#775 - Daniel Cox - Why Are Young Men Becoming More Right Wing?

28:22So really when you're pointing the finger, I think that a lot of it should be what what happens when you get lots of young people With social media and trends in a cosmopolitan city that's probably coastal at least it may be maybe maybe coastal But big cosmopolitan city what do they talk about and how do they? How does the discourse self -reinforce? How can it sort of run away with itself? That's That's a fantastic point. That's a really really interesting point I hadn't thought of Yeah, and then stuff. There's a reinforcing effect, right, too, with our polarized media environment in the United States.

28:57So you don't even have to leave your bubble. And so if you have your best friends and your immediate social group is all left -leaning folks, they're citing opinion writers that are left -leaning and MSNBC anchors. And so you can live quite happily in this bubble, both in your immediate environment and then your larger information environment too. I wonder how conflicting this is for young women. I wonder if we know how the hypersensitivity that young women have to the trends of the social group around them, very, very tuned up. But I don't imagine this is particularly enjoyable for young women to, you know, maybe they've got one opinion that sits outside, maybe they're slightly different on the first amendment or maybe they're not too sure on immigration or maybe they're not too sure on whatever, you know, anything else.

29:59I feel bad for them. I feel bad for the fact that there is a huge sort of wave that's moving through and I and anyone who doesn't adhere, it's going to feel uncomfortable. They'll be discordant. I imagine this probably doesn't make them psychologically feel all that sort of safe or robust or able to be open and honest and truly sort of speak their opinions. Yeah, well, I think too, right? We know in political science that having, being surrounded by people who share your political views is actually not great from a sort of larger political system perspective because those folks tend to have more extreme attitudes, right?

30:45That being constantly having your views affirmed by those around you, it's easier to demonize, it's easier to engage in kind of a tribal politics. So that's - You never get any counter points that are setting good faith. Right. And I think the other thing too is like, I don't think we properly appreciate that so much of stuff is an evolution, right? We kind of learn, we try out ideas, we try out language, and I think we ought to give space for that. So I think like one of the things, like I'm not a huge believer in the cancel culture conversation, I think that, you know, in certain instances, yes, you know, we have been to restrictive certain institutions have played roles that I think are kind of productive in terms of having an honest open debate.

31:31I think some of it's overblown, but I think there is one way that I think like the entire way we engage in political discourse in this country is problematic. And that is like, we think that nothing will ever change, that people don't change in terms of their views on various issues. And of course, that's not true. And one of the quickest ways for you to change your opinion is I drop you in a different political context. And you'll change your views pretty quickly, or at least you will reflect on what you believe. these people are deeply, and they're necessarily demonized. Right. And I think that's one of the problems when you get to the political influence of dating and relationships, as you say, well, I'm only going to date a Trump supporter or I would never date a Trump supporter.

32:17I think one of the problems with social media and dating apps is it allows you to more effectively filter out things that you think you might not like. but we are pretty terrible judges on the things that we actually care about and in many respects. I tell this to my son when he's, you know, turning his nose up at food or dinner is like, you've never tried this so you have no idea. And so the experiment and experience are actually a part of growing up. And I think to the extent that politics is a part of that, we ought to give people space, we ought to give them, you know, some empathy and understanding when they're working through things.

32:53And I think we're just so quick to judge and bash and it's really unfortunate. Yeah. Can you try and explain it? So we've spoken about young women, I want to talk about young men. Yeah. But how much is it young women moving to the left and how much is it young men moving to the right? Is it equal amounts from wherever the set point is or is it more left and men are a little bit more right? How would you categorize that? Yeah, so this is the hard part about this. is it's not really clear what's going on in men. There's sort of different stories and narratives emerging from different polls. So the same Gallup survey that I quoted earlier with women becoming more liberal by about 12 to 14 points over the last, you know, seven, eight years.

33:37The men seem pretty flat in that in terms of their ideological disposition, a plurality or moderate. And yes, I think similar numbers are liberal and conservative. There's some sense that they are becoming a little bit more Republican or more predisposed to support Republican candidates. Is that different to being conservative? Yeah. So political ideology and partisan affiliation are different. Most of the way that survey research focuses on this and asks about this is that there's a Democrat, Republican, independent, is your political affiliation and there's for ideology, there's conservative, moderate, liberal.

34:17role. They are correlated. So if you're liberal, you're likely to be Democrat. If you're conservative, you're likely to be lead Republican. But one of the challenges is that for this younger generation, they tend to have increasingly negative views of both parties. So even people who are quite liberal said, I say, I don't like Biden. I don't like the Democrats. And this is actually particularly true of young men. I think it's like close to four in 10 view both political parties, the Democratic party and the Republican party unfavorably. And so you have this weird thing, like there's more people identifying as independent, even as the country is moving a little bit to the left.

34:55So we're becoming more independent and slightly more liberal. And so it's complicated when we try to make sense of what's going on. And I think too often we correlate those things and it's actually there's some daylight between them that we need to appreciate. That was one of the most interesting things that I learned in your article, which was young men are far less likely than women to say that any issue is personally important to them. It seems like if there was a checked out of politics, like dimension to this, that that would be the real skew for men. Yeah, and I think for a lot of, you know, men, like I think this is kind of an orientation that has happened because of how rapidly some of the social norms and cultures changed.

35:45And there's a real sense of dislocation like where do I fit? What I'm told to be an ally, but how do I be an ally? Can I advocate for myself even or the things that I care about? And so you see this, you know, in a large number of young men, kind of this political disaffection of I just like, I'm come tuned out, I'm done with it. And I think one of the things we're seeing is that the Republican Party has actually probably done a little bit better job of reaching out and saying that they are concerned about the issues that young men are facing, whereas liberals and Democrats are a little bit less so.

36:22And so you've, we're perhaps seeing a little bit of polarization around just the way the parties are engaging on issues around gender. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. What about men's opinion on feminism and me too and stuff like that? Is this an impact? Could this be a reaction to them feeling like those have gone too far? Yeah, and I think you see this in the point data. So whether it's the Pew Research Center showing a 20 -point gap in support of the me too, between young men and young women, young men are kind of divided and young women are overwhelmingly supportive of me too. And then in our data, we ask question about whether people identify as a feminist, young women largely likely to identify as feminist, but it's only like 40 % of young men.

37:06So you do have a pretty significant gender gap. And on the question of feminism, actually, the gender gap is largest among Gen Z than any other generation. So there's more disagreement about feminist identity and what feminism is. Yeah, 2022 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 46 % of Democrat men under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good and even more Republican men agreed. So, you know, it's not like Democrat men and Republican men are just one bundle of ideology. Like people have different wings within that. But, you know, nearly 50 % of Democrat men under 50 saying that they think that feminism's gone too far.

37:51I think, yeah, I can see why if men do feel dislocated and displaced and uncertain about their position, and then they don't feel like they're being given the sympathy or the support that perhaps they would, they're going to start pointing the finger around. And then as you know, we've seen, you know, various cars have started looking into this. There's many ways young men are struggling economically in education. And they have, you know, particular needs that are not being met. They have problems that people are advocating for, solutions. And so I think that plays into all this. And I think we're really, really bad at trying to hold these two different ideas in our hands at the same time that there's been progress in terms of a gender equality, but there's still plenty of places where women face structural disadvantages.

38:50And then there's increasingly problems that young men are facing that are unique to young men that societally would be, you know, would be an interest to try to address. And both those things can be true. Yes. Both those things can be true. Yes. And often cited statistic that conveys the enduring absurdity of the gender gap is that until very recently there were more CEOs named John than CEOs who were women across most industries from politics to academia men in American society still control more resources and higher wages and enjoy more prestige but few young men have any experience in the boardroom and in the classroom It's their female peers who are crushing it and Christine Ember wrote this phenomenal article last year where she said, young men feel like their problems are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of.

39:39And it's this sort of use of outlier male success. I think a lot of the time that kind of legitimates some of the, what are you crying about? Look at the number of CEOs and it's like, yeah, but look at the number of men at the lower end of the distribution as well. They don't feel like they've got the same kind of sympathy. And again, what does this lead to? It just leads to this sort of finger pointing, this tribal, purity spiral, and the thing that came to mind when reading this part of your research was that it's like a zero -some view of gender equality on both sides. Yeah, which is increasingly where we're headed, right?

40:19On either side, if you help women, you're hurting men, if you're helping men, you're not paying attention to the I did an episode. I must have done, I don't know, 40 episodes that is something along the lines of what's happening to young men, how a young man's struggling, how male mental health, male loneliness, blah blah blah. I did one episode a couple of weeks ago. I've done many episodes about women, but I did one in particular. There was the first one in a little while with Freyra India, this great writer Jonathan Heitz, a massive fan of the show. phenomenal, phenomenal writer. No, I don't know her personally.

40:54I didn't episode with her. And it was like, why are Gen Z women struggling so much? And immediately so many of the comments were to do with like, oh, this is pandering, this is like feminism's gone too far. You know, it's men that are struggling. I'm like, dude, like there is a library of, and what it made me think was like, it's really easy to point the finger and say, you know, look at how many benefits women are getting and they're the ones that are doing well in education and employment and the men of the guys that are being held behind and no one really cares. And it's like, yeah, and then as soon as you say also women are struggling, also there's a lot of problems that they're facing, especially when it comes to mental health, like Jesus Christ.

41:35And again, zero sum view of empathy. Like we can't have if we give empathy to someone that isn't me or my tribe, then it's taking it away. And it's like, all that that can lead to is dissatisfaction and people not being able to understand each other. It's just going to make the situation worse. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting that you use the word tribal when we're talking about men and women because I feel like we talk about tribal politics, we talk about race and religion, we talk about class, we talk about Republicans and Democrats, but typically we don't talk about as much men and women inhabiting their oppositional tribes, but I think I think that's exactly what's happening.

42:20Kind of abetted by social media and the lack of socialization. And I think that's gonna be a pretty profound civilization, civilization will problem. Yes. How could you be wrong about this data? In what ways might you be wrong? A million ways. I mean, in any work that we do, one of the things we try, and one of the first things, when I ever I see some kind of interesting or seemingly anomalous finding is like, where is this corroborated? How can we see where this stacks up compared to what we know? And so looking at a lot of different trusted data sets, conducting high -quality reliable research ourselves is a priority for us and being transparent.

43:05So on our website, the Survey Center on American Life, you can download all our data and one of the great things about that is it keeps you really honest if you think that people who are going to be poking around your stuff. And so I think that is incredibly important, sort of institutionally. But when it comes to where things might end up, I think there's, I'm writing a book on this topic, but I think the divide that I'm looking at, which is not just political but relational, I think this is solvable. So the trajectory that I currently am forecasting that I'm seeing in this data may not wind up as bad is I may talk about it.

43:44It may sort of come back into land in a bit more. In 2024, right. We are seeing divisions over marriage with young women saying that marriage benefits men more than women. So we're seeing declining interest in parenthood, plummeting rates of civic participation. And so all these things are kind of pointing in a negative direction could change pretty significantly. One of the ways in which I was actually somewhat feeling rather positive about the pandemic, one of the only ways and optimistic is that I thought that it would in this generation and among people generally kind of develop an appreciation for the importance of social ability, right?

44:32The importance of hanging out and being with each other in community, whether it's a religious community, whether it's being part of membership organizations, whether it's just going to work out with friends or play board games. That when that was taken away from us, I think a lot of people suffered in a lot of different ways. My hope would be that this generation, particularly the teenagers and young people who really suffered through it, we know those folks suffered 10 to suffer more than others, would develop an understanding of we really need to prioritize this. We need to find spaces where we can spend time with each other.

45:09I think the verdict is still out on that one. I'm hoping that that's what will happen, but I'm not 100 % positive that it will. Rose Horowitz, Rodin article titled, are Gen Z men and women really drifting apart? The much theorized political rift has yet to show up in actual voting behavior. What's he thought on that? Well, she's wrong on that. I talked to, I talked to Rose for that article. And she's not the only one. So what's happened is there's a number of political scientists who've come out and sort of say, well, in these academic data sets, the general social survey, the American National Election Study, the Congressional Election Study, like we don't see this stuff replicated.

45:53But point of fact, the only data set where you really don't see it that you have a large enough sample is the CES. And in the rest of them, in the Pew Research trend data, you see it and Gallup, you see it. There's monitoring the future data that folks have looked at and you see it in there. You even see it in incoming freshmen, the UCLA, it does an ongoing study and looks at the politics of incoming freshmen and you see a growing gender divide. There's a lot of corroboration in terms of the data. And then you see an exit poll data, right? There's a, I think, a 12 -point gap in the voting behavior of young women and young men.

46:32In exit polls, and you see it in voter file data as well. So I think it's, we should proceed cautiously. And I think that, I think what some of the political scientists object to, which I think is absolutely valid, is to say, well, what do people mean when they're identifying as liberal? Does that mean that they're liberal and supportive of, you know, the progressive position on all these different issues from gun control to climate change to abortion? Because point of fact, like young men today are significantly to the left of older men on a lot of those questions, particularly when it comes to race, because the generations is much more racially diverse, right?

47:11So you do see them to the left, but relative to where young women are, I think there's still a lot of evidence that suggests that they're in a little bit different place. The other thing too, it's not just politics. You look at views of pornography, there's a really significant difference of where young men and young women are. What did they say though? So we asked this question about whether there should be more restrictions, place on internet pornography. There's like a 20 point gap in the view of young men and young women. and young women want it much more restricted, young men don't, not shockingly.

47:46I think, so there's a lot of those kind of cultural questions where you see these divides show up as well. And then like concern about climate change, concern about gun control, young women again, show up much, much higher. Yeah, Gallup just did that own analysis as well. Right, I think I saw you. It was the same data, but they just published it finally. So like I published it in 2022, to then I did this op -ed earlier this year based on the Subsec article and then got a couple of weeks later published there. It's the same data though. Right, right, I understand. It's a... And just to kind of round out the stress testing of your data here.

48:30How... You said around about 2014 was when this really began to kick in? Yeah, 2014, 2015, depending on what data you're looking at. Okay, so we're now at, you know, a decade approaching a decade where this has been sort of trending. So this isn't the same kind of flash in the pan. For instance, for a while, quite a while, I was citing this stat. The number of men between 18 and 30 that report not having sex in the last year has tripled from 2008 to 2018 from 8 % to 28%. And I was like, trotting this stat out, that was GSS data. I didn't realize that new GSS data would come out twice. It'd come out once and then the second one was what made me realize that the first one had come out and that trend had reversed.

49:12And I was like, right, okay, like that. And if you actually look at, it was such a sharp increase of such a short space of time that now plotted across enough time, it actually just looks like, yeah, what happened to you? Maybe it was something to do with the way that this thing was captured. Maybe it was something about 2018, I don't know. But that seems to have come back down now. And actually, women switched over with men, I think 2019, 2020, women did, perhaps a hyper -vigilance around sort of like pathogen, discussed response type thing around about the pandemic, that could have been a part of it.

49:45But it seems like the trend that you are talking about here is more robust, longitudinally. Yeah, and I think if you're, it's not just an in response to I think specific events, right when we look at you know and and and post a look at you know what kind of impact is a particular even in an important national event. So you know the some of the protests over police shootings of African -American men right I mean sort of say okay how did this change attitudes towards police and policing you did see a significant impact of that but then it dissipated pretty quickly. And so I think some of that is like that almost always happens.

50:29Right? You know, for events to have really profound changes in our political trajectory, they, you know, they have to be, you know, of a magnitude that we don't typically see. But what we're seeing among, I think young women is not just a reaction to the election of Donald Trump to the Dab's decision or in me too. I think it's partly demographic. So you look at their education attainment, significantly more educated than men. If we're seeing education polarization, we would expect that to show up in their politics. Rise of LGBTQ identity. Again, that's increased over the last six, seven, eight years dramatically.

51:09And that group, LGBTQ people, are much more liberal than people who identify as straight or heterosexual. So, there are some demographic reasons to expect that, you know, we would see this growing division and politics. What's happening with race? So race is really challenging to get at in this cohort because simply in a lot of the survey data we have, we don't have large enough samples to break out. So you know, in terms of your average survey of 1 ,000 people, you have basically maybe 120 120 people who are Black, African American. And so you can't do a lot in terms of the analysis. Now, some of the data we have is much larger, but still you're pretty limited in what you can do.

51:58But a lot of the divisions we're seeing cuts across racial categories. So we see between Black men and Black women pretty significantly different. In fact, I just published a piece that looked at the way there's been a really significant drop off in terms of Democratic identity among black men, but not black women. And this is again based on some of that gallup data. So I think that makes sense in terms of, well, okay, look at the rates of religious participation among black Americans. That has historically tied them to the Democratic parties. So more religious black Americans tended to be more democratic.

52:38So as we've seen, black men drop out of church, much higher rates than black women. We might expect that there's this to have an impact on there downstream affiliation. What does this mean for the 2024 election cycle? That's probably the hardest thing to predict because I think despite the fact that we've seen this divergence, I think we're going to see some significant amount of support for young people. One of the challenges is that I don't know if you've been tracking polls when it comes to the youth vote this year, but they've been all over the place. There's been some reliable polls that say, you know, Trump is up with young people, which would be an absolutely unprecedented shift, you know, of like basically 20 points to what happened in 2020.

53:29So I think we're going to see significant support for Biden among young people overall. I think it's going to be significantly higher among young women. I think that that binding campaign, they are already, but I think they're going to continue to make abortion a really significant part of their campaign outreach to young women. I don't know what they're going to do for young men. One of the things that I thought was pretty interesting, and I don't know if you've had reason to go over to the Democrats webpage to sort of check it out. Well, I was there recently just to look at the groups that they were advocating for, right?

54:07So these are the groups that Democrats are fighting for. There's like 16 of them, I think. Women, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, other ethnic groups, rural people, urban people, women, the one group that was missing, men. And so it almost seems that it's such an oversight that it has to be intentional. I don't know. And so I think to the extent that we see this divide occurring, I think that the parties are going to play a role in orienting and reaching out to folks. And to the extent that the Democratic Party does not, you know, actively appeal to men and particularly young men, I think they're gonna continue to slide right.

54:58Yeah, I wonder... One thing that you said earlier on was how formative me to, and then I guess the me to of 2023, which was the abortion ruling, I wonder whether that is formative to young people during their life, but that if there wasn't a similar incident in six years time or whatever, that's kind of baked into the system and that this is almost like a quite prolonged but a response to those kind of situations. Whether or not, without continuing to sustain that with more and more, what is perceived as an egregious transgression of somebody's freedom or like an important cultural moment, And I wonder how much of what we're seeing is still the blast radius of some big events.

55:55And I wonder how much is more sort of deep rooted and deep seated. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I've kind of struggled with this myself. And I think I've evolved in the way I think about it. Like I think at one point I thought, you know, me too was seismic and generational. Now, I tend to think that it just has a pretty significant blast radius as you put in. So, we'll see it among Gen Z, but we may not see it in Gen Alpha or even younger Gen Zers who just were not young enough to be paying attention to this stuff. So there might be that cohort of like, you know, six to seven year, eight year span of young women who came of age during that period who said like it was really important.

56:39and then not for folks coming after. What are the implications of this gender divide for the world of dating? It's hard to, I mean, in one way, so if we were talking about politics, I think it's a little bit overstated. The Washington Post came out with an article sort of saying that the political divide and the salience of politics and dating could have significant repercussions because there are many more conservative men than the Braw women. So there's a dating mismatch there. But I think when you talk to people about dating and we did like 30 in -depth interviews among young people, it was a lot about, I just want someone who treats me well, who is respectful, the kind of things that you would expect, people to say just in general about the kind of relationships, platonic or romantic that they were after.

57:39And politics didn't come up that often, even the issue of abortion, which seems like there's of any issue that could be like a deal breaker, which there's not a lot of common ground to be found. A significant number of young women, even liberal young women sort of said, like well, it might make things difficult, but it was not an essential deal breaker for them. Wow. So how much of that do you think is, as far as I'm aware, having a mismatch in values and something like abortion is a pretty strong sort of fundamental value about the way that you see the world, it's probably indicative of a lot of other things.

58:17It's more of a keystone than your view on economic policy, I would imagine, like more interpersonal. How much of that do you think is people wanting to give what sounds like a balanced answer to posters, but when it comes to actually dating someone, it may be something that they can't get past? Right, and I think any question, we ask in that 2023 survey a list of, I think, like 20 items, would you be more or less likely to date someone who live with their parents, smoke cigarettes, like all these different types of lifestyle, behavioral, sort of social, demographic background questions. And so you're asking people to make these judgments without a real person standing there and people tend to think very differently when they're thinking in the abstract.

59:09Is there a name for that? It's like White Coat Syndrome, I guess, in medicine, but is there an equivalent, like observer effect? Is that what would you call that? Yeah, I don't know if there's a technical term for in pulling, but again, there's a challenge in trying to get people to, well, first off, tell the truth, but secondly, know the truth. How well do we know? What their actual priorities are in terms of the qualities they want in a partner. It's incredibly difficult. But I think one of the things that's happening in online dating is that you can pre -sort all that stuff. I can sort of say this is what I think I want and Long behold the algorithm can can spit out, you know a whole bunch of different matches for me and for women They they can still find matches regardless of what kind of restrictions they put on Men you know have it at a harder time and online dating So I'm trying to work out whether or not the world of dating has become more or less political because what you've just said there makes it sounds like it's, well, maybe it's just someone that cares about me and it's a normal balanced human, but then on other sides, it's like 55 % of young women would be less likely to date a Trump supporter, 39 say the same about the possibility of dating a Republican and 76 % of young women with a college degree, they would be less inclined to date a Trump supporter.

1:00:28I'd rather die alone than date a conservative man said one woman. Yeah, well, and I think this this is where the politics and the personal get kind of fused I Trump is very very effectively Politicized always things that weren't all that political. I remember people before the pandemic They're you know, they're saying you know what this country really needs is an external Challenge with that we can bring bring us together like 9 11 this horrific tragedy An attack on an American soil that common humanity Yeah, that we rallied around and even Democrats had had you mean like a global a global pandemic that didn't put all right and and of course, you know that became immediately politicized and Trump bears you know some responsibility there, but it certainly wasn't all him and so I think yeah, when it comes to Trump, I think one of the things that we heard we saw in the survey and heard from the people we interviewed was that it wasn't politics like they didn't care about his his his economic plan.

1:01:30They didn't really, you know, that was not the deal breaker issue for that. It was this treatment of people, particularly women. That that I think leads them to be like, okay, well, I mean, like his personal, the way that he comes across the media, incredibly personally, incredibly and negatively. And in people who he thinks have wronged him. The language that he uses, he is, you know, you know, Adam Surer at the in Lannick said that the famous article that the cruelty was the point and he behaves absolutely cruelly to many people. And I think, you know, for folks who are saying, wow, like if someone really not just like, well, vote for him, but like really adores this guy and there's lots of Americans who do.

1:02:15What does that say about how they might treat me or what I mean to them as a woman or like, you know, those kinds of things? And like, we heard that a lot. We heard that a lot from the women who said that this would be a deal breaker for of them. So with not about policy, you could say it was kind about politics because Trump was president, he's a Republican president. But I think a lot of it was his personal behavior, his decorum, you know, the stuff with the porn star, the infidelity. I mean, he just ticked so many boxes that I think a lot of women, they just like, they found reprehensible. A potential solution that's been put forward for this is for women to trade fish or for men to woke fish, that there's basically a blue ocean if you date unassortatively in terms of your sex's typical direction of political orientation.

1:03:05Yeah, well, I mean, and there's like a, you know, I'm learning about this all this kind of second hand. I've been married for almost 10 years now, but from what my younger research assistants will tell me when it comes to dating and stuff that I've read, that some sort of men then if identify as moderate and they're dating profile in order to get dates from liberal women. Liberal women actually know this so now they won't date moderates.

1:03:33There's some amount of adjustment of the sites in a way. Like no, I'm going to have to. I got to move a little bit, the cursor a little bit more to the left, I guess. Well, it's not just men and women not being able to find partners, though. Young men are just just checking out of dating altogether, quite a lot. Have you got any idea what's causing that? So yeah, it is not just dating, there's workforce stuff. That's not an area of primary focus for me, but there's men who are just checking out kind of altogether. Video games I think are a common culprit there. I think when it comes to their economic ambitions, I think it's just tough.

1:04:20to know what the trajectory there is for them. What do they see as the goal? I think at previous generation, we kind of, there was like, okay, you do this, this, this, and this. But I think for a young man today, I think there's just a lot of, they feel kind of adrift. And then, have you looked at Nicholas Abastant's work? Yeah. So he's a AI and has done some great work. He's at the state organization that I'm American Enterprise Institute. Right. Okay. So yeah, yeah, so he's some great work on that. And I think it's, yeah, it's absolutely right that when you sort of see your goal, sort of say, okay, I want a good job, good career.

1:05:00I want marriage, I want kids, a house, with a mortgage and all that. It can be, you know, it can be hard to get that, but then at least with those goals in mind, you can sort of say, okay, I know what I have to do. And I feel like that, those kind of kind of a north star places like orientation is kind of missing now from from young men. And in terms of like what they're doing and said, yeah, so video games, I actually, I don't think a lot of people have thought about this yet in terms of the way it's going to impact relationship and dating, but like the AI girlfriend thing, something that I've written about a bit and concerned that similar to how pornography gives you an absolutely warped view of sex and sexual relationships, I think AI girlfriends and that kind of interactions is going to give young men an absolutely warped idea of any kind of relationships with the platonic or romantic.

1:06:01Oh, because there's never any disagreement that needs to be dealt with. everything is over there. Affirmation, affirmation, affirmation, you know, there to respond whenever, wherever, and I think it's going to be pretty popular because of that. We're seeing this, increase in loneliness. We did a survey back in 2021 and we identified this, the friendship recession quote unquote, which was afflicting men significantly more, harshly than women. And so a lot of this is something that could conceivably be a pre -signiving problem, because that's going to be attractive for folks who are saying, well, I have a hard time meeting people.

1:06:43My friends aren't really giving me the support that I want, and I can't find a partner. So I'm going to turn back to screens. VR headsets, video games, AI games. Yeah, so a couple of insights I've learned from evolutionary psychology friends. One of the problems that you're going to encounter with AI girlfriends is that there is no prestige associated with having one. It's the same reason that people don't advertise how many only fans, creators they subscribe to or whatever, because selection is so much of the prestige that comes with being in a relationship. Not only was I able to get this person, but they chose me.

1:07:20Whereas if you've got the price of a cheeseburger per month and you can buy a VR girlfriend, the degree of prestige and status associated with that, I don't think that should be undercounted. I think that that counts for an awful lot, like deep down for men. Now you might say, well, the same is true of having a real friendship as opposed to one that's on the internet and look at how many people are spending all of the time on screens and social media. I don't disagree. But for the people, and I think about this a lot, I'm not a gamer, I was like, I played Xbox a good bit, but I wasn't like addicted or I didn't really use it all that much when I was younger, but I don't now.

1:07:59And I think I, I don't fully account for just how compelling and compulsive that is especially for young guys. I think the video games industry is worth more than the TV, movie and music industries all combined together. Like video games know more about human nature and human behavior and how to manipulate it and capture it than every other industry put together. So yeah, even for the people listening that like, no, video games, you know what, like playing a bit of cauldron in the evening, like blah, blah, blah. They've gotten good. My boys just got an Xbox. Their uncle got it, got it for them.

1:08:41So I have a five year old and a seven year old. And the games have gotten really like I have not played video games for years I used to but they've gotten real good I was playing Gears of War 5 Before my wife made me uninstall it They didn't want the boys coming across it because it's pretty violent. Yeah, but yeah, I mean It's immersive. It's engaging you can sit there for hours and hours and hours And I think like yeah, there's you know you know, again, you can sort of laugh at like, oh, you know, video games and this is not being not, not realizing people's time, but it clearly is the amount of time that young people are spending on these things is, young men is growing and really significant.

1:09:24What's happening with life satisfaction? It's low among young adults, but it's always been kind of low like comparatively, right? So we tend to be happier as we go over, we have more friends when we're younger, but in terms of the kind of insecurities that we have the way we think about our lives, I think that the way that we feel in our teens and early 20s, there's a lot of just life cycle stuff that we tend to grow out of. Now we're in a different environment now with social media, so I think there's been scholars research, you're looking at the social, the, you know, anxiety producing effects of social media.

1:10:08And it's, it seems huge. I've not looked at it a ton of myself, but it seems like really, really important. And it's focused on women, but I think men too are suffer from this a little bit too. For the third time in more than two decades, less than half of Americans say they are very satisfied with the way things are going in the personal lives. The 47 % of US adults expressing high satisfaction with their lives has edge down three percentage points over the last year and is only one point higher than the 2011 record low for the trend. Not good. So, yeah, and I think Gallup recently did this whole multi -country look at happiness and life satisfaction.

1:10:48And the really interesting thing to me was how huge the generation gap was. So at one point there wasn't a huge difference between where older people were and younger people world. But now I think United States has one of the largest generation gaps in terms of happiness and life satisfaction of any country. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, this slow life strategy that Jean Twangies looked at, I know Jonathan Heitz looked at it as well, extended adolescence as it's called young people getting their driver's license later moving out of the house later, getting their first job later starting dating later.

1:11:21I wonder how much, how many of those things, like it's a risk aversion, it's like generalised risk aversion against change and safety. Leaving the house, Scott Galloway got in trouble for basically saying that unless if you're still living at home with your parents, unless you're asleep, you shouldn't be in the house. And people were, I second that as a parent of young boys, like get out of that house, go play. But that might be a way for you to get a little bit of peace. But yeah, I understand personal motivations aside that, no, it's independence and agency, right? Like that you you learn like I was talking with the colleague today like it's the importance of being bored right to come up with your own games be imaginative find ways to figure things out yourself so that you're you're not I mean I think this generation of parents and I you know I count myself as part part of this problem were kind of overly engaged I mean the common terms of like helicopter parenting or a snow plot parenting I think is absolutely right that we're doing too much for them and things that they should be doing themselves, we're not readily letting them do.

1:12:26And so they're not learning agency, they're not learning independence. I looked at this interesting thing about life satisfaction, a highest amongst upper income, marries and religious adults. A few groups have majority saying that they are very satisfied. This includes those with annual household incomes of $100 ,000 or more. Married adults, those who attend religious services, regularly college graduates, its Democrats and those aged 55 are older. So you're like, sort of threading the needle through and I'm going to guess the number of those may, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if married adults have high household income, if people who are earning a little bit more are more likely to be religious, you know, like all of these things will stack on top.

1:13:06Yeah, no, I think that's right. And we've done research on this too, the class divide in religious participation. So at one point there wasn't a huge attendance difference between people who had a college degree in those without, so you go back 30, 40 years. Pretty much the same. Everyone was attending at relatively high rates. Then over the next 20, 25 years, a significant gap emerged with the non -college folks attending at far less high rates than the folks who went to college. So it's the college educated folks are getting buried. invested in the religious communities, engaged in community life.

1:13:47And that has a multiplicative effect, right? Like you are getting support systems across the different institutions. You are, you are valuing yourself of information of all these important things in life that is strongly correlated with the happiness and contentment. Yeah. How do you sort of come to conceptualize everything that we've gone through today? So what's your view of the current state of things in the trajectory moving forward? So I'm a little bit of a resident pessimist. I cannot look at this data and think like, wow, what is happening? Because we do a lot of surveys on a lot of different topics from dating to religious demography, to politics.

1:14:33We're doing a working class survey. And we haven't talked about this, but I think that one of the really concerning things for me is trust. And rather, it's precipitous to climb. So if you look at young people today, on a variety of different measures, but you just ask them, like, how much do you think people can be trusted? They're far lower, like 30 points lower than older Americans. Whether they think people take advantage of them, again, like there's like a 30 or 40 point divide. Most young people say that they do. And I don't want to be constantly pointing the finger at social media, but again, I think it makes some sense adaptively, right?

1:15:11If I'm engaging with strangers a lot when people have access to my profile, they can message me a lot of times, I'm getting negative interactions online. Of course, I should be a little bit suspicious, right? I'm not being socialized in my sort of geographic community where people know each other, where there's a lot of support. But I'm kind of in the wild west where I don't know people's motivations. I don't know what they're gonna do. And so it, I think it pays to kind of be cautious and think the worst of people. And so I think that to me is a pre -significant difference in the way people are being raised today versus a generation before social media.

1:15:57That's that high -povidulence again, right? I can't necessarily trust people. I don't know if they have best interests at heart. And the other thing, I can't remember who said it, but basically that the internet has made psychopaths out of all of us, that it permits you to do things online that you would never do in person. Yes. Basically no repercussions. And if you don't think that this is true, log into any first person shooter lobby and hear what people say to each other. Like just the things that people say, there's no way that you would dare say that. In even face to face, let alone in a small village, a hundred years ago where you knew everybody and reputation would get around and you're held accountable for your actions and things like that.

1:16:40So what's the natural response? Natural response is this, vigilance and certainty. I'm gonna protect myself. I'm never actually going to be emotionally open or vulnerable or invest in anybody else because they might move on quite quickly and I've had all of these bad experiences. Look how terrible humans are. Humans overall were a scourge on the earth. That probably contributes to the climate change. Oh, we don't need to worry about birth rate decline because there's too many people on the planet in any case and humans are kind of a bit of a cancer. So, you know, it is the most like multi -headed hydrohead thing of all time.

1:17:11But when you actually zoom out enough, it does the patterns and the shape start to make a little bit of sense. Things are moving in directions and you can begin to see how each of the different and contributing elements, make stuff go toward that direction. Yeah, if I could like, move up the chain and sort of say, what is the thing up here that is going to be influencing everything downstream? I do think it comes down to this kind of communitarian impulse that we've lost. This that we're so obsessed with the way that we look, how we're being perceived, were interested in our own career trajectory, our own professional success, and the validation that we get from it as opposed to like, well, how much are you volunteering?

1:17:59You know, what kind of activities are you doing and furtherance of something or someone other than yourself? How are we rewarding that culturally? And so I think like the fact that we don't have that impulse, we don't have that greater good ambition, and that they were seeing each other in the real world more often than we're, you know, from Putnam on, we've known that we've been in kind of a civic decline. And I think we need to, you know, rebuild a lot of our institutions. We need to encourage young people not just to have amazing resumes, but actually be amazing people and support the people around them.

1:18:40So you're not checking boxes, but you're actually, you know, having real experiences with real people. And, you know what, there's a value in, you know, hanging out and chasing your friends around with sticks. Right, there's value in that, right? I see ads for like Russian math classes around my neighborhood. I live in a pretty nice part of DC. And just like, well, yeah, you could do that, but I'd rather have my kids spend time with their friends just out in the neighborhood or out biking around. And I think some of that probably stems from this kind of competitive impulse, right, that we, I want my kids to get in really good schools.

1:19:15It's a competitive education environment. If, you know, they make a mistake, they're going to fall off the ladder and, you know, there's not a sort of safety net for them. So they just have to do everything right. And I think if we could get off that a little bit and, you know, refocus our attention and the way we spend our time, with towards furthing a broader interest, I think we'd be well, much better served by it. Daniel Cox, ladies and gentlemen, Daniel, I love your work. I think that the insights that you're able to bring, which kind of add a bit of statistical rigidity to the insights that people are seeing and sort of stuff that people feel.

1:20:00It's like, I've got this trend that I've noticed online a little bit, but it's there. So there in front of you, you can almost sort of grab it. I really appreciate the work that you do. Your subs tax, fantastic. Where should people go? They want to check out all the things you do on the internet. So you can check out our website, Survey Center on American Life, and then I write American Storylines on subs tax. So check it out. Hell yeah, Daniel, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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