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This went viral. Estimated percentage of 30 year olds who are both married and homeowners. So two of the American
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dreams, dare I say, getting married and starting a family, having kids, and um in the 50s that was, you know, half of
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30 year olds already were married and already had homes and now we're down to 12%. There's a lot of factors here
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obviously Chimov but your thoughts generally on this you were I sort of I started to do some research on this
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and it's really sad actually what's happening right now so I think if I had to kind of frame
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this that chart that you showed is more of the outcome and so you have to go all
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the way back and try to explore what are the potential root causes that causes this kind of an outcome and There are
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there are a bunch of them. I think one of the first ones that we have to look at is what has happened to
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young men. And I think what's happened to young men is a little concerning. So I don't think
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it's our generation, but I do think if you talk to people 30 and under, you start to hear a consistent theme from
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guys, which is one, it's they don't really have the social skills to really talk to girls.
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It starts with that. And so what happens is they go to these different outlets. They go to video games.
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They kind of communicate more online. As a result, they tend to have brittle or fragile emotional relationships and
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social relationships. They don't date the same way that they used to. Then a lot of guys just feel like they
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also don't want to get caught into being perceived, you know, post the me too movement in
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any way, shape, or form as being untowart. You take all of these factors and you put it together and there's a
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lot of guys that have just opted out and they just kind of move in a direction of
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parasocial relationships instead. Then I started to look at like the the data on
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porn usage. It's out of control. I had no idea. But do you guys know what the average age now of a porn watching
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male is? That's scary to think. The average age. Yeah. Would it be the average age of an
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American man or does it skew younger? I would assume skews younger. It's gone. It's gone from 20 down to 16.
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There are more than 50% of 12-year-old boys now that watch porn. I was shocked. I was like, "What are you
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even talking about?" I was a teenager, late teenager, I think, when I like I mean, we had like you found a magazine
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here or there, whatever. They got a girly magazine. Yeah. But can you imagine what it does to a
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12-year-old boy when they start to get instant gratification and you compound that all through high school and they
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don't have quote unquote what we would call gain, right? The ability to just talk and just kind of like carry on a
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conversation. What do you think happens? And then you go into the dating pool and
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what are these dating sites optimized for? These dating sites are optimized to keep people there, not for you to find a
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relationship and for you to churn, right? And so the gamification and the and the dynamics of those systems are
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where many young men and women now look to to find a relationship. And so you have lonely young men that creates
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lonely young women. a small cohort of very eligible men and women that everybody's chasing and fighting over.
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Everybody else kind of left on the sideline. And so what do you think happens over 15
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or 20 years of this activity? It's what you see in this data. People aren't coupling up. They're not having
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long-term committed relationships. So obviously as a byproduct, they're not getting married more. Obviously, as a
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byproduct of that, then you're not combining two incomes. You're still with one income. At the same time, Nick, I
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just pulled this data. You can show it. What has happened to the underlying things that people would look to as
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satisfying markers of progress in life? A home, a good education, those are way out of
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reach, right? So, if you look at this chart, the price to income ratio of a home from 1980 to now has effectively
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made it so that you have to make an enormous amount of money as a single individual to afford a
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home today. M and then if you only have a small percentage of people actually getting
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married and bringing two incomes together, you see what you're seeing today in that chart. So I don't know. I
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think that we have a an issue in the American fabric we need to figure out. I don't exactly know what the solution is,
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but it's taken me this long and maybe this is what all these young people have been screaming about and I have ignored.
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So I apologize for not really understanding the gravity of it. But I think that this is a big problem and I
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think we need to start talking about it a lot more and here's a manifestation of it. If you
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look past year prevalence of major depressive episodes US adults 2021 pretty recent data and that 18 to 25
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spike look at that Shimoth and then 26 to 49 and then the older generations maybe not having these massive
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depression episodes. Frey any thoughts on the American dream changing and young men? Yeah, I think there's a lot of
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conflated factors here. They can certainly be related, but there's just a lot to unpack in all that. I mean, I can
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I can comment on the one piece. I I think we talked a little bit about, you know, getting lost online. I mentioned
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when I was in college that year, 1996, when that that woman got lost in AOL, we had dialup internet. It was, you know, a
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very different world where we're all connected 24/7 on our phones. I'm sure we all have average phone usage of 7
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hours a day today. So, there's a lot more rabbit holes to fall into that reinforce this isolation. It doesn't
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actually solve your isolation or loneliness problem when you get stuck on a phone or stuck on the internet. It
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actually magnifies it, makes it worse because you start to see all the things you don't have and you start to feel
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worse about yourself and that leads to all of these kind of I would say difficult social context that Simon's
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talking about. With respect to affordability, as you know, I think that that's a distinct point which is related
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to our expectation that the government can and should always solve our problems for us. And as a result, we created the
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federal home loan program much like we created the federal student loan program. Both of which I believe created
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bubbles in those markets. We created this concept that every American family should be able to afford a home. And our
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solution was to pump a bunch of money into homes through the federal home loan program. And that ultimately led to
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bubbles of inaffordability for for homes. If we really want to solve this today, besides solving the government
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spending problem and inflation problem and dollar devaluation problem, which obviously require cutting spending, I
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think it's going to need to be some sort of set of rules around making sure that
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homes are not being bought up by institutions. That that's one that I think is going to be a pretty popular
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point that's going to come up in the next year or two, particularly in the next election cycle. So, you know,
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there's two sides to that to that one. I think you you're kind of dancing around
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the the issue there and I think it's very real which is the financial piece of this Freedberg boomers have just
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absolutely this these couple of generations if you look at the cost of homes like you mentioned the cost of
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education and then you just look at real wage growth I don't know if I sent you a
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chart Nick if you can take a look at this you know the big problem in the United States is wages have not grown
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except for people who have a lot of money already and so if you wanted to start a family and you're in $100,000 in
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debt for your student loans and homes have double, triple, quadrupled in price when compared to your income and we
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don't have real wage growth. That's an issue and I think this will become the issue of the next election. We see
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Mandami and the socialist movement. We talked about it last week. If you really want to make a compelling argument for
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the next election cycle, I think it's real wage growth. And if you look at something like minimum wage and this
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disparity between what top earners make and minimum wage, here's a chart of where minimum wage is in the United
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States versus other developed countries. There is a real argument here even though we might all be free market.
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Well, there's a very different approach. There's a very different approach to higher education in literally all of
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those countries except for ours. It's affordable. Yeah. Well, yeah. And and I think that we have
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to call a spade paid. There was an entire generation, if not two generations of young men and women
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younger than us, right? So, not in their late 40s, early 50s who were told that they must, not should, not it's nice to,
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they must go to university. And these folks took out an enormous amount of financial support to do so. And part of
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the underlying reason was that they were told and it sounds very credible. Technology is coming and there's going
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to be so much automation of all of the other kinds of jobs that you may do in a trade school. You should go to
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university and protect yourself. Well, lo and behold, it's turned out to be the exact opposite. So, could you imagine
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where, you know, you could have gone to trade school, been an electrician, been a plumber, build, done something,
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welder, made a couple hundred grand, married somebody, you know, she does a good job.
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Now, all of a sudden, she also makes $150, $200,000 a year. You're making $400,000 and you have no debt. That is
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the key. You have no debt. When you make 400K and have no debt, I'm sorry, but that is probably actually
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better than being the doctor making a million bucks. And then there are all of these other jobs that aren't a doctor
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where you're still saddled with the 300,000 and you have no way of paying it back. So I think that that's also a
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really important issue that we have to figure out at some point. There was a framing of the issue for an entire
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generation that was probably wrong. If I had to bet, I would bet that engineers are more
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likely to have their jobs replace in the short term than welders and plumbers.