Is There Really A Crisis of Masculinity?

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Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silker.

So today on the show, we've got a fun one for you.

We'll be playing a game that we've played on the show before, Good Call, Bad Call.

And we're going to be starting up by talking about the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, who's about to become even wealthier because Tesla has given him quite the compensation package.

So we'll discuss whether that's a good call or a bad call.

And we'll be talking about the purported crisis of masculinity.

I am trying not to add skeptical inflection to my voice.

In fact, as you'll hear, you know, I don't think there's any particularly good reason to be skeptical, but maybe Maria disagrees.

We'll have a fun segment, I predict.

All right, Nate,

let's get into it.

But before we do, I want to welcome you back to the United States.

Thank you.

No, I mean, if I had learned a word of Norwegian or Finnish, I would greet you in that language.

But they're very fluent in English, and so it was not necessary, to be honest.

You and I were both abroad, but I came back a week before you from Barcelona, and you were in Northern Europe.

Was summer over in Northern Europe?

It was quite pleasantly...

temperate.

I was in Norway,

saw some fjords, pretty good fucking fjords, right?

The first day we kind of drove around.

We're like, oh, this is nice.

This looks like Maine or something, right?

And then the next day we took a fucking cruise on the real fjords, one of the most spectacular natural things I've ever seen.

Hawaii is up there, but you know, top, top three in terms of things that will hopefully outlast the human race.

That sounds pessimistic, but you know what I mean, right?

Eternal.

I do know what you mean.

And I do, I hope they outlast as well.

And I hope that they last long enough, at least for me to see them, because those are one, that's one of the things that I've never seen that I would love to see one of these days.

Then spent some time in Helsinki, Finland.

You can tell I have, because I'm pronouncing it Helsinki, not Helsinki, which is how uneducated Americans say.

Very nice town.

Great food, which I wasn't expecting.

And then Amsterdam, briefly.

Where there's also delicious food.

You didn't agree?

No.

I think I like Amsterdam and Robbie and I have some friends there.

I have visited a number of times, had a great visit.

I think Amsterdam is pound for pound one of the worst food cities in Europe.

Huh.

There's good like Nepalese and stuff.

There's good, it's it's mixed ethnically, right?

Uh, and so, like, you know, the international food's good, but the Dutch food, the continental food, I, I, I, you know, so, so I think this is where you and I kind of differ because someone, as someone who grew up eating herring, um, I absolutely love it, and um, you can get really incredible herring in Amsterdam.

We took the boat, the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia for a day, too.

Pretty good fucking herring on that boat.

Oh, absolutely.

I'm sure.

I'm sure it was delicious.

Well, welcome back to the United States.

You were missed.

I think New York missed both of us, but now we're all back.

How did Barcelona?

Barcelona.

Barcelona.

How did Barcelona go?

How the EPT go?

It was fine.

You know, it's it's very funny because I actually, you know, I'm normally pretty good at not caching and then like having one big score when it comes to these.

I actually cached in, I think, half of my events and had no big scores, so ended down for the trip.

The deepest I went was,

well, actually, I got fourth in one event, but I missed out, Nate, on a 37,000 Euro pay jump.

And it was really, it was really heartbreaking.

Had I just made it and and had I lasted, and had I been in third, I would have been way up for the trip.

So, we were very close.

Um, and you know, we've talked on the show before about butterfly effects and how, you know, one thing affects another.

Um, there was a player who was the short stack, so people who don't play poker, he had the fewest chips, and it seemed pretty likely that I would end up outlasting him.

And he ended up getting it all in with Ace Vsuit and getting called by Ace King, or actually Ace 3, not Ace 5, Ace 3, getting called by Ace King.

And he hit his three and ended up doubling.

And then he knocked me out a little while later.

So, you know, butterfly effects.

It was pretty good.

Good player or bad player?

Incredibly wealthy player who doesn't really care.

He is capable of playing well, but at that point, he was not playing well because he was kind of in an I don't give a fuck,

but you guys all care about the money type of mood.

He is a businessman.

He's not a professional poker player.

You know, sometimes people with a fuck it attitude toward ICM.

ICM, if you don't play poker, is

the strategy, the changes you make when you're trying to cash a tournament.

I've had, by the way, this problem cashed a lot and nothing too exciting beyond that, right?

But like if you're really rich though and you just care about winning, then you don't have to play with ICM.

And it's like annoying to all the other knits at the table who are.

Yeah, there's a t-shirt that some poker players like to wear that says ICM is for poor people.

ICM of poor people.

That means that people who care about the independent chip model, you know, the value of your chips actually changes as these huge pay jumps loom.

That means you're poor.

And if you can say, fuck it, sometimes that's the way to do it.

And, you know, there is,

it's an interesting analogy kind of to life, because there are definitely moments in life where, you know, it pays to hang around a little bit, but sometimes you're like, oh, fuck it, I want to play to win, right?

Like, I want to, I want to get, I want to take a big swing.

I really want to go for it.

And sometimes that feels really good, even if it's not necessarily correct.

And you have to just try to think, you know, what risks am I willing to take?

What's the reward here?

Is it worth it?

And am I, I think this is actually really important.

Am I willing to walk away?

Right.

Like, It's kind of like the fuck you money type of concept where will I walk away like if this doesn't go right?

And I see him as for poor people.

That person says, I am willing to walk away, right?

I am willing to forego, you know, $40,000, $400,000.

It doesn't matter because I'm not poor and I don't care and you do.

And your time is valuable too.

You know what I mean?

I mean, obviously, sometimes you're just giving up thousands of dollars by not adapting your ranges, right?

But like, yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying opportunity cost is high.

I mean, it's a very, very, very, very, very slippery slope.

But yeah.

It certainly is.

And on that note, Nate, maybe we should talk about someone who has the most fuck you money in the entire world, Elon Musk.

So

we play a game, good call, bad call.

You know, is this a good call?

Is this a bad call?

And right now, we're going to be putting that lens not on Musk, but on Tesla's board.

Because earlier this week, so we are recording on Monday, September 8th, so I guess it was last week, that Tesla offered its CEO, Elon Musk, a new compensation package that's going to be worth $1.

trillion

over the next 10 years.

And by the end of it, if he actually earns out this compensation package, which is an if, right?

There are a lot of things that have to go right, but he would own almost 29, 28.8%

of Tesla's stock because that's how his compensation would be paid out, which is huge, right?

And that's a lot more than

most CEOs ever get to earn

of their company's stock, which would put him in a really interesting position.

So basically, you know, the board has thrown money at him to try to get him to stick around.

Nate, do you want to talk about some of the things that he has to do or should I just go through that quickly?

Why don't you go?

You know, I'm still on finish time here.

So why don't you go through it, Maria?

All right.

So basically, he needs to meet some milestones, which include everything from

profits that have to increase over 24 times

to 1 million autonomous taxis that are going to be deployed, 1 million humanoid robots, and car sales, obviously.

So there are a lot of things that have to happen.

So Tesla has to reach 400 billion in adjusted earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization annually.

And right now it is earning less than $17 billion a year.

So that's quite a high number.

He needs to have an $8.5 trillion market cap.

Current market cap is about $1 trillion.

The robo-taxis is a huge ask, right?

Because right now they're way behind schedule on that.

So

they have to deliver 20 million Teslas, which is actually probably the most attainable, but I don't know.

We can talk about that.

I could deliver 14 million Teslas per year.

And their humanoid robots, Optimus,

is another one where they've had a lot of issues, including in their demos.

The Optimus robots have not hit their benchmarks.

Over time, I think Elon has been over-optimistic with all of these, including the robots.

But these are the things that have to happen for him to get his compensation, except.

And this is one big except.

So I was reading all of this and I was like, huh, interesting thing that they put in there.

If there are factors, quote, outside Tesla's control, end quote, that hurts Tesla's ability to reach these milestones and reach these delivery targets, then Musk will still get compensated.

And it seems to me that that's a pretty big out, right?

That Musk can say, oh, well, you know, this was out of the middle of the year.

You might have the best

lawyer billing cycles in history if there's a dispute over this, I would think.

Yeah, I think so.

So that's kind of the

one caveat.

This will come to a vote on November 6th.

Listeners might remember as well that Musk already has a prior compensation package that is in courts right now because it was challenged.

So, yeah, so that's where we are.

And the question is, right, like good call or bad call on the part of the board of Tesla, everything is going down.

Profits are going down.

Tesla's market share is going down.

Is it a good call to just throw money at Elon and try to kind of get him to hit all of these targets to get his attention back?

Do we think this is a good use of capital?

Do we think Elon will be motivated by it?

He's already the world's richest man.

Do we think he's going to perform?

Like, what do we think about all of this?

I think it's actually a really kind of interesting psychological question about someone who's already insanely wealthy.

You know, how do we motivate someone like that?

And is this, you know, is this the way to do it?

Yeah, I think it's a smart package, actually.

So you can burn me at the stake for being such a capitalist.

But no, the reason why it's smart is because it would seem to me like these targets are A, not terribly easy to hit, notwithstanding the ambiguity of some of these, you know, act of God clauses, right?

And B,

if the comp is doing that well, then there's a lot of wealth to go around, right?

We're talking about much higher than market growth.

The fact that Tesla,

you know, is facing more competition from

Chinese automakers.

Its products are not seen as innovative.

There are all these things they are trying to do, robo-taxis and stuff like that, but they're kind of like not as market-leading right now.

But like, but if he turns it around, then I think it strikes me as like fairly rational.

If it's unlikely to be hit these benchmarks, although Elon has bet on himself before and been right, it's part of why he is already the world's richest man.

I'm all for it.

Well, so theoretically, I don't mind great compensation packages if there's a good end result.

I'm wondering, though,

if you want to get...

you know, the world's richest man, right, to focus on Tesla, even though his attention has been elsewhere, his ambitions have been elsewhere, you know, he's interested in X and SpaceX and all these other things,

is just like throwing dollar signs at it, is that really going to be the best motivator?

And the reason I ask that, and maybe the answer is yes, but the answer could also be no, because there is a lot of really great psychological research about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

And a lot of times the reason that games players want to play, you know, are for flow states and kind things that are intrinsic to the game, right?

Like they want to do better, they want to level up, they want to do this, they want to get that, like things that make them a good player within the game, right?

That convey some sort of prestige on them.

And it fits, and I'm not talking about people for whom like this is their profession and like they just need to get paid.

But when you start replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation, right?

When you start putting dollar values on everything, sometimes motivation actually lags.

So there can be this, you know, ironic effect

where when you actually get money, like all of a sudden it's not fun anymore.

And that's why a lot of people, you know, you sometimes hear the advice, like, keep your hobbies, your hobbies, right?

Don't try to make everything into a side hustle because you might find that you no longer enjoy the types of things that you used to really enjoy when you feel like you have experienced that.

I'm curious, Nate, why don't you actually say a little bit more about that?

Because I think that that is part of the question here, right?

About whether this is the best motivator.

Well, look, I'll talk about the two big things that I find very motivating.

And maybe they're not so different than the way Elon thinks about the world, right?

You know, one is just to build a product that you think is really great, right?

To do something that nobody else has done, to differentiate,

to add intellectual value, artistic value, aesthetic value, whatever it might be, right?

But it's like, okay, here's the world.

Nobody is building a good election model or writing a book like the book i wrote or whatever else right and so i am going to do that really well right

and i think elon is or maybe was motivated by that type of thing right he definitely has vision i think you have to be pretty biased not to give him credit for that right and the other big motivator is like the desire to prove people wrong and the fact that you'll have people like us say, oh, these targets seem very hard to achieve.

They're kind of crazy.

It can't be done.

How can he do all these things where they're not even like leading the robotaxy market, for example?

Like that can be very motivating too.

I think, I think more so than the money, really, right?

It's like not like that, you have very many

anyone in Silicon Valley, be they founders or VCs or whatever else, they don't like just go and say, okay, well, I made a lot of money.

I'm going to go ride in the sunset and hang out at my private villa in Tuscany and show up and go to really nice three-star Michelin restaurants, right?

They usually are still motivated to prove their doubters wrong, which makes them assholes sometimes.

And I don't think anybody would shy away from accusing Elon of that either, right?

But yeah.

Yeah, no, I think that that is a very powerful motivator for people like Elon, right?

Like prove the haters wrong, prove that I can do it, prove that I'm better than they think I am because I know better.

Now, he has shown a penchant for overconfidence, right?

He has failed to hit very ambitious targets in the past, but they're actually, you know, you know, I mean, this is, and listeners of the show know, no fan of Elon, but this is

something that is actually pretty,

not smart, but like it is something that can work when you do set these ambitious targets, right?

Even if you don't actually hit them, you might hit a much higher target than you otherwise would have done in trying to hit this crazy target, right?

So it's kind of the opposite of customer service business or like consulting when you say

under promise, over deliver, right?

Like that's how you get people to be really happy.

Like you, you tell them a little bit less than you think you're capable of doing.

And then once you hit what you're actually capable of doing, they'll be like, holy shit, this is even better than I thought.

And he is kind of doing the opposite, right?

Historically, what he's done is over promise and under deliver.

That's not necessarily great for Tesla stock in the short term, but it might not be necessarily a horrible strategy for motivating people within the company to actually strive to hit kind of these other milestones.

And one of the reasons why I think that probably the board wants him there and is willing to kind of do any, throw anything at the problem to get him there is that anecdotally,

Musk does have a very strong motivating influence on workers when he's present, right?

And when he's not, motivation tends to sag.

Like it is a very kind of cult of personality type of business from what we've heard and from what we've seen.

And so maybe they're just trying to do everything they can to try to get him physically there and really trying to motivate people directly.

I'm torn, right?

Like I don't know.

Obviously, I don't think they should be throwing this amount of money at anyone, but like, let's just put that aside

and just think about it.

Are you some type of socialist?

Are you running Zura and Mom Donnie's campaign?

I know, I know, right?

But so let's let's just put those considerations aside.

If you believe billionaires shouldn't exist, are trillionaires okay?

I'm fine with billionaires existing.

But yeah, so

I think the question here is an interesting one in terms of how do we, you know, how do we get people like that to perform at peak?

They, I think, are trying to throw everything into the equation.

You know, all these targets, money, all, all of these different things.

The one thing that does worry me is that out clause that I read to you, right?

Because, like, if he can just get the money without doing anything,

I think that there's a good chance that he is going to potentially go there.

So, I might be worried about language, but that's my biggest, that's one of my biggest things.

Yeah, look, I assume that, I mean, Tesla's stock was up on this, right?

I assume that like

the lawyers have thought about how that clause might be interpreted in their out clauses and in clauses, and I'm making that term up, right?

I assume that like it's not just, you know, writing things up on a whiteboard that they thought this through a little bit.

But yeah, look, to me, the question is also,

you know, does Elon add

that much marginal value over another CEO?

That kind of thing is very hard to test, right?

If you go and I asked my handing assistant Claude, the AI bot, I asked Claude, what's the empirical literature say on whether CEO pay packages are worth it, right?

And Claude wasn't sure.

There does not seem to be a clear consensus on this question in general.

And specifically, I mean, you know, Elon got very distracted by politics for some period of time.

Well, distractions are not the right word.

I mean, I think most people would say that.

XAI is doing interesting things behind kind of the big three AI labs, but is a serious player, right?

There's SpaceX.

There's a lot of things.

So, yeah, you know, meanwhile, Elon has also been accused of recreational drug use in well-sourced stories from the Wall Street Journal.

He is a polarizing figure.

I don't believe that his approval rating, we've been tracking favorability ratings for Elon.

They haven't really improved very much since he left the White House.

In fact, if anything, Republicans are more mad at him now than they once were.

Democrats haven't really, you know, returned to admiration for him yet.

So there are a lot of disadvantages too.

But, you know, I mean, look,

what what are the other options?

He owns somewhere in the range of 15%

of Tesla stock, right?

So he's the largest shareholder.

If you wanted to oust him, you would have to have the majority of other shareholders wanting him out, which is very difficult for lots and lots of reasons.

So, you know, maybe it's not a choice between Elon and

generic CEO so much as motivated Elon versus unmotivated Elon.

Yeah.

So at the end of the day, Nate, good call or bad call.

I think we know where you come down.

All right.

And I am, oh, I, it's hard.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna waffle on this one.

I'm gonna say, I really, I'm not sure.

I can see it going either way.

Um, and this is a very waffly answer, but that's at the end of the day where I'm coming out.

And yeah, I'm hedging, Nate.

I'm hedging.

Um, so yeah, so that that's where that's where we are on this.

Um, let's take a quick break now.

Um, and then when we come back, we're gonna talk about the battle of the sexes.

Or, you know, is there actually a crisis of masculinity we'll find out after the break

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Nate, normally, when I think of the battle of the sexes, I'm thinking game theory, right?

There's actually a game that's called Battle of the Sexes.

But in today's segment, that is not what we're talking about.

Well, sort of, but not really.

We're talking about kind of the headlines that have been in the news over the last few years about kind of a crisis of modern masculinity that men men are not doing as well as they once were.

Basically, you know, suicide is up, education levels are down, loneliness is up, you know, we're seeing a loneliness epidemic, and that's actually true of both sexes, but more for men than for women.

Suicide actually is also true that it's going up for both men and women, but more for men and on and on.

So the question here is, is this actually a crisis of masculinity or are these overblown headlines that basically are just like

little data blifts that really do not tell the whole story, where there's actually, you know,

just as much male dominance as there ever was.

And maybe on the margins, certain things are changing a little bit, but it's still.

basically same old story.

So that is kind of, that is the topic for this battle of the sexes.

And obviously, I'm female, you're male, but I'm going to let you kick this one off, Nate.

So what is your kind of initial reaction?

And then we can get into some data.

Yeah, look, maybe I'm playing into the stereotype a little bit here.

I think there's something real.

I mean, one reason why I say that is because you can see it reflected in voting patterns too, which is something that I study quite a bit, where among young voters in the U.S.

and elsewhere, there are bigger gender splits than there ever have been before.

Historically, gender is only mildly predictive of voting share.

Usually, women are a bit more liberal than men, but that's been more profound, for example, for Kamala Harris, for Donald Trump.

And I think it reflects the fact that like

some men feel a little bit left out of the direction that society is headed, right?

They feel society is too risk averse.

They feel emasculated.

They feel that, you know, institutions may be led.

Well, I don't know.

Certainly

what I call the village in my book, right?

The village is kind of academia and media and so forth.

Certainly in that field, you see more and more women leaders, right?

In like Democratic politics, a lot of people who work on campaigns, you know, the woman who ran Joe Biden's campaign was a woman.

So yeah,

I think there's something there.

Maria, yeah.

Well, having there be something there and having it be like a full-blown crisis are two different things.

So I do think that there's definitely,

I agree that there is dissatisfaction.

I mean, I think a lot of what you're talking about is probably what got us, you know, Trump 2.0, right?

What got us to

that moment in time where a lot of people felt really disaffected.

And by the way, you're seeing this in women too, where it's kind of a dovetailing that where you're seeing the trad wife movement, right, where women are saying, yeah, you know,

we want to be at home and be wives and full-time homemakers and cook elaborate meals, and take care of our children, and have lots of children.

We've talked on the show a little bit about this movement in the past, but I think that these two things are kind of going hand in hand, right?

So, it's not just men who feel disaffected.

There is a subset of women who think, oh, you know, it's good that women are staying at home.

They shouldn't be in the workforce in the same numbers as men.

Men should be the breadwinners.

You know, we like traditional gender roles.

So, you definitely have this current, this subcurrent in society.

That said, I think that some of the data that has been cited that shows that basically men are not doing as well as women.

I think that a lot of those data points, if you dig a little bit deeper, don't hold a lot of water.

So, for instance, when it comes to the workforce, we still do have quite a significant gender pay gap.

women on average make 83 cents to 85 cents on the dollar um of what i'm gonna i'm gonna note for the record that i think people would debate the causes of that the causes of that yeah

that's that's totally fine i'm just saying that this that this still exists right when because if we're posing the question of men are not doing as well as women i'm just kind of saying that there is a still a gender pay gap that is in um in favor of men and it holds true over all um education levels.

So

basically, men who have no education are able to get better jobs than women who have no education.

Women with PhDs are paid more than women with PhDs.

And we still don't see women progressing into positions of power at nearly the same rates as we see men.

So we do have that sort of thing.

And the fact that, oh, there's a crisis in higher education or that women graduate from college more often than men.

This has been the case for kind of a long time.

Like women tend to do better academically and have for a very long time.

So this is not something new.

It's not like all of a sudden we have different education.

I've got to push back.

I mean, it has gotten, I believe, significantly big.

I mean, in terms of like college graduation rates, it's gone to like three to two women or might go to two to one eventually.

I mean, this kind of leads to interesting things like, should there be affirmative action for men on campus?

It also affects things like the campus dating scene, potentially.

But that's actually, so, so, Nate, that's actually the kind of a data point in the opposite direction.

If this is, if it's true that it has gotten worse and there is still a huge gender pay gap and that men are still getting paid more than women, even though women are pushing to get educated and are more educated than men, then that actually shows that men are getting even more privilege when it comes to how much they're being paid than women.

Right.

Because if you're.

No, I don't think necessary.

I mean, there are a few things here, right?

By the way, By the way, the reason we're going back and forth on this is even economists go back and forth on this.

Like,

the data is really complicated, and this is a very muddy subject with tons of confounds.

And it's really, really hard to control for all of the variables.

So

I'm just doing a little bit of a caveat on that.

Let me go through a couple of the arguments that I think the kind of

economists on the other side of this issue would go through and

some of them are explanations liberals would like more, some conservatives would like more, right?

You know,

one

belief is that women often take more time out of their careers to care for children, to care sometimes for other like ailing family members, for things like that.

And that, you know, if you count for that, then there's questions about how much of the gender wage gap remains.

You know, the more politically incorrect thing, too, this is kind of what got Larry Summers in a lot of trouble at Harvard University, right?

You know, there is some evidence that men have higher variance, that they end up in really bad circumstances, commit substantially more violence and more crime, right?

Can crash out in different ways.

But if there's more genetic variation in a population, then maybe the very top earners that Elon Musk is of the world to bring him up again might tend to be men more, right?

I mean, those are theories that compete with this, I guess, right?

You know, I think one could ask, how predictive is college completion

of success in career anyway, right?

Yep.

That's a very valid question, especially now when you have, you know, also the Peter Thiels of the world paying people not to go to college.

You know, there, I think we are seeing a very, very different society than even 10 years ago.

And I think that that shift is going to, all the, all the evidence shows that that shift is not a temporary blip, that people are putting less value on, okay, where did you go to school, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

And tech, as you said, is like the field where this is most pronounced, right?

There's now a

anti-higher education quadrant in tech, I would see, right?

For sure.

It hasn't spread to like finance as much, which is still a bit more hierarchical, but like all of this is tied together, right?

The backlash against elite higher education and

the backlash against women's roles in society, these things are tied together, I think, to like a greater and greater extent, right?

You know, and again, you know, look, my premise is always that like

it doesn't do anybody any good to pretend that on average that gender differences don't exist, right?

If you look at measures of self-reported well-being, if you ask people, are you happy or not, basically, right?

First of all, there are enormous generational divides where a lot of Gen Z reports very poor mental health, but there is a gender gap too.

Men tend to report higher happiness, lower levels of anxiety and depression.

If you look at like what circumstances, what life circumstances affect people's sense of well-being, right?

For some types of things, men are more resilient, but not for work-related stuff, right?

If you ask kind of questions about like, what would happen if you got demoted at work or you weren't performing expectations that, you know,

men have a bigger psychological effect from that than women do on average.

All these are averages.

Yeah, absolutely.

I will just add to that

to kind of give a broader picture that usually the gender differences within genders are much, much larger than the gender differences between genders on almost any data point you can find.

Right.

That means men differ more from men and women differ more more from women than men on average and women on average differ from each other.

That is something that is just basically true of almost anything you can find in the psychology literature.

So I just want people to keep that in the back of their minds.

Yeah, look,

I just came from the self-professed happiest country in the world, Finland.

I was trying to.

Oh my God,

that always just, I get such a kick out of that.

They seem pretty happy.

They drink a lot.

You get offered.

Oh, that's probably why.

Yeah.

They haven't bought into the all alcohol is bad for you yet.

So yes, their life satisfaction is probably higher.

This could be a whole different episode.

Not that, I mean, you could do the booze thing, right?

But like national happiness rankings, what do they really tell you, right?

I think they're probably

somewhat real.

One thing you actually notice, I haven't published this work.

Maybe I'll get around to it eventually.

If you look at fertility rates by country, then happiness is somewhat predictive of that when you control for GDP.

I mean, basically, you know, the big thing that no one wants to talk about is that like both men and women have seemed to discover around the world that like when you get wealthier, then maybe there are better things to do with your life than to have children, right?

And this is causing potential decline in the global population, right?

That's a big difference between not really between men and women, but it's also a generational difference, right?

But people actually have controlling for other factors more kids in happier countries, which suggests to me that there is like some tangible difference here, potentially.

I mean, you could look at things like suicide rates.

I haven't looked at that actually.

You know, men commit suicide much more often than women, even though, even though they report higher

self-reported mental health, which is interesting.

Maybe it's another case of like having more variation, potentially.

But I think these things are at least partly real.

And some of it's more, you know, the notion about like men

not feeling like they have a lot of close friends, right?

That's actually a huge thing.

I think that there's a lot to that.

And I think that there, you know, women

historically, socially,

have had to kind of be more socialized, right?

It's one of those things where women, I think,

just in general in society have kind of had to get support groups, right, and be nice and be the people in the family who take care of calendars and appointments and keep up with other parents and like and do all of the social stuff.

And for men, that, once again, historically hasn't always been their dominant social role.

So we actually do see that men tend to have smaller circles and that those circles often shrink with age unless they do something specifically to counteract it.

Something else that we mentioned briefly but have not gone into in detail, but I think is important here, including in social circles who you interact with and i think that this is affecting both genders is that um you know teens right now, tweens are coming up in an era where so much activity is online, right?

And there's this atomization of society that we didn't experience, you and I, Nate, when we were, when we were growing up.

And I think that there are generational differences that we have no idea yet how that's going to play out.

But as of now, I think that those do not have a great effect on mental health, right?

If you socialize online versus in person, there is a difference.

We do have data on that.

And so I do think that we're going to be seeing kind of some spillover effects from that in the future.

And it's too early to say whether, you know, what the gender differences will be,

what kind of what the fallout from that will be.

But there is an important kind of generational shift going on right now that we should be paying attention to.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Find new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Yeah, look, I think some stereotypes are true on average, right?

If you,

let's say I get dinner with a male friend, Platonic, right?

The next day, do I get like a follow-up, thank you, let's hang out again soon text?

Probably not, right?

With a female friend, over 50-50, I would say, right?

Just an observation that I think will hold true for a lot of people.

You know, men stereotypically like to hang out by doing things together, right?

You're watching a football game, you're watching a movie, you're playing a video game, right?

Maybe playing poker.

Women tend to, you know, involve more talking on average.

Don't shoot the messenger, right?

There is data on this, right?

And like, and that might be more threatened by like a model where now you're hanging out in person or you're, or you're not hanging out in person as much, right?

You know, I think poker is interesting and there is certainly outright sexism in poker.

For sure.

And yes, but, you know, I also think it's a male bonding experience and an outlet for some men who feel like they don't have another way to like, to make friends, right?

You go to the poker room and believe me, there are some poker players who are very sociable and eloquent and everything else, but like, you want, yeah, some guys just want to play poker and talk about crypto and sports and women, right?

You know, that's one of the reasons why poker is a popular hobby with with men, right?

And might encourage encourage men who are like okay this is my this is my safe space a little bit when you do see some of the more sexist behavior oh for sure i mean i i've i've said that often that you know especially at lower stakes when you go to your local casino that's where i've experienced some of the greatest misogyny because I think that people there are playing for different reasons than when you get to like high stakes pros for whom like this is a career they're taking it like it's their profession and at those lower stakes you often get people for whom like this is their socializing right like this is their like, I just want to be with the guys and, like, I don't want to watch my fucking mouth.

Like, you're the one who chose to sit at this table.

If I want to, you know, hit on the dealer and like talk about her boobs and like mention your ass, that's fine.

And if you're not comfortable, you leave, right?

I'm not going to change my behavior.

I'm here with the boys.

I want to drink.

I want to have fun.

So, so I think that there's definitely something to that.

And yeah, so I do think that all of these factors matter when we're thinking about like, is there actually a crisis here?

Right.

So at the end of the day, Nate, how would you weigh all of this to say, you know, is there a crisis or are these just kind of some issues where men are winning, some where they're losing, and it's true of women as well.

And we're just in a moment of social change that's not necessarily gender related, which is how I would kind of think, think about it, as opposed to saying, yes, it's a crisis of masculinity.

That would be my answer.

How would you answer it?

Well, look, I think most people are, will tend to treat everything as a crisis whether or not it's actually yeah in crisis no

the

the mental health numbers for young people are very bad and i think it has to constitute a crisis now they're worse for women than men but look okay let me be a little spicier here right i think there is often implicit bias against men

in how the village, right, the kind of progressive communities talk about some of these things potentially, right?

If you kind of get at the question of like,

to go back to self-diagnosed mental health, right?

Some people will say, okay, women are higher and liberals are higher.

This is an even bigger difference.

Liberals are higher than conservatives by a wide margin, right?

You know, they will say, well,

that's because there is a stigma against declaring mental health conditions and that women and conservatives or women and liberals don't suffer from the stigma, whereas conservatives and men do, right?

To which I would say, okay,

maybe there is something to stoicism, basically, right?

And, you know, they're popular stoicist books and podcasts and websites and things like that, where it's like, okay, you know, maybe there's something to be said for like toughing it out.

under pressure.

Maybe this is actually an evolutionarily smart strategy, right?

Maybe it's okay to like compartmentalize things a little bit, right?

Or, you know, to kind of the example I was kind of half joking about before, where like men like to do stuff, women like to talk with one another, you know, now and then I'll see like

some

op-ed

in the Atlantic or whatever, right?

Usually went by women, they're like, well, men don't know how to make good friendships.

It's like, fuck you.

If I want to go out and watch a baseball game with my friend, like, don't tell me that's like any less valid than like chatting, chatting, chatting.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

And by the way, I actually think there's good data for both men and women that you bond more through experiences, that like that kind of stuff and doing things together is just good for friendship, period.

Yeah.

People talk so much.

You know, what's there to talk about?

Go do something.

But, yeah, I mean, but

it sounds like you're kind of on the same page as I am when it comes to like, yeah, there are obviously some issues happening, but it's less clear how much of it is gender, is kind of a crisis of masculinity as such, right?

Because the mental health stuff, that's a very different crisis.

Like, that is not, the data, as you said,

are not great for women either.

So, I think there are lots of things going on.

I do think we need to, there are lots of trends that we should be paying attention to, but I think the data are incredibly inconclusive when it comes to, oh, you know,

is there a crisis for one gender or another?

I think the answer there is no.

There's not enough evidence for that, but there are some undercurrents that we should be paying attention to and monitoring, especially with the next generation coming up.

Yeah, look, I mean, I don't know.

If you look at like the male versus female employment to population ratio, right, it's dropped actually for everybody,

in part because you have like the population aging outside of prime working years, but it's dropped quite a bit more for men, right, in 2005, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, before

the site gets compromised by Trump.

So in 2005, 73%

of men age 20 and older were employed.

Now it's 67%,

right?

There's a drop-off for women, but it's been less from 58 to 56, it looks like here, right?

So

I think there's plenty of evidence for this, right?

Quantitative and qualitative and everything else.

But there's also evidence against it that we've talked about.

I don't think we need to rehash it once again.

But it sounds like you're coming out more on the side of crisis.

I'm coming out less on the side of crisis.

And I don't just don't like the crisis language.

I think that is,

I think that's way too alarmist.

And that is not how we should be approaching this.

I'm much more in the camp of stoicism.

You know, that's one of the underlying philosophies of my writing.

So

I'm all for that.

This has been fun, though, and I think that it is interesting to look through these data.

It's a really tough topic, one that I'm sure some of these things will be revisiting.

But it also goes to show that, you know, assessing these sorts of risks, it's tough, right?

And it's a really difficult job for economists to try to parse the numbers.

And there's so much going on that it's just not going to be a clear story ever, which is why people can.

write authoritative op-eds on opposite sides of this and cite data that seems to support their point of view.

So yeah, this has been a fun show, Nate.

I, you know, one of the other things about Northern Europe, where you came from, is that there also is a lot more gender equality there than there is in other parts of the world.

So curious if that has something to do with the happiness levels as well, but maybe we can maybe we can leave that for another show.

Look, I think if you look at the happiest countries in the world, they're also smaller countries, right?

I think that might be.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so many confounding factors.

Yeah.

Lots and lots of confounding factors.

there.

And on that note, Nate, I hope you have a lovely week.

And let me invite you to dinner so that we can talk because I'm female and, you know,

I like to bond over talking and good food.

So let's get a dinner on the calendar.

You know, maybe go to a Yankees game, Maria.

You can get dinner there.

Okay.

All right.

I will go to a Yankees game, Nate, because I am a good friend.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you.

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Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

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Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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Live in the Bay Area long enough and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

You've probably heard me say this.

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