The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: Moment 122: The Unseen And Horrifying Knock On Effect Of Dating Apps On Our Society - Scott Galloway

What do you make of dating apps?

Well, I think my advice to young people would be to do it all.

You know, it's how people meet.

It used to be how people made it, if you will, is that it used to be a third work, a third

friends and a third school.

Now it's well above 50% online.

So the majority of relationships are beginning online for people your age and it's very efficient.

But what happens when technology comes into any sector is it consolidates it.

It becomes a winner-take-most market.

So whether it's e-commerce, social media, search engines.

Once technology comes into it, you have one company that owns 50% of online retail, two-thirds

of all social and 93% of search.

So technology is coming to mating with dating apps and it's created a winner-take-all or

winner-take-most dynamic which is somewhat unhealthy and it plays out like something

like this.

Women are interested in men based on three criteria.

The first is their ability to signal resources.

The second is intelligence and the third is kindness.

It doesn't matter how rich or how smart you are, if you're an asshole or you're not kind,

people eventually don't want you as a mate.

And unfortunately online, it's very difficult to signal two and three so you can signal

one.

And when everyone has access to everyone, women who have a much finer filter for mating

because the downside of sex is so much greater for them if they get pregnant.

So they have much finer filter.

They end up all being drawn or expressing interest to a much smaller group of individuals.

So what the dynamic is, you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women on Tinder, 46 of the women

will express all of their interest to just four men, which these 46 men vying for the

attention of just four women.

So if you apply the genie coefficient to online dating, it's got the same genie coefficient

as income inequality in Venezuela.

So mating inequality is greater than income inequality in Venezuela.

And what it leads to is what I call Porsche polygamy.

And that is the men who are able, who are the top 10% in terms of attractiveness online

get 90% of the interest.

So that does not lead to good behavior or establishing long-term relationships, kind

of 50 to 90 percentile do okay, but the bottom half of attractiveness of men based on online

attractiveness are totally shut out of the market.

And as a result, in America, one in three males under the age of 30 has not had sex in

the last 12 months.

And I find people hear the term sex and their mind goes different places.

I think of it as the key step to an elemental foundation of any society and that is relationship.

So in the US, what's happened with online dating is it's amazing for the top 10% of

attractiveness of men.

It's okay for the top half.

It is a disaster for the bottom half.

And when I say attractiveness, I mean by very crude metrics.

So if you're Tinder profile, I went to MIT, I just started at KKR and my Rolex accidentally

is visible in my profile picture.

And I'm geolocated living in Manhattan or living in Beverly Hills.

You're going to get a massive amount of attention.

The bottom half, we're not able to express anything other than wealth, which they may

not have are totally shut out of the market.

And the knock on effect here is that we're producing too many of what is the most dangerous

person in the world.

And that is a young, broken, alone man.

So the guy who taxed Salman Rashti recently in the US.

That wasn't about the fatwa.

That was about a young man living in his mother's basement.

When you hear about mass shooters in the US, you know who they are before you know who

they are.

So we are producing an enormous cohort of economically and emotionally non viable men.

And I think it's bad for society.

I think it creates an existential risk for us.

I think women, as a result, don't have as many, find there just aren't as many economically

or emotionally viable men as they would like.

Women are graduating at double the rates of college as men now for every one male graduate

in the next five years of college.

There's going to be two women.

And you think, well, okay, it's time women, it's time women leveled up.

They're finally getting their due.

Okay.

But this has just realized it has huge societal impacts because women made socioeconomically

horizontally and up men horizontally and down.

In some women with college degrees typically aren't interested in men without college degrees.

So we're seeing less household formation, lower birth rates, and these things usually

stunt an economy.

So I think it's a big issue.

And again, I think it comes down to providing more young, more opportunity from young people

in general.

If you had sort of gender specific affirmative action towards men, it would just become so

politicized and heated that it wouldn't be worth it.

I think you need a massive leveling up of all young people that I think will disproportionately

help young men.

How do we get those bottom 50% of young men laid?

I think you need to make them first and foremost more economically viable.

I think more job opportunities.

I think it builds confidence.

I think you need to get them out of the house.

I think it's vocational programs.

I think it's opportunities to go to college or get some sort of certification.

I think it's things as basic as social service or more opportunities for them to get together.

Community.

Yeah.

And I think it's a certain amount of education that embrace some of the things that are wonderful

be about being a man.

Being aggressive is fine.

Be physically fit and strong.

I think we're blessed with, and this is true of men and women, I'm a big fan.

I believe they're a forward-looking indicator of your success is the amount of time you

spend sweating versus watching other people sweat.

Any person under the age of 30, man or woman should be able to walk into any room and think

if shit got real, I could kill and eat everybody or outrun them.

One or the other.

And it's not about being ripped.

It's not about being skinny.

It's about being a stronger version of yourself.

You'll be happier, less prone to depression, more attractive to other mates.

You'll be kinder because you will feel more confident.

So I think real embracing physical fitness, young people have one thing that's terrible

about young people as they've gotten unhealthier consistently the last 50 years.

I think social service, and I think figuring out institutions and means, whether it's

school or social service, so they can meet each other, develop friendships, fall in love,

have more opportunities to have, not only make relationships, but have guardrails.

Young men need guardrails.

They need a girlfriend, a job to tell them, no, you need to pit on a shirt and get into

work.

No, you can't get high and drunk every night.

No, if you want to continue to have sex with me, you need to get your shit together.

I think that's really important for a young man, especially young men.

And young women need it as well, but just not as much.

So I think what you have is a generation of young men that have no motivation, no guardrails.

They get their dope hit of addiction on Robin Hood.

They don't have the mojo to get out there and meet women as much because they're watching

so much porn.

They get this illusion that they have some sort of worth or affirmation when they say

angry things on social media that they get rewarded for.

They become, they start blaming other people.

Specifically, they start blaming women and they become much more prone to misogynistic

content.

They start believing in conspiracy theory.

They're less likely to believe in climate change and some, they become just really shitty

citizens and we're producing just a massive amount of these individuals.

And the scary part is we'll just ignore the weirdo and put them in the corner.

The problem is the government doesn't ignore them because we're very misogynistic when

it comes to our elected leaders.

In the US, we've been producing more female college graduates than male college graduates

for the last 40 years, but still only 28% of our elected representatives are female.

People, societies, men and women conflate leadership quality with height and depth of voice.

So we will always, at least in the US for a long time, elect more men.

And who do these men appeal to?

How do they get elected?

They appeal to this cohort of conspiracy driven misogynistic anti-government men, young men.

These young men will always have overrepresentation in government, which leads to elected leaders

saying that they believe the elections are rigged, that they stoke nationalist fears,

that blame immigrants.

I mean, really, really hateful stuff.

And so not only are these individuals dangerous and unproductive, but what's even more unproductive

is they will have a disproportionate voice in our politics.

Because the easiest way to get elected is to tap into the tribal instincts or motives of this cohort.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.