#855 - Richard Reeves - Why Do Modern Men Feel So Left Behind? | Modern Wisdom

Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show.

My guest today is Richard Reeves.

He's a writer, researcher, and the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

Men have been struggling for quite a long time.

What exactly is going on?

What resources can genuinely help modern men?

And how can we better understand the dynamics that are driving this decline in male well -being?

Expect to learn why Obama endorsed Richard's book, the scary trends about male suicide, why it's important for humans to feel needed, whether the Harris -Waltz campaign has even considered men's existence, if this upcoming election will be decided by masculinity, Richard's thoughts on therapy for men,

and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Richard Reeves.

Obama endorsed your book.

Yeah, that was a bit of a surprise.

I mean, first of all, it was also a year late.

I don't want to criticize, come out the gate criticizing, but the book came out in 2022.

And so, when his 2023 list came out, everybody who'd written a book in the previous year or so was like, I make it, I didn't make it.

I wasn't surprised, but then 2024 comes around.

Ta -da. Has that been the growth of this discussion about boys and men?

Has it been one of those little compoundy things that didn't spike super hard, but it's been building?

I think so. Yeah. What my sense of this is that, I mean, even since we spoke, when did we speak?

A couple of years? About maybe 18 months, a little bit more, between 18 months and two years ago.

I think even since then, the permission space around this conversation has widened.

So just to be very autobiographical about it, when I tried to find a publisher for my book in 2020, I couldn't.

I was turned down by every publishing house.

At the time, it was just seen as like too controversial a topic to engage in.

And then you fast forward and then you're on Barack Obama's reading list.

And whatever you might think about Barack Obama, he's not a reactionary, he's not seen as a kind of like men's rights reactionary type.

And so that's obviously as an author, that's a great accolade because I do think his lists tend to be quite thoughtful.

Broadening the conversation to an audience.

It's more that. Yeah.

It's okay. And it really helps me if I'm having a conversation with people who still sometimes understandably think this is a bit men's rightsy.

Really the skepticism that people bring to the debate, which I not only understand, I actually have a lot of time for.

I think if you're not a bit skeptical to start with, then you're probably not thinking that hard about it.

But then to say, well, Barack Obama's thinks the books worthy of reading, it just helps to sort of take a little bit of the heat out of it.

But I would just say that's one of the perhaps most prominent examples of a just a general sense that the temperature around this conversation has gone down even just in the few years I've been talking about it.

Well, we'll see what we can do today to turn that temperature up.

Yeah. I knew I could rely on you.

Yeah. I'm here. I'm here to just throw a couple of coals on the fire.

Actually, I'm super interested to know if you agree with that or also what your experience is as you talk about this, because there's a, let's put it this way.

There's almost like a gravitational well that pulls you towards more conservative, more kind of reactionary, whatever you want to put up kind of framing, because that's where a lot of the audience is for this stuff.

Let's be honest, that's where the natural audience is.

So I just wonder how you calibrate that.

Do you feel that, Paul?

Do you see it in your audience?

Do you see it in your own conversations?

How do you manage the this perilous journey between these different, the way I think about this as these gravitational wells out there, they're constantly trying to suck you in.

Yeah, I think about it an awful lot.

I have spent so much time considering this very point.

You know, I'm so, I'm so keen about advocating for Boys and Men.

It's such an important part.

It's been such an important part of this show, you know, 850 episodes, maybe 50 have been on men's mental health in one form or another.

Hundreds of psychologists have been on the show.

And I've been really trying to dig into this.

And yet one miss word by me results in me being accused as a budget Andrew Tate, you're the misogynist that we've known all along, or from the red pill Manosphere space, I'm a blue pilled cook that's like secretly living for the whatever.

So to be honest, it's very difficult to do.

One of the things that I really do not like about this, and I wanted to get into this with you when we were a bit warmer, but fuck it, we can we can just run it now.

I hate having to temper my talking points to avoid being pattern matched as a misogynist.

I hate having to do this weird, prostrate myself on the altar of history.

Well, we know that women are struggling.

And it's very important that we talk about this, like you just said.

And if you don't realise that as a point, it's like, I understand why.

Because the more extreme sides of the pro men conversation aren't always coming at it from aren't rarely coming at it from a place of well balanced, I care about men, it's do you care about men, or do you just hate women?

Is this your vehicle to be able to talk about hating women?

So I understand why that kind of needs to be there.

But I find it fucking exhausting.

It's so and you must do this permanent tempering of talking points around what we know that women are that there's always this inclusion that needs to happen.

Even in the conversation for men, there is this requirement for us to include women in it.

I don't see the reverse thing happening.

The reverse is not happening when it's a pro female influencer.

They're not saying, well, we must remember that men are killing themselves at four times the rate of women, we'd have half a million more men since 1999, if they killed themselves at the rate that women do through suicide.

But we're talking about women's it's like no one no one's doing that.

So we're talking about asymmetries in the world and the way that things are positioned.

And I just think it feels arduous to me.

And it still shows when we talk about imbalances in you know, what are some of the things that men have to deal with the women don't and vice versa and stuff like that.

The conversation around sexes that are promoting either men or women, there is definitely in many ways, this additional cost that needs to be paid by anybody that wants to have a conversation for men by having to bring women into the fucking conversation about it.

It's like, is this not exactly what we're here to do to try and just focus on what are the men's points.

And as you talk about a lot, it's this zero sum view of empathy.

Yeah, okay. So this is good because I don't mind doing that at all.

I don't mind contextualizing in the context of what's happened to women, etc.

And I think that's for a couple of reasons.

I think number one is simply because I am so called to this mission, so determined to be as persuasive as possible that I am absolutely happy to do some of the work tonally, right.

To pay the entry price, the cost of doing businesses for framing contextual.

Because if in the end I'm trying to persuade, I don't know, some people at CDC or in the White House or a governor's chief of staff to take this stuff.

If I actually want to be persuasive, then a recognition of their discomfort with it and an understanding of the need to prepare the ground around that, fine.

Great point, really great point.

This is too important to get hung up on that.

And the second thing I've really noticed is, and I'm trying to watch this very carefully in myself, is that people who embark on this journey, and some people have said to me, well, it's early days for you.

Let's see what happens.

Early onset Republican.

Just give it another 10 years, Reaps, is basically what they're saying.

It's that you advocate for a certain change or to try and raise awareness around an issue.

And it doesn't work.

And then it doesn't work.

And it keeps not working and you keep not feeling heard.

And so you get more and more frustrated.

This is climate change.

You get more frustrated.

And so the frustration level goes up.

The tone you adopt.

Inflammatory rhetoric.

So I was at this conference where this guy, who I know quite well, was asking a question about why there should be an office for men's health.

There's all these women's health ones and quoting the statistics, et cetera, all stuff that I say, and I've also written about.

I'm sitting next to a young feminist woman who just happened to be at the conference with me.

And she listened to this guy who's been saying this for 10 years.

And she said to me afterwards, I had to keep reminding myself that I agreed with him.

Because he was so angry, he came across as so mad about it that all her radar, all her visceral, literally her body was like, this guy's just an angry guy.

Wow, he's like, whoa, whoa, has he got an issue here?

And so that affect of anger and frustration, it kills anything you're trying to achieve.

And so what happens is that the understandable frustration that many people feel doing this work mounts and mounts.

It turns then into anger and frustration.

It presents itself through this prism of the emotionality of it.

It even came across a little bit just in the way you were talking.

Your frustration, right?

And someone could take that clip and they could say, whoa, Chris is a bit mad.

He's getting bored at talking about women's problems.

Yeah. And so, and he's mad about it.

He's like, why the hell should I care about women in order to talk about men?

And whoa, everyone's like, okay, Chris.

And so it's just not effective.

But the other reason is that I genuinely believe that after the long history we've had and the issues that women have faced historically, that it's not too high a price to pay to acknowledge that.

And then to say, oh, and by the way, there's these issues for men too.

I think it's a false analogy in some ways to say that people who are advocating on behalf of women around the world say or just historically also need to say, oh yeah, of course, there's these issues for men.

This is a very, very new world we're in now, where it makes even empirical sense to talk about gender equality the other way or the issues of boys and men, frankly.

This is decades at most, probably years, whereas we've had a few millennia of it the other way around.

So I'm like, okay, I'm unsure about how I feel about this sort of like, how would you say, cultural reparations or like sort of linguistic reparations that need to be done in that there's this sort of debt that was owed for a while and now it can be repaid and it's kind of carrying over.

But you've reminded me of a concept that I wrote myself only a year and a half ago, which is the soft signal of effectiveness.

Triggering a tribal response is antithetical to having effective behavior and belief changing messages.

It's nowhere near as sexy to caveat heavily.

But when it comes to important subjects, the most compelling arguments are sometimes the gentle ones.

If you care about changing behavior, you'll dial back the aggression of your argument.

I think that's exactly what you're talking about, soft signal of effectiveness.

You even use the word effective right partway through.

You're 100 % right. I think what my point here is that I'm not sure that the bar that these conversations often need to jump over in order to be seen as being sufficiently soft is I feel like that is sometimes quite high.

There is a long period of and we're not saying this, we're not saying that.

And the caveats to me become exhausting.

I'm again, so like Libcucked, apparently, despite the fact that Shapiro was on the show last week, I'm so Libcucked that I'm, you know, a blue pill, like idiot that works for the Guardian or something by most people on the right side of the Manosphere.

So I'm like, okay, I'm not sufficiently aggressive for those guys.

But anyway, you can't in that sense, if you were to win, you'd have lost.

Correct. Anyway, to have done it would have been to have ruined it.

You've been ruined it.

The other point that I have, I guess a unique challenge with or a slightly unique challenge is the way that I present.

So I look like the sort of guy that would absolutely come in screaming and wouldn't really be thinking about mental health, talking about emotions, talking about vulnerability, going to therapy twice a week for the last year, doing meditation, like that's not typically, so again, I get pattern matched

as budget Andrew Tate.

So there's an even additional layer of like, I know I'm not saying that such and such, and I'm not saying that such and such.

You're saying I know I look like this, but trust me.

Give me a break. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And I just think it's a real challenge.

You said something earlier that I wanted to pick up on, which is the sense that you say one thing and it can kind of get picked up.

And I will say that when I talk to people in more progressive spaces, just about particularly the more male dominated kind of podcast space and kind of including you, what they've done in many cases, they've actually gone through like all the transcripts.

And there's a couple of things you've said about feminism that they don't like or kind of disagree with, right?

And I don't even bother to kind of look them up, but like, A, you're not going to agree about everything, but B, these are long conversations.

You're thinking out loud, you're trying to learn.

And there's sometimes just a lack of grace about allowing people a bit of latitude to have the conversation or to presume a good will.

It's almost like they want you to be like that.

To be the misogynist that they've always...

Yeah. And then if they push you that way, of course, then the gravitational pull comes in.

And I do think it's a pressure particularly for male podcasters.

This is very, very inside the podcast, but I'm super interested in it because I see people like you as your very persuasive voice in some ways, not despite the affect that you have, it's a very masculine affect, but because of it, right?

And so that gives you a space and gives you a certain credibility that then you can kind of use to talk about it.

It's all well and good, Jordan Peterson talking about the issues of boys and men in the way that he has in the past, but very few of those boys and men want to be Jordan Peterson.

He can be a great patriarch, but not a particularly good role model.

And I think this is, I'm really, really trying to thread this needle.

So two things. First one, do you remember when Melissa Carney brought her book out, one of your colleagues?

So she brought a book out called The Two Parent Privilege, Two Parent Advantage.

Two Parent Privilege.

And before that book was even published, she was shredded on Twitter.

Melissa is, as far as I can see, kind of similarly built as you, like a policy wonky type.

Most sort of than me.

Not physically. You are quite, you're very tall in person actually, way taller than I would have expected.

Policy wonky kind of like lefty leaning.

I'm flattered by the comparison because she's more serious academic than I am, but she's a legit statistician.

She's very good. So, but what I saw was the exact push toward the right that you're talking about.

And you know exactly where I'm going to go with this, but for the people listening that didn't see this unfold.

You had her on, right?

I did. I thought she was fantastic.

I saw this woman who is like, as liberal and sort of fair and egalitarian and open -minded and pro everything you wanted to be pro, if you're sort of left of center, as you can get.

And she writes a book that's called Two Parent Privilege, shredded online.

This is conservative talk.

You haven't even, you don't even know what it's about.

You don't even know what she's coming from.

It was a very pro. It was trying to raise up the original disadvantaged group that the left was looking after, which is the working class.

That's what it was there to try and do.

And she got, and I thought, huh, I'm seeing right in front of me, the exact incentive that pushes people who write or consider a talking point, which is unpopular with the left, why they end up listening toward the right because they go, I tried to do something that I really thought you guys would get

on with. And this purity spiral, the level of, like, pureness that you require me to get to is so high that I might as well just be friends with the only people that will accept the work that I do.

Who's going to invite me on their show?

The Young Turks aren't inviting me on their show.

David Pakman's not inviting me on his show.

Sam Seed is not inviting me on their show.

Like all the people that are part of the group that I'm from, they're not letting me go on.

So Kyle Kalinsky, Crystal Ball, like, where are you?

She came on here. She came on Modern Wisdom.

And not that I'm right of center, but not that I'm like super right of center.

I guess I'm probably coded that way.

But like, I can imagine her going on Tim Pool's show.

I can imagine her going on Jordan Peterson's podcast or something from the Daily Wire.

You go, okay, so you'll accept me on that side despite the fact that this is supposed to be ostensibly written from the other direction.

So I think that's one of those dynamics you're talking about that pushes people right of center.

I've seen it happen.

I mean, it's happened to Carol Hoover as well, for example, 100 % pushed out of Harvard uses a political football by Bill Ackman, but then you get pulled up.

So I talked earlier about these, these gravitational fields, right?

You get pulled one way.

But very often there's a push, a push that comes along.

And I have to say that in Carol's case, and in a couple of other cases too, I actually just watched these dynamics play out.

And that made me much, much more intentional and thoughtful about how I land my own work.

Just to interject there, is that partly that you are aware that if people start to react negatively to your work, that you're going to begin to think negatively of that side?

Are you almost trying to sort of take your take a little antidote before you maybe get hit with the poison?

Like you're preparing yourself almost building up a not putting yourself into a dangerous situation that could cause you to be pushed in that way?

Is that something you think about too?

Yeah, to some extent, there's two stages to it.

That would be the second stage, that would be as if the let's call the first stage, the kind of PR stage, right?

How does this land?

Who's endorsing it?

What's the what's the mood around this, right?

This book or this idea?

And then, okay, if it tilts one way or the other, these incentives then kick in.

Suddenly the speaking engagements, the contracts, the so Carol now works at the American Enterprise Institute, because they're hiring.

Right? Because and she gets invited to more conservative conferences.

And she's reviewed in conservative journals, and she has to make a living.

And also, we're humans.

And so we most humans don't want to be ostracized.

Like you actually go back to us reading this very good book about equality.

And there are these caves in Italy, which have these the original, the oldest images of human tribes we can find.

And they're quite violent, people go and see the ones where people are kind of spearing each other and stabbing each other.

But the one that really, really struck me is the one where there's a group of about 14 or 15 stick figures.

And then there's another figure that's moving away from them.

And the interpretation of this is it's an ostracism.

And that it's kind of one of the earliest examples of somebody who the tribe has to kind of kick out, right?

And an ostracism is being one of the most powerful ways in which people have kind of protected identities and tribes for a long time.

Which is like, you're out, you're exiled.

In our country, we say sent to Coventry.

Where does that come from?

And so everyone's now, where's Coventry?

What's he talking about?

But that idea of ostracism.

And I think about that image quite a lot, when I think about these dynamics, which is that if you kind of ostracize someone, what are they going to do, right?

They're very unlikely to become monastic nomads living alone, out in the wild, living off berries, right?

They're going to find another tribe.

They'll go with the enemy.

They'll find a tribe.

They have to. Like our survival at some very primal level requires us to have a tribe.

So if you get expelled by one tribe, then it's almost inevitable.

What I really thought about, and this goes back to kind of when I brought my book out, is that I did notice that, unfortunately, if you come out, and it's seen as in a particular way, like through a particular violence, it will get ignored on the other side.

And so I actually was very careful about who I got to cover the book first and who I spoke to first.

First impressions last.

First impressions have a huge impact.

And so I was very thoughtful about that.

Just like, I knew, so I'll upset people by saying this, but I lived in fear of a Laudatory Wall Street Journal review from a very conservative academic.

I knew that if that was the first thing that came out, I wouldn't get it.

If the spectator had picked up on it before anybody else or the New York Post or something like that.

Yeah. Or my first media appearances had all been on Fox News and then kind of whatever.

So Carol went on Fox and Friends, and that's where a lot of the stuff happened.

And so, and so unfortunately, whether you like it or not, you have to sort of think about.

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So I did I had this conversation Ryan Long, Canadian comedian was sat there yesterday.

And we were talking about this, this tension between positioning and optics and transparency and honesty, and this tension that you have between the two like what is actually going on?

And what what do I need to do to put my best foot forward?

He's this great example of, you know, you can be honest with your girlfriend and her family, but you don't need to tell them about the time you did drugs when you're in university on your first date.

So you know, there are better ways to put your foot forward and not and obviously people get sort of slippery and slimy with that.

And then it ends up being totally contrived.

And it isn't it isn't sort of honest or truthful at all.

But there's a second element of what you were talking about, which is this purity spiral, there's sort of a very much them and us tribal thinking.

Eric Weinstein's got this concept called an accuracy budget.

What he basically talks about is that if you're playing with ideas in public, you should be allowed to play with them imprecisely at times.

Yeah. And there's a second element of it too.

So accuracy budget is one that here is an idea.

And look, I'm just I have to say I'm bro, sign saying here, this is just my bro theory or whatever.

That's my like, I'm not an academic.

Oh, Rogan. Yeah, exactly.

That's Rogan's. I'm just a comedian, like get out of jail free card.

So there's an accuracy budget, which is I have no idea if this is true, but I'm going to have a crack at this as an idea.

But there's also a precision budget, I think, which is when you're trying to communicate a thing, whether it's within the accuracy budget or not, your ability to get thought from brain out of mouth is also going to be imprecise.

So not only are you playing with ideas, practicing in public, learning out loud, doing this for the first time you haven't mean you didn't do this yesterday, and say, right, when you say that, I'm going to say this and do it, it's like, no, this is just happening.

This isn't a comedy set.

So you'll make natural errors when you're just coming up with ideas.

But you'll also make even more natural errors when you're just trying to communicate them.

But there is no, there is no part of anybody who slips up.

And this is both left and right.

There is no part of anybody that slips up, where it is not seen as complicity.

It's never seen as accident.

It's always seen as that, the real you homophobe, it's misogynist, the veil drop.

Yeah, exactly. As opposed to how many times have you spoken in precisely?

Yeah. How many times have you got this thing slightly wrong?

And I think really the issue isn't that you have a different opinion or an imprecise opinion, it's that you have a different opinion to the person who's seeing it.

It's like, I don't like him.

I think I think he might be talking about something else that's here.

And if I can throw a bit of shade at him, that's going to be hard slime to wipe off.

Sexist is really, really difficult slime to wipe off.

Misogynist, really difficult slime to wipe off, especially if you're a podcaster that talks about lifting weights and testosterone and like, men's problems and stuff like that.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's a problem with like, miss, it's a couple of that.

I love the idea of the accuracy budget.

And I think if you're from like, more like scholarly background, right?

So you can say, Oh, this is probably just bro science, right?

I can't say that. No, no, no, no, no, no, you're held to a higher standard.

If you're supposed to be like, the expert, there's a degree of anxiety that comes with that as well, right?

I really worry that I'll get stat wrong, or that I'll kind of, you know, characterize some facts incorrectly, because like, that's my stock in trade.

And I should be anxious about that.

But on the other hand, I should also be allowed to misspeak, I should be allowed to get stuff wrong.

And in the end, the thing I've come to value almost above anything else in an interaction with someone is the presumption of goodwill.

And the belief that even if you get it wrong, I don't think you're getting it deliberately wrong.

And I'm going to assume that what you're saying to me is an accurate reflection of what you're currently thinking, and that you're open to correction.

And that there isn't a kind of hidden agenda, there is this thing, I'm just this little sense of like, but what do you, what do you really think?

And then and then and then a mask will drop, right?

And then it'll be like so good.

Right. And so good.

And I think that's true on both sides is that just that sense, you see it just the way that the media on both sides will use clips out of context, like not allow someone to misspeak or even just the thing I've thought about quite a bit recently is how this idea of thinking out loud, thinking in public,

in this kind of conversation is really a very difficult thing to square with the kind of traditional peer review, fact checking kind of processes.

And and so you've noticed that I had really interesting experience just listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast, however long ago that was.

Two years? Yeah, a long one.

Yeah. And my wife and I listened to the whole thing on this, it was really long.

And I don't know how long, three hours long, right?

And there was a bunch of stuff in there that was really interesting and really good and really thoughtful.

And there was a bunch of stuff that I thought was less so.

And there was this little piece on climate change.

And it so happens that my wife is something of an expert on climate change.

And there's this 15 minute thing where Jordan was saying, well, it's a system.

And then the things come down here.

And they do all that.

And I was looking, we're looking at each other.

I said, this is just batshit, right?

This is like, but it doesn't matter, right?

No, nobody is turning to Jordan Peterson for advice on their climate policy.

Right? No government is saying, you know who we need to read our climate change.

Jordan, and that's okay, because that's not what he pretends to be.

So just ignore that bit.

And there's this nice phrase in trying to think where I got this from somewhere in the south, which is like, you know, focus, eat the flesh, leave the bones.

That's good. Eat the meat, leave the bones.

And so what happens is that in that context, that conversation, the stuff he said on climate change, I thought was kind of wrong.

And I didn't, I didn't mind the guy.

He's a psychologist, and he's an expert on mythology and theology and some rate.

He's not climate scientist, right?

So his views on that, I didn't take very seriously.

Next day, all the press, climate scientists denounce Jordan Peterson's stuff on climate.

And I'm like, well, of course it would be like me, if I start talking to you now about UFC.

Right. Let's say let's do a 10 minute thing where I talk about fighting techniques, which also say Richard Reeves was wrong about how you throw something.

It would also, it would, it would also be like a 10 year old child calling out Mike Tyson and all of the press covering it.

And they go tiny child calls out one of the greatest boxes of all time.

Like this isn't his domain.

So again, here's another thing I've been thinking about so cool.

You've been thinking about all this stuff.

I finally get to talk to someone about it.

This idea called experts only.

And I just, no one is allowed to play with ideas on the internet at all anymore.

And I think this is particularly an issue on the left.

I always hesitate like pointing the finger at the left, because it just seems like I'm the sort of person that would do that a lot.

This is one of the times where I think that purity spiral really comes out that if you just decide to play with ideas, look, I don't know much about this, but like, let's have a crack.

Let's have a crack at that.

The credentialism just immediately, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

And my least favorite comment on the entire internet is, as soon as I heard x, I couldn't take him seriously anymore.

It's like, okay, so there is one misstep in this person's entire and it's never like, you know, he got gravity wrong, or he's a flat earther, or like he doesn't believe in, you know, pick something that's widely regarded as true.

It's always like he got the stats wrong around glyphosate, and its impact on health, or he disagrees with my position on seed oils, or like he thinks that 12 to 16 reps is better than eight to 10 reps or something.

It's like, as soon as he said that I couldn't take him seriously anymore.

So we have a blanket rule on the show.

There's like a content manager that looks after the comments.

If anybody says unless it's a joke, after they mentioned that I couldn't take him seriously anymore, it's an immediate ban for life from the channel.

We've been doing that for years.

It's someone that is so one -dimensional in their thinking that I don't want them in the party.

They can still watch, and they can still type comments, but only they see them, and no one else is able to see.

So they're just spewing into the ether.

And I just don't want people, anybody that thinks one comment from somebody is worthy of the rest of the things that they're saying.

Like maybe there's some stuff that's so egregious where you go, wow, but if it's like someone's playing with ideas around climate change, do you know what it is?

The book that took him two decades to talk about meaning, all of that's out the window as well.

How perfect are all of your opinions as well?

Or is it just that the eye of Sauron doesn't turn around to you, person on the internet?

Or you, person who's also a podcaster, but just doesn't happen to be talking in this.

Yeah, but it's just like, let's focus on the wrongness bit.

Let's find there. Maybe this is a bit like the intellectual equivalent of fighting.

Let's find their weakest spot and go for that.

Whereas conversation and intellectual conversation and idea creation should be exactly the opposite.

It should be like, what's the best of what you've just said?

Exactly. How can we alchemize this?

Yeah, and say, look, I mean, one of my backdrops is the philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

I ended up writing his biography.

I was so obsessed with Mill.

And one of Mill's ideas is that it's almost impossible to imagine that in any conversation, regardless of who they are, that one person is 100 % right.

And the other person is 0 % right.

It's almost always this direct quote from Mill.

He said, we almost always share the truth between us.

Oh, that's great. And the idea of sharing the truth between you, doesn't mean you're sharing it equally.

But it does mean that even if there's a grain of truth in what you're saying, even if I'm like, the world's biggest expert on whatever it is, it's still possible that you coming along thinking, oh, well, what about this novel insight?

Oh, that's interesting.

That's interesting.

Yeah, maybe I'll take that, you know, so maybe I'm 98 % right, and you're 2 % right.

Let's focus on the 2%, right, rather than trying to bludgeon you with my 98 % expertise.

And I actually find, particularly during COVID, and just kind of more generally, the potential for sort of thinking out loud, and people playing with ideas is incredibly powerful.

And it's exactly the kind of quotes liberal, I'm using it in the more Mill sense now society that you want, which doesn't mean, by the way, that blogger X should be taken in the same way as like peer reviewed journal Y, right.

So you've mentioned Melissa Carney, there's a reason why Melissa is treated, is treated the way she is, because she does peer review journal articles, she's got tenure at the University of Maryland, she's stellar academic, trained, right.

And so I'm going to risk offending you by saying that when Melissa says something about changes in family structure, I'm going to believe I'm going to treat that more heavily than when you say, right.

On the other hand, when Melissa tells me how best to kind of punch someone in the solar plexus and take them I mean, saying that right, that's also not my area of expertise.

But anyway, lifting heavy things, lifting heavy.

Yeah, I'm, I'm risking offending you.

But I think it's this place where the point simply being that there are you have whole areas of expertise.

But here's the other thing, you might have read a lot of evolutionary psychology.

And so, and you have and that's obvious in the way you talk about it.

Now, you actually probably know a lot more about certain aspects of, you know, the academic world, and more deeply than a lot of academics, right.

And the fact that you've come by that auto as an auto didact, under your own steam doesn't make that knowledge any less valuable in of itself.

It's not the same as having been through a peer review journal article, that's precisely why it's useful.

But exactly, you need both forms of knowledge, don't you?

Yeah, I do think there's a there's a seduction of the kind of renegade genius.

I think that there's especially in the on the internet, maybe a little bit too much credence is paid to that.

Like most people, the reason that you do have these sort of formal processes, especially for the more sciencey things is that there's a pretty well established route that you go from being an ignoramus about something to being an expert about something and you kind of need to learn add your layers on top

like this. But for instance, somebody criticized Eric Weinstein on my show, this is a perfect example, right of where the experts only thinking is pattern matched incorrectly for somebody who actually does have a novel insight.

We did a clip we had a talking point around do women really want masculine men anymore.

And he brought up the Malbraman, which I had to go on Google because I didn't know as you're too young, and he's too British.

Exactly. I know. And he was saying, this is my thoughts on whether women want a masculine man or not.

And he was called out for that by the internet for like, what does Eric Weinstein mathematician and managing partner at teal capital know about whether women want masculine men or not anymore?

And it's like, huh, yeah, on the surface of it, that makes sense.

And you dig a little deeper.

He's married, he's got a 19 year old daughter.

So he probably does have some sense of an idea a lot more than people on the internet.

Many people on the internet, like he's fully invested in this because presumably his daughter at some point is going to start dating.

So maybe he is thinking about maybe having conversations with her and her wife around the dinner table.

Some like that experts only thing it drives me up the wall.

And I understand why because people like frictionless communication on the internet allows anybody to spew any half baked theory and reach potentially as many people as somebody that spent their entire life, more people than a journal article that nobody ever reads.

So I understand. But yeah, it pushes people in niches.

I love that idea of the sort of increasing agitation that people have.

And then it changes the rhetoric and it changes the inflammatory way that they talk about stuff.

And then you end up being pushed into a corner, so loud and so abrasive, that the people that would have listened to it now write you off.

It's like, why are all of these people so I think that the climate change conversation is not too dissimilar to this.

Like people that are fully captured by concern about why the world is going from a temperature and CO2 standpoint, glue themselves to roads and throw paint over, soup over paintings and stuff like that.

You go, how could you get yourself to that stage?

And it's like, well, they believe that it is such an important talking point, that this is the level of sort of vehementness and vitriol, they need to do it with.

And I think that's the same as you see with a lot of the pro men movement.

Yeah. And then if you start to get a little bit mad about something, and then people say, oh, they dismiss you even more, which makes you even madder, makes you even easier to dismiss.

And so there is that sort of cycle that you see, where you just like, the affect really does matter, if you're in the business of persuasion.

And the other thing is, especially for people who are younger, my three sons are all in their 20s now.

There is something about, there's something rather beautiful about the way in which young people can see things in such like, clear, unambiguous terms.

And it's very easy as you get older to be like, oh, the world's much more complicated than that.

But I tried to remember my I know what I was like when I was 17, 18, 19, right?

And the kind of moral purity that I felt I had and how I knew, I knew the answers.

And so when I look at things like that, I'm like, yeah, I look at the student protests and things like that.

And I'm like, yeah, but I look, I remember what I was protesting about when I was 19.

Okay. And I'm just like, I didn't really know what I was talking about, but there was something that's okay.

Right? It's okay to acknowledge that people are going to have narrow views about things in some cases, purity tests, etc.

As long as we also allow ourselves to grow up a little bit about it and very inflammatory, very, in some ways unpopular topic for quite a while and trying to do it.

What's your advice to people to both send and receive information that is maybe a little bit inflammatory?

Well, the first thing is to add the caveat.

So we've already talked about that.

So in the case of gender, as I've said, I think that when I genuinely think there is still an issue facing women and girls or there has been, I don't make them up, like I genuinely believe in them.

Right? So I've argued very strongly that we should be doing more to get women, more women into politics in the US, for example.

Right. I think that's a, I think that's a problem.

I wouldn't say if it wasn't, so I'm not, it's not earthsats.

So I think it's never made up.

So fake. And the other thing is trying to be as fact based as possible.

Right? So it's not like you can get all the facts, but just start empirically.

So just start with here are some facts, whether whatever the issue that's on.

But in my case, I'll be talking.

So I'll lay out the education data, or lay out the mental health data, or lay out the employment data, or lay out the stagnant earnings.

So here's some charts.

Here are some facts.

In fact, one of the mottos for my new institute is keep it boring.

And my son said, Well, you're the man for that job.

Very good. Spoken like a true British son.

Yes. I was very proud of it.

Yeah, you're the man for that job.

Good. That's going to be the wreckage of a slide.

That's funny, right?

But I do think there's something about try to be as fact based as possible.

It's not that everyone has to become the it's not an experts only thing.

But it is to try and be as truthful as possible about it.

Try and say, well, this is what the here are the facts, as I see them, don't be zero sum.

So don't say in order to do x, we have to come to not do y and try to be solutions focused.

One of the things that I think really helps is if you if you persuaded people to come along, then you want to say, so that's why I think we might want to try x, where I'm really inspired by that program over here, rather than just like, so that's terrible, isn't it, right?

And the kind of competition for the who can conjure the greatest dystopia is kind of boring at certain points.

So although I think there are some deep problems here, I'm also pretty hopeful that we could find solutions to them.

And I try to lead on that and say, and that's why I think, for example, we should do something to encourage more men into teaching, which is one of my own sons has just done, right?

So rather than just lament how badly boys are doing in school, but some more male teachers, what about some more technical high schools?

What about some more hands on plate?

Actually, what about redshirting?

What about giving them an extra?

What are we doing some work right now on like, sport, the decline in sports participation among boys, especially?

Like, what about that?

What about paying coaches more so that actually we have more coaches in our schools?

What about what about what about?

And I think that changes it too, because the the intellectual glamour of being negative about stuff all the time, wears pretty thin after a while.

And people, people I think are quite hungry for more positive conversation.

I think so too. There's something called the cynical genius illusion, you might be familiar with that.

So a lot of the time people think that cynics are smarter.

Oh, yes. I haven't heard it put that way.

But it turns out that they're not they die sooner, they're more lonely, they have worse health outcomes, they're poorer, they don't even make as much money.

And they do on average have lower IQs.

So by whatever judgment you want to think there was a study of book reviews, which I review books occasionally, too.

And so I have this study in my mind always.

And what they did was they asked people to rank the intelligence of the reviewer, and then sorted that into whether or not the review would be negative or positive.

And what they found was people were much more likely to think you're intelligent, it was a negative review.

And so actually, there is another male quote, which is that, it is thought necessary of any man who knows anything of the world to think ill of it.

Wow. And even then he was saying, he just noticed this intellectual fashion, which is that for people to think that you're clever, you have to show you have to be it's a negative kind of intelligence.

And there is an over weighting of negative intelligence quite often, which is that we give the kudos to the acerbic critic to the person that demolished that argument.

So brilliant. Like so and so you just have a Shapiro on right?

I have destroyed the owns that it destroys the guy.

It's all owns, destroys and so.

And if you think what's happening there is that we're just really admiring the negative application of intelligence.

And it's, there's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong, like we should be demolishing bad arguments and so on.

But, but it's very interesting to me that like the argument that some guy makes for how could we make middle school better for boys by improving recess and hiring more male English teachers, no one says, no one's ever put Reeves destroys or Reeves makes polite suggestion.

Yeah, make a reasonable balanced suggestion, think about it this way.

The only thing that's worse than being wrong on the internet is being naive.

Right? Right? Because naivety is oh God, you, you, you poor thing.

You, you my sweet summer child, you didn't know the way that the world is fucking patronizing.

So look, I think, I really appreciate, I've seen you do so much stuff over the last two years since we spoke and obviously I've been kind of in the cold face on the other side of the internet from you watching this stuff to your ability to be patient is that you may be one of the most patient men in the world.

Your wife may say otherwise, but we'll, we'll wait and see on that.

Talk to me about just really zooming out.

Why is advocating for men so unpopular?

Why is it, why is it so difficult just from your experience?

You know, it's a, I think in some cases it's a classic example of vicious circle, which is where if the only people who feel comfortable advocating for men are the ones who are more likely everything else equal to have a more reactionary view of women, then that means that people won't want to enter

that space. And so right now, discourages reasonable conversation.

Yeah. It's hard. It's hard given the people's prior views about this to enter that space without immediately arousing suspicion.

And this is why again, why I'm not, I'm not as troubled as some other people are by the caveats and by the kind of warmup because you're slowly changing my mind about it as well.

Here's why here's the way I is going down.

Okay. That's quite significantly.

We could get a chat GPT to probably do an assessment.

It's like a good, I just, I'm just thinking about it now.

Like when I give talks about the work I'm doing or on podcasts or I'm figuring, I feel like I used to have to spend more time doing that than I do now.

People like, yeah, we all know that boys and men are struggling.

Tell us how right. I feel like as we win the argument, as it becomes more of a mainstream thing, the need to do that will get lesser.

So in some ways, my success will be measured by the real direct, you can be, I'm not having to do it anymore.

How much do you think, how much do you think is a progress that you're making culturally around the conversation and how much is bravery personally as well bifurcating those may be a little bit difficult, but you're going like, I've kind of pushed, maybe you could have done this earlier, but you're

sort of treading on thin ice and you're going am I, can it hold my weight?

I think that was okay.

Can it hold my weight here?

Yeah, that's okay. Can it hold my weight here?

And maybe the ice is changing in thickness.

Or maybe you're just becoming a little bit less risk averse to I think the ice is getting thicker.

Right. Because I'm thinking I'm trying my risk aversion is I think I'm trying to hold it constant.

Because that's what the mission requires.

I actually can't run a significant risk because my reputation reputation of my of the Institute and to some extent the downstream movement.

Yeah, I would be affected by it.

So and actually, I do.

There's this book from a friend of mine, who's at American Enterprise Institute had a big impact on me.

And what he talks about is, what does the role you're currently doing require of you?

And so it's like, how do you think about what is someone in what, how is someone in my position supposed to behave?

Right? So very good.

And he talks about the difference between institutions that are platforming, and those that are forming.

And his view is institutions form should form you, right, they should shape you.

So to become a member of Congress, you go in, and it shapes you and like, okay, I'm a member of Congress now.

And so here are the rules.

And here's how I'm supposed to behave.

And here's like a decorum.

Here's what people are going to expect of me in this role rather than a platform, which is just like, I go on there and yeah, I'm on the TV all the time now.

And this is great for my career, etc.

And so this question that he says, you should always ask is what does my current role require of me?

And my current role as the director of a think tank on boys and men, and someone talking about this requires something different from me than if I was in a different role.

And what I also, what I also find is important about this is to recognize that division and recognize that everyone can people can have different roles to play, right?

And to honor those roles.

But to be clear what your role is in that conversation at any particular point in time.

That's so great. That's so I mean, like I say, I'm just so impressed at how much you've thought about all of this stuff.

And it's evident that you're very intentional with the way that you go about this, which is what we need.

And yeah, I think I'm really very important not to agree.

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I'm really reflecting as we sort of keep going back and forth with this about why I've become so exasperated with the caveating with the pattern matching.

There's an idea, you'll be familiar with audience capture.

Have you heard of Criticism Capture?

No. So Criticism Capture, it's this great article I'll send it to you once.

Is it you like the criticism?

No. Basically, that your critiques, not your compliments, are more warping to your messaging.

That you, I mean, Jordan has certainly been, I think, on the receiving end of this a little bit that what you actually end up doing is becoming the enemy that your enemy's always said you were because it's a self -fulfilling prophecy in many ways and that you start to do things to prepare yourself.

Maybe you shy away from topics more often than not, you lean in, you become this sort of like firebrand version of things.

And I do think that criticism capture at least around this sort of conversation, I'm like, how many times have I said on previous episodes, this is the same single distribution channel for 850 900 episodes, thousands of hours over the last six years, six and a half years.

How many times have I said, well, we do know that we must be careful with this thing and we got it.

And I'm like, here we go again.

I got to say the thing this time, because the clipping, the purity spiral, the grievances that people want to find or with this version of it here, he didn't say it quite, he didn't use the word historical and therefore that means that you know what, like whatever it is.

So yeah, all of this coming together just makes for an easily exasperating situation, but I really, really appreciate your input on that.

You mentioned the Institute, I don't think you'd launched it the last time that you were on.

What have you learned since launching the American Institute for Boys and Men?

Yes. Yeah. Thank you.

Not many people get it, actually.

So that's great. Well, I've learned that it takes the IRS a long time to give you 501c3 status.

What's that? So we're a 501c3, which is charity, basically.

Okay. Is that the same as a nonprofit or no?

Yeah. But it's a legal status for the organization.

And so I apologize to the any of the IRS that's listening that was love the IRS.

Yeah, I also love the immigration, the immigration service, NCIS or whatever it is.

Yeah. Well, first of all, because of the conversations I was having, like with you and with others, it became clear to me that this was an institutional problem, not just an intellectual problem.

And why that what I mean is that you actually do need to be producing research, you do need to get the numbers out there, you do need like to be in that space.

Because there's a and drawing attention to an issue in COVID or whatever it is with research, which then gets media attention.

And because it just weren't any institutions doing that for men, boys and men, those issues weren't getting the same attention.

And so at some point, it felt like I need to institutionalize this.

So that's, that's the insight that led me to decide to form a whole new organization, because, you know, obviously, we need more think tanks, Chris, that's really what the world needs is another said the guy that used to live in Washington DC.

And I have to say that, like, in this case, I did feel like it was justified in terms of just this gap, this vacuum that's that's around boys and men.

The other thing I learned was, it's hard to recruit women to come and work for an institute for boys and men.

The associate director of our Institute, Alana Williams is currently the only woman in our team or any six.

Again, the same would be true the other way around.

Why was it hard? I think that there'd be way more male feminists that would want to join the female equivalent.

Is that not true? I don't know from the other side.

I know that those female equivalents, they do skew very female.

But again, I think that's because understandably, I can tell people have heard the argument about what you're trying to do, they they, they code you.

Right? And so what I've also done match.

Yeah, just, and I saw sit down, I've been at a couple of events where I sit down and people say, Oh, yeah, I saw that you were the president of the American Institute for boys and men.

So I assume that you were kind of lunatic, conservative.

And I Oh, interesting.

Why did you consider?

Why did you assume that?

I said, Well, it gives you an American Institute for boys and men.

I said, Oh, so that's a conservative.

So it codes, it codes, right?

It codes conservative.

Yeah. And so what that means is, again, back to what we were talking about earlier that does, if that's how it's coded, don't be naive about that, right?

Just recognize that means that you're going to have to do a little bit of work to decode it, not to make it a thing that's left or progressive, but just to decode account for that, in the same way as if you're hitting a drive forward and the wind's blowing right to left.

That's exactly right.

You just got to allow for that, right.

And it's you could argue forever that it's unfair that it's right coded.

And of course, I will judge our success to some extent, by the extent to which is not coded.

It's just mainstreamed rates, just straightforward thing.

And I would say the other success that we've had has been to, by focusing on, I would say big issues where the data is clear, and where not caring about them would make you a bit of a monster has been powerful.

So take education and mental health just as too big.

So we came out, that's what we really spent our first year mostly focusing on those two issues.

And that again, that's strategically intentional, because a, they're big issues, but b, it's just really hard looking at that data.

When you see how far behind boys and men are falling in education, and you see the issues around suicides and drug poisonings, etc.

A, like you just can't look away from that data, or you cannot claim that those aren't big issues, and that there are big gender gaps there.

And secondly, you've got to be a bit of a monster not care about how boys are doing in school, or whether men are taking their own lives.

And so by starting with those issues, I think that's helped to mainstream.

In the same way as you thought very carefully about the publications that were first for your book, you've thought very carefully about what he studies and issues that are first for your institute.

Yeah. And, and again, could we could we wish for the world where that's different?

Sure. But I can talk about all of them at the same time.

Yeah, I didn't find don't care.

I have a job to do.

And my job is to mainstream these issues and get more people in mainstream institutions, the media, government policymaking philanthropy, to take these issues seriously.

And if that requires me, demands of me in my role to be strategic about the issues we focus on and disciplined about the things we don't do, and I don't talk about at different stages at launch, etc.

Yeah, I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to make a living as a kind of polemic or a standup comic or something like if I do that in three years, then I will definitely do different issues.

And I will definitely do in a different way.

But right now, I'm the president of an institution whose job it is, is to mainstream these issues.

And so being strategically thoughtful about that, not just in subject, but also in tone, hugely important.

And then the last thing I would say is the importance of endorsements, either implied or direct.

And so we've just launched an advisory council with people like Scott Galloway on it, but also Lisa de Moore, the psychologist, Anne -Marie Slaughter, who runs New America, Jonathan Hight, also Jason Furman, who was chairman of the Council for Economic Advisors.

And they've kind of also got Dr.

K on there, very healthy gamer and so on.

But I would say that what's really pleased me about that list of folks on there is that in the sort of policymaking, scholarly world, those are all highly credible names.

And what that says to people is like, oh, okay, the temperature just came down another couple of degrees.

And so if I think about this temperature analogy, right, so if I started off, like, let's do it, let's do it in centigrade, shall we, because I can never get Fahrenheit, right?

Let's say we started at, I don't know, 90 degrees or at close to boiling point, every successive month, I think I've been trying to get that temperature down.

Reasonable, we're doing this, this is correct.

Such that. Gentle introduction.

I mean, anybody that looks at Scott Galloway and says that he's insufficiently concerned about minorities or working class or women or, you know, progressive problems or whatever it is, yeah, it's very much the, you know, sniper taking a shot and blowing a lot from right to left.

I'm going to have to adjust the site here.

And maybe over time, as the wind turns down, you're going to be able to adjust that site.

A little bit. And also, I think that as the issues get more mainstreamed, and so the suspicion quotient, like coming into the conversation goes down a little bit, then I think that will open up different spaces where we can actually kind of start to move.

There are obviously some fringe issues that I think that I think will be difficult for us.

I can't imagine going into them.

But let's take an issue where I think we will end up doing more work, which will be around fathers and fatherhood, and especially the way that the legal system for unmarried fathers works in different states.

I think that's an important issue.

And it's one that people like Catherine Eden and others have done work on.

But it's also a much more hot button issue, frankly.

Because for a lot of people, the father's rights movement has really morphed with the men's rights movement.

And there's a lot of guys out there come back to where we were before who are mad as hell, about the way the family courts have treated them.

And I'm leaving aside for the moment whether or not that's, whether they are correctly mad as hell or not.

But there's a lot of wounded guys in that space.

And I'm not in any way saying that those wounds aren't appropriately hell, but it does mean that they have a certain approach, a certain affect.

And also the data...

Maybe you don't have enough temperature headroom to be able to bring that quite in before we break through boiling.

And I also don't yet know quite what I think about it.

I need to dig in. I think divorce court is actually doing a pretty good job.

But I'm just giving that as an example of that's territory where I can imagine us going.

But if we started with that, right, I just...

A, I don't think the data would have led me to do that.

But I think this is a conversation now about persuasive strategy.

But in a space like this, being intentional about persuasive strategy, I think is fine.

And also I'm being candid about it.

I'm talking publicly with you about it now.

So it's not like a secret.

And I think it's also important that it's not a secret.

Right. As we try and do this.

I'm not... This is the game that we're playing.

And this is how we're going to play it.

This is how I'm playing it.

Right. And hopefully I'm going to predict it appropriately and it'll come into land safely.

Yeah. That's so great.

I wonder what some of the other topics are that you think are...

That you may not even end up getting into, but that you think are part of the pro men's advocacy, men and boys advocacy, why you think that's a like real sort of thousand million Scoville unit, hot jalapeno thing over there.

What are some of the areas where you go, oh, wow, that's that maybe that's five year tenure or maybe never thing.

Yeah. I mean, it's easier to do that, maybe never things probably than the five or 10 year ones, because I think those will be kind of bigger ones.

But one that... Well, I'll just share with you a question that I got asked at an event that I'd never been asked before, which was why aren't you doing anything about circumcision?

And then it turns out that's a huge issue for a lot of the men's rights space.

And see it as male genital mutilation.

Yeah, there's the whole thing around that.

So and as it happens, like you from the UK, and so there's obviously a difference culturally around this.

And so I have some personal experience of the kind of differences.

And I think it's kind of...

At some level, it's kind of interesting.

And in fact, when I still had a podcast, I had a British feminist philosopher who had a book called Intac, which had a whole chapter just on that issue, and she'd actually kind of engage with it.

And so it's not like I'm unaware of the issue.

But yeah, no. Really, maybe not your fight to jump into.

Another one, I mean, one of the ones that I think about that I think would be like a 10, 20 year issue for you.

Hopefully not. Hopefully it'll happen very quickly, but would be further down the line would be male victims of domestic violence.

And then the downstream suicides that have been preceded with domestic violence for men.

Well, I did talk to George about this on Tin Man.

Correct. That's his big thing.

He's coming on the show next week.

Yeah, it's a big thing.

And we'd engaged a little bit online and had some email exchanges with him.

We had quite a long conversation about that.

And the way I think about this is first of all, I'm not convinced at all that there's anything like the symmetry that he and others claim.

That's interesting.

Now, that doesn't mean that I know he's wrong.

And the other is wrong.

It's just that I don't yet have confidence that it's right.

And certainly in the impact that it's having, and in the way that it's defined.

So this becomes a very sort of empirical question about what are we talking about here?

What kind of violence?

What kind of, right.

Number one. Number two, I prefer to frame it at least as things stand as an empirical question around say male suicide.

And so if you're like, which is a huge issue for me, and that we're doing a lot of work on, especially for young men, I mean, the suicide rate among young men in the US has risen by a third since 2010.

What's young men? Under 30.

And actually the suicide rate among men under the age of 30 now is higher than among middle -aged men.

Which was previously the biggest cohort.

Was it 40 to 45? Yeah, it's a big reversal.

And so - Has 40 to 45 declined?

No, just leveled out.

So it's the difference here to level and growth.

So overall, the suicide rate has gone up.

Been picked up by this younger population.

So actually, again, we were the first people to do the work this way.

And I'm not claiming that the work itself was groundbreaking.

It's just that as the American Institute for Boys and Men, we just did the work that someone else wouldn't have done.

Which was we looked at the growth and suicide up to 2010, and then after 2010 by age.

And what we found was from beginning of the century for the first 10 years up to 2010, the rise in suicide was almost entirely driven by middle -aged men, men in their 30s and 40s into the early 50s.

It wasn't much change among young men.

Big rises for middle -aged men.

From 2010, it's basically flattened out for middle -aged men.

So hasn't gone down, but it hasn't grown.

But it's gone up by a third among men between the ages of 15 and 34, actually.

And so the nature of the suicide crisis has completely changed.

In the space of - Deaths of despair, middle -aged men's story, if you like, dislocated by the recession, working class men, etc.

to being something completely different, which is like, no, no, no, this is men in their late teens and 20s now, where we've seen this rise of a third.

Now, the reason I say all that is because that's a huge important issue for us.

And as we try to understand what lies behind that, what are the roots of that?

What's leading so many of our men, and now especially our young men, to take their own lives?

And if it turns out that one of the leading predictors of that is what's happened in their relationship, maybe even some sort of domestic violence, to use that term in the relationship, well, okay, then I'm interested.

But that's an empirical question, led by my concern around suicide rather than an assertion that it's important in and of itself, which I remain unconvinced of.

What do you think or what are you attributing this increase in young male suicide to?

You've talked about the sedation - Male sedation hypothesis.

Yeah, which I find very interesting, which is around - obviously it's about drugs, but it's also about pornography and video games.

And I think it's consistent with this idea of a retreat and a kind of pulling away from the difficulties and challenges of modern society.

I think that's number one.

And it's very interesting if you look at drug poisonings, which is separate from suicide.

One of the reasons that's risen so much among men, and perhaps we can talk a bit about that, is because the sorts of drugs that the men are taking, they are very often taking them on their own.

So there's no one there to revive them.

These are not party drugs.

These are not the drugs that the kids were taking when you were doing your job as a bouncer, right?

This is not let's take this and go out and have a good laugh.

These are drugs of retreat.

And my sense is that among many young men that they don't feel that sure about the extent to which they are needed and valued.

And in the end, that seems to be the best predictor in the end, that some will take their own lives is that they have come to believe that the world will be better off without them or they're kind of not needed.

I think one of the best protectors against losing your life to suicide is a real clarity that the world needs you, that your absence from the world will be bad.

And increasingly, I think particularly young men without much economic power, perhaps not quite sure where to go, what to do, do end up being unconvinced that the world is actually better off with them than without them.

I think that the state of feeling unneeded is literally fatal, through drugs, through suicide, etc.

And also just like any society where anybody ends up feeling like we're not sure we need you, that you might be a bit surplus to requirements.

It's just, that's the society that's morally failing.

And that's the sense that quite a lot of young men have now, which is just this uncertainty.

So this would not be particularly kind of young men, but I think it speaks to the issue about neededness, which is that the suicide rate among men is four times higher than among women, every age group.

But if you look at the specific cohort of divorced men and women, it's eight times higher among divorced men than divorced women, it doesn't really go up among divorced women, but it really goes up among divorced men.

And a plausible explanation of that I think is just the sense of like, well, am I needed?

Am I connected? Do I have a sort of sense of responsibility and obligation?

Am I tied in to some relationships that kind of make it clear?

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Well, one of the problems that divorced men have is that their ability to hold onto their social networks, especially when they get married degrades.

Guys just suck at keeping their friends.

They do. Wifeless men tend to be a real mess.

But when men get married, they let their male friends drop, or their previous single male friends drop.

They then absorb the wife's friend groups.

We're going around to such and such a person's house.

You kind of become a friend with the husband.

And then you realize when you get divorced that they were her friends all along.

Correct, yes. Everybody was linked through the wife, not through the husband.

So I think this conversation around neededness, you need to be needed, was something I really, really wanted to get into.

I think very few times, maybe ever in human history, but certainly in the modern world, has anybody asked the question, what does it mean to be a woman in the modern world?

What does it mean to be a woman?

The role is kind of in many ways for women both the mothering side or the career focused side, sort of, I guess, the two main skews that women have in terms of life direction now.

Recent opportunities socioeconomically, to be independent financially, to achieve qualifications, to do all of those things.

This is a sort of big novel shiny new opportunity that lots of women have got.

That's evident, like I'm kind of liberated, I'm independent, I'm doing it on my own, I'm sort of chasing after these things, like, that's you, you're kind of breaking new ground, it's revolutionary in a way, it's sort of frontearing, pioneering type stuff.

And then the other side, which is maybe more typically where women have got their meaning from, it's like, as soon as you are pregnant, I need to raise this creature, I'm a mother, I've got meaning, it's this positive thing back and forth, I'm relationally, I've got this, I've got other mother, I'm

aloe parenting with my sister or my aunties or whatever.

And, you know, many men, even when they were more important to the running of the family, were kind of cheerily waving from the sideline while the wife raised the kid, especially, you know, first six months to a year, any dad knows that they're kind of just like a spare part, that's kind of like a moral cheerleader,

who's going like, well, well done, honey, would you like should I do some toast?

Like, is there anything I can do?

You kind of it's the mother and the child type.

A little bit harder than that.

You know what I mean, that it's very much mother is the MVP, and dad is there as the support animal.

Yes, my point being that I don't think what does it mean to be needed conversation now, in quite the same way that men have some, I'm asking the question in a very long winded way, trying to identify why you would have this sext difference, given that both men and women use social media, women may be

more psychologically affected women in the 15 to 34 age bracket, more affected by it, the only bits of sort of toxic femininity, I think that really have been raised up by the modern world has been this sort of relational outcasting bullying that happens online, etc.

I'm trying to work out why that would be sext and what that's what's happening to men.

And I get the sense that women have two very prestigious, very rewarding life paths laid out in front of them right now.

Whereas men, both of those, the socio economic approach, and the homemaker approach have kind of been, they're a little more surplus to requirements in both of those arenas.

Yeah, super interesting.

In some ways, you could argue that the So let's take neededness, I love that as this just fundamental need, I have a role, I have a role to play a role to play.

And in some cases, like I have a distinct role, right as me or as a dad or as a mom and something and you take the old version of neededness was like the supply of neededness to women was all we need you to raise the next generation have to have the kids and raise the next generation.

And the supply of neededness to men was well, you need you to kind of raise the money get the money to raise the family and feed the kids and look after right so they're these kind of old supplies of neededness.

And what we've done, I think with women is to add another way in which they needed.

Right. So the message that a lot of young women will get is like, we actually the economy needs you, we need you in science, we need you in STEM, we need you to be the role model, yeah, and a role model for the next generation of girls and so on without really saying, Oh, by the way, also would forget

about the kids, right?

Because I know we still need you to do that, by the way, and of course, that's a double shift.

It's a source of complaint among many.

But but what's, what's clear is that there hasn't been this evacuation of neededness for women and girls.

If anything, the message that they're getting is we need you more than ever, because we still need you to do the old bit and do it all.

Whereas for men, the old form of neededness, which is through the kind of economic provider model, protector model has been very significantly, and for good reason, but it's been significantly evacuated.

I haven't really added anything to it.

And so there's been an expansion of the domains of neededness for women, and a contraction of the domains of neededness for men for all kinds of reasons that we could get into.

I think that's then playing out in terms of the different ways in which we see the mental health crisis playing out and especially for men.

The question is, then what do we need men for?

And do how do we help men kind of feel needed?

And that's the whole area around fatherhood, etc.

And one of the things I'm really passionate about is saying like dads matter, men matter.

Because the reason why you made this point out of femininity earlier is you don't really read across history or even recently about a crisis of femininity.

But you read repeatedly about a crisis of masculinity.

And now that could be like Q .I.

role, right? But actually what it's telling us is something incredibly important, which is that the role of men has always been and always will be somewhat more socially constructed and validated because of our different role in reproduction, right?

Like at some basic visceral level, I've talked a lot of people...

More of a Swiss army knife, whereas the woman is a bit more of a sword or a hammer.

Yeah. We have a few jobs that we have you and your...

What it means is that like at some basic level, I think it's embodied that we're not needed.

I've just got it. I've got it in my head.

You'll know this, this greater male variability, right?

Males at the tail. Yes, exactly.

There's more male geniuses, there's more males with disabilities, there's more male billionaires, there's more that are in jail at the same time and homeless and all the rest of it.

This is like a social role, cultural equivalent of this, that there is greater male variability in the role that they're going to take.

You're going to be the protector provider, you're going to be the warrior, you're going to be the diplomat.

You're going to be...

Yeah, yes, yes, need across time, you're going to be the person that maybe considers taking their own life.

You're going to... There's more of that variability too.

Well, that's right.

The definition of mature masculinity has really shifted a lot in exactly the way that you describe it, right?

And so one of the things I kind of point out is that actually physical competence, the ability to kind of be a fighter.

Well, actually in many parts of human history, that was incredibly important, right, for a kind of man, and it's actually just not as important anymore.

Certainly not in my world.

It's been outsourced to law enforcement...

Yeah. I mean, and certainly in lots of jobs now, being in a brooking seminar and really having a great right hook just doesn't really help.

Ron -based to brain -based.

It just doesn't help.

And so what do we valorize instead of this?

Well, in that case, you want earnings or intelligence and then it's something else altogether.

But there is this term, we may have talked about this before, but this term cognitive self -complexity, have you come across that?

No. You're like this.

And so basically what this is...

This idea of cognitive self -complexity is that your view of yourself has multiple sources.

So it's complex, right?

So yourself has multiple sources of meaning is basically the idea.

And if you look at surveys where you kind of ask women, what do they get meaning from?

What are their sources of meaning?

It's much broader than for men.

And so women are able to kind of draw on, well, the sense of meaning I get from being a mom, the sense of meaning I get from being a friend, the sense of meaning I get from being a daughter, the sense of meaning I get from being a professional, kind of in the workplace, et cetera.

And the idea here is that actually it's like having a balanced portfolio, is that actually you're not putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of your identity.

So you've had a terrible day at work, but okay, you're still important to your kids as a mom.

You can be there for your friends, et cetera.

Whereas with men, they're still putting a lot of their eggs in the basket around work and economic provision.

Yeah, they've got the sort of conceptual inertia around what they did a little bit and it's a bit of a lag there.

And so what that means for what it means for number one is that if men lose their jobs, it hits them much harder psychologically because that's so still very central to their identity.

But it also means they don't have quite that same ability to flex that self complexity to just actually lean more into their role as say a friend or a father, even if they're sucking at work that weighs so heavily for them.

And there's a lot we could learn there, I think.

I wonder if that also plays into society, maybe particularly women, not understanding why, not appreciating quite why it would be so painful to a man, because to the women itself evident that there are these other roles, but the men with the conceptual inertia, there's still got this, Mark Manson's

got this concept called identity dysmorphia.

He says identity lags reality by one to two years.

So if you have a rapid change in social status, you kind of you like somebody that loses weight and has a glow up, as it's called, a go up, glow up, what is that?

So it's playing off grow up, which is somebody really decides to get their life together.

And they go to the gym and they eat healthy.

And you know, they start looking after their hair and they do all the rest of this stuff.

And you go, Oh, my God, in the space of six months or two years or whatever you've gone from being this sort of to like an absolute sort of worldy winner.

And that's a glow up.

And this is kind of But it takes a while for you to realise that you're still the fat sweaty dude.

Precisely correct. But actually, you're now rocking it.

But you don't know that yet.

It's the it's the reason that some areas of pickup artistry back in the day used to say that trying to pick up girls in the gym was a good idea because you had a reliable indicator of where they were going to end up in future.

But it's like, you know, she's not in that, that good shape right now.

But is she going to the gym regularly?

That's probably going to be the same for the guy.

It's like, you know, is he on a good perfect example of this?

Perfect example of this, I think, is why is it that women can be attracted to the starving artist guitar player?

There's something like sexy about playing guitar that I don't get right, that presumably women are attracted to.

But it's that, well, he's working hard and he's got talent that could project him in future.

If this keeps on going, you were almost able to sort of throw out where this person could end up finishing.

Yeah. And you go, he could become a rock, or it's the person that's very hardworking.

He maybe doesn't have the status and resources now.

But he's got the early indicators.

It's his kindling of a fire.

Like he seems reliable.

He seems hardworking.

This is what I think that yes, especially guys, and especially in a world that's got lots of transactional, transient relationships, casual sex, easy distractions, all the rest of this stuff to open.

Guys that are in shape, it is decreasingly being about the way that you look and how your body is going to feel when the clothes are off in the bedroom.

And much more, this is an indicator of some underlying mental traits that you have.

Yeah. This is your willpower.

It's your discipline.

It's your fortitude.

It's your resilience can overcome a pain.

That's kind of like sexy.

In a way, you probably get up at a good time.

You can't have, can you be in really good normal shape and also have a fentanyl addiction?

That seems quite unlikely to me.

You know what I mean?

Like it's an outward facing indicator of the mental state.

And when you're swimming upstream with that to Trump is a signal.

Yeah. So, well actually that that's one of the things that I think there's a misinterpretation of a question in a lot of the surveys and the misinterpretation is done by some of the more men's right.

See guys, more conservatives, which is the question is something like when you're looking for a partner, something in a partner, what's their earnings potential, right?

Is one of the questions that tends to come up in the top.

So Pew does this, I will need to be fact checked on this back to our earlier conversation, but I'm directionally right about this.

You know you said bro science.

Yes. You know what the academic equivalent is?

I'm directionally right about this.

Wow. I love that. You've got your own bro science.

I'm in the ballpark.

So if you don't know the actual numbers, you say it's directionally correct.

So directionally, like Pew does this work and they ask men and women, like what are you looking for?

What's the traits that you'd most want to see in a potential partner, right?

And what they show is that earning potential is always in like the top three things that women say they want in a male partner, but not the other way around.

And so conservative interpretation of that is like, women say they want equality, but then when it comes to it, they still want a guy that's kind of making lots of money.

And I've talked to a few people about this and something that a female colleague of mine said sometime ago, absolutely struck me.

She said that is a proxy question for has he got his act together?

It turns out that actually earning potential is a really good proxy for all the other stuff, right?

It's very hard to do well in the labor market, unless you're willing to work hard, be disciplined, turn up, have good social skills.

You've got tons of externalizing behavior.

You can't regulate your emotions.

Right. And so, and she's saying, so that's the closest question in there to has he got his act together?

And so, and it turns out that that's what women want is that they want a guy who's got his act together.

And it may well be, and here I'm just going to project my own experience.

So they may well be that she says, Look, I actually might work best.

This is what happened for us, for him to be at home and looking after the kids for a while.

Right? But when he's doing that, I don't want him to just like forget to drop the kids off and then go home and sit and lie on the sofa, smoking.

Where? I need his competence.

I need to be on it.

I need to do the doctor stuff, do the, I need him to have the same skill set, just applying it to raising the kids as he would in the labor market.

And I think that's true.

And I think that what a lot of women are kind of saying now, this might come back to the guitar player guy, it might not just be like, okay, if he's a guitar player and he makes it be, we're going to get rich.

It's more just, he's competent, he's hardworking.

He's trying to get better at something.

Yeah. And guess what?

That's attractive. And it may be that he doesn't make it big.

He isn't huge, but you'd still rather be with someone that's got those skills and aspirations.

And it also turns out that if you can get up at 6am and practice guitar for three hours and then go on tour and you don't make it.

By the way, when we have kids together, you're going to be able to get up at 6am.

And maybe Lolan's asleep.

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Going back to the suicide conversation, what have you, what else have you learned over the last 18 months at the Institute?

What else has been standing out to you?

Well, I mentioned already that we've seen this shift in the age demographic that we're seeing a lot more young men now taking their own lives.

We've also been digging in a little bit around other forms, other forms of death, like unnatural deaths, if you like, which include suicide, but also include things like drug poisoning.

And I was this self poisoning.

This is you take drugs and you die from the drugs, but you weren't intending to write.

So this is like if you're Fenton, you're fenton, lace or accidental overdose, etc.

Now that's a huge problem, generally, but it's become a really big problem for men.

And the biggest growth we've seen in those deaths from quotes unnatural causes, which is drug poisoning, suicide, homicide, car crashes of like the four big ones, almost all the growth for all men has been from drug poisonings.

And in fact, if you look at the number of men who are dying from drug poisonings, this century, so since 2001, you look at the increase, the increase in deaths from drug poisoning between 2001 and today, is the equivalent to an additional 400 ,000 men in the US that we've lost.

Plus, there was 500 ,000 additional over the top of women's rates of suicide from 1999.

Yeah, suicide is also much higher.

And then of course, COVID was much higher for men to lost about 100.

Lastly, we more than this.

Now, more than 100 ,000 more men to COVID than women, even though men are less likely to be old, who are the ones who are most affected by it.

So and actually, that's what's the life expectancy gap between men and women just to screw by a year.

And these are the reasons why.

But the drug poisoning gap, so that additional deaths from drug poisoning, that's 400 ,000.

And just to put that in context, that's about the number of men that the US lost in World War Two.

So we've lost the equivalent of a world war in men in the increase in drug poisoning deaths since 2001.

And it's almost all been met.

And so, for me, that's adjacent to these deaths from suicide.

I still think they're part of this retreat.

I still think they're part of this checking out thing.

Obviously, to take your own life is the most tragic form of checking out.

But I also think that drug addiction, substance abuse, and particularly these drugs of retreat are also part of the drugs that they're using.

Most of the opioids.

Now synthetic, in many cases, and of course, part of this is a supply side problem, because a lot of them now they're different quality or they've been laced.

And so this is just, it's an accident.

Yeah, yeah, it did the person wasn't didn't even really know what they were taking.

They were taking how do you the quality has been a real issue now.

And then do you bifurcate this person purposefully took so many drugs that they would take their own life, and this person accidentally took so many drugs that they lost their life?

If if there's some indication a note or some some sort of message, etc.

So there may be a bit of Venn diagram crossover a little bit.

Yeah. And if anything, it's hard to know for sure.

But like, if anything, what would be the bias here?

I think the bias would probably be against clearing it a suicide.

So generally speaking, the stigma will be higher there.

And so it could well be that everybody writes a note.

So you know, some people just decide to be a little bit riskier, because God, what does it matter?

Nobody needs me in any case, I can I can just enjoy the evening.

Yeah, it's a little bit like the idea of a kind of unintended pregnancy is like there's always a bit of a gray area there.

And so I think in this case, too, there's, there's a bit of a gray area.

And in some senses, I just see these all as symptomatic of this general malaise, this kind of sense that a lot of men are having of you talk about sedation, but they're like retreat, uncertainty, and this kind of backing away into something whether that's whether that's drugs, or it's on video games

screens, it's some kind of retreat.

So the interesting thing about the sedation hypothesis, it really only my theory around that only answers the question, why is there not more incel violence?

Like that's what it was there to do.

And I think I'm yet to see.

I mean, Buss and William are looking at it now.

It's in a paper that they're going to try and assess.

It doesn't just have to be incel violence, I think it's just male male, young male violence in particular.

But the reason that, or at least the question I was asking was we have high rates of sexlessness, and social isolation among young men than ever before.

Why are we not seeing the typical outcomes that we would see, which is the young male syndrome?

Where is the young male syndrome basically?

But what you're saying is maybe this, what it may be the case, the male sedation hypothesis is true when you're talking socially.

But maybe some of that aggression is being turned inwardly.

That the retreat doesn't, they're not fully being sedated out of any sort of aggressive or violent tendencies.

It's just not happening to the world out there.

Yeah, that sense of, it's odd to think about this way, but like an externalizing behavior around sort of violence, risk taking, etc., being turned in.

And so it's a form of, it's a sort of internalized externalizing behavior, if I can put it that way.

Internalizing behavior.

A little bit, but there was this very interesting study that I was surprised that New York Times actually gave, got a lot of coverage to a year or so ago now, where some scholars looked at the psychological profile of mass shooters and compared them to suicides and drug deaths from deaths of despair.

And they found that it was pretty similar.

And so what they said was that the title on the piece was something like school shooters, cool shootings are one, are variant of a death of despair.

Most of those, a huge proportion of homicides are also suicides.

So homicide, suicide is a huge thing.

Thomas Joyner does a lot of work on this, but in almost every case, like the people who are these mass shooters, they're not trying to survive themselves.

Oh, it's kind of like a death by cop, but I'm just going to take some people out with me.

But yeah, so they're going to kill themselves, or be killed, or allow themselves to be killed.

But what was interesting about it was just, and it was the reason I thought it was quite courageous to kind of cover it was because like, anything that attempts to sort of explain that kind of behavior, which in any way is related to something that's happened to that person later, they're despairing,

they're lonely, they're whatever, runs the risk of a potentially saying, you know, every young man is a potential mass shooter, which is a line of argument that I fiercely dislike, but also kind of excusing it is the fear that people are going to have like, and this is again part of this problem where explanations

are very often mistaken for excuses.

And of course, they are not analysis is not justification, right?

That's actually better way to put it.

I had to there's an episode that everyone will have seen by the time that this one goes up, where I had to roll back my was my accuracy budget, my precision budget, I'd veered outside of that.

And in that, I had to say, look, just because I talk about something doesn't mean that I'm supporting it, reinforcing it tacitly or explicitly saying that this is something which is good and we should do it.

But yeah, the the conflation of analysis and justification a lot of the times is one that we need to separate out.

Yeah, but I do think it's it's interesting to think about like when when men are in trouble in one way or another feeling unneeded feeling loss feeling hopeless, whatever it is, like, what happens then.

And I think that you can see it happening this in various ways.

And it could, it could be acting out towards others could be acting out towards yourself in terms of Alice disregard for your own drug ability to exactly exactly because it's like, well, like if in if it all goes wrong, yeah, I'm losing whatever you're gonna tell it you're a new father of your second

set of twins, like, who's gonna care.

But it's that's also interesting.

If you look at the criminal justice stuff is like, actually, the prospect of becoming a father has a big impact on men's kind of propensity to kind of commit to commit crimes, it seems to really affect them.

Because it's like, it does, it does signal to them, you know, what, someone's going to need you sometime pretty neededness.

And have there been any there been any formal studies on neededness?

Is this even a defined term yet?

It's a complex psychological trait?

Yeah, I don't I don't know of any it's one thing I want to dig into.

And I was really, there'll be a lot of psychologists listening.

So if someone wants to try and do a little bit of work in wherever you are on your lab on the need.

Yes, I mean, I'm sure it'd be one of the things where I just haven't looked, there's actually a term for it.

I mean, you have to do it.

Actually, there's a term in math, weirdly, some weird statistical thing called neededness.

But I struck by Joe Arthur Brooks, he's been on the show.

Okay. Yeah, he he had this, he wrote this story about this.

And it really affected me a few years ago, this guy who'd just been in prison.

And it was chatting to Arthur and he was part of this rehab program, employment program to get help kids and men who'd been in prison.

And this guy's looked at this, some of his phone buzz, and he looked at it, this guy started tearing, tearing up.

And prison guy. Yeah, this prison guy.

He's now out and he's in employment, right?

He just got out of prison.

And he's in this place.

And Arthur's talking to him, because he's interested in this labor market thing, like this, this guy that's hiring former prisoners, and how's it working.

So Arthur's just interviewing him.

And this guy looks at the phone starts getting tearful.

And I'll say, Is there is everything okay?

Like, is something something bad happened?

And the guy went, no, no, no, the opposite.

And he just showed off of the phone.

And the phone, it was just his boss.

And it just said, Hey, Bob, as soon as you can, can you get over here?

I really need you. And I was like, sorry, yeah, what?

Because he needs me.

I've never heard anyone say that to me before.

And I just think that's that moment where that guy was getting tearful, because all his boss said was, I need you.

And it's taking this ex -con into this tearful space, because he's like, wow, he needs me.

I have no idea what it was for, whether it was to kind of clean up.

But it didn't matter this guy that had this journey.

In that moment, he felt like there's another human being out there who needs me.

Me. And that's just like, that's so powerful.

And I think for those of us who've maybe been fortunate enough, one way or another, to most days have that feeling of kind of knowing, right, that someone there does kind of need you.

It's very easy for us to kind of imagine what it's like to not feel that.

I would love to know from some of the women that are watching, whether they or any of their friends, whether they've got stories of what women's equivalent of non -neededness is like.

How does a girl woman get themselves into the situation where they're not needed, given that women seem to have better, more concretized, broader social groups, they seem to be able to hold on to those social networks more effectively, the more likely to be a mother, which means they've got a relationship

with the child. Socioeconomically, they're flourishing more than men are at the moment.

Like with all of this happening, how does a woman fall through the cracks?

Because I think that would be a really fascinating, because what I'm always interested in here is, why is this sext?

Why is there something happening to one side and not to the other?

Or why is it increasing in a manner that's happening differently or whatever it might be?

Like, for instance, with girls, the persistent feelings of hopelessness and blisslessness between the ages of 12 and 16 or whatever, it's like 60 % of girls say that they've got that.

And you go, okay, what is it that's happening to that?

Why is that particular constitution causing that?

I'm trying to bifurcate out those.

I actually want to show you video.

All right. I think I have an answer to that, by the way, if you want to, well, speaking as a woman.

Oh, here we go. Well, here's what I think will be a reasonable answer to that will be women who have passed their childbearing years, who have done their job, they've raised the kids, they're probably, maybe post menopause, and the husband says, yeah, I'm out of here, I'm going to go and marry a kind

of a younger woman, right?

And there's been some evidence around this recently.

So I think you can easily, you can imagine a world where women would start to feel like once they've done the job of kind of raising kids, they've got to a certain age, post fertility age, and maybe their husband leaves them, say, or their marriage breaks up, maybe they leave the husband, I don't know.

But then they would say, okay, you know what it's like to feel unneeded?

It's to be a post menopausal woman whose kids have left home and whose husband has now married someone younger than them.

That's what it feels like to be unneeded.

I don't know, but I think that that age thing would kind of maybe come in.

And actually I wasn't thinking about, I wasn't thinking about older women.

And that's a really great point.

You know, the, like, cat, I mean, the cat, the cat lady is the cat, at least the cats need her, you know, that sense of, well, at least something, your kids are gone, maybe your husband's gone.

So I do think that they're probably at different ages.

And it's a very interesting, I think societies have thought quite hard historically about the role of women in that state.

They've actually like having given them an incredibly important role.

You actually see this, like, like, this is a weird fact, but in the early church, women could be deacons in a way that actually can't be kind of correct.

But post menopause, now a feminist critique of that be like, wait, what, you're gonna have to go through menopause to do that.

But actually a more charitable interpretation of that is they gave them an incredibly important role in the church.

The role that you can graduate up into.

Yeah. And they had very senior roles in the church in many cases.

You'll be familiar with the grandmother hypothesis for why menopause exists, right?

I think I've heard you talk about it.

Yeah, a few times. It's one of my favorite pet theories.

Again, nobody knows for certain, like, a lot of evolutionary psychology is kind of a explanatory, not kind of, like, completely exclusive, but that why is it almost all animals, females, when they are no longer able to reproduce, they die?

Like, why would you still be here survival and reproduction?

The only reason you can survive is so you can reproduce.

So given you can't reproduce, why do you need to survive anymore?

And it seems like the raising of children is so costly, it is advantageous to have somebody who can no longer contribute any more children, but can contribute to raising the ones that exist.

It's the reason that allo parenting with a huge amount of wisdom as well to pass on as well.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

You know, the accuracy budget thing.

I think I've almost got like a renting budget, or like a mad as hell budget around stuff, which is I do think I give myself permission to have a good rent.

When was the last time that you did that publicly?

Just now. On suicide, where I have to tell you that I do get mad about the way in which discussions in the media around suicide are being portrayed.

And so I just vented against this piece that was written by Andrew Solomon.

Do you know him? He wrote a book called The Noonday Demon about depression.

It's a brilliant book.

A wonderful writer.

And he has the cover issue in The New Yorker from, you know, whenever it will be when this airs.

Pretty big time. And it's The Teen Suicide Crisis is the title.

And I was like, oh, Andrew Solomon has written about the teen suicide crisis.

A lot of it's about social media, etc.

And I'm reading it.

And I'm just getting progressively madder as I read it, because there are five case studies of tragic cases of suicide.

I mean, really tragic suicide, then four of them ago.

And worse than that is that he has this way.

He talks about the statistics.

He says between 2007 and 2019, the rate of teen suicides rose by 62%.

Next sentence, the share of girls who say they've considered suicide has written by X since Y and is now two thirds.

Some groups, LGBTQ, etc., are at a higher risk of suicide period.

That's the stats parable.

And so, what he's done there is what I've seen a lot of people do, which is that they they state the overall actual suicide statistics without breaking by gender.

They then take some of the more subjective self -reported measures about sadness, considered suicide, etc.

And they break them by gender, leaving the reader with the impression that the teen suicide crisis is much worse for girls than for boys.

In fact, of five teen suicides, four of them are going to be boys.

And so, it's irresponsible.

And here you've got one of the best informed journalists on the subject of mental health writing in one of the world's most authoritative and notoriously fact -checked publications, The New Yorker, giving entirely the wrong impression.

It is not an exaggeration, in my view, to call that misinformation.

It is impossible to read the essay and not come away.

If you don't know the stats and come away with the impression this is playing out much worse for girls than for boys when exactly the opposite is the case.

And any parent who reads that and comes to the conclusion that their teen girl is at higher risk of suicide than their teen boy has been willfully, in my view, misled.

And actually, that's one area where I think things have gotten worse.

I then looked at, there was a New Yorker article from 10 years ago also on suicide, which was much more balanced, written by a woman.

Why do you think that's the case?

I think what's happened is that the attention that has been drawn to the mental health issues of teen girls has actually led to the self -perpetuating cycle of ignorance, where people are so aware of that, that they don't, that they presume that that must be the way - That leads to suicide too.

Yeah. And so when I tell people that it's four times, that, you know, teen boys are four times more likely to commit suicide than teen girls, they say, no, no, it's the other way around now.

Didn't you see that thing from CDC?

I'm like, I did, which was the subjective, self -reported measures of sadness and considered suicide, which is a problem, to be clear.

I also read the release a month later, which was the actual deaths from suicide rate, which didn't get a CDC press release or a CDC webinar or a CDC director rollout.

And so it's not your fault, if you're consuming all this media, if you come to the conclusion that the teen mental health crisis is just much worse for girls, because that's all people are telling you.

Meanwhile, the share of teen boys who are losing their lives to suicide has increased in absolute numbers, much more than teen girls.

And that's really frustrating to me.

I have made no progress with CDC or others in terms of trying to get into address this.

But then when you see someone with the stature of Solomon writing in a magazine like the New Yorker, and again, even then I think about it.

And I'm just like, you know what, I'm going to use up a little bit of my mad as hell budget today.

Yeah, very good on that issue.

So maybe I've got an implied mad as hell budget.

And I know I can't do it all the time, even if I wanted to.

But I think if you choose your moment, and choose your issue, and you're sure of your ground, and I would be very willing to have this argument with Andrew Solomon himself from a big fan of or whoever was the editor of the New Yorker and say, What were you thinking?

Yeah, this erasure of Matt.

It's, I think, gamma bias.

Oh, yeah, that's the Dr.

John Barry, Barry's thing.

Yeah. Yeah. gamma bias is an interesting one.

It's very frustrating.

I mean, this is one of the reasons that I love George from Tin Man, because the way that he approaches a lot of this is in a he's very much from the left.

So he was telling me about the the best justification for an intersectional view of the world.

So intersectionality has just become this sort of catchall term for, well, it means that you're a lesbian, but you've also got a gluten intolerance.

And you're great -grandmother once went to like India or so, you know what I mean?

It's like, that's a very peculiar intersection.

But yeah, I know, but it's the point being that there's sort of these intersecting hierarchies, a minority and so on and so forth.

And he was saying, well, you have a male, when men get sentenced, they get higher sentences than women do.

And black people get higher sentences than other races do.

And when you get black men, it's a multiplicative situation.

Same as school exclusions, by the way, exactly the same pattern.

So just thinking about, you know, this sort of reverse here, where you've got the erasure of the group that needs it the most.

That talking point, this is the one that could do with you actually bringing this point up.

And yeah, it's sad, it really is, especially when you're talking about suicide.

Yes. Because it's such a it is the most terminal final of them all.

That's not dick about with the stats.

And it has such consequences for everybody else behind it.

It's so interesting to me that like, when I've talked about this kind of publicly, the number a number of like, there's one, a woman who I'd worked with for quite a while.

And she saw me, I was on I think it was on Morning Joe or something.

And I talked about this.

And I said, look, 40 ,000 men a year and rising.

That's about the same as the number of women we lose to breast cancer every year, right?

This is a big number.

And it's going up, especially about our young men.

And she just emailed me afterwards, and she said, I'm so glad you're doing this work.

I've never told you this, but I lost my son to suicide.

And we're not talking about it enough.

And this is woman, she's like highly very feminist, made it to made it to the top of her profession, but still like, and I can't believe we're not talking about this very much.

And she just said, thank you.

And please don't share this with anybody else.

I'm not gonna tell you who it was.

But but you get that quite a lot, where with something like this, it's huge.

And also, because the loss of a life to suicide has these ripple effects, and they're just the whole family and kind of community around them.

That why did why how did I not know if it is the guilt and the blame and the two words, I don't know whether you've come across much of the social penalties for suicide literature.

There's some interesting stuff in there, I'll send you once we're done.

And so one of them is that a study was run where they asked people, whether they would hypothetically get into a relationship, and there was two different cohorts of people.

The first one was somebody who right now had cancer.

The second cohort was somebody who in the past had attempted suicide.

And on average, people choose the person who right now has cancer over someone that previously attempted suicide, the argument being that there is a kind of like a social antibody response to somebody that does it is so catastrophic to the tribe to the social fabric to all the rest of this stuff that we

do as much as we can, you know, even depression in many ways is seen as a potential precursor or a warning sign.

Exactly. Not only a warning sign to everybody else.

But it's also your own defensive mechanism because your listlessness actually in many ways stops you from doing the thing that you're going to do.

One thing I say you've got million fucking videos I need to show you.

Okay, before we get into that, again, what is true about the sort of meme or meme, the cliche the stat that's been thrown around for a long time, women attempt suicide more than men, men take their own lives more than women?

Have you started to break this apart a little bit?

Because I'd love to get the real data.

Basically true. The question then becomes what's the data source that you're using to measure attempts?

And the criteria and how'd you define an attempt?

Yeah. And this is difficult to talk about.

Because if you even hint that there's something softer about that data, then you might be mistakenly construed as diminishing those mental health problems.

But I would say that it seems true.

And people then say, well, it's about the choice of method.

So it is true that men are much more likely to use firearms in the US.

But it's also true that the gender gap is similar in the UK, where there are no firearms.

So that doesn't explain it.

What happens it seems is that when men attempt suicide, they select a much more decisive method, one that is very unlikely to fail.

Fail is a weird word.

This is hard to talk about.

And I want to acknowledge that we all have people listening to this and watching this, who may be having some of their own feelings about this or have experienced it and so on.

But I like the way we're talking about this, which I think is with the right degree of empirical evidence and empathy.

But it does look like men are just as a more decisive method.

Whereas with women, it's much more likely to be something less obviously decisive.

Cutting or pills. What are the top male methods in the US as firearms?

And what about in the UK?

I don't know, that's a good question.

But my instinct might be something more like a high offer.

I mean, again, I'm not sure we should talk about this.

But you can imagine various methods that are just pretty decisive.

Understood. The lethal force is a bit more...

Yeah, but the gun is very good.

I wonder whether...

I mean, this is again, I'm really, really getting into neuroscience territory here, but I have heard some stuff around the cutting for women being their equivalent of a cry for help.

But the cutting, by design, it is on the outside.

Yeah. That maybe this is a please, somebody step in.

I have no idea whether that would be sexed in any way.

I guess maybe men's lack of social awareness or predisposition to talk about their emotions might just mean that they are having this conversation with themselves.

They are five steps further down the road toward lethality than the woman is.

Their cries for help have all been internalized.

Internalized, internalized, internalized.

That's the interesting way to put it.

Because most of the men who we do lose to suicide have not been in touch with mental health professionals before doing so.

And so very often comes as a real shock to people.

It's not like they...

Well, he's been struggling for a while.

You didn't see it coming.

Yeah. Whereas that's much less true for women.

And so the difficulty around the kind of cry for help thing is it makes it seem like less, lesser than.

It's not in any way.

It's a bad term. Yeah.

That's right. I think a terminology is not helpful around that.

It's also worth saying that in quite a lot of these surveys it's self reported.

And so it's sort of like people will report that they've attempted to take their lives.

If you go to hospital for something that's got involving drugs, was it an attempt?

It depends. Honestly, it boils down to whether the doctor codes it as such in terms of the statistic.

Was that overdose coded as a suicide or as an accidental?

Yeah. And how many pills do you have to take for it to have been considered to be?

No. No, but he was being a bit sad for a while and he hasn't shown up to work.

Yeah, it's just harder to interpret the attempt data.

Whereas the suicide data, if anything, I think is likely to be understating it because of the stigma.

And so if a death has been clearly defined institutionally and legally as a suicide, then you can be pretty sure it was.

They're not going to misclassify the other way.

So you're going to get a lot more false negatives and positives around that.

And so I think that the kind of hard data on suicide deaths is like that's the best measure we have available to us for what's suicidality because it's the ultimate expression in some ways of suicidality, which isn't to say that considering it having think about it, but the other thing is like in many

of our own lives, I can think of someone very, very close to me who like he describes to me driving home from work during an incredibly difficult time.

And like night after night, there was one place where he knew that if he kind of just drove in a different direction, this is a new guy, that that would be it.

And how often he thought about that.

And it came into his head and he didn't, he had kids.

And he didn't, and he didn't, but it was like night after night that he would get to that point on the road.

And this is like, just now talking about diminishing and the sort of erasure, which is a very popular term that's used to raise your past suffering, so on and so forth.

What do you make of the Harris waltzes campaign around the groups, the struggling groups that they're trying to bring into their camp and the ones that they've missed off?

Well, I find it interesting that this election, which was, I think, supposed to be about women's issues.

And now we have a woman at the top of the ticket on the dem side has actually become in some ways, a bit of a contest about men and masculinity.

And that's partly because you see this gap opening up in voting intentions, at least among young Americans, especially with young women being much more likely to be on the left now and young men, if anything, somewhat moving to the right.

So this become something that people are really talking about a lot, like what's happening with men.

And then of course, because of the way that the Republican Party has really lent quite hard into lots of kind of men's spaces and also just a certain affect, right?

In some ways the data point I like best on that is that in 2016, Donald Trump was introduced at the RNC by Ivanka Trump.

In 2020, he was introduced by Ivanka Trump.

In 2024, he was introduced by Dana White.

Dana White. I couldn't remember if it was Dana White or Hulk Hogan.

No, Hulk Hogan came on later, but Dana White.

So okay, so from Ivanka Trump, right.

And so that's not subtle, right.

That's a kind of clear bid, I think, for to be the quote, men's party.

Whereas the Harris -Wolce campaign are betting very hard on winning with women's votes, not least since Dobbs reproductive rights being a huge part of the agenda.

But what's interesting is they're not really playing up at all correctly, in my view, Harris as the first female president, glass ceiling, etc.

They're kind of downplaying that.

And in Tim Walz, there's an interesting figure there.

High school teacher, if he becomes VP, in fact, I think even running for VP first career public school teacher to do so.

We've had 27 lawyers as president of the United States.

And I've got no idea how many vice presidents, but let's just assume double that, right?

Let's assume we've had 50 lawyers as president or vice president.

We have a single career public school teacher, so he would be the first to do that.

But he was also a coach.

Great relationship with his son, that video of his son.

So I mean, Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad from Lotus Eaters, somebody who is not exactly a massive fan of the Democrat Party, as far as I can tell, defended that video of his son crying and said, anybody that thinks that this is cringe or worthy of critique, this is precisely the sort of masculinity

that you want. Like a son, an adult son bawling his eyes out at his dad reaching.

So proud of his dad.

Oh, my God. And I gotta tell you, as the father of three sons, I have yet to have any of them in tears in the audience, at least not deliberately, but there is something about, of course, sons want their dads to be proud of them.

But the thing we don't say as much is, I really want them to be proud of me.

And when they are proud of me, and they'll say something about that, it's a thing.

I agree. Anybody that saw that and was unmoved by it, there is something wrong with them.

But I would also say that the Democrats actually haven't articulated a kind of pro -male agenda in a way that they now really could.

I think it dropped some of the kind of, they're not really leaning on a very strongly first woman president thing.

You don't hear them talk about toxic masculinity or the patriarchy.

You don't hear them talk that much about her minority status either.

No, I think that's got to be a strategic thing.

Because coming into this, I would have expected it.

Hillary Clinton, they definitely did try and go for that.

Hillary, they did. And then in Hillary, the bumper sticker was like, I'm with her.

That's all you had.

And so they're not doing that.

And they're trying to - Counter -signal.

Yeah. But then even though I think there's a lot of substance to the things they're doing, which actually would be quite good for boys and men, they don't seize the political capital around it.

So the political terrain for being pro -men without being anti -women seems to be still terrain that neither party is able to kind of occupy.

For the Republicans feel unable to be able to articulate in a way that's really resonant, the issues of boys and men.

Without coming across as somehow wanting to go turn back the clock on women.

Maybe not the Democrats, who I think have had some really good policies for men, can't talk about it.

Now, I'll take an example of something that will...

The reason I'm hesitant about this is it risks sounding really trivial, but I think it speaks to something deeper.

So the Harris -Waltz campaign just put out their opportunity economy paper, which talks a lot about jobs and inflation, all the stuff you'd want them to.

Not about identity.

It has seven images of the candidates interacting with a voter.

In those seven images, guess which demographic doesn't appear once?

No men, not a single man.

And you've got to think that couldn't have happened the other way around.

And I've got to think that someone up there has a blind spot that you would produce a publication, which doesn't feature a single male vote, a single man, out of all the seven.

Just one out of seven.

And so I don't think that was intentional, but I do think it was indicative of just a mindset issue here, which is that there's one picture in a warehouse with hard hats, and probably someone went, Oh, we better make sure that's a woman.

It's actually a pregnant woman.

And you could see that we want to make absolutely sure that people don't think that factory jobs are just for men.

So let's make sure that's a woman.

But then all the others are women.

Look, I don't like talking about that kind of stuff because I think it sounds silly and trivial.

And why is he talking about a public pictures in a publication when he runs a think tank?

But the answer is because I think representation matters.

And I think if political parties want people to feel like they see them, they should show them.

Well, if we look at the, it is really funny, someone brought this up the other day, a lot of criticism around Kamala Harris going on, call her daddy, very sort of female focused podcast, biggest female podcast in the world, female, and basically saying, well, look, what are you going in there for her?

How many call her daddy watches?

Do you think we're like, I was going to vote for Trump, but now that I've seen Kamala Harris on the call her daddy, it's really going to change my liberal.

I mean, it's Yeah, it is.

It's, it's, I would say pretty liberal.

It's like Hollywood.

So whatever that is, which is probably pretty liberal.

But I mean, the primary talking point on that was women's bodies, and abortion.

You think she was preaching to the choir there?

I mean, absolutely.

But then on the flip side of that, you know, like Trump going on Andrew Schultz's show, Theo Vaughn's show, Sean Ryan's show, I would guess Sean Ryan has maybe 98 % men.

It's a sort of military veteran podcast, you know, five hour episodes about the Battle of Luzia and stuff like that.

It's like not a massive like the most Trump, like cohort that you could think of.

So it kind of got me thinking, because they're not stupid, the people that run these campaigns aren't stupid.

And so I wonder what they're doing, I wonder whether they're going on so that they have a warm audience, and a warm host who is forgiving and largely on their side, so that it's just a good press opportunity.

And they can tick the box of I did unscripted interview, I'm wondering whether or not they actually genuinely feel like they need to shore up this base, wondering whether or not they think if they tried to do it in the other direction, that it would just have no impact, and there's the potential for them

to come across as being still.

So I'm not really trying to sort of be this my world, right?

I'm thinking, okay, what would what would happen?

You know, who I really wanted to bring on the show, I really wanted to bring the two VPs on, I really wanted to have together separately, no, separately, I really wanted to speak to them separately.

I thought that that like, be interesting, JD, and Tim would have just been like, in some ways, actually more interesting than the two people that were leading, because their debate was way better.

And certainly on this in certainly on this question about the role of men in society, I mean, they're both very interested in it.

And he JD broke the whatever it was called the beard ceiling.

Did you see this? Yeah.

So this was a one of the one of the that means you could run.

I can be president, right?

Because you're British, I couldn't, Joe Rogan and Cameron Haynes said they'd vote for me if I did run for president though.

So this is Scott Galloway on Ryan Holliday's podcast recently.

This should make sound, if I play it.

I think the election is going to be decided by masculinity.

What do I mean by that?

The voters that are kind of up for grabs right now are not young women, they're going Harris.

It's not old people.

Yeah, old men, they're going Trump.

Young men aren't really going towards the Republican Party as a lot of people would say are the Manosphere.

Young men actually are supportive of gender rights, any demographic, what they're doing is they're moving away from the Democratic Party because they don't feel seen on the DNC site.

There's an explicit section that says who we serve and it lists 16 different demographic groups from people of faith, to immigrants, to Asian specific Islanders, blacks, women, disabled veterans.

I tried to calculate it.

My best estimate is it covers 76 % of the population.

They have the same issue that universities have or the DEI apparatus has a university when you are explicitly advocating and favoring 76 % of the population.

You're not advocating for them, you're discriminating against the 24%.

Unfortunately, these individuals feel shunned by what I'll call more progressive or the establishment.

They're very drawn to anyone who feels their pain.

Unfortunately, that void has been filled by some very negative voices.

What do you make of that?

The example of like who we serve from the DNC site, which does list all those demographics, but not men, is kind of on the nose.

I actually think that you had Dan Cox on, and Dan I think was the person who actually first identified that.

We've all been picking it up kind of since.

Again, it's a bit like my example of the opportunity economy PDF.

Not very many people are actually going to those places and noticing that thing, but I do think it's indicative of a problem that the Democrats have and that the center left generally has and that center left institutions have with just acknowledging these problems.

They're getting the CDC to admit that there's a gender gap in suicide.

Just it's like banging your head against the wall.

It's like, but you know, there is a fourfold difference, right?

You're bang, bang. They won't.

So that has created a vacuum because if there are real problems and they're not being acknowledged, then of course someone's going to come in and say, yes, you're struggling.

The question is whose fault is that and what do we do about it?

So I do think there's a lot of ground being left open here, particularly on the center left by their failure to acknowledge that these problems are real.

What's interesting about this is that when you actually kind of turn to areas of policy, you actually find that there's probably more policy energy around some of these things on the center left than there is on the center right.

And so my favorite example of this is the infrastructure bill.

Have we talked about this?

Probably no, probably hadn't happened.

So, so the bipartisan infrastructure bill, you know, creating millions of jobs in construction transit and some in manufacturing, etc.

Two thirds of those jobs are going to go to men are going to men.

We know that because a very good women's think tank did the analysis showing that because those occupations skew male, there is going to men and challenged on that, the Democrats just apologize for it or run away from it.

So in as a clip of Pete Buttigieg being asked about Joy Reed, and Buttigieg is a consumer political communicator.

And so watching him struggle was, you know, that was worth watching it on this.

So this is just a bill for white men, isn't it?

And what he should have said was, well, it's it's a bill that will help working class men, but actually will help black and Hispanic men at least as much as white men joy.

And you know what, given the recent economic trends, I actually don't think helping working class men is necessarily a bad thing.

Isn't that maybe a good thing, given what's happened to working class men?

By the way, we're also doing these other things for kind of women.

But why do you think that a piece of legislation that's helping working class men of all races is a bad thing?

Like he didn't say that.

He said, well, we're working on that.

And we're trying to get more women into them.

And it's all difficult.

And everyone uses bridges.

And so it's like it's a it's a unusually bad interview from Buttigieg, because he's just like, ah, deer in headlight.

Meanwhile, Josh Hawley, who is the Tribune of the working man by his reckoning, voted against the infrastructure bill, which is the only major piece of legislation that actually has been directly going to help working class men that we've seen for probably decades.

And so on the one hand, you've got a party that's actually doing some stuff to help working class men.

But my god, trying to get them to admit it.

Oh, my God, they'd never admit it.

And then you've got another group over here who say, oh, we're for the working man.

But what in that case, why did you vote against infrastructure investment, which creates jobs for working men?

Why do you think they did?

Hawley would say it's because there were conditions attached to the investments, which he would say were the part of the woke agenda, etc.

And I don't want to say that his arguments against it were entirely without merit.

But nonetheless, here you've got this bill, it's for the working guy, right above all.

And one side won't take credit for it, and the other side won't.

So isn't it funny? I mean, it's still the same in the UK as well.

But especially being two Brits now living in America, the complete blindness to cut any kind of talk about class is mind blowing to me.

You know, we have a term in the UK that gets used an awful lot, and is almost entirely absent from the American lexicon, which is posh, posh talking about so he's a bit posh, isn't he?

Yeah, he comes. Would you say that about me, Chris?

You're a little posh.

Yeah, I would say so.

Let me get so I've got a trick that I've been able to play, I probably can't do it with you, I'll get it wrong.

But there's a trick a couple of times where I've met another British person in Austin, if we're at dinner or a party or something like that.

I'm like, give me a second.

Just talk to me a little just say something you don't even need to talk about you.

And I'm like, private school?

Like North London? They're like, Yes, yes.

I'm like, like sort of lower middle class up a middle you can zero in it's like from accent from the way that they present themselves.

So on and so forth.

But the conversation about class is totally absent in America.

Nobody is talking about it.

And it's the one thing that cuts across all of the other bits of bullshit that everyone says that are exhausted about being captured by over the last couple of years.

So you go, Okay, it's the one that cuts through sexual orientation and gender and and fucking political viewpoint.

And all of these different things.

You go, well, just make it the exact reason.

And this has been flipped now as well, that previously the left was supposed to be the party of the working class.

And now it's the right that's playing into that side you go I mean, yeah, and then then you get into this question about what Yeah, but Oh, but where are the policies right and to help them because I think this is playing out very much in a cultural dimension right now.

So it's sort of like this is did you know that this book called well what's the matter with Kansas?

Have you heard of that book?

No, it's quite old now.

But it was basically an argument that working class Americans were being persuaded by the Republicans to vote against their own economic interests by ghastly through culture through cultural war issues, especially abortion, right?

So that's the argument interest.

And there's a little bit of this going on here to think around this whole debate about gender, because Scott's exactly right.

The in that clip you just showed that there's no strong evidence that young men are less supportive of gender equality than they were, or than older men, I just did my own analysis of the general social survey with Alan Downey.

And that also a bunch of questions like, female president, female boss, you know, society would be better if women stayed in the home and men did the earnings.

These are questions I've been asking for decades.

And the trend towards gender equality on those use continues, including among young men.

Right. And so I didn't see any strong evidence that there's this sort of shift against gender equality.

And so that's why the framing is correct.

I think that it's less young men especially becoming enthused by a reactionary anti female agenda.

I don't see any evidence of that in any serious numbers, of course, online.

And right, what I actually think is closer to the truth is that a lot of these young men just feel a bit politically homeless.

Now, they don't feel that welcome on the left.

That's for sure. And that's been really growing over the last few years.

And given some of the stuff we've been talking about, I don't think that's crazy.

Right? They get a lot of sense of like they're the problem, not that they have problems.

They know what not to do, but they don't know what to do.

And that they're kind of over it, is my sense of it, but they're not stampeding over to some sort of massively reactionary turn back to the 50s agenda.

They're not, they're just like, that means their votes are up for grabs now in a way that they were not previously.

That was the most interesting thing that I learned when Dan came on the show.

People should go back and listen to that.

It was really fascinating.

He's fantastic, I think.

And what he taught me was that men, especially young men, are more likely than any other cohort to say that no particular political issue is important to them.

So it's very much just checking out.

Disengagement. Yeah, exactly.

It's not going left or right, it's going back, like this way of it.

So you've used a term a couple of times today, and so have I, this sort of zero sum view of empathy, just dig into that a little bit for me, sort of how you think of it and conceptualize it.

Yeah, of course, gender is only one example where this can happen.

You can see it around immigration and various other issues.

But the basic idea that like for one group to do better, another group has to do worse.

There's only so much of something to go around, whether that's money or empathy or political capital or whatever.

And so what that means is that if I successfully convince you that we should spend more time and energy and political capital and invest on boys and men, that means by definition, we're not going to be spending as much time kind of caring about women and girls.

And that fear that is zero sum means that if you're on the side that stands to potentially lose out, then of course, you're going to oppose moving toward, even if you agree with my stats, even if you agree with everything that I've been saying here, like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But there's still so much more to do for women and girls that we just can't be distracted from that, right.

And there's only so much to go around.

In fact, I did into Ezra Klein from the New York Times, and he reposted it about a month ago.

And in that he said there is this sort of feeling that people have that there's only so much empathy to go around, right.

And so if we start wasting some of it on the guys, there'll be less for the women.

He's like, but that's not how empathy works.

Right. It's like it's like saying to a parent is considering having a second child.

It's like, well, should you do that?

Because, you know, you can take some love away from the first one, you really want to love the first one 50 % less, right.

It's as absurd as that.

But it does play into this debate quite strongly, where people genuinely fear that if you, if you do pay more attention, you pile on the gas a little bit around the boys and men's issues, which I believe you should, that means doing less for women and girls.

And it's a general proposition.

That's just entirely false.

We're perfectly capable of doing both.

I had a chat with Christine Ember, who wrote that, you know, she's on my board, by the way, is she really?

Yeah, she's shit hot.

I mean, she's got to be writing a book off the back of that thing.

Surely she should do if she's not, she should go and do it, because she was great.

And I love the conversation with her.

So I wrote a little essay after that.

So I'm going to read you this, this short diatribe about the zero sum view of empathy as a caveat.

This is part of my rant budget from 18 months ago, okay.

So we can't claim it against your rent budget from this month.

I've already paid it, I've already paid it.

The IRS took this off last year.

Got it. Publicly trying to work out why men are struggling is largely a thankless task.

This is a zero sum view of empathy.

There is an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women or some other minority group who is more deserving.

After all, haven't men had it good for long enough?

Maybe they should just suck it up for a while.

But empathy does not work this way.

It's not a limited resource.

Recognizing the plight of men does not ignore the plight of women.

And ultimately, women end up suffering in any case, as it's this increasing cohort of apathetic, checked out and resentful men who contribute to the exact lack of eligible partners that women say they're struggling with.

Women posting boo -hoo, poor patriarchy, sad, whilst also complaining, where are all of the good men at, is mating logic, seppuku.

If one sex loses, both sexes lose.

Male blame is something else I see a lot.

A common question is, why don't men just do better?

Surely they can try harder in school, employment and health, chop chop men, hurry up and stop being so useless.

Well, no other group is told, when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world, that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems.

Instead, we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns and funds to solve the problem.

In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask, what can we do to fix society?

If a man has a problem, we ask, what can men do to fix themselves?

It's a blatant double standard in people who are unwilling to admit to any structural disadvantages faced by men are standing in the way of solving the problems that are hurting men and also the potential wives that they should be viable for.

The problems are not in men's heads, but out there in society.

We should not gaslight men into thinking they can solve these problems by being less masculine.

If the patriarchy is so powerful, why aren't men flourishing more?

As Christine Ember says, many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they do not feel a part of.

Just because you're in the majority does not mean that you don't need support.

In this regard, modern men are being made to pay for the sins and advantages that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed.

I remember that I read that Chris.

Good, very good. I also listened to your conversation with Christine and we're mutual fans of hers.

I would just say in there you said that being told men that they need to be less masculine.

I'd also say that from the other side, they get like you need to be more masculine.

But either way, there's a strong agreement that it's like you're the problem.

You're either not man enough or too manly.

And maybe depending on which day it is, you listen to somebody else.

On Tuesday, your problem is that you're too masculine and on Wednesday, it's like you're not masculine enough.

And on Thursday, you're too masculine.

So these poor men were like, we were like pinball, right?

Depending on which podcast we've listened to, or like what we've read, right?

Which stat was. Yeah, but in a sense, that's like a second order problem.

The first order problem is that we're positioning it as about you and about you as an individual.

And one of the things that I probably have found maybe the most gratifying thing about my work is the number of people that have said, thank you for framing this as a kind of broader issue and not just a problem with me or my son or my brother, right?

This sort of like rather than saying kind of what's wrong with him, we can say, well, what's what's wrong with schools, right?

And too often the problem has been the like, let's say a boy is struggling at school would like we treat him like a malfunctioning girl and then try and fix him rather than fixing the school.

And as you say, that one of the big lessons I think of recent years has been not to do that.

And I had this argument someone recently about mental health care and men not men not seeking mental health care as much as women do, I think there's all kinds of reasons for that.

The cratering share of men in those professions might be one factor, which we've done some work on.

But even if it's true, that men seem to find out a little bit harder to ask for help, say in terms of their mental health, right?

We can either have a 1000 year argument about whether that's nature or nurture and what's going on there, or we could just do something the hell about it, which is in that case, how do we help men to help get more help?

How do we make it? How do we make sure that our mental health messaging is kind of more pro male friendly?

How do we do outreach programs?

And actually, I thought the equivalent was in the labor market literature, there's this evidence that one reason that women sometimes end up being paid less than they arguably should is because they don't ask for pay rises.

Yeah, right. They're less disagreeable on average.

Right. And so, but it's very hard to find someone who will say, okay, one of the reasons women don't know less is they don't ask for pay rises.

Well, that's their fault, isn't it?

They should just ask for it.

If they don't ask for it, they're not going to get it.

Boo hoo them. No one says that no one says that we say okay, if that's the problem, maybe there's something about the workplace culture that makes it harder for women to ask for pay rises, or if women are just forever reason less likely to kind of advocate for a pay rise for themselves.

Maybe we need automatic pay rises based on performance, etc.

Rather than relying on the individual to be pushy about it structurally and systemically to try and fix how do we fix the structure, right?

If that's the difference, which is leading to women being disadvantaged in the labor market, we don't just say, well, I should ask, but we do do that when we say why don't men get help from mental health professionals?

We say well, what's your, this has been a topic that's come up an awful lot recently.

What's your opinion on therapy for men, the relationship of men with mental health care and therapy in particular?

I don't know. What do you probably ask the question more specifically?

Yeah. So there is an awful lot of rhetoric around men should ask for help, they should learn to open up more about their emotions, they should be going to therapy.

There is even a meme like men would rather X instead of going to therapy.

Yeah. They'd rather like go bow hunting for a week.

Precisely. Yeah, exactly.

They'd rather try and illegally climb the pyramids of Giza than just go to therapy or whatever.

But I think it plays into a cliche, which is that more women go to therapy on average.

Have you looked at any data around the effectiveness on mental health outcomes, on happiness, on all the rest of that stuff for men?

And when it comes to mental health interventions from that side, therapeutically, I guess, what have you have you learned anything?

Yeah, so what I've learned is that for all kinds of reasons, the whole field of mental health is less male friendly than female friendly in various ways.

And again, that's at the average and that's a sweeping statement.

So let me justify it.

Number one, directionally correct is directionally correct.

Number one, the survey instruments we use to pick up measures of mental health, miss some of the more male centric ones.

So and I'll, you know, I'll plug some AIBM pieces here.

But Lisa de Moore, who's a very well known psychologist points out that the the surveys that CDC use on mental health, they they capture information on internalizing behavior, but not externalizing behavior.

So they literally miss one of the ways in which you might see boys suffering.

So we don't we don't measure it as well.

Men punching walls, and that doesn't count that all effect counts as anti social behavior or something.

But there's literally there.

The question is not there in that in the main youth risk behavior set.

So number one, number two, is that, as the mental health field just becomes more and more dominated by women, like it just men aren't represented.

And so to the extent that it helps to feel represented by any kind of particular profession, the fact that it's getting harder and harder to find like a male psychologist or social worker or counselor, that doesn't help.

And also just culturally, you're going to get into a space where you have a profession that's so dominated by one gender or the other.

It's almost impossible for that not to be more sensitive to the particular expressions of mental health problem.

Then speak the language.

It's just Yeah, I think I was wondering, is I worry about male teachers, etc.

And actually, a lot of mental health professions, especially if they're women, report that they actually feel a bit uncomfortable dealing with some of the issues around male mental health.

They don't feel equipped to do so.

Do you know any of those are?

Particularly around externalizing behavior, violent behavior, risk of suicide.

So a lot of obviously, for a good reason, they're worried that they're going to do it might you do it, yeah, they worry about that.

And issues around like things like sex and porn addiction, for example, which skew pretty, pretty gun agenda, which is crazy, given how difficult it is for a guy to say, even to a trained professional, a woman to open up about your sex porn addiction, some, you know, malfunction of your manhood.

They've had to jump over a lot of hurdles already for it to then land and maybe not be right.

And then this is kind of a woman, right?

Okay, so, and actually, Zack seedler, who's on our advisory council, and he's the health director for Movember.

Okay, fabulous guy.

And he's designed this intervention, which is called men in mind, where they're actually training mental health professionals to be more comfortable dealing with more of these sort of male male issues.

And there is early days, and they're only kind of they can only evaluate how the professionals feel after the training, they don't have long term outcomes yet.

But what I love about that is that it's a recognition of the fact that the profession as a whole is just not equipped well enough now to deal with those issues around men.

So you can actually train mental health professionals to be somewhat better at dealing with those kind of more male presenting mental health problems.

But the other thing is, I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I started looking at maybe it's none, for example, but someone just said, you've got to talk to this person.

They've set up this mental health charity.

And it's all about reducing suicide, getting suicide down to zero.

And I was like, I'm super interested in that.

Yep. I'm gonna have a look at it.

And again, the image thing, all the images are of women.

And the whole vibe, if I can put it that way, of the website, as well as it when you're women.

And and I just said, as a guy, I felt yeah, that's not welcoming.

Yeah, I didn't feel but like, if your goal is to reduce suicide, then given 80 % of the suicide speak to your audience, male.

And so, and I've challenged them on that, we're talking about it.

And they're like, Yeah, I wouldn't really thought about it that way.

That's interesting.

And like, okay, let's try and move on that.

And so I think that, again, without any ill will or anything being advertent, the whole field of mental health is increasingly being coded as female and feminine.

And then we wonder why men aren't interested in going to it, because it's being seen as more of a female thing.

And so we do need I think to have a lot more men doing it, we need to make sure that it's presented in a way that's more male friendly.

Now we need more apps, we need just wonder what would happen.

I mean, can you imagine the fucking uproar that would occur publicly, if you said this is the first therapy clinic for men?

Like, which is essentially no women allowed, like, we're trained for men, we have a disproportionate number of male clinicians, and it was a UFC cage in that it was just males therapy clinic here.

So it's a bit in that exactly the theme of that mean, male would men would rather punch each other in the face for 25 minutes, then go to therapy.

I tell you what something else that I always think about.

Scott Galloway made this amazing point, where he said that older guys mentoring younger boys that are not their sons, even like uncles doing it and stuff, there is just this sort of ick meme around that, that you're suspicious, you're highly suspicious of the coach that spends a bit too much time with your

child, and be due to horror stories, maybe rightly so in some ways, but it has robbed so many young men.

And I mean, this is exactly where the vacuum that a Jordan Peterson, or an Andrew Tate, or a me or a you in many ways, like, just somebody's talking to me.

Someone's talking to me when we've got higher rates of father listeners than ever before, you know, but all animations work talking about just twice.

Yeah, she's phenomenal.

I agree, she has had a huge influence on me.

She knows she's writing another book on fathers.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Well, good, because she did another book on something else.

She did. She did love, then she did life of dad, and now she's doing another book.

Oh, no, sorry, maybe she did dad and then dad.

That was it. So she's going back to she told me on the most recent episode, we did book two first then book one.

And now she told me so she's doing another book on dad's.

I'm so pleased about that.

But also this, so this issue of like, Scott does talk a lot about this, you know, of this mentoring scheme or coaching, right, I think about you think about the role of a coach.

And one of my one of the reasons I'm so worried about lack of male teachers is because male teachers, by the way, they're coaches, so between 30 and 40 % of male teachers are also coaches, what's coaches like coaching, the after school football team, or the the athletic coaches, right, Tim walls was famously

a social studies teacher, and he coached his high school football team to a state championship, right.

But it actually men are about four times more likely if their teachers to also be coaching a sports team, as women are, which is in no way men would literally rather coach a children's sports team than go to therapy.

But, but when I think about that, and you, and I've been a scout leader, and I've done a little bit of coaching, and my son actually now is, is a fifth grade teacher, and his face and discrimination, or at least some stigma along the lines you've identified is now also coaching the soccer team.

And, and so he's in that space of doing it all.

But I think that coaches are very often like mental health professionals in disguise.

Right. And one of the reasons why it worked, by the way, is because it's shoulder to shoulder.

And I think I know you've talked a lot about this, and which is like, you're on the bench, you're chatting, how things going?

I think it has everything right at home, you kind of chatting and, you know, because it's not threatening, you're just on the bench, and you're chatting, right.

And so maybe that creates an environment where it's a bit easier for boys, especially to open up to a trusted the children's equivalent of the men's sheds initiative.

Yeah. Like you're there with coach, and he's chatting to you, and he cares about you.

And he does the same thing.

Same thing is true now.

So pickleball, and the most Austin man ever, my new sport of choice, playing pickleball, if you and your friend, there's a, you start with what's called dinks at the net.

So you just bring the little, you just doing the little sort of warm up over the top.

Sometimes that's ended up being 45 minutes, because we're just, yeah, my mom's going on and you can talk while you're playing, you're just there.

And you're like, we haven't even started competing yet.

We're just sort of, we've got this thing that occupied five or 10 % of our brain.

And then the rest of it is just running through emotions.

I'm struggling with this thing or blah, blah, blah, got this issue that I'm coming up with.

And yeah, before you know it, it's like a mental health therapy masquerading as a racket pursuit.

And you have to be, it is true that men sort of have to be doing something else or pretending to do something else.

Fixing a lawnmower.

Right. And that's why the men's sheds movement work and why the shoulder to shoulder stuff works.

And you can either roll your eyes at that, or just say, that's true.

And so let's work with it.

And I'm much more in the latter camp, which is true.

You can't, but I think this point about the stigma and it's also self perpetuating once it becomes weird to say, be a teacher as a man, then the stigma associated with it gets weird just statistically.

You stand out more when you go and do it.

It's like being a female engineer in the 1950s.

We'll be like, what's wrong with you?

But even on that point, my ex girlfriend was a teacher and she was telling me, I think in the entirety of the primary school in the Northeast of the UK, I think there was maybe one or two.

No, there was, I think there was two or three teachers, one of whom was sort of a late forties Indian man who had the turban and all the happily married, like blah, blah, blah.

There was one guy who was maybe twenties, something like that.

And there's a lot of kind of the viciousness, the real viciousness sides of femininity, like status game playing, that's kind of done behind the scenes, venting, gossip, all of this stuff that happens when you was treated by the women.

A lot of very lewd comments made to him in a manner that if it was reversed would be a fucking immediate disciplinary.

There was a staff night out at some point in Newcastle on the South and you know, sort of like very handsy women, which in many ways is like, yeah, it gives you that response.

It doesn't give you a full on ick response.

It's like, he's probably fine at dealing with it weird.

But it's like the evidence that I've seen is suggest that once men are in these professions, they typically are pretty well supported by the women in them.

That's interesting.

They're stigmatized by the people outside them, including by other men.

Where's women? Oh, that's a low status job.

Yeah, where's women?

It's the other way around.

Like women, if they go into kind of traditionally male roles, they're on construction sites or in engineering, whatever, they actually face problems inside, but they're actually celebrating.

Everyone's applauded outside.

That's so interesting.

Yeah, so there's just kind of, that does look like it plays out a bit the other way.

But this is a personal thing.

But when I told somebody that my son was, had got his first job as a fifth grade teacher, and how proud I was of him, they said, well, they they said, let me ask you one question about it, I said, sure.

And they said, does his door have a window?

Does his classroom door have a window?

I said, I don't know.

I'll ask him. Yeah, he needs a window.

And there have been schools where the male teachers have insisted the windows get put in the doors, because they want to make sure they can be observed.

And actually, most most of those doors do have windows, but but it was just this kind of moment of, wow, I would literally never thought of that.

Right. But a lot of but if you talk to male teachers, that's exactly the sort of thing they'll bring up, which is make sure door has a window, and make sure that there's no blind or anything like so that like at any point in during the day, anybody can kind of look in.

Well, and of course, most of the other teachers in there as well.

But relating to that, I tweeted this earlier on, so I'm probably in trouble right now for it.

But I saw a quote that I thought was really fascinating about male behavior.

So I want to get your thoughts on this.

So this is the duality of warning men about bad behavior.

The problem with giving men advice like don't be pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it won't listen.

And the men who benefit from being more assertive will take it straight to heart.

And I thought that that framing was so interesting to me.

That is interesting.

I mean, it's a little bit like this sort of sense that like the men who are like dark triad, total note, like trying to getting a narcissist to sort of not be an narcissist is basically impossible, right?

You can put as many posters up and have any social campaigns.

Yeah, I mean, taking a narcissist through a sort of like compulsory three hour harassment training just doesn't really work.

But you're right that the it's an interesting kind of thought.

I mean, I struggle with this a little bit because on the one hand, I'm older than you.

And so I can remember some of the behaviors in the workplace that were seen as acceptable.

Now I was in journalism and it was a particular time in the 90s.

But I do look back and think, wow, really?

Like that was like not okay.

Exactly. But that was like, really?

Tolerate? And the women were just all just don't get in.

Just don't get in the lift with him after lunch.

We know he's a bit handsy.

He's a bit handsy after lunch, because he's been drinking.

The advice was that so the women's job was to make sure they didn't get in the lift with him if he'd been out drinking right there.

And I think what the hell?

He couldn't have done walk home alone at night, but in the office.

I mean, honestly, to the extent that I feel slightly implicated in those cultures going kind of looking back, I actually feel, I feel genuinely ashamed looking back on what we thought was acceptable, and just some of the norms around kind of behavior.

So in that sense, I think that the positive effects of just saying what is and is not appropriate in terms of like male -female interactions and what mankind can't do.

Amazing. Do I think that, of course, there's a danger that some people will take it the wrong way, that it'll get over interpreted or whatever, of course.

But I really do worry a little bit that the reaction to things like the Me Too movement and to those changes in policy is disproportionate compared to the overall good that those movements have done.

You can always find exceptions, but it's back to where we were a little bit before.

You've got to look in the round here and not just use the edge cases to kind of make your case.

And as a whole, I've got to tell you, like the workplaces that my sons are going into, and if I had daughters that they would be going into so much better on most fronts than the ones that were in existence.

Does that mean that we want to get to a place where people feel like they can't just be natural with each other, right?

Ask each other out for coffee or whatever?

No, of course not. But no one seriously wants that.

It's only the fringe people.

Yeah. I had this little bit that I ran for a while talking about how Me Too had sought to sanitize the elements of bad male behavior and accidentally ended up sterilizing all of it.

Like all male behavior had been removed and he'd largely bifurcated out.

There was this rule supposedly from Netflix's offices.

Oh, how long you could look at each other.

But the reason I love that story, though, was how the Netflix employees responded to it.

So the rule was that you couldn't look for more than nine seconds or something.

And so it became this internal joke.

And so the Netflix employees would start looking at each other and going, one, two, three, and they'd look away.

They all just took the piss out of it, right?

And just because it was so patently absurd that you could sort of regulate that.

You can call the meta on it.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, and actually, I think the market sort of the equilibrium is figuring itself out.

We're certainly correct.

We're certainly correcting with that.

We are certainly correcting.

I've had I mean, how many it's kind of overdone in cliche now to say that we're past peak woke.

But I think that we are, I think I'm fascinated by the talking point of what will the more reactionary elements of the right wing commentary at do when most people agree with the this is an overreach, crazy blah blah thing campaign.

Well, it's like, yeah, of course, mate, like, that's obvious.

It's no longer revolutionary and anarchistic.

And you're fighting the good fight.

It's like you're just saying the thing that everybody else knows.

I think that's going to be a big pivot in my world of online commentary stuff, whatever.

I think that's going to be a really big change.

But yeah, just to round out the talk about giving blanket coverage advice often doesn't find the era of the people that you're trying to give it to and does hit the era of the people that you're not.

David bus bad men, which I'm going to guess that you read in that, you know, when you're looking at sexual assault, it's a very small cohort of men.

What is it? It's not all men, but it's always a man was like the tagline, because it's not all men on hashtag not all men, or whatever was one of the defenses and then it's not all men, but it's always a man was the defense of the defense.

Yes, but with David's thing, it really is a very small cohort of men committing a thousand offenses, not a thousand men committing one offense each across time.

Yeah. And I just think that I'm really interested, like, as a good man who is friends with good men, I'm like, you're going to switch off, there's going to be like a degree of fatigue, like messaging fatigue.

If you're regularly told that you are a thing that you're not.

And I wonder how many times you can say, well, we know, and you go, well, hang on a second, that's not me and my friends.

And that's not the people that I know, and so on and so forth.

The assumptions or the implicit accusations and stuff like that, of male behavior of the things that you do, can kind of like the boy who cried wolf, it makes you desensitize if everything's racism, then kind of nothing's racism, if everything's misogyny, then kind of nothing's misogyny.

And if you continue to degrade the importance of using particular words or trying to get people on board of any cohort, with the things that people are maybe going to switch off and they're not going to listen when you really need them to.

Yeah. And I'm just reflecting on that and thinking that the other danger with always going to some of the more extreme behaviors that you're talking about or catastrophizing certain kinds of behavior is that we might actually also lose, like, most of this is about learning how to be a grown up, proper

person, right? I remember my - Expediting adulthood.

Yeah. It's what my mom used to call having good manners, all right?

And I think there's so much of this is like, right, you know, I explained to her what was happening when we had some training after some of the Me Too stuff.

She's like, you mean like having good manners?

It's like, yeah, it is that mom, but like it's a whole different thing.

Had to be reinvented.

Right, yes. Right. But what's the truth that's captured in that is that learning how to conduct yourself with other people, learning how to kind of regulate your own behavior appropriately, just through social learning, right?

And that to some extent, some of that's going to be a little bit different for men than for women, just because of some of the different average proclivities of men.

Like just, you know, dealing with certain things like we've talked about risk taking, but you could talk about like romance and dating and so on too, that actually, that's the point, is that you grow up.

And I thought the reason I don't really don't like toxic masculinity, but I quite like mature masculinity, because I think kind of the difference between 15 year old Chris, and how old are you now?

36. 36 is very big.

So what's the difference for 21 years of learning and growing and learning from other people and probably getting some stuff wrong and then like, oh, that didn't work.

You're going to get it right.

Yeah. So actually, this idea of formation is one that I think quite a lot about now, which is actually more of a theological one.

And people talk about formation in the church, and more generally, but of course, that's just true, generally, right?

We're forming ourselves and each other.

And so the things we choose to form us are very important, and how we form others is usually important as well.

And what I don't want to lose from all this is the fact that like, as a father, one of my jobs was to help form my sons into mature men.

And that meant learning this, it's okay to be like this, but it's not okay to act like that.

And this is the appropriate kind of behavior.

And this is when it's good to do that.

And this is when it's bad to do that regulating.

Yeah. And most of it's just everyday stuff.

It's not. Well, this was the thing, you know, the sort of common laughing track that's put after Jordan Peterson's advice is, do you really need this Canadian psychologist to tell you to stand up straight and make your bed?

And you go, yeah, actually for a lot of young guys, yeah.

And, you know, that criticism is often thrown from the sorts of people who should really be thinking a little deeper about why there was a market for that, which was fatherlessness.

You know, Jordan Peterson was the surrogate father to a few million men for...

It also wasn't, a lot of it, I mean, it wasn't new, right?

Admiral McRaven. Yep, and the rich will make your bed.

The rich will make your bed, right?

And actually, I had a bit of an influence on me, which is like, and actually the thinking behind it, which is achieve something good.

It's a gift to your future self.

It's like taking care of your environment and showing some discipline and habit and all.

That's actually pretty compelling stuff.

And then it just appeared in, you know, 12 rules for life.

I have to tell you that that is not the rule that my sons took from that book.

Unfortunately, I kept waiting for them because they had the book and like, still your beds aren't made boys, they have no in your bed.

We mentioned it earlier on, you've been focusing on working class men.

Yeah. What have you learned about working class men?

Well, I've written quite a lot about class before, partly because I was so interested in the lack of attention to class in the US.

British heritage. And it's so weird because actually I was trying to escape from it and I ended up missing it.

And the thing, because the only thing worse maybe than a class bound society that's constantly obsessed with its classness, you know, where you from, is a class bound society that pretends it isn't.

And that camouflages unbelievable class divides under this idea of classlessness, underneath this idea that we're not class, we're not like the UK, but actually social mobility is lower in the US than it is in the UK.

And so the gap between the classes is much bigger.

And, and the upper middle class in the US are much better at protecting their position than the upper middle class are in the UK.

For all kinds of things, they rig the housing market, they rig the college market.

But anyway, that was my book about the school dream hoarders.

But so I thought I knew the data on class pretty well.

I thought I knew the data on men pretty well.

So what does it tell us?

Some of the stuff I already knew, you know, stagnant weight.

So we use the college, non college break as the main one.

stagnant wages for men without a college degree, plummeting employment rates for those men.

That's where a lot of the drug poisoning deaths come from to like, it's really class based as well as working class men who were losing to drugs.

Why? Well, if you think that they are quotes deaths of despair, to use the phrase that Case and Deaton have used, then it's part of a sense of just, you've lost out economically, you've lost out socially, you don't know if you're needed.

And so you just take more risks around drug taking.

You're about to fall through the bottom of the net in any case.

In any case. So and it might fit maybe a little bit with the sedation thesis, too, which is like, things are a bit things are a bit shit out there.

So like, you know, the things I was surprised by, even though I thought I knew some of the data was the huge increase in the class gap in marriage and living with children.

And so I was astonished to learn, for example, that if you take men without a college degree in the US, in their 30s and 40s, only half of them are in a household with children now.

And that was 80%, just in 1980.

And so it's it's 5050.

Now, whether a guy in his 30s and 40s is in a household with children, if he doesn't have a college degree, most men with college degrees, they are in a household with children, right?

There's a massive class gap.

But actually, I was kind of blown away by that.

I thought, well, that's just culturally a huge fact, because your 30s and your 40s, better use your typically raising kids, right, your kids around.

And so if only half of the men working class men in the US, now in that situation, gone from like, it's not obvious, like it was a few of them one in five, just a few decades ago, now it's half.

If you think that feeling needed feeling connected feeling like you've got value is part of that family, is part of just anthropologically being in that kind of family unit.

I think that's huge.

Now, it doesn't mean they're not their kids in other households, and it could be non residents and all that.

But nonetheless, I was, I was very surprised to see quite how much the class gap in having kids in your life had opened up.

Have you looked at Nicholas Iberstadt's work?

Yeah, yeah. He's another, just outstanding.

His stuff on employment is amazing.

Yeah, yeah, I should bring him back on.

Because that first conversation I had with him was great.

And I'd love to know where he's at with that.

But that, you know, I think about what percentage of men under the age of 30 or 35 are still living at home with their parents?

I think it's the most common living arrangement.

It depends what age you do it at.

And at 24, it's about, I want to say it's like 34 % of men, something like that.

So I still think it's the it's the modal one.

Yes, it's the modal up to maybe 30.

Yeah, I don't know if it goes up today.

That's true. It's certainly much more true for men than it is for women.

Correct? Yeah, exactly.

And if you were to then say, let's break this down by working class men.

Yes. How many more of them are going to be living at home more likely because they're going to have less disposable income.

So they're going to be more reliant on their their family's home, maybe still in the bedroom that they had 20 30 years ago.

That's interesting.

I don't think we did break the data that way.

It would also be partly explained by the fact that the college going gap, agenda gap is much bigger for working class families than it is for upper middle class families.

Big into the big class grade and and for rural families and so on too.

So the further you so if you look at the income distribution, parental income distribution, and you look at the ones at the bottom who are like at their fifth or the 10th percentile, I can't remember exactly where it is, there's like a 16 point gap in college enrollment between boys and girls from those

poorest families. And there's like a five point gap at the top.

Now is much higher at the top generally.

But you also see the gender gap just gets narrow and narrow.

So Raj Chetty has a great paper, just showing this gender gap getting narrower and narrower.

And so it's not that there isn't a gender gap everywhere there is, but if you want to see the big gender gaps, you go to the bottom of distribution, you go to the poorest households, where you'll see the sister going away to college and the son staying at home.

And you also see we haven't published this data yet, but geographical mobility rates are now higher among women, young women than the arming young men.

So women moving more, they're more likely to go to a different city, more likely to go to a different state.

So you know this this idea of like go West, young man, as like the men are going to go out and no, no, it's the opposite.

Now it's actually the women who are moving out.

And what that means, by the way, is you then get some place parts of the country, where the sex ratio starts to skew, because the women leave, and the men don't.

And so there's going to more men left behind, as the women have gone off to seek opportunities.

And that has all kinds of potentially interesting implications.

The sex ratio work is so interesting to me.

I mean, I think it has to get quite big, is my sense of it, before you start seeing like the gap, before you start seeing serious results.

But I'm early, I'm early in the process of looking at it, but you do see stark examples where then, like East Germany was a place that where just the men, the men stayed, the women just emptied out, and all the oil ran west.

There, you see, you have a look at, was it Portugal in the 18th century?

Do you have a look at that?

Pretty interesting.

So I don't know why, but there was going to be a very male skewed sex ratio.

So there was a law that was put in, where the first son was permitted to marry, and any subsequent sons after that were put on galleon ships and sent off to explore the new world.

And in many ways, I think that was more male sedation stuff that they were trying to avoid young male syndrome coming in.

And they were, you know, it wasn't really sedation.

Extradition, the male extradition.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.

Yeah. So what else?

What else in working class man, we've got this, like very interesting gap with regards to going to college.

Yeah, fascinating. Got the health.

You've got the health stuff, where you're seeing, I mentioned the kind of poisoning gap, being much, much bigger for working class men.

I don't think I quite realized that the earnings for men without four year college degrees, even though they've come up a little bit in the last few years, are still basically flat since the 79.

And so - It's adjusted for inflation.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the sort of, there's a lot of argument about this among labor economists, but the sort of basic story that it's only really men at the top of the distribution that have seen wages go up relative to men a generation ago, still seems to be true.

And I thought that might've improved a bit more than it has.

Because as I say, wages have gone up in the last few years, but it's just been such a long -term trend, this kind of economic stagnation story for kind of these, for working class men, that it doesn't appear to have been undone just in the last few years.

It will take quite a lot longer for that to happen.

And then the other thing was, when you look at men who are not in the labor force, so this is back to Eberstadt stuff, and you look at the reasons why.

So you can see, okay, these are men, they're not unemployed, they're not seeking work, they're actually out the labor force all together.

And that's a much bigger group.

That's where the story is, I think.

And then you ask them, why aren't you working?

For men, working class men, 52 % say it's because I'm sick or disabled.

That's the modal answer, more than half of them.

For men with a four -year college degree, what do you think the most common reason why a guy with a college degree is not in the labor force?

Can't get a job? No, that's much lower down.

I'm getting more education.

Followed by, I'm looking after family members, so there's a bit of stay at home there.

Followed by, I've retired, because I don't need the money anymore, and these are primate, fire.

Yeah, they're gone.

And then I'm sick or disabled right down there.

It's the fourth most common reason.

So first of all, men with a college degree are much more likely to be in the labor force anyway, but if they're out, the fourth reason they give is sick.

How much of that? I mean, this is one of Nick's...

Nick's point. Yeah, this is one of Nick's things where he wonders how many men are gaming the system from a benefits standpoint.

Yeah, he's worried about disability benefits.

Correct, yeah. And I think that he's got this stat that I've forgotten about the number of hours per year that they play video games, and then he's broken down the number of hours per year they play video games whilst on either prescription or recreational drugs.

Oh, I haven't seen that.

It's like some absurd amount of time, like thousands of hours.

Always one of my friends would say, where is this nirvana of which you talk when I talk to him about this stuff.

But where I disagree a bit with Nick and some of those others is that that's a kind of supply side explanation, which is, well, of course, the men aren't working.

They're all high and they'd rather play call of duty or whatever.

And I actually think it's different.

I think that... And there is some evidence for this that's like, actually, if you don't think you need to work, then you're going to do those other things instead.

And so I think the causality runs more that way, which is that having opted out of the labor market one way or another, then you might more likely be doing those other things.

He's right that once you're on disability benefits, the incentive to come off.

And so there is this...

And then, of course, if you're out of the labor market, you tend to get sicker, et cetera.

And a lot of these health problems are mental health problems and they're drug addiction problems.

Substance abuse is a...

I don't know the number, but it's a significant share of that.

This is not people who've lost two fingers on an oil rig.

This is more of that.

But in some ways, it runs the risk of this eye roll, pull yourself up by the bootstraps thing too.

And I think we've got to understand a little bit more about what's the incentive for men to be in the labor market and staying in a labor market and doing well.

You know where you should go.

You should send one of the interns from your...

I don't know what the other...

My massive organization.

Yeah, exactly. A huge, huge institution.

Well -funded institute.

Check out, or maybe just run some chat GPT analysis on the comments section of my episode.

That's reached over a million people.

And it has got per play, one of the highest comment ratios of any episode we've ever...

It may be the highest.

That episode's two years old and it's still multiple times per day, it's the most commented site.

And I don't wonder whether it's discussions that people are having or whatever.

And just getting like a sentiment analysis that would be...

Because it's definitely speaking...

And they're talking about people they didn't know.

Yeah. And themselves, largely themselves.

It is men that have checked out of society, at least from an employment sort of contribution standpoint.

And you don't know how many people are larping.

You know, you're not going to be able to use it for a sort of registered...

LARPing? Live action role playing, like pretending to be something.

But yeah, that really got to me, that episode and the comments say, not got to me, but it upset me a little bit.

It made me feel a little sad because I...

Just so many men evidently saying, the world doesn't need me, nobody needs me.

Why should I contribute to a place that hates me?

I'm like, I don't hate you.

Like, I think it would be cool if you were out in the world doing stuff.

I think it would be a pretty sweet idea.

So I just... This self -perception.

Yeah. But it also ties into this family stuff too.

So the things like you can treat these...

So I have different charts on labor force participation, family life, kind of et cetera, but I'm reasonably convinced by the evidence that when men are like in a relationship, feeling the kind of the need to contribute one way or the other, it doesn't have to be financially, but like to be in it, like

partnering, that massively predicts them being in the labor market.

And then of course, the men who are doing well in the labor market are also much more likely to be the ones who are then kind of...

The Matthew principle as it's known.

Yes, exactly. So that's the problem, I think a little bit with this.

It's very easy to sort of miss the fact that there's lots of different dynamics playing out at the same time here.

And then the question is how do you break it?

How do you break that cycle?

What are your suggestions structurally, systemically, policy sides to help working class men?

Well, number one is in the education system, but not just for like kids, but more generally, the US is at the bottom of the league table of OECD countries for investments in apprenticeship.

Hang on, hang on, hang on.

There's like a million acronyms.

So the OECD is the advanced economy, so it's the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

These are the rich countries in the world, right?

If you look at those countries and see who invests the most in apprenticeships and the least in apprenticeships, the US is at the bottom, right?

And so just the US doesn't do apprenticeships.

It just doesn't do vocational training, anything like other countries.

That's crucially important, particularly to help men retrain, but also because apprenticeships turn out to be very male friendly forms of learning, for young men.

Also, we don't spend enough of the money on apprenticeships on young men in the US.

Whereas in other countries they are for young men.

Here, they're very often not, but that's number one.

Number two is, it relates a little bit to what we were talking about before.

One of the real problems we've got is that even though we have created through the infrastructure investment, as I mentioned, more of those quotes, classically male jobs, as a general proposition, the kind of traditionally male jobs have declined and it seems very unlikely they're going to come back

in huge numbers again, like heavy industries, mining, steelworks, et cetera.

Not least because even if we have those things, so much of it's automated now, right?

So those classically male jobs are making up fewer, smaller and smaller part of the labor market.

Okay. So what are these guys going to do then?

Well, we have these massive growth areas in healthcare.

We've talked about mental healthcare, teacher shortages and education, para -educators, et cetera.

And so in just the same way we've had this huge effort to get more women into STEM professions and so on too.

I think we need a huge effort to help get men into those growing parts of the economy, including in areas that are traditionally seen as more female, like healthcare, social work, teaching, et cetera.

And they don't necessarily have to do like a four year college degree or get a master's degree.

A lot of these professions now are trying to get people mid -career to come in.

And if you take something like teaching, men are much more likely to enter teaching as a second career than a first career compared to women.

That's interesting.

Right. But it's very hard to do that.

So one thing we could do is make it much easier to switch into teaching as a profession.

And if we did that, we'd get a lot more men in and you can lower what's be, have you heard of this term, the paper ceiling and the Byron August stuff.

And so Byron does a lot of work.

He's from Opportunity at Work and does a lot of work on the paper ceiling is saying you need a degree for this job when you don't really.

And so it's like the, it's a kind of diploma thing.

Right. And of course, because men are now, much as like to have a college degree, they hit the paper ceiling a lot more than women do.

But a lot of these jobs actually you just don't necessarily need, like you, you don't need a master's degree in education to, to be an elementary school teacher.

And if you've had 10 years, say in tech or something, and you want to be going to be a science teacher, you really don't need to go and get a college degree to do that.

And so just opening up those professions to men and then de -stigmatizing them, which we talked about a bit earlier.

So we, if we want men in the growth areas of the economy, it's not going to happen automatically.

And if anything, the problem is getting worse.

We have fewer men in those professions, not more, even though that's where the growth is coming from.

Richard Reeves, ladies and gentlemen.

Richard, I absolutely love your work.

This is so great. I can't believe it's been two years since you came on.

So I want to make this an annual thing.

Okay, I need to get you back more frequently, given that you only live two hours away now, by plane.

I guess that's right.

That's close. Yeah.

You're significantly closer than you are.

Where should people go to keep up to date with all of your work, Institute, all of that?

So the Institute is AIBM, as in American Institute for boysandmen .org, so airbm .org.

And then I have a sub stack which is just called of boys and men, which people can find at that URL on sub stack.

And I tend to update there as well.

But I would really encourage people to look at our website.

I will warn you that, and I've already warned you, it's a little bit boring.

My comp people are going to kill me for this.

And what I mean by that is like, if you want authoritative data on any of the things we've talked about, come to our website.

We pride ourselves on being the kind of source of like high quality data.

And if you get anything wrong, we'll correct it.

Please let us know if we've got something wrong.

But I think what's lacking from this is just like, what's the data?

What's the hard evidence here in a nonpartisan and unbiased way?

And that's the mission of the Institute.

You're saying that it's not going to have a Halloween themed header image of you in a fancy dress costume or anything like that.

We're not going for that.

And we haven't commented on the man versus bear or the Barbie movie.

Make it sexy. Make it sexy.

This is what people say, make it sexy.

And I am resolutely keeping it boring.

But here's my final thought.

Maybe boring is the new sexy.

Is that too much to hope for?

Said like a true British.

I appreciate you. Thank you.

[The Crisis of Masculinity, Male Well-being, and the Path Forward]-[#855 - Richard Reeves - Why Do Modern Men Feel So Left Behind?]

📋 Summary

The Silent Decline of Male Well-being

The "Soft Signal" and the Purity Spiral

The Crisis of Neededness

Empirical Realities vs. Ideological Narratives

A Path Toward Solutions

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Crisis of Masculinity, Male Well-being, and the Path Forward]-[#855 - Richard Reeves - Why Do Modern Men Feel So Left Behind?]

📋 Summary

The Silent Decline of Male Well-being

The "Soft Signal" and the Purity Spiral

The Crisis of Neededness

Empirical Realities vs. Ideological Narratives

A Path Toward Solutions

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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