Alice Evans
speaker
145 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 11 Mar
Alice Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I totally agree that in person you get when I think the male female friendships are really important driver of gender equality, because as you come to care about someone as a friend, as you listen to their stories, as you as you hear about how their day was or the kind of things they don't like.
And they say, hey, you know, I was interviewing this guy in Catalonia or in Spain and he was telling me that, you know. they went to watch a football game at the bar and the women were saying that they didn't like it when guys were rowdy or aggressive. Or when one of his female friends was approached by a guy and she said no to him, he called her a puta, he called her a whore or something.
And she was saying to her friend that that was distressing. She didn't like that. And because he cared about her friend, his friend, he sort of understood that and he empathized that and he moderated his own behavior. And I think that building trust, rapport, understanding of what offends or, you know, not even just a fence, but having a sense of what matters to the other person. So that's it.
I absolutely agree that retreating into these digital spaces of solitude harms our understanding and also our solidarity more broadly, you know, whether we care about other people, right?
I definitely believe that.
I think that's all true. And I absolutely agree that intimate partnerships are a major important factor for building mutual understanding, common ground, etc. That said, I don't think this is just about men not understanding women, a sort of men from Mars, women from Venus story, because
If you look at some modern trends, say, for example, the discourse of secular monks, whereby a young American man will say, I'm going to eat these specific macros, I'll have 200 grams of protein, I'll spend two hours on the bike. That's a guy with no friends. That's a guy who's prioritizing, optimizing his physique and he's not strengthening and he's not building friendships.
He's not building rapport. He's not becoming a funny, charismatic guy. So this isn't just the gender issue. It's a solitude issue of people losing the capacity, losing the social skill to charm and make friends. And if you don't have a network that is socially active, then even if you wanted to go out, no one is. And so it's all reinforcing, right?
Yes, totally.
I think we can think about this in two ways. So certainly, as women increasingly enter the labour force and get higher skills, then they can be more economically independent and they can choose to be alone. So they would only marry if a guy is charming, you know, if they have fine love. But of course, the phones may be hurting that.
Or if the guy offers a desirable package of goods, whether that's attractiveness, entertainingness or money, right? You know, money is impressive for many of us. So I think that the most disadvantaged guys certainly may struggle to offer an appealing package. And as you rightly say, the marriage rates are plummeting chiefly among the most disadvantaged men.
It's the men who are earning least who are most likely to stay at home with their parents to be single, who can't necessarily offer an attractive package of goods. I should just say that it's not entirely that young men are getting less educated, rather that the most disadvantaged men are struggling in education. So I certainly think that aspect is partly about economics.
100% and created by the broader economic situation now.
So I think that if it's the case that technology is the major friction, then we need to look at the political economy because each tech company, to be successful, they want to distract us and hoover up our attention for as long as possible, for as much as possible. So the market mechanism is really against coupling.
And my concern is that tech companies are just becoming so much more engaging, more affable, more charismatic, more shocking. Mr. Beast, oh, what's he going to do now? That's so engaging, right? So my concern is, what if tech outcompetes our social connections? And that already seems to be happening, not just in coupling, but the wider rise in solitude.
And so I honestly don't know the answers, but here are a couple of things we could do. One is we could think about how do we regulate technology in some way. So Jonathan Haidt has really done fantastic work in encouraging phones-free schools, for example. And that would be important in enabling young people to actually talk to each other.
To play in the parks, to chat, to make jokes, to learn how to make jokes, to become less anxious. I think that's really important. But it's clearly not a sufficient solution because us as adults are also vulnerable to just getting sucked into all these things.
Absolutely. And politically, it's very difficult. So I think there are two tensions. One is both the demand and the supply. As humans become more hooked and dependent on these personal online entertainment, then we want to protect those freedoms. And simultaneously, all the various companies from Netflix to sports gambling will lobby different political parties simultaneously.
to prevent any kind of restrictions and regulations. And then even if, say, for example, one was trying to have a church building program or a program to champion the church, the church is fighting against all those competing distractions.
Or even if you're doing something secular, like a community fair or community festival, some people may well say, as they so often do, hey, I'll rather just stay home in my pajamas and enjoy what's ever on TV. And you can choose exactly what you want on TV.
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