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

Daniel Cox is a researcher, pollster and Director of the Survey Center on American Life. Expect to learn why men and women understand each other less than they used to, why young women feel less safe despite so much progress, what parents should do differently if they want their children to eventually have successful relationships, what young men incorrectly believe about women because of the internet, why political compatibility became romantic compatibility and much more… Sponsors: Get 35% off your first subscription to the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Do Men and Women Understand Each Other? (05:53) What the Man vs Bear Debate Really Revealed (08:48) Why Do Women Feel So Unsafe? (14:23) Does the Internet Bring Out the Worst in Us? (17:45) What Men Get Wrong About Women (27:07) How Financial Independence Changed Relationships (30:38) Are Smaller Families Making Us Less Community-Minded? (42:07) Is AI Making Us More Antisocial? (46:35) Why Are More People Staying Single? (56:30) Why Men and Women See Cheating Differently (01:05:03) Is Modern Education Failing Boys? (01:12:26) What Are Young Men Supposed to Aspire To? (01:15:54) Is Monk Mode Helping or Hurting Men? (01:22:12) How Loneliness Differs Between Men and Women (01:26:34) Are Women Better at Emotional Support? (01:32:35) How Politics Is Driving Men and Women Apart (01:46:37) Can We Reverse the Rise of Uncoupling? (01:53:51) Where to Find Daniel Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You say that modern hostility between young men and women didn't start with Me Too or the Manosphere or dating apps. Where did it start?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it started in their formative experiences, right? This is a generation that grew up online, grew up with social media. But more than just the technology that they were using to understand the world was changes in how their parents were engaging with them, right? We saw smaller families, a lot more resources pumped into kids and their various interests and pursuit of various accolades. You saw from admission activities to private tutors to travel sports. And so I think a lot of young people grew up understanding that the purpose of family

• 0:48Speaker 01

  is not the betterment of all members, but like for their personal interests and achievement.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Do men and women understand each other less or more than they used to?

• 1:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:45Speaker 01

  And so it just heavily skews how people are understanding relationships. But beyond that, right, that there's like that component of it, but there's also like what people come to expect then, right? So now I'm on the dating market and I have this sort of skewed sense of the world that is I've gotten from all the algorithms. But now my expectations for a dating partner have changed dramatically, right? And in some cases, I've elevated my expectations pretty significantly.

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  Only 42% of young men think women understand their problems and only 25% of young women say the same about men. But historically, as people got older, this gap would have closed.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and the formative experience, right? Like, there was much more dating going on, there was more social activities in previous generations. You may have seen someone at church or a place of worship. There were more opportunities to actually get to know girls or girls got to know boys in these environments that now those opportunities are just much harder to come by. And so you have a case of entire generation that has less formative experience just talking to the opposite sex, let alone dating sex and everything else. And so like, how do you come to understand someone whose experience is going to be very different from your own, right? It's already pretty difficult for men to understand women and women to understand men.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  It's my lead off example in the book where I asked these teenagers, imagine you were suddenly a member of the opposite sex, you woke up and what are you feeling or what are you excited about, what are you worried about? And it's a chock full of like generalizations and stereotypes, right? Like this girl saying, oh, gross, ew, I have to wear my brother's disgusting clothes and I could like belch and be gross around my friends. No, thank you. And the guys are sort of saying similarly, they're saying far less in their responses. But they're saying, yeah, I guess I could be like emotional and I could try to take advantage of people or manipulate people. And so these kind of pernicious stereotypes are operable.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And the way you kind of disabuse people of them is like, actually have a conversation, just like sit down with someone. So the people who are least likely to sort of draw on that are people who actually have close friends or family members who they know and respect, who members of the opposite sex and be like, hey, that's actually not how girls are thinking about sex or relationships and same for boys.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  I guess it's interesting because men and women are talking about each other maybe more than they ever have done before. And we have the concretized for the rest of time ledger of everything that we've ever said on the internet, right? And you can, some news article breaks and then there's your thoughts. You talk about what you think the other sex was thinking or doing or what their motivations were. And they're talking about each other rather than to each other.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:39Chris Williamson?

  Now, and I guess that this causes an odd like recursive echo chamber. Men talking about women hear what other men are saying and women talking about men hear what other women are saying and neither of them are actually getting their assumptions tested.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. There's a, there's a study actually that I say, I think there's Washington Post did it. And it found that gender was one of the most effective ways the algorithm separated people. They knew you were a man or a woman very early on and they just fed you content accordingly. And a lot of that was reinforcing existing notions of the opposite sex. And so you got more and more sort of affirmation and validation of your viewpoint that that remains unchallenged. And so when you get to really difficult things, like I talk about the man versus bear episode, right? And women are fed content that is really different. It's sort of fearful. If you, if you express a little bit of concern about sexual violence or abuse or harassment,

• 5:39Speaker 01

  well, guess what's coming down, you know, three posts later on is just more of the same kind of content. And for, for men, they're not seeing it, right? They're not seeing that kind of content. So their views are like, well, why are these women so upset? I'm not, I'm not getting it.

• 5:52Chris Williamson?

  What did the man or bear debate reveal about how badly men and women communicate with each other in your opinion?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it, it shows that the, that social media in general is an incredibly ill-suited platform to have really difficult discussions on sensitive topics, right? Like for whether it's Me Too, whether it's the man versus bear, you need space to have some of these hard conversations that don't have easy answers. It's not believe women, it's not believe men, right? It's that there's.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  I think the man versus bear example was a relatively easy answer. I think symbolically what it stood for.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Right. So if you step behind it, right, that it's like, well, are men really that dangerous? And the best available evidence is certainly they're no more dangerous than they ever were, largely not dangerous. But that, that sort of fear industrial complex that a lot of online influencers are perpetuating is like, makes it really difficult for women to sort of break that once you're like, oh wow, I'm seeing all this content and I'm seeing a lot of products online on Amazon, right? The scrunchie that I can cover my drink with, all these different kinds of pepper sprays. You know, a hair scrunchie is like those.

• 7:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Well, they have one design that you can cover your drink with.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  So you don't get spiked?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Right. And, and I found out about that from an account that had nothing to do with gender, it was like how things work, which I followed on X, which is about like how things, it's like, it's like technology. Yeah. And it's like, this was there, probably because I was doing.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Can you get an image of this up, Marco? I want to see what the.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Research on dating and probably that's where it came from. But like, it's really interesting to see like what you are quickly fed and then like how that just alters your worldview.

• 7:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh dude, if you briefly get interested in a book or a movie or something, you need to almost be careful about how much you click on it because if you're not like appropriately delicate with the clicks that you have, like, guess what, dude? The next week is just you learning about this obscure Japanese movie from the seventies or something.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a Premier League fan, so like, if I, if I like too many videos, then I get inundated very quickly.

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  Night Cat, a wearable solution. This is what you were talking, this drink spiking prevention scrunchie. And there's a little hole and you put the straw in it. Can you show me how it was? Is there a video on the left, the far left with the overly done nails? Oh God, it's got a, right. I mean, oh, but it does adorn the drink quite nicely at the bottom. That's quite cute.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Right? And so, and now you can find that kind of stuff everywhere. Like the, sort of, there are so many products now that are aimed to, to help people maintain their personal safety. And if I'm a, you know, a young woman, I'm thinking, well, why would I need this if the world wasn't incredibly dangerous place?

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Why do you think women feel less safe despite so much progress happening civilisationally?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Uh, I think there are a number of, of causes, but I think like at the root, one of the things that I come across in the book, one of the things I talk about a lot is this shift in responsibility from institutions to individuals, right? So at one point, whether it was, you know, your family, schools, a place of worship, you know, a civic organization, they were taking a lot of the, they're doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to establishing norms, ensuring behavior, if people transgressed certain norms, there'd be accountability mechanisms in place. But increasingly, what you're seeing is, A, there's been a huge decline in trust, like across the board. Pick an institution, young people have less faith in it than previous generations.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  But when it comes to things like sexual assault and harassment, we ask questions about, well, how well do you think certain institutions like churches and places of worship and the police are handling these kinds of allegations? And you see a really stair step generational divide with young women far less likely to have faith in them, these institutions to handle them responsibly than older women are. And so like you have this, this case of where-

• 10:06Chris Williamson?

  If no one else is gonna protect me, I need to protect myself.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And the whole language around, right, which was sort of in therapy speak, but the whole language around, um, you know, policing my boundaries or my borders, right? Comes from this, I think, accent fear of I've gotta do it because no one else is going to do it.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. No one else is gonna look out for me. Yeah, I mean, it's strange, right? Because what women are doing is looking out for tail risk. What the internet is doing is taking tail risk and making it feel like the middle of the bell curve for interactions and male behavior. You know, the, it's not all men, but it's always a man, like-

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  I mean, what you're saying, it is tail risk, but also you can make this tail risk into a judgment. And at the same time, you go, well, why do we have insurance? Why do we have car insurance? So why do I insure my car? I don't intend on getting in a car crash today. Well, it's for tail risk. It's for tail risk because if I don't have it, then the potential of something bad happening and me not being appropriately protected isn't there. So-

• 11:11Speaker 01

  So one of the things that's behind this sort of rising fear, rising concern about sexual harassment and sexual abuse is what's happening online. So we know that from, you know, the early mid 2000s, as social media was introduced and became more popular, we saw a pretty significant rise in, in negative experiences. Harassment, particularly gender and sexual harassment increased dramatically, especially among certain kinds of users. So we actually-

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  Online.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, online, right? And not that it's not happening offline, but a lot of it now is happening online, particularly among people who are, are spending more time there.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And there are certain types of users that are experiencing more often. So young liberal women report experiencing sexual harassment more often than conservatives and moderates.

• 12:01Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  And there's a couple of reasons that you could think this is happening. One is that, well, maybe they're more sensitive to it, like the language of microaggressions, like, okay, they, they have a different metric for what they view is constitutes harassment.

• 12:14Chris Williamson?

  They've got like some concept creep perhaps happening.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  There's another thing that I think that we haven't talked about as much, at least sort of in the, in the, in the conversation, and that's, well, if you look at who's commenting about politics and the way they're commenting on it and the stuff they're talking, they're commenting online, young liberal women are more active, sharing their opinions online. And sometimes those opinions aren't shared by certain kind of men who are online a lot.

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  And so- Did you look at whether it was mostly men that were doing the harassment?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've, we asked about who, who are you experiencing harassment from? And not only is it men, it's often men that they don't know or know well.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Right? So these are strangers, which is a, a sort of qualitatively different experience, right? Like, if you look at perpetrators of like sexual assault, it's often someone the victim knows. When it comes to these online harassing experiences, it's often strangers.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that that's unique to like cross-sex or like sexual, online sexual harassment. Like, there are far more people on the internet that don't know you than do know you.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:16Chris Williamson?

  And if you put anything up there, most people, most people don't have a few million person following, which means that the 2,000 people from their city that do follow them, one post blows up because of something that they've said. Almost everyone doesn't know you, right? And the harassment that you're going to get-

• 13:39Speaker 01

  What I think you, where the divergence lies is I think that women get attacked more personally, are more likely to face sort of sex-based attacks than men for sharing political opinions. That, I think, is fairly widely established. So like, threats, right? So if you're a woman, you're like, I think this about, you know, transgender issues or Title IX. And suddenly, like, I'm getting emails and if you know someone, you know, a woman who's been in the news reporting industry or media, right? These things are not uncommon. And then I, you know, I'm sure you've seen some, I've certainly seen people share them, like, that's pretty horrific stuff that they're getting for basically just sharing a political opinion, perhaps an unpopular one.

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

  Do you think the internet is just systematically showing men the worst women and women the worst men?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like, undoubtedly that that's happening.

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  I had this, I had this idea a couple of years ago of recursive red pill learning. So kind of the way that AIs are being trained on a particular data set. That data set, at least for AI, is quite broad, but the data set that people who typically learn and talk about sex difference issues on the internet, political issues on the internet, what they're being served are the most newsworthy stories typically either that confirm their existing opinion or that make them angry about the other side. But the most outstanding stories by design are the ones that are surprising and shocking, which means that they are the tail end stories.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  And you're bringing those back in and saying, hey, this, this guy went out for three minutes to get some milk and he came back in and his wife was in bed with the postman and the postman's mate and the dog as well. And, and isn't this crazy? And then, and then, and then she took 85% of everything he's ever worked for and now, now he's, he's got Parkinson's and lives under, under a tree. And you're like, right, okay, that is an outlandish story. But the reason that that happens, you're forgetting whether or not you've actually done a legibility check or like a, a, a accuracy check on it. The reason that that story kicks off is that it is so newsworthy. And that means that if you spend most of your time looking on the internet and the pre-selection of the internet is for the outlandish stories, you start to make the outlandish into the normal.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Right. And I, and I think if, if I could like change one thing that might possibly make things better, it would be, it would be this. I would take off the ability to comment on like extreme posts. Because I, when I would talk to young men and young women, right? Like, one of the things I heard is that it's not simply that, um, when you have like women belittling short kings, right? Like, sort of talking down to the opposite sex, whatever, whatever they're saying, it's not the comment that resonates with so many of these people that are seeing it. It's like the barrage of comments that are saying, yep, like, sort of affirmation after affirmation about this negative comment. And it's like, well, I guess it's not just one person who has an axe to grind.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  There's a whole community of here of men or women who are sort of perpetuating this negative stereotype or negative idea about the opposite sex.

• 16:47Chris Williamson?

  The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentous around a higher standard. Every product from Momentous uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sport, so what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back

• 17:32Chris Williamson?

  guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/moderndwism and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What do you think men incorrectly believe about women because of the internet now?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  It's interesting. So I think there's a misconception about

• 18:01Speaker 01

  what women want in men and how they want them to behave on a, on a date.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Like what I would talk to even the most sort of liberal or self identified feminist women, they wanted men to, to do the little acts of, you can call them sort of chivalrous, you know, actions, so opening the door, um, you know, asking them how they're doing, like sort of checking in, being, you know, cognizant of how they're feeling, uh, paying for dates, like all the, all the, holding the door, all these things, uh, were really important. Uh, like sort of demonstrating kindness and concern, like were really, really high. And in surveys too, we see this. And I think that still matters, right? In the, in the one-on-one conversations I'd have with young people, young and young women, that invariably came up. Like, I actually want men to do this.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And like, put the benevolent, benevolent sexism stuff to the side. Like, there are people who complain about that, but your, your average girl who's trying to date actually wants some of the, like, sort of demonstrable, uh, caring activity.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Uh, I'm going to devil's advocate.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:12Chris Williamson?

  A little bit of this because I've thought a lot about benevolent sexism. William Costello's done a bunch of, of studies on this. I think what's interesting is benevolent sexism, so seeing typically for what we're talking about, men seeing women as a special and uniquely fragile come vulnerable in certain ways that requires care from men. Like, that might be a garage bro way to describe it. Think that's fair?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, cool. So I think one of the issues that comes up here is that it may be true that women, most women, especially on average, want a guy to behave in ways that make them feel special, that make them feel cared for, concerned, safety, et cetera. But if you were to say, okay, what are the underlying beliefs that you need to hold in order for that to be the natural outgrowth of your relational pattern? I don't think that that is anywhere near as palatable for most women. Well, do you need a man to look after you? No, I don't. I can do it on my own. It's like, ah, okay. So now what you're saying is, I don't need you to do this thing. You're surplus for requirements, but I would like you to still treat me in a manner

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  to which I don't think that I am actually that vulnerable. Like, it's this, do you understand what I mean?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:25Chris Williamson?

  There's this sort of push and pull going on here.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And it's, it's, this stuff can get very thorny very quickly, but I think that

• 20:34Speaker 01

  there's often a sort of simpler way to sort of think about these things. And I think about, you know, uh, with my wife, uh, when I think about the stuff that I do around the household and she does around the household.

• 20:47Speaker 01

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

• 21:29Speaker 01

  two boys, uh, to have young men like be a little bit vigilant and.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  I think that that would give them something to aspire to.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  I think that that would be, I think that would be a great thing to be encouraged. But if we look at the last decade, 15 years or so of what men have, much of the culture around sort of male and female relating has been, I don't think that aspire to this is something that's really been put in front of men.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  A lot of what's been put in front of them is that you are too much. You're dis, you're pre, preconceptions of conquer and mastery and aggression.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Mansplaining.

• 22:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Manspreading.

• 22:06Chris Williamson?

  Don't, yeah, don't, don't try.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  To, uh, interject into the conversation, that's you using your patriarchal overreach in order to, and you go, hey, dude, I'm, and I, the word othering, right? I'm sure is something that women felt for a very long time. But if that's the case, it, it should be relatively easy to understand why guys would feel that way at the moment. And this isn't fighting, fighting the fight for it. I think I'm just trying to say, hey, this is what the other side of the scales looks like for, I think, most young men at the moment, that they're like, I don't know what my place is in society. It seems like the, the girls are socioeconomically really crushing it at the moment. And, and, and that's like, great for them, but I kind of feel like I've been forgotten about and it doesn't really seem like I'm needed.

• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  And then I've seen these videos online where like, guys have been mocked for going up to a goal or that they've been accused of having done something that, and, but then I've also seen these stats that say that 80%, 86% of women want a guy to make the first move. And I already had approach anxiety and maybe I'm nervous too. Like, I haven't been out that much and you go, these are lots of very big asks to pile on top of a generation of young men that are socially underexposed to all of the normal existing gravity they had to get over previously. And now there's this sort of additional complexity.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  The other thing that, uh, I think is really helpful to understand too is like the, the problems don't have to be the same, right? Like, we can acknowledge that men and women face different problems and different challenges.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  You've got sexual assault, I've got, uh, like homelessness, you've got.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Right, suicide. Um, when it comes to rejection, right? Like, who faces the most social and romantic rejection? It's, it tends to be the people who have to initiate more, right? I, I say in the book, right, the people who take the first step are most likely to misstep because that's just the, the way of things, right? So if I'm expected to ask this young lady out, um, I'm putting myself at greater risk for being rejected. And in the era, in the era of like smartphones and social media and T apps, right? Like, then it becomes like a little bit more riding on that than just my ego. Uh, there's, there's a little bit more to be.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  Reputation.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a little bit more to be concerned about. And so you have this, this state where on both sides, there's like, more people are feeling guarded about what they can do and what they can't do in public. Like, I write a little bit about the fact that people aren't dancing anymore, right? Like.

• 24:31Chris Williamson?

  They're doing a look silly on videos.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and these, these DJs are like looking around and see everyone holding their phones and, and watching, but there are very few people actually out on the dance floor enjoying themselves, which I think is kind of tragic.

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, the, speaking as a distinctly unrhythmic man, um, the advent of, I'm as white as you can get when you put me near a dance floor. Um, it's, I mean, I ran nightclubs for, forever, right? And, and 50% of that was pre sort of iPhone proliferation. 50% of it was BlackBerry, 50% of it was Apple, basically. And yeah, it made a massive difference. It changed even the sort of events that happened, like the kind of events that we were running, the more sort of lary, louty, classic British drinking culture, lads, lads, like that kind of thing. That very quickly dissipated once Facebook came along. And because everyone, previously, you like threw up all over yourself in the middle

• 25:28Chris Williamson?

  of the dance floor of Tiger Tiger on Monday at some event. No, I didn't. Or it's been and it's gone, right? But the photo lives forever. The story has entropy and the photo is concretized on the internet.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I mean, the half-life of our mistakes and foolishness needs to be.

• 25:45Chris Williamson?

  It's forever.

• 25:46Speaker 01

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

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  That's a flex. Yep.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And I, I think what happened was he had pulled down his warmup pants and his shorts right along with it. He was so energized for the game that he didn't realize it. And he's just like, it's cold.

• 26:38Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  And he got like halfway out and then his teammates start, he's like, you're in your underwear, man. And he bolted back, uh, to re-cloth himself, but there were no, there were no pictures, right? There was no documentation of this, what I would say, pretty embarrassing experience. And so like, it was sort of forgot about, right? Like, it was talked about for a while, but then, right? You didn't really need to worry about that would end up following you around for the rest of your life on, you know, various websites.

• 27:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you think changed in this dynamic when women stopped needing men economically?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I would argue that, you know, point of fact that men and women still do need each other economically, right?

• 27:21Chris Williamson?

  The felt sense, perhaps.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  I don't need men economically.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  There's some research coming out that homeownership might be impacted by the lack of marriage, right? That when people get married, they can combine resources. Housing is really expensive.

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  Two people, one roof as opposed to two people, two roofs.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  It's a lot more affordable. And so there's a lot of ways in which men and women still, I think, would benefit. Even if you can kind of make it on your own, you're like barely making it.

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  Is that what you think people think, though? Because it doesn't matter what the stats say. What matters is whether people believe that that is true.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  I think there's a sense that you don't want to feel like you need someone, right? Like, I think we've raised this generation, and I sort of put myself in this bucket a little bit, that to need someone is a sign of weakness, right? Like, that showing that you can't get along on your own in every way, that means that you're a failure. And we're seeing this in our surveys, too. One of the most amazing exchanges, we did a bunch of focus groups in Philly and Raleigh, North Carolina. And at the end of the focus group, we'd ask folks, okay, you know, we've talked about a lot of topics today. We talked about family, talked about sex, talked about dating. And we asked them, well, when you were growing up, what did your parents say about all this?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  But did they give you any guidance when it comes to what's important in life? Did they talk about the importance of financial stability? Did they talk to you about the importance of getting an education? What about marriage or finding a partner and parenthood? And so we asked, like, show of hands, like, put your hand up if they talked about any of these things. And so for financial stability and education, all the hands went up. In the women's groups and the men's groups, universally, like, parents are talking about these things and kids are hearing it. When it comes to marriage, none of the hands went up in either group. Comes to parenthood, again, nothing.

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Some of the women said that their grandparents were the ones who talked to them about marriage and parenthood.

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on there?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I think it's wanting to not be prescriptive. This idea that you, as a parent, need to, like, appreciate that there's some innate truth in your child, and they will discover for themselves who they are on their own without any instilling of values or character.

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  But not financially discover who they are on their own.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Right, they may still be on your.

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  You have some overbearing principles when it comes to your bank account, but not to do with your marital status.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Right. And the amazing thing is, like, for the most part, marriage and parenthood are probably the things that matter most to these parents, and yet they're not sharing that with their kids. Like, the critical experience of being married, having a long-term partner, and having kids, these are life-changing experiences. And the best social science research shows that the quality of our social relationships far more important than almost any other attribute or metric. So why aren't we telling young people this? Like, why aren't we emphasizing it? And I think it's this fear of being overly prescriptive and kind of judgmental, and this is the kind of life I think you should have.

• 30:38Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that smaller families are producing children with less experience of negotiation and compromise?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yes. I, this has some of my favorite data in the entire book. American families are smaller than they used to be, so people are growing up with fewer siblings to fight with, fewer cousins to, you know.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, of course. Fuck, I didn't even think about the extended family.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  It goes, what was it, like, 2.8, 2.9 to now, like, 2.4, 2.3, something like that?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the number of people with only children now has increased dramatically. It's like something like one in five now. And so you can operate very differently, right? When you don't have to share a bedroom or a bathroom, you don't have to be accommodating other people's meal preferences, or just like being in your physical space all the time. Like, my boys share a bedroom. I'm one of three, so I grew up with two brothers, and so they were always, I'm a middle child, so they were always kind of around.

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  Up in your shit.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? And there's a way that's super annoying, and it leads to lots of disagreements. But then, one of the things my parents did, I don't think that was something planned, this is just their parenting approach, is they would kind of leave it to us to navigate this stuff and figure out and resolve our differences. And that's incredibly valuable, right? Like, that you learn the benefit of this kind of friction. And so it's not something to be.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  Rupture and repair.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not something to be avoided. It's just sort of natural and innate that you have to deal with when you're a member of a family. And increasingly, this generation is just having to deal with it less, through no fault of their own, right? Like, this is just the formative experiences that they had. But there's a way in which I think I do blame parents a little bit, and this has to do with the parental investment in childhood experiences, right? That instead of, you know, doing volunteer work, or, you know, working in a soup kitchen, or working with, you know, religious organizations in your community, you know, people are funneled into sort of enrichment activities. So they're doing, you know, they have private tutors, or they go to dance classes, or art classes, you travel sports.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  And in doing so, they learn that their parents think that they're kind of special, right? Why would they invest so much time and energy in me if I was not kind of special? And so we asked this question in a recent survey. We asked, when you were growing up, did your parents view you as special or kind of average? And there's a massive generational divide here. So if you're over 50, you generally believe that your parents thought of you as average. But if you're young, a majority of people under 50 said that their parents viewed them as special. And so that's a very different sort of perspective to go through the world with, sort of thing,

• 33:29Speaker 01

  wow, I'm kind of unique, I'm distinct, I'm different, and I kind of need people to accommodate that.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  Right. The implication of that is that maybe my demands will be met more easily, I need to negotiate and compromise less.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're seeing it in schools, too, right? That sort of, there's an article, I think, in The Atlantic about like Accommodation Nation, right? That increasingly, schools are accommodating a whole host of different kinds of needs. And you're seeing parents weigh in. My brother first actually told me, he was a professor, told me about getting calls from parents complaining about kids' grades in like the 2010s, right? So this shift in the way parents engage and the expectation that, oh, no, it's something wrong with your test, or my kid needs some special.

• 34:16Chris Williamson?

  Little Timmy. No, Timmy's a genius. You don't understand, the test must be wrong.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I talk about this, like, parents overvalue the academic and intellectual capacities of their kids, too, in ways that I feel like they probably didn't a generation ago.

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  This is mostly in America, your research?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is 100% US-based stuff.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay, right. Fuck, dude, I would adore you to do this same study in the UK. Holy shit. I mean, for a lot of the British and Australian people, like, UK and Australia are two of the biggest countries that listen to the pod. And just the concept of being seen as a special British child, that special would be an insult. It's like, oh, you go to school on the different bus.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's special is, special would be used ironically.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:03Chris Williamson?

  But this is, the American affliction is bullshit, and the British affliction is cynicism. And I do think, one of my favorite stats I learned recently is that America is 8% of the world's population, but had 50%, no, sorry, 4% of the world's population, but had 50% of new millionaire creations in 2025. 50% of new millionaires were in America. The UK is 0.8% of the world's population and had 10% of the world's millionaire exits in 2024. So you have a big culture of blue-sky thinking, helicopter vision, become anything you want to be.

• 35:46Chris Williamson?

  You know, for all that America's a horrible patriarchal, cis-heteronormative superstructure that misogynistically keeps everyone down, there is still, even for the people that kind of hate it, this belief that I should be able to make it, and the fact that I'm not is where the pain is coming from, right? Like, the supposition that you enter, the physics of the social system that you enter the world with is that I can make it, and it's the denial of that which is where the unfairness and the tension and the twisting comes from. The UK is the opposite.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  In the UK, you're allowed to become successful, but only if you treat it like some sort of horrible accident. Like, you have to be tremendously embarrassed that you managed to become successful. I fell backward into it. I swear, I won't do it again.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  I mean, there's been, you know, forever, like, a really powerful strain of individualism in the United States, and I don't know how it compares to the UK. But I also know, like, there's, I don't think I've seen in my lifetime, I'm, you know, crashing towards 50, a more pessimistic and despairing generation than this upcoming one. So while I think there's a lot of.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Evidence that we are still economically competitive. We are doing really well in some ways. I think like the sort of social fabric has been fraying and has been for decades.

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, the millionaire winners at the top don't make the massive bell curve or the bottom end feel that much better.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  Right. It's pointing at the outlier CEO and saying, see, X group is doing fine. And you go, that's like one guy, a one girl.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And there's been a sort of decoupling too, right? Our economic outlook is now closely tied to our social outlook. So our ability to form friendships, garner support from people around us, establish enduring social connections is tied to our financial stability, right? So the people who are doing well financially are doing well socially. And that didn't used to be the case. It didn't used to be.

• 37:55Chris Williamson?

  Would you mean like more friends?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  More friends, more civically engaged, sort of all those kind of correlates of of social health.

• 38:02Chris Williamson?

  A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue, supports brain function and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely notice the difference when I take it versus when I don't, which is why I don't shut up about it and also why it's used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams, the good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they offer free shipping in the US.

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Why do you think that that's the case? Is it that they've got more spare time?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  It's it's that we've kind of privatized this kind of activities, right? So that when it comes to religious participation, members in, being a member of a union, a member of a VA organization, those organizations used to shore up working class communities, right? Like they were, they were the sort of glue of rural and exurban communities. And and those places have declined dramatically over the last few years. And so now you have declines across the board, but now college educated folks are using like Orange Theory or yoga or other place, other places to sort of form their own kind of of social outlets, right?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So like book clubs are really popular in a lot of.

• 39:52Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Run clubs.

• 39:53Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard of Darty's?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 39:55Chris Williamson?

  Day parties. So it's like the health, get up at six in the morning or run around Lake Austin or whatever, Ladybird Lake and to get your, get your morning.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  That sounds terrible.

• 40:06Chris Williamson?

  Jogging with the guys. I'm not built to run, but yeah, I think.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  But it requires a lot of organization, right? Like, so if if.

• 40:14Chris Williamson?

  And spare time.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and money. And so like, if you don't have those, it becomes a lot more difficult to build it on your own.

• 40:20Chris Williamson?

  Going either way, because I could have maybe seen you are a high powered professional person, maybe laden with a ton of student debt and you are now having to work even more. So I imagine that in the middle class and beyond cohort, that there'll be a bunch of people who actually have way less time than some people that might have a job that's a little bit more nine to five. But yeah, I have to assume that more disposable income would just mean that you can choose more, you've got optionality.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  I think the workplace situation matters a lot too, because one of the things that is really hampering the ability of working class folks to form these kind of connections is that they're, they turn over a lot more often, right? They, they're in and out of jobs at different rates. They, they face more on long-term unemployment. And also they're in occupations that often like gig work is there, you're by yourself a good portion of the day. And that's, that's stuff to being done by disproportionately by working class folks. Whereas if you're in more white collar work, then you're, you're more likely to have sort of stable employment. There are more social outlets, like people go to happy hours. There's kind of things that are developed around that, those workplaces that allow you to foster long-term friendships.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  In fact, for college educated folks, the number one place that they make friends.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Work.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. We spend a heck of a lot of time there. So we don't really know what's going to happen if if more of our workplace experience is remote. It's not good for young people. We, we know that, right? You're, you're not learning the culture, you're not building relationships, you're not building trust if you're working full on remote. Now, I don't know what the research says about the sort of hybrid situations, but in in-person workplace experiences are incredibly valuable.

• 42:07Chris Williamson?

  How quickly was the mirage of working from home dispelled when COVID came along? Once I broke.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  I don't got to put pants on.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  I can do, I just be next, I can get snacks whenever I want, don't go to see my asshole boss and be in the office. I'm going to sit in traffic, this rules. And then.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I can catch you on my Netflix.

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  Very quickly.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  The reality came and smashed everybody in the face of this might be what I want, but it's not what I need. It might be comfortable, but it's slowly turning me insane.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is, I think the, we're sort of circling back to technology now. And this is, I think, the big, my big fear about what it is going to do to us, especially AI. It's not that it's not going to be useful or we're not going to be able to find, you know, new ways to benefit from this technology, is that it's going to make it very easy to sort of bypass all the things that we needed other people for.

• 43:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you're talking about this, like increased ability to work from home or AI job displacement?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  I think it's more about the social component, right? That, that if I needed.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  What's the mechanism that's causing the social component? That people will be hybrid working or working from home more?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I think sort of stepping, putting that aside, I think just this, when you look at, so AI technology allowed us to work from home, Zoom, you know, think about all the different ways we can share documents, all that, all that kind of stuff. When it comes to AI and these other newer technologies, one of my, my big fears is that it will replace the kind of in-person socializing and social engagements that we needed. So if I needed a ride to the airport, right? I'd ask.

• 43:50Chris Williamson?

  Have to call a friend.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now I call Uber, right? If I needed food delivered, I, I can do that very easily. Instead, I have to go to the store, maybe talk to a cashier. Task Rabbit allows me to not have to rely on my neighbor to help me build my ping pong table.

• 44:05Chris Williamson?

  These little insults, these little chipping away at the small micro interactions that you would have had.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and maps are a great one too, right? I used to.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  Asking for directions.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Right. I, I used to not infrequently get asked for directions in, when I lived in Dupont Circle in Washington DC. And typically these people were like 50 year older. They were, they were tourists for the most part. And I love, if I could give them directions, I would. And I love that experience, right? Like you're actually being.

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  It is fun.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's painless for me. Like, and I, it's, I'm.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  I feel useful, I'm helping.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  I'm showcasing my knowledge of the city that I live in, right? It's, it's fantastic. And the fact that we have fewer of these, right? Like is, is a meaningful loss.

• 44:46Chris Williamson?

  It happened to me twice last year, walking around the neighborhood where I, where I live. And it was evidently to, one was an older couple, one was a couple that was obviously from out of town, maybe even from out of country. And it did make me feel like quite good.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  I really enjoyed that experience. And the worst thing was, I had no fucking idea where they needed to go. I was like, hang on, wait a second, let me pull my phone out and I'll be able to tell you where it is easy to go.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  I have definitely sent people in the wrong direction on, on an occasion or so.

• 45:14Chris Williamson?

  Hey, look, you want the social integration? You're going to have to put up with the, the side effects of maybe my shitty directions. Okay.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  But I, I like that people like trusted me enough to come talk to a stranger and I, I could help them in some small way.

• 45:26Chris Williamson?

  Also, there is something to be said for like the serendipity of things not always being precise.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, the, the, I stumbled across something newness that we think technology's supposed to enable. And in some ways it does, you would search, I want to go to a show tonight and you, something comes up that you maybe wouldn't have seen before. But I get the sense that what it does is it, it more frictionlessly delivers our existing preferences to us.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  More than it avails us of new opportunities. Do you know what I mean?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. Because I think it's true with online dating, right? That you are optimizing.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  You lock in on your type.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Right. As opposed to like meeting someone at a party, right? Like I met my wife at a beach house with a bunch of friends and, and so we would be kind of introduced that way. And it was an integrated social experience. And I don't know if I had like a checklist of her like personal background or attributes, I'd be like, yes, this is the person for me.

• 46:23Chris Williamson?

  You did it the medieval way.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Right. I, you're out in the world and you're having fun and you're with a bunch of your friends. And like that, that's a, an experience that I feel like is, is vanishingly rare now.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  How much of this generation and couple do you think is due to dating? How much of it is the dynamics of the dating market? Because the, the point, the intersection, I suppose, that people think about mostly when it comes to men and women is when they get together.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  Right? Yeah, okay, we got to work together. It's important that boys and girls, they got to go to school together, although sometimes not.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  But the real, you know, meeting in the middle is, is the relationship thing.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:04Chris Williamson?

  Is dating like the vanguard of this? Is it the tip of the spear?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  I think so, because if you, if you look at the, in both the qualitative and quantitative component, then the number of negative interactions between men and women occurs, I think more often in that context, in terms of just like the, the way they engage socially, right? There's, there's, it's more fraught, there's less trust often. And people come away with often negative, or even, even when the date wasn't that bad, right? It's like profound sense of exhaustion and disappointment. They're like, another one, right? It didn't, it didn't go well. And.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  I think as part of what's going on too is there's a lack of a script of like how things are supposed to work. Like it's not clear what you're supposed to do, um, how you're supposed to, to act in certain situations. And with little, with less formative experience dating, then you become an adult and you're like, well.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  You're a white belt.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Crap, I don't know how this is.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  In a new world.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Right. And it's very complicated, right? Like the, the, the norms are, are, there are some norms that are there, some norms are being changed.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  What do you think of the ones that have changed? Like what's, why is this not an issue that existed previously, but it does exist now?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's, there's, uh, norms about, um, you know, who pays, who asks, like there's still, I think the sort of vestigial like, yeah, men should do it, but increasingly that's coming under question when women are outperforming men, at least in a lot of like entry level jobs or in, in, in certain economic spaces, they're doing really well. So like, what, why do then men need to, uh, you know, foot the bill for maybe the first date and a number of other ones? And I think that's just less clear. I think the other thing is like the, the online dating environment makes things really, really difficult because it is, it's disembodied, right? Like I, I'm not seeing you out in the world. I'm not seeing you interact with strangers or children. Um, I'm not seeing

• 49:01Speaker 01

  you in an, an environment that I can make sense of. I'm seeing photos of you like, uh, maybe, you know, hiking somewhere beautiful or with your dog, right? Like, and it's like, I have to make judgments about.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  Inferences.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yes, based on really limited information. None of it's social. Like I can't see how you're interacting. How do you manage stress? Uh, like, how do you treat people who can offer you nothing? Right? Like those kinds of experiences are incredibly valuable and we have far less of it, uh, when we're making decisions online.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  The small little character tests and stress tests.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:36Chris Williamson?

  I do think the, what would be some good, uh, non-obvious ways to assess the person that you're spending time with? I think definitely one is how they treat serving staff and, uh, waiters, waitresses and stuff in a restaurant. Uh, how they treat, uh, air hostess, airline people.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Um, animals, small animals on the street. I think you've got to be an animal person, but I am. So I guess that's, I've got a competitive advantage there.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:07Chris Williamson?

  Kids, like if kids come up, like little kids and stuff like that, again.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Anything that introduces stress, right? So like running late to like, running late to your dinner date, uh, trying to find parking, you know, these kinds of things like, you know, navigating through traffic.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  Cancel flight.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. Like how, how are you managing this? And I am a person who hates being late. So that would be, I would have to exercise a lot.

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  Trigger warning for you.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  I'd have to exercise, um, some, some, I'd do some deep breathing or something. But I think like those experiences are incredibly valuable because you can get a sense of this person out in the real world. And then you can also get a sense of like the things and ways in which you're compatible and the things that you may not care about. Like, yeah, I don't care that he, he blew a gasket, uh, you know, in heavy traffic because being in traffic sucks. Uh, and I feel the same way.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. But when you, most of your interaction with people, especially in the early stages, especially when you're searching is just an online, squeezed through this teeny tiny little aperture.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  Which is a single photo or a very selected video or whatever. Uh, no one's showing themselves like losing their shit at a kid that won't stop crying on a plane.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:14Chris Williamson?

  And that's not me at my best.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  It's performative, right? Like dating is performative, right? Like you are trying to put your best self out there that you think that person will respond positively to.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Um, the other thing that we know in, in, uh, the day that we've done is that people respond and react very different, differently to a bad date if they met with someone online versus if they met through mutual friends. So we asked this question, whether you would give someone a second chance if it was a bad first date? And then we said like, if it was, you know, gave this, the circumstances of their meeting. And if it was online, almost everyone would be like, no, that's it. You get one date. Uh, but if it's through mutual friends, you're more likely to give them a benefit of the doubt. Like, well, maybe they had an off day or whatever.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  Maybe he screamed at that three-year-old for a reason that was justified.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Right. Something. And then, uh, it, it of course is higher for men. Men are more likely to give women a second chance than women are to give men, which, you know, I think is consistent with a lot of this sort of selectivity literature. Uh, but, but it's really important, right? That this person is part of your social world because then you have more people invested in it working out, even if it's not a major investment.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  So there's more ballast in the system.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:21Chris Williamson?

  A little bit more stabilization if you've got it from somebody that's inside of your existing social circle.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  I, I, I talk about this in a number of ways, and I think for marriage too, right? This should be a community enterprise, right? Like that we should be invested in people's relationships. Like if, if you have family members that are married, like your, your cousin, like you should care about how that marriage is, right? You should care about that they're both doing well. And in the same way, I think that people should be invested in people getting together, right? Like we should, societally.

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  He's saying that we should crowdfund our local single friends into relationships. Let's do it. Let's.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I think, I think the relationship will, even if it ends, I think the relationship will be better if, uh, people are in, like people who care about both people are invested.

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  I did, uh, I did a work in progress show last night and I got asked this really interesting question, which was when people are in relationships for a good amount of time, uh, and then it ends, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, and maybe a lot of the time they say, I wasted five years of my life. You know, I wasted this time of my life. But nobody says that about friendship that comes and then goes.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:28Chris Williamson?

  And the guy posed to me, he said, well, why is that the case? Why is it that we feel like we wasted time in a relationship, but we didn't waste time if it was a friendship that then dissolved?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  I think it depends on what your expectations were for the romantic relationship. If it was supposed to lead to marriage and kids, then you sort of say, well, the fact that it didn't get there means like that I didn't get out of the relationship what I wanted.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Even if I got valuable experience, which, and, and this is something else, uh, I think is really important that the, you know, if we're talking about sort of America's social malaise and the romantic recession, these things are not separate, right? That, that it's not a coincidence that we're struggling romantically, uh, we're, we're having less sex. All this stuff is happening at the same time. We're spending a hell of a lot less time together.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Uh, and so I think like those two things are, are inextricably intertwined. And we see this in the data, right? Like for, for men especially, that the number of close friends you have is strongly correlated to your relationship status and whether you go on dates.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  So if you have more close friends, you're more likely to have reported that you went on a date recently or more likely to be, uh, in a committed relationship.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  How much of that is just social people are social and good at dating because they're good socially?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think it, it is like you have a larger, you have more opportunities, you have a larger friend group, more from a disposition standpoint, that people who are good with friends tend to have friends and the people who are good with friends are also good on dates. Yes, but they are also more likely to be married in committed relationships as well. So they're, so then it, it could be just extroversion, right? That they're very good. But, but extroversion does not necessarily lead one to get married. I don't think, I'm not a psychologist, but, uh, that I think is telling, right? That, that, that being able and having opportunities and having confidence.

• 55:16Chris Williamson?

  Local social fabric.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:17Chris Williamson?

  And capacity to take advantage of it.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Hugely important. And, and I, I don't know why we don't talk about it more often.

• 55:24Chris Williamson?

  Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline. And eat your heart out, Martin Shkreli, because

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the US, plus they ship internationally. And right now you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below. Heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom, using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. How do men and women view cheating differently?

• 56:34Speaker 01

  So it's really interesting. We asked this question, I don't think it had been asked before. Like, we know that infidelity is something that Americans largely, across the political divide, across, you know, all these different demographic groups, they view as morally wrong, right? It's something like eight and 10 or nine and 10. And that's been consistent, right? Like, we've changed our attitudes on a lot of different kinds of personal behavior. We've become more accepting on some, like homosexuality. But when it comes to infidelity, especially marital infidelity, Americans strongly oppose. There's an interesting wrinkle in this, and that we asked, in our survey, we split the samples. So we asked two independent groups.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  One, if a man commits adultery, and one is the woman commits adultery. And we had everyone rate whether it's morally wrong or morally acceptable. And we found that when it comes to men cheating, there wasn't much of a gender difference. That across the board, pretty much, people said like, yeah, when a man cheats, it's morally wrong. When it comes to women, women, especially younger women, were far less likely to take a kind of hardline approach and say it was morally wrong in like all circumstances. There was more like, well, it's either not a moral issue or morally acceptable. And, you know, I hypothesized that, well, there's a couple of things that might be happening.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  It might be that, you know, men do commit adulterous acts more often. There are power dynamics, potentially, that they're thinking about. It could be just that ideologically, there's a, we know that when it comes to things like a shared fate or linked fate, this idea like what happens to other people impacts you is much higher among young women than it is among men or older women. So there's a number of things that might be going on here, but we know that it matters to women who's doing the cheating and what the circumstances are.

• 58:31Chris Williamson?

  You're saying that when asked, is it morally wrong for a man or a woman to cheat?

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Men were asked, and it was basically the same, it's morally wrong for.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, men judge men the same way they judge women.

• 58:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  But women judge women differently than men.

• 58:45Chris Williamson?

  Did women judge men more harshly than men judged men?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  No, it was actually pretty similar.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so everybody, three quadrants of this four quadrant survey are all pretty much the same.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Men judge female cheating and male cheating the same.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  And females judge male cheating the same.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  But females judge female cheating differently.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's mostly young women, so older women are, I think, pretty similar to others. So it's young women who really stand out on that measure.

• 59:16Chris Williamson?

  And you think that this is shared fate to a degree?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Shared fate, experiences with cheating, women are simply more likely to have experience with being cheated on than men.

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  So this is some righteous retribution.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  So they're like, yeah, they may have heard stories like, oh, you know, she cheated, but like, you know, this guy was a real jerk. And so like, it could be informed through those kinds of experiences. This is, we're all hypothesizing here, because I don't have.

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  Did you, oh, I guess it was just a survey, you didn't say, or say, why? Why have you got this? Oh, that's quite an ugly stat, I suppose, that there is this, I mean, you do see this more so online, like, at least from, again, going anecdotally, I don't see many guys coming out to excuse the behavior of a man cheating on his partner, like if he's got a wife. And this might just be the echo chambers that I'm in. But I would say that there is an implication of like, what did he do to deserve it?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to what did she do to deserve it? And that seems to be reflected in the survey data, too.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's probably, I think there's like a mirrored conversation happening around the issue of like sexual assault, where women will say like, well, every woman knows someone who's been sexually assaulted, but no man has a friend who sexually assaults women. Right? So you have this sense of like, okay, how can both these things be true?

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's quite, at least, David Buss has got a pretty easy explanation for that, which is that it's not a thousand men doing one incident each, it's one man in a thousand doing a thousand incidents, that like, there is tail risk, it's repeated offenders that are inside the group of men.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  I'm convinced of that argument when it comes to like the more serious offenses. But I think when it comes to sort of less pernicious, sort of sexual harassment online, I think is not just one or two perpetrators, I think it's a much larger group. But I think that, yeah, I'd agree with his perhaps take on the more serious offenses.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, man, like, I, I remember seeing kind of the Wild West of Twitter, the first time around, not the second time around, which we're in again, I suppose. And some of the shit that guys would post in response to women was like Call of Duty lobby level stuff. And it's, there's just, there is a limit for what should be acceptable in like common public discourse.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  Just because you can say it doesn't mean that it's okay. And I get it, like, you can have trolling and all the rest. This is before trolling, this is before there was a meme setup that you could have been anti-memetically like, sardonically cool, working against, you know, I'm not contravening this, this norm, no norms have been created, dude, it's fucking 2015 or something. So I get that, I didn't consider the potential for like online sexual harassment to creep in, in this sort of a way. And I imagine that especially if you're a young woman, growing up in a society that's got, it's post Me Too, there's a lot of concern about safety around men and bears and woods

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  and stuff, and then there's this thing that happens online, and then you see this thing, and, you know, maybe your mother at your age would have blown it off, or maybe she wouldn't have done, but now it's really gonna hit at this thing.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Chris Williamson?

  This fear, this very visceral fear that every woman has, and has then been perhaps magnified or multiplied through, through modern social media and stuff, like, that's, that's got to be a gnarly, a gnarly situation.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think too, the extent to which this stuff can like follow you home, right? Like, you feel like, I'm in my home, in my apartment, this is my safe space, wait a minute, I'm getting emails and instant messages in a place where I'm supposed to feel safe that are promising to like harm me. The other thing too, that I think, it's not just about, you know, the harassment either, you know, we know that women are more likely to get asked for, to share nudes, so naked pictures of themselves, right?

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  Who wants to see, who wants to see guy nudes? That's my question.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Not me.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, me neither, Mark does, but yeah, that's it, yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And so like, there's ways in which that can be exploitative and, you know, harmful too, but it's, right, it happens an awful lot. And so like, where do you draw the line in some of this stuff? I would say that boys shouldn't be asking for nudes of their female classmates in general, but there's not as strict norms against this stuff. So what happens is the girls and young women have to sort of erect those walls and establish that themselves.

• 1:03:55Chris Williamson?

  Don't use the word erect while we're talking about it, come on. Yeah, I mean, I can't, I can't, I can't help but think about, as you were talking about that, the difference in supply versus demand of male nudes to female nudes.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  That like, just the straight up supply of unsolicited dick pics, very high. Like, we don't need anymore, you want to talk about living in an abundance society? We're post-abundance with dick pics on the internet, especially if Conor McGregor's online.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  The psychology of that I've never understood, I think.

• 1:04:23Chris Williamson?

  Just the unsolicited dick pic?

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, very strange.

• 1:04:25Chris Williamson?

  You need to work on your dick pics. Then, on the other side, the request, like, no, I don't know, has any woman ever asked for an unsolicited dick pic? Maybe not, that might be, that might be a world first, if a woman went to go and do it now. But then on the other side, the like, demand for female nudes.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  If I could polymarket this, it would be like, it would just, the lines would be at opposite ends of the ground.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  Not sponsored by fucking polymarket, by the way. I feel like any time, this is how prevalent betting prediction market ads are, that if I ever refer to Calci or polymarket, I want to do like a anti-ad read, be like, like, this is not a partner of the show. But like, going back to the boys thing, what do you think's happening with boys in education? Because this seems to be one of the first entrants into the meritocracy, setting you on a set of guardrails or train tracks that might predict many of the outcomes that you get in later life. We're both friends with Richard Reeves, he kind of at least put this on my radar. What's, what's the newest updates around what's happening with boys in education and why they're falling behind?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  So I'll start with a stat that perhaps shouldn't have surprised me, but did. We did a survey of teenagers, this is our, you know, American teens, aged like 13 to 17. And we asked them a whole bunch of questions, a lot about social media use and other things. And they asked a question about their school experiences, and one particular question about the extent they thought that girls were encouraged and supported more than boys at their school. And it was a majority of teen boys who agreed with that, that in their school, this is a national survey, that girls received more encouragement and more support than boys did. And I have no doubt that this is correlated with the more disciplinary actions that boys

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  are receiving, because we know that there's a huge discrepancy in that. And I have, I'm raising two boys, right? Like, I know that the needs of boys and girls are different in a number of different ways. Like, boys simply have a ton of energy, particularly, and inability to control when they're like five, six, and seven. I have the story of a friend of mine, whose kid.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  It just had a lot of energy and this is in second grade and the teacher was an incredibly good teacher and she like recognized it and she's like, you know, go run up and down the hallway.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  And, right, so.

• 1:06:49Chris Williamson?

  Sounds like a punishment, but actually.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Not sending him to the principal's office and so he's not missing class, he's not, you know, not getting letters home, just like she recognizes that he was not trying to disrupt the class, but he needed to just expend this energy.

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Blow off some mitochondria.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Right, run. And, and I think if you don't, if you don't raise boys, you're not around boys, it can be like kind of confusing. I remember my brother has, has two girls and we were up visiting them in Connecticut once. And my kids were a little younger now, they were like vibrating in their chairs. And I looked at my wife, she looked at me, she gave me a nod and I just took them out and we just started running around the building and they were jumping off picnic tables. And my brother's like, what the hell's going on? And she's just, oh, that's, it's fine, they'll be.

• 1:07:35Chris Williamson?

  You're treating your kids like dogs.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  They'll be right as rain as soon as they come back. And, and you know, after like 15 minutes, we came back in and it was great. Cause they, they had that excess energy and they just needed to run around and then they can enjoy their chicken fingers.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. So your point here is the modern education system punishes rambunctiousness, energeticness, disruption in large classes.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  It can. I think it misidentifies it.

• 1:08:03Chris Williamson?

  Disproportionately impact boys versus girls.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it does. I mean, I think too, right? Like when you think about models, like my, my oldest now 10 is going to finish elementary school this year, never had, having a male teacher.

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't think that's that unique. So I, you know, when it comes to elementary schools, I mean, I think middle and high schools are different. There's much more gender parity in teachers. But in elementary school, it's, it's many more women than men.

• 1:08:30Chris Williamson?

  I think there are four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are males kindergarten teachers in America.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Which is a big thing is like, yeah, we, we need, cause.

• 1:08:45Chris Williamson?

  Heel.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  At, at, at every stage, we need good role models for boys and girls. Like it's, it's really, really important.

• 1:08:52Chris Williamson?

  On that, just a interesting gender dynamic. My ex-girlfriend was a primary school teacher in the UK. Maybe one or two, I think there was one or two male teachers in, in this primary school. One was a like mid 50s Sikh man who was not going to be the object of, of much like attention, although he's integrated into the group or whatever. But there was one guy who was like maybe late twenties or something and he was teaching the kids. And there was a lot of sort of classic female flirting stuff that would go on in the staff room and such. And he's a big boy. I'm sure that he can handle it or whatever. But there was some times where she said, I, like, I noticed sort of what was going on and it

• 1:09:35Chris Williamson?

  doesn't make for a particularly like comfortable environment. And if nothing else, there is this like almost collective action problem that you have when trying to get any group.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  That is typically going to socialize with their own group into a new industry. Because like, who am I gonna, like, I can't, my interests are not your interests. And if a couple of hours or an hour and a half of the day, I'm in the staff room or whatever, the break room, talking about the, it's the fucking lumberyard, everyone telling chicks that they need to, you go and work on a building site. So what am I gonna talk to? Like even if I wanted to do that.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:10Chris Williamson?

  Who am I gonna talk to? Unless you can somehow immediately deposit a like critical mass, significant minority of other people that I can hang with in this workplace, I'm not gonna do that.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think too, it's, it's, it's, and, and my, my kids have had wonderful teachers. So this is, you know, I'm not criticizing them, but, but there's a way in which you will be able to, I think, just recognize and appreciate, you know, what your students are going through. When you've, you've been there, you've walked in your shoes, you may share interests, like whether it's sports, whether it's something else. And I think that's really helpful when you're trying to reach kids, you're trying to show them, hey, you know, I, I kind of know you're struggling here. I know you'd rather be out there, you know, playing basketball than in here. But like, listen, I, I used to play basketball and, you know, that's gonna end at some point. And you actually do need to

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  learn math and you do need to know how to read and write. And I think there's a way in which like that, that's just profoundly helpful and we shouldn't rely just on parents.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  They should not be the only models that, that kids get. There should be, you know, from, you know, people in the community, neighbors, religious leaders, teachers should all be sort of contributing to the sort of formation of, of young people.

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests, spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test 20 markers. Function runs over 160. It's huge. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard. So you track trends over time, make sure you're moving in the right direction. And this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is $365 per year. Just $1 a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body.

• 1:12:11Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get $25 off, bring it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. What do you think young men are supposed to aspire to now?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  a lot of different things, but I, I think that, that there has to be more of a script for, for young men, because too often they're told, what you're doing is wrong, what you're doing is not helpful. Or that you need to sort of curb this sort of impulse that you have to, you know, whether rough and tumble play or whatever it is. And I, I don't think we have a good script for them now. I talk about, again, in, in the book, reimagining chivalry as a way for them to orient, particularly when they're in public places, right? We, we know that young women feel less safe than they used to, right? Well, be, be sort of an example, serve as an example.

• 1:13:56Chris Williamson?

  Haragon of safety.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  I was gonna use that word, but I decided I didn't want to.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  I got you.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  But yeah, like, that shouldn't be hard, right? It can be very small, modest acts. And they can make a huge difference collectively.

• 1:14:08Chris Williamson?

  You know, everyone is talking about the purposelessness crisis that's hit everybody, but particularly young men.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, like having a sense of civic contribution, even if it is just being a cool dude later in the evening, walking down the street or something. But that seems like a pretty good place to start. But it's kind of like, it is very much like a fat guy saying that doing one push up is too few because it's not going to make any difference. Well, you're currently doing zero. So how's one for that?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  I, I think too, there's, you know, offering young men and boys a way to show up, especially for their friends, matters, like whether they're teammates, like having them understand that it matters that they're contributing, that they're showing up, that they're helping. I, I'm a huge believer in sports for everyone. I think that it just, it's, it's an incredibly important character building experience. Both my kids play a variety of sports and I think they've just learned a heck of a lot from it. But increasingly, we're seeing kids gravitate towards video games, right? The, the video games got really, really good. I play a little bit with my kids and.

• 1:15:20Chris Williamson?

  What are they playing?

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  Far cry. We limit them, but we're playing stick fight, stick fighter. Have you?

• 1:15:26Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  It's your little stick care, stick person and you like guns and swords and you try to kill each other.

• 1:15:33Chris Williamson?

  The entire world of next generation technology, you decided to go for.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  They decided, this is, I, I never heard of this game.

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  It's, it, you should look into this. It is incredibly fun and you can do four players.

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever find yourself playing it once they've, you've sent them off to bed?

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  No, my wife was like, no.

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck, you've been disciplined by everyone. Right? Okay. Yeah. All of the men, all of the males in the household have been disciplined. What do you think of the trend of men withdrawing to work on themselves? The monk mode approach?

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's the exact opposite of what men meet, men need. We know that, you know, from the nineties to, you know, 2020, 2021, when we did this remarkable study on American friendship, that the number of close friends that Americans have is, is down across the board. And for certain groups, especially young men, the, the drop has been even more pronounced. And so I think there has to be a reorientation towards social commitments, right? It can be scouting, it can be sports, it can be, you know, art, whatever it is. But I think having more social outlets, I, I agree with Jonathan Haidt

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  here, that more freedom for kids to kind of roam and, and connect with their, you know, kids who live in the neighborhood, really, really important. We know that kids are spending a lot of time alone. I don't know if I mentioned this stat, that we found.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Video game has changed from a sort of communal activity. Like when I grew up, I played with people and we played, you know, Mario Kart or GoldenEye.

• 1:17:11Chris Williamson?

  Guitar Hero, whatever.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, like there were, there were always people in the room, sometimes a lot of people. Increasingly, kids are playing online or alone, right? So it's now a solitary pursuit. And, and that is a remarkable change, right? This is one of the things that, that we do see huge differences between girls and boys in terms, boys are far more likely to play video games than girls. And now they're playing it in a way that is actually taking them away from social, other social pursuits.

• 1:17:38Chris Williamson?

  The thing that's interesting, the men withdrawing to work on themselves thing, the monk mode, the isolation, the introversion, the improvement to some degree. I would agree that the ultimate goal of that is to reintegrate into society as a functional, but slightly upgraded human. Maybe you've got your fitness in order, or maybe you've improved your dress sense, or maybe you've read a little bit, or you've learned to regulate your emotions or whatever. I also agree that the end goal is, or the biggest mover is, are you just socially integrated?

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Chris Williamson?

  So you probably can skip to the end.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think, I think that who cares if you have better calves, right? Who cares if you like?

• 1:18:19Chris Williamson?

  Me.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Right, but it's, it's, the things that will make you a better person are the people in your life. Like that, it's not going to be AI that allows you to, you know, maximize your potential. It's going to be the sort of consistent engagement you have with the people in your life, the people that are important to you, that you'll give up smoking, you'll give up other bad habits. You will, you will change because of them. And we are actually meant to change because of the people in our lives. Like that's, I think the thing that we, we have missed in all these conversations about the purpose of dating and marriage, and marriage isn't serving you, or your relationship isn't serving you, that we are meant to be formed by these, these institutions and these people in our lives. And like that, that to me is sort of central to all of it.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And if you want to be your best person, establish a really good group of people. And that, that, those people will help you become your best person.

• 1:19:12Chris Williamson?

  I think the way that lots of young men are looking at it, and your research has, you know, shown that economic prospects do matter in dating. Men are responding rationally to that, in their opinion.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Chris Williamson?

  What they're seeing is, okay, whether they know it explicitly or just subliminally.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  I need to go and grind. I gotta go crank away on the monk mode thing. Like I'm gonna, you know, come out of my winter arc as a sigma male and I'm gonna crush this shit. And I, I, you know, as a only child that grew up in a place that wasn't, I didn't feel like I fitted in particularly much in the northeast of the UK, like the, the most working class town that you can imagine. Work on yourself first, I get it. That can kind of become an excuse to postpone integration indefinitely.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Chris Williamson?

  But at the same time, there's, we're stuck with a few difficult, different knobs and dials to turn here that, well, I do need to go and do the grinding thing. The social thing's become increasingly difficult, especially for young men. A lot of the male only spaces that you would have had as kids have been dissolved or gotten rid of entirely, that Boy Scouts is now just scouts, but.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Barber shops have closed, like, yeah, all these different spaces that you, you could go and you could actually, hey, there's, there's a guy that I really respect. I can sort of try to emulate him, I can learn from him.

• 1:20:41Chris Williamson?

  There's fatherless homes, patriarch, a, a, a replacement substitute patriarch that I can hang out with. I know that I was doing that, even with a father. Like I was looking all the time for this sports coach. What can I learn from him? I really want, I really want a person in my life that teaches me this sort of a thing or that sort of a thing.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the, the, working on, I think there's, there's two, two different things, right? There's sort of, you know, working on your, your financial outcomes, right? That, that matters a lot in dating. We just know if you are, if you're wealthy or you're gonna, as a man, you're gonna do better. It's, it's far easier to sort of signal on dating apps that you have, you know, good taste, that you have resources, and resources will attract more attention, right? You can show, you know, interesting places you've been, or interesting people you've met, or you doing fun or interesting activities, skydiving, whatever.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, it, it really works to the advantage on a platform that is based on superficial evaluations, which is what dating platforms are, right? It's really hard to evaluate someone's character online. But you can, you can see that, wow, they're, they're eating at really fancy restaurants. Like, that's kind of cool, he's wearing really nice clothes, I like his gar.

• 1:21:58Chris Williamson?

  But all of this is tied in with dependence on other people being increasingly treated as some sort of weakness or pathology.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, or, or just unnecessary, I can, I can do it myself. I can, my apps can give me everything I'm gonna need, or, or AI.

• 1:22:12Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that the flavor or the, the, the tenor of male isolation and female isolation has been different? I get the sense that the male isolation, young guys, feels a little bit more like a retreat.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Chris Williamson?

  Whereas the female one feels a little bit more like, like autonomy, like lean in autonomy. Like I have the opportunity to be able to do this, I don't need anybody. Whereas the ma, the male one, at least from what I can see, it's like colored somewhat more with like reject, like a response to rejection or a felt sense of surplus to requirements-ness. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and there's a way in which I think it's important not to judge the, the dynamics of male friendship and female friendship, which I think are different in what they provide, right? Like so judging male friendship by the fact that, well, you don't tell your buddy you love them, or that, right, are you, you're not vulnerable to them, right? That means that, that friendship is not providing you what it needs. And I don't, I don't think I agree with that, right? Like when you look at, at men and how they respond to in surveys and, and the men I've talked to, they appreciate the time they spend with their buddies. And, and it could be fishing, it could be watching, you know, a game, it could be just, you know,

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  chatting about politics, whatever it is.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  It's, it, it operates somewhat differently. Like you, you don't have the same kind of, you know, sort of emotional based relationship. It, it tends to be more activity based. But again, when you, when you ask people like, how's your friendship serving you? Are you happy with your friendships? Men and women report similar, like they, they, regardless of how, how many friends that they have, men tend to be more content with the friends that they have. Uh, and so like.

• 1:24:04Chris Williamson?

  They tend to be more content with the friends that they have than women do.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Or even with, women with more friends are as content with men, say with, with fewer friends.

• 1:24:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's, that's interesting.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  So like, you, you either sort of trust them that they're, they're responding like, based on their belief, or that they're, they're, they're lying, right?

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  Stockholm syndrome.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting, I wonder whether, if you were to show women men's friendships, whether they would look and go, well, how on earth is that sufficient socially?

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  They don't understand, I mean, like I, I, I've been married for over 10 years. And I, I told my wife, so I'm doing a, an event for the book at a local bookstore and I'm inviting lots of people from the community. And my wife's super excited about it, you know, and she's like, all, all my, you know, the mom friends are like, they purchased the book, they pre-ordered it, they're, they're, they're gonna come, they're excited to support you, cheer you on. And she's like, what are, what are the dads saying? I'm like, oh, they, they said they're gonna heckle me.

• 1:25:05Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Right, like, but I love it, I mean, that's great.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  Men relate through shit talking, women relate through hugs.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, I mean, and, and I'm not opposed to the occasional hug or high five, whatever, but like.

• 1:25:17Chris Williamson?

  Shit talking and hug at the same time.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, it just operates differently and that's okay. Like we don't have to judge, uh, male friendships and female friendships on, on the same criteria.

• 1:25:26Chris Williamson?

  I do, I would say it, it seems like the kind of set point for, you know, what, what's that thing? Patri, not patro local, the thing that's to do with healthcare, where the, the male body was seen as the default and a lot of medicines and stuff are kind of.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, like crash test dummies were.

• 1:25:44Chris Williamson?

  That, that, that whole world.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Chris Williamson?

  I would say when we start to move into the world of emotionality and relating, the opposite seems to be true to a degree, that you, you will be judged by the standards of the more emotionally adept sex, which tends to be women. And it does, it can, I guess, make male friendships look deficient in some way, or, or callous even. And you're like, hey, hey, that's how we relate, all right? That's how, that's my form. I, you know, when I called him that really mean name, that was my I love you to him.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and I think that, again, there are ways that male friendships can certainly be deficient if, if, that, you know, you can't actually rely on someone, if you feel like you can't be honest with them, like, right, those are separate issues if you're not getting the support. But again, you don't need the exact same thing to be, to feel supported.

• 1:26:34Chris Williamson?

  Interesting that doing the inversion of that, to think about the ways in which female relationships might be deficient, that male relationships are sufficient, is like, even just that frame, like I'm trying to think about the physi, I'm also trying to not kick a fucking landmine at some point.

• 1:26:53Chris Williamson?

  But.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  That was the entire experience of writing.

• 1:26:55Chris Williamson?

  I bet it was, yeah, you're like Captain Jack Sparrow, like running down the gangplank, desperately not to try to fall off. But for instance, you could say, not me, but someone, that, that someone else, uh, might say, there is a degree of frank honesty, which is typically available.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Chris Williamson?

  In male relationships where the amount of well-meaning bullshittery might be less, that could be perhaps lacking in some female relationships.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Chris Williamson?

  No, you look great in that whatever, no, I think that this thing, so on and so forth, which is coming from a, a pretty noble place.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Unqualified support.

• 1:27:35Chris Williamson?

  But it's also like, hey, I'm here for you, like, look at this thing. But it's like, a harsh truth can go far every so, I'm trying to, I, I don't know. But even with that, like, because the framing, the emotionality framing thing is like, well, the set point is that like chicks have got it locked and we, we, we're trying to play catch up a little over here.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  I'm sure you, you came across the debate about like the emotional labor that, you know, that.

• 1:27:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very interesting.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Women do on behalf of men. And I talk about it a little bit, but one of the things I wanted to, to try to just, like, open the door a little bit, is that there's probably a lot of different ways to measure it, like, so. Helping someone regulate their emotions, A, adults probably shouldn't be doing that, right? You should be able to regulate your own emotions. But this is an example of the emotional labor that the authors use, that women do for men. And I was thinking, well, what about kind of being a calm presence during when someone's having like a really difficult time emotionally, right? And just being sort of solid and there? Like, that, does that

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  count? Are we, like, can we sort of think about ways in which that would be really important as a, as a way to support someone too? And I, and I, I don't know, I, I don't think there's been work that have, that have looked at the ways that men and women engage and support each other emotionally. But I think you could make an argument that men and women do support each other emotionally, but maybe in different ways, based on their different needs.

• 1:29:07Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, there's some really fascinating research when you look at couples before they got together, how much double shifting they said they did when they lived on their own?

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Chris Williamson?

  And because the male standard for a household is different to the female standard for a household, the female standard for the double shift on her own was much closer to what it ends up being when she becomes coupled than the man's was. So you have this disparity in terms of like, how often should the bed sheets be washed? And like, do they need to be ironed?

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Do you put art on the walls?

• 1:29:38Chris Williamson?

  Do they need to be ironed once they're done? How quick, how often do we need to, do we need to use the squeegee thing on the shower door? Or does it kind of not really fucking matter? Like, all of those, the standards are the expectations that you then need to meet. So, yeah, a lot of this is just, and for all that, I mean, we're an hour and a half into a podcast, I can say whatever the fuck I want now. It is very difficult, it's become very difficult for me to have conversations about this stuff without someone from the fucking Guardian or the Times or TikTok taking issue. A guy that presents like me, talking about the difference, differences between men and women without being coded as like incredibly manosphere, incredibly right wing, despite the fact that the manosphere fucking

• 1:30:22Chris Williamson?

  hate me. Like, I'm not their friend. The only person that I brought on to do with the manosphere documentary that Louis Theroux did was Louis Theroux, the day that the manosphere documentary came out, like that. So, you know, you know, pattern match me however you want. Anna Kasparian, Chank Yuga, fucking Ezra Klein, like Bernie Sanders. These are not the rabid right wingers of, of someone that's trying to like, you know, misogynistically put women down. All that is to be said, I find it difficult to sometimes play gracefully with ideas to work out what's going on. And this is why someone, like you said yourself, like you're sort of dancing through this potential minefield going like, have I hit some sort of invisible tripwire that's going to piss off people and make it sound like

• 1:31:06Chris Williamson?

  white guy from America, well educated, just castigating a group that's only recently reached socioeconomic parity? Who the fuck do you think you are? Like, it's, it's trepidatious, right?

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And more so than it has to be, right? Like, we, we should be able to have honest conversations about this stuff. But it's incredibly fraught because, you know, we have, you know, 90 minutes or two hours in which we're going to talk, we're talking about a range of issues. There's a lot of nuance that's going to get, right, truncated into clips and shared on social media and taken out of context. And then all of a sudden you have like, well, like, you know, look at this misogynist talking about this or look at, I mean, like, I have already been criticized from both the right and the left on this.

• 1:31:56Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations. That means you're doing something right.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I think like, it's, it's sort of inevitable that we, we come to some of this with some tribal energy, right? That, that, oh, I see my group being attacked. I need to kind of rally around and.

• 1:32:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's fascinating is this, like ideological Roshark test, where you're able to put the same piece of content out and both sides see it as their own enemy.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:19Chris Williamson?

  You're like, oh, hang on. So I don't even have consensus across the board.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Chris Williamson?

  Everyone is pissed for opposite reasons. And that, this ideological spit roasting that I appear to be subject to, and I'm sure that you will as well. I guess you mentioned politics earlier on. What is the role of politics here? How important is it now?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's incredibly important. I sort of came to this research, you know, my, my background is, I'm, I'm political science, then I've moved to sort of more sort of sociological topics over the last like seven, eight years. And then in like 2022, I started looking at some Gallup data and noted that, it was around 2016, there's just this massive divergence emerging between young men and women in terms of their ideology. Young women becoming much more liberal than young men. And so we started doing more work around this area and we looked at like feminist identity and other things. And so we saw

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  like across all these different measures, politics, culture, that this persistent gap was evident in all these different surveys. So like, for instance, feminist identity, men and women are pretty close across generations, right? So for boomers.

• 1:33:34Chris Williamson?

  Feminist identity.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Right. Do you, are you a feminist? Right? So baby boomers, I think they're both around like the high 30s or low 40s, right? Within five points. Similar Gen X, millennials, they're higher. But again, gender gap's not really there. For Gen Z, it's like 15 points. Like, majority of, of Gen Z women are feminist. It's like 40% of Gen Z men.

• 1:33:57Chris Williamson?

  Hang on. So more Gen Z men than millennial men are?

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  About the same. But, but the Gen Z women are much higher.

• 1:34:04Chris Williamson?

  Right. Well, I mean, this was the stat that I saw. There was a famous graph that I went around on the internet, maybe six months to about a year ago, that showed this sort of wobble over time, maybe over the last 50 years, something like that of how right wing versus left wing men and women are. And it got real fucking close a few times, like almost basically to parity. And then it goes whoop, whoop. And then there's now a 23, 26, 30 point difference. But it seems like, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, it seems like women have become aggressively left wing and men have stayed relatively flat.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, one of the big takeaways was that it's not that we're seeing young men moving far, far to the right, but that women becoming far more liberal. And I talk about like attitudes and abortion changed dramatically for young women, especially in the wake of Roe being overturned. You used to have a lot more nuance around the issue. The sort of morality of abortion was a much more complex question, both among that, that cohort of folks, but also in like among elected Democrats too, right? You had a really different way of talking about the issue of abortion in the 90s than you did in the 2020s. And one of the things I think is happening is that you're seeing in, in

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  political leadership, right? So people, leaders are, are making the gender divide worse by, by simply, you know, seemingly advocating for one side over the other.

• 1:35:40Chris Williamson?

  Black or white.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, right, that, that there's a win lose situation where like you cannot find common ground here. You cannot compromise that if, if one side goes up, there it goes down. And this has been kind of a hallmark of, of democratic politics, which used to be so focused on class issues and economics, has shifted pretty dramatically to more talking about cultural issues. But I'll give you an example of the thing that I saw that I think it has, has sort of exacerbated this, is that I noted that, I think it was like in 2023 or something like that, you know, looking at the Democratic Party's webpage, right? So the, like Democrats, and you look at all the, the who we represent tab, right?

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  So a list of like 17 different groups, like, oh, we, you know, veterans and immigrants and we, you know, African Americans.

• 1:36:32Chris Williamson?

  Black people.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Women and men are just conspicuously absent from this list, which seems crazy to me. Like, and I, I can only conclude that it's, it's purposeful, right? That this is not a group that the party is advocating for. And then you have in Trump, very clearly a guy who does not seem to, you know, have a lot of sympathy for the position of a lot of young women, right? To, to put it kind of lightly. And so they, they see in Trump, again, someone who has been unfaithful to every person he's been married to, who's had sex with a porn star, you know, all these alleged sexual assault accusations and all

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  that. And so you have this, this situation where neither side feels that there's a place for them and, and the other party. And so you have this really strong.

• 1:37:26Chris Williamson?

  Who the fuck do you think they're going to vote for?

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  Right. And for, for young men especially, there's a sense that, you know, even Republicans aren't really, like, they, they, for a while, thought Trump was their guy because he's not part of a broken political system. He's kind of exists outside of it.

• 1:37:42Chris Williamson?

  Clearing the swamp.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Right. And if I don't trust, you know, the establishment, yeah, I can trust him. But when it comes to like the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, you have something like one in three young men, or maybe close to four in 10 actually now, saying that they don't trust either one.

• 1:37:58Chris Williamson?

  This is, I think, unfortunately, one of the by, byproducts of an overwhelm of information. The goal of.

• 1:38:09Chris Williamson?

  Pressure hosing you with conflicting points of view is not to convince you of any one particular perspective. It's to make you completely nihilistic and throw your hands up and say, I don't, I don't fucking know. Because that is the most pliable that you're ever going to be eventually, that you get to the point where it's like, someone come along and tell me. And this is why certainty is used as a proxy for expertise. If you ardently say a thing as opposed to, oh, there's a bit of incongruence there, or he caveated somewhat or whatever. And this is just like, once you see this formula, it's impossible to unsee. Look, people are confused and uncertain about what's going to happen. Someone comes along that sounds certain.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:51Chris Williamson?

  I'll go after them. That he, he, they, he, she has got the answer. Fucking brilliant for that. But I mean, the, I understand exactly what you mean. Like, who were they obviously going to vote for? The thing that's kind of mad about the Trump versus Dems situation is Trump was the candidate and there was no way that the Republicans were going to choose anybody else. So they were stuck with him. So if young women, many women, minorities, whatever, didn't feel seen or welcome in what was going to be for the final term Trump's party, that nothing could have changed there.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:26Chris Williamson?

  The democratic lack of focus on men just feels like an elected own goal.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  That's the term I was just going to use. Yeah. It's, it's.

• 1:39:34Chris Williamson?

  But you did this to yourself. You didn't have some candidate, Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or whoever the fuck was going to run, didn't, they weren't so toxic as to not be, yeah, sure. Would some cohorts of men have found it a little bit more difficult to follow a black woman? Yep, maybe, whatever. But like, not to the same extent that women would have found it difficult to follow Donald Trump. So the fact that they weren't serviced on the list of 17 groups that we are here to support, it's like, I mean, who's left? Like, who, that you worked, you have done?

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  At a time too, when like, working class people are really struggling, working class men have, have suffered, I think, even more than working class women in the last few years, as the, the job growth has gone, you know, in the service sector and healthcare, gone to predominantly, you know, women over men and, and in those communities. And so like, yeah, like, it should be, it should be easy if you're, if you're sort of raison d'etre, right? Like, your reason for existence is to advocate for marginalized people, people who are struggling.

• 1:40:39Chris Williamson?

  But not those ones.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  Working class people seems like, you know, which cuts across race class religion, right? That's the other thing is it's, it's a kind of unifying group that, that, you know, you can sort of please everybody. And it's, it's, it's perplexing to me that, that this has not been taken up by the Democrats who could probably do it fairly easily.

• 1:41:01Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that's the case?

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  So one of the things that has happened over the last 20 years is the composition of the Democratic Party has just changed dramatically. Right? So Democrats have, have, at least over the last 20 years, been more women than men. So self identified Democrats are like 60% women, 40% men. That's been true. Folks have noted that the party's become more educated. So college graduates shifted from roughly evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats to moving more towards Democrats. But the, one of the reasons I think things have changed is it's college educated women that have, have sort of swollen the ranks of the Democratic Party. One in three Democrats is a college educated woman. And their views on policy are very, very different than a lot of other groups.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  When it comes to abortion, reproductive health, climate change, trans issues. Again, just.

• 1:41:54Chris Williamson?

  You don't have as, as big of a diversity of viewpoints inside of the Democratic Party as you would have done in the past.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Right. And then like, it's also then who's running the campaigns, who is staffing? Again, it's disproportionately in the Democratic Party and a lot of those really important roles are college educated women.

• 1:42:13Chris Williamson?

  This is the, the thing that I've always found, like, really difficult, actually, like, even emotionally quite difficult to put up with, both in the UK and in the US, is I come from the most, like, canonical, stereotypical, working class town in the northeast of the UK. Right? Like, this is a place that had the second highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK and the widest high street. Those were the two things that it was famous for. And then it got knocked down the rankings for fucking teenage pregnancies. So we didn't even have that anymore. And like, this was, this was a place where I saw people that had gambling addictions, that had alcohol addictions. And that was what I, state primary, state secondary, state sixth form college.

• 1:42:57Chris Williamson?

  I, I think I was the only person out of my entire 300 person, your group in school to go to university. Right? So this is not salubrious surroundings for me to come from. And then when I get to hear people from significantly more well off backgrounds tell me what the fuck privilege I've been given. Like, let, forget the, you know, bad weather of the northeast of the UK thing behind and the, the tax and all the rest of it. Like, just straight up, the denial of the issues of class unless they're couched within something else. Well, your issue, yeah, the working class thing, but your real issue is that you're African American. The real issue is that you come from a single parent home.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Which is so reductive, right?

• 1:43:44Chris Williamson?

  Dude, look at the fucking, and I'm still, I still yet to hear, maybe it's the college educated thing, maybe it's the chattering class, maybe it's that if we keep you focused on, maybe it's more conspiratorial, we keep you focused on race and, and gender and other stuff that you don't look at what the big problem is. But the, hey, if you are one family trying to scrape it together on like, three quarter of one person's wage, it's not, I, I come from a household where we would share bath water so that we didn't need to, like, spend too much money heating the water twice for different bath.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Like, yeah.

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  To not have that be represented within the space of a decade and a half, from me being a child to me being like, an adult that's at least cognizant of politics, fucking blows my mind. And it feels very, and I think this is why a lot of working class people feel not, and this is me too, regardless of, regardless of where I've ended up in life, I'll always be working class in the UK because of where I went to school, because of where I grew up, because of what my parents did, because of the postcode that I was from. And it makes me feel a low key amount of resentment for pretty much everybody that's a politician. Because I'm like, you didn't care then, you still don't care now. I've never seen anyone that seems to actually give a single fuck about what my people, people like me, had to deal with.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  I, I think so much of the frustration too, if you look at, you know, how working class folks view the political system in two parties, is that they see them as, as both representing elites. The Republicans are representing the financial elites, you know, the bankers, pharmaceuticals, lobbyists. And Democrats are representing the cultural elites, you know, think of, you know, the media, Hollywood, college professors, right? And so it's like a lose lose situation.

• 1:45:37Chris Williamson?

  Neither of these groups are me.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  Right. I, I don't fit here. And other than Trump, who at least, you know, had affinity for the, the language of grievance, that was familiar with.

• 1:45:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, we saw that during the campaign, right? Here's me at a McDonald's, here's me in a, a high vis jacket in a garbage truck, here's me doing the thing, like, I am one of you, like, working man.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  But, but, you know, presuming that Trump leaves office in two years, right? That the Republican Party is going to then like, still, still have to reckon with what kind of party it is in a post-Trump landscape. And is, is it going to be one that they, you know, they talked in the early, you know, early Trump days of a, a new multicultural working class party for the GOP? It is, it is not on that trajectory currently.

• 1:46:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  And so I think that, you know, we remain to be seen where, where it ends up.

• 1:46:37Chris Williamson?

  What is the solution that you see for closing this gap of generation uncoupled?

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  So I start the book with the introduction and I title it Rekindling Curiosity. And I do think that.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  One of the most important things that we can talk to about young people is that

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  you don't know what you don't know. And you don't find out about someone's experience from watching a 30 second clip, from looking at their Instagram, right? You have to talk to them. You have to learn about them and you are almost inevitably going to be surprised because people are not

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  representations of their online personas. They're not representations of their of their political attitudes either. Like, we tend to be pretty heterodox, that if you talk to a person long enough, you're going to realize that, wow, they're Republican, but actually, there's a number of things that they are involved with, or they view that are actually similar to what I think as a liberal, right? And so I think that that we need to talk to people about the importance of embodied

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  embodied engagement with three dimensional people, right? Like, the more you can can spend time with someone across the table for maybe 90 minutes and learn about their life and ask about

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I think that's one of the biggest challenges we have because of the spaces that we used to have, right? Whether they're, you know, union halls, or, you know,

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  civic orgs, like, there's just fewer of them left. We did a study before the pandemic, and then followed up a couple of years after, and asking if people had like a third space, if you're familiar with that. So it's not your home, it's not your work, it's the coffee shop, the bar, the barber shop, where you can spend time with people in your neighborhood, or people in your community. And before the pandemic, most people said, yeah, I got, there's a place I can go that I can see people, and I go there semi regularly. After pandemic, like, dropped like a rock, it's like 20 points lower, and it has not recovered now, five, six years out.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  So I do think the built environment matters a lot. I'll talk about my own neighborhood. So I live in Chevy Chase, Washington DC, and I live just a couple of blocks from the school that my kids go to. But we also have, there's a little market there on the corner, and you can get pizza there, and you get sandwiches, and it is an it is an absolute hub of activity for the entire community. During, we had some snowstorms, probably like a decade ago now, and it it was the sort of central location where people got together, got coffee, got hot chocolate to dig out, like elderly neighbors, right? You need those spaces. And I think in the US, there's a

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  lot of ways in which the building codes and, you know, development restrictions just don't allow it. But they're incredibly important for communities, because we need spaces outside our homes to gather with people.

• 1:49:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the

• 1:49:48Chris Williamson?

  three dimensional sort of understanding thing is, is a really great point. You know, like, I see a hair bubble that can be used to protect a drink. And I think, like, wow, like, isn't that strained? Oh, fuck, isn't that horrible that this is a world that people think, girls think that they need to do that in, that they may need to do that. Yeah. And you're like, fuck, like, that's a whole now additional, I don't want to say burden, it's like, like, like a responsibility, like, like, it's

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  A individual responsibility. It's not a collective responsibility, it's individual, right? And so they can't, there's this idea that they can't rely on other people, they can't rely on

• 1:50:31Chris Williamson?

  Bingo.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  an institution or

• 1:50:32Chris Williamson?

  I can't trust the people that are around me. Right. I can't trust the people that are around the people that I might need to be worried about to make sure that they don't do it.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:38Chris Williamson?

  The only person that I can look out for me is myself. And I learned about something like that. And I'm like, huh, it just makes me sad. This makes me sad. And I think that the volume of it just makes me sad insights that everybody is exposed to on a daily basis, is so great, with so over saturation with, fuck, like, if you walk through New York City, and you're genuinely emotionally tapped in, you can get about 300 yards before something happens that should fracture, like, the heart of a normal. But you see somebody that's on the street that desperately needs help, and you're like, I'm going to Blank Street, I got to meet my friend, there's a match away,

• 1:51:19Chris Williamson?

  like, you know, you just can't not, you can't, you can't engage with it in that way. And I think this is why, yeah, to some degree, people have like a emotional prophylactic around them, which is, I just, I can't, there's only so much, and I've got my own shit as well, but the less integration, the less integration, the more on your own autonomy, I can't rely on anyone else.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  I mean, the good news is that we, I think, and research has shown this, actually, that that we misapprehend

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  the way people will react to us socially, that that, and there's, there's been studies that that people riding a train were told to strike up a conversation with a fellow rider. And people didn't want to do it. But when they did, they found that the people who engaged in conversations with a stranger on the train felt better about their trip than those who didn't. In the same way that they had people, another study had people call an old friend versus email an old friend. And more people want to do email than call, but the people who called and talked to their old, their old friend, yeah, they felt better, they felt more connected. And so it doesn't

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  take huge shifts in what we're doing, how we're doing it. I do think it it matters that the places that we go are designed for us to be there, right? Like Starbucks now prioritizes drive through. Like, I was out in New Jersey visiting family, and we roll up and like, I'm like, oh, man, there's a huge line for Starbucks and some random part, random highway. And we drive in like, oh, the parking lot is empty. And so we just park in there and it was the

• 1:53:03Chris Williamson?

  Service immediately.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was down the street, this line of cars. And we stroll in and they're like, yeah, what do you want?

• 1:53:10Chris Williamson?

  Served immediately.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And no one was there. It was this immaculate, clean Starbucks. And we got our coffee immediately because we didn't wait in this this line. But it's, it's tragic, because, like, coffee shops are a really good place to foster community, right? Like, we know this, we know this from our research. Like, it's one of the things that people actually mention about places they would like to go and spend time with with other people. And so like, designing it to facilitate just the the acquisition of caffeine products is actually not a great use of of

• 1:53:44Chris Williamson?

  That's not slime on caffeine products, as a, as a man that is a purveyor of caffeine product. But no, I agree. Daniel Cox, Lathan Jellem, Daniel, your rule, why should people go to check out everything you got going on?

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  You can check out the book, you can get it on Amazon, any other bookstores, and then you can find my my work at the Survey Center on American Life.

• 1:54:04Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. I appreciate you, man.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:54:07Chris Williamson?

  All right. Goodbye, my beauties.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 1:54:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.