The Hidden Crisis Modern Men Are Facing - Chamath Palihapitiya

This went viral. Estimated percentage of 30 year olds who are both married and homeowners. So two of the American dreams, dare I say, getting married and starting a family, having kids, and um in the 50s that was, you know, half of 30 year olds already were married and already had homes and now we're down to 12%. There's a lot of factors here obviously Chimov but your thoughts generally on this you were I sort of I started to do some research on this and it's really sad actually what's happening right now so I think if I had to kind of frame this that chart that you showed is more of the outcome and so you have to go all

the way back and try to explore what are the potential root causes that causes this kind of an outcome and There are there are a bunch of them. I think one of the first ones that we have to look at is what has happened to young men. And I think what's happened to young men is a little concerning. So I don't think it's our generation, but I do think if you talk to people 30 and under, you start to hear a consistent theme from guys, which is one, it's they don't really have the social skills to really talk to girls. It starts with that. And so what happens is they go to these different outlets. They go to video games.

They kind of communicate more online. As a result, they tend to have brittle or fragile emotional relationships and social relationships. They don't date the same way that they used to. Then a lot of guys just feel like they also don't want to get caught into being perceived, you know, post the me too movement in any way, shape, or form as being untowart. You take all of these factors and you put it together and there's a lot of guys that have just opted out and they just kind of move in a direction of parasocial relationships instead. Then I started to look at like the the data on

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 male is? That's scary to think. The average age. Yeah. Would it be the average age of an American man or does it skew younger? I would assume skews younger. It's gone. It's gone from 20 down to 16. There are more than 50% of 12-year-old boys now that watch porn. I was shocked. I was like, "What are you even talking about?" I was a teenager, late teenager, I think, when I like I mean, we had like you found a magazine here or there, whatever. They got a girly magazine. Yeah. But can you imagine what it does to a

12-year-old boy when they start to get instant gratification and you compound that all through high school and they don't have quote unquote what we would call gain, right? The ability to just talk and just kind of like carry on a conversation. What do you think happens? And then you go into the dating pool and what are these dating sites optimized for? These dating sites are optimized to keep people there, not for you to find a relationship and for you to churn, right? And so the gamification and the and the dynamics of those systems are where many young men and women now look to to find a relationship. And so you have lonely young men that creates

lonely young women. a small cohort of very eligible men and women that everybody's chasing and fighting over. Everybody else kind of left on the sideline. And so what do you think happens over 15 or 20 years of this activity? It's what you see in this data. People aren't coupling up. They're not having long-term committed relationships. So obviously as a byproduct, they're not getting married more. Obviously, as a byproduct of that, then you're not combining two incomes. You're still with one income. At the same time, Nick, I just pulled this data. You can show it. What has happened to the underlying things that people would look to as

satisfying markers of progress in life? A home, a good education, those are way out of reach, right? So, if you look at this chart, the price to income ratio of a home from 1980 to now has effectively made it so that you have to make an enormous amount of money as a single individual to afford a home today. M and then if you only have a small percentage of people actually getting married and bringing two incomes together, you see what you're seeing today in that chart. So I don't know. I 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,

but it's taken me this long and maybe this is what all these young people have been screaming about and I have ignored. So I apologize for not really understanding the gravity of it. But I think that this is a big problem and I think we need to start talking about it a lot more and here's a manifestation of it. If you look past year prevalence of major depressive episodes US adults 2021 pretty recent data and that 18 to 25 spike look at that Shimoth and then 26 to 49 and then the older generations maybe not having these massive depression episodes. Frey any thoughts on the American dream changing and young men? Yeah, I think there's a lot of

conflated factors here. They can certainly be related, but there's just a lot to unpack in all that. I mean, I can I can comment on the one piece. I I think we talked a little bit about, you know, getting lost online. I mentioned 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 very different world where we're all connected 24/7 on our phones. I'm sure we all have average phone usage of 7 hours a day today. So, there's a lot more rabbit holes to fall into that reinforce this isolation. It doesn't actually solve your isolation or loneliness problem when you get stuck on a phone or stuck on the internet. It

actually magnifies it, makes it worse because you start to see all the things you don't have and you start to feel worse about yourself and that leads to all of these kind of I would say difficult social context that Simon's talking about. With respect to affordability, as you know, I think that that's a distinct point which is related to our expectation that the government can and should always solve our problems for us. And as a result, we created the federal home loan program much like we created the federal student loan program. Both of which I believe created bubbles in those markets. We created this concept that every American family should be able to afford a home. And our

solution was to pump a bunch of money into homes through the federal home loan program. And that ultimately led to bubbles of inaffordability for for homes. If we really want to solve this today, besides solving the government spending problem and inflation problem and dollar devaluation problem, which obviously require cutting spending, I think it's going to need to be some sort of set of rules around making sure that homes are not being bought up by institutions. That that's one that I think is going to be a pretty popular point that's going to come up in the next year or two, particularly in the next election cycle. So, you know,

there's two sides to that to that one. I think you you're kind of dancing around the the issue there and I think it's very real which is the financial piece of this Freedberg boomers have just absolutely this these couple of generations if you look at the cost of homes like you mentioned the cost of education and then you just look at real wage growth I don't know if I sent you a chart Nick if you can take a look at this you know the big problem in the United States is wages have not grown 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

debt for your student loans and homes have double, triple, quadrupled in price when compared to your income and we don't have real wage growth. That's an issue and I think this will become the issue of the next election. We see Mandami and the socialist movement. We talked about it last week. If you really want to make a compelling argument for the next election cycle, I think it's real wage growth. And if you look at something like minimum wage and this disparity between what top earners make and minimum wage, here's a chart of where minimum wage is in the United States versus other developed countries. There is a real argument here even though we might all be free market.

Well, there's a very different approach. There's a very different approach to higher education in literally all of those countries except for ours. It's affordable. Yeah. Well, yeah. And and I think that we have to call a spade paid. There was an entire generation, if not two generations of young men and women 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, they must go to university. And these folks took out an enormous amount of financial support to do so. And part of the underlying reason was that they were told and it sounds very credible. Technology is coming and there's going

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 university and protect yourself. Well, lo and behold, it's turned out to be the exact opposite. So, could you imagine where, you know, you could have gone to trade school, been an electrician, been a plumber, build, done something, welder, made a couple hundred grand, married somebody, you know, she does a good job. 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 the key. You have no debt. When you make 400K and have no debt, I'm sorry, but that is probably actually

better than being the doctor making a million bucks. And then there are all of these other jobs that aren't a doctor 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 really important issue that we have to figure out at some point. There was a framing of the issue for an entire generation that was probably wrong. If I had to bet, I would bet that engineers are more likely to have their jobs replace in the short term than welders and plumbers.