#754 - Freya India - Deconstructing The Female Mental Health Crisis

29:33And I think the things that will actually stand out are the things that you forgot to film because you were so in the moment you weren't even thinking about. The threshold for that is now being changed. The threshold for things that are pulling you into the moment so much that you forget to film them is basically zero. Yeah. And people say, oh, you know, the amount of kind of tweets and stuff you see people say, oh, I went to this and I forgot to film where I forgot to take it and they're regret. And it's like, no, that's a good thing because you are living your life. And from my point of view, you forgot.

30:03The big difference, I think, is are you doing it as a memory for you? Are you doing it so that you can then post it on social media? Yeah. Because even if it's your job, there are certain things that I think it's a good idea to keep off social media. And especially if it isn't your job, who's this for? If you're posting it online, what you're trying to do is get some fucking titrated dose of whatever Kim Kardashian did. Which one of the Kardashians was it that used to surrogate and then the baby was born and immediately like handed it over to the... Is Chloe? I don't really know. I don't know them.

30:41I'm bad at my Kardashian. I try hard not to know. You also said, I've seen a quote from you that says, what's totally absent from modern mental health advice is trying to be a better person. What's that mean? Yeah, I've got some backlash for that. Well, what I was trying to say by that is I think, you know, Gen Z especially if bombarded with mental health advice that is always By a product or have this service or you know take a pill for whatever's wrong with you And I'm not talking about you know severely mentally or people but for most of Gen Z who are anxious stressed Having these normal adolescent feelings that are being ramped up by modern life You don't necessarily need therapy, you don't necessarily need to take a pill.

31:32What you very often need is to look at your life and think about it. The first thing to think about is whether you have real human connection in your life, whether you have a solid community, then if you're eating right, if you're exercising right, then things like how you're treating people, how you're maintaining your relationships. But it's so absent from mental health advice because people are absolutely terrified now of telling young people, you know, maybe this is not a mental health diagnosis, maybe this is something you have agency over. You just would never hear it, you would never hear it from mental health campaign, you'd never hear it from an influencer.

32:15They'd never say, you know, take a look at your own life, have you done everything you can to feel good and are you trying your best to be a good person. There's no way they would get away with saying it. It's very strange coming from this Joe Rogan David Goggins, Jocker Willink, Alex Homozi universe of everyone saying no one cares, just work harder, like stop complaining, just improve. That whole sort of worldview almost feels is trite and obvious in kind of in some ways like old. Oh, well, that, you know, that's, that's, there's nothing novel to be said with that. But I guess you're forgetting about the cohort of people for whom that is a radical assumption.

33:04Well, I think girls and young women don't hear that. You know, I think there's a lot of, obviously talk about like young men not having role models. But I think in recent years that has changed, you know, there's all, there's Jordan Peterson, there's you, there's all kinds of pop stars who try to fill that gap and speak to young men and tell them, you know, to think about discipline and think about how they're treating people and, you know, if they're the best version of themselves. But I think there's a massive gap for young women because people are absolutely terrified to say, you know, are you being a person, especially to women because they think it's, you know, regressing back to telling women what to do.

33:47But I think, you know, young women are craving that because deep down, because all we're hearing is everything you do is great, everything you do is empowering, everything, you know, if you like it, then it's good for your mental health, then go for it. You know, we're hearing that from, like mainstream feminism, we're hearing it from therapy culture and we're hearing it from all of these kind of influences and celebrities who are our role models like Kim Kardashian, whoever it is. You know, where is the female Jordan Peterson saying no, this behavior is not good. This is the kind of behavior that, you know, is going to be bad for your well -being and the people around you.

34:29We're just going hear that. Who are the heroes, heroines? Who are the heroines of Gen Z? Like what are the girls? You know, if you were talking about, I'm aware that you say there isn't an equivalent of the of the Jordan Peterson or the Andri Tate or the the Rogen or whatever, but who is the who are the girls looking up to? Kardashians, what else? Yeah, I think pop culture figures. So I think it would, if you were to ask them, it would be like singers and celebrity it would be like Taylor Swift it would be like actresses they see on TV. Zendaya Ariana Grande. Yeah yeah so you know people who aren't gonna push a strong moral value system on young women they're gonna be very vague about everything for fear of offending and for fear of lecturing and I think you know everyone talks about coddling Gen Z but I think This is a big part of it is that we're absolutely terrified to tell girls and young women what to do, but you have to tell young people what to do, what to aim for.

35:39So they're growing up now with absolutely no milestones for coming of age, no kind of guidance of where to go in the direction of their life. And I think it does a great, you know, to service to young women to just pretend everything they do is fine. And I think, yeah, we are actually craving some of that discipline that men are craving as well. Yeah, I have a theory that over the next 10 years the female mental health crisis will be the main story and the male body image crisis. I think that we're going to switch from crisis of femininity, crisis of masculinity to crisis of femininity and crisis of female male body image to crisis of male body image.

36:21Now girls are also maybe gonna hold on to both of those titles, I'm not sure. But male body dysmorphia is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within about two decades. Really? Yeah. But is that caused by, is that fitness? Kind of. A good chunk of it. So the, male, the ideal male body has changed an awful lot. You know, perfect examples of this. If you look at action figures, if you look at Luke Skywalker from the 70s, as a, you know, a kid's action figure. He's just normal dude. He look at Luke Skywalker now, and he looks like he's on a very heavy course of PDs. And yeah, they're like all of the representations physically of men are unbelievably jacked.

37:07That's not to say, I mean, look at what's happened with Barbie, like how many, look at the waist to hip ratio of Barbie. If Barbie was in the real world, she basically have no internal organs, etc, etc. There's been a a reckoning around that for women and there hasn't been for men. So it's always this flip flop of well, men have got, you know, this thing is something that we need to be concerned about with them and that gets forgotten for the girls and then the same thing happens for girls with you, gets forgotten for men. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I think the, I think a lot of the mental health advice now is geared toward women.

37:41So it's like, you know, talk more about your problems, you know, view it in a very kind of female way. But I actually think that's gone so far that it's now harming women as well. You know, constantly saying to men, you should be opening up more about your problems. Would never ever, you know, ever dare to say to women, maybe you're opening up too much. That would be unacceptable. There was this interesting quote that I found from Steve Stuart Williams, guy that wrote the APU understood the universe, one of my favorite books. And he said, consider the claim that society encourages males to be aggressive.

38:23This is probably true in some ways. We do sometimes give boys the message that they ought to be tough and not cry. Overall though, we spend a lot more time discouraging male aggression than female. Why? because males are more aggressive or consider the claim that we tell girls to be quiet and passive. Again, we probably do this sometimes. More often though, we tell boys to be quiet and passive. Why, for the same reason, boys are louder and more disruptive. Yeah, that's true. It's very interesting. I think it's... Yeah, but I think what's happening now is we try to... The more you try to do something that's going to help young women, Like, I think everyone's trying to be very careful with their language and careful with how they approach these issues because they know that women don't really like that direct discipline, the same amount that boys are mending.

39:16They don't, we don't respond to it quite the same. I think that is true, but now we've taken it to such an extreme where we're terrified to tell women anything, you know, it's all about what makes us happy, what our desires are. So it's based on some truth, but it's just one way to far. It's like this is coddling culture, basically. Yeah. What is it making girls more depressed or more bitchy? Do you think? Both at the same time. No, I think most of the narrative now is social media and therapy culture and all of these things are making girls anxious and making them depressed. But I think a lot of things in modern life are also making girls, you know, behave worse as well.

40:05So social media, for example, we know that girls in securities are a lucrative market that companies go after, but I also think companies know how to draw out female vices as well. So if you look at social media platforms, they're like perfectly set up for girls to be mean to each to engage in this kind of indirect forms of aggression, like reputation destruction, passive aggression, gossip. It's like perfect on social media. So if you want to socially exclude someone, you've got like the snapchat, snapmap, where you can have your live location, all with the friends are together, and you can see that you're not with them.

40:47You know, you can create group chats where you cut people out. you can, if you want to be passive aggressive, you can like tweet about someone but not mention their name, so you're just like subtly digging them. And you know, companies play on this like Instagram, lets you have a set of close friends where you can exclude other people. There's apps like NGL, which is like an anonymous messaging app. NGL. Not gonna lie. So it's like, you say something like not gonna lie, she's really ugly. There was something called YAC, YAC, YAC. Oh, yeah. Is that a similar thing? Yeah, that was basically the same.

41:29So it was geolocated anonymous posting. And this was for a couple of years in club promo. This was fucking fire because it meant that we could all, we could all talk shit about every other promoter from town and know that everyone in town that was using yak yak or whatever would see it, but that no one could say who it came from because by design it was anonymous. It was so funny. Did you have to ask if M? Was that when you were in? No, what was ask FM? Oh, so that was like brutal. That was again, it's like anonymous messaging app where you can just like people would just use it to rate other people.

42:13So you'd be like, can you give this girl a rating on like looks personality? It's absolutely brutal. But yeah, companies are doing that because they know adolescence teenagers, especially girls, can be absolutely brutal to each other in that way. So they're playing on that as well. So I think it's not only how social media is making us feel, but it's like who it's encouraging us to become as well. Do you think selfie editing is a powerful act of self -expression? No. Yeah, so that was face -to -win, wasn't it? So it's so weird how that has changed. I mean, I remember when I was younger, people used to kind of disguise the fact they were editing their photos.

42:58It was like a shameful thing. And now it's kind of spun to something to be proud of. It's like self -expression. It's just like putting on makeup and the companies. I don't know what came first But now the companies are jumping on that saying you know selfie editing is empowering and it's about Self -love it's like about being proud of who you are and enhancing that like they use all kinds of language to spin it I think it was Chloe Kardashian said like face -tune is life -changing she also faced tuned her newborn baby as well. She faced tuned her newborn baby. Yeah, there's a picture of her holding her baby and the baby is like ridiculously airbrushed.

43:47Did anyone pull her up on this? Yeah, I think people did say, you know, this is a step 75. But saying that it's a powerful female self -expression and it's true self -love to... Yeah. What's happening through what's happening with self -image, body image, girls sort of perspectives and perceptions of how they should look physically, facially or the rest of it? What is interesting because we seem to be the generation that's been inundated with this kind of message of self -love and body positivity, so it's everywhere. But we're the generation who seem to be struggling with it the most. So we've got record rates of cosmetic surgeries among Gen Z.

44:32So things like lip fillers, liposuction, boob jobs, all going up for Gen Z and the clients getting younger and younger. So you're getting kind of teenagers who are so Botox is banned in England. Teenagers are traveling to Wales to get Botox to prevent aging. So you've got these like record rates of cosmetic surgery, record rates of body dysmorphia, eating disorders, facial dysmorphia, so things like young women going to plastic surgeons asking to look like the Snapchat filter version of themselves, whereas before they'd come in with like a picture of a celebrity, wow it's them with a filter. So despite being so loud about self -love and self -acceptance and having that kind of shove down our throat, the opposite seems to be happening.

45:29That's so interesting. Yeah and I mean I would put that down to social media because you know I don't think older generations quite realize how often Gen Z especially Gen Z women are looking at their faces because of their phone and because of TikTok and Instagram. Oh it's like having a mirror with you everywhere that you go. Yeah and And it's also, you're seeing a distorted version of yourself through filters and through your camera. So when you're looking in the mirror or someone takes a photo of you, it's very different to that camera image that you're so accustomed to. With the right angle, that you know, with the right lighting, that you know, with the filter that you like.

46:13So it's dysmorphia. It's like, I don't know that. But it's selfie dysmorphia. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's, it's, so there's a couple of things here. First off being other people on the internet, portray themselves and make photos and videos of themselves in a way which is misrepresentative of the way that they actually look in the real world. And again, this recursive convey about thing that we both separately came up with, causes you to spend or to see people as their online version, not their real life version. Then this is a very unique version of it, which is how you see yourself on the phone is actually different to how you are in the real world.

46:59So I imagine there must be something like mirror dysmorphia or like phone dysmorphia, which is wow, my phone now looks so great, but in the mirror I don't like myself. Well, because you're making all of these edits. I mean, have you seen the TikTok filters now, like the beauty filters? They are so like when I was younger we would have like Snapchat filters, but they would kind of like lag. So they had like, there was one that was like puppy ears, but it kind of smoothed your skin and like chisel your cheeks. So like all the 13 year old girls were using it. But if you moved it would like lag. So it was obviously wearing a filter.

47:36But now like there's what the puppy ears weren't enough of a giveaway. way. Okay, well, well, what figure would do? There'll be other ones like, you'll be makeup or you have like butterflies or something and girls would try and crop out the filter bit. Right. I see. For the companies tried to introduce seamless ones. But now there's like young women trying on these filters that give them like a perfect kind of avatar face, but it's very realistic. And if they go like this, nothing changes. So when I was younger, like the fake eyelashes would be like on your hand. Whereas now you can do that, you can move, you can, you know, speak normally, you can edit your body on face change.

48:25So you can, like, make your waist microscopic, you can change your, like, bum sides, whatever. And this works for videos as well as photos, right? And then you can film yourself walking around with a different body and the background doesn't move or wobble or anything. And so not only it goes staring at their faces for hours a day but they're staring at an often distorted version of that, then going to the mirror, then thinking they have a mental illness of body dysmorphia or whatever. And it's like anyone would have dysmorphia because you're not supposed to be staring at your face for this long, especially in a modified version.

49:04Have you been watching this season of Love Island that's happening right now? I have not. Right. What a shame for you. What a shame. So this is Love Island All Stars, which is bringing back, there's at least two or three people from my season. And that's been interesting to observe. You remember my season was eight years ago, eight or nine years ago. Hannah, who was this scouse girl, she purposefully went to get Bratz doll surgery. Right. Have you heard of this? No, but I can guess is it Bratz, Bratz face or Bratz body portion. Face but also body to a degree. There's a video Josh one of the kids actually another kid that was on my season.

50:03Wow they really took a lot from season one. Maybe I was left out I don't know but they he was she was walking away from him they were just catching up or whatever his friends and she was walking away from him and he said fucking hell of your address done as well and she went yeah I have so you know there's no there's very few bit I mean she was pretty enhanced the first time, but this broke the internet when the thing first came out, someone sent it to me. And I mean, Hannah was a playboy girl, Scouse playboy girl. For the Americans listening, Scouse is kind of like New Jersey a little bit, I guess.

50:37It's like sort of Jordy Shore, Jersey Shore type sort of fake tan and fake lashes and and stuff. And she really took it to the extreme about this. And yeah, the internet was lit up. So is that a BBL that she's had? She'll have had a BBL another and I mean she had a boob job fucking eight years ago when we were on the show she had a pretty big set of good missiles on her and now they're like nuclear warheads. I think when you get this you're just more free. Well when you start to get these procedures it's almost like you get blind to how far you're taking it until like she might look in the mirror and not see it as extreme.

51:23Almost certainly, almost certainly does. Yeah, because it's been gradual process for her. You know, she's upgraded each feature one by one, whereas you meet her in her real life and it's like jarring. Well, that was the thing that people were comparing the photo from eight years ago to the photo now. But it's the question, when did you get older? When did you get fat or when did you get whatever? Well, one day at a time. one procedure at a time, one lip filler appointment at a time. Yeah, that's true. And then social media, I think, is a big part of that again, because it's the algorithm, one step at a time.

51:59So firstly, you get an ad for lip fillers. And then it's like, oh, well, if you've had lip fillers, you might want to even out with a nose job. And then if you get a nose job, you probably want to get, you know, and it just goes on and on until, you know, there's a lot of influencers now who are coming out and dissolving villas or reverse in surgery. And they all say the same thing, which is I just woke up and didn't recognize myself. And you may did a, lucky this is like love island podcast, Molly May did a big thing with that, didn't she? She's sort of debutificationed herself. Yeah, she looks way better, she looks way younger.

52:35But she said the same thing. She just said, I have no idea who that person was. She's like, I look at that filler version and I don't recognize her because it happened gradually. What do you think about this trend of fitness checks or just Instagram goals uploading? See, I've got roles in stretch marks too. What do you make of that? Yeah, well, I've seen a couple of those and they're always like unflattering but flattering. So it was like the most flattering version of an unflattering photo you could get, which I think is kind of worse than just posting a load of flattering stuff because it's like, oh, here's my vulnerabilities, but I'm also still using good lighting and it's not that like repulsive.

53:23It's the bodily humble brag. Yeah, yeah. So I think, I don't know, I still see that as kind of inauthentic sometimes and actually worse in a way because you're pretending it's your ultimate. The goal is laudable, right? Which is, look, I am not perfect all the time. This is a photo of me posing and this is a photo of me not posing. James Smith, my business partner on Newtonic and and Darren Cartel made a very big mess of Instagram. They were mercenary assassins going around and finding these girls that were doing it and then doing a parody of it themselves with them in like a girls crop top sort of posing and going, um, crying on the fact that they've got, they've got roles and stuff, but then on the other side, how are you supposed to fight back against insane body -sandered imagery.

54:20If you don't do that, if you don't try and do that, well this is me in real life. This is what happens if I've had too much gluten or this is me around that time of the month or this is me when I'm not posing and I'm not lit and I don't have makeup on. Well I think it's like the mental health thing. So I think a lot of people share their mental health problems online because they think, oh, you know, social media is a highlight reel and everyone's pretending to be perfect so I'm going to show my vulnerability. A lot of influencers do that. They'll be like, oh, here's a selfie of me crying. I'm normal.

54:53Don't worry. But it's like, I don't think the answer to the endless posting of perfection is then to start revealing your most vulnerable personal moment, especially if you're a normal young girl. I think the answer is to postless in general and to consume less of this stuff. Because I think a lot of young people now are kind of being convinced that they need to share their vulnerability so that their whole self is on social media and it's kind of balanced. But I don't think that, you know, if you're a preteen or a teenager, I just would not be putting my deepest vulnerabilities online now. You know, when you don't know yourself, you don't know how you're gonna feel in the future.

55:38It's a similar thing. What do Gen Z girls think about guys?

55:47Well, there's a big gap between Gen Z girls and Gen Z guys. I don't know, did you see that financial times? Yeah, so the Gen Z girls and Gen Z guys world view and values definitely seem to be diverging. Of course. What do you lay that at the feet of? A couple of things. Most of the divide in most of the countries is girls and young women shifting to the left. So guys seem to be either staying the same or becoming slightly more conservative on things like gender roles or I think race and immigration as well. But it's young women who are like blurching rapidly to becoming more progressive. And so I think to explain that, to explain the rise of liberal women, I think a big part of it is education.

56:41So universities leaning left, but young women weighing on like to go to university and men are actually. This is an age group that's for a lot of them below the age of going to university. True. So, well, yeah, I think this most sub -surveys are looking at Gen Z men and women. Right. I think if you were to include, you know, Gen Z girls and boys, it would also be the things like social media. So for example, if you're looking at progressive, something progressive on social media, some social justice post or something, again, the algorithm will serve you the more extreme version of that. And you can end up going from kind of like a normal liberal position to the extreme left very quickly.

57:30And obviously the same is true of right wing content, but it's liberal teen girls who are spending five or more hours a day on social media. So it seems to be what I think is happening is girls are kind of naturally drawn to something like the social justice movement because it's very much about compassion, it's very much about lived experiences and I think young women higher in empathy and more conformist. So we're drawn to that and then those natural tendencies are then picked up by the algorithm and then you're spending hours a day on social media getting that confirmed and getting it more extreme and guys are getting a different experience and then as they grow older, going to university, getting a different experience, guys are more likely to study STEM subjects rather than humanities which are much less left -leaning.

58:22So it just seems to be that we're Having such different experiences and it's getting to the point where our world views are completely different And we're not even like inhabiting the same reality anymore Yeah, I've got Daniel Cox who was the dude that did the research. I've got him coming on He was a bit of a digital ghost. I had to go through a bunch of people to to get in touch with him But I can't wait for that episode. Yeah, I think that's gonna be so good And so that's exciting. Gonna bring him on and have a conversation, really dig into the mechanisms of it. I'd be interested to try and find somebody else that can dig into the mechanisms more.

58:58Obviously he knows the demographics and he's made some inferences. And that's articles, fantastic. But yeah, there's a bit more. I want to understand why is this happening more than just what's happening. Okay. So, Gen Z girls about guys, what do they think about relationships and dating and the importance of that? Well, I think a big thing now that I've noticed is being is Gen Z women being risk of us around guys and around dating. So for example, if you go on like TikTok dating advice, it's very kind of cynical, it's very negative, it's like, you know, if a guy approaches you, he's a predator, or if he kind of complements you a lot and gives you loads of gifts, he's love bombing you, he's an abuser, you know, the words like narcissism and red flags came thrown around and it's honestly everywhere.

59:57Like I saw a tweet recently that was viral, when viral that was like, oh, if you, if you meet someone and you have intense chemistry, that's a major red flag, but you should leave because it's like a trauma signal that reminds you of your caregiver who mistreated you or whatever. It's got like thousands of likes and it's that kind of language is so common among young women talking about dating, which like I get, I think there are legitimate reasons to be riskabest, so I think obviously it's much harder to date now, after the sexual revolution, with less guardrails of custom and chivalry. I do think there's reasons women are risk -versed to being disposed of, not having a meaningful relationship follow from meeting someone.

1:00:56We've got very high rates of divorced parents, which plays into that risk aversion? Was I think social media teaches you to be risk averse and avoid discomfort? Well, what is the reason for the risk aversion? Is it just not wanting to ever get hurt? How much of this is just an avoidance of any discomfort? Yeah, so basically all of these things are creating this absolute terror of getting hurt. So I think a lot of the therapy speak and the kind of feminist language is is cloaking this deep fear of vulnerability. I think Gen Z grew up with this kind of message that anything with risk is a threat to be avoided.

1:01:40Whether that's through social media, whether that's family structure, whether it was the childhoods we had. Our childhoods were very much like avoid risk, prioritise health and safety and regulations, and simulating it all online rather than actually engaging in risk -taking behavior. And I think that plays out all the time in Gen Z's life, but a big part of that is relationships because they come with a high level of risk. And I don't think some Gen Z people can kind of, it's almost like we've been convinced that's not a part of life, that you can actually get away with a life that avoids risk and, you know, uncomfortable motions, but you can't.

1:02:26And so it's actually, you know, really tragic because it puts us on a path to miss out on really meaningful things. So I think a lot of the kind of child -free TikTok stuff that everyone makes fun of and the, you know, less desire among Gen Z tab children can be explained by this fear of discomfort and risk aversion. There's like a deep terror of things going wrong, which you go on like child -free TikTok as well. It's all about discomfort and it's all about... What is that for the people that don't know? So people who've made the decision not to have children will post on like a dink which is like double -income, no kids.

1:03:12So they'll post like their luxury three lifestyles that they can afford. And then they'll post their kind of child -free days and what they gal up to and everything. But there's also among that, there's a lot of young women, especially talking about kind of the risks and discomfort that comes with having children and trying to warn other young women and girls not to have children. So for example, there's a girl who does a free birth control series on TikTok where she basically lists every possible risk that could go wrong with pregnancy or children. To kind of take. Was that the girl with a list?

1:03:51That's another one. So then there's another one. What's this one? So this is just a girl. She does like a helpful birth control series to remind you why you shouldn't have children. And she'll just put clips of children screaming and throwing up and destroying stuff and like, I hope it was. This is like a cultural intervention type. a lifestyle warning. Yeah, but I think the first - She doesn't have kids, so she's right. Yeah, and then I think the first person to do that was this woman who created the list, which is like a crowdsource list of reasons not to have children. I think there's 350 reasons not to have kids and it was a page in a heart, but she printed them out.

1:04:32So it's like nine pages, 10 pages or something. every reason to not to and I think the reasons to amounted to a page of A4. But the reason to not to have kids was, can't why cute heels anymore will miss brunch with the girls, literal parasite living inside of your body. Yeah, plus every kind of risk or health scare that could possibly go wrong is like listed on it. So like everything from starting with you know losing sleep and you know having like a stomachache or headache to the absolute worst case scenario risk that could happen. And you kind of read it and you're like, God, this is like the most meaningful thing a human can do.

1:05:17You know, it's the fundamental human instincts not not to say that everyone should have children. But But when you see so many young people convinced that life should be fun and easy all the time and that anything that comes with this level of risk is not worth it, I think that's a symptom of something extremely sinister, which is, you know, Gen Zia suffering from because they're on a path to miss out on the most meaningful things because of it out of fear. Yeah. It's the prioritization of immediate emotional comfort over long term flourishing. It's the avoidance of risk, but also change because change is associated with risk.

1:06:02Yeah. There is a kind of individualized solipsism about, I think the most popular reasons for why people aren't in relationships or why they're not dating, it's working on myself right now, just don't feel ready, don't have enough time, having too much fun on my own. The same thing for why people don't want to have kids, it's this sort of imposition on their life. That's what that's what they're primarily concerned about because if I do this thing, things are going to change and if the things change. Where was it here? This is interesting. When asked what it takes the leader fulfilling life, the public prioritises job satisfaction and friendship over marriage and parenthood.

1:06:4971 % of all adults say having a job or career they enjoy is extremely very important for people to live a fulfilling life and 61 % say having close friends is equally important. Only about one in four adults say having children or 23 % being married is extremely are very important to in order to live a fulfilling life. A third, say each of these is somewhat important and 42 % and 44 % say having children or being married is not too or not at all important. Having a lot of money is viewed as extremely or very important for a fulfilling life. Women place a little more importance on job, career, enjoyment than men do.

1:07:2474 % versus 69%. The same time men place somewhat more importance on marriage and having children. 28 % of men compared with 18 % of women say being married is extremely are very important for a fulfilling life. Similarly, 29 % of men versus 22 % of women say the same about having children. And that was pure research that literally came out three months ago. Interesting take online was having a great job is zero sum. Only one person can be the best salesperson, but hypothetically everyone can have a happy marriage and family. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think again that's the, I'll put that down to the lack of role models again for young women who are showing that different lifestyle of family and children.

1:08:11If you look at the top kind of pop culture, stars that Gen Z women are looking up to and loving, they're all living a similar lifestyle because they're in that world where their ultimate goal is money and fame and all of these values that are incompatible with children, they make children get in the way of that. They're not seeing role models whose ultimate values are family or legacy or anything like that. So it is just not being translated to them. I wonder what will happen if Taylor Swift gets pregnant. I'm not getting up. Fucking hesitate to use Taylor Swift as the linchpin for female culture, but she has captured culture in a way that, you know, I don't think really anybody else has.

1:09:01And something tells me that Travis Kelsey, he's a bearded, beard drink. I mean, he's also sponsored by Pfizer and maybe paid for by George Soros, but he is a pretty like old school sweary guy. Him and his brother behave in that kind of a manner. Something tells me that he probably intends on having a family at some point. And if you've got the greatest, or one of the greatest NFL players ever, their genes, plus perhaps one of the greatest female pop stars, it's like make some kids, come on. But if that happens, do you remember when Adele lost weight? And all of the body positivity people were like, You betrayed us and blah blah blah.

1:09:42I wonder how many people will say, you know, they're all happy for the fact that Taylor Swift's in a relationship. But she is still able to do the dink role model thing but if she decides to start having a family, I wonder how much of that would change. And then look at it the other way. I mean, Alex Cooper should have been called to account so fucking hard. She should have got dragged so fucking hard on the internet for extoling the virtues of casual sex and no frills attached and sleep with them and don't catch feels and here's how to The glug glug for four thousand or whatever this like good blowjob episode that was episode number three of a podcast or something else Like extoling the virtues of casual sex and then for the final three years of the podcast secretly having a relationship with a guy that she was totally besotted and in love with and then to kind of like like Bruce Wayne saying that he's Batman.

1:10:39Go, I'm engaged and the engagement was so cute and there was a Rose Garden and he got down on one knee and he'd ask my dad and he'd done all this other stuff and it goes, yo, how big is the wake of broken girls that allowed themselves to be used by guys over the last half decade because of you as the second biggest, whatever, one of the biggest female podcasts on the planet. And how many girls did you basically sell a lie to about the lifestyle that you thought was good when what you were doing was the opposite. And then you knew it. You knew that this was the case. Yeah. Yeah. I think, again, it's that fear.

1:11:21The fear of telling girls what to do, but also the fear of in promoting a traditional lifestyle in any way. You know, I think there's like a terror of thinking that you're regressive if you start saying, oh you know actually enjoy my marriage, I'm actually glad I got married young or you know I'm gonna give up some of this um you know I'm gonna put fame to the side to have children or things like that. I think a lot of probably older women feel that but don't translate it to younger women because they don't want to lecture them. You know whereas you know we need some people in culture who are who are point, you know, not saying all young women need to have children or get married, but saying, you know, actually the most fulfilling things are things that you don't buy and you don't, you know, need to have soul to you, that things like a meaningful relationship and children, which are separate from the market and they provide this kind of sustainable meaning, you know, no one's saying that because it's not sexy and it's not like attention grabbing.

1:12:24Well, how many women as well that would be the role models for this talking point just don't exist in the same communication ecosystem as the audience that would benefit from it most? Yeah, and also the people with the platform are usually influences who are whose ultimate values are the fame money and You selected for a very particular type of person that was chasing the fame and the fame is what got them the platform on which they can talk about the virtues of chasing fame. Yeah, so probably the best role models for women are not on social media and are not famous. They're having a quiet coffee with their friends on a Tuesday afternoon.

1:13:08Yeah, yeah. And then you get this like, like, tradwifed movement or whatever where you get the other extreme end, but it's still, it's still a performance. there's still like filming it for TikTok. So it's like either way, we're still getting like a shallow version. Do you know who Sam Suleck is? No, who's that? It's so unsurprising that you a girl on the internet doesn't, when every guy on the internet pretty much does, he is a 22 -year -old, 23 -year -old bodybuilder, I guess. And his whole thing is completely raw authenticity. His entire YouTube channel, there's no crafting of thumbnails, there's no crafting of titles, and all he does is film the training sessions and he gets in a car and he's just the least polished person that you're going to meet.

1:14:02He's a little bit socially awkward. He's jacked out of his mind, so he's huge. So there's a lot of aspiration in his normality, but there's a trend at the moment, and at least on the guy's side, I think, of moving away from the hyper polished, very edited, very curated messaging. I think people are falling in love with people that, yeah, I get that. Like I understand, I drive a Toyota fucking avancist. I, you know, sometimes get uncomfortable when people come up to me in the gym. Those sorts of things that he's just showing what's going on. and I wonder when there will be a female equivalent because he's had phenomenal success that seems to be, I mean, he's playing five dimensional chess if that's actually a role.

1:14:53And he's conned everybody. But yeah, I think there could be gap in the market for an influential female to come in and do something similar. Yeah, I think the problem is with that is So I think some people try, they try to be very authentic online. And then like I said, they end up performing in a different way. So they end up performing like, you see videos on TikTok like influencers saying, oh, you know, this is me kind of crying on my bedroom floor because everything's going wrong. And it's like, yeah. And it's also, you've set up the camera in order to cry in order to capture this. And it's like influencers saying, oh, you know, I caught my panic attack on camera.

1:15:36and you watch it and it's like, yep, this is performance again. So I think there's a very narrow line to actually be authentic. And again, we just seem to be swinging right past it. To still be performing all the time. How is, or why is it the case that sex and dating are down if hookup culture is so prominent? Yeah, this is interesting. I think it seems to be that when people are having sex, it's more often casual sex. But in general, Gen Z are having less sex compared to previous generations at the same age. But if you talk to young people about their sexual experiences, they'll usually typically be like a hookup or something like that.

1:16:31But I think a lot of what Gen Zia in now is like situationships. So they're in like this gray area where they seem to be hooking up and there's no commitment, there's no relationship out of it. So the people who are having sex, like don't seem to be in committed relationships, like previous generations were, they're in this kind of weird stage where you're not exclusive but you're having sex. And I think that is like a big cause of anxiety team relationship problems is that there doesn't seem to be boundaries anymore with that. And why is that the case? What is the underlying driver that's encouraging both sex positivity and risk aversion at the same time?

1:17:21Like I don't understand what the current is. Well, it seems to be this paradox in so many areas of young women's lives. So like you said there's the risk of version in the sex positivity. Then there's also the self -love and body positivity and the body dysmorphia and the eating disorders. And there's also like, you know, I'm a feminist, empowered woman who doesn't care, but also I have crippling anxiety and depression. And there seems to be so many paradoxes going on. And I think it's because a lot of the narratives are like a front for how we're actually feeling like a defense mechanism. them.

1:17:57So there's a lot of people talking about sex positivity and how casual sex is empowering, but there's also a lot of people saying they're stuck in situations, they can't get a guide to commit. They don't want to commit, you know, they're having all kinds of doubts and thinking of all kinds of red flags of reasons not to commit. So I think like the louder we get about sex positivity, the louder we get about anything really, in modern life, it seems to be that deep down the opposite is true. There's real pain and there's real confusion. But yeah, it seems to be a way of dealing with it. There's definitely the paradoxes I think exist because people are performing this performative empathy toxic compassion thing causes where you want to thread the needle to intersect two Venn diagrams sometimes, right?

1:18:51Like, I don't want to kink shame and women can have sex the same as men do, and also, like, I, you should be afraid of all of the things that exist on the internet and all of the things that can happen in real life and here's red flags because he's come up to you in the gym. Like, that sometimes that needle gets threaded between the two because people aren't actually doing the sense -making for themselves that outsourcing it to people on the internet. And this person over here, the guys shouldn't approach girls in the gym person. Also, there's one cohort, okay, I believe that thing. Yeah. And if I don't believe that thing, I think that thing or I've seen that thing.

1:19:26And then you've got the other side, which is the Donk King shame me, you can sleep with them and not catch feels, I listen to Alex Cooper. And, you know, those things come together. Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. And I think it's one of those things where people, it's like they've not thought through the consequences of it. So there'll be, for example, there's like a lot of feminists who push kind of commodifying herself and selling herself online as fun and like risk -free and empowering. But then if they saw like a 13 -year -old copying that behavior, they would be absolutely horrified. So they know that when they're saying it's fun and risk -free and there's nothing wrong with it, they know that there is something about it that you shouldn't be sharing with young girls without warnings of the risks and the dangers, but they continue to do it and sell it that way.

1:20:20So I think a lot of the time what people are pushing and celebrating, they know there's dark sides to it or they know there's dangers, but they keep pushing and celebrating it to kind of justify that and it's like a defense mechanism.

1:20:39Talk to me about the So Adele got divorced and it was like a big... Did she, in my world, she only just got married? No, she got married very young and she got divorced. And she made it kind of like her personal brand. So like, she, I pretty sure she was selling divorce to merchandise at her concerts. What does that consist of? I think it was necklaces saying divorced. I'm pretty sure and her catchphrase was like divorce, be able or something. And to be fair to her, like a lot of fans were pushing it as well, like it was her divorce album, so they were like loving it. And I'd noticed as well, like mainstream magazines and publications also glamorizing divorce, so like the New York Times called it a Radicouactive Self Love.

1:21:30and the vote was saying this Valentine's Day lets celebrate divorce. And yeah, with the Guardian was talking about the joy of divorce parties. They spoke about it recently as well. Joy of divorce parties. Yeah, so to celebrate your divorce with your loved ones. So I'd seen all of this stuff in culture that was not just kind of saying you know, don't shame people for getting divorced. It was saying like that's actively celebrated. And I think it's the same thing again. It's like a defense mechanism because we all know intuitively and through the data that, you know, divorce is devastating for children and families by almost every metric.

1:22:14And yet to kind of deal with that, again, we're getting louder and louder about the joys of divorce and how it's self -love and it's empowering. And I think the only way to explain that is it's it's like a topic that's so close to home that's so like difficult to confront that the only way to handle it is to kind of wrap it up in this language and pretend that you know we're all celebrating it. But I've seen that so much and it's also interesting that it's never mentioned as like a factor in Gen Z's mental health. Family breakdown is just, if you look at the academic essays, if you look at mainstream media commentators trying to figure it out, it's never divorced, it's never, you know, maybe this, there could be a part to play that, you know, one in three Gen Z, see their parents split by the time they're 16 in the UK.

1:23:08That's never mentioned. It's always, again the climate crisis or the housing ladder or whatever it is. How much of a big role do you think are how instrumental are broken families and single -parent households? How much of Gen Z's problems are downstream from that? Well I would say I would say a lot of Gen Z struggle because of that, because we know from research that having divorced parents means that you're more likely to suffer from anxiety, from depression, from eating disorders, self -harm, girls especially seem to have these internalising behaviours when they go through trauma, like family breakdowns, so they'll very often get very anxious and withdraw in words and kind of punish themselves through things like eating disorders or self -harm, which we're seeing like on mass now.

1:24:05So it's not to say that I think like family breakdown causes all of Gen Z's mental health problems, but I think everything Gen Z is struggling with is made worse by family breakdown. So for example, if you're like I think social media's terrible for young girls, but I would say it's probably worse if you don't have a family to ground you and you're putting more of yourself worth into these platforms and you're depending on strangers online for that emotional validation that you're not getting from both parents. Same with things like, I'm sure there are some Gen Z who are terrified of climate change, but I'm pretty sure if you don't have a stable family around you and like, you know, a place to develop that resilience in those healthier coping strategies, then you're going to be even more afraid of climate change.

1:24:57So the way I see it is just that family breakdown will be exacerbating all of these problems and not giving girls and boys that kind of grounding to be more resilient to these things. Do you think that progressives make worse parents? I think that the parenting style is popular among progressives. So this new like gentle parenting style, which is very much listening to your child, like validating their emotions and their explanations for things instead of punishment. So having the compassion and the love that parenting need but without the kind of strictness, I think that is worse for parenting and I think there's a lot of research showing that Conservatives are actually much better at disciplining children and actually have better relationships with their children as a result.

1:25:58It's that thing again of like, girls and young women and men, but girls and young women as well need this discipline with the compassion, but society as a whole and some families seem to be just prioritising the compassion and the instant gratification, you know, what looks most loving in the moment, but is not long -term. There was a really interesting book, Life of Dad, by animation, and she came out of Robin Dunbar's lab, think in Oxford, evolutionary anthropologist, and like, ardently pro -women, but when she had her first kid, her husband really suffered his mental health suffered.

1:26:45It was wife and newborn child got wheeled out of the room with ventilators and things attached and all the rest of it. And he was just left there. And she started researching the challenges that fathers face the fact that we all of the attention is on mum, but that dads don't even get prepared with this cascade of hormones that they slept. And obviously the woman's body is the one that goes through it and the hormones and the stress and the health and all the rest of it. Morning signal. No, yeah, obviously, but it's this inability of the modern world to hold to slightly nuanced thoughts in your mind.

1:27:23They're not contradictory. They don't conflict with each other. It's like, hey, having a child can be stressful on both participants, even the one that doesn't have the child inside of their body. Like, that's the level of nuance that we need to get to. But it's such a zero -sum mentality and again, this hyper individualism, this focus on the discomfort fit of the person means that it's very hard to be able to get someone to see that. And she was great. The episode ended with it was super interesting. And yeah, I wonder, there was some really cool stuff about how we often hear about the negative outcomes for males when they grow up in a fatherless household because the kind of externalizing behavior that then do when they grow up is, you know, they burn down car.

1:28:16They burn the secars on firing, do anti social behavior or getting involved in gang culture or find surrogate fathers that aren't good for them or whatever. But it's not good for girls either. It's very, very important. There's some really worrying sociosexual adjustments that girls who grow up without father have that they seem to chase male validation in a different kind of way, particularly formative during their teenagers to have a father around. I can't remember why that was, but you just so many things. And again, the main reason is, well, if you say this, you are implicitly derogating the hardworking single mothers that are trying to build a family on their own.

1:29:09And we need to be inclusive, especially to the people who are the ones that are suffering the most in life, which means that this conversation and the insights of it are publicly less invoked. Yeah, I think it's this concept of stigma, which obviously comes from somewhere. There's truth in it that there are issues that have stigma attached, but I think there's a fixation with stigma, particularly on the progressive left, that seems to just stop us from being able to have honest conversations about things. So family breakdown is a good example of it. like it's all about the stigma against single mothers, so you can't talk about fathers leaving, or it's the stigma of you know divorced parents, so you can't talk about all the data showing that you know that's not good for children.

1:30:02And I feel like again with the mental health stuff especially this word stigma seems to just block off honest discussions about these issues and it seems to be a way to shut people down and stop them from going any further, where it's like sometimes, you know, this conversation is more important than this idea of societal stigma. You know, it's very important that we talk about the effects of divorce on children. And I think, yeah, constantly bringing that up stops that and makes people afraid to talk about it. There was this idea I learned that I think explains this. It's called a semantic stop sign.

1:30:41One way that people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behavior, but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding but by killing curiosity. Semantic stop sign. I think that's the stigma. Yes, exactly what it is. It stops. Is a semantic stop sign? stops any kind of further analysis, you know, like, okay, we can't go any further because it's now stigmatizing. Which I think, you know, for so many issues, this idea of stigma stops us from actually getting to the root of the mental health crisis.

1:31:26What's the role of mainstream feminism here then? Like how does that fold into, like what's happening? What are they supposed to be? What are they spending their time doing? I feel like, you know, the feminism I grew up seeing and, you know, I, I've not read all the feminist literature, but I can just go off of what I have grown up with and what I associate it with. And what I associate managing feminism with is very much selling me things. It's like almost like a marketing strategy because it feels like whenever I hear about feminism or empowerment, it's like some kind of product or service or procedure that's being sold to me or it's a lifestyle that's very much materialistic and consumerist in some way.

1:32:18So that's like my interpretation of feminism now because that's what I'm seeing. So I feel like it's been co -opted by corporations and this version that Gen Z are growing up with the the thing that that feminism kind of tells you to value, again, is money, is, you know, working for a corporation, it's kind of all of these values that are very, very convenient for companies and industries. That's definitely what I associate it with, unfortunately. Well, that's how powerful the patriarchy is. We've convinced women that not only do they need to be the homemaker but also that they can go to work and be the bread winner while we get to stay at home and play Xbox.

1:33:03Yes, exactly. It's worked out well for you. It's worked out incredibly well. What are you working on next? What's coming up? Well, I've just written an article actually about what we were talking about about stopping opening up about mental health online. So that's, yeah, kind of saying, you know, we need to stop swinging too far to the extreme. we need to stop, you know, telling young people it's their duty to open up and trying to backtrack on some of this. So I think my focus at the moment is mental health culture and the industry that's developing around it because I think, like I said, I think there's a genuine mental health crisis, but I think a lot of it is the way young people are being taught to think about their mental health and to talk about it has just gone way too far in the wrong direction.

1:33:52Do you follow C -Rut Traveller on Instagram. She's fucking fantastic. She was on the show. She'd had three hours sleep because she'd gone down some Netflix rabbit hole the night before, but she's so she's so great and she's very sort of on apologetic. She's a tough love. She's a good woman. I'm a role model. That's what we mean. She's a tough love. She's like the psychotherapist, female psychotherapist, David Goggins. very anti -codal culture, very anti -victim heard. Yeah, that's cool. Look, Freya, I'm really, really impressed with you. I think that your work's fantastic. I think that the next few years has got huge things in store.

1:34:29You're part of the based British women squad with Louise. It's me that came up with it. But then Mary is in it, Louise is in it. I think kind of Helen Lewis is in it a little bit. Nina Powers in it. the problem that we found was that base British women shortens as an acronym to BBW, which is a type of porn. So we need to come up with a new name. I thought like IDW, base British women, base British women's cool, but BBW is maybe a little, we might be fighting up, fighting uphill with that. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of this stuff? So mostly my substack, so that's freerindia .co .uk.

1:35:13It's called Girls, so I'm publishing most of my articles on there. And also Twitter is freerindia, but I have no other social media because it's terrible. Well played, Freer, I really appreciate you. Thank you.