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

You 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? I mean, I think it started in their formative experiences, right? This is a generation that grew up online grew up with social media but but more than just the Technology 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 and their various interests and and pursuit of various accolades you saw You know from an enrichment activities private tutors to travel sports. And so I think a lot of young people grew up Understanding that the purpose of family is not the betterment of all members but like for their personal interests and achievement, hmm the men and women understand them each other less or more than they used to I Think less in some ways right because it's it's it's not that there's nothing that they 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 a lot of the other shows It's 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 the perfect relationship or the disasters Like that's what you get online. And so it just heavily skews how people are understanding Relationships but beyond that right that 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 had this sort of skewed sense of the world that is I've gotten from all the algorithms But now my expectations for a dating partner have changed dramatically, right? And in some cases they 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 and and the formative experience right like there was much more dating going on They were there was more social activities and previous generations that you may have seen someone a 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 like how do you come to understand someone who's whose experience is gonna 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 in the book where I asked these teenagers Imagine you were suddenly a member of the opposite sex you woke up and what are you feeling or what are you excited about? What are you worried about and it's 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 and the guys are sort of saying similarly they're saying far less in their responses, but they're saying yeah this I guess I could be like emotional. I could try to take care of 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 It's like sit down with someone So the people who are least likely to sort of draw on that are people who actually have close friends or family members Who they know and respect who members of the opposite sex and be like, hey, that's actually not how Girls or 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 that 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 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 right now. And I guess that this causes an odd like Recursive echo chamber men talking about women here What are the men are saying and women talking about men here? What other women are saying and neither of them are actually getting their assumptions tested. Yeah, right There's a there's a study actually that I say I think there's Washington Post Did it and It it found that gender was one of the most effective ways the algorithm separated people They knew you were a man or 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 that remains unchallenged and so when you get to really difficult things like I talk about the the man versus bear episode, right and Women are fed content. That is really different. It's it's sort of fearful If you if you express a little bit of concern about sexual violence or abuse or harassment Well, guess what's coming down, you know three posts later on is this more of the same kind of content and for for men? They're not seeing it, right? They're not seeing That kind of content so their views are like well, why are these women so upset? I'm not I'm not getting it Mm-hmm. 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 that social media in general is an incredibly ill-suited platform to have really Difficult discussions on sensitive topics right like for whether it's me to whether it's the man versus bear You need space to have some of these hard conversations that don't have easy answers. It's not believe women It's not believe men, right? It's that there's things a man versus bear example was a relatively easy answer I think symbolically what it's stood for right slightly. 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 Largely not dangerous 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 All these some kinds of there's a pepper sprays a what you know a hair scrunchie is like those. Okay Well, they've one design that you can cover your drink with so you don't get spiked, right? And and there I found out about that from an account had nothing to do with genders like how things work Which I followed on on X which is about like how things like it's like technology Yeah, and it's like this was there and 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 like it's really Interesting to see like what you are quickly fed and then like how that Just alters your worldview. Oh, dude If you briefly get interested in a book or a movie or something You need to almost be careful about how much you click on it because if you're not Like appropriately delicate with the class that you have like a guess what dude the next week is just you learning about this obscure Japanese movie from the 70s. Oh, yeah that I'm a fan so like if I if I'd like too many videos then I get Inundated very nice cat a wearable solution. This is what you're talking Yeah, this drink spiking prevention scrunchie, and there's a little hole and you put the straw in it Can you show me how it what 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 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 help people maintain their personal safety and If I'm a you know a young woman I'm thinking well Why would I need this if the world wasn't an incredibly very 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 like at the root one of the things that I come across in the book one of 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 a civic organization They were taking a lot of the day doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to establishing norms ensuring behavior if people transgressed Certain norms there be accountability mechanisms in place But increasingly what you're seeing is a there's been a huge decline in trust like 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 have faith in them these institutions to handle them responsibly Than older women are and so like you have this this case of where well, no one else is gonna protect me I need to check myself and the whole language around right which was sort of in therapy speak, but the whole language around 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. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm No one else is gonna look out for me. Yeah, I mean, it's strange, right? What women are doing is looking out for tail risk What the internet is doing is taking tail risk and making it feel like the middle of the bell curve for Interactions and male behavior You know the it's not all men, but it's always a man like right 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 ensure 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 and writing bad happening and me not being appropriately protected Isn't that so so one of the things that's behind this sort of rising fear rising concern about sexual harassment sexual abuse Is what's happening online? So we know that from you know, the early mid 2000s as social media Was introduced and became more popular. We saw a pretty significant rise in and negative experiences harassment particularly gender and sexual harassment increased dramatically, especially among certain kinds of users, so we actually Online online right and not that it's not happening offline But a lot of it now is happening online particularly among people who are 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 and There's a couple of reasons that you could think this is happening One is that well, maybe they're more sensitive to it like the language of microaggressions like okay they they have a different metric for what they view is Constance harassment 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 this other talk They're commenting online Young liberal women are more active. Hmm sharing their opinions online and sometimes those opinions aren't shared by Certain kind of men who are online a lot And so you did you look at whether it was mostly men that were doing the harassment? But yeah, we've at we asked about who 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 some of the victim knows When it comes to these online harassing experiences, it's often strangers I don't think that that's unique to like cross sex or like sexual or online sexual harassment Like there are far more people on the internet that don't know you than do know you right and if you put anything up there most people don't most people don't have a few million person following which means that the 2,000 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 you with the divergence lies is I think that women get attacked more personally Are more likely to face or sex based Attacks than men for sharing political opinions that I think is fairly widely established. I like threats, right? So if you're a woman you're like, I think this about you know, transgender issues or title nine 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 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's happening. I had this this idea a couple of years ago of recursive red pill learning So kind of the way that a eyes 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 they'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, right? 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 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, okay, that is an outlandish story, but the reason that that happens, even forgetting whether or not you've actually done a legibility check or like a, uh, uh, uh, accuracy check on it, um, 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 preselection 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, uh, 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, um, when you have like women belittling short Kings, right. Like sort of talking down to the opposite sex, whatever, whatever they're saying. Um, it'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 of 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, uh, 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 momentous that co-founder Jeff Byers played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built momentous around a higher standard. Every product from momentous uses evidence backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports. So what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally right now. You can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's L I V E M O M E N T O U S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. 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, uh, what women want in men and how they want them to behave on a, on a date. Uh, 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, action. 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, all holding the door, all these things, uh, were really important, uh, like sort of demonstrating kindness and concern. Like we're really, really high in, in, in surveys too. We see this. And I think that still matters, right. In the, in the one-on-one conversations I'd have with young people, young 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, the like sort of demonstrable, uh, caring activity to have there. Uh, I'm going to devil's advocate a little bit of this because I've thought a lot about benevolent sexism. William Costello has done a bunch of studies 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 them feel cared for concern, 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? I 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, but it's this. Do you understand what I mean? Yeah. Sort of push and pull going on here. And it's, it's, this stuff can get very thorny very quickly, but I think that there's often a sort of simpler way to sort of think about these things. And I think about, you know, uh, with my wife, uh, 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, like, right. This is something that she could do. She is fully capable of taking out the trash, the recycling, but I do, cause I just, she doesn't like doing it. Um, and I'm very capable of doing it and going out in the early morning to take care of it. And I think it's, 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's, uh, women who are pregnant, anyone who, 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 should talk and I'm, and I'm raising two boys, uh, to have young men like be a little bit vigilant. 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. Now, a lot of what's been put in front of them is that you are too much. Is it your pre preconceptions of conquer and mastery and aggression, mansplaining? Yeah. You like spreading don't. Yeah. Don't, don't try to, to, uh, interject into the conversation. That's you using a patriarchal overreach in order to, and 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 that they're like. I don't know what my place is in society. It seems like the, the girls are socioeconomically really crushing it at the moment. And, and, and that's like 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 mocked 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 under. Exposed 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, uh, I think it's really helpful to understand too, is like the, the problems don't have to be the same, right? Like we can acknowledge that men and women face different 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, um, I'm putting myself at greater risk for being rejected. And in the era, in the era of like 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 to be, yeah, 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, uh, yeah. And, and these, these, uh, DJs are like looking around and see everyone holding their phones 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 smiling, 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 sort 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 most sort of Larry loud tea, 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. I mean, the half-life of our mistakes and foolishness needs to be, yeah. I mean, it needs to be much shorter. I talk about this anecdote. I grew up playing soccer and, uh, in, in Western New York. So we played through, you know, late November and got pretty cold. And so we were in the state tournament one year playing against, I even forget the team. Uh, but we had our warmups on, we're getting ready to game. We, you know, 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 so energized for the game that he didn't realize it. And he's just like, it's cold. Uh, and he got like halfway out and then his teammates are, 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 he 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 stop 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? Like the felt sense, perhaps. Yeah. Right. I don't need men. There's, there's some research coming out that, um, home ownership might be impacted by the lack of marriage, right? That, that when people get married, they can combine resources. Housing is really expensive. One roof as opposed to two people, two roofs. It's a lot more affordable. And so there's a lot, a lot of ways in which men and women still, I think would benefit, um, even if you can kind of make it on your own, you're like barely making it, uh, is that what you think people think though? Cause 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 and I sort of put myself in this bucket a little bit that to, to need someone is, 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, the most amazing exchanges we did a bunch of focus groups, uh, in Philly, in North, in 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, talk 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, um, what's important in life? Do they talk about the importance of financial stability? Do they talk to you about the importance of getting an education? Uh, what about marriage or finding a partner and, and parenthood? And so we asked like, show hands, like put your hand up if, 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, are talking about these things and kids are hearing it when it comes to marriage. Uh, none of the hands went up and either, either group comes to parenthood again, nothing. Some of the women said that their grandparents were the ones who talked to them about marriage and parenthood. I think it's not, it's wanting to not be prescriptive. This idea that you as a parent, uh, need to like, appreciate that, 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 may still be on your overbearing principles when it comes to your bank account, but not to do with your marital status, right? And it's, it, 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 Being married having a having a long-term partner and having kids. These are life-changing Experiences and the best social science research shows that the quality of our social relationships far more important than almost any other attribute or metric so why Why aren't we telling young people this like why aren't we emphasizing it? And I 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, I 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 you know 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 Yeah, and the number of people with only children now is increased dramatically I took up 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 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 I don't think there was something planned. This is just their parenting approach is they would kind of leave it leave leave it to us to navigate this stuff and figure out And resolve our differences and that's incredibly valuable right like that that you learn the the benefit of this kind of friction And so it's not something to be yeah, it's not something to be avoided It's just sort of natural and innate that you have to deal with when you're a member of a family But it's also a way to kind of like you know, you know, you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're member of a family and Increasingly this generation is just having to deal with a 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, don't need it working in a soup kitchen or working with you know religious organizations in your community You know people are funneled into sort of enrichment activities so they're doing you know, they private tutors or they go to dance classes or art classes you travel sports and in doing so they they Learn that their parents think that they're kind of special right? Why 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 to your parents view a 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 they 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 I'm kind of unique. I'm distinct. I'm different and I think I didn't 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. Yeah, and you're seeing it in schools to write that sort of there's a article I think in the Atlantic about like accommodation nation right that 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 like the 2010s right so this shift in the way parents engage and and the expectation that oh, no, it's it's Something wrong with your test or my kid needs some special Timmy. No, I mean Timmy's a genius You don't understand the test must be wrong. Yeah, and I thought with this like parents over overvalue the Academic and intellectual capacities of their kids to in ways. I feel like they probably didn't a generation ago Mostly mostly in America your research. Yeah, this is a hundred percent. Okay, right 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 like UK and Australia are two of the biggest countries that listen to the pod and um Just the concept of being seen as a special British child, but special would be an insult It's how you go to school on the on the different bus. Oh, right, right. Yeah, it's a special is special would be Used ironically. Yeah but this is The American affliction is bullshit and the British affliction is cynicism. And I do think I one of my favorite stats I learned recently is that America is 8% of the world's population But had 50% no, sorry 4% of the world's population 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 Supposition that you enter the physics of this 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 Yeah in the UK you're allowed to become successful But only if you treat it like some sort of horrible accident Like you have to be tremendously embarrassed that you managed to become successful. I fell backward into I swear I won't do it again. I mean there's there's been you know Forever like a really powerful strain of individualism in the United States, and I don't I don't know how it compares to the UK But I also know like there's I don't think I've seen in my lifetime I'm I'm you know crashing towards 50 a more pessimistic and despairing generation than this this upcoming one so while I think there's a lot of Evidence that we we are still economically Competitive we are are doing really well in some ways. I think like the the sort of Social fabric has been fraying and has been for 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 Outliers CEO and saying see X group is doing fine and you go that's like one guy There's been a sort of decoupling to write Our our economic outlook is now closely tied to our social outlook so our ability to form friendships Garner support from people around us established enduring social connections is tied to our Financial stability right so the people who are doing well financially are doing well socially and that didn't used to be the case that you Didn't use to be like there's more friends more friends more civically engaged Sort of all those kind of correlates of social health a quick aside You probably heard me talk about element before and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last Five years now, which is a cold glass of water with elements 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 your appetite throughout the day. I Genuinely noticed the difference when I take it versus when I don't which is why I don't shut up about it and also why it's Used by everyone from dr. Andrew human to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams the good sniper teams Not the bad ones. Also, never no questions asked refund policy So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back Plus they offer free shipping in the US right now You can get a free sample pack developments most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below Heading to drink LMNT comm slash modern wisdom, that's drink LMNT comm slash Modern wisdom. Why do you think that that's the case? Is it that they've got more spare time? It's it's that we've kind of privatized this kind of Activities right so that 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 they were the sort of glue of rural rural and exurban 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 place other places to sort of form Their own kind of social outlets, right? So like book clubs are really popular in a lot of us, right run clubs Have you heard of darties and I have not a parties day. So it's like the health get up at 6 in the morning or run around Lake Austin or whatever Lady Bird Lake and and to get you get your morning. That's not terrible jogging with the guys I'm not built to run but Yeah, I 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 You are a high-powered professional person 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 But 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're they turn over a lot more often right they they're in and out of jobs at different rates They 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's of that stuff to being done by it Disproportionately by working-class folks, whereas if you're in more white-collar work, then you're you're more likely to have sort of stable Unemployment there are more social outlets like people go to happy hours There's kind of things that are developed around back at 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 if more of our workplace experience is remote It's not good for young people. We we know that right? You're 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 in-person workplace Experiences are incredibly how quickly was the mirage of working from home? Dispelled when Kobe came along once I broke. Yeah, I don't got to put pants on Yeah, I can do I just be next I can get snacks whenever I want Don't go to see my asshole boss and be in the office. I'm gonna sit in traffic this rules and then I Can catch a Netflix? Very quickly. Yeah, 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 that 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 you know 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 what 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 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 it's sort of stepping putting that aside I think just this when you look at so AI technology allowed us to work from home zoom You know think about all the different ways. We can doc share documents all that all that kind of stuff when it comes to AI and these other newer technologies One of my my big fears is that it will replace the kind of in-person socializing and social Engagements that we needed so if I needed a ride to the airport, right? I'd ask to call a friend. Yeah Now I call uber right if I needed food delivered. I I can do that very easily instead. I have to go to the store Maybe talk to a cashier Task rabbit allows me to not have to rely on my neighbor to help me put 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 direction, 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 year older. Yeah, they were they were tourists for the most part And I love if I could give them directions. I wouldn't I love that experience, right? Like you're actually being fun. It's it's it's painless for me like and it's I'm sure I showcasing my knowledge of the city that I live in right? It's it's fantastic. And the fact that we have fewer of these right like is is a meaningful loss It happened to me twice last year walking around the neighborhood where I where I live And it was evidently to 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 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 you where it is easy to go. I have definitely sent people in the wrong direction, uh, on an occasion or so. 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, I, I like that people like trusted me enough to come talk to a stranger. And I, 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. You know, the, 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 does is it, it more frictionlessly delivers our existing preferences to us more than it avails us of new opportunities. Do you know what I mean? Yes. A hundred percent. Cause 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. That like I met my wife at a beach house with a bunch of friends. And, and so we would be kind of introduced that way. And it was an integrated social experience. Uh, and I don't know if I 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? I you're out in the world and you're having fun and you're with a bunch of your friends and like that, that's a, an experience that I feel like is, is vanishingly rare now. How much of this generation uncoupled do you think is due to dating? How much of it is the dynamics of the dating market? Because the, the point, the, uh, intersection, I suppose that people think about mostly when it comes to men and women is when they get together. Right. Right. Okay. We got 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, in both the qualitative and quantitative component, then the number of negative interactions between men and women, um, occurs 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 and you're like, well, you're a white belt. Crap. I don't know how this is in a new world. Right. Well, and 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 of the ones that have changed that? 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 lot of like entry level jobs or in, in certain economic spaces, they're doing really well, so like what, why do then men need to, uh, you know, foot the bill for maybe the first date and a number of other ones, and I think that's just. Less clear. Um, I think the other 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's like, I'm have to make judgments about, 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? Uh, 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, uh, when we're making decisions online, the small little. Character tests and stress tests. I do think the, what would be some good, uh, non obvious ways to assess the person that you're spending time with. I think definitely one is how they treat serving staff and, uh, waiters, waitresses and stuff in a restaurant. Uh, how they treat, uh, air hostess, uh, airline people. Yeah. Um, 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 that, um, kids, like if kids come up, but little kids and stuff like that, again, 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 be, you know, navigating through traffic, cancel 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. Yeah, I'd have to exercise. Um, some, some, I do some deep breathing or something, but I think like those experiences are incredibly valuable. Cause 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, man, I don't care that he blew a gasket, uh, you know, in heavy traffic because being in traffic sucks. Uh, 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 squeeze through this teeny tiny little aperture, 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. I mean, it's not me at my best. It's performant. 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 data 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 we asked this question, whether you would give someone a second chance, if it was a bad first date. And then we said like, if it was, you know, gave this the circumstances of their meeting. And if it was online, almost everyone would be like, no, that's it. You get one date. Uh, but if it's through mutual friends, you're more likely to give them a benefit of the doubt. I'm like, well, maybe they had an off day or maybe he screamed at that three year old for a reason that was justified. Right. So something, and then, uh, it of course is higher for men. Men are more likely to give women a second chance than women are to give men, which, you know, I think is consistent with a lot of this sort of selectivity literature. Uh, but, 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, even if it's not a major investment. So there's more ballast in the system. Yeah. 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. It, this should be a community enterprise, right? Like that we should be invested in people's relationships. Like if, if you have family members that are married, like your, 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 into relationships. Let's do it. Let's I 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, uh, and then it ends sometimes, not always, but sometimes maybe a lot of the time they say I wasted five years of my life and I wasted this time of my life, but nobody says that about friendship that comes and then goes, right? And the guy posed to me and said, well, 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, I 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 this is something else 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. Uh, and so I think like those two things are inextricably intertwined and we see this in the data, right? Like for, 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 like you have a larger, you have more opportunity of larger, a 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're also more likely to be married in committed relationships as well. So there, 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, that being able and having opportunities and having confidence local social fabric and capacity to take advantage of it. Hugely important. And, 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 on mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria. So your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory in clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with timeline and eat your heart out, Martin Shkreli. Cause they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the U S 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. Uh, we asked this question. I don't think I've been asked before, right? We, we know that infidelity is something that Americans largely, uh, across the political divide across, you know, all these different demographic groups, they, they view as morally wrong, right? It's something like eight and 10 or nine and 10. And that's been consistent, right? Like we've, we've changed our attitudes on a lot of different kinds of personal behavior. We've become more accepting on some like homosexuality. Um, but when it comes to infidelity, especially marital infidelity, um, Americans strongly oppose. There's an interesting wrinkle in this, uh, and that we asked, uh, in our survey, we split the sample. So we asked two, two independent groups. Um, one, if a man, uh, commits adultery and one is the woman commits adultery. And we had everyone rate, whether the, what is 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. Uh, women, especially younger women were far less likely to take a kind of hard line approach and say it was morally wrong in like all circumstances. There was more like, well, it's either not a moral issue or morally acceptable. And, you know, I, I hypothesize that, well, there's a couple of things might be happening. It might be that, you know, men do commit, uh, adulterous acts more often. Um, there are power dynamics, uh, potentially that they're thinking about. Um, it could be just that ideologically there's a, we know that when it comes to things like a shared fate or linked fate, this idea of like what happens to other people impacts you is much higher among young women than it is among, uh, men or older women. So there's a number of things that might be going on here, but we know that, um, it, it 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 men were asked and it was basically the same, it's morally wrong. For men, judge men the same way they judge women, 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. And females judge male cheating the same. Yep. But females judge female cheating differently. Yeah. And it's, it's mostly young women. So older women are, are, uh, 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, uh, experiences with cheating. Women are simply more likely to have experience with being cheated on than men. Um, so this is some righteous retribution. 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. Cause I don't, I don't have, I guess it was just a survey. You didn't say, I'll say why, why have you got this? Oh, that's quite an ugly stat. I suppose that there is this, I mean, what you do see this more so online. Like 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 and this might just be the echo chambers that I'm in 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? well, it's quite at least I David Buss has got a pretty easy explanation for that, which is that it's not a thousand men doing one incident each It's one man and one man in a thousand doing a thousand incidents that like there is tail risk 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 that sort of sexual harassment online I think is is 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 Perhaps take on the more serious offenses. It's interesting man. Like I I I Remember seeing 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 now stuff and it's There's just there is a limit for what should be acceptable in like common public discourse Yeah, you'd you'd 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 as I get that I 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 gonna hit at this thing Yeah this this fear this very visceral fear that every woman has and has then been perhaps magnified or multiplied through through Modern social media and stuff like that's that's going to be a gnarly gnarly situation Yeah And I think to the extent to which this stuff can like follow 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 messages in a place where I'm supposed to feel safe that that are promising to like harm me The other thing too that I think it's not just about you know, the harassment either You know, we know that women are more likely to get asked for to share news So naked pictures of themselves, right? Who wants to see who wants to see guy nudes? That's my question. Not me Yeah, I mean either mark does but yeah, that's it. Yeah and so the like there's ways in which that can be exploitative and and You know harmful too, but it's right it happens an awful lot and so like how like where do you draw the line in some? Of this stuff. I would say that boy shouldn't be asking for nudes of their female classmates in general But 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 establish that don't use a direct when we're talking about. Come on. Yeah. I mean look I can't Yeah, I can't I can't help but think about I was you were talking about that the difference in Supply versus demand of male nudes to female nudes Yeah But like just the straight-up supply of unsolicited dick pics very high like we don't need any more You look like you want to talk about living in an abundance society We're post abundance with dick pics on the Internet, especially if Connor McGregor psychology that I've never understood. I think just the answer is the dick pic Yeah You need to work on your dick pics then on the other side the request like no I don't know as 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 poly market this it would be like it would just the lines would be at the opposite ends of the ground Yeah, not sponsored by fucking poly market, by the way I feel like anytime this is how prevalent betting prediction market ads are that if I ever refer to calcium or poly market I want to do like a anti ad reads be like like this is not a partner of the show, but going back to the Boys thing what what do you think is happening with boys in education? Because this seems to be one of the first entrance into the meritocracy setting you on a set of guardrails or train tracks It's 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 what's saying? 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 that Perhaps shouldn't surprise me, but did we did a survey of teenagers as our you know, American teens age like 13 to 17 And we asked him a whole bunch of questions 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 more than boys at their school And it was a majority of teen boys who agreed with that that that in their school. This is a national survey that Girls received more encouragement and more support than boys did And I have no doubt that it's that this is correlated with the more disciplinary actions that boys are receiving Because we know that there's a huge discrepancy in that and I have I'm raising two boys, right? I I know that the needs of boys and girls are different in a number of different ways Like boys simply have a ton of energy particularly and an inability to control it when they're like five six and seven I have the story of a friend of mine whose kid It just had a lot of energy and this is in second grade and the teacher what was an incredibly good teacher and She like recognized it and she's like, you know, go run up and down the hallway And right, so she sounds like a punishment, but not sending him to the principal's office. And so he's not missing class He's not you know, not getting letters home Just like she recognizes that it he was not trying to disrupt the class but he needed to just expend this energy off some mitochondria right run and And and I think if you don't if you don't raise boys you're not around boys it can be that kind of confusing I remember my brother has 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 And my brother's like what the hell is going on and she's like, oh, that's it's fine. They'll be treating It's like dogs. They'll be right as rain as soon as they come back and and you know 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 then they can enjoy their chicken fingers. Yeah okay, so your point here is the modern education system punishes rambunctiousness Energetic nurse disruption in large classes it can I think it misidentifies it disproportionately impact boys versus girls Yeah, I think it does and I think to write they can you think about models like my my oldest now 10 is gonna finish Elementary school this year never had it having a male teacher No fucking way. Yeah, and I don't think that's that unique So I you know when it comes to elementary schools, I mean, I think middle high schools are different There's much more gender parity in teachers. I think in elementary school. It's it's Many more women than men. I think there are four times as many Female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are males kindergarten teachers in America. Yeah, I mean, that's Yeah, that's big thing is like yeah, we need because he'll at at every stage We need good role models for boys and girls like it's it's really really important on that Just a interesting gender dynamic. My ex-girlfriend was a primary school teacher in the UK Maybe one or two. I think there was one or two Male teachers. Yeah in in this primary school One was a like 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 we go on in the staff room and yes 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 almost collective action problem that you have when trying to get any group Yeah, that is typically going to socialize with their own group into a new industry because like Who am I gonna 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 them It's the fucking lumberyard everyone telling chicks that they need to you go and work on a building site So what am I gonna talk to like even if I wanted to do that, right? Who am I gonna talk to unless you can somehow immediately deposit as like critical mass Significant minority of other people that I can hang with. Yeah in this workplace. I'm not gonna do that Yeah, I think too. It's it's it's And and Mike my kids have had wonderful teachers. So this is you know I'm not criticizing them. But but there's a way in which you will be able to 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 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 gonna 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 profoundly helpful. We shouldn't rely just on parents Yeah, 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 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 a hundred and sixty 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 might test 20 markers function runs over a hundred and sixty. It's huge Best of all you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard So you track trends over time make sure you're moving in the right direction and this level of testing would usually cost thousands but with function it is $365 per year just one dollar a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body and right now you can get $25 offering it down to 340 bucks get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to function health comm slash modern wisdom. That's function health comm slash Modern wisdom. What do you think young man is supposed to aspire to now? I Think a lot of them are really looking To find meeting and meaning in relationships I think that there's we've seen a drop-off in desires of teen girls to be parents, but it's the 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 gonna work in you know the mill for 80 hours a week and you're gonna come home and and You know be around for your kids It can mean a lot of different things But I think that that there has to be More of a script for for young men because too often there's some told what you're doing is wrong What you're doing is not helpful 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 I don't think we have a good script for them. Now. I talked 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 Be be sort of An example serving as a paragon of safety. I was gonna use that word, but I decided I didn't want to I got you but yeah, like That shouldn't be hard, right? It can be very small modest acts and they can make a huge difference collectively well, you know everyone is talking about the Purposelessness crisis that's hit everybody but particularly young men. Yeah, and yeah Having a sense of civic Contribution even if it is just being a cool dudes Later in the evening walking down the street or something Yeah 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. Not. Well, you're currently doing zero So how's one for that? I think two there's you know offering Young men and boys a way to show up especially for their friends Matters like whether or their teammates like having them Understand that it matters that they're contributing that they're showing up that they're helping I I'm a huge Lever in sports for everyone. I think that it just it's it's an incredibly important character building Experiencing 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 the video games got really really good I play a little bit with my kids and what are they far cry? We limit them, but we're playing stick fight the stick fighter of you know You're a little stick care stick person and you like guns and swords and you try to Hire world of next-generation Technology you decided to go for it. They decide this is I never heard of this game. Okay, okay? It's it you should look into this incredibly fun And you can do four players like 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, okay? Yeah, all of the men all of the males in the house. I've 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 We know that you know from the 90s to you know 2020 2021 When we did this remarkable study on American friendship that the number of close friends and Americans have is down across the board and for certain groups especially young men the the drop has been Even more pronounced and so I think there has to be a reorientation towards 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 height 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 But we know that kids are spending a lot of time alone. I don't know if I mentioned the stat that we found Video game is Changed from a a a sort of communal activity like when I grew up I played with people when we played you know Mario Kart or goldeneye. It's all hero, whatever Yeah, like there were there were always people in a room sometimes a lot of people Increasingly kids are playing online or alone right so that it's now a Solitary 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 boys are far more likely to play video games and girls and now they're playing it in a way that is actually Taking them away from social 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. Yeah to some degree 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 So maybe you've read a little bit or 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 think I think 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 people that are important to you that you'll give up smoking You'll give up other bad habits You will you will change because of them and we are actually meant to change because of the people in our lives like that's I think the thing that we Have missed and all these conversations about the purpose of dating and marriage and marriage isn't serving you where your relationship isn't serving you 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 you know 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 know it explicitly or just subliminally. Yeah, I Need to go and Grind I got to 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 gonna crush this shit and I 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. Yeah, but at the same time There's was 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 lot 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 of clothes like yeah all these different spaces that you you could go and you could actually hey There's there's a guy that I really respect. I can sort of try to emulate him. I can learn from him there's fatherless homes patriarch as 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 different things right? There's sort of you know working on Your your Financial outcomes right that that matters a lot in dating. We just know if you are if you're wealthy or you're gonna as a man You're gonna do better It's 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 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 you can see that while they're they're eating in really fancy restaurants Like yeah, that's kind of cool. He's wearing really nice clothes. I like his car Mm-hmm, 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 I can do it myself. I can my apps can Give me everything I'm gonna need or or a 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 like Autonomy like lean in autonomy like I have the opportunity to be able to do this I don't need anybody whereas the male the male one at least from what I can see It's like colored somewhat more with like reject like a response to rejection or a felt sense of surplus to Requirements. Yes. 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 right? Are you open you're not vulnerable to them, right? That means that that friendship is not providing you what it needs and I don't I don't think I agree with that Right, like 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 with their buddies and 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's it it operates somewhat differently like you don't have the same kind of You know sort of emotional based Relationship it 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 women report Similar like they 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 With women with more friends are as content with men say with with fewer friends, right? That's interesting So like you you either sort of trust them that they're responding like based on their belief or that they're there They're lying right Stockholm syndrome. 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 like I I've been married for over 10 years and I I told my wife so I'm doing a an event for the book at a local bookstore and I'm finding lots of people from the community and My wife's super excited about it, you know, and she's like all my you know The mom friends are like they purchased the book. They pre-ordered it there. They're gonna come they're excited to support you cheer you on And she's like, what are the what are the dad saying? Like although they said they're gonna heckle me Brilliant, right like yeah, but I love it. I mean, that's great Men relate through shit-talking. Yeah relate through hugs. Yeah, right I mean and 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, they it just operates differently. That's okay. Like we don't have to judge A Male friendships and female friendships on the same criteria. I do I would Say it seems like the kind of set point For you know, what? What's that thing? Patriot but not petrol local 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 precious 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 callous 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 Yeah, and and I think that again there are ways that male friendships can certainly be deficient if that you know 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 to support But again, you don't need the exact same thing to be 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, but I'm trying to think about the physics I'm also trying to not kick a fucking landmine at some point But I was the entire experience of right I bet it was yeah, you're like Captain Jack Sparrow like running down the gangbang desperately done. It's trying to fall off But for instance, you could say not me, but someone did. Yeah someone else might say there is a degree of frank honesty Which is typically available? Yeah in male relationships where the amount of well-meaning bullshittery might be less That could be perhaps lacking in some female relationships. Yeah. 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 qualified support But it's also like I am here for you like look at this thing But it's like a harsh truth can go far every so I'm trying to let I don't know but even with that like because the framing the emotionality framing thing is like Well, the set point is it like chicks have got it locked and the 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 talked 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 like so Helping someone regulate their emotions a adults probably shouldn't be doing that, right? You should be able to regulate your own emotions But this is an example of the emotional labor that that the authors use that women do for men And I was thinking well what about kind of being a A Calm presence during when someone's having like a really difficult time emotionally right and just being sort of solid and they're 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 to and I and I and I I don't know. I don't think There's been work that have 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 based on their different needs. Have you seen there's some really fascinating research when you look at Couples before they got together. Yeah, how much double-shifting they said they did when they lived on their own Yeah 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 Yeah, then the man's was so you have this disparity in terms of like how often should the bedsheets be? Right 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? Yeah on 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 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 tick-tock taking issue a guy that presents like me talking about the difference differences between men and women without being coded is like Incredibly man is here incredibly right way despite the fact that the man is fear fucking hate me Like I'm not their friend the the only person that I brought on To do with the man is fear documentary that Louie through did was Louie through the day that the man is fear documentary came out Like that, so yeah, you know pattern match me However, you want Anna Kasparian Chenky you go fucking Ezra Klein like Bernie Sanders These are not the rabid right-wingers 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 tripwire that's going to piss off people and make it sound like white guy from America. Well educated just Castigating a group that's only recently reached its socio-economic parity. Who the fuck do you think you are? Like it's it's Trepidatious Yeah, and it's like in it more so than it has to be right like we we should be able to have honest conversations about this stuff but it's an incredibly fraught because You know we have you know, 90 minutes or two hours in which we're gonna talk. We're talking about a range of issues There's a lot of nuance That's gonna get Yeah, right truncated into clips and shared on social media and taken out of context and and then all of a sudden you have like well All of a sudden you have like well like, you know, 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 congratulations. That means you're doing something, right? So I mean I think like it's it's sort of inevitable that we we come to some this with some tribal energy Right that that oh, I see my group being attacked. I need to kind of rally around and what's fascinating is this? Like 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 that is this ideological spit roasting that I appear to be subject to And 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? I think it's it's incredibly important. I sort of came to this research, you know, my background is I'm Political science then I've moved to sort of more sort of sociological topics over the last like seven eight years and then in like 2022 I Started looking at some Gallup data and noted that There's 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 Was evident in all these different surveys so like for instance feminist identity Men and women are pretty close across generations, right? So for feminist identity, right? Do you are you a feminist, right? So Baby boomers, I think they're both around like the high 30s or low 40s, right within five points Similar Gen X Millennials, they're higher. But again gender gaps 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 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 Now a few times like almost basically to parity and then it 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. No, I could 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 become becoming far more liberal and I talk about like attitudes and abortion changed Dramatically for young women, especially in the wake of Roe being overturned. You used to have a lot more nuance around the issue the sort of Morality of abortion was a much more complex question both among that that cohort of folks but also in like among Elected Democrats to write 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 happening is that you're seeing in in political leadership, right? So people leaders are Making the gender divide worse by by simply, you know at Seemingly advocating for one side over the other. So yeah, like right that 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 Noted that I think was like in 2023 or something like that, you know looking at the Democratic Party's Web page, right? So the like Democrats and you look at all the the who we represent tab, right? So a list of like 17 different groups like oh we you know veterans and immigrants and we you know American blacks. Yeah. Yeah women and men are just Conspicuously absent from this list which seems crazy to me like it in it And I can only conclude that it's it's purposeful right that this is 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 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 and so You have this the situation where neither side feels that there's a place for them and and the other party And so you had this really? Strong the fuck you think they're gonna vote for right? 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 in the side of it, right and and if I don't trust and you know, the establishment Yeah, I can trust him But when it comes to like the Republican Party and the Democratic Party you have something like one in three young men Or maybe close to four and ten actually now saying that they don't trust either one this is I think unfortunately one of the by by products 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 a caveat in somewhat or whatever and this is just like once you see this formula It's impossible to unsee look people are confused and uncertain about what's gonna happen, right? Someone comes along that sounds certain right? I'll go after them. That's he They he has got the answer fucking brilliant for that But I mean the I understand exactly what you mean Like who were they obviously gonna 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, right? 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, right? The Democratic lack of focus on men just feels like an elected own goal. I that's the term. I was gonna use Yeah, it's it's but you did this to yourself. Yeah, you didn't have some candidate Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or whoever the fuck was Gonna run didn't you they weren't so toxic as to not be yet Sure, would some cohorts of men have found it a little bit more difficult to follow a black woman? Yep, 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 Who's left? Like who that you worked you've done me at a time to 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 As the the job growth has gone, you know in the service sector and health care gone to predominantly, you know women over men and In those communities and so like yeah Like it should be it should be easy if you're if you're sort of raised on detriment, 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 it's a kind of unifying Group that that you know, you can sort of please everybody And it's it's it's perplexing to me that that this has not been taken up By the Democrats who could probably do it fairly easily Why do you think they want a 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, right? So Democrats have 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 to moving more towards Democrats But the one of the reasons I think things have changed is it's college-educated women that have have sort of swollen the ranks of the Democratic Party one in three Democrats is a college-educated women 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 much as big of a diversity of viewpoints inside of the right and then as you would have done In the past right and then like 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 Really important roles are college-educated women. This is the the thing that I've always found Like really difficult actually like even emotionally quite difficult to put up with both in the UK and in the u.s. 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 got a state primary state secondary state sixth form College I think I was the only person out of my entire 300 person your group in school to go to university right, so this is not Silubrious 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? Yeah I've been given like let them forget the you know Bad weather of the northeast of the UK thing behind and that you did 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 a real issue reductive, right? Like yeah, dude, look at the fucking and I'm still I still yet to hear Maybe it's the college educated thing. Maybe it's the chatter in class. Maybe it's that if we keep you focused on right? Maybe it's more conspiratorial. We keep you focused on race 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 like yeah 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 you too, regardless of where I've ended up in life I'll always be working class in the UK because of where I went to school because where I grew up because what my parents The postcode that I was from 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 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, the bankers, pharmaceuticals, lobbyists, and Democrats are representing the cultural elites. Think of the media, Hollywood, college professors. It's like a lose-lose situation. Neither of these groups are me. Right. I don't fit here. Other than Trump, who at least had affinity for the language of grievance, that was familiar. 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. I am one of you, working men. Presuming that Trump leaves office in two years, that the Republican Party is going to then still have to reckon with what kind of party it is in a post-Trump landscape. Is it going to be one that they talked in the early Trump days of a new multicultural working-class party for the GOP? It is not on that trajectory currently. I think that we remain to be seen where it ends up. What is the solution that you see for closing this gap of generation uncoupled? I start the book with the introduction, and I title it Rekindling Curiosity. 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. You don't find out about someone's experience from watching a 30-second clip from looking at their Instagram. You have to talk to them. You have to learn about them. 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. 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. I think that we need to talk to people about the importance of embodied engagement with three-dimensional people. The more you can spend time with someone across the table for maybe 90 minutes and learn about their life and ask about, what? Well, I think that's one of the biggest challenges we have because of the spaces that we used to have, whether they're union halls or civic orgs. There's just fewer of them left. We did a study before the pandemic and then followed up a couple of years after and asking people who had a third space, if you're familiar with that. 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. Before the pandemic, most people said, yeah, there's a place I can go that I can see people. I go there semi-regularly. After the pandemic, it dropped like a rock. It's like 20 points lower and it has not recovered now five, six years out. I do think the built environment matters a lot. I'll talk about my own neighborhood. I live in Chevy Chase, Washington, DC. I live just a couple blocks from the school that my kids go to. There's a little market there on the corner. You can get pizza there and you can get sandwiches. It is an absolute hub of activity for the entire community. We had some snowstorms probably a decade ago now. It was the central location where people got together, got coffee, got hot chocolate to dig out like elderly neighbors. You need those spaces. I think in the US, there's a lot of ways in which the building codes and development restrictions just don't allow it. They're incredibly important for communities because we need spaces outside our homes to gather with people. The three-dimensional sort of understanding thing is a really great point. I see a hair bubble that can be used to protect a drink, and I think, wow, isn't that strange? Oh, fuck. Isn't that horrible that this is a world that girls think that they need to do that in, that they may need to do that? Fuck, that's a whole now additional, I don't want to say burden. It's like a responsibility. Yeah, an individual responsibility. It's not a collective responsibility. It's individual. 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. I 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. I learned about something like that, and I'm like, huh, it just makes me sad. It just makes me sad. 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 oversaturation with fuck. 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 the heart of a normal, but you see somebody that's on the street that desperately needs help, and you're like, I'm going to blank street. I've got to meet my friend. There's a match away. You can't engage with it in that way. I think this is why, to some degree, people have an emotional prophylactic around them, which is, there's only so much. I've got my own shit as well, but the less integration, the less integration, the more on your own autonomy. I can't rely on anyone else. The good news is that we, I think-and research has shown this, actually-that we misapprehend the way people will react to us socially. 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. 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. In the same way that another study had people call an old friend versus email an old friend. More people want to do email than call, but the people who called and talked to their old friend, yeah, they felt better. They felt more connected. It doesn't take huge shifts in what we're doing, how we're doing it. I do think it matters that the places that we go are designed for us to be there, right? Starbucks now prioritizes drive-thru. I was out in New Jersey visiting family, and we roll up, and I'm like, oh man, there's a huge line for Starbucks and some random highway. And we drive, and I'm like, oh, the parking lot is empty. And so we just park in there, and it was- Service immediately- Yeah, it was down the street, this line of cars. And we stroll in, and they're like, yeah, what do you want? I'm like- Served immediately, hilarious. 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 a community, right? We know this. We know this from our research. It's one of the things that people actually mentioned 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. Let's not slam on caffeine products as a man that is a purveyor of caffeine products. But no, I agree. Daniel Cox, ladies and gentlemen. Daniel, you rule. Where should people go to check out everything you've got going on? You can check out the book. You can get it on Amazon, any other bookstores. And then you can find my work at the Survey Center on American Life. Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude. Yes. Cool. Is your home wishlist just sitting in your cart? Well, get ready to hit checkout because Wayday at Wayfair starts October 24th with up to 80% off everything home. That new sofa, the rug you've been eyeing, the upgrades you've been putting off, they could all be way less during Wayday. It's Wayfair's biggest sale of the year. So make your list and mark your calendar. Shop Wayday starting October 24th for up to 80% off everything home at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.