You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and this is Nadia Dalamante's interview with the director, producer, and creator of the FX documentary series Social Studies, Lauren Greenfield. Social media is kind of like the only way to communicate. It's the only way you feel connected to anyone. I could be myself. I need a perfect body. I can't get rid of it. She was bullied. That makes you want to beat up somebody.

It doesn't really end.

It becomes everything.

Everything.

I always wanted to do this.

I hope to document the first

I hope to document the first generation that had grown up with social media their entire lives.

Teenagers from Los Angeles agreed to share their private accounts and their digital experiences.

School is starting.

Well, Lauren, thank you so much for being here to discuss social studies.

It's a pleasure to have you on.

Thanks for having me. So in the series, you documented the first generation of kids that grew up

without social media, their whole lives. With social media, their whole lives, yes. I'm thinking

of myself here. Because when I watched it, I felt a level of fear far greater than in most horror movies that I've seen because social media has a terrifying impact on kids who don't know a world without it.

And, you know, as a 90s kid when social media wasn't around, it was very enlightening to see such an in-depth, candid look at the pressure that teens are facing online right now and how their identities are being shaped in real time.

And I wanted to start by asking, when did you first become aware of the dangers of social media?

And if there was a particular moment that you can pinpoint in recognizing the severity

of it. Yeah, I think it was really during the pandemic. When I started thinking about it during the

pandemic, I had two teenagers myself, one who was 14 and one who was 20. And I saw a big difference in

them. My eldest was a reader, would just go, you know, read a book for like five hours, my youngest.

We would have constant battles about screen time and he got all his news from TikTok.

And all of this kind of amplified during the pandemic when young people were on screens all day long.

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