Speaker | Time | Text |
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I say this all the time. | ||
What does every young generation have in common throughout all of human history? | ||
We want to rebel against the people who came before us. | ||
If you're a parent of teenagers, you'll know more than anyone else your teenagers say, you've never experienced what I've experienced. | ||
I'm going to do it my own way. | ||
And that happens at the 30,000 foot societal level, too. | ||
20, 30 years ago, being countercultural in America might have looked like spiking your hair and putting tattoos all over your body and piercing everything and putting a leather jacket on and Sticking it to the man in a punk rock band, but now sticking it to the man is quite literally believing there is such thing as objectivity. | ||
Is wanting to get married instead of sleep with as many people as humanly possible and follow the advice of the manosphere or the radical feminism community. | ||
It's wanting to have kids in a society that's begging you don't have kids for the sake of your career, for the sake of the environment, for the sake of your personal life. | ||
We're moving out of big cities. | ||
I've been reading lots of big studies about this, that we want more suburban or rural areas to reconnect with Nature. | ||
We're eating real food in a time where everything is hyper-processed or full of chemicals or even grown in a laboratory. | ||
And perhaps most encouraging for me is that we're believing in something bigger than what's right in front of our face again. | ||
We're embracing God and belief in a higher power again, which nobody saw coming in our hyper-atheistic society. | ||
But that is to be punk rock and countercultural is to be conservative. | ||
All right, Isabel Brown, I'm freaking out, not only because you're here in my studio, | ||
which somehow you've only been to once for about 30... | ||
I know, I have no idea how that's real. | ||
That seems very bizarre, but I'm holding your book in my hand, which comes out this week, The End of the Alphabet, How Gen Z Can Save America, forward by Dave Rubin. | ||
And we do a show together Monday through Thursday at 1 p.m. | ||
People of the Internet, and you're here, and your fiancé is my social media guy, Brock. | ||
There's a lot of worlds colliding right now. | ||
How are you feeling about life and all that good stuff? | ||
I'm so happy, Dave! | ||
It is so surreal actually, like, sitting in here, because I see this through my screen every day, but it looks a lot different in real life. | ||
The three-dimensional thing definitely is a little thrown off. | ||
But I'm so excited, and we've had such a fun year together working on so many different projects. | ||
I am so happy to see your name on that book cover, and so grateful that you've taken the time to write such a beautiful foreword. | ||
Well, I'm actually honored that you asked me to do it, and we shouldn't just sit here giving platitudes about each other, but I— So great! | ||
No, you are great, and I wrote some very nice things about you, because I think one of the first times we met—we met a couple times over the years, usually at Turning Point— But I remember specifically, and I write it about in the foreword, I remember sitting with you, do you remember the date on that one? | ||
We were outdoors at that turning point thing? | ||
July 2021? | ||
I think it was 2021 or 2022, yeah. | ||
Something like that. | ||
And I remember you interviewed me, and afterwards I wanted to make a point of saying to you that you were an excellent interviewer, because you are an excellent interviewer, And I feel like nobody has an attention span anymore. | ||
And I was like, oh, she's listening to me and asking the right follow-up question and pleasant and all of those things. | ||
And I'm used to so many robots doing it on the other side of all of this. | ||
That's not a question. | ||
It's just a compliment. | ||
And now we'll get to the hardcore questions. | ||
unidentified
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Well, thank you. | |
I love it. | ||
And you were a good sport that day because I made you sit outside in Florida in July. | ||
It's extremely hot. | ||
Well, all right. | ||
First off, I guess for anyone that's watching this that has no idea who you are, who are you and what's going on with this? | ||
How did you decide to write a book about Gen Z? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
My name is Isabel Brown. | ||
I am an independent content creator, and I like to say I wear a ton of different hats. | ||
It's way too much for me to tell you what I do with all of the things that I do every day. | ||
But it all comes down to one thing, and for a living, I get up and I tell people the truth every day, be that a 15-second TikTok video or a three-hour livestream, a book or a speech, or anything in between. | ||
I never thought this would be my career or what I wake up and am so, so happy to do every day. | ||
I was actually pre-med, as you know, Dave. | ||
And I have two degrees in biomedical sciences, so obviously life went in a very, very different direction. | ||
But it stemmed from that love of truth, really. | ||
That's why I loved science growing up. | ||
I was so obsessed with understanding how the world works and asking the biggest questions about the universe, using data and evidence to prove that there was an objective reality. | ||
And then I was really disappointed in my college experience to find that that just isn't the case about science and academia anymore. | ||
Long story short, really inspired me to find people who shared my values of critical thinking and objective morality and this idea that objective truth still exists in a world where my truth is different from your truth. | ||
Got involved in politics along the way and started posting videos on the internet instead of medical school. | ||
It's the great American story for a Gen Z person, except that most Gen Z people usually, or at least if we were to kind of look at it from the way most people understand the world over the last five or ten years, most Gen Z people, kids, shift the other way. | ||
So what was it that was causing you to always go in the right direction? | ||
Were you always going in the right direction? | ||
Did you flirt with the crazy people? | ||
Oh, of course. | ||
And always just for fun. | ||
I always like to poke the bear, Dave. | ||
You know that about me. | ||
But I think it's important to note Generation Z starts in what most experts say is 1997. | ||
So I was born in May of 1997. | ||
So I was born in May of 1997. | ||
I'll be 27 in a couple months, which is exciting. | ||
And it goes down to those born in 2012. | ||
So when we're talking about Gen Z, we're talking about mostly preteens, teenagers, | ||
and up to middle 20-somethings. | ||
I started college at a time where millennials were on the way out. | ||
And right in the thick of all of it, when Antifa was coming onto the scene, | ||
I've had many a good run-in with them in my own state of Colorado. | ||
They're good people at the end of the day. | ||
When people were lighting their college campuses on fire because people like Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager were coming to give a speech about freedom of speech on a college campus, which is just insane. | ||
And so I was watching the ideas and the values and this political notion of socialism unfold from millennials when I was starting my college campus experience. | ||
By the time I left, it was a totally different atmosphere and totally different environment. | ||
I remember thinking, I don't know if this is because of the work we're doing with activism on campus and bringing these speakers and facilitating these conversations, or it's a totally different generation that's younger and coming up into the fold, but either way, it's an exciting time. | ||
And working as a content creator and doing the research I've done for this book, I've come to discover that many people are attributing the values and ideas and behaviors of millennials This idea that you're lazy and entitled, and the participation trophy group, the people who scream at the sky when Donald Trump becomes elected president, the blue-haired socialists, if you will, they're attributing that to Generation Z, even though we are fundamentally juxtaposed as generations. | ||
We have very different values and very different perspectives. | ||
Do you think that's partly, we've talked about this a little bit before on People on the Internet, partly because Gen X, the old timers like me, Gen X and then the millennials that you were just off, as you mentioned, you were just a few months off of being a millennial technically, seemingly haven't taken over? | ||
When they're supposed to take over. | ||
So we're still dealing with Biden and Trump and all of these boomers who refuse to retire, refuse to give up the reins. | ||
So the people that are kind of supposed to be in charge now aren't, meaning the Xers. | ||
And then that leaves it being very easy. | ||
This is why when we do the show, I'm always telling you, I don't want to just endlessly make fun of these people. | ||
Of course, we can make fun of all the blue hair people, but I'm sympathetic to them because it's the it's the people before them that have failed them. | ||
So I see like a generational tension here that has led to saying people like you actually. | ||
Yeah, I think part of it is who's pulling the levers of power in Washington. | ||
Sadly, it's not even Gen X. It's baby boomers that are still pulling the levers of power. | ||
But I think a lot of it is also the fact that the world keeps moving faster and faster and faster. | ||
And with the dawn of technology, I think older generations have a hard time realizing that we are 20 years out from the 1990s and this glorious utopia that everybody lived through. | ||
It's a totally different earth that we live on today. | ||
We have different values. | ||
We get our news in a different way. | ||
We're interacting with each other in a different way. | ||
We have different TV shows and fashion sense and everything, and I break all of that down in the book. | ||
But also, it's just a different time, and I think it's time to have a different conversation because of all of that. | ||
So they kind of lump millennials and Gen Z all in together, thinking we're still dealing with the issues of the late 90s, early 2000s. | ||
We're not. | ||
It is a totally different world, and we all know that. | ||
But I don't think we often take the time to sit back and analyze everything that has happened in the last 20, 30 years. | ||
Do the Gen Z-ers sit back and watch Friends and think, because I know Friends is big with you guys now apparently, and think, boy, I did miss something that was a little more sane. | ||
It's hard to know what sanity was if you grew up in an insane time, if that's all you know. | ||
It's Plato's cave in a way. | ||
It's hard to know what sanity was if you grew up in an insane time. | ||
I love that. | ||
Yes, and actually, that's one of the first things that I noticed about my generation and why I decided to write this book in terms of being radically countercultural. | ||
I noticed that we were resurrecting fashion trends from the 1990s. | ||
We were resurrecting music from the 1990s and maybe even before. | ||
The only TV shows that we binge watch over and over and over again are either set in decades past, look at Stranger Things being in the 1980s, very nostalgic. | ||
Or they actually are from decades past. | ||
The number one TV show for years and years among our generation has been Friends or we rewatch The Office or Seinfeld and love and crave this idea of a time where you could just exist when not everything was this very divisive, partisan political statement. | ||
I mean, now, gosh, you brush your teeth in the morning and that brand of toothbrush is saying, I support this political party. | ||
The brand of underwear that you're wearing right now, especially with Calvin Klein, is I support this ideology and this particular direction for America. | ||
I think I'm wearing Lulu underwear, which they've been kind of squishy on this stuff, right? | ||
But the underwear is good, it breathes, what can I tell you? | ||
unidentified
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And their founder is okay with that, so we'll take it. | |
Oh, has he come around? | ||
unidentified
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Because remember at first... He was always pretty conservative, but they pushed him out. | |
So he's coming around publicly now saying all this, but he doesn't control the company anymore. | ||
Well, don't worry. | ||
I just steal these when I go to the stores in New York. | ||
That's all right. | ||
It's totally fine. | ||
I'm not going to pay for my underwear. | ||
You're not even breaking the laws, Abe. | ||
Look at you, you good law-abiding citizen. | ||
So I think When we look at something like the 1990s, right, or even aspects of the 70s and 80s and the early 2000s, we see this image either through the stories we hear from our parents or the media that we're consuming or the fashion that we're trying to resurrect. | ||
And we're seeing a time where you could just exist, when you could have a friend that you disagreed with, when you could freely practice your religion and people didn't think you were this evil bigot, when you could go to school and it wasn't always about what the president said that morning. | ||
And we're longing for a time where we could just have Peace, unity, an objective sense of reality and common morals again, when it didn't always have to feel like that was predicated on your political party. | ||
Right. | ||
How much of that do you think has seeped just naturally because of the phone? | ||
When did you get your first phone? | ||
Ah, well, this is an interesting question, because my answer would be fundamentally different from the younger half of our generation, right? | ||
So I talk about that quite a bit, too, in this concept of... Oh, right, because you're an old-timer for you Gen Z people. | ||
I'm old! | ||
They say about me on TikTok, the older Gen Zers, you know, those born in the 1900s, and I'm like... | ||
By three years, okay? | ||
There is kind of a schism there between the older cohort and the younger cohort, because I remember the first iPhone vividly. | ||
My friend Molly got her first iPhone in sixth grade, and she was the only one in our school that had one, and we were all enamored and obsessed with watching the Zippo lighter app on her phone, because if you moved it, the little flame would What is this, like 2006? | ||
This was the 2008 election. | ||
Okay. | ||
Sixth grade was, and I remember because I got very bullied that my mom went to the same college as Sarah Palin. | ||
How dare you? | ||
How dare you do something like that? | ||
But they let you come back to school after that? | ||
They did not, actually. | ||
Different story for a different time. | ||
I got in trouble at that school for other activism reasons. | ||
I've never sat down and shut up even as a child. | ||
Is that for another time? | ||
It seems like it would be apropos to this. | ||
In sixth grade, I had to do a science fair where we were all supposed to research a wild animal from the state of Colorado. | ||
And we did a big, like, three-panel poster board presentation to all the parents. | ||
This was a Montessori school, so obviously that lays the foundation for this. | ||
And I picked the coyote because I loved dogs. | ||
Dogs are much better than people to me in most circumstances. | ||
And my horseback riding instructor had found a coyote that died on her property and kept the pelt of this coyote and said, you should take this to school, to your science fair thing. | ||
You can show people like what the coat of a coyote looks like. | ||
I think that's a great idea. | ||
Yeah. | ||
About a dozen parents, not children, parents at the science fair that night complained that I was engaging in animal cruelty by presenting this animal pelt. | ||
This was 2008. | ||
And they made me pack up my presentation and go home. | ||
And the next day I said to my parents at 11 years old, I'm not going back to school. | ||
And how many of them were wearing leather belts and leather shoes and fur coats and it was Colorado probably in the winter. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
But back to the phone because I think this is important. | ||
The phone was fascinating. | ||
I got my first flip phone I think in 7th or 8th grade in my first iPhone sophomore year of high school. | ||
So I remember most of my favorite childhood memories without screens or if it did have something to do with the screen it was taking a family trip to Blockbuster and having to pick out exactly the movie you wanted and hopefully it wasn't stuck. | ||
Having to rewind the VHS when our parents were leaving us home alone as the oldest sibling and calling up Domino's for some pizza delivery at the same time. | ||
But my youngest sister, for example, who's 21, doesn't really have those same memories. | ||
She only remembers at least the iPod Touch that she had before her iPhone and iPads in school and it's a totally different reality. | ||
I think a lot of the dystopia that we see is partially due to technology, but mostly I think people are blaming technology and using it as the boogeyman because really it's just a tool that can be used for good or bad. | ||
Sadly, I think for a lot of parents, it's been the easy button and they don't need to take responsibility for their parenting style, so the iPad raises the child. | ||
If you've been to a restaurant lately, you'll see whole tables full of parents with 20 different iPads everywhere. | ||
Oh, I know. | ||
And you know, David and I talk about it a lot, like how it's very easy to be like, oh, our kids will never use iPads or iPhones. | ||
But like when you finally want a little of that quiet and you're at a restaurant, like you can see. | ||
So it's easy to complain about it or judge everybody. | ||
But in practice, it's a little bit different. | ||
Way, way, way different, yeah. | ||
And so I think we're trying to learn to navigate how do I use this thing for good to advance my life, to work with my career, to interact with my friends on social media, maybe to find somebody to date, but not let it completely take over my entire existence and make me so negative all the time because that's what I fear I'm seeing for most people in our society. | ||
Did you see a moment where that happened? | ||
Where, cause I can sort of remember like the beginning days of the internet. | ||
It was all like cool and fun and everybody sharing their stupid cat videos and all that stuff, you know, like I love the news blooper stuff. | ||
So I was always sharing that kind of stuff, but like there was something like very fun about it and then it shifted into something else. | ||
And I do think about it. | ||
It's like, Was that just the next obvious evolution? | ||
Like, we got something, it was shiny and beautiful, we all played with it. | ||
But then human psychology, coupled with algorithms, lends itself to craziness, basically. | ||
I would agree with that. | ||
I think part of it probably is just the nature of any industry. | ||
Eventually bad things are going to happen with an industry. | ||
Have you ever gone back in your archive on Instagram to see the first pictures you liked on Instagram? | ||
There's some tool that you can use for this. | ||
I looked at this the other day and they're all like One Direction fan posts, which was great because I made my Instagram right at the high of One Direction. | ||
Great band. | ||
I hope they get back together. | ||
I don't remember what my first likes were, but if I'm not mistaken, I'm 99% sure, my first Instagram post was around 2012, because it was right before I moved to LA, and it was just a glass of water. | ||
Yeah, because artsy. | ||
Well, I took the picture saying, well, I guess here I am on Instagram taking a picture of a glass of water, because we all knew it was just another one of those things. | ||
Did you use the Valencia filter? | ||
unidentified
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Probably. | |
That was the real question. | ||
unidentified
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That was the only appropriate filter, the Valencia filter. | |
Wait, what did Valencia do? | ||
It was like a little more stark? | ||
It was like a little more artsy. | ||
Yeah, it was good. | ||
Those were the easy days, but you're right. | ||
Now, I think it has turned into such a dystopian image of what that used to look like, not just on Instagram, but just across the internet. | ||
It's such a difficult thing to grasp with, especially for people like us that use the internet every day to tell people the truth and try to bring some goodness and joy back into the world. | ||
So, I think now more than ever we really have an obligation to use this tool for good because so many people have co-opted it for bad. | ||
And I think that's exactly what our generation is doing. | ||
You know, we showed you on People of the Internet this week a stupid video of the American Revolution using catnips. | ||
Which was hilarious and historically true, but I love that. | ||
Even though it's so stupid, it's kind of bringing us full circle to what you were just saying, posting cat memes on the internet and learning to laugh and not take things so seriously anymore. | ||
Right. | ||
So now we're in this odd place in 24. | ||
We've got the phones. | ||
We've got a crazy political situation. | ||
We're also What, like two years out of COVID, I suppose, or something like that. | ||
And how much did that affect, do you think, the psyche of Gen Z? | ||
COVID changed everything for us, easily. | ||
We already had a very fascinating, psychologically, childhood, largely because of 9-11 and the War on Terror. | ||
And, you know, I was born in 1997. | ||
I have the faintest, vaguest memory of 9-11, but the vast majority of our generation doesn't. | ||
But because of that, we grew up constantly being at war and being told we're always going to be the target of something, some imminent terrorist attack. | ||
Most of our memories from elementary school involve school shooter drills where they taught us literally how to be a sitting target for some violent criminal that was sure to walk through our door. | ||
We knew it was going to happen at our school because that's how it was presented. | ||
And there was just constantly this aura of fear and needing to be on the defensive in terms of what should be a pretty idyllic childhood, unfortunately. | ||
I think COVID took that to an adult level that nobody was really psychologically prepared for in terms of the isolation and Separating us from one another, taking away our community, and really stripping down our identity to, okay, if I sit in my room all day and I have to work on Zoom, I have to go to school on Zoom, I have to see my friends on Zoom, I have to have Thanksgiving dinner with my grandma on Zoom, I have to attend a funeral on Zoom because they literally won't let me go to a funeral, and I'm just sitting here in my room | ||
Who am I? | ||
Like, what am I doing in society to contribute something positive? | ||
For me, it was a little bit easier, I think, because I was working still, I was traveling still, I had finished up the last few months of graduate school online. | ||
But looking at my youngest sister as a great example, she graduated from our Catholic high school with a drive-through graduation. | ||
And it was the most sad, anticlimactic day. | ||
We were all crying because it was just not an actual ceremonial rite of passage. | ||
We typically had a full mass at our high school graduation because it was a Catholic school. | ||
But instead, priests used water guns to spray holy water through the windows of your car as they handed you your diploma and your yearbook and you drove away. | ||
And that was it. | ||
I mean, that was the whole ceremonial experience for her for a huge life passage of growing up. | ||
God, that sounds completely made up. | ||
It's absolutely 100% real. | ||
I wish I could make that up. | ||
I couldn't possibly have made something that crazy up. | ||
Was it a super soaker at least? | ||
unidentified
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No, it was a sad little one. | |
Maybe like a super soaker of holy water would feel... That would be kind of cool. | ||
They did baptisms that way back in 2020, but not graduations. | ||
I guess it wasn't ceremonial enough. | ||
And I think about that for people her age, people younger than her, the experiences you're supposed to have as an adolescent. | ||
that are so formative to how you see the world, how others perceive you, what your friend group looks like, how you take that monumental step into adulthood and start defining your own identity that's free from your parents and free from the values of your hometown, but who are you going to be for the rest of your life? | ||
That was robbed of an entire generation who has now spent not two, four years trying to figure that out on the other side of it where everything is still largely through a screen. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
And I guess I would connect that to something else that we talk about on People of the Internet a lot, which is dating, because now you guys, in many respects, have sublimated this all into basically using one thumb and just clicking right or swiping right the entire time and knowing. | ||
So even if you found someone that you were matched with perfectly, you already know all the movies they like. | ||
You know exactly their favorite playlist on Spotify. | ||
You know what clothes they wear. | ||
You've seen all the pictures of them. | ||
You maybe have traded nudes already and everything else. | ||
And that it's removed, like, some of the mystery and magic of life. | ||
Like, I guess there's no... It feels to me like there's no, like... I guess magic is really the only word I can come up with. | ||
There's probably a better word, but, like... Mystery was a good one, too. | ||
Mystery and magic. | ||
There's none of that left for your real life because of the way we've itemized everything. | ||
And again, I'm not anti-technology. | ||
It's just kind of the way it is, and it is a tool. | ||
There is an episode of How I Met Your Mother, one of my favorite shows, although it's literally just a shot-for-shot remake of Friends, basically. | ||
basically like to the same episode sometimes and it's like, come on, be a little more creative. | ||
But they have a whole episode about this, about how everybody would stalk each other on Facebook | ||
at the time in the early 2000s and you'd know everything about somebody | ||
before you showed up for a first date. | ||
You can't just pick somebody up in a bar anymore. | ||
So they make a pact not to research each other and of course Ted breaks the pact | ||
and that ends up falling apart the whole episode. | ||
But it's true. | ||
You don't have an opportunity to really get to know someone over time anymore and build a foundation of trust | ||
and build the opportunity to develop shared hobbies and inside jokes because you literally know | ||
every single thing about someone by one glance at their Instagram feed | ||
or their Facebook profile, even though nobody uses Facebook anymore. | ||
And I feel really lucky to have escaped a lot of that. | ||
I met my fiancé the old-fashioned way in person at that same Turning Point USA conference, I think, actually. | ||
Yeah, hot damn, hot damn. | ||
And learning, you know, what his favorite candy was, what his favorite movie was, and the bigger question is, how do you feel about God? | ||
Wait, what's his favorite candy? | ||
I always think he's gonna love... Can you guess? | ||
Well, I always think it's Gummy Bears. | ||
We have this running joke with him that he loves Gummy Bears. | ||
He likes Gummy Bears, but that's not his favorite. | ||
unidentified
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But I'm gonna say Skittles? | |
Is it Skittles? | ||
No, although we ate a lot of Skittles that weekend when we met each other, because that's one of my favorite candies. | ||
Sour Chewy Sweet Tarts are his... No! | ||
unidentified
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What? | |
Not the Chewy. | ||
unidentified
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Normal. | |
Sorry. | ||
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
We're being fact-checked in real time here. | ||
Normal, sour, sweet turnips. | ||
Not the Chewy. | ||
Got it. | ||
Sorry. | ||
I'm going to be in trouble later. | ||
The fact that you even looked at the camera shows that you are a content creator from Gen Z and all of that. | ||
I apologize to every party involved. | ||
But you're right, in the dating world, that has been narrowed down to a screen. | ||
But I think there's a lot of hope for that. | ||
And this is one example of why I chose to write this book, because even though this is the norm that we are living through, and we've changed everything we know about American culture to basically exist on this, Gen Z is saying, you know, We want a little bit more than that. | ||
We want more substance. | ||
We want more purpose. | ||
And dating is maybe the best example of what that looks like. | ||
We're all unanimously deleting our dating apps. | ||
There are several articles that have come out in the last few months about how Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge and several other competing companies, is freaking out about how to retain Gen Z as a customer base because 90 plus percent of us say we've had horrible experiences on the app. | ||
Gen Z women are overwhelmingly throwing away our birth control because no matter where you fall on the partisan political spectrum, no matter what your intimacy life looks like, we realize we're feeling really sick and we're slowly poisoning ourselves in the process. | ||
And why do I need to take this, to be honest with you? | ||
What a weird reality that that's become normal. | ||
And 93% of us, a study just came out the other day, still want to get married in a time where we have the lowest marriage rate in American history, which is That in and of itself, that marriage is no longer a normal human institution in the United States, and yet 93% of our generation looks at that and says, even though that's not normal, I want that because it's better than what's normal. | ||
It offers more than what's normal. | ||
That should give you hope more than anything. | ||
Yeah, what does that tell you about the truth in general? | ||
So they're getting sent all the wrong messages, and then I had never heard this until you said it to me a few months ago, that Gen Z actually is breaking more conservative than at least the two previous generations. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
What do you think that says about the truth in general, that you could get all the wrong messages, you could go down that path, and that somehow there's like a bumper, like it's bumper bowling, and something kind of pushes people back? | ||
This is a great segue into the meat and potatoes of the end of the alphabet, because you're right, there is sort of this pendulum that is going back and forth between all of the generations. | ||
You can call it a bumper, you can call it whatever you want. | ||
But I say this all the time, what does every young generation have in common throughout all of human history? | ||
We want to rebel against the people who came before us. | ||
If you're a parent of teenagers, you'll know more than anyone else your teenagers say, I've never experienced what I've experienced. | ||
I'm going to do it my own way. | ||
And that happens at the 30,000-foot societal level, too. | ||
20, 30 years ago, being countercultural in America might have looked like spiking your hair and putting tattoos all over your body and piercing everything and putting a leather jacket on and sticking it to the man in a punk rock band. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
But now, sticking it to the man is quite literally believing there is such thing as objectivity. | ||
Is wanting to get married instead of sleep with as many people as humanly possible and follow the advice of the manosphere or the radical feminism community. | ||
It's wanting to have kids in a society that's begging you don't have kids for the sake of your career, for the sake of the environment, for the sake of your personal life. | ||
We're moving out of big cities. | ||
I've been reading lots of big studies about this, that we want more suburban or rural areas to reconnect with nature. | ||
We're eating real food! | ||
In a time where everything is hyper-processed or full of chemicals or even grown in a laboratory. | ||
And perhaps most encouraging for me is that we're believing in something bigger than what's right in front of our face again. | ||
We're embracing God and belief in a higher power again, which nobody saw coming in our hyper-atheistic society. | ||
But that is, to be punk rock and counter-cultural, is to be conservative. | ||
And when I say that word, it doesn't necessarily mean, like, the red bag ahead. | ||
This was already my next question, actually, so go ahead. | ||
You're good. | ||
We've done this before, haven't we? | ||
Especially when I'm talking peer-to-peer and they go, I'm not conservative. | ||
What the heck are you talking about? | ||
I don't mean politically. | ||
I vote for the Republican Party. | ||
I support every policy that Donald Trump absolutely loves. | ||
I think that will come, and we can dive into that in a little bit. | ||
But culturally, embracing traditional values in a conserving way, conservative in that sense. | ||
We are the most conservative generation America has seen since World War II, and it just seems to be trending further in that direction. | ||
So let's go to that part that you just jumped over, that political part. | ||
Yeah, so the late great Andrew Breitbart is famous for saying that politics is always downstream from culture, that if you want to change who sits in the Oval Office or what Congress is debating on any given day, you have to start with changing how people live their day-to-day lives. | ||
We've seen the opposite, I think, of what's happening with Gen Z, with millennials and Gen Xers in your generation, unfold in real time throughout my lifetime in America. | ||
The left has strategically planted seeds for decades that they knew wouldn't take root quite yet, | ||
but were going to pay off in the long run of overhauling the education system, | ||
trying to take over Hollywood and poison our brains with as much as they possibly could | ||
in the entertainment content that we were watching, taking over social media companies | ||
to make sure they could control the algorithm and see what you were engaging with every day, | ||
sharing and saving and downloading mainstream media. | ||
Obviously, we know that's been gone for a long time. | ||
So today, the left, the radical, authoritarian left, really has strategically gained control | ||
of every pillar of American culture, from the church to Hollywood to government | ||
and everything in between. | ||
And we've seen that happen because of culture now manifest with very disastrous political policies | ||
that are leading America in a race to the bottom for the rest of the world, | ||
that are seeing what can be possible, but in the wrong direction for the United States. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
So how do we hold those two ideas, that the generation is coming around and also that Well, they've destroyed all the institutions in front of you. | ||
Do you think your generation, well, I suppose it's in the subtitle of the book. | ||
Do you want to save those institutions? | ||
Do you want to rebuild all those institutions? | ||
I mean, what do you think the actual course will be? | ||
Yes. | ||
Both, depending on the situation. | ||
I think some institutions are absolutely worth saving, and some we just have to let go as an era of bygone American history, which is okay. | ||
That happens in every major revolutionary moment, 1776 moment, if you will, in our own country's history, but also in global history. | ||
I learned about it because of cats. | ||
There was a cat video showing me. | ||
Well done, Dave. | ||
We love to see that. | ||
But whether that's reclaiming the institution of marriage, for example, which is quite traditional, or what Gen Z is doing educationally, foregoing traditional four-year liberal arts degrees, which I now like to call leftist arts degrees, because let's be honest, what are you, studying non-binary dance theory and race of my cat? | ||
I mean, that's just the dumbest thing ever, but that's what we're actually paying a quarter of a million dollars to get a piece of paper for. | ||
We're realizing that's not really going to make me successful, even though everybody tells me it's going to. | ||
So I don't want to pay for that. | ||
I'll go to trade school or I'll start my own business and be CEO on day one, which 62% of our generation has already done. | ||
So those cultural levers of power, be it our intimate personal relationships in the dating world and marriage, even our friendships, to education, to entrepreneurship and commerce, I think you're starting to see us pull the levers of power back Culturally, and because of that, we know that's going to swing politically as well. | ||
If you look at exit polling, I know I'm having a long answer, but if you look at exit polling from 2018 to 2020 to 2022, do you remember taking high school algebra and learning about y equals mx plus b and there was like the sample graph of just the straight line? | ||
That's what it looks like right now with Gen Z voting behavior. | ||
The more of us that are starting to vote, the more Republican and conservative Gen Z is starting to embrace in our actual voting patterns. | ||
And that doesn't necessarily mean adherence to the Republican Party. | ||
Fifty two percent of new Gen Z voters are registering as independent, actually. | ||
But I think it is stemming from this cultural conservative revolution of our values and our lifestyle choices that's going to manifest in policy as well. | ||
So I would imagine somebody's watching this going, wait a minute, this just doesn't make sense. | ||
I keep seeing all these videos from colleges and it's all these crazy purple haired people and they're screaming about this and that and they're burning the whole place down and everything else. | ||
How much of what you're saying is not reflected in mainstream just because people like you are actually happier? | ||
So the kid, the younger Isabel Brown, who's on a college campus right now, while the purple-haired version is screaming and burning the place down, is actually either studying, or cooking, or dancing, or whatever else she might be interested in. | ||
So we just can't see that. | ||
So it's hard to connect to the culture part, right? | ||
We can't be like, oh, they're winning the culture war, or there's more of these Gen Z conservative-leaning people, because where would we see them? | ||
We'd have to go into their houses and You hit them still on the head. | ||
And I've been wildly frustrated about this reality because, number one, nobody older than us on the political right is really hyping up our generation, inspiring us, giving us a seat at the table on a platform. | ||
But then they're also fundamentally misrepresenting us and misunderstanding us in the eras of echo chambers that they operate in. | ||
Through the mainstream media, through radio, print media, television, and even on social media, which is shocking in and of itself to me because one Google search would take you in a very different direction compared to what you're talking about is the norm that you saw on TikTok or something like that. | ||
Very often, for example, TikTok videos about people at their jobs or people at school will get posted to Fox News and all of the Fox hosts will react to it. | ||
And then the Gen Z person that they made the video about will react to them. | ||
People on TikTok can say, these people have literally no idea what they're talking about. | ||
They totally misrepresented my video. | ||
Which is frustrating, to be honest, because yes, I think there is an element of this is always a generational pattern. | ||
Every older generation is going to think the new people are upending everything they worked for, and they're ruining America, they're ruining Western civilization. | ||
But in this case, it's literally objectively not true. | ||
You're cherry-picking the most ridiculous, avant-garde, crazy people from the internet that don't represent the majority, but they happen to be the loudest, and you're giving them this platform that's making it seem like everybody is colored in the same picture. | ||
Chris Willicks, who is a great podcast host, I love him, talked about this on his Instagram the other day. | ||
That there's this manufactured outrage cycle right now in American media where some person will post a video on TikTok about being a dog. | ||
I identify as a dog and I pee in a litter box, which maybe like 10 people in the United States might agree with. | ||
All Democrats, though. | ||
Correct. | ||
Yeah, that's important to know. | ||
It'll maybe have 20 views, and then it'll get picked up by a podcast host who will show it on their show to millions of people and say, this is what's happening on TikTok, and this is what's happening in our high schools, and to the youth, we have to save the youth, which then will get 20 million views instead of 20 views, and then the left will have to triple down on that behavior and say, Well, yeah, actually, we do support your right to be a dog because we have to fight. | ||
We can't agree on anything or say something is crazy mutually and agree on that. | ||
And the cycle just continues to repeat. | ||
So I think most of what you're saying about Gen Z really is that manufactured outrage. | ||
It's not based in reality. | ||
If you want to see reality for Gen Z, talk to your kids, talk to your friends' kids or your grandkids even. | ||
The number of stories I hear from parents who have 13, 14, 15 year olds and they say their kids are unbelievably based, have the dark darkest sense of humor, like they do not hold anything back. | ||
It's astounding to me. | ||
So are you telling me that Gen Z in many ways is just punking us in some respect, actually? | ||
I think that's kind of what you're saying, right? | ||
Because it's like- In a different sense, I think you're punking yourselves | ||
about Gen Z, but yes. | ||
Something like that, because I grew up, I mean, I remember getting on the color internet | ||
I was a sophomore in college and some kid had, in my dorm, was screaming that he got the Yankees' Royals score. | ||
And I remember walking in and everyone was going nuts. | ||
And it was Yankees, three Royals run, one with their logos. | ||
And I swear to you, I remember thinking this is the stupidest thing ever because I was like, I'll just watch this on SportsCenter tonight the way I always did on ESPN. | ||
Nobody will ever do that. | ||
Right, like, or, you know, there's that famous was that Tom Friedman quote from like 40 years ago where he's like, you know, by the time in 10 years from now, no one will think the internet is as nearly as important as the fax machine, something like that. | ||
But basically, what you're saying is they're punking us in some respect, because they put up these silly videos, knowing the reaction will happen, then the counter reaction, and then it just extrapolates through the system. | ||
Of course, yeah. | ||
Of a system that literally doesn't even give us a seat at the table to talk about it, which is just crazy to me. | ||
And that's happening on both sides of the political aisle, which I think is contributing really significantly to this push for independence. | ||
Maybe not even politically, I don't support either party, but just learning how to think for yourself, how to embrace critical thinking. | ||
Our universities aren't teaching that, so we have to teach that to ourselves, or we might learn it from A Jordan Peterson or a Dennis Prager or a Dave Rubin by watching them every day. | ||
And it's this idea of building a new path to reclaim traditional values that has been really fascinating to me in doing the study for this book. | ||
Because yes, we're kind of going backwards in a sense and embracing institutions and ideas that have always worked throughout the dawn of humanity all the way up until now. | ||
But also putting our little fun New Age Gen Z 2000 spin on it that I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding. | ||
How dare you assume that I am a woman? | ||
I know we've been working together every day, but come on. | ||
That would be a hell of a drop right now. | ||
No, but as a woman, when you see like, I always think of like, The Sarah Silverman's and the Chelsea Handler's like there's a core, um, what's your name? | ||
The redhead who had the Trump, Kathy Griffin. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like they all happen to be comedians, but comedians generally are the most outspoken people, but like a certain set of male comedians. | ||
Well, but a certain set of female comics, but, but talkers in essence, um, that are childless, that are unmarried, that are of a certain age. | ||
Um, that video that I think maybe we covered it together that Chelsea Handler did about what her day is like compared to her friends. | ||
And it's like, she's, Drunk and masturbating at 8am or whatever else she was doing throughout her day. | ||
But to seeing some of that, that was not what I thought you were going to say, but to seeing some of that type of thing as a woman, has that helped you shift into something where you're about to get married, you talk about having kids all the time, your husband's got a decent job, like your future is bright in some way as again the bumper to that type of thing? | ||
Yes and no. | ||
I don't know that it's really those types of voices that have pushed Gen Z women back to a different type of lifestyle. | ||
In fact, I think a lot of people would even disagree with what I'm saying right now, that Gen Z women are changing our culture. | ||
Most people would say, all Gen Z women are so leftist, they're so bought into all of the lies of feminism. | ||
And if you look at polling of like 20 people, yeah, sure, that probably would support that claim. | ||
But I write about this in the book. | ||
I had an experience of being on the Very Viral Whatever podcast about a year ago, and I was really nervous about doing this podcast. | ||
I rarely get nervous for media, but for whatever reason, I was thinking they're going to eat me alive or try to say that I'm this horrible person, I'm going to be surrounded by OnlyFans pornography stars, and I don't know how I feel about that. | ||
Can you just explain to people who don't know exactly what it is? | ||
Because I even did it, and I'm still not exactly sure what it is. | ||
The Whatever Podcast really took shape because they started bringing people on, big groups of people, on this podcast to start talking about dating and sex and relationships, and it was usually a handful of token, more conservative people and then literal porn stars or recovering sex addicts or OnlyFans models across the table, and they would just hit go, hit play, and you would talk about whatever they ended up talking about that night. | ||
So when I was on, we talked for five and a half hours. | ||
It was a very long podcast. | ||
And across the table from me was an active OnlyFans creator, a girl who was regularly acting in the porn industry, another girl who was a recovering sex addict, and she was very graphic about that experience for her, and then tons of other very liberal feminist Gen Z women. | ||
And I didn't know they were going to do this, but I showed up for the podcast and they used the picture of me in a MAGA hat on the thumbnail for the video. | ||
I'm like, great, thank you. | ||
Thank you for setting me up for this. | ||
I'm so excited. | ||
And we were standing outside the studio before, and we're all introducing ourselves, nervous to talk to each other. | ||
And some girl said, can you believe there's a girl with a MAGA hat on this episode? | ||
Not realizing that! | ||
Oh, she thought you were an OnlyFans star! | ||
unidentified
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Oh no! | |
Oh no! | ||
But we sat down for this podcast, and I had my guard up. | ||
I was a little nervous about what this conversation was going to say. | ||
I thought surely we'd get some viral, good, clippable moments out of it. | ||
But it didn't end up being as viral as I was anticipating in the best way, because over the span of five hours, we start talking about hookup culture and how every single one of these women, including the porn stars and the OnlyFans creators, went around the table and started saying, yeah, I feel really empty. | ||
After I have a meaningless hookup and I'm really tired of just sleeping with as many men as possible, every single woman around this table ended up saying, I feel like modern feminism has lied to me. | ||
I'm not happy. | ||
I don't feel fulfilled in my life. | ||
Every single woman around the table said they were thinking about, in the process of, or just had recently quit their hormonal birth control, which is very radically countercultural, especially for women working in the porn industry. | ||
They were all saying, I felt sick, I felt poisoned, I wasn't myself, I was depressed, I was anxious, I was suicidal all the time, and I didn't want to live like that anymore. | ||
And I think it's easy to assume that Gen Z women especially are embracing the lies of feminism. | ||
Especially when you see all of the rah, rah, rah, go abortion, make a cake and shout it out on social media, and I don't need a man, I'm just going to have my career. | ||
Very toxic content that you see on the internet. | ||
But if you really think about where women are at in my generation today, the CDC, and we don't trust them, but it's fine, we'll come back to that later, came out with statistics a few months ago that in 2021, one in three teenage girls seriously contemplated taking her own life. | ||
And that's heavy. | ||
I know a teenage girl who took her own life a few weeks before her 16th birthday, longtime family friend, and I think about her regularly when I'm researching all of these issues because she, like all of the women in our generation, are smack dab in the middle of people saying being a woman is so terrible, you should just run away from that and not be a woman and we'll help you chop off your breasts when you're 15 years old like a Chloe Cole. | ||
You don't have to do this anymore. | ||
Being a woman is actually about being a man and singing about days of girlhood when you have a penis and you're sponsored by Tampax and you don't know what it's like to actually be a woman but you make tens of millions of dollars on TikTok gaining 20 million followers overnight by appropriating women's culture. | ||
That's what being a woman is for our age and our generation. | ||
Being a woman is never expecting to have the joy of connection and long-term monogamous love in a marriage or with children because those things are evil. | ||
For you personally, that would sacrifice your career and your happiness, but also for society at large because marriage is patriarchal and children are going to destroy the environment. | ||
How dare you think that of your fellow man, your fellow woman? | ||
It's this horrifying time where it's genuinely impossible to be a woman. | ||
And for all of its issues that I think a lot of people had with it, the Barbie movie kind of hit that on the head. | ||
They actually said it's impossible to be a woman today. | ||
And when the best women are men in society today, that echoes throughout the halls of our entire generation. | ||
Is that the gender thing? | ||
Is that like the craziest of the crazy things that you guys have been assaulted with? | ||
Yes. | ||
Because it was not... | ||
So wait, how old are you again? | ||
You're 20? | ||
Almost 27. | ||
You're almost 27. | ||
So you're 27. | ||
So I got 20 years on you. | ||
So 20 years ago, it just was not a thing. | ||
You might have heard of someone who dresses a different way and nobody cared even. | ||
But then they turned it into something else and then just hit everybody in the head with that. | ||
Yes, I think gender is very much the biggest cultural issue of our time, and I don't think anybody is in denial of that or in debate over that, but people are portraying it in different ways. | ||
So, great example, there's been studies dropped this month that 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, and 20% of Gen Zers at large identify as LGBTQ+. | ||
Is that alarming? | ||
Yes. | ||
Does that speak to the fact that teenagers in particular are being targeted with this over the head, being beaten with a club every single day, no matter where they look? | ||
And those letters have nothing to do with each other, so there's a lot of confusion around that. | ||
unidentified
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Correct. | |
But they also mean nothing. | ||
So we talked about this on the show, but the plus sign, getting new letters added to it every single day, literally to self-identify as LGBTQ+, might mean saying, I'm demisexual. | ||
And Dave, to let you know what demisexual— You told me once and I still—what are you, like— I'm sexually attracted to some people, but not all people, but especially people I have a romantic connection with. | ||
So, like, literally every human being could self-identify. | ||
unidentified
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It just means you're an old soul. | |
Yes. | ||
It means you're a person, a functioning human being with a brain and a soul. | ||
Congratulations. | ||
So, I think those numbers are really hyperinflated. | ||
It goes back to that cycle of manufactured outrage. | ||
But to bring things full circle on young women, in particular, and why I see a lot of hope. | ||
Young men, I think we've already won them over. | ||
A study came out a couple weeks ago saying 17-year-old boys are over 70% wildly conservative, the most they've been in 50 years. | ||
So, they're happy. | ||
They're taken care of. | ||
You don't think he's playing too much Fortnite? | ||
No, actually, but he could probably stand to do a couple more nights of reading instead of Fortnite. | ||
Different conversation for a different time. | ||
Wow. | ||
Gen Z women are broken, and I think that's the starting point that we can take to change culture for the better moving forward. | ||
We don't have to escape our womanhood. | ||
We don't have to buy into the lies of feminism. | ||
And culturally, you're seeing that shift start happening now. | ||
The quitting of the birth control, the deleting of the dating apps, the idea that we want to get married again, which seems so Like a non-issue, like everybody would want that, but we haven't for so long that we're reclaiming that for ourselves. | ||
And that cultural swing takes some time as we're continuing to grow up. | ||
Most of us are still teenagers, but absolutely will impact the political realm too. | ||
So since you're going to save the world, and I actually have no doubt that you're going to do it, and you've got your work cut out for you, but I know that you will do it, actually, I'm only going to ask you one other question, and then we're going to do something we've never done before, which is we're going to roll right into a live... No, not live. | ||
We're taped, but live. | ||
We are live to tape. | ||
Technically, we're not live streaming it, but we're going to go right into people of the internet, which we've never done in person together, because you got a book tour and you're heading to New York. | ||
Literally, it's a matter of days. | ||
So we're jamming in a lot of stuff. | ||
But let's do it this way. | ||
20 years from now. | ||
So I said we have 20 years between us. | ||
So I'll be 46. | ||
You're 46. | ||
It's okay. | ||
Seems like a lot. | ||
It's okay. | ||
But now you're 46. | ||
Lay that out. | ||
What if you've done it? | ||
If Gen Z has saved America, what does that life look like to you? | ||
We've both prioritized the freedom of the individual while understanding the need for moral objectivity in society, and that has manifested in every way possible. | ||
I think the right diagnoses a lot of the problems correctly, but sometimes our solution is just Yeah, okay, but that's that. | ||
It's horrible and we're just going to let everybody keep doing their thing because human freedom is the most important thing. | ||
And yes, it is. | ||
Of course, prioritizing freedom of the individual is so, so important. | ||
It's the foundation of our country. | ||
But the foundation of our country wasn't just that. | ||
It was citizenship, but it was also caring for your community. | ||
It was also this idea that there was an objective truth and there was a moral hierarchy predicated by the existence of a higher power. | ||
I hope that can manifest in education again. | ||
Actually, frankly, I just hope we dissolve the Department of Education, which helps everybody at this point, which would be great. | ||
I hope that comes back into strong religious practices and people attending church or synagogue every weekend, because that's important. | ||
That stems from where we embrace morals moving forward. | ||
I hope that comes back through in education. | ||
I think it already is. | ||
Look at people like Angel Studios and the content that they're making. | ||
That's absolutely rivaling Hollywood every single day. | ||
And I hope we can learn to laugh again. | ||
You know, everybody is so angry and divisive all the time. | ||
It's okay for us to disagree. | ||
It's okay to still love people, even if they don't necessarily check every single box on your political hierarchy the way the authoritarian left is demanding of us. | ||
And with all of that, I think the laughter will accompany with love, with joy, and with a sense of purpose that we've been missing for way too long. | ||
And I guess if it goes horrifically awry, it's just you and the Metaverse with your kid in the Metaverse and just basically being the batteries for the machine. | ||
I want to rewatch Running Player One this week. | ||
I've been thinking about it for several weeks. | ||
No, I personally will just go off the grid and move to the woods at that point. | ||
You will never hear from me again if we all in fact live in the Metaverse. | ||
It's going to be very difficult to do People of the Internet if you're in the woods with no internet. | ||
I know, sorry. | ||
At that point I'll just retire. | ||
You have to do it through like cans and string or something. | ||
I like that idea. | ||
We can live on a compound in the woods where no one will find us and we'll film People of the Internet. | ||
We'll let other people post it because at that point I just, I don't want to. | ||
Who knows what they're doing. | ||
The book! | ||
Is the end of the alphabet. | ||
How Gen Z can save America. | ||
Forward by Dave Rubin. | ||
Can we roll right into it? | ||
unidentified
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Do we even have to pause and recalibrate in any way? | |
I'm told we have to pause. | ||
We have to pause. | ||
As magical as the internet is, every now and again you have to pause. | ||
The algorithms don't pause, but we do. | ||
The link is down below. | ||
And I thank you, my friend. | ||
Thank you, Dave. | ||
If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of non-stop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |