Why Men & Women Are Giving Up On Each Other - Daniel Cox - #1166

0:00You say that modern hostility between young men and women didn't start with Me Too or the Manosphere or dating apps. Where did it start? that they were using to understand the world was changes in how their parents were engaging with them, right? We saw smaller families, a lot more resources pumped into kids and their various interests and pursuit of various accolades. You saw, you know, from enrichment activities, private tutors, to travel sports. And so I think a lot of young people grew up uh understanding that the purpose of family is not the betterment of all members but like for their personal uh interests and uh achievement do men and women understand them each other less or more than they used to

1:01i i think less in some ways, right? Because it's not that there's nothing that they're operating without any information. They're operating with, I think, far more pernicious stereotypes. A lot of that is coming from online content, from social media, which is painting the worst possible portrait of female and male behavior. I mean, you've talked about that on a lot of the other shows. It's endemic. And the other side of it is you're actually getting two sides, right? You're getting the very worst and the very best. So your average relationship with all the problems, with all the sort of difficulties and uncertainty is just not portrayed. You have just the perfect relationship or the disasters. like that's what you get online.

1:45And so it just heavily skews how people are understanding relationships. But beyond that, right, there's like that component of it, but there's also like what people come to expect then, right? So now I'm on the dating market and I have this sort of skewed sense of the world that I've gotten from all the algorithms. But now my expectations for a dating partner have changed dramatically, right? And in some cases, I've elevated my expectations pretty significantly. Only 42% of young men think women understand their problems, and only 25% of young women say the same about men. But historically, as people got older, this gap would have closed. Yeah. Well, and the formative experience, right? Like there was much more dating going on. There was more social activities in previous generations.

2:40You may have seen someone at church or a place of worship. There were more opportunities to actually get to know girls or girls got to know boys in these environments that now those opportunities are just much harder to come by. And so you have a case of entire generation that has less formative experience just talking to the opposite sex, let alone dating, sex, and everything else. And so how do you come to understand someone whose experience is going to be very different from your own, right? It's already pretty difficult for men to understand women and women to understand men. It's my lead off example in the book where I asked these teenagers, imagine you were suddenly a member of the opposite sex.

3:17You woke up and what are you feeling or what are you excited about? What are you worried about? And it's a chock full of like generalizations and stereotypes, right? Like this girl saying, oh, gross. Ew, I have to wear my brother's disgusting clothes and I could like belch and be gross around my friends. No, thank you. And the guys are sort of saying similarly, they're saying far less in their responses, but they're saying, yeah, I guess I could be emotional and I could try to take advantage of people or manipulate people. And so these kind of pernicious stereotypes are operable. And the way you kind of disabuse people of them is like, actually have a conversation, just like sit down with someone. So the people who are least likely to sort of draw on that are

4:02people who actually have close friends or family members who they know and respect, members of the opposite sex and be like, hey, that's actually not how girls think about sex or relationships and same for boys. I guess it's interesting because men and women are talking about each other maybe more than they ever have done before. We have the concretized for the rest of time ledger of everything that we've ever said on the internet, right? And you can, some news article breaks and then there's your thoughts. You have to talk about what you think the other sex was thinking or doing or what their motivations were. And they're talking about each other rather than to each other now. And I guess that this causes

4:41an odd, like recursive echo chamber. Men talking about women hear what other men are saying and women talking about men hear what other women are saying and neither of them are actually getting their assumptions tested. Yeah, right. There's a study actually that I say, I think it was Washington Post did it, and it found that gender was one of the most effective ways the algorithm separated people. They knew you were a man or a woman very early on, and they just fed you content accordingly. And a lot of that was reinforcing existing notions of the opposite sex. And so you got more and more sort of affirmation and validation of your viewpoint that remains unchallenged. And so when you get to really difficult things, like I talk about the man versus bear episode, right? And women are fed content that is really

5:31different. It's sort of fearful. If you express a little bit of concern about sexual violence or abuse or harassment, well, guess what's coming down three posts later on is just more of the same kind of content. And for men, they're not seeing it, right. They're not seeing, uh, that kind of content. And so their views are like, well, why are these women so upset? I'm not, I'm not getting it. What did the man or bear debate reveal about how badly men and women communicate with each other in your opinion? I mean, I think it, it, it shows that the shows that social media in general is an incredibly ill-suited platform to have really difficult discussions on sensitive topics, right? Like whether it's Me Too, whether it's the Man vs. Bear, you need space to have some of these hard conversations that don't have easy answers.

6:20It's not believe women. It's not believe men, right? I think the Man vs. Bear example was a relatively relatively easy answer i think symbolically what it stood for right so if you step behind it right that it's like well are men really that dangerous and and the best available evidence is certainly they're no more dangerous than they ever were um largely not dangerous uh but the that that sort of fear industrial complex that a lot of online influencers are perpetuating is like, makes it really difficult for women to sort of break that once you're like, oh, wow, I'm seeing all this content. And I'm seeing a lot of products online on Amazon, right? To the scrunchie that I can cover my drink with.

7:00All these different kinds of pepper sprays. You know what a hair scrunchie is like those? Well, they have one design that you can cover your drink with. So you don't get spiked. Right. And I found out about that from an account that had nothing to do with gender. It was like how things work, which I followed on X, which is about like how things, it's like technology. And it's like, this was there probably because I was doing- Can you get an image of this up, Mark? I want to see what the- Research on dating and probably that's where it came from. But it's really interesting to see what you are quickly fed and then how that just alters your worldview. Oh, dude, if you briefly get interested in a book or a movie or something,

7:40you need to almost be careful about how much you click on it. Because if you're not appropriately delicate with the clicks that you have like guess what dude the next week is just you learning about this obscure japanese movie from the 70s or something yeah that i'm a premier league fan so like if i if i like too many videos then i get uh inundated very night cat a wearable solution this is what you you were talking about. Yeah. The drink spiking prevention scrunchie. And there's a little hole and you put the straw in it. Can you show me how it works? Is there a video on the left, the far left, with the overly done nails? Oh, God, it's got a... Right. I mean, oh, but it does adorn the drink quite nicely at the bottom that's quite cute

8:26uh right and so yeah and and now you can find that kind of stuff everywhere like the sort of there are there's so many products now that are aimed to to help people maintain their personal safety and if if i'm a you know a young woman i, well, why would I need this if the world wasn't an incredibly dangerous place? Yeah. Why do you think women feel less safe despite so much progress happening civilizationally? I think there are a number of causes, but I think at the root, one of the things that I come across in the book, one of the things I talk about a lot is this shift in responsibility from institutions to individuals, right? So at one point, whether it was, you know, your family, schools, a place of worship, you know,

9:14a civic organization, they were taking a lot of the, they're doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to establishing norms, ensuring behavior. If people transgressed certain norms, there'd be accountability mechanisms in place. But increasingly, what you're seeing is, A, there's been a huge decline in trust across the board. Pick an institution. Young people have less faith in it than previous generations. But when it comes to things like sexual assault and harassment, we ask questions about, well, how well do you think certain institutions like churches and places of worship and the police are handling these kinds of allegations? And you see a really stair-step generational divide with young women far less likely to

9:58have faith in these institutions to handle them responsibly than older women are. And so you have this case of where- If no one else is going to protect me,ibly than older women are. And so like you have this, this case of where, well, no one else is going to protect me. I need to protect myself. And the whole language around, right. Which was sort of therapy speak, but the whole language around, um, you know, policing my boundaries or my borders, right. Comes from this, I think, extant fear of I've got to do it because no one else is going to do it. No one else is going to look out for me. Yeah. I mean, it's strange, right? Because what women are doing is looking out for tail risk. What the internet is doing is taking

10:35tail risk and making it feel like the middle of the bell curve for interactions and male behavior. You know, it's not all men, but it's always a man. for interactions and male behavior. It's not all men, but it's always a man. I mean, what you're saying, it is tail risk, but also you can make this tail risk into a judgment. And at the same time, you go, well, why do we have insurance? Why do we have car insurance? So why do I insure my car? I don't intend on getting in a car crash today. Well, it's for tail risk. It's for tail risk because if I don't have it, then the potential of something bad happening and me not being appropriately protected isn't there. So one of the things that's behind this sort of rising fear, rising concern about

11:16sexual harassment, sexual abuse is what's happening online. So we know that from the early mid-2000s, as social media was introduced and became more popular, we saw a pretty significant rise in negative experiences. Harassment, particularly gender and sexual harassment, increased dramatically, especially among certain kinds of users. So we actually... Online. Online, right? Not that it's not happening offline, but a lot of it now is happening online, particularly among people who are spending more time there. Yep. And there are certain types of users that are experiencing more often. So young liberal women report experiencing sexual harassment more often than conservatives and moderates. Interesting.

12:02And there's a couple of reasons that you could think this is happening. One is that, well, maybe they're more sensitive sensitive to it like the language of microaggressions like okay they they have a different metric for what they view is constitutes harassment i've got like some concept creep right happening there's another thing that i think that we haven't talked about as much at least sort of in the in the in the conversation and that's well if you look at who's commenting about politics and the way they're commenting on it and the stuff they're commenting online, young liberal women are more active sharing their opinions online. And sometimes those opinions aren't shared by certain kind of men who are online a lot.

12:38Did you look at whether it was mostly men that were doing the harassment? Yeah, we asked about who are you experiencing harassment from? And not only is it men, it's often men that they don't know or know well. Okay. Right, so these are strangers, which is a sort of qualitatively different experience, right? Like if you look at perpetrators of like sexual assault, it's often someone the victim knows. When it comes to these online harassing experiences, it's often strangers. I don't think that that's unique to cross-sex or online sexual harassment. There are far more people on the internet that don't know you than do know you. And if you put anything up there, most people don't have a few million person following, which means that the

13:242,000 people from their city that do follow them, one post blows up because of something that they've said. Almost everyone doesn't know you, right? And the harassment that you're going to get. What I think, where the divergence lies, is I think that women get attacked more personally, are more likely to face sort of sex-based attacks than men for sharing political opinions. That I think is fairly widely established. They're like threats, right? So if you're a woman, you're like, I think this about, you know, transgender issues or Title IX. And suddenly like I'm getting emails and if you know someone, you know, a woman who's been in the news reporting industry or media, right? These things are not uncommon. And then I, you know, I'm who's been in the news reporting industry or media, right? These things are not

14:05uncommon. And then I, you know, I'm sure you've seen some, I've certainly seen people share them, like, that's pretty horrific stuff that they're getting for basically just sharing a political opinion, perhaps an unpopular one. Do you think the internet is just systematically showing men the worst women and women the worst men? Yeah, I like, undoubtedly that that's happening i had this i had this idea a couple of years ago of recursive red pill learning so kind of the way that ais are being trained on a particular data set that data set at least for ai is quite broad but the data set that people who typically learn and talk about sex difference issues on the internet political issues on the internet what

14:44they're being served are the most newsworthy stories, typically either that confirm their existing opinion or that make them angry about the other side. But the most outstanding stories by design are the ones that are surprising and shocking, which means that they are the tail end stories. and you're bringing those back in and saying hey this thing this guy went out for three minutes to get some milk and he came back in and his wife was in bed with the postman and the postman's mate and the dog as well and and isn't this crazy and then and then and then she took 85 of everything he's ever worked for and now now he's he's got parkinson's and lives under under a tree and you're like right, that is an outlandish story.

15:26But the reason that that happens, forgetting whether or not you've actually done a legibility check or like an accuracy check on it, the reason that that story kicks off is that it is so newsworthy. And that means that if you spend most of your time looking on the internet and the pre-selection of the internet is for the outlandish stories, you start to make the outlandish into the normal right and i and i think if if i could like change one thing that might possibly make things better it would be it would be this i would take off the ability to comment on like extreme posts because i i when i would talk to young men and young women right like one of the things i heard is that it's not simply that when you have like women belittling short kings, right, like sort of talking down to the opposite sex, whatever they're saying.

16:12It's not the comment that resonates with so many of these people that are seeing it. It's like the barrage of comments that are saying, yep, like sort of affirmation after affirmation about this negative comment. And it's like, well, I guess it's not just one person who has an ax to grind. There's a whole community of here of men or women who are sort of perpetuating this negative stereotype or negative idea about the opposite sex. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder Jeff Beyers played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard.

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17:30and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What do you think men incorrectly believe about women because of the internet now? It's interesting. So I think there's a misconception about what women want in men and how they want them to behave on a date. Like when I would talk to even the most sort of liberal or self-identified feminist women, they wanted men to, to do the little, uh, acts of, and you can call them sort of chivalrous, you know, actions. So opening the door, um, you know, asking them how they're doing, like sort of checking in, being, you know, uh, cognizant of how they're feeling, uh, paying for dates, like all the,

18:26holding the door, all these things were really important. Like sort of demonstrating kindness and concern, like we're really, really high. And in surveys too, we see this. And I think that still matters, right? In the one-on-one conversations I'd have with young people and young women, that invariably came up. Like, I actually want men to do this uh and like put the benevolent benevolent sexism stuff to the side like there are people who complain about that but your your average girl who's trying to date actually wants some of the like sort of demonstrable uh caring activity i understand uh i'm gonna devil's advocate yeah a little bit of this because i've thought a lot about benevolent sexism william costello's done a bunch of

19:09studies on this i think what's interesting is benevolent sexism so seeing typically for what we're talking about men seeing women as special and uniquely fragile come vulnerable in certain ways that requires care from men like that might be a garage bro way to describe it i think that's fair yeah yeah cool so i think one of the issues that comes up here is that it may be true that women most women especially on average want a guy to behave in ways that make them feel special that make make them feel cared for, concerned, safety, et cetera. But if you were to say, okay, what are the underlying beliefs that you need to hold in order for that to be the natural outgrowth of your relational pattern?

19:54I don't think that that is anywhere near as palatable for most women. Well, do you need a man to look after you? No, I don't. I can do it on my own. It's like, ah, okay. So now what you're saying is, I don't need you to do this thing. You're surplus for requirements, but I would like you to still treat me in a manner to which I don't think that I am actually that vulnerable. Do you understand what I mean? There's this sort of push and pull going on here. And it's, the stuff can get very thorny very quickly, but I think there's often a sort of simpler way to sort of think about these things. And I think about, you know, with my wife, when I think about the stuff that I do around the household and she does around the household, I think it's been years since she's been to the alley to take out the trash.

20:43Like, right. This is something that she could do. She is fully capable of taking out the trash, the recycling. But I do because she doesn't like doing it. And I'm very capable of doing it, going out in the early morning to take care of it. And I think it's that level of like, yeah, there are many ways that women, you know, don't need men to sort of step in. But wouldn't the world be a little bit better if men were acting a little bit more pro-socially in public spaces, looking out not just for women, but maybe like elderly people, women who are pregnant, anyone who requires perhaps a little bit of accommodation to feel safe or just to be seen. Like that doesn't seem to me like a bad thing that we,

21:20you know, should talk. And I'm raising uh, to have young men like be a little bit vigilant. And, and I think that that would give them something to aspire to. I think that that would be, I think that would be a great thing to be encouraged. But if we look at the last decade, 15 years or so of what men have much of the culture around sort of male and female relating has been, I don't think that aspire to this is something that's really been put in front of men. No. A lot of what's been put in front of them is that you are too much. You're preconceptions of conquer and mastery and aggression. Mansplaining. Yeah. Manspreading. Yeah, don't try to interject into the conversation. That's you using your patriarchal overreach in order to,

22:07and you go, Hey dude, I'm, and I, the word othering, right. I'm sure is something that women felt for a very long time, but if that's the case, it should be relatively easy to understand why guys would feel that way at the moment. And this isn't fighting, fighting the fight for it. I think I'm just trying to say, Hey, this is what the other side of the scales looks like for, I think, most young men at the moment. They're like, I don't know what my place is in society. It seems like the girls are socioeconomically really crushing it at the moment. And that's great for them, but I kind of feel like I've been forgotten about and it doesn't really seem like I'm needed. And then I've seen these videos online where like guys have been

22:49mocked for going up to a goal or that they've been accused of having done something that, and, but then I've also seen these stats that say that 80%, 86% of women want a guy to make the first move. And I already had approach anxiety and maybe I'm nervous too. Like I haven't been out that much. And you go, these are lots of very big asks to pile on top of a generation of young men that are socially underexposed to all of the normal existing gravity they had to get over previously. And now there's this sort of additional complexity. The other thing that I think is really helpful to understand too is like the problems don problems don't have to be the same right like we can acknowledge that men and women face

23:28different problems and different challenges you've got sexual assault i've got uh like homelessness you've got right suicide um when it comes to rejection right like who faces the most social and romantic rejection it's it tends to be the people who have to initiate more right i say in the book right the people who take the first step are most likely to misstep because that's just the way of things, right? So if I'm expected to ask this young lady out, I'm putting myself at greater risk for being rejected. And in the era of smartphones and social media and t-apps right like then it becomes like a little bit more riding on that than just my ego uh there's there's a little bit more reputation

24:09yeah there's a little bit more to be concerned about and so you have this this state where on both sides there's like more people are feeling guarded about what they can do and what they can't do in public i write a little bit about the fact that people aren't dancing anymore right like they're doing to look silly on video yeah and and these these uh djs are like looking around and see everyone holding their phones and and watching but there are very few people actually out on the dance floor uh enjoying themselves which i think is kind of tragic yeah i mean the speaking as a distinctly unrhythmic man um the advent of i'm as white as you can get when you put me near a dance floor um it's i mean i ran nightclubs for forever right and and 50 of that was pre

24:56sort of iphone proliferation 50 of it was blackberry 50 of it was apple basically and yeah it made a massive difference it changed even the sort of events that happened like the kind of events that we were running the more sort of larry louty classic british drinking culture lads lads like that kind of thing that very quickly dissipated once facebook came along and because everyone previously you like threw up all over yourself in the middle of the dance floor of Tiger Tiger on Monday at some event. No, I didn't. Or it's been and it's gone, right? But the photo lives forever. The story has entropy and the photo is concretized on the internet. Yeah, I mean, the half-life of our mistakes and foolishness needs to be...

25:41Yeah, I mean, it needs to be much shorter. I talk about this anecdote. I grew up playing soccer in Western New York. So we played through late November and got pretty cold. And so we were in the state tournament one year playing against, I even forget the team. But we had our warmups on, we're getting ready to game. We ditched our warmups, which is jackets and pants for shorts and long sleeves. And I see out of my like left field division, this guy runs to the field in his underwear, right? He's got his, he's got a Jersey on, but then he's wearing boxer shorts and soccer socks. That's a flex. Yep. Uh, and I think what happened was he had pulled down his warmup pants and his shorts right along with it he was

26:26so energized for the game that he didn't realize it and he's just like it's cold brilliant uh and he got like halfway out and then his teammates started he's like you're in your underwear man and he bolted back uh to reclothe himself but there were no there's no pictures right there was no documentation of this what i would say pretty embarrassing experience and so like it was sort of forgot about right like it was talked about for a while but then right you didn't really need to worry about that it would end up following you around for the rest of your life on you know various websites what do you think changed in this dynamic when women stopped needing men economically? I mean, I would argue that, you know, point of fact that men and women still do need each other economically, right?

27:14The felt sense, perhaps, that I don't need men economically. There's some research coming out that homeownership might be impacted by the lack of marriage, right? That when people get married, they can combine resources. Housing is really expensive. Two people, one roof, as opposed to two people, two roofs. It's a lot more affordable. And so there's a lot of ways in which men and women still, I think, would benefit. Even if you can kind of make it on your own, you're like barely making it. Is that what you think people think though? Because it doesn't matter what the stats say. What matters is whether people believe that that is true i think there's a sense that you don't want to feel like you need someone right like i think we've raised this generation

27:54and i sort of put myself in this back bucket a little bit that to to need someone is a sign of weakness right like that showing uh that you can't get along on your own in every way, that means that you're a failure. And we're seeing this in our surveys too. One of the most amazing exchanges, we did a bunch of focus groups in Philly and Raleigh, North Carolina. And at the end of the focus group, we'd ask folks, okay, you know, we've talked a lot of topics today. We talked about family, talked about sex, talked about dating. And we asked them, well, when you were growing up, what did your parents say about all this? But did they give you any guidance when it comes to what's important in life? Did they talk about the importance of

28:37financial stability? Did they talk to you about the importance of getting an education? What about marriage or finding a partner and parenthood? And so we asked like, show of hands, like put your hand up if they talked about any of these things. And so for financial stability and education, all the hands went up in the women's groups and the men's groups universally. Like parents are talking about these things and kids are hearing it. When it comes to marriage, none of the hands went up, in either group. When it comes to parenthood, again, nothing. Some of the women said that their grandparents were the ones who talked to them about marriage and parenthood. What do you think is going on? I think it's wanting to not be prescriptive.

29:21This idea that you, as a parent, need to like appreciate the that there's some some innate truth in your child and they will discover for themselves who they are on their own without any uh instilling of values or character but not financially discover who they are on their own you right they may still be on some overbearing principles when it comes to your bank account, but not to do with your marital status. Right. And it's the amazing thing is like, for the most part, uh, marriage and parenthood are probably the things that matter most to these parents. And yet they're not sharing that with their kids. Like the, the critical experience of, of being married, having a, having a long-term partner, and having kids. These are

30:07life-changing experiences. And the best social science research shows that the quality of our social relationships is far more important than almost any other attribute or metric. So why aren't we telling young people this? Why aren't we emphasizing it? And think it's just this fear of being overly prescriptive and kind of judgmental. And this is the kind of life I think you should have. Do you think that smaller families are producing children with less experience of negotiation and compromise? Yes. This has some of my favorite data in the entire book. American families are smaller than they used to be. So people are growing up with fewer siblings to fight with, fewer cousins to, uh, you know,

30:56get along with. Fuck, I didn't even think about the extended family. Right. And so it goes, what was it like 2.8, 2.9 to now like 2.4, 2.3, something like that. Yeah. And the number of people with only children now has increased dramatically. I'd say something like one in five now. And so you can operate very differently, right? When you don't have to share a bedroom or a bathroom, you don't have to be accommodating on people's meal preferences or just like being in your physical space all the time like my boys share a bedroom i'm one of of three so i grew up with two brothers and so they were always i'm a middle child so they were always kind of around up in your shit yeah right and there's a way that's super annoying and it leads to lots of disagreements but then

31:39one of the things my parents did um i don't think there was something planned, this is just their parenting approach, is they would kind of leave it to us to navigate this stuff and figure out and resolve our differences. And that's incredibly valuable, right avoided. It's just sort of natural and innate that you have to deal with when you're a member of a family. And increasingly this generation is just having to deal with the lesson through no fault of their own, right? Like this is just the, the formative experiences that they had, but there's a way in which I think I do blame parents a little bit. And this has to do with the, the parental investment in childhood experiences, right? That instead of, you know, doing volunteer work or, you know, working in a soup kitchen or working with, you know, religious organizations in doing so, they learn that their parents think that they're kind of special.

32:49Why would they invest so much time and energy in me if I was not kind of special? And so we asked this question in a recent survey. We asked, when you were growing up, did your parents view you as special or kind of average? And there's a massive generational divide here. So if you're over 50, you generally believe that your parents thought of you as average. But if you're young, a majority of people under 50 said that their parents view them as special. And so that's a very different sort of perspective to go through the world with sort of thing. Wow, I'm kind of unique. I'm distinct. I'm different. And I think kind of need people to accommodate that. Right. The implication of that is that maybe my demands will be met more easily. I need to negotiate and compromise less.

33:37Yeah. And you're seeing it in schools too, right? That sort of, there's a article, I think in the Atlantic about like accommodation nation, right? That increasingly schools are accommodating a whole host of different kinds of needs. And you're seeing parents weigh in. My brother first actually told me, he was a professor, told me about getting calls from parents complaining about kids' grades in the 2010s, right? So this shift in the way parents engage and the expectation expectation that oh no it's it's something wrong with your test or my kid needs some little timmy no timmy timmy's a genius you don't understand the test must be wrong yeah and i talk about this like parents over overvalue the academic

34:16and intellectual capacities of their kids too uh in ways i feel like they probably didn't a generation ago we don't mostly mostly in amer, your research. Yeah, this is 100% US-based stuff. Fuck, dude, I would adore you to do this same study in the UK. Holy shit. I mean, for a lot of the British and Australian people, UK and Australia are two of the biggest countries that listen to the pod. And just the concept of being seen as a special British child, but special would be an insult. It's like, oh, you go to school on the different bus. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, special would be used ironically. But this is the American affliction is bullshit and the British affliction is cynicism. And I do think one of my favorite stats that I learned

35:05recently is that America is 8% of the world's population, but had 50% no, sorry, 4% of the world's population, but had 50% of new millionaire creations in 2025. 50% of new millionaires were in America. The UK is 0.8% of the world's population and had 10% of the world's millionaire exits in 2024. So you have a big culture of blue sky thinking, helicopter vision, become anything you want to be, you know, for all that America's a horrible patriarchal cis heteronormative superstructure that misogynistically keeps everyone down. There is still, even for the people that kind of hate it, this belief that I should be able to make it. And the fact that I'm not is where the pain is coming from, right? Like the

35:54supposition that you enter the physics of the social system that you enter the world with is that I can make it. And it's the denial of that, which is where the unfairness and the tension and the twisting comes from. The UK is the opposite. In the UK, you're allowed to become successful, but only if you treat it like some sort of horrible accident. You have to be tremendously embarrassed that you managed to become successful. I fell backward into it. I swear I won't do it again. I mean, there's been forever a really powerful strain of individualism in the united states and i don't i don't know how it compares to the uk uh but i also know like there's i don't think i've seen in in my lifetime i'm i'm you know crashing towards 50 uh a more pessimistic

36:38and despairing generation than this this upcoming one um So while I think there's a lot of evidence that we are still economically competitive, we are doing really well in some ways. I think the sort of social fabric has been fraying and has been for decades. Well, the millionaire winners at the top don't make the massive bell curve or the bottom end feel that much better yeah right it's pointing at the outlier ceo and saying see x group is doing fine and you go that's like one guy and there's been a sort of decoupling too right um our our economic outlook is now closely tied to our social outlook so our ability to form friendships uh garner support from people around us um establish enduring social connections is tied to our uh financial stability right so

37:42the people who are doing well financially are doing well socially. And that didn't used to be the case. It didn't used to be like more friends, more friends, more civically engaged, sort of all those kinds of correlates of social health. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've studied every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue, supports brain function, and helps to regulate

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38:59It's that we've kind of privatized this kind of activities, right? So when it comes to religious participation, members in being a member of a union, a member of a VA organization, those organizations used to shore up working class communities, right? Like they were the sort of glue of rural and ex-urban communities and And those places have declined dramatically over the last few years. And so now you have declines across the board, but now college educated folks are using like Orange Theory or yoga or other places to sort of form their own kind of social outlets, right? So like book clubs are really popular. Run clubs. Right? Run clubs. Have you heard of Darties? I have not. Day parties? So it's like the health,

39:51get up at six in the morning, run around Lake Austin or whatever, Lady Bird Lake, and get your morning jogging with the guys. I'm not built to run, but yeah, I think. But it requires a lot of organization right like so if if and spare time yeah and and money and so like if you don't have those it becomes a lot more difficult to build it on your own going either way because i could have maybe seen um you are a high-powered professional person uh maybe laden with a ton of student debt. And you are now having to work even more. So I imagine that in the middle class and beyond cohort, that there'll be a bunch of people who actually have way less time than some people that might have a job that's a little bit more nine to five.

40:39But yeah, I have to assume that more disposable income would just mean that you can choose more. You've got optionality. I think the workplace situation matters a lot, too, because one of the things that is really hampering the ability of working class folks to form these kind of connections is that they turn over a lot more often. jobs at different rates. They face more on long-term unemployment. And also they're in occupations that often like gig work is there you're by yourself a good portion of the day. And that stuff's being done disproportionately by working class folks. Whereas if you're in more white collar work, then you're more likely to have sort of stable employment. There are more social outlets, like people go to happy hours. There's kind of things

41:25that are developed around those workplaces that allow you to foster long-term friendships. In fact, for college educated folks, the number one place that they make friends. Work. Yeah. We spend a heck of a lot of time there. So we don't really know what's going to happen if more of our workplace experience is remote. It's not good for young people. We know that. You're not learning the culture. You're not building relationships. You're not building trust if you're working full-on remote. Now, I don't know what the research says about the sort of hybrid situations, but in-person workplace experiences are incredibly valuable. How quickly was the mirage of working from home dispelled when COVID came along?

42:07Once I broke, I don't got to put pants on. I can get snacks whenever I want. Don't got to see my asshole boss and be in the office. I'm going to sit in traffic. This rules. And then very quickly, the reality came and smashed everybody in the face of this might be what I want, but it's not what I need. It might be comfortable, but it's slowly turning me insane. Yeah. And this is, I think the, we're sort of circling back to technology now. And this is, I think the big, my big fear about what it is going to do to us, especially AI. It's not that it's not going to be useful or we're not going to be able to find new ways to benefit from this technology, is that it's going to make it very easy to sort of bypass all the things that we needed other people for.

42:57What do you mean when you're talking about this, like increased ability to work from home or AI job displacement? I think it's more about the social component, right? That if I needed- What's the mechanism that's causing the social component that people will be hybrid working or working from home more? I think sort of stepping, putting that aside, I think just when you look at, so AI technology allowed us to work from home, Zoom, you know, think about all the different ways we can share documents, all that kind of stuff. When it comes to AI and these other newer technologies, one of my big fears is that it will replace the kind of in-person socializing and social engagements that we needed. So if I

43:40needed a ride to the airport, right? I'd ask- Have to call a friend yeah now i call uber right if i needed uh food delivered i i can do that very easily instead i have to go to the store maybe talk to a cashier um task rabbit allows me to not have to rely on my neighbor to help me build my ping pong table these little insults these little chipping away at the small micro interactions that you would have had yeah and and maps are a great one too, right? I used to, when I first, right. I used to not infrequently get asked for directions in, when I lived in DuPont circle in Washington, DC. And typically these people were like 50 or older. They were, they were tourists for the most part. And I love, if I could give them directions, I would. And I love that experience, right? Like you're actually being- It is fun.

44:26It's painless for me. Like, and I'm showcasing my- I feel useful, I'm helping. I'm showcasing my knowledge of the city that I live in, right? It's fantastic. And the fact that we have fewer of these, right? Like is a meaningful loss. It happened to me twice last year, walking around the neighborhood where I live. And it was evident evidently two one was an older couple one was a couple that was obviously from out of town maybe even from out of country and it did make me feel like quite good yeah i really enjoyed that experience and the worst thing was i had no fucking idea where they needed to go i was like hang on wait a second let me pull my phone out and i'll be able to tell. I have definitely sent people in the wrong direction on an occasion or so.

45:07Look, you want the social integration. You're going to have to put up with the side effects of maybe my shitty directions. Okay. But I like that people like trusted me enough to come talk to a stranger. I could help them in some small way. Also, there is something to be said for like the serendipity of things not always being precise. Yeah. there is something to be said for like the serendipity of things not always being precise yeah you know the the um i stumbled across something new nurse that we think technology is supposed to enable and in some ways it does you search um i want to go to a show tonight and you something comes up that you maybe wouldn't have seen before but i get the sense that what it

45:42does is it it more frictionlessly delivers our existing preferences to us. Right. More than it avails us of new opportunities. Do you know what I mean? Yes, 100%. Because I think it's true with online dating, right? That you are optimizing. You lock in on your type. Right. As opposed to like meeting someone at a party, right? Right. I met my wife at a beach house with a bunch of friends. And so we got kind of introduced that way. And it was an integrated social experience. And I don't know if I had like a checklist of her like personal background or attributes, I'd be like, yes, this is the person for me. You did it the medieval way. Right. You're out in the world and you're having fun and you're with a bunch of your friends. And like that's an experience that I feel like is vanishingly rare now.

46:28How much of this generation and couple do you think is due to dating? How much of it is the dynamics of the dating market? Because the point, the intersection, I suppose, that people think about mostly when it comes to men and women is when they get together. Okay, we go to work together. It's important that boys and girls, they got to go to school together. Although sometimes not, um, but the real, you know, meeting in the middle is, is the relationship thing is dating like the vanguard of this. Is it the tip of the spear? I think so. Cause if you, if you look at the tip of the spear i think so because if you if you look at the in both the qualitative and quantitative component then the number of negative interactions between men and women

47:14occurs i think more often in that context uh in terms of just like the the way they engage socially right there's there's it's more fraught um there's less trust often and people come away with often negative or even even when the date wasn't that bad right it's like profound sense of exhaustion disappointment they're like another one right it didn't it didn't go well and i think as part of what's going on too is there's a lack of a script of like how things are supposed to work like it's not clear what you're supposed to do um how you're supposed to to act in certain situations and with little with less formative experience dating then you become an adult you're like well you're a white belt crap I don't know how this is in a new world right

48:01and it's very complicated right like the the the norms are are there are some norms that are there some norms are being changed what do you think are the ones that have changed like what's why is this not an issue that existed previously but it does exist now well i think there's there's uh norms about um you know who pays who asks like there's still i think the sort of vestigial like yeah men should do it but increasingly that's coming under question when women are outperforming men at least in a a lot of like entry level jobs, or in certain economic spaces, they're doing really well. So like, what, why do then men need to, you know, foot the bill for maybe the first date and a number of other ones. And I think that's just less clear. I think the

48:42other thing is like the the online dating environment makes things really really difficult because it is it's disembodied right like i i'm not seeing you out in the world i'm not seeing you interact with strangers or children um i'm not seeing you in an environment that i can make sense of i'm seeing photos of you like uh maybe you know hiking somewhere beautiful or with your dog right like and it like, I have to make judgments about- Influences. Yes, based on really limited information. None of it's social. Like, I can't see how you're interacting. How do you manage stress? Like, how do you treat people who can offer you nothing? Right, like those kinds of experiences are incredibly valuable and we have far less of it

49:23when we're making decisions online. The small little character tests and stress tests. I do think what would be some good non-obvious ways to assess the person that you're spending time with? I think definitely one is how they treat serving staff and waiters, waitresses and stuff in a restaurant. How they treat air hostess, airline people. Animals, small animals on the street. I think you've got to be an animal person, but I am. So I guess that's, I've got a competitive advantage there. Kids, like if kids come up, little kids and stuff like that. I think anything that introduces stress, right? So like running late to like running late to your dinner date, uh, trying to find parking, you know, these kinds of things like, you know, navigating through traffic.

50:16Cancel flight. Yeah. Right. Like how, how are you managing this? And I am a person who hates being late. So that would be, I would have to exercise a lot. It's a trigger warning for you. I'd have to exercise, um, some, some some i'd do some deep breathing or something but i think like those experiences are incredibly valuable because you can get a sense of this person out in the real world and then you can also get a sense of like the things in ways in which you're compatible and the things that you may not care about like yeah i don't care that he blew a gasket uh you know in heavy traffic because being in traffic sucks and i feel the same way yeah but when you most of your interaction with people especially in the early stages uh especially when you're searching is just an online

50:56squeeze through this teeny tiny little aperture yeah which is a single photo or a very selected video or whatever no one's showing themselves like losing their shit at a kid that won't stop crying on a plane right and that's not me at my best it's performative like right like dating is performative right like you are trying to put your best self out there that you think that person will respond positively to um the other thing that we know in in uh the day that we've done is that people respond and react very different differently to a bad date if they met someone online versus if they met through mutual friends so this is this question whether you would give someone a second chance if it was a bad first date and then we said like if

51:34it was you know gave this the circumstances of their meeting and if it was online almost everyone be like no that's it you get one date uh but if it's mutual friends, you're more likely to give them a benefit of the doubt and be like, well, maybe they had an off day or whatever. Maybe he screamed at that three-year-old for a reason that was justified. Right, something. And then it, of course, is higher for men. Men are more likely to give women a second chance than women are to give men, which I think is consistent with a lot of the sort of selectivity literature. But it's really important, right, that this person is part of your social world because then you have more people invested in it working out,

52:10even if it's not a major investment. So there's more ballast in the system, a little bit more stabilization if you've got it from somebody that's inside of your existing social circle. I talk about this in a number of ways. And I think for marriage too, right? This should be a community enterprise, right? Like that we should be invested in people's relationships. Like if you have family members that are married, like your cousin, like you should care about how that marriage is, right? You should care about that they're both doing well. And the same way I think that people should be invested in people getting together, right? Like we should societally. He's saying that we should crowdfund our local single friends

52:43into relationships. Let's do it. Let's think i think the relationship will even if it ends i think the relationship will be better if uh people are in like people who care about both people are invested i did uh i did a work in progress show last night and i got asked this really interesting question which was when people are in relationships for a good amount of time and then it ends, sometimes, not always, but sometimes and maybe a lot of the time they say, I wasted five years of my life. I wasted this time of my life. But nobody says that about a friendship that comes and then goes. And the guy posed to me and me so why is that the case why is it that we feel like we wasted time in a relationship but we didn't waste time if it was a friendship that then dissolved

53:31i think it depends on what your expectations were for the romantic relationship if it was supposed to lead to marriage and kids then you sort of say well the fact that it didn't get there means like that i didn't get out of the relationship what i wanted even if i got valuable experience which and and this is something else uh i think is really important that the you know if we're talking about sort of america's social malaise and the romantic recession these things are not separate right that that it's not a coincidence that we're struggling romantically uh we're we're having less sex all this stuff is happening at the same time, we're spending a hell of a lot less time together. And so I think like those two things

54:09are inextricably intertwined. And we see this in the data, right? Like for men especially, that the number of close friends you have is strongly correlated to your relationship status and whether you go out on dates. How so? So if you have more close friends, you're more likely to have reported that you went on a date recently or more likely to be in a committed relationship. How much of that is just social people are social and good at dating because they're good socially? Yeah, I mean, I think it is. You have more opportunities, you have a larger friend group. More from a disposition standpoint, that people who are good with friends tend to have friends and the people who are good with friends are also good on dates yes but they are

54:49also more likely to be married in committed relationships as well so they're so then it could be just extroversion right that they're very good but but extroversion does not necessarily lead one to get married i don't think i'm not a psychologist but uh that i think is telling right that that being able and having opportunities and having confidence. Local social fabric and capacity to take advantage of it. Hugely important. And I don't know why we don't talk about it more often. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is

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56:0530-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the US plus they ship internationally. And right now you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. How do men and women view cheating differently? So it's really interesting. We asked this question I don't think had been asked before. We know that infidelity is something that Americans largely across the political divide, across all these different demographic groups, they view as morally wrong. It's something like 8 in 10 or 9 in 10.

56:45And that's been consistent. We've changed our attitudes on a lot of different kinds of personal behavior. We've become more accepting on some, like homosexuality. But when it comes to infidelity, especially marital infidelity, Americans strongly oppose. There's an interesting wrinkle in this, and that we asked, in our survey, we split the sample. So we asked two independent groups, one if a man commits adultery, and one is the woman commits adultery. And we had everyone write whether it's morally wrong or morally acceptable. And we found that when it comes to men cheating, there wasn't much of a gender difference. That across the board, pretty much people said like, yeah, when a man cheats, it's morally wrong. When it comes to women,

57:34women, especially younger women, were far less likely to take a kind of hardline approach and say it was morally wrong in like all circumstances. They were more like, well, it's either not a moral issue or morally acceptable. And, you know, I hypothesize that, well, there's a couple of things might be happening. It might be that, you know, men do commit adulterous acts more often. There are power dynamics potentially that they're thinking about. It could be just that ideologically, we know that when it comes to things like a shared fate or linked fate, this idea like what happens to other people impacts you is much higher among young women than it is among men or older women. So there's a number of things that might be going on here, but we know that

58:18it matters to women who's doing the cheating and what the circumstances are when asked is it morally wrong for a man or a woman to cheat yeah men were asked and it was basically the same it's morally wrong for yeah men judge men uh the same way they judge women okay but women judge women differently than men did women judge men more harshly than men judged men? No, it was actually pretty similar. Okay. So everybody, three quadrants of this four quadrant survey are all pretty much the same. Yeah. Men judge female cheating and male cheating the same. Yeah. And females judge male cheating the same. Yeah. But females judge female cheating differently. Yeah. And it's mostly young women. So older women are, I i think pretty similar to others um so it's young women who really stand out on that measure and you think that this is shared fate to a degree shared fate

59:13uh experiences with cheating women are simply more likely to have experience with being cheated on than men um so this is some righteous retribution so they're like yeah they may have heard stories like oh you know she she cheated but like you know this guy was a real jerk and so like it it could be informed through those kinds of experiences um this is we're all hypothesizing here because i don't i don't have did you want oh i guess it was just a survey you didn't say or say why why have you got this oh that's quite an ugly stat yeah i suppose that there is this i mean what you do see this more so online like i i at least from again going anecdotally i don't see many guys coming out to excuse the behavior of a man cheating on his partner like if he's got a wife

59:59and this might just be the echo chambers that i'm in. Uh, but I would say that there is a, an implication of like, what did he do to deserve it? Yeah. As opposed to what did she do to deserve it? And that seems to be reflected in the survey data too. Yeah. And there's probably, I think there's like a mirrored conversation happening around the issue of like sexual assault where women will say like, well, every woman knows someone who's been sexually assaulted, but no man has a friend who sexually assaults women right so you have this sense of like okay how can both these things be true um well it's quite at least i david bus has got a pretty easy explanation for that which is that it's not a thousand men

1:00:39doing one incident each it's one man and one man in a thousand not a thousand men doing one incident each. It's one man in a thousand doing a thousand incidents. That like there is tail risk. It's repeated offenders that are inside the group of men. I'm convinced of that argument when it comes to like the more serious offenses. But I think when it comes to sort of less pernicious sort of sexual harassment online, I think it's not just one or two perpetrators. I think it's a much larger group, but I think that, yeah, I'd agree with the, his, uh, perhaps take on the more serious offenses. It's interesting, man. Like I, I remember seeing kind of the wild West of Twitter the first time around, not the second time around,

1:01:20which we're in again, I suppose. kind of the wild west of twitter the first time around not the second time around which we're in again i suppose and some of the shit that guys would post in response to women was like call of duty lobby level yeah stuff and it's there's just there is a limit for what should be acceptable in like common public discourse yeah that you just because you can say it doesn't mean that it's okay and i get it like you can have trolling and all right this is before trolling this is before there was a meme setup that you could have been anti-mimetically like sardonically cool working against you know i'm not contravening this this norm no norms have been created dude it's fucking 2015 or something uh so i i get that i

1:02:03i didn't consider the potential for like online sexual harassment to creep in in this sort of a way and i imagine that especially if you're a young woman growing up in a society that's got it's post me too there's a lot of concern about safety around men and bears and woods and stuff. And then there's this thing that happens online and then you see this thing and you know, maybe your mother at your age would have blown it off or maybe she wouldn't have done, but now it's really going to hit at this thing, this, this fear, this very visceral fear that every woman has. And it's then been perhaps magnified or multiplied through through modern social media and stuff like that's that's got to be a gnarly a gnarly situation yeah and i think too the the extent to which this stuff can like

1:02:52follow you home right like you feel like i'm in my home in my apartment this is my safe space wait a minute i'm getting emails and instant instant messages in a place where I'm supposed to feel safe that are promising to harm me. The other thing too, that I think it's not just about the harassment either. We know that women are more likely to get asked to share nudes, so naked pictures of themselves, right? Who wants to see guy nudes? That's my question. Not me. Yeah. No, me neither. Mark does. But yeah, that's it. Yeah. And so there's ways in which that can be exploitative and harmful too. But it happens an awful lot. And so where do you draw the line in some of this stuff? I would say that boys shouldn't be asking for nudes of their female classmates in general.

1:03:39But there's not as strict norms against this stuff. So what happens is the, the girls and young women have to sort of erect those walls and, and establish that. Don't use the word erect when we're talking about it. Come on. Yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't help, but think about it as you were talking about that, the difference in, uh, supply versus demand of male nudes to female nudes. Yeah. That like just the straight up supply of unsolicited dick pics, very high. Like we don't need any more. You want to talk about living in an abundance society? We're post abundance with dick pics on the internet, especially if Conor McGregor's online. The psychology of that, I've never understood that. Just the unsolicited dick pic?

1:04:17Yeah. Very strange. You need to work on your dick pics. Then on the other side the request like no i don't know has any woman ever asked for an unsolicited dick pic maybe not that might be there might be a world first if a woman went to go and do it now but then on the other side the like demand for female nudes right if i could polymarket this it would be like it would just the lines would be at the opposite ends of the graph uh not sponsored by fucking polymarket by the way i feel like any time this is how prevalent betting prediction market ads are that if i ever refer to calci or polymarket i want to do like a anti-ad read be like like this is not a partner of the show but um like going back to the the uh boys thing

1:04:58what do you think's happening with boys in education? Because this seems to be one of the first entrants into the meritocracy setting you on a set of guardrails or train tracks that might predict many of the outcomes that you get in later life. We're both friends with Richard Reeves. He kind of at least put this on my radar. What's the newest updates around what's happening with boys in education and why they're falling behind? So I'll start with a stat that perhaps shouldn't have surprised me but did. We did a survey of teenagers. This is our American teens aged like 13 to 17. And we asked them a whole bunch of questions about social media use and other things. And they asked a question about their school experiences and one particular question about the extent they thought that girls were encouraged and supported

1:05:47more than boys at their school. And it was a majority of teen boys who agreed with that, that in their school, this is a national survey, that girls received more encouragement and more support than boys did. And I have I have no doubt that it's, that this is correlated with the more disciplinary actions that boys are receiving. Um, because we know that there's a huge discrepancy in that. And I have, I'm raising two boys, right? Like I know that the needs of boys and girls are different, uh, in a number of different ways. Like boys simply have a ton of energy, particularly an inability to control it when they're like five, six, and seven. I have this story of a friend of mine whose kid just had a lot of energy. This was in second grade, and the teacher was an incredibly good teacher. She recognized it, and she's like, go run up and down the hallway.

1:06:41Sounds like a punishment, but actually is. And she recognized it. And she's like, go run up and down the hallway. And right. So she's not sending him to the principal's office. And so he's not missing class. He's not getting letters home. Just like she recognizes that he was not trying to disrupt the class. But he needed to just expend this energy. Blow off some mitochondria. Right. Run. And I think if you don't raise boys or you're not around boys, it can be kind of confusing. I remember my brother has two girls and we were up visiting them in Connecticut once. And my kids were a little younger now. They were like vibrating in their chairs. And I looked at my wife, she looked at me, she gave me a nod and I just took them out and we just started running around the building and they were jumping off picnic tables.

1:07:24And my brother's like, what the hell is going on? And she's like, oh, it's fine. You're treating your kids like dogs. They'll be right as rain as soon as they come back. And after like 15 minutes, we came back in and it was great because they had that excess energy and they just needed to run around and they can enjoy their chicken fingers. Yeah. Okay. So your point here is the modern education system punishes rambunctiousness, energeticness, disruption in large classes. It can. I think it misidentifies it. Disproportionately impact boys versus girls. Yeah, I think it does. I think too, think too, right? Like, when you think about models, like my oldest, now 10, is going to finish elementary school this year

1:08:06never having a male teacher. No fucking way. Yeah, and I don't think that's that unique. So, you know, when it comes to elementary schools, I mean, I think middle and high schools are different. There's much more gender parity in teachers. But in elementary school, it's many more women than men. I think there are four times as many female fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force as there are males kindergarten teachers in America. Yeah. I mean, that's Richard's big thing is like, yeah, we need. Heal. At every stage, we need good role models for boys and girls. Like, it's really, really important. On that, just an interesting gender dynamic. My ex-girlfriend was a primary school teacher in the UK.

1:08:50Maybe one or two. I think there was one or two male teachers in this primary school. One was a mid-50s Sikh man who was not going to be the object of much like attention although he's integrated into the group or whatever but there was one guy who was like maybe late 20s or something and he was teaching the kids and there was a lot of sort of classic female flirting stuff that would go on in the staff room and such and he's a big boy i'm sure that he can handle it or whatever but there was some times where she said i like i noticed sort of what was going on and it doesn't make for a particularly like comfortable environment and if nothing else there is this uh almost collective action problem that you have when trying to get any group yeah that is typically

1:09:39going to socialize with their own group into a new industry because like who am i gonna like i can't my interests are not your interests and if a couple of hours or an hour and a half of the day i'm in the staff room or whatever the break room talking about it's the fucking lumberyard everyone telling chicks that they need to you go and work on a building site so who am i going to talk to like even if i wanted to do that right who am i going to talk to unless you can somehow immediately deposit a like critical mass significant minority of other people that i can hang with yeah in this workplace i'm not going to do that yeah i think too it's it's it's and and my my kids have had wonderful teachers so this is you know uh i'm not criticizing

1:10:25them but but there's a way in which you will be able to uh i think just recognize and appreciate you know what your students are going through when you've you've been there you've walked in your shoes you may share interests like whether it's sports whether it's something else. And I think that's really helpful when you're trying to reach kids, you're trying to show them, hey, you know, I kind of know you're struggling here. I know you'd rather be out there, you know, playing basketball than been here. But like, listen, I used to play basketball. And, you know, that's going to end at some point. And you actually do need to learn math. And you do need to know how to read and write. And I think there's a way in which like that, that's just

1:11:04profoundly helpful. And we shouldn't rely just on parents. They should not be the only models that kids get. There should be, you know, from, you know, people in the community, neighbors, religious leaders, teachers should all be sort of contributing to the sort of formation of, of young people. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical

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1:12:22i think a lot of them are really looking to find meaning and meaning in relationships i think that there's um we've seen a drop off in desires of of teen girls to be parents but it's far less pronounced among teen boys. So I think that instinct of wanting to provide, wanting to protect is still there. I think it is incredibly strong. And I think that just being a little flexible about what that means, right? Like it doesn't have to mean that, you know, you are going to work in, you know, the mill for 80 hours a week and then you're going to come home and, you know, the mill for 80 hours a week and then you're going to come home and, and, uh, you know, be around for your kids. It can mean a lot of different things, but I think that,

1:13:08that there has to be more of a script for, for young men because too often they're told what you're doing is wrong. What you're doing is not helpful. Um, or that you need to sort of curb this sort of impulse that you have to, you know, whether rough and tumble play or whatever it is. And I don't think we have a good script for them now. I talk about, again, in the book, reimagining chivalry as a way for them to orient, particularly when they're in public places, right? We know that young women feel less safe than they used to, right? Well, be sort of an example, serve as an example. Paragon of safety. I was going to use that word, but I decided I didn't want to. I got you. But yeah, like that shouldn't be hard, right?

1:13:56It can be very small, modest acts. And they can make a huge difference collectively. You know, everyone is talking about the purposelessness crisis that's hit everybody, but particularly young men. And yeah, having a sense of civic contribution, even if it is just being a cool dude later in the evening walking down the street or something. That seems like a pretty good place to start. But it's kind of like, it is very much like a fat guy saying that doing one push-up is too few because it's not going to make any difference. Well, you're currently doing zero. So how's one for that? I think too, there's, you know, offering young men and boys a way to show up, especially for their friends, matters, right? Whether they're teammates, like having them understand that it matters that they're contributing, that they're showing up, that they're helping. I'm a huge believer in

1:14:53sports for everyone. I think that it just, it's an incredibly important character building experience. Both my kids play a variety of sports and I think they've just learned a heck of a lot from it. But increasingly we're seeing kids gravitate towards video games, right? Video games got really, really good. I play a little bit with my kids and Far Cry. We limit them, but we're playing stick fight. Stick fighter, have you? No. What's that? You're a little stick stick person and you like guns and swords and you try to kill each other the entire world of next generation technology you decided to go for it they decided this is i i never heard of this game okay okay it's it you should look into this it is incredibly fun and you can do four players

1:15:37like that you ever find yourself playing it once they've you've sent them off to bed no my wife was like no you know fuck you've been disciplined by everyone right okay yeah all of the men all of the males in the household have been disciplined what do you think of the trend of men withdrawing to work on themselves the monk mode approach i think it's it's the exact opposite of what men meet men need uh we know that you that from the 90s to 2020, 2021, when we did this remarkable study on American friendship, that the number of close friends that Americans have is down across the board. And for certain groups, especially young men, the drop has been even more pronounced. And so I think there has to be a reorientation

1:16:23towards social commitments, right? It can be scouting, it can be sports, it can be, you know, art, whatever it is. But I think having more social outlets, I agree with Jonathan Haidt here that more freedom for kids to kind of roam and connect with their, you know, kids who live in the neighborhood. Really, really important. We know that kids are spending a lot of time alone. I don't know if I mentioned this, Dad, that we found video game has changed from a sort of communal activity. Like when I grew up, I played with people and we played you know mario kart or or golden eye guitar hero whatever yeah like there were there were always people in the room sometimes a lot of people increasingly kids are playing online or alone right so that it's now a

1:17:13solitary pursuit and and that is a a remarkable change right this is one of the things that that we do see huge differences between girls and boys in terms of boys are far more likely to play video games than girls. And now they're playing it in a way that is actually taking them away from other social pursuits. The thing that's interesting, the men withdrawing to work on themselves thing, the monk mode, the isolation, the introversion, the improvement to some degree uh i would agree that the ultimate goal of that is to reintegrate into society as a functional but slightly upgraded human maybe you've got your fitness in order or maybe you've improved your dress sense or maybe you've read a little bit

1:17:55or you've learned to regulate your emotions or whatever i also agree that the end goal is the biggest mover is are you just socially integrated yeah so you probably can skip to the end yeah i i think i think that who who cares if you have better calves right who cares if you like me right but it's it's the things that will make you a better person are the people in your life like that it's not going to be AI that allows you to, you know, maximize your potential. It's going to be the sort of consistent engagement you have with the people in your life, the people that are important to you, that you'll give up smoking, you'll give up other bad habits. You will change because of them. And we are actually meant to change because of the

1:18:38people in our lives. Like, that's, I think the thing that we, we have missed in all these conversations about the purpose of dating and marriage and marriage isn't serving you or your relationship isn't serving you, uh, that we are meant to be formed by these, these institutions and these people in our lives. And like that, that to me is sort of central to all of it. And if you want to be your best person, establish a really good group of people and that, that those people will help you become your best person. I think the way that lots of young men are looking at it and your research has shown that economic prospects do matter in dating. Men are responding rationally to that in their opinion yeah what they're seeing is okay whether they

1:19:23know it explicitly or just subliminally yeah i need to go and grind i gotta go crank away on the monk mode thing i'm gonna you know come out of my winter arc as a sigma male and i'm going to crush this shit. And I, you know, as a only child that grew up in a place that wasn't, I didn't feel like I fitted in particularly much in the Northeast of the UK, like the most working class town that you can imagine. Work on yourself first. I get it. That can kind of become an excuse to postpone integration indefinitely. But at the same time there's we're stuck with a few difficult different knobs and dials to turn here that well i do need to go and do the grinding thing the social things become increasingly difficult especially for young men a

1:20:15lot of the male-only spaces that you would have had as kids have been dissolved or gotten rid of entirely that boy scouts is now just scouts but barbershops have closed like yeah all these different spaces that you you could go and you could actually hey there's there's a guy out there i really respect i can sort of try to emulate him i can learn from him um there's fatherless homes patriarch as a replacement substitute patriarch that i can hang out with. I know that I was doing that even with a father, like I was looking all the time for this sports coach. What can I learn from him? I really want, I really want a person in my life that teaches me this sort of a thing or that sort of a thing. Yeah. Well, the, the working on, I think there's, there's two, two different things,

1:20:58right? There's sort of, you know, working on your financial outcomes, right? That matters a lot in dating. We just know if you're wealthy or you're going to, as a man, you're going to do better. It's far easier to sort of signal on dating apps that you have, you know, good taste, that you have resources, and resources will attract more attention, right? You can show, you know, interesting places you've been or interesting people you've met or you doing fun or interesting activities, skydiving, whatever. And, you know, it, it really works to the advantage on a platform that is based on superficial evaluations, which is what dating platforms are, right? It's really hard to evaluate someone's character online, but you can see that, wow, they're eating at really fancy restaurants.

1:21:47Like, that's kind of cool. He's wearing really nice clothes. I like his car. But all of this is tied in with dependence on other people being increasingly treated as some sort of weakness or pathology. Yeah. Or just unnecessary. I can do it myself i can my apps can give me everything i'm gonna need or or ai do you think that the flavor or the the the tenor of male isolation and female isolation has been different i get the sense that the male isolation young guys feels a little bit more like a retreat yeah whereas the female one feels a little bit more like a retreat. Yeah. Whereas the female one feels a little bit more like autonomy, like lean in autonomy. Like I have the opportunity to be able to do this.

1:22:29I don't need anybody. Whereas the male one, at least from what I can see, it's like colored somewhat more with like a response to rejection or a felt sense of surplus to requirements do you know what i mean yeah and there's a way in which i think it's important not to judge the the dynamics of male friendship and female friendship which i think are different and what they provide right like so judging male friendship by the fact that, well, you don't tell your buddy you love them or that you're not vulnerable to them, right? That means that that friendship is not providing you what it needs. And I don't think I agree with that, right? When you look at men and how they respond to in surveys and the men I've talked to, they appreciate the time they spend

1:23:20with their buddies. And it could be fishing. It could be watching, you know, a game. It could be just, you know, chatting about politics or whatever it is. It operates somewhat differently. Like, you don't have the same kind of, you know, sort of emotional-based relationship. It tends to be more activity-based. But again, when you ask people, like, how's your friendship serving you? Are you happy with your friendships? Men and women report similar. Like, they, regardless of how many friends that they have, men tend to be more content with the friends that they have. And so, like... They tend to be more content with the friends that they have than women do. Or women with more friends are more content with the friends that they have than women do.

1:24:07Women with more friends are as content with men, say, with fewer friends. That's interesting. You either sort of trust them that they're responding based on their belief or that they're lying. Stockholm syndrome. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I wonder whether if you were to show women men's friendships, whether they would look and go, well, how on earth is that sufficient socially? They don't understand. I mean, I've been married for over 10 years and I told my wife, so I'm doing an event for the book at a local bookstore and I'm inviting lots my wife, so I'm doing a, uh, an event for the book at a local bookstore and I'm inviting lots of people from the community. And my wife's super excited about it, you know, and she's like, oh, all my, you know,

1:24:48the mom friends are like, they purchased the book, they pre-ordered it. They're going to come. They're excited to support you, cheer you on. And she's like, what are the, what are the dads saying? I'm like, oh, they said they're going to heckle me. Brilliant. Right. Like, but I love it. I mean, that's great. Men relate through shit talking. Yeah. Rel heckle me. Brilliant. Right? But I love it. I mean, that's great. Men relate through shit talking. Women relate through hugs. Right. I mean, and I'm not opposed to the occasional hug or high five or whatever, but like- Shit talking and hug at the same time. Yeah. It just operates differently and that's okay. Like we don't have to judge male friendships and female friendships on the same criteria i do i would say it it seems like

1:25:23the kind of set point for you know what what's that thing uh patriot not patrilocal the thing that's to do with health care where the male body was seen as the default and a lot of medicines and stuff yeah like crash test dummies were that that that whole world yeah i would say when we start to move into the world of emotionality and relating the opposite seems to be true to a degree that you will be judged by the standards of the more emotionally adept sex which tends to be women and it does it can i guess make male friendships look deficient in some way or or call even. And you're like, hey, hey, that's how we relate. All right. That's how, that's my form. I, you know, when I called him that really mean name, that was my, I love you to him.

1:26:10Yeah. And, and I think that, again, there are ways that male friendships can certainly be deficient. If, if they, you know, you can't actually rely on someone, um, if you feel like you can't be honest with them, like, right. Those are separate issues if you're not getting the support, but again, you can't actually rely on someone if you feel like you can't be honest with them. Like, right, those are separate issues if you're not getting the support. But again, you don't need the exact same thing to feel supported. Isn't it interesting that doing the inversion of that, to think about the ways in which female relationships might be deficient, that male relationships are sufficient, is like even just that frame.

1:26:40I'm trying to think about the physics i'm also trying to not kick a fucking landmine at some point uh um but that was the entire experience of writing i bet it was yeah you're like captain jack sparrow like running down the gangplank desperately not trying to fall off um but for instance you could say not me but someone that but someone else, might say there is a degree of frank honesty, which is typically available in male relationships where the amount of well-meaning bullshittery might be less that could be perhaps lacking in some female relationships. No. No, you look great in that. Whatever. No, I think that this thing, so on and so forth, which is coming from a pretty noble place. Unqualified support.

1:27:28But it's also like, Hey, I'm here for you. Like, look at this thing. But it's like a harsh truth can go far every so I'm trying to, I don't know. But even with that, like the, cause the framing, the emotionality framing thing is like, well, the set point is it like chicks have got it locked. And we're trying to play catch up a little over here i'm sure you you came across the debate about like the emotional labor that you know that yeah very interesting women do on behalf of men and i talk about it a little bit but one of the things i wanted to to try to just like open the door a little bit is that there's probably a lot of different ways to measure it. So helping someone regulate their emotions, A, adults probably shouldn't be

1:28:10doing that, right? You should be able to regulate your own emotions. But this is an example of the emotional labor that the authors use that women do for men. And I was thinking well um what about kind of being a uh calm presence during when someone's having like a really difficult time emotionally right and just being sort of solid and there like that does that count are we like can we sort of think about ways in which that would be really important as a way to support someone too? And I don't know. I don't think there's been work that have looked at the ways that men and women engage and support each other emotionally. But I think you could make an argument that men and women do support each other emotionally, but maybe in different ways,

1:28:58based on their different needs. Have you seen there's some really fascinating research when you look at couples before they got together, how much double shifting they said they did when they lived on their own. And because the male standard for a household is different to the female standard for a household, the female standard for the double shift on her own was much closer to what it ends up being when she becomes coupled than the man's was so you have this disparity in terms of like how often should the bed sheets be right be washed and like do they need to be put art on the walls do they need to be ironed once they're done right how quick how often do we need to do we need to use the squeegee thing

1:29:36on the the shower door or does it kind of not really fucking matter like all of those the standards are the expectations that you then need to meet so yeah a lot of this is just and i for all that i mean we're an hour and a half into a podcast i can say whatever the fuck i want now uh it is very difficult it's become very difficult for me to have conversations about this stuff without someone from the fucking guardian or the times or tiktok taking issue at a guy that presents like me talking about the difference differences between men and women without being coded is like incredibly manosphere incredibly right way despite the fact that the manosphere fucking hate me like i'm not their friend the the only person

1:30:18that i brought on to do with the manosphere documentary that louis through did was louis through the day that the manosphere documentary came out like that so you know you know pattern match me however you want anna caspari and chenki yuga fucking ezra klein like bernie sanders these are not the rabid right wingers of of someone that's trying to like you know misogynistically put women down all that is to be said i find it difficult to sometimes play gracefully with ideas to work out what's going on and this is why someone like you said yourself like you're sort of dancing through this potential minefield going like have i hit some sort of invisible trip wire that's going to piss off people and make it sound like white guy from America, well-educated,

1:31:02just castigating a group that's only recently reached socioeconomic parity. Who the fuck do you think you are? Like it's, it's trepidatious. Yeah. And more so than it has to be right. Like we, we should be able to have honest conversations about this stuff um but it's incredibly fraught because you know we have you know 90 minutes or two hours in which we're going to talk we're talking about a range of issues there's a lot of nuance that's going to get yeah right truncated into clips and shared on social media and taken out of context and and then all of a sudden you're like well like you, look at this misogynist talking about this or looking. I mean, like I have already been criticized from both the right and the left on this.

1:31:49Congratulations. That means you're doing something right. So, I mean, I think like it's sort of inevitable that we come to some of this with some tribal energy, right? That, oh, I see my group being attacked. I need to kind of rally around. Well, what's fascinating is this ideological Rorschach test where you're able to put the same piece of content out and both sides see it as their own enemy. Right. You're like, oh, hang on. So I don't even have consensus across the board. Yeah. Everyone is pissed for opposite reasons. And this ideological spit roasting that I appear to be subject to. And I'm sure that you will as well. I guess you mentioned politics earlier on. What is the role of politics here? How important is it now? You know, my background, political science, then I've moved to sort of more sort of sociological topics over the last like seven, eight years.

1:32:46And then in like 2022, I started looking at some Gallup data and noted that it was around 2016. There's just this massive divergence emerging between young men and women in terms of their ideology. Young women becoming much more liberal than young men and so we started doing more work around this area and we looked at like feminist identity and other things and so we saw like across all these different measures politics culture that this persistent gap um was evident in all these different surveys. So for instance, feminist identity, men and women are pretty close across generations. Feminist identity. Right. Are you a feminist? Right. So baby boomers, I think they're both around the high 30s or low 40s, right?

1:33:37Within five points. Similar Gen X, millennials, they're higher. But again, gender gap's not really there. For Gen Z, millennials, they're higher, but again, gender gap's not really there. For Gen Z, it's like 15 points. Like majority of Gen Z women are feminist. It's like 40% of Gen Z men. Hang on. So more Gen Z men than millennial men are? About the same, but the Gen Z women are much higher. Right. Well, I mean, this was the stat that i saw there was a famous graph that i went around on the internet maybe six months to about a year ago that showed this sort of wobble over time maybe over the last 50 years something like that of how right wing versus left wing men and women are and it got real fucking close a few times like almost basically to parity and then

1:34:17it goes whoop whoop and then there's now a 23 26 30 point difference but it seems like and you can tell me if i'm wrong it seems like women have become aggressively left wing and men have stayed relatively flat yeah like what one of the big takeaways was that it's not that we're seeing young men moving far far to the right, but that women are becoming far more liberal. And I talk about, like, attitudes on abortion changed dramatically for young women, especially in the wake of Roe being overturned. You used to have a lot more complex question, both among that cohort of folks, but also among elected Democrats too, right? You had a really different way of talking about the issue of abortion in the 90s than you did in the 2020s. And one of the things I think is

1:35:18happening is that you're seeing in political leadership, right? So people, leaders are making the gender divide worse by simply, you know, seemingly advocating for one side over the other. Black or white. Yeah, like, right. There's a win-lose situation where, like, you cannot find common ground here. You cannot compromise that. If one side goes up there it goes down and this has been kind of a hallmark of democratic politics which used to be so focused on class issues and economics as has shifted pretty dramatically to more talking about cultural issues but I'll give you an example of the thing that I saw that I think it has, has sort of exacerbated this is that I, I noted that I think it was like in 2023 or something like that, you know,

1:36:09looking at the democratic parties webpage, right. So the like Democrats, and you look at all the, the, who we represent tab, right. So the list of like 17 different groups, like, oh, we, you know veterans and immigrants and we, you know, and men are just conspicuously absent from this list, which seems crazy to me. not a group that the party is advocating for. And then you have in Trump, very clearly a guy who does not seem to, you know, have a lot of sympathy for the position of a lot of young women, right, to put it kind of lightly. And so they see in Trump, again, someone who has been unfaithful to every person he's been married to, who's had sex with a porn star, you know, all these alleged sexual assault accusations and all that.

1:37:09And so you have this situation where neither side feels that there's a place for them and the other party. And so you had this really strong divergence. Who the fuck do you think they're going to vote for? Right. the other party and so you had this really strong the fuck you think they're gonna vote for right uh and for for young men especially there's a sense that you know even republicans aren't really like they they for a while thought trump was their guy because he's not part of a broken political system he's kind of exists later inside of it right and and if i don't trust you know the establishment i can trust him, I can trust him. But when it comes to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, you have something like one in three young men, or maybe close to four in ten actually now, saying that they don't trust either one.

1:37:51This is, I think, unfortunately one of the byproducts of an overwhelm of information the goal of like pressure hosing you with conflicting points of view is not to convince you of any one particular perspective it's to make you completely nihilistic and throw your hands up right and say i don't i don't fucking know because that is the most pliable that you're ever going to be eventually that you get to the point where it's like someone come along and tell me and this is why certainty is used as a proxy for expertise if you ardently say a thing as opposed to oh there's a bit of incongruence there or he caveated somewhat or whatever and this is just like once you see this formula it's impossible to unsee

1:38:38look people are confused and uncertain about what's going to happen right someone comes along that sounds certain right i'll go after them that he he they he she has got the answer fucking brilliant for that but i mean the i understand exactly what you mean like who were they obviously going to vote for the thing that's kind of mad about the trump versus dems situation is trump was the candidate and there was no way that the Republicans were going to choose anybody else. So they were stuck with him. So if young women, many women, minorities, whatever, didn't feel seen or welcome in what was going to be for the final term, Trump's party, that nothing could have changed there. The democratic lack of focus on men

1:39:21just feels like an elected own goal. That's the term I was just going to use. Yeah, it's... You did this to yourself. You didn't have some candidate, Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or whoever the fuck was going to run, they weren't so toxic as to not be... Yeah, sure. Would some cohorts of men have found it a little bit more difficult to follow a black woman? maybe whatever yeah but like not to the same extent that women would have found it difficult to follow donald trump yeah so the fact that they weren't serviced on the list of 17 groups that we are here to support it's like i mean who's left like who that you worked you've done i mean at a time too when like working class people are really struggling, working class men have, have suffered, I think even more than working class women in the last few years. Um, as the, the job growth has gone, you know, in the service sector and healthcare gone to predominantly, uh, you know, women over men and, and, um men in those communities.

1:40:22And so like, yeah, like it should be easy if you're sort of raison d'etre, right? Like your reason for existence is to advocate for marginalized people, people who are struggling. But not those ones. Working class people seems like, you know, which cuts across race, class, religion, right? That's the other thing is it's a kind of unifying group that, you know, you can sort of please everybody. And it's perplexing to me that this has not been taken up by the Democrats who could probably do it fairly easily. Why do you think that's the case? So one of the things that's happened over the last 20 years is the composition of the Democratic Party has just changed dramatically. So Democrats have, at least over the last 20 years, been more women than men. So self-identified Democrats are like 60% women, 40% men. That's been true. Folks have noted that the party's become more educated. So college graduates shifted from roughly evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats

1:41:22to moving more towards Democrats. But one of the reasons I think things have changed is it's college-educated women that have sort of swollen the ranks of the Democratic Party. One in three Democrats is a college-educated woman. And their views on policy are very, very different than a lot of other groups. When it comes to abortion, reproductive health, climate change, trans issues. Again, just... You don't have as big of a diversity of viewpoints inside of the Democratic Party as you would have done in the past. Right. And then it's also then who's running the campaigns, who is staffing. Again, it's disproportionately in the Democratic Party and a lot of those uh really important roles are college educated women this is the the thing that i've always found

1:42:09like really difficult actually like even emotionally quite difficult to put up with both in the uk and in the us is i come from the most like canonical, stereotypical working class town in the Northeast of the UK, right? Like this is a place that had the second highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK and the widest high street. Those were the two things that it was famous for. And then it got knocked down the rankings for fucking teenage pregnancy. So we didn't even have that anymore. And like, this was, this was a place where I saw people that had gambling addictions that had alcohol addictions. And that was what I go state primary state, secondary state sixth form college. I think I was the only person out of my entire 300 person year group in school to go to

1:42:55university. Right. So this is not salubrious surroundings for me to come from. And then when I get to hear people from significantly more well-off backgrounds tell me what the fuck privilege I've been given. Forget the bad weather of the northeast of the UK thing behind and the tax and all the rest of it. Like just straight up, the denial of the issues of class, unless they're couched within something else. Well, your issue, yeah, the working class thing, but your real issue is that you're African-American. The real issue is that you come from a single parent home. Which is so reductive, right? Dude, look at the fucking, and I'm still, I still still yet to hear maybe it's the college educated thing maybe it's the chattering class maybe it's that if we keep you focused on

1:43:48right maybe it's more conspiratorial we keep you focused on race and and gender and other stuff that you don't look at what the big problem is but the hey if you are one family trying to scrape it together on like three quarter of one person's wage, it's not. I come from a household where we would share bath water so that we didn't need to like spend too much money heating the water twice for different bath. To not have that be represented within the space of a decade and a half from me being a child to me being like an adult that's at least cognizant of politics fucking blows my mind. And it feels very, and I think this is why a lot of working class people feel not, and this is me too, regardless of where I've ended up in life.

1:44:37I'll always be working class in the UK because of where I went to school, because of where I grew up, because of what my parents did, because of the postcode that I was from. Uh, and it makes me feel a low key amount of resentment for pretty much everybody that's a politician because I'm like, you didn't care then you still don't care now. I've never seen anyone that seems to actually give a single fuck about what my people, people like me had to deal with. I think so much of the frustration too, if you look at, you know, how working class folks view the political system in two parties, is that they see them as both representing elites. The Republicans are representing the financial elites, you know, the bankers, pharmaceuticals,

1:45:18lobbyists, and Democrats are representing the cultural elites. You know, think of the media, Hollywood, college professors, right? And so it's like a lose-lose situation. Neither of these groups are me. Right. I don't fit here. And other than Trump, who at least, you know, had affinity for the language of grievance, that was familiar with Trump. Oh, we saw that during the campaign, right? He is me at a McDonald's. had affinity for the language of grievance. That was familiar with Trump. We saw that during the campaign, right? Here's me at a McDonald's. Here's me in a high-vis jacket in a garbage truck. Here's me doing the thing. Like, I am one of you, like working man. But, you know, presuming that Trump leaves office in two years, right, that the Republican Party is going to then like still have to reckon with what kind of party it is in a post-Trump landscape.

1:46:11And is it going to be one that they, you know, they talked in the early, you know, early Trump days of a new multicultural working class party for the GOP. It is not on that trajectory currently. And so I think that, you know, we remain to be seen where it ends up. What is the solution that you see for closing this gap of generation uncoupled? So I start the book with the introduction and I title it Rekindling Curiosity. And I do think that one of the most important things that we can talk to about young people is that you don't know what you don't know. And you don't find out about someone's experience from watching a 30 second clip from looking at their Instagram, right? You have to talk to them. You have to learn about them. And you are almost inevitably going to be surprised because people are not representations of their online personas. They're not representations of their political attitudes either. We tend to be pretty heterodox,

1:47:22that if you talk to a person long enough, you're going to realize that, wow, they're Republican, but actually there's a number of things that they are involved with, or they view that are actually similar to what I think as a liberal, right? And so I think that we need to talk to people about the importance of embodied engagement with three-dimensional people, right? Like, the more you can spend time with someone across the table for maybe 90 minutes and learn about their life and ask about— What? because of the spaces that we used to have, right? Whether they're, you know, union halls or, you know, civic orgs, like there's just fewer of them left. We did a study before the pandemic and then followed up a couple years after

1:48:14and asking if people had like a third space, if you're familiar with that. So it's not your home, it's not your work. It's the coffee shop, the bar, the barbershop, where you can spend time with people in your neighborhood or people in your community. And before the pandemic, most people said, yeah, there's a place I can go that I can see people. And I go there semi-regularly. After the pandemic, like dropped like a rock. It's like 20 points lower and it has not recovered now five, six years out. So I do think the built environment matters a lot. I'll talk about my own neighborhood. So I live in Chevy Chase, Washington, DC, and I live just a couple of blocks from the school that my kids go to. But we also have, there's a little market there on the corner and you can

1:49:00get pizza there and you can get sandwiches. And it is an absolute hub of activity for the entire community. During, we had some snowstorms, probably like a decade ago now. And it was this sort of central location where people got together, got coffee, got hot chocolate to dig out like elderly neighbors right you need those spaces and i think in in the u.s there's a lot of ways in which the building codes and and you know uh development restrictions just don't allow it but they're incredibly important for communities because we we need spaces outside our homes uh to to gather with people yeah the the three-dimensional sort of understanding thing is a really great point. You know, like I see a hair bobble

1:49:48that can be used to protect a drink. And I think like, wow, like, isn't that strange? Oh, fuck. Isn't that horrible that this is a world that people think, girls think that they need to do that in, that they may't that horrible that this is a world that people think, girls think, that they need to do that in, that they may need to do that in. And you're like, fuck, that's a whole now additional, I don't even want to say burden. It's like a responsibility. Yeah, an individual responsibility. It's not a collective responsibility. It's individual, right? And so there's this idea that they can't rely on other people. They can't rely on an institution. I can't trust the people that are around me.

1:50:26I can't trust the people that are around the people that I might need to be worried about to make sure that they don't do it. The only person that I can look out for me is myself. And I learned about something like that. And I'm like, huh, it just makes me sad. And I think that the volume of, it just makes me sad insights that everybody's exposed to on a daily basis is so great. We're so over saturation with fuck. Like if you walk through New York City and you're genuinely emotionally tapped in, you can get about 300 yards before something happens that should fracture like the heart of a normal but you see somebody that's on the street that desperately needs help and you're like i'm i'm going to blank street i gotta meet my friend there's a match away like you know you just can't

1:51:14not yeah you can't engage with it in that way and i think this is why, yeah, to some degree, people have like a emotional prophylactic around them, which is I just, I can't, there's only so much. And I've got my own shit as well, but the less integration, the less integration, the more onapprehend the way people will react to us socially. And there's been studies that people riding a train were told to strike up a conversation with a fellow rider. And people didn't want to do it. Uh, but when they did, they found that the people who engaged in conversations with a stranger on the train felt better about their trip than those who didn't. Um, and same way that they had people, another study had people, um, call an old friend

1:52:16versus email an old friend and more people want to do email than call. But the people who called and talked to their old, their old friend, yeah, they felt better. They felt more connected. And so it doesn't take huge shifts in, in what we're doing, how we're doing it. I do think it, it matters that the places that we go are designed for us to be there, right? Like Starbucks now prioritizes drive-th like i was out in new jersey visiting family and we roll up and like i'm like oh man there's a huge line for the starbucks and some random part uh random highway and we drive him like oh the parking lot is empty and so we just park in there and it was the service immediately yeah it was down the street

1:52:58this line of cars and we stroll in and and they're like, yeah, what do you want? And I'm like, yeah. And no one was there. It was this immaculate, clean Starbucks. And we got our coffee immediately because we didn't wait in this line. But it's tragic because coffee shops are a really good place to foster community. We know this. We know this. We know this from our research. It's one of the things that people actually mention about places they would like to go and spend time with other people. And so designing it to facilitate just the acquisition of caffeine products is actually not a great use of that space. It's not a slam on caffeine products as a man that is a purveyor of caffeine but no i i i agree daniel cox ladies and gentlemen daniel you rule why should people go to check out

1:53:47everything you got going on uh you can check out the the book you can get on amazon to any other bookstores and then uh you can find uh my my work at the survey center on american life heck yeah i appreciate you man until next time Thanks for having me on. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes. Our all-inclusive free lifetime warranty covers everything and protects your ring for life. If you want something new down the road, trade up for a new style or carat size anytime with our easy trade-up program. Stop by or visit shanko.com to see for yourself. Shane Company, your friend in jeweler.