← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Lonely, Online, and Disconnected? What 1,000 Young Men Say About Life, Mentorship, and Meaning
00:30:38
Young men need to exercise “agency” in their own lives.
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- [00:00]
Alex Terracio
Men need responsibility and they need connection. And so the men who do better, who say that their life is on track, who say they have better mental health, who say they have more friends, they are in fraternities, they exercise, they are online less, they participate in at least some religion, they are more highly social, they have male mentorships, though. That's a lot of options. That's a lot of different choices for how men can be engaged with other people. And when they do that, they're exercising agency in their own life.
- [00:42]
Jack Fowler
Okay. Well, hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, alas, without the great Victor Davis Hansen. But he's recovering, folks. I'll tell you a little more about that in a second. But I am very blessed here to have today with me Alex Terracio from Signal, a pollster, more than a pollster, strategist, wise man, and he's here to help us talk about an important survey done on young men and their problems and actually their prospects, too. He comes along with. She's not here with me, but the great Ellen Carmichael from the Lafayette Company, who had a symposium on young men in October that was put together very quickly, it was in Washington, but it was really consequential and meaningful. And part of that effort was a very deep dive survey that Alex and Signal, the company he works for and is one of the leaders at, took place. So we're going to talk about those findings and we are recording on Friday the 30th, and this episode will be up on Saturday the 31st. So thanks for joining us, Alex. Greatly appreciate it. And we'll get to some of these questions when we return from these important messages.
- [02:03]
Narrator/Announcer
Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful.
- [02:33]
Jack Fowler
We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, carried on the Daily Signal Network. Happy home of this podcast. I talked to Victor myself two days ago, actually, I think it was yesterday. And he's two steps forward, one step back. He had major surgery, cancer removal, and the cancer was removed, but the surgery was major and it beats up your body. So he'll be back in the saddle soon, folks. And he deeply appreciates many of the prayers. I mean, there are millions of people praying for Victor. It's just that itself Is quite inspiring thing. So, Alex, this survey that you did was of 1000 males age 16 to 28. It was performed in October for the Lafayette company. Why don't you say what was the purpose of it? And then we're going to talk about some of the depressing findings that you have, and then I think some instructive and actually inspiring findings. So let's tell us about the survey, how you went about it first.
- [03:38]
Alex Terracio
Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate being here and likewise, I hope for the best for Victor's recovery. I grew up reading him, and so it's pretty cool to be here in this podcast. As far as our survey data went, we interviewed 1,000 young men, 1628. That cutoff was because we wanted to get a. A group of men that we could call Gen Z. Fairly. Gen Z goes down to 13 up to age 28. And so that's, that's what this, this encompasses a thousand. Because we want to know, just like in a political poll that I might do, and that's the essence of what my firm typically does, is we, we do political work for candidates usually. But I like doing issue work like this. And we get a lot of people with a large sample so that we can cut up different groups of people and find out where the differences are. And so in a political context, you've probably heard about, you know, white women with a college degree are plus X on Democrats or Republicans. I wanted to do that for this survey and to, to get enough men who were in men's only organizations, enough men who were in fraternities, enough men who were currently in school, who had graduated school, and find out where the differences were. That's just as important on a poll as the questions that you ask is your audience. It's actually more important for, for me, you can have a perfect poll, but if you have the wrong audience, your results are going to be terrible. And so that's who we talked to. And the results that we found were really fascinating. Initially kind of depressing. And so I got to set the table for that. The, the theory behind this was right after Charlie Kirk was killed, Ellen Carmichael approached me and said, we want to do this survey. There are a lot of lonely young men out there who are online a lot. They aren't connected to each other. And we want to do a poll and see what's going on with this group of people. And so that was the genesis of this project. And we wanted to look at online habits, how much people are on the Internet, on smartphones, what different sorts of online habits might contribute to negative mental health, to disconnection from society, and then where there might be positive benefits and particularly like where do people join groups, where do people join churches, where do people join fraternity and where does that help them? Does it mean that they're better off? I would have suspected, yes. But that's a theory. And you don't know until you actually go and you ask people and then you, you gather the data. And so initially I'm going to start off with like the, the fundamental status of young men today. And you'll forgive me, I have a screen off screen here. And so if I'm going off of you, that's why the vast majority of young men in this age group are online a huge amount of the time. And so I break it up into three categories just for simplicity. High online meaning more than six hours a day. So no upper limit. 27% of young men are online for more than six hours. Not for work purposes. This is for social media, streaming, gaming, browsing, recreational purposes. 53% are in the three to five hour range or just pure recreation. That's a massive amount of time. And only 17% are in the low online category. So zero to two hours. Men who are in fraternities, more of them are in the low online category. So 26 compared to 17%. And fewer of them are in the high online category. 27% at the baseline compared to 19% of men who are in fraternities. Men who are not in any kind of organized group. And so they're not in a fraternity, they're not in a men's organization, they're not part of a religious group, they're not even part of an online forum or, or like a gaming team. Anything where people know their name and it's organized. They are, almost none of them are in the low online category. And so if you are disconnected from other things, you are also very online. 33% of these men were in the high online category. And this is a large proportion of our sample. This was 35% total of men who answered this poll. So 350 plus men, they are not part of any organized group.
- [07:44]
Jack Fowler
Can I ask?
- [07:45]
Alex Terracio
Yeah, please.
- [07:46]
Jack Fowler
Did anything track, say with these figures, say, I don't know, this was part of your purpose, employment, education level. Did these things track alongside with some of these findings strictly of the online time?
- [08:02]
Alex Terracio
Less than you might think. I looked at it because I had a suspicion that if you are employed, if you're in school, that there might be some differences there. The One that made a big difference across education and employment was if you have graduated college, if you graduated college, then those men were better off in several metrics that I'll, I'll go through in some of this data. But whether you are in school, if you're in high school, if you are high schoolers were slightly more optimistic about life generally, but only slightly so if you are in college, you're a little bit more stressed out about life, but only slightly more so. Um, but when it came to employed and unemployed postgrads, there wasn't a huge difference, which surprised me actually. I would have figured that unemployed men in this group were a little bit worse off, but that was not the case. Not dramatically. So. Um, the, the largest, there were like six negative correlations and then six positive correlations with, with my, my good behaviors and my bad behaviors. And when I say correlations, I say correlations with positive outcomes. I should have an asterisk there. This poll did not measure outcomes. We did not look at people at one point in time and then track them again years later to see how they're doing. So this is not actual outcomes, this is perceived outcomes. So we asked men if they thought their life was on trouble.
- [09:23]
Jack Fowler
Oh, go ahead. Yeah, I want to stop you one second Alex, because I do want, I have to read an ad, but I also want to get, just because this is really important what you're about to do and I want to give it complete attention. But also I need to ask, was there any difficulty in finding these men? As when you're doing a survey of a thousand Republican voters say is, was that far easier undertaking than finding 16 to 28 year old men and asking seemingly asking a lot of questions of them.
- [09:55]
Alex Terracio
This was a, I think we asked 45 questions in this survey. The longer you ask or the more questions you have, then the more drop off you get. So it's harder to fill a sample. This took us five days to field. Most surveys take us two to three days, but that's for a more general audience. This was a pretty narrow audience because you gotta figure men are half the population and then young men in this age group are maybe like 8% of the total population. And then you know, you gotta talk to em and make sure that we're getting, for us, we, we want quotas. And so I'm not just gonna randomly talk to men 16 to 28. I wanna make sure that my sample represents the census essentially and, and what people look like in reality.
- [10:44]
Jack Fowler
Okay, well we're gonna get, let's Let me read this and then, then let's focus. If it's okay, makes sense to you with the negative correlations, then we're gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back to the positive correlation. Does that make sense?
- [10:58]
Alex Terracio
Okay.
- [10:58]
Jack Fowler
All right. Now this makes sense too to our listeners and our viewers. We're only a few weeks into winter and already brutal cold, huge snowstorms, and of course, power outages and snowstorms. Alex, you're in the Virginia area. I assume maybe yes, you've had, I assume you had some shoveling to do the last few days. I had to shovel 20 inches up here in Milford, Connecticut. I, I didn't have my heart attack, thankfully. But think about it fair listeners and viewers, if the power goes out when it's really cold, you have a way to keep yourself and your family warm. And this is a real problem. Winter power outages can even be life threatening, like it was those terrible ice storms that Texas had a few years ago. So that's why many Americans are getting a Vesta off grid heater from my Patriot supply. It's a space heater that doesn't use electricity or propane. It runs on something called canned heat, which is an indoor safe fuel. With a Vesta stashed in your closet, you know you can keep warm no matter what. It even doubles as a stove to cook your food. And that's pretty cool. Just don't touch the stove because it can be pretty hot. The best part is right now you can get that Vesta and a bunch more preparedness gift gear as free gifts. When you order the winter survival kit from my Patriot Supply, just go to my Patriotsupply.com VDH that stands for Victor Davis Hansen V D H to see everything included. This offer won't last last long, so go to my patriotsupply.com VDH today. That's my patriotsupply.com vdh we thank the good people from my Patriot Supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words here on the Daily Signal Network. Okay, Alex, tell us about this. Truly well done Deep Dive poll and the six negative correlations you found.
- [12:49]
Alex Terracio
Absolutely. So our anchor question for this was life direction. And we asked, is your life going the way that you expected or envisioned that it would go? And for the overall population, 50% of young men said yes, 46% said no, negligible amount said unsure. Not a terribly interesting finding on its surface. When you dive underneath the surface and you look at which groups are saying yes and which groups are saying more, it Gets really interesting. And so there are several negative correlations. The overall is +4. That's the number to beat. That's the baseline. So you have 50% say yes, 46 say no. So plus four is the, is the neutral level. Men who never exercise, because we asked about if you exercise often, they were negative 39 on that same question. So 26% of men who never exercise say their life is going in the right direction. 66% say it is not going in the right direction. Non affiliated men, the ones that I talked about earlier, who are not in any organized group, they are negative 22. 59% of them say their, their life is not going the way they expected it to go. Only 37% say yes. Men who are highly online, that 27% who are online for six plus hours a day, they are negative 20 on this question of saying that their life is going the way that they inspected. Most of them say no, 59% say no. Men who have no religion, who never participate in any religious services at all, 55% of them say their life is not going the right direction. And then men who are low social, who are in person socializing with friends or part of some organized group for five or fewer hours a week, they are negative 12 on this question. And so that's, that means that an average, on average they are socializing less than an hour per day. Now these are 16 to 28 year olds. These are a lot of men who are in school. They should be socializing like more than, than I do as a 36 year old with a couple of kids. And if they are doing so less than an hour per day, that, that's not good for their overall life trajectory. And unsurprisingly they can, they, they know that. And they say their life is not going the way they inspect or envisioned it would go. And so those are the main correlations here. There's not, is there not exercising, not being affiliated with organized groups, being highly online, having no religion and being low social. And there's another one here that I'll, I'll get to a second and that is the lack of having a male mentor.
- [15:19]
Jack Fowler
Should we come back from the book? Let's take a break and you can come back and explain that particular. Okay folks, great. We're having. We have Alex Terracio here from Signal discussing this really important finding study on young men. And we're going to come back for more of his findings after we hear these very important messages.
- [15:40]
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- [16:07]
Jack Fowler
Just we are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words recording on Friday 30th January. This episode will be up on Saturday the 31st. Again, thank you, Alex. Alex, you're about to talk about men and mentors. Go ahead.
- [16:25]
Alex Terracio
So this was another one of my anchor questions. This was a surprising one, though. Initially I did not expect that male mentorship would have such a strong correlation with the positive behaviors and lack of male mentorship to have such a strong correlation with the negative ones. But it did. And so overall, 53% of men say that they have a male mentor or role model in their life who is either a regular influencer or not irregular influence. And then 40% say no, they don't have one at all. So 53 and 40 plus 13, that's the, that's the number to beat.
- [16:58]
Jack Fowler
Okay.
- [16:59]
Alex Terracio
Among fraternity men, 71% of them have a male mentor or role model and only 27% do not. So they're plus 44 on that same question.
- [17:09]
Jack Fowler
Can I just say, is there a sense that that is through the fraternity also that they have that mentorship ongoing or is it just a habit they picked up? Or maybe you don't have that info?
- [17:25]
Alex Terracio
I can speculate. I don't have that info. If I really wanted to know, then what I would typically do for any surveys, I would follow up with a focus group and I would find some people in this audience and find out who that male mentor is. Is it all because of their fraternity relationship? I suspect some of it is, yeah. But I can't say for sure based on this.
- [17:45]
Jack Fowler
Okay, go ahead.
- [17:46]
Alex Terracio
And by, by contrast, the men who are not affiliated, because I like to go back to them, that's, that's a huge proportion of the overall, it's 35% of the sample. They are negative 8 on this same question. So the baseline is plus 13. Non affiliated men also do not have male mentors at very high rates. 50% of them do not have a male mentor or role model. And then I looked back and compared the life direction question to the male mentor question. And those men who say that their life is going in the right direction, the people who say yes. 65% of them have a male mentor or role model. So if your life is on track, you are highly likely to say that you have a male mentor in your life if your life is not on track. Only 30% of them have a male mentor or role model in their life. And so these things all are moving like a kind of flock of birds. All the positive traits, positive things are moving in the same direction, and the negative things are moving in the same direction. And those positives include your life being on track, having positive mental health, and having a male mentor or role model, and then participation in organized groups, not doing those things. Abstaining means abstaining from everything. They're abstaining from religion. They're abstaining from social life. They are not abstaining from being online. That's the one thing they're doing a lot of. They're abstaining from being around other men, whether they are male mentors, role models, or something else. And these are the men who are not doing well. These are the kinds of men who are the archetype of the Charlie Kirk shooter. They are not super political. They're abstaining from politics, too. They are much more politically independent. They are not more likely to be a Democrat or a Republican, which it was a little surprising when I first saw it, but kind of makes sense when you think about it. These are people that are disconnected and disengaged. I'm not saying that everybody in this group is violent, shooter. That's certainly not true. But there is a high preponderance of men who are disconnected from all kinds of offerings the society has made. And the men who are staying connected to pretty traditional sources of community and connection that they're doing a lot better, even as they are also very highly online.
- [19:51]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. If I'm highly online, could I be listening to. And I'm just picking on him because of a name. Could I be listening to Joe Rogan for three hours and this podcast or that podcast or another? And that I could be disconnected. Because I could be. I'm not playing video games. I'm not killing Nazis in my basement on some. But I'm. But I'm a podcast junkie, by the way. We're doing a podcast. I got the wrong people listening to podcasts. But there is. That would count for disconnectedness under this. Or not.
- [20:22]
Alex Terracio
I wouldn't. I mean, there's. It's important to note that everybody, everybody in this age group and even. Even older is online a huge amount of the time. Everybody is watching YouTube, everybody is on podcasts, everybody. This is just the world that we live in now. And so it is not realistic to assume that people should go into that low online category. That's only 17%. And you don't have to be in that category to be doing a little bit better. You just have to have some limits. And this is what I think the data shows, is that the men who exercise some limits on the amount of time that they spend online, who do some other things offline, they are more likely to be in relationships, they're more likely to have more close friends. They are more likely to say that their life is on track. They're more likely to say that they have more positive mental health. They're more likely to say that since COVID they are more social than they used to be, they are more likely to participate in religion. And when you have all these things so consistently moving in the same direction, the more of those positive correlations that men can amass and the fewer of those negative ones that they can stay away from, then the better off that they are. It doesn't mean that the disconnected men can't be well off. That's not true. It is a question of likelihood.
- [21:34]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, you know, the friendlessness of this group is very disturbed by the way. I'm a Catholic. I practice. I would like to think the irreligiosity of the group matters also for, you know, the next. The afterlife, but that so many of the young men you. You've interviewed are. Are friendless or very few friends. It's really despairing. Do you have any other key takeaways or. So I mean, you're a neutral here, right? You did the study, you asked these questions. Do you want to just. Synopsis. Synopsilize, if I may create a word, synopsize. Well, you worked on the Hill. If you were giving policy advice, would you mind swinging away at that? Like what? Would you make a recommendation here, or do you feel uncomfortable with that.
- [22:35]
Alex Terracio
To some extent? I'm a pollster, not a policy guy on this question. But men need responsibility and they need connection. And so the men who do better, who say that their life is on track, who say they have better mental health, who say they have more friends, they are in fraternities, they exercise, they are online less, they participate in at least some religion, they don't have to be regularly religious. Even people who go sometimes are better off. They are more highly social, they have male mentorships. That's a lot of options. That's a lot of different Choices for how men can be engaged with other people. And when they do that, they are adopt, they are. They're exercising agency in their own life. These men, when they talk about their biggest problems, the problems they identify are problems that they can change. Let me give you an example. If you say paying my bills, that's a hard problem. That's not a problem that you can change super easily. If your problem is romantic relationships, that problem is entirely on you. Nobody can fix that problem for you. Only you can. If your problem is getting through school, that's on you entirely. Only you can fix that problem. And so men who chose those kinds of problems, career success, romantic success, educational success, those men were better off and had a higher sense of where their life was going than the men who chose financial pressure or paying bills or mental health. Those men, I think, feel less agency in their own lives compared to the men who chose problems that they could do something about. And so even conceiving of your problems in a different manner has an impact on how these men think of themselves. And so when I look at all that and some kind of a policy solution to this, it is don't victimize men. Don't encourage them to be victims, because they're not. They're not naturally victims or terrible victims. And when we are, we were worse off for it as a group. Give them responsibilities, give them burdens, they will rise to the challenge. They already have a lot of burdens, but you can't hand them a solution. You need to help them build a solution. You need to encourage them to build a solution. That's not an easy policy solution. That's not a bill that I can introduce into Congress or ask somebody to. But that is what I see in the men who are doing better compared to the men who are rapidly falling behind and much worse.
- [25:01]
Jack Fowler
Let me ask you one final question before we close. And again, I really appreciate you being here. And I do want to let folks know, if they go to the Lafayette Company website, they can find the synopsis of this survey that you've done and a more detailed report. Did any of your questioning have, I guess, have to do with men perceiving themselves as being intentionally emasculated? The questioning may not have gone that way, but you see much social commentary about that. I'm wondering if you've got into that in any way.
- [25:40]
Alex Terracio
I didn't. We had some draft questions on that. I'll tell you, when we first started this questionnaire, it was like 75 questions long. And the one that we shipped was 45 questions long. And so there were quite a few lanes that we looked at and that was one of them. I decided to cut it because really I wanted to know the correlation of online habits and how that was contributing to some of these behaviors. But it is an interesting question. I wish I had some data on it. I do not. But that's a poll for another day.
- [26:10]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Okay. Well, Alex Terracio, I really appreciate you joining us today to share this. As some of our viewers and listeners know, Victor and I did a, we did a series of podcasts before he went into surgery. And they were the things that keep you awake, wake at night, things that frighten you the most. And there are a couple of, of these kind of issues of I use the word emasculation before, but emasculation of young men, the breakdown of the nuclear family, irreligiosity that are deeply troubling to him and to many others. More so than you know. Do you stay awake at night worrying that China has nuclear weap? I'm not thrilled by it, but these are really deep and troubling matters. But also the fact that you have shown in your study that there are solutions that are readily accessible to men who are they can join an organization. They can try to find God, they can seek a mentor. They can join. I know if you're Catholic, for example, I know they were active at this symposium, Knights of Columbus. There were other fraternal organizations that are. So there are ways out. And that's uplifting to know that you've uncovered that also. Well, again, thanks very much, Alex. I deeply appreciate it and I thank all who watch this episode who listened. And as for me, Jack Fowler, if you're interested, go to the Civil Thoughts and you can sign up for the free weekly email newsletter I do for the center for Civil Society. Alex, they want to see your work. They go to how do you spell signal so our listeners know.
- [27:53]
Alex Terracio
Yeah, it's C, Y, G, N, Al. You can also look at my X account. I tweet a lot of our data out pretty regularly. And so if you have questions about this poll, about any of our national monthly public polls, you can engage me on there easily.
- [28:10]
Jack Fowler
Thanks. Tremendous. All right, thank you so much. Thanks, folks. And we'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words at the Daily Signal. Thanks and bye bye. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition.