 And one of the things that's fascinating though, is that at the state level, when places like Florida have said, okay, we're gonna ban certain types of social media practices, that does get in the way of a libertarian idea. It's like my kids, and I should be able to raise them the way that I want. One of the big proposal that you have is age gating, is changing the age, the minimum age, raising it, under which kids can't have access to social media. Talk about that and how does that, you know, is that just, okay, this is a difference with libertarian ideas? So this is the one place where I think I do have conflict with libertarians. And I wanna talk about it because, you know, I'm best friends with Greg Lukianoff, I have, you know, a lot of libertarian sympathies. Yeah, and if we, I mean, you're the co-author of, with Greg of the Coddling of the American Mind, who on his sub-stack wrote a critique, or his concern, his first amendment concerns with some of your policy proposals. And he writes to paraphrase an old adage, it is unfair to deny a man a stake because a baby can't chew it. Let's see, it's unfair to deny a man a stake because a baby can't chew it. Okay. And he's saying that one size fits all, government bans are one size fits all, he writes. That means those kids who benefit from social media, and there are plenty of them, would be out of luck. Parents know their kids better than anyone, let them, not the government, make the decisions about what media they consume. How do you respond to that? So let's talk about, let's talk about age-gating. So first, I would ask you or him or anyone else. So let's start with pornography, strip clubs and casinos. So let's talk about things that either involve sex or addiction. Let's also bring in alcohol, nicotine. So all these things, when there is especially sex, let's focus on sex or addiction. In the real world, we've largely said, you know what, adults wanna do these things, they're really harmful for kids, we're not ready to make these decisions and their brains are developing. So in the real world, we've worked out all kinds of ways where adults can do what they want and sometimes there's a little inconvenience. So when I was in high school, we could buy cigarettes from vending machines. But then they realized, you know what, we have to stop that. And now people wanna smoke, they have to actually pull out their driver's license and show it and then they get their cigarettes. That's an inconvenience, I understand that. But in the real world, we've found ways to do that. We're only 10 or 25 years in, however you wanna count it, into the internet age. I really consider it really, the early 2010s is when the current internet age really began. So this is all very new for us. And so far we've done nothing. There's no protections of any kind. Well, there is parental. Where? I mean, parents either know or they don't know what their kids are doing, right? Because there are controls on all of the social media platforms and all of the devices. Parents either say they can't use them or they don't use them, which is similar to in the 90s when cable TV was being attacked. And we created TVs with V-chips in ways of banning certain channels. And parents didn't use them. That was, okay, well, that's fine. So even when it was simple on one device, parents often didn't use them. And then there would also be differences of education and marriage. There are gonna be all kinds of couples that are gonna be trying to do it. They're all kinds of. So I would put it to you like this. Suppose, I certainly want parents to have control, but here's the thing. Most parents feel they don't have control. Most parents don't want their kids on these things early, but they feel like they can't stop it. So something's going, if you value parental control and consent, you should be very upset with the way things are now. And you should ask for a change that would allow you to have the kind of policies that you want. Because right now very few parents are able to do that. So think about it this way. Suppose 100 years ago when they began to regulate passing laws on alcohol and drugs and all sorts of things. Suppose they said for alcohol, okay, the age is 18, but we can't expect bars and casinos to enforce that. It's up to the parents. Parents, if you don't want your kids being in bars and casinos and strip clubs and other things, you keep them out. Well, that would mean you have to lock your kid up. You cannot let your kid out. Otherwise, you can't stop them. But it's also, if I want to go to a bar, I mean, because the age-getting laws means that everybody has to enter confidential information on a website in order to, well, how else do you do it? And it's not, if I want to go to a bar, I don't have to share my credentials that then get put into a database, which is going to be hacked, et cetera. That's right. Okay, thank you for that, yeah. So I think many people think, first of all, there's a misconception that height wants the government to control everything and wants the government to tell you how to raise your kids. Again, I wrote the book assuming that nothing is gonna happen on the government level that we can do this all ourselves with collective action. The one place where it'd be really, really helpful would be if Congress would raise the age from 13 to 16 and require the platforms to actually share in the policing of it. Now, people assume then that I'm saying, you have to show your driver's license, your government ID in order to open an account. Because we're not talking about logging on to your account. It's only to open an account. That's all. What I'm suggesting is that Congress undo the mistake it made when it said, companies don't have to check age, the age of 13 at which you can give away your data and sign a contract with the company, but the companies don't have to check anything. I want Congress to fix that and not say, as a couple of state bills do, that they have to require a driver's license. I don't want that. I want them to say, and the platform shall offer a menu or a range of options for doing age verification. There are many, many range of things already there. So Clear, the company Clear. Many of us have Clear to go to airports. You can use that to buy a beer at a stadium. You don't need to show an ID, just I don't know whether in that case it's biometrics, but Clear is one way, if you have a Clear account and my kids have Clear accounts, so Clear already is doing it. What's the liability that you would hold companies responsible for if parents sue Instagram and say, my daughter killed herself and she shouldn't have been able to have an account? What happens to, I mean... Well, under the current practice, I think that the parents should be able to sue and the companies have done everything they can, especially Metta. They've done everything they can to get the youngest kids they can. They want to do Instagram for kids. They talked about how do we get five and six-year-olds involved. So Metta I think should be held responsible for what it is done to kids. Now what I'm suggesting is, especially for the underage, what I'm suggesting is, what if Congress were to actually undo the mistake, make it 16, require age verification, but not 100%. We don't expect like, oh, this kid got on, therefore you can sue Metta. But if Metta is doing a reasonably good job of putting in an obstacle, making it harder, then they wouldn't be sued for that. What do you do to the parent who lets their kid on at 13 rather than 16? Do the kids get taken away? What's their liability? So... Well, I mean, because like if your kid was having sex below the age of consent, being a child protective services would come in and be like, what the fuck's going on here? No, no, no. What we're talking, so what I'm really focused on here is not banning an experience. It's what are the laws around signing a contract at which you can give away your family's information and data without your parents knowing or consenting? What did you think that should be? I mean, do you think that any seven, eight year old should be able to just sign a contract with a company and tell them all about what you have in your house without you knowing? Like how can this be the reality that we live in? So I'm not focused on banning an experience. I'm saying at what age do we treat children as adults? And what Senator Markey did when he was in the house and introduced Kappa, he said 16. We've got teenagers dealing with all these new tech companies in the 90s, 16 should be the age, but various libraries, they pushed it down to 13. They gutted enforcement. So now it's essentially nothing. That was a mistake. Let me ask you, what age do you think your kids should have been able to make contracts with companies without you knowing? I have a Gen Z child as well as a millennial and they got social media or they got unfettered access to the internet. At my younger son was probably 10 or 11 and we monitored it though as much as we could. But unless you keep them away from browsers, if he's at someone else's house and they have a browser, he can open accounts on everything. Totally, yeah. But I'm asking you personally, at what age? The way that we dealt with it was, it was not seven or eight, but you talk about it and you check things and you check in with other parents. I mean, I'm not disputing like, I think you're absolutely right and this is one of the real insights of Abigail Shrier's book, which is that, and we forget this, kids are different than adults and they should be treated differently and things that are fine for adults to do are not good for kids to do and all of that. But once you start getting into the nitty gritty of saying, how do you police this and how do you regulate it? It comes back to this question more of social norms and of kind of individual familial or parental kind of enforcement mechanisms more than, I think, overarching legal ones. But that's not the way we dealt with drinking and gambling. But it is kind of, and like I lived in Ohio, no, no, but what I'm saying is that, and that's also up to businesses to do what they want, but if you are with your kids in Ohio, you can, if you're with your family, if you're with your parent or guardian, you can drink at the age of like 15 in a restaurant. So there's a sliding scale and things like that to give away discretion away from families to a government, that's like, that is a big deal. And I'm not saying one is right and wrong, but it is a real difference. Okay, so I appreciate that as a libertarian, you're willing to say that kids are different from adults. And while we both have very libertarian ideas for adults, but we recognize that kids are different. We recognize, I assume you think it's legitimate, do you think, actually, do you think it's legitimate for states to say there's a minimum age to gamble, like in a casino? Or do you think that should be entirely up to the parents? No, I think it's mostly up to the parents, but yeah, I don't lose a lot of sleep over that. And I don't lose sleep over age of consent laws and things like that. Although there are always exceptions, right? Okay, good. So the two exceptions we've already talked about are sex and addiction. So we agree with it. And things that involve sex or addiction, there might be a role for a government to set a minimum age. I wanna add a third category, which is those that by your very action as an individual put pressure on everyone else. That's what we're dealing with. Social media is unlike anything else we've ever dealt with. I'm not convinced of that or to say that having access to Instagram at 14 would lead to a collective action problem or a particular outcome for a kid that I would say, no, nobody can consider that. Now why did you say 14? I'm just saying, well, it could be 13. Okay, no, it can't. It could be 12. It has to be 14. I don't know. No, so, okay, so. I'm just saying it's below 60. Because that's what you wanna make it come up. So let's talk about the Florida bill. Because I think that's actually a very good one. So my second norm is no social media before 16. I think that should just be the norm. It should be supported by age verification. So that's what I'm proposing. Now the Florida bill that DeSantis just signed a couple of weeks ago says originally it was that. It was that you can't, in Florida, you can't open an account. It's not banning experiences saying you can't have this commercial relationship with a company until you're 16. And then there was pushback. And so they added on, now if you're 14 or 15 and you have your parents' consent, then you can do it. So it's like a Romeo and Juliet law for age of consent. Okay, yeah, okay, that's fine. So actually I'm okay with that. And the reason why I'm actually, the reason why I'm okay with it is because that would force the companies to do something they could easily have done long ago but they really don't wanna do, which is establish a way to get parental consent. Right now, you have no, you really can't stop your kid from doing things unless you lock them away and they can't get to the internet. But if they could develop ways by which, if you have an Instagram account or you will do something and you can verify that you're the parent, then you can give permission to your 14 year old, not your 13 year old, because we have to get it out of middle school. It's a collective action problem. We have to get middle schools free of social need entirely. I don't necessarily, let me put it this way. We might agree on this. We need to get rid of middle school. And I don't say that lightly. I mean, or junior high, because it used to be seven, eight, nine. Now it's six, seven, eight. Middle school is a terrible institution. Nobody comes out of middle school. Well, what do you propose? What do you propose we do? You know, maybe it's one through eight. Maybe it's one through eight or you put them in a coma, a medically induced coma for a couple of years. No, but restructuring, yeah. That's very good. But restructuring the educational experience so that you're not hitting puberty in a kind of Lord of the Flies scenario. And we need to be thinking more creatively about that.