Malta made public buses free, yet ridership barely changed. The buses are unreliable, slow and socially stigmatised. Until the experience is genuinely competitive with car ownership, nothing will shift.
Where this was said
At 38:00 · chapter starts 31:40
The conversation moves from pensions to roads, and the tone darkens. [1] — Jon Mallia "Malta has 154,000 registered cars. Every new road built fills up immediately. Speakers compared the island to an artery clogged with choles…" 48:00 Robert Formosa reveals that in 2020 Malta commissioned external transport experts to produce a comprehensive strategic study — a costly and thorough piece of work that outlined the structural changes needed. Five years later, the report sits largely unimplemented. A 2025 update acknowledged its findings but shied away from the hard decisions. Jon Mallia adds that Malta's attempt to boost public transport ridership by making buses free was a well-intentioned policy that completely failed: the service is so unreliable and socially stigmatised that even zero cost cannot persuade commuters to abandon their cars. David Grech frames the underlying problem: with 154,000 registered cars on a tiny island, every new road built instantly fills up. The system is at saturation point. Using the metaphor of a clogged artery, Mallia warns that if the underlying causes are not treated — not just the symptoms — the heart attack is coming.
Malta commissioned external transport experts in 2020 to produce a comprehensive transport study, whose recommendations have yet to be fully implemented years later.
Social media feeds men and women the absolute worst caricatures of each other while stripping away the everyday, imperfect relationships that would calibrate their expectations. Combine that with smaller families and fewer cross-sex friendships, and you get a generation that talks about the opposite sex constantly but almost never to them.
The 'would you rather be alone with a man or a bear' debate went viral not because men are objectively more dangerous than ever, but because an entire fear industrial complex of influencers and safety products had already primed women to feel that way. Once the algorithm identifies you as worried about personal safety, the content and the scrunchie drink-covers never stop.
Women feel less safe not because danger has increased, but because trust in institutions — police, churches, schools — that used to enforce safety norms has collapsed. Young women are far less likely than older women to believe those institutions will handle sexual assault responsibly, leaving them with only individual self-protection as a fallback.
Even self-identified feminist women consistently told Daniel Cox in interviews and surveys that they want men to open doors, pay for dates, and show demonstrable care. The internet noise around 'benevolent sexism' drowns out this widespread, quietly held preference.
In focus groups in Philadelphia and Raleigh, every single hand went up when participants were asked if parents discussed financial stability and education. Zero hands went up for marriage or parenthood. Parents are shaping their children's ambitions with total silence on the experiences that matter most.
American families are smaller than ever, with roughly 1 in 5 children now growing up as only children. Without the daily friction of siblings — shared bedrooms, shared bathrooms, resolving disagreements — young people enter adult relationships without the negotiation muscles relationships require.
Online dating optimises for your existing preferences rather than expanding your horizons. People who meet online give bad first dates almost no second chances; people who meet through mutual friends are far more forgiving. The disembodied, checklist-driven nature of apps removes all the social cues that actually reveal character.
A split-sample survey found that men judge male and female cheating identically harshly, and women judge male cheating the same way men do. The outlier: young women are dramatically less likely to call female infidelity morally wrong, suggesting shared-fate thinking and personal experience of being cheated on are reshaping the moral calculus.
The monk mode trend encourages men to withdraw from social life to work on themselves — but this is precisely backwards. The research is clear: close friendships are the single most powerful predictor of whether a man dates, commits, and becomes his best self. Self-improvement without social reintegration is just sophisticated avoidance.
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