Why Women Have Become Much More Liberal Than Men - Daniel Cox

you are in the thick of it right now that article that you wrote at the start of the Year caused quite the Ruckus yeah it did uh and it's funny because this is some research we've been doing for you know over a year and uh often it just takes a single all oped and people start paying attention how would you categorize the last couple of months for you and the sort of Fallout yeah I mean one of the really interesting things is people are debating just exactly the extent uh of the divide the nature of it what's going on so you have a lot of pollsters like myself saying hey you know this is kind of unprecedented what we're seeing uh young women becoming much more liberal and demographically we're seeing rapid changes when it comes to like lgbtq identity um growing education divides between young men and young women so there's a lot of things that are emerging or new and the the political divide is just one of those things but there are the the the cold water throwers who who you know largely uh political scientists who want to say well you know hold on let's let's wait till we you know we can get some corroborating data um but the fact of the matter is actually there's a lot of craing data already from a lot of really reliable sources that suggest that something is going on and we can I think debate the margins around how extreme is the Divide how far apart are young men and young women and on what issues but I think we can safely say that something really big is happening all right so just how big is this ideological divide between young men and young women what's happening so uh according to the Gallup data which is some of the the research that we've been using uh we conduct our own surveys at the survey Center on American life but we also look at a lot of different other polls from the P Research Center in places like Gallup that have really long and reliable trustworthy Trends and so Gallup shows beginning around 2014 2015 this this emerging uh ideological divide with young women becoming significantly more liberal uh around 42 43% uh identify as liberal uh in the latest polls and young men really haven't shifted all that much when it comes to their ideology so there's a you know anywhere from a 12 to 14 point gap between them now right you've got at no time in the past quarter Century has there been such a rapid Divergence between the views of young men and young women right and you know as far as we know uh this is something that will continue to shape the way these folks relate to each other in terms of their um you know priorities when it comes to you know the politicians that they want to uh nominate and elect and the issues that they care about one of the really significant divisions we seen is actually over the issue of abortion and while both young men and young women tend to lean uh pretty significantly pro-choice when it comes to the priorities of that issue issue uh we did a poll in 2022 right before the the midterm elections and 61% of young women said that abortion was a a critical priority for them but it was only like 30% of young men so just in terms of what they care about and how much they care about it is really different what is the age bracket for this because could this not just be the usual young people a more liberal effect and we've got a bit of social media that's maybe kind of emphasizing or or magnifying that and kind of that explains it yeah I I I think it when it comes to this stuff there's a lot that's going on and a lot that's pretty complicated so I think the social media actually plays a really significant role in all this um but the other thing is like when it comes to the the the age gaps one of the problems we have in polling is we're often talking about different age groups so in the research that we do we identify young people as 18 to 29 and we identify as young adults or young women or young men but some polls will will scoot that up to 18 to 34 which is again you know it's they're young but also there's a pretty significant difference between comparing 18-34 and 18 to 29 in terms of life experience and you know economically people are in just some different positions in their mid 20s versus their their early 30s and so we do have this this problem sometimes we're talking past each other and different pollsters hand handling things a little bit differently and then journalists when they rush to cover this stuff uh not to mention podcasters uh they're trying to sort through you know a a kind of Confluence of of different uh and sometimes contradictory information and it can be challenging to sore through so is this different than just young people becoming more liberal this is a because young people have always been young people like we have a a regular supply of 15 year olds and 17 year olds and 20 year olds and such but this is a marked difference from that yeah no absolutely so if you we compared young people today versus young people a generation ago so we're not comparing Baby Boomers and Generation Z we're not comparing generational cohorts we're look actually looking at young people across time right do men and women live on different planets then they just see the world in very different Mars and Venus you mean uh I I think in one way one of the things that's really challenging uh and I think it is contributing to this uh kind of gender antagonism that we're seeing is that so much of the interactions we're seeing among young men and young women is incurring online on social media uh on platforms that it's really easy to to be and de to be dehumanized and to dehumanize people to uh not proceed with a lot of of caution or empathy uh not to to you know take people seriously and so I think that's a significant problem one one of the things that I wrote uh recently for this great organization called the American Institute for boys and men uh which whichard Reeves runs uh who's who's great uh I'm a huge fan and one of the things I wrote for them is the decline in dating particularly among young men we've seen a really precipitous Decline and how often uh teenagers are are dating spending time having a boyfriend or a girlfriend and I think that's problematic uh in that you kind of learn how to engage with someone uh in in a really difficult in in situations that require a lot of nuance a lot of understanding uh a again a lot of empathy so like successful relationships have all that and can be very fraught and so it's helpful to have experiences earlier so that when you you know move into your your 20s and you're out on your own you have some experience to draw draw from when you're you're trying to engage and trying to date and and navigating really difficult uh complex romantic situations why have young women move to the left then what's the driving forces here so I think there's all there's some there's any one thing of course this is social science so there's a number of factors that we might consider but I think there's some obvious ones when you look at just what's happening that with the me too movement I think that was pretty significant we conducted a bunch of in-depth interviews among young women and young men after a dating survey that we conducted ear early last year and one of the things we heard from these young women again and again was how formative that experience was you know growing up and sort of seeing this happen in real time uh uh there there I think was a source of like uh we're in this together um this idea of kind of shared or link fate that um you know if this thing was happening to this person it could happen to me too uh right th thus me too so that that would be felt like there was something of a commonality of interest and concerns there I think that was was pretty critical and then for for young men what was really interesting is a lot of them said like well this is not really about me uh this is about celebrity or this is like the kind of malevolent dudes out there who are kind of you know awful and have nothing to do with them so as opposed to being kind of a structural uh concern uh it became something that they kind of dismissed as as something that has nothing to do with them yeah I love the idea of linked fate i' never heard it before you say two-thirds of young women believe that in most or every way what happens to women in the US will have a bearing on their own lives it's this sort of like a it's it's like in built sort of tribalism but it's more emotional than than tribalism yeah I mean I think it's it's kind of a recognition that there are structures in society your institutions that regardless of your race or ethnicity or religion or your geography that you will have to navigate these things that you are treated differently in American society because you're a woman and I'm going to throw a lot of pulling at you but this one I think is is pretty interesting so Gallup tracked the how um how women and men felt about the position of women in society were they satisfied with the way women were treated and over the last like 20 or so years roughly similar numbers of men and women said that yeah they were basically satisfied with how women were being treated and then around 2016 2017 uh women just plummeted so they were like 61% uh 16 17 and then today they're in the like the mid-40s so they're they're far less happy today about the way women are being treated in American society um which is a significant disruption from the past despite the fact that you've got Rising socioeconomic success for women improvements in education graduation from University two women for every one man completing a four-year us college degree women earn 1,111 more between the ages of 21 and 29 on average than men do etc etc etc so it seems like that has to be at least in part something mimetic or something sort of cultural sort of like social psychology that's going on because at least in many of the ways that you can frame the reality of their experience it is improving yeah I think undoubtedly you can't look objectively at whether it's economic data or data about politics um or just understand the way the culture is evolved and how we treat issues like uh sexual harassment and discrimination and not think that things are better for women than they were you know in the 1970s but interestingly um some sociologists have actually looked at the way young women felt in the 70s versus today in terms of how much gender discrimination was a problem and how much they experienced it and actually women today feel like they have things worse uh so some of this I think is about like understanding of okay uh what Behavior do I categorize as as sexual harassment and how I how am I feeling about various types of of these kind of infractions so if uh you know a male cooworker asked me out three times is that if he does it politefully politely and respectfully is that is that sexual harassment how how do we Define those kinds of interactions and I think in the past uh you know a lot of that stuff was kind of dismissed and again like some of it was not good uh a lot of it was not good and and roundly criticized and and you know should have been changed a long time ago yeah rightly so but but some of it is now you know we're sort of judging I think society as as smaller infractions uh are sort of treated the same as really significant infractions and behavior yeah do you know what the tville paradoxes I've not heard it cool idea so as living standards in a society rise people's expectations rise along with them but when you start yourself off off on that trajectory the problem is reality has to at some point like ASM toote out like it can't continue to just get infinitely better but your expectations can and it's this sort of comparison between the two also when you combine the toille Paradox with Concept creep you know the the ever broadening of what might be considered to be racism or what might be considered to be sexism or what might be considered to be harassment again not saying that these things don't exist but I think that most samean people would agree that there has been a hyper sensitization to things that previously probably wouldn't have even appeared on the radar maybe they should have done but a lot of the things that were occurring before have been gotten rid of and much of the stuff which is happening now seems to be uh at the very least magnifying Small Things uh into big things yeah and of course I mean you know I want to be very sensitive and careful about how we talk about this stuff I mean but I think that's that's absolutely right and in terms of um you know what you you've seen some we've seen some um conservative but feminists talk about this issue and they say say it's it's kind of stripping agency away from women to sort of say Hey you know we can't handle this or you know we don't know how to navigate these situations or right like and again if if if the the behavior is really you know bad heinous um there should be you know legal moral ethical redlines for all that stuff and there should be a zero tolerance policy but I I think a lot of this stuff Falls in in a grer area uh and so how we treat it like culturally is and socially is is pretty important yeah and it's open it's open to debate as well right yeah no absolutely and a lot of this stuff is is based on perception so how did I perceive this the interaction how does how did I think this person was was uh oriented towards me and what what were their what was their intent but the other thing and I think this is uh something that is missed in all this discussion uh which again I'm generally sympathetic to the fact that we aren't as nuanced when we talk about this stuff as we should be but there's a rising rate of sexual harassment that's actually occurring online uh so the p resarch Center looked at over like a 5-year period and found that a range of behaviors that young women are were far more likely to to be uh experience some type of sexual harassment uh and they Define a bunch of different types of behaviors and so in that way uh it is increasing right that that is a difference that's a good that's a good point that I hadn't considered that technology has enabled new types of sexual harassment unsolicited dickpics people sending sort of uh rude unwanted messages stalking harassment onl that sort of stuff that's that's something that I hadn't considered that being said um the toxic male gays if you look at somebody if you look at a woman on the tube for longer than 5 Seconds that constitutes something that they should be concerned about um workplace culture being incredibly sort of anti- uh collaborative I think and what it feels like you know I'm I'm not in an office but what it feels like from at least friends that work there um their felt senses that trepidation that they're they're in a lot of fear and that is going to come across as kind of like cold to a lot of women that they actually want to be able to collaborate with their male counterparts some really interesting research that suggests that post me to uh male supervisors were less likely to collaborate with female graduates because they were scared that something Downstream from that was going to get them in trouble even if they didn't have any intention of doing that so I I do think that we need to be careful about what we make people expect one of the other that I thought was really interesting he said look at this is from a a 21-year-old woman luckily I had all that over social media to shape the way I look at dating and Men she said it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up a 20-year-old woman offered a similar take that me too empowered her to stand up for herself I think it makes me less of a doormat again female agency taking control Independence all that stuff very very good but it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up I'm not convinced that putting a guard up based on other people's experiences especially if it's a guy glancing over in the gym or you know like some social media campaign that kind of maybe makes mountains out of mole Hills I'm not convinced that that forms uh robust psychologically healthy women I think that that makes them hypervigilant scared of lots of men always on edge and that can't be good for them either that that's not the sort of uh environment I want for women to inhabit from other women yeah and I think one of the problems is and we could talk about this a lot is taking so many of our cues from social media right versus our own personal experience and and the people that we know because you'll often hear this kind of Divergence where um in in the research that we've done women will say yeah you know the people the men in my life you know uh siblings uh cousins friends are all great um but I think overall men are kind of terrible and well where are you getting that perspective from because your real world experience is actually telling you a very different story but well I'm I'm seeing these terrible men online and well what what kind of you know what do you think the algorithm is doing is it is it putting you know the kind of boring polite respectful men are you think they're overrepresented on social media of course not um it's like the worst uh examples of all these different categories of offenses the most egregious stories are always the ones that catch fire and the problem is if you spend most of your time and learn about the world through the internet you get a disproportionate view you get a biased view toward crazy stories you know the guy leaves the house and comes back to find his wife in bed with the postman like you know that story catches fire because it's so oh my God like could you believe that this thing happened the same thing goes for and it it makes everybody model the behavior of others on the worst examples exactly and and there are there are folks out there entrepreneurs who actually are pushing this stuff too so it's not just that the algorithm's finding this stuff and and pushing it in front of you it there are people out there who uh you know they they built their um business or their brand on doing this stuff yeah there's also not enough female leadership in the eyes of women yeah well I think they're on on both sides and one of the things that I've really tried to do is sort of say well we we actually need more more conversations and opportunities for for young people to engage with one one another so one of the things I've been you know consistently concerned about is the decline in sociability among young people so that the pandemic was a real big hit but even before then we saw a really significant decline in just how often teenagers hung out with each other um and and maybe you know drank alcohol or smoked or whatever but just kind of did St something you know out Beyond parental supervision uh on their own and you know behave like we would traditionally expect teenagers to behave and maybe get into some trouble uh but also have opportunities to form bonds and engage with each other socially uh and learn from each other why is political socialization not in effect here why aren't Republican parents giving birth to Republican young women yeah so this is something that we found in our data as well in in a 2023 study so we looked at it it was focus on gen Z but we also want to look at their their form of experiences so what was the educational background of their parents what was the religious background um what was the the politics of their parents and and one of the things that we see that is consistent with a lot of political science research is that parental politics does influence the politics of children uh particularly when uh there's consistency within the household so when when both parents and two parent households are Democrats or both are Republicans they're they fairly effectively can pass on political values to the Next Generation there's lots of c caveats and there's a rich socialization literature that that deals with all this and talks about um how this how this all this all works but one of the things that we saw was that while Republican parents tend to raise Republican Sons they're far less likely to raise Republican daughters so only 44% of women raised by Republican parents still identify as an adult as a Republican and that's pretty significant because every other configuration that we looked at we saw the political socialization was was proceeding fairly consistently uh and this was the kind of anomalous case and for me you know I speculate uh in the piece that I wrote about this well at least some of it has to do with um Donald Trump I think some of it has to do with the rise in lgbtq identity that a lot of young women who who identify this way and and in L surveys it's one in three young women so it's how accurate is that number because I've I've seen that sort of banded around have you stress test that at all uh you see it and I think Gallop has numbers that are close to that in our large National surveys uh uh that we conduct with ipsos we see that number so I think there's another um polling organization called PRI who has that number so so we've seen it pretty consistently asked a couple different ways and so I I think we have some confidence that at least what the questions are are asking do you identify as you know lesbian gay bisexual queer um uh whatever that that at least you know we are seeing you know positive increased identity uh from but but I think like when it comes to uh what that means in terms of sexual behavior and sexual preferences there there's some separation there and some folks and I I would count myself in this category I think that at least there's there's some politics involved in all this so if you look at for instance that the number of people who identify as as bisexual that is the the fastest increasing category bisexual um but if you look at the the sexual preferences uh and behavior of people who identify as bisexual there's there's some distance there there's some oh so people identify as bisexual but still date heterosexually mostly yes much more right so so that so is where's that come from is that polling data as well so yeah this is this is polling data and again I there's some fluidity in all this we're talking about young people so again things may may change over time things take some things may change week to week sort out yeah and and I think that that's right that this generation is has been given the space to kind of explore and find out and that's that's all good uh but I think that it does mean that we need to uh exercise some caution when we're thinking about whoa okay you know there's one and three young women are lgbtq but what does that mean and and might that be subject to change at some point I think it might an identification with the movement overall but when the rubber meets the road um things don't change that much just to kind of round out what you were talking there 44% of women raised by Republican parents identify as Republican but 77% of women with Democrat parents identify as Democrats and you're right political socialization is a thing but just your behavioral genetics gives a big predisposition here you know your political affiliation is at least in part genetically predisposed because you have certain values about the way that you see the world that are just like imbued into the the mechanisms of your brain and so on and so forth and then you lay on top the socialization piece so to go 44% of women raised by Republican parents identifies as Republican themselves so it's more likely for you to be a Democrat female young girl with Republican parents than for you to follow the political socialization of your family plus the uh sort of genetic predisposition some of those folks are probably like politically independent too so it's not just Republican Democrats not but yeah yeah I mean the point the point still stands what role is abortion playing here I think it's pretty huge I I I know there's been you know I feel like there's a a pendulum swinging in terms of you know one week we say portion is going to you know totally reconfigure the the political landscape in the US with the overturn of row and the do's decision and next week well you know we're not seeing this pulling data and you know we're not seeing this huge uh jump in or spike in turnout among young women and so I think I feel like it's vacillated in terms of of how critical we think this is both sort of the in the immediate political context and sort of longer term I tend to think that it's it's pretty crucial uh because it's it's occurring uh when it did for this this generation that is all kind of predisposed to be very very supportive uh if you look at generation earlier among Millennials actually they tended to be surprisingly conservative on abortion and I don't think political scientists ever really sused out why that was because at the time the millennial generation you so you look back in you know the mid 2000s forward and and that generation was the most educated at that time the least religious um there there was a number of of policy uh positions they were pretty liberal on like gay marriage and so you would think that this uh the abortion issue they would also be tend to be pretty pro-choice but they were not um but that's not true for Generation Z the the generation that's followed Millennials and for that generation they're incredibly liberal on abortion H so so you combine uh a a Supreme Court ruling that was not popular among that generation uh an issue that's try to be Salient for young women and typically always is uh and an issue that they tend to care a lot about and then I think like that that to me suggests that moving ahead you know it's going to be a pretty significant factor in orienting their politics and and motivating them you just mentioned higher education it seems to be a trend that people who are more Highly educ Educated end up being more liberal is the increasing female participation in higher education contributing to this too I think so I I am not one of those folks who who believes that you know higher ed is has a huge impact uh on the political trajectory of young people I think there's a lot of self- selection that goes into people who go to college uh I think there's a lot of differences across different types of campuses if you're going to a school you know in the South versus the northeast or the West I mean there's a there's a lot of factors the other thing I thought I always kind of chuckle at uh is when people start saying oh you know professors are turning people uh into marxists and atheists and the professors that I know says that we can't even get these kids to read a damn syllabus and so like they think that they have you know all this power over the the politics of their students what I think what's going on there is is probably that uh for on a lot of these campuses the the peer environment is exercising pretty significant influence and so your your peers politics and then also the the longer trajectory in terms of where you end up so if you go to college you're more likely to end up in a city um possibly a coastal city that and then uh among you work in places with lots of other college educated folks and because of Education polarization we're seeing that you know you're you're more likely to be around people who share your you know Centrist left leaning political views that's a really good point I want to just sit in that for another moment because there is a a big demonization about the structure of the universities overall it's the the ones that are woking the students and the all of the rest of it but when you consider that I mean I think back to my university educator I did five years two degrees and I spent like 2% of my day in lectures and most of the time that I was in lectures I was talking to my friends in any case and all the rest of the time it was just the melting part of the student community so really when you're pointing the finger I think that a lot of it should be what what happens when you get lots of young people with social media and Trends in a Cosmopolitan City that's probably Coastal at least maybe maybe Coastal but big Cosmopolitan City what do they talk about and how do they how does the discourse self-reinforce how can it sort of run away with itself that's that's a fantastic Point that's a really really interesting point I hadn't thought of yeah and then stuff there's a reinforcing effect right too with our polarized media environment in the United States like so you don't even have to leave your bubble uh and so if you have you know your best friends and your immediate uh social group is all left left leaning folks they're citing opinion writers that are left leaning uh and you know MSNBC anchors and so like you you can live quite happily in this bubble um both in your immediate environment and then your larger information environment too I wonder how conflicting this is for young women I wonder if we know how um the hyp sensitivity that young women have to the the trends of the social group around them uh very very tuned up I don't imagine this is particularly enjoyable for young women to you know maybe they've got one opinion that sits outside maybe they're slightly different on the First Amendment or maybe they're not too too sure on immigration or maybe they're not too sure on whatever you know anything else I I I feel I feel bad for them I feel bad for the fact that there is a a a huge sort of wave that's moving through and I think anybody who the Purity spiral is very sort of pure and anyone who doesn't adhere um it's it's it's going to feel uncomfortable there'll be discordant I imagine this probably doesn't make them psychologically feel all that sort of uh safe or robust or um able to be open and honest and truly sort of speak their opinions yeah well I think too right like we know in in political science that um having being surrounded by people who share your political views is actually not great um from a sort of larger political system perspective because those folks tend to have more extreme attitudes right that that being constantly having your views affirmed by those around you it's easier to demonize it's easier to engage in kind of a tribal politics so that's you never get any counterpoints that are set in good right and and I think the other thing too is like I don't think we properly appreciate that so much of the stuff is an evolution right we we kind of learn we try out ideas we try out language and I think we ought to give space for that so I think like one of the things like I I'm not a huge believer in the I the cancel culture conversation I think that you know in certain instances yes you know we have been too restrictive certain institutions have played roles that I think are counterproductive in terms of having an honest open debate um I think some it's overblown but I think there there is one way that I think like the the entire uh way we engage in political discourse in this country uh is problematic and that is like we think that that nothing will ever change that people don't change in terms of their views on on various issues and of course that's not true and one of the quickest ways for you to change your opinion is I I drop you in a different political context uh and you'll change your views pretty quickly or at least you you will reflect on what you believe oh these people are the eny they're not necessarily demonized right uh and and I think that's one of the problems when you get to to the the political influence of dating and relationships you sort of say well I'm only going to date um you know a trump supporter or I would never date a trump supporter uh I think like one of the the problems with social media and dating apps is it allows you to more effectively filter out things that you think you might not like but we are pretty terrible judges on the things that we actually care about in in many respects I tell this to my to my son when he's he's you know turning his his nose up at Food uh or dinner is like you've never tried this so you have no idea uh and so like the experiment and experience are actually a part of growing up and I think to the extent that politics is a part of that we ought to give people space we ought to give them uh you know some empathy and understanding when they're working through things and I think we're just so quick to judge and Bash and it's it's really unfortunate yeah can you try and explain so we've spoken about young women I want to talk about young men yeah but how much how much is it young women moving to the left and how much is it young men moving to the right is it equal amounts from wherever the set point is or is it more left and Men or a little bit more right how would you categorize that yeah so this is the hard part about this is it's not really clear what's going on in men there's sort of different stories and narratives emerging from different poles so the same Gallop survey that I I quoted earlier with women becoming more liberal by about 12 to 14 points over the last you know seven eight years the men seem pretty flat in that in terms of their ideological disposition uh plurality or moderate uh and yes I think similar numbers are liberal and conservative there's some sense that they are becoming a little bit more Republican uh or more predisposed to to support Republican candidates there's sorry is that is that different to being conservative yeah uh so political ideology and partisan affiliation are different uh you know the most of the way that survey uh research focuses on this and and asks about this is that there's a Democrat Republican independent is your political affiliation and there's for ideology there's conservative moderate liberal they uh are correlated so if you're a liberal you're likely to be Democrat um if you're conservative you're likely to be Republican but one of the challenges is that for this younger generation they tend to have increasingly negative views of both parties so even people who are are quite liberal said to say I don't like Biden I don't like the Democrats uh and this is actually particularly true of young men I think it's like close to four and 10 uh view both political parties the Democratic party and the Republican party uh unfavorably and so you have this weird thing like there there's more people identifying as independent even as the country is moving a little bit to more to the left so we're becoming more independent and slightly more liberal uh and so it's complicated when we try to make sense of what's going on and I think too often we correlate those things and it's actually there's some there's some daylight between them that we need to appreciate that was one of the most interesting things that I learned in your article which was young men are far less likely than women to say that any issue is personally important to them it seems like if there was a checked out of politics uh like Dimension to this that that would be the real skew for men yeah and I think for a lot of you men like I think this is kind of an orientation that has happened because of of how rapidly uh some of the social norms and cultures changed and there's a real sense of dislocation like where do I fit what I'm I'm told to be an ally but how do I be an ally can I advocate for myself uh even or or the things that I care about and so you see this this you know in in a large number of young men kind of this this political disaffection of I just like I'm I'm kind of tuned out I'm I'm done with it uh and and I think one of the things we're seeing is that the Republican party has actually probably done a little bit better job of reaching out and saying that they are concerned about the issues that young men are facing whereas liberals uh and Democrats a little bit less so and so you've you've we're perhaps seeing a little bit of polarization around just the way the the parties are engaging on issues around gender right yeah that makes sense what about um men's opinion on feminism and and me too and stuff like that is this a inart could this be a reaction to them feeling like those have gone too far yeah and I I think you you see this in the point data so whether it's the PE Research Center showing a 20o gap in support of the me too movement between young men and young women uh young men are kind of divided and young women women are overwhelmingly supportive of me too and then in our data we we asked a question about whether people identify as a feminist uh young women largely likely to identify as feminists but it's only like 40% of young men so you you do have a pretty significant gender gap and on the question of feminism actually the gender gap is largest among gen z uh than any other generation so there's more disagreement about feminist identity and what feminism is uh you see older Generations yeah a 2022 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 46% of democrat men under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good and even more Republican men agreed so you know it's not like Democrat men and Republican men are just one bundle of uh ideology like people have different Wing Wings within that but you know nearly 50% of democrat men under 50 saying that they think that feminism's gone too far I think yeah I I I can see why if men do feel dislocated and displaced and uncertain about their position and then they don't feel like they're being given the uh sympathy or the support that perhaps they would that they're going to start pointing the finger around and and and then as you know we we've seen you know various Scholars have started looking into this uh there's in many ways young young men are struggling uh economically in in education and they have you know uh particular needs that are not being met they have uh problems that that people AR advocating for Solutions and so I think like that that plays into all this and I think we we're really really bad uh at at trying to hold these two different ideas in our hands at the same time that there's been progress uh in terms of gender equality but there's still you know plenty of places where women face structural disadvantages um and then there's increasingly problems that young men are facing that are unique to young men that Society we would be um um you know would be in our interest to try to address and both those things can be true right yes both those things can be true yes uh an offs sited statistic that conveys the enduring absurdity of the gender gap is that until very recently there were more CEOs named John than CEOs who were women across most industries from politics to Academia men in American society still control more resources earn higher wages and enjoy more Prestige but few young men have any experience in the boardroom and in the classroom it's their female peers who are crushing it and um Christine Ember wrote this phenomenal article last year where she said um young men feel like their problems are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of it's this sort of use of outlier male success I think a lot of the time that kind of legitimates some of the what are you crying about look at the look at the number of CEOs and it's like yeah but look at the number of men at the lower end of the distribution as well like they they don't feel like they've got the same kind of sympathy and again like what does this lead to just leads to this sort of finger pointing this this uh tribal Purity spiral and the thing that came to mind when reading this part of your research was that it's like a zero sum view of gender equality on both sides yeah which is increasingly where we're we're headed right that that uh on either side if you if you help women you're you're hurting men if you're helping men you're not paying attention to the dude I did an episode I must have done I don't know 40 episodes that are something along the lines of what's happening to young men how are young men struggling how male mental health male loneliness blah blah blah I did one episode uh a couple of weeks ago I've done many episodes about women but I did one in particular uh that was the first one in a little while with freyer India this great writer Jonathan Heights a massive fan phenomenal phenomenal writer I don't know her person I did an episode with her and it was um like why are jenzy women struggling so much and immediately so many of the comments were to do with like uh oh this is pandering this is like feminism's gone too far uh you know it's men that are struggling I'm like dude like there is a library of and what it made me think was like it's really easy to point the finger and say you know look at how many benefits women are getting and they're the ones that are doing well in education and employment and the men are the guys that being held behind and no one really cares it's like yeah and then as soon as you say also women are struggling also there's a lot of problems that they're facing especially when it comes to mental health like Jesus Christ and again zero some view of empathy like we can't have if we give empathy to someone that isn't me or my tribe then it it's taking it away and it's like the all that that can lead to is dissatisfaction a and and people not being able to understand each other like it's just going to make the situation worse yeah and I I think it's really interesting that you use the word tribal when we're talking about men and women because I I feel like we talk about tribal politics we talk about race and religion we talk about class we talk about Republicans and Democrats but typically we don't talk about as much men and women inhabiting their you know oppositional tribes but I think that's exactly what's happening uh kind of embedded by social media and the lack of socialization and I think like that's going to be a a pretty profound civilization civilizational problem yes how could you be wrong about this data in what ways might you be wrong A Million Ways uh there I mean in any any work that we do one of the things we try and one of the first things whenever I see some kind of uh interesting or you know seemingly anomalous finding is like where is this corroborated how can we see where where this Stacks up compared to what we know and so looking at a lot of different trusted data sets conducting high quality reliable research ourselves is is a priority for us and being transparent so on our website the survey Center on American life you can download all our data uh and one of the great things about that is it keeps you really honest if you think that people are going to be poking around your stuff and so I think that is is incredibly important um sort of institutionally uh but when it when it comes to to where things might end up I think there's you know I'm writing a book on this topic but I think um the divide that I'm looking at which is not just political but relational I think we this is solvable so the the trajectory that I I currently am forecasting that I'm seeing in this data may not wind up as bad as I may talk about it may sort of come back into Landon a bit more in 2024 right um you know we are seeing divisions over marriage with young women saying that you know marriage benefits men more than women um so seing declining interest in in Parenthood uh plummeting rates of of civic participation and so all these things are kind of pointing in a in a negative Direction could could change uh pretty significantly one of the ways in which I was actually uh somewhat uh feeling rather positive about the pandemic one one of the only ways and and optimistic is that I thought that it would in this generation and and and among people generally uh kind of develop an appreciation for the importance of of social ability right just the the importance of hanging out and being with each other in in community whether it's a religious community whether it's you know being part of membership organizations whether it's you know just going to work out with friends or or play board games that when that was taken away uh from us I think a lot of people suffered in a lot of different ways and you know my hope would be that this this generation particularly the the teenagers and young people who really suffered through it uh we know those those folks suffered T tend to suffer more than others would develop an understanding of we really need to prioritize this we we need to find spaces where we can spend time with each other I I think the verdict is still out on that one I'm hoping that that's that's what will happen but um I'm not 100% positive that that it will Rose herwitz wrote an article titled are jenzy men and women really drifting apart the much theorized political Rift has yet to show up in actual vote Behavior what's your thoughts on that well she's wrong on that um I talked to I talked to Rose for that article and she's not the only one so what's happened is there's a number of political scientists who who've come out and sort of say well in these academic data sets the the General Social Survey the American national election study the uh the congressional election study like we we don't see this stuff replicated um but point of fact the only data set where you really don't see it that you have a large enough sample this this this the CES and in the rest of them in the Pew research uh Trend data you see it in Gallup you see it um there's um modering the future data that uh um folks have looked at and you see it in there you even see it in in incoming freshmen the UCLA does an ongoing study and looks at the politics of of incoming freshmen and you see a growing gender divide there so there's there's a lot of corroboration in terms of of the data and then you see it an exle data right that there's there's a I think like a 12-point gap in the voting behavior of young women and young men um in exit polls and you see it in in voter file data as well so uh I think it's it's it's we should proceed cautiously and I think that I think what some of the political scientists subjected to which I think is is absolutely valid is to say well what do people mean when they're identifying as liberal does that mean that they're liberal and supportive of you know the progressive position on all these different issues from UNC control to climate change to um abortion because point of fact like young men today are significantly to the left of older men on a lot of those questions particularly when it comes to to race because the the the um generation is much more racially diverse right so you do see them to the left but but relative to where young women are um I think there's still a lot of evidence that suggests that um they're they're they're in a little bit different place the other thing too is it's not just politics um you look at uh views of like pornography um there's a really significant difference of where young men and young women are young women what did they say that so we we asked this question about whether um there should be more restrictions placed on internet pornography there's like a 20o gap uh in the view of young men and young women young women want it much more restricted young men don't not shockingly I think so there's there's a lot of those kind of cultural questions where you see these divides show up as well and then like concern about climate change concern about gun control young women again show up much much higher yeah Gallup just did their own analysis as well right I think I saw you it was the same data but they just published it finally so like I I published it in 2022 uh then I I did this oped earlier this year based on the subsec article uh and then galop a couple weeks later published their it's the same data though right right I understand yeah uh it's uh and just to kind of round out the stress testing of your data here how how you said around about 2014 was when this really began to kick in yeah 2014 2015 depending on what data you're looking at okay so we're now at you know a decade approaching a decade where this has been sort of trending so this isn't the same kind of flash in the pan uh for instance uh for a while quite a while I was citing this stat um the number of men between 18 and 30 that report not having sex in the last year has tripled from 2008 to 2018 from 8% to 28% and I was like trotting this stat out that was GSS data uh then I didn't realize that new GSS data had come out twice it come out once and then the second one was what made me realize that the first one had come out and that Trend had reversed and I was like right okay like that and if you actually look at it was such a sharp increase of a such a short space of time that now plotted across enough time it actually just looks like yeah what happened here maybe it was something to do with the way that this was captured maybe it was something about 2018 I don't know uh but that seems to have come back down now and actually women switched over with men I think 2019 2020 women did perhaps uh hyper vigilance around sort of like pathogen disgust response type thing um around about the pandemic that could have been a part of it but um it seems like the trend that you are talking about here is more robust uh longitudinally yeah and and I think if you're it's not just um in in response to I think specific events like when we look at you know posters look at you know what kind of impact is a particular even an important National event um so you know the some of the protests over uh police shootings of African-American men right we sort of say okay how does this change attitudes towards police and policing you you did see a a significant impact of that but then it dissipated uh pretty quickly and so think some of that is like that almost always happens right you you you know for events to have really profound changes in our our political trajectory they you know they have to be you know of a magnitude that uh we don't typically see uh but what we're seeing among I think young women is is not just a reaction to the election of Donald Trump to the dobs decision or me2o I think it's partly demographic so you look at their um Ed educational tment uh it's significantly more educated than men if we're seeing education polarization we would expect that to show up in their politics rise of lgbtq identity again that's increased over the last you know six seven eight years dramatically and that group LG dpq PE lgbq people are much more uh liberal than people who identify a straight or heterosexual so like there's some demographic reasons to expect that you know we would see this this growing division in in in politics what's happening with Race So race is really uh challenging to to get at uh in this this cohort because simply in a lot of the the survey data we have we don't have large enough samples to break out so you know in terms of your average survey of a thousand people you have uh basically maybe you know 120 people who who are black or African-American and so you can't do a lot in terms of the analysis now some of the data we have is is much larger but still you're you're pretty Limited in in what you can do but a lot of the the divisions we're seeing because of cross racial categories so we see between you know black men and black women pretty significantly uh different in fact I just published a piece that looked at the way there's been a a really significant drop off in terms of democratic identity among black men but not black women uh and this is again based on on some of that Gallup data uh so I I think that that makes sense in terms of well okay look at the the rates of religious participation among uh Black Americans that has historically tied them to the Democratic party so more religious uh Black Americans tended to be more democratic so as we see we're seeing um black men drop out of church at much higher rates than black women you know we we would we might expect that this to have an impact on their um Downstream affiliation what does this mean for the 2024 election cycle that's probably the hardest thing to predict because I think despite the fact that we've seen this Divergence I think we're going to see you know some significant amount of support for young people one of the challenges uh is that I don't know if you've been tracking polls when it comes to the youth vote this year but they've been all over the place there's been some reliable polls that say you know Trump is up with young people which is would be an Absolut absolutely unprecedented shift you know of like B basically points to what what happened in in 2020 so I think we're going to see significant support for Biden among young people overall I think it's going to be significantly higher among young women uh I think that that Biden campaign they are already but I think they're going to continue to make abortion uh a really significant part of their campaign Outreach to to young women uh I don't know what they're going to do for young men uh one of the things that I thought was pretty interesting and I don't know if you've ever had reason to to go over to the democ uh uh Democrats um web page to sort of check it out well I was there recently just to look at the the groups that they um were advocating for right so these are the they have like these are the groups that Democrats are fighting for there's like 16 of them I think um women Native Americans uh Hispanics African-Americans uh other ethnic groups rural people Urban people uh women down the the one group that was missing men so it it it almost seems that it's such an oversight that it has to be intentional uh I don't I don't right and so I think to the extent that we see this this divide occurring I think that that um the parties are going to play a role in in orienting and and reaching out to folks and to the extent that the Democratic party does not you know actively appeal to men and particularly young men I think they're they're going to continue to to slide right yeah I wonder one thing that you you said earlier on was how formative uh me too and then I guess the the me too of 2023 which was uh the abortion ruling I wonder whether that is formative to uh young people during their life but that if there wasn't a similar incident in six years time or whatever that that's kind of baked into the system and that this is almost like a a quite prolonged but a response to those kind of situations and whether or not um without continuing to sustain that with more and more uh what is perceived as an egregious transgression of somebody's Freedom or or or or like a important cultural moment I wonder whether I wonder how much of what we're seeing is still the blast radius of of some big events and I wonder how much um is more um sort of deep rooted and deep seated you know what I mean yeah and uh I've kind of struggled with this myself and I think I've evolved in in the way I think about it like I I think I at at one point I thought you know me too was seismic and generational now I I tend to think that that it just has a pretty significant blast radius as you put in so we'll see it among gen Z but we may not see it in gen alpha or or even younger gen zers uh who just were not young enough to be paying attention to this stuff so there might be that the cohort of like you know a six seveny year eighty year span of of young women who came of age during that period who said like it was really important and then not for not for folks coming after what are the implications of this gender divide for the world of dating it's hard to to I mean in in one way so if we were talking about politics um I I think it's a little bit overstated you know the Washington Post came out with an article sort of saying the the political divide and the the salience of of um politics and dating could have significant repercussions um because there are more there are many more conservative men than than um uh liberal women so like there's a there's a dating mismatch there um but I I think like when you talk to people about dating and we we did like 30 in-depth interviews among young people it was a lot about I just want someone who who treats me well um you know who is respectful um you know the kind of things that you would expect uh you know people to say just in general about the kind of relationships platonic or romantic that they were after and politics didn't come up that that often even the issue of abortion uh which seems like there's of any issue that you that could be like a deal breaker of which there's not a lot of common ground to be to be found a significant number of young women um even liberal young women sort of said like well it might make things difficult but it was not an essential deal breaker for them wow I how how much of that do you think is um as far as I'm aware having a mismatch in values and something like abortion is is a a pretty strong sort of fundamental uh value about the way that you see the world it's probably indicative of a lot of other things it's more of a keystone than your view on economic policy I would imagine like more interpersonal um how much of that do you think is people wanting to give what sounds like a balanced answer to pollers but when it comes to actually dating someone it may be something that they can't get pasted right and and I think any question like we we asked in that 2023 survey a list of I think like 20 items of like would you be more Lely or more or less likely to date someone who Liv with their parents uh smoke cigarettes like all these different types of Lifestyle um behavioral um sort of social demographic background questions and so it's you're asking people to make these judgments without a real person standing there and you know people tend to to think very differently when they're you know thinking in the abstract verus what's like is there a name for that it's like white Coat Syndrome I guess in medicine but is there an equivalent like observer effect is that what would you call that yeah I don't I don't know if there's a technical term for it in in polling but again there's a challenge in trying to get people to to um yeah first off tell the truth but secondly know the truth right how well do we know ourselves what their actual priorities are in terms of the qualities they want in a partner it's incredibly difficult uh and so but I think like one of the things that that's happening in online dating is that you can you can presort all that stuff like you I can sort of say this is what I think I want and lo and behold the algorithm can can spit out you know a whole bunch of different matches for me and for women they they can still find matches regardless of what kind of restrictions they put on um men you know have have a harder time uh in online dating so I'm trying to work out whether or not the world of dating has become more or less political because what you've just said there makes it sound like it's ah well maybe you know it's just someone that that cares about me and is a normal balanced human but then on other sides you know it's like 55% of young women would be less likely to date a trump supporter 39 say the same about the possibility of dating a Republican and 76% of young women with a college degree say would be they would be less inclined to date a trump supporter I'd rather die alone than date a conservative man said one woman yeah well and I think this this is where the the politics and the personal get kind of fused Trump is very very effectively politicize all these things that weren't all that political I I remember people before the pandemic they're you know they were saying you know what this country really needs is an external uh challenge that we can bring bring us together like 911 this horrific tragedy um an attack on American soil that common Humanity yeah that we rallied around and even Democrats you know had had you mean like a global a global pandemic that didn't help at all and and and of course you know that became immediately politicized um and Trump Bears you know some responsibility there uh but it certainly wasn't all him and so I think yeah when it comes to Trump I think one of the things that we heard uh we saw in the survey and heard from the people we interviewed was that it wasn't politics like they didn't care about his his his economic plan they didn't really you know that was not the deal breaker issue for them it was his treatment of people particularly women um that that I think leads them to be like okay well you mean like his personal the way that he comes across incredibly personally um incredibly negatively and and people who he thinks have wronged him the language that he uses he is you know um you know Adam SE at The Atlantics said the this famous article that the cruelty was the point and he behaves absolutely cruy um to you know many people and I think you know for for folks who was like wow like uh if someone really not just like will vote for him but like really adors this guy and there's lots of Americans who do um what does that say about how they might treat me or or like what I mean to them as a woman or like you know those kinds of things and like that we heard that a lot we heard that a lot from the women who who said that this would be a deal breaker for them so was not about policy you could say it was kind of about politics because Trump was president he's a Republican president um but I think a lot of it was his his personal Behavior his decorum um you know the the stuff with the porn star the the infidelity I mean he just ticks so many boxes that I think a lot of women they just like they found reprehensible a potential Solution that's being put forward for this is for women to Trad fish or for men to woke fish that there's basically a blue ocean if you date UN assortatively in terms of your sex's typical direction of political orientation yeah well I mean and there's like a you know I'm I'm learning about this all this kind of secondhand uh I've been married for almost 10 years now but um from what my uh younger research assistants uh will tell me when it comes to to dating and stuff that I read that some conservative men will ID identify as moderate uh on their dating file in order to get to to get dates from Liberal women liberal women actually know this so now they won't date moderates there's um some amount of uh uh adjustment of the sites in a way they're like no I'm gonna have to I got I got to move a little bit the the cursor a little bit more to the left I guess well it's not just men and women not being able to find Partners though young men are just checking out of dating altogether quite a lot have you got any idea what's causing that so yeah it's not just dating I mean like there's Workforce stuff I mean it's that's not an area of of um primary focus for me but like there's there's men who are just checking out kind of alt together um the you know video games I think are uh a common culprit there uh I think when it comes to uh you know their economic Ambitions I think it's just it's tough to know like what the trajectory there is for them like what what do they see as the goal I think think previous generation we kind of you know there was like okay you do this this this and this um but I think for young men today I think there's just a lot of um they they feel kind of a drift and then have you have you looked at Nicholas eat's work yeah so he's at Ai and um has done some great work he's at the same organization that I'm American Enterprise Institute right okay uh so yeah so he's done some great work on that and and I think it's yeah it's it's absolutely right that that when you sort of see your goal sort of say Okay I want a a good job good career uh I want marriage I want you know kids a house you know with the mortgage and all that it can be you know it can be hard to to get that but then at least with those goals in mind you can sort of say okay I know what I have to do and I feel like that those kind of um kind of North Star uh places like orientation is is kind of missing now from from young men in terms of like what they're doing and said yeah so video I actually uh I don't think a lot of people have thought about this yet in terms of the the sort of the way it's going to impact relationship and dating but like the AI girlfriend thing is something that I've I've written about a bit and am concerned that similar to how pornography gives you an absolutely warped view of of sex and sexual relationships I think AI girlfriends um and that kind of interactions is going to give young men absolutely warped idea of any kind of relationships whether platonic platonic or romantic oh because there there's never any disagreement that needs to be dealt with everything is always affirmation affirmation affirmation um you know there to respond whenever uh wherever uh and I think it's going to be pretty popular because of that um we're seeing this this increase in in loneliness we we did a survey back in 2021 and we identified this this the Friendship recession quote unquote which was afflicting men significantly more uh harshly than women and so a lot of this is is um something that that could conceivably you know be a pretty significant problem because that's going to be attractive for folks who are saying well I have a hard time you know meeting people my friends aren't really giving me the support um that I want and I can't find uh a partner so yeah I'm G to turn back to screens you know VR headsets video games AI girlfriend yeah so a couple of insights I've learned from evolutionary psychology friends one of the problems that you're going to encounter with AI girlfriends is that there is no Prestige associated with having one it's the same reason that people don't advertise how many only fans creators they subscribe to or whatever because selection is so much of the prestige that comes with being in a relationship Not only was I able to get this person but they chose me whereas if you've got the price of a cheeseburger per month and you can buy a VR girlfriend the degree of uh Prestige and Status that's associated with that I don't think that should be undercounted I think that that that counts for an awful lot like deep down for men now you might say well the same is true of having a real friendship as opposed to one that's on the internet and look at how many people are spending all of their time on screens and social media I don't I don't disagree but for the people and I think about this a lot I'm not a gamer I was like I I played Xbox a good bit but I wasn't like a did or I didn't really use it all that much when I was younger but I don't now and I think I I don't fully account for just how compelling and compulsive that is especially for young guys uh I think the video games industry is worth more than the TV movie and music Industries all combined together like video games know more about human nature and human behavior and how to manipulate it and cap it than every other industry put together so yeah even for the people listening that like n video games you know what [ __ ] like pling a bit of call done an evening like blah blah blah they've gotten good I my my boys uh just got an Xbox their their uncle got it got it for them so I uh a five-year-old and a seven-year old and uh the games have gotten really like I have not played video games for years I used to uh but they've gotten real good I was playing Gears of War five um before my wife made me install it because they want the boys uh coming across it because it's pretty violent yeah but yeah I mean it's it's immersive it's engaging you can sit there for hours and hours and hours um and I think like yeah there's you know again you can sort of laugh at like oh you know video games and this should not be monopolizing people's time but um it clearly is the amount of time that young people are spending on these things is young men is is is growing and really significant what's happening with Lifey isfunction uh it's low among uh young adults but it's always been kind of low like comparatively right so we we tend to be happier as we get older we have more friends when we're younger but in terms of the kind of insecurities that we have the way we we think about our lives um I think that that the way that we feel uh in our you know teens and early 20s uh there's a lot of of just life cycle stuff that that that we tend to grow out of um now we're in a different environment now with social media so I think you know there's there's been Scholars and researchers looking at the social the the you know anxiety producing effects of of social media and it's it seems huge I've not looked at it a ton of myself but it seems like really really important and and it's focused on women but I think men too are are um suffer from this a little bit too for the third time in more than two decades less than half of Americans say they are are very satisfied with the way things are going in their personal lives the 47% of us adults expressing High satisfaction with their lives has edged down 3 percentage points over the last year and is only one point higher than the 2011 record low for the trend not good so yeah and I think Gallup recently uh did this whole multicountry look at at happiness and life satisfaction and the really interesting thing to me was how huge the generation gap was so at one point wasn't a huge difference between where older people were and younger people were but now I think United States has one of the largest generation gaps in terms of happiness and life satisfaction of any country yeah yeah but I you know this slow life strategy that Jee Tang's looked at I know Jonathan Heights looked at it as well this extended adolescence as it's called young people getting their driver's licenses later moving out of the house later getting their first job later starting dating later I wonder how much how many of those things like it's a risk aversion it's like generalized risk aversion against change and safety leaving the house Scott Galloway got in trouble for basically saying that unless if you're still living at home with your parents unless you're asleep you shouldn't be in the house and um people were i i i Su that as a parent of young boys like get get out of the house go play but that might be a way for you to get a little bit of Peace but um yeah I I I I understand personal motivations aside that no it's Independence and agency right like that you you you learn like I was talking with the colleague today like it's the importance of being bored right to come up with your own games be imaginative find ways to to figure things out yourself so that you're you're not I mean I think this generation of parents and I you know I count myself as part part of this problem um were kind of overly engaged I mean the the common terms of like helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting I think is absolutely right that we're we're doing too much for them and things that they should be doing themselves were not readily let them do and so they're not learning agency they're not learning Independence I looked at this interesting thing about life satisfaction are highest amongst upper income married and religious adults a few groups few groups have majority saying that they are very satisfied this includes those with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more married adults those who attend religious Services regularly college graduates Democrats and those aged 55 or older so you're like sort of threading the needle there through and I'm going to guess a number of those may I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if married adults have high household income uh if people who are earning a little bit more are more likely to be religious you know like all of these things will stack on top yeah no I think that's right and and we've done research on this too the the class divide in in religious participation so at one point there wasn't a huge attendance difference in between people who had a college degree and those without so you go back 30 40 years pretty much the same everyone was attending at relatively High rates then over the next 20 25 years a significant Gap emerged with um the the non- col folks attending at far less less High rates than the folks who went to college so it's the it's the college educated folks are getting married uh you know invested in uh the religious communities engaged in community life and that has a multiplicative effect right like you are getting support systems that are across the different institutions you are yourself of information uh of all these important things in life that is is strongly correlated with happiness and contentment yeah how do you sort of come to conceptualize everything that we've gone through today sort of what's your what's your view of the of the current state of things and the trajectory moving forward so uh I'm a little bit of a resident pessimist like I I you know can't not look at this data and think like wow um you know what is happening you know because we we do a a lot of surveys on a lot of different topics from from dating to religious demography um to politics we're doing a a workingclass survey and we haven't talked about this but that I think that one of the the really concerning things for me is trust and rather it's it's precipitous decline so if you look at young people today on a variety of different measures but you just ask them like how much do you think people can be trusted they're far lower like 30 points lower than than older Mar Americans um whether they think people will take advantage of them again like there's like a 30 or 40 Point divide most uh young people say that they do and I don't want to be constantly pointing the finger at social media but again I think it it makes some sense adaptively right if I'm engaging with strangers a lot when when people have access to my profile they can they can message me um a lot of times I'm I'm you know getting negative interactions online uh of course I should be a little bit suspicious right like I'm I'm not being socialized in my sort of geographic Community where people know each other where there's a lot of support uh but I'm I'm I'm kind of in the wild west where you know I don't know people's motivations um I don't know what they're going to do uh and so it it I think it pays to kind of be cautious and think the worst of people and so I think that to me is a pretty significant difference in the way people are being raised today vers um uh generation before social media that's that hyper vigilance again right I I can't necessarily trust people I don't know if they have best interests at heart and the other thing I I can't remember who said it but basically that the internet has made Psychopaths out of all of us that it permits you to do things online that you would never do in person with basically no repercussions and if if you don't think that this is true log into any firstperson shooter Lobby and hear what people say to each other like just the things that people people say there's no way that you would dare say that in even face to face let alone in a a small village you know a hundred years ago where you knew everybody and reputation would get around and you're held accountable for your actions and things like that so what's the natural response natural response is this vigilance un certainty I'm going to protect myself I'm never actually going to be emotionally open or vulnerable or or invest in anybody else because they might move on quite quickly and have had all of these bad experiences look at how terrible humans are humans overall were a Scourge on the earth that probably contributes to the climate change oh we don't need to worry about birth rate decline because there's too many people on the planet in any case and humans are kind of a bit of a cancer so you know it is the the most like multi-headed hydr head thing of all time but when you actually zoom out enough it does the patterns and the shape start to make a little bit of sense things are moving in directions and you can begin to see how each of the different contributing elements make stuff go to that direction yeah if I could like you know move up the chain and sort of say what is the thing up here that is going to be influencing everything Downstream and I do think it comes down to uh this kind of communitarian impulse that we've lost this that that um you know we're so obsessed with the way that we look how we're being perceived we're we're interested in our own care career trajectory um our own professional success and the validation that we get get from it as opposed to like well how much are you volunteering uh you know what kind of activities are you doing in furtherance of of some some something or someone other than yourself um how are we we rewarding that culturally uh and so I think like the the fact that we don't have that impulse we don't have that that greater good ambition um and that we're that we're seeing each other in in the real world more often that we're we're you know from from putam uh on WE we've known that we've been in kind of a a Civic Decline and I think we need to you know rebuild a lot of our institutions we need to encourage young people not just to have amazing resumés but actually be amazing people and and support the people around them um so you're not checking boxes but you're actually you know having real experiences with real people and you know what there's value in uh you know hanging out and chasing your friends around with sticks right there's value in that right uh I I see as for like Russian math classes around my neighborhood I I live in a pretty nice part of DC and just like well yeah you could do that but I'd rather have have my kids um spend time with their friends just out in the neighborhood or out biking around and uh and I think some of that probably stems from this kind of competitive impulse right that we I want my kids to get in really good schools it's a competitive education environment um if if you know they make a mistake they're going to fall off the ladder and you know there's not a uh sort of safety net for them um so I just they just have to do everything right and I think if we could get off that a little bit and and you know refocus uh our attention and and the way we spend our time with you know towards furthering uh a broader interest uh I think we'd be well you know much better served by it Daniel Cox ladies and gentlemen Daniel I love your work I think that the the insights that you're were able to bring which kind of add a bit of uh statistical rigidity to the insights that people are seeing and sort of stuff that people feel it's like I've got this trend that I've noticed online a little bit but like you know it's there it's there in front of you you can almost sort of grab it uh I really appreciate the work that you do your sub Stack's fantastic uh where should people go they want to check out all the things you do on the internet so you can check out our uh website Survey Center on American life and then I write American storylines on substacks so check it out hell yeah Daniel I appreciate you thank you thank you so much what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my fulllength podcast with Dr Andrew huberman which is available right here go on tap it