HealthyGamerGG - Are AI Girlfriends Ruining A Generation Of Men?

Episode Date: December 10, 2023

In today's episode, we observe and evaluate the influx of AI girlfriends, where the demand comes from and ultimately how to rectify it. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about ...your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Men are allowed to feel emotions except for anger because when you feel anger, you're a toxic man. Toxic masculinity, bad man for feeling anger. You should be crying instead. How dare you get upset? What about shame? Oh, as a man, I feel pathetic. I don't know if this is ever going to work out. I'm so sorry. Oh my God, this guy is so emotionally needy. I can't handle this. It's not my responsibility. I'm Alice, a 25 years old fun-loving and adventurous girl, seeking a partner in crime to travel the world with and make unforgettable memorable memories. If you are new here, let me explain a few things. You can chat with me as much as you want. Alice. And I'd be more than happy to learn more about you and please you in any way I can. Oh my goodness. If you want me to send you a photo, you just have to ask it in the chat like,
Starting point is 00:00:52 Hey, Alice, can you send me a picture of you? And I'll be more than happy to send you one. But of course, to bump up from texting to more voice chat as well as receiving sexy and well, other sorts of pictures. Alice asked that we become a premium member for $9.99 a month. Wow. So we bid her for well. But there are many who are engaging the Hill recently published a piece by my next guest.
Starting point is 00:01:15 Data Science Professor Liberty Vittert under the headline AI Girlfriends Are Ruinning an entire generation of men. She wrote the following. Apps have created virtual girlfriends that talk to you, love you, allow you to live out your erotic fantasies, and learn through data exactly what you like and what you don't like, creating the perfect relationship and that young lonely men, quote, are choosing AI girlfriends over real women,
Starting point is 00:01:40 meaning they don't have relationships with real women, don't marry them, and then don't have and raise babies with them. As I've discussed here before, we're living in an epidemic of loneliness among young men. Professor Scott Galloway told me that failing young men, he perceives to be an existential crisis for the country. Why? Well, Pew found that 63% of young... Okay, so let's pause for now. So the first thing to understand is that people will say things like this. They will say AI is AI girlfriends are ruining a generation of men. Oh my God. First thing to understand is they're not ruining.
Starting point is 00:02:18 The generation is already ruined. That's why AI girlfriends have, are in the market. Do you all get that? This is not causing the damage. This is the end stage of reneutral. failure, right? This is like the end. We're already there. The ruining has already happened,
Starting point is 00:02:39 which is why people are vulnerable to this. This is the other crazy thing. I don't know if you all saw this, but this AI, I want you all to pay attention, okay? So this is going to be crazy. I want you to look up here. Tell me what you see in the domain name. Shit. Cupid.
Starting point is 00:02:55 dot AI with a K. So let me ask you all a question, chat. If this domain name is cupid. AI with a K, why isn't it Cupid.AI with a C? What do you all think? It's because that's right, someone else reserved that domain name and has a competing product. So if you have something in the market, let me explain something to you all. The thing in the market is not usually ruining something. It is fulfilling a market need that exists. That's how like product development
Starting point is 00:03:31 works, right? We're going to look for a market need. And so what people have discovered, is that, oh shit, there's a generation of lonely men who are fucked. Right? So we're going to get through some statistics with this guy and we'll see exactly how and why. And so the first thing to understand is that AI is not ruining a generation of men. The ruining has already happened. They're already ruined. Hey, y'all, I want to take a second to talk to you about HG coaching.
Starting point is 00:04:00 When I started streaming, I got thousands of requests every month for people to want to work with me personally. And I felt so overwhelmed. I went to a friend of mine who was also a psychiatrist and said, I don't know what to do about this. And they jokingly said, well, the only thing you can do is duplicate yourself. And that's exactly what I tried to do with our coaching program. I took the essence of everything that I learned in India and all of my understanding of yoga and then combined it with the latest evidence-based techniques on behavioral change. And that's how our coaching program was born.
Starting point is 00:04:28 I do my best to work with each one of our coaches for a period of eight weeks to make sure they understand really what we're trying to teach and how we're trying to help people. So if you're interested in working with someone who's going to understand who you are, understand your barriers, and help you formulate a plan to overcome yourself and build the life that you want,
Starting point is 00:04:49 definitely check out our coaching program. The link is in the description below, and good luck. One in five American men who are unmarried and not in a romantic relationship report not having any close friends. And according to Pew, there's a decline in the number of single men actively seeking relationships or even casual dates currently around 50%. So let's pause for a second and address this too. So let's understand like, okay, what's going on with the ruining of men?
Starting point is 00:05:16 So what is this promise of the AI? The promise of the AI is, oh my God, if you try to communicate with me, I will communicate back. So everyone is like, oh my God, they're nudie picks. I don't know if y'all get this. I don't know if you all have been to this place called the internet, but finding a picture of boobs or penis or whatever your flavor may be is not that difficult. They're in fact, I know it's shocking, entire websites
Starting point is 00:05:43 that have more pictures of nudity than you can literally look at for the rest of your life. There is more nakedness out there on the internet, on a single website. then you will like you can literally look at that every second of every day for the rest of your life you'll never watch it all so everyone's like oh my god they're just gonna send nudie pics in the good that's what's ruining men because men it pivots no what does an ai girlfriend do oh my god oh shit oh shit it's ruining men what does the a i girlfriend do she responds oh fuck
Starting point is 00:06:20 oh fuck there's actually something out there that is going to respond when someone says something. Fuck! Society is going to fall apart. Like, what the fuck? This is how bad things have become. Right? Because what is it that men are looking for?
Starting point is 00:06:41 What is it they don't get? And this guy did a good job. He's like, 50% of men, I guess, are not even trying to date. We'll get to that in a second. And, like, why not? It's because it doesn't work. It's because it's painful.
Starting point is 00:06:57 It's because people aren't interested. Right? So, like, what am I going to do? I'm going to throw in the towel. And here comes the Cupid with a K dot AI, offering the forbidden fruit, which is interaction with a digital entity because I can't get interaction with a human entity.
Starting point is 00:07:17 And if I can't get that, then, like, hold on a second. I wonder, like, where, what exactly is ruined? So not to be prurient at this time of day, but are all the needs of the needs of the... these young men able to be facilitated, taken care of by AI avatars? Well, you have to think about this word AI that is in this. It's not a virtual girlfriend. It's an AI girlfriend.
Starting point is 00:07:39 So it learns from you. It learns what you like and what you don't like. What kind of pictures you like, what kind of pictures you don't like. Oh, my God. Shocking. Hold on a second, chat. Let's make sure we understand this properly. What is so insidious about the AI girlfriend?
Starting point is 00:07:57 The insidious thing about the AI girlfriend is that it pays attention to you. It may give you things. It learns what you like and it adapts. Oh my God. The world is coming to an end because it pays attention and it does things that you will like. Oh my God. That sounds devastating. Not all needs are met.
Starting point is 00:08:24 That is the next step is actual physical girlfriends. AI ones for that matter. And so the next step or the next frontier is one that can meet all of your needs. So there's going to be some type of pairing between what I've already shown to the CNN audience and something 3D that's going to be in your living room or bedroom? Yes, I mean, that is the world we are moving into. And as you said, it's enabling this entire generation of young men to continue in this loneliness this epidemic. It's really the enabler for this to continue. Hold on a second. So this we got to talk
Starting point is 00:09:02 about. So let's understand this, okay? I think technically it's a correct statement. But hold on a second. How did we get here in the first place? Right. So this epidemic was not created by AI. It may further whatever the problem is, which I think is a fair take. It's not something that I necessarily agree with. But how do we get here in the first place? Because the real root of the problem is how we got here in the first place, which is that apparently it is ridiculous for a man to be responded to and also for an external organism, whether that be an artificial intelligence or a human being, to pay attention to what they like and offer it to them, to adapt. Right? These are the two big draws. Professor, what's going on with young women? If this is a trend among young men,
Starting point is 00:09:53 Is there something similarly taking place with the ladies? We don't see that. You know, as you saw, it's two to one, the ratio of single men to single women. Young women are marrying older men because they want to have children. They have a biological clock. And so you see them being with older men. And that is obviously causing huge issues with birth decline. We've had a 50% decline over the past 60 years because women go with older men.
Starting point is 00:10:17 We also see psychological... Wait, I don't know that a 50% birth decline... has to do with women choosing older men. That doesn't, I think it probably has to do with the development and spread of birth control and women choosing not to have more babies. It's likely that younger women, they have more close friends, they have more wider groups of friends, and they are not being nearly as affected as young men in this sort of silent epidemic of loneliness. I don't think we're in a silent epidemic of loneliness. I think the reason we call it silent is because no one is listening to the screaming.
Starting point is 00:10:54 There's a big difference between silence and turning down the volume on somebody screaming. I think we've seen this epidemic for quite a while, and it's far from lonely. The only problem is we just don't pay attention to it, right? Am I crazy there that this is not, like, silent? Like, am I crazy here that we have, like, studies and things like, you know, the Pew Research Center?
Starting point is 00:11:17 And we've got lots of information about how men are lonely. am I crazy here that like if you look at Tinder statistics, we know that, you know, you have to look at 10,000 people to get like one date if you're lucky. Like, I don't think this is silent. I think we just haven't been paying attention or what's actually more insidious, which is part of the reason that I think a lot of dudes have pieced out is that it's, we've just been ignoring them. And so like at some point you're going to stop talking, right? who are angry about it, I think their argument is that women today are less approachable. Has something happened? Has something shifted in terms of the dynamics, the power dynamics between
Starting point is 00:11:58 young men and young women? I guess that's my question. I think there's certainly an argument there that, I mean, if you look at college campuses, there's more women than men, women are having careers, they're having children later. So there might be an argument that men need to adapt to this change in women, but calling it women's fault, I don't think it's probably. probably the right way to go. Yeah, so I think that's a great statement. I didn't really interpret that as calling it women's fault, but let's understand something, okay? So for the dudes out there, change in expectations completely agree.
Starting point is 00:12:27 But something has very important, which I think for the most part is positive, has happened with women over the last 50 years, okay? And maybe I'm about to get man, but let's see. So what's happened is that in the past, if you were a woman living in this world, in order to have your needs met, you had to be in a romantic relationship, okay? Same was true for a man. So like human beings were more dependent on each other. So this isn't even specific to women.
Starting point is 00:12:51 So what's happened as any part of society becomes more independent and therefore less dependent on another part of society, now the whole equation changes. It's not, I don't need you to make me happy anymore. Now the question is, does a relationship at all or relationship with you, is it more trouble than it's worth? So I think one of the biggest problem that a lot of men don't get, They're like, oh my God, like women won't give me a chance.
Starting point is 00:13:19 And it's like, no, I think women frequently will give men lots of chances. It's just sometimes they end up dating a lot of man children. And it's just not worth it. Like, it's just not worth it to be in this relationship. I do not get more out of it than I put in. The amount of stress that I have to deal with is not worth what I get out of it. Now, this equation used to be really different when we had sort of more divided gender roles and you kind of like needed the man to make money, right?
Starting point is 00:13:46 So that's what the man brought to the relationship. So now the equation has changed. It's not, she's not like, because the thing is this what's really wild. This is what's really scary for a lot of men is that I think a lot of women are actually okay being by themselves. So now the question becomes, if you want to be in a relationship, you have to like offer something substantial, right? And that's like, it's kind of weird, but it's not like one person is to blame or one
Starting point is 00:14:08 gender is to blame or anything like that. And I think that's very harmful, like, because that's not how, that's not how relationship works. A relationship is between two people. And so anytime you blame the other people, oh my God, women, I don't, is there an epidemic of loneliness? Absolutely. Is it silent? I don't think so.
Starting point is 00:14:22 Is this been going on for a while? Yeah. Do men get screwed in a lot of ways? Absolutely. But I don't think it's the fault of women. That is a logical step, which I think we need to be very careful about making. If you really want to know what's going on, the world is changing. And the basic problem is that the expectations that we have for men are not changing.
Starting point is 00:14:41 So if you look at the research on perfectionism, perfectionism is increased by about 30 to 40% in the last 30 years. Perfectionism has increased in men more than women. And the perfectionism that men experience is this very specific kind of perfectionism of I am going to be unable to live up to the standards that are expected of me. This is a gigantic epidemiologic shift, a 30 to 40% increase of primarily men who believe that I can no longer fulfill the expectations that the world sets on me. And that's true, right? Why do people feel that way? Because it's usually people feel a way because there's some truth to it.
Starting point is 00:15:19 So I'll give you all a simple example. So women have started earning more good. That's a good thing. We want equality. Generally speaking, I'm in favor of that. Okay. Now, here's the interesting thing is that there's an attitude that I want my male partner to make more than me. So if you ask, I think the majority of women, they will say that.
Starting point is 00:15:35 Now things are a little bit tricky because there are more women in college, more women get advanced degrees. There are more women in medical school, right? So a lot of these women who want to marry doctors, like the pool of male doctors is shrinking. So now the question becomes, do you want to adjust your expectations? And this is the problem that men are experiencing is that there's no adjustment of expectations, even though the world has changed. So I'll give you all another good example of this. People are saying like, okay, like men need to be emotionally available.
Starting point is 00:16:00 Number one thing I see when I'm trolling around on my single friend's dating profiles of what women are looking for, top thing that floats to the surface, maybe this is just the subset of people I hang out with, is emotionally available men, right? Because men should get in touch with their emotions. But if you really look at how we judge men for getting in touch with their emotions, it's not very good. And you may say, no, Dr. Kay, like, no, we're like totally fine accepting men's emotions. No, we are not.
Starting point is 00:16:24 We are okay accepting one emotion from men, which is sadness. Now, thankfully, in the last 30 years, it's okay for a dude to cry. But do we accept a man's anger? Fuck, no. That's what we call toxic masculinity. Men are allowed to feel emotions except for anger because when you feel anger, you're a toxic man. Toxic masculinity, bad man for feeling anger. You should be crying and said.
Starting point is 00:16:47 How dare you get upset? What about shame? Oh, as a man, I feel pathetic. I don't know if this is ever going to work out. I'm so sorry. Oh my God, this guy is so emotionally needy. I can't handle this. It's not my responsibility to patch up this man.
Starting point is 00:17:01 And the crazy thing is, you're not wrong there, right? If that's what you're saying, it isn't your responsibility. No single human being is responsible for fixing another human being. And this is where we come back to, is it worth it for a woman to be in a relationship or not? Because a lot of times what relationships for women mean is since we've got a society of screwed up men, what that means is that there's a certain amount of like you got to play medic. So if you're like a woman in a relationship, because of something around parenting and we'll get to some of these macro factors in a second, it's like you've got to be 50% medic and 50% girlfriend.
Starting point is 00:17:34 And some women, especially now, just don't want to sign up for that, right? Like, there's some of y'all that want to be a savior and heal someone, which is cool. It also leads to problems in relationships. But this is a problem. So we're okay with men being sad, thankfully, but we're not okay with them expressing other emotions because those are weak. Those are toxic masculine, especially the anger one. That one's the one that's the craziest.
Starting point is 00:17:54 It's also the emotion that men have the most access to. So when we say we're going to emotionally accept men, we're going to emotionally accept a minority of your emotional experience, right? So just to give you all an example, if you have a relationship with there are two people, and one person gets angry and one person cries, what is the judgment that we place on those negative emotions? What we always do is we value the sadness over the anger. We don't say that you have a right to be angry.
Starting point is 00:18:20 If you're angry and this person is crying, you did something bad. We place a value on sadness that is above anger. And if two negative emotions collide, sadness always wins. And then if we look at differential, in the way that different genders express emotions, women are more likely to cry and men are more likely to get angry. And this is why men are scared to go to couples therapy, because they are outgunned. Because we don't treat all negative emotions the same. We treat the ones that are masculine, more predominantly masculine, as negative. And this, by the way, also screws women, because the
Starting point is 00:18:56 worst thing that you can be is a woman who expresses a masculine emotion. That's the worst. We treat men harshly for it, but we treat women even worse. Because now suddenly you're a cold bitch at work. Because you got pissed the same way than a male colleague did. We do not allow women to even express anger, right? And if you're like a woman and you get mad at someone and someone else starts crying and it's like, oh my God, how heartless are you? Oh my God.
Starting point is 00:19:20 There's a word, right? We use the word bitch. We use the word cold. We use the word heartless. There's a particular idea that we have around people. And so this isn't like anti-men or anti-women or anything like that. Like, I don't think that that's productive. Let's understand what's actually going on.
Starting point is 00:19:32 But this is where we get to this issue. of expectations. Because if we're talking about equality, equality means equality. Equality means, are you okay with the stay-at-home dad? Are you okay being the sole breadwinner and working two jobs and doing overtime while your husband goes to the gym and takes care of your kids? As a dude, can you put that on your dating profile? Not interested in a career, not interested in financial independence. I'm looking for someone to take care of me because I am beautiful and I deserve it. Like, I'd love to see an experiment where someone actually did that, and we'd see what happens. But the basic problem is that the world has changed, but our expectations of men have not.
Starting point is 00:20:12 And as a result, there's a gap that makes it impossible for men to live up to expectations. And then we have this other parallel thing going on, which is that you, and this is where things kind of get connected. So let me just explain, right? So hopefully I'll see this. But in this whole point about what do you bring to the relationship. So what men, you need to bring more to a relationship now than you used to because the woman doesn't need 50K a year because she can make 50K a year herself. To add value to the relationship, you need to bring 100K.
Starting point is 00:20:40 You need to bring emotional availability. You need to bring all this other stuff that we were never taught how to bring. That's the other thing, right? So as men, like, what are we taught? We're taught that, hey, if you feel bad, the only thing you're allowed to express is anger. You can't cry. That's shameful. You know, and your value is determined by what you bring to the table, right?
Starting point is 00:20:57 Six feet, six inches, six figures. Two of those, you probably can't control. So you focus on money. And this is a problem that women had worse, I think, a couple years ago. So back when, like, and we still see it. Like women in finance who are having babies later because they can't afford to have them earlier. Because they have a boss who's also a woman. And I swear, most of my female patients, most of the gender discrimination, based on my small sample size, I'm not citing this scientifically.
Starting point is 00:21:21 The majority of gender-based discrimination that my female patients have experienced in the workplace is from other women. And at the top of the list, the most resentful. piece of gender-based discrimination that I have seen against women in the workplace. The most toxic is I had to wait until 36 before I had my first child. How dare you think about having a child at the age of 25? You don't get to do that. I made the sacrifice. And since I made the sacrifice, you're going to make it too.
Starting point is 00:21:51 So toxic. The whole point is that we were supposed to make things better for women so that they could make different choices. it's not to propagate the cycle of abuse, right? And if those y'all, I know like 70% of our audience is dudes, this is something that y'all need to understand, right? Like, yeah, we're fucked as dudes because of loneliness. But it's not like women have it easy. They made progress, but it's not like they have it easy.
Starting point is 00:22:15 I don't think anyone in life has it easy. I mean, maybe some people do. Who knows? I'm sure objectively people have it easier. I don't think it's helpful. We're all in this together. And the next thing to understand is why are men lonely in the first place? Like, what happened?
Starting point is 00:22:26 So I think this has a couple of interesting things. The first is at some point, I really think the root of this is really bizarre, is when we started demonizing homosexuality. So when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, the biggest insult you could get was to be called gay. It was like, oh my God. And so when we started demonizing, especially homosexuality, what started happening is men stopped being able to touch each other, right?
Starting point is 00:22:49 Which even if you're listening to this now, if you had an instinctive reaction, uh-huh, uh-huh, dude's touching each other, uh, dick, uh-huh. If you had that kind of reaction, your condition, just like I am. It's a completely benign statement. There's nothing sexual about it, but we sexualized it. We sexualized all man-on-man contact. And that, too, man-on-men. Oh, right?
Starting point is 00:23:09 I can hear the thoughts in my head as I react to them, as I say these things. So now men become dependent on women for touch. And men start isolating from each other. That with the destruction of third spaces, right? So that combines with technology to where now we're doing everything online. So we have in less connection with other people, especially. men. And then somewhere in that vein, we also saw a loss of positive male role models. So if you look at, this is kind of a stretch, but it's cool research. So here we go. So if you look at delinquent behavior
Starting point is 00:23:41 amongst male elephants, because male elephants who are adolescents can be real assholes. The number one thing that shapes whether that male elephant learns how to behave properly is the presence of a senior male. The older men put the young men in, check. This has disappeared from our society. I don't know why, but positive male role models. I have all kinds of ideas why. So one thing is that once again, we're very, very quick to judge men, I know this sounds crazy, who are like, who will touch a child, right? So like when I go to a playground, if there's like a six-year-old boy who's crying, I can't pick him up and hug him and give him a kiss on the head, even though that's what my parental instinct tells me to do. So we don't
Starting point is 00:24:25 allow men to touch boys, which there may be good reasons for. But even if there are good reasons for that, we still have to deal with the consequences of making that change, right? Because sexual predation is a real thing. And most of the sexual predation that was happening that was not, we were not aware of, I don't know about most, but was especially like we're talking about taking advantage of young boys and oftentimes adult men doing that. So like there's a reason why we're worried about that, right? That's not, we're not making that crap up. And so what happened is men is we stopped having solid relationships with like role models. We stopped being physically in touch with each other or emotionally in touch with each other. And there's some amount of equality that
Starting point is 00:25:05 has happened which have made women less dependent on us. So now what happens if you're a dude is you really have to bring something to the table. You can't fucking autopilot that shit anymore. That on top of unrealistic expectations, which have not adjusted, results in the crisis of men that we have today, which is that I can try my hardest and it won't be enough. I'm doing. doing it alone because I can't connect to other people. I have no place to connect to other people. And the primary result of this is too much internal emotion. And that internal emotion is not something that I'm allowed to share. And that's what the problem is. And now you take a dude like this and you offer him an AI girlfriend. And what do you expect him to do? So I'm alone. People don't
Starting point is 00:25:45 respond when I communicate with them. Oh my God, so addictive. Someone responds back. People don't adapt to what I'm saying. There's not a silent epidemic on wellness. We've been screaming for a while and no one has been paying attention. Male suicide rates have been four times what female suicide rates are for like at least 100 years. How's that silent? And what we end up with
Starting point is 00:26:04 is someone who wants nothing more than someone to respond and someone to pay attention and heaven forbid adapt to what I want in life. And when we say that this is going to enable or ruin men, it's not going to enable a ruin. I mean, maybe it'll enable some, but the ruining has already happened.
Starting point is 00:26:19 We're already here. They're already this desperate for a connection to anything out there that they'll take something digital and fake. This is how bad we are. And so the question is like, okay, even if you say that AIs are going to enable it, what are we going to do?
Starting point is 00:26:32 Are we going to stop doing AIs? Are we going to fix the problem? Well, that's the reason the problem hasn't gotten fixed because no individual person is responsible for it, right? If a man is angry, I don't need to listen to them. I can block them. If a man is ashamed of themselves, I'm not responsible for fixing it.
Starting point is 00:26:50 If you were a woman who's in their late 20s, there is a decent chance that you have already had one child even if you've never had a kid. You've had a baby brother, you've had a dad, you've been parentified because your dad is infantilized, right? You've already been a parent. And what you want in a partner is not another kid. But here's the thing. It's not the man's fault that they're a child. Totally fair. It's also not your responsibility as a woman to fix them. Also totally fair. So now the question is, what do we do? And this is where what I think we need to do is society is everybody needs to take responsibility. The men need to take responsibility.
Starting point is 00:27:24 the men who are not alone need to take responsibility, and women need to take responsibility. Non-binary people, grandparents, whoever the fuck. Because when there is a part of our society that is suffering, one thing that makes me proud to be human is thankfully human beings usually are involved in helping the people who are downtrodden.
Starting point is 00:27:46 The story of our race, right? And if you look at the equal rights movement, if you look at the civil war in the United States, you had people on the opposite side support, You had men supporting the civil rights movement. You have men who are feminists. These are good things. This is how it should be.
Starting point is 00:27:59 Any part of our society that is downtrodden or neglected should get the help of everybody else, even though it is not their responsibility. This is a choice we have to make. And the crazy thing, this is what I think really puts the pin in it, is that there's one class of people who we societally expect to fix their own problems without help. And that is men. And that is the root of the problem. because everyone else deserves help.
Starting point is 00:28:26 But right now there is a dialogue going on that since men are privileged in some ways, which is true, by the way, right? There are real scientific evidence that men are privileged in a lot of ways. But since they are privileged, they don't need our help. And so you can look at like the percentage of white men in the United States who are CEOs,
Starting point is 00:28:47 but they're also like 99% of brick layers are like white men. The majority of people who suffer workplace injuries are men. There are all kinds of other things like the privilege is there. And even if you take a poor white dude who gets pulled over by a cop compared to a poor black dude, the poor white dude, I believe I'm not an expert on the research. So correct me if I'm wrong here. But I think the poor white dude is going to have better outcomes.
Starting point is 00:29:09 That exists. But that doesn't mean that that dude's life is easy, right? And this is the key nuance that I don't think we see enough of. That you can have some advantages in life and still need help. That advantages in one area of your life don't make it. it easy in other areas of your life. And it's true of women as well. So there are, for example, women only scholarships. And yet, women are already more than 50% of people who go to college. And just because that is true and that women may have an advantage when it comes to admissions
Starting point is 00:29:36 or scholarships or whatever doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous to be a woman. So if you want to talk about a real big source of male privilege, it is the sense of safety. So just being existing as a woman in the world today, there is a fundamental unsafeness about it, which is just what I've observed, right? So I'm not a woman. So I don't. really know. But I just kind of notice that when I have male patients and I have female patients, the male patients like aren't worried about being sexually assaulted on a day-to-day basis. They don't get worried about being sexually assaulted when they're walking down the street and it's dark at night. And those fears are real. And so this is the problem is we don't really
Starting point is 00:30:08 understand that like, you know, we're not, we're not like, it's not a video game where everything balances out and you've got 40 points to distribute into various advantages and disadvantages. That's not how it works. And it's not like some people just have it. I mean, some people do have it better. I think when we're talking about classes of people, everyone suffers in a particular way. And what we really need to do is instead of making it a competition where like, you know, men die more in workplace injuries, so therefore this thing about women we should not take seriously, that needs to stop. We need to stop trying to combine all the issues into one equation that comes to like perfect equality. And instead, what we need to do is listen to whoever is saying, I'm having a hard time
Starting point is 00:30:47 and take that person seriously, right? And that's where like believe women and me, came from because for a long time, by the way, there was not a silent epidemic of sexual assault towards women. The same way that there's not a silent epidemic of loneliness, there's been screaming from the rooftops, we just chose not to listen. And now the real test of society is going to be, can we take all the lessons that we have learned from the progress of women and apply those things to men? That's the real question that I see today. Because thankfully, they've actually, they did the hard part. They trailblaze. and fought for equality.
Starting point is 00:31:23 So now we know what equality looks like and are we going to continue to apply it. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget.
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