefits behind social media, no one would be on it.
So drilling down, Okay, well what is the benefit I

(01:12:19):
think can be useful.

Speaker 4 (01:12:20):
One hundred and like what are you actually seeking out
of it? And what content like isn't serving you? You know,
like what are you reacting to in the minute, and
like changing your algorithm a little bit. Like we've all
kind of learned these behaviors of like when I see
a bunch of bad stuff, it's like, okay, I got
to go like some x y Z videos and hopefully
get some of that on my feed, you know. But
use the tools that you can mute the people that

(01:12:41):
you need to mute. Do the best you can. It's
very hard. That's why I would argue we need sort
of some of these top level fixes. But until we
get those top level fixes, I very much support people
kind of just doing whatever they can totally.

Speaker 1 (01:12:53):
All right, We're going to start to land the plane
pivot into a totally new lane. You've covered the Internet,
online worlds, your entire career. Looks maxing is a thing,
and just last night, Clovicular it's kind of the looks
Maxing King supposedly might have odeed. What is your sense
on the looks maxing community and what is going on there?

Speaker 2 (01:13:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:13:16):
I think it's, you know, this outgrowth of like broader
trendsing culture towards like sort of self optimization, so like documenting,
live streaming every aspect of your life, tracking like the
Brian Johnson kind of like tracking everything to Also, you know,
I've seen people just be like Clivicular is just sort
of appropriating like women's culture. We like we've been looks

(01:13:38):
maxing forever, like gay male culture, Like it's just being
brought to straight men now. You know, for him specifically,
I feel very sad for him because this guy is
a twenty year old. You know, he's spoken about being
like extremely neurodivergent and having a really hard time finding friends.
And I think the bad thing about the current like
algorithmic internet that we all live in now that rewards

(01:13:58):
attention and over everything else is like I don't think
that this kid is served by live streaming his life
twenty four to seven with these other like kickstreamers. I feel.
So I'm like, I hope his parents can like get
him out of whatever, you know, system that he's in.
But but yeah, he's gotten I mean, he talked so
he got out of the hospital this morning. He talked

(01:14:20):
about the fact that he basically takes drugs to cope
with being neurodiversent, because it's hard for him to stream
fourteen hours a day with you know, the way he is,
and so he took this sort of toxic cocktail of drugs.
He's also on peptides. He's also talked about doing meth
things like that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
That almost feels that almost goes back to what we
were talking about earlier, where most I mean, we'll just
use the word addiction because it's easy.

Speaker 4 (01:14:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:44):
Most addiction stems from trying to solve an inherent, underlying
problem in a person's life.

Speaker 4 (01:14:51):
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I talked to a lot
of people in the Looksmacks or community, and a lot
of people that were actually like taking courses from people
like clivicular and like smaller people, and so many of
these young men. Like the reason they're turning to looks
Maxing is because they feel like they don't have any
sort of economic mobility, they don't feel any sort of
agency over their lives, and so taking agency over the

(01:15:14):
way that you look is this way to kind of
like establish autonomy and feel a sense of control. This
is also how a lot of women end up with
serious eating disorders. It's this like desire for control and
autonomy and like exerting that control in unhealthy ways. And
I think that like, if we want to address like
the looks maxing and all of these sort of like

(01:15:34):
unhealthy things, we need to have like again broader conversations
about like what is it that is making these men
feel so hopeless and nihilistic about the world, and how
do we mitigate that? Because it's like, yes, social media
exacerbates it, but actually the worst uh sort of places
where these places, you know, the places where these men
get radicalized and all of this hate is fomented are

(01:15:56):
are forums like looks max dot org that are not algorithmics.
They're like old school forums, and so it's like you
could ban social media and stuff, but they're they're actually
getting radicalized in it like very nineteen nineties kind of
like format. So you can't just blame the algorithms, like
you need to go a little deeper and be like,
what is making young men turn to these coping mechanisms and,

(01:16:17):
like you said, unhealthy stuff, whether it's I think drugs, alcohol, going,
you know, bone smashing, whatever, you know, it's all sort
of like maladapting.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
Yeah, and that's where it gets really complicated. And so
with what we've just been talking about now, it's easier
for politicians these different groups to just be like, oh,
it's the social media, it's not all these million other
things happening in people's lives.

Speaker 4 (01:16:41):
Yeah, it's not the fact that young men, you know,
have seen like average wages decrease for you know, so
many years, or they watch their parents struggle economically, their
entire childhood was defined by the financial crisis, they feel,
you know, I did a bunch of stories back when
I was at the New York Times in twenty twenty
one on Wall Street bets and crypto and speculative kind

(01:17:02):
of I mean effectively gambling. I would say, with these
like meme coins and meme stocks, and a lot of
those kids have ended up in the looksmaxing sort of
community and adjacent communities, and they're all there's a lot
of overlap between the like meme coin crypto world, and
it's just nihilism. It's basically like the entire economic system
in America is a lottery. Anyway, what's the point of

(01:17:25):
you know, investing. There is no such thing as like
working for forty years for a stable company. There is
no stability in the world. And I get it, Like,
these are kids that grew up. Donald Trump, you know,
has had a political career for like ten years, so
it's they sort of have primarily known him as our president.
They had COVID, they have you know, it's like there's
a lot of upheaval that they've witnessed, and so I

(01:17:46):
think they just this is how they're kind of, you know,
reacting to that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:51):
Yeah, all right, final question, this is a more positive question. Yeah,
you've been a vegan for a long time, right, Yeah,
what have you learned from that?

Speaker 4 (01:18:00):
You know, it's given me a lot of empathy. Like
I was thinking of this recently. I used to be
extremely militant about it when I was young, and like
really moral, like really annoying. I was like the one
that was like most people, I'm surprising, you know. I actually,
like I've bringing up sometimes we don't have it like
in my bio and stuff. And if you want to

(01:18:20):
go talk about toxicity on the internet, nothing is more
toxic than like the vegan communities online. And like so
much of my early Internet experience was being that person
online that was like the fourteen year old like, you know,
being like you're a murderer. You're doing you know, genocide
of the chickens, and you should die, and you know,
and and I think like the older I get, the

(01:18:42):
more I realized that, like we all just make these
sort of like ethical trade offs and decisions in life
and how to live life, and and you kind of
just have to do the best you can and accept
that like I'm flawed. I'm not living perfectly. This other
person is living perfectly, but like let's just all kind
of like work together to have a better society and
not be it's black and white. And you know what,
if you want to eat twenty percent less meat, like

(01:19:03):
that's that's good for the world, I would argue.

Speaker 1 (01:19:06):
So that's a positive. That's a positive note to end on.
I like that empathy for people and being accepting and open.

Speaker 4 (01:19:14):
Yeah, try not to rage tweet, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:19:17):
Try not to rage tweet. That's a good rule to
live by. Well, Taylor, I appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 4 (01:19:22):
This is awesomes Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Speaker 1 (01:19:26):
All right, let's land the plane. Here. We heard from
Dean Statman about why alcohol in moderation can be a
good thing in some circumstances, and we talked to Taylor
Lorenz who told us that maybe all of this moral
panic over social media is overblown and there are ways
to use social media to improve your life. So now
I'm going to talk about one of my own personal vices.

(01:19:48):
It is my absolute favorite thing in the world, besides
my wife, my dogs, and a good trail run. But
if you listen to the Internet, they would tell you
that this habit I have is completely ruining my health.
This is going to give me cancer, it is going
to end me early, it is going to do all
these terrible things for me. But if you listen to science,

(01:20:10):
turns out it may not be that bad. Here I
am talking about diet soda, and I'm going to crack
one right now because it is so delicious. Now I
will say this about diet soda. I am not the
Trumpian twelve diet cokes a day consumer, but probably half
maybe five a day. Probably five seems about good. Now,

(01:20:35):
diet soda gets a bad rap, and a lot of
the bad rap came from the studies that were conducted
in mice in the seventies. So what happened is that
they fed mice a bunch of aspartame, which is the
no calorie sweetener that is found in diet soda and
makes it so delicious without the sugar, and they found

(01:20:56):
that these mice developed more tumors miser didn't have.

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
That.

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
Now, the problem with this study, though, is that the
amount of aspertain that they fed these mice, it was
a ridiculous amount. There was no way a human being
could ever eat that much aspertain. In fact, if you
were to try and get all that aspertain from diet soda,
you would literally die from all the liquid you had

(01:21:21):
to drink to get that aspertain. The liquid the water
would kill you first. And then follow up research also
found that the way that these tumors were created the aspertain,
that same mechanism does not apply to humans. So it
turns out you do not have to worry about getting
cancer from drinking your diet coke or diet doctor pepper
or diet pepsi or diet insert anything. There's a new

(01:21:43):
fear though, So the cancer thing that was in the seventies,
it persisted for a while. You probably still hear it
out there. Now. A big target is that aspertain and
other artificial sweeteners might disrupt your gut microbiome. Sounds very spooky, like,
oh no, my gut micro I don't want that to
be bad. But here's the thing. We do not know

(01:22:03):
a lot about the gut microbiome, and it takes a
lot to change it. So researchers will throw all sorts
of fiber, all sorts of vegetables at the gut microbiome,
and it does nothing. In fact, one of my favorite
nutrition thinkers, she is a columnist at the Washington Post.
Her name is Tamar Haspell. She wrote about aspartame, artificial sweeteners,

(01:22:24):
and the gut microbiome in general, and she said the following,
The gut microbiome has become the conspiracy theory of nutrition.
It's where people go to prove something's dangerous when there's
no evidence that it really is. So you don't have
to worry about gut microbiome. Now, some people will say, oh,
just drink water. Why don't you just drink water, idiot,
that'd be so much better for you. It's like, yes,

(01:22:46):
I do drink water. Water is great. I drink plenty
of it. But here's the thing. Water is not as
delicious as diet soda. So I think about it this way.
Diet soda is a good alternative instead of drinking sugary
soda because we know if you drink a lot of
sugary soda, you're probably gonna end up with some bad
health outcomes. So what diet soda does as it comes

(01:23:07):
in and goes, hey, I'm going to give you that
same deliciousness, the sweetness, the bubbles, the cola flavor, the
root beer flavor or whatever it is. But you're gonna
have very few downsides. So it is a very reasonable
alternative to real soda. If we followed that water logic
too far, it would be like, yeah, we'll never drive
your car when you could just walk. Yeah, never have

(01:23:27):
dessert when you could just eat a grilled chicken salad
all the time. It's like, no, we need to have
times where we have things that we really enjoy, and
if they have very few side effects, like diet soda does,
I think that is a good bargain. I also saw
a thing online the other day where RFK was supposedly
going to ban diet soda. Now it turns out that

(01:23:49):
was not real, but when I first saw it, I
was like, this is why we have the Second Amendment.
Out of my cold dead hands, my man, I love
my diet soda way too much for that. Take away
for you is really one, diet soda is fine, and two,
if you got something that you love and it's not
causing you any clear health problems, lean into it. You're

(01:24:11):
only going to live once. Enjoy yourself. Cheers to that.
Thanks for listening to my rant, Thanks for checking out
the show. New episodes drop twice a week, so make
sure to subscribe so you will get those directly in
your feed. And we are always open to your questions.
Feel free to send them to our email or to
put them in the comments, and we will try and

(01:24:33):
answer as many questions as humanly possible. I'll say it again,
don't forget to subscribe. It really helps us. And as
always inclosing, as we always do and as we always
will have fun, don't die

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} Is Alcohol Actually Bad for You? The Truth About Drinking, Social Media & Diet Soda

Episode Transcript

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb

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Is Alcohol Actually Bad for You? The Truth About Drinking, Social Media & Diet Soda

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