The Gender Expert: Men Are Emotionally Dependent On Women & We're Treating Them Like Malfunctioning Women! Richard Reeves

[0] It is pretty clear, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well.

[1] In fact, they do terribly.

[2] And in modern society, that's a problem.

[3] Richard Reeves is the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

[4] An organization dedicated to researching and tackling the challenges faced by boys and men in modern society.

[5] We're in the early stages of a cultural revolution, so that women are not economically reliant on men, which is great.

[6] But one consequence of that is that it's put a big question mark next to the role of men, which used to be, filled with a whole script of ways to be a man, ways to be a head of household, et cetera.

[7] Because of that, they're struggling.

[8] They're behind in education, wages have stagnated.

[9] You're seeing a massive rise of young men who are single, and now the suicide rate is four times higher and rising.

[10] They looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives.

[11] And the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless.

[12] And the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded.

[13] You said the hardest thing you've ever done as a man is couples therapy.

[14] Why?

[15] I was talking about what I'd done at home and how I'd supported her career.

[16] My wife said that you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough.

[17] The problem is that you're not masculine.

[18] What I came to realize is that men feel like that in order for women to become bigger, we had to make ourselves smaller.

[19] That is not the answer.

[20] So what would you do at a social level to fix things?

[21] The most important move would be to see.

[22] You wrote a book called Of Boys and Men Why the Modern Male is Struggling and Why It Matters and What to Do About It.

[23] Of all the things you could have done.

[24] Why?

[25] Why did you do this?

[26] Partly because I was warned so strongly against it by my colleagues, by friends, professionally, just saying this is such a difficult subject to write about particularly right now in this sort of moment we're in culturally.

[27] And the reason I say I did it despite being warned or because I was warned isn't because I'm like a sucker for punishment.

[28] I'm actually like very thin -skinned.

[29] Interestingly, my wife said that in some ways I was in the worst of all worlds because I'm a thin -skinned polemicist.

[30] So in other words, someone who kind of goes out of their way to kind of make provocative points, right?

[31] I'm provocative.

[32] So I provoke responses, but then I'm kind of upset the responses, right?

[33] And actually, this work around boys and men is not intended at all to be provocative.

[34] Ironically, I'm trying to make it less provocative.

[35] I'm trying to make it more database, more mainstream, like, more boring in a way.

[36] But it was very interesting to me, and it was very hard to get a publisher in the US for the book.

[37] So it was interesting to me that this whole debate was one that was just seen as too risky to enter.

[38] And I honestly thought, well, hang on, if I, as a fairly boring guy with charts and research, I'm being warned against this, who is going to talk about it?

[39] And are we sure that it's better that those other people are talking about it and that we're not talking about it?

[40] But basically benching ourselves from the conversation.

[41] Because of our fear about what's going to happen to us professionally or reputational.

[42] We're basically benching ourselves.

[43] And that just leaves the ground open.

[44] And if you think there's a real issue around boys and men, questions around boys and men.

[45] It's not like it's not going to be talked about.

[46] That's not the question.

[47] The question is, who's talking about it?

[48] And I actually thought, we need more people like me talking about it, i .e. boring, research -based, policy -oriented, you know, non -fiction type people, brookings -type people, and not just some of the people who are currently talking about it online.

[49] And that's not, there are lots of great people talking about this online.

[50] Don't unless you were willing to risk something.

[51] And that just seems crazy to me. When you say you come from this, from a place of stats, graphs, figures, etc., what is your background?

[52] Where does that come from?

[53] I bounced around, essentially, between academia, think tanks, politics, journalism.

[54] So when I was over here, I was in the UK until 2012, and I'd served in the coalition government, working as a director of strategy for Nick Clegg.

[55] Before that, I'd run demos, the think tank.

[56] I'd written for The Guardian and the Observer.

[57] I'd worked at IPPR.

[58] I'd worked at the Institute of Psychiatry.

[59] I did a PhD in philosophy at Warwick.

[60] And so I basically found myself in this space where either I'm trying to make policy or I'm writing about policy or I'm trying to think about policy in that sort of semi -academic space.

[61] And so I'm a kind of social scientist by experience, I guess rather than by training.

[62] And that led me to the Brookings Institution in D .C. where I was for 10 years working on race inequality, class inequality, and Brookings is like a big blue chip, you know, policy think tank places.

[63] It's regularly ranked as the most important think tank in the world.

[64] Whatever that means today, I don't know.

[65] And so in a way, that was a kind of natural place for me to end up.

[66] And so, yeah, I come at this, and I'm very nonpartisan.

[67] So I try to be as fact -based as possible.

[68] I'm not partisan.

[69] But I am very, very concerned about trying to do what we can to reduce the obstacles that people face to human flourishing.

[70] I know that sounds really like vague, but that's what's driven all of my work.

[71] And you run the Institute for Boys and Men?

[72] Yeah, the American Institute for Boys and Men.

[73] It's actually the first think tank, like research policy shop on this issue, certainly in the US and arguably anywhere.

[74] We've had lots of institutions quite rightly created to look at issues for women and girls, and we need those.

[75] Arguably, we need more of them in many parts of the world.

[76] But we haven't actually thought that it was important to have any that specifically look at the issues of boys and men through a kind of research lens and a policy lens.

[77] And so in the end, I felt like that was necessary.

[78] And then I was persuaded that I had to do it myself.

[79] I actually looked quite hard for other ways to get someone else to do it because it was a difficult move.

[80] When was the moment where you decided that this was the subject that you were going to tackle?

[81] Was there a stat you read, a moment you had, a eureka moment of sorts, or was it just a culmination of things?

[82] It was more of a culmination.

[83] There was just a series of statistics that I just kept running into, and not just stumbling over, but sort of just running into with my shin, bruising my shin and going, wait, really?

[84] And then checking those stats with people.

[85] And most of them, I had a sense of the direction, but I didn't know how big some of the changes had become.

[86] So, for example, discovering that there's like a bigger gender gap in higher education now than there was in the 70s, but it's the other way around.

[87] So we kind of completely flip the gender gap in higher education or learning that the suicide rate is four times higher among men and boys and rising.

[88] But, you know, I think I was already on this track when COVID hit, but actually COVID was probably underlined my determination to keep.

[89] doing it because in the U .S. at least, the immediate impact of COVID was huge for boys and men.

[90] The college enrollment rate dropped seven times more for men in the U .S. than for women.

[91] And then I noticed that men were dying in much bigger numbers from COVID, and no one was really researching that.

[92] So I found myself doing research on COVID death rates, which was not my field at all, because it wasn't being done elsewhere.

[93] And those sorts of moments are illustrated to me that it was.

[94] wasn't anybody's job to wake up each morning and think about how is this thing, in this case, the pandemic.

[95] How is it affecting boys and men?

[96] It was no one's job to do that.

[97] And so those stats that I've just mentioned to you, they didn't get any attention because no one was drawing attention to them, whereas the impact of the COVID -19 pandemic on girls and women was getting a lot of attention because lots of people were producing good reports on that.

[98] What is the sort of the macro then on the current state of boys and men, if I'd never, if I just landed on this planet and I was an alien and I said to you, how are men getting on comparatively versus how they used to be getting on?

[99] What information would you supply to me to make your case?

[100] And what would you say to me?

[101] So assume we're going to talk about advanced economy.

[102] So we're going to talk about the UK, the US, Scandinavia, etc. I think a fair answer there would be to say that there are many ways in which boys and men are struggling in those societies.

[103] They're behind an education, for sure.

[104] Wages have stagnated, especially if they're working class.

[105] The mental health challenges of men are playing out differently, but in some ways more tragically because of these very high suicide rates.

[106] So in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.

[107] So playing out differently for women and girls.

[108] But I think I'd probably say we're in the relatively early stages of a cultural revolution in advanced economies.

[109] And that revolution is one where the economic relation between men and women has been dramatically transformed.

[110] And so the old world, my father's world, my father just turns at 80 today.

[111] And the world that he and my mum have occupied was one where their roles were just much more tightly defined.

[112] It wasn't really that much of a question about what their roles were going to be.

[113] And women had just so little economic power that they were essentially forced into relationships, marriages with men, right?

[114] And so there was this economic dependency of women on men, and I would argue an emotional dependency of men on women, and of course a huge reliance on women to kind of raise the kids.

[115] But there was like a script, there was a story, there was a way to.

[116] The economic rise of women has achieved what Gloria Steinem set out to achieve, which is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity.

[117] That argument, which was really about changing the economic relation between men and women, said that women weren't economically reliant on men.

[118] That was the central, I think the central argument of that wave of the women's movement.

[119] And very largely achieved.

[120] And I would argue that's probably the greatest economic liberation in human history is still playing out.

[121] We need to do more in other parts of the world.

[122] But one consequence of that is to then put a big question mark next to the role of men.

[123] So I think underpinning a lot of these issues that we see kind of playing out for boys and men, it's really just, there's just a gap.

[124] There's a space with a question mark in it now, which used to be filled with a whole script of ways to be a man, ways to be a dad, ways to be a head of household, etc. And so we've torn up those old scripts by and large in these advanced economies, which is great.

[125] But I would say that we've replaced the old script that women had, the one my mum had.

[126] So the script my mum had was, you're going to be a wife and a mother, primarily.

[127] She was also a nurse, but part -time.

[128] Skip forward one generation to my sister, my wife, my female friends.

[129] It was, you're going to be able to stand in your own two feet.

[130] So in the blink of an eye, we change the story for women in a way that I think is profoundly positive.

[131] And how did we change the story for men?

[132] The old story, my father's story, you're going to have to do as well as you can because you're going to have look after a family, you know, make some money, provide, right?

[133] That's going to be your role.

[134] So we took away that story because we don't know if he's going to be a provider anymore.

[135] I've certainly not been the main provider, certainly not all of the time in my relationships.

[136] And what did we replace it with?

[137] What's the new script for masculinity?

[138] What's the new set of roles?

[139] What's the new set of dues that we've got for men?

[140] You could argue we've got quite a lot of don'ts, many of which we need.

[141] But not a very long list of dues.

[142] And so I think that that sense of that category, being at open, that question mark now, being open, has just left a lot of men feeling adrift, uncertain of their role, uncertain of their place, uncertain of being needed, wanted.

[143] And I think that's feeding into a lot of the things that are easier to measure, like mental health, education, employment, etc. But underlying it, I think it's this coming to terms with this huge revolution that we've seen.

[144] I want to make sure by the end of this conversation, we do our very best to hazard a guess at what that list of do's are for men, but also to kind of fill that question mark.

[145] I get so many women and men come up to me, often talking about their young sons.

[146] and encouraging me to have more conversations like this because they want a good script for their young sons in a world where their young sons are going online and being offered maybe a not so good script by certain influences and influencers online.

[147] So that's one of my objectives with having these conversations.

[148] And I think it's worth pausing there just to say that from looking at your work, you're not suggesting we go backwards to the old way of things.

[149] No. That's part of the challenge is that there's, in some ways, an understandable reaction to change that is disorienting, it's destabilizing, it maybe threatens a sense of status among men, and to reach back for the world as it once was.

[150] Very recently, right, this is not, we don't have to go back millennia, probably only have to go back one generation or two generations to a world way, like men had their roles, women had their roles, everyone knew their place.

[151] And you can see the appeal of that.

[152] when there's just so much uncertainty, but emphatically not the answer to go back.

[153] And I think in this debate, what you very often feel as if those who are perhaps on that more conservative side of the argument, they want to kind of turn back the clock, especially on women and women's roles.

[154] But I would say on the other side of the argument, maybe more on the progressive side of the argument or liberal side of the argument in American terms, there's a bit of a sort of turning a blind eye to the actual problems of boys and men.

[155] And so I think for a lot of young men, and I, you know, having spoken to them and had some responses to my work from them, they feel as if there are two fairly unappetizing options on the table for them.

[156] From the right, they get the message of like, you should be more like your father or your grandfather, be a real man, right?

[157] Provide, protect, etc. Have a wife that can stay at home, fill in the gap.

[158] But then they're going from the left, the message they get is, you should be more like your sister.

[159] the problem with your masculinity is your masculinity and we should just basically should be more like a woman right and actually it's not surprising to me that most young men who are strongly in favour of gender equality right they've grown up with it there's no evidence they're turning against it so they want gender equality but they also there's something about the way they feel in the world that means that they don't want to be treated as something there's something wrong with them because they are a man right and I think for even especially in schools but maybe more broadly, there's a danger that we treat men like malfunctioning women.

[160] So your problem is you're not feminine enough, you're not caring enough, you're not nurturing enough, you're not emotionally vulnerable enough, you don't cry enough, you don't spend enough time of your kids, and I'm not saying those aren't all valid challenges.

[161] But if that's all we've got, if in other words, we're just defining positive masculinity in a way that is completely synonymous with femininity, I'm not surprised with driving, we're seeing a lot of young men in particular, say, well, no, I'm not interested in that.

[162] And the only other thing else they can see on offer is this more reactionary alternative.

[163] And so if we give them that choice between being feminine and being reactionary, it's not clear.

[164] to me that they're all going to choose the former.

[165] It's interesting because the way that the digital world, the algorithms, the social media are designed, is to kind of push you towards camps.

[166] So this like space in the middle of nuance, it's just not going to get the likes, the retweets, the engagement.

[167] In fact, it's the ideas on the outside, the men should be more feminine or men should be extremely masculine that are going to get all of the attention because of the way the algorithms are designed.

[168] So if the if the answer is some kind of nuanced position in the middle, I just can't see in a world how that's ever going to form a tribe and be rewarded by the algorithm.

[169] So you know, this is this is part of the beauty I guess of having podcast conversations because you can because we're not really held hostage by an algorithm here.

[170] We can kind of, you know, speak openly but most of the algorithms don't work in such a way.

[171] At the heart of this issue though, I think is a very difficult question, which is are men and women different?

[172] Okay.

[173] Well, Let's come to that.

[174] But can I go back to your previous point?

[175] Because I think you're underselling yourself in a way.

[176] I agree that the way the algorithm works drives the kind of short -term attention towards those more tribal, simplistic ideas.

[177] But the mere fact of your success and the success of others like you to me is an incredibly positive sign.

[178] It suggests to me that actually there is an appetite for more nuanced conversation.

[179] There is an appetite for recognizing that two things can be true at once and that there are trade -offs like A is mostly good, like the rise of women.

[180] Amazing.

[181] Some causing some issues that we should deal with.

[182] And I have to tell you my own experience of this as a, you know, we've established boring, chart -driven policy won type person, right?

[183] I did this video for Big Think, the YouTube platform, and it's had more comments than I've sold copies of the book.

[184] Oh, wow.

[185] Different audience, of course.

[186] My wife calls me, I'm traveling somewhere, and she says, have you read the comments on your video?

[187] And I said, of course not.

[188] I'm old school journalist, never read the comments.

[189] She said, no, we got to.

[190] We started reading them together.

[191] And by the end of that taxi journey, wherever I was, we're both in tears.

[192] Because what we found was young men, including some teenage boys, saying, thank you for recognizing that the problems that boys and young men are facing are real, but not saying, and they're not saying, and they're not.

[193] Therefore, become a reactionary misogynist, actually saying, guys, this is a difficult time.

[194] There is some transitions.

[195] We've got to think about, you know, come to your question about, are they different?

[196] We are different in some ways that we have to talk about.

[197] But that in no way means we should be trying to turn back the progress of women.

[198] The solution to your problem as a young man is not to make your sister less powerful or independent.

[199] And there's a huge appetite for that.

[200] It's just hard to articulate.

[201] It doesn't drive the algorithm.

[202] But honestly, the conversations you've had around this, that other people are having around this gives me a lot of hope that actually most young men out there want that real conversation.

[203] But it does, I agree, it has to start with a recognition of the fact that there are differences, on average, between men and women.

[204] And I can't remember who said this.

[205] It might have been the Swedish public health economist called Hans Rosling.

[206] I absolutely love.

[207] He's passed away now, but it might have been him.

[208] It's the sort of thing he would have said.

[209] And I'm paraphrasing it, but something like the world would be much better if everyone could understand the idea of an overlapping distribution.

[210] Everyone, we're all trying, if you say men are taller than women, most people know what that means, right?

[211] On average.

[212] If you say men are taller than women, no one in their right mind thinks it means every man is taller than every woman.

[213] Right.

[214] No one thinks that.

[215] They know that that means mostly, so that most of the men over, most of the people over six foot are male, you know, the average man is taller than two thirds of women or, you know, whatever it is, right?

[216] So there's two cut.

[217] And that's what most sex differences are like.

[218] They're not completely separate or completely the same.

[219] They just, they have overlapping distributions.

[220] And so on average, men might be a little bit less likely to cry.

[221] That's true.

[222] But it doesn't mean that there aren't some very weepy men, some of whom I think you've had on this podcast.

[223] And who knows where this conversation is going, right, or some women who are less likely to.

[224] And we could take in aggression, we could take in risk taking, we could take in sex drive, we could take in competitiveness, and we could take in more interest in things rather than people, and put all of those on this sort of distribution and just say, look, we can accept there are differences on average, ask if they really matter, and then never use that as a way to discriminate against an individual.

[225] So are women and women different?

[226] On average, yeah.

[227] And in what ways are they different that are pertinent to this conversation?

[228] You know, when we talk about, it's really about societal roles and gender roles that I'm getting to here.

[229] Because when we talk about the changes that have happened, and also when we get to the heart of what a man's script should be, there must be clues in how we are different, if you know what I mean.

[230] Yeah.

[231] Yeah.

[232] The way I think about this is that if there are these differences on average in, say, risk taking.

[233] Yeah.

[234] Because men are the ones that are, I saw the stats.

[235] It's like 90 % of men are, 90 % of people that have like gambling addictions, for example, are men.

[236] Yeah.

[237] So it definitely opens up all kinds.

[238] So that there's, let's take on average men, boys and men, somewhat more likely to take risks.

[239] Right.

[240] So let's take that as an example.

[241] Like, does it matter?

[242] Well, it does matter in some negative ways because you just identified, look, there's an addiction issue, there's also like teenage boys, twice as likely to die as teenage girls, from risk -taking activity by and large, from car crashes or accidents, you know, much more like to drown, all these kinds of things, right, because they're just taking more risks, right?

[243] And so that aspect of kind of risk -taking, and especially if the risks involved somebody else's life or well -being.

[244] Obviously, that's a problem.

[245] But if the risk -taking means that say they're on average a little bit more likely to kind of take a risk in business, right?

[246] Or they're more likely to sign up to be a smoke jumper in the US.

[247] Do you know what a smoke jumper is?

[248] No idea.

[249] You're going to love this.

[250] What is it?

[251] A smoke jumper is someone, you know, I have these wildfires out in the kind of west of the US.

[252] Yeah.

[253] Right.

[254] In California and places like that, in very remote places.

[255] Sometimes the only way to fight the fire is to parachute people.

[256] into the middle of the fire, or just close to the fire, in the middle of nowhere, out of the plane.

[257] So, basically, these are people who, for a living, parachute out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes into a raging inferno, and stay there for as many days as necessary to try and fight the fire, incredibly dangerous, and it's almost all men.

[258] It's hard for me to imagine a world where it wouldn't be mostly men selecting into that occupation because it's very high risk, right?

[259] And you could think of others.

[260] Is that okay?

[261] Probably, right?

[262] You don't want to exclude anybody, but you're also not going to freak out that that one's not kind of 50 -50.

[263] And you're also going to say, well, that's good.

[264] And on the risk take, actually, I think you'll be interested in it.

[265] I'd like to get your reaction to this, because I was very interested to discover that if you, this is based on one study, to be clear, but I liked the study, that companies that are led by women, as in CEO and CFO, both women.

[266] are a bit less likely to go bankrupt than ones run by men.

[267] I knew what you were going to say before you said the stats.

[268] But a little bit less profitable.

[269] So, yeah, I knew what you were going to say before you said the stats, because my experience has been that exactly kind of what you described in the sense that the CEO of my company now is a woman and the CEO of my group of companies is a woman.

[270] And in my experience, men have a higher risk appetite as it relates to company finances, typically, a little bit more, yeah, prone to risk.

[271] And so, you know, for me, the real important thing has been combining that set of perspectives.

[272] So we get the balance.

[273] Exactly.

[274] So people could, I think you've drawn the right conclusion from your own experience, which is, it's like some people look at that data.

[275] later, right?

[276] I'll be unfair to, but they'd say, well, of course, look, look at these profitable companies led by men, these entrepreneurial risk -taking men.

[277] That's why men have to be running all the companies, right?

[278] And these women, they're just too, you know, safetyism.

[279] They're, you know, they're just too scaredy cat, right, for capitalism, right?

[280] So let's have a minute.

[281] And the other view would be like, hey, look at all these women -led companies that don't go under as often, don't go bankrupt.

[282] Sure, they're a bit less profitable, but, you know, they're less risky.

[283] So we should have women running companies, or your conclusion, which is, given that it's probably likely benefits to both sides of that.

[284] And again, recognizing it's not all women and all men, maybe we should have diverse leadership teams.

[285] That seems to me to be the right conclusion from that.

[286] But the conclusion is itself.

[287] The arguments for gender diversity are based on the assumption.

[288] There must be some differences.

[289] If there weren't differences, why on earth would we care about gender diversity, right?

[290] If we don't think that women are bringing something different to the party, not just because of their life experience, but it's like something else a bit different, but risk -taking competition, etc. If we didn't think that mattered, then we wouldn't care how many board members were women.

[291] But we do care about that, quite rightly, because we presume that actually there are some differences between men and women.

[292] And so sometimes the idea that there are differences between men and women is seen as a conservative idea, but weirdly it underpins a lot of the progressive movements for gender diversity.

[293] It's so true.

[294] It's so very true.

[295] And this is why it is difficult to talk about the differences between men and women at a physiological level without it appearing to be inherently sexist because it's not to say that either is better or worse it's just to say that there's differences and I think it goes back to what I was saying to understand the script for male to fill in that question mark there must be some clues hidden in our biology there must be because I think there is because I'm trying to you know it's interesting as I'm 31 years old now and my girlfriend is 31 years old.

[296] And in the way that the world has changed, I'm still trying to figure out if like me holding the door open for her is me being old school in old fashion and a bit misogynist or if that's because that's what I want to do and she likes it.

[297] Does she?

[298] Of course she loves it.

[299] That's the big question, right?

[300] Of course.

[301] She says thank you every time.

[302] I want to do that and she loves it.

[303] And she will have moments where she turns to me and tells me she'll thank me for doing things.

[304] like that and she'll thank me for the way that I am and she'll acknowledge that my brain and her brain have two completely different perspectives on the world and it's it's the differences that make us work you know because I'm I come to everything super logical how can I fix it babe it's like I show up with like a spanner to every problem in our relationship and she has this much more holistic she almost has like this sixth emotional sense and together we like navigate issues really well but we but it does but it does to respect those differences and not see...

[305] The old problem was one was seen as better than the other, right?

[306] So that kind of let's...

[307] With all the caveats about averages an overlapping distribution.

[308] So let's agree now that by this point in the conversation anybody listening to this gets that when we say these things we're not saying all men are all women, right?

[309] If there are differences, the problem in the past was let's say men were a bit more risk -taking, a bit more competitive, a bit more inclined to kind of rational approaches to problems, that that was better.

[310] That's the definition, in my mind, a useful definition of patriarchy.

[311] A patriarchy is one where more typically masculine virtues or attributes are seen as better, right?

[312] And you could argue that a matriarchy, where we to have one, would be the other way around.

[313] And an equal society isn't one of androgy.

[314] It's one where they're treated as equal value.

[315] So we don't say one is better than the other.

[316] We say they're different and try and bring them into kind of collaborative and constructive and rather beautiful equality.

[317] But I do think a lot of people making the mistake of thinking that equality requires androgyny.

[318] That's a nice simple intellectual idea.

[319] Like, let's get rid of all these ideas, right?

[320] And then we'll all be...

[321] But there's no difference between men and women.

[322] Okay.

[323] So, it's just...

[324] Androgyny is where...

[325] Like, if you have an androgynous species, there's no difference between men and women.

[326] Okay.

[327] Or, like, we're going to have to double down on this.

[328] I find your door opening one really interesting.

[329] So I was raised to...

[330] when you're walking along a street to always, with a woman, always to put yourself roadside.

[331] Yes.

[332] You do that?

[333] Always, yeah.

[334] Why do you do that?

[335] I don't know now you've said it, but I remember when I was crossing the road yesterday, my first instinct was to reach back and grab her hand and basic, because there was like a big bus coming in, and there was this black cab coming.

[336] And my instinct was to solve that problem.

[337] which was like to put myself in the front of the taxi.

[338] Maybe I think in my head because I thought this was the only conscious element to it, my body's bigger, so the taxi will see me. My girlfriend's about a foot smaller than me and she's really, really small.

[339] So I thought maybe the taxi would see me. And also there's a protective element.

[340] It's two things.

[341] If I put myself in front of the taxi that's coming, it will see me better.

[342] But also, I kind of would rather take the hit.

[343] Yeah, but that wasn't, you didn't, you didn't think all that.

[344] No, I didn't.

[345] It's a reaction I have.

[346] That's all coded in you.

[347] And you see it actually, even in quite tragic circumstances in the US, when you see these kind of mass shooting incidents, when they do the kind of, when they reconstruct the after us, what you very often see is that quite often men have been killed when they're just automatically putting their body between the shooter and their girlfriend or somebody, usually a woman, right?

[348] And there's also this great, there's a great photograph of a baseball heading towards this kid, right it's been whacked really hard and it's heading towards this kid and and they're and he's just these two guys doing this right in the shot they're like diving in front of it um whereas the moms are kind of like doing this like they're protecting the kids yeah and whoever's going to get hit by it right and again they weren't they didn't think through oh my body's big it's like it's just a reaction and and the road one is very interesting and again most of the women that i've been with i don't say anything i just do it i just go roadside and that's because the road could be that you could get splashes It's dirty, so it could be like a chivalry thing, it's about, but I also think there's more danger there, like if someone comes off the road or something, like, so to the extent that just at some psychological level, danger, more danger that side, right?

[349] You want to put yourself between that and the woman that you're with.

[350] And it's happening at a quite a natural level.

[351] Now, is there any danger there?

[352] Does it make any kind of sense?

[353] Probably not.

[354] But is it still symbolically quite a good thing?

[355] And my answer would be.

[356] yes and I don't I know not everyone's going to agree with this but I've come to believe that some of those symbolic acts which are quite gendered are still valuable even in a world where we want absolute substantive gender equality and so the test would be you hold the door for a woman who's your boss and that's okay you're okay with the fact that having gone through the door she goes to the CEO suite right and she's okay with the fact that that even though she's the CEO and your boss, you held the door for her.

[357] And so I sometimes fear that in our desire to sort of squeeze out all of these symbolic differences, we lose a little bit of those symbols of difference, which even in a world of complete gender equality, which we're hopefully getting closer to, I don't know if we want to eradicate them.

[358] And increasingly, I find a lot of young women not wanting to eradicate them.

[359] They just, they want us to hold, many of them want us to hold the door, but then by God help memorize up the corporate ladder if that's necessary and have no problem at all with them being our boss then them being boss to us that's what they ask of us i think that's a reasonable thing for them to us we can do that right what's the rebuttal to that is it that holding the door is a symbol of like the patriarchy and it's a symbol of oppression and that i am you need me she's too weak to open the door okay but actually i've noticed there's got a lot feminist now they're like i've seen this a bit on on social media, they're like, for the love of God, guys, feminism doesn't mean you shouldn't offer to help me get my overhead down on the plane.

[360] You are taller.

[361] You are stronger.

[362] Get my bag down, right?

[363] And I do think, and you've seen a bit of reluctance around that merely because I think men are almost entirely wrongly afraid if they offer, right, that the woman will turn to them and say, why, because I'm weaker than you, right?

[364] By the way, that's never going to happen.

[365] almost never going to happen.

[366] But she might say, no, I'm good, thanks, I'm fine, right?

[367] But specifically if it's obviously a shorter woman or a kind of older woman, or even a man, right?

[368] But more, and so I think that's the kind of danger is that some of this has kind of descended into this kind of, these symbols are bad.

[369] Meanwhile, we've got so much more work to do to get more women on boards and, you know, increase female safety that it sort of feels like too much politics has become locked in these symbolic things.

[370] You said that you think one of the biggest issues facing men today is the issue.

[371] of suicide.

[372] I mean, you talked about some of the stats at the top of this conversation that relate to men.

[373] The most startling of being someone that lives most of the time in the UK is that it's now the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.

[374] Have you been exposed to those stories?

[375] Especially as you published this book, but in your own personal life, have you been exposed to those stories of the impact of suicide directly?

[376] Yeah.

[377] Yeah, people rarely talk about it in an open forum.

[378] but they will very often afterwards talk about it.

[379] And I had this moment recently, someone I'm actually working with, and I've been working with for some time.

[380] I did a little piece on Morning Joe, which is a daytime thing in the US.

[381] And I talked about this crisis of kind of male suicide.

[382] And she told me afterwards that they put up just a stat that four times higher among men.

[383] It was just a graphic.

[384] And she said, she burst into tears.

[385] And she said, I'm so grateful you're doing this work.

[386] I lost my son to suicide when he was 16 and started telling me kind of why and I have worked with this woman for years on this issue and she'd never raised it with me before I had no idea and I now understand why particularly given her situation she's been so supportive of my work it wasn't just an intellectual thing this is very rarely just an intellectual thing it's usually visceral as well there's usually something going on there and I've had countless stories like that, people sharing their stories and it's heartbreaking.

[387] And you've had, you know, people on this show talk quite a lot about this.

[388] Jordan Peterson was asked in an event once by this guy said, I'm thinking, I delayed my suicide to come and hear you talk.

[389] Why should I not take my own life?

[390] No, I haven't had anything like that.

[391] But it's there.

[392] This crisis is there in our communities playing out.

[393] Is there a, I'm just thinking about that woman who's been working with you supporting your work but hadn't said anything and i'm wondering why people don't say something about about it when it happens in their family with with other deaths with with a cancer death you'll see a facebook post you'll see a yes or whatever you'll see you know but it seems i'm wondering here if there's a different level of i don't know public sharing as it relates to suicide because it's a different type of death isn't it yes that creates a lot of guilt and feelings of shame and like so you're in her situation and I have to tell you having raised boys one of whom in particular really struggle with his mental health through teen years there are days where you just hope as a parent that they're still around and you think what it was and actually 16 and we've seen a huge rise in young young men's suicides in the US especially and just think if you're a parent and you lose a child to suicide, the idea that you cannot free yourself of the burden of what could I have done, what did I miss?

[394] Was it me?

[395] Being a parent is already a lifelong trip in rethinking your decision, right?

[396] And you add that to the mix?

[397] I can't imagine it.

[398] I mean, my parents lost a daughter very young, your heart defect.

[399] And they have an amazing marriage and they've been amazing parents.

[400] But I do think that the loss of this illness, this terrible tragedy thing, it's just different.

[401] It's not, it's hugely grief, but, but it doesn't turn them, like it turns the mirror on you.

[402] It's like, was this you?

[403] Was this your fault?

[404] Are you the reason your son is dead?

[405] Just think about that for a moment and what that kind of does to people.

[406] And so because of that, people don't talk about it.

[407] So you'll get died unexpectedly.

[408] Yeah.

[409] We're not willing to talk about it in the same way as we are others because we think it might reflect on us in some way perhaps or on the memory of that person.

[410] Or them, yeah.

[411] I mean, it's still a crime technically.

[412] Oh, is it?

[413] Now, people say it's a really interesting thing.

[414] I've really learned not to say commit suicide.

[415] Yeah.

[416] Died by suicide.

[417] Died by suicide.

[418] I just wanted to, because I've got some crazy unthinkable stats here that I want to just add on.

[419] top of what you're saying, which come from the Institute of Boys and Men Report.

[420] That really was staggering to me is that a man dies by suicide approximately every 13 minutes?

[421] In the US, yes.

[422] In the United States alone.

[423] So that's not including other countries and the UK.

[424] Just the US.

[425] Okay.

[426] If men's suicide rates had matched those of women's, approximately 545 ,000 fewer men would have died since 1999.

[427] And that's again just in the US.

[428] Just US.

[429] Half a million men, yeah.

[430] suicide rates amongst younger men have grown the fastest the growth of male suicides has occurred almost entirely since the beginning of 2010s and interestingly as well rural countries in the USA have higher rates of suicide than those in urban metro so it highlights again that suicidality is geographically distributed in in certain ways why what's going on here What's going on with this full picture?

[431] Why is this the state of suicide amongst men?

[432] In some ways, the decision to end your own life, obviously it's complex and it varies, but in some ways it's like the ultimate signal that you don't feel as if the world is better off with you than without you.

[433] So many people who take their own lives, lose their lives to suicide, will say something like, you'll be better off without me. I've been a burden to you.

[434] I know I've been difficult.

[435] They convince themselves that they're not wanted.

[436] They're not needed.

[437] And so in a ways, that goes back to, like Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, Willie Lohman, takes his own life because he thinks that the life insurance his family will get will be will be a better breadwinner than he can be because he's so badly failed in his primary responsibility as a breadwinner.

[438] So it's not a new idea, but there's a really nice piece of work by Fiona Shand.

[439] She's an Australian research and the work was done primarily in Australia where they looked at the words that men who did take their own lives used to describe themselves before doing so or in some cases attempting to.

[440] But usually when men attempt suicide, they do lose their lives.

[441] And the two most commonly used words by those men who took their own lives were about themselves were useless and worthless.

[442] Now, of course, this is a sample of people who then went on to take their own words.

[443] own lives, but it's nonetheless, I think, very powerful statement that to get to that stage, you don't think you have worth, you don't think you have use, you don't think you're needed.

[444] And I believe that the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded.

[445] I think to be needed is arguably the most important and constant human requirement.

[446] And so if you end up feeling like, I'm not need, my family don't need me, my employer doesn't need me, my community doesn't need me, I am surplus to requirements, if anything, I'm a drag on my parents or on my community, I'm not adding value, how you define value, to the people around me. I'm taking away from it.

[447] That's the psychological trajectory that seems to put a lot of men towards this path.

[448] And well short of suicide, I think many of the other mental health problems we see among men, addiction, checking out in one way on another, coming out of the labor market, et cetera.

[449] They're not the most extreme form, of course, of checking out by literally taking your own life.

[450] But they are a different form of that.

[451] They are a different way of kind of benching yourself, taking yourself out of the equation, because of a sense of like, well, who needs me anyway?

[452] Right.

[453] And so I just think in a way that the suicide statistics are, in some ways, the kind of tip of the iceberg of this sense that many men have are feeling unneeded, unwanted.

[454] Is there an evolutionary basis for why men or humans, I guess, need to be needed amongst their community, do you think?

[455] Have you thought about that at all?

[456] Yeah.

[457] Well, when we started operating in tribes, of course.

[458] We realized we were going to sink or swim together, right?

[459] Or hunt or die together, maybe is a better way to put it.

[460] And so what that meant was being needed by your community and or your family was kind of central to the human experience.

[461] So the kind of invention of those bonds.

[462] And the difference is that for women, particularly once they become mothers, or if they're intending to become mothers, the question of like whether I'll be needed is never us in quite the same way because you're literally needed to grow children and give birth to them and feed them.

[463] And so that kind of very rooted sense of being needed for the species.

[464] I think it's just more obvious with women.

[465] But why do we need men?

[466] Why do we need dads?

[467] And that's a much more kind of recent phenomenon in the sense of being dads.

[468] And the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by Anna Machen.

[469] She's an anthropologist at the university.

[470] of Oxford about fatherhood.

[471] And she's, so I'm just paraphrasing her now, but she has this wonderful description of how we invented fatherhood because we went bipedal.

[472] Do you know all this?

[473] And the baby's head thing?

[474] It's amazing.

[475] So we had this bit of a crisis X hundreds of thousands of years ago.

[476] I'm terrible at remembering whether it's millions or hundreds of thousands, so Google it.

[477] Back in the ancestral times is what people say, right?

[478] So what happened was we had this massive growth spurt in our brains, in our heads, so we've got massive heads.

[479] But we also went bipedal.

[480] And if you're bipedal, your hips can't be that big.

[481] And so women couldn't get the heads of the babies out of their smaller hips.

[482] Right.

[483] So we're actually facing a bit of a crisis.

[484] The way we solved that crisis was by giving birth to babies way early than we should.

[485] Way, way early.

[486] In fact, if we were like other mammals, pregnancies would last about two years.

[487] So I don't know how women watching will feel about that.

[488] Can't speak to that, but two years would be about the average, right?

[489] We don't.

[490] We obviously do it at nine months.

[491] So they're incredibly vulnerable, and mum has to literally keep feeding them, right?

[492] And the caloric requirements, just a amount of food that they need, mom and baby, was huge.

[493] And so, Dad, go get food.

[494] This is only going to work.

[495] We're only going to survive as humans if this stuff comes.

[496] So in a way, that was the invention of fatherhood.

[497] And you see the brains of fathers, you know, getting activated by all this stuff.

[498] So being needed by the community, family, et cetera, to produce something, to provide something is, I think it's just deeply encoded.

[499] It's encoded in our DNA.

[500] It's like part of, like if we're not needed, then we're dead because we're going to be on our own, right?

[501] So these ties, familial ties, tribal ties, are actually central to our identity.

[502] And so the danger now is that if people, particularly men, start to feel like, am I needed?

[503] Does the community need me?

[504] Do my kids need me?

[505] Does the woman I've had my children with need me?

[506] Am I needed?

[507] If the answer to that is not clear, I think that has all kinds of downstream consequences.

[508] And we've just done a really poor job of making sure that even in this time of great transition, we still need you.

[509] we need every man every boy every everybody we need you we don't yet know exactly what we need you for but by god we need you we cannot afford to lose you you are precious and we need you know you i don't know what you're going to go on to be yet but by god our community cannot afford to lose you and so that message of just like how much we need you i just think we've lost a little bit of that in recent debates And too many men have drawn the conclusion that maybe they aren't needed with tragic consequences.

[510] A few questions there, just because I want to make sure I'm clear.

[511] Fiona's work in Australia around these letters that men had left before they had died by suicide.

[512] Did she also look at the letters that women had left?

[513] No, she only looked at men.

[514] Okay, fine, that's my first question.

[515] And for me, the key thing in the suicide stats is that, it's increasing it's increasing so if we're saying that it's a case of men not feeling needed then why is that sense that men aren't needed increasing if we're saying there's some kind of link between those two ideas yes yes because the extent to which they're needed is less clear now than it was right so it was very clear before that you're needed because you're the breadwin okay you're the provider right so go And I don't, I think part of the point here is that this idea of being kind of, this gets us into discussions about masculinity, but being generative, like producing, providing, it gets narrowed down to like the breadwinner model of like post -war Western societies.

[516] So like it's like a wage earner.

[517] But that's not all it means.

[518] It used to mean going, getting meat.

[519] It used to mean helping farm together.

[520] There's all kinds of ways you can be a provider.

[521] Service, I guess, as well, just like.

[522] Yeah, it's about being more.

[523] there's this great line from C .S. Lewis, the very good theologian, but obviously much better known for his work on the line, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Chronicles of Narnia.

[524] But he's this lovely line, and he was talking here about what it meant to be a Christian.

[525] But I think it applies to what it means to be a mature man as well.

[526] He said, you shouldn't think less of yourself.

[527] You should just think of yourself less.

[528] and there's something about service and just doing for others your family your community etc that I think is quite intrinsic to these ideas of mature masculinity and if men don't feel as if they are necessary or encouraged to have a kind of distinct and important role in the family in the community then I think that kind of question mark over well am I needed anymore is a real one And lots of people like Margaret Mead, anthropologists in the 70s, and a lot of conservatives were saying, look, if women do achieve a significant degree of economic independence, she thought that was a wonderful thing.

[529] The conservatives didn't, right?

[530] But they all agreed that we will have to think really hard about men.

[531] How do we make sure that men still feel connected and needed in our society if we have very quickly changed the central way in which they expressed that?

[532] a few things came to my so it's interesting before i move forward on this point um when you're talking about this idea of humans needing to be needed it made me reflect on some of the stats that came out around how quickly someone dies after they retire yeah and that that kind of general narrative that if you retire you don't have long left which is kind of you know this idea of a social tribe and feeling like you need to be serving the tribe in some way i've always wondered if there was any truth to that, this idea that, you know, retirement can speed up your mortality because you're, so it's almost like there's something in your body.

[533] Either one or two things could be happening.

[534] Number one, you just sit around more, which means, you know.

[535] You're more sedentary.

[536] Yeah, exactly.

[537] It's just going to kill you anyway.

[538] But number two is that there's almost, I don't know, I've ponded this idea that there's this almost a device in our brains that makes us the tribe and when it knows that we might have switched from becoming useful to the tribe to becoming burdensome to the tribe in some way now that we're consuming resources but providing none this device in our brain turns us off or something yeah that's that we're done we are surplus to requirements and so the decent thing to do is just you know die for the tribe yeah for the tribe and that we theoretically from an evolutionary standpoint we evolved as tribe so it's not impossible that there's something, you know.

[539] Well, I do think that we, I mean, of course, we didn't use to live anything like as long.

[540] This is a stat that I came across today, some of this new book that's just come out, which was in the, in 1963, the most common age of death was one.

[541] And now it's 83 or whatever, right?

[542] Do you know what I mean?

[543] So the progress we've made towards greater life expectancy generally has been huge, but it has then asked these questions about kind of being needed later on in life.

[544] So there's a couple of things I would say.

[545] One is that like having a job is just a massively powerful way of feeling needed, right?

[546] Just showing up.

[547] Like we need you to start to open up at six.

[548] We need you to like.

[549] And in fact, Arthur Brooks, who used to run the American Enterprise Institute, he tells this wonderful story.

[550] He was interviewing this guy who'd come out of prison, was in this new program, rehabilitation, etc. And he's chatting to him, and the guy gets a text while he's chatting to him, and he bursts into tears.

[551] That gets really tearful.

[552] And Arthur says, is everything all right?

[553] Did he get some bad news?

[554] You know, what's happening?

[555] Is this bad news?

[556] And he said, no, no, it's the opposite.

[557] And he showed the text to Arthur.

[558] And the text just said, Fred, can you get over here as soon as possible?

[559] I really need you.

[560] And the guy said to Arthur, I've never heard anyone say that sentence to me before.

[561] I've never had anyone say to me, I need you.

[562] And in this case, it was, I need you to come and I don't even know what it was, right?

[563] Fix this floor tile, deal with this customer.

[564] I don't know, but I need you.

[565] And it brought this guy to tears because he hadn't kind of felt that sense of neededness before.

[566] And at its best, the workplace signals to us on a daily basis or whatever.

[567] Like, yeah, you're needed, right?

[568] Your colleagues need you.

[569] They need each other.

[570] That's huge.

[571] And so if you then don't have that in the labor market, maybe because you've retired, the question is, are you still need it?

[572] And then I just think we have to reinvent the ways in which we can make use of the skills and wisdom of the people who've suddenly got time.

[573] So my mum, she volunteers as a reader in a primary school because she has time.

[574] And it's amazing.

[575] She gets to know the kids really well and she loves it and so on.

[576] You know, my father, he's on the board of a technical thing and he runs charity.

[577] They do stuff, right?

[578] They raise money for all these, because they've got time.

[579] And so they're just, they're contributing to the community in a new way.

[580] And actually, as more and more women work, those community roles that were previously very often filled by moms at home, like school volunteering, for example, right?

[581] Now they can be done by, perhaps by older people.

[582] And so part of this story here, I think, is also making sure that older people don't lose that sense too, because although we focus quite rightly on what's happening to young men, The suicide rates among older men are also very high, especially if they end up on their own.

[583] So kind of men on their own later in life are at massive risk, because if you take my theory about being needed quite seriously, they're just looking around and saying, will anyone even notice if I'm gone?

[584] Maybe they'll be better off.

[585] And so even for those older men, we have a job of work to do to make them feel really like, yeah, we need you.

[586] Your church needs you.

[587] your scout group needs you your local charity needs you your neighbours need you the kid across the street who needs help with his university applications needs you the boy down the road who's like struggling a bit because you know his parents have split up and just want someone to give him a cup of tea every now and I talk to him they need you we don't know the boy down the road anymore or the family next door anymore and I think so when you described that you were describing like an old fashioned way of the world in my mind because even you even said the word church I was like well you know where there's been a rise in atheism and a falling religiosity.

[588] So, yeah, that's part of the problem, though, and from this point of view, is that we used to have more institutional structures through which our connection to the broader community could be, you know, captured and organized, honestly, right?

[589] So you didn't have to sort of sit there on your own, someone saying, how can I contribute to the community?

[590] If you just volunteer as an usher or for a Bible club or to do the soup kitchen at your church.

[591] Life came sort of inherent with the responsibility, because even with church, I just grew up in there in my family.

[592] I wasn't religious after the age of 18, but as early as I knew, I was in the church, and I was in Sunday school, and I was in St. Luke's Hospice on the weekends with my mum, and I didn't choose that.

[593] It just came with life.

[594] Yeah, and actually, so the de -institutionalization of those community relationships, as we've seen these institutions weaken, has created a real problem, because the needs are still there, But it's like we didn't have the organizing framework, right?

[595] So whether it's churches or community groups or whatever, and moms.

[596] Like, one of the things that would happen, like, my mom was at home kind of most of the time.

[597] And back in the dark ages when I was being raised in the 70s and the 80s, they were a lot of moms around, right?

[598] And so they organized a bunch of stuff and they kind of took care of the community and they volunteered for stuff.

[599] And it's amazing now that women are in the workplace, of course.

[600] But that sense of like there were soft institutions like those networks, but also just, churches, community groups, et cetera, they basically provided a way to kind of plug in my time and energy to an institution that then did stuff for other people.

[601] It's really hard to do that on your own, right?

[602] It's really hard to recreate those institutions online or just on your own.

[603] And so I actually think that that's had a bigger effect on men as well, because historically and even today, women are a little bit better at kind of maintaining those community and social networks than men are.

[604] So absent those institutional roles, you're going to be a scout leader, you're going to be an usherent church, you're going to volunteer for the school PTA, you're going to, you know, you're going to do, we need men to do this, this, this and this, right?

[605] You're going to do that.

[606] And you're right.

[607] Some of it wasn't even questioned, it was just what you did.

[608] Of course, we want more choice, but I do worry about the loss of those institutional frameworks if we don't find ways to replace them.

[609] And you're starting to see that now, men's sheds, and men's groups and so on.

[610] But it's really hard to find secular online alternatives to those traditional institutions.

[611] You mentioned an elderly man who's now alone, maybe lost his partner, maybe, what do they call it, widowed, no, widower?

[612] What's the male?

[613] I think widowed is both, isn't it?

[614] Oh, is it?

[615] I think so.

[616] A widowed man. But as we think about younger men and the environment in which the sort of date, love environment that they're in.

[617] What's changed there?

[618] Because one of the ways that we can feel needed is if, you know, 18 years old, we find a partner and, you know, she makes me feel needed.

[619] In my life, my girlfriend is one of the people that makes me feel most needed and most important.

[620] She's constantly asking when I'm coming back from Dragon's Den filming or when I'm going to be here and she's, you know, she makes me feel like I've, I'm serviced to her in the same way that she's serviced to me. So, but that landscape seems to have changed as well, the dating environment, the romantic environment.

[621] Yeah, it's interesting.

[622] Again, I'm just reflecting on my own personal experience, too, just through the lives of my sons.

[623] And one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend buy her first car.

[624] And he's really into cars and all that stuff.

[625] And he's into finance, the loans.

[626] And he's just basically done, like, basically done the work for her around it because she's working full time and he's got a bit of time.

[627] And so that is a really good example.

[628] He said to me the day, he said, I said, God, you put a load of time into his like test driven, like 20 cars.

[629] and all of this stuff.

[630] Loads of this for your girlfriend.

[631] He's like, well, right now I don't have that much of my own stuff to do.

[632] So it's really nice to be able to do stuff for her.

[633] And so you're right.

[634] I think those relationships, they can be in like traditional families, but also, of course, friends, but particularly romantic relationships, they can do that for you.

[635] So it's not for nothing that we're dating less, dating later.

[636] You're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single, by comparison, and both the young women and in the past.

[637] And so that's another change, which you could argue is good or bad, right?

[638] Is it good or bad that we're dating later and having sex later and taking longer to get married and so on?

[639] Again, I think you can argue for sure there's lots of good stuff there.

[640] But one consequence of that is to leave a lot more men going a lot longer before those romantic relationships were also pulling on them, calling on them.

[641] to say, I need you to do this.

[642] I need to drive me to work.

[643] Can you pick me up from this?

[644] Can you do this?

[645] And that used to happen much, much earlier than it's happening now.

[646] And so there's now perfectly possibly 25, 26, 27 years of age.

[647] And your parents don't need you because then, you know, maybe you've left home because they don't need you.

[648] Maybe you don't have a girlfriend, so you don't have a girlfriend that needs you.

[649] Maybe you're not working or you're working in a place that you don't really feel like it matters if you're there or not.

[650] So it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid and late 20s as a man and honestly feel like it's not quite clear who needs you.

[651] It's interesting because also when you layer on top of that, the dating app environment, I had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about, I mean, I've had a couple of the founders of the big dating apps, but I've also had...

[652] Have you had the Tinder founder on?

[653] No. Okay.

[654] I've heard people that have left Tinder and started their own apps like Bumble.

[655] Oh, okay.

[656] But one of the things that I've come to learn is that the bottom sort of 50 % of men are basically getting not much action at all.

[657] Almost none, yeah.

[658] Almost none.

[659] And then the top 10 % of men are getting all the action because the way that these dating apps are set up is to really reward that sort of most affluent, most attractive top 10 % of men that are most desirable.

[660] But I imagine if you'd gone back 100 years, it was really like, who's in your village versus, you know, yeah, versus an algorithm sorting millions of people.

[661] Yes, but it's so interesting that pattern, you describe of like the bottom 50 % of men basically not getting much action, if any, and the top 10 % are getting almost all of it.

[662] Because an evolutionary psychologist that I know looked at that data and said, that looks like human history to me. So if we go back further, actually 95 % of known human societies were polygamous.

[663] Monogamy is very weird and very recent.

[664] And here's one that always blows my mind, even though I've said it so many times now, is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.

[665] We have twice as many women in our ancestral past as men.

[666] Why is that?

[667] How does that make sense?

[668] Because, and the reason it's so hard for a modern brain to get ahead around that is because you're thinking, well, you need a man and a woman to have a kid, right?

[669] So you'd have to have equal numbers.

[670] Yeah.

[671] But you're thinking about monogamy.

[672] Across human history, men have only had about a 50 % chance of reproducing.

[673] So, in each generation, half the male lines just literally die out.

[674] Like 50 % of the men just don't have kids.

[675] So, boom, they're gone.

[676] And almost all women have reproduced.

[677] Right.

[678] So if you've got almost all women reproducing 50 % of men, then mathematically you're going to end it twice as many female ancestors.

[679] Because you don't need that many men to have babies.

[680] And so historically, what's happened is the top status men with the, the gold and the rich, whatever, they've had multiple wives.

[681] Or certainly concubines or multiple partners.

[682] And there's, like, famous examples.

[683] Like, Genghis Khan is the ancestor to whoever.

[684] But in Ireland, something like more than one in five Irish, people are descended from king, whatever it is.

[685] Well, I was told my grandfather in Nigeria has, I'm going to say, 10 wives.

[686] Okay.

[687] I'm told that I have 40 -odd uncles and aunties in Nigeria.

[688] Not intending to go back anytime soon, just in case there's a lot of conversations.

[689] You're not tempted by that model?

[690] I'm not, no, no, I'm actually going to Nigeria soon, but it's a headache to think about navigating that many uncles and aunties.

[691] But is it interesting how actually these, by going online and sort of taking away the sort of cultural norm around kind of monogamy, in a way, what it's exposed is kind of this ancient pattern, which is women are much pickier than men around partner selection, right?

[692] And so women are trying to, women are sort of, ideally, I'll go for him.

[693] And women are just going, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know which way it is.

[694] That's right, which way?

[695] It's right.

[696] Yeah, so the women are going, no, no, no, no. Swipe.

[697] Oh, he's incredibly handsome and incredibly rich and right.

[698] Maybe, whatever, like, maybe.

[699] Whereas the men are like, yeah, sure.

[700] Yeah, sure.

[701] She looks nice.

[702] Maybe not.

[703] Yeah.

[704] So you get this incredible asymmetry between the two.

[705] But in some ways, it's like, I'm making a light of it.

[706] But actually, could you find a kind of more telling sign of the fact that so many men are just kind of feeling like, well, maybe a bit useless, not very attractive, not very needed, not very like just, right, the old rules about how to kind of navigate the romantic space, the old rules about how to be a man, the old rules about how to succeed, a lot of those have just been turned upside down, creating this huge vacuum, which has been filled by all kinds of bad stuff.

[707] and but also just this massive sense of disorientation.

[708] It's like a kaleidoscope.

[709] You shake it, right, but it's still moving.

[710] We don't know what the new patterns look like yet.

[711] And so I genuinely kind of feel like when I talk to a lot of young man and see them, that is the sense they've got.

[712] They're just like, whoa, like the disorientation that they're feeling as we've kind of shifted these equilibrium.

[713] In some ways, the online dating apps are just magnifying that.

[714] But there's a, that's not a great feeling, is it, to go.

[715] and go on a dating app and not get any interest at all.

[716] I mean, you wouldn't know because you're not on dating apps.

[717] Well, I'm not on dating apps.

[718] And when you were, I'm sure you got plenty of attention.

[719] Well, do you know what's funny?

[720] When I was on dating apps, I didn't get much attention.

[721] Really?

[722] No, I didn't.

[723] And I've got a very good looking best friend.

[724] And he got all of the attention.

[725] So bear in mind, I was 18 shoplifting food to feed myself.

[726] I was scrawny as hell.

[727] Okay.

[728] I was, you know.

[729] Did you put all that on the?

[730] But I tried to put my best selfie on there and I just couldn't get any like decent leads.

[731] And my best friend who's like blonde and beautiful and he's got the perfect hair and he looks like something out of like a magazine, I would sit with him and he would just get the pick of the litter.

[732] So my whole strategy was I would just do much better in person when I met people.

[733] But obviously it's much more difficult to meet people.

[734] If you look at the stance around how people meet, it's crazy.

[735] It's like a vertical line upwards.

[736] when you look at the line that's showing people meeting online, just out of nowhere.

[737] And school's gone down and church has gone down and through a friend has gone down and it's pretty much all online.

[738] So if you're not, I think, aesthetically beautiful in the typical sense of the word and, you know, have signals of wealth and status, you really are going to struggle.

[739] And I actually came to learn this a lot, not just from my own experience in dating apps once upon a time, but also from doing this podcast.

[740] And I remember the first time we had on a founder of a dating app and put the episode out assuming everyone would love it and just the anger in the comment section from pretty much all men who feel like dating apps have ruined their lives or are just an evil thing in the world and it really caught me off guard in fact reading those comments on that particular episode is when I go oh my god people hate dating apps there's like this group of people that just think it's like the cause of all pain um this is really difficult stuff to talk about, I think, because it's so visceral, it's primal.

[741] We're talking about sex.

[742] We're talking about procreation.

[743] We're talking about our DNA being passed on and who with.

[744] And so it's not for nothing if something's happening in that market.

[745] And it's not for nothing.

[746] We see a huge rise in the share of childless men, especially getting to 40 and of women, but more, even more so for men.

[747] And more men saying, having children important to them.

[748] More men starting to say, actually, forming a family is kind of important to them.

[749] And so there's a weird paradox here, which is that, you know, the old idea of, like, marriage and kids is that, like, women have to kind of trap men into it, right?

[750] You know, as men, we just want to go our own way, right?

[751] We want to be cowboys.

[752] We're out in the desert or the forest or something, but the ball and chain, the woman, she traps you, right?

[753] And she domesticates you and you kind of go along with it because you're going to have kids, right?

[754] But in your heart, in your heart, you're still out there on the frontier, right?

[755] And she's the one at the heart.

[756] Arthur.

[757] That is complete bullshit on every single level.

[758] Actually, historically, back to where we were before, being masculine meant being in the tribe.

[759] It meant generating more than you need for yourself.

[760] I love this idea of a surplus that comes from this guy, David Gilmore, that mature men generate more of whatever it is than they need.

[761] They're surplus generators.

[762] So rather than being surplus to requirements, which is what I think a lot of men feel.

[763] They actually generate a surplus for others to use.

[764] And so the idea of like, you've heard this men, going their own way movement.

[765] It's like a male separatist thing online.

[766] We're going to go our own way.

[767] We don't need, no, turning away from women is the opposite of masculinity, right?

[768] Masculinity defined as like a lone ranger or a, I'm my own man is the least masculine sentence I think you could ever utter.

[769] I'm just my own man. I do my own thing, right?

[770] If you're not a man for others, then in my view, you're not, you're not a man. And so it's quite interesting to kind of think about how the current world of like dating and families and so on, if it does leave many men feeling like they're not going to have those connections, they're not going to have a sense of being for others, and not providing just in the economic sense, but being needed, then it does leave a lot of them bench, and they either go their own way or they get mad as hell, so you see the rise of the in -cell movement, etc. And so again, you're just seeing these extreme examples are the ones that get the headlines, but behind that, behind the kind of men who are acting out, men who are checking out and are just saying, I think I'm done with this.

[771] And that's very dangerous.

[772] Marriage has also had a knock on effect to this, hasn't it?

[773] Because the sort of the role of marriage in society has changed, but also the stats around marriage seem to be changing.

[774] What information do you have on that?

[775] Am I right in thinking that marriage is in decline?

[776] A little bit.

[777] Yeah.

[778] Marriage has gone down.

[779] This is one area where it's very different in different countries, so I have to be careful about this.

[780] Like in the US, there's a big class gap in marriage.

[781] Like college educated Americans are still getting married.

[782] non -college educated Americans are not but in most of Western Europe you've seen a big rise in the share of kids being born outside marriage now the question then was like what job if anything was being done by marriage and if marriage was a way to sort of signal and enshrine a commitment to having kids together raising those kids together then in a sense like there all kinds of only have a civil partnership now or there are legal documents you can have that kind of do that.

[783] And so if it gets, if the decline of marriage is related to a decline in fathering, that's a problem.

[784] It doesn't have to mean that because a, you can be a perfectly good father if you're living with your partner and you're not married.

[785] But also, you can be a good father if, for whatever reason, the relationship with the mother doesn't work out.

[786] It's harder.

[787] You're going to have to kind of work at it a bit more, but you can still do it.

[788] But because, Because of this old idea of, like, fathering being bundled together with marriage, right?

[789] I think that's my big problem is it was like a one -stop thing, right?

[790] It's like, husband and father was kind of like one thing.

[791] But that's not true anymore.

[792] So it's okay, if that's not true, so long as we don't lose the fathering bit.

[793] Because dads matter for their kids as much as their moms in different ways and at different times, on average.

[794] But so my worry about the changes in family are not about marriage per se.

[795] they're about what that might mean for fatherhood.

[796] And what a conservative critics will say is, well, the evidence is that actually the men who marry are more engaged fathers and do stick around for longer.

[797] But of course, the problem with that, that's one of the reasons they got married.

[798] Yeah, of course, yeah.

[799] Right.

[800] So it's very hard to tease out cause and effect there.

[801] And in the end, I'm sort of agnostic about the marriage question, but I'm not agnostic about the fathering question.

[802] I don't think you have a moral responsibility to get married before you have kids at all.

[803] I do think that if you have kids, you have a moral responsibility to be a father to those kids.

[804] That is a, that's an inextinguishable moral responsibility.

[805] And that gets a little bit lost because sometimes on the feminist left to just characterize horribly say, do we need, do we need dads anymore?

[806] Isn't that a bit heteronormative?

[807] I've sometimes been accused of being heteronormative for being pro -dad.

[808] Now, what about same -sex couples?

[809] What about single parents?

[810] Are we saying that they need their dads, right?

[811] Isn't that, that feels a bit old -fashioned, a bit conservative to get that on the other side.

[812] And then another side is, yeah, of course, dads matter.

[813] That's why they all have to get, that's why they should be married.

[814] And of course, the truth is between the two.

[815] The truth is that dads matter will stop, whether they're married to the mother or not.

[816] And both the people who insist that the only way to do that is true marriage are wrong and the people who insist that dads don't matter are equally wrong.

[817] And about 40 % of births in the US now take place outside of marriage, which is up from about 10%.

[818] Yeah, it's quadrupled in the US.

[819] That's crazy.

[820] That's just Why is that?

[821] The US is really weird because it has really high rates of like unmarried pregnancies and births, but then like really high rates of marriage among the kind of college educated at the top.

[822] So as I said, this huge class gap.

[823] There's a race element here.

[824] So 70 % of black kids in the US are born outside marriage.

[825] There's also a huge education gap here, as I just alluded to, is a big, big class gap.

[826] So most kids to non -college educated parents are born outside marriage in the US now.

[827] And so it's weird.

[828] what's happened is that the average marriage rate in the U .S. is really disguising these huge differences by race and class, whereas in most Western European countries, there aren't such big differences by race or class.

[829] It's sort of more of a general decline.

[830] It hasn't declined particularly more for one class than another in the UK.

[831] So quite common in the UK for couples to decide to have kids together, have kids together, and not get married.

[832] And that's definitely true in Scandinavia and Northern Europe as well.

[833] And who is marriage good for?

[834] Who's it serving more men or women?

[835] Now men.

[836] Because I was thinking, if we pressed a button and the marriage stats went backwards in time, i. more people got married and they got married within, when they gave birth within marriages, would that be better for men or women?

[837] Better for men.

[838] Why?

[839] Because marriage being with the kids and kind of with the mum is just right now still an incredibly important way for men to feel needed, connected, involved, etc. Now, that might change, but right now, it is pretty clear that they'll do better.

[840] And, like, if you look at the impact of being married and not married on employment, earnings, health, physical and mental health, life expectancy, huge positive impacts for men, much less so for women.

[841] So it's like women, and of course, if we go back, if we went the other way, like you'd say, well, actually women who weren't married were in real trouble economically.

[842] until recently, right?

[843] So my line from before was that, like, women used to be economically dependent on men, but men were emotionally dependent on women.

[844] And I think we've really done a lot on the first half of that, and it's kind of revealing the second part, the kind of the fact that actually, wifeless men, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well.

[845] In fact, they do terribly.

[846] So I've mentioned this four -fold suicide difference in risk.

[847] It's eight and eightfold difference among divorced men and women.

[848] So men who get divorced, their risk of suicide skyrockets.

[849] So the question is like why, and I think it is because of this sense of like not being needed, not being slept.

[850] Like if your kids are at home and your wife's at home and you know, you're just, you're contributing to the family unit, I think that's much obvious.

[851] And it's really interesting in recent surveys in the US at least, men are now more likely than women to say that it's important to them to get married.

[852] So what does that say about what's going on in men's heads if they're now more keen on marriage than women?

[853] What is, because that's to me sounded a little bit, I know, territorial.

[854] Well, there's a danger with that.

[855] And of course, you can get into real trouble as one of your previous guests did by talking about enforced monogamy.

[856] Who he talked about Jordan Peterson.

[857] Oh, did he?

[858] Yeah, he talked about enforced monogamy.

[859] And you can imagine enforced monogamy?

[860] Enforced monogamy.

[861] He didn't say that on this show, did he?

[862] I don't think so.

[863] Okay.

[864] But no, I think it said an interview.

[865] Interesting.

[866] It's a very unfortunate term.

[867] It's actually a term from anthropology that basically was a way of describing this new way of raising families.

[868] It's only been around for a few centuries where you just, where men and women, either by law or by social norm, are only required to marry one person.

[869] They're required.

[870] Well, you can't, bigamy is a crime.

[871] What's bigamy?

[872] Being married to more than one person.

[873] Okay.

[874] Right.

[875] It's a crime in the U .S., it's a crime in the U .S., it's a crime in most, in most countries.

[876] It's actually against the law to have more than one spouse.

[877] Imagine how illiberal is that?

[878] The state telling me how many wives I'm allowed or how many husbands?

[879] I thought when you said required, I thought you meant you have to marry one person.

[880] Sorry, that's what people thought it meant.

[881] And that's why you got to such terrible trouble.

[882] But actually what it's referring to is a social system, which is basically against polygamy.

[883] It's basically saying, no, no, no, no. No one gets forced into marriage.

[884] What it is is saying, if you're going to marry, it can only be monogamous, right?

[885] Okay.

[886] So the trouble is that people, the trouble is people heard it as we're going to force you into marriage and into monogamy.

[887] And actually what the term means is we're not going to allow you to be polygamous.

[888] Okay.

[889] So it's kind of, it was sort of misinterpreted.

[890] The term was kind of misinterpreted.

[891] But it does speak to this fear, I think, that people will feel forced economically or socially into it.

[892] It's actually, because not for nothing, that Andrew Tate, I'm sure you know Andrew Tate and his words.

[893] work.

[894] I know who he is, yeah.

[895] Right.

[896] I don't know him.

[897] I've never spoken to.

[898] Right, but I'm who I'm referring to, right?

[899] Why did he convert to Islam?

[900] People aren't talking about this, by the way.

[901] This is not a polite topic of conversation, Andrew Tate's conversion.

[902] For understandable reasons, people don't want to be seen to be stoking Islamophobia or whatever, but I will tell you this, and we published a piece by an Imam.

[903] Yes, Andrew Tate has a huge following among young Muslim men in the US and the UK, and he's now converted to Islam publicly.

[904] And the reason he's done that is so he can have multiple wives, which is, to be fair to him, entirely consistent with his worldview about gender and gender equality and the role of men and women, right?

[905] And so it's interesting to kind of think about the role, and there's this rise of polyamory now, and so on.

[906] Actually, thinking about monogamy, polygamy, etc., it's a much more complicated story.

[907] I think that many people are willing to admit because it's not clear that if we just kind of take away the sort of social norms around like the one and one model that that will necessarily be better for men.

[908] So when you say, of course men are in favour of it.

[909] Of course you'd be in favour of it.

[910] Like who wouldn't want three wives?

[911] Shouldn't speak for you?

[912] No, I'm trying to satisfy one at the moment.

[913] Right.

[914] Right, that's the most of the same thing.

[915] But actually, as some people point now is, you know, actually if you're a woman, is it clear that you'd rather be the only wife of an unemployed steel worker than the second wife of an incredibly successful podcaster?

[916] Maybe, maybe for all women, that's a clear choice, right?

[917] But the kind of point simply being is we shouldn't just assume that this is kind of a male, you know, only for kind of man idea.

[918] Anyway, it's a digression into an area that I'm far from expert in, but it's prompted by this whole idea about dating marriage and commitment.

[919] And so where I would land on this is that even as we reform marriage, family life, the roles of men and women, we have to be really careful to keep grounding men in a sense of being needed by their kids, especially.

[920] and by their communities.

[921] So if not in the traditional way, to a recently traditional marriage as a breadwinner and provider and all that, the one my father had, and lots of other things besides, swimming coach, math tutor, chauffeur, all the ways he provided for us and as a father, if we're going to replace that with a new model, we have to be really careful to make sure that we do replace it and that we don't actually make men feel like they are not needed in this new world.

[922] Are women asking for divorce?

[923] You know, you're talking about that, you know, idea of polygamy and women and men, are women asking for divorce now more so than men are?

[924] Yes, women are more likely to precipitate divorce than men.

[925] And again, does it...

[926] About two to one, I think.

[927] Wow.

[928] Certainly, that's certainly a much higher...

[929] In the US, it's much higher among women, yeah.

[930] I mean, that's an indication of something.

[931] It's an indication of a healthy freedom.

[932] Yeah, exit power.

[933] Yeah, exit power.

[934] I mean, that's what an economist would call it, right?

[935] And that that shows you, that's a massive sign of success that women can leave relationships in a way that they couldn't before because they were trapped economically.

[936] And so this kind of economic trap that was marriage, which the women's movement really kind of really took aim out and just said this institution of marriage is basically a way to trap and oppress women in relationships of economic dependency, which will be powerless because.

[937] he has the money, right?

[938] That feminist critique of traditional marriage was profound and correct.

[939] And the results have been extraordinary in unbundling that and giving women an economic power.

[940] Because without economic power, women don't have choice about marriage.

[941] So now we've got this massive rise in women's choice as to whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have kids, who to have kids with, etc. And so you've seen this massive expansion of women's choice and power, which is magnificent and destabilizing, especially for men.

[942] Both of those things can be true at once.

[943] Yeah.

[944] It can be creating these unintended destabilizing consequences for men.

[945] And if we then add to that a danger sometimes to either mock men or masculinity, almost pathologize them in humor, but sometimes maybe not so much in humor as well.

[946] I think that just doubles down on this sense.

[947] It's like not only are you not needed, but maybe you're actually a bit toxic.

[948] And so I think there's, of all the moments to not be really kind of making sure that men feel really bad about themselves, this is not that moment, right?

[949] What do you think of that phrase toxic masculinity?

[950] I think it's toxic.

[951] I think the term toxic masculinity is toxic.

[952] I didn't always think that.

[953] It's taking me a while to get to that.

[954] But I would now say it's basically a slur.

[955] It's a gender slur, if you like.

[956] And it's just used too easily, too loosely, too casually to describe male behavior that we don't.

[957] like.

[958] And I would say actually most thoughtful kind of women's groups and feminists are not supporting it now because it just, it's not a great recruiting tool by and large, right?

[959] So one big problem with it is if you ask people who use the term toxic masculinity to define non -toxic masculinity, they struggle.

[960] They'll say, oh, no, no, there are positive aspects of masculinity.

[961] So, okay, great, great, what are they?

[962] And they'll say nurturing and caring and kindness and emotional availability.

[963] And you go, and is that different?

[964] from femininity?

[965] No, no, no, it's the same.

[966] Okay, so let me get this straight.

[967] Masculinity is either toxic or not masculine.

[968] Because if they start saying courage, positive risk -taking, well -channeled competitiveness, do you say, what, are you saying women aren't courageous?

[969] No, no, no, I'm not saying that.

[970] Okay, so sorry, what do you, so it's an empty set.

[971] So non -toxic masculinity is basically an empty set.

[972] So they can't fill that category.

[973] So you've either got toxic or nothing.

[974] That's bad.

[975] But also just think on a visceral level, it reminds me, and you have a church background.

[976] So the phrase toxic masculinity really reminds me of the term original sin.

[977] It's something in you that's kind of, you didn't have any choice about it, like you inherited it from previous generations.

[978] And it's kind of bad.

[979] I can't get rid of it.

[980] So they sound like you're born with this flaw.

[981] You've got to repent at all opportunities for you.

[982] And it feels like that to me. And maybe this is the third point.

[983] I don't know.

[984] But I'm like, honestly, is the best we can offer to young men is a prospectus that we could make them not toxic?

[985] How would you like to be non -toxic?

[986] Isn't that an exciting idea?

[987] It's the worst recruiting slogan ever.

[988] And so it's driving young men away.

[989] It's an incredibly unhelpful term.

[990] It's unfairly applied.

[991] It used to have some value.

[992] in academia, like before 2016, it had this very technical term in academia.

[993] But I think it's a time now, it really just does send this incredibly unfortunate message to men, which doesn't encourage a debate about how to be a better man. I much prefer immature and mature masculinity.

[994] I like the idea of saying, like, what does mature masculinity look like?

[995] Because you know what immature masculinity looks like, right?

[996] And so I think this kind of maturation is a much better way to frame it than toxic, non -toxic.

[997] Is there such a thing as, and I've never asked this question before?

[998] but it just came to mind.

[999] Is there such a thing as toxic femininity?

[1000] Have you watched Mean Girls?

[1001] I can't say I've watched it, but I know the movie and I've seen trailers and stuff.

[1002] And there's a new Tina Fey movie, I think, right?

[1003] Okay.

[1004] An update of it.

[1005] But yeah, I think this relates to the debate about social media and the way that social media is so particularly damaging to the mental health of teen girls and young women because it's very relational.

[1006] And so the relational bullying that girls and young women are more like to engage in than men are.

[1007] So men are more likely historically, much less so today, but to have bullied physically.

[1008] Women are much more likely to bully relationally.

[1009] So they exclude you.

[1010] You're not my best friend anymore.

[1011] You're not invited.

[1012] And they bully by using how you look.

[1013] So that relational bullying gets kind of amplified by social media.

[1014] And so if you were to try and define toxic femininity, I suspect that's where you would go.

[1015] and it would be around ostracism and meanness.

[1016] If you think the mean girls' phenomenon is getting at something real, which is the ability of kind of women to be pretty brutal to each other, it's probably something more around that.

[1017] But I just think putting the word toxic before either femininity or masculinity is just a bad move.

[1018] I think it's a bad move intellectually, and I think it's a terrible move culturally.

[1019] On this subject of masculinity, one of the sort of defining traits of masculinity, Linnensian society is that men don't speak, they don't open up and they're less likely to I think they struggle more to form friendships.

[1020] I've certainly found that to be the case in my life.

[1021] If you drop me and my partner in London, as actually has happened, and she wasn't from here, she's never lived here before, it only took her a couple of months before she's got a group.

[1022] She's going to these like dance, this class, and I'm away doing Dragon's Day next week, so she's found a group of Portuguese girls and she's going to go watch the match.

[1023] I could never.

[1024] I don't know how the hell she's made friends.

[1025] I've made zero new friends in London in five years.

[1026] My friends are my colleagues and my friends that I've had for 10 years.

[1027] That is it.

[1028] I don't make new friends.

[1029] And this is something that I have echoed to me a lot when I meet men out and about when I do talks and stuff and they come up to me after.

[1030] I've had men whisper to me, how do I make friends where I'm lonely?

[1031] And when they do it, they come really, really close so that the person behind them in the queue can't hear them say it.

[1032] I've had exactly the same experience.

[1033] And they whisper it about.

[1034] how do I make friends or I'm feeling lonely or something like that.

[1035] And I've heard in your work, the work that was in your book, and I think on page 45, you say that there is a male friendship recession.

[1036] What did you mean when you said that?

[1037] We're seeing a decline in friendships generally, but it's much more acute for men.

[1038] So in the US, 15 % of men under the age of 30 say they don't have a single close friend.

[1039] That's up from 3 % in 1990.

[1040] And so it's almost one in seven men.

[1041] you're seeing declining number of men saying how much time they spend with friends shrinking social networks everything you've just described which is like the process of making and sustaining friends is just something that men are really struggling with right now much more so than women and I think there's a couple of things going on here one is we're revealing the extent to which a lot of that work was actually outsourced to women before right so if you're in a couple how often are the social arrangements made by the women um they do a lot of that maintenance the relationship maintenance and the men free ride on the women right every like weekend plan that's outside of my comforts in pretty much most of them come from my partner all right she's organized something she's an organizer she wants to go try this thing right and you're like let's go do vegan sushi role you know i just want to play far cry five i just want to lie on my back on much manchester united all right fine i chose the wrong i chose the wrong thing Yeah, I don't.

[1042] So I think, like, and women have been better at it, and men haven't had to do as much of it.

[1043] So in some ways, like, I think we're being exposed a bit more in a sense that, like, women aren't doing as much as that work for us anymore.

[1044] They're saying, look, I'm, like, it's not my job to create your friendship network for you.

[1045] So we're having to do it.

[1046] And we're not very good at it.

[1047] And we're still not very good at it yet.

[1048] And I've had the same experience.

[1049] I mean, I wrote a bit about loneliness.

[1050] And I spoke at an event not that like, oh, afterwards.

[1051] And I had a couple of young men exactly the same as you.

[1052] just come close and just say I'm incredibly lonely and thank you for talking about this and you end up hugging them and like and actually for me I was talking about this the other day there's something about loneliness that just breaks my heart in a way that other forms of suffering don't and I don't know why but if I hear about someone that's really lonely it just my mom was talking about this guy that who she ran into him and he was going to this supermarket and You know, he was in front of her, you know, in the queue.

[1053] And she's like, no, I'll go after you.

[1054] He's like, no, no, no, you go first.

[1055] And he says, I'm on my own.

[1056] And actually the hours after dinner, especially in the summer, they're the hardest.

[1057] So I always come down here to the supermarket and I buy a couple of things and then come back and have a chat.

[1058] And, you know, it fills my time.

[1059] And my mom, because she's like a massive, like, she's like a social worker to the world.

[1060] She ends up chatting to him and getting his phone number.

[1061] But actually, that just pierced my heart.

[1062] it's just and so when you hear about these men young old women like who are lonely I think it's huge and and so I and back to our earlier bit of the conversation too is like those institutions that maybe used to kind of connect you to other people right where do you where do you make friends and you just said at work right and so I think our colleagues in some ways become our friends and that's not necessarily a bad thing saying it is a bad thing but but it's it's different to the friends you've made at church or through your sports or through do you know what I mean or wherever and And so the other thing I'll say about this is, have you heard of the men's sheds movement?

[1063] I don't know what a men's sheds is, but I've heard of male groups and stuff emerging.

[1064] Yes, there's a lot of male groups emerge.

[1065] There's one, which is the Australian government just funded this in Australia.

[1066] It's called the men's sheds, and there are places where men go and fix stuff.

[1067] Like you'll bring a lawn mill where I do stuff, right?

[1068] And it's one of the things that I've found, I've really learned from this.

[1069] I wish I'd known more about it before.

[1070] It's like, have you heard of this thing about men communicating more easily shoulder?

[1071] shoulder to shoulder than face to face.

[1072] Have you come across this?

[1073] Yeah, yeah, I've heard about this.

[1074] It's really interesting.

[1075] So when my wife would sometimes, and her boys came home from school, she'd sit down directly opposite them, like across the breakfast bar type thing, right?

[1076] And she'd sit directly opposite and give them protein.

[1077] And then she'd be like, how's your day?

[1078] Yeah.

[1079] And then later on, she'd be like, yeah, right?

[1080] And then later on, we'd be driving somewhere or watching soccer or playing a video game, like shoulder to shoulder.

[1081] And they'd be like, yeah, it's a weird thing happened today.

[1082] With her or with me, right?

[1083] So eventually, I said that you've got to stop staring them in the face.

[1084] That's not how men open up, right?

[1085] And so the men's sheds movement is actually, I think, based on a profound insight, which is that men have to be doing something in order to be being with their friend.

[1086] Go into any coffee shop and count how many people are sitting there staring at each other for hours on end, mostly women.

[1087] Not saying, right, right.

[1088] And then go to fishing, road trips.

[1089] It's the only explanation for golf.

[1090] Do you play golf?

[1091] Thank God.

[1092] But like when a guy is saying, do you think I should use the five iron?

[1093] Yeah.

[1094] I don't play golf either, right?

[1095] But what he's really saying is, I love you.

[1096] Yeah.

[1097] Or I'm lonely or need to have a boy.

[1098] And so there is something to be said for like men.

[1099] And even people have studied actually how men stand in relation to each other at like a party or something.

[1100] When I've told you this, you won't be able to stop looking.

[1101] Is that men actually are always a bit of an angle, right?

[1102] We just don't stand face to face.

[1103] It spikes are threat, cortisol or whatever.

[1104] So we always stand a little bit.

[1105] of an angle um but also like doing something together um requires us to be more shoulder to shoulder which is why some psychotherapist now they do walking talking therapy they realize that with men especially like sitting them down and staring at them is less effective quite often going for a walk you've done therapy haven't you yeah how was it i've done therapy and i've done couples therapy and um actually i will say that i did much better with a male therapist and one of them we did walk.

[1106] And so I'm basing some of some kind of personal experience, which is like, there's something about sitting on a chair and being stared at and told to open up.

[1107] I've been there.

[1108] Do you find it hard to do that?

[1109] Yes, I do.

[1110] I find it really, really hard.

[1111] When I did couples therapy and I've done individual therapy, I found it really hard.

[1112] I found it even harder in couples therapy.

[1113] Was it a male or a female therapist?

[1114] It was, I had a male therapist, and then I had a male and female therapist at the same time okay it's interesting because in couples therapy i found it easier with just a woman and then in individual therapy i find it easier with a man i think it's one of the reasons i'm really worried about the declining share of men in psychology and therapy i mean you know we're emptying the men out of those professions really yeah yeah the share of men going into psychology and counselling has plummeted in the US and the UK so there are few and fewer men it's getting harder and harder to find a male therapist now maybe that doesn't matter but I absolutely think it matters and again we're basically like you've just shared your experience I'll share mine is I think to have the option when one of my kids were really needed therapy too I think for him he did so much better with a man and I think there's some depending on the nature of the problem maybe you're it's just something about like an intuitive connection If you're a B to be marketeer, then you'll want to stick around for the next 30 seconds or so.

[1115] As a business to business marketeer, you'll know how tough it is to explain what you do.

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[1127] I think I heard you say that going to couples counseling with your partner was one of the most difficult things you've ever done.

[1128] Yes.

[1129] This is a quote.

[1130] The hardest thing you've ever done as a man is when him and your wife went to couples therapy.

[1131] You said that on Scott Galloway's podcast.

[1132] Yes.

[1133] Why?

[1134] so my wife and I were working through actually a lot of these issues that we've been talking about today like what our relative roles were and responsibilities and she's been very successful professionally and we've raised our kids together I've been a stay -at -home dad and then worked and so on and there was this moment where that was really one of those pivotal moments in your life where I was talking about what I'd done at home and how it supported her career and, you know, all of that.

[1135] And she looked at me and said, you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough.

[1136] The problem is that you're not masculine enough.

[1137] Like, that's a moment.

[1138] That's a real moment.

[1139] That was a, it was, and we then started talking, what did she mean by that?

[1140] And it was about responsibility.

[1141] It was about stepping in in some ways some of those roles.

[1142] And what I came to realize, and this is in some ways the book, the book underneath that book, which is my own journey and my own struggles with my own sense of what does it mean to be a man. What does masculinity mean in a relationship and a society of profound moral.

[1143] equality between men and women.

[1144] And I realized that in some ways, I'd been sort of almost at war with my own masculinity for quite a long time because it didn't fit my feminist mindset, right?

[1145] Like, to the extent that there were things that I kind of wanted or felt that didn't fit with the kind of model of gender equality and feminism, that was a problem to be solved, rather than a way of being to be expressed and learned about.

[1146] And it took that moment of my incredibly feminist, unbelievably professionally successful wife to say, I think the problem is you're not masculine enough.

[1147] And it was just like the energy that I had.

[1148] And like I felt as if like asking for more in our relationship for myself, was to be a bad feminist, was to not support her.

[1149] I was supposed to be a good ally.

[1150] You know, the world is made for men and all our needs and desires and so on.

[1151] So my job was to be an ally to her.

[1152] And anything that got in the way of that, or that was difficult or complicated.

[1153] And it was, well, I don't know what would have happened to our relationship without it, but I can tell you that from that moment onwards, our relationship grew and flourish and continues to flower in a way that it just would not otherwise have done because it's almost like, by being so direct, she forced this movement inside me where I almost gave myself permission to give some expression to the sides of myself that are more masculine.

[1154] I mean, that's not the conversation people hear publicly.

[1155] You're not putting this out, are you?

[1156] I thought it was just us.

[1157] But I mean, people don't, people don't, There's so much truth to that, and I think there's so many women that are listening right now that are nodding their head and can relate in various ways because of the way that society is to some degree now.

[1158] But that's not the narrative we hear that a woman would turn to you and ask you to be more masculine in the context of sort of the typical idea of what masculinity means.

[1159] It released what it means to her.

[1160] Yeah, almost the opposite.

[1161] It would be the toxic, back to your point about it, is masculinity the problem?

[1162] which I thought it was, and it took her to point out that no, no, no, it's how it's expressed that's the question.

[1163] And for me, it was like I just, I thought that being assertive in the relationship was somehow bad because it was associated with kind of patriarchy, masculinity and like men dominating.

[1164] And it's really interesting.

[1165] I'll bring it down to like a more benign level.

[1166] I think a lot of young women actually one of the things they feel about a lot young men is that they're a bit passive.

[1167] It's almost like a lot of those men almost don't feel they have permission to be assertive.

[1168] And what women, like, it's fun for you and I to talk about what women want, isn't it?

[1169] But I think there's something like, what a lot of the women I talk to say is like, I just want someone who's my equal.

[1170] And that's so weird to say now, right?

[1171] But they want someone that's a partner that's with them.

[1172] And they say, well, what should we do tonight?

[1173] or, you know, where should we go for dinner?

[1174] And if he says, I don't know, you decide.

[1175] I don't mind, right?

[1176] It's always just like, well, no, you decide and you make a plan and you, you know, you book it.

[1177] You, like, show some agency here.

[1178] And I might not always agree with you or even like it.

[1179] We can get into that, right?

[1180] But just going passive is not what makes you a good partner or a good feminist.

[1181] And I think my, maybe my generation, I'm older than you, maybe my generation of men have really struggled more with that.

[1182] just because I think there was this kind of strong sense that we that we needed to sort of yeah just in order for women to become bigger we had to make ourselves smaller and I think that was a profound intellectual and for me emotional and relational error the point is we all need to get bigger we all want to rise and grow and challenge each other and challenge each other to grow not silence ourselves or bench ourselves Following going through that process with your partner, how did you change?

[1183] I became much more willing.

[1184] So one of my issues is I'm quite agreeable, right?

[1185] So I don't, I avoid conflict quite a bit.

[1186] But I also saw like provoking conflict and disagreeing and arguing as like bad for the relationship and also like me doing it as a man, like bad for her.

[1187] And so I actually became much more willing to say, no, I don't want to do that.

[1188] I want to do this.

[1189] or I want to go there, not there, or I'd like to do this, not that.

[1190] And it caused more arguments, which was uncomfortable for me. But it was great, and it was what she wanted.

[1191] There were two aspects to it, if I'm honest.

[1192] One was, like, stand up a little bit more for myself and a little bit like in the relationship.

[1193] And I'm a bit more like, no, I disagree about that.

[1194] I'm going to do this and just give her more of an equal in that sense of challenge.

[1195] But the other thing was really an issue was just actually just the, kind of responsibility around kind of economics and so on too.

[1196] And I don't think this was just about gender, but it took me a while, I think, to really get a proper sense of like just being a provider, a co -provider, wasn't bad, right?

[1197] Making money in a way that would help our family and give us more choices wasn't bad.

[1198] And so there was that kind of sense, too, it's like, because up until that point, she'd actually done more of breadwinning.

[1199] And so there was a kind of sense of her saying, look, I'm about as feminist as you get, but you know what?

[1200] Wouldn't mind it if we couldn't do a bit of this, you couldn't do a bit more of that as well.

[1201] I read some study the other day, and I'll triple check this and put it on the screen.

[1202] But I think the study, if I'm going to get this correct, said that about 70 % of women want to be with a guy that's earning more than them, something like that.

[1203] It was like 70, 80 % or something like that.

[1204] That's about right.

[1205] I mean, you can check it, but it depends which serve it.

[1206] You can choose a certain.

[1207] Yeah.

[1208] But you know what?

[1209] It's so interesting that I've been thinking about that quite a bit recently that reliably in surveys, women will say, like, I want a guy that can, that has the earning potential, it earns more, can earn more.

[1210] But what you have to be really careful, I think, how the question's asked and what the interpretation of it is.

[1211] I think actually what it's very often about is women wanting, and a lot of young women have suggested this to me, not just young women, but that even women of my generation, that what they really want is a partner.

[1212] And earning is a really good proxy for someone who's got their act together, right?

[1213] Someone who's a good earner is also going to be a good father, probably, and a good partner and so on too.

[1214] So it's actually just a really good signal, right?

[1215] The labour market is a very good signal of all kinds of other skills and so on.

[1216] So that's number one.

[1217] I think they're actually just getting someone who, like, he's got his act together, right?

[1218] He's good thing.

[1219] He's got skills.

[1220] He's got, you know, he's got agency.

[1221] He's like, and those are good in all kinds of other circumstances too.

[1222] So when I was a stay -at -home dad, I like to think I had a lot of agency and I didn't like lie on the sofa all day.

[1223] Like I did stuff and organized stuff.

[1224] So I think it's partly that.

[1225] But I also think it's partly because a lot of women want choice.

[1226] They want options to maybe take some time themselves to be at home.

[1227] And that's a really interesting modern development, right?

[1228] Is I think the feminist call now from a lot of women to men is like, I don't know if I'm going to want to take time out to kind of raise the kids, but I'd like the option.

[1229] Yeah.

[1230] And that's only an option if you're doing your bit, if you're earning, right?

[1231] And so I do know some women who are like very successful professionally, and then they have kids and their partner is much less successful.

[1232] Like I know one couple where he was, he was literally a kind of failing musician as she was like this partner in some law firm or whatever.

[1233] It was like a movie.

[1234] It's so stereotypical.

[1235] And she's like, she has kids.

[1236] and she's like, well, I'd like to have a bit of time.

[1237] I ain't going to live on his solo guitar YouTube salary or whatever it was, right?

[1238] And at that point, she's mad at him, maybe a little bit too late.

[1239] But you know, she goes like, I just like you to give me the option.

[1240] And of course, we want it both ways now, right?

[1241] Like, it was great for me to be able to have time at home while my partner was able to just go for it professionally for a while, just totally go for it.

[1242] That was beautiful for both of us.

[1243] But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that it shouldn't go both ways.

[1244] Like we can't, we can't, we got to, couldn't get rid of the provider model.

[1245] We've got to think about ourselves as co -providers of a whole bunch of things, money, time, love, energy, and not take ourselves out of the equation at all.

[1246] That's not, that's not, that's not what the women's movement was about.

[1247] The women's movement was about women securing economic independence, not about men losing it.

[1248] That's not attractive.

[1249] You've got two sons, right?

[1250] Three.

[1251] Three sons.

[1252] Okay.

[1253] So I guess this kind of brings us to the penultimate point, which is, and if you were sitting down with all three of your sons, which you might have done already, and they said to you, Dad, listen, what does it mean to be a man in the modern world?

[1254] What should I do?

[1255] Should I hold the door open?

[1256] Should I, I don't know, go to the gym?

[1257] Should I pursue a high -flying, breadwinning job?

[1258] What does it mean to be a man?

[1259] What advice would you give them about being a man in the modern world?

[1260] Honestly, the advice.

[1261] The advice.

[1262] that would set them up to be successful in their romantic relationships and in the world and in their mind.

[1263] Yeah, well, it's interesting because in some ways, I think the fact that conversation might almost be a sign of failure, not just individually, it more socially, because I really believe that people believe their eyes before they believe their ears.

[1264] And so what I would really hope is that I've been showing, not telling.

[1265] that it's not a curriculum it's not a here or the here's the four point plan for modern masculinity based on my years of research it's more like well you've seen how i am you've seen how i'm with your mom you've seen how i've seen how i've worked you've seen how raised you you've seen like how you've seen how i interact with people in this this this lovely phrase from a philosopher is in the thick of daily life like how are you in the thick of daily life you've seen me help that person you've seen me like they tease me this i pick up the lime scooters all the time, right?

[1266] Because someone's going to trip over them, right?

[1267] You've, you've seen how I've reacted.

[1268] And I haven't done that kind of saying, oh, this is masculinity, but you've seen me do certain things that you've just kind of imbued along the way.

[1269] So that sounds like a cop out, but I won't cop out completely because I think I would say, look, first of all, recognize that there are on average differences, right?

[1270] So there are going to be things that you're going to be inclined towards or want to do.

[1271] They're just different, right?

[1272] There's nothing wrong with masculine.

[1273] And it's nothing wrong with some of these impulses and instincts that you've got, right?

[1274] Of course, you want complete gender equality.

[1275] And so you're going to look for partners who are going to give you that as well.

[1276] And above all, be for others, serve.

[1277] And so the first two, I'd open the door for sure.

[1278] Yeah.

[1279] What was the second one?

[1280] I can't remember that you said, open the door.

[1281] It's about Korea.

[1282] It's about going to the gym.

[1283] Go to the gym, sure.

[1284] I mean actually all the evidence about being physically healthy is important but then kind of get a high -earning job I wouldn't say that I would say find work that yes we'll pay don't be naive about that but it's much important that you're passionate about your work you'll be much more attractive to someone if you're passionate we're only here once for God's sake and so the idea that you're going to you know that someone's attracted someone who's kind of into their work just because it makes a bunch of back to our that's not sexy It doesn't matter what the paycheck is, right?

[1285] Well, SETI is passion and agency and, you know, Verve, Mojo, whatever.

[1286] So absolutely, I would advise all of that.

[1287] I actually think it's kind of weird, back to the dating thing, is that in some way, I think it captures a lot of our conversation, though, which is that I've tried to raise them in a way that would give them the courage to ask a girl out.

[1288] the grace to just accept no for an answer and then the responsibility to make sure that either way she gets home safely.

[1289] So what I've got in there is a little bit of agency, a little bit of leaning in, a little bit of taking a risk.

[1290] It's a risk to ask someone out, right?

[1291] And I think risk taking is on average, a bit more masculine.

[1292] Secondly, you have no sense of entitlement about that.

[1293] And if you've read it wrong or whatever, and she's like, no, thank you.

[1294] You are totally cool with that, right?

[1295] Incredibly.

[1296] But then thirdly, either way, like, there is a responsibility to make sure people are kind of safe.

[1297] And if you're in a position where you're a little bit stronger and able to do that, great.

[1298] And in fact, I had a rule with my kids that they had a curfew, but actually they broke the curfew because they were getting someone home safely.

[1299] They got an exemption from that.

[1300] And there was one night when my sons came home and I was waiting for him and he was 30 minutes after curfew, pouring with rain, he came home, drowned out, and he'd walk to go home safely.

[1301] Great.

[1302] I like to think that sort of formulation is capturing some stuff that is a bit more inherently masculine but in a world where there's no entitlement there's no sense of inequality and I don't think that's a horrible formula and generally speaking I've kind of found a lot of men kind of women like yes actually actually I would quite like you it's a covered garage order I would actually quite like to kind of make you make sure that I get to my car safe feel kind of whatever and I don't think that's patriarchy I think that's good manners responsibility.

[1303] What that doesn't mean is that, and you do it for your boss, you do it for somebody else, it doesn't mean that there's any going back to a world where that gave you some sort of extra power in the labour market or something like that.

[1304] So I think it's really difficult, honestly, right now to get this right.

[1305] I think, but I think too many people also treading on eggshells a little bit too.

[1306] Yeah.

[1307] Like they do, rather than run the risk of doing something wrong, they do nothing.

[1308] And that's the worst of all worlds, because we don't learn.

[1309] But also those kids are going to their hands of others in terms of their influence, so they're going to learn how to be a man from TikTok or Twitter, and you never know which algorithm's going to sweep them away.

[1310] One thing we can be pretty sure of is that, with some exceptions, you're not going to learn how to be a man from social media or online.

[1311] You're going to learn it from your dad, your neighbor, your brother, your teacher, your coach.

[1312] The best antidote to some of the reactionary content that some young men are encountering online now isn't other online content much though of course we're all producing more online content it's actually a real live man in your life it's flesh and blood and I think that's so much more powerful I think that my son as a teacher in front of a classroom of boys is going to be a much more powerful antidote to those reactionary figures that they might see online than somebody else online that's how we win we win in real life not online I mean there's kind of two adjacent points here the first is your son is going into a profession that is increasingly depleting in men because what's it like 20 % of 30 % of primary school teachers are women men no it's primary it's one in 10 one in 10 in primary yeah okay so those those role models are lacking in primary education but then he's going into second is it high school secondary school he's going to be teaching elementary to start with yeah primary school yeah so it's those role models are really needed there and the adjacent point was you've talked to me about what you'd say to your sons around the kitchen table but but if I elect you as president of the world or at least the Western world UK and US let's say and North America and I tell you that you've got to solve the issues you talk about in this book of boys and men why the modern male is struggling white matters and what to do about it in fact you had to solve the issues you described so eloquently what would you do at a social level to fix things the suicidality the mental health issues we're seeing the loneliness we're seeing the educational gap we're seeing if you're in a position where you have a voice, you're in a position of authority, you're president, prime minister, or anybody actually, I think it's very easy to understate the power of simply acknowledging a problem and having empathy for the people who are struggling from it.

[1313] And so whilst I could list a whole bunch of policy solutions, which I think would be part of the inter, you'd have to say, and that's why I'm doing X. That's why I'm having a men's health strategy, and we're hiring male teachers, and we're, you know, we're funding mental health services for men, et cetera.

[1314] I would do all that, but I actually think that the most important move would be to send a signal especially to young men and boys who are struggling.

[1315] I see you.

[1316] We see you.

[1317] We hear you.

[1318] We've got you.

[1319] We understand that you're struggling.

[1320] We are not going back on the move for women and girls.

[1321] But we are taking your problems seriously.

[1322] and we're continuing to take the problems of women and girls seriously, simply making them feel seen and heard and empathised with is a massive, it's a massive, because so many of them right now feel as if their problems aren't being discussed, aren't being addressed at that level.

[1323] They are being addressed online over here by many reactionary figures, but they're not being addressed by the people in positions of power.

[1324] very often they're being dismissed sometimes.

[1325] And the result of that is to create this really dangerous vacuum in our society, also in men's lives.

[1326] Like if there are real problems and we neglect them and they don't feel, they can become grievances.

[1327] And that's a perfectly natural result of having real problems that are neglected.

[1328] And so simply saying, we understand it is a struggle right now.

[1329] there are a lot of problems facing young men and we are on it.

[1330] I can't tell you how powerful I think that would be because so many men feel right now as if their problems are sort of second order problems.

[1331] They just don't count as much.

[1332] They're not being addressed in the same way.

[1333] Or if they are, it's turned back on them.

[1334] It's because you don't try.

[1335] It's because you're lazy.

[1336] It's because you watch too much porn.

[1337] It's because you're toxic.

[1338] So it's individualized back on them and you need to fix yourself.

[1339] And I think if we were just able to say we can do two things at once and we can continue to fight for women and girls, but we can also help you, boys and men.

[1340] I think it'll be profound.

[1341] It's so clearly so important to that group in particular as well because letting them know that they are seen in a situation where they are already unbelievably alone in a sense of loneliness is especially powerful.

[1342] And I think just from having these conversations on the podcast, I've seen that.

[1343] I've seen that just by having the conversations even if we don't have all the solutions yet just by turning the lights on and saying okay this is a thing, people are so unbelievably grateful and it's not just men that are grateful.

[1344] If you look at the gender split on the podcast that I've done with men and women on these male issues, the comment section are full of mothers and grandmothers and sisters and daughters who are equally concerned about men and boys in the same way that we should all be concerned about the issues that women and girls face.

[1345] And I think that's a really wonderful thing because I feel like someone said to me on the podcast, you know, we've spent a long time calling men out and now we need to call them back in.

[1346] Yes.

[1347] And I think it's just a wonderful expression of where I think we find ourselves at where we're now trying to figure out how we coexist and champion each other and the individual issues we both have as two different sexes.

[1348] And...

[1349] Well, thank you for your work in this space.

[1350] I do think that using your platform to honestly engage to grapple with decisions in the way that we have today and you have with others and just look there aren't any of it's hard I think that's an incredibly important thing because if you're not talking about it others will be and so for you to use your voice and this kind of space to just say we get it we're hearing you we're seeing it we maybe don't have the answer it's very powerful for you to use your voice to do that and I'm glad you're getting the reaction that you are which is to a much lesser extent in my direction I get too which is thank God, because you're not framing it in a reactionary way.

[1351] You're not saying, and that's why we need to go back to the 50s.

[1352] Men were men and women.

[1353] You're saying, no, this is hard, right?

[1354] But yeah, we see it.

[1355] Yeah, and I love the progress we've made as a society.

[1356] I love that.

[1357] I love it for all the women in my lives.

[1358] I love it for myself.

[1359] I love it for my sister, for my mother, for my partner, for all the wonderful women that work with me. But I also know that with all upsets, comes a unintended consequence as well.

[1360] And if we can manage that, if we can manage both the upside and sustain that while managing the unintended consequence and talk about it.

[1361] And this is something, this is not just about socialists, it's about medicine.

[1362] We're talking before about medicine or any other, you know, being really successful in work comes with an unintended consequence over here, right?

[1363] You lose your friends or you might become lonely.

[1364] If we can highlight both and manage both and talk about both, then I think we'll be much better as a society.

[1365] And if we're much better as a society, then I think will be much better.

[1366] We'll all be happier and we'll all be better.

[1367] And it's difficult to have these conversations sometimes because obviously these are such polarising issues.

[1368] Yes.

[1369] But what the fuck are we here for if not to have those conversations?

[1370] As you speak about this stuff and I found myself doing it a bit in this conversation, you think like what's the kind of least generous interpretation of what I've just said?

[1371] Yeah.

[1372] That someone's going to post somewhere.

[1373] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1374] But if we're constantly worried about what the least generous interpretation, of what we're saying is we'll never say anything.

[1375] 100%.

[1376] And so just by saying it and trying to be honest about it and changing your mind, we're just having, I think you're proving this, that the appetite for good faith conversations about real issues is huge right now.

[1377] I think people kind of over the simplification, they're over the algorithm, they're over the sound, but we're all kind of in it still, but just honestly wrestling with real problems and seeing that we have to rise together, I think that's a huge gift.

[1378] we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for so i'm assuming that's the last one yeah it must be there's no other it is okay interestingly they've written a statement at the top which is someday is now full stop and then they've written at your age at this point in your journey what is one thing you always swore you would do one day have you done it yet and if not why not i can't answer that question I'm trying really hard because I'm trying to think of anything I've sworn that I will do one day.

[1379] And I can't think of a single thing.

[1380] Richard, thank you.

[1381] Thank you.

[1382] It's been such a wonderful conversation for so many reasons.

[1383] And, you know, I have zero doubt that there are so many, so many men and women out there that are, have benefited tremendously from the fact that you do the work that you do in the way that you do it.

[1384] And I think that's a really important additional part to the sentence, which is the way in which you do it.

[1385] Tone matters, right?

[1386] It really, really matters because I think you're able to call everybody into the room in a way that other people aren't.

[1387] They call half of the group into the room or just some of the group into the room, which I never think is the best way to get ideas across.

[1388] But really skillfully in your book, but in your work more generally, you call everybody into the room.

[1389] And you do it in a way which is objective.

[1390] it's not political and it's incredibly powerful and compelling and that's exactly what your book was I spent a long time after having multiple conversations on this podcast looking for the book that sets the right tone and can speak to someone like me who considers myself I'm not sure if this is always true because I have biases and stuff but considers myself right in the middle in terms of politics and all these things so your book was it didn't seem to be pandering to either group it seemed to be able to maintain an absolute objectivity which was incredibly powerful but everything is supported by data and stats not just vibes and I think that is the book that society is needed and I think it is this book so I'd highly recommend everybody give it a read if you have any interest in these subjects we've discussed today I'm going to link it below for everyone and it's called of boys and men why the modern male is struggling why it matters and what to do about it but also for all of the millions of people listening right now thank you because I'm sure all of them would like to say thank you you for a variety of different reasons.

[1391] But on behalf of them, thank you so much for doing the work that you do.

[1392] It's very, very important.

[1393] And to kind of close off this conversation, thank it means a lot to me. We need you.

[1394] Oh, thank you.

[1395] We need you too.