Why Gen Z Is Afraid of Rejection: Dating, Therapy Culture & Housing (Ep. 331)

Emma Camp , senior newsletter editor at The Wall Street Journal's Free Expression, joins us to talk about why Gen Z is dating less and spending more time alone, how therapy culture and helicopter parenting can turn growing pains into permanent labels, why the fix for the housing shortage is more housing, and why she invites everyone she's met to every party. She also previews her forthcoming book on Gen Z and risk aversion.

We've shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

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Emma Camp & Jim O'Shaughnessy

• Emma Camp: Senior newsletter editor at Free Expression, The Wall Street Journal's opinion newsletter, and former Reason magazine editor. Read Free Expression
• Emma's breakout essay: Her reflection on the 2022 New York Times op-ed that started her career. After My Big Break
• Jim O'Shaughnessy: Host of Infinite Loops, founder and CEO of O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and author of the New York Times bestseller What Works on Wall Street. Follow Jim on X
• Full transcripts: Transcripts and highlights from every Infinite Loops conversation. OSV newsletter

Books & Ideas Mentioned

• The Grim Old Days by Chelsea Follett: Emma's reference for how hard life was for the average person before modern markets. Chelsea Follett
• The Genius of the Beast by Howard Bloom: Jim's reference for what capitalism achieved that earlier systems couldn't. The Genius of the Beast
• Jefferson Literary and Debating Society: The University of Virginia society where Emma threw a party every Friday. Jefferson Society
• Partiful: The app Emma uses to invite everyone to every party. Partiful
• Sally Rooney: The novelist Emma writes about in her essays on modern relationships. Sally Rooney
• Attachment theory: Emma's frame for why a secure marriage lets her take more social risks. Attachment theory
• NAR 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers: The data on first-time buyers reaching a record median age of 40. Coverage

I am concerned by the increasing popularity of socialism across all groups of people in America, but especially younger people, because I think what's happened here is that a lot of up-and-coming socialists are very good communicators, and they're very good at offering kind of simple, utopian-seeming solutions to what are often very real problems. The issue is that the solutions they're offering, we know, will just make the problem worse. So something like housing is a great example. It is 100% true that we have a housing shortage. We have a huge housing shortage in this country. It is way too expensive to be able to rent an apartment. So many young people can't afford to move out of their parents' houses, definitely can't afford to buy a home of their own.

The average age of first-time home ownership is inching higher and higher. And housing is one of the biggest purchases that people make. It is this huge problem if you can't afford a place to live. And the socialist answer is: the reason why we have this problem is because of greed. It's because of greedy landlords, it's because of greedy developers. And what we need to do is stop them from charging you so much, and then you'll be able to afford a place to live. When of course the problem is a housing shortage. And so you can artificially lower the prices as much as you want and you will not solve the underlying problem that we have, you know, nine houses for every 10 people or whatever the number is. That cannot erase the shortage.

And the solution is to build more housing. And on that rent control video, where I was sort of making this very basic Econ 101 argument, I saw people in the comments who were like, "Oh, what? So you want us to choose the interests of big companies over people?" And I'm like, okay, so who builds houses? If we need to build more housing, yes, we need to make the environment friendly for the companies who build housing. The people who build housing are housing developers. And if your primary interest is doing whatever will screw over housing developers, you will not get more housing. And so in this case, the interests of housing developers are the same as the interests of American people who need more affordable housing.

And so if your primary goal is just making big businesses angry because you have the sense that wealth is bad, you end up creating environments that hurt less wealthy people.

Emma Camp
Flaking is a scourge. People should be put in the stocks for flaking, in my view. And this goes back to... I think it's a combination of social risk aversion and this sort of therapy culture belief that you don't owe anything to anybody, and your primary duty is to yourself, and doing what protects your peace and makes yourself happy.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Very narcissistic.

Emma Camp
Which I think at its extremes it can be. But I think it is this sort of reflection of: you don't need a good reason to do what you want to do. And I think that's so backwards, because you have a duty to other people. And if you tell someone you're going to be there for them, you go. Unless you are literally running a 102-degree fever, you have to go. And all the time... So last night, my husband and I went out with another couple that we're friends with, and we've been trying to find a date for us to go out together for a long time. And I got back from work and I was like, "I am so tired. I just kind of want to take a shower and curl up on the couch and watch Slow Horses for three hours." But…

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Great show

Emma Camp
I promised. Fantastic show. But we said we would do this. It would be a grievous social crime for me to cancel all these people at the last minute, even though I don't really want to go because I'm exhausted. I'll go. So I got dressed, got back on the subway, and went out, and we had a great time. This is often the thing that people do not realise: the you before the social event is not the same you that's at the social event.

Every single time, I'm like, "Oh, I can't believe I agreed to do this thing after work, I'm so tired." And I actually get there, I have a great time, and I'm so glad I went. And I'm like, "That was great. That was lovely." So that, I think, is something important for people to remember.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Emma, welcome to Infinite Loops . When I saw your video on rent control not being the greatest thing in the world, I was fascinated for a couple of reasons. Like, as an old... that is sort of like saying the sky is blue, or a variety of those things. But essentially you blew up with that video. But you're primarily a writer, would you say, or...

Emma Camp
Yeah, yeah, I would definitely say that.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Which do you enjoy more?

Emma Camp
I enjoy writing more. Writing is the only thing I've ever been really good at. It's the only thing I've ever really wanted to do. I have the very stereotypical writer background, which is, like, I was scribbling stories in notebooks when I was eight years old, but that's just 100% true. I went to a public fine arts magnet school in Alabama for creative writing. It was like LaGuardia, but in Alabama. I was an English major. It's just what I've done. But as it turns out, I'm pretty good at making videos. I guess some years of community theatre paid off. I don't know. I just have the right vibe on camera, I guess. And I do enjoy... So with writing, I'm often thinking about exploring ideas in a very deep, rich way.

And videos, I feel like, use the other side of my argumentative brain, which is: how can I make a point as simply as possible? And I have a minute to do it, but really I have half a second to do it, because if you don't get the hook right, people just keep scrolling.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So what has the reaction been like? And by kind of generation... I mentioned, I saw it and I'm like, well, duh. But was your generation more shocked, or "Really? I didn't know that"?

Emma Camp
I don't know. I can't really tell how old people are based on their very tiny profile photos. I'm not taking stock of this. So I think there are some generational stereotypes, which is people who are old enough to remember the Cold War and remember how awful communism was, or, like, "Yes, obviously Soviet-style controlling of our economy, having these super intense rent control regimes, obviously that's not going to work, because it never works." And I think for younger people, there can be a tendency to assume that this just hasn't been tried yet, and to sort of forget the lessons of the past, which is: no, we did try it and it didn't work.

And I think there's just some partisan sorting as well, where it's sort of a left-coded thing to be in support of rent control now. And young people are slightly more left-leaning. So there's a little bit of that. But I don't know, this sounds strange to say, but I found that for me, doing the work that I do, it makes the most sense for me to just do my thing and put it out there and not have Twitter on my phone and not really think that much about how people are reacting to it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You know, you bring up politics, and I mentioned, I read all your work, and you seem to me to be a very well-grounded, philosophical, highly literate person.

Emma Camp
Thank you.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And you wrote, I think your article was called "The Manosphere," and it was about the various political divides. And I've always thought, you know, it's a circle, right? When you go further and further to the extreme part, you go from socialism to communism and then you get to fascism, and it's more of a circle. And you know, the old left-right distinctions, as you probably know, come from France. Before the revolution, the supporters of the king sat on the right and the supporters of the revolution sat on the left. And I think that labels are dangerous because, was it Wittgenstein? "When you label me, you negate me." And I think that those old labels probably don't work anymore. What would you think about newer labels like control versus freedom?

Emma Camp
Yeah, I don't like to label myself. This is often something I'm asked. I don't like labels because I think when you adopt a label, you implicitly sign on to this slate of viewpoints on different policy issues. And there are some labels where I agree with more of the stock policy positions than others, but none enough that I feel comfortable enough to hitch my wagon to that ideology. And I agree with you. I think the left-right dichotomy is not useful for people with a more sort of civil libertarian orientation. There you go, using labels. It is very small-l libertarian of me to think of it this way, but I think it's so much more revealing where someone is on the authoritarian versus... control versus freedom axis than the left-right axis, because it fundamentally is a personality feature.

I think people kind of have either authoritarian personalities or small-l libertarian personalities, moderate personalities. Are you the kind of person who has whatever set of beliefs you have and thinks that the government really should try to coerce people into living your prescribed best life for them? Or are you the kind of person who's willing to live and let live, and not have the government control people's lives as much? And so because of that, I think people on the centre left and centre right have far more in common than they do with the extreme fringes of their, quote unquote, sides.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, I think that the average American is kind of a go-along-to-get-along type person. And I always look at New York as not real America. At my old firm, I was in asset management, and every time I would have to travel, I would say to my wife, "I'm going to real America." And the differences were pretty profound. I mean, places like Mississippi, Alabama, I met the nicest people, who I really didn't expect to like because, you know, I was steeped in New York and all of the ways that New York thinks and does things. Have you found that, moving first to DC and then New York City?

Emma Camp
Yeah, I think I disagree with you a little bit that New York isn't real America. I think every part of America is just as real as any other part of America. And being from... I'm from Alabama. I'm from kind of a smallish exurban town outside of Birmingham. The people I grew up around are just as real as the people in New York. And sometimes for me, maybe this shows that I'm in this sort of murky, not super politically categorisable area, but this sort of more conservative, very MAGA kind of stock person that you find in Alabama, I find their worldview just as baffling in many ways as the most strident Mamdani socialist. I don't really feel fully at home in either place.

And I think they are just as legitimate and just as batty in their own ways. I mean, red-state-level politics are just as crazy as New York City-level volunteers.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I've always thought that if you could imply all of my beliefs from hearing one of them, then I am brain dead, and I have succumbed to the party line. And that is the thing that really concerns me, as one who lived in a different world, pre-internet, et cetera. And maybe it was the Cold War, but the parties, there wasn't really an ounce of difference between them on Cold War strategy. But when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviets fell, we started to see this parting of the ways. What do you think? If I was going to say... and again, here we go, labelling... but younger people versus older people. In your piece you were talking about the different political opinions of older people versus younger people. Talk a bit about that in terms of...

Emma Camp
I mean, it's very hard to make broad generalisations about groups with millions of people. I think there is somewhat of a misconception that younger men are more right-wing than... you know, Gen Z men are more right-wing than millennial men or even boomer men, depending on who you ask. As far as I've been able to tell, looking at a couple of surveys, younger men are more left-wing than older men, in the same way that younger women are more left-wing than older women, generally speaking. It shouldn't be surprising that younger people are slightly more left-wing than older people. This matches with our long-standing cultural stereotypes. So in many ways that's good news, because it's like, okay, this current cohort of young people is not unique. They're sort of like all other humans before them.

I am concerned by the increasing popularity of socialism across all groups of people in America, but especially younger people, because I think what's happened here is that a lot of up-and-coming socialists are very good communicators, and they're very good at offering kind of simple, utopian-seeming solutions to what are often very real problems. The issue is that the solutions they're offering, we know, will just make the problem worse. So something like housing is a great example. It is 100% true that we have a housing shortage. We have a huge housing shortage in this country. It is way too expensive to be able to rent an apartment. So many young people can't afford to move out of their parents' houses, definitely can't afford to buy a home of their own.

The average age of first-time home ownership is inching higher and higher. And housing is one of the biggest purchases that people make. It is this huge problem if you can't afford a place to live. And the socialist answer is: the reason why we have this problem is because of greed. It's because of greedy landlords, it's because of greedy developers. And what we need to do is stop them from charging you so much, and then you'll be able to afford a place to live. When of course the problem is a housing shortage. And so you can artificially lower the prices as much as you want and you will not solve the underlying problem that we have, you know, nine houses for every 10 people or whatever the number is. That cannot erase the shortage.

And the solution is to build more housing. And on that rent control video, where I was sort of making this very basic Econ 101 argument, I saw people in the comments who were like, "Oh, what? So you want us to choose the interests of big companies over people?" And I'm like, okay, so who builds houses? If we need to build more housing, yes, we need to make the environment friendly for the companies who build housing. The people who build housing are housing developers. And if your primary interest is doing whatever will screw over housing developers, you will not get more housing. And so in this case, the interests of housing developers are the same as the interests of American people who need more affordable housing.

And so if your primary goal is just making big businesses angry because you have the sense that wealth is bad, you end up creating environments that hurt less wealthy people.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And let's drill down on the "wealth is bad," right? The real quote is "the love of money is the root of all evil," not "money is the root of all evil." Are these educational issues? Are these societal issues? Are these... I mean, if I was going to appoint you the czar of more housing, obviously, I think I know what you'd do, but how would you communicate that? Because what I love about you is your communication style. When I watched your video, I'm just like, oh, she's going to be a big star. Because you really... That was 60 seconds. How long was it?

Emma Camp
A minute and a half.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I watched it on Twitter and I'm like, finally. So on the one hand, some people say, well, presentation, that's meaningless. I think in our era, it's kind of everything. So what would you build out to persuade people, not to just say, obviously, the big developers are going to be the ones to build that housing? What would you think about... take me through you blocking out a video on trying to persuade people this is really the solution.

Emma Camp
I mean, I think I would do that same kind of basic, logical argument, because I like to think that people can be persuaded with facts, certainly with kind of intuitive arguments. And so this is why I presented the rent control issue by focusing on the housing shortage, because I think everybody can understand, okay, if we literally do not have enough apartments for the number of people who want to live in New York City, that's going to cause issues. And I don't even have to bust out a supply and demand graph for people to intuitively get that. It's like, okay, we need to build more housing, and going from there. You can make a more nuanced argument, because sometimes people say, "Oh, well, why doesn't the government build housing?"

It's like, well, when the government attempts to build housing, it takes way longer and it costs way more than when the private sector builds housing. Largely because when the government gets money involved in things, then the unions get involved, and legislators can place these really stringent requirements on the apartments built with public money. And so it just ends up costing much more, because there are all of these regulatory hurdles that private sector builders don't have to face.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Right, right.

Emma Camp
There's also that. And if our primary goal is fixing the housing shortage, we should focus on allowing housing to be built as quickly as possible. And that also means getting rid of some regulations that make it hard to do that, whether that's height limits or single... or having... I'm not being the most articulate right now, but you can only build an apartment of a certain number of floors if you're going to have one stairwell, which is sort of a fire safety requirement. But it ends up keeping a bunch of houses from being built that would have been built otherwise. On and on and on. And it's like, this is how... if the core problem is the housing shortage, here's how we build as much housing as quickly as possible, and hopefully that would work.

And I think to your earlier point, it feels very counterintuitive oftentimes to make a moral case for why rich people should be allowed to exist. Even just saying that, I realise that people are like, "What is wrong with this person? She just loves billionaires." And I don't have this particularly romantic view of the ultra wealthy. But the thing is, when we have free markets in which people are incentivised by the possibility of getting wealthy to technologically innovate, to make better products... I mean, take something like Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos isn't so... well, let me go back a little bit. I think this comes from a fixed-pie mentality.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yes. I completely agree.

Emma Camp
This idea that someone has more than someone else, it's because they took more than their fair share, when in reality, oftentimes someone has more than someone else because they made the pie bigger for everyone. So Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos is incredibly wealthy, but he created a product that people love. Most Americans are Amazon Prime subscribers. I love that if I need something, I can press a couple buttons on my phone and it'll show up at my door the next day, cheaply, and I didn't have to go to the store. There's a lot of sort of consternation about whether Amazon is bad or not. But people, voting with their behaviour, love Amazon. And if Jeff Bezos could not have gotten wealthy from that, he wouldn't have created this product.

And so I would much rather live in a world like America where, yes, there is increasing inequality, but the floor for people's income is also getting higher. So I would much rather live in a world in which the rich are richer and the poor are also richer than live in a world in which there is less inequality, the rich are poorer, but the poor are also poorer. And I think a lot of leftists make these sort of equality-based arguments. They focus on inequality to hide the fact that free markets have actually improved the lives for the worst-off Americans.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And, you know, equality, right? So equality of opportunity is one thing; equality of outcome, same word, right? But the equality of outcome, we've seen, we have hundreds of years, thousands really, if you look at the kings too, of that not being the case. I mean, literally, for most of human history, the average conditions for the average human have been horrible. They've been atrocious.

Emma Camp
Oh, absolutely. I was just starting to read... I got an early copy of... a Cato fellow wrote a book called the... I think it's called The Bad Old Days .

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, no, I had her on the podcast. Yeah.

Emma Camp
Oh, amazing. Well, I was starting to read that book on my e-reader, my cheaply produced e-reader the size of a credit card, on the subway here. And yeah, she talks about how atrocious the lives of the average person used to be. And this is why I'm so passionate about free markets, at a time where so few people are, because I'm an optimist. When you look at how, 100 years ago, even the life of the average person on earth, even the life of the average American, was just horrendous, when you compare it to today... I mean, when you look at how the vast, vast majority of people lived in crushing, menial poverty, and very few humans today live at that level of poverty.

How did we go from 95% of all humans living in, you know, $2-a-day-level poverty to something like 15 or 20%? Free markets, technological innovation. That's how we... huge advancements in medicine, that's how we got there. And if we've done it before, then we can use those same tools to do it again and continue improving people's lives.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Howard Bloom, in his book on helping capitalism with better PR... actually, it's a very thoughtful book about how to reorient people around capitalism. But in the beginning of his book, he essentially says every major religion, everyone promised the promised land of milk and honey. And he goes, "I don't care which religion you look at." And we've had them for a millennium, and we got nothing. We got the case that you just made, everyone living in crushing poverty, et cetera. And then he goes, capitalism did in 300 years what none of these religions that ruled for thousands could achieve.

Emma Camp
Well, okay, I'm going to push back against that, because I'm not sure that major religions are promising prosperity in your earthly life, right? I know most about Christianity, because I am a Christian. But the promises are not that if you follow Jesus, you'll be super rich, right?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Unless you're a megachurch pastor...

Emma Camp
Right? Right. Maybe. Maybe some. Maybe something. But it's that if you follow Jesus, you'll have paradise in the next life, right? It's about how do you come to terms with the suffering that you experience here on earth.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
But let's talk about that for a minute. Because religious beliefs are, by their very nature, unfalsifiable, right? "Trust me, you're going to have the best life after this one." We can't test that, et cetera. And then you see this religious attitude working its way into politics, right? By that, I mean, they're appealing to emotion, to...

Emma Camp
I don't think that's unique to religion, though. I just think that's a feature of ideology.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I agree. Right, right. But in the old days, when the Pope ruled all of Europe with an iron fist, it was only because he was vain that we got the printing press. If you look into the history of the printing press, he made beautiful Bibles, enjewelled, and basically bribed the Pope, because he knew the Pope was vain about having to wear glasses when he gave his sermon. So what did Gutenberg do? He made the Pope a Bible with letters that were this big, so he didn't have to wear the glasses. And so he got the Church's authority for the printing presses, and they didn't know what they were unleashing.

Emma Camp
I mean, people respond to incentives.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Exactly, right. And so my point is more along the lines of: I worry when people lose context, right? And by that, I mean, I have a lot of context because I'm 66 and I lived through a lot of that Cold War stuff, and I literally watched them tear down the Berlin Wall. And very familiar with the photos of the people, the guard jumping over to escape to freedom, et cetera. And so I worry that the younger generation, not having the context of that... here we're going to go... I don't know if you're a fan of True Detective , but "life is a flat circle," and we just seem to be going around and around again and again. Eternal recurrence, to good old Nietzsche.

Emma Camp
Yeah. I'm both someone who is concerned for my generation, if I can make such a broad claim as that, and I'm also sceptical of pronouncements that are too dire, that are too "these are going to be the people that ruin everything," those kind of pronouncements. I think the sliver of this that I will agree with you on is that I think there's a lot of reflexive anti-Americanism on the left broadly, but I think especially popular with sort of the young people most likely to be socialists. And I think some of that comes from the "wow, the Iraq war was bad, the Iran war is bad," sort of somewhat reasonable pushback against certain policy that we've had.

But I think the problem is when reasonable scepticism of America's choices becomes this belief that, okay, well, if it says that America's bad, then it must be true. It almost becomes this conspiracy-level thinking of: everything that I hear that's good about America is bad, evil imperialist propaganda, and everything that I hear criticising America must be true, because it's the secret truth that they won't tell you. And that, I think, is how you end up with young people who are smart enough to know better full-throatedly endorsing terrorist groups. It's how you get... there was a trend a couple years ago. I don't think this is representative of young people, but it was crazy that this even happened, of people reading Osama bin Laden's letter explaining his hatred of America, being like, "Oh my gosh, guys, he's so right, America's bad."

Leaving out the sentences where he's like, "And also America needs to be destroyed because of gay people and Jews." In the same way that it's reasonable to criticise brain-dead reflexive patriotism that does not consider critically things that our nation has done, it is equally ridiculous to have this brain-dead anti-patriotism. And in some ways they're both equally destructive.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
But again, it requires so much nuance, right? Because I think the short-form videos... your longer works allow you to elaborate much more. Another one of the things you talk about a lot, which I really resonate with, is that it seems that risk aversion is rampant.

Emma Camp
Yes. I will talk about this, because I have a book about it coming out.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I know. I think you're really onto something there.

Emma Camp
Thank you. So when you look at all of these kind of discrete trends among people in their twenties, who's mostly what I'm thinking about when I say Gen Z, because teenagers are a whole other ball game and most Gen Zers are adults... I think, to continue rambling in my preface, a lot of people say Gen Z when they mean 14-year-olds.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's actually Alpha.

Emma Camp
But the actual age band is basically people who are like 29 to like 17.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, you're grown up.

Emma Camp
It's mostly teenagers at this point. Or sorry, mostly young adults at this point. But you look at these discrete trends: people are dating way less, people are spending way more time alone. People aren't getting married as much. People aren't drinking as much. What unites... everybody is using AI therapists, everybody is self-diagnosing themselves with ADHD. What unites them, these trends? And I was thinking about this and it was like: it's social risk aversion. I think people are afraid of rejection. They're afraid of being perceived as weird, as cringeworthy. They're afraid of being judged by other people.

I don't want to blame too much of it on the phones, because I think that's far too simplistic. But the threat of anything embarrassing you might do can be recorded, whether that's you send a girl some messages on Tinder and she thinks they're stupid and she takes screenshots of them and she posts about them on Instagram, or even just sends them to her friends, or something dumb you do at a party, there's a photo taken of it. Or even something like you go to a college party and you're 18 and you're drinking and someone takes a video or a photo of it, and then you get kicked off the track and field team or whatever it is. This kind of digital panopticon, I think, causes people to sort of put their hackles up.

And I think this kind of temperamental trepidation is keeping people from living rich, full, connected lives. If you're so afraid that someone will think you're weird if you invite them to the party you're going to have, or if you ask them to get lunch with you, it ends up meaning that you don't take the opportunities for connection. And of course, most people aren't actually walking around with this ready-to-judge view of other people. This was something I had to overcome, where I would be like, "Oh, I want to invite this person to this party, but, well, they'll think I'm being overly eager." And it took somebody, I think maybe it was my boss at Reason , Katherine Mangu-Ward, who was like, "Emma, people love getting invited to parties. Even if they can't go, no one's ever going to be like, 'Gosh, I can't believe she invited me to that party. What a loser.'" Actually, yeah, you're right. And now I invite everyone I've ever met to every party I throw, and the vast majority of them do not come. And that's okay. I still get pretty good numbers. I'm more than willing to invite 150 people to a party, because it means I get 30 that show up. And a 30-person party is pretty good.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And I love the fact that you're doing that. And that's one way. But parenthetically, what you're speaking about, the panopticon, is very true. If social media was around when I was a teenager, permanently cancelled, because... obviously no phones, no internet, nothing. So we got up to a lot of pretty crazy stuff. And because we couldn't intermediate through screens, right, we did everything in person. How did you find your friend? Well, you drove over to his house. If he didn't answer the phone, you asked his parents, "Hey, where's Greg?" And then you went there, and then you finally found your group. But I love the idea that you're doing a lot of the throwing of parties, because that was the norm for all of human history.

And then the pandemic came along and we get, "I don't want to go to that party. I might say something stupid," or whatever. Have you ever had a party that just bombed?

Emma Camp
I'm going to say, well, yes and no. So my party-throwing journey started when I was in my fourth year at UVA. So this would have been right after the pandemic, fall 2021, spring 2022. And I was in a literary and debating society called the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. It just celebrated its bicentennial. Oldest student organisation at UVA. It's awesome. And it was founded in a Lawn room at UVA, which are these 1820s dorm rooms designed by Thomas Jefferson himself. It's very cool. Very cool. And so the society had an endowed room, and they could basically place someone in this room. And so I was selected to be that person.

And part of the deal, it's like, okay, you don't have to pay rent, but in exchange you have to throw a party every Friday during the meeting, so people can drink during the meeting, which they can't do because technically the room that we meet in is university property. There's some reason why we couldn't have alcohol in there. And so I had to throw a party every Friday from 5pm to 2am, and I did that. And I got the cheapest booze money could buy. Kroger had a four-for-$3 two-litre store-brand soda deal. So I got a lot of Dr. K, a lot of Citrus Mist-type fake sodas.

And I would get a handle of Dr. James Crow's Old Crow whiskey and Bowman's vodka and a 24-pack of PBR and a bag of Franzia Crisp White and a couple bags of chips, and we'd have a great time.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Shocking.

Emma Camp
It was shocking, yes. And then after I graduated college and I got a real person job, I was like, okay, I want to keep throwing parties, but I think I'm probably a little too big to continue having provisions... Also no ice, everything room temperature, warm, right? I can't keep doing this. This is too much. And so at the time I was working at Reason magazine, and one of my colleagues there, Peter Suderman, is amazing. He's a cocktail wizard. And I was inspired by him to start making cocktails. And so my signature thing, the reason why you should come to this party, is that there are very fancy craft cocktails there, and they're free. And so I started doing that.

But the parties, what I mean, they didn't bomb, is it started out with... when I first moved to DC, I had some friends from college there, but most of my college friends were a year younger. So not everybody had quite moved to DC yet, which everybody who attends the University of Virginia moves to DC. It's just how it works. And so I would invite six people from church over. So they were hangouts more than capital-P Parties. And they sort of got larger as my social circle got larger. So it sort of grew over time. I will say the times I've been the most disappointed with how things have worked out have been when I've had a lot of flakers, which doesn't happen that often.

It happens more in New York. This is my big complaint about the social scene between New York and DC: when I have 30 people telling me that they're coming to my party in DC, 30 people show up. And when I have 30 people telling me they're coming to my party in New York, 20 people show up.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
And that annoys me. It hurts my feelings when people say they're coming and they don't show up. And the party planning app I use has a "maybe" function, which I usually read as people who are not going to go, but they don't have a good excuse, and so they put maybe. And that's okay. I understand. That's how that works. And flaking is a scourge. People should be put in the stocks for flaking, in my view. And this goes back to... I think it's a combination of social risk aversion and this sort of therapy culture belief that you don't owe anything to anybody, and your primary duty is to yourself, and doing what protects your peace and makes yourself happy.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Very narcissistic.

Emma Camp
Which I think at its extremes it can be. But I think it is this sort of reflection of: you don't need a good reason to do what you want to do. And I think that's so backwards, because you have a duty to other people. And if you tell someone you're going to be there for them, you go. Unless you are literally running a 102-degree fever, you have to go. And all the time... So last night, my husband and I went out with another couple that we're friends with, and we've been trying to find a date for us to go out together for a long time. And I got back from work and I was like, "I am so tired. I just kind of want to take a shower and curl up on the couch and watch Slow Horses for three hours." But…

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Great show

Emma Camp
I promised. Fantastic show. But we said we would do this. It would be a grievous social crime for me to cancel all these people at the last minute, even though I don't really want to go because I'm exhausted. I'll go. So I got dressed, got back on the subway, and went out, and we had a great time. This is often the thing that people do not realise: the you before the social event is not the same you that's at the social event.

Every single time, I'm like, "Oh, I can't believe I agreed to do this thing after work, I'm so tired." And I actually get there, I have a great time, and I'm so glad I went. And I'm like, "That was great. That was lovely." So that, I think, is something important for people to remember.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I can't remember which movie it is, but somebody's talking about someone, like a shirker, like one of yours that says they're coming and they don't come. And he's like, "We live in a society."

Emma Camp
We do, we do. And I don't want to be too harsh. I live in Brooklyn, and all of my friends live on the Upper East Side, and so it's hard to get places. But you know what? I get on the subway for an hour and a half to see my friends on the Upper East Side. Come to see me in Brooklyn.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
When you're inviting people to parties, do you intentionally try to mix it up? Do you intentionally try to get very different personality types?

Emma Camp
I think it depends on what kind of thing I'm doing. So if I'm just having a big party, there's a wonderful app called Partiful, which is how I invite everybody. And I just check this box that's "invite all previous guests." And so I just kind of roll the dice. And so it's this huge group of people: people I know from work, people that I know from college, people I know from the internet, someone at a friend of a friend's party who I hit it off with and whose phone number I asked for. And I just send those out into the ether. I think if I'm having a dinner party where there is a smaller set of guests, or I'm just inviting a couple people over, the strategy can be different sometimes.

I've done dinner parties that are discussion-based. So I'll give everybody an article to read before, and then we talk about it. So it's like, okay, what people do I know who I think would have a good time discussing this topic? Or something I've been trying to do... and I think I've had to make peace with the fact that you cannot brute-force this. I'm really trying to have a friend group in New York, because my favourite thing about living in DC is that my husband and I had this group of friends, six or seven friends. We all had a group chat. We all knew each other from college, and we saw each other once or twice a week. And all you would have to do is go into the group chat.

There was this bar that we really like to go to called Galaxy Hut. We'd go, "All right, who wants to go to the Hut tonight?" And a couple people would show up. That kind of cohesive friend group, I feel like in New York... I moved in January. In fairness, I have a lot of great individual friendships, but that kind of friend group feeling, I really want, and I'm trying to cultivate. But I think I have to accept that I can't just be like, "You, you: we are a friend group now."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Here's the question. We give fellowships. So let's say I gave you a $100,000 fellowship, and it was for creating, I don't know, 10 social groups. How would you design that? And by the way, they would have to live on after you were no longer involved. What would the design look like? Would it look a lot like the way you're doing parties, or would you do it differently?

Emma Camp
I don't know. I'm just not really sure that the kind of thing I'm trying to do is... I don't think you can buy it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
No, I agree.

Emma Camp
I don't think that...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I agree. The hundred thousand would be just for you to be able to get the venues to set that up.

Emma Camp
I mean, I feel like there are a good amount of events sort of built to attract people with a certain kind of political or personality orientation. Whether that's something, I guess sort of apolitically, like run clubs, or the salon where we're going to have this public intellectual speak and then their fans will come, that can sort of create a social group. Or even something like a church, right? Where it's people oriented around certain religious beliefs, and then it creates community from there. I just don't know how I would create...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You're doing it right now. You're designing it, right?

Emma Camp
Well, I just don't... I think what I'm sceptical of is, I feel like whether or not you want to be friends with someone is so difficult to categorise. And I think that you can have events that might attract the kinds of people who might get along, and then maybe they will become... But I guess what I'm running up against is you can't make people do things that they don't want to do.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
No.

Emma Camp
It's both that you can't make people go to events they don't want to go to, but you can't make the people go to events... Here is the thing that I think holds people back with making friends in New York City. Okay, you and I are talking. We just met. We're hitting it off. We're having a great time. In order for this to become a friendship, in order for us to not just never cross paths again after this, one of us has to pull out our phone and say, "Hey, do you want to swap numbers?" And that is hard to do, because it requires kind of revealing that you like this person and you want to keep talking with them and you want to get to...

And it does open yourself up to the possibility of some kind of rejection, because the person will probably not say no, but you have the possibility that someone's going to be like, "What is this overeager weirdo doing? Gross." Right? That's always a possibility. And I used to be the kind of person who was terrified of doing something like that. Even though I'm quite gregarious and extroverted, I still would not do that. At a certain point in my early college career, I remember having a list: what are my goals for the semester? Being "ask one friend to go to lunch." It was that big of a difficult thing for me to do, because I was so... I just had this...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
What do you think was causing that anxiety?

Emma Camp
I just think I thought that I was just too weird. I think that I just hadn't quite found my people yet.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Right.

Emma Camp
And so I think some of this was the accurate perception that some of the people I was around thought I was weird. And I hadn't quite gotten comfortable enough in my own skin to be like, "That's fine. That's your prerogative. I think I'm pretty great." And I think that being rejected sucks, and it's hard to pierce that film and just do it. And this is the thing with taking the risk. I didn't used to do that. And I started doing it basically because I went, "I want to make more friends."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
So I started doing it, and now it doesn't bother me at all. And I always do this. If I like somebody and I'm enjoying talking to them, I go, "Hey, do you want to swap numbers?" And then I invite them to my next party. And people are often shocked when they come to my parties, when they hear me talking about my plans or whatever. They're like, "Oh my gosh, you've only lived in New York for a year. How do you have 50 people in your house right now?" Well, it's called not caring at all what people think of me.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
See, that is...

Emma Camp
And trusting that people will self-select.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That is a superpower.

Emma Camp
Yes. I think it is so important for people to accept that they are not everyone's cup of tea.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Right.

Emma Camp
And that how you actually find the people who are meant to be your friends is by accepting that the fact that not everyone likes you is a good thing, because it means that you have enough of a personality that people can react against that.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Exactly.

Emma Camp
And so being distinct in whatever way, just having your personality, will allow people to be like, "Oh, okay, this person has things that I like, I want to hang out with..."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. And back to Bezos: when he was asked about this, what's the one quality that people should strive for? And it was authenticity. Basically, be yourself, because some people are going to hate you, some people are going to love you, and that's just the way it works.

Emma Camp
And I think it's also easier to change certain parts of your personality than you might think, because being yourself is important. But also, what if you don't have a pleasant personality? I think I genuinely have become more likeable as I've gotten older. And I think part of this is that I've just become... I don't know. I think part of it is just growing up. I think for a lot of people, it's important to not confuse temporary problems that basically stem from needing to grow up, and needing to stop being 17 and start being 23, with basically diagnosable mental health conditions. I think so much of the therapy culture... trend is people confusing...

Like, I'm in high school, and high school is really stressful, and I haven't quite found the group of people that I like. And I'm feeling lonely and weird and out of place, and maybe because I'm 17, I'm also not being the best version of myself. This must be because I have whatever condition, right? Or because my mom, who I'm clashing with, must be a narcissist, or whatever it is. No, it's just because being a teenager sucks, and because nobody is the best version of themselves when they're 17. And you can always grow up.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, that is so true. When I was younger, I was basically an overbearing asshole. And literally, I proselytised. It was my way or the highway. And I realised, life punched me in the face repeatedly to say, "No, Jim, there are many other roads that people can take that are equally acceptable." But I was very lucky to be blessed with really not giving a shit what people thought about me from a very young age. When I graduated from high school and they did the senior class poll, I was voted most radical. And literally, I'm like, I'm not a radical. I'm conservative. But then as you get old, you... at least for me, you begin to understand there is that fragility to a lot of people, yourself included, right?

And what worries me, and it's something I wanted your view on, and I know you have very interesting views: this creep into making everything a therapy session or a new diagnosis in the DSM, right? Like learned helplessness. Is that real, learned helplessness? I happen to think it is. But is that coming from a place where they're shy or afraid, or... I'll let you tell me.

Emma Camp
I mean, I guess there's sort of two different things here. One is the larger therapy culture, "every feature of someone's personality is a diagnosable condition" kind of trend. I think something like learned helplessness is almost anti... people who, I think, are somewhat sceptical of the diagnose-everything movement sort of frame a lot of the emotional fragility, risk aversion among people to learned helplessness. I mean, I think on the learned helplessness question, helicopter parenting definitely has something to do with it. I think that if you reach adulthood without ever experiencing real independence, without ever living without adult supervision, yeah, of course that's going to make you helpless. There was this viral TikTok video the other week, and I sort of had mixed feelings about it.

So it was this mom, and to be honest, she was speaking in a very condescending and grating way. She was like, "My daughter is 17, and she's decided that she wants to move out when she's 18 because she's such a big grown-up, and she decided that she wanted to live in this student housing, and she came to me and asked for help, and I was like, 'Figure it out, you're 18, you're supposed to know things.'" And so she was basically talking about how her daughter had this "I don't know how to navigate this system, so I'm just going to freak out and assume that my parents should do it for me." But I also was sitting there and I'm like, how does your 18-year-old not know how to do this?

On the one hand, yes, it is a problem. It is probably good parenting... I don't have kids, I'm not going to... but it seems to me like good parenting, when your teenager is trying to figure out something that is totally reasonable for them to be able to figure out, to say "figure it out." But she also was treating it as presumptively ridiculous that her 18-year-old would be able to live outside of her parents' home, and sort of saw it as, "See, this proves what a big dumb idiot my kid is, that she can't figure out how to navigate living on her own." And I'm like, I'm pretty sure most reasonably intelligent 18-year-old girls could move out, right? I'm not saying they have to, right? But if they want to, they probably could. And if your kid can't figure that out, maybe you've contributed to this problem. Why has she never had to figure out anything on her own before? You are the problem, right?

I mean, I don't know. I went to... so this fine arts magnet school in Alabama I went to had a boarding option, and so I went there from seventh through 12th grade, but I lived there my last three years. And so I kind of left home when I was 15, and it was great. It was fantastic. I entered college knowing how to take care of myself and kind of secure in my own ability to be independent and figure things out.

When I see this sort of online discourse about parents doing things for their college students, I'm like... the idea of my mom emailing a professor, it's like, are you from Mars? I almost struggle to think that this is a real thing. But I know it must be. Look, I love my parents and I respect them. And there were plenty of times in college where I had problems, where I was like, "Oh, I'm not quite sure how to navigate this challenge I'm facing," and I would ask my parents for advice.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Sure.

Emma Camp
About what I should do. But the idea of then my parents stepping in to solve it for me: absolutely mind-boggling.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
It's continuously infantilising your child, right? Well, I got married very young. I was 22. And we decided, well, what the hell, we got married at 22, we might as well be young parents. So our first child was born at... we were 24. And we talked a lot about how we wanted to raise our kids. And what we ultimately landed on was: our job is to raise great adults. And using that as a control line prohibits all sorts of behaviour. Like this woman, can you imagine that? She thinks she can learn how to move out on her own... And so we couldn't say "because I said so." We couldn't say "my house, my rules." That isn't raising a great adult. That's raising a compliant person. And so I loved your line about "figure it out."

Because my kids used to use me as... before Google... I read a lot and I retain facts. And so when they had an assignment, they'd just come up and say, "Dad, who was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars?" And of course I knew it was Talleyrand, but I wouldn't tell them. We had a big bookcase, and I said, "Look it up in there." And so I was having a talk with my oldest child, who is the very famous podcaster Patrick O'Shaughnessy. And he said, "Honestly, Dad, I think the greatest thing you and Mom did for us was that, because we learned when you go and find Talleyrand, well, you've gone through a dozen other interesting characters too, and so you start going down those rabbit holes."

But I definitely hate, because it really kind of started with my generation, this helicopter nonsense. When cell phones were relatively new, we had a lot of contemporaries that put spyware on their children's phones.

Emma Camp
Oh, yes. Everyone has Life360.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
When I first saw it, I said, "That is obscene. You will destroy your relationship with your child, because you're going to blurt out something when you see something that really freaks you out, and you're going to destroy the trust that you have with your child."

Emma Camp
Yeah, it's pretty common to find on sites like Reddit college students who are like, "What do I do about the fact that... I'm an adult, but my parents have this tracking app on my phone, and they get mad if I'm not at my 9am class or whatever." I'm like, oh my gosh. Look, I do have a hard time telling how common the extreme end of it is. Certainly when you look at surveys about at what age should a child be allowed to be left at home, I think there's an indication that it's gone a bit too far. And I think some of this is only possible for the most affluent parents. I had college-educated parents, a pretty normal middle-class family. But when I was 14, during the summers, my parents couldn't... they didn't hire a team of babysitters and tutors for us. We were just left alone. And my youngest sister was seven. And then I had an 11-year-old sister, a 10-year-old brother. And we were old enough that we would be fine on our own for the day. And I was 14, I knew how to dial the phone, and so if something went wrong, I could call them, or I could call 911 or whatever, and nothing bad ever happened. We mostly sat around watching YouTube or playing outside.

Occasionally... the closest it was like, "Maybe there should have been a little adult supervision here": I was maybe 16, and my brother, four years younger, with one of his friends, were playing in the creek near our house, and they caught a crawfish, and they brought it back in a pot. They're like, "Emma, Emma, can we cook and eat this crawfish?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure, why not?" And then I thought about it a little bit more, and I was like, "Actually, no, you cannot do that." And I told them. And then my mom was driving home, and she saw them as they were walking down the street to put the crawfish back in the creek. They were like, "Emma said we could eat it, then she said we couldn't eat it." And she was like, "Yes, why would she let you do that?" But yeah, it worked out just fine.

And I think, entering college feeling confident in my ability to live on my own... my family was in Alabama, I was in college in Virginia. I don't think I'm a homesick person by nature, but I was not always thriving at a 100% level in college. But the kind of basic "Can I pay my rent? Can I clean my room? Do I need someone to tuck me in?" That was not a problem I was having.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Let's talk about your book.

Emma Camp
Okay. It's a collection of essays on Gen Z and risk aversion called No Hard Feelings . It comes out with Ballantine Books, and I think August 2027.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
We missed it. We have a publishing division called Infinite Books. We would have loved to have published that book.

Emma Camp
Sorry, Penguin got it first.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, too late. Too late for us. Tell me about it. I've written four books, all nonfiction. I just finished my first fiction book, which... wow. Fiction is a hell of a lot harder than nonfiction.

Emma Camp
Yes. I don't think I could write...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
It's fun. It's fun. You've got to... if you start from first principles: I'm a baby, I understand nothing. I actually programmed an AI prompt to be one of the best and most well-read in the genre that I'm writing. But I also told the prompt that he hates me. Not only what I wrote: he dislikes me as an individual.

Emma Camp
Nice, nice.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
But some of the best criticism that I got for what I wrote came from that prompt, right? Because I'm like, you know, if someone I love said these horribly mean things to me, I wouldn't forgive them. But this is a machine. And it fits in with the theme of your book. So how many essays? When is the book due? I think we've covered pretty much...

Emma Camp
It's so close to being done. So it's eight essays, and I'm supposed to turn in my third draft to my editor at the end of the month. So I'm locked in. But it's so close. We're basically in line-level edits at this point, which is so nice.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
But it's funny. A year ago, I was on book leave doing the actual writing of the thing. So it's very nice that the actual writing of the thing is done. But of course, with books, there's a year between when you actually finish it and when it comes out. So we're going through that now, which is exciting. I'm very much looking forward to the stage in which the book is done and all I have to do is hawk it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well, the capitalist in me would tell you that one of the things Infinite Books, our imprint, does is we collapse that time. It doesn't take a year when you're done with a book.

Emma Camp
I don't mind that it takes a year. That's more time to hawk it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay, so what can readers anticipate? And who are you aiming the book at? Will I enjoy it?

Emma Camp
I hope you will enjoy it. So with the essays, I'm sort of trying to bridge the space between memoir and cultural criticism. I think of the book largely as cultural criticism, so I have essays focusing on stuff like therapy culture, AI boyfriends, celebrity worship, marriage, dating, that kind of thing. Both looking at what's the latest op-ed from The Cut about this that went viral, what's happening on TikTok, but also what's happening in the novels people are reading. So I wrote a lot about Sally Rooney novels, because those are very popular literary novels that are focusing on these sort of contemporary relationships. What does this say? Also looking at older works of literature. I have an essay about sexual... in which I write a lot about Lady Chatterley's Lover , which I would like my parents to maybe skip. It's like, "You guys can... you don't have to read that part."

And then I'm also drawing from a lot of my own experience. So, for example, with the therapy culture essay: I went through a rough patch during Covid. I was 20, and I convinced myself I had autism. And that was sort of how I explained the problems I was having. I was like, "This is it. This proves that it's not my fault, right? It's not because of some deep deficiency within myself. It's because of this lifelong condition that was going to be this way forever." And both how I came to believe that, but also how I came to then start questioning whether that was actually right. So I glommed onto this label, and then almost immediately after, I hit my stride, and I found my people, and I was like, "Wait a second. This identity label was supposed to explain why I don't have friends, and now I have a lot of friends. Wait a second, maybe something else was happening here, and I was giving this permanent name to a temporary problem." So I was writing about that.

My essay on marriage obviously has a lot about how I came to be the kind of person who got married at 24, which is pretty rare among people of my age group, and has...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You're three years in, right? Your marriage?

Emma Camp
Yes.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
How has that changed you?

Emma Camp
How does that change me? It makes my life better in every way. I know. It's pretty great. 10 out of 10. I think always having someone there, and having the security of that, is so wonderful. I was almost thinking about attachment theory, which is sort of this idea that in order for children to explore the world and be able to take risks, they need to have a secure base, which is normally a parent. I think almost in my adult life, when you have a really rich, stable, loving marriage, I can take more social risks because my husband is always there. And in the same way for him with me. He's always there at the end of the day for me to talk to. I can talk to him about anything. Whatever problem I have, he's always there.

He's always there for me to be silly with. Just having that person... And I think what makes marriage different from indefinite cohabitation or whatever is that you're deciding to put the eject button further away. And that, I think, has been the big shift. The difference between how I felt about my husband when we were just boyfriend and girlfriend versus how I feel about him now that we're married is that the whole operation just feels so much more secure and permanent. It's like we have chosen each other forever. We're doing this. That kind of team feeling, all the time. I'll say stuff about "our family." We don't have kids yet, but it's just like, even though it's just two of us, we're this family unit, and we make these kind of collective decisions. And that's great.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You know, that's so cool for me, because that's the way I felt when I got married at 22. My wife and I have been married 44 years. And so, literally, you become one person, right? She remembers certain things that I have no clue about, and I remember certain things that she has no clue about. But again, when we were talking about it, in the same conversations about how we were going to raise children, we were like, okay. So at the time, divorce rates were soaring. Everyone was staying married for up to six to seven years and then splitting up. And I just sort of said to her, "I think we really need to say we are in this for good."

Emma Camp
Yes.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And there's going to be a lot of hills and a lot of valleys. Do you agree? I mean.

Emma Camp
Yeah. I mean, I think I've been very lucky in that we've only been married three years. We haven't really had any challenges yet. But I think that's probably how it should be. On year three, before you've had any kids and you're living your awesome life in New York, everything should be perfect. And that's basically how it is. Everything is perfect. You're the best person ever. Everything is amazing. But that's good. But also, I think we have talked about this, where we know the happiness data... when couples have young kids, there's normally a dip in their marital satisfaction. But we both know this.

And of course, I don't want to make big proclamations about how I'm going to feel about having kids before I have them, but I at least hope that we will be somewhat inoculated against the worst possibilities of that, when we're like, okay, we're super-duper ultra happy now. And we know that when we have kids, we'll probably be a little more annoyed at each other all the time, because we'll suddenly be super sleep-deprived and we'll have this other person to worry about. But that's okay, because we're at 12 out of 10 right now, so a brief dip would still be fine.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And also, you're not...

Emma Camp
And we just love each other a lot. I don't understand...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You're also not yet accounting for how much you're going to love those children.

Emma Camp
Right, right. Yes.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I was unprepared for that when I was 24 and held my son for the first time. I'm not a crier, okay? I literally had tears in my eyes, and I was just looking at him, and I finally understood what unconditional love felt like, because I really hadn't felt that before. So, yeah, you're right about the kids and the problems. And there's a really funny skit from an ancient British show, Ab Fab , where these two women are living together, and they both have drinking problems, and they're both really funny, and they don't have kids... one of them does. Anyway, they have guests coming who were always the ultra minimalists, right? And so they're running around their house, stowing all their junk in the closets and hiding it so that everything is absolutely pristine.

And then the gag is, they open the door and their couple has had children, and they come in.

Emma Camp
With a bunch more stuff.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
With all of the stuff, and everything, there's stuff on their shirt, et cetera. And if you kind of lean in, that too can be fun.

Emma Camp
Oh, I'm sure. I have a half-brother who's 20 years younger than me.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Oh, wow.

Emma Camp
Everyone should have a much younger half-sibling. It's awesome, because you get all of the baby cuddles, none of the responsibility. And obviously it's so different because it's not my kid, but when I held him in my arms for the first time, I was like, "I would die for you."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's what I love about being a grandparent. Because the old joke was: why do grandparents and their grandchildren...

Emma Camp
They have a common enemy.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. But it's true.

Emma Camp
Maybe that's how I am with my half-brother.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And within our family, there's a span of 10 years between my oldest and my youngest. So the oldest got a little bit of that in helping his youngest sister. And now both of my daughters, who are the younger two, have young children. And everything you're saying is a reality. And yet I was talking to my youngest, who used to be a stand-up comedian, and you remind me a lot of her. You're very funny and you're very smart. And so I was checking in with her, and she was like, "Yeah, certain days are kind of like travelling third class in Bulgaria."

Emma Camp
Nice.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay, so for the book... I know we're on a little time constraint here, but for the book that comes out in a year, in the meantime, what are you enjoying doing the most? Is it the writing for the Journal? Is it the videos? Do you have bigger...

Emma Camp
Writing for the Journal is pretty awesome. It's the dream job, right? I get to write about whatever I want, and I can write longer things or shorter things. It's really the dream job. So I'm very grateful to be doing that. I'm enjoying just making fun cocktails and serving them to people.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I saw you had a toga party.

Emma Camp
Yes, that was our... So my husband and I were born exactly 14 days apart, so we have joint birthday parties every year.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Great.

Emma Camp
So this year's theme was toga party. And so of course that meant that I made sort of Roman-inspired...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I saw the names of the drinks. I thought they were great.

Emma Camp
There's some part of my creative brain that's fulfilled by making drinks and coming up with new ideas, and "how do I get this flavour in this format?" That's just very satisfying.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And are you finding that people who might have been a little reticent to kind of join in the fun at your various parties, as you've held them... is there a standout who came in kind of like a turtle, with the head in the shell, and...

Emma Camp
I don't know. I'm not going to do any of my friends dirty like that. I'm going to say that everyone who shows up is a delight, who has a great time and is the life of the party just as much as any other person. They're all equally lives of the party.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And back briefly to the video versus the books and the writing for the Journal. Harder time killing your darlings in the books and written pieces, or harder time killing your darlings in the videos? Was there a video where you had to leave something out, and you're just like, "Yeah..."?

Emma Camp
I mean, I think with videos it's harder, because you have to make such a simple point.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And the way I've been able to deal with the having-to-kill-my-darlings thing is that I've made follow-ups, where if there's a common objection that I really want to respond to but I don't have time to get to, making a follow-up is a way of getting to that. So I made this grocery store video, and the first one was just talking about why grocery stores show that free markets are the best way to get the most economic prosperity for the most people. And people were like, "What about the city-owned grocery stores? What about the city-owned grocery stores?" I was like, I was going to address that in the first draft, but I didn't have time to. And so I made a second video about the city-owned grocery store.

Writing-wise, I don't think that I am far enough in my career. I'm not yet successful enough to be able to afford being hard to work with. So normally, even if I'm like, "Aw, but I really liked that line," I will just accept all changes from my editor. I think for this round I'm letting myself have two places where I'm like, "I would like to keep that line in," but everything else I'm like, "Okay, yes, we can cut it." And also, editors are very good at their jobs.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yes.

Emma Camp
I like editors a lot. I'm starting to edit a little bit for the Journal now, but I still think of myself as mostly a writer, and the people who live and breathe editing are so talented and are so good at helping me kind of see outside of my own brain. There have been so many times, especially with this book, where either my editor or my agent, who did a lot of editing on my book proposal, would say something about my argument, and I'd be like, "Oh, that is so obviously true. And for some reason, I could not see that until you pointed that out to me. You're so right." So I'm also very grateful to editors. So I... you just do what they tell me.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
As do I, because it is a very different skill. And again, I was lucky in my marriage, because my wife graduated summa cum laude in journalism, and her talent actually proved to be editing. And the first time around, it did not go so well. I was writing my first piece for publication for Barron's , and I was 33, I think, at the time. And I wrote it, and I thought, "Oh, that was funny," and "Ooh, I really made... that was a real zinger there." And I handed her the actual physical paper, right? A couple hours went by, and she walked back in, and all I saw was a sea of red.

Emma Camp
Oh no.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And we were coming into the city. We were living in the suburbs. We were coming into the city on the train, and we got into the biggest fight ever, until at the end of the train ride I realised that she was completely right.

Emma Camp
Yeah. I will say, I always want my husband to read my essays before I turn them in. But mostly what I want him to tell me is, "Sweetheart, this is the most brilliant thing anybody has ever written. You're the smartest woman I've ever encountered. This is amazing." And whenever he's like, "Oh, I'm not so sure about this line," I'm like, "Why are you persecuting me right now?"

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That was me. That was me on the train.

Emma Camp
So I don't think I can take it from everyone else, but my husband is not allowed to say anything mean about my writing.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
But I got incredibly lucky, because I did have that realisation early. Yes, she was trained to do this. She is really gifted at doing this. She's gifted at a lot of things. She's a street photographer here in New York. But that gave me the freedom to let her fix it, which made me a little lazy, to be honest. Do you find that you rely a lot on the editors?

Emma Camp
A little, I would say. I don't know what a normal amount is. Not too much, I don't think. It also depends on the piece you're doing. So most of what I write for the Journal is not getting big, heavy edits. I write for a newsletter, so most of what I'm writing is between 500 and 800 words. So it's not this big overhaul. With the book, most of the essays are between 8,000 and 10,000 words. So most of the editing is about structural arguments. And so I self-determine, do it myself, which is good. I've had a couple experiences writing for outside publications where at the end of it, I was like, "I feel like the editor wrote 30% of this."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
I don't love when that happens. And thankfully, that isn't there. I think there's a good balance between getting the piece into the best shape it can be, but also preserving my voice.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
Also feeling like I wrote the thing.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I think that was why I was so lucky, in that my wife got my voice. And so if she changed it, she just made it make sense. I went through a very early... I was way too academic in my writing style, even though I was not a huge fan of college and found most of it a waste of time, as far as the academics. I loved reading on my own. And I was punished when I was a kid for going all the way through the SRA reading tests in third grade, when you were supposed to wait, because they went all the way through eighth grade. And I went to Catholic school. And so they made me sit at my desk when the other kids were doing the SRA, instead of sending me to the library with a Christmas tree.

And I think that was what radicalised me, because I went home and complained deeply to my father. And he's like, "Come here." And he walked me into the library, and he pointed at the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and he said, "Read that."

Emma Camp
Nice.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Which I did. But I definitely think that the ability to put your stuff out there takes a lot of courage.

Emma Camp
Thank you.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And I just... from the first video that I saw of you, and then where I really got excited about being able to chat with you and get to know you was what you wrote. I am much more oriented toward the written word than I am to video or audio. And I think your writing is great. Do you aspire to write full time, to join the Journal as a journalist? I mean...

Emma Camp
I mean, I do write full time. That's my job.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. No, no, that is what I mean. I mean, is there some sort of journalistic thing that you aspire to, or more book...

Emma Camp
I think I have the best of all worlds.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, you really do. You're very Panglossian in your outlook.

Emma Camp
So I can write book-length stuff, but I can also write shorter pieces, and I can also make videos. I feel very lucky in that. And actually for the Journal, because I do really like writing longer-form pieces. I like being able to really investigate something and spend 4,000 words on it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Emma Camp
And working at Reason , I got to do that pretty often, because it's a magazine. But with the Journal I've also been able to do that. If there is something that I think deserves 3,000 words, I've been able to pursue that and just publish that there too. So I feel like I have the dream situation, because any length thing I want to write, any format thing I want to produce, I can do it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that is very cool. Nick at Reason is a pretty good friend of mine.

Emma Camp
Yes, Nick is awesome.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well, listen, thank you for giving me so much of your time. I think you are awesome.

Emma Camp
Thank you.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I live in a family of writers. Both of my daughters are writers. My middle has won a bunch of awards for kind of middle-grade fiction. She's now into young adult.

Emma Camp
Awesome.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So I just love people who love to write, and then do it as well as you do. Because the other thing that I think you do really well, and maybe this is more in your videos, is you make it fun. People don't want... you know, the busybody bluestockings to be telling you, "This is what you have to do." I think if you make your point a little lighter and a little more entertaining, people are going to respond to it better. Listen, we have one final question that we ask everyone on here, and it's pretty simple. We are going to wave a wand and we are going to make you empress of the world for one day. You cannot put anyone in a re-education camp. You cannot kill anyone.

But what you can do is, we are going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it, and you are going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, "I just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on both."

Emma Camp
That is way too much responsibility. No. No. If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. I am not doing this.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You're just not going to...

Emma Camp
No. No, I am not. I am not touching that with a ten foot pole.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You are the first guest who's refused. I love that.

Emma Camp
No, I can't believe everyone isn't refusing. I can't live with... because what if it goes badly, right? What if whatever I say ends up horrendously, and then I have to live with that? No.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So you're taking the General Sherman approach?

Emma Camp
Yes. 100%. I am getting out of there. No way.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You know what, Emma? That makes me like you all the more. Thank you so much for joining us on Infinite Loops .

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