Karl Pillemer

Kind of like, you know, leather boots and that sort of thing, right? So [laughs] Cordell's legacy point.

Karl Pillemer interviewed 700 Americans over 65, average age 77, married an average of 43 to 44 years.

He asked them what they had learned about love.

100% of these individuals described a sensation of rightness when they chose their spouse.

And also probably not news, but very disturbing is the Increase in intergenerational estrangement with adult children cutting off their parents.

There are two books, one by Josh Coleman, one by Karl Pillemer that I highly recommend that really look at this phenomenon.

It's extremely, extremely painful for the elders who are cut off often without knowing why.

TikTok therapists are encouraging millions of followers to cut off from difficult parents.

A confluence of forces is leading to certain actions and choices that were considered taboo before now becoming acceptable and even celebrated, and then they spread via social contagion." Hard post-pandemic numbers are scarce.

Karl Pillemer's twenty-twenty book Fault Lines found ten percent of Americans estranged from a parent or child at any given time, and twenty-five percent cut off from some close relative.

Experts still say something shifted.

Since the pandemic, social media talk about estrangement has exploded.

Before the break, you were talking about the loose data that we've had historically about how much family estrangement is actually going on.

And you had mentioned Karl Pillemer and a survey that he did.

And the question that he asked is very interesting to me.

He asks, do you have any family members, i.e., parents, grandparents, siblings, children, uncles, aunts, cousins, or other relatives? Yes.

I would like to say that why is this important? Who cares? Maybe it's a lovely story, and maybe I have something to offer.

But the fact is is that a lot of research has been done about estranged families, and there's a guy named Karl Pillemer at Cornell University in 2019.

He did a study that says that 39%, I think that's the number, of Americans have ha- experienced loss and, you know, y- death, bereavement, without reconciliation.

That's 70 million people in our country.