Mike Rowe Makes Bill Maher's Audience Gasp With Alarming Statistic About Gen Z

Discussing the growing number of men who have dropped out of the workforce and civic life, the “Dirty Jobs” host cited research showing that some disconnected men spend roughly 2,100 hours every year staring at screens — enough to make Maher’s audience audibly gasp.

Mike Rowe just made Bill Maher's audience gasp. He says young men aren't volunteering, joining clubs, or doing anything productive because they're spending 2,100 hours a year staring at a screen.

It's actually even worse than he said: the average Gen Z adult spends ~9 hours a… pic.twitter.com/28Wjm2dNjx

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) August 8, 2026

That is essentially a full-time job. The standard 40-hour workweek amounts to about 2,080 hours per year.

Rowe's statistic appears to derive from economist Nicholas Eberstadt's research into prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work. Eberstadt has studied federal time-use data showing that these men spend extraordinary amounts of their days watching television, movies and other screens while participating comparatively little in work, volunteering, religious activities or other parts of civil society.

"The huge majority of them, the ones who are neither employed nor in education and training, the NEETs as the Brits call them, the NEETs, they paint a pretty dispiriting picture of their own lives," Eberstadt explained.

"They report that they basically don’t do civil society. They don’t do much worship or charity or volunteering."

What do they do instead?

"What they say that they do is watch," Eberstadt said. "They say they watch screens."

The figure is around 2,000 hours annually, he said, "sometimes more, as if this were their full-time job."

But Rowe's statistic describes a particular group of disconnected men. When we look at America's younger generation more broadly, the numbers are astounding.

One of the strongest measurements comes from the Common Sense Census, a nationally representative survey of American children and teenagers.

Researchers found that teenagers between 13 and 18 were consuming an average of eight hours and 39 minutes of entertainment screen media every day in 2021.

READ MORE: A Judge Just Sent Big Tech a Message It Couldn't Ignore

That figure doesn't even include schoolwork or homework. The survey measured television, online videos, gaming, social media, web browsing and other recreational digital activities.

At 8 hours and 39 minutes per day, that works out to more than 3,150 hours of screen media per year.

There is an important qualification: Common Sense notes that those hours can overlap with other activities and with one another. Someone might watch television while scrolling through a phone, for example. So the statistic should not be interpreted as teenagers necessarily spending nearly nine exclusive hours every day doing nothing but looking at a screen.

Still, the trend is alarming. The Common Sense Census found entertainment screen consumption among teenagers jumped from seven hours and 22 minutes per day in 2019 to eight hours and 39 minutes in 2021. Among children ages 8 to 12, it increased from four hours and 44 minutes to five hours and 33 minutes. In just two years, screen use increased 17 percent for both groups.

Something happened between those measurements that should be impossible to overlook: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schools closed. Sports were canceled. Churches closed their doors. Children were separated from friends. Playgrounds and recreational activities were restricted. Millions of young Americans were sent home and told to conduct much of their education and social lives through computers.

The Common Sense researchers identified the pandemic as a turning point. Their report notes that young people spent more time at home and away from friends and activities, while remote learning placed students in front of computers for hours. Importantly, the study's screen-time figures excluded the additional hours spent doing classes and homework online.

And the increase wasn't simply a continuation of an existing trend. Between 2015 and 2019, entertainment media use increased only 3 percent among tweens and 11 percent among teenagers. Between 2019 and 2021, it jumped 17 percent in only two years for both groups. A broader scientific review reached much the same conclusion.

A 2022 JAMA Pediatrics systematic review and meta-analysis examined 46 studies involving more than 29,000 children and adolescents around the world. Researchers calculated that screen time increased an average of 84 minutes per day during the pandemic — a 52 percent increase compared with pre-pandemic measurements. The largest increases occurred among adolescents ages 12 to 18.

And this isn't merely a debate about whether teenagers are wasting time. Researchers are increasingly investigating what heavy screen exposure may be doing to developing brains.

A 2019 study published in JAMA Pediatrics examined 47 preschool-aged children using MRI scans. Researchers found that greater screen-media use was associated with lower measures of white-matter integrity in areas of the brain involved with language, executive function and early literacy.

Children with higher screen-use scores also performed worse on corresponding language and literacy tests. The researchers were careful about what those findings meant. The study was observational and relatively small, so it could establish an association, not prove that screens caused the brain differences. But subsequent research has produced additional reasons for concern.

A 2022 Scientific Reports study found that greater digital-media use among preschool children was associated with lower cortical thickness and sulcal depth in brain regions involved in visual processing and higher-level functions including attention, memory, letter recognition and social cognition.

Again, the researchers did not claim they had proved causation. They specifically called for further research to determine what the structural differences mean for long-term development. The picture becomes more troubling when mental health is included.

A longitudinal study published in JAMA Network Open followed more than 2,000 Canadian children and adolescents during the pandemic. Researchers found that higher levels of screen use were associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, irritability, hyperactivity and other mental-health symptoms, depending upon age and the type of screen activity.

The federal government now acknowledges that excessive screen use has become a serious public-health concern. In May, the Department of Health and Human Services released a Surgeon General's advisory on screen use, saying American adolescents now average approximately seven to nine hours per day on entertainment screens. HHS warned that excessive screen exposure has been associated with problems ranging from sleep disruption and physical inactivity to depression, anxiety and developmental difficulties.

That doesn't mean every hour spent looking at a screen is harmful. A teenager researching history on a laptop isn't doing the same thing as someone scrolling TikTok for four hours. A child talking to his grandparents over FaceTime isn't having the same experience as one spending the night playing video games alone. The content matters. The age of the child matters.

But there is another variable that may matter just as much: what the screen replaces. Nine hours spent consuming digital media are nine hours that cannot all be spent playing baseball, working a summer job, talking around a dinner table, dating, reading a book, attending church, volunteering, joining a club, learning a trade or simply hanging around with friends.

That gets to the deeper point Rowe was making. The problem isn't merely that young people are looking at screens. It is that screens have become extraordinarily efficient substitutes for participation in the real world.

Eberstadt's description of disconnected men is striking precisely because it isn't principally about technology. It is about withdrawal.

"We have this picture of people who are pretty disconnected from society, and maybe even from families, totally disconnected from work, who are living in screens," he said.

He described the result as "an enormous amount of wasted human potential."

There is also an uncomfortable reason the issue may not receive the sustained cultural attention it deserves. The modern information economy is built around attention.

Social-media companies want users scrolling. Streaming companies want them watching. Video platforms want another click. Gaming companies want another hour. News organizations want another click.

Much of the media business therefore has an inherent economic interest in producing information consumers — precisely the kind of people who spend enormous portions of their waking lives looking at screens.

As we recently covered on RedState, social media companies are starting to get hammered for the allegedly “harmful” content they have been distributing.

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta — the parent company of Instagram and Facebook — to pay $567 million into an abatement fund aimed at addressing harms to children and teenagers linked to Facebook and Instagram.

The ruling came on top of $375 million in civil penalties already imposed on, after a jury found the company had willfully violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act.

But parents aren't exempt from responsibility. Technology companies can design addictive products, schools can normalize digital learning and governments can make disastrous decisions about closing society, but ultimately families still have enormous influence over whether childhood takes place primarily in the physical or digital world.

A society can survive young people wasting an afternoon looking at screens. It has a much bigger problem when they waste their entire lives.