#623 - Dr Jean Twenge - Why Do Young People Seem So Fragile?

28:22Really, what is your boss going to say in six months when I'm like, I can't do the big presentations. I'm going to Vegas for my birthday. So, yeah, so that type of it, that type of entitlement is much less common among Gen Z, but they also, you know, downside are much more reluctant to talk in class. But they're very nice, they're very nice, they're very helpful, they're very sweet people. You know, each generation has their strengths and weaknesses. I'm obviously generalizing here and it's obviously my one experience, but that does sort of fit the data. that you see self -esteem, you know, go down between millennials and Gen Z.

28:57And Gen Z is more likely to say that they really want to help others. Why are young people much more risk -averse then? Yeah, so that's one of the things that really surprised me in looking at Gen Z is they are. They're less likely to say they want to take risks. And there's a big culture around safety and not just physical safety, but what they call emotional safety. So, as a phrase I had never heard before, I started talking to a lot of young adults and they don't just want to be protected from physical dangers, but they often seem to want to be protected from bad experiences. And I can understand that impulse, but as many people have observed, I can veer into to just never being, wanting to never be uncomfortable, which isn't realistic.

29:50And especially as the adult you're thinking, especially say a university student, it's often how you learn. And having difficult discussions is necessary sometimes when you're talking about complex topics. What are some of the ways that this risk of ocean has shown up in behavior? So, Gen Z's less likely to get into physical fights with each other. They are less likely to get into car accidents. And then there's around the kind of emotional safety piece. I think that is why there has been the call for safe spaces, why there's been more of the disinvitations of speakers. But there's been much more of the idea if you can't say that.

30:36We can't even have that person come to campus. that words can hurt. So this really big focus on speech and language as harmful or even violent, and that kind of the kind of concept creep of words like trauma and hurt and violence. What's driving that? I think part of it is safety was hugely emphasized. with this generation when they were young and they did not rebel against that they embraced it. So, you know, expect teenagers and young adults to rebel against a safety culture and they really didn't. You know, they took it seriously and there were lots of upsides that safety culture. So I think it comes from that and then it of course also comes from the way people are interacting with each other online.

31:31Because, you know, think about if you're 16 years old today, you know, how are you more likely to be hurt? Often it's going to be online. That's where people are going to be nasty to each other, not to your face. And that's partially just the way the media works, feel more aggressive verbally when they're anonymous and when they're not seeing the look on the other person's face. And that's what online culture is and that's where so many teens are spending so much of their time now. Why was there more of an emphasis on safety and less of a pushback? I can't work out. I remember being told from my parents, you know, as every young person is, they're concerned about your health and your wellbeing.

32:19What changed? Yeah. You know, it's hard to say. I mean, I think there was. There clearly was a fundamental change though, because Gen Z teens fight with their parents less. than especially Gen X teens did at the same age. So, you know, you think, parents are like safety, safety, safety, that they're be able to be bailing against that by fighting about it, and that just hasn't happened. And I think it's partially because they are, just don't, they're not as likely to want to say, you know, go and drive around and do crazy things because they can do crazy things online. So I've got a bunch of interesting cottage industry obsessions at the moment and one of them has been trying to work out why young people are having less sex than ever before.

33:17Social sexuality, openness to new experiences, risk aversion, all of this to me seems to be driven by partly the ripple effect, I think, which is what you mentioned earlier on. And it seems that there are just so many other things that are convenient and comfortable to do that get in the way. And the reason that I like this as an explanation is that it seems to cover so many of the different bases that each individual person can find in their online use, their own targeted version of an anesthetic or an analgesic that will allow them to not need to go out into the real world to face rejection from a partner to deal with the discomfort of making up and breaking up the risk of having sex.

34:05You know, we are in a post -MeToo world. It's no surprise. One was MeToo 2013, something like that. 2018. Was it? Me too. 2018. Oh my god. Anyway, my point being we have have these things have converged, right? They're all converged together. And it seems like what a lot of people, especially guys, that are the ones that will face the most rejection. Women also face their own massive security risks in the dating market. But I think more frequent low -level rejection would be something that is felt by men. And if you are in an environment and a society which is more risk of us, which has perhaps coddled and coaxed young people to not have to deal with these sorts of things.

34:51Stepping out and facing the fear of approach anxiety and rejection and all of that, when you do have Tinder, online porn, video games, all of these things are potential distractions. What is your view on the current approach of young people to relationships, family life, casual sex, long -term marriage, all of that. Yeah, I mean, you know, life isn't safe and sex and relationships, you know, don't feel safe either. I mean, you describe for young men and then for young women, there's a fear of sexual assault. There's also a lot of complaints from young women that, you know, young men watch so much porn.

35:30They think that's how real life sex is going to be. It is all of these things.

35:37But certainly there are other spheres. Previous generations kind of looked at those spheres and said, well, that's the price of doing business. And I think a lot of Gen Z because they have these alternatives has said, well, forget it. Because I have, there's all of these other things I can do for a sexual outlet. And I think that goes a long way toward explaining what's going on. And not just as a sexual outlet, just, you know, there's more things to do at 10 p .m. Now, you know, when there were three TV channels, it was all boring. Now you can binge watch almost whatever you want on Netflix or other platforms.

36:14Was slowly distracting ourselves outside of human nature. I think that's, that's kind of true. You know, and we're really seeing this in the surveys with teens as well, that the number of teens you say want to get married or at least want to have a long term partner has been was steady since the 1970s until the transition between millennials and Gen Z about 10 years ago. That's when it started to go down. Same thing for saying that they're likely to want to have children. So I think we're going to see really big shifts in family life as Gen Z is of childbearing age that the birth rate might never come back up.

36:53And that probably the marriage rate is made may suffer as well. That's another pet obsession of mine, the birthrate global birthrate declines. But this is global, right? You're looking at South Korea, 0 .8 Japan, I think, just above one China right down in the bottom of the ones as well. US is what? 1 .7, 1 .8, something like that. Also, particularly good. The UK, Germany, absolutely ruined at the moment. And yet, you know, everyone remembers the R -naught number from COVID. You know, if it's above one for every person, there is more people giving more people. But if it's below one, for birth rates, or below 2 .1.

37:31Actually, it's two. Yeah, 2 .1. But if you have the equivalent, which is there are fewer people having fewer people, which makes fewer people to have fewer people and so on and so forth. Right. I spoke to someone that added another wing into this because I like that sort of demographic explanation. But their point was that females are very easy to sort of have social contagion and the mimetic nature to their behavior. And if motherhood is less seen, it is less inculcated in themselves. So you almost get in the same way that birth rate decline and demographic collapse occurs in this kind of spread out step by step way.

38:16You also get an equivalent here, which is kind of like a psychological Contagion to that spreads out while there's fewer mothers around which means there are a few mothers influencing young girls to become mothers Which means that they're a few to to to to to to to to to to to all the way down. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It builds on itself and you know, it I think it's especially to get a guessing that it's that You know, we're not gonna see much return around because the birth rate really started going down with millennials. Well, millennials, that's 18 year olds, said, yeah, I want to have kids.

38:46And Gen Z is an even saying 18. Have you seen the TikTok trend of girl with the list? Do you know what this is? No. It's bad. So I wrote a newsletter about this a couple of weeks ago. There was a girl who printed out on a piece of paper, 350 reasons as to why she didn't want to have kids. and it ranged from everything from literally growing a parasite inside of you to like vaginal prolapse and all manner of obscure complications that can occur during Charlotte. One of them was not being able to wear cute heels as much as I want. And it was, I think, it ends up, she's printed it out so visually, it's very, very kind of impressive and long.

39:32But it showed to me just how much the individual, their own freedom, themselves as a priority, it takes precedent that you are pedestalizing your own ability. Those are a recent street interview that just went up yesterday using a ton of clips from my channel. You're really loved. And a bunch of women mostly being asked, do you want to have kids? If not, why not, et cetera, et cetera? And the answers, I know that these street interviews get very heavily edited. I'm very, I'm always hesitant of using these as evidence, but you don't put words in people's mouths. These people are saying it for themselves.

40:12And it was stuff like, I go to music festivals every weekend. And if that happens, that means that I don't have time for a kid. I'm working on myself right now and I don't feel ready. Oh, how old are you? I'm 38. And, you know, the evidence that I've seen from a metronalysis from Professor Rinska Kaiser says that eight out of ten women who don't have children after they break through their fertility window didn't intend to not have children. I wonder how that's going to change. That was 2011. So you know, you're catching that tail end, I guess. I really wonder whether that's going to change. I wonder whether the biological clock is basically going to stop ticking for Gen Z women, in at least psychologically, when they look back and think, okay, I'm now going to spend the remainder of my life without children, for the people that like to throw around, well, there's millions and millions of children that need to be adopted.

41:13In the USA, there are 30 pairs of parents for every one child that is available for adoption. The number of hoops that you need to jump through is unbelievably high. So adoption isn't some sort of panacea to this. The same as like why buy a new dog when you can adopt from a home. Like it's just the numbers aren't there to support this. But one of the other things that I don't understand is some of the claims that get made. And I think that this is indicative of both my generation and the generation coming after, which is that we hate to be wrong because being wrong on the internet is tantamount to ego destruction.

41:55Everybody's always been like this, but I think it's got even worse recently. If you ask people why it is that they don't want to have kids, they'll say that it's due to income. Right. But I know that you have some statistics that show if the problem was income, even adjusted for living, even, et cetera, et cetera, that's Bollocks. So what is the story of income over the last couple of generations comparatively? Yeah. So first, I had to mention there's been several recent polls of young adults who don't have children and then asked those who said, yeah, I don't want children. Why? Personal freedom was almost always at or near the top of the list.

42:33So exactly what you saw in these on the street interviews. income certainly comes up, but it's often not the primary thing. So yeah, the story of income is interesting. Millennial young adults actually make more money than genxers and boomers did at the same age. Their wealth building has also caught up. That wasn't true for a little bit there, but it's now caught up. So there is a little bit of truth to the income idea though, because most of those income gains have been from women. So you think about a heterosexual couple, and maybe the woman makes a little less than the guy, but they're both making good amount of money, which is why those numbers are so high for millennials now.

43:20Well, if they both keep working full time, then you have to pay for childcare. Child care has always been expensive and is even more expensive now. So there is a little bit of truth to it that is more challenging than the old days when the old bad days in a lot of ways when women were not making hardly anything. So if they quit their job, the family wouldn't really lose that much income if she stayed home with the kids. So there's that, but there's also some economists have looked at those that they look in the US at counties that had a lot of income growth. Well, you think it was income, then you should get a big increase in the birth rate in those counties that had the big economic growth.

44:02They actually went completely the other way. The birth rate went down in those counties that had the big economic growth. And they think it's because young women were taking those career opportunities instead of having kids. So plus, if it took so much income to have children, why do people who are lower income have more kids than people with more income? And they do. So, income explanation, if people have priorities, they make choices. And yes, certainly, there are big problems with housing and childcare and so on. But it is not the only explanation. It's probably not the primary one. I find that so fascinating.

44:41There was a study done recently looking at lottery winners. And if a man wins a lottery, it seems like he's more likely to get married if a woman wins the lottery, she's more likely to get divorced. and I think that the, it seems like in a modern world where you can be afforded all of the different opportunities and experiences that can be placed in front of you, there are lots of things to do and having children seems basic, this seems boring. So I don't want to do this. Talking about the gender pay gap and the changes to one of the insights I got from you was, Millennial women's incomes are much higher than the incomes of women of previous generations as a result of both higher wages and more hours worked.

45:25In 2021, Millennial women aged 35 to 44 made roughly twice as much as boomer women in 1980 and over 20 % more than Gen X women in 2005, women 25 to 34 made similar gains. Men's incomes have fallen since 1970. That would fall in much. That's the way it balances out. Women's incomes have just gone way up. Minnes and gums have gone down by a little bit. You average it out and what you get is pretty solid incomes. Why do millennials still feel poor then? I think there's a bunch of reasons. One is what we just described that in heterosexual couples, you're going to get that challenge of, okay, is somebody get a quit or go part time?

46:05Or are we going to pay for the expensive childcare? I think that's one reason. Another reason that's often mentioned is housing, okay, but housing is so much more. Well, those income statistics that I've been talking about correct for inflation and housing is one of the main pieces of that inflation calculation Plus if you look at the data at least up to 2020 afterward Got even harder, but up to 2020 Millennials homeownership rate was very similar to Gen Xers and boomers at the same age It was less but it was less by a couple of percentage points It really wasn't as much and given that more went to more Millennials went to college that makes sense that in that 26 to 39 group that you might have a little bit of tapering off, but it's really small.

46:49You know, you didn't give in the way people talk about it online that it would be, you know, the home ownership rate would be like half in millennials compared to boomers. And it's not. So I think that, you know, that explanation falls apart a little bit. I think a lot of it is the social comparison that people do online that, you know, it who goes on Twitter and says, my income is great. My generation is doing awesome. So that's not the norm. It's just not the way people discuss these things online. And it's the same thing with news articles. It's so often, this boomers were the ones who got all successful, which isn't true either.

47:28And then they pulled up the ladder after they climbed up it so the millennials couldn't go up. I mean, that gets clicks. So I think there is this, again, this toxicity and this negativity that have driven and a lot of it. And I think partially it also got stuck because great recession times millennials were really pummeled by that. That is absolutely true. It's just that they were back really well, say between about 2011 and 2019, in particular, but even during the pandemic, those incomes were doing very well for people in that millennial age range. Even if it's not as well as the people that they follow with Blutics on Instagram showing.

48:14One of the really interesting dynamics that I've just considered there is if women are the primary breadwinner in the household and on average, overall household earnings are looking pretty good, but the woman needs to take time off work in order to raise the kid. You are taking a larger hit, a larger proportion of the overall household income is being sold like that. That's right. Yeah. I think that's one of the big dilemmas. It's also something to think about in terms of the birth rate because even though you're on the same page, a lot of this is around personal freedom, there is an economic component and that's what the economic component is.

48:57It's the challenge of child care. If you're going to concentrate policy, maybe that's where the policy should be around childcare. What's happening in education? College degrees and high school graduates lumped together what's happening? You mean in terms of income? No, just in terms of people completing college degrees, people completing high school. Yeah, it's really, really amazing. I think we forget that it was really only a few generations ago say, greatest generation born in the early 20th century, where it wasn't even really the norm to complete high school. Many of them didn't. That was very, very common.

49:36And then very few went to college. So with the silent generation, those were 1925 to 1945. It started to become much more common to finish high school and go to college. And then that kept growing. And it really, really came to fruition with millennials who are the most college educated of the generations. and it's probably why their incomes are higher, by the way, because they more of them did get that college degree. So, you know, that's just a really huge change that the people forget about about how large that has been. What about the...didn't I see something that the number of people completing high school has dropped recently?

50:23Aren't there more high school dropout people that aren't getting high school diplomas? not that I know. I mean, it now it's possible that there were some weird things going on in the pandemic. Yeah. That might be what you're what you're thinking of. But at least up to that point, it had been absolutely in the other direction that dropping out of high school was a lot less common for say Gen Z versus Gen Xers in the 90s that the high school completion rates used to hover, in the 80s and now they're well into the upper 90s. Yeah, one of the interesting stats I learned from Richard Reads last year with his book of boys and men was that seven times more males than females dropped out of college during COVID.

51:07And you've got this massive retreat, this huge imbalance, it's gonna be two to one, females to males completing a four year US college degree by 2030, that's going to worsen the earning potential down the line, that's going to worsen their imbalance within the home in terms of who's contributing income, which is going to make having children, even more of a burden in terms of the lost income from the female. Yeah, it's a perfect storm. It is. And, you know, maybe there will be more men who are the stay -at -home parent that's already happened, but, you know, is it ever going to be 50 -50? A lot of people have their doubts.

51:46Yeah, I think, look, There is, people can be what they want. There are ways to have unconventional household setups that will work out fantastically. But on average, I think that women's attraction is going to wane if they have a man that isn't contributing in the protector provider role that typically that's what happens. This is more than just cultural archetypes as far as I can see. this is genetic predisposition, you know, like status accounts for an awful lot. Make value isn't something that we just make up. It's mediated through culture for sure, but it is rooted in biology, right? And these things can be bent, maybe even a good amount, but they can't be broken.

52:30And I do think that there are some challenges there. So what about changes to approaches in career, the workplace, younger employees, why are they different, how are they different? Yeah, so, you know, the workplace changed a lot, of course, you know, with, especially with virtual work. That's starting to shift, you know, post -pandemic. But, you know, I think the most interesting changes are with Gen Z, you know, by my calculations, the oldest of Gen Z or 28. So they're not just new young employees at accounting firms, they're now the new young employees at the law firms and you know in medicine and in the faculty and you know lots of other professions.

53:14So you know I the most important thing is the most simple do not assume your young employees are millennials anymore they're not and their and Gen Z is fundamentally different now from from millennials but you know I think we're going to see I think a lot of the things that have come up on college campuses are already in the workplace are going to even more so I think that's what we're already grappling with and we'll continue to do so in the next few years. Are they going to be demands for safe spaces? Is Everyone going to need to state their pronouns, not just in their email signature, but verbally?

53:53You know, I think these things are all bad. There's some very good practical things to do both of those, but a lot older generations are gonna have some, you know, yeah, wrestle with them. I think that's a good verb. And then there's other things we've already really seen. One example I use in the book is just how it has become so common for university presidents to really statements about political events. And I think that's also now why young employees are demanding or asking that CEOs release statements about a political event. CEOs are kind of reluctant to do that. They don't want to alienate half of their customers, but then their young employees are demanding it and they're caught between and rocking a hard place.

54:42I don't think that's going to go away. So the personal is political, but the professional is also political now as well. Exactly. Very interesting. Yeah. Have you seen, I may be getting out over my skisia. Have you seen the newest season of South Park? I have not. There is one episode that I implore you to watch and in this episode, butters gets a job at an ice cream parlor and Cartman is jealous because butters has a job and it means that he's earning money So Cartman decides that he'll ask butters to get him a job but does pulls a favor and Cartman starts working there within the first couple of minutes Cartman says that he needs to take a mental health break Then he works from home for the remainder of the day because it's mindful Mondays And then it's like work from home Wednesdays and it's finished early Friday And it like he keeps on needing to take a mental health day and he's being overworked Then he tries to get butters to work in a co -op thing with him because he says why are we working for this only?

55:41He doesn't even do anything Meanwhile the joke is obviously that Carmen hasn't done anything at all or contribute to it and yeah, I It really hits the nail on the head I think of of one of the stereotypes that we have about this industry or this this sort of current generation of people who industry don't want to work particularly hard, but then there also seems to be some truth in this, the fact that there are increasing rates of mental health problems. Have you seen any data to do with sick days, days taken on leave for mental health absence, stuff like that? Yeah, I haven't seen that, but there are some interesting questions around this for one of the the big surveys of 18 year olds.

56:26It's a great, great place to sample. They're gonna get a university or end of the workplace. Things are on work ethic. Are you willing to work overtime? Is a great example. So that one had actually been going up. So it had been on the decline for quite a long time with from boomers such as an extra millennial's, younger people saying, that's not what I wanna do. I don't really want to work that hard and I don't want to work over time. And then about 10 or 15 years ago, it actually started to come up with Gen Z's started to be more likely to say, yeah, I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to work hard.

57:05And then in 2021, it went just like a huge big decline. And who knows? Maybe that's a blip? I don't know. But that was also, you know, around the time of the idea of the quiet quitting and the great resignation. and some of these ideas of, somewhat unrealistic ideas. Why should we have to work for living? I don't know, I don't think I get this. Yeah, that's kind of how it works. Are you familiar with Nicholas Eberstadt? Do you know him? I recognize the name. Yeah, so he did men without work and then he did men without work a post -COVID edition. He was on the show a couple of weeks ago, fascinating.

57:39You would love his stuff. I think you should really dig into it. So there is this cohort of seven million men, age 22 to 55 in the UK and they are not in work and not looking for work. Only 10 % of them are students. They spend an average of 2 ,000 hours per year watching screens. Half of that time is on either prescription drugs or weed. One third of them live in a household which claims at least one disability benefit. And yeah, hiding in low unemployment data is this cohort of prime working age men. And when you actually drill it down to it's that particular group of that particular gender of that particular age cohort with these particular, it's massive.

58:28It's a huge, huge group of people. And they have absolutely no desire to do it. And I put this episode out with Nicholas and it performed really well on YouTube. And there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from guys saying, you know, why should why should I bother working? You know that you know the world hasn't offered me anything. Cost of living is so high that it's easier to work from home or they would say corporate employers don't value you in any case so I don't need to do this. That because women who follow themselves and because girls that are four out of ten's believe that they should be getting with a millionaire, that there's no point in me even working if girls don't give us the incentives to do it.

59:14And it felt like a fever dream. It literally felt like a fucking fever dream, reading this thing and going, either some very, very appropriate chat GPT bot has been deployed on my YouTube channel, like all with the same personality to try and troll me and believe in it. It's true. Or I managed to find a cohort of these guys that I, you know, not even work skeptical work negative. And it made me reflect. I wrote again another newsletter that reflected on a couple of conversations. One, I had with David Goggins, who's this Navy SEAL hard guy, and Dana White, the president of the UFC, a video that I'd seen of him.

59:52And David Goggins looked me in the eyes a couple of months ago when we were doing this episode and he said, it's so easy to be great nowadays because most of the world is weak. And David, Dana White says to his kids, if you are even remotely a savage, you will run these people over because nobody has any work ethic at the moment. And it really made me reflect on those two things. And I understand that people don't want their greatness to stand on the shoulders of a failing society, right? You don't want to capitalize on what you feel like is an increasing fragility that is spreading out around you.

1:00:24But for the people that listen to the stuff that we're talking about today and kind of despair and think, oh, God, you know, what's going on? Yes, civilizationally, this is a massive problem. But individually, if you are the sort of person that is concerned about this, you're probably not the sort of person that is going to actually be affected by it. So what that means is that the bar for greatness has never, ever, ever been set lower. It is so easy to decide and put five percent of work in and a tiny bit of talent, and you are already ahead of almost everybody else because the bar is set so low.

1:01:01So that was me trying to turn a white pill out of Relatively negative a bunch of stats that I blend at the same time And you know a lot of what a lot of people would answer to that especially in the US is yeah But it's so much harder to get into these competitive colleges Which is true But more people are going to college overall so you can argue it's easier to get into college period maybe But you know it is it is true that But there is a lot of competition. But more people do apply to the most competitive places. So I think that would, I'm guessing if Gen Z heard that, that would be their answer.

1:01:36They'd be like, nope, you're, you know, you're being delusional. That actually is more competitive. And that's what they have, they have been heard. And there's some truth to that. But I also do think it's true. Maybe in particular, getting to the workplace. Yeah, if you're somebody who's really gonna put in that, that hard work. Yeah, maybe that is a little more unusual. That's just me. We've got the stats on overtime, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's there in front of you. If you're able to work on your mental health, if you're able to spend as much time off social media, go outside and touch some grass, a little bit, that should be pretty protective.

1:02:12And again, the easiest thing to do to separate yourself out from any group is to look at what most other people are doing and avoid those things that you know that are negative toward them. Like, it's not hard. But does this mean that Elon Musk tweeted about a year ago that I fell in love with? And it's this sort of traumatized illustration of a man with some con eyes and scraggly hair and he's sort of looking down at the floor and he says, dear Lord, why are you testing me so much? And then on the other side, there's this sort of Chad Jesus illustration that says, you literally need to put your phone down and go outside.

1:02:47And it just makes me think, like look, again, the bar is set relatively low. So yes, these things are incredibly compelling, they're limitically hijacking, their purpose built to try and get you to come back, variable schedule, reward, all of that stuff. I understand. I have my own problems with my mobile phone, too. But just a tiny, tiny little bit of wrangling, finding a group of friends who also want to better themselves too, that also want to kind of push back against comfort and convenience and ease. And this isn't to say that you need to live an uncomfortable or inconvenient life. But there are ways to do this.

1:03:21So one of the other elements that we haven't spoken about yet, but is a massive contributor, is political stances. How has that wobbled and waned over the last few generations? Yeah, so, you know, the really the biggest overall change is just a lot more polarization. And you see this among young adults, to the more identify on the extreme left or the extreme right. And that there's in the US, you also get much more of an association over the last few decades with being liberal and being Democrat and being conservative and being Republican. People forget that that used to not be as stark. And it's just become this environment where it's not just, oh, I disagree with that other party, but I hate them.

1:04:13And not only I disagree with that other person, but I hate the person. And we're there. It's some people refer to it as effective polarization, affect, meaning emotion. And that's what's really stunning. There's a big survey that's done for decades and decades. And it asks people to say, you know, on a temperature scale, you know, how warm do you feel towards certain certain groups? And Democrats about Republicans or Republicans about Democrats is in frostbite territory now and used to be maybe, oh mid -50s and now it's like 20. So there's just a lot of negative feeling. It's almost like it's replaced religion or even more, something else where it's just like that's the other.

1:05:01That's how we're dividing each other now is based on politics. A sort of study that showed one third of Democrats worry about their son or daughter marrying a Republican. The exact same thing. Yeah. Is it true? So you mentioned earlier on Gen Z from college coming into the workplace and needing the CEO or president to comment on current cultural events. Something tells me that if you are conservative or Republican, and this is not going to be the sort of thing that you're pushing. Therefore, does this suggest that Gen Z is more liberal, that they are voting more progressively? Well, the younger generations tend to be more progressive and older people tend to be more conservative.

1:05:47It's the basic idea is that when you're young, you see the problems in the world and you want things to be changed. You get to a certain age in midlife where you say, hey, there's actually a lot of these things have changed. That's enough. We can stop there. So I think that's part of the dynamic there. But people do sometimes stereotype and think all of Gen Z is liberal and Democrat and that's not the case. There's a good third of them who voted for Trump. But even the conservatives like Trump a little bit less. So there's some generational break there's actually probably one of the reasons why he lost in in 2020 was that he lost the support of more young conservatives.

1:06:37Is that evidence to suggest that this aging out of liberalism is happening more slowly or less? You know, there's not and it's, you know, the one thing we've kind of learned in the last five years or so is a really cool paper that made the case that your politics are at least somewhat shaped by who was president when you or a teen in the young adult and whether that president was popular. So the millennials who were young when Obama was president, a relatively popular president, will probably, this data suggests, tilt more liberal and Democrat their whole lives. So then if you look at that for Gen Z, it's a little bit more, it's a little harder to predict because neither Trump nor Biden has said particularly great, you know, popularity ratings.

1:07:33So it's a little harder to see, you know, what direction they're going to go in the future. And it is interesting because although they are a very progressive generation across a a lot of social issues, they also, in terms of their behaviors, are almost more conservative in an odd way, like they're less likely to drink alcohol and have sex, for example, but their views on a lot on most issues are pretty progressive, on average. Why are these young people so much more negative about their country? I think that's one of the biggest questions that we have to try to answer. And I think one possible explanation, obviously there's a lot of toxicity online and that has a lot to do with it.

1:08:18But I think kind of the other piece of the puzzle that has not been discussed as much is that this is another downstream effect of more depression and mental health issues. Because depression isn't just about feeling, it's not just about emotions, it's also about how you think, and how you think about things. And by definition, depression means you view the world in a negative light. So that's why there's more pessimism. That's why there's that view of everything is unfair, and thus we need to change things. and then the one that really knocked me out of my chair was the poll of US adults that said, do you believe that the founders of the United States are better described as heroes or as villains?

1:09:13And four out of ten Gen Z said villains. There's only one out of ten for boomers. And that's interesting because that's offense 250 years in the past. It's not even an assessment of the current moment, and there's that very, very strong negativity. And it's, you know, the other items too, you know, whether things are fair or whether, you know, they should be changed. Young adults much more likely to say, yeah, you know, we need to tear the whole thing down and start over. And negativity isn't always bad, you know, we don't want people to have rose -colored glasses and see everything is positive.

1:09:48But if that negativity is combined with hopelessness and nihilism, which it seems to be, that's not good for a stable democracy. This is probably my least favorite part about the internet. I have many things that I like about the internet, despite the fact that we've been very critical today. My least favorite it took a conversation with my friend Michael Malis to actually give a word to it. And it's so funny, you know, you spend all of this time reflecting on things and introspecting, you know, I'm going to link all of these different concepts together. And then you realize that something that you thought was an unbelievably difficult web to put together already existed.

1:10:29And it had a word that you'd learned since you were age 12 or something. And it was cynicism. I realized that the culture that I hate the most on the internet is cynicism. that everything sucks, that everything's rubbish, that it's not going to get better, that the people who believe that it can get better, that are the ones that are actually the problem, they're the ones that did a delusional or conspiratorial, or have been silver spooned or coddled, or been given unfair advantages in life. And I realized that that, as far as I was concerned, was the worst trend that I was seeing online. So outside of the distaste and negativity for country, Is there evidence that shows that there's a, how could you say, like generalized cynicism disorder that this is just being spread out elsewhere too?

1:11:16Yeah. So this is the thing you're describing on the internet, I call it the hell scape narrative. You know, and that's what you see. And things are worse than ever. Are they really? I don't know. And yeah, in the survey data, 18 year olds more likely to say, I don't have any hope for the world. I can't have hope given the given the situation. Locals have control become has become more external meaning, you know, I don't think there's anything I can really do about it Yeah, things are so unfair all of those have have have have spiked in the last 10 years So during this back to my current pet obsession of the mating crisis I see a lot of people doing that externalizing in terms of locustive control that it's because of of whatever that's out there.

1:12:04All men are going, are potential rapists and the soldiers, or women to full of themselves, or whatever it might be. Another sort of interesting, I guess, consideration there too, is the cynicism and the negativity that we see amongst young people is, it's almost like a self -fulfilling prophecy that if they don't try to step outside of whatever it is that they're doing, they give themselves proof that the world is like that because if you don't go and do something to change it, then what do you think's what's going to happen? The world isn't just going to deliver you change, especially not to just your life.

1:12:50And again, with the climate change things, something we were talking about earlier on, but with regards to having kids, it's almost like some of the social change movements that that are happening are used as excuses. You know, how many gen Zedders genuinely understand anthropological impact on climate? Like, really, really understand what's going on. It is incontrovertible that humans have an impact on the climate. But let's talk about, you know, exactly how much of a difference is it going to be in downstream, et cetera, et cetera. I see so much because I talk about the sort of declining birth rates a good bit.

1:13:24People saying why it is fully unethical to bring a child into this world when it's already overpopulated and we're destroying the planet. You do understand that's just straight up anti -natalism. The most anti -natalist position that you can hold, and do you really think that living on a planet that's got too many people, which we don't, at the moment is bad? Wait until you live on one that's got too few. Wait until you live on one that is trying to desperately hold on to an embedded growth obligation to continue the GDP to grow when the population is dropping by 10, 20, 30 % per generation. Wait until that happens.

1:14:04And I'm like, fucking screaming this from the rooftops saying, look, how can you be focused on climate change? Something that may slightly inconvenience your great, great, great, great, great, grand daughter's life that isn't going to be born. If you don't have any kids and within the space of 50 years, within the space of 30 years, China's population is going to be halved. They're going to go from 1 .2 billion to 650 million people. Korea is having a 96 % extinction rate over the next 100 years. For every 100 Koreans that exist now, there will be four great -grandchildren. For every 100 Koreans, there are four great -grandchildren.

1:14:46Wow. Climate, it's the impression in the world and you just think, fuck like I've turned into the boomers. I've turned into the boomers I railed against for so long. Listen to me. I can hear it just falling out of my paws. So I don't know. I I I want to be able to discount a lot of the stuff that we've said today as you know every generation rails against the one that is coming next and says that it is so on and so forth. I wonder whether there is such a thing as such a difference of degree that it becomes a difference of kind that it almost locks in a longer term trajectory, which is so much more suboptimal, that it almost is a difference of kind.

1:15:30And there have been some different of kind things as well as different of degrees and intensities too. What ways could you be wrong about this stuff? If you considered Did that? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. What has really been the kind of life saver of that my whole career has been, I've tried to draw from these big, nationally representative data sets often of young people. And that you're listening to what the generation says about itself, not what older people's observations or some tiny pocket of people are doing. that helps a lot. But things can change. It's very hard to predict the future.

1:16:16That's just the way it is. So, you know, does this mean that Gen Z is going to be negative their whole lives? Well, I hope not. And I think there are some positive signs. I mean, one thing is that voter participation is way up among young adults. So if you are hopeless and negative, that's pretty bad. If you're negative, but then you vote, and try to change the things that you think need to be changed, that's a better outcome. So that's where I do have some hope is that political activism in this generation, where I do have a little bit of fear and bias, maybe also just given my life stage, is I would prefer that we didn't completely over through the government, burn it all down and start over.

1:17:06And I think there's there's there are a good number of Gen Z who do want to do that. What are your predictions for the future? We've got you call them the the polar generation or generation polar or Gen A generation alpha coming through. What do you think's happening next? Yeah, so we don't have that much data yet on this generation But this is those born 2013 and later. So yeah, a lot of people call them Gen Alpha. I call them Polars after melting polar ice caps and political polarization. So two things that we'll be talked about and perhaps have an impact on them. The little data that we do have is troubling a lot of childhood obesity, a lot less playing outside and exercise, probably because of screens.

1:17:57So hopefully we can turn that around. I'm less pessimistic about the fact that a lot of them went through the pandemic when they were young because a lot of generations say the silent generation went through the Great Depression and World War II when they were young and they turned out pretty well. So generations can grow from adversity. What I'm afraid of is if they get stuck with problems that they can't get rid of as children and And I have the same worry about Gen Z. Especially if there is something pathological perhaps about seeing challenge as a negative as opposed to something which is to be overcome, you can only really grow from it if you decide to go through it as opposed to be completely split in half by it.

1:18:46Jean, this is really fascinating. I really appreciate your work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the things that you do. Where should they head? Yeah, so the new book, Generations about all six living American Generations and just tons of tons of data and conclusions in there. So my website is gene twangie .com. So J -E -A -N -T -W -E -N -G -E. See, after 90 minutes, I can't even spell my own name. But that has stuff about the book. I also have frequently asked questions about generations, stuff about speaking engagements and all the good stuff. Jane, I really appreciate you.

1:19:24Thank you. Thank you very much.