00:02:05.260So those OG liars among you may remember her from that episode.
00:02:09.240But she just published her first book,
00:02:12.000so it's finally time that we take a deeper dive.
00:02:14.640Caro, do you want to tell me what you know about Freya India?0.88
00:02:18.680Yes, I know that she runs a popular sub stack. And from what I recall, she's a little bit of a free press darling. I don't want to say that she's reactionary, but I think that I remember her kind of co-opting like a very Barry Weiss coded view of the world, which is like, this is why my generation sucks.0.95
00:02:36.720And I also remember that she, like, came up with a sweeping generalization for Gen Z, Gen Zed, as my people, the Brits, say, for what Gen Zed talks about by referencing an autistic woman's TikTok online.
00:02:50.760And I remember that was really noticeable.
00:02:52.920Yes. So today we are doing a quasi-if-books-could-kill style review of her book, which comes out in the U.S. this week.
00:03:01.120And that is girls, Gen Z, and the commodification of everything.
00:03:07.660Can I just say really quickly, on this, the year of our Lord and Savior, Lena Dunham's memoir, Fame Sick, to take her title, Girls, and then co-opt it is just, it's ambitious, is all I have to say.0.73
00:03:22.340I know. I had that thought while I was working on this outline because I've been re-watching
00:03:27.960Girls, and I was like, wow. All day long, girls. Then after work, girls. And what whiplash.
00:03:36.800The book urges us to, quote, look past what you're being told and see what you're being
00:03:42.320sold. Dun, dun, dun. So I was dying to get my hands on it.
00:03:46.620I mean, that kind of sounds diabolical lies coded.
00:03:48.700Thank you. That's what I was going to say, is that this is like diabolicalized catnip. I'm very interested in critiques that use language like commodification, things that gesture at vaguely Marxist ideas, but then reach these insanely reactionary conclusions with them.
00:04:05.960So Freya India is not a household name yet, like, for example, a Barry Weiss. I think it's safe to say that when we critique Barry Weiss, we are decidedly punching up, because even before the Free Press sold for $150 million and she became the editor-in-chief of CBS, she was running a multimillion-dollar media business with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers.
00:04:31.560That is not the case with Freya India.
00:04:34.120She has roughly 50,000 subscribers on Substack.
00:07:56.040And he is perceived and has positioned himself as an objective thinker, as someone who, like, thinks beyond politics.0.79
00:08:02.720And his whole shtick is that we're fucking kids with social media, which, to be fair, is an incredibly compelling message in its—like, from the outset.0.94
00:08:13.380So Haidt is a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business.
00:08:17.920Oh, like Scott Galloway, NYU Stern boys.
00:08:21.040And each book is quite different from the last, but to your point, he's now best known for his book, The Anxious Generation, which, if books could kill, actually did a solid review of.
00:08:32.320And the TLDR on this book is that it essentially makes its argument based on correlation between
00:08:37.480the supposed rise of what Haidt perceives as social ills and the introduction of social
00:08:42.720media to society, particularly for children.
00:08:45.340So his main beat now, I would say, is this sort of the kids are not all right ethos.0.67
00:08:50.180I don't think it is totally fair to say that Haidt completely astroturfed Freya India into0.96
00:08:55.680existence, but he did have a substantial hand in legitimating her in these more mainstream
00:09:01.240spaces and introducing her to much larger audiences than she had previously. Okay. Blurb
00:09:08.560number two. This one is much shorter and I'm going to have you read this. Okay. Freya India
00:09:18.060is an essential voice on Gen Z. This is her first book, comma, of many. Is that a threat?
00:09:26.360i i don't know this one doesn't really give anything away okay that is friend of the pod
00:09:34.040scott galloway oh of course he would phone in a blurb of course he would phone in a blurb so we
00:09:39.840have covered scott galloway's notes on being a man ad nauseum so listen to that episode if you0.93
00:09:44.260haven't yet caro knocked that one out of the fucking park it's my nobel prize but galloway0.87
00:09:49.640is essentially a business guy who wrote a book about what's wrong with young men and the formula0.97
00:12:35.240So maybe it is punching down at this point. We'll see.
00:12:38.500What are we going to do when we have, when we like eclipse Joe Rogan and there's nowhere to punch but down?
00:12:43.720Oh, we kill ourselves. That's what women do at that point.1.00
00:12:47.280Don't worry, there's a plan. There's an architecture there.1.00
00:12:50.060So we are spinning quite the scare quotes diverse ideological web here in the endorsements that this book and by extension Freya's point of view has received.0.98
00:13:01.540So based on these blurbs, what would you expect to find in Girls, Caro?
00:13:07.600I mean, I guess I would expect to find some sort of liberal analysis that's maybe kind of Ezra Klein coded if I were reading those blurbs.
00:13:16.480I think if I'm you and I, I was reading those blurbs, I'd be like, oh, we've got a problem.0.99
00:15:59.260So the point is that, like, the work is, on the surface at least, supposed to be about the effects of social media use and, like, the related things that you do on a phone, like sell your body on OnlyFans and swipe on dating apps, things of that nature, and teenage girls.
00:16:14.840But we actually are not going to spend all that much time today debating the merits of the social media argument, because as I'm going to argue, none of this is actually about social media. So I think it would be a mistake to engage with her on those terms.
00:16:33.000So, who is Freya India? Freya raised the Substack Girls, one of the first popular Substacks that I remember seeing in my feed when I joined the platform. She is 26 years old, she is from the UK, and is pretty involved, as I understand it, in the social media ban conversation in the UK.
00:16:51.540She went to an all-girl private school in Essex and then studied politics at King's College London
00:17:09.380She's also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt's newsletter
00:17:12.220and has contributed over the years to right-wing publications that we're going to be reviewing today.
00:17:16.640And she summarizes her beat as follows.
00:17:19.500Caro, if you will finish chewing and then please read.
00:17:23.980I'm at this hotel in central London, and there's a wood-fired pizza place right next to me, and I'm just on a first-name basis with those dudes.
00:17:32.260In this age of atomization, sexual liberalism, rapid technological change, and a deepening mental health crisis, Girls is a series of dispatches trying to make sense of it all.
00:17:42.740Expect all kinds of topics, from critiques of contemporary feminism to scrutiny of the mental health industry to rants about the relentless commodification of our lives.
00:17:52.780So that's the description that she gives for her substack.
00:17:56.960And if I remember correctly, I think it has been this for a long time.
00:18:01.420But I think if you were to strip that description of its underlying context and, like, the work itself, you could say that these topics are quite diabolical-lisely.
00:18:14.340Like, the scrutiny of the mental health industry, hashtag brought to you by BetterHelp.
00:18:18.740Even critiques of contemporary feminism could code leftist.
00:18:23.660And I think that this is really indicative of Freya's sleight of hand in her positioning.0.51
00:18:28.700So she has been called both the, quote, anti-woke voice of Gen Z women by The Times,
00:18:34.200as well as a new type of, quote, feminist author by The New Statesman.
00:18:38.860I'd also say that she speaks relatively compellingly about her beliefs.
00:18:42.040Like, her written work feels, to my eye, much more extreme than some of what she said in the mainstream platforms that she has been given.
00:18:51.260Yeah, and that checks out. Like, I would also do that.
00:18:53.760I would kind of code switch a little bit between like deep diving on our podcast versus talking
00:18:58.360on CNN. Absolutely. So we're going to do a little compare and contrast today. But it's very important
00:19:05.180to understand when you engage with this work that her worldview is very conservative, which is not
00:19:14.420always immediately clockable, depending on your entry point. So the first piece that I encountered
00:19:20.400from her was in my Substack news feed in 2024. And it was about how we shouldn't document our
00:19:26.000lives in lieu of living them. So like pretty unobjectionable critique of social media use
00:19:30.740that I remember enjoying. And I think I even quoted a line from it in something that I wrote
00:19:35.160that year because on its own as a standalone, it was like just very unobjectionable.
00:19:41.980Didn't this piece go viral on Substack?
00:19:50.400Yeah. I wish, Freya, can you give me some advice? I really would like to grow my newsletter. But then there's this question of who are her fans? And I think most of her fans are actually older people. So if you click through the comment section of her work, it appears to be mostly middle-aged men, not young women.
00:20:10.360I got an email from an older gentleman who's a family friend of mine who was like, I think he's vaguely aware of my podcast, but I don't think he's really clocking my politics or maybe he is.
00:20:43.600I don't know if he was already reading it or if it was free press.
00:20:45.880But I think that you're on to something.
00:20:47.820Reading her book just convinced me of my theory about this audience even more because of how rudimentary the explanations of platforms like Snapchat or like Instagram filters are.
00:20:59.780It's not the tone or the level of detail that you would be going into if you were writing for your peers who ostensibly understand and have lived through these things themselves.
00:21:09.900And part of that could be because her biggest audience exposure is via John Haidt's newsletter.0.85
00:21:14.960But I think she really flatters that kids these days' generational instinct to be, like, Gen Z is a bunch of pathetic little piss babies in the same way that the free press flatters, like, the free-thinking tendencies of the highbrow Fox News viewer.0.73
00:21:32.320Does she have a big social following?0.93
00:25:52.020the cover and marketing of the book, position it as your sort of classic pro-woman read.0.93
00:26:00.120It's a picture of a headless white person, I assume woman, wearing a dress that is actually
00:26:06.940a barcode. And in the introduction, she basically positions herself as someone who began writing
00:26:13.560about these issues because her concerns about young women were foundational to her interests.
00:26:21.060But as we will discuss today, it seems like that backstory has actually been retrofitted to paper over a slightly less tidy narrative about the intellectual journey that she has gone on.
00:26:35.120In the 19-page introduction, the words commodity, commodification, or commodify are used nine times.
00:26:44.660And that's basically where the analysis starts and ends.
00:26:48.340That's about the extent of the economic analysis that we did.
00:26:51.820Oh, so she went to the Scott Galloway School of Nonfiction Books,
00:26:55.520where it's like, I'm going to shoehorn all of the numbers into the first seven pages
00:26:59.620and hope that you're stoned by the time you get to page eight.
00:27:04.960I literally went through and started, by the seventh commodification,
00:27:09.220I was like, all right, I'm not convinced you know what this word means.
00:27:13.480Freya to commodification is me to the word notable on this podcast.
00:27:18.340Oh my God. It's like, who are we reading once where you were like, every paragraph is just
00:27:25.880seven topics. Anyway, in the introduction, there's a lot of generalizing and a lot of
00:27:32.280dramatizing happening. So to give you a sense for what I mean, this is just one line from the
00:27:37.960introduction. And I'm pulling it out of context because it's not surrounded by any context.
00:28:51.040So the book is structured in this way.
00:28:53.620She says to trace what has changed from the early 2010s to the present.
00:29:00.360So right away, we have a very abbreviated timeline in the grand scheme of things.
00:29:04.980And she says she's careful to note, though, that these changes are not just technological. They are also cultural. And then here's the list she gives for the changes.
00:29:15.960From the evolving language of feminism, okay, to the expansion of therapy culture, okay, to the emergence of new progressive norms.
00:29:25.120Yeah, those, you know what, Katie, gun to my head, if someone were to ask me what the number one challenge is for women, I would be like, I think therapy culture and progressive norms.0.97
00:29:35.840Together, these cultural, technological, and commercial forces collide and intersect, intensifying insecurities like never before.0.97
00:29:44.300So the world that we are presented with in girls is one of Victorian fainting couch calamity. It is dystopian. It is a godless hellscape in which girls and young women are described frequently as, quote, falling apart, as, quote, unable to cope with, quote, age-old anxieties.
00:30:07.160I lost count of how many times the phrases age-old anxieties and falling apart appeared in this book.0.52
00:30:14.340It is a world where Gen Z is too afraid to order from a menu or talk on the phone.0.95
00:30:20.280Friendly reminder, though, that is a reference point to the autistic TikTok she shared.0.75
00:30:24.980There was no, but dude, there was one quote-unquote study she cited that was like 86% of Gen Z is terrified to order from a menu.
00:30:34.000It was pretty light on facts or detail, mostly a description of Freya's perception of girls her age, which, like, fine if you're writing a memoir, but this book is not positioned like a memoir. It is positioned as a nonfiction diagnosis, as an analysis, right?
00:30:50.600She closes her introduction with one simple call.
00:30:56.060Quote, that is why we need to go back, she says.
00:34:32.640But that's also why I don't blurb things really ever. There are some finance authors like Ramit Sethi who just as a general rule of thumb will not blurb anything for that reason. Because you're just constantly being asked and there's not enough hours in the day to actually read every book that you're asked to endorse.
00:34:50.520And so my guess is that all of these men, with maybe the exception of John Haidt, who I do believe read it and agreed with it, they may have just been asked to like, hey, this is what this book is. Are you okay with us attaching your name to it with this quote? But yeah, there is no economic analysis in this book whatsoever. I do want you to read this specific quote, the only sentence in the book that uses the word capitalism.
00:35:16.200This is what happens when you have too much pretty privilege.0.98
00:35:18.080You've got to grow up ugly, and then you really fucking cite your sources.0.96
00:35:21.700Okay, not all young people were activists, of course.0.98
00:35:24.600For teenage girls like me at the time, these were just there.
00:35:28.640On our social media feeds, across mainstream media, treated as common sense by university lecturers.
00:35:35.200This became another lens through which we made sense of the world and ourselves.
00:35:39.800Our problems, our anxiety, stress, body image issues started to seem less personal.
00:35:45.300They became symptoms of something bigger.
00:35:48.060Patriarchy, late capitalism, white supremacy, or other forms of oppression.0.99
00:35:56.700She's saying all these dumb social justice ideas on social media made it sound like my body image issues were because of patriarchy or whatever.0.91
00:36:05.620Wait, I just need to pause for a second.0.57
00:36:07.640This is like in our last episode when someone referenced apartheid as a social justice term.
00:36:14.520Like, capitalism is not a social justice term. Capitalism is not, like, a wokey thing. Like, capitalism is like—
00:36:23.320Adam Smith is like, uh, fucking excuse me. Would like a word.0.98
00:36:28.800Like, what the fuck are you—capitalism is our economy. Like, what are you talking about?1.00
00:36:34.360So this is a pretty strong focus of the final chapter, which made me laugh because something Michael and Peter often say in If Books Could Kill is that0.96
00:36:41.720these authors like save all the craziest shit for the end and she definitely loads all the SJW0.71
00:36:48.880stuff into that last that last section those last 20 pages go fucking crazy for the 150.99
00:36:55.320midwestern grandpas who are going to be like I knew it I knew that's why my granddaughter won't0.82
00:37:01.700speak to me so we are going to revisit parts of the text of this book throughout the episode
00:39:16.280It's almost like she's trying to do a Didion thing
00:39:18.200where it's like the example kind of speaks for itself,
00:39:21.380but it's just not. In this case, it's not having that effect. In the first chapter,
00:39:26.880we get a pretty staid accounting of like how different editing apps came to be, like the
00:39:32.380timestamps of, and then Facetune did this. And then in this year, it was worth this much. And
00:39:37.040then this, and then this, and a history of like how the newsfeed became algorithmic. And then,
00:39:42.240then it was monetized with ads. And then the grand reveal, the big takeaway is like, and that
00:39:49.920distorts women's self-image she's like that is not capitalism you fucking communist0.97
00:39:57.300but it's like okay yeah and this isn't really in question anymore like right we don't really0.97
00:40:06.280need a book in 2026 to break the news that this is how this works or for another very detailed
00:40:15.340timeline of the Kylie Lipkit phenomenon. And so I kept being like, what function is this serving?
00:40:22.360Like, why are we pointing out old and obvious things and at an extremely painful level of
00:40:29.780unnecessary detail, things that people just more or less agree on now? And I think to get a sense
00:40:37.060for what is actually happening here, we do have to examine Freya's work over time. How has it
00:40:43.620evolved, and how does she exist in the ecosystem now? Because she has been publishing online since0.96
00:40:49.8202020, and her work has shifted in interesting ways. So the general thrust of Freya's evolution
00:40:56.780is that the whole social media is ruining the girl's angle that she has taken on is a bit of
00:41:03.560a recent invention. This is how she describes her interest in these topics in the book.
00:41:11.820In 2020, I started pitching to magazines and newspapers, trying to put into words how I felt about social media, about dating apps, about family breakdown, about how girlhood felt in the modern world.
00:41:24.880I began to notice threads running through it all.
00:41:27.660The pain girls and young women felt, the industries profiting from this, the commodification of everything, including our very selves, the lies we were being told.0.98
00:41:37.460So, my original theory of the case was that she started with the social media shit and then got more overtly right-wing over time. And making this outline made me realize that I think it was actually the opposite.0.88
00:41:53.580I think she started with more overtly reactionary gender stuff and then had a breakout moment with a couple social media-related blog posts about capturing your life online, and then that sort of became the lacquer over the rest of it, but the core message remains the same.
00:42:12.940She really strikes me as a person who probably wanted to be, like, a right-wing self-help guru, but then found herself in the John Haidt influence bubble and is now doing, like, a weird hybrid of gender stuff and screen time moral panic.
00:42:28.060And so, I tried to do a general classification exercise of her substack work over time.
00:44:02.640I would also send all of the men to their deaths.0.99
00:44:04.540Okay. We've all heard the claim that if women ruled the world, there would be no wars. If more women were put in charge, there would be less war, kids would be better taken care of, and there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former President Barack Obama once said at an event in Singapore.1.00
00:44:21.360He described women as indisputably better and blamed men, particularly old men, for not, quote, getting out of the way.
00:44:28.840Obama has also previously stressed the importance of, quote, putting women in power because men seem to be having some problems these days.
00:44:35.520Okay. So, like, I actually don't mind the defense that women are actually bloodthirsty warmongers because, as we know—
00:48:34.980And that is giving Jackie Eubanks, I will say, that is giving Jackie Eubanks that you pull women up because they serve a role in this landscape.1.00
00:48:42.600And you're like, oh, this woman will be a great punching bag.1.00
00:48:44.940Let's get the woman to say that we should blame mothers for stuff.1.00
00:48:48.760And they just happily do it because it's a paycheck.1.00
00:48:50.660And I get it. I mean, look at the clickbait I wrote.
00:48:52.740Like, I'm not above that. I understand that you want to make money, but, like, it's fucking dark.0.98
00:48:57.760It's stupid, and it also has a very particular view of girls and women that is not—I was just so distraught by the amount of pain they were in and wondering what could be causing it.0.99
00:49:15.320This is not that. That's not what she was doing. That's not where she started.1.00
00:49:20.120Moving on. In 2021, we got a piece about why women should listen to Jordan Peterson. And it made me realize that Jordan Peterson is like pseudo-intellectual girl wash your face for boys. So if you find it motivating.1.00
00:49:37.340He's like, let them. Let them and let you.
00:49:50.120So if you find it motivating to be degraded by a man in a sweater vest, which I will not kink shame, JP is your guy. Like, there's a reason that he resonates with a certain group of people. There's a real self-help element to his brand that I don't think I quite appreciated before I went down this rabbit hole for this episode.
00:54:15.060Honey, honey, sympathizing with bin Laden is not liberal, babe. That's way farther left. Okay.
00:54:21.360Okay. Another, I mean, have we thought about Bin Laden's mom? I don't know. I think we should
00:54:27.380take that into consideration. Don't get mad at Bin Laden. Get mad at his bitch mom. He didn't do
00:54:35.260anything. Dude, calling Harvey Weinstein a sex offender, I don't know what she would call Bin
00:54:40.880Laden, but I'm certain it would not be a correct classifier. Okay. A hyper-masculine aggrieved.
00:54:47.300Seriously, the Jordan Peterson of the Middle East. With some good ideas.
00:54:51.360Okay. Another major part of this is social media. Take those natural tendencies of girls and women,
00:54:58.020of agreeableness and conformity, and add to them algorithms designed to track our interests and
00:55:03.540deliver targeted content to our devices. Some feeds evolve into endless reels of social justice
00:55:09.640activism and progressive politics, becoming more extreme to boost engagement. You may have started
00:55:15.340out being a bit worried about climate change, but by the time the algorithm is done with you,
00:55:20.700That minor concern is deep-seated fear of an imminent apocalypse, like the heat death of our planet. Lucy Biggers just kicks down the door Kool-Aid man style and is like, climate change isn't real.
00:55:32.660Okay. Perhaps you started with sympathy for oppressed groups, and before you know it, you're making TikTok videos agreeing with Osama bin Laden.
00:55:43.760The assigning of social justice to white girls is probably giving them more undue credit than they deserve.0.76
00:55:52.200You know what I mean? Like, I don't think white liberal girls in 2015 were, like, at the base of social justice movements, but maybe that's just me incriminating myself.
00:56:02.660just like militant marxist organizers no well and also i mean i i include this example because
00:56:10.740i think it's illustrative but also because it's kind of funny to be like yeah it's hysterical
00:56:14.680you know woke dumb ideas like climate change it's like oh you mean the one thing that actually is
00:56:21.300like a you know an imminent and undeniable um threat to our existence so when i read this i0.79
00:56:29.040was like, it kind of feels like she only objects to social media insofar as it is a place where
00:56:34.780young women are expressing values that she personally finds objectionable. And I think
00:56:41.320that that lens is going to be really useful when we listen to her most popular interview to date
00:56:46.980shortly. But she cites a statistic a lot, both in interviews and in her book that, quote,
00:56:53.980liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to say they spend five or more hours on social0.94
00:57:01.640media every day. So right off the bat, Caro, anything about that that seems a little off
00:57:07.940to you? How do you know if a teen girl is liberal? What the fuck does that mean?
00:57:12.860Thank you. Her citation for this statistic in the only place that it is cited, which is in print,0.98
01:01:26.920Yeah, yeah, yeah, that he shared has since been re-shared by all these other thinkers
01:01:30.740and it is now accepted as common knowledge.
01:01:33.320It just reflects what Jonathan Haidt wants to believe about allegedly liberal people. And I will say secondarily, just to take it at face value that there is some legitimacy to this survey. Okay, so you're looking at three and a half hours for conservative girls and five hours for liberal girls. Okay, what does that 90 minute difference mean? What does that mean that like, we're getting more? What are they doing on social media? Are they talking to friends? Are they looking at their algorithm? What counts as social media? Is it screen time?
01:12:44.500ready all right but in recent years since social media i would say therapy culture has just
01:12:51.080escalated um to the point where i think young women don't see it as a world view they just
01:12:58.500see that as kind of life so they interpret everything through this therapeutic lens
01:13:04.560so their lives their relationships their emotions um and i think it has elevated to the level
01:13:10.640of religion um so you think of you think of all the kind of characteristics of religion we just
01:13:17.040mimic them with therapy culture so instead of praying we just repeat our like positive
01:13:22.420affirmations um instead of like seeking salvation you'll go on like a healing journey um instead of
01:13:30.820like you know resisting temptation from the devil you'll reframe your intrusive thoughts um
01:13:37.760And so I think for young women in particular who are becoming less religious, this kind of therapeutic worldview has completely replaced that void.
01:13:47.460What does a therapeutic worldview consist of? What does that mean?
01:16:05.220And also your parents are more likely to have clearer boundaries with you, which I think is actually very useful for anxiety and depression.
01:16:16.760I can see you Googling. Don't worry, we're going to get into it.
01:16:20.320There's different explanations for it. But yeah, it's a worry because young women are becoming less religious and their mental health is also tanking. So there has to be some link there.0.89
01:16:31.320Okay, so there has to be some link there. That's actually, that's not how causality works. This is the Jonathan Haidt School for Correlation is Causation. And okay, so think about what just happened there.
01:16:47.860We start with this broad statement about this ambiguous, but I think generally understood phenomenon called therapy culture.
01:16:55.360She links it to social media, and then she zooms way in to a kind of complete non sequitur.
01:17:00.800And by the way, religious conservative teens are happier, and then zooms back out and says religion has been declining and mental health issues are worse, and so there must be some link there.
01:17:10.980I want to slow this down and take these five rapid-fire claims one by one.
01:17:30.740Claim number one, conservatives feel more control over things happening in their lives.
01:17:36.460She uses the phrase locus of control.0.98
01:17:38.920This is a very popular idea that the Cato Institute fucking loves.
01:17:42.900The only evidence that I can find ever cited for this claim about internal versus external locus of control is a 1981 study that asked conservatives and liberals a series of questions about whether they believe their life outcomes are shaped by their own actions and whether their outcomes are shaped by powerful people or random chance.0.73
01:18:07.740And conservatives were more likely to assign a higher value to individual action and a lower value to the forces in their environment.
01:18:16.900Any modern-day articles about this idea cited this study, and there are a few things to note about it.
01:18:22.460Number one, much of the research used undergraduate college students.
01:18:27.140That is not a representative population for making broad claims about political psychology.
01:18:32.560Number two, beyond that, the study itself is correlational.
01:18:37.200We do not know whether people who think they are individually responsible for everything that happens to them are more likely to become conservative because of that belief,
01:18:45.360or if adopting a conservative viewpoint makes you feel more in control of your life.
01:18:50.520Number three, and I think this is the most important part,
01:18:53.500The author herself notes explicitly that sometimes believing that powers greater than you are impacting or controlling your outcomes is actually just the most accurate perception of your reality.
01:19:05.800We should not pathologize that answer because you may just be correctly identifying an obstacle to change, not indulging in, like, personal helplessness.
01:19:15.040Just to add to that, she also makes a lot of effort to describe progressive or liberal beliefs as kind of like a dogma that someone falls into without realizing. And she doesn't ever acknowledge that conservative beliefs are the same. Like, going to church is a dogma in its own way. And so it's like, I mean, again, moral neutrality to either of those sides. But like, both of those are cultural frameworks that you either inherit or step into and then impact how you view the world.
01:19:42.560Neither of those are fixed variables, but she treats basically a conservative dogma and she treats like prior language, like pre-therapy speak language as this fixed variable.
01:19:53.860And it's like, well, language is always changing.
01:19:55.520Well, and it's also the biggest kind of LOL happening here is like we're writing a book and discussing essentially like radicalization online when what is obviously the more dangerous and prominent version of radicalization online is right wing radicalization.0.83
01:20:17.640Like, as defined by the fucking FBI, who was like, yeah, this is a problem, folks.
01:20:24.660So if you are concerned about radicalization by algorithms, there is a story to be told there.0.98
01:20:31.060But it's not teen girls talking about patriarchy, you know?
01:20:35.280Right, right. It's not teen girls fangirling over Osama bin Laden.
01:20:39.140But I think this process is indicative of the sorts of claims that are being made here when Freya says things like, studies show.
01:20:46.360When you look into the studies, they're often small sample sizes, undergraduates, kind of tenuous methodology.
01:20:53.280And here is a passage in the final chapter of the book where, again, we get claims about liberal girls, again, citing John Haidt.
01:21:02.900One likely explanation, Jonathan Haidt argues, is a loss of agency.
01:21:07.740In psychology, this relates to our locus of control, the sense of how much power we have over our own lives.
01:21:14.220Those with an external locus of control tend to feel that life happens to them, while those with an internal locus of control believe they have more influence.
01:21:23.660In recent years, adolescents' sense of control has shifted outwards.
01:21:28.600Gen Z as a whole began to feel less in control of their futures, but the shift was biggest among liberal teenagers, particularly liberal girls.
01:21:36.600This aligns with decades of research showing that conservatives, on average, tend to have a more internal locus of control while liberals lean more external.
01:21:46.420And the more external your locus of control, the more likely you are to feel anxious, hopeless, and depressed.
01:21:53.020Okay. The only citation in that entire section is a paper from 2014 about the, quote, partisan personality conducted by a researcher whose specialty is social media and public relations. It used 610, quote, young voters with a study design that was considerably less thoughtful than the 1981 study.
01:22:21.020one serious. Okay, let's move on to claim number two. If you're a conservative teenager, you're
01:22:26.820more likely to be living in a two-parent household. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, we've covered this.
01:22:32.240The problem is that teens being segmented by their own politics doesn't really happen in
01:22:37.640serious research because they are minors who do not have politics. Right. So I really couldn't
01:22:42.960find evidence for this claim as she's making it. And she didn't cite it. And she provides none.
01:22:48.200But we can segment for politics of parents, right? So maybe we can't say conservative teens, but we can say conservative parents. There was an interesting piece from none other than our boy Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies.
01:23:03.700This is a cottage industry of people just keeping each other afloat and just coming up with stats to slip into each other's books. It's unbelievable.
01:23:11.840Well, the problem with that statistic is that it's only half true, according to Brad.
01:23:16.440Teens in the reddest and bluest states were those most likely to have grown up with continuously married parents, which would appear to contradict the claim that conservatism is the best predictor of whether you live in a two-parent household.
01:23:31.320So again, the most blue states and the most red states.
01:23:35.880Now, the theories about the various, like, causal devices happening here are different.
01:23:41.300We're really not going to spend too much time digging into those today, but the point is it's not just the more conservative the voting record in a particular zip code, the more likely you are to find a two-parent household, and then, like, it gets progressively more single as you, like, go across the spectrum to the left.
01:23:57.140Similarly, if you're asking which households have the lowest rate of nonmarital births, which means the fewest kids born to unmarried parents, again, bluest and reddest.
01:24:06.800In fact, if you just look at the top 25 states, okay, the top half with the highest percentages of teens with married parents, 14 of them are blue states.0.59
01:24:17.700And what really jumps out at you when you look at the list is that the lowest rates of teens with married parents are in the poorest states, which are largely red states.
01:24:28.100Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, West Virginia.
01:24:34.180So again, one of the strongest predictors of whether you stay married, and again, we don't really know the causality versus correlation here, but like statistically this is evident, is whether you're college educated. So like race, income, education, these are big confounding variables here that can have correlations to particular political viewpoints, but not with enough consistency or coherence to make the claim that she is making. So that's claim number two.
01:25:01.740Okay, claim number three is the second part of the conservative teens live into parent households claim, which is that being a teen living with both of your parents protects your mental health.
01:25:13.920This is true if your parents get along.
01:25:16.780Like, it is true that parental conflict is associated with, quote, poorer academic achievement, increased substance use, early family formation and dissolution, which basically means teen pregnancy.
01:25:28.040but this claim assumes that you only experience the effects of marital conflict if your parents
01:25:34.500get divorced but if your parents have a high conflict marriage divorce can actually be what
01:25:41.480brings relief from the stressful home environment not the thing that creates the stressful environment
01:25:46.720high conflict continuously married parents produce statistically indistinguishable results from the
01:25:53.560other family types they studied. Plus, like, again, I hate to hammer me nail here again and
01:25:59.020ring the bell, but income plays a really big part in this outcome. I was just about to say this is
01:26:03.860a socioeconomic conversation, I feel like. One... Derek! Derek! One study that I will link in the
01:26:13.080show notes cited a few others, and they basically found that up to half the association between
01:26:18.880single-parent families and the outcomes that are often studied as negative effects, so the
01:26:23.560children's academic performance, the teen pregnancy, the, quote, idleness, can be attributed to being
01:26:28.400low-income, which is often a confounding variable with being a single parent, rather than, like,
01:26:33.420the generalized absence of a second parent. This is why it is so frustrating that the story you
01:26:40.140will often hear about social safety nets is that the family is supposed to be the location where
01:26:45.580you receive all the things that you need to survive. And hey, wouldn't you know it, married0.84
01:26:49.360people, they have greater resources, so everyone should get married to avoid all the pitfalls of0.84
01:26:54.460single parenting. And like the social safety net is bad because it discourages people from marriage,
01:26:58.940right? That is the story. When in reality, the social safety net can eliminate half the bad
01:27:03.740outcomes of raising a family alone. Like if you don't want those bad outcomes, there's a very
01:27:07.780simple solution that does not involve forcing people to get and stay legally married. Claim
01:27:12.800number four, conservative parents have clear boundaries with their children. Okay. Didn't
01:27:17.840really know how to go about fact-checking that one. I mean, I think you and I can probably fact-check
01:27:23.280that one personally. I'm like, unclear. And then claim number five, clear parental boundaries are
01:27:29.160helpful for anxiety and depression. I mean, okay, sort of tracks if you think about conservatives'
01:27:35.020relationship with order and rules-based approaches to life. But like, even then,
01:27:40.340It's so tenuous, I don't even know how to respond to it.
01:27:43.360I was going to say, it's just something that, like, potentially sounds nice.
01:27:46.960I think it very much falls into that camp of that which you do not need evidence to believe.
01:34:35.780If I'm being excessively generous, what I would maybe say is, okay, yeah, providing fertility benefits and not providing like a subsidy for child care.0.74
01:34:44.120Like, sure, you can maybe spin that as like a nefarious kind of like, yeah, put off the family, don't have the family.
01:34:52.640Sure, I could maybe see that as like a conspiratorial explanation for why you would get one and not the other.1.00
01:34:59.460But the corporate world Freya India paints here, and for the record has never been a part of, is one in which corporations made it too easy for women to participate fully in work and accommodate their family life.1.00
01:35:18.160She is mirroring the critique that people made of tech companies about having cafeterias and laundry service and, like, nap pods and shit with the intention of creating an environment conducive to employees working longer hours.0.74
01:35:31.540But, like, this idea that, like, they're providing childcare because they want you to never leave and they're just making it too easy for mothers to participate.
01:35:40.960It's like, you are not living in the same reality that the rest of us are.
01:35:44.440Yeah, I mean, this is one of those paragraphs where it's like, I have a hard time even deciding what to say because she obviously doesn't have research experience. So like, it's not like she's looking into this because I never want to pretend that you can't speak, at least with like intentional eloquence about something that like, you don't have to have a lived experience in order to understand it. I do believe that.
01:36:05.620But, like, she doesn't have the research to back up anything she's saying, and she doesn't have the lived experience to talk about motherhood or to talk about working in the corporate world. And so she's speaking very broadly to the two realms that she hasn't, as far as I can presume, that she hasn't even dipped a toe in.
01:36:25.520I would be willing to bet that if you asked her what the minimum federal leave is, she wouldn't begin to guess. She would have no idea what, like, the non-corporate paid leave benefits are. Because as much as it's fun to shit on corporations, like, having the parental leave benefits at, like, a Google is a fucking jackpot compared to what most Americans have.
01:36:48.120Google is the closest you get to Scandinavia.0.99
01:36:50.220They have like a six or seven month maternity leave.0.84
01:36:52.740And for all of the flaws of that aside and all of the incentives and blah, blah, blah,
01:37:12.480It's like, yeah, I'm working there longer.1.00
01:37:13.940But like most women work very long hours in America and then go home and do a shit ton of labor. And so it's just every sentence in this paragraph reeks to me of like you really don't know what you're talking about to the point of this being like a nonsensical tirade that again, full circle, only a man would agree with. Again, only men blurbed this book. It's like, oh, yeah, other people who also don't know what the fuck they're talking about.0.73
01:37:41.600I just thought that was such a telling passage if the argument had been like yeah the workplace1.00
01:37:49.420isn't set up for women and that's why you shouldn't be in it and you should just opt out1.00
01:37:55.300that would have been one thing yeah but to argue that it's making it too easy for women to0.99
01:38:00.220participate it's crackpot shit and you know what I'm also thinking about is that she's pulling up0.99
01:38:05.380these clickbait things of like robotic nursing ribs and they're shipping breast milk I'm like0.99
01:38:10.580I don't know. It's giving like all the clickbait we had about like the woke seminars when Robin
01:38:16.040D'Angelo was like waging her tirade. But you know what's so funny and ironic is that you actually
01:38:22.740don't have to do what she's doing to depict a dystopian world because the actual world that
01:38:28.520American mothers live in is dystopic. You can be like, hey, do you know that women are being forced
01:38:33.480to undergo C-sections because they don't have rights over their own bodies and states right
01:38:37.660now. Hey, do you know that women are bleeding out in parking lots? Hey, do you know that women1.00
01:38:41.040have to go back to work when they are two weeks postpartum in this country? Like, you can play1.00
01:38:46.440that game with widely relevant statistics that impact millions of women, but instead she's doing
01:38:53.400the Pierce Morgan thing, and she's, like, pulling at these things that actually are completely
01:38:57.620irrelevant to the vast, vast majority of Americans to paint a picture that is, like,
01:39:02.980indirect opposition to the actual dystopian reality okay next clip and then you think of
01:39:07.800things like young people not wanting to get married and have children and it's like well
01:39:11.740yeah because there'll be a huge obstacle if we think that we have to have this perfect control
01:39:16.100over our mental health or our productivity routine um anyone else is going to seem like
01:39:21.080chaos coming into that and so i think young men and women can both can both go to an extreme of
01:39:27.400those but it's kind of the same thing it's like an avoidance strategy it's like i have full control
01:39:33.640in this situation and i'm not vulnerable okay you're i i can't i can't with this i can't with
01:39:40.400her pushing this and not doing it so it continues like that for a while okay you can observe this
01:39:45.300same pattern oh my god start with the social media critique expand it to the broader demographic
01:39:50.320thing position conservative ideology as the solution but it becomes really explicit
01:39:57.000toward the end of the interview and i think what has accidentally happened is
01:40:03.060feminism pushed this idea of like girls and boys are just as strong as each other
01:40:08.380and then that led to people thinking oh so they don't need girls don't need extra protection0.97
01:40:13.800which killed chivalry but also killed fathers actually protecting girls um because the problem
01:40:21.660is not like women are weak it's that girls are vulnerable but now we think oh we should all step
01:40:27.300back let girls do what they want um a lot of baby went out with that for them yeah and now you see
01:40:33.460a lot of chivalry went out with patriarchy yeah well we we killed good authority we just killed
01:40:39.980All authority. And so now you have young women like demanding that their universities protect them and demanding that the government step in and like staring at someone becomes a harassment on the tube because they don't have, we degraded the authority of men they trust. Like good men and hopefully like their fathers and brothers. We just said, oh, all kind of protection is patronizing and we don't need it.
01:41:06.640Hopefully, hopefully you've been doing a lot of work there.
01:41:53.400We need to restore the authority of the good men, the fathers and the brothers, because otherwise the young women will sell their bodies on the internet.1.00
01:42:00.620Babe, who do you think they need protection from?1.00
01:42:04.500It's the stranger danger thing all over again.
01:42:06.88075% of child sex abuse, that's a low estimate,
01:42:51.640that that has decreased significantly over time.
01:42:54.400If we were to take women seriously as people, this would be like a laughable thing to say.0.95
01:42:59.740It would be one thing to argue like, well, you know, you know, you argue about the nuclear family and you do all that bullshit and you basically imply that like women should suffer some violence in order for us to restore society.0.63
01:43:10.480That actually is an argument that has more rhetorical consistency than arguing that women will be safer under these environments.0.99
01:43:22.960Okay, so to lighten the mood again, just briefly, something that's increasingly obvious to me from this interview and reading her work is that almost the entirety of her analysis is focused on, like, young women being annoying on the internet.0.63
01:43:37.040Like, it's all just so inextricably connected to how people behave on TikTok.
01:43:52.160Okay. Feel misunderstood? TikTokers suggested you might have ADHD. Bad at eye contact? Could be
01:43:59.880autism. Watch the same TV shows over and over? Might be an anxiety disorder. Replay the same
01:44:06.380songs in your head? Sounds like neurodivergence. I can't believe I just found this out, but having
01:44:11.420songs stuck in your head isn't normal, says one TikToker to 2.9 million views. This is common
01:44:17.140with people who have adhd or autism and it's called internal echolalia other influencers
01:44:23.060make these conditions sound fun and quirky neurodivergent has become neuro spicy or
01:44:27.740neuro sparkly while neurotypicals are boring tiktokers call themselves hotistic hot and0.62
01:44:33.420autistic insist that's funny insist that hot girls have anxiety and playfully ask followers0.87
01:44:39.940what flavor of autism they have i i this is just so unserious this is so boring it's just like if1.00
01:44:46.800just like is annoyed this is a woman who has built an entire like regressive media shtick on
01:44:53.520just genuinely finding her peers annoying like this is boomer bait this is designed in a lab1.00
01:45:00.200to make people over 65 freak the fuck out that their grandchildren are going to start using a0.83
01:45:05.540litter box and i would add this is important like we did talk about the autistic thing earlier
01:45:10.160it not infrequently flickers into transphobia like that paragraph later goes on to being like
01:45:16.580Or maybe you go from finding out what gender identity is to being told by TikTokers that, you know, being forgetful is a symptom of gender dysphoria.
01:45:25.540I've been trying to find a way to, like, say this without making it a personal attack.0.92
01:45:30.760I don't think the point is really Freya.
01:45:33.300I think it's the ecosystem that she's swimming in.
01:45:36.220This ecosystem, these people who are so fixated on the Internet, I understand that she doesn't have social media channels.
01:45:43.700But it really gives the mouthfeel of someone who doesn't spend time with people in real life.
01:45:50.160There is a little bit of an element here where I'm like, yeah, I mean, the Internet algorithms are decidedly weird.
01:45:56.240The effect of an algorithm is such that anything you look at for more than 30 seconds, it will give you an endless supply of that.
01:46:03.140So, like, for example, right now, to manage my mental health, all I see on Instagram are rescue horse farms.
01:46:09.000I'm not going to write a book about how rescue horse farms have taken over the culture because I understand that that is specific to my own nervous breakdown.
01:46:17.640I think that Freya would do well to understand that maybe she is going through her own nervous breakdown, which, no judgment, Queen, again, I'm right there with you, God soldier.
01:46:27.600And maybe she might realize that like on whatever burner account she certainly has where she's spending a lot of time online, maybe what you're looking for is being fed back to you to make you think that this comprises the entire internet when in reality the internet is designed to make you feel like the center of the world.
01:46:46.680And again, you're not giving me the impression of someone who spends time in the actual world by implying that this is so much more prevalent.
01:46:56.900There's kind of a funny thing happening here where like, we are making the argument, I think, that so much of the stuff that she's discussing is purely an internet-based phenomenon. And like, she is making an argument that this internet-based phenomenon is a bad thing.
01:47:15.220But I don't think that anyone's in disagreement that algorithms can fuck up your day or that using social media can be a bad thing, especially in excess. I don't think that anyone is pushing back on that necessarily.
01:47:30.300But I think what I tend to see her do and what this broader project seems concerned with is taking these internet observations and then extrapolating them out to broader social ills that I just don't think we have data to support.
01:47:51.320She extrapolates the social ill and then is like, and conservatism is the answer.
01:47:55.180Yeah. And again, I think to your point, the idea that what's hurting women right now the most is therapy culture is like so myopic as to, again, for me to be like, Derek, read past page five, please. I'm genuinely curious what these men would say of these claims.
01:48:13.620This is why we started with the blurbs, because, like, to reread the Derek Thompson blurb, terrific reporting, sharp analysis, right?
01:56:43.820Daddy doesn't have to get to have sex with his daughters anymore when he wants.0.99
01:56:49.700This is like a—I'm a dumbass, but there's—I know in the English language there's like different—0.98
01:56:55.100I don't know what tense she's using here, but it's like, this has fallen away, this has this, and then it's placed this, da-da-da.
01:57:03.100And it's like, there's something about that tense that kind of obscures the fact that you're not naming an actor, you're not naming the cause of what's happening or when it happened, it's just like it has happened.
01:57:17.040So we get a deeper understanding of Freya's view on this in the book than in the interview, and so I'm going to have you read a passage that I found to be one of the books.
01:57:25.100the more, uh, we'll say bold in the book, where we deviate from describing TikTok videos briefly
01:57:32.200to more overtly right-wing talking points. Yeah. Okay. Oh my God. The royal we, she like really,
01:57:41.780it's so annoying. Okay. Some of our parents split because of constant conflict or worse,
01:57:47.460but many families fell apart for less obvious reasons. The pursuit of personal growth and
01:57:52.780emotional fulfillment had had in the last few decades become much bigger priorities and more
01:57:59.860and more marriages were ending because they no longer felt right the idea of having an authentic
01:58:04.780self was also taking hold divorce became a way for parents to find their true selves finally
01:58:10.640becoming who they were meant to be free from restraints and obligations wow that's a crazy
01:58:15.440way to characterize the need for divorce with freedom seen as the ultimate goal spouses became
01:58:21.960distractions and inconveniences. Commitments became burdens. Compromises and sacrifices
01:58:27.960felt like an affront to autonomy. Laws were also changing. No-fault divorce, which allowed spouses
01:58:34.180to end marriage without providing wrongdoing, was first legalized in California in 1969 and by 2010
01:58:41.840adopted in some form by all 50 U.S. states. Dude. The U.K. followed in 2020 with the Divorce,
01:58:49.680Dissolution and Separation Act, described as the biggest shakeup in divorce law for more than half
01:58:54.000a century, which in 2022 completely removed the ability of one's spouse to assign blame or
01:59:00.040contest a divorce. Meanwhile, in the UK and US, online platforms promised to make divorce cheaper
01:59:06.560and simpler, allowing couples to prepare and file legal paperwork themselves. Marriage vows came to
01:59:12.400feel more like business contracts. Divorce continues to be made easier and more convenient.
01:59:17.280Okay, number one, number one, go fuck yourself. Number two, you have no understanding of basic history in any sense, economic, gender history, political history. If you are claiming that people get divorced, if you are claiming that people get divorced because they just feel like being selfish.1.00
01:59:39.020Number three, and most importantly, let's circle in on this here. Marriage vows came to feel like business contracts. Tell me, tell me, Katie, you've never read a book in your motherfucking life without telling me you've never read a book in your life. If you think marriage vows are now more like business contracts than they were for all of history. Like, what in the fuck are you talking about?
02:00:07.980Your father would have traded you for three cows a hundred years ago.1.00
02:00:14.280I would trade you for three cows right now.
02:00:16.780The idea that you, like, marriage for anything but a business contract has only begun in the last, what, half a century at the most?
02:01:32.700no. No, it is not. The refined divorce rate, which measures divorces divided by the number
02:01:40.380of married women 15 and older, has been declining steadily since the early 1980s. This is different
02:01:46.880and more accurate from the overall divorce rate, which just does like divorces divided by all0.90
02:01:52.080women. In fact, it fell most dramatically between 2008 and 2023, which is essentially the period of
02:02:00.120time that Freya is covering in this book. So to the extent that family breakdown can be measured
02:02:05.740by the rate of divorce, it is going down. And that trend holds true in the UK where she is from as
02:02:12.240well. But there is one group for whom divorce rates are up and it's people over 50, which is
02:02:18.280notable to me because it means we're talking about people who got married in the era that Freya would
02:02:22.840likely have considered the golden age of the family. So like, I don't know, is your 65-year-old
02:02:28.000aunt divorcing your uncle because she's selling her body on OnlyFans? Probably not. There is no
02:02:33.280plausible social media explanation for that one unless you want to, like, work Facebook Messenger
02:02:38.940into this. And this is the only group for whom divorce rates are rising. Okay, the second reading
02:02:44.680of this comment is that Family Breakdown is referring to fewer families being formed.
02:02:49.160She is arguing pretty explicitly that young women should get married and have children and stop
02:02:53.500complaining in their co-rumination spaces online and that this will help them with anxiety and
02:02:58.940depression and meaninglessness. And yes, again, again, Katie, Katie, Katie, she as a woman who
02:03:05.220for a full-time job complains in co-rumination spaces online has no child and is very recently
02:03:13.880married if just currently engaged. Continue. And yes, fewer people are married today than in
02:03:20.180the 1990s. The rate has been declining steadily, but the top-line married data is less helpful
02:03:28.260than if you also consider how many people live with their partner. In 1996, 59.6% of people
02:03:36.240were married or living together with a partner. In 2025, it was 55.5, so four percentage points
02:03:42.760lower, and a larger portion of those people were living together but not married, which is to say
02:03:48.480the idea that people aren't interested in partnership anymore or are like have been
02:03:53.700convinced to avoid the inconvenience and challenge of partnership by TikTok influencers is very
02:04:00.740overstated. Alex Earle. But even then, there are two things worth noting. The first is something
02:04:06.960that you said a long time ago that I think about all the time when it comes to marriage rate
02:04:11.540discussions or birth rate discussions, which is that there is an implicit assumption in these
02:04:16.180conversations that the rate in the past, aka the rate that we have declined from, the rate that
02:04:22.780represented the time when women didn't have a choice, was the correct rate. And that any
02:04:28.440deviation from that must indicate— That it was the natural rate.
02:04:32.860Yes, must indicate some issue. Whereas the complete opposite is the far more reasonable
02:04:38.560conclusion, which is that now that people have the autonomy to make that choice,
02:04:42.020This would be considered the more natural rate of like what people would do when they have more optionality. But what struck me as interesting, if we're talking about the so-called, you know, sharp economic analysis in this book, over half of unmarried but partnered people who would like to get married, who said like, yes, we want to get married, cited finances as a minor or major reason they were not yet married.
02:05:06.600Okay? And the rates of marriage are lowest among low-income, low-education people. Again, I think this is really a story about the divergence of income and education and less about, like, these dang girls are just too darn anxiously attached for their own good.
02:05:22.940Yeah, and I would also add to that. I mean, we talked about this in the Who Wants Kids episode, but I think it's even more complicated than people would think with finances when you think about, like, a Denmark or a Sweden that have such a strong and robust social safety net where people feel less financial pressure.0.99
02:05:39.440and even then they're not having kids at the rate that these countries want them to so like
02:05:44.080you can talk about how that's the result of capitalism or the 40-hour work week or that
02:05:48.100you know it's just or it's just the natural end state is that people will want more kids but like
02:05:53.000it really is not cut and dry in the way that these people claim for it to be there's a double-sided
02:05:58.480coin with the like not getting married because of financial reasons because at the same time
02:06:05.960you could, I guess, make the argument that in a country like the U.S.,
02:06:10.300you are financially incentivized to be married.
02:06:13.640So, like, you might stay married because financially you are trapped.
02:06:18.300Right. People are still forced into marriage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:06:20.860People are still forced. So, yeah, it's even—
02:15:19.380I really think, I was just thinking that as you were approaching the conclusion that, like, my takeaway from this has nothing to do with Freya India and everything to do with those three men.
02:15:29.340There is no conclusion that does not implicate them.0.93
02:15:32.060Either they don't care about what this woman wrote, or they don't care about women's issues, or they genuinely believe that this garbage is representative of women's issues.0.71
02:15:43.720I think the most likely outcome is that these men genuinely do not read work by feminist scholars.0.94
02:15:49.560They do not read work by women altogether.
02:15:51.540They do not communicate with women.0.99
02:15:53.080And this woman also won't communicate with women.0.99
02:15:55.340She is always in conversation with men.1.00