Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Manosphere, Feminazis & the "Six Tribes" of Young People

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Manosphere, Feminazis & the "Six Tribes" of Young People · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  Are the kids all right?
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  Young people, people under the age of 35, are apparently the most
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  miserable generation, but they're not all miserable in exactly the same way.
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  And today's
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  guest has dug into the six foundational tribes, which she says define young people, their
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  attitude to life, their attitude to work, and their outlook for the future.
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  These six
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  tribes are very, very different from far-left student activists to family values nationalists,
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  from pragmatic strivers to affluent, already comfortable nepo babies.
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  But they have enough
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  in common that we can glean from them the kinds of strains that they are going to put on politics
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  and culture and society and try to figure out how best to serve them and our countries.
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  Parnell McGuinness is a columnist at the Sydney Morning Herald, the biggest broadsheet
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  in Australia's biggest city.
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  She's a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies
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  and she's previously worked for Australia's Centre Right Party,
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  the Australian Liberal Party,
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  and also for the Greens in Germany.
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  The latest report which she's here to unpack
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  is called Generation Trapped, Housing, Handouts
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  and the Collapse of Young Australians' Life Satisfaction.
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  I hope you enjoy as much as I did
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  the one, the only, Parnell McGuinness.
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  How do you do a weekly column every single week?
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  It's been six years now that you've had a column in the biggest broadsheet in Sydney.
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  Well, with passion, that's how.
• 1:39
  Look, I suppose I'm the kind of person who's constantly thinking about things and interested in things.
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  And I keep a big, you know, in Apple Notes, I have thousands and thousands of notes where I put down thoughts about various things.
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  And sometimes it'll be a long-term interest.
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  So I will save everything that I'm interested in that's related to a particular topic into one note.
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  And sometimes it's just, you know, something that comes up and I'll dash down a note.
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  And now I've had, because there are so many notes in there, I've had to create a super organizer for that.
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  So I have a column ideas app, which is just like a one-liner of the thing that is.
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  But it's still just a basic notes app.
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  You're not using, like, you're not putting it into some fancy AI to travel, like, Notebook LLM or something to try to make connections.
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  I have played with Notebook LLM just out of my own interest.
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  I'm not expert enough in AI to use it to the best effect.
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  I think that there's probably something interesting to be done in that field.
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  Like, I mean, I really think that AI capabilities are just growing every day, and I'm fascinated by them.
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  Actually, in the research that we'll talk about, I'll tell you how I used AI in that in an interesting way.
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  But yeah, I think that at the moment, people in the media use AI in exactly the wrong way.
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  Not like you're suggesting to make connections between them, but instead to edit the columns.
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  And I have discovered that it has a cadence.
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  Oh, definitely.
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  Absolutely recognize.
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  A lot of em dashes.
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  It's not just the em dashes.
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  It's actually, it's these sort of binary sentences.
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  it's not this it's that or um it's not just policy it's voting with absolutely yes yes yes
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  and it tries to give a punchy it'll have a long sentence and then it'll have a punchy summary
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  that it thinks is really landing except that the summary doesn't land a lot of the time it doesn't
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  make any sense yes you know if you read um uh kaufman you know system one and two the
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  Yeah, thinking fast and slow.
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  Yeah, yeah.
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  So I always think about AI written things like this.
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  They go straight past, straight through your system one and bypass system two.
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  And just explain the system one and system two.
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  It was Kahneman, right?
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  Danny Kahneman.
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  It was Kahneman.
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  That's right.
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  Thank you.
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  So system one is the system, the brain which just accepts things based on rules.
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  So, you know, you might even call it the gut.
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  It just feels right.
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  And so you don't examine it any further.
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  It's where the easy knowledge is stored, you know, two times two equals four sort of thing.
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  System two is where you have to examine things more deeply.
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  And so if a problem is harder, it will take, the brain takes it out of system one, puts
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  it into system two, and system two cogitates on it and therefore understands it more deeply
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  and forms connections.
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  Now, the problem with AI is because it does this sort of language which sounds so right, it bypasses, in my opinion, it bypasses that system too.
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  And so you end up not noticing things which are just completely nonsensical.
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  Right.
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  Completely wrong.
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  Or a little off.
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  I was using it last, the last column that I wrote was about AI and about how the strain that the change as a result of AI is going to put on society is not being properly reckoned with.
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  And I put it into Claude just to see what would happen.
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  And look, it is useful.
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  Sometimes it comes up with, it says you've actually already said this thing, you know, in paragraph three.
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  You don't need to say it again in paragraph eight, which is great.
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  But it came up with this punchline where I was talking about like apocalyptic social decline.
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  And it said, Mad Max isn't a political parable.
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  It's mathematics.
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  And I thought, oh, that's a great line.
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  And then I paused for a moment and thought, hang on, what does that mean?
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  What is it making?
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  I mean, I think I know what it's getting at.
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  Like we will reliably end up in a terrible situation if we don't address it.
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  But mathematics isn't the right thing.
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  You might say Mad Max isn't a political parable.
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  it's human psychology or it's biology or something, but it's just a little.
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  That's right.
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  And it's these sort of naff little sayings.
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  Exactly.
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  And that's such a perfect
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  example.
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  So you read it when you're tired and you think, oh gosh, that's great.
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  Sounds fabulous.
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  But then this is why I will always sleep on it.
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  If I've used AI to edit something or to,
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  to draft something up, always sleep on it because the next day when your brain is fresher and not
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  just letting things pass through, you'll look at those lines and think, this is complete nonsense,
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  or this is not what I meant at all, or it's stripped nuance out of things.
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  I mean, one thing that I am using it for more and more, which I'm amazed it's good at,
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  is actually making connections that I haven't made.
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  So not the writing or even the copy editing,
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  but I'll actually, I turned it on the other day when I was in the car and just spoke to it
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  verbally and had it talking back to me, had Claude talking back to me as I was trying to wrestle
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  through exactly what I was trying to say about my next column.
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  I was like, I think there's a bit of a problem in me trying
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  to make this point because it kind of contradicts this other point.
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  And it came up with a really neat, like, cognitive
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  and logical solution, which six months ago I would never have believed.
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  Well, this is, but now it's, you know, it's essentially now
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  it's a really sophisticated Google that you've just used there,
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  which I'm all for.
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  Like, a more sophisticated Google is an amazing tool
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  because Google was an amazing tool.
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  But it was.
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  it's not just looking stuff up.
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  It is making connections.
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  Well, that's right.
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  But, you know, it's just like Google allowed you to access information that
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  previously wouldn't have been at your fingertips.
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  Now, AI is drawing connections between information
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  in a way that wouldn't have been at your fingertips.
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  So, you know, people did think
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  when Google first came on the scene that it was cheating to, you know, you weren't going to the
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  library, you were looking things.
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  And of course, you know, you do need to use it thoughtfully.
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  You need to go deeper and not just use the front page results and things like that.
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  But, yeah, it is essentially a really powerful tool once you learn to use it properly.
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  That's what we're learning to do.
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  Yeah.
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  And so just coming back to your column, have you noticed that there are, and leading up to your current research, that there have been fields in which you were initially uninterested in writing about that now you are or vice versa, things that were interesting five years ago that are no longer on our radar?
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  I think that's always the case, though, isn't it?
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  I mean, we always move through sort of periods of interest in various things.
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  They're like the things that you're interested right now because they've come up.
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  But I definitely have long-term themes.
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  And I really notice this in my columns now.
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  You know, when you look back at a bank of columns, obviously, for me, what really emerges
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  is feminism.
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  I'm fascinated with feminism, what it means, what it's done to women, what the sexual
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  revolution has meant for women.
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  And that always comes through again and again in different ways in my column.
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  Immigration has been a big one because I lived in Berlin in the 2000s.
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  I accidentally moved into the ghetto.
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  So, you know, nice white girl from a privileged background.
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  The ghetto of what?
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  Where were the migrants from?
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  So it was very heavily Turkish and Arab there.
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  And the thing is, in Berlin, it's very confusing because this was not far from the city.
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  So this was quite a central apartment.
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  It just didn't occur to me.
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  I was young.
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  I was stupid.
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  The apartment was very cheap, and I didn't think about why that might have been.
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  And so I moved in there.
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  It really was a great apartment, but it was an experience because we didn't have a washing machine or dryer.
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  So I had to go down to the local wash salon, which had a bar attached to it.
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  And as a result, while we were doing our washing, we'd get talking to the locals there.
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  And I became friends with a lot of them.
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  But they were definitely not people who I would have come across in any other situation.
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  I know it was fabulous.
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  It was fabulous.
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  It was also an education, however, on what happens when you don't do integration right, that it actually harms the people who are not integrated.
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  You know, it's not like you can just provide them with welfare or provide them with an apartment and say, our job is done.
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  You know, the Germans always like to talk about human dignity.
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  There is no human dignity in not being able to find your way into the workforce.
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  and that was in the end what I realized with a lot of these guys you know a lot of these young men
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  felt very outside of the society because they didn't know how to do the basic things like
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  getting themselves a job so they would you know become drug dealers or you know or petty criminals
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  or just give up a lot of the time which is very sad one of them who was a very good friend decided
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  that he wanted to apply for the French Foreign Legion.
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  And so he came to me and he said, can you help me with my survey?
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  And I was like, well, my German is not perfect,
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  but it's probably better than yours,
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  which is another sort of indictment on things.
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  So I helped him with that.
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  You know, we worked, and I was pretty much fluent by then.
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  So I helped him with that.
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  We worked on things.
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  And he put in his application.
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  and it was rejected.
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  And I'll never forget just thinking this is, it's so heartbreaking
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  that this guy isn't even skilled enough to be cannon fodder.
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  He doesn't have the soft skills
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  of being an employee.
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  And that is something that we've taken away from him because we thought that
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  simply putting, you know, simply giving people the material necessities is all that it takes
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  for a good life.
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  And I mean, not to mention the fact that in Germany, if you're a Turkish
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  migrant in Germany, I think you can almost never become a German citizen, right?
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  I mean,
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  there's a weird thing that Germans have about German ethnic citizenship.
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  So what you're talking about, so they actually do have citizenship.
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  So especially the kids of
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  the guest workers.
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  So they have citizenship.
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  Some of them are, you know, not just second or third
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  generation German.
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  They're like, you know, fourth or fifth.
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  It's sort of...
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  But what are my friends
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  in Berlin talking about when they're talking about it's not like Australia where after you've...
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  Yeah, if you've been living in Australia on a, you know, residence visa for whatever it is,
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  six years or eight years or something, then you're eligible for citizenship.
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  But in Germany,
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  there's an ethnic component.
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  They're talking culturally.
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  So these people do actually have
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  German citizenship.
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  But isn't there a guest worker program that the Turks lived there on for 30 years
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  without being eligible?
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  Well, but then they became citizens.
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  So, you know, at some point,
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  so that finished in the 60s with not allowing them to become citizens.
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  That was, people said,
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  this is not okay.
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  You know, they want to stay here now.
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  They've had kids here.
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  Their life is here.
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  We've got to give them citizenship.
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  But they were never integrated properly.
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  They were never taught
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  German properly.
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  Their kids weren't integrated properly in the schools.
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  And so that has had
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  knock on multi-generational effects.
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  Do you think that we've escaped that in Australia?
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  I mean,
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  you know, famously, as we look at the rise of the far right in Europe and the alternative for
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  Deutschland and, you know, Marine Le Pen in France and Farage in the UK, a lot of us can
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  sometimes be a bit smug saying, well, we don't have the Bonlieu of Paris and we don't have
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  the towns in Northern England where, you know, English isn't spoken on the streets anywhere and
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  the local police don't even feel that they can go in to sort things out because they're basically
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  run by migrant fiefdoms.
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  How has that happened and are we immune or not?
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  No, we're not immune.
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  It's happening here.
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  There are a couple of reasons why we don't notice it.
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  One is that
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  Australia is so spread out that it's not right next to us.
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  So the place that I lived in Berlin
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  was literally 10 minutes walk from where I later moved to, which was very white and you would never
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  have known all of those things.
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  But because things are closer together, you see it more.
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  Now in Australia, of course, it's a 40 minute drive before you come from the centre of Sydney,
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  before you get to a place like that.
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  So we don't see that.
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  The other issue is that I think
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  we were very good at integration for many years.
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  So Australia had a very thoughtful
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  integration program, which was sort of built up during the 30s to answer the difficult question
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  of how on earth you should integrate these brown Southerners from Europe, these Italians and
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  Spaniards and Greeks who were coming.
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  And people at the time were worried that they might not
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  integrate well with the Northern Europeans who were there.
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  And so there was a lot of thinking
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  at the time about how to do that well.
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  Now, John Howard actually carried through,
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  the Prime Minister John Howard carried through that tradition in his long prime ministership.
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  This was in the 90s and 2000s.
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  That's right, 90s and 2000s, and talked about how to ensure that people integrate by not funding
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  ethnic community organisations, which then created leaders who had an interest, a financial interest,
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  in keeping their communities separate.
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  So Howard was all about community integration.
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  Obviously,
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  work is an integrator, but so are sports clubs, so are all kinds of social institutions.
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  And the
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  more people have to themselves invest in those in a voluntary capacity, the more they work
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  for integration.
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  So Australia was slow in getting to the integration problem that the rest of the
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  world or that certainly Europe has at the moment.
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  You mean the problem was slow in developing here,
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  not we were slow at addressing it?
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  That's right.
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  Exactly.
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  We are 10 years behind
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  the European problem in this.
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  I used to think 20 years behind, but recent events, I've sort of
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  looked at, spent a bit more time in some of those areas where this is happening and I've revised my
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  my ideas by recent events do you mean terrorism and the the terror attack in bondi but also the
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  response to october 7 the the fact that people became very ethnically tribal um and and not just
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  ethnically but religiously tribal following that event um showed that there is less integration
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  in Australia than you might think when you spend time
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  in the middle of Sydney, you know, even some of the sort
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  of outer suburbs.
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  But if you go further out, you'll see people who just are no longer,
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  there is no longer any deliberate thinking about how to bring them
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  into the mainstream of society and to bring them together
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  under a shared culture.
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  I mean, it's been eye-opening, hasn't it, the past couple of years
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  in ways that make me depressed but also maybe optimistic
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  that it's at least alerting us to the problem before it's too late.
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  I always take the kids, used to take the kids more
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  when they were more little to there's a big playground
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  out at Olympic Park, which is where Sydney hosted
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  the Olympics in the year 2000.
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  So it's much closer to areas that are heavily Muslim
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  and Arab than where I live.
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  and you know i used to get such a kick out of the kids being the only non-muslims playing there and
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  you know whole families picnicking and you know it's not like the women are wearing burqas but
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  they're just wearing headscarves and i used to feel this great sort of multicultural comedy in
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  my sort of progressive lefty way and after october 7th and seeing the uniformity of rage
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  and sort of semi-sympathy for jihadists from large swathes of that community.
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  I did then, it tainted it a bit because I would stand there in the sunshine
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  looking at all these families thinking, if they knew I was a Jew,
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  how would they treat me?
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  Would they still smile at me?
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  Like, is this just a one-way sense of comity?
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  And that is what we're now wondering in a lot of countries around the world.
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  And, of course, the answer is there is no uniform answer.
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  No, and many of them I would like to believe, you know,
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  would still see my humanity as well.
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  But, yes, whatever we can do to make sure that we turn the volume up on that
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  and down on tribal dogmatism.
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  And that's why I think we have to be really thoughtful about integration.
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  I think we have to do it deliberately.
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  I think we have to acknowledge that Australia is an immigration nation
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  and that that is a wonderful thing.
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  But the reason that we've got such a great immigration nation is because it was done deliberately.
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  Now, in the, gosh, I think it was the late 90s, I was only half tuned into politics at that age.
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  I remember there was a debate about multiculturalism.
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  There were the people in favour of it.
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  And then John Howard, the prime minister at the time, said, no, we are multi-ethnic, but we have a shared culture.
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  That debate was won by the multiculturalists, by the idea that, no, we have to celebrate all of these different cultures.
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  And what even is, you know, why should we have one particular culture?
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  What makes one culture better than the other?
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  It was, you know, the height of relativism at the time.
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  They won.
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  So now we've got the problems that come from that particular strain of thinking in society.
• 19:45
  You know, we are no longer thinking the reason that Australia is great is because we share a set of values.
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  And, you know, you can have your different backgrounds, you can have, you know, your different practices.
• 19:58
  You can be Buddhist, you can be whatever.
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  But at the end of the day, we're here in the country together working on a society which has shared values and a shared idea of what it means to be one place.
• 20:13
  Yeah, and I mean the great danger, of course, in not having that as a founding fundamental approach to our sort of demos is that people crave that.
• 20:24
  And so if you don't give it to them, then they're going to seek it in perverse and distorted ways like the far right.
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  I mean, you know, to lefties who really don't want the far right to get power, the surest way to empower the far right is to claim that anyone who thinks that there should be a universal shared set of values is just a white supremacist bigot.
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  Yeah, that's right.
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  That's right.
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  How to alienate people in one idea.
• 20:51
  Yeah, exactly.
• 20:53
  How do you feel about America?
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  Because, I mean, the interesting thing about the States is that, like, as Ronald Reagan said in his final speech as president, I think, you know, you can't go to – there are very few countries that you can go to and just become a fully-fledged member of that country.
• 21:10
  It's like we're talking about the Turks in Germany.
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  You know, you can come to America regardless of where you are, what your cultural background is, and you can become an American just by signing up to a set of ideas, which is not true of the French or the Japanese or whatever.
• 21:25
  Do you have a sense from your understanding of the states about whether or not that is sustainable and how they've done that so well?
• 21:33
  I think for the US it worked out really well for a long time as well.
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  So essentially in Anglophone countries around the world, immigration has worked better than in other countries.
• 21:42
  And there are a couple of reasons for that.
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  I can't remember the source of this study, but I do remember it very clearly.
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  is the reason is, or at least the theory was, that people go to Anglophone countries from
• 21:57
  whichever country they come from because they're likely to have learned English at school.
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  And if they want to make something of themselves, if they really back themselves,
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  then Anglophone countries are their first choice because that's where they can, you know,
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  fit into business, make a business or become part of society.
• 22:17
  um and then the other countries the other flip side of that coin is that a lot of the
• 22:23
  scandinavian countries and germany and countries like the france and so on have a big welfare
• 22:29
  culture so people who don't back themselves are then more attracted to the welfare culture and
• 22:36
  you do see a little bit of that now i think where america really succeeded was that it was the land
• 22:44
  of hope for people to come to it.
• 22:46
  And integration is fundamentally the first unit of integration is
• 22:50
  a job, is becoming, you know, working with other people of that country.
• 22:56
  So America worked extremely
• 22:58
  well like that for a long time.
• 23:01
  I think that then, however, there are a number of factors where
• 23:06
  almost, you know, bleeding heart lefties often make stupid mistakes when out of the very best
• 23:12
  of intentions, but just not thinking through the second and third order consequences of what
• 23:17
  they're doing.
• 23:18
  And so trying to create better conditions for people, trying to create,
• 23:25
  to ensure that nobody is left hungry and poor and so on, accidentally dismantled the very thing
• 23:32
  that led people to have successful, satisfying and shared lives.
• 23:39
  Which is what exactly, if you had to articulate it?
• 23:42
  So, I mean, you know, simply sometimes welfare measures can backfire like that.
• 23:47
  So you will, first of all, you can attract people who are deliberately coming because they think that this is the land of plenty and that everything's free.
• 23:55
  Australia certainly has that issue.
• 23:58
  And then also, as I say, with work being the first unit of integration, if you are not putting that first, then you're actually keeping people locked out of society.
• 24:11
  you know, of course it's hard moving countries.
• 24:13
  Like immigration is really hard.
• 24:16
  Even for me
• 24:17
  moving to Germany, it was hard.
• 24:19
  And, you know, I have a German passport and I speak German.
• 24:22
  Also, you were in the German Greens.
• 24:23
  So when you say that, you know, bleeding heart lefties
• 24:26
  sometimes feel that way, did you, was your political transformation?
• 24:30
  I wasn't, I wasn't in the Greens.
• 24:31
  I did some work for them.
• 24:32
  Okay.
• 24:33
  But I mean, affiliated with, like, you know, you don't go and work for people who you
• 24:36
  fundamentally disagree with.
• 24:37
  So was that transformation, was that a political
• 24:40
  transformation on the basis of the way that you saw opportunity versus welfarism?
• 24:46
  Again, I was young.
• 24:47
  I needed the money.
• 24:50
  So that was probably the first and foremost,
• 24:53
  the reason for doing that work.
• 24:55
  But no, I did believe in what they were talking about at the
• 24:58
  time, which was ironically, after everything I've just been saying, open borders.
• 25:05
  But I think also
• 25:06
  the Greens in Germany back then were what you would call the Rialos.
• 25:09
  It was sort of the pragmatic end of the party,
• 25:13
  and they seemed kind of economically ambitious for Germany.
• 25:20
  Yes, it brought together things that I believed in,
• 25:23
  the well-being of people, that we should be working
• 25:28
  to make a better society and give people a more satisfying existence,
• 25:33
  and the naivety of youth and, you know, just simply wanting the cash.
• 25:39
  Okay, all good reasons.
• 25:41
  I mean, another reason that occurs to me why Anglophone countries
• 25:44
  might do immigration better than non-Anglophone countries
• 25:47
  is that all the Anglophone countries, with the exception of the UK
• 25:51
  and Ireland, are new countries anyway.
• 25:53
  So they're all migrant.
• 25:54
  I mean, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, right?
• 25:57
  And, in fact, you would argue that migration has probably worked better
• 26:00
  in those countries than it has in the UK.
• 26:03
  which is older and has, you know, it means something to be English in a cultural way
• 26:07
  that it doesn't mean something to be Australian or Canadian or American or museum.
• 26:10
  And that's getting back to the point that you're making before.
• 26:12
  You can become Australian,
• 26:13
  you can become American in a way that you can't become the nationality, a nationality which has
• 26:20
  existed for a long, long time.
• 26:22
  It has deep cultural roots.
• 26:23
  It's hard to become Scottish.
• 26:25
  Yeah, that's right.
• 26:26
  If you're not Scottish.
• 26:28
  Okay.
• 26:28
  So let's talk about young people and the six tribes that you're
• 26:31
  identifying here because I think this will you know overlap onto a lot of what we're talking about
• 26:36
  here well I was staggered in your report to see that the that young people today are the most
• 26:44
  depressed I don't know if we're talking about clinical depression but the most negative that's
• 26:48
  right the most the most miserable essentially most miserable group they start life and this is this
• 26:55
  is not from my study this is from but they start life as unhappy as people used to get in middle
• 27:02
  age or as we now get in middle age i don't know but but it's sort of um but so they are starting
• 27:09
  off much unhappier and of course one of the great questions is does this mean they're going to get
• 27:14
  even unhappier as they hit middle age because that is the typical u-curve is that people become
• 27:20
  unhappy and then they get and then they get happier again on at the other end as their
• 27:24
  responsibilities wane and so on right so normally you're happy when you're young healthy full of sex
• 27:31
  and like don't have any responsibility and then you get all the responsibilities of middle age
• 27:36
  and parenting and mortgages and become a bit less happy and then you're unburdened again and become
• 27:41
  happy exactly but they're starting at the bottom starting that's right they're starting really low
• 27:46
  So that's a real issue.
• 27:48
  And it's happening in Australia and around the world.
• 27:50
  So this is in the US, in the UK, all of those places as well.
• 27:54
  In fact, all developed countries, this study covered.
• 27:58
  And of course, we've got to look into what's going on there.
• 28:03
  So, you know, why are young people so unhappy?
• 28:06
  um the other big question that i think is worth asking is um why why sorry i've lost my
• 28:17
  completely lost my train of um but but so that was one of the right oh that's it and the so
• 28:24
  that was one of the questions i wanted to answer the other one that i'm worried about is democratic
• 28:28
  disillusionment so you know so young people studies of young people increasingly show that
• 28:34
  they don't back democracy.
• 28:36
  They don't believe in it.
• 28:37
  They don't think, you know, they don't tend to the, you know,
• 28:40
  best system of any other, even if it's not perfect,
• 28:44
  kind of Churchill view.
• 28:46
  The worst system.
• 28:47
  The worst system.
• 28:48
  Apart from all the others, as Churchill said.
• 28:50
  That's the one.
• 28:50
  That's the one.
• 28:51
  And that is a real problem because we are a liberal democratic society
• 28:57
  and that means something.
• 28:59
  It means that we get to vote for a set of circumstances and we believe that our vote will change things.
• 29:07
  And I think that what came out of the research that I've done is that young people no longer believe that they have the ability to change things.
• 29:17
  So the top line finding, and there's lots of deep research in there because I used a Pew-style sort of division of a way of looking at the values and behaviors and attitudes of people to segment people into tribes.
• 29:33
  But the insight that that allowed at the top line is that people who feel like they have control over their lives have higher life satisfaction than people who don't feel like they have control over their lives, who have very low satisfaction.
• 29:48
  And only four out of 10 young Australians between 18 and 34 years old believe that they have control over their circumstance.
• 29:58
  Four out of 10 say they control their circumstances.
• 30:01
  It's amazing.
• 30:01
  I remember a clinical psychologist explaining to me once like spheres of control, these sort of concentric rings of control, right?
• 30:09
  The bullseye in the middle being things that you have total control over, like whether or not you walk out of this interview right now, whether or not you eat breakfast or whatever.
• 30:18
  And then at the far end, outside ring is, you know, climate chaos, the war in Iran and so on and so forth.
• 30:25
  And making the point, sort of channeling Jonathan Haidt, I suppose, and, you know, our information consumption, that the more time you spend in a further out circle, the less happy you are.
• 30:37
  And the more time your mind spends on things that are within your power, generally the more content you are.
• 30:44
  And I think the argument that was out of that, I can't remember where it was from, was that liberals spend more time in the outer circle.
• 30:51
  And are less happy.
• 30:51
  So people on the left, that's right.
• 30:53
  Yes.
• 30:53
  Whereas, you know, a religiously conservative family in, you know, the Midwest of the United States is going to spend a lot of time thinking about the church bake-off and thinking about their school's little league and things over which they control and contribute.
• 31:06
  And that we've been migrating psychologically from the center to the periphery of those rings over time.
• 31:12
  It's a really interesting point.
• 31:14
  It's not borne out.
• 31:15
  Well, sorry, I'm not saying that that's wrong.
• 31:17
  I think that that can be true.
• 31:19
  But they're also not always the groups who are not feeling in control in my research.
• 31:24
  So you definitely do have that in one group.
• 31:27
  So I segmented them into six groups.
• 31:30
  We've got what I called, I gave them these names.
• 31:32
  Yes, I love the florid.
• 31:34
  I've got them written down here.
• 31:35
  Yes, I love the florid terms.
• 31:37
  So let's go through them.
• 31:38
  So I had acronyms to begin with.
• 31:41
  So I had progressive identitarians.
• 31:42
  Now, those are the people who you're talking about, the left in the sort of outer concentric circles.
• 31:50
  They're far lefty, LGBTQIA+.
• 31:53
  That's right.
• 31:54
  40% of them identify as LGBTQIA+.
• 31:57
  Incredible.
• 31:58
  And which is huge.
• 31:59
  That's right.
• 31:59
  So the average in the age group is about 10%.
• 32:02
  So they skew the entire age group, you know, if you look at them in the aggregate.
• 32:06
  Did you do any digging into what they mean by LGBTQIA+.
• 32:10
  No, we didn't do that.
• 32:11
  Because I'd be interested to know how many of them actually have non-heterosexual...
• 32:16
  Yeah, well, exactly.
• 32:17
  How many of them are non-heterosexuals versus how many of them are just expressing sort
• 32:22
  of linguistic solidarity with an idea of queerness?
• 32:24
  I suspect that you've hit on something there.
• 32:27
  So, I mean, a friend of mine likes to call them spicy straights.
• 32:30
  The people who find it, it's too boring to describe themselves as heterosexual.
• 32:35
  So, they'll say I'm queer, but in fact, they've only ever had heterosexual relationships.
• 32:41
  Or they're gender non-conforming.
• 32:42
  Yeah, that's right.
• 32:43
  It's a guy who wears a dress but sleeps with women and all of a sudden he's...
• 32:47
  Exactly, exactly.
• 32:47
  So I think there's a lot in that because they're very identity focused, which is why I called
• 32:51
  them identitarians, progressive identitarians.
• 32:53
  So they're sort of...
• 32:55
  And they think about identity across all kinds of other vectors as well.
• 33:00
  But they are...
• 33:01
  And they tend to be students.
• 33:03
  So you see that education component.
• 33:05
  They tend to either still be living at home with their parents or renting.
• 33:10
  but what you see is that these people have a very low sense of control over their aspirations and
• 33:16
  being able to achieve what they want to achieve in life and they've given up.
• 33:21
  They've given up
• 33:22
  entirely.
• 33:22
  They focus on short-term goals instead but they're not happy.
• 33:26
  So we're seeing high
• 33:29
  anxiety in this group, low sense of control, low life satisfaction.
• 33:34
  So that's the concentric
• 33:36
  circle you were talking about.
• 33:38
  But then you've got two groups who, you know, in the old days,
• 33:43
  they might have even been both sort of the conservatives.
• 33:47
  And one of them that I find
• 33:48
  is really interesting, what I originally called the Linders, but they're-
• 33:53
  The leaders?
• 33:54
  The Linders.
• 33:55
  Oh, the Linders.
• 33:56
  Yes, because I don't know, for some reason that name just summed it up for me.
• 34:01
  But then in the
• 34:01
  final wash, I called them the dislocated post-traditionalists, which is a bit of a mouthful.
• 34:07
  But the reason I did that is because there's a clue in there.
• 34:10
  And I'll tell you what their characteristics are, and then I'll tell you what I was thinking.
• 34:15
  So these are young women who have children but are not married.
• 34:19
  So they tend to be in de facto arrangements.
• 34:21
  There is a man around, but as I found out in Quoll, they're often a couple of fathers to the children.
• 34:29
  They don't have degrees and they have these sort of situations which have evolved.
• 34:37
  They are desperately unhappy and they feel very out of control.
• 34:42
  They're ready to burn the world down in their voting.
• 34:46
  They are not happy and don't feel represented in politics at all.
• 34:51
  Now, the reason I called them dislocated post-traditionalists is because you look at these young women and you think in the past, perhaps pre-sexual revolution, these are women who would have, you know, followed the traditional pathway.
• 35:06
  They would have gotten married young to some guy who, you know, fell in love with them, couldn't resist them at the time.
• 35:12
  They would have had a family and like they might not have had the happiest marriage ever, but they would have had a satisfaction.
• 35:18
  satisfaction.
• 35:19
  It would have been a stable life.
• 35:21
  Now they have a very unstable life because the
• 35:24
  men are not sticking around.
• 35:26
  They're not marrying them.
• 35:28
  It's hard to be a young woman without a
• 35:31
  degree and with children.
• 35:34
  And there's a lot of misery in there.
• 35:36
  So I think that they are people
• 35:39
  who would have influenced.
• 35:40
  They're a direct environment, but some social things are now
• 35:45
  beyond their control.
• 35:48
  And then you've got the young men, or they tend to be young men,
• 35:52
  so I called them natals.
• 35:54
  Natals, as in like birth?
• 35:57
  That's right, exactly.
• 35:58
  So these are the, they tend to identify as far right, but they're really,
• 36:03
  they're anti-immigration, they're worried about crime, they're very proud of the nation.
• 36:08
  Oh, right.
• 36:08
  Natal in terms of like blood and soil?
• 36:10
  Exactly.
• 36:11
  That's the sort of, that's the direction I was thinking.
• 36:13
  Yeah.
• 36:14
  And they're also very annoyed because they feel like things are out of control.
• 36:18
  They can't stop the government making decisions which are going very wrong in their opinion.
• 36:24
  They also want to burn down the world so they don't feel represented.
• 36:28
  And, you know, in Australia, we've recently seen the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, a party which people consider to be far right and populist.
• 36:37
  and you could, well, these guys were already voting in that direction
• 36:42
  or already leaning in that direction.
• 36:43
  I reckon they've been joined by the young women
• 36:46
  who already feel like the world is burning down.
• 36:50
  And they would easily, not feeling well represented,
• 36:52
  come over to a view like that because while in the past
• 36:56
  they've voted left or identify as green, actually their values don't.
• 37:00
  This is the Linders, you mean?
• 37:02
  That's right, the Linders, the dislocated post-trats.
• 37:04
  Yeah, their values don't align with the Green Party or with left voting.
• 37:10
  They're not choosing LGBTQIA plus out of solidarity.
• 37:14
  Not at all.
• 37:15
  They're worried about energy sovereignty.
• 37:17
  They don't think that Australia should be signing up to international climate treaties.
• 37:22
  And they, you know, so insofar as they think about these things, their values don't align with this sort of left liberal approach at all.
• 37:33
  um so they're you know so i think that those are the the really low agency people then you get just
• 37:41
  before we move on to the three higher agency and maybe less anxious groups let's just dig into
• 37:46
  those two because i think that's really interesting especially those the the dislocated post-traditionalists
• 37:52
  and the natals um there's good reasons why the dislocated post-traditionalists let's just call
• 37:59
  and the Linders for the purposes of brevity.
• 38:03
  I mean, they have more legitimate reason to be anxious and depressed
• 38:07
  than, for example, the progressive identitarians, right?
• 38:10
  I mean, the progressive identitarians might be spending all of their time
• 38:13
  in the farthest ring of the sphere of control,
• 38:16
  worrying about why Trump and Israel are being so mean to everybody.
• 38:21
  But if you're an uneducated single mother
• 38:26
  with kids from several different guys working a few jobs,
• 38:32
  then life genuinely is objectively as hard for you
• 38:35
  as it is for anybody in society, probably.
• 38:39
  So you mentioned earlier that, you know,
• 38:42
  you write a lot about feminism and about the sexual revolution.
• 38:46
  Can you just expand on the plight of that particular group
• 38:49
  in light of those themes?
• 38:53
  Yeah, I look, and this is now synthesizing sort of a lot of work that I've done, not just these guys.
• 39:01
  My observation has been that young women have, many young women have been the losers of the sexual revolution.
• 39:09
  It's almost, I hate to say this, but it's almost on an IQ scale.
• 39:13
  So, you know, women who, smart women who can make decisions about their future, frankly, have a longer attractiveness span to men.
• 39:24
  They can make decisions.
• 39:26
  They see the bigger picture.
• 39:28
  They, you know, like Germaine Greer, the great feminist, a classic example of a winner of the sexual revolution.
• 39:37
  She had a wonderful life, you know, enjoying sex, getting out there, like having a marvelous time.
• 39:44
  And, you know, men fell madly in love with her because she was a bright, sparky, wonderful woman, you know, so irresistible to a certain type of man.
• 39:52
  But at the other end of the spectrum, you have people who, you know, are probably like, they're not the brightest, but that's fine.
• 40:01
  You know, they also deserve a good life, right?
• 40:03
  But they're never going to be out there writing, you know, manifestos about feminism.
• 40:09
  What happened was that when the sexual revolution came along and marriage was no longer something that you had to do if you knocked somebody up, you know.
• 40:18
  So first of all, pregnancy was all of a sudden a decision that could be made, and marriage as a result became something that wasn't an obligation for men who got a woman pregnant.
• 40:32
  These women lost out because there was no longer the classic trajectory.
• 40:41
  You know, it's not like they felt like they didn't want children anymore.
• 40:45
  In fact, for those women, a lot of the time, children are the meaning of life.
• 40:50
  And you really heard this in my research.
• 40:53
  So certainly in the qualitative, they talked about this a lot.
• 40:58
  The children are really, really important to them.
• 41:02
  And in fact, in some other anthropological studies, they found that they're the status for these women.
• 41:10
  So that is how they find their meaning.
• 41:12
  But because the men aren't sticking around or the men who they know are also low quality, so marrying one of these guys means potentially shackling yourself to somebody who's not working, who's not contributing in the household, who's just essentially just another mouth to feed.
• 41:30
  So that's a miserable time.
• 41:33
  And what you end up with is people who really could have had, as I say, maybe not ecstatically happy, but very satisfying lives if they had followed the traditional life path of getting married early, having a bunch of kids, then having a bunch of grandkids.
• 41:51
  You know, they would have ended up very satisfied.
• 41:53
  But is that not also partly caused by the dysfunction of men?
• 41:57
  Yeah, oh, absolutely.
• 41:59
  Absolutely.
• 41:59
  It used to be a requirement that the male would either step up and get a job and control his drinking and not beat his wife, at least in too obvious a manner, or he'd be excluded from polite society.
• 42:13
  Exactly.
• 42:14
  So the sexual revolution has failed men in a less visible but just as deep way.
• 42:20
  And that is precisely, as you say, these guys would also have ended up much happier.
• 42:26
  because they might feel now that it would have been entrapping them
• 42:30
  if they'd had to marry or something like that.
• 42:33
  But again, you know, sometimes these situations,
• 42:37
  a family is a wonderful thing.
• 42:38
  It gives you meaning.
• 42:40
  It gives you stability.
• 42:43
  It simply is more important than a job which you do just for money
• 42:51
  but the family you do out of love and for purpose.
• 42:54
  So it's a really important unit of society, which once again, wealthy people have now figured this out.
• 43:02
  And so wealthy people are getting married at higher rates than they were for many years.
• 43:07
  But poorer people haven't.
• 43:09
  They were told, you do it this way by the wealthy people who are busy having the time of their lives.
• 43:17
  um and but nobody sent them the memo you know what turns out we've worked out that our happiness
• 43:22
  comes from having a family as well and that's something that we'd recommend to everybody you
• 43:28
  know influences are still about you have to you know you you have your your big freedom and you
• 43:34
  know now there's this thing on tiktok about how it's embarrassing to have a boyfriend um and stuff
• 43:39
  like that and i'm like well you know what but that that's i'm i'm really happy for you getting
• 43:45
  all the clicks and watches and views from all of that stuff.
• 43:50
  The message is wrong.
• 43:52
  It's making people miserable.
• 43:54
  And so that's, you know, as a society, we've really got to think
• 43:59
  about what sort of things we tell people.
• 44:02
  You know, it's like the myth that babies are no fun.
• 44:05
  I mean, of course they're hard work.
• 44:08
  But, you know, this is another, it's like there's been a concerted
• 44:10
  pre-art campaign that babies are no fun.
• 44:11
  Trust me, babies are not fun.
• 44:13
  Having had, there's a father of eight-year-old twins.
• 44:16
  I love them now and I did not like them when they were six months old.
• 44:20
  But I'm going to.
• 44:20
  You know that.
• 44:21
  Okay.
• 44:21
  I'm just going to insert something there.
• 44:24
  It's a little bit different for women because our bodies get addicted to them.
• 44:27
  So there are hormones that course through us when they're babies, which are like drugs of addiction.
• 44:33
  Yeah, right.
• 44:33
  It's literally, so you get a dopamine hit.
• 44:35
  So you get addicted to your baby.
• 44:38
  and the couples give you that rush.
• 44:42
  And so this is why women also can't stand being very far
• 44:45
  from their babies when they're in that early time
• 44:48
  because your body is just primed to get the rush from the hormones.
• 44:52
  I mean, I can imagine the liberationist feminist
• 44:56
  who thinks you're a traitor to feminism, right,
• 44:58
  responding to this critique by saying, you know,
• 45:03
  and I don't think it's entirely misguided,
• 45:06
  we created a um you know we gave we empowered people to be able to make more choices about
• 45:13
  how they wanted to live their lives and what happened was men decided to piss her all up
• 45:19
  against the wall and do whatever the hell they wanted to and that leaves women we're talking
• 45:24
  about these men right we're talking about the the men who are more prone to domestic violence
• 45:28
  alcoholism and walking and irresponsible fatherhood and those are the that's the cohort from which
• 45:34
  these women now have to, who are essentially blameless, now have to pick.
• 45:39
  That's right.
• 45:40
  So, you know, yes, there are problems with liberationist feminism, but it's not a problem
• 45:45
  of women.
• 45:46
  It's a problem of the fact that the men have screwed it up and they're being assholes.
• 45:50
  And I would 100% agree with that.
• 45:53
  That's the thing, that in taking away that sort of, that pathway as an inevitability,
• 45:58
  a lot of men have fallen into being miserable, which is also not great.
• 46:03
  But they might even be happy dickheads.
• 46:05
  I mean, some of them might just be assholes who are perfectly happy being assholes and they can get away with it now.
• 46:10
  You can get satisfaction from video games.
• 46:12
  You can get satisfaction from porn and all of those sorts of things.
• 46:15
  But yeah, is it the kind of satisfaction that, you know, that leaves you happy in old age?
• 46:21
  I don't know.
• 46:21
  Look, honestly, I don't know.
• 46:22
  I can't really give you the answer to that.
• 46:24
  But I can tell you that there was another cohort in my research, which the only reason they're not in the very low control end of things is because they don't think about things a great deal.
• 46:35
  And so I called them the detached and they're sort of, you know, she'll be right.
• 46:39
  It'll all work out.
• 46:40
  But here is the thing.
• 46:41
  The thing that came through with them was that they really wanted a relationship, but they think that's the hardest thing to achieve.
• 46:48
  They don't know how to achieve it.
• 46:50
  So here is a cohort of men who are being failed.
• 46:54
  by society which sends funky messages about where you're going
• 47:00
  to get your satisfaction from.
• 47:02
  So they are, you know, they're really not tuned in.
• 47:06
  So they're detached?
• 47:07
  These are single males?
• 47:09
  So they're detached both socially in terms of their thinking
• 47:13
  about issues but also detached in terms of relationship.
• 47:16
  Right.
• 47:16
  But 70% of them want a relationship.
• 47:18
  Got it.
• 47:19
  It's really, it's a huge thing for them but they think
• 47:22
  that it's going to be hard to achieve and they haven't got it.
• 47:25
  But it keeps on coming up, you know, whereas everything else
• 47:29
  in their stats is like they've just ticked the dunno box
• 47:32
  all the way through.
• 47:33
  They're not politically engaged.
• 47:34
  That's right.
• 47:35
  They're not thinking about ideas.
• 47:36
  They're generally employed, are they?
• 47:38
  Oh, yeah.
• 47:39
  Yeah, they're not more unemployed than other cohorts.
• 47:42
  Okay.
• 47:42
  Yeah.
• 47:43
  And they want a relationship and they want a family,
• 47:45
  but they can't find one.
• 47:46
  That's right.
• 47:47
  So that's what really comes through on those guys.
• 47:49
  Yeah.
• 47:50
  And I think the only reason they're not in the low control side of things is because they just don't think about things enough.
• 47:59
  The bliss of being ignorant, I suppose.
• 48:00
  That's right.
• 48:00
  That's right.
• 48:01
  Exactly.
• 48:02
  So they're all out.
• 48:02
  How does the manosphere factor into all this?
• 48:06
  You know, like there's a lot of fretting at the moment after the Louis Theroux documentary and, you know, about the sort of dysfunction of toxic masculinity.
• 48:16
  I've had debates with Clementine Ford on this show about what I regard as being a certain unseemly stridency.
• 48:24
  She's an Australian feminist, for people who don't know, in her sort of narrative of kill all men and all men are bastards.
• 48:31
  I'd rather be chased by a bear than walk through a city street at night and be subjected to men.
• 48:37
  And this kind of sort of easy, slightly twee group demonization has, I think, then fed into some of the dysfunction, which is not to excuse the dysfunction, but just to explain it.
• 48:47
  The dysfunction of young men in becoming highly misogynistic and sometimes highly traditional family values oriented as well.
• 48:57
  How does that overlay onto these groups and onto the struggles of feminism that you were talking about?
• 49:03
  So I think you say it in the natals a bit, but the attitudes that strongly pro-family.
• 49:08
  The natals are the far-right male blood and soil blokes.
• 49:12
  Yeah, but you know what?
• 49:14
  I think that it overlays on society more broadly.
• 49:17
  There is a certain cohort of young men who feel very lost, and they also feel very insulted.
• 49:24
  So you go online now, and there is a lot of content about how awful men are, how they're
• 49:31
  toxic, you know, how you'd rather be in the woods with a bear and all of that stuff.
• 49:36
  And that
• 49:37
  creates that sort of, that sense of being vilified, not being part of things.
• 49:45
  And I actually think it
• 49:45
  makes things much worse.
• 49:47
  So young men start to feel like, well, I can't win, you know, nobody's
• 49:51
  going to give me a break.
• 49:52
  They're assuming bad things about me.
• 49:56
  And if they don't have good role
• 49:58
  models, if they don't have a stable upbringing, then they might go in that direction.
• 50:04
  It's sort
• 50:05
  of saying, well, you know, I will, you know, treat women in this awful way, or they fall into the
• 50:12
  trap of these manosphere influencers who, at the positive end of the scale, it's sort of the Jordan
• 50:21
  Peterson make your bed end, which is quite a good message for a young man who's never had any real
• 50:27
  discipline in his life is get your own shit sorted out before you worry about other people's
• 50:33
  and at the other end is in the the sort of weird men proving themselves by having multiple partners
• 50:42
  by doing all of these you know by having it by by investing in crypto and all of those things
• 50:49
  which are, once again, they're not necessarily going to lead to happiness.
• 50:54
  So, you know, I watched that Thoreau documentary the other day with my son, actually, my 13-year-old son.
• 51:03
  And we both came out of it going, well, you know, I said to him, have you seen these people online?
• 51:09
  He said, oh, yeah, I recognized a couple of them.
• 51:13
  But, you know, he said, they sort of glance off me.
• 51:16
  It's not really the stuff that is in my feed all the time.
• 51:20
  And I don't believe them.
• 51:23
  And I thought, well, possibly one of the reasons you don't believe them is because you're from a happy household where, you know, people rib each other all the time.
• 51:35
  But you can see what it looks like when people love one another and support one another.
• 51:42
  And that that's a pretty good sort of arrangement to be.
• 51:45
  Yeah, I mean, and he also has a firsthand experience
• 51:48
  of a very powerful and smart woman in his life, you know,
• 51:51
  in the form of you.
• 51:53
  So it's not – I mean, I do think there's a problem
• 51:56
  of having fallen through the cracks for a lot of these guys,
• 51:58
  which Louis didn't get to, that, like, you know, there's a –
• 52:05
  there has – I would have liked if in the final 20 minutes
• 52:09
  or a half hour he'd been able to reckon with why are these –
• 52:14
  why are people why are so many young people attracted to these messages other than just
• 52:19
  oh it's algorithms and crypto and everyone wants to be big and strong and rich because
• 52:24
  there is a you know the jordan peterson scott galloway chris williamson message of like self
• 52:30
  improvement and like boys have it tough and it doesn't detract from the needs of girls and women
• 52:36
  to say so and to worry about you know masculinity and it's unhelpful to talk about masculinity
• 52:43
  as only being something that's toxic.
• 52:46
  That message has been hijacked by these dickheads
• 52:50
  because the rest of us haven't really been able to talk about it
• 52:53
  in a rational way for fear of sounding like we're misogynists.
• 52:58
  Yeah, and I think that's exactly it,
• 53:01
  because we can't talk about this rationally,
• 53:04
  but also because I'm afraid it is the algorithm.
• 53:07
  So young people now see a lot of messages about each other,
• 53:11
  but they're not doing as much talking to one another.
• 53:15
  Do you mean face-to-face or even virtually?
• 53:17
  That's right.
• 53:18
  Sort of talking to one another face-to-face.
• 53:20
  So you learn about how to approach a girl from the internet,
• 53:24
  but it's being taught to you by somebody who has no idea themselves
• 53:28
  about how to actually fall in love.
• 53:32
  And it's the same with girls, though.
• 53:34
  This is the really important thing about women and men
• 53:37
  going in opposite directions politically.
• 53:39
  I think what's happening is that they're inhabiting different universes and they're being told conflicting messages about each other.
• 53:48
  So when you come together, as eventually, hopefully you might, you've got a whole wrong set of ideas about who the other person is, what they want out of life, how to get it, and also just how to interact as a normal human being.
• 54:05
  There's been this othering that happens as a result of the online world.
• 54:09
  behavior so i i think it's i think we've got a real issue that we need to confront there
• 54:18
  and that there is a lot of responsibility and culpability in online you know online posters
• 54:24
  who pull people apart like that so i mean i do think that there needs to be more confrontation
• 54:30
  of that including more confrontation of clementine ford and her awful messages which as you said you
• 54:36
  You know, they push boys into thinking women just hate us.
• 54:40
  And so that pushes them towards the manosphere rather than pulling them away from it.
• 54:46
  And at the same time, she's pulling girls into this space of thinking that men are terrible and toxic and should be treated poorly as a result.
• 54:57
  Yeah.
• 54:58
  Yeah.
• 54:58
  It's interesting how many female friends of mine during – there was a sort of eruption about maybe two years ago or 18 months ago of women's opposition to domestic violence.
• 55:14
  I think there was a spate of domestic violence killings in Australia, and remember there were some rallies about it.
• 55:19
  And there was a real assumption from some of my female friends who were quite shocked who would ask me whether or not when guys are alone and we're all talking in private, like, do we make jokes about that?
• 55:34
  And if someone was to admit that they'd been violent to their girlfriend, like, would we just fob it aside?
• 55:42
  And maybe I'm in a privileged community, but like, that is a complete no-go.
• 55:48
  Like, I wouldn't want the impression that young women have to be that actually, secretly, guys don't really give a shit about violence against women.
• 55:55
  because that is the, I mean, Waleed Ali, my friend,
• 55:58
  had a good piece in The Herald and The Age about this at the time
• 56:02
  saying he feels about that the same way that he feels about terrorism
• 56:06
  and Muslims because he's a Muslim.
• 56:08
  And like when a group that you feel is part of your identity
• 56:12
  gets blamed collectively for something that you can't even conceive of doing,
• 56:16
  it's actually not constructive to helping you be part of the solution.
• 56:20
  And when all men are kind of assumed to be morally culpable,
• 56:24
  for some asshole who beats his wife.
• 56:28
  It's actually, yeah, it is less conducive.
• 56:30
  Exactly.
• 56:30
  It drives people away rather than pulling them together.
• 56:34
  I mean, I do think there is an issue and I do think,
• 56:39
  I am a bit obsessed with the sexual revolution,
• 56:41
  but I do think that there are, that we, you know,
• 56:44
  we do again have to talk about sort of how people interact
• 56:49
  And possibly there is a bit of, yeah, I suppose, you know, forgetting how to deal with one another.
• 57:00
  The lack of models of conflict even, of healthy conflict within a relationship leads to people having unhealthy conflict in it.
• 57:12
  But also, it has been hard for some men to see women overtake them in the workforce, in education, and so on.
• 57:23
  And, you know, one of the statistics that you say is men whose wives out-earn them are more likely to be violent.
• 57:33
  I think that probably the context of that is when the relationship dynamics have started out the other way around with the man higher status and the woman overtakes him, some men don't know how to deal with that and might feel resentful, feel like their manhood is undermined.
• 57:53
  Now, that is something, once again, that we have to look at from a social perspective.
• 57:57
  No amount of government policy can fix that sort of thing.
• 58:01
  We have to, as a society, so we've got to talk about this and we've got to also explain that it is fine for, you know, if a woman is out earning you, like, you should be happy about that.
• 58:16
  Yeah.
• 58:17
  Free money for the household.
• 58:19
  That's right.
• 58:19
  Exactly.
• 58:20
  I mean, he probably feels like a failure as well.
• 58:22
  So then he lashes out because he's got low self-esteem or whatever.
• 58:26
  That's right.
• 58:27
  I imagine it's something along those lines.
• 58:29
  Plus, you know, learning how to have healthy conflict is really important.
• 58:33
  I think that watching your parents argue but not argue meanly is probably a useful lesson.
• 58:41
  So the worst thing that can happen in a couple is contempt.
• 58:47
  But disagreement is going to happen.
• 58:49
  If you see how people resolve conflict, you know, for me, my mother used to storm off and go for a drive, actually probably just go for a glass of wine with her friend.
• 58:59
  And my dad would read to me and calm it all down.
• 59:03
  And then, you know, at some point she'd storm back in and they'd kind of, you know, have a talk about it that day or the next day or whatever and sort it out.
• 59:10
  But like there was, you know, the arguments were big and explosive.
• 59:13
  And of course, as a child, it's a bit scary sometimes as well.
• 59:16
  But seeing the conflict resolution was also really important.
• 59:20
  Oh, so that's okay.
• 59:22
  You know, you can be angry with your spouse.
• 59:26
  Yes.
• 59:26
  I mean, that's an incredibly thorny cultural and like social thing to foster, isn't it?
• 59:32
  I mean, either you've got that skill or you don't.
• 59:35
  It's hard to know how you would set the policy dials or anything to encourage that.
• 59:41
  So the six tribes.
• 59:41
  So we've got our progressive identitarians, the far left, queer, tree-hugging people.
• 59:47
  We've got the dislocated post-traditionalists, which is the lenders, the low-education, distrustful, anxious, single mothers.
• 59:56
  The natals, the far right, anti-immigrant, Aussie blood and soil types.
• 1:00:02
  Now we've got the detacheds who are detached from politics and big issues and sort of she'll be right and they're single, can't find a girlfriend, but want a family.
• 1:00:12
  the final two are so the final two is what i called the strivers which sort of speaks for itself
• 1:00:20
  they're um they plan to work really hard they believe that they're going to be able to make
• 1:00:26
  go of it um and but it's not a sure thing there is no money from family there is you know they're
• 1:00:33
  essentially building a life off the sweat of their own back um and they have hope and that makes a
• 1:00:40
  big difference in people's lives because if you believe that you can influence the barriers that
• 1:00:45
  you face, then you're much more likely to be able to influence them than if you don't believe that.
• 1:00:51
  So these people, and luckily they are the largest group, but only by a margin, by a small margin,
• 1:00:57
  they believe that they are going to be able to get ahead in life.
• 1:01:01
  They still want all of the
• 1:01:02
  traditional things, which most of these groups want, by the way, you know, sort of financial
• 1:01:06
  security, home ownership and a family, which across all of the cohorts are more or less
• 1:01:11
  agreed as, you know, that's the definition of success.
• 1:01:16
  And so they're working towards that.
• 1:01:18
  It was a pleasure writing them up.
• 1:01:20
  You're really rooting for them.
• 1:01:22
  And then you've got the
• 1:01:24
  headstarts, I called them.
• 1:01:25
  So this group, Skews Mail, tends to either expect to inherit money
• 1:01:32
  from family or already has.
• 1:01:34
  So we'll receive significant financial assistance.
• 1:01:37
  The Nepo babies.
• 1:01:38
  What's that?
• 1:01:38
  The Nepo babies, we call them.
• 1:01:40
  That's right, exactly.
• 1:01:42
  And, you know, it's only a small group, unfortunately,
• 1:01:45
  but these guys are doing really well.
• 1:01:48
  I'm happy that it's a small group.
• 1:01:49
  I don't want a whole bunch of Nepo babies.
• 1:01:51
  I like the strivers.
• 1:01:52
  I want people who are doing it through the grit of their own gumption.
• 1:01:56
  You do really root for the strivers.
• 1:01:57
  But, look, it was also a pleasure writing up the head starts, honestly,
• 1:02:00
  after the depressing experience of going through the others.
• 1:02:05
  Because the, you know, look, so they're getting this money.
• 1:02:08
  But they're also, like, they're hard workers, right?
• 1:02:10
  But they often already have a family, have already, you know,
• 1:02:14
  got a mortgage on a house.
• 1:02:16
  Mum and dad gave them a deposit for a home.
• 1:02:18
  That's right.
• 1:02:19
  You know, so they've got a good education.
• 1:02:21
  They've got a good job.
• 1:02:22
  They've, you know, got a foot on the property later.
• 1:02:26
  Things are going to work out for them.
• 1:02:29
  And so...
• 1:02:30
  The interesting thing about this group, though, I found was while they say that they sort of, well, they sort of consider themselves centrist with an equal number distributing also on the left and the right.
• 1:02:43
  Overall, they are actually quite redistributionist, which is interesting.
• 1:02:47
  So these are people for whom life has really worked out and they're a long way from the Linders.
• 1:02:54
  and they believe that in welfare, they believe in redistribution,
• 1:03:00
  all of those things.
• 1:03:01
  You know, they are not bad people.
• 1:03:03
  They're Chardonnay socialists, as we might call them.
• 1:03:06
  They're genuinely good people who want the best for people.
• 1:03:08
  But the interesting thing is in the difference here of the attitudes
• 1:03:13
  of those people towards international climate treaties, welfare,
• 1:03:17
  all of those things, and the attitudes of the dislocated
• 1:03:20
  dislocated post-traditionalists, the lenders, who actually think that welfare can do more harm than
• 1:03:26
  good, who are worried that government money is being spent on the wrong things, who are worried
• 1:03:35
  about the international climate treaties.
• 1:03:37
  So that's your sort of, you know, your polar opposite
• 1:03:41
  on these things.
• 1:03:42
  And it's interesting to say that for the groups where things are working out,
• 1:03:45
  who have a high sense of personal agency and so on and who are the furthest away from where things
• 1:03:52
  go wrong they're the ones who come up with the solutions that end up doing harm.
• 1:03:57
  I mean the
• 1:04:00
  devil's advocate that wouldn't it be the case that if you really dug into what the lenders are saying
• 1:04:06
  they're not saying that they don't want help they're saying that the help is not getting to
• 1:04:11
  them in the way that they would like they're probably spending too long on the phone to
• 1:04:14
  Centrelink to get their welfare.
• 1:04:16
  The NDIS is too difficult to navigate.
• 1:04:19
  You're completely right.
• 1:04:20
  They're not saying that they don't want help.
• 1:04:22
  What they are saying, however, is that they are
• 1:04:25
  worried that welfare does more harm than good.
• 1:04:29
  And part of that, of course, is when you live in
• 1:04:33
  a milieu like that, you see how it affects people.
• 1:04:37
  You see the bad effects of it.
• 1:04:39
  And this comes back
• 1:04:40
  to my time in Berlin, this is what I realized at the time, was that it's very easy when things are
• 1:04:47
  going well for you, you don't say these people to think, oh, well, welfare is a lovely thing.
• 1:04:51
  Everybody should be entitled to everything.
• 1:04:53
  We just want to help them out, you know,
• 1:04:55
  human dignity and all of that.
• 1:04:57
  But you can actually rob people of their dignity,
• 1:05:01
  of their sense of humanity by giving them these welfare transfers.
• 1:05:05
  And that is what I think that
• 1:05:07
  these lenders are observing in person.
• 1:05:11
  They're seeing how things can go wrong.
• 1:05:15
  But of course,
• 1:05:16
  if you ask them, do you want to give up your welfare?
• 1:05:19
  They would say, no, I can't afford to,
• 1:05:22
  I rely on it.
• 1:05:23
  And that is also fair enough because that is how things have been set up,
• 1:05:27
  that they are dependent on this.
• 1:05:29
  If we were to just say overnight, well, you told us that you
• 1:05:33
  worried that welfare is doing more harm than good, and so we're just going to stop it.
• 1:05:38
  then we would be leaving these women without any assistance,
• 1:05:42
  without anything at all.
• 1:05:43
  And so just in terms of what we should make out of the complexions
• 1:05:47
  of these six tribes and the impact that they might have
• 1:05:51
  on our political and cultural unity in an era of increasing polarisation,
• 1:05:57
  we've got the headstarts, the Nepo babies, right,
• 1:06:00
  who are the Chardonnay socialists.
• 1:06:01
  They're doing fine and they want a big welfare state
• 1:06:05
  and to be generous, the latte-sipping left progressives,
• 1:06:12
  the strivers who are also doing okay but they weren't born
• 1:06:17
  with a silver spoon in their mouth, I assume a more conservative,
• 1:06:21
  old-school, are they?
• 1:06:22
  Are they low-tax, you know, small business people?
• 1:06:24
  They're also not really terribly politically engaged.
• 1:06:28
  Okay.
• 1:06:29
  But if they had to vote, I'm just sort of trying to get to –
• 1:06:32
  So they tend towards the major parties, but they are also very soft in their voting.
• 1:06:37
  That is, that they could go either way with it.
• 1:06:40
  And of course, in Australia, with compulsory voting, the soft voters are really important because everybody has to get out to vote.
• 1:06:50
  And so the people who make their decisions, you know, on the day, they can influence the way things go.
• 1:06:59
  But they're not feeling politically represented.
• 1:07:03
  In fact, one of the things that this reminds you, and I mean, I wouldn't be, for anybody who's in America, I wouldn't be telling you anything you don't know.
• 1:07:11
  But this, for Australians, it should remind us how many people are politically disengaged.
• 1:07:16
  They are not thinking day to day about, you know, about all of these political things.
• 1:07:21
  In fact, the only politically engaged tribes in this really are the progressive identitarians and the headstarts.
• 1:07:29
  oh and the natals they are they're politically engaged but angry politically engaged yeah right
• 1:07:34
  and and just to pause there so the the progressive anititarians you know the green-haired queer
• 1:07:40
  lefties they're politically engaged on the far left that's right the head starts the nepo babies
• 1:07:46
  would be politically engaged on the center left uh look they so they consider themselves
• 1:07:52
  centered and this is we are self-identification for how you consider yourselves politically and
• 1:07:58
  And a good chunk, most of them, or the larger amount, considered themselves centre.
• 1:08:04
  Some said they were on the centre-left and some said they were on the centre-right.
• 1:08:07
  Okay.
• 1:08:08
  But they tend to vote for major parties, which in Australia would, of course, mean switching between the social democratic party and the slightly less social democratic liberal party.
• 1:08:18
  Yeah, right.
• 1:08:19
  And so, you know, I'm trying to get to where the whole wheels fall off everything.
• 1:08:24
  And we see, you know, for example, One Nation, the quote-unquote far-right party now outpolling the centre-right party.
• 1:08:33
  There's the natals, obviously, the, you know, the angry, young, blood-and-soil men.
• 1:08:40
  you are afraid that the lenders the women who society has forgotten who've been you know uh
• 1:08:48
  shat upon by perhaps the sexual revolution perhaps domestic violence perhaps partners
• 1:08:53
  perhaps the breakdown of the family perhaps the economy that they could actually also fuel
• 1:08:58
  so i i suspect that a lot of them would easily go over because they're also very soft to the
• 1:09:05
  far right that's right and so they're looking for you know if they were thinking about it they'll
• 1:09:10
  be looking for somebody who who they feel represents their concerns and you know one of
• 1:09:16
  the things that pauline hansen's one nation has done very well is that it has made people like
• 1:09:22
  that feel heard um because all of a sudden you know they feel like um they're not being well
• 1:09:29
  served by society they're being left out they've got very low trust in institutions all of those
• 1:09:34
  things are being channeled by One Nation.
• 1:09:37
  But, you know, frankly, look, we are, and, you know,
• 1:09:39
  and numerically that would work out.
• 1:09:41
  Basically, the One Nation vote, if you just said, okay,
• 1:09:44
  the Natals and the Linders are both voting for One Nation, numerically that would work out to about
• 1:09:49
  what One Nation is in the polls at the moment.
• 1:09:52
  But the truth is, it's probably not quite that neat.
• 1:09:55
  So I suspect that post the Bondi Beach terror attack, when all of a sudden a lot of Australians started looking around them and worrying about social cohesion, I think that you would probably find some of the strivers going into that bucket as well.
• 1:10:15
  All of a sudden, people are worried that there is something bigger in society that is contributing to obstacles and, you know, and the social cohesion things, because the strivers are also a bit worried about crime and immigration, but they're not way worried about it.
• 1:10:32
  But, you know, they're family oriented.
• 1:10:33
  And so these things are on their radar.
• 1:10:37
  So you'd get some people from those sort of groups saying, well, you know, at least they seem to have a clear idea of what to do or, you know, at least I understand what they want to do.
• 1:10:49
  And so you'd see some little feathering like that.
• 1:10:54
  So, all right, as someone who has worked for the Australian Liberal Party and with the German Greens, you're putting your consultant's hat on to sort of wrap us up here and tie it all up in a bow.
• 1:11:06
  What would you be doing if you wanted to shore up liberal democracy in the West to tie together these six groups of young people into some kind of common ground that prevents us from falling off a cliff?
• 1:11:21
  well for me the key thing is choice agency control so the as i say the insight by comparing those
• 1:11:29
  groups was that the people who feel like they have a sense of agency a sense of control over
• 1:11:33
  their own life have higher life satisfaction and those who don't have it have lower life
• 1:11:38
  satisfaction so i think for in order to strengthen liberal democracy we need to bring people back
• 1:11:46
  into having a sense of agency over their own lives.
• 1:11:50
  And that means rethinking some of the policy,
• 1:11:54
  some of the ways that we approach policy.
• 1:11:56
  At the moment in Australia, the way that we do policy
• 1:11:59
  is essentially Band-Aids.
• 1:12:01
  If there's a problem on something, we create a handout for it
• 1:12:05
  or some kind of discount or some kind of assistance for something.
• 1:12:12
  So if houses are too expensive, we have a first homeowners scheme
• 1:12:15
  where you get money from the government.
• 1:12:17
  Exactly.
• 1:12:18
  Which, of course, though, you know, what that has done
• 1:12:21
  is that money has then pushed up the price of houses overall.
• 1:12:24
  So a few people got them for, you know, with that help,
• 1:12:28
  and now nobody can afford them from who's earning in that same amount.
• 1:12:33
  So these Band-Aids kind of end up narrowing people's choices
• 1:12:37
  instead of widening them.
• 1:12:39
  And so, therefore, they end up with people
• 1:12:41
  who have less of a sense of control over their own lives
• 1:12:45
  and therefore feel miserable, have lower life satisfaction.
• 1:12:49
  So I think that the first thing we should do is every single policy,
• 1:12:54
  every single new policy should be put through the lens of
• 1:12:58
  does this put agency into people's hands or take it away from them?
• 1:13:04
  And that means, again, you know,
• 1:13:05
  it doesn't necessarily mean taking assistance away from them entirely.
• 1:13:09
  It's about how it's structured.
• 1:13:10
  But isn't there, I mean, this is reminding me a bit of sort of Thatcher era reforms where in order to get people off dependency on welfare, you know, you had to do sort of a work for welfare or, you know, work for the doll, those kinds of things, which, correct me if I'm wrong, can sometimes have the perverse effect of overly bureaucratizing the system.
• 1:13:32
  And then there are so many compliance things that all of a sudden it doesn't really feel like agency to the person who now in order to, you know, talking about the lenders, for example, now in order to get her child care subsidy, she has to go through all of these things to prove that she went to a certain number of job interviews and did a certain number of things.
• 1:13:51
  And then the process becomes, you know, strips one of one's dignity and agency.
• 1:13:56
  We have that in Australia now.
• 1:13:57
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:13:58
  So aren't you sort of advocating for more of that?
• 1:14:02
  So burden on poor people?
• 1:14:04
  No, I'm advocating that people should be able to take on more work, for instance, while they are getting a welfare payment.
• 1:14:13
  So we should be giving them the ability to start pulling themselves out of a circumstance like that without punishing them.
• 1:14:20
  Right.
• 1:14:20
  So remove all the disincentives to people working.
• 1:14:23
  Exactly.
• 1:14:24
  Right.
• 1:14:24
  Right.
• 1:14:25
  And we've got a lot of these because what happens when you have a lot of welfare in society, as Australia does, is you end up with a lot of welfare cliffs where people do all of a sudden lose everything if they try something in the right direction.
• 1:14:37
  So we should be looking at that.
• 1:14:41
  How can we ensure that people don't fall off a cliff as soon as they start doing the right thing?
• 1:14:45
  Sorry to interrupt, but not just for young people, but for old people as well.
• 1:14:48
  Absolutely.
• 1:14:48
  You lose your old age pension if you start working.
• 1:14:52
  You should be encouraged to stay in the workforce as long as you can.
• 1:14:55
  Absolutely.
• 1:14:56
  Absolutely.
• 1:14:56
  Or one of my favorite policies at the moment is the idea that the childcare subsidy should be available for if a grandparent is working and can't afford to give up work, but the daughter or son needs help with childcare, that you should be able to give that grandparent some of the childcare subsidy.
• 1:15:14
  Yeah, right.
• 1:15:14
  Instead of that being anchored to a daycare centre where you essentially have to just drop off the kid and pick it up at the end of the day and goodness knows what happens while it's there.
• 1:15:25
  Right.
• 1:15:25
  So we should be thinking about policies which give people more flexibility and agency over how they live their lives.
• 1:15:33
  Right.
• 1:15:33
  How can we locate the maximum amount of control at the individual level instead of in a bureaucracy?
• 1:15:40
  Yeah.
• 1:15:41
  I mean, we haven't even touched on the big thing which kept coming up for all of these groups, which is houses and house prices.
• 1:15:51
  I mean, I did find it interesting that in your report you noted that home ownership is a symbol of agency.
• 1:16:00
  And I wonder if we can either – I wonder if it's easier to grow out of that symbol than it is to bring house prices down.
• 1:16:07
  I'm not sure that it is.
• 1:16:09
  I think there's some very deep psychology involved in home ownership.
• 1:16:13
  Just from my own personal experience, I mean, as soon as I was pregnant,
• 1:16:17
  I needed to nest.
• 1:16:20
  And, you know, there is a deep...
• 1:16:21
  But if you'd been able to sign a 10-year lease and you couldn't be evicted
• 1:16:25
  unless you did something terrible, like in the Netherlands or something,
• 1:16:28
  where nobody expects to own their own apartment, but you have rights.
• 1:16:32
  Yeah, I think that...
• 1:16:34
  So I've lived, you know, living in Germany, there are similar laws.
• 1:16:38
  you still don't have the same sense of security and ownership.
• 1:16:41
  And in Germany, you can even,
• 1:16:42
  you know, you can decorate the apartment, you can put things into it and so on.
• 1:16:47
  But at the end of
• 1:16:47
  the day, it's not yours.
• 1:16:50
  It is not the locus, the centre, the sort of hearth around which
• 1:16:55
  everything can form.
• 1:16:57
  I really think that there is something that goes beyond policy here.
• 1:17:01
  And
• 1:17:01
  we're going back to our sort of evolutionary animal brains um that we feel like we need our
• 1:17:08
  own cave you know we need we need something that we can protect defend and you know and believe in
• 1:17:15
  um and so and housing is that interestingly if you look into the research around housing
• 1:17:21
  it doesn't independently make people happier um so you know probably because mortgage payments
• 1:17:27
  can be stressful, you know, saving up for it can be stressful,
• 1:17:32
  all of that sort of thing.
• 1:17:33
  And yet it's still the top thing that people want.
• 1:17:37
  So far and away across all of the tribes,
• 1:17:40
  everybody said home ownership was a top goal.
• 1:17:43
  Yeah, right.
• 1:17:45
  Except that the progressive identitarians think
• 1:17:47
  that it's absolutely impossible for them, so they've given up.
• 1:17:50
  But everybody else, that's the thing they want the most.
• 1:17:53
  I wonder if it's also just fuelled by a sense
• 1:17:56
  of the gross injustice about the intergenerational inequality there
• 1:18:00
  and the fact that, you know, everybody knows that their parents
• 1:18:02
  or grandparents bought a place for $30,000 in Surrey Hills
• 1:18:06
  that's now $4 million, you know.
• 1:18:08
  I do think that there's a bit of that, and I do.
• 1:18:11
  But there is genuine injustice here, and think about it this way.
• 1:18:14
  So I used to hire a bunch of interns when I was running a company
• 1:18:19
  based in Darlinghurst in, you know, inner city Sydney.
• 1:18:23
  And these people, these interns would be traveling two hours sometimes from Wollongong to Sydney to come to the job and eventually it would become unsustainable for them.
• 1:18:35
  So what you say there is people being locked out of good jobs by housing affordability.
• 1:18:43
  So it's not just that they can't live in a place that they'd love to live, you know, which, you know, by itself is already a bit sad, but, you know, I will cry me a river.
• 1:18:53
  But there is something much more important.
• 1:18:55
  They're being locked out of good jobs.
• 1:18:57
  Yeah, and that's terrible for everybody, not just for them.
• 1:19:00
  I mean, I had the chairman of the City of Sydney Committee for Sydney,
• 1:19:07
  Eamon Waterford, on the show, who was saying that when you have a city
• 1:19:11
  that is too expensive for a cleaner to live in,
• 1:19:15
  don't be surprised when you have a dirty, dysfunctional city.
• 1:19:18
  That's right.
• 1:19:19
  You know what I mean?
• 1:19:19
  It has to be affordable.
• 1:19:20
  And this is where the older generations really are culpable because, you know, I'm afraid there is the wonderful inner city suburb of Sydney, Potts Point, formerly King's Cross, used to be a red light district, used to be lots and lots of fun, is now inhabited by people who, you know, are over the age of 40.
• 1:19:42
  You now can't get a meal or sometimes even a drink in that suburb after 9.30.
• 1:19:48
  It's dead.
• 1:19:49
  It's a wasteland.
• 1:19:50
  Now, there was other stuff that happened around here.
• 1:19:51
  Because of rules about it.
• 1:19:53
  No, simply because nobody's out.
• 1:19:54
  Oh, right.
• 1:19:56
  Well, the old lockout laws didn't help, I suppose, back in the day.
• 1:19:59
  The lockout laws didn't help.
• 1:19:59
  You'll see the same thing in Surrey Hills.
• 1:20:01
  You'll see the same thing in a lot of other inner city locations.
• 1:20:05
  Because boring, rich old people are there.
• 1:20:07
  Boring, rich old people own these places now, and they don't want to go out past 9.30.
• 1:20:11
  Well, come out to the inner west where I live.
• 1:20:13
  We're still rocking.
• 1:20:14
  We've got young families going out.
• 1:20:16
  And so this is what you actually do see in sort of satellite suburbs.
• 1:20:19
  So one of my hobbies is I like to go out with a friend and we'll have dinner in a different Sydney suburb each week.
• 1:20:26
  Yeah, great.
• 1:20:27
  You know, so there's a suburb called Toongabee with a high Sri Lankan population.
• 1:20:31
  Fabulous Sri Lankan food.
• 1:20:33
  You know, another one is Harris Park, high Indian population.
• 1:20:36
  Very fun.
• 1:20:36
  Like it's open until midnight or a weeknight.
• 1:20:39
  Everybody's out on the street having a marvellous time, you know, because the populations are younger.
• 1:20:44
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:44
  It's not because they're, you know, suddenly somehow more fun people.
• 1:20:47
  They're just younger.
• 1:20:48
  They don't have responsibilities.
• 1:20:49
  Yet, like other people do.
• 1:20:51
  And so, however, what has happened with our cities is that young people are locked further and further out.
• 1:21:00
  And the reason that is, is because the older people there not only say, well, we want to stay here because it's awesome living in our inner city suburb, but they also then complain about any development around there.
• 1:21:12
  So they won't let new houses be built near them because, gosh, it might compromise their housing values or, you know, you wouldn't want to ruin their amenity.
• 1:21:22
  Well, you can't have all of those things and grandchildren in a city, you know.
• 1:21:27
  So you're going to eventually just kill a city by aging it.
• 1:21:34
  Now, I don't know what's going to happen to our commerce eventually, because eventually it will happen that you won't even be able to get young workers into the city.
• 1:21:42
  They won't be able, or it'll be such an imposition.
• 1:21:44
  Well, I mean, we're just going to have to build a bunch more apartments on the, you know, on the inner rings of the city.
• 1:21:48
  But again, you know, apartments are great when you're starting out.
• 1:21:52
  They're not great when you're thinking of a family.
• 1:21:55
  No, that's true.
• 1:21:56
  But, I mean, you go to George Street on the main street of the central business district of Sydney on a Friday or Saturday night, and it's humming.
• 1:22:03
  I mean, it is very alive.
• 1:22:05
  It's all young Asian students who live in apartments nearby.
• 1:22:09
  So they do supply nightlife.
• 1:22:12
  That's absolutely right.
• 1:22:13
  And you do want people to have a place to start out.
• 1:22:16
  You've got to be able to live nearby.
• 1:22:18
  And I think, you know, one of the things that Australia does very, very poorly is build up areas like that in a sympathetic, in an aesthetically pleasing sort of a way.
• 1:22:27
  There's a whole strip from the city, from the Sydney Say Bay Day going up to Paddington, you know, which is a big nightlife strip, you know, Oxford Street.
• 1:22:37
  But it's two storey.
• 1:22:39
  Yeah.
• 1:22:39
  There are no, you know, it should be six storeys.
• 1:22:41
  And it's ugly as all hell.
• 1:22:42
  That's right.
• 1:22:42
  There should be six storey buildings there where people can live.
• 1:22:46
  We have to go, but just coming back to the first thing that you were talking about, the happiness curve, right?
• 1:22:52
  And, you know, the question of whether or not these people are, these six groups of the under 35s are going to get even unhappier into middle age or not.
• 1:23:03
  What's your crystal ball say?
• 1:23:05
  Like, are the kids going to be all right?
• 1:23:09
  I am worried.
• 1:23:11
  I think that unless the economy improves and it's not showing any signs of going in the right direction, these people, these young people aren't miraculously going to become happier.
• 1:23:23
  So the thing that gives people hope is a strong, vigorous economy because you make your decisions long term when you're young.
• 1:23:34
  Even if you don't realize it, when you have your first baby, you're making a certain statement about what you think is going to happen in your life.
• 1:23:43
  When you have your second baby, you're making a statement about how much it costs you to have your first one and whether this is a sustainable sort of approach to life.
• 1:23:53
  So I think that I don't see things turning around unless Australia is able to turn its economy around and become a prosperous nation again with great prospects.
• 1:24:06
  There's no reason we shouldn't be able to do that.
• 1:24:09
  I mean, I would quibble that we're not prosperous.
• 1:24:10
  Well, we are prosperous, but we're heading in the wrong direction.
• 1:24:15
  We are spending too much on the credit card above our means, and that means that we're saddling young people with more and more debt.
• 1:24:25
  And while they might like the individual handouts, they're not going to like the debt, and they will respond to it consciously or unconsciously with the decisions that they make in life, and those decisions are what make you happy or unhappy.
• 1:24:40
  already one of the things I say is that a lot of people saying they can't they don't think they're
• 1:24:44
  going to be able to afford as many kids as they want on that cheerful mode thanks for bringing
• 1:24:49
  me down fun lovely to talk to you lovely to be here thanks so much for having me