2024-11-23 01:46:32
Just as my obsession with relevance and economic security have often crowded out what’s really important — relationships — I’ve let my preoccupation with the election results crowd out the blessings in my life. God, I’m so fucking sick of politics. So … let’s talk about cars. Fast cars.
I’m in Vegas for Formula 1. Actually, the truth is, I’m not here for the race — It’s more a desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable melt into irrelevance, which I believe can be arrested by extending my adolescence. Also, I love Vegas. The last race I went to was the inaugural Miami Grand Prix in 2022. It was a great time, despite F1 races being boring: here he comes, there he goes. And so on … and so on … and so on.
The real fun is found far from the track. The vibe is money, tech, and glamour, a Super Bowl for the super rich. If Nascar is Android, F1 is iOS.
In Miami I went to a dinner party on the beach hosted by Carbone, a fabulous restaurant, right in the middle of a Covid flare up. Fab. U. Lous. Wyclef Jean played to 700 people crowded into a hot tent with no ventilation. I had two thoughts: “I’m getting COVID tonight” and “It’s worth it.” I was right on both counts.
F1 has long had large and rabid fan bases in Europe and South America, but that enthusiasm didn’t land on U.S. shores until 2017, when Liberty Media bought a controlling interest in the league. Under new boss Greg Maffei, F1 took a big swing at America. Targeting young people, Maffei and the F1 Team built an iconic brand, in the most competitive market, in less than a decade. There were races with celebrities in attendance — Tom Cruise, LeBron James, Rihanna — new sponsorships, and an aggressive social media presence.
However, Liberty’s gangster move was the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive. Now in its sixth season, the show is rewriting the playbook re how sports leagues market themselves. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at “a lot of young, good-looking guys,” as Maffei once told CNBC, hard-charging billionaire team owners, and high-tech pit crews competing in a series of überluxe international locations. (F1 wasn’t the first to try this; the NFL’s Hard Knocks premiered on HBO back in 2001.)
By focusing on individuals and harnessing the power of storytelling, Drive to Survive used streaming to introduce U.S. viewers to drivers who were superstars overseas, among them Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. It gave newbie (read: American) fans a compelling point of entry and became a fount of bingeable video that was easily shared, particularly on Instagram. There are accounts devoted to what Hamilton wears as he walks on red carpets.
Tribal rivalries, betrayal, greed, revenge — all the stuff humans are hardwired to love in a lustrous package every week. Champions muse about “having a target on my back.” Young guns talk about “being hungry.” Everybody obsesses about forces beyond their control. Shakespeare knew this turf pretty well — Marcus Aurelius would have felt at home. The song remains the same; the actual game being played is unimportant.
The results: Liberty paid $4.6 billion for F1; it now has a market cap of about $22 billion. In 2023, F1 generated about $3.2 billion in revenue, up from $2.6 the year before, most of it from promotional deals with host cities, media rights, and team sponsorships.
TV viewership has doubled since Liberty took over (though the U.S. audience pales beside those of the NFL and other big team sports, and it’s only a third of Nascar’s). In 2022, F1 signed a three-year deal with ESPN (up for renewal next year) worth $270 million. American TV viewership of this year’s Miami Grand Prix was 3.1 million, the largest ever for a U.S. race. Meanwhile, between 2017 and 2021 the average age of an F1 fan dropped from 36 to 32. About 40% of fans are now female. Earlier this year, Liberty announced it had bought a majority interest in MotoGP, which is to motorcycle racing what F1 is to autos.
Owning a team (F1 has 10) used to be a money pit for a brand or a billionaire in the throes of a midlife crisis. Now teams are a legitimate asset class. Oracle is paying Red Bull $100 million to put its name on their car. Mercedes paid $176 million for its team in 2010; it’s now worth $1.5 billion. The Phoenix Suns and Chelsea FC were recently purchased for $4B and $5.3B, respectively.
So: Media, tech, increasing value, and Wyclef Jean. Everybody’s happy, right? Sort of. The mood in Vegas this year is subdued, a bit chastened even. For starters, the business face of all this success, Maffei, is out. His contract expires at the end of this year, and Liberty announced he’ll be leaving, to be replaced temporarily by Chairman John Malone. Malone is brighter than me, but that won’t stop me from making the following assertion: He retired/fired the wrong guy.
Maffei has doubled Liberty’s shareholder value in the past 12 months and received comp averaging $25M per annum. David Zaslav has been paid an average of $115M for the last three years to destroy two-thirds of Warner Bros. Discovery’s shareholder value.
Maffei says he’s ready for something new; Liberty thanked him and said 2024 made a fitting capstone to his brilliant tenure. Who knows what really happened? Liberty is also restructuring assets with spinoffs to tell a cleaner story. Maybe Maffei didn’t want to drive a smaller car, or didn’t want to deal with the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation — it’s looking into F1’s rejection of a proposed new team from retired driver Michael Andretti. Maybe a sale of F1 is looming. (Liberty says it’s not.) Or none/all of the above. Whatever the reason, Maffei leaves a sport that, while still thriving, is at an inflection point.
Last year’s much-hyped Vegas Grand Prix was something of a shit show: Race fans complained that prices were crazy and getting around the event was difficult; drivers complained about the track; casinos, bars, and restaurants complained about disruption. U.S. Grand Prix sites, with a few exceptions, don’t have the infrastructure that European and South American sites do. Courses, grandstands, and other structures tend to be ad hoc affairs. Fans watching at home have complained about glitchy streams on ESPN+ and other services.
Meanwhile, F1 still hasn’t completely shaken the funk of last season’s uncompetitive races, which wafted into 2024. Max Verstappen won so many — 7 of the first 10 this year — that a lot of bored fans tapped out, and TV viewership and social media engagement have sagged. It all feels very 1990, when Pete Sampras was so dominant, and boring, that people felt he’d ruined tennis.
Seasoned race fans point out that periods of dominance by a hot driver have always been part of the sport (think Michael Schumacher), and it was just a matter of time until the other teams figured out how to take him on. Which seems to have happened recently: While Verstappen is a lock to win Driver of the Year for a fourth time, competition for the team championship has gotten much livelier.
The downturn, though, highlights two weaknesses. While F1’s marketing has been brilliant, it has had trouble providing: 1) a consistently great product (i.e., high excitement, competitive races) and; 2) a consistently great experience at an affordable price for fans who aren’t wealthy. F1 must balance its luxe, aspirational vibe with a simple fact: Most auto racing fans are not rich.
A fan on a budget would have to spend at least $2,200 for a bare-bones Vegas Grand Prix weekend. Given last year’s fiasco, it’s not surprising that hotel prices are way off this year.
The hardest things in business are pricing and compensation. F1 blew the pricing. Wimbledon’s Center Court has a capacity of 15,000, and seats there average $200. The seating capacity at F1 Vegas last year was 100,000, and grandstand tickets were $2,500. It may have set a record for the worst demand/elasticity forecasting of any event its size in history.
I’m not, as I said, into racing, so I don’t know what kind of rule or organizational changes F1 needs to make it harder for another Verstappen to dominate and kill viewership. A secret to the NFL’s success is a draft system that helps keep all teams somewhat competitive. In the last five years, 94% of NFL teams have appeared in the playoffs. Similarly, in an attempt to maintain some level of parity, F1 has implemented spending caps.
Also, F1 would be well served to do more to foster young U.S. talent and produce a homegrown superstar. At this year’s Brazil Grand Prix, half of Argentina showed up to watch Argentine driver Franco Colapinto. American fans need someone they can get that excited about.
Netflix could keep applying the Drive to Survive formula to new sports, going to teams and saying, “Pay us $100 million and we’ll do two seasons of what it means to play for the Boston Red Sox.” Or take a league in a second- or third-tier pro sport, say pickleball or lacrosse, to the next level at a lower price point. Magazine publishers do this — their most profitable businesses are custom jobs (e.g., that Four Seasons magazine in your hotel room).
What is definitely going to happen, though, is that sports teams are going to keep increasing in value, even though they’re shitty businesses in terms of cash flow. As long as the fastest-growing demographic group is billionaires, who tend to be at the age where the fear of death erupts, and leagues maintain monopoly power, we’re going to see a continued increase in the terminal value of teams. Most of them will lose money every year. Then, in a few years, they’ll sell at extraordinary multiples to the next generation of men in their sixties still trying to impress their dads.
However well or badly F1 handles the bumps it’s hitting now, what it has done with Netflix may become the default sports media model. You’re going to start to see media businesses, celebrities, and streaming companies come together to build sports-entertainment enterprises. Imagine Tom Cruise and Disney not buying the Anaheim Ducks, but an entire league.
There’s something more here. One in 7 men can’t name a single friend, and 1 in 4 can’t name a best friend. The Premier League, the NFL, and F1 give men license to bond and express emotions in a safe place. In addition, these events happen in the most wonderful venues ever constructed: not on a fucking screen. We are a social and emotional species, and being part of a collective watching people with speed, strength and alien-like instincts compete … puts us in the moment.
I’ll be at F1 this weekend, and, for a few moments, I’ll be in that moment. Pardoned from the past, where my anger/depression won’t let me forgive myself, and distracted from the future, where I’m focused on garnering more relevance and money. I’ll be there, watching the collision of men, machines, technology, and culture. But, more than anything, I’ll just be there.
Life is so rich,
P.S. Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau joined Jessica Tarlov and me on Raging Moderates this week to discuss the road ahead for Democrats. Listen and follow here on Apple or here on Spotify. (If you are still listening to Raging Moderates via the Prof G Pod, move on over to the dedicated Raging Moderates feed so you don’t miss this episode.)
P.P.S. Section’s CEO & COO also write a great weekly newsletter called Personal Math. This week’s post, about AI’s effects on our self-worth at work, is worth a read — and a subscription.
The post F1 Is at an Inflection Point appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2024-11-16 01:19:45
I believe the more interesting conversation than why she lost, is how he won. We on the left try to comfort each other with the cold (i.e., freezing) comfort of “he barely won the popular vote,” or “Wisconsin was decided by just 30k people,” but the reality is Donald Trump destroyed Kamala Harris. Trump, for the first time, won the popular vote and took all seven swing states. It was a political earthquake that rendered legacy media and knocking on doors as 20th century relics. Trump gained 13 points with Latinos, and the quake even shook races in California. (Note: the Golden State is still counting ballots.) The aftershocks will be felt for the next four years (and beyond), but we know where the epicenter was.
Despite a 51-48 split in the popular vote, three-quarters of Americans agree on one thing: We’re on the wrong track. That’s been the political reality for most of this century — high levels of dissatisfaction, resulting in a series of “change” elections. The reason? Voters recognize that millennials and Zoomers aren’t as prosperous as their boomer and Gen X parents. One example: In 1981 the median age of a homebuyer was 38, today it’s 54.
The epicenter of the 2024 political earthquake wasn’t immigration, bodily autonomy, or democracy. It was the social contract between America and its citizens. The contract is straightforward: Work hard and play by the rules, and your children will have a better life than you did. For the first time in 250 years, that contract has not held.
During an earthquake, solid ground is an illusion. I learned this in 1971, when the Sylmar quake devastated Los Angeles. The movement of tectonic plates, usually just a few centimeters per year, goes unnoticed until they slip, releasing enough energy to rip apart the ground beneath your feet. Tectonic plates meet, pressure builds, and ultimately breaks apart at the fault line. If the epicenter of this election was America’s social contract, the fault line was masculinity.
Before the election, I predicted the outcome would be decided by whoever presented a more aspirational vision of masculinity. The reasoning was correct; the call was wrong. Instead of seeing men as providers and protectors, voters embraced crypto, the UFC, and Hulk Hogan. Tesla, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin are up 29%, 25%, 24%, and 106%, respectively. (Note: the S&P is up nearly 4% over the same period.) And we Democrats were stood up, left bereft by voters motivated by bodily autonomy … who didn’t show up.
Trump was able to distance himself from the bodily autonomy issue. Five of the seven states that voted for pro-choice amendments split the ticket on the issue, pulling the lever for the former president. America elected President T, only the “T” doesn’t stand for Trump, but testosterone. How Americans vote should be taken seriously re the direction of the country, but much of the rhetoric has been ugly and should not be normalized.
I receive a lot of emails from worried parents, particularly mothers, along these lines: “I have a daughter who lives in Chicago and works in PR and another daughter who’s at Penn. My son lives in our basement, vapes, and plays video games.”
Young American men are in a crisis of underemployment and under-socialization. Soaring college costs affect people regardless of gender, but since 2011, the percentage of young men enrolled in college has dropped from 47% to 42%. Manufacturing jobs, once a ticket to the middle class for men without college degrees, have been offshored. Housing is increasingly unaffordable; nearly 60% of men aged 18 to 24 live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at 30. Many men are stuck: isolated, despairing, and unproductive, prone to obesity, drug addiction, and suicide, susceptible to misogyny, conspiracy theories, and radicalization. They make inadequate mates, employees, and citizens.
An African proverb states: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” When young men are struggling, they, and their parents, vote based on an attribute vs. an issue. That attribute this cycle was disruption. These voters didn’t vote for the party that believes the solution for young men is to act more like women, or even traditional Republicans. They opted for whoever would disrupt an America that’s broken its most basic contract. As Cersei Lannister said: “I choose violence.” The electorate chose chaos.
When parents see their kids hurting, they become single-issue voters. From 2020 to 2024, Trump gained 15 points among 18- to 29-year-old men. The mothers of young voters (women ages 45-64) voted for Trump more than any other age group of women, including women over 65. Their fathers (men ages 45-64) voted for Trump at a higher rate than any other male age group — except for men over 65, who supported him by one percentage point more. The boys burned down the village to feel its warmth, and their parents gave them the matches.
In April I gave a TED Talk about America’s war on the young. The war is being waged on nearly every front, but one especially revealing battleground is our social safety net.
If it seems like we care more about senior citizens than our children, trust your instincts — recall that we let the Child Tax Credit expansion expire post-pandemic. Meanwhile, Social Security remains the third rail of American politics, with old people electing older people who vote themselves more money. To paraphrase Warren Buffet, there is a generational war in America, and my generation is winning.
After a campaign where most of the oxygen was consumed by performative pandering over culture war issues, voters reminded us that their No. 1 issue is the economy. America is a platform that provides two things: the defense of our shores and citizens and economic opportunity. Everything else comes in a distant third. In a capitalist society, the fastest path to expanding and protecting rights is simple: Give people more money. When you put expanding rights ahead of increasing economic opportunity, you’re treating the symptom, not the disease.
In America — and this has not always been the case and should be celebrated — your opportunities are more a function of your economic weight class than your identity. Demographics are no longer destiny. Today in America you’d rather be born non-white or gay than poor. Our spending priorities (entitlements), tax policies (capital gains and mortgage interest deductions), and fiscal policies (bail-outs of incumbents) are nothing but a transfer of wealth from young to old. Compared to 40 years ago, the average 70+-year-old is 72% wealthier, and the average person under 40 is 24% less wealthy. In addition, social media notifications remind them 210 times a day that everyone “else” is killing it. The most noxious emission in America is not carbon but shame.
The disease is simple to diagnose: Young people don’t have enough money. We should treat the disease, not with leeches (tariffs) and cocaine (tax cuts for the wealthy), but treatments that are proven to work.
A few suggestions …
Seventy percent of minimum wage workers are between 16 and 34. The fastest way to put more money in their hands is to give them a raise. I believe the federal minimum wage should be $25 per hour.
Only 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds say they’re proud to be an American. We should require/encourage one or two years of (paid) service for young people. Service builds grit, camaraderie, connections, and social conscience; it heals political divisions and restores faith in the country. The left will cry fascism, the right communism. Angering both extremes is a tell for good policy, which generally appeals to the center rather than the fringes. Note: When the extremes agree, it’s usually centered on reckless spending or antisemitism.
JFK challenged Americans to improve their physical fitness. The President’s Physical Fitness Test emphasized performance, but it was replaced by the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which emphasized health. We should do both, as some studies have shown that physical strength and exercise are 1.5x as effective as antidepressants at battling depression.
We have a shortage of affordable housing. One conservative estimate suggests we need to build 3 million housing units. This isn’t rocket science. Building housing at that scale would create more than a million jobs and generate billions in tax revenue. The private sector responds to incentives. This should likely be done via a tax credit, vs. regulation.
FDR’s New Deal put millions to work, building the Hoover Dam and LaGuardia Airport and bringing electricity to the South. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System — a project of immeasurable benefit for jobs and commerce — continues to pay dividends 70 years later. Today we need carbon-free energy to combat climate change and fuel the AI revolution. Nuclear accounts for 20% of our total power output and half of our clean energy. Increasing our nuclear output 3x would likely create 1.5 million jobs. Nuclear energy feels more masculine than wind and solar — I’m hopeful Trump will embrace it.
We should take a page from Portugal and grant a tax holiday for 18-35 year olds as a means of staunching generational wealth transfer. The Portuguese government recognized the most talented young Portuguese had one thing in common: They’d left the country. The new tax benefits extend over 10 years, including no taxation for the first year. The program is meant to help retain and attract young professionals. In the U.S., we have the most anxious and depressed younger generation in history. The incumbents will plead complexity as a mis-direct from a simple solution, more prosperity (i.e., money). The program would not be that expensive, as it requires no increase in the administrative state, and young people don’t generate much tax revenue to begin with.
Nothing says “we believe in you” like education. Some public universities offer free admission to students who meet minimum academic requirements. This should be the rule, not the exception. Any university that has an endowment over a billion that’s not expanding its freshman class faster than population growth should lose its tax-free status. It’s no longer a public servant but a hedge fund offering classes.
Also, we should bulk up on vocational training and paid apprenticeships, as many people, especially men, thrive in careers that require strength, sweat, and technical skill. These are good-paying jobs shamed by the zeitgeist in our society, which says if you’re one of the two-thirds of families whose kid doesn’t graduate from college you and your kid have fucked up (see above: shame).
Young people are having less sex. This contributes to a delay in unlocking adult milestones (marriage, kids) and sets up a demographic time bomb. Without the prospect of a romantic relationship, women pour energy into other relationships and work, men into addiction and resentment. Remote work is a disaster for young people — a quarter of all couples meet at work. We need to get more young people into an office, classroom, or some other environment where they’re serving in the agency of something bigger than themselves (see above: national service).
Today’s venue for connection, or lack thereof, is online dating. But, like every other sector that’s been digitized, it’s become a winner-take-most arena. A small number of men garner all the attention, leaving a man of average attractiveness totally shut out of the market, which validates his sense of worthlessness. And the top decile of men are given license to engage in Porsche polygamy, which doesn’t encourage the formation of long-term relationships and issues a hall pass for bad behavior. Who wants more economically and emotionally viable men? A: Women. How do we get young people pairing? A: Make more men more attractive by leveling up young people economically.
AI, GDP, S&P, innovation, shareholder growth … these things are all means. The ends are deep and meaningful relationships. They are everything. And the center of (literally) everything is the well-being of your kids. When they’re not doing well, they and their mothers become the mother of single-issue voters: change/disruption.
So … how did Trump win? A: His campaign determined the best way to win over young men and their parents was to act like a young bro himself. Think about it: rockets, crypto, Rogan, coarse language, offensive jokes. This election was supposed to be a referendum on women’s rights. It wasn’t. It was a cold plunge into testosterone.
Life is so rich,
P.S. Josh Brown joined us last week on the Prof G Markets pod to discuss how the financial landscape could evolve in Trump’s second term. Listen here on Apple or here on Spotify.
P.P.S. Section’s big Black Friday deal this year is 40% off the first AI for Business Mini-MBA of 2025 for everyone who joins the waitlist before Nov. 22. This is no longer an optional skill — I’d encourage you to take advantage.
Correction: Last week we incorrectly cited the source on our chart on the median age of audience for select media. The correct source is Amplifi Media and the chart has been corrected and republished, with our apologies to CEO Steven Goldstein.
The post The Testosterone Election appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2024-11-09 00:52:43
I’m still in my pajamas — haven’t changed since Tuesday night. I’m also drinking a fair amount and toggling between Netflix shows: Nobody Wants This, which is pleasant but über cliche (i.e., stupid); and Monsters, which, as the father of two boys, I find just plain disturbing. In sum, for me, it’s Covid again. Even my stocks are going up … so 2021.
I’ve received 22 emails in the past 24 hours (when I’m down, I obsess over inconsequential data as a coping mechanism) asking for my thoughts on the election. My reflexive desire, or megalomaniacal belief, that I can comfort strangers, leads me to remind them that “nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems,” and that the U.S. remains the U.S. — the richest and freest country on Earth. This election was neither what I wanted nor expected, but I’m still very much looking forward to moving back to America.
I just read the previous paragraph, and it’s sort of true. Sort of. My disbelief and despair are shapeshifting to anger. A narcissist (President Biden) crowned an untested candidate and asked her, in 107 days, to overcome the crises of immigration and inflation and the burden of an unpopular incumbency. When two-thirds of the country says we’re on the wrong track, there’s no way someone from the current administration can credibly claim to be a change agent, much less the disruptor people are looking for in an age of rage.
I am going on AC360/MSNBC/Smerconish to discuss the male vote — this election gave us the opposite of the expected referendum on bodily autonomy; it was the Testosterone Election. The only thing I’m (fairly) certain of is what medium played a pivotal role, for the first time, in young people’s decision to violently pivot to Trump: podcasts. And that’s what this post is about.
New forms of media periodically reshape our culture and politics. FDR mastered radio, JFK leveraged TV, and Reagan nailed cable news. Obama energized young voters via the internet. Trump hijacked the world’s attention on Twitter. This year it was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harris and Trump’s respective appearances on Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.
Almost half of adult Americans, 136 million people, listen to at least one podcast a month. The global audience is now 505 million, a quarter of the internet’s reach. When Trump went on Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, he was embracing the manosphere and riding a tectonic shift in media: The most efficient way to reach the largest and most persuadable audience (i.e., young men) is via podcast. Nothing comes close.
Rogan has 16 million Spotify subscribers and can reach many more people across a variety of other platforms: In just three days after the live podcast, his three-hour-long conversation with Trump was viewed 40 million times on YouTube. The audio downloads likely exceeded 15 million. There will be a lot of second-guessing re what the Harris campaign should have done. Getting on a plane to Austin to visit Rogan would have been a layup.
By comparison, when Trump appeared on Fox News’ Gutfeld!, which averages about 3 million viewers, he reached 5 million people, and the full episode has been viewed 2.3 million times on YouTube. To reach as many people as he did via Rogan, Trump would have had to do at least three separate one-hour hits on cable TV shows with numbers comparable to Gutfeld! There are only a handful of those, and they’re all on Fox, the top-rated cable news channel. Any other news network would have been a waste of his time. The typical viewership for CNN is below 1 million, and CNBC’s is less than 100k.
Anyway, the comparison is apples to cocaine. Specifically, the audience on the pods is not only exponentially bigger, but also much more valuable (i..e, younger, more male, and more persuadable). What if a campaign could gather the tens of millions of undecided or persuadable voters who may/may not vote and put their candidate in front of them for three hours in an environment that sets the candidate up for success? The Trump campaign achieved this by prioritizing podcasts.
Among Fox’s 3.5 million regular viewers, 70% are 50 and over and 45% are women. The No. 2 cable network, MSNBC, reaches 1.5 million viewers most days; its median viewer is a 70-year-old woman. So: a big audience of young men vs. a small audience of older women. People listen to pods to learn; they watch cable TV to sanctify what they already believe. The former is (much) more appealing to candidates and advertisers.
Rogan’s demographic is 80% male, 93% under 54, and 56% under 34. Men under 34 are the Great White Rhinos of advertising, the most valuable beast in the consumer jungle, and they’re increasingly difficult to find. The average listener to my Prof G podcast is 35, male, and makes about $150k a year. This is an audience I sometimes — affectionately! — call stupid. They have disposable incomes and are in the meeting-and-mating years, meaning they’re prone to buying all kinds of high-margin stuff to try to increase their sexual attractiveness.
They’re also the cohort ambitious politicians want to reach. Both Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, who launched a short-lived primary challenge to Biden, and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who loudly called on the president to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, have come on the Prof G pod and been nice to me, and they’ll likely come back. It’s not my charm. Both want to be president and recognize they have to build name recognition with young men. The calculus is simple math: Just as newspapers lost relevance to Google and Meta, cable news is losing relevance to podcasts.
We have transitioned from a fossil-fuel-based economy to an attention economy, full stop. If you command attention, revenue will follow. Note: The best-performing tech IPO of 2024 is the fourth-most-trafficked site in the U.S., yet the company was valued at only $5.7b when it debuted on the Nasdaq seven months ago. Since then the market cap of Reddit (Nasdaq: RDDT) is up 274%. The only ad-supported medium growing as fast as Meta, TikTok, Alphabet, and (now) Reddit is podcasting. Podcasting revenue grew 18% this year, similar to Alphabet (15%) and Meta (17%).
Podcasts’ share of attention is well ahead of their share of ad revenue. This delta will converge. I believe podcast revenue is going to grow faster than that of every other digital platform, with the possible exception of TikTok. My guess is that, next year, pods’ ad revenue will grow by 20+%. Listenership will continue to grow as well, and the ARPU, like those of Meta and Alphabet, will increase dramatically, too, as advertisers discover this is where young, successful consumers have been hiding. Podcast CPMs now are about $18 for a 30-second ad and $25 for a 60-second ad.
When people approach me in the wild, it’s easy to discern where they’ve been exposed to my content. A high five and some bro-ey banter, video. If they greet me like a friend they haven’t seen in a while, podcast.
It’s a very intimate medium. You are physically in somebody’s ear, in a private setting — washing the dishes, working out, walking the dog. It’s just you and them. That’s one reason advertisers like podcasts, as the audience’s “I’m being sold to” screen is more porous. A listener’s guard isn’t up. Tom Brokaw never had that kind of relationship with his audience.
That level of intimacy also makes podcasting a great medium for interviews. In his conversation with Rogan, Trump seemed unusually relaxed and comfortable, a guy you could grab a beer with. And that’s typical for a pod. The medium has a zeitgeist where hosts generally try to present their guests in a good light. Unlike cable TV, the hosts aren’t looking for a gotcha moment; we let the guest “run.”
Initially, people accused pods of being … radio. They aren’t. Pods aren’t shackled to the clock, for the listener or the podcaster; they’re on-demand (i.e.,streaming). And hosts decide how much time a topic deserves, or doesn’t. Think about this: One of the key commercial advantages of movies over TV was the producers’ control over the cadence and length of their content; they didn’t have the 21- or 41-minute guardrails that network TV later imposed. Rogan thought Trump’s story was worth three hours of his audience’s time, not one or four. TV anchors and radio hosts are asked to create differentiated art using a one-size canvas.
Broadcasters sink a lot of capital into state-of-the-art studios, satellite trucks, transmitters, fiber optic cables, people, etc. Podcasts don’t need any of that stuff. That capex was a moat that created leverage for the networks and their shareholders, who captured most of the medium’s profits. They controlled the means of production. The moat’s now been crossed.
When I go on CNN or another TV network, I travel to a studio staffed by numerous skilled technical people. The network pays their salaries and benefits, and gives them offices and snacks. A decent TV studio can easily run $400k. It’s also inefficient. My show on CNN+ (weak flex) took a dozen or more people the better part of a week to pull together 21 minutes of content. AWESOME content … but still.
Now my studio looks like a pretentious footballer’s Dopp kit. I doubt it cost $1k. Assembled by my tech guy, Drew, it travels with me everywhere. Any place that has broadband, or even just cell reception, I have a studio that can produce content. I’d speculate a third of my podcasts are done from somewhere other than my (home) studio. Think about how efficient this is. It enables me to host or co-host three pods a week and appear on many more. That kind of portability wasn’t physically possible pre-Covid. Meanwhile, net neutrality ensures that any podcast I go on is available to anyone, anytime. There is no technical reason I could not, in theory, reach every one of the 5.25 billion humans on the planet with a digital device.
In broadcast and cable TV, the platform has always been bigger than the talent. In podcasting, it’s the other way around. There is little sustainable enterprise value in a podcast company; what matters isn’t capex or infrastructure, it’s talent. That’s why a lot of individual podcasters are getting rich, but not a lot of podcast company shareholders.
All you really need to start is a computer and an internet connection. You don’t have to run the obstacle course of suits you’d encounter trying to get into TV or radio or any other old media. Which is another reason advertisers love podcasts: There are fewer hands in the talent’s pocket and fewer hands in their pockets, resulting in a greater ROI on ad spend.
Low capex means the profits can be enormous once a podcaster covers the costs of producing two pods a week (e.g., two or three producers and a part-time sound engineer). The Prof G podcast portfolio (Prof G, Prof G Markets, Raging Moderates) will register 2025 revenue of approximately $10m. We employ five producers, two analysts, and a technical director/sound engineer. Few businesses garner $1m+ per employee. Pivot, the podcast I co-host with Kara Swisher, does more revenue, with even fewer resources. (Note: Vox, our distribution partner, is responsible for ad sales.)
The pods that make the jump to lightspeed (covering their fixed costs) — and few do — are very profitable businesses. The best part? A: As I have a great team, with some people I’ve worked with for a decade or more, I spend 8-12 hours (total) per week on the pods. The leverage on (my) time is substantial. The cocktail of broad reach and low overhead translates to more for less for advertisers and talent.
All the moons have lined up, and podcasting is on an upward spiral. But as with most everything digital, podcasting is a winner-take-most/all proposition, because everyone has access to … everyone. A scant handful of pods, those with the biggest listenerships, capture nearly all the ad revenue. By some estimates, of the 600k podcasts that produce content each week, the top 10 get half the revenue. Put another way, to build a business in podcasting that pays people well and keeps the attention of a host with high opportunity cost(s), you likely need to be in the top 0.1% by listenership.
The odds of success are admittedly long. If you’re a high school drama student who goes on to join SAG-AFTRA, you’re 2x more likely to win an Academy Award than have a sustainable pod. As a member of UCLA’s crew team, I was 3.5x more likely to end up in the Olympics than telling dick jokes (and making a good living) on a successful podcast. I could do this all day …
The political power of podcasting is only beginning to be felt. This election was supposed to be a referendum on bodily autonomy: It wasn’t. Historically, the candidate who raises the most money wins: She didn’t. In each election the victor is likely to be whoever best weaponizes an emerging medium: He did. By far the most potent media weapon this time was podcasting.
Life is so rich,
P.S. Jessica Tarlov and I discuss the election results on a special Friday edition of Raging Moderates available on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
P.P.S. Section is hosting a free event on AI safety and the risks of AGI with the executive director of the Center for AI Safety, Dan Hendrycks, on Nov. 21. AI that can do what we do is closer than you think, so join this free event and learn something.
The post The Podcast Election appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2024-11-02 00:36:28
I just returned from the U.S. and was struck by how tense things are. It feels similar to what I imagine the mood was during the Vietnam War. So let’s take a break and discuss something even more stressful: college admissions. Yay.
Last week I did a college tour with my son. It was a chance for us to bond and bask in the infinite possibilities that stretch out in front of him. The previous sentence is a lie. The college admissions process has kicked off (two years before he sets foot on a campus) and it’s already a flaming bag of shit, where a flaming bag of shit is a ton of unnecessary stress.
My industry (higher ed) is corrupt and second only to poverty re: preventable stress in U.S. households. Note: You likely had the reflexive synapse fire of “Reducing poverty is not that simple.” No, it is … that simple. It would just mean lower stock prices and a more progressive tax policy. The incumbents deploy the illusion of complexity as a weapon of mass distraction from a simple, hard truth: The U.S. chooses to let 1 in 5 households with children live in poverty. But that’s another post.
Despite the lie we tell ourselves (you don’t need college) in a vain attempt to opt out of the stress, higher education is in fact a wonder drug. A pill that extends life, makes you happier, healthier, and wealthier, and strengthens your relationships. America is the world’s premier manufacturer, producing the compound at a purity no other manufacturer can rival. No nation dominates any industry the way the U.S. dominates higher ed. Millions come to the U.S. to access this drug. In a rational world, we’d scale it. Instead, we sequester it behind ivy-covered walls and tuition that commands a gross margin of 90%+. And for centuries, we prescribed this cure-all exclusively to white men.
Despite a 6% increase in applications this year, there’s a narrative questioning the value of a college degree. I’m often asked, “Is college worth the price?” My answer: Mostly, yes. My hunch is that decades of news stories about for-profit scam schools, student loan debt, and income inequality have dinged the college brand, as those narratives speak to a sense of stagnation for people who once viewed universities as an onramp to a wealthy lifestyle. In a digital economy, where everyone has access to everything, there are more students applying to the top schools, giving the top schools access to better students, all of which creates an upward spiral of strength among the strong. Lower-tier schools, however, are struggling; since 2020, 64 colleges have either closed or merged. Meanwhile, the myth of “education always pays off” has been busted at tier-2 schools, many of which offer a Hyundai for a Mercedes price.
The strongest brands in the world — MIT, Apple, Hermès, the U.S. — are built on the artificial choking of supply via rejectionist admissions, premium pricing strategies, limited production, and rationing visas, respectively. My business intelligence firm, L2, advised nearly every luxury business. The firm was founded on a simple premise: Prestige brands trade at higher multiples of revenue due to increasing income inequality and their ability to manufacture scarcity. We sold the company in 2017 for 8x revenue. Mirroring our client base, we were disciplined about pricing and said no to many potential clients. My first consulting firm, Prophet, said yes to every client, and it sold for 2.8x revenue. It was the right decision at the time, as I didn’t have the capital to utter the sexiest word in the English language: no. Saying no is the correct strategy for a consulting firm or a luxury brand, but not for a university. Yet the top 2% of institutions have decided they are luxury brands, saying no to more than 90% of their applicants. When I applied to UCLA, the acceptance rate was 76%; last year, it was 9%.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, higher education was the key that allowed remarkably unremarkable kids (e.g., me) to unlock America’s promise of upward mobility. Today higher ed is a bouncer at the entrance to an exclusive club, where wealthy kids and a cadre of freakishly remarkable 18-year-olds build lasting relationships and lucrative networks with elite peers, while obtaining certification that gives them access to the greatest wealth-generating vehicles in history: S&P 500 companies.
In my sophomore year at UCLA, I learned my limits were not my real limits (crew), realized I would not be a doctor (chemistry), became less insecure about my insecurities (psychology), fell in love for the first time, and developed resilience (heart broken). I’d like to think all these things would have happened whether or not I attended college. But they likely wouldn’t have happened in such a safe and joyous place.
But my sense is the college experience isn’t as appealing as it once was. The University of Michigan, for example, is a world-class institution that also provides students with the college experience. Except there’s something rotten in Ann Arbor. Michigan invested $250 million in DEI programs over the past decade. The result? More conflict, a “culture of grievance,” and a 33x increase in complaints involving race, religion, or national origin. Meanwhile, Michigan’s pro-Palestinian student assembly voted to withold $1.3 million in funding for student activities until the university divested from Israel. Two months into the fall semester, the same student assembly reversed course when they realized defunding ultimate frisbee made zero fucking sense. In response, pro-Palestinian activists accused the assembly members of complicity in genocide.
It may be this march of the zombies at elite schools that explains why Southern universities experienced a 30% jump in applicants from kids in the Northeast between 2018 and 2022. Georgia (48% acceptance rate), Clemson (51% acceptance rate), and Alabama (83% acceptance rate) aren’t elite schools, but Southern schools are generally less expensive and seen as less political. They’re also more likely to embrace the traditional college experience, i.e., football games, Greek life, and fun. State schools have registered an 82% increase in applications since 2019, as they offer a better value.
The whales of high-tuition prestige universities are international students. At NYU, they constitute 22% of our student body and likely half our cash flow, as they’re ineligible for financial aid. We claim we let them in for diversity. This is bullshit. International students are the least diverse cohort on Earth (i.e., they are the richest kids on campus). Letting in the daughter of a Taiwanese private equity billionaire isn’t helping diversity, but claiming it is illustrates just how far we’ve fallen from the original goal of affirmative action. Note: International Ph.D. students, whom we pay, are some of the most impressive young people on the planet.
In 1960, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had a total of 15 Black students out of a combined enrollment of 3,000. That was a problem, and shifting to race-based admissions made sense. In 2024, 65% of students at Harvard identified as non-white; the Ivy League as whole now scores high in the U.S. News & World Report diversity index. This is a wonderful thing, as Black students, along with Asians, women, LQBTQ people, and folks from other groups, have historically been excluded from elite colleges. But at this point, the cost of race-based affirmative action outweighs the utility. Affirmative action should be based on one color: green. It’s poor kids who need a hand up. Identity politics have been weaponized by a DEI apparatus on campuses that doesn’t translate to progress, but student debt.
When the University of California system banned affirmative action in 1995, the number of Black and Latino first-year students plunged by nearly half at UCLA and UC Berkeley. But over time the numbers rebounded. By 2021, UCLA’s first-year class included more Black students — 346, or 7.6 % — than its 1995 class (259, or 7.3%). While the UC chancellors submitted an amicus brief supporting affirmative action at elite private schools, they achieved similar results by implementing an admission guarantee to top-performing students statewide, as well as an admissions process that factors in the location of an applicant’s home and high school.
While the Supreme Court banned race-based admissions, affirmative action for the rich, aka legacy admissions, continues. (Not-so-fun-fact: Elite schools began using legacy admissions in the 1920s, along with standardized tests, interviews, and extracurricular activities, to keep out Jews.) Despite its ugly origins, more than half the schools in the U.S. continue to use legacy admissions, and 40% of students nationwide benefit from such preferences. At Harvard, legacies accounted for 36% of the class of 2022. Culture wars center the fight around race-based preferences, but elite universities are businesses, and the only color that really matters is (again) green. For loyal, wealthy customers the legacy advantage is remarkable.
Here’s the thing: I don’t have a problem with legacy admissions. When I was at Haas, there was a student who was obviously a legacy, i.e., their billionaire father donated to get them into business school. That’s a good thing, if the money is used to expand access for other students. My problem with higher education is that we’re whores who aren’t transparent about being whores.
Many faculty and administrators forgo higher-paying careers, as they believe in the mission. Most, like the rest of us, wake up every day and ask, “How can I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability?” They’ve found the answer in the LVMH strategy. Only hitch: College degrees aren’t Birkin bags, and higher ed is not only the best path to economic security, it will also shape the view of many, if not most, of the people running the world for the next century. (The last time I wrote about higher ed I received three cease and desist letters from universities we said were likely to perish.)
DEI, Ethics, Sustainability, Leadership, and near-anything with the word “Studies” in its title is no longer about helping people … but welfare for the overeducated. Here’s the dirty secret: Using AI, software, the abolishment of tenure, and higher standards for faculty, we could cut costs 30% and tuition (conservatively) in half. We wouldn’t need student debt bailouts, because kids wouldn’t need student loans.
Five states and a handful of elite schools recently banned legacy admissions. My Prof G Markets co-host Ed Elson believes the practice will be gone in a few years, as donations no longer guarantee acceptance. I disagree. Donating isn’t entirely transactional. When I gave to UCLA and UC Berkeley, the chancellors were explicit: A donation wouldn’t make it easier for my kid to get in; in fact, it likely makes it harder. And that’s fine. I donated to give an overdue nod to the Californian and American taxpayers who invested in me. I also donated out of ego (it wasn’t anonymous). Being a provider makes me feel masculine.
Still, Ed has a point about why many people donate. Last year saw a 2% drop in private donations to universities, despite the strong economy and the market hitting new highs. The $1.5 billion that might otherwise have gone toward donations is likely up for grabs, as parental admissions anxiety is closely correlated with the size of your bank account. Such anxiety will likely supersize the emerging college admission consulting complex. Soon it won’t be an advantage to hire a consultant, but a disadvantage if you don’t.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have elite schools that have exceptionally high standards. But embracing a for-profit business model more suited for Panerai than a public service, unnecessarily restricting supply for money and ego, is just plain wrong. We have the pill, the miracle drug. Any university that has an endowment over a billion that’s not expanding its freshman class faster than the population should lose its tax-free status, as they are no longer a place of learning, but a hedge fund offering classes. And schools should be on the hook for 50% of bad debt from student loans. I can’t imagine the economic stress levied across American households who don’t have a spare $250k lying around. It should be noted that many schools (e.g., ASU, Purdue, the University of Illinois system) offer free tuition to students who meet minimum academic requirements. Also, 17 states provide tuition-free vocational programs via community colleges.
If grief is love’s souvenir, then anxiety is love’s tax. I never cared much about anything until I had boys. But now, I’m anxious all the time, despite having the funds for my boys’ education. We’ve lost the script. The leadership and faculty of elite universities have morphed from public servants to Birkin bags. Whether you’re a stressed kid in high school, a family saving for college, an anxious parent, a college grad/dropout struggling with student debt that’s difficult to discharge in bankruptcy, or someone being asked to bail out someone who had opportunities not afforded to you … we’re all paying the price.
Life is so rich,
P.S. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran returned to Prof G Markets this week to discuss the road ahead for some of the “fallen angels,” including Nike, Starbucks, Estée Lauder, Boeing, and Intel, and shared his thinking, as an investor, about the upcoming election. Listen here on Apple podcasts or here on Spotify.
P.P.S. Section has announced new speakers at its AI:ROI Conference — including ServiceNow’s global head of AI and General Catalyst’s managing director. This is a great opportunity to get into the heads of AI investors and leaders. Register free.
The post High Anxiety appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2024-10-25 23:23:13
The Last Swing Voters
The catastrophizing, from both sides, re “The end of America” if s/he wins is obnoxious and recognizes neither history nor the resilience of the U.S. We’ve survived much worse than her/him. However, it’s clear that, as in any election, some groups will fare better/worse with their guy/gal in the White House. And, if you disagree with me … we’ll both be fine. The group whose well-being (or lack thereof) I am increasingly focused on is young men. I believe Kamala Harris and Tim Walz offer the best way forward for young men in the U.S., who’ve been left behind in a time of unprecedented prosperity.
This election is — or should be — a referendum on two related things: women’s bodily autonomy and the future of men in the U.S. With the race likely to be decided not by a handful of battleground states but by a few battleground counties, the votes of young men could be decisive. No group has fallen further behind faster.
Young men are more persuadable than older voters, who are more partisan. According to Data for Progress, swing voters are more common among young people. Close to half (43%) of swing voters are under 45. According to Circle at Tufts University, young male voters are motivated to a large degree by economic issues such as inflation and job stability, issues that candidates tend to shift positions on during the campaign.
Gender Gulf
The GOP has proven smarter and more aggressive than the Democrats in reaching out to men, especially online. In recent years, young men have been trending more conservative and apathetic, while young women have become more progressive and engaged. The gender gap has become a gender gulf.
Women make up a little over half of the electorate, but they turn out in larger numbers to vote than men. This year the overthrow of Roe v. Wade and numerous state ballot questions about abortion are likely to bring record numbers of young women to the polls. Young men, most of whom support the right to choose and gender equality, are not as strongly motivated to vote on those issues. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the Democratic party has abandoned young men and failed to show them what the loss of Roe means for them, their opportunities, and their choices.
Who We Serve
The DNC website has a page titled “Who we serve.” Listed are 16 constituencies, including African Americans, the LGBTQ community, women, veterans, and 12 other demographic groups that comprise approximately 76% of the population. When you explicitly advocate for 76% of the population, you’re not advocating for 76% but discriminating against the 24%. In this case, young men. This visibly absent group comes into sharp relief when you extract an obvious truth from the data: No group has fallen faster or further in the U.S. over the past two decades than young men.
That neglect shows up in polls. As The New York Times recently reported about Democrats faring poorly with all men, “it increasingly seems possible that most or perhaps all of that weakness is concentrated among young men. … Surprisingly, Ms. Harris is faring no better than Mr. Biden did among young men in the Times/Siena data, even as she’s made significant gains among young women.”
Man Trouble
I receive a lot of emails from worried parents, particularly mothers, along these lines: “I have a daughter who lives in Chicago and works in PR and another daughter who’s at Penn. My son lives in our basement, vapes, and plays video games.”
Young American men are in a crisis of underemployment and under-socialization, which is bad for all of us. Even as the costs of college have soared beyond reach of many families, many of the manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a college degree, and were a ticket to the middle class, have been offshored. Housing is increasingly unaffordable; nearly 60% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at age 30. Since 2004, deaths of despair among young men have taken 400,000 lives. Think about this: more young men in America have died deaths of despair in the last 20 years than were killed in World War II.
Meanwhile, the whole subject of what it means to be a man has become radioactive, infected by a dialog that feels more like disdain (e.g., “toxic masculinity”) than a conversation meant to address the issue. Young men don’t know who they’re supposed to be and lack the resources to go out into the world and find out.
Many are stuck: isolated, despairing, and unproductive, prone to obesity, drug addiction, and suicide, susceptible to misogyny, conspiracy theories, and radicalization. They make lousy potential mates, employees, and citizens. While young women have made great strides in education and earning power — which is great, and we should do nothing to stop that — young men seem stuck in reverse.
I have spent a decent amount of time reviewing the different economic policies and positions of both campaigns and feel Harris’s policies would provide young men with increased opportunities to realize their masculinity. Specifically: to provide, to protect, and to procreate.
Provide
These are prosperous times. America doesn’t need to be made great … again. As Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld recently highlighted in Time, the U.S. economy under Biden/Harris is, by a number of objective measures, doing well:
Writing about technology, William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” The same is true of prosperity. And the algorithms that increasingly run our lives want to convince us that everything is awful. IRL the Biden administration has an economic record to be proud of, and Harris should embrace and extend it. She is campaigning on expanding housing construction, reducing student debt, increasing child tax credits, bringing back manufacturing jobs, and helping the sandwich generation care for their aging parents. The other side’s policies are inflationary: raising tariffs and cutting immigration. The GOP’s other standby, tax cuts, adds to the deficit, and that debt is an enormous long-term tax, particularly on young people. Older people (e.g., me) aren’t going to be around to pay off the deficit; young people are.
Historically, being a provider was a man’s job, though we now live in a world where physical strength doesn’t carry as much weight economically, meaning women can bring home just as much bacon as men. But women becoming breadwinners doesn’t mean the role is any less important for men. A guy with a decent job in a strong economy is creating wealth, paying taxes, and earning social capital, not to mention his own self-respect. He’s a more attractive potential husband and father. As Richard Reeves says “He adds surplus value.”
The No. 1 condition for the development of male providers — a strong and expanding economy — is far more likely under Harris. There is near-universal agreement on this among economists, Nobel laureates, and investment banks that have bothered to do the math.
Protect
This election is about policies, but it is also about values.
If you’re looking for a good shorthand term for healthy masculinity circa 2024, you could do a lot worse than the word “mensch,” which in German simply means “human” and in Yiddish describes “a person of integrity or rectitude; a just, honest or honorable person.” The first instinct of a mensch is to protect, to sacrifice for something bigger than oneself, not to pick on the vulnerable. Real men don’t start bar fights; they break up bar fights. They don’t shit-post their country, they defend it.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, demonstrated that instinct during his long service in the National Guard (as did JD Vance, by enlisting in the Marines). Walz also exhibited the impulse to protect as a high school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, where he was an adviser to LGBTQ kids starting a gay-straight alliance. “I understood what it meant to be that older, straight, white guy who was coaching football,” he said recently. “It’s easy to be an ally when it’s easy to be an ally. What really matters is knowing who’s going to be at your side and stand up when it’s hard.”
The Democrats have done poorly reaching out to young men. Picking an “America’s dad” type guy for VP, somebody with gray hair who can talk to both football players and queer kids, was an important move in bridging the gap and a statement of principle. A man’s default setting should be to move to protect, in any situation.
Procreate
The third foundational element of masculinity — the third leg of the stool, if you will — is ensuring the species endures. Which starts with … sex.
When I was a kid, my mom was worried I’d get into too much trouble. I believe today’s parents are concerned our kids won’t find enough. Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman have declared war on alcohol, where they see ill health and drunkenness. Where young people and drinking are concerned, I see togetherness. But that’s another post.
My generation never gave up on sex. However, lately, underemployed and screen-bound young men, who feel rejected in an increasingly winner-take-all online dating market, have thrown in the towel. About 63% of young men are single, and a lot of them aren’t even trying to date. Meanwhile, young women find themselves in an intensifying competition for a shrinking pool of what they view as acceptable mates. The viral hit was “I’m looking for a man in finance,” not “I’m looking for a high school dropout who lives with his parents.”
Guardrails
Young men need guardrails, and there are few stronger than the prospect of maintaining a romantic relationship. A decent summary of the key moments between me and several of my first post-college girlfriends went something like this: “Get your shit together, or I am going to stop having sex with you (i.e., break up).” This was motivating, and needed.
Young men today have fewer venues where they can meet potential romantic partners. With fewer of them going to college or church, and more of them working remotely, men have less social interaction and no ability to build social capital. Less sex ultimately means less intimacy, less marriage, and fewer kids.
Straight young men are interested in straight young women because they want to have sex. We tend to act as if there’s something wrong with that: There isn’t. Sex and the pursuit of it leads to romance and intimacy and lights a fire under young men to better themselves to be more attractive to potential mates.
This intimacy often involves sacrifice, the forsaking-all-others stuff that comes when a pair of young people decide, “I choose you.” This often leads to children. The most wonderful things in life, in my experience, lack rationality and structure. My grandmother, re finding a mate, used to say, “You have your list, and then you fall in love and tear up your list.” The person you fall for, and how it happens, will likely make less sense than almost any other important thing in your life. And that’s one of the reasons it’s wonderful. It speaks to you on a different level. Not what society or your parents want … but what you desire. And, eventually, the answer to the most important question of your life: Who do you want to have a family with?
According to Gallup, though, only about 21% of Americans under 30 have kids. In 1980 the figure was about 38%; in 1950 it was about 50%. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the war on bodily autonomy is a contributing factor. The state laws restricting or banning abortion that sprang up in the wake of Roe’s demise are designed to limit the sexual freedom of young women (and men), and undermine their ability to get into the game and create families.
The people most vulnerable in a post-abortion America are poor women. Affluent women will be able to get hold of mifepristone or to travel for a safe, legal abortion. A pregnant 17-year-old, Black, single mother in Alabama, however, is at ground zero for an emerging gender apartheid. She’s likely already poor, and forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, she and the father (if he’s even in the picture) become less likely to escape poverty.
While Democrats have pushed hard to get young women to turn out and vote, the Harris campaign hasn’t been making the case to young men that the fight for bodily autonomy involves them, too. That needs to change.
Harris in the White House offers a chance to begin to reclaim the Supreme Court for the majority in this country who support bodily autonomy and a national effort to roll back state restrictions on it.
Not Heaven
I don’t think electing Harris and Walz is going to magically bring young men out of the crisis they are in. I do think, however, that it’s an important step.
A vote for Harris and Walz is a vote for the future, a vote to continue to improve economic policies that have served America well, that can give young men a place in it. It is also a vote for a shift in the way we think about masculinity in this country.
This is the most anxious generation in U.S. history. Action absorbs anxiety, and I hope young men will exercise their agency and support candidates who enable them to be providers, protectors, and procreators. I believe a Harris/Walz administration will serve young men well. If you disagree, again, we’ll both be fine.
Life is so rich,
P.S. This week on the Prof G Pod I discussed grit and perseverance with psychologist and UPenn Professor Angela Duckworth. Listen here on Spotify or here on the Apple podcast network.
P.P.S. Section’s AI:ROI Conference is three weeks from today, on November 14. I’ll be sharing my latest predictions — will there be an AI bubble or a growth wave? — and leaders like Moderna’s VP of AI will share how they achieved AI wins like 80% internal adoption. It’s free, register now.
The post Endorsement: Vice President Kamala Harris appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
