Derek Thompson

Maybe it was antibacterial drugs that reduced the mortality rate of giving birth over here.

Maybe it was household...

equipment, household electronics that might have made it more efficient to take care of a home.

Maybe it's this, maybe it's that.

No one has a full skeleton key.

But what you can't debate is it was a cultural phenomenon.

You look at advertising for the 1940s, 1950s.

It's incredibly, it seems incredibly reactionary today.

But this idea that the highest expression of being a woman in America was being a housewife

or this incredibly popular notion that you should, of course, have two, three, four kids.

This is what a good American household does, just seems to have emerged and then was quelched in the 1960s, 1970s.

I'm so interested in how these things happen, right?

How these paroxysms of cultural revolutions happen.

And it seems to me like we're in the middle of one right now with a smartphone.

where the evidence is just so clear that it's changing our mental health, it's changing our ability to focus, it's changing our test scores in verbal and mathematics.

It might even, to your point, be changing our personality, making us less conscientious, less agreeable, less extroverted.

But these things are very, very, very hard to turn around.

And so that's why I'm glad that you're out there like popularizing the potential risks of the way that we're living.

Because I do think that's how it has to start, right?

The flood has to start with a little trickle.