 here on a given Wednesday, this is the Brad Coats Show. Otherwise known as Community Matters with Brad Coats, hi, Brad. Hi, Jake, good to be back. Yeah, and today we're gonna talk about the Delta factor. When I say Delta, I mean La Defiance. La Defiance. La Defiance, not necessarily between the sexes as that's always relevant is between the generations, yeah? Okay, changing habits in relationship and romance, the generations, they are never the same. What do you think about that? Well, it's interesting because, you know, when I wrote the divorce with decency book and I've rewritten that crazy book five different times for the UH press, and each time I try and keep track of what's coming up with the next generation. This was not a big deal when I first started in 1999. We didn't have a lot of this information, but there is definitely a huge difference now between the baby boomers and between the millennials that came behind them. There was a generation X that was kind of a lost smaller generation between, the big ones are the baby boomers, millennials, and then Gen Z, which is actually gonna be bigger than even the millennials. How can you tell? I mean, I got this vision, you know, these people in the privacy of their bedroom, okay? There's a knock on the door, and it's Brad Coates with a clipboard. I just have a few questions I'd like to ask you. How do you find out about this stuff? Well, there's a lot of stuff being written on. I mean, I'm not a social, I'm a divorce lawyer. I'm not a social scientist, especially, although I've kind of become one just by osmosis, but there's all kinds of stuff that has been done on research of this. The Atlantic Magazine did a huge article on how the millennials were having far less sex. Turns out everybody's having less sex than we boomers did. This is not good for the, what do you call it, the curve, the demographic curve? Well, if you don't have as much sex, you don't have as many babies, and we're below the refill rate for a population in the U.S. to begin with. I mean, you'd have to have something like 2.1 children to keep the population stable, and we're down to 1.75 per couple. So that's a problem. And it also is a bit of an issue because there's a little bit of resentment between the generations. The new tagline that I was hearing the other day was okay, boomer. Or they just started, the generation Z guy just kind of gaff off anything the boomers have to say. Because the boomers did, I mean, we like to think that we changed the world for better, but a lot of people think we changed the world for worse. I mean, we took a lot of the money, we took a lot of the jobs, where a lot of us are still in jobs that they think they ought to have by now. There's a little bit of resentment, and there is definitely some other changes that are going on. Boomers for divorce, which is what I track, boomers are getting divorced at twice the rate of previous generations. I mean, the statistics on boomer divorces are staggering. And you would think that a marriage that had been stable for 20 years, 25 years, people in their 60s, okay, that ought to be the height of stability for a marriage. And in the old days, that's of course what it was, but not anymore. Terribly inefficient, really. Yeah. And dis-economic, I might add. Well, that's true too. Yeah, that's true. There's a movie called The Marriage Story. If you haven't seen it, you gotta see it. It's a Netflix production. In one awards, it's quite amazing. And you're gonna love this movie because it goes into this very sort of thing. No, it's interesting. Right now, one in four Americans getting divorced is a baby boomer. It used to be like one in 10 in 1990. Divorce freight for boomers has surged like 50% in the last 20 years. Amazing. I mean, really, the boomers who have always kind of wanted to have their own way about everything, I mean, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and we're gonna change everything from the 60s on, from clothing styles to, to the key for sex was of course the birth control pill. None of this would have ever happened as a sexual explosion, but for the birth control in I think 1963, 64, women for the first time were able to enjoy recreational sex. That was a big breakthrough. It used to be a pretty big choice for a woman as to whether to want to have sex at all. I remember I practiced for a while in the 70s in matrimonial issues. And my plate was always full. They came around, well, they wanted to get divorced so fast it was head spinning. And I thought maybe it cooled off after that. You know, maybe things came to a kind of balance. But now it sounds like it's right up the ramp again. Well, actually it's sort of plateaued for every other generation except for the boomers. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, the boomers did kick it off in the early days when they were, you know, the young boomers, then it sort of stabilized in the 80s and 90s and the 2000s. And then the boomers are again, as they get older, are divorcing again. And, you know, as I've talked on your shows before, the more people are accustomed to getting divorced, the more they do get divorced. I mean, the actual divorce rates are about 40% for first marriage. It's about 60% for second marriage. It goes up to 80% for third marriage. Right, so the more times you're married, the less likely it's gonna work. That's right. Can you explain that? Well, I think people just get, they've got the divorce lawyer's number programmed into their speed dial, you know. I mean, they're just, they're used to doing it. They've, you know, they've survived at a time or two. There's not as frightening it. And the thing of it is, there's an expanded pool of potential choices. I mean, that's what the internet has brought that about. And that has a lot to do with it. Now, it used to be that, you know, you're 65 years old and you get divorced. You know, what the hell are you gonna do from this? But, you know, now you're 65, you go onto a website and you can pick people that are age 58 or 59 or exactly, you know, where you want it. You gotta be able to afford the argument, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. And in this movie, it studies that. There are some lawyers who are reasonable and do reasonable things. There are other lawyers that see this as a target. And there are some clients who wind up bankrupt after the argument's over. You've gotta be really careful about divorce lawyers because, you know, the reality of it is they get paid by the hour and the longer they can protract a fight, the better, the more they make, so you gotta be careful. Yeah, so, I mean, that's a factor that works just the other way. In other words, boomers have enough money to live independently. They have enough physical strength in their health, thank goodness for medicine, to continue to live a reasonable life even without a spouse. Bottom line, footnote to that is that, you know, I think the stats are clear that if you're living with someone, married to someone, your useful life is not the right word. Your life expectancy is greater because you're in a kind of partnership that one takes care of the other. There's no question about what marriage or a committed relationship does increase the likelihood that you'll have a longer and healthier life and that you'll amass more money in it. And you don't necessarily have to get married. A lot of these boomers are not getting remarried after this. They've got a new status called CU, committed unmarried, where because the wife doesn't wanna lose her alimony by getting remarried for any second, you know, she loses her alimony for the first marriage, maybe there's government benefits, whatever, pensions, you know, they don't necessarily wanna intermingle all that. So they just live together without getting remarried, which has become increasingly common in all generations, but the boomers are surprising. Looking at it as a policy matter for the whole country, you know, if everybody was in a CU, did you call it? Yeah. And there was less marriage, little, little marriage. That wouldn't be necessarily good for the country because you need to have a resilient, even if it's based on a religious connection, you need to have a resilient relationship for there to be stability, right? And the less marriage you have, the less stability. This is especially so with kids when you have kids. And I worry for the country if we give up the institution. America's economy thrives on what economists speak called household formation, getting married, buying a car, having kids, you know, putting in through school, you know, and all of that is of course, you know, what keeps the economy going, but a lot of these cash-strap generation-wide, you know, they can't do it. The millennials just got whacked financially. They had, it's not like a 63% drop in net worth. And you know, from 2000, I think it was 1998 to 2009, people just got hammered in that great recession. And the millennials got hit the worst and they didn't see the humor in it. It's interesting, there's other stuff about the millennials that is surprising. Millennials are having less sex than either the boomers or apparently Gen Z. The millennials have kind of a weird approach to sex. They're having less sex, less relationships, less commitment. The sex they are having is more casual. It's more of this hookup kind of stuff that you see on Tinder and the dating sites. But they're less likely to have a report having a regular sexual partner. Something like 75% versus 85% of millennials have a regular sexual partner. So they're, and a lot of them aren't having any sex at all. I mean, a lot of them are staying virgins longer. If you don't have sex in your 20s or your 15s, your formative years, they say that you're less likely to have it, you know, ever in life or they'll tell you're 45. I mean, you know, that is the time when you're finding yourself and you know, the teenage early 20s years, you're finding yourself on all kinds of levels, including, including sex. That can't be good for you. And it can't be good for the demography either. Well, no. And there's other aspects of this that are just totally bizarre that I would never have figured out or expected. Apparently the millennials are somewhat inhibited when it comes to physicality period. You know, we all grew up taking showers and gyms and you know, after every school. Apparently it starts with gym classes. There's fewer gym classes and you don't have to shower after gym class. So they're not used to being naked in front of other people. So they're freaked out about just really the physical intimacy and seeing the naked body. It's a silo issue. I live in my little protected world and I never exposed myself. This is so interesting. It's fascinating. It really is. They call it inhibition. The millennials don't like to get naked. They require their privacy. They, something like 60% less, millennials are 66% less likely than older generations to enjoy receiving oral sex. So go figure. I mean, I don't want to make this an X-rated show but oftentimes oral sex is the best sex for actually enjoying sex, especially for females that the oral sex is one of the things that gives them orgasm. One of the most likely to give them orgasm. But they're freaked out about it. They don't want oral sex, which is news to me because I kind of always enjoyed it, but it is very surprising. So you know, the liberation day of the 60s and 70s, I suppose, not the 50s, no, that was too early. 60s, 60s mostly where things got liberated. That's over. That's over. You know, I remember I lived in New York at the time in school and boy, it was liberation time. Well, it certainly was. I mean, it was, you know, I mean, when you think about it, I mean, everything from car to be street and dress changes and rock music and the birth control pills, sex drugs, rock and roll. I mean, it all happened. Vietnam War, there was, you know, the brookers got very passionate about a lot of stuff. Like I say, the other generations kind of resent the fact that we took all the money, we've got all the jobs, we got all the, you know, status in society and because we're aging, you know, people used to, you know, my dad's, I think retired 62 or something like that. He gave him a golden watch and he walked out the door and you know, now we're all working, you know, you're still having talk shows that's 70s or something. So, you know, some young generation Zee problem, person probably chomping on the bit to replace you. Well, it's about you. Or replace me as a dwarf lawyer. It's about the perception of use, you know. And I think that has a lot to do with all of this. Well, they feel like they've been stymied. I mean, this okay boomer thing, you know, millions of kids in the succeeding generation, they use that as that okay boomer as kind of a put down, you know, okay boomer, leave me alone. You know, they're fed up with the feeling that they've been left a world plagued by climate change, mounting debt, and affordable housing, income inequality, all the kind of stuff that, you know. It's true, isn't it? It is true. It is true. I've been surprised and somewhat disappointed in our generation, which grew up thinking, oh, we're gonna have communal everything and we're gonna save the planet. You know, we've, you know, done, you consume more than any other generation ever, where you know, a lot of us are boiled brats and haven't done our share. Haven't done anything near what we thought we were gonna do when they put out the whole earth catalog and everybody was gonna wear, you know, working stock sandals and you know, we were all gonna tread lightly on the planet that we have not done that. That was in the 60s, but it kind of went away. As we got older and I, you know, this is a really great conversation, not necessarily about the matrimonial aspects of it, but it's about the conversation between the boomers and the millennials. It's like the boomers say to the millennials, well, it's yours now. It's up to you to take care of me. And the millennials says back to the boomer, what do you mean? You give me a, you know, you give me a mess. Okay, how come you didn't give me a better deal? This is your fault and the two of them, it's your fault. That's exactly right. And the millennials now are getting whacked with another problem, which is that one out of four millennials is having to take care of an older parent or a relative. So now they're having to take care, you know, now they're irritated by the fact that they're having to care for us. Maybe social security disappears, maybe Medicare disappears, God only knows. And, you know, we've taken all the money and spent it and we're having them, we're, you know, we're moving back into their houses to be taken care of when we get incapacitated. Well, Elizabeth Warren says it's time for a revolution on this kind of stuff. We had a show two weeks ago with Helsinki, you know, which is in some ways the heartland of the Scandinavian model. And they really care about their neighbor. They care about their community. They care about people getting older, they're gonna take care of them. They're gonna give them free health care, all that stuff. Right. And what's remarkable is that they are light years ahead of this country. And this country had no political will to catch up. Yeah, yeah. So the Scandinavian countries are a true model and interesting community, but they're a small community. That's true, not that many people. They're a smaller number of people and they're, except for Sweden, which has taken in a lot of Muslim refugees and maybe on the verge of regretting it. They, you know, a lot of them are really sort of, you know, all one common crux and creed and identity. Well, that leads to a very important point. We're in the middle of maybe change, transformational change, if you will. And so many things. I mean, Europe is a good example of transformational change, but I think it's been held up in the US. We haven't really got there, but I think we're gonna get there. We're gonna have to get there. And this process you talk about, it's gonna have to adapt to these transformational changes, political and otherwise, yeah. Well, what was interesting, I went to your Christmas party for Think Tech and Robert Pennybacker, who does a lot of PBS stuff and does a lot of training for young filmmakers and stuff, he was saying that he really thought that Z generation, which is the one that comes after the millennials, they are total digital natives. They're the first generation that's really just been totally digital. They are actually adopting some more, wouldn't say conservative values, but they want to own houses, they want to own cars, they're going back to wanting to be married. I mean, millennials kind of, they had to, I mean, they got hammered by the economy. They couldn't do a household formation they wanted to. They're living in their parents' basement, for Christ's sake. But the Z generation, apparently, and Pennybacker spoke eloquently, I thought about that, about how the fact that he thinks that Z generation could be the one that's gonna come along and try and save us, so to speak. I mean, the millennials kind of resented it. The Z generation are taking it as the situation that they face, and then, you know, because they're so computer savvy there, they take in information faster and they absorb faster and they're kind of dealing with it faster. How are they on sex? How are they on... Apparently better than the millennials. But the problem, of course, is when you take in all that information so fast, your attention span starts to diminish. And there's another problem where... That happens to me, too. You know, I've got a theory that the social media and the computer generations, to some degree, are rewiring the human brain, to where we're more accustomed, you know, turn-offs matter than turn-offs. You know, some, you know, some actor or something comes out with a political position and, you know, 100 people come in and talk about how improper that was. I mean, people are really just getting hardwired to go negative instead of positive. And that is, that's tricky. And it's certainly tricky when you talk about these generational things and romance because you've got a situation where a lot of people are getting, you know... Instead of getting excited and positive stuff, they have immediate negative stuff. I mean, the turnover's so fast in these... That's absolutely true. Yeah. And it's kind of an interesting deal. There's a quote for the millennials that I think is a great one. We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up. And when you think about that, that's exactly right. You're having these brief, fleeting encounters. A lot of it's done through the media. There's something called ghosting nowadays where instead of having a decent breakup with your significant others, you just stop talking to them all together. Turn it around. Yeah, I mean, it's turned people into kind of weird sort of anti-social, social animals. And it's a big change. I mean, like I say, they're inhibited. They're not happy. They've got the all-time highs for depression. The millennials are in danger of having... Being one of the first generations to not outlive their parents. I mean, there are some serious issues. They're less affluent than their parents. Yeah, well, and then they're less healthy. I mean, their mental health is not good. There's a lot of depression. The sexual STD rate is going through the roof. It's the highest it's been in decade, which is weird because you think they're having less sex. How can they be having more sexual transmissive disease because of the way they're doing it? It's all these hookups one night stands instead of having regular partner. And not aware of STDs and all the rules about that. So the question is, can you break the mold? I suppose you can always slide back. You can be a generation Z that acts like a millennial, which is not so good, but you can be a millennial that says, gee, you know, I should move out of the house. I should get a job. I should look for a long-term relationship. I should care about those sort of middle-class values and do the right thing instead of the hookup thing. Not a temporary life on the planet, but a long-term life on the planet. What's your thought about that? What's your advice about that? Can they change? Well, the possibility, like I say, there's apparently a trend that the generation Z is adopting some more of the... I'm talking about the millennial themselves. The millennials are gonna have a harder go of it, I think. You know, the problem is, it's almost like the paradox of choice. When it comes to relationships, it's almost the paradox of choice. Too much choice, too many options, almost leads to the inability to pick any one because there's always something new around the corner. Swiping, I've never been on Tinder, but I know how it works. You're swiping, like, swiping, like, swiping. You go through a hundred possible choices. How do you pick one? Whereas when you and I were growing up, you had to meet somebody live and in person. I mean, maybe this was gonna be the best person you were ever gonna meet, and maybe you thought, oh my God, if I don't marry her, then I'm never gonna see any of you. So there's almost like the limited number of selections trying to make you make a selection, whereas, and now with this infinite number of selections, God only knows where it all stops. Well, does it work, you know, the dating sites, the match sites, does that work? Do you have any stats on that? Do you have any feeling about that? In other words, if I'm looking for a spouse or a long-term relationship and I go on one of those sites, I was always troubled by this actually, Brad. I go on one of those sites and, you know, my column, the menu, right? My menu looks just like our menu. So I say, oh, this must be the right match. It's a computer match. That's what it is. You know, is that likely to work, or is there something beyond the computer match that make for a better relationship? Well, all I can say is that, you know, whereas I used to have clients that would come into my office at the end of their relationship, and they had, you know, been a high school boyfriends and girlfriends met in college, done, you know, whatever. Now, when I ask of how'd you guys meet, you know, more than 50% of them met on match.com or one of the dating sites. Interesting. So, I mean, it definitely, it has turned over a new leaf as far as the way people date. There are no longer, you know, I don't know how much time you spend as a barfly, Jay, but, you know, I'm not as much as I used to either, but, you know, you used to go to, you know, big events and you would meet people and, you know, here in Hawaii, there were block parties or, you know, you know, big popular bar, restaurant row would open up. I'm always at a Christmas and August program when everybody was interested in that. Well, my firm's Valentine's Day party, still one of the last ones left standing, but, you know, you used to meet people in that kind of real configuration. Now, that doesn't exist. That's small little groups of people getting together, oftentimes texting each other the last minute, saying, okay, let's, you know, let's just sort of get together and hang out. Women, the guys aren't inviting girls to come, you know, have a date with me. They're having it, they're saying, hey, me and the guys are gonna be at Joe's bar, you know, eight o'clock, why don't you and some of the girls come on down? You're not even sure who's really with who. And... Gee, that's so true, Brad, that is so true. And that is a remarkable and noteworthy change between 60s, 70s, 80s, and now, you know, it used to be that you would have a substantial crowd getting together. Right, and you can... Like our party this week. And you can meet people in person. Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, that's really not happening anymore. So it leaves the social media and the dating sites to be sort of the way, and what's happening is I've talked about your show before, so I won't belabor it, but it's also causing a self-selection between the stratas of society. Because now, you know, you can find somebody who's, they've got these millionaire websites. Now, you have to be a certified millionaire to go on and date other millionaires. So now the millionaires can marry each other. The doctors can marry other doctors. And then, you know, it used to be a doctor would maybe marry an attractive nurse or whatever, you know, and I don't want to sound like a chauvinist pig, but, you know, a partner in a law firm would maybe marry a legal secretary. That doesn't happen anymore. Now doctors and lawyers marry each other, which means that they preserve the wealth. That's the other part of the income inequality. But let me give you an interesting aspect of how the hashtag me too part of this is all carried over. A recent poll, 17% of Americans aged 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink always or usually constitutes sexual harassment. Sexual harassment. Sexual harassment to ask somebody out for a drink. So it used to be, that was the sign of an alpha male. You'd go to one of these big parties that we were talking about, you know, good looking guy, he's taller and darker and handsome than the other guys and better for breeding and whatever, you know, and you know, I drove a big car, you know, you know, he was a guy who would be an attractive to the opposite sex. Now, you know, if you exhibit those alpha male deals, you know, hey, look at my Armani suit and you know, you're meeting a girl in an elevator, you know, and don't I look sharp and can we go out for a drink? Now you're sound sexual harassment. Oh, it's almost like there's not even a premium replaced on that. In fact, it's a negative nowadays to act like an aggressive male. That's a nice stress you're wearing. Yeah, I can't say that. Yeah, I can't say that. Yeah. And you really have to be careful what you're saying. I'm really, you know, a lot of these things are totally harmless and perfectly okay. Well, they used to be, but that was before, that was before the millennials invented the Z's, doing the same thing, safe spaces and you can't say this, you can't say that, you can't have somebody come do a college campus and lecture at a viewpoint that's different mine. I mean, we've really, like I say, the negatives and the haters have begun to outweigh the positives and that's really- Silo's. Yeah, Silo's. And so, and social media, you know, actually enters into this and supports it, right? Because you can have these really, what they call it, thin mechanical relationships and social media, but you never really know the person. And I think, you know, like the match site, you can wind up in a long-term relationship or a marriage based on an incomplete examination of the other person. This is really a problem. It could be a problem individually, but it's a bigger problem when you're talking about 350 million Americans who are more and more doing that very thing. And I worry about the Z guys. I worry about the Z guys following through on what you described, because they may not actually wind up doing that given the changes in our political environment, the likely changes in our economic and social environment. You know, what you see and aspire to now for them may not be the same environment in five or 10 years. They may wind up in some other category somehow, yeah? Good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's safer to do it that way. I mean, the anonymity that goes with the internet, you know, you can do all kinds of stuff. You know, you can, you know, everything from, you know, planning out a mass shooting to, you know, you can do all this kind of crazy stuff in your own little zone without ever having to performance test it against any reality and that dating is the same way. You can kind of like, you know, okay, I'll just worry about these tiny little things, but I'll never figure out the real guts of human interaction. And that's, that's to my view, but again, it works out like crotch of the old guys. So, you know. We are, but you know what? I mean, age actually wields some wisdom. And so that's my last question to you here today. What's your advice to disease? What would you tell them to try to, you know, learn from what your experience has been, our generation's experience has been? What should they know? What should they do in order to, in order to, you know, have the best generation possible? Well, maybe it's a melding of what the boomers and the millennials and, you know, and get a little, take the best of both generations. I think, you know, I mean, the boomers get hammered for having, you know, taken all the goodies in society, the wealth, and, you know, and the planet itself. I mean, you know, we have, you know, abused it, but they also brought in the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, you know, we did, you know, we did a lot of good stuff too that made life a lot easier for him. You know, a lot of the technological stuff was really brought about by boomers. And it's now being certainly expanded upon by the succeeding generations, but a lot of the things that have been positive in society were, and the boomers at least had an experiential kind of, you know, we're gonna go out there and kind of grapple with stuff. I mean, you know, you can trace it in all kinds of different areas. I mean, you know, when I was young, the first thing you did was get a car and hit the open road when you're 16. You get a passport, you go to ride the Uray all around Europe. I mean, you know, it was like, we're gonna, the number of Americans that are traveling abroad that even have passports, that even have cars, that even do anything outside their little safe space is diminishing. And that's, you know, and so maybe, maybe you take some of the best of what the boomers had and then you take some of them, some of the understandable irritation that the millennials had and blend it into a Z generation that goes ahead and merges both. That would be the best hope for a case. Travel. Travel's brought it. You gotta get out there. Travel is definitely brought it. American kids don't get out there enough. Yeah. They gotta go east, they gotta go west. They gotta take the risk of travel and learn to suck it all up. Yeah. Well, and when you hear, you know, college campuses, you know, kids booing somebody off stage if they don't have the same viewpoint they do. I mean, isn't the whole point of college and then a liberal education to hear competing viewpoints and synthesize them? It's just, you know, it's like I say, some of this has gotten a, it's way too easy to find your own little insular little grouping and stay there as though that was reality. And technology reinforces that. Technology can give us great lives but can also complicate our lives to the point where it may not be worth it sometimes. Thank you, Brad Coats. Hey. Great for you to come down. Thank you, I always love talking to you. Don't forget. Yeah, we're gonna do this again. I always love talking to you. 2020 is coming soon. Aloha. Aloha, all the Think Tech audience. This is a great program you put together here.