Caitlin Flanagan: Why I Finally Left Los Angeles

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Caitlin Flanagan on Marriage, Motherhood, and Modern Women"

Conversations with Coleman (The Free Press) — June 22, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this compelling conversation, Coleman Hughes sits down with Caitlin Flanagan—acclaimed writer, Atlantic essayist, and Free Press columnist—to discuss her recent departure from Los Angeles after 35 years, and to explore deep themes of urban decline, the social and political roots of disorder, and American shifts in marriage, motherhood, and modern womanhood. The episode thoughtfully unpacks the complexities of balancing career and family, the reasons behind plummeting birth rates, the challenge of dating across political lines, and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) consequences of a changing America.

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1. Leaving Los Angeles: A Personal and Civic Tale

Timestamps: 02:33 – 10:45

Flanagan’s Arrival and Love for LA

• Background: Flanagan moved to LA in her twenties, expecting to dislike it but quickly fell in love with its openness, lack of rigid social hierarchies, and vibrant communities.

  “In LA, even a humble school teacher, you could be whoever you wanted…” (03:52–05:00, Caitlin Flanagan)

• Los Angeles as an archipelago: A city defined by its neighborhoods, each with a distinct spirit, making LA deeply multi-dimensional.

• “No center point in [LA]...it's an archipelago of neighborhoods.” (05:10, Caitlin Flanagan)

Indicators of Decline

• Former vibrancy has given way to visible decay: copper wiring stolen from streetlights leaves areas in darkness, street disorder is rampant, infrastructure is decaying.
• “If you drive down the Miracle Mile at night, it’s pitch dark because all the copper has been ... stolen out of all the street lights.” (06:20, Caitlin Flanagan)
• Issues of organized crime exploiting loopholes and incentives, showing “criminals are to some extent rational,” responding instantly to changes in law enforcement or commodity prices (e.g., copper prices).

Public Safety Failures and Social Service Breakdown

• Increasingly “third world” aspects: e.g., teenage girls caught in prostitution rings on Figueroa, authorities unable (or unwilling) to keep track of or help vulnerable foster youth.
• “It's just, it's third world to have such a situation that we don't know where our girls are.” (09:59, Caitlin Flanagan)

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2. Policy Paralysis & Corruption: Governance in LA

Timestamps: 10:45 – 18:56

Criminal Incentives and Progressive Dilemmas

• Hughes and Flanagan discuss how progressive policies (e.g., shoplifting below $1,000 being a misdemeanor in San Francisco) create perverse incentives, leading to increased and highly calculated property crime.
• Flanagan challenges the tendency among progressives to romanticize petty criminals, suggesting if the state wants to provide “endless products to people,” put it on the ballot honestly.

The Lost Center-Right Mayor

• Flanagan’s provocative claim: “Every city should be run by a center right Republican. But they don’t exist anymore—they’ve either gone MAGA or melted like sugar cubes…” (13:32, Caitlin Flanagan)
• Cites former LA mayor Richard Riordan as an example—competent, practical, focused on functionality and swift, business-like problem solving.
• “The idea that maybe this state and its monopolies isn't always the way to serve the people… a city in a sense is like a business and … needs to be a very benign business.” (16:26, Caitlin Flanagan)

Abundance Movement Among Democrats

• Discussion of the “abundance” argument (Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson): attempts to revive center-right pragmatism in the Democratic party under a different name. Remove pointless regulatory barriers; build efficiently.

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3. The ‘Homelessness Industrial Complex’ and Systemic Grift

Timestamps: 18:56 – 23:29

• Flanagan unpacks the “homelessness industrial complex” and describes how billions earmarked for homelessness are funneled through bureaucracies, contracted to NGOs of varying quality—resulting in huge inefficiency and outright fraud:

  “That’s how $2.2 billion is missing ... and I think a lot of fraud is going to be discovered.” (21:55, Caitlin Flanagan)

• The original “asylum solution” for the indigent and mentally ill failed due to abuses; efforts to create humane alternatives keep getting bogged down in corruption and ineffectiveness.
• “Every five people would give you a different answer about our obligation to homeless people—and some now say we have none.” (19:51, Caitlin Flanagan)

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4. The Palisades and Altadena Fires: Disaster, Responsibility, and Dysfunction

Timestamps: 23:29 – 29:23

• LA’s government failed to prepare, even with clear advanced warnings; the mayor left town; half the fire engines weren’t working, and rebuilding has been appallingly slow.
• “If we are the fourth largest economy in the world… how do we not have plenty of money for the fire trucks to be repaired?” (25:09, Caitlin Flanagan)
• Highlights disparity between wealthy (Palisades) and middle-class (Altadena) community responses and how bureaucratic inertia leads to tragic outcomes.

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5. Marriage, Motherhood & Modern Womanhood

Timestamps: 29:23 – 52:42

Shifting Sexual and Romantic Norms

• Explores the evolution from the sexual revolution to the current landscape, where:

  • Sex no longer needs “legitimizing” by marriage or even love.
  • Upper-middle-class women increasingly question what men bring to the table as providers.
  • Despite sexual liberation, Flanagan observes a persistent “yearning for a romantic life.”

• “There remains a strong yearning for a romantic life. Not just a romance, but a romantic life.” (32:18, Caitlin Flanagan)

Marriage as Intentional Choice

• Observes a division: some young people very intentionally pursue marriage and family, while another cohort finds the task daunting or irrelevant, leading to bitterness and disdain between the sexes:

  “There seems to be some problem in the sorting mechanisms to get [good men and good young women] together ... the cohort starts breaking apart.” (42:00, Caitlin Flanagan)

The Politics of Dating

• Young men increasingly report that political divides—often left-leaning women vs. more centrist/right men—are a deal-breaker in dating.
  • Hughes’ advice: avoid politics as long as possible, allowing genuine connection to precede ideological differences.
  • Flanagan’s advice: if you’re only looking for reasons to reject, you’ll always find them; don’t mistake a job interview for a first date. (40:44–41:02)
• “One date, two dates, it takes a few times to really get to know each other.” (41:02, Caitlin Flanagan)

On Motherhood and Cultural Pressure

• Flanagan powerfully advocates for the joy and importance of motherhood, lamenting that cultural status now often diminishes women who openly desire to be mothers.
• “There is no kind of joy in life—nothing—like when they hand you that baby and it’s a person... That is what life is.” (46:05–47:30, Caitlin Flanagan)
• Addresses the narrative that career is more significant, arguing societal disdain for motherhood has gone too far.

Parenting, Genetics, and “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”

• Hughes introduces Brian Kaplan’s argument: genetics, not micro-parenting choices, mostly determines children’s future—thus parents can relax and consider having more children.
• Flanagan counters: “If you have a good home... The best thing you could ever do for your child is to love your partner ... If they see that and they feel that... that will always make a strong person. Always.” (50:49–52:18, Caitlin Flanagan)

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6. Children and Society: From Child-Full to Child-Free

Timestamps: 52:42 – 64:45

Cultural Comparison (US vs. Israel/Italy)

• Children as Public Joy: Other societies (Israel, Italy) normalize and celebrate children in public life; American culture, as fewer have children, is less tolerant.
  • “Children are the delight. Nothing’s going to go right when you have a lot of kids around, it’s always going to get messed up. And that’s life.” (54:20, Caitlin Flanagan)
• Raising children without community “play” becomes exhausting and isolating; the culture’s lack of “test drives” (babysitting, younger cousins, inclusivity at events like weddings) self-perpetuates childlessness.

Boredom and Resilience

• Reflections on earlier American childhoods: boredom was a spur to imagination; parents didn’t feel obligated to cure it with technology.
  • “Boredom is a very generative state because there's only one way out, which is finding something to do to no longer be bored.” (56:42, Caitlin Flanagan)
• Concerns about excessive screen time and societal trends making parenting harder despite “everything else getting easier.”

Missing Transmission of the Joy of Children

• Fewer young people are ever around children before parenthood, making the leap to desiring kids less likely, and the demystification of parenthood rarer.
• Cultural turn: Weddings with “no children”—a signal of sterility.
• “No, it's just a fancy event and we don't want it sullied by a yelling baby... It's so antiseptic and it's so cold... It's bizarre to me to not want children at a wedding.” (61:04–63:30, Caitlin Flanagan)
• “If we get to the point...fewer and fewer children are born... the robots can take over with no questions.” (63:15, Caitlin Flanagan)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote / Moment | |-----------|-------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 06:20 | Caitlin Flanagan | “If you drive down the Miracle Mile at night, it’s pitch dark because all the copper has been ... stolen.” | | 13:32 | Caitlin Flanagan | “Every city should be run by a center right Republican. But they don’t exist anymore—they’ve either gone MAGA or melted like sugar cubes…” | | 19:51 | Caitlin Flanagan | “Every five people would give you a different answer about our obligation to homeless people…” | | 25:09 | Caitlin Flanagan | “If we are the fourth largest economy in the world… how do we not have plenty of money for fire trucks?” | | 32:18 | Caitlin Flanagan | “There remains a strong yearning for a romantic life. Not just a romance, but a romantic life.” | | 40:44 | Caitlin Flanagan | “You have to manage the conversation in such a way that you don’t hit the trip wires…” | | 46:05 | Caitlin Flanagan | “There is no kind of joy in life—nothing—like when they hand you that baby and it’s a person...” | | 54:20 | Caitlin Flanagan | “Children are the delight. Nothing’s going to go right when you have a lot of kids around, it's always going to get messed up. And that's life.” | | 63:15 | Caitlin Flanagan | “If we get to the point...fewer and fewer children are born... the robots can take over with no questions.” |

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Closing Thoughts

• Flanagan closes on a bittersweet note: a passionate, sometimes pessimistic champion of the joys of marriage and parenthood, even as cultural, political, and economic tides seem to be washing those values away.
• Hughes acknowledges the complicated place the country is in, hesitant to end on a “pessimistic note,” but grateful for Flanagan’s candor and wisdom.

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This episode is an incisive look at the collapse—and possible reinvention—of urban America and family life in the 21st century, as seen through the eyes of one of the country’s sharpest cultural observers.

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Transcript

[Caitlin Flanagan]

And we're live on Matchday as Doug

[Coleman Hughes]

reaches for a Buffalo wing. He's got it.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it, it just tastes better. Matchdays deserve Pepsi.

[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

My guest today is Caitlin Flanagan.

[Coleman Hughes]

Caitlin is an American writer, critic and essayist best known for her long running work at the Atlantic magazine. She's the author of To Hell with all that Loving and Loathing, Our Inner

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Housewife, and she is now a columnist at the Free Press.

[Coleman Hughes]

In this episode, we talk about Caitlin's

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

decision to leave Los Angeles after 35 years.

[Coleman Hughes]

We talk about the decline of LA due to public disorder, homelessness and many other issues. We talk about the abundance movement among some Democrats. We talk about the so called homelessness industrial complex. We talk about the Palisades and Altadena fires. We talk about Karen Bass. We talk about modern womanhood balancing career and marriage, declining birth rates, dating across political divides, and much more. So without further ado, Caitlin Flanagan,

[Caitlin Flanagan]

If

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

you're like me, you've probably seen a recent headline and wondered, can the President really do that? That's why I recommend checking out the chart topping podcast you Might Be Right. Hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. It's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public affairs at the University of Tennessee. And Fun Fact, the show's named after Howard Baker's principal, Always remember the other fellow Might Be Right. Now that's a quote that conversations with Coleman can get behind on youn Might Be Right. The governors tackle timely policy conversations with political luminaries like Al Gore and Judy Woodruff. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode on whether there's too much money in politics. Political spending enables expression and participation, but at what cost? As we approach the midterms, the this is a timely and thoughtful discussion featuring Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig and former Chair of the Federal Election Commission, Brad Smith. Here balance perspectives without the shouting matches found on mainstream news. Follow youw Might Be Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell them I sent you.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay. Caitlin Flanagan, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Coleman, thank you so much for having me. Very big fan of yours.

[Coleman Hughes]

Oh, likewise. I think is the last time we saw each other. Bill Maher a couple years ago.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Yes, yes. And I meant I was going to stay for a drink, but I always by the end of The Bill Maher Show. I practically comatose for some reason and I just had to fall into the car and go home.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, that's okay. It's understandable. So I've been reading your essays for the Free Press and looking through the topics that you've been interested in in the past year and sort of the areas of mutual interest between us and, and I want to talk about, you know, the, what it is to be a, a woman in the modern age, a younger woman that is debating internally the choice whether to have a family. I want to get your advice on, on men, but before we, before we get there, I think we'll end there, but I want to start with your decision to leave Los angeles after, after 35 years. Can you give my listeners a little context on sort of how long you've lived there, what you love about Los Angeles and what made you leave?

[Caitlin Flanagan]

I came here in my twenties, married, I had already gotten a job, a teacher's job. I was a teacher forever, or 10 years, I should say. And I thought I was going to hate Los Angeles because I grew up in Northern California and there's always been a certain hauteur about Northern California being the best. And I came out here and I just thought, this is just the greatest place ever. It was truly open, the Berkeley Bay area. There's just a lot of old systems and clubs and litmus tests that always have to be passed. And in la, even a humble school teacher, you could be whoever you wanted, you could meet people. There was really no closed society, there was celebrity society. You know, this was back when movies were so big so you couldn't necessarily meet the movie stars, but you were constantly meeting the artisans who worked on movies and had really specific jobs. You know, not just set building, but building a very particular kind of set and using a very particular kind of paint and having sat with the director in pre production. And I just thought that was so interesting. And the city just looked great. People often when they first come to la, they don't understand it because they're looking for the center point of the city. And then they can kind of gauge where they go from there. But there's no center point in. It's an archipelago of neighborhoods. And once the longer you're there, the more you get, okay, this neighborhood is like this. And then how you connect to this neighborhood, and before you know it, the whole map starts filling in in a way that's just beyond the two dimensional. And it was the 80s, so there was a great art scene in Los Angeles. And you would just drive around like on Miracle Mile, which is a particular portion of Wilshire Boulevard. In the mid century it was named the Miracle Mile because it had these beautiful old, then very new department stores and it was a wide boulevard and there's still the sign Miracle Mile. But today, if you want to drive down Miracle Mile and the Robinson's May is a very famous building that was built in the mid century that has these huge gold bands around it and now owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is still there. If you drive down the Miracle Mile at night, it's pitch dark because all the copper has been taken, stolen out of all the street lights on that patch of the city.

[Coleman Hughes]

The copper. Explain that to me. The copper's been stolen.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Yeah. So after the pandemic, strange confluence of events. After the pandemic, the copper started to become very expensive. I don't know if that has anything to do with one another, but thieves are always very shrewd. They're looking at the, they're looking at the copper markets and they're like, oh, you can make money off this copper. And so they were, it wasn't like an individual enterprise. They were organized and they have stolen so much copper out of so many street lights that there are large parts of the city in darkness. And, and the city says it's 10%, but I don't believe that because the city also says it takes us one year to repair one street light. If it was just 10%, it wouldn't be the posted time, the admitted time of being a year. And the streets are torn up and they have. In New York you're used to potholes and your cab is flying down. You think you're going to be in traction at the end, but this is where we create, or I shouldn't say we. They created car culture more than anywhere else in the country. It was Los Angeles because there were these huge freeways and these wide boulevards and cars didn't get destroyed through the winter with the salt and the corrosion and all of that. And being able to just drive, obviously there was horrible traffic came in by the early 70s, but if you knew different ways to get different places or you chose your time, you just drove like you were the king of the road or something. And you were always. I was really into Raymond Chandler at that point in my life. And there were so many old Chandler esque buildings and I lived in one of them and I just felt very attuned to different times and eras of Los Angeles. And it was exactly Opposite. They used to say, before I came to la, there was a saying, an old saying, that after people graduate from college, the smart ones go into publishing and the dumb ones go into movies. And by the 80s it was reversed. Everybody was coming out, all the really sharp, smart, smart, smart young people, almost all men at that point for making movies, they didn't want to be in publishing. They understood it was already starting to be a dying industry compared to the movies, which is now also a dying, dead industry. But things were really happening. And then the old thing of just go to the beach, if you can get to a beach, a beautiful beach, anytime you want to, life can't be that so bad. And now it's just really, it's vile what's going on. And there was a big piece in the New York Times, a very good piece about two months ago about the prostitution trafficking out on Figueroa, which is in east part of the city of LA. And there are extremely young girls out there, 14, 15, there may be 13 year old girls and they have pimps and it's violent and the cars just drive through and drive through. And for whatever reason, I used to have an appointment at the Children's dependency court. And every way back then, every single kid that didn't have a mother or a father or somebody, a guardian that they were living with, they were contact, if they were in a foster care, if they were in a temporary foster care with a relative, they were visited regularly by a social worker and their names, they were known. And I'm not saying that the department did a very good job, it didn't do a very good job. But at the very least we knew these kids and we knew where they were supposed to be and we knew what school they were enrolled in and we knew that if we called the school registrar and gave our ID that she would let us know was the kid in school or when's the last time you saw her. And there are all these young girls and department services, they don't, they've given up on them and it's just, it's third world to have such a situation that we don't know where our girls are.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So a couple things you mentioned provoke some thoughts to me. One was the, the idea that thieves are sensitive enough and paying attention to the incentives so much that they understand the price of copper has gone up. So we need to be taking copper out of, out of lampposts. Right. It's just one more data point in favor of the idea that criminals are to some extent rational.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Yeah.

[Coleman Hughes]

And they respond to incentives. So for instance, you know, the law that San Francisco infamously passed, which, you know, I think, I think it made like, it made shoplift, shoplifting up to a thousand dollars or so a misdemeanor rather than a felony. And then you would see criminals go into, you know, a pharmacy and get $999 worth of stuff. It's just like, yeah, like if you change the laws to make it more relaxed around theft, what you will get is more theft precisely to that, that threshold. And there is a whole ideology among progressives that really finds, thinking along the lines I've just been talking, they find something about that to be inherently degrading and immoral. And um, at, at some level, every thief is like Jean Valjean stealing bread for, for, for their children. Even when, you know, when you get these people on camera, they will tell you, yeah, like this is a lifestyle. We pay attention to all the laws. We're basically just like young hooligans. Like, we like doing this. It's part thrill, it's part money. For, for most of these people, they have other options.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Well, to progressives, I always say in this argument, fine, if you think the state should be providing endless amounts of, or any amount of all the kinds of products that are in a mid level drugstore, okay, let's get that on the ballot. Let's agree to that. Let's find a distribution point if that's what you think. But obviously they don't think that that would ever make any sense to do that. And so they have to find this narrative, this inspirational narrative about why people are stealing from drugstores. And that's when people start to lose. I mean, we've all lost faith in either side of the political spectrum. Or you can have two sides on a spectrum that both sides are really embedded in these obvious lies and the people are supposed to just choose their lie, I guess.

[Coleman Hughes]

I want to read you something that you wrote in a recent column. Quote, every city should be run by a center right Republican. But they don't exist anymore. They've either gone MAGA or melted like sugar cubes in the ocean when they've come up against someone of that philosophy. That philosophy being maga, Right. Explain that.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Well, since the last time this city had a Republican mayor was 30 something years ago. Richard Reardon, he was a center right Republican. He was not into abortion, getting involved in all of that. I don't think he ever said he was against. No, I don't think he ever said he was against abortion. Or any of those litmus tests. He was a very respected businessman and he was one of these guys that make great mayors because he really loved the city and things were really bad. There was the epidemic of carjacking and gangs were very, very active at that time, coming up in the 1980s. And he just said, as a center right Republican, a thing that would be anathema to say in the House I grew up in, which was extremely liberal, that business is what makes money for people. We have to make it possible for people to have businesses and we have to take as many impediments away from it as we can. And shortly after he was elected, we had the huge Northridge earthquake, which out of all my life in California, that's really the only big earthquake that I've ever been through. And that 10 freeway, which many of us used to go to work, I certainly did. I mean, it had huge number of fires going through. It pancaked at one particular point.

[Coleman Hughes]

Wow.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

So I needed to get to work through that particular freeway interchange. And the way it works in California is Caltrans, California Department of Transportation, they run everything with road repair. And they came out and said it was going to be about a year or a year and a half to replace it. And it was really a horrible moment because you just thought, a year and a half, I got to get to work, I got to get to the Valley every day. And for a year and a half, I'm going to have to go through the canyons, which sounds glamorous when I put it that way, but not when your first class is at 8:00'. Clock. And he said, no, this is force majeure. We don't have to follow that rule that we have to go with Caltrans. I'm going to bid this out. He was right, he could do that. And he bid it out to all variety of contractors in the state. And he put the most draconian rules into it. Huge incentives for making certain dates and then huge penalties for not making them. And I don't want to say eight days, although I keep remembering that. But in less than two weeks, as opposed to a year and a half that was back and it worked again.

[Coleman Hughes]

Amazing.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

It was amazing. And for the first four years, definitely the first time I drove it, I was like, I'm going over this, you know, bridge that they made in two weeks. That's really properly. It still works perfectly. So the idea that maybe this state and its monopolies isn't always the way to serve the people of the state. Or a city best. And that those old fashioned center right Republicans, they had an idea about these things and that a city in a sense is like a business and that it needs to be a very benign business. It needs to be a business that also, or primarily you could even say, takes care of the poor or other people who can't really get into that level of life yet. But it should be functional. And a Senate Republican thought a city should be functional.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. The idea of abundance, which, which is coined by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson really is just an attempt to smuggle in that center right vibe you just described of let's build things quickly, get rid of red tape where it doesn't make sense and at minimum allow the government to do things that make sense quickly without the government imposing all kinds of insane red tape on itself.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

It's an attempt to smuggle that into the Democratic Party without, without highlighting that it's sort of, sort of center right.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Without saying we need to get rid of regulations. You can't say that. But that's really what it comes down to is California has so many regulations and every 10th one is critically important. It does help prevent, you know, falls from tall buildings by toddlers and whatever. But the others are just old grifts that are, you know, being paid out to entities that don't even exist anymore to get, to get this money flowing to certain entities and not to others. And by the time you get as many regulations as we have, you can't really move. There's, you know, with Spencer Pratt, one thing I will say to his defense is that in the Palisades, only one house has been rebuilt. One instead of 6,000. Even though Karen Bass said, oh, she was going to fast track everything. There's one house. There's no such thing as building fast in Los Angeles.

[Coleman Hughes]

Wow. Yeah. I want to talk about the Palisades fire in a second, but while we're on the topic of grifts, one of the things I hear about a lot from people right of center is the so called homelessness industrial complex. You know, sometimes it's, it's called that colorfully, but it just refers to the NGOs that deal with homelessness and the money that they receive from the government and an air of skepticism about what it is that they're actually doing, if their incentives are aligned or if it's just kind of a massive grift. I'm curious, do you paid much attention to that issue and what's your view of it?

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Oh, about homelessness, I pay a Huge amount of attention. My son has worked for a great service for the homeless for he's now in graduate school, so he's gone down to halftime for six years and volunteered as a high school student and is a very strong Christian. And he says something to me that I just always think is interesting, which is that we always ask the wrong question about homeless people. You know, we say, what should we do to them? Where should we put them? Where will we hide them for the Olympics? But you have to turn the question entirely around to ourselves and say, what is our obligation to people who can't take care of themselves? What's our obligation to them? I wouldn't say any five people would give you the same answer. I do think we're getting to a point where there would be some people who say we have no obligation to them and we need to get rid of them. And what Pratt was advocating is completely illegal. And it's been illegal since the late 70s when we opened up all the asylums, which made homelessness. The problem that it is is that that's how we used to treat the problem. We used to say if someone was severely mentally ill or wasn't a drug thing in that time, it was like dipsomania, alcoholics, or huge, profound cognitive deficits. We put them in enormous asylums and we forgot about them. And there were huge ones on the East Coast. Huge ones. And there's a documentary, did you ever see it, about Pilgrim State? It goes by this name of the talent show that inmates or the people they themselves had made, which was Titicut Follies. It was made on property in the late 70s and it would not even be allowed to be released for 20 years. It was so shocking, so shocking. And now you can find it. And you see people lined up, 100 people being told to take their clothes off and being fire hosed. That's their bath. We don't know. We have no. As soon as we set up any kind of group place that people are going to be cared for, something terrible happens and we do absolutely terrible things. So I think that, yes, the NGO problem is definitely a big one, because that's how $2.2 billion is missing. Because in California, what you do is when there's a social problem, say now Newsom, he designates them large amount of money to go to that solving it, then that money gets funneled into a government agency in la, or it was the Los Angeles Homeless Authority, Services Authority. And then they, okay, so what's the next step? They start making grants to Neighborhood community organizations, which there's a lot of variance among them. As I said, my son works at a really great one. But a lot of them are, I'm going to say, I think in the next six months as this case goes forward, the $2.2 million billion missing dollars, I think a lot of fraud is going to be discovered. A lot of it, yeah. It's a terrible system.

[Coleman Hughes]

So let's talk about the Palisades fire. I know this is at the heart of the mayoral race in la, which you've written about. What, what? And I, I think just what two days ago we, we, we started jury selection on, on the, the case of the person who allegedly started the fire. So we, with respect to the Palisades fire, you mentioned that only one house has been rebuilt. But do we have a final verdict on who, if anyone is to blame or what institution, if any, is to blame for the Palisades fire?

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Well, remember the LA fires of that terrible two weeks? There were two fires. There was the one in the Palisades and there was the one in Altadena and they were very, they both were equally devastating. They, they both destroyed almost the same number of houses. The difference was that the Palisades is in LA city proper. So that's where LA City is investigated for that. And then Altadena is in the county of la. They were also different in that the Palisades are very wealthy neighborhood. Maybe one of the. It's always been the dream, everybody, the dream where you would want to raise your children because it looks like it's not radiating wealth, it's just everything's kind of nice and you're right at the beach and you can take your kids there every day after school. And then it started getting bigger and bigger houses there. But that's a rich person's experience of a problem or rich people experiencing a problem. And over here in Altadena, very middle class, very truly middle class neighborhood. So who's to fault? Well, I was always taught about fires because I'm from California. The big difference between a fire and an avalanche or a snow emergency is that you have to have snow falling for a long time before you get enough for an emergency. So you get a lot of heads up. But a fire is like, it's like a nuclear event because it just rips that one tiny flame can rip up a hillside it in just seconds. And so definitely the story about climate change, I'm not gonna say that's not right, but I'm also gonna say a 64 year old Californian. I've seen extremely dry conditions before start extreme be part of extremely bad fires. But the truth of the matter is they were predicting for four days before those fires, my son was calling me from New York and saying, are you guys aware of this? That the Forest Service in California, Forest Service and the US Forest Service is saying in so many words, this is as bad a condition as it can be. So it wasn't as though the mayor, Karen Bass, had legitimately been in Ghana and it was certainly a legitimate trip and had had no idea that this might happen. She left LA knowing that the Forest Service was saying this was really a serious problem. And then to the mismanagement. Apparently there were a huge number of fire engines that weren't in working order. How can that be? How can that not be ultimately her problem? They didn't have enough fire engines. And it just speaks to if they're going to constantly tell us that we're the fourth largest economy in the world, which I guess we are, and we are the number one tax base in the country, how do we not have plenty of money for the fire trucks to be repaired? How would we not have plenty of money for everything to be in working order? And it gets back to that idea of the grift. I think a lot of money disappears in between Sacramento, the seat of the government and the problems that we have. But it's not people will immediately say, oh, it's you have all those illegals that just even at its highest level of how much that might cost is just a fraction of the trillion plus dollars that we take in every year. So somebody's not telling the truth. And the state and the people in it are suffering for it.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

On this show, we spent a lot of time having honest, unfiltered discussions around Israel, Zionism and antisemitism. And if our conversations have made you more curious about any of these topics, I have a recommendation for you. Wandering Jews with Mijjal and Noam is a podcast hosted by two of the leading Jewish voices of today, Noam Weissman and Mijal Biton. On their show, Mijal and Noam are finding fresh perspectives on tough subjects. They've explored the war in Iran from the viewpoint of Persian Jews, they've poked fun at anti Semitism with comedians, and they've asked prominent rabbis about the future of religion. If you value nuance over hot takes

[Coleman Hughes]

and want to get past all of

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

the noise, this show is for you. Search Wondering Jews with Mijjal and Noam on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube and subscribe or find the link in the show Notes. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely that private. What's changed? The Internet. Think about everything you've browsed, searched for, watched or tweeted. Now imagine all of that being crawled and aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record. Your record. Having your private life exposed was once something only celebrities worried about. But in an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure. To keep my data private, I turn to Express vpn. The easiest way data brokers track you is through your IP address, that unique number that reveals who you are and where you are. Every time you go online, ExpressVPN hides it, making it much harder for brokers to monitor and monetize your activity. It also encrypts 100% of your network traffic, works on all your devices, and plans start at just3.49amonth. I interview a lot of people who prefer our conversations stay private. At 12 cents a day, there's really no argument against a solution like this. Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com Coleman that's E-X P-R-E-S-S-V P N.com Coleman to find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com Coleman let's pivot here and talk

[Coleman Hughes]

about motherhood and being a woman in the modern age with so much changing and relationships. I mean, there's a lot to discuss here. One way into the conversation is through the declining birth rates in America and all around the world. You've written about being the mother of twin boys and obviously you've had, in addition to being mother, you've had an extremely successful career as a writer for several decades now. And so you've negotiated all of these trade offs and decisions that women more than men have to make in terms of balancing family and work. And we're entering, I mean, as technology changes, as culture changes, those challenges update and change and they're not quite the same as they were in the 80s or even in the 2000s. And I'm curious, what is your vantage point on this moment right now? What is it that the typical 20 year old or 25 year old or 35 year old woman is thinking about now and negotiating between with respect to these decisions between career and family? And how has that changed over the past several decades?

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Okay, so if we want to just think about the social history of. It's interesting, the sexual revolution came with the birth control bill, but it didn't come to girls for a long time. It was like women were free. But there was still a repressive attitude towards girls until the late 70s, early 80s. And it was still an idea that no matter how much sexual liberation adults had found, the daughters of the household had to be protected. And there was still that old idea, I don't know you. It started to crack apart in the 70s, but that the only legitimized way for a girl or a very young woman to have sex was to get married. That was the legitimizing event. And so many were still having sex, but they were doing it in this somewhat non legitimate way. And then by the late 70s and early 80s, girls came up with their own legitimizing way and people respected it, which was instead of marriage, there was love. If my boyfriend loves me and if I love him, and if we're, you know, just in this tight relationship, you know, mini marriage for three months or five months or whatever it might be, that that legitimizes my being sexual. And you get later into the 80s and 90s and they're like, why should I need anything to legitimize my sexual life? And it's my sexual life, I'll do with it what I want. And society has respected that. And, and as women's opportunities for real careers, you know, for. They could really. Now we're talking about upper middle class women with access to this much education, but when they can really have jobs that are the equal of their husbands, you know, they're both, both doctors or whatever, then the younger generation's like, well, if I can make as much as a doctor and if I have sexual, total sexual liberation, what is the man bringing me? Why would I want to be married? I have my own money. Men seem to have all of this baggage that comes along with them, and yet underneath it obstinately, stubbornly contra everything that the young women would want to have, there remains a strong yearning for a romantic life. Not just a romance, but a romantic life. And that there's still this idea that no matter how many dates or coffee dates they get from the apps, the ick factor, as they always say, is almost immediate. Because what they're really trying to find isn't like a date. When I was doing a date, like, yeah, that math didn't work out. I don't want to go out with him again. But it wasn't just because it wasn't interesting. But it wasn't as though from the second I sat down, I was wondering, would I marry this Guy. Would this guy be a long term romance for me? No, that wasn't the idea. And now they're, they're neither in the place of we just don't need men, we're over it, and we shall live our own lives. Nor are they at the place where they think they need, in any respect, a man. And so that incredible, you know, magnetic pole that existed when I was young between men and women where it was just like you had no control over it, you know, and your mind started spinning, you know, the more intense the relationship, you did start to spin. When I'm going to marry this guy, maybe that seems to be totally gone, you know, so everything sort of. And you'll hear young people when they're talking about where they're, you know, if they're talking about marriage, they're not talking about, oh, we'll do this and we'll do that. It's just, well, I'm going to be having a residency in Boston, so I know that. So you've got to find your job. And they're just talking about their careers. It's very bloodless. So what I just notice very casually is that the young people who, they do want to get married, they see worth in marriage. And they, they've always thought of that for themselves. They do seem to be getting married, they do seem to be finding one another. They do seem to be having children. There's an intentionality about it is what they always thought they would do. And my twins are 28 and it's now like this summer. Weddings are going off like popcorn, but just for some kids that they know, for other kids, not at all. So I think that there's something beyond the manosphere or the privileged women that are so judgmental. I think there's still a stratum of society, men and women who want to do that, who just always thought they wanted to do that and were looking for that and quickly found it, relatively quickly. And then there are people who just, oh, why would I do that? But then it turns out, well, I would do it if I could find this and this and that. And because it becomes so hard once you're in that pool, there becomes this incredible bitterness. And I would say the manosphere, however real or real or unreal it is that they have a power over the women who are nasty about men because men are scary. You know, when men are angry, that's really scary. But they both, this whole group of men and women have real, I'll just say disdain for one another and, and women Will have sympathy if a friend of theirs is getting married, why is she doing that? So, as with everything in America, literally everything, something has ended. The way the boomer air is over and the new thing isn't here yet, and we have no idea what it's going to be. But we can all feel the ground shifting beneath our feet in all sorts of ways, whether it's social, political, in every possible way. We're, you know, and you can add on all the technology, et cetera. We don't know who we are. We don't have a common story. There's not a common story of what America is. There's not an understanding of what. No wonder our kids are woefully uneducated. We don't have any idea of what we expect after 13 years of public education. Okay, these are the skills every kid should have. These are the things they should know. This is their reading ability. This is where they should be in math, and that's a high school diploma. We have no standard for that. And so we're just drifting right now into a post educated, post literate, hypertech era, and people are terribly unsure of themselves within it.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, um, One of the most common questions I've gotten when I do ask me anything episodes is from men that are probably roughly my age, maybe a little younger, a little older. I'm 30 and you're 30.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Oh, gomen, you're so smart. I thought you were a lot older. Okay, good. So much life to live.

[Coleman Hughes]

The. But they, they're asking like, how do I manage the problem of, you know, I want, I want to date and meet great women my age and find my wife, but I'm having, like, I don't know how to negotiate the political gap between me and most of the women I'm meeting that are far to the left of me. And we know this from the data that there is a. There's a big gender divide in politics. Men are young. Men in particular tend to be much to the right of, of young women. And this becomes a problem because we're, you know, I, I'm old enough to just, I think, barely remember a time when your politics were not a referendum on who you were as, as a human being. It's like, yeah, Jim's a Republican and Dave's a Democrat and whatever, and they're friends and nobody wonders how their friendship survives. Right. It's just like they vote. They have different views on what the tax rate should be. It wasn't a deep issue,

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

but now

[Coleman Hughes]

it's considered by many young people to be a referendum on whether or not you are a good person. And that then becomes an obstacle. And so to whatever extent this problem is real versus imagined, because if it's real on one date, then it becomes a thing in your head on the second date. And the psychological, the memory of how bad it went on the last date becomes its own new obstacle in addition to the potential obstacle itself. So I'm curious, what advice do you,

[Caitlin Flanagan]

what do you tell them?

[Coleman Hughes]

My advice thus far has been practical advice, which is try to not bring up politics as long as possible. And in the vacuum of politics, it is possible that you will connect pretty deeply with her for other reasons, whatever that is. Maybe humor, maybe you have the same taste in movies, maybe you're super attracted to each other. You just really like get to know each other. And then by the time politics comes up, she will judge, she will very likely judge those differences in the light of already liking you, which makes the entire difference. Most women will, once they like you, will judge these things far differently than they will judge you if they're meeting you just, just straight up.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

That's really good advice. You have to manage the conversation in such a way that you don't hit the trip wires. That would reveal a political inclination one way or another.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, that's been my practical advice. I've seen that work. And I say that because I've seen it work for people.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

That's good. And the only thing I have said is if you go into that date, I mean, I just say it to women, where you're looking for the disqualifying things, where you're looking for the ick factor when you're, you know, every possible thing could be, no, not him for sure, then that's what you'll find, you know, and there's no such thing as a first date. That's just like a little job interview for a low level position. You don't even get to scratch the surface of who someone might be. One date, two dates, I mean, it takes a few times to really get to know each other in any way. And I think for women, that whole political just, I mean, I can see them now, but abortion, which I agree it's terrible what's happened, but the idea that any man is just a terrible enemy of all women if he has a certain political inclination, and as soon as you can find that out, you immediately get rid of him and tell all your friends how close you came to sleeping with the enemy. And then that is a perfectly acceptable way to live. A Life, for sure. And I'm not even saying that a life without children or a husband is a lonely life. I've known women, you know, certainly older women, who've lived really great creative lives without families or children. For me, it would be a terrible, lonely thing that I couldn't bear. But if you want to do that, then don't waste your time or the other person's time by pretending to go on a date that is full of possibilities. You know, you're just going so that your bitterness can be legitimated. Like, yes, I have every reason to be so bitter. It turned out that this person had read J.D. vance's memoir, and because of that, I must never, ever be put in the same room with him again. Why are you wasting your time? You know, and yeah, but the thing is, we all know so many good men and we know so many good young women, and there seems to be some problem in the sorting mechanisms to get them together, you know, And I don't know what that is, but it seems to be the younger they find each other. I do see, like among middle, upper middle class kids, I see a lot, as I said, of kids getting married younger than they had in the previous years, this sort of sense like, we know what we want, we know what we were looking for when we were in college and maybe the early professional school. And that's what we've done, you know, and their parents are thrilled. And I do think that not, not to be horrifying, say anything horrifying, but that the longer you wait, the more the cohort starts breaking apart. You know, when you're young, everybody's kind of still in the same groups and doing the same things, and they're still getting together with college friends or whatever. And the more time that spends and more people kind of drift and do do other things. You're no longer with a large cohort of peers. I think it gets smaller, right?

[Coleman Hughes]

What about the choice whether or not to have kids? Because obviously we're living in a world where just fewer and fewer people are having kids and the people who are having kids are having fewer kids. And I am, I, I, I've known that I want to have kids with 100% certainty since I was probably 18 or 19, which I think definitely put me in, in the minority. But you know, for, for women, at least when I was in college, I, I heard from women who said there was at that point that the, the feminist valorization of having the big career as a CEO or, or whatever it is, had gotten to such an extent that to express a desire to be a mother was subtly frowned upon which never really made sense to me because think of my vantage point as someone that knew he wanted to be a father. Absolutely. And that whatever my career was probably the, the there, there was nothing I would, if I, there's nothing I would regret in my career that could even come close to, for me to the regret of like not having kids. That's just me. So I, I, I always, I always felt, well, something must be, must have gone overboard. If you know, a 20 year old young woman feels like diminished status being because she strongly wants to be a mother and has that as a conscious

[Caitlin Flanagan]

goal, you know, something has gone wrong. I mean there's nothing he'll ever do that's as consequential, as meaningful and important as having children. But that's not even the reason to have them. It's that there is no kind of joy in life. Nothing. Like when they hand you that baby and it's a person, you know, you've been thinking all nine months and seeing the images on the screen and reading all the books and then there's this person, a separate hall person and you just feel like the delivery room for like one minute is just bathed in this kind of golden light in the sense that you are in the middle of a miracle and you are so immediately bonded to that child, it's beyond anything you could imagine. And you're like, oh, my old life, whatever it contained all those things, they're far, far, far down the list. My whole life is doing right by this child. And you know, I hear young women say, well, I want to do something with a purpose. I want to do something that's meaningful. There's nothing more meaningful than this. And there's nothing, just the pleasure of holding that sleeping baby when he's little and he's just snuggled up into your arms. There's a reason human. For all of humanity. Art has shown us images of mother and child. Everybody has known this is a really important thing and that this kind of love is a separate and particular love that reoccurs everywhere. And to miss out on it would be a terrible thing, A terrible thing. And to have to pretend or to espouse these ideas that oh, I don't want a kid and I won't get to party and I won't get to do this or do that. Yeah, that's the least of what you're not going to be able to do. You know, you're not in the same life in a Lot of ways. But finally, finally, finally your life is no longer totally dedicated to self. As much as you go to yoga, you go to mass, you go to everywhere, try to get out of your own head, you're still like, what's my next job? What's this? What's that? And the minute you get that baby, you're like, oh, no, this is the new life that's come into the world. And I'm the one blessed to shape it and protect it and raise it and then someday let it go on by himself. And that's what life. That is what life is. So I don't know. That's my commercial. Not a popular one, but I try to promote it.

[Coleman Hughes]

I'm a big fan of Brian Kaplan and his book Selfish Reasons to have More Kids, where he makes the counterintuitive argument that if you really accept the research which says that parents have less power to shape their kids than we all think. In other words, the biggest, the biggest influence that you have on your kids is, is the individual genetic package that you give them. And so long as you avoid the major no no's of parental abuse and extreme parenting, you don't have a huge impact on their life outcomes. At some level, that is like an unacceptable truth. If it's true. It's kind of psychologically unacceptable to most parents because the amount of love you have for the child, the idea that you have so little control over the child's outcomes, there's just something unacceptable about that.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

It's ridiculous.

[Coleman Hughes]

But on the other hand, he argues that if you accept that this is true, then you can take some of the felt burden off of parenting with the knowledge that you know, not every tiny choice you make, you know about whether, do they need to take an extra class? Do they need to, do I need to run around to an extra round of dance practice? Or else, you know, God forbid we don't keep up with the Joneses, or God forbid we don't get them that extra hour of tutoring, whatever it is. You can relax a bit as a parent with the understanding that these micro choices don't matter as much as you think they did. And he ultimately argues that that's a reason that people should have more kids and be more relaxed about their parenting styles. Right.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

What do you think?

[Coleman Hughes]

What do you make of that argument?

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Definitely being more relaxed. And I see a lot of young parents who are a lot more relaxed than I was, maybe because I'm such a high strung person, but obviously how you set a child up in life economically is probably equal to the genetic package and those two are probably bigger than the parenting, so to speak. But yeah, if you have a good home and I mean if you. The best thing you could ever do for your child is to love your partner, if they look in that stable, the gift of that beyond anything that you can imagine is profound. Their sense of security in the world is profound. And their sense that whatever goes on these two I can count on, whether I'm mad at them, whether they're weird, whatever, they will always be there. They are the backstop for everything. And if they see that and they feel that, you know, and people always say when they've had a recent divorce, you say, well, how are the kids doing? They're doing great, they're just doing great. They're not doing great. They don't know how to tell you what's wrong. They don't even know what's wrong. But it really hurts. And so I would say if you can get that, if you just get that part of the. Because everybody's gonna love their kids unless you're psychopath and care about where they're in school or whatever. But if they get a sense that it's not just that you and your husband love them, it's that you love each other and that the group, the family is indivisible, That will always make a strong person. Always.

[Coleman Hughes]

I'm curious what you think about the way modern society in particular in the west treats sort of the issue of children. Like what? What I mean by that is when I visited Israel years ago, it struck me that this was inherently an easier place to raise a child because there's something like self perpetuating about having children. If everyone else around you also has children, right? Then your kids just walk outside, they go play with the neighbor's kids, they can disappear for two hours and you can be a hundred percent certain that they're safe and probably having fun and that there are other adults around who welcome children, right? You can bring, there's just like a culture of you can bring your kids to a restaurant and no adult is going to think you've ruined the vibe by bringing your, you know, you're snot nose kid. It's just like not, that's not. No one's gonna have that attitude. And everyone is just more tolerant of the kinds of small nuisances that children bring along to any social space, right? And then, you know, I was just listening to, I think it was Andrew Sullivan and historian H.W. brand and they were just talk both Talking about how in their childhood

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

on

[Coleman Hughes]

a weekend, they would literally disappear at noon and come back at 6. And their parents, you know, mom would have cooked dinner by six, but like they're just out roving with the neighborhood kids for hours. Right.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

That's how we grew up in the States. Yes. I mean, no one knew where I was. I mean I had loving parents, but you just, you got, sometimes you come back to get a lunch. If it was the weekend, but you were out and about, you had your business to conduct. You know, you had these other friends and you'd sort of wash ashore in one of their houses. And if it was lunchtime, that mother would make you a sandwich. And it was just. Now, I don't know if the parents were right, that nothing would happen to us. I don't think that, I don't really think that it was less or more safe for a child to be on his or her own in the Berkeley hills in that era. But no, we had. But I know what you're saying. I haven't been to Israel, but I've been many times to Italy. And that sense that we love the children, we love them. And my sister, years ago, she was at a restaurant in Italy, she's American, and her little two year old took the plate, it was empty and he smashed it on the ground. It was that big noise and they thought, oh, we're going to get thrown up and thrown out. And the waiters just loved it, you know, bambino. And they're cleaning it up and they're playing with him. And it was just that children are the delight, you know, and nothing's going to go right when you have a lot of kids around, it's always going to get messed up. And that's life, right?

[Coleman Hughes]

And I think like the fewer people that have kids in a society, the fewer people kind of are used to that sort of level of nuisance, the fewer people tolerate it in public spaces. Uh, I mean, you can just see how in some ways being a parent is less attractive in, in this environment because you have to be your kids entertainment, right? Like if you like more and more people only have one kid as opposed to two or three or four. Okay. That means you're your kids. Either you're your kids entertainment or you're handing them the iPad, right? And, and that becomes exhausting for, for the typical adult if you don't have that four hour break on the weekends where they're just running around. You can see how the way culture is evolving has actually made though, you know, Everything in life is getting easier with technology. Like, easier and easier and easier. But certain things sort of aren't getting easier. And it might be that parenting is one of those things. I'm curious if you share that view or if that's too pessimistic.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Well, at least I could just tell you how things were in America 60 years ago. You spend a lot of time being bored, and your parents aren't going to give you anything to stop the bored. I mean, you're really angry about that, but, you know, nothing's changing. And before you know it, oh, you found these old toys, and now you've set up this new thing to do with them. And then you get bored again. You're angry, but then you start reading a book that you've already read. And it is that boredom is a very generative state because there's only one way out, which is finding something to do to no longer be bored. But I certainly know. I don't know what's going to happen with this. When I see people and their kids have a screen, I get it. If I'd had that. And in fact, they just. Game Boys. I remember we got them each a Game Boy when we were going to Hawaii, and they were five, and I thought, this is going to be the end of him. And it wasn't. But it was just like. It was like we'd set our kids to pause from just total noise. We gave it to them right before we took off. But it was also scary to see how quickly they just were totally drained into this little piece of machinery. So I don't think that's going anywhere good. But, no, you're going to find. You'll find the other parents. You always do. You go to the park every day and you meet that other mother, you meet that other father, you meet this other person. Someone says, let's get them all together on a Saturday. It's not a glamorous lifestyle, but you find the other people and you set up the play dates and you're doing this great thing of raising children, and there's just nothing like. There's nothing like it. I mean, it's just so strange to even have to talk about the appeal of children. That's how much the culture has changed. But, like, when you look around, like, what is the point? They're the point. You know, that's the. That's the deep pleasure of life. It's not getting ahead yourself. And life is ruinously expensive. But the poor have had children much poorer than any American. Poverty can Be that there's a saying that each child brings his own loaf of bread with him. Somehow you make space. But I think if you don't want them, don't have them definitely ever. And it's perfectly legitimate to not want them. But be sure that you know what you're giving up on.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I mean someone commented recently that, you know, one thing that has disappeared for most people like in their late teens and early twenties is that experience of being around children that are not your children, but frequently as like a young adult. Right. Because everyone is a child. And then some people when they're, you know, nowadays it's like 30, right. Some people when they're 30 will choose to have a child. But there's this in between period where you're no longer a child, you're no longer, as far as modern society is concerned, old enough to have kids. And in an earlier era there were just so many kids around, people had so many cousins and just there was, it was more of a child full culture that you would experience that almost like, that almost like test driving parenting thing of hanging out with someone else's kid as a 20 year old or your cousin. Right. And you would get to experience a little bit of what that joy might feel like as a young adult, which becomes a test of test drive for whether you want to have a kid in five or 10 years. And I think increasingly very fewer people have that experience as a, as a normal part of the rhythm of their life. Like okay, you might be around a kid once in a while, but not enough for that kid to really begin to love you and trust you and for you to experience that warmth. And so this is another way in which there being fewer children around is a self perpetuating cycle because that the person who quote unquote, quote unquote doesn't want kids. That's real. And you're right, like if you don't want kids, you shouldn't have kids. But it, it also could be in some cases at least that you, you never really got to experience that, that

[Caitlin Flanagan]

kind of feeling and the feeling of that little kid like if you're the cousin, the older cousin and they just look at you like you see, because you're the big older cousin who can do different things. But again, back to America of another era that will never return and probably shouldn't and kept women back. If you were a girl, a middle class girl by the time you were 12, you were babysitting for money. That was what you do did and they didn't have any extracurricular, like, maybe, like, somebody had to play the. I don't know, the OPA once a week on Saturday with the teacher. But it was like, that was. Nobody questioned, well, is she good enough? Or whatever. And then you started getting like, oh, kids like her. So people really call her early. And then when I went to college, how weird is this? Someone told me, oh, in the main hall, they have a book of people who need babysitters. And I was like, really? Because I had a car. And so I babysat a lot in college. And it was just. This is what would be seen as a limiting thing, is that your. As a girl, to be good at that, to be seen by others. Oh, she's very good with children. Didn't mean like, oh, she's kind of slow. It meant like, that was a treasured thing in a young woman. And obviously that barred so many young women from advancing in more powerful positions because it was seen that this was the thing they were good at. But it was just. Yeah, exactly. So it was just such a different era and we can't and won't and wouldn't want to go back to it for all sorts of reasons. But I do see in big families, you know, my husband's from a really big family in Minneapolis, and there is that generational thing where the oldest of the cousins have taken care of the youngest of the cousins stood. Now the very oldest of the cousins are now getting married and there's even a grandchild. And being around a lot of kids is definitely puts you in that. Either very much in the family way of mind or never am I doing that frame of mind. But I just see, like, wedding invitations, no children. Don't bring any children. And it's like. But the wedding, the fecundity, you know, the children, the flowers, everything is just. That's what a point of a wedding is. No, it's just a fancy event and we don't want it sullied by a yelling baby or something. It's so antiseptic and it's so cold and it leaves no inch of just human life and the mess and drama and joy of human life. It's bizarre to me to not want children at a wedding, but I vent to them. Being not a child myself, I can go, but I think if we get to this point, we can continue it where fewer and fewer children are born. Well, the robots can take over with no questions. If we don't even care enough to have children and to be with them and to raise them and have something. Have our 25 cents in on the future of humanity. Put our 25 cents in on what comes next and how a person should be in life and why it would be important to before you go to graduate school, spend time working with the homeless. Why that would be important. If people don't have any interest in doing that, I guess we're giving up.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right. Well, I don't want to end on that pessimistic note, but it's always a

[Caitlin Flanagan]

pessimistic note with me.

[Coleman Hughes]

There's so much, so much stronger than Caitlin Flanagan. 3. Thank you so much for coming on my show.

[Caitlin Flanagan]

Thank you for having me. And I would like to be invited to the wedding whenever it happens.

[Coleman Hughes]

Oh, all right.