How to Actually Help Young Men Struggling in Our Economy

The "boys and men crisis" conversation set in motion following the 2024 election is now shooting off in erratic directions, leading to a lot of hand-wringing about college enrollment, long-gone factory jobs, and “loss of purpose.” Still, men’s workforce participation has been on a long, slow slide for seven decades, and it is reaching a worrying level. To address that, though, we need to have harder conversations about what truly affects young men disproportionately – things like substance abuse disorders, other addictions like gambling and video games, and criminal records. Support the Optimist Economy podcast by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/, or donating at https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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  This whole episode is just going to be a tribute to, like, songs we could never afford the rights to, like "The Boys Are Back in Town," and "Boys, Boys, Boys," Charlie XCX. I watched the video twice today to get ready. Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.

• 0:50Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin.

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  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time. Y'all, we have a website. It's optimist economy dot com. And it's a little bit newer looking, because we received some feedback from many of you that you actually tried to give us money and you couldn't figure out how from our website. So that's on, that's a, that's a cellphone.

• 1:20Robin Rauzi?

  That's on us.

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• 1:33Robin Rauzi?

  And you never will.

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• 1:55Robin Rauzi?

  I also wanted to add that you can join our chat on Substack. And we got a subscriber in North Dakota.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:02Robin Rauzi?

  Greetings to you in Fargo. And also, several of you have actually come in at kind of a super spiritual sponsor level. And we also wanted to make that in particular easier.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or the guy who said he wanted to give us money but not have to be committed on a monthly level. I was like, wow, that actually kind of looks like entrapment. Also fix that, or at least try to.

• 2:20Robin Rauzi?

  We did, yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Look at us growing and learning.

• 2:24Robin Rauzi?

  We are. We are. Okay. First up is retcon. Retcon again, retroactive continuity. This is where we talk about things we should have talked about in a previous episode.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yes, and we are like just ultimately committed to continually retconning the minimum wage because I have two more retcons about the minimum wage.

• 2:43Robin Rauzi?

  Great, but two more. I mean, have we done any yet?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  We've already done min wage retcons, and I have two, and in fact, I have three. I just don't know if I'm going to say the third one because I'm kind of embarrassed that we still have another one. Okay, retcon one. We had a listener write in to tell us that in the minimum wage episode, we didn't talk about the fact that there are many occupations and situations in which you don't even have to be paid the minimum wage. So the tipped minimum wage is one of them in which you were able to be paid...

• 3:12Robin Rauzi?

  $2.13 an hour.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  $2.13 with the assumption that tips will put you up to the minimum wage. There are also exceptions for people who are young workers, people who are in certain types of occupations, like if they're doing piece rate textile work. One of the biggest exceptions is for workers with a disability. And you can pay people who have certain types of disabilities less than the minimum wage as a way to increase their employment. The U.S. Council on Civil Rights actually did an exhaustive report on whether or not it benefits or harms the disabled community to have someone with, say, an intellectual disability to be paid $1 an hour.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  And they came to the conclusion that disabled workers should no longer have a minimum wage exemption, and they should be paid the same wage as everybody else. And the National Council on Disability applauded that. Now, they are still exempt from the minimum wage in certain circumstances. Some states are changing that with their own minimum wage, but it is one of the biggest exemptions. So that's min wage retcon one for those of you following. Min wage retcon two is I had a former congressional staffer reach out to me because in the show, Robin asked, "Why do you think it's failed politically on the federal level?" And he said, my answer was good, but that in his experience, it's that nobody wins.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  And he said, if you think about the minimum wage constituency, the people who are against the minimum wage, you raise it by a cent and they're going to tell you that business will collapse. And we won't have jobs or industry anymore. It's a very over the top reaction. They're opposed to any increase. But constituents who are in favor of the minimum wage, it's never enough. Right? Like you say, you're going to raise it to 15 and they're like, it needs to be 40. And it has two very vocal constituencies in the middle of like, can't you just make it a little bit higher? People don't really hear from them. So I, I was like, okay. Interesting. We post clips of our show on social media channels and the public comment response

• 5:20Speaker 02

  on minimum wage videos, he was exactly right. I, whatever I said was wrong, he nailed it. Every comment we got on the minimum wage was either how much I hate the US economy and don't know anything about it because I want to raise it, or I hate the US economy and don't know anything about it because I don't want to raise it to $40. And I was like, man, this guy, this guy was totally right. It's a really toxic subject. And I, I think from my point of view, I very much discounted it, but I appreciate now that because it's been so long, there's no like, just a set of like reasonable people in the middle who are like,

• 5:55Robin Rauzi?

  Can we make it 15, 17?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  How about 15, 17? Sounds great to me. I won't be thrilled, but I won't be upset. We don't, we're erased from this conversation. So I, I appreciated that he reached out and I appreciated his comments and it actually made it a lot easier when the comments on the minimum wage videos started to come in. And I was like, oh my God, why is everybody so mad at me?

• 6:19Robin Rauzi?

  That is really interesting, especially because so many people have a minimum wage that's around 15 to $17 an hour. Like leveling that field across the country just doesn't seem like it should be that controversial.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I know, I'm pretty sure all the people who commented, not a one of them listened to the show. Pretty sure they didn't even finish the video, even if it was only 60 seconds. But it was clearly a topic that hit a nerve. And then the last one is that we had a person DM me who's from Missouri, who brought up that the minimum wage and paid sick day increase that they voted in and that is being repealed.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  They made the comment that was, it's just really hard when even in a place that's relatively conservative, people want something and your representatives don't listen to you. And I just wanted to tell her, and everyone who lives in, no, we don't say red and blue state on this show, but everyone who perhaps has a little bit more of a progressive bent than their representatives, or who feel like policies that should be passed, like the minimum wage, shouldn't be so hard to be enacted. In the communist capital of this country, District of Columbia, one of the bluest parts that you will ever come across in terms of a voting block, the citizens of the District

• 7:38Speaker 02

  of Columbia have twice voted to end the tipped minimum wage, so that all workers make the same minimum wage, and twice, the solidly democratic way to the left of center city council has overturned it. Hmm. So they voted it in office. Really? Yeah, they voted it, they voted it up, majority wins, the council overturns it. They put it on the ballot again, and even stronger majority votes for it, it's starting to be phased in. Council just announced this month, or last month, that they are going to pause the phase in and not bring it to the full minimum wage, they're going to cap it at like 75%.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  So twice, the people of the District of Columbia have voted for a minimum wage increase that even their very liberal city council has overturned. Crazy. Yeah, so it's, I don't want people to think that there are these halcyon places where progressive policy just becomes action, and you live in some other place that's being thwarted by bad representatives, I think that there's truly a lot of fear that dictates policymaking, as well as a very uneven representation of who picks up the phone and calls when they're mad. Mm-hmm. And that's not, that's not a Republican thing, or a Democrat thing, that is just, that isn't everyone thing.

• 9:01Robin Rauzi?

  I have a couple of retcons. I got a text from a friend who said, you got paid $4.35 an hour on your first job? I got paid $3.35 and I looked, actually, I got paid $3.35 an hour on my first minimum wage job. Um, second, this is actually about our poverty episode. I actually went back and we mentioned briefly about general assistance and I kind of just threw out that it was not very much. So I went and looked in, in Los Angeles County, the monthly amount of money you would get if you were to get a grant from general assistance is $221 for a person and $375 for a married couple. You can only have about $100 in your bank account in order to qualify for that.

• 9:45Robin Rauzi?

  And you can have a car that has to be worth less than $2,000 unless you're actually living in it, in which case it can be worth $4,500. Anybody who thinks that you can live on $221 a month or even buy groceries, that's how generous our general assistance program is.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  That's depressingly low.

• 10:04Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, and it hasn't changed in, I don't even know how many decades.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  It's an optional program for states to do and they fund it. And so it's just, I mean, the fact that LA County has general assistance is still like better than some.

• 10:18Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, terms and conditions. Catherine, what'd you look up this week?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I looked up, I think I'm saying this right, a scofflaw?

• 10:29Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Someone who violates the law.

• 10:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Didn't it just have?

• 10:34Robin Rauzi?

  Didn't you know?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Oh, you didn't know it? No, I didn't know it, Robin. I'm reading a gripping biography of Ed Rendell and this word came up and I was like scofflaw, I'll have a term and condition, but apparently it's just impressive.

• 10:49Robin Rauzi?

  I thought you should know, sorry, sorry.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  You know, I did fine on the SAT.

• 10:53Robin Rauzi?

  I'm sure you did, yeah. Um, I looked up involution. I came across this story in a news article about the Chinese auto market. And then I looked it up and the definition didn't make any sense at all. And apparently this word has just taken on a new meaning in China or related to China in particular, I don't know how they say it in China, where it means sort of an extreme competition that leads to kind of damage to the competitors. The story I was reading of was about the auto market, particularly in electric cars in China, where it becomes this self-defeating cycle of excessive competition and then becomes damaging deflation for the whole sector.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Fascinating.

• 11:36Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  I'm like, my head's spinning a little bit of like,

• 11:39Robin Rauzi?

  Mic drop.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Too much competition leading to bad things in a country that's notionally communist.

• 11:45Robin Rauzi?

  I'm, I know. So in China, I don't want anybody to think I'm an expert on the Chinese economy, but when there's some sort of new product, or in this case, electric cars, that a bunch of companies will enter the market space all at once, but they're also sort of state-supported regionally because all of the provinces have their own economic growth goals. So they're basically doing, you know, what Uber did, but on this massive industry-wide scale, right? They're buying market share by dropping prices and in fact, they're just, they wind up cannibalizing each other.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do have a friend who works in this space who has told people like, you don't want to buy a $14,000 electric car. Right? Like that price is, is so wrong and way too low that it has to represent like nefarious things happening or bad, like very bad treatment of workers, bad treatment of like the minerals, state subsidization, like that, that this is not a good form of competition with American automakers to have a $14,000 electric car.

• 12:51Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  This is getting very close to suggesting we should do an episode on trade, which we are not going to do.

• 12:58Robin Rauzi?

  Fair enough. Fair enough.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Let's get to the big pill crow.

• 13:02Robin Rauzi?

  The big pill crow.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  The big pill crow today is about boys.

• 13:06Robin Rauzi?

  Boys. And is it just boys, or is it going to be boys and young men?

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Boys and men.

• 13:13Robin Rauzi?

  How old is, what's our outside, I just wanted to find some terms here.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  So technically, I'm going to go all the way up to 54.

• 13:22Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Boys, boys, all right. So, so the motivation for this show came via an experience I had in my other capacity of being an expert that goes on radio and TV and talks to print journalists. That I, I went on a radio show in LA to talk about boys.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Got to text Robin and she tuned in and that was awesome.

• 13:45Robin Rauzi?

  I did, real time backstage.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  The kind of premise of the show all hinged on, boys go to college at much lower rates than girls. And so there was two experts on the show, my counterpart, who was talking about education and really thinking about younger men, and me talking about employment and earnings and thinking of older men or boys. I don't know, it's really hard to decide which one to call them, boys or men.

• 14:10Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Anyway, this is just to say, I went on a radio show and I think that I learned through my experience of participating in this show, just how concerned people are about the prospects of young men and how, I'm going to say this is kindly as possible, displaced a lot of that might be.

• 14:30Robin Rauzi?

  The Public Affairs Show did a week long series about boys and men, but it didn't come out of nowhere. There have been, I'm honestly going to, I'm going to trace this back to the election, just article after article after article about what's going on with young men. And what's sort of fascinating is, you know, these trends, some of them date back decades, decades.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  The link that they made that I had problems with was because boys aren't going to college at the same rate as girls, there must be something going critically wrong with K through 12 education.

• 15:02Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  And he even said on the show, things like, Some boys do okay, but other boys are survivors of an education system that doesn't fit them. That, you know, it is particularly tough for young men to know what they want to do at 18. And I'm like, listening to this and I'm like, hang on.

• 15:25Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Hang on. So, Robin could tell you, because she listened live, in the show, I did pour buckets of cold water on him a couple of times and pointed out things like, "Men outearn women at every education level. Men have higher employment than women at every education level." And then, I'm in the middle of this like rant, and the, there's a lightning storm in Houston, and the power goes out at this truly devastating moment, where the host asked me, "Do you think we're getting to a place where women will outearn men?" And I mean, I was like, categorically not. And I go through like, all these reasons really quickly, and then I say, "So, no." Boom. Power goes out, and I stop talking, even though I had a whole other thing after that.

• 16:08Robin Rauzi?

  It was, it sounded on the radio like the biggest like, "So, no."

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Houston gets stormed. The power flickered, and I mean, it flickered, and I was just like, "Oh."

• 16:22Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, no. Here it comes.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  I'm off air, and then this is like, really meek text message from Robin. Wow, that was harsh. So, now, this is the show where we are proverbially keeping the power on, so I can continue talking about boys and men, which I didn't get to do when I was cut off on live radio at a very popular public affairs talk show in LA. So, let's continue this conversation here.

• 16:50Robin Rauzi?

  More gently.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  A little bit more gently. Okay, so, I'm gonna take on the premise of the radio show that we were on, which is that... Girls and boys don't go to college at the same rate. They don't, they haven't for decades. If you look at share of men versus share of women who have college degrees, women passed men in 2014. Of all adults who were holding degrees, the women college educated share passed men in 2014. They've been going to college at higher rates for 40 years. And so that felt like there was a little bit of a, what are you making this crisis out of? But in the pandemic, when college going in education was severely affected, men's enrollment did fall.

• 17:35Robin Rauzi?

  And it didn't really bounce back.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It didn't bounce back. So in the fall of '24, 63% of high school graduates start college in the fall. Among women, it's around 70%. Among men, it's around 55%. So it's a gap.

• 17:49Robin Rauzi?

  Big gap.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  It was a 15-point gap, and it got bigger after the pandemic. But it is not a reversal of trend, but rather an acceleration of one. So the bucket of water that I poured on the show was the outside options for college don't look the same for men and women because as long as we've had a labor market, we've had concentration of men and women in certain occupations. And the non-college occupations for men pay much better. So that means that if you are a woman and you don't go to college, your earnings prospects are going to be much lower than a man's that doesn't go to college.

• 18:25Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, like a lot.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Like a lot, like a lot less.

• 18:28Robin Rauzi?

  Like a lot.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Lot less. So college, like the returns to college education aren't just, I mean, we think about it so much in terms of the student loan question of like, is it worth how much you borrow versus what kind of income you'll get after the fact? But there is a massive other aspect to this equation, which is what are you leaving on the table for four years while you are in school? And that relative, like, return on investment for women is so much higher because their outside option is so much lower.

• 18:56Robin Rauzi?

  They're also taking on more debt. Like, yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's a pretty complicated calculation.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yes, that was the first bucket of water I wanted to pour. The one that I didn't get to talk about, not related to the power going out, but just something that didn't get a chance to breathe, broaden the conversation, is that if you look at different races and look at the difference in college going by men and women of different races, the biggest gap is among Hispanics.

• 19:18Robin Rauzi?

  More Latino women go than men.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  So the overall gap would get wider, all else equal, simply because Hispanics are a growing share of the population. But I guess what really bothered me about this whole conversation is that if you were to ask me, a labor economist, is there something worrying you about men? This would not come up. Like, this would not be on my list of things that I'm worried about is college enrollment. That wouldn't come up.

• 19:48Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. You've talked about this a little bit before about, like, college. When we talked about employment for college, recent college grads, like, they're a population that's easy to identify, that's easy to slice out of studies. But I thought, I don't know that this is the right, you know, metric that we should be looking at if we agree that there are sociological problems or labor market problems. I don't know that college enrollment is the right diagnostic tool here.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And if you treat as the big problem that men and women don't go to college at the same rate, you're not going to get to the actual economic problem facing men, which is that they have had declining labor force participation for as long as we have measured it.

• 20:28Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And something is happening to men over the long term that is pulling them out of the labor market, not when they're 18, but when they're like 35. This is a problem because this means it's a much bigger population. It spans every level of education. Men with a college degree, men with some college or associate's degree, men with a high school degree, all three of them have seen decades-long declines in labor force participation.

• 20:55Robin Rauzi?

  And this is, like you said, has been going on since like the 50s or something?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  As long as we've measured it. So, man, not to overwhelm listeners with numbers. Economists measure the most kind of important to us population in the labor market is 25 to 54-year-olds.

• 21:13Robin Rauzi?

  Prime age.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Because prime age, that big old piece of meat in the middle. That A1 steak because younger than that, you were in school or doing various things. And older than that, you're probably going to start retiring. So we look at 25 to 54 because it's the best.

• 21:29Robin Rauzi?

  Sorry.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the best indication of like, is the labor market doing a good job as opposed to, did you decide to go to school? Or did you decide to leave early? Or did you have some health condition? Like this one is truly.

• 21:40Robin Rauzi?

  Everyone you expect to be working, if they're going to be working in this, in this age range.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So men's labor force participation amongst prime age workers, we started measuring this in 1955. Between 1955 and 2025, it's basically been on a slow decline that entire time. It started around 98% is now around 89%.

• 22:01Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  So it's just, it's just a decline. Now, women, on the other hand, they are in possibly their third era. Where in between 1955 and 2000, their labor force participation rate basically doubled. And they went from around 40% to almost 80 in 2000. Between 2000 and now, women's labor force participation in the prime age has flatlined. And it's been stable at around 78 to 80% since then. So men, straight line down, not that steep of an angle, but always going down. That is the bigger concern. It's a lot more people and it reflects a trend that isn't going to be explained by like the pandemic. Something is going on in the labor market.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And the reasons for this decline among men could be shifting, but this effect is a much more worrying effect than just, did you go to college?

• 22:53Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. This cuts across all segments of age groups and levels of educational attainment. That suggests that, yeah, there's something much, much broader going on.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And it's getting worse. You know, women's participation flatlined around 2000, but we know why. They don't have childcare. Being a parent is tough and the declines are very clearly associated with the demands of parenthood. For what it's worth, women out of the labor force report relatively high levels of emotional well-being if they are looking after a kid. Right, so if you ask a woman who's not working, you know, and she's home with two kids, or one kid, or, you know, 10 kids, like, she's pretty happy, like, she's pretty satisfied with her life. What makes men's labor force participation decline also worrying is that they are not happy. It's not as if they like, "Oh, no, I was like, I'm gonna retire at 40 and I'm loving this." Like, that's not what we're seeing.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Not only is this a growing share of the men's population, but they are not doing well.

• 23:53Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I think this is why I was so frustrated by the conversation on the LA show. We've had decades of trying to understand what is hurting men in the labor market, and it just, it doesn't get the same airtime, even in this era of the crisis among boys and men. And so I wanted to use our show to give attention to those problems, to discuss what research has found. And, you know, it, all of it's really fascinating. There's, there's one good reason, so, obviously, we should dispel that one really quickly. One reason for the decline in men's labor force participation is that they're going to post-baccalaureate education more. So, more master's degrees, more M.D.s, more J.D.s, more P.H.D.s, and those people can be older than 25.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  So, there's a decline in the prime-age labor force participation of men, and some of it is great because they're getting more education in these good, skilled jobs.

• 24:45Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  The rest are bad. So, the next three are basically the three groups of what we think are pulling men out of the labor force. So, the first one is labor market difficulties, which is that they do not find their place in the labor market and permanently leave. This was definitely something that was brought up a ton in the 80s and 90s as US started to shed manufacturing employment. And you have, some people would call this like a skills mismatch or an opportunity mismatch. Some people would focus on things like, men didn't want to do jobs that were left available

• 25:28Speaker 02

  because they're dominated by women, or because they are skilled in certain things and the jobs that are replaced are lower paying. That is going to be one reason why men were out of the labor market.

• 25:38Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean, you've got, I mean, manufacturing, right, goes from like, I don't know, 18% of private employment to like 10%. But that's over a 40-plus year, that's two generations of workers that this happened over, like, this was, you know.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Well, so some of it is, like, people who are affected by job loss versus the opportunity is missing.

• 26:02Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, I see, okay.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  If you're laid off from a very good, high-paid manufacturing job in 1990, and you're 45 years old, your employment prospects are not going to be good.

• 26:12Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  But if you are instead 19 in 1990, and you don't find the manufacturing job, that's a different problem. It's a function of the fact that men and women don't have the same jobs. Some, some jobs, some industries are more male-dominated, some jobs, some industries are more female-dominated, and this means that their labor market experiences differ, not because of their gender, but because of their job. Even today, like, people are pointing out that the college grad unemployment rate is higher for male grads than female grads. But, right now in the economy, growth outside of health and education has been weak, and men don't work in health and education jobs to the same degree.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  I mean, as long as men and women have different jobs, they'll have different labor market experiences, and it's just really reductive to say, who has it worse? Like, the pandemic hit women a lot harder, the Great Recession hit men a lot harder, loss of manufacturing reduced high-paying job opportunities for men. Care work has never had high-paying job opportunities for women. So I, I mean, you cannot, categorically cannot, make the case that men's jobs or women's jobs have fared better in the economy. They, they both have problems, and I think that making that case is distracting from what are the true, like, gender issues. And for men, there is a much- Bigger, but in some ways uglier, problem that we don't like to talk about when it comes

• 27:40Speaker 02

  to a truly male problem in the labor market. The other part of the labor market, which I think is maybe a more dominant story, is just how high a share of men without a job have a felony background.

• 27:55Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, nobody wants to talk about that.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Nobody wants to talk about it, and nobody wants to hire a felon, and nobody really wants to embrace records clearing.

• 28:03Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  So, we have an incredibly long reach for our judicial and carceral system, and we have let that system basically encroach on the juvenile system for some time, especially among men, and especially given the nature of the crime. And men commit a lot more crime than women, and in general, crime committing.

• 28:27Robin Rauzi?

  It's when they're young.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  It's like 19 is when crime, the peak of crime committing is 19.

• 28:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Someone's going to ask about this, so I'm going to explain it quickly. If you are in an institution, whether it's the military, a old folks home, or prison, or jail, you are not counted in the labor force statistics. It is a measure of the civilian, non-institutionalized population, so this isn't picking up people who are in prison.

• 28:55Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  This is only going to pick up people who are out of prison. Even amongst people who are out of prison, their felony history is a massive barrier to employment, and it affects such a high share of men without a job.

• 29:07Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. And probably the same non-college-educated group disproportionately, too.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:15Robin Rauzi?

  It's going to be really interesting to me how this plays out and if it gets better, because one of the things about Gen Xers is that we were the most incarcerated generation, and millennials and Gen Z'ers are actually being arrested and committing crimes at much lower rates. So, it could be that you will get a little bit of a lower touch with the criminal justice system in the decades ahead, which would be a nice side benefit on the employment market.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, if you were going to bring up to me like what would help men in the economy, I would say criminal justice reform.

• 29:49Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  We need to actually change how we execute.

• 29:54Robin Rauzi?

  Charge.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Charge, plea. Criminal justice reform is holding back the economic potential of millions of American men.

• 30:02Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  And to not talk about that. In this era of boys and men feels like such a slap in the face of like, we've decided you still don't exist.

• 30:12Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  And you still don't matter. And there might be something racial going on in our assessment of that.

• 30:18Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Because the tragedy of boys and men's team is often very white coded. So labor market difficulties, whether that's that a factory closed, you didn't have the same type of jobs available to you when you turned 19, or, you know, you are carrying around the weight of a felony conviction that makes it hard to get a job. That is one massive factor for the labor force participation decline of men is that they have been pushed out by other opportunities they don't have, don't want, or can't reach.

• 30:50Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  That's one.

• 30:52Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  The second one, and the most prevalent probably today, is disability.

• 30:58Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  A very, very high share of men who are not in the labor market cite some kind of disability. You know, disability could be physical, it could be mental, it could be psychological. It also can be a term that applies to people who are suffering from a substance use disorder, whether that's drug addiction or alcohol addiction. And then something that kind of through the addiction link gets put in this category are addiction to non substances, like addiction to video games, computer games, and gambling. And these addictions, both the substance use addictions and the kind of the behavioral addictions, they affect men more and they affect their ability to hold a job.

• 31:36Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm. Even though they're not categorized by workforce standards as disabled, there is something disabling about those behaviors.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  There's disability as measured, kind of we talked about in the poverty episode, there's disability as in the government says you are disabled and now you start to get cash.

• 31:55Robin Rauzi?

  Qualify for S S D I or whatever.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Or S S I.

• 31:58Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Then there is just, I am telling you in surveys and I'm reporting, and when people ask, why don't you work, I am saying that it's because of a disability, but I don't get cash for it. And either that's because I have a diagnosis that's not recognized your disability, I'm not severely disabled enough in order to get the diagnosis or the disability check, but I am reporting that the reason why I'm not working is because I'm not physically able to.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  I mean economists have studied these each. They've done papers on video games and how much an addiction to video games especially pulls 21 to 30 year old men out of the labor market. And men who aren't working, they do play a lot of video games.

• 32:38Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  I would say it's a two way street of causality. We don't know how wide the lanes are, but we know there's traffic going in both directions. Video games are pushing people out of the labor market and video games are also keeping them out of the labor market because they're, that's what they're doing because they can't find a job.

• 32:54Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  But gambling, opioids, these are all hard nationwide social issues where the problem is manifesting as not as many men are working and...

• 33:08Robin Rauzi?

  And we know that those are problems.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And we know that they're problems and this is one of the consequences of them.

• 33:14Robin Rauzi?

  I see a lot of these articles, like I read one in of all places Harvard magazine, right? Not because I went to Harvard, just FYI. But it's like there are these sweeping indictments of like what's wrong with men, right? And it will do the college thing and then the job thing and then all of these other like deaths of despair and like, and it's painting with like this huge wide brush. And journalism has great purposes in the world, but diagnosing and teasing out what's the relationship between these things is not really the strong suit of journalism.

• 33:59Robin Rauzi?

  And we've got a lot of those articles.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  We have a lot of those articles and every, every one that I read makes me mad on behalf of the like people who have problems that we don't address of like, let's navel gaze for 6,000 words about what it means to be a man and Trump's second term and why they voted for him more as opposed to like it's criminal justice reform. You've put way too many people in prison. We have drugs on the street that they get addicted to. Then there's video games like... You are ignoring social problems that have hard solutions and hard conversations to go for these like, isn't it interesting to think about like, women cresting as an economic power? Like, no, it's not. It's really not. It's not that interesting at all. It's really

• 34:45Speaker 02

  not. Because women aren't cresting as an economic power. They make 80 cents on the dollar and have for almost three decades. Like, there is not some like, massive gender swing of like, women are rising like phoenix from the ashes while men have to sit back and wonder what their role is. Like, no, absolutely not. Deal with drugs, deal with prison, deal with crime, deal with all these hard conversations, instead of being like, man, women are really crushing it right now. It makes me like, it does a disservice to women who are struggling, who suddenly get painted as if like, they have everything in the world going for them because they weren't diagnosed with ADHD at age 10, and that men are like, we must think about what our society must look like for men. No, men are

• 35:27Speaker 02

  in our society struggling and you are ignoring them, because it's more fun to navel gaze about like, what it means they voted for Trump. I don't care. They have addiction issues, you're kicking them off Medicaid. Like, I don't know, I just, it gets me so mad to have these like, almost like academic intellectual of like, what does it all mean in the election? Like, is this why Kamala lost? Like, instead of, maybe we should have passed criminal justice reform. Maybe we should have a felony records clearing process that's automatic and required in every state. Maybe we should do a better job treating addiction. Yeah. Yeah. That was a big sigh.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  I get really mad about this, because people love looking for the wrong solution that is more interesting and palatable, and people love ignoring the hard problem, and they love being distracted by a conversation that is meaningless. Yeah. Which is why we podcast, everybody.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so yeah, this is

• 36:29Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  We put that on the

• 36:33Robin Rauzi?

  I do think that there were a lot of men quoted in the news who did, after the election, say, "No one's paying attention to our issues." And I think part of the problem with that is, I mean, they might be right. Like, the addiction issue may not be their issue. The education part of it may not be their issue. Like, there are myriad reasons that these things are coming together in this way.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  People understand narratives more than they understand cause and effect.

• 36:58Robin Rauzi?

  For sure.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Right? Like, you should know the narrative. You should understand the narrative. You should be empathetic with the narrative. But the narrative can't determine policy, because often the narrative is wrong, or it makes leaps of judgment in order to fit into a nice little story. And it's missing the complexity. It's missing the nuance of people who don't fit into the nice story, which are often the people who are most severely hurt.

• 37:20Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  You know, I should say, I'm not trying to be unsympathetic. I understand that someone could listen to this and say, "Well, I'm a man, and I can't find a job. But apparently, if I don't have a drug addiction or a felony record, I don't matter." It's not that. The labor market is weak right now and getting weaker. And that is the biggest problem most workers are facing. Male or female, young or old, college grad or high school grad, the labor market is slowing down, and that is the problem. If we want to respond to what is specifically hurting men and not workers overall, it is these, like, less applicable broadly, but still affecting some men very deeply, criminal justice and disability. It's hard, right?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  I don't want to make it sound like what you're going through isn't important, but what you're going through isn't male. It's American. Americans in an economy whose labor market is slowing down. So to review, we have, like, schooling good. Labor market and criminal justice issues, not good.

• 38:24Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Disability, addiction, not good.

• 38:26Robin Rauzi?

  Not great, yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Four is changes in family. So here's a fun fact. Labor force participation rates of men with children at home, especially if they're under six, has never declined.

• 38:39Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Men, especially when they have kids at home, participate at almost 100% rates in the labor market. It's around 95%.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  There is a story here that because we have lower fertility and because we have delayed family formation, as well as lower marriage rates in general, the changes to the way that US households are formed has also kind of mechanically resulted in men working less because they're not married, and men working less because they're not fathers, and fathers work at really the highest rates.

• 39:14Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, so first of all, household formation is like, that's another one of these economic speak.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Is that another thing, is that another way that you?

• 39:21Robin Rauzi?

  No, it's kind of, it's up there with consuming leisure.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Household formation?

• 39:25Robin Rauzi?

  Household formation.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Family formation is what we would call getting married and having a kid and setting up your own household, which I'm sure y'all humans have a way to describe, but I would call it family formation.

• 39:39Robin Rauzi?

  We might call it shacking up, I don't know.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Shacking up, it's with the ring. So men, again, this is a two-way street, but certainly one part of the decline in men's labor force participation has to deal with not being married.

• 39:56Robin Rauzi?

  Has to, has to do with not being married?

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the, there are some economists who think that as the labor market prospects of men declined, they became less marriable. I mean, economists do refer to marriage as a market, and not like a meat market and kind of like a tongue-in-cheek way, I mean, like, we mean like an actual market, like, this is an economic transaction, which is, sure, artless, but it does, it is a lens that exists that like, men who have very high earnings, men who have very high earnings potential, men who have high economic stability, they're much more likely to be married than men who don't. And men who don't have a job, men who have never had a job, they're much less likely to be married.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Again, that's a two-way street of, are you rejecting the labor market, or is the labor market rejecting you? Are you rejecting women, or are women rejecting you? But it's a very, like, they have very different rates of work, of an unmarried man and a married man. And same thing with fatherhood, dads work more than non-dads, even conditional on marriage.

• 40:59Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  This is the one where I'm like, this one's the hardest one to talk about, because this is the one that I think people would jump on to blame women.

• 41:06Robin Rauzi?

  Really? Because they're not marrying men and making them step up?

• 41:11Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah.

• 41:13Robin Rauzi?

  That seems kind of crazy.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's also our fault that childcare has failed. So like, I mean, what's not our fault here, Robin?

• 41:21Robin Rauzi?

  What's not to... We talked about this related to fertility and teen pregnancy. There were things that we actually encouraged as a society, one of which was, you know, kind of delaying marriage, not getting married at 19 and 20, or and waiting till maybe you'd gone to college, and particularly if women are going to college, not getting married until you're out of college.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's, yeah, I mean, because we were, you know, for a long time, the nightmare was divorce. And if the Gen Xers are the most incarcerated, the Boomers divorced, like, nobody's business. Now, granted, it was when divorce and access to divorce changed, but I want to say, outside of World War II, so 45 and 46, massive divorce years. Like, nothing will ever come close to the number of people who came home from World War II, or the war ended and they're like, this is not working. Yeah, big, huge shoot up in divorce at the end of World War II. And then it goes quiet for a while, because it's very hard to access divorce for a very long time in the US with the way that fault was written, and the way that child custody worked and lack of child support. That all changes in the 70s, and

• 42:26Speaker 02

  the early 80s are like,

• 42:28Robin Rauzi?

  Boom time for divorce lawyers.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Boom time for divorce lawyers. The 1980s were incredible, like especially the first half of the 1980s in just terms of the sheer number of marriages that are dissolved.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  So after that, we had this, like, you shouldn't get married at 19.

• 42:45Robin Rauzi?

  So early.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, because those marriages have, because the younger you get married, the higher the fail rate of a marriage.

• 42:51Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Especially if you get married before 21. So you really push people of like, you need to wait before you get married, but it also means that kind of

• 42:59Robin Rauzi?

  Family formation is happening later.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Formation is also delayed, and that affects men and women differently.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  The reason why I say I'm worried to bring up the family thing is that I had someone, this woman DM'd me, and she was like, you know, My husband genuinely thinks that women being in the economy makes the economy worse.

• 43:21Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  And that if women weren't working, men would have more jobs, better jobs, they'd earn more money. And so he thinks that like, we shouldn't have things like access to free childcare because it would put more women in the labor market and that hurts men.

• 43:38Robin Rauzi?

  And they're competing with men for jobs.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  And the economy does better when it's just men. And yeah, I had to like-

• 43:44Robin Rauzi?

  Take a deep breath there.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Put down my phone. Not do yoga.

• 43:52Robin Rauzi?

  Falling stick pose, it's time.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Whatever weird pose my son came up with, but I just, there are many men who have, I think, found appeal in the idea that it's harder for them because women are here. And I trace a lot of this back to before and after are not the same thing as cause and effect. And before women worked, you would get married and have kids and a man's wage would support a whole family, you didn't have to go to college for it. And so everything that's happened since, well-

• 44:28Robin Rauzi?

  It's because the women are-

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Women are working now, so it must be that women ruined the economy. And I was gonna do a quick fact check and say, don't need to retcon this one, that is not true. The decline of men's wages is not because women were working. And this idea that it's women's fault, I think it has an appeal for a lot of men. But again, if you don't diagnose the problem correctly, you won't find the solution.

• 44:55Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. It's interesting, you were just saying, you know, they don't hold the same jobs. I did see a lot of mention of the fact that men aren't generally being drawn to-

• 45:08Robin Rauzi?

  Growth areas, right? Healthcare jobs in particular, besides doctors, are still dominated by women, where, you know, construction jobs are still dominated by men. And so, jobs that can be cyclical, can be particularly cyclical. Education, same thing. Education's still, well, we'll see what continues to happen, but has been a growth area. And where construction work goes up and down. And as we discussed, though, people didn't like it, engineering work, too.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in some ways, women becoming economically empowered is a fall guy. And I think maybe going back to this conversation on the LA radio show, it felt like girls doing well in school was a similar fall guy. Of like, that means that public education was designed for girls.

• 45:56Robin Rauzi?

  It was bad for boys, yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  And bad for boys, because girls do well in it. And it felt like, why is this the comparison? Whenever I'm in a conversation about boys and men, and it comes up in a lot of spaces and a lot of policy circles, something that I always think of in these types of conversations is this, like, general finding about the effect of divorce on health.

• 46:18Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  So divorce isn't good for health, for men or women. Now, these are averages. They're, you know, people are different, and divorces are different, and life is textured. But in general, if you were to tell me you were getting divorced, and you were a woman, I would say, research would predict that you're gonna have worse health for the rest of your life, because you're gonna have lower income. And you have a higher-earning partner, and you either don't work, or you earn more or less money than him, and you are about to move down in the income distribution.

• 46:48Robin Rauzi?

  And that's gonna harm your health.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  That's gonna affect your health. Yeah. And that'll affect your health for a long time. For men, the prediction would be, you are about to fall into a black hole of self-care.

• 46:59Robin Rauzi?

  Like a bad, a black hole of non-self-care.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  The black hole of non-self-care. Like, men, the health issues that are typical for men who have become divorced are things like, they don't eat as well, they don't exercise, they don't have basic self-care, they might not go to the doctor. But their bad health kind of ends when they get a new partner.

• 47:22Robin Rauzi?

  Who says, "Hey, you should get a colonoscopy."

• 47:29Speaker 02

  When was the last time you went to the doctor? Never?

• 47:31Robin Rauzi?

  Never?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  You should probably go to the doctor.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, men in partnerships are healthier. And I think about this in terms of, there's some ways it serves as a point of reference for these conversations where like, women are struggling because of their lack of economic power, and men are struggling because the lack of women caretaking. And that is how divorce gives this insight into gender, which is both like a mirror that might be hard to look at, but does tell us something about men and women and the economy. So this family question, I think, is the one that gets both the most toxic, and it also presents a conversation that's hard to have, which is like, why do men struggle to take care of themselves to the degree that women can take care of themselves?

• 48:19Speaker 02

  And like, women struggle to be as economically independent. You know, men struggle without women who are taking care of them, at least from this perspective. I don't, I'm trying not to speak in like blanket terms, but to bring it up as a point of reference.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know, it lives back there in these conversations of gender roles. But, I mean, if you were to ask me, like, if you were to come to me, labor economist, and say,

• 48:44Robin Rauzi?

  What do we do?

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Catherine, you're the new commissioner of the Boys and Men Commission. I would absolutely pursue a criminal justice reform, juvenile justice reform, records clearing policy that would make our criminal justice system a little bit more forgiving, and not make every crime a life sentence. And then I would attack as viciously as possible addiction, in all forms.

• 49:11Robin Rauzi?

  You know, I think that there's a lot of talk about apprenticeships, and technical school, and career training, and doing more of that for young men in particular, who don't want to go to college, or who are trying to re-enter the workforce. I mean, I don't think those are bad things. I think that that kind of workforce development is good. I don't know that it, I'm curious what you think about it solving the reduced labor force participation in the big picture.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  I don't think what's wrong with non-college jobs is a male thing. I think we could do better, but like if you were to ask me like what in particular would I do to put men first to deal with their issues so that they don't feel ignored? I would look at criminal justice and addiction. Because those do affect men so disproportionately. And of men who are in the labor market, which is, I say this not because I think the labor market is the end all be all, but it is a very like big predictor of health and life satisfaction. We know who's left out of that world. On the men's side, for reasons that are terrible, that is what we should focus on. If you wanted to talk about middle skill occupations, to me, it's a men and women's

• 50:19Speaker 02

  issue. There are problems and strengths in both directions and like that just needs its own thing. That's not a, that would be another one of those like you're putting a problem first, that's like nicer to solve and better to work on and then still ignoring like the really ugly thing. So that's why it would not be part of my presidential commission on boys and men agenda. I know almost nothing about child development and there could be like a legit child development thing, but if there's a child development thing, it's going to affect girls too. And I wouldn't put an 11 year old boy above an 11 year old girl. I don't like the degree to which the focus on children becomes this rationed competition of like, well, you gotta help boys or you gotta help girls. No.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  We under invest in all children. We under invest in all children. We don't feed children. We don't give them enough education or development or community involvement. We punish them if we don't like their parents very cruelly. That is problem one. I know that boys and girls are different, but I would never want to make any type of investment in children have to be rationed across children. The idea that we need to somehow put kids under 18 in some kind of line over who needs the investment first, like no, not working for me. You have to invest in all children. I am not competing for funds. No. Again, I go back to disability, addiction and criminal justice.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  All things I didn't get to say after the power went out. So like, imagine how long that radio show. I mean, look how, look how long our shows are for that radio show to be that long. Um, yeah. One of the comments we got on the, one of our last shows on youth unemployment was from, I think it was on Spotify, but the comment was, I really appreciated what you said about youth unemployment because young people have a dumerism about them. And it's a, it's been a hard time to grow up with.

• 52:14Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  With how much negativity there is in the air. And he just said, I appreciated that it was find the problem to get to the right solution. I'm paraphrasing, but it was, it meant a lot to me to hear that, like, even saying something that doesn't confirm your priors, that maybe makes what you think smaller than it is.

• 52:33Robin Rauzi?

  Than it looms, yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that I, I, I appreciated that there were people who listened, who were willing to not only hear, but tell me that I made their problems smaller, even if they're still suffering because.

• 52:48Robin Rauzi?

  You put it in, put it in a bigger context. Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. God, and his review is not as long as what I just said, but it.

• 52:54Robin Rauzi?

  It was not.

• 52:59Robin Rauzi?

  Think it's time for a little palate cleanser?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Palate cleanser.

• 53:02Robin Rauzi?

  Shake it off?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Executive order. My executive order is all playgrounds need bathrooms.

• 53:09Robin Rauzi?

  Totally.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Every playground in the United States needs functioning, clean toilets. The idea that I will take.

• 53:17Robin Rauzi?

  Changing rooms?

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Changing rooms. The idea that I will take a child to a place outside where there's no bathroom. Man, it's such hell sometimes.

• 53:25Robin Rauzi?

  Terrible idea.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think every, America, you need to put your hatred and fear of homeless people aside and build.

• 53:33Robin Rauzi?

  More bathrooms.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Millions more bathrooms.

• 53:36Robin Rauzi?

  And you could start on the 101 in California and playgrounds, which is just as a starting point. Um, my executive order was inspired by this story about Marie Glusencamp Perez. Who is the Congresswoman from Washington, from the district that is actually in Washington State, but just north of Portland, Oregon? And she was suggesting that we needed to do cognitive testing among elective officials. I think that this is the long way around. We just need retirement ages. We just need mandatory retirement ages for all sorts of political offices, Congress, Senate, courts, all of them.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Or, you know, and like, they can have another job. I mean, there's not, it's not like they can't have another job. Maybe like, create some kind of like advisor capacity where like, their knowledge is used.

• 54:25Robin Rauzi?

  Sure. Go teach at a college, be on a commission, I don't care. But really, I think everyone feels that this is a problem, and I don't think we need cognitive decline testing. I think we just need retirement ages.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:41Robin Rauzi?

  Next up?

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on. I think this is a term and condition challenge. If we call people in elected office who have lost the election but are still serving out their term lame ducks, what would we call politicians that are like, in their last year before retirement age? Because you'd have to think that if you were like, alright, I'm 69, and at 70, I'm not allowed to do this, so it's like...

• 55:03Robin Rauzi?

  Lame horse? I don't know.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Lame horse. There has to be something very fun about like, well, these people are like, well, if I'm never allowed to do this again, actually, we're going to do this. And you would get a lot of...

• 55:14Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  You would get a lot of really interesting policy from the people who are like, well, I'll never be elected, so...

• 55:20Robin Rauzi?

  I don't have to run for reelection ever again.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we should think of a term for people who are about to hit their age limit in every political office of like, what we want to call them, that aren't lame ducks. Because lame duck's a thing, and this would be different.

• 55:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, to ponder that. Okay.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Lame horse is pretty good. Okay, so I, spiritual sponsors for this week, I have to do a bit of a brag as part of my spiritual sponsorship, but my spiritual sponsor is really satisfying jigsaw puzzles. I love doing them.

• 55:51Robin Rauzi?

  I really dislike jigsaw puzzles.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  You dislike jigsaw puzzles?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Oh my God, I love them.

• 55:57Robin Rauzi?

  I know, so does everyone in my family.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  And I pay for like, high-end ones, too.

• 56:02Robin Rauzi?

  I bet you do.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's order them from some bougie puzzle. Order for, yeah, go all out. The big thing about moving to Houston is that we have a slightly bigger house. And so, for the first time in like, five years, I can actually comfortably do a puzzle.

• 56:15Robin Rauzi?

  And you can just leave it out?

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Because I can leave it out, which I haven't been able to do since I've had children. Because they love puzzle pieces, my God. And they do not respect my puzzle-making process.

• 56:27Robin Rauzi?

  Do you have like, a puzzle table that's got drawers for the pieces?

• 56:30Speaker 02

  No, one day.

• 56:31Robin Rauzi?

  My mother has one of those.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  We've long had a kitchen table. And in our new house, we actually have like, a breakfast table. It's separate from a different table. We've repurposed that table as like, you know, puzzles and in office and things like that. But yeah, this was all just a way for me to brag that I have two tables now. Not just the one table. I've got two tables, so I'm like, basically paying the estate tax. That's how rich I feel.

• 56:59Robin Rauzi?

  With your jigsaw puzzles.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  With like, my nice jigsaw puzzles.

• 57:03Robin Rauzi?

  Do you have like, a thousand piece, fifteen hundred piece? What's your?

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Depends on the puzzle. But I tend to like the five hundred.

• 57:11Robin Rauzi?

  I did not expect that. Depends on the puzzle.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  You didn't expect that? Depends on the puzzle? Because some of them, if they're really hard, the thousand piece is like, well, this is just a punishment that you gave yourself.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Whereas if like, they have an interesting design that actually distinguishes between a thousand puzzle pieces, like, that's great. But I had met a puzzle person once who was like, oh yeah, it's just, it's a puzzle that's like, all a fade. Of like, it fades from like, light pink to like, red. And I was like, that is not okay. I do like, paintings of flowers. It's just me on my like, second table, putting little pieces in together. And I'm like, I have achieved the American dream.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Your spiritual sponsor.

• 57:54Robin Rauzi?

  My spiritual sponsor. Okay, first of all, Parker from Seattle, Washington, joined us as spiritual sponsor this week. And we want to thank Parker.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Thank you, Parker.

• 58:03Robin Rauzi?

  Thank you, Parker. My spiritual sponsor this week, actually, I took a carpool trip up to take a friend to a movie recently. And anyway, I wound up in the car with three guys that I've known since their twenties. And I had the best time. And, you know, just they've all grown into just stand-up humans and stand-up dads.

• 58:25Robin Rauzi?

  And it was really great. And I think about that a lot.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Dads? Oh, yeah. Dad humor, dad jokes, dad bod. Yeah, the whole, everything, all the dad jokes and like the whole dad culture. I for one have gone so far deep in the, the social media algorithms of dad videos. They're really dumb social media videos that dads make of like training for Disney World and it's them on a treadmill, holding their children in like six different positions. And like, I just, all of it. I love all of it. Oh no, Robin, it's so funny. Or it's dads in gyms and they're doing like the most insane exercises. And then it shows them like trying to like in the car while driving, hand something back to their children.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  So they're doing this like really absurd yoga as they're trying to hand something back. I mean, kids take a lot out of you and they give you a lot back, but you're not the same. And I appreciate the, the true transformation that it takes to become a dad. This is, that's a great spiritual sponsor for the boys episode, dads.

• 59:33Robin Rauzi?

  Um, all right. That's it.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  My snapping arms.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Sometimes we end the show and Robin looks at me blankly. Other times I'm sitting here like a little lobster.

• 59:47Robin Rauzi?

  Can I snap now? Let me snap now, please.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  And.

• 59:53Robin Rauzi?

  We're like, send a message going, you guys have been talking for two hours. Stop talking.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Stop talking, Catherine and Robin.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Give us money. That's the show.