Male Inequality & The Fall of Men - Richard Reeves

Obama endorsed your book yeah that was a a bit of a surprise I mean first of all it was also a year late I don't want to criticize I don't come out the gate criticizing but the book came out in 2022 and so when his 2023 list came out everybody who'd written a book in the previous year or so was like would I make it I make it I didn't make it I wasn't surprised but then 2024 comes around Tada there it is has that been the growth of this discussion about boys and men has it been one of those little compounding things that didn't Spike super hard but it's been building I think so yeah what my sense of this is that I mean even even since we spoke when did we speak a couple years uh about about maybe 18 months a little bit more between 18 months and two years ago I think even since then the permission space around this conversation has widened so know just to be very autobiographical about it when I tried to find a publisher for my book in 20120 I couldn't I was turned down by every publishing house uh at the time it just seen as like two contr a topic to to engage in and then you fast forward and then you're on bar Barack Obama's reading list and whatever you might think about Barack Obama he's not a reactionary he's not seen as a kind of like men's rights reactionary type and so that's obviously as an author that's a great Accolade because I do think his his lists tend to be quite thoughtful broadening the conversation to an audience it's more that yeah it's it's okay and it very it really helps me if I'm having a conversation with people who still sometimes understand think this is a bit men's righty really the skepticism that people bring to the debate which I not only understand I actually have a lot of time for I think if you're not a bit skeptical to start with then you're probably not thinking that hard about it but then to say well Barack Obama's thinks the books worthy of reading it just helps to sort of take a little bit of the heat out of it but I would just say that's one of the perhaps most prominent examples of a just a general sense that the temperature around this conversation has gone down even just in the few years I've been talking about it well we'll see what we can do today to turn that temper a little I knew I could rely on you yeah I'm here I'm here to just throw a couple of calls on the fire actually I'm super interested to know if you agree with that or also what your experience is as you talk about this because there's a let's put it this way there's almost like a gravitational well that pulls you towards more conservative more kind of reactionary what however you want to put kind of framing cuz that's where a lot of the audience is for this stuff let's be honest that's where the natural audience is so I just wonder how you calibrate that do you do you do you feel that Paul do you see it in your audience do you see it in your own conversations how do you manage the this perilous Journey between these different the way I think about this is these gravitational Wells out there they're constantly trying to suck you in yeah I think about it North a lot um I have I I spent so much time considering this very point you know I'm so I'm so Keen about advocating for boys and men it's such an important part it's been such an important part of this show you know 850 episodes maybe 50 have been on men's mental health in one form or another hundreds of psychologists have been on the show and have been really trying to dig into this and yet one missw by me results in me being accused as budget Andrew Tate you're the misogynist that we've known all along or from the red pill manosphere space I'm a blue pilled cook that's like secretly for the whatever so um to be honest it's very difficult to do one of the things that I really do not like about this and I wanted to get into this with you when we were a bit warmer but [ __ ] it we can we can just run it now yeah I hate having to temper my talking points to avoid being patent matched as a misogynist I hate having to do this weird prostrate myself on the altar of History well we know that women are struggling and it's very important that we talk about like you just said and if you don't realize that as a point it's like I understand why because the more extreme sides of the promen conversation aren't always coming at it from aren't rarely coming at it from a place of well balanced I care about men it's do you care about men or do you just hate women is this your vehicle to be able to talk about hating women so I understand why that kind of needs to be there but I find it [ __ ] exhausting it's so and you must too this te permanent tempering of talking points around well we know that women are that there's always this inclusion that needs to happen even in the conversation for men there is this requirement for us to include women in it yeah I don't see the the reverse thing happening the reverse is not happening when it's a pro female influencer they're not say well we must remember that men are killing themselves at four times the rate of women we'd have half a million more men since 1999 if they' killed themselves at the rate that women do through suicide but would talking about women's it's like no one no one's doing that so when we're talking about asymmetries yeah in the world and the way that things are positioned and I just think it feels arduous to me and it still shows when we talk about imbalances in you know what are some of the things that men have to deal with the women don't and vice versa and stuff like that the conversation around Sexes that are promoting either men or women there is definitely in many ways this additional cost that needs to be paid by anybody that wants to have a conversation for men mhm by having to bring women into the [ __ ] conversation about it it's like is this not exactly what we're here to do to try and just focus on what are the men's points and as as you talk about a lot it's this zero some view of empathy yeah okay so this is good because I don't mind doing that at all I don't mind contextualizing it in the context of what's happened to women Etc and I think that's for a couple of reasons I think number one is simply because I am so called to this Mission so determined to be as persuasive as possible that I am absolutely happy to do some of the work tonally y right and to pay the entry price the cost of doing businesses because frame it contextually like if in the end I'm trying to persuade I don't know some people at cdcu and the White House all kind or a governor's chief of staff to take this stuff if if I actually want to be persuasive M then a recognition of their discomfort with it and an understanding of the need to prepare the ground around that M fine great really great point this is too important yeah to really to get hung up on that and the second thing I really noticed is and I'm I'm trying to watch this very carefully in myself is that people who embark on this journey and some people have said to me well it's early days for you let's see what happens early onset Republican right like just give it another 10 years reefs is basically what they're saying yeah yeah yeah it's that you advocate for a certain change or to try and raise awareness around an issue and it doesn't work and then it doesn't work and then it doesn't work and it keeps not working and you keep not feeling heard and so you get more and more frustrated escalate this is climate change you get more frustrated and so the frustration level kind of goes up the tone you adopt inflammatory rhetoric so I was at this I was at this uh conference where this guy who I know quite well was asking a question about why there should be an office for Men's Health there's all these Women's Health ones and quoting the statistics Etc all stuff that I say and I've also written about and I'm sitting next to a young feminist woman who just happened to be at the conference with me and she listened to this guy who's been saying this for 10 years and she said to me afterwards I had to keep reminding myself that I agreed with him because he was so angry he came across as so mad about it that all her radar all her visceral literally her body was like this guy's just an angry wow he's whoa wow has he got an issue here and so that affect of anger and frustration it kills anything you're trying to achieve and so what happens is that the understandable frustration that many people feel doing this work mounts and mounts it turns then into anger and frustration it presents itself through this prism of like the emotionality of it it was even came across a little bit just in the way you were talking about right your frustration right and someone could take that clip and they could say whoa Chris's bit mad he's getting he's getting bored at talking about women's problems yeah and so and he's mad about it he's like why the hell should I care about women in order to talk about men and whoa everyone's like okay Chris right and so it's just not effective but the other reason is that I genuinely believe that after the long history we've had and the issues that kind of women have faced historically that it's not too high a price to pay to acknowledge that and and then to say oh and by the way there's these issues for men too I I think it's a false it's a false analogy in some ways to say that people who are advocating on behalf of women around the world say or just historically also need to say oh yeah of course there's this issues for men this is a very very new world we're in now where it makes even empirical sense to talk about gender equality the other way or the issues of boys and men frankly this is decades at most probably years whereas we've had a few Millennia of it the other way around so I understand it okay I'm I'm unsure about how I feel about this sort of like uh how would you say um cultural reparations or like sort of linguistic reparations that need to be done in that there's this sort of debt that was owed for while and now it can be repaid and it's kind of carrying over but you've reminded me of a concept that I wrote myself only a year and a half ago which is the soft signal of Effectiveness triggering a tribal response is antithetical to having effective behavior and belief changing messages it's nowhere near as sexy to caveat heavily but when it comes to important subjects the most compelling arguments are sometimes the gentle ones if you care about changing Behavior you'll dial back the aggression of your argument I think that's exactly what you're talking about about soft signal of Effectiveness you even used the word effective right partway through yeah you're 100% right I think what my point here is that I'm not sure that the bar that these conversations often need to jump over in order to be seen as being sufficiently soft is I I feel like that is sometimes quite high that like there is a a long period of us and we're not saying this we're not saying that and the caveats to me become exhausting I includ I'm again so like lib cooked apparently despite the fact Ben Shapiro was on the show last week I'm so lib cooked that I'm uh you know a a blue pilled like idiot that works for the guardian or something by most people on the right side of the manosphere um so I'm like okay I'm not I'm not sufficiently aggressive for those guys but I'm so anyway yeah you can't in that sense if you if you were to win you'd have lost correct the only way to have done it would have been to have ruined it all you been ruined ruined it all yeah the uh the the other point that I have a I guess a a unique challenge with or a slightly unique challenge is the way that I present so I look like the sort of guy that would absolutely come in screaming and wouldn't really be thinking about mental health talking about emotions talking about vulnerability going to therapy twice a week for the last year doing meditate like that's not typically so again I get patn matched as budget Andrew Tate um so there's a an even additional layer of like and I'm not saying that such and such and I'm not saying that such and such it just you're saying I know I look like like this but but but trust me give me a [ __ ] break yeah exactly yeah and I I I do think it's a real challenge that you said something earlier that I wanted to pick up on which is the sense that you say one thing H and it can kind get picked up and I will say that like um when I talk to people in more Progressive spaces just about particularly the more male dominated kind of podcast space and kind of including you what they've done in many Cas they've actually gone through like all the transcripts and there's a couple of things youve about feminism that they don't like or kind of disagree with right and I I didn't even bother to kind of look them up right but like a you're not going to agree about everything but B these are long conversations you're thinking out loud you're trying to learn and there's sometimes just a lack of Grace about allowing people a bit of latitude to have the conversation to presume the Goodwill it's almost like they they want you to be like that to be the misogynist that they've always yeah and then if they push you that way of course then then the gravitational pull comes in and I do think it's a pressure particularly for male podcast this is very very much inside the podcast thing but but I'm super interested in it because I see people like you as in potentially incredibly you're very persuasive voice in some ways not despite the effect that you have very masculine eff but because of it y right and so that gives you a space and gives you a certain credibility that then you can kind of use to talk about it in different it's all well and good Jordan Peterson talking about the issues of boys and men in the way that he has in the past uh but very few of those boys and men want to be Jordan Peterson right he can be a great uh patriarch but not a particularly good role model and I think this is I'm really really trying to thread this needle so two things first one do you remember when Melissa Carney brought her book out one of your colleagues right so she brought a book out called the two parent privilege two parent advantage two parent privilege two parent privilege uh and before that book was even published she was shredded on Twitter yeah Melissa is as far as I can see kind of similarly built as you like a policy wonky type much shorter than me not physically you are quite you're very tall in person actually way taller than I would have expected um policy wonky kind of like Lefty leaning I'm flattered by the comparison because she's more serious academic than I am but she's a legit statistician she's very good so but what I saw was the exact push toward the right that you're talking about and you know exactly where I'm going to go with this but for the people listening that didn't see unfold you had her on right I did I thought she was I thought she was fantastic I saw this woman who is like as liberal and and sort of fair and egalitarian and open-minded and pro everything you wanted to be Pro If you're sort of left of center as you can get and she writes a book that's called two parent privilege shredded online this is conservative talk you haven't even don't even know what it's about you don't even know what she's coming from it was a very Pro it was trying to raise up the original uh disadvantaged group that the left was looking after which is the working class that's what it was there to try and do and she got and I thought ha I'm seeing right in front of me the exact incentive that pushes people who write or consider a talking point which is unpopular with the left why they end up listening toward the right because they go I tried to do something that I really thought you guys would get on with and this Purity spiral the level of of uh like um pureness that you require me to get to is so high that I I might as well just be friends with the only people that'll accept the work that I do who's going to invite me on that show The Young Turks aren't inviting me on that show David Pacman's not inviting me on on on his show Sam Seed is not inviting me on their show like all the people that are part of the group that I'm from they're not letting me go on so Kyle kolinsky crystal ball like where are you she came on here she came on Modern wisdom and not that I'm right of Center but oh not that I'm like super right of Center I guess I'm probably coded that way but like I could imagine her going on Tim P's show I can imagine her going on Jordan Peterson's podcast or something from the daily wire you go okay so you'll accept me on that side despite the fact that this is supposed to like ostensibly written from the other direction so I think that's one of those Dynamics you're talking about that pushes people right of Center seen it happen I mean it's happened to Carol hooven as well for example 100% pushed out of Harvard used as a political football by Bill akman but then you get pulled up so I talked earlier about these these gravitational fields right you get pulled one way but very often there's a push a push that comes along and I have to say that in Carol's case and in a couple of other cases too um I I actually watched these Dynamics play out and I that made me much much more intentional and thoughtful about how I land my own work is that just just to interject there is that partly that you are aware that if people start to react negatively to your work that you're going to begin to think negatively of that side are you almost trying to sort of uh take your take a little antidote before you maybe get hit with the poison like you're preparing yourself almost building up a not putting yourself into a dangerous situation that could cause you to be pushed in that way is that something you think about too yeah to some extent there's two stages to it like that would be the second stage that would be as if if the let's call the first stage the kind of PR stage right how does this land who's endorsing it what's the what's the mood around this right this book or this idea and then okay if if it tilts one way or the other these incent then kick in suddenly the speaking engagements the contracts the so Carol now works at the American Enterprise Institute because they're the ones who right because and and she gets invited to more conservative conferences and she's reviewed in conservative journals and she has to make a living and and also we're humans and so we we most humans don't want to be ostracized if you actually go back to I was reading this very good book about equality and there are these caves in Italy which have these the original the oldest uh images of human tribes we can find and they they're quite violent people go and see the ones where people are kind of spearing each other and stabbing each other but the one that really really struck me is the one where there's a group of about 14 or 15 stick figures and then there's another figure that's moving away from them and the interpretation of this is it's an ostracism and that it's kind of one of the earliest examples of somebody who the tribe has to kind of kick out right and and ostracism is been one of the most powerful ways in which people have kind of protected identities and tribes for a long time which is like you're out you're exiled in our country we say sent to Coventry right where does that come from and so everyone's Now where's commentry what's he talking about right but but that end ostracism and then I and I think about that image quite a lot when I think about these Dynamics which is that if you kind of ostracize someone what are they going to do right they they're very unlikely to become monastic Nomads living alone out in the wild living off berries right they're going to find another Tri they'll go with the Enemy they'll find a tribe they have to like our survival at some very Primal level requires us to have a tribe so if you get expelled by One Tribe then it's it's almost inevitable what I really thought about and this goes back to kind of when I wrote my book out uh is that I did notice that unfortunately if you come out and it's seen as in a particular way like through a particular veence it will get ignored on the other side and so I actually was very careful about who I got to cover the book first and who I spoke to First first yeah First Impressions Last First Impressions have a huge impact and so I was very thoughtful about that it's like I knew so I'll upset people by saying this but like I lived in fear of a laat Wall Street Journal Review from a very conservative academic I knew that if that was the first thing that came out I wouldn't get if the spectator had picked up on it before anybody else or the New York Post or something like that yeah all my first media experien all been on Fox News and then kind of whatever so Carol went on Fox and Friends and that's where a lot of the stuff happened and so and so unfortunately whether you like it or not you have to sort of think about we'll get back to talking to Richard in one minute but first I need to tell you about Factor if your fall schedule leaves no room for meal prep Factor has got you covered Factor's fresh never frozen meals already in Just 2 minutes so all you have to do it's heat them and enjoy you can skip the extra trips to the grocery store plus all of the chopping and prepping and cleaning up while still getting the flavor and nutritional quality that you need and right now their Autumn menu has a few of my favorite dishes like their pumpkin Sage chicken and smoked guda mac and cheese if you're struggling to hit your protein goals every day their Protein Plus meals have 30 g of protein per serving this fall get factor and enjoy eating without any of the hassle right now you can get 50% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to factor meals.com mw50 using the code mw50 a checkout that's factor meals.com mw50 and mw50 a checkout so I dude I I had this conversation Ryan long uh Canadian comedian was sat there yesterday and we were talking about this this tension uh between uh positioning and Optics uh and uh transparency and honesty and this tension that you have between the two like what is actually going on and what what do I need to do to put my best foot forward he's this great uh example of you know you can be honest with your girlfriend and her family but you don't need to tell them about the time you did drugs when you're in University on your first date yeah so you know there are better ways to put your foot forward and not and obviously people get sort of slippery and slimy with that and then it ends up being totally contrived and it isn't it isn't sort of honest or truthful at all but there's a a second element of what you were talking about which is this um Purity spiral the sort of uh very much them and US tribal thinking Eric Weinstein's got this concept called an accuracy budget what he basically talks about is that if you're playing with ideas in public you should be allowed to play with them imprecisely that's so interesting at times and there a second element of it too so accuracy budget is one that here is an idea and look I'm just I have to I I'm bro sciencing here this is just my bro Theory or whatever that's my like I'm not an academic exactly that's rogans I'm just a comedian like get out of jail free card so there's an accuracy budget which is I have no idea if this is true but I'm going to have a crack at this as an idea but there's also a Precision budget I think which is when you're trying to communicate a thing whether it's within the accuracy budget or not your ability to get thought from brain out of mouth is also going to be being imprecise so not only are you playing with ideas practicing in public learning out loud doing this for the first time you haven't mean you didn't do this yesterday and say right when you say that I'm going to say this and do it again it's like no this is just happening this isn't a comedy set so you'll make natural errors when you're just coming up with ideas but you'll also make even more natural errors when you're just trying to communicate them but there is no there is no part of anybody who slips up and this is both left and right there is no part of anybody that slips up where it is not seen as complicity it's it's never seen as accident it's always seen as homophobe big misogynist the veil drop yeah exactly as opposed to how many times have you spoken imprecisely yeah how many times have you got this thing slightly wrong and I think really the issue isn't that you have a a different opinion or an imp imprecise opinion it's that you have a different opinion to the person who's seeing it it's like I don't like him I think I think he might be talking about something else that's here and if I can throw a bit of shade at him that's going to be hard slime to wipe off sexist is really really difficult slime to wipe off misogynist really difficult slime to wipe off especially if you're a podcaster that talks about lifting weights and testosterone and like men's problems and stuff like that yeah so yeah it's the problem of like Miss it's a couple I love the idea of the accuracy budget and I think if you're from like a more like scholarly background right so you can say oh this is probably just Bro Science right I can't say that so you higher standard if you're supposed to be like the expert there's a degree of anxiety that comes with that as well right I I really worry I'll get a stat wrong or that I'll kind of you know characterize some facts incorrectly because it's like that's my stock in trade and I should be anxious about that but on the other hand I should also be allowed to misspeak uh I should be allowed to St wrong and in the end the thing I've come to value almost above anything else in an interaction with someone is the presumption of Goodwill 100% And the belief that even if you get it wrong I don't think you're getting it deliberately wrong and I'm going to assume the what you're saying to me is an accurate reflection of what you're currently thinking and that you're you're open to correction and that there isn't kind of a hidden agenda there is this thing I'm just this of sense of like but what do you what do you really think think and then and then and then the mask will Str off right and then it'll be like so good right and so good and I think that's true on both sides is that just that sense you see it just the way that the media on both sides will use Clips out of context like not allow someone Tope or even just the thing I've thought about quite a bit recently is how this idea of thinking out loud thinking in public in this kind of conversation is really a very difficult thing to square with the kind of traditional peerreview factchecking kind of processes and and so you've noticed that I had this really interesting experience just listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast long ago that was that I what two years yeah a long one and my wife and I listened to the whole thing on this G it was really long Y and I don't know how long three hours long right and there was a bunch of stuff in there that was really interesting and really good and really thoughtful and then there was a bunch of stuff that I thought was less so and there was this little piece on climate change and it so happens that my wife is something of an expert on climate change and there's this 15minute thing where Jordan was saying well it's a system and then the things come down here and they do all that and I was looking we're looking at each other I said this is just bad [ __ ] right this is like but it doesn't matter right no nobody is turning to Jordan Peterson for advice on their climate policy right no government is saying you know who we need to read our climate change Jord and that's okay because that's not what he pretends to be so just ignore that bit and there's this nice phrase in um uh trying to think where I got this from somewhere in the South which is like you know Focus eat the flesh leave the bones that's good eat the meat leave the bones and so what happens is that in that context that conversation the stuff he said on climate change I thought was kind of wrong and and didn't I didn't mind the guy's a he's a psychologist and he's an expert on mythology and Theology and so on right he's not climate scientist right so his views on that I didn't take it very seriously next day all the Press climate scientists denounce Jordan Peterson's stuff on climate I'm like well of course it would be like me if I start talking to you now about UFC right let's say let's do a 10-minute thing where I talk about fighting techniques it's also no one's going to say Richard Reeves was wrong about how you throw someone it would also it would it would also be like uh a 10-year-old child calling out Mike Tyson and all of the press covering it they go tiny child calls out one of the greatest boxes of all time like this isn't his domain so again here's another thing I've been thinking about so cool you've been thinking about all this stuff I finally get to talk to someone about it um this idea called experts only MH and I just no one is allowed to play with ideas on the internet at all anymore and I think this is particularly an issue on the left uh I always hesitate like pointing the finger at the left because it just seems like I'm the sort of person that would do that a lot but this is one of the times where I think that Purity spiral really comes out that if you just decide to play with ideas look I don't know much about this but like let's have a crack let's have a crack at that the credentialism just immediately come he doesn't know what he's talking about and my least favorite comment on the entire internet is as soon as I heard X I couldn't take him seriously any anymore it's like okay so there is one misstep in this person's entire and it's never like you know he got gravity wrong or he's a flat earther or like he doesn't believe in you know pick something that's widely regarded as true it's always like he got the stats wrong around glyphosate uh and and and its impact on health or he disagrees with my position on seed oils or like he thinks that 12 to 16 reps is better than eight to to 10 reps or something it's like as soon as he said that I couldn't take him seriously anymore so we have a blanket rule on the show there's like a a a content manager that looks after the comments if anybody says it unless it's a joke after they mentioned that I couldn't take him serious anymore it's an immediate ban for life from the channel really yep we've been doing that for years interes we've been doing for that's it's someone that is so one-dimensional in their thinking that I don't want them in the party they can still watch and they can still type comments but only they see them and no one else is able to see it so they're just spewing Into The Ether and uh I just don't want people that anybody that thinks one comment from somebody is worthy of the rest of the things that they're saying yes like maybe there's some stuff that's so egregious where you go wow that's like that's but if it's like someone's playing with ideas around climate change do you know what it is the book that took him two decades to talk about meaning all of that's out the window as well like right exactly all right and how how perfect are all of your opinions as well or is it just that the eye of Sauron doesn't turn around to you person on the internet or you person who's like also a C but just doesn't happen to be talking in this in yeah but it's just like let's focus on the wrongness bit like let's focus on the bits that we think that person's not not as good on it's like you just find their maybe this is a bit like the intellectual equivalent of fighting let's find their weakest spot and go for that whereas conversation and and intellectual conversation and idea cre should be the exactly the opposite should be like what's the best of what you just said ex how can we alchemize this yeah and say look I mean I one of my one of my backdrops is uh the philosophy of John Stewart Mill I ended up writing his biography I was so obsessed with Mill and one of Mill's ideas is that it's almost impossible to imagine that in any conversation regardless of who they are that one person is 100% right and the other person is 0% right it's almost always this is a direct quote from Mill he said we almost always share the truth between us oh that's great and the idea of sharing the truth between you doesn't mean you're sharing it equally but it but it does mean that even if you've got a there's a grain of Truth in what you're saying even if I'm like the world's biggest expert on whatever it is it's still possible that you coming along thinking H well what about this novel Insight oh that's interesting that's interesting yeah maybe I'll take that you know so maybe I'm 98% right and you're 2% right let's focus on the 2% right rather than trying to bludgeon you with my 98% expertise and I actually find particularly during covid and just kind of more generally the potential for sort of thinking out loud and people playing with ideas is incredibly powerful and it's exactly the kind of quotes liberal I'm using it in the more Mill sense now society that you want which doesn't mean by the way that blogger X should be taken in the same way as like peerreview Journal y right so you mentioned Melissa car right there's a reason why Melissa is treated is treated the way she is because she does peerreview Journal articles she's got tenure at the University of Maryland she's Stellar academic career she's trained right and so I'm going to risk offending you by saying that when Melissa says something about changes in family structure structure I'm going to believe I'm going to treat that more heavily than when you say it that's fair on the other hand when Melissa tells me how best to kind of punch someone in the solar plexus and take them am I saying that right that's also not my area of expertise but anyway lifting heavy things living heavy yeah I I I I'm I'm risking offending you but I think it's this way the point simply being that there are you have whole areas of expertise but here's the other thing you might have read a lot of evolutionary psychology no and so and you have and that's obvious in the way you talk about it now you actually probably know a lot more about certain aspects of you know the academic world and more deeply than a lot of academics right and the fact that you've come by that auto as an autodidact under your own steam doesn't make that knowledge any less valuable in of itself it's not the same as having been through a peer-review journal article that's precisely why it's useful exactly you need both forms of knowledge don't you yeah I do think there's a there's a seduction of the kind of renegade genius uh I think that there's especially in the on the internet uh maybe a little bit too much Credence is paid to that that like most people the reason that you do have these sort of formal processes especially for the more sciency things is that there's a pretty well established route that you go from being an ignoramus about something to being an expert about something and you kind of need to learn add your layers on top like this but for instance somebody criticized Eric Weinstein on my show this is a perfect example right of where the experts only thinking is patent matched incorrectly for somebody who actually does have a novel Insight we did a clip we we had a talking point around do women really want masculine men anymore and he brought up the malra man which I had to go and Google CU I I didn't know it Too Young Too British exactly I know um and uh he was saying so this is my thoughts on whether women want masculine man or not and he was called out for that by the internet for like what does Eric Weinstein mathematician and managing partner at teal Capital know about whether women want masculine men or not anymore and I like huh yeah on the surface of that that makes sense when you dig a Little Deeper he's married he's got a 19-year-old daughter so he probably does have some sense of an idea a lot more than people on the internet many people on the internet like he's fully invested in this because presumably his daughter at some point is going to start dating so maybe he is thinking about maybe he's having conversations with her and her his wife around the dinner table so I'm like that expert only thing it it drives me up the wall and I understand why because people like frictionless communication on the internet allows anybody to spew any half-baked Theory and reach potentially as many people as somebody that's spent their entire life maybe more people than a journal article that nobody ever reads so I understand but yeah it pushes people in uh niches I love that idea of the um sort of increasing agitation that people have and then it changes the rhetoric and it changes the inflammatory way that they talk about stuff and then you you end up being pushed into a corner so loud and so abrasive that the people that would have listened to it now write you off it's like why are all of these people so I think that the climate change conversation is not too dissimilar to this like people that are fully captured by concern about where the world is going from a temperature and CO2 standpoint glue themselves to roads and throw paint over soup over paintings and stuff like that you go how could you get yourself to that stage and it's like well they believe that it is such an important talking point that this is the level of sort of vness and vitriol that they need to do it with and I think that's the same as you see with a lot of the pren uh movement yeah and then if you do if you start to get a little bit mad about something and then people say oh he's they they dismiss you even more which makes you even madder makes you even easier to dismiss and so there is that sort of cycle that you see where you just like the affect really does matter if you're in in in the business of persuasion and the other thing is like and especially for kind of people younger I my my three sons are all in their 20s now um like there is something about there's something rather beautiful about the way in which young people can see things in such like clear unambiguous terms and it's very easy as you get older to be like oh the world's much more complicated than that but I try to remember my I know what I was like when I was 17 18 19 right and the kind of moral Purity that I felt I had and how I knew I knew the answers and and so when I look at things like ruin the yeah I look at the student protests and things like that and I'm like yeah but I look I remember what I was protesting about when I was 19 okay and I'm just like I didn't really know what I was talking about but there was something that's okay yeah right it's okay to acknowledge that people are going to have like narrow views about things in some cases Purity tests Etc as long as we also allow ourselves to grow up a little bit about it and allow for the Nuance that can come given that you've been talking about a very inflammatory very in some ways unpopular topic for quite a while and trying to do it what's your advice to people to both send and receive information that is maybe a little bit uh inflammatory well the first thing is to add the caveat so we've already talked about that so in the case of gender as I've said I think that when I genuinely think there is still an issue facing women and girls or there has been I don't make them up like I genuinely believe in them right so I've argued very strongly that we should be doing more to get women more women into politics in the US for example right I think that's a I think that's a problem I wouldn't say if it wasn't so I'm not it's not earth SATs um so I think made up uh so fake right um and but the other thing is trying to be as fact-based as possible right so it's not like you can get all the facts but just start empirically so just start with here are some facts whe whatever the issue that's on but in my case I'll be talking so so I'll lay out the Education data I'll lay out the mental health data or I'll lay out the employment data or I'll lay out the stagnant earning so here's some charts here are some facts in fact one of the mottos for my new Institute is keep it boring and my son said well you're the man for that job ah very good spoken like a true British son yes I was very proud of him yeah you're the man for that job dad like good that's good a rck of aceline that's funny right yeah um but I do think there's something about try to be as fact-based as possible it's not that everyone has to become the it's not an expert's only thing but it is to try and be as truthful as possible about it try and say well this is what here are the facts as I see them don't be Zero Sum so don't say in order to do X we have to kind of not do y and try to be Solutions focused one of the things that I think really helps is if you if you persuaded people to come along then you want to say so that's why I think we might want to try X or I'm really inspired by that program over here rather than just like so that's terrible isn't it right and the kind of competition for the who can conjure the greatest dystopia is kind of boring at certain point so although I think there are some deep problems here I'm also pretty hopeful that we could find solutions to them and I try to lead on that and say and that's why I think for example we should do something to encourage more men into teaching which is what one of my my own sons has just done right so rather than just lament how badly boys are doing in school what about some more male teachers what about some more technical high schools what about some more Hands-On play actually what about giving them an EXT what are we doing some work right now on like sport the decline in sports participation among Bo boys especially like what about that what about paying coaches more so that actually we have more coaches in our schools what about what about what about and I think that changes it too because the the intellectual glamour of being negative about stuff all the time wears pretty thin after a while and people people I think are quite hungry for more positive conversation I think so too the there's something called the cynical genius illusion you might be familiar with I've heard of that uh so a lot of the time people think that cynic are smarter oh yes haven't heard it put that way but it it turns out that they're not they die sooner they're more lonely they have worse Health outcomes they're poorer they don't even make as much money uh and they do on average have lower IQs so you by whatever judgment you want interesting there was this study of um book reviews which I review books occasionally too and I so I have the study in my mind always and what they did was they asked people to rank the intelligence of the reviewer and then sorted that into whether or not the review had been negative or positive and what they found was people were much more think you intelligent it was a negative review and so actually there is another mil quote which is that it is thought necessary If any man who knows anything of the world to think ill of it wow and even then he was saying he just noticed this intellectual fashion which is that for people to think that you're clever you have to show you have to be NE it's a negative kind of intelligence and there is an overweighting of negative intelligence quite often which is that we give the kudos to the ass serbic critic to the person that demolish that ARG argument so brilant like no so and so youo one right owns the destroys the guy it's all owns destroys and so and if you think what's happening there is that we're just really admiring the negative application of intelligence and it's there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong like we should be demolishing bad arguments and so on but but it's very interesting to me that like the argument that some guy makes for how could we make Middle School better for boys by improving recess and hiring more male English teachers no one says no one's ever put re Rees destroys or Reeves makes polite suggestion yeah reasonable balanced suggestion which call for evaluation study like think about it this way the only thing that's worse than being wrong on the Internet is being naive right right because naivity it's oh God you you you poor thing you you my My Sweet Summer child you didn't know the way that the world went [ __ ] patronizing so I think um I I I really appreciate I've seen you do so much stuff over the last two years since we spoke and obviously I've been uh kind of in the at the coace on the other side of the internet from you watching this stuff too your ability to be patient is that you you may be one of the most patient men in the world your wife wife may say otherwise but um we'll we'll wait and see on that on the show talk to me about just really zooming out why is advocating for men so unpopular why is it why is it so diff difficult just from your experience yeah it's a it's I think in some cases it's a classic example of vicious circle which is where if the only people who feel comfortable advocating for men are the ones who are more likely everything else equal to have a more reactionary view of women then that means that people won't want to enter that space and so right now discourages reasonable conversation yeah it's it's hard it's hard given the people's prior views about this to enter that space without immediately arousing suspicion and this is why again why I'm not I'm not as troubled as some other people are by the caveats and by the kind of warmup because what you're slowly changing my mind about it as well here's what I here's the way I think about this now and I actually I will say this I would say that the amount of caveat that I have to do is going down okay that's quite significantly we could get a chat GPT to probably do an assessment it's like a good I but I just I'm just thinking about it now like when I give talks about the work I'm doing or I'm on podcast or I'm I feel like I used to have to spend more time doing that than I do now if people like yeah we all know that boys and men are struggling tell us how right I feel like as we win the argument as it becomes more of a mainstream thing the need to do that will get lesser so in some ways My Success will be measured by the realiz direct you can be I'm not having to do it anymore how much do you think how much do you think is uh progress that you're making uh culturally around the conversation and how much is bravery uh personally as well bifa those maybe a little bit difficult you're going like I've I've kind of pushed maybe you could have done this earlier but you're sort of treading on uh thin ice and you're going am I can it hold my weight that was okay can it hold my weight here yeah that's okay can it hold my way here maybe the ice is changing in thickness or maybe you're just becoming a little bit less risk averse too uh I think the ice is getting thicker because I'm thinking I'm try I my risk aversion is I think I'm trying to hold it constant because that's what the mission requires I actually can't run a significant risk because my reputation the reputation of my of The Institute and to some extent the downstream movement yeah I I would be affected by it so and actually I do there's this uh book from a friend of mine yal Lavin who's at the American Enterprise Institute had a big impact on me and what he talks about is what does the role you're currently doing require of you and so it's like how do you think about what do someone in what how is someone in my position supposed to behave right so very good and he talks about the difference between institutions that are platforming and those that are forming and his view is that institutions for should form you right they should shape you so to become a member of Congress you go in and and it shapes you and like okay I'm a member of Congress now and so here are the rules and here's how I'm supposed to behave and here's like decorum and here's what people are going to expect of me in this role rather than a platform which is just like I go on there and yay I'm on the TV all the time now and this is great for my career Etc and so this question that he says you should always ask is what does my current role require of me and my current role as a director of a think tank on boys and men and someone talking about this requires something different from me than if I was in a different role podcaster and and what I also what I also find is important about this is to recognize that Division and recognize that everyone can people can have different roles to play right and to honor those roles but to be clear what your role is in that conversation at any particular point in time so great that's so I mean like I say I'm just so impressed at how much you've thought about all of this stuff and it's evident that you're very intentional with the way that you go about this which is what we need and uh yeah I I think I'm really too important not too great in other news this episode is broughty by function you probably want to know what's happening inside of your body but getting your blood work comprehensively analyzed can cost thousands which is why I've partnered with function because for just $500 you can receive extensive lab work and over 100 carefully selected biomarkers giving you an 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familiar with audience capture uh do you have you heard of criticism capture no so criticism capture it's this great article I send it to you on is that you like the criticism no basically that uh your uh critiques not your compliments are more warping to your messaging that you I mean Jordan has certainly been I think on the receiving end of this a little bit that what you actually end up doing is becoming the enemy that your enemies always said you were because you it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways and that you start to do things to prepare yourself maybe you shy away from topics more often than not you lean in you become this sort of like fire branded version of things and uh I do think that criticism capture at least around the this sort of conversation I'm like how many times have I said on previous episode this is the same single uh distribution channel for 850 900 episodes thousands of hours over the last six years six and a half years how many times have I said well we do know that we must be careful with the this thing and we got to and I'm like here we go again I got to say this thing this time because the clipping the Purity spiral the Grievances that people want to find or with this version of it here he didn't say it quite he didn't use the word historical and therefore that means that you know what like whatever it is so yeah all of this coming together just makes for an exasperate an easily exasperating situation but I really really appreciate your your input on that you mentioned the Institute I don't think he launched it the last time that you were on what have you learned since launching the American Institute for boys man thank you yes thank you Cat not many people get it actually so that's great um well I've learned that it takes the IRS a long time to give you 501c3 status what's that so we're a 501c3 which is Charity basically is that the same as a nonprofit or no yeah but it's a legal it's a legal status for the organization and so um I apologize to the any ofone from the IRS that's listening that was not love the IRS yeah I also love the uh immigration the immigration set NCIS or whatever it is yeah um well first of all because of the conversations I was having like with you and with others it became clear to me that this was an Institutional problem not just an intellectual problem and by that what I mean is that you actually do need to be producing research you do need to get the numbers out there you do need like to be in that space because there's a lot of organizations that do really good job on behalf of women doing that and and drawing attention to an issue in Co or whatever it is with research which then gets media attention and because there just weren't any institutions doing that for men boys and men those issues weren't getting the same attention and so at some point it felt like I need to institutionalize this so that's that's the Insight that led me to decide to form a whole new organization because you know obviously we need more think tanks Chris that's really what the world needs is another said the guy that used to live in Washington DC and I have to say that like in this case I did feel like it was justified in terms of just this Gap this vacuum that's that's around boys and men the other thing I learned was it's hard to recruit women to come and work for an Institute for poison men uh the associate director of our uh Institute Alana Williams uh is currently the only woman in our team we're only six um again the same would be true the other way around why was it hard I think that there' be way more male feminists that would want to join the female equivalent is that not true I don't know from the other side I know that those female equivalents that they do skew very female but again I think that's because understandably like until people have heard the argument about what you're trying to do they they they code you yeah right so what I've also learn yeah just and I so I sit down I've been a couple I sit down and people say oh yeah I saw that you were the president of the American Institute for boys and men so I assumed that you were a kind of lunatic conservative and like oh interesting why did you cons why did you assume that I said well because you're the American Institute for boys and then I said oh so that's a conservative so it codes it codes right it codes conservative yeah and so what that means is again back to what we were talking about earlier that does if that's how it's coded don't be naive about that right just recognize that means that you're going to have to do a little bit of work to decode it not to make it a thing that's left or Progressive but just to decode account for that in the same way as if you're hitting a drive forward and the wind's blowing right to left that's exactly right you just got to allow for that right and it's You could argue forever that it's unfair that it's right coded and of course I will judge our success to some extent by the extent to which it's not coded it's just mainstreamed right it's just a straightforward thing and I would say the other success that we've had has been to by focusing on I would say big issues where the data is clear and where not caring about them would make you a bit of a monster has been powerful so take education and mental health just as two big though so we came out that's what we really spent our first year mostly focusing on those two issues and that again that's strategically intentional because a they're big issues but B it's just really hard looking at that data when you see how far behind boys and men are fall in education and you see the issues around suicides and Drug poisonings Etc a like you just can't look away from that data or you cannot claim that those aren't big issues and that there are big gender gaps there and secondly you've got to be a bit of a monster to not care about how boys are doing in school or whether men are taking their own lives right and so by starting with those issues I think that's helped to mainstream in the same way as you you uh thought very carefully about the Publications that were first for your book you've thought very carefully about the studies and issues that are first for your Institute yeah and and again could we could we wish for the world where that's different sure but I'm we can talk about all of them at the same time yeah I fine don't care I I have a job to do yeah and my job is to mainstream these issues and get more people in mainstream institutions the media government policymaking philanthropy to take these issues seriously and if that requires me demands of me in my role to be strategic about the issues we focus on and disciplined about the things we don't do and I don't talk about at different stages at launch Etc yeah I'm not you know I'm not trying to make a living as a kind of pmic or a standup comic or something like if I do that in three years then I will definitely do different issues yeah and I will definitely do it a different way but right now I'm the president of an institution whose job it is is to mainstream these issues and so being strategically thoughtful about that not just in subject but also in tone hugely important and then the last thing I would say is the importance of endorsement either implied or direct and so we've just launched an advisory Council uh with people like Scott Galloway on it but also Lisa deore the psychologist famili with her anarie Slaughter who runs new America Jonathan height also Jason Ferman who was chairman of the council for economic advisers and they kind of also got Dr K on there're healthy gamer and so on but but I would say that what what has really pleased me about that list of folks on there is that in the sort of policymaking scholarly World those are all highly credible names and and what that says to people is like oh okay the temperature just came down another couple of degrees and so if I think about this temperature analogy right so if I started off at like let's do it let's do it in centigrade shall we because I can never get Fahrenheit right let's say we started at I don't know 90 degrees or close to Boiling Point every successive month I think I've been trying to get that temperature down we're reasonable we're doing this this is correct gentle introduction I mean anybody that looks at Scott Galloway and says that he's insufficiently concerned about minorities or the working class or women or you know Progressive problems or whatever it is yeah it's it's very much the you know sniper taking a shot and you're like it's blowing a lot from right to left I'm going to have to adjust the site here and maybe over time as the wind turns down you're going to be able to adjust that sight less a little bit and also I think that as the issues get more mainstreamed and so the the suspicion quotient like coming into the conversation goes down a little bit then I think that will open up different spaces where we can actually kind of start to move there obviously some Fringe issues that I think that I I think will be difficult for us I can't imagine going into them but let's take an issue where I think we will end up doing more work which will be around fathers and fatherhood and especially the way that the legal system for unmarried fathers at Works in different states I think that's an important issue and it's one that people like Katherine Eden and others have done work on but it's also a much more hot button issue frankly um because for a lot of people the father's rights movement has really morph with the men's rights movement and there's a lot of guys out there come back to where we were before who are mad as hell about the way the family courts have treated them and I'm leaving aside for the moment whether or not that's whether they are correctly mad as hell or not but there's a lot of um there's a lot of wounded guys in that space and I'm not in any way saying that those aren't those wound aren't appropriately held but it does mean that they have a certain approach a certain affect and and also the maybe you don't have enough temperature headro to be able to bring that quite in before we break through boiling and I also don't yet know quite what I think about it I need to dig in I think the divorce courts are actually doing a pretty good job but but I'm just to giving that as an example of like that's territory where I can imagine us going but if we started with that right I just a I don't think the data would have led me to do that but I think this is a conversation now about persu strategy but in a space like this being intentional about persuasive strategy I think is fine and also I'm being candid about I'm talking publicly with you about it now so it's not like a secret and I think it's also important that it's not a secret right as we try and do this I'm not I don't this is the game that that we're playing okay and this is how we're going to play it and this is how I'm playing it right and hopefully I'm going to predict it appropriately and it'll come into land safely yeah that's that's so great I um I wonder what some of the other topics are that you think are that you may not even end up getting into but that you think are part of sort of the Pro men's advocacy men and boys advocacy where you think we that's a like real sort of thousand million Scoville Unit H jalapeno thing over there what are some of the areas where you go oh wow that's that maybe that's fivey year 10 year or maybe never thing well yeah I mean it's easier to do the maybe never things probably than the five or 10 year ones because I think those would be kind of bigger ones but one that um well I'll share with you a question that I I got asked at an event that I'd never been asked before which was why aren't you doing anything about circumcision and then it turns out that's a huge issue for a lot of kind of men's rights uh space see as male genital mutilation yeah there's the whole thing around that so um and as it happens like I'm like you from the UK and so uh there's obviously a difference culturally around this and so I have some some personal EXP of the kind of differences and I think it's kind of at some level it's kind of interesting and in fact when I still had a podcast I had um a British feminist philosopher on who had a book called intact which had a whole chapter just on on that issue and she'd actually kind of engaged with it and so it's not like I'm unaware of the issue but yeah no really maybe not your fight to to jump into another one I mean one of the ones that I think about that I think would be like a 10 20 year issue for you hopefully not hopefully it'll happen very quickly but uh would be further down the line would be uh male victims of domestic violence uh and then the downstream uh suicides that have been uh preceded with uh domestic violence for men well I did talk to George about this I went on 10 men that's his big thing he's coming on the show next week yeah it's a big thing and um and we'd engaged a little bit online and i' had some email exchanges with him and we had quite a long conversation about that and the way the way I think about this is first of all uh I'm not I'm not convinced at all that there's anything like the Symmetry that he and others claim that's interesting um now that doesn't mean that I know he's wrong and the others are wrong it's just that I'm I don't yet have confidence that it's right and certainly in the impact that it's that it's having right and in the way that it's defined right so this comes a very sort of empirical question about what what are we talking about here what kind of violence what kind of right um number one uh number two um I I I prefer to frame it at least say things stand as an empirical question around say male suicide and so if you're like which is a huge issue for me and that we're doing a lot of work on especially for young men I mean the the suicide rate among young men in the US has risen by Third since 2010 what's young men under 30 and actually the suicide rate among men under the age of 30 now is higher than among middle-aged men which was previously the biggest cohort was it 40 to 45 yeah it's a big reversal and so has 40 to 45 declined no it just leveled out so it's a difference here level and level and growth so overall the suicide rat's gone up and been picked up by this younger popul yeah so what's in so and actually again we were the first people to do the work this way and I'm not claiming that the work itself was was groundbreaking it's just that as the American in for boys and men we just did the work that someone else wouldn't have done which was we looked at the growth in suicide up to 2010 and then after 2010 by age and what we found was from from beginning of the century for the first 10 years up to 2010 the rise in suicide was almost entirely driven by middle-aged men men in their 30s and 40s into the early 50s right wasn't much change among young men big Rises for middle-aged men from 2010 it's basically flattened out for middle-aged men so hasn't gone down but it hasn't grown but it's gone up by a third among men between the ages of 15 uh and 34 actually and so the nature of the suicide crisis has completely changed in the space being a middle-age yeah deaths of Despair middle-aged Men story if you like dislocated by the recession workingclass men Etc to being something completely different which is like no no no this is men in their late teens and 20s now where we've seen this rise of of a third now the reason I say all that is because that's a hugely important issue for us and as we try to understand what lies behind that what are the roots of that what what's leading so many of our men and now especially our young men to take their own lives and if it turns out that one of the leading predictors of that is what's happened in their relationship maybe even some sort of domestic violence to use that term in the relationship well okay then I'm interested we go I'm interested right but that's an empirical question um led by my concern around suicide rather than an assertion that it's important in and of itself which I remain unconvinced of what do you think or what are you attributing this increase in young male suicide too you've talked about the sedation male sedation hypothesis yeah which I find very interesting which is around obviously around it's about drugs but it's also about pornography and video games and I think it's consistent with this idea of a retreat and and a and a kind of pulling away from the difficulties and challenges of modern society I think that's number one and it's very interesting if you look at drug poisonings which is separate from suicide one of the reasons that's ritten so much among men and perhaps we can talk a bit about that um is because uh the sorts of drugs that the men are taking they are very often taking them on their own so there's no one there to revive them this is not these are not party drugs these are not the drugs that the kids were taking when you were doing your job as a bouncer right this is not let's take this and go out and have a you know have a good laugh this is these are drugs of retreat and my sense is that among many young men that don't feel that sure about the extent to which they are needed and valued and in the end that seems to be the best predictor in the end that some will take their own lives is that they have come to believe that the world will be better off without them or that they're kind of not needed I think one of the best protectors against losing your life to suicide is a real Clarity that the world needs you that your absence from the world will be bad and increasingly I think particularly young men without much economic power perhaps not quite sure where to go what to do do end up being unconvinced that the world is actually better off with them than without them I I I think that the state of feeling unneeded is literally fatal uh through drugs through suicide Etc and also just like any society where we where anybody ends up feeling like we're not sure we need you that you might be a bit Surplus to requirements it's just that's that that's a society that's morally failing and that's the sense that quite a lot of young men have now uh which is just this is uncertainty so these this would not be particularly kind of young men but I think it speaks to the issue about needed which is that the suicide rate among um men is four times higher than among women every age group but if then if you look at the specific cohort of divorced men and women it's eight times higher among divorced men than divorced women doesn't really go up among divorced women but it really goes up among divorced men and a plausible explanation of that I think is just the sense of like well I am I needed am I connected do I have a sort of sense of responsibility obligation am I tied in to some so to some relationships that kind of make it clear in other news this episode is brought to you by Maui Nei we're all looking for easy ways to get more protein in without compromising on taste which is why I'm such a massive fan of Maui Nei not only does their meat taste amazing but it has the highest protein per calorie ratio on the market it's got up to 53% more than grass-fed beef and it is the only stress-free 100% wild harvested red meat available they're actively comb the environmental destruction caused by Maui's axis deer overpopulation and their venison sticks are outrageous I keep talking about them because they taste phenomenal and when you're on the go needing to get protein in is basically impossible and these venison sticks are a GameChanger Tim Ferris and Andrew hubman and petera are also massive fans and they're all kind of jacked so if it's good enough for them it's good enough for you right now you can get a 20% discount on the healthiest red meat on the planet by going to the link in the description below or heading to Maui venison docomond wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's M aui Nu venison docomond wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout one of the problems that divorced men have is that their ability to hold on to their social networks especially when they get married degrades guys just suck at they they suck at keeping their friends they do W wifeless men tend to be a bit of a mess but the when men get married they let their male friends drop or their their uh previous single male friends drop they then absorb the wife's friend groups we're going around to such and such a person's house you kind of become friend with the husband and then you realize when you get divorced that they were there her friends all along correct yes yeah everybody was linked through the wife not through the husband so I think this conversation around needed uh like the you need to be needed yeah was something I really really wanted to get into I think [Music] um very few times Maybe ever in human history but certainly in the modern world has anybody asked the question what does it mean to be a woman in the modern world what does it mean to be a woman sort of the role is kind of in many ways for women both the uh mothering side or the career Focus side sort of I guess the two main skews that women have in terms of Life Direction now um recent opportunities socioeconomically to be independ dependent financially to achieve qualifications to do all of those things this is a sort of a big novel shiny new opportunity lots of women have got that's evident like I'm kind of uh liberated I'm independent I'm doing it on my own I'm sort of chasing after these things like that's you you're kind of breaking new ground it's revolutionary in a way it's sort of fron tiering pioneering type stuff and then the other side which is maybe more typically where women have got their meaning from it's like as soon as you are pregnant I need to raise this creature I need I'm a mother I've got meaning it's this positive thing back and forth I'm relationally I've got this this the I've got other mother I'm alo parenting with my sister or my aunties or whatever and you know many men even when they were uh more important to the running of the family were kind of cheerily waving from the sideline while the wife raised the kid espe you know first six months to a year any dad knows that they're kind of just like a spare part that's kind of like a a moral cheerleader who's like well done honey would you like should I do some toast like is there anything I can do you kind of it's the mother and the child type a little bit harder than that you know what I mean um that it's very much mother is the MVP and dad is there as the support animal that's true um yes my point being that I don't think women have had the uh what does it mean to be needed conversation now in quite the same way that men have some I'm asking the question in a very long-winded way trying to identify why why you would have this sex difference given that both men and women use social media women may be more psychologically affected women in the 15 to 34 age bracket more affected by it uh the the the only bits of sort of toxic femininity I think that really are have been uh raised up by the modern world has been this sort of relational outcasting bullying that happens online Etc um I'm trying to work out why that would be sexed and what that's what's happening to men and I get the sense that women have very uh uh prestigious uh very uh rewarding life paths laid out in front of them right now uh whereas men both of those the socioeconomic approach and the Homemaker approach have kind of been they're a little more Surplus to requirements in both of those Arenas now yeah super interesting in some ways you could argue that the so let's take needed I love that as this just fundamental need I have Ro I have a role to play I have a role to play um and in some cases like I have a distinct role to play right as me or as a dad or as a mom and something and you take the old version of needed was like the supply of needed to women was all we need you to raise the next gener have have the kids and raise the Next Generation and the supply of needed as to men was we're going to need you to kind of raise the money get the money to raise the family and feed the kids and look after right so there were these kind of old supplies of needed and what we've done I think with women is to add another way in which they're needed right so the message that a lot of young women will get is like we actually the economy needs you we need you in science we need you in stem we need you to be leaders model yeah and a role model for the next generation of girls and so on without really saying by the way we also would forget about the kids right because they're like no we still need you to do that by the way and of course that's aort shft there s complaint among many but but what's what's clear is that there hasn't been this evacuation of needed for women and girls if anything the message that they're getting is we need you more than ever because we still need you to do the old bit do it all you know to do this bit um H whereas for men that old form of needed which is through the kind of economic provider model protector model has been very significantly and for good reason but it's been significantly evacuated we haven't really added anything to it and so there's been an expansion of the domains of needed for women and a contraction in the domains of needed for men for all kinds of reasons that we could get into I think that's then playing out in terms of the different ways in which see the Mental Health crisis playing out and especially for for men the question is then what do we need men for and do how do we help men kind of feel needed and that's a whole area around fatherhood Etc one of the things I'm really I'm passionate about is saying like dads matter men matter um because the reason why you made this point about femininity earlier is you don't really read across history even recently about a crisis of femininity but you read repeatedly about a crisis of masculinity and now that could be like Qi role right but actually what it's telling us is something incredibly important which is that the role of men has always being and always will be somewhat more socially constructed and validated because of our different role in reproduction right like at some basic visceral level and I've talked to a lot of you're more of a Swiss army knife whereas the the woman is a bit more of a sword or a hammer like we have a few jobs that we have you and you're well what it means is that like at some basic level I think it's embodied that women needed I've just got it I've got it in my head you'll know this there's greater male variability right in males at the tals yes exactly there's more male Geniuses there's more males with disabilities there's more male billionaires there's more that are in jail at the same time and homeless and all the rest of it this is like a social role cultural equivalent of this that there is greater male variability in the role that they're going to take you're going to be the protector provider you're going to be the warrior you're going to be the Diplomat you're going to be across time you're going to be the person that maybe considers taking their own life you're going to you know there's more of that variability too well that's I think that the that's right the definition of mature masculinity has really shifted a lot in exactly the way that you describe it right and and so one of the one of the things I kind of point out is that actually physical competence the ability to kind of be a good fighter well actually in many parts of human history that was incredibly important right for kind of men and it's actually just not as important anymore certainly not in my world it's been outsourced to law enforcement yeah I mean and certainly in lots of jobs now it would and like being in a Brooking seminar and really having a great right hook just doesn't really help right you Brawn based to brain based just doesn't help and so so what do we valorize instead they say well in that case you want earnings or intelligence and then it's something else altogether but there is this term we may have talked about this before but this term cognitive self- complexity have you come across that no you're like this and so basically what this is this idea of cognitive self- complexity is that your view of yourself has uh multiple sources so it's complex right so yourself has multiple sources of meaning is basically the idea and if you look at surveys where you kind of ask women what do they get meaning from what are their sources of meaning it's much broader than for men and so women are able to kind of draw on well the sense of I get from being a mom the sense of meaning I get from being a friend the sense of meaning I get from being a a a daughter the sense of meaning I get from being a professional kind of being the workplace Etc and the idea here is that actually it's like a balanced it's like having a balanced portfolio is that actually you're not putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of your identity so you've had a terrible day at work but okay it's still important to your kids as a mom you know you can be there for your friends Etc whereas with men there're still putting a lot of their eggs in the basket around work and economic provision yeah they've got this sort of conceptual inera around what they did pre a little bit and it's a bit of a lag there and so what that means for what it means number one is that if men lose their jobs it hits them much harder psychologically because that's so still very Central to their identity but it also means they don't have quite that same ability to flex that self- complexity to just actually lean more into their role as say a friend or a father even if they're sucking at work that that weighs so heavily for them and there's a lot we could learn there I think I wonder if that also plays into society maybe particularly women uh not understanding why not appreciating quite why it would be so painful to a man because to the women it's self-evident that there are these other roles but the men with the conceptual inertia they still got this uh Mark Manson's got this uh concept called identity dysmorphia he says identity lags Reality by one to two years so if you have a rapid change in Social Status you kind of you know like somebody that loses weight and has a glow up as it's called glow up glow up what is that so it's playing off grow up which is um somebody really decides to get their life together and they go to the gym and they eat healthy and you know they start looking after their hair and they do all the rest of the stuff and you go oh my God in the space of six months or two years or whatever you've gone from being this sort of slovenly person to like an absolute sort of worldy winner and that's a glow up and um this is kind of the but it takes a while for you real realize yeah exactly you're still the Fat Sweaty dude precisely correct but actually you're now rocking it but you don't know that yet it's the re it's the reason that some areas of pickup Artistry back in the day used to say that trying to pick up girls in the gym was a good idea because you had a reliable indicator of where they were going to end up in future that it's like you know she's not in that that that good shape right now but is she going to the gym regularly that's probably going to be and the same for the guy it's like you know is he on a good perfect example of this perfect example of this I think is why is it that women uh can be attracted to the starving artist guitar player there's something like sexy about playing guitar that I don't get right that presumably women are attracted to but it's that well he's working hard and he's got talent that could traj him in future if if this keeps on going you you're almost able to sort of throw out where this person could end up finishing yeah and you go he could become a or it's the person that's very hardworking he maybe doesn't have the status and resources now but he's got the early indicators it's his kindling of a fire like he seems reliable he seems hardworking this is what I think that yes uh especially guys and especially in a world that's got lots of um transactional transient relationships casual sex easy distractions all the rest of this stuff dope I mean uh guys that are in shape it is increasingly or it is it is decreasingly being about the way that you look and how your body is going to feel when the cloths are off in the bedroom and much more this is an indicator of some underlying mental traits that you have this is your Willer it's your discipline it's your fortitude it's your resilience you can overcome a pain that's kind of like sexy in a way you you probably get up at a good time you can't have you can you be in really good normal shape and also have a fentanyl addiction that seems quite unlikely to me you know what I mean like it's a an an outward facing uh indicator of the the mental state and when you're swimming Upstream with that to try it's a signal yeah so well actually that that's one of the things that I think there's a misinterpretation of a question a lot the surveys and the misinterpretation is done by some of the more men's righty guys more conservatives which is the question is something like when you're looking for a partner something in a partner what's their earnings potential right is one of the question it tends to come up in the top so Pew does this I will need to be fact checked on this back to our earlier conversation but I'm directionally right about this it's that you know you said Bro Science do you know what the the academic that is I'm directionally right about this wow I love that you've got your own bro sign so if you don't know the actual numbers you say Direct correct um and so so directionally like few does this work and they ask men and women like what are you looking for what's the what's the the traits that you'd most want to see in a potential partner right and what they show is that earning potential is always in like the top three things that women say they want in a male partner but not the other way around and so conservative interpretation of that is like women say they want equality but then when it comes to it they still want a guy that's kind of making lots of money and I've talked to a few people about this and and something that a a female colleague of mine said sometime ago absolutely struck me she said that is a proxy question for has he got his act together it turns out that actually earning potential is a really good proxy for all of the other stuff right it's very hard to do well in the labor market unless you're will to work hard be disciplined turn up have good social of externalizing behavior or you can't regulate your emotions right and so and she's saying so that's the closest question in there to has he got his act together and so and it turns out that that's what women want is that they want a guy's got his act together and it may well be and here I'm just going to project my own experience so it may well be that she says look I actually might work best this is what happened for us for him to be at home and looking after the kids for a while right but when he's doing that I don't want him to just like forget to drop the kids off and then go home and S lie on the sofa smoking where I need his competence I need him to be on it I need him to do the doctor stuff do the I need him to have the same skill set just applying it to raising the kids as he would in the labor market and I think that's true and I think that what a lot of women are kind of saying now and it's might come back to the guitar player guy it might not just be like okay if he's a guitar player and he makes it big we're kind of get rich it's more just he's competent he's hardworking he's trying to get better at something he's yeah and and and guess what that's attractive and it may be that he doesn't make it big he isn't huge but you'd still rather be with someone that's got those skills and aspirations and it also turns out out that if you can get up at 6:00 a.m. and practice guitar for 3 hours and then go on tour and and you don't make it by the way when we have kids together you're going to be able to get up at 6:00 a.m. guit to them exactly and maybe low them to sleep yeah exactly that's so good you might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to 106 last year and one of the supplements I used throughout that was tonat Ali momentus make the only NSF certified tonat Ali on the planet which means it's so rigorously tested even Olympic athletes can use it and 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demographic that we're seeing a lot more uh young men um now taking their own lives um we've also been digging in a little bit around other forms uh other forms of death like unnatural deaths if you like which include suicide but also include things like drug poisoning and and I was is this self- poisoning this is you take drugs and you die from the drugs but you weren't intending to right so this is like if you your offcial Lac or accidental overdose yeah Etc now that's a huge problem generally but it's become a really big problem for men and the biggest growth we've seen in those deaths from quotes unnatural causes which is drug poisoning suicide homicide car crashes like the four big ones okay almost almost all the growth um for all men has been from drug poisonings and in fact if you look at the number of men who are dying from drug poisonings this Century so since 2001 you look at the increase the increase in deaths from drug poisoning between 2001 and today is the equivalent to an additional 400,000 men in the US that we've lost plus there was uh 500,000 additional overthe toop of women's rates of suicide from 1999 yeah suicide is also much higher and then of course covid was much higher for men too lost about hundred last be more than this now Lo more than 100,000 more men to covid than than women even though men are less likely to be old who are the ones who are most affected by it so so and actually that's what's um the life expectancy gap between men and women just just grew by a year and these are the reasons why High um H but the drug poisoning Gap so that additional deaths from drug poisoning That's 400,000 and just to put that in context that's about the number of men that the US lost in World War II so we've lost the equivalent of a World War in men in the increase in drug poisoning death since 2001 and it's almost all been men and so that's for me that's adjacent to these deaths from suicide I still think they're part of this retreat I still think they're part of this checking out thing I you know obviously to take your own life is the most tragic form uh of of checking out but I also think that drug addiction substance abuse and particularly these drugs of retreat are also part of what are the drugs that they're using um mostly opioids um now synthetic in many cases and of course part of this is a supply side problem because a lot of them now they're different quality or they've been laced and so this is just it's an accident um yeah yeah the person was didn't even really know what they were taking what they were taking the quality has been a real issue now and then there isn't someone with you to revive you how do you bate um this person purposefully took so many drugs that they would take their own life and this person accidentally took so many drugs that they lost their life if if there's some indication a note or some some sort of message Etc so there may be a bit of vend diagram crossovery a little bit Yeah and and and and if anything it's hard to know for sure but like if anything what would be the bias here I think the bias would probably be against declaring it as suicide so generally speaking the stigma will be higher there and so it could well be not everybody writes a notes or you know some people just decide to be uh a little bit riskier because God what does it matter nobody needs me in any case I I can I can just enjoy the evening yeah it's a little bit like the idea of a kind of unintended pregnancy is like there's always a bit of a gray area there right and so I think in this case too there's there's a bit of a gray area and in some senses I just see these all as symptomatic of this General Mala this kind of sense that a lot of men are having of you talk about sedation but that like got Retreat uncertainty and this kind of backing away into something whether that's whether that's drugs or it's porn video games screens but it's some kind of retreat so the the interesting thing about the sedation hypothesis it it really only my theory around that only answers the question why is there not more incel violence like that's what it was there to do and I think it's I yet to see uh I mean bus and William are looking at it now it's in a paper that they're going to try and assess um but doesn't just have to be incel violence I think it's just male young male young male violence in particular but the re the reason that or at least the question that I was asking was we have higher rates of sexlessness uh and social isolation young among young men than ever before why are we not seeing the typical outcomes that we would see which is the young male syndrome where is the young male syndrome basically um but but what you're saying is maybe this what it may be the case the male sedation hypothesis is true when you're talking socially but maybe some of that aggression is being turned inwardly uh that the retreat doesn't they're not fully being sedated out of any sort of aggressive or violent tendencies it's just not happening to the world out there yeah that that sense of it's odd to think about this way but like an externalizing Behavior around sort of violence risk-taking Etc being turned in and so it's a form of it's a it's a sort of internalized externalizing Behavior if I can put it that way internalizing Behavior a little bit but like there was this very interesting study that I was surprised that the New York Times actually gave got a lot of coverage to a year or so ago now where some Scholars looked at the psychological profile of mass Shooters um and and compared them to suicides and drug deaths from deaths of Despair and they found that it were pretty similar and so what they said was the the title on the piece was something like School shooters school shootings are one are a variant of a death of Despair U most of those a huge proportion of homicides are also suicides so homicide suicide is a huge thing Thomas Joiner does a lot of work on this but in almost every case like the people who are these Mass Shooters they're not trying to survive themselves oh it's kind of like a death by cop but I'm just going to take some people out with me before yeah so they're going to kill themselves uh or be K or allow themselves to be killed and but what was interesting about it was just and it was the reason I thought it was quite courageous to kind of cover it was because like anything that attempts to sort of explain that kind of behavior which in any way is related to something that's happened to that person's like they're despairing they're lonely they're whatever runs the risk of a potentially saying you know every young man is a potential Mass shooter which is a line of argument that I fiercely dislike but also kind of excusing it is the is the fear that people are going to have like and this is Again part of this problem where explanations are very often Mist are mistaken for excuses and of course they are not analysis is not justification right that's actually better actually better way to put it I had to there's an episode that everyone will have seen by the time that this one goes up where I had to roll back my uh my accuracy budget my Precision budget uh I'd veered outside of that and in that I had to say look just because I talk about something doesn't mean that I'm supporting it reinforcing it tacitly or explicitly saying that this is something which is good and we should do it but yeah the uh the the conflation of of analysis and justification a lot of the times is one that we need to separate out yeah but I do think it's it's interesting to think about like when when men are in trouble in one way or another feeling un needed feeling lost feeling hopeless uh whatever it is like what happens then and and I think that you can see it happening this in various ways and it could it could be acting out towards others could be acting out towards yourself in terms of the risk taking disregard for your own drug ability toal exactly because it's like well like if in if if it all goes wrong yeah what am I losing what have you got to lose you're you're a new father of your second set of twins like who's going to care but it's that's also interesting if you look at the criminal justice stuff is like actually the prospect of becoming a father has a big impact on men's kind of to kind of commit to commit crimes it seems to really affect them because like it does it does signal to them you know what someone's going to need you sometime pretty soon need have there been any have there been any formal studies on needed is this even a defined term yet it's a complex psychological trait uh yeah I don't I don't know of any it's one thing I want to dig into and I was really there'll be a lot of psychologists listening so if someone wants to try and do a little bit of work in wherever you are on your lab on needed yes I mean I'm sure it'll be one of those things where I just haven't looked there's actually a term for it and me and you well do you know actually there's a term in math weirdly there some weird statistical thing called needed but I struck by um do you know Arthur Brooks he course he's been on the show okay um yeah he he had this he wrote this story about this uh and it really affected me this was years ago now this guy who'd just been in prison and it was chatting to Arthur and he was part of this rehab program Employment Program to get help kids men who'd been in prison and this guy's had there some his phone Buzz and he looked at it and this guy started tearing tearing up prison guy yeah this prison he's now out and he's in employment right he just got out of prison and he's in this place and Arthur's talking to him because he's interested in this labor market thing like this this guy that's hiring former prisoners and how's it working so Arthur's just interviewing him and this guy looks at phone starts getting tearful and I says is everything okay like is something something bad happened and the guy went no no no the opposite and he just showed off of the phone and on the phone it was just his boss and it just said hey Bob as soon as you can can you get over here really need you and I was like sorry yeah what the goes he needs me I've never heard anyone say that to me before and I just think that's that moment where that guy was getting tearful because this all all his boss said was I need you and it's taking this excon into this tearful space because he's like wow he needs me I have no idea what it was for whether it was to come and clean up but it didn't matter this guy that had this journey in that moment he felt like there's another human being out there who needs me me uh and that's just like isn't that that's so powerful and I think for those of us who've maybe been fortunate enough one way or another to most days have that feeling of kind of knowing right that someone there does kind of need you it's very easy for us to kind of imagine what it's like to not feel that I would love to know from some of the women that are watching uh whether they or any of their friends whether they've got stories of what women's equivalent of non-need is like that how does how does a girl woman get themselves into the situation where they're not needed given that women seem to have better more concretized broader social groups they seem to be able to hold on to those social networks more effectively they're more likely to be a mother which means they've got a relationship with the child socioeconomically they're flourishing more than men are at the moment like with all of this happening how does a woman fall through the cracks because I think that would be really fasc because what I'm always interested in here is why is this sexed why is there something happening to one side and not to the other or why is it increasing in a manner that's happening differently or whatever it might be like for instance with girls the uh persistent feelings of hopelessness and listlessness between the ages of 12 and 16 or whatever it's like 60% of girls say that they've got that and you go okay what is it that's happening to them why is that particular Constitution causing that I'm trying to bate out those I actually want to show you I want to show you video right I I I think I have an answer to that by the way if you want it like well speaking as um a woman oh here we go but no well here's what I think would be a reasonable answer to that would be women who have are past their childbearing years uh who done their job they've raised the kids they probably maybe you postmenopause um and the husband says yeah I'm going to yeah I'm out of here I'm going to go and marry a kind of a younger woman right and there's been some evidence around this recently so so I think you can easily you can imagine a world where women would start to feel like once they've done the job of kind of raising kids they' got to this they've got to a certain age the post you know post fertility age and maybe their husband leaves them say or their marriage breaks up maybe they leave their husband I don't know but then they would say okay you know what you know what it's like to feel unneeded it's to be a postman and pause of woman whose kids have left home and whose husband has now married someone younger than them that's what it feels like to be unneeded I don't know but I think that that age thing would kind of maybe come in and actually I wasn't thinking about I wasn't thinking about older women and that's a really great point you know the the like cat I mean the cats the cat lady is the cats at least the cats need her you know that sense of well at least there something your kids have gone maybe your husband's gone and kind of so I do think that they're they probably at different ages and it's a very interesting I think societies have thought quite hard historically about the role of women in that stage they've actually like having given them an incredibly important role you actually see this like like this is a weird fact but in the early church uh women could be deacons uh in a way that actually can't in kind of current but postmenopause now a feminist critique of that be like wait wait you're only let what why do women have to go through menopause to do that but actually a more charitable interpretation of that is they gave them an incredibly important role in the church a role that you can graduate up into and they had very senior roles in the church in many well you you'll be familiar with the grandmother hypothesis for why menopause exists right I think I've heard you talk about it yeah a few times it's one of my favorite pet theories uh again nobody knows for certain like a lot of evolutionary psychology is is kind of a explanatory not kind of like completely exclusive but um that why is it almost all animals females uh when they are no longer able to reproduce they die like why would you still be here survival and reproduction the only reason you can survive is so you can reproduce so given you can't reproduce why do you need to survive anymore yeah and it seems like the of children is so costly that it is advantageous to have somebody who can no longer contribute any more children but can contribute to raising the ones that exist it's the reason that Alo parenting with a huge amount of wisdom as well to pass on as well exactly exactly you know the accuracy budget thing I think I've almost got like a a ranting budget or like a mad as hell budget around stuff which is I I do think I give myself permission to have a good rent when was the last time that you did that publicly just just now um on suicide yeah where I have to tell you that I do get mad about the way in which discussions in the media around suicide are being portrayed and so I just vented against this piece that was written by Andrew Solomon do you know him no he wrote a book called The Noonday demon about a depression it's a brilliant book about depression cool um wonderful writer and he has the cover issue in the New Yorker from you know whenever it will be when this pretty big time and it's the teen suicide crisis is the title and I was like oh Andrew Solomon's written about the teen suicide crisis a lot of it's about social media Etc and I'm reading it and I'm just getting progressively madder as I read it because there are five case studies of tragic cases of I mean really tragic suicides and four of them are girls and worse than that is that he has this statist when he talks about the statistics he says between 2007 in 2019 the rate of teen suicides Rose by 62% next sentence the share of girls who say they've considered suicide has ridden by X since Y and is now 2/3 some groups lgbtq Etc are at high risk of suicide period That's the stats par and so what he's done there is what I've seen a lot of people do which is that they they State the overall actual suicide statistics without breaking by gender they then take some of the more subjective self-reported measures about sadness considered suicide Etc and they break them by gender leaving the reader with the impression that the teen suicide crisis is much worse for girls than for boys in fact of the F of 15 suicides four of them are going to be boys H and so it's irresponsible and here you've got one of the best informed journalists on the subject mental health writing in one of the world's most authoritative and notoriously fact checked Publications the New Yorker giving entirely the wrong impression it is not an exaggeration in my view to call that misinformation it is impossible to read that essay and not come away if you don't know the stats and come away the impression this is playing out much worse for girls than for boys when ex exactly the opposite is the case and any parent who reads that and comes to the conclusion that their teen girl is at higher risk of suicide than their teen boy has been willfully in my view misled and and actually that's that's one area I think things have gotten worse I then looked at there was a New Yorker article from 10 years ago also on suicide which was much more balanced written by a woman why do you think that's the case I think what's happened is that the attention that has been drawn to the mental health issues of teen girls has actually led to the self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance where people are so aware of that that they don't that they presume that that must be the way that leads to Suicide too yeah and so when I tell people that it's four times that you know teen boys are four times more likely to commit Su and T Go say no no no it's the other way around now didn't you see that thing from CDC I'm like I did which was the subjective self-reported measures of sadness and considered suicide which is a problem to be clear I also read the release a month later which was the actual deaths from suicide rate which didn't get a CDC press release or a CDC webinar or a CDC director roll out and so it's not your fault if you're consuming all this media if you come to the conclusion that the Teen Mental Health crisis is is much worse for girls because that's all people are telling you meanwhile the share of teen boys who are losing their lives to Suicide has increased in absolute numbers much more than teen girls and and that's really frustrating to me I have made no progress with CDC or others in terms of trying to get into address this but then when you see someone with a stature of Solomon writing in a magazine like the New Yorker and again even then I think about it and I'm just like you know what I'm going to use up a little bit of my MadAss hell budget today yeah yeah yeah very good on that issue so maybe I've got an implied mad as hell budget and I know I can't do it all the time even if I wanted to but I think if you choose your moment and choose your issue and you're sure of your round and I would be very willing to have this argument with Andrew Solomon himself who I'm a big fan of or whoever was the editor of the New Yorker and say what were you thinking yeah this eraser of met it's uh I think gamma bias oh yeah that's the um the Dr John Barry Baris thing yeah yeah yeah gamma bias is an interesting one it's very frustrating um I mean this is one of the reasons I love George from tinman because the way that he approaches a lot of this is in a he's very much from the left so he was telling me about um the the best justification for an intersectional view of the world so intersectionality has just become this sort of catch all term for well it means that you're a lesbian but you've also got a gluten intolerance and your great grandmother once went to like India or you know what I mean it's like that's a very peculiar intersection but yeah I know the point being that there's sort of these intersecting hierarchy minority and so on and so forth and um he was saying well you have a male when men get sentenced they get higher sentences than women do and black people get higher sentences than other races do and when you get black men it's a multiplicative situation same as school exclusions by the way exactly the same pattern so just thinking about you know this sort of reverse here where you've got uh the erasa of the group that needs it the most that talking point this is the one that could do with you actually bringing this point up and uh yeah it's sad it it really is especially when you're talking about suicide yes because it's such a it is the most terminal final of them all let's not dick about with the stats and and it has such consequences for everybody else behind it's so interesting to me that like when I've talked about this kind of publicly the number a number of like there was one a woman who I'd worked with for quite a while um and she saw me I was on I think I think it was on Morning Joe or something and I talked about this and I said look you know 40,000 men a year in Rising that's about the same as the number of women we lose to breast cancer every year right this is a big number and it's going up especially our young young men and she just emailed me afterwards and she said I'm so glad you're doing this work I've never told you this but I lost my son to suicide and we're not talking about it enough and this is a woman she's like highly very feminist made it to made it to the top of her her profession but still like and I can't believe we're not talking about this very much and she just said thank you and please don't share this with you know with anybody else I'm not going tell who it was but but and you get that quite a lot where with something like this is huge and also because the loss of a life to Suicide has these Ripple effects and the just the whole family and kind of community around them why did why how did I not know just the guilt and the blame and the tell you what's I don't know whether you've come across of the social penalties for suicide literature there's some interesting stuff in there I'll send you on Burn um so one of them is that a study was run where they asked people uh whether they would hypothetically get into a relationship and there was two different uh cohorts of people the first one was somebody who right now had cancer mhm the second cohort was somebody who in the past had attempted suicide and on average people choose the person who who right now has cancer over someone that previously attempted suicide the argument being that there is a kind of like a social antibod response to somebody that does it is so catastrophic to the tribe to the social fabric to all the rest of the stuff that we do as much as we can you know even depression in many ways is seen as a a potential precursor in some ways a warning sign exactly not only a warning sign to everybody else but it's also your own defensive mechanism because your listlessness actually in many ways stops from doing the thing that you're going to do one thing I got a million [ __ ] videos that I need to show you before we get into that again uh what is true about the sort of meme or me the cliche the stat that's been thrown around for a long time women attempt suicide more than men men take their own lives more than women have you starting to break this apart a little bit because I'd love to get the the real data basically true the question then becomes what's the data source that you're using to measure attempts and the criteria how do you define an attempt yeah and this is difficult to talk about because if you even hint that there's something softer about that data then you might be Mis mistakenly construed as diminishing those mental health problems um but I would say that it's it seems true and people then say well it's about the choice of the choice of method so it is true that that men are much more like to use firearms in the US but it's also true that the gender gap is pretty similar in the UK where there are no firearms so that doesn't explain it what happens it seems is that when men attempt suicide they select a much more decisive method one that is very unlikely to fail all right fail is a weird word this is hard to talk about and I want to say acknowledge that we all have people listening to this and watching this who may be having some of their own feelings about this or have experienced it and so on so like but I like the way we're talking about this which I think is with the right degree of empirical evidence and empathy um but it does look like men are kind of just as a more decisive method whereas with women it's much more likely to be something less less obviously decisive cutting or or or pills what are the men what are the top male uh methods in the US as firearms and what about in the UK I don't know that's a good question but um but I my instinct would it be might be something more like a high know offer I mean again I'm not sure we should talk about this but but you know you can imagine like various methods that are just pretty decisive understood the lethal force is a bit more yeah with the gun it's like I wonder whether I mean this is again I'm really really getting into broscience territory here but I have heard some stuff around um the cutting for women being their equivalent of a cry for help the the The Cutting is OB it's by design it is on the outside that maybe this is a please somebody step in uh I have no idea whether that would be sexed in any way I guess maybe men's uh lack of social awareness or predisposition to talk about their emotions might just mean that they are having this conversation with themselves they are five steps further down the road toward lethality than the woman is their cries for help have all been internalized internalized internalized internalized interesting way to put it because most of the men who we do lose to Suicide have not been in touch with mental health professionals before doing so and so it very often comes as a real shock to people it's not like they he's been struggling yeah whereas that's much less true for for women um and so the the difficulty around the kind of Cry for Help thing is it makes it seem like less lesser that it's not in any a bad term yeah that's right I think a terminology is not ful around that it's also worth saying that in quite a lot of these surveys it's self-reported and so it's it's sort of people will report that they've attempted to take uh to take their lives if you go to hospital for something that's got involving drugs was it attempt it depends honestly it boils down to whether the doctor codes it as such in terms of the statistic was was that overdose coded as a suicide or as an accidental yeah and how many pills do you have to take for it to have been considered no note but he's been a bit sad for a while and he had show up yeah it's just it's just harder to interpret the attempt data and one of reasons I you whereas the suicide data if anything I think is likely to be understating it for the because of the stigma and so if you if if a death has been clearly defined institutionally and legally as a suicide then you can be pretty sure it was right they they're not going to miss high bar they're not going to misclassify the other way right so you're going to get a lot more you know uh false uh negatives and positiv yeah uh around that and so I think that the kind of hard data on suicide deaths is like that's the best measure we have available to us for what suicidality because it's the ultimate expression in some ways of suicidality which isn't to say that considering it having think about it but but the other thing is like in many of our own lives I can think of someone very very close to me who like he described to me driving home from work during an incredibly difficult time and like night after night there was one place where he knew that if he kind of just drove in a different direction this in the UK that that would be it and how often he thought about that and it came into his head and he didn't he had kids and he didn't and he didn't but like night after night that he would get to that point on the road and this is like just that talking about diminishing and the sort of eraser which is a very popular uh term that's used eraser of past suffering so on and so for what do you make of the Harris waltz's campaign around the groups the strugg groups that they're trying to bring into their camp and the ones that they've missed off well I find it interesting that this election which was I think supposed to be about women's issues and now we have a woman at the top of the ticket on the Dem side has actually become in some ways a bit of a contest about men and masculinity and that's partly because you see this gap opening up in voting intentions at least among Young Americans especially with young women being much more like to be on the left now and young men if anything somewhat moving to the right so it's become uh something that people are really talking about a lot like what's happening with men and then of course because of the way that the Republican party has really lent quite hard into lots of kind of men's spaces and also just a certain affect right the the in some ways the data point I like best on that is that in 2016 Donald Trump was introduced at the RNC by evanka Trump in 2020 he was introduced by ianka Trump in 2024 he was introduced by Dane Dana White Dana White yeah uh I couldn't remember if it was Dana White or Hulk Hogan no Hulk Hogan came on later but Dana White so like okay so from Vanka Trump like and so that's a kind of that's not subtle right that's a kind of clear bid I think for to be the qu's men's party whereas the Harris wals campaign are betting very hard on winning off uh with women's votes not least since Do's Reproductive Rights being a huge part of the agenda but what's interesting is they're not really playing up at all correctly in my view Harris as the first female president GL class ceiling Etc they're kind of downplaying that and in Tim wal there's an interesting figure there high school teacher if he becomes a VP in fact I think even running for VP first career public school teacher to do so we've had 27 lawyers uh as president of the United States and I've got no idea how many vice presidents but let's assume double that right let's assume we've had 50 lawyers as president or vice pres we haven't had a single career public school teacher so he would be the first to do that but he was also a coach great relationship with his son that video of his son so I mean k Ben K Benjamin sgon of a cad from lotus e is somebody who is uh not exactly a massive fan of the Democrat Party as far as I can tell defended that video of his son crying and said anybody that thinks that this is cringe or worthy of critique this is precisely the sort of masculinity that you want like a son an adult son balling his eyes out at his dad proud at his dad oh my God awesome and I got to tell you like as as the father of three sons um I have yet to have any of them in tears in the audience at least not deliberately but um but I have there is something about like of course Sons want their dads to be proud of them but the thing we don't say as much is I really want them to be proud of me yeah and when they are proud of me and they'll say something about that is it like it's like it's a thing and and so like any yeah I agree any anybody that saw that yeah and was unmoved by it something is something wrong with them but but I would also say that the the Democrats actually haven't articulated a kind of PR male agenda in a way that they now really could I think they've dropped some of the kind of they're not really leaning on uh a very strongly first woman president thing you don't hear them talk about toxic masculinity or the patrio you don't hear them talk that much about her minority status either no I think that's got to be a strategic thing coming into this I would have expected it Hillary Clinton they definitely did try and go Hillary they did and and the bumper sticker was like I'm with her that's all you had and so they're not doing that and they're trying to counter sign yeah but but then then but then even though I think there's a lot of substance to like the things they're doing which actually would be quite good for boys and men they they don't seize the political Capital around it so the political the political terrain for being proen without being anti- women seems to be still terrain that neither party is able to kind of occupy for the Republicans feel unable to be able to articulate in a way that's really resonant the issues of boys and men without coming across as somehow wanting to go turn back the clock on women meanwhile the Democrats who I think have got had some really good policies for men can't talk about it and I just say this is I'll take an example of something that will this the reason I'm hesitant about this is it risks sounding really trivial but I think it speaks to something deeper so the Harris walz campaign just put out their opportunity economy paper which talks a lot about jobs and inflation all the stuff you'd want them to not about identity it has seven images of the candidates interacting with a voter of th in those seven images guess which demographic doesn't appear once no men not a single man and You' got to think that couldn't have happened the other way around and I've got to think that someone up there has a blind spot that you would produce a publication which doesn't feature a single male voter it's a single man out of all the seven right just have one just one out of seven right and so I don't think that was intentional but I do think it was indicative of just a mindset issue here which is that there's one p there's one picture in a warehouse with hard hats and probably someone went oh we better make sure that's a woman it's actually a pregnant woman right so so it's like really like so it's like and you could see that like we want to make absolutely sure that people don't think that we you know factory jobs are just for men so let's make sure that's a one but then all the others are wom I me look I don't like talking about that kind of stuff because I think it sounds it sounds silly and trivial and like why is he talking about a public pictures in a publication when he runs a think Tech but the answer is because I think representation matters yeah and I think if political parties want people to feel like they see them they should show them well if we look at the uh it is really funny someone brought this up the other day a lot of criticism around Kamala Harris going on call her daddy very sort of female focused podcast biggest female podcast in the world female Joe Rogan and basically saying well look what are you going on there for her how how many call her daddy Watchers do you think well I he going to vote for Trump but now that I've seen CA Harris on call her Daddy it's really going to change quite liberal I got I I mean it's yeah it is it's I would say pretty liberal it's like Hollywood so whatever that is which is probably pretty liberal but I mean the the primary talking point on that was uh women's bodies and and uh abortion think she was preaching to the choir there I mean absolutely but then on the flip side of that you know like Trump going on uh Andrew Schultz's show Theo Von's show Shawn Ryan Show I would guess Shawn Ryan has maybe 98% met it's a sort of um military veteran uh podcast you know five hour episodes about the Battle of fujia and stuff like that it's like not a massive like that the most Trump like cohort that you could think of so it kind of got me thinking cuz they're not stupid the people that run these campaigns aren't stupid so I wonder what they're doing I wonder whether they're going on so that they have a warm audience and a warm host who is forgiving and largely on their side uh so that it's just a good press opportunity and they can take the box of I did unscripted interview I'm wondering whether or not they actually genuinely feel like they need to shore up this base I'm wondering whether or not they think that if they tried to do it in the other direction that it would just have no impact and there's the potential for them to come across as being silly so I'm like really trying to sort of this is my world right I'm thinking right okay what would what would happen you know who I really wanted to bring on the show I really wanted to bring uh the two VPS on I really wanted to have separately no separately uh I really wanted to speak to them separately I thought that that like interesting JD and Tim would have just been like in some ways actually more interesting than the two people that were leading because their debate was way better and certainly on this in certainly on this question about the role of men in society I mean they're both very interested in it uh and JD broke the what whatever it was called the beard ceiling did you see this right I did yeah um so this was uh one of the one of that me that means you could run President right because you're British I couldn't uh Joe Rogan and Cameron Hayes said they'd vote for me if I did run for president though uh so this is Scott Galloway on Ryan holiday's podcast recently this should make sound if I play it I think the election is going to be decided by masculinity what do I mean by that the voters that are kind of up for grabs right now are not women they're going Harris it's not old people yeah old men they're going Trump young men aren't really going towards the Republican party as a lot of people would say or the manosphere young men actually are supportive of gender rights any demographic what they're doing is they're moving away from the Democratic party because they don't feel seen on the DNC site there's an explicit section that says who we serve and it lists 16 different demographic groups from people of Faith to immigrants to Asian specific Islanders blacks women disabled veterans I tried to calculate it my best estimate is it cover 76% of the population they have the same issue that universities have or the Dei apparatus has at University when you are explicitly advocating and favoring 76% of the population you're not advocating for them you're discriminating against the 24% so unfortunately these individuals feel shunned by what I'll call more Progressive or the establishment they're very drawn to anyone who feels their pain and unfortunately that void has been filled by some very negative voices what do you make of that well the ex Le of like who we serve from the DNC site which does list all those demographics but not men is kind of on the nose uh and I actually think the you had Dan Cox on and Dan I think was the person who actually first identified that um great and we've all been picking it up kind of since and again it's a bit like my example of the opportunity economy PDF like not very many people are actually going to those places and noticing that thing but I do think it's indicative uh of a problem that the Democrats have and that the center left generally has Center left institutions have with just acknowledging these problems like getting the CDC to admit that there's a gender gap in suicide just it's like banging your head against the wall it's like but but you know there is a four-fold difference right you bang bang they won't uh and so that has created a vacuum uh because if there are real problems and they're not being acknowledged then of course someone's that someone's then going to come in and say yes you're struggling the question is whose fault is that and what do we do about it so I do think there there's a lot of ground being left open here um particularly on the the center left by their failure to acknowledge that these problems are real what's interesting about this is that when you actually kind of turn to areas of policy you actually find that there's probably more policy energy around some of these things on the center left than there is on the center right right and so my favorite example of this is the infrastructure Bill have we talked about this probably probably hadn't happened so so the bipartisan infrastructure bill you know creating millions of jobs in construction Transit and sumon Manufacturing Etc two-thirds of those are going to go to men are going to men we know that because a very good women's Think Tank did the analysis showing that because those occupation skew male there is going to men and challenged on that the Democrats just apologize for it or run away from it so you know there a clip of Pete bter jedge being asked about Joy Reed and butter jedge is a consumate political communicator and so watching him struggle was you know that was worth a watching it on himself she this is just a bill for white men isn't it what he should have said was well it's a bill that will help workingclass men but actually it will help Black and Hispanic men at least as much as white men joy and you know what given the recent economic Trends I actually don't think helping workingclass men is necessarily a bad thing isn't that maybe a good thing given what's happened to working-class Men by the way we're also doing the these other things for kind of women but why do you think that a piece of legislation that's helping workingclass men of all Races is a bad thing right he didn't say that he said well we're working on that and we're trying to get more women into them and it's all bit difficult and um everyone uses Bridges uh so it's like it's a it's a unusually bad interview from Budaj because he's just like ah head meanwhile Josh Hy who is the Tribune of The Working Man by his Reckoning voted against the infrastructure bill which is the only major piece of legislation that actually been directly going to outwork men that we've seen for probably decades and so on the one hand you've got a party that's actually doing some stuff to help working-class men but my God trying to get them to admit it oh my God they' never admit it and then you got another group over here who say ah we're For the Working Man but well in that case why did you vote against infrastructure investment which creates jobs for working man why do you think they did um Holly would say it's because there were conditions attached to the Investments which you would say were the part of the woke agenda Etc and I I don't want to say that his arguments against it were entirely without Merit but nonetheless here you've got this bill it's for the working guy right above all and one side won't take credit for it and the other side won't isn't it funny uh I mean it's still the same in the UK as well but especially being two Brits now living in America the complete blindness to CL any kind of talk about class yeah is mindblowing to me you know we have a a term in the UK that gets used an awful lot and is almost entirely absent from the American lexicon which is Posh Posh talking about so he's a bit Posh isn't he yeah he comes would you say that about me Chris you're a little Posh yeah yeah yeah I would say so let me get I've I've got a trick that I've been able to play I probably can't do it with you I'll get it wrong but there's a trick a couple of times where I've met another British person in Austin if we're at dinner or a party or something like that I'm like just give me a second just talk to me a little just say something you don't even need to talk about you and I'm like private school like North London they're like yes yes I'm like like sort of lower middle class upper you can zero in it from accent from the way that they present themselves son so forth but the conversation about class is totally absent in America nobody is talking about it and it's the one thing that cuts across all of the other bits of [ __ ] that everyone says they're exhausted about being captured by over the last couple of years so you go okay it's the one that cuts through sexual orientation and gender and and [ __ ] political Viewpoint and all of these different things and you go well just make it for the exact reason and this has been flipped now as well that previously the left was supposed to be the party of the working class yeah and now it's the right that's playing into that site you go I mean yeah and then then you get into this question about yeah but oh but where are the policies right and to help them because I think this is playing out very much in a cultural Dimension right now so it's sort of like there's this did you know about this book called what's the matter with Kansas have you heard of that book no it's quite old now but it was basically an argument that um workingclass Americans were being persuaded by the Republicans to vote against their own economic interests by through culture through culture War issues especially abortion right so that the argument interest and there's a little bit of this going on here to I think around this whole debate about gender because Scott's exactly right the In that clip you just showed that there's no strong evidence that young men are less supportive of gender equality than they were or than older men I I just in my own analysis of the General Social Survey with Alan Downey and that asks a bunch of questions like female president female boss you know society would be better if women stayed in the home and Men did the earnings these these questions I've been asking for for decades and and the trend towards gender equality on those use continues including among young men right and so I don't see any strong evidence that there's this sort of shift against gender equality and so that's why the framing is correct I think that it's less young men especially becoming enthused by a reactionary anti-female agenda I don't see any evidence of that in any serious numbers of course online and right you what I actually think is closer to the truth is that a lot of these young men just feel a bit politically homeless now they don't feel that welcome on the left that's for sure and that's been really growing over the last few years and given some of the stuff we've been talking about I don't think that's crazy right um they get a lot of sense of like they're the problem not that they have problems they know what not to do but they don't know what to do and that they're kind of over it is my sense of it but they're not stampeding over to some sort of you know massively reactionary turn back to the 50s agenda they're not they're just like that means their votes are up for grabs now in a way that they were not previously that was the most interesting thing that I learned when Dan came on the show people should go back and listen to that episode it was really fascinating he's fantastic I think and um what he taught me was that men especially young men are more likely than any other cohort to say that no particular political issue is important to them yeah so it's very much a just checking out engagement yeah exactly it's not going left or right it's going back like this way of it so um you've used the term a couple of times today and so have I this sort of zero some view of empathy just dig into that a little bit for me sort of how you think of it and and conceptualize it yeah and of course gender is only one example where this can happen you can see it around immigration and various other issues but the basic idea that like for one group to do better another group has to do worse there's only so much of something to go around whether that's money or empathy or political capital or whatever right and so what that means is that if I successfully convince you that we should spend more time and energy and political capital and invest on boys and men that means by definition we're not going to be spending as much time kind of caring about women and girls right and that fear that is zero sum means that if you're on the side that stands to potentially lose out then of course you're going to oppose moving toward even if you agree with my stats even if you agree with everything that I've been saying saying here you're like yeah yeah yeah but there's still so much more to do for women and girls that we just can't be distracted from that right and there's only so much to go around in fact uh I did uh interview with Ezra Klein from The New York Times and he reposted it about a month ago um and in that he said there is this sort of feeling that people have that there's only so much empathy to go around right and so if we start wasting some of it on the guys there'll be less for the women he's like but that's not how empathy works right it's like it's like saying to a parent is considering having a second child it's like well should you do that because you know you take some love away from the first one you really want you really want to love the first one 50% less right it's as absurd as that but it does play into this debate quite strongly where people genuinely fear that if you if you do pay more attention you pile on the gas a little bit around the boys and men's issues which I believe you should that means doing less for women and girls and a general proposition that's just entirely false we're perfectly capable of doing both I had a chat with Christine Ember uh who wrote that you know he's on my board by the way is she really yeah she's [ __ ] hot I mean she's got to be writing a book off the back of that thing surely she should do if she's not she should go and do it because she was great and I love the conversation with her um so I wrote a little essay after that uh so I'm going to read you this this short diet tribe about the zero some view of empathy as a caveat this is part of my rant budget from 18 months ago okay it may not so we can't claim it against your rant budget from from I've already paid it I've already paid it this this was the IRS took this off last year got it publicly trying to work out why men are struggling is largely a thankless task this is a zero some view of empathy there is an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women or some other minority group who is more deserving after all haven't men had it good for long enough maybe they should just suck it up for a while but empathy does not work this way it's not a limited resource recognizing the plights of men does not ignore the plights of women and ultimately women end up suffering in any case as it's this increasing cohort of apathetic checked out and resentful men who contribute to the exact lack of eligible partners that women say they're struggling with women posting boohoo poor patriarchy sad whilst also complaining where all of the Good Men at is mating logic seppuku if one sex loses both sexes lose male blame is something else I see a lot a common question is why don't men just do better surely they can try harder in school employment and health Chop Chop men hurry up and stop being so useless well no other group is told when they suffer with poor performance or accolades the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps we don't tell any other group to talk about their problems instead we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees departments campaigns and funds to solve the problem in simple terms if a woman has a problem we ask what can we do to fix Society if a man has a problem we ask what can men do to fix themselves it's a blatant double standard in people who are unwilling to admit to any structural disadvantages faced by men are standing in the way of a solving the problems that are hurting men and also the potential wives that they should be viable for the problems are not in men's heads but out there in society we should not Gaslight men into thinking they can solve these problems by being less masculine if the patriarchy is so powerful why aren't men flourishing more as Christine EMB says many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they do not feel a part of just because you're in the majority does not mean that you don't need support in this regard Modern Men are being made to pay for the sins and advantages that their father and grandfathers enjoyed I'm remembering that I read that Chris good um very good I think after you cuz you did I also listen to your conversation with Christine and we're Mutual Mutual fans of hers I would just say what in there you said like being told men that need to be less masculine I'd also say that from the other side they get like you need to be more masculine but but either way there's this strong agreement that it's like you're you need to you're the problem right you're either not man enough or too manly right but like and and maybe depending on which day it is you like you listen to somebody else like on Tuesday you're problem is that you're too masculine and on Wednesday is that you're masculine enough and on Thursday you're too masculine so these poor like pinballs right between like depending on which podcast we've listened to or like which what we've read right which stat was in a sense that's like a second order problem the first order problem is that we're positioning it as about you and about you as an individual and one of the things that I probably have found maybe the most gratifying thing about my work is the number of people that have said thank you for framing this as a kind of broader issue and not just a problem with me or my son or my brother right there s like rather than saying what's wrong with him we can say well what's what's wrong with schools right and too often the problem has been that like let's say a boy is struggling at school we're like we treat him like a malfunctioning girl and then try and fix him rather than fixing the school and and as you say like one of the big lessons I think of recent years has been not to do that and I had this argument with someone recently about mental health care and men not men not seeking mental health care as much as women do I think there's all kinds of reasons for that the cratering share of men in those professions might be one factor which we've done some work on but even if it's true that men seem to find it a little bit harder to ask for help say in terms of their mental health right we could either have a thousand year argument about whether that's nature or nurture and what's going on there or we could just do something the hell about it which is in that case how do we help men to help get more help how do we make it how do we make sure that our mental health messaging is kind of more PR male friendly how do we do Outreach programs why do we and actually the I thought the equivalent was in the labor market literature there's this evidence that one reason that women sometimes end up being paid less than they arguably should is because they don't ask for pay Rises yeah right yeah they're not they're less disagreeable on average right and so but I it's very hard to find someone who will say okay one of the reasons women earless is don't ask for pay rid well that's their fault then isn't it they should just ask for it if they don't ask for it they're not going to get it boohoo them no one says that no one says we say okay if that's the problem maybe there's something about the workplace culture that makes it harder for women to ask for pay Rises or if women are just for whatever reason less likely to kind of advocate for a pay rise for themselves maybe we need automatic pay Rises based on performance Etc rather than relying on the individual to be pushy about it we do structurally and systemically to try and fix how do we fix the structure right if that's a difference which is leading to women being disadvantaged in the labor market we don't just say what that's there they should ask but we do do that when we are when we say why don't men get help from mental health professionals we say well well [ __ ] yeah what's your this has been a topic that's come up an awful lot recently what's your opinion on therapy for men the relationship of men with mental health care and therapy in particular I don't know what do you you probably ask a question more specifically yeah so uh there is a there is an awful lot of rhetoric around uh men should ask for help they should learn to open up more about their emotions they should be going to there is even a meme like men would rather instead of going to therapy yeah they'd rather like go bow hunting for a week pris EXA exactly they'd rather trying to legally climb the Pyramids of Giza than just go to therapy or whatever but I think it I think it plays into a cliche which is that more women go to therapy on average have you looked at any data around the effectiveness on Mental Health outcomes on happiness on all the rest of that stuff for men uh and when it comes to mental health interventions from that side therapeutically I guess uh what have you have you learned anything uh yeah so what I've learned is that for all kinds of reasons the whole field of mental health is less male friendly than female friendly in various ways and again that's at the average and that's a sweeping statement so let me justify it number one directionally correct it's directionally correct number one the survey instruments we use to pick up measures of mental health uh Miss some of the more male Centric ones so and I'll you know I'll plug some aibm pieces here but Lisa deur who's a very well-known psychologist points out that the the surveys that CDC use on Mental Health they they capture information on internalizing Behavior but not externalizing Behavior so they literally miss one of the ways in which you might see boys suffering more so we don't we don't measure it as well don't men punching walls and that doesn't count or if that counts as as antisocial Behavior or something but there literally the question is not there in that in the main youth risk behavior set so number one number two is that um as the mental health uh field just becomes more and more dominated by women like it just men aren't represented and so to the extent that it helps to feel represented by any kind of particular profession the fact that it's getting harder and harder to find like a male psychologist or social worker or counselor that doesn't help and also just culturally you're going to get into a space where you have a profession so dominated by one gender or the other it's almost impossible for that not to be more sensitive to the particular expressions of mental health problem or than to speak the language it's just yeah I think that's that's one of the reasons I worry about male teachers Etc um and actually a lot of Mental Health Professions especially if they're women report that they actually feel a bit uncomfortable dealing with some of the issues around male mental health they don't feel equipped to do so do you know what any of those are um particularly around externalizing Behavior violent behavior um risk of suicide so a lot of um obviously for a good reason they're worried that they're going to be Trea some you might do it yeah they're worried about that and issues around like things like sex and porn addiction for example which skew pretty uh in a pretty gun ofender Direction which is crazy given how difficult it is for a guy to say even to a trained professional a woman to open up about your sex porn addiction some you know malfunction of your manhood uh they've had to jump over a lot of hurdles already for it to then land and maybe not be well this kind of woman and right uh okay so and actually Zach seedler who's on our advisory Council and is he's the um Health director for movember okay uh fabulous guy and he's designed this uh Intervention which is called men in mind where they're actually training mental health professionals to be more comfortable dealing with more of these s of male male issues and there is early days and they're only kind of me they can only evaluate how the professionals feel after the training they don't have long-term outcomes yet but what I love about that is that it's a recognition of the fact that the profession as a whole is just not equipped well enough now to deal with those issues around men so you can actually train mental health professionals to be somewhat better at dealing with those kind of more male presenting mental health problems the the other thing I don't know if you'll agree with this but I just started looking at maybe it's an unfair example but someone just said you've got to talk to this person they've set up this mental health charity and it's all about reducing suicide getting suicide down to zero and I was like I'm super interested in that yep I'm going have a look at it uh and again the image thing all the images are of women um and the the the the whole vibe if I can put it that way of the website as well as it would when feminine and and I just as a guy I felt yeah that's not welcoming yeah I didn't feel but like if your goal is to reduce suicide than given 80% of the suicide speak to your audience a male and so and I've challenged them on that we're talking about it and they're like yeah we had really thought about it that way that's interesting and like okay let's try and move on that and so I think that again without any ill will or anything being advertent the whole field of mental health is increasingly being coded as female and feminine and then we wonder why men aren't interested in going to it because it's being seen as more of a female thing and so we do need I think to have a lot more men doing it we need to make sure it's presented in a way that's more male friendly we need more apps we need just I wonder what would happen I mean can you imagine the [ __ ] uproar that would occur publicly if you said this is the first therapy uh clinic for men like which is essentially no women allowed like that we we're we're trained for men we have a disproportionate number of male clinicians and and PSY a joke about that it was a UFC cage and they they mes Therapy Clinic here so it's a bit in that exactly the theme of that Meme male would men would rather punch each other in the face for 25 minutes than go to therapy I I tell you what something else that I always think about Scott Galloway made this amazing point where he said that older guys mentoring younger boys that are not their sons even like uncles doing it and stuff there is just this sort of ick meme around that that you're suspicious you're highly suspicious of the coach that spends a bit too much time with your child and due to horror stories maybe rightly so in some ways but it has robbed so many young men and I mean this is exactly where the the vacuum that a Jordan Peterson or an Andrew Tate or a a me or a you in many way like just somebody's talking to me someone's talking to me when we've got higher rates of fatherlessness yeah than ever before you know um but yeah animations were B talking about just you had her on she's phenomenal I agree she had had a huge influence on me she know she's writing another book on fathers oh I didn't know that well good because she did another book on something else she she did uh she did uh love then she did life of dad and now she's doing another book oh no sorry maybe she did Dad then love then Dad that was it um so she's going back to she told me on the most recent episode we did book two first then book one and now she told me so she's doing another book on Dad I'm so pleased about that but also this the so this issue of like Scott does talk a lot about this you know of this mentoring scheme or coaching right I think about you think about the role of a coach and one of my one of one of the reasons I'm so worried about lack of male teachers is because male teachers by the way they're coaches so between 30 and 40% of male teachers are also coaches what's coaches uh like coaching the after school football team or the the so the athletic coaches right Tim wal was famously a social studies teacher and he coached his high school football team to a state championship right um uh but it actually men are about four times more likely if their teachers to also be coaching a sports team as women are which is in no way again men would literally rather coach a children's sports team than go to therapy but but when I think about that and you you and and I've been a scout leader and I've done a little bit of coaching and my son actually now is uh is a fifth grade teacher and has faced some discrimination or at least some stigma along the lines you've identified is now also coaching the soccer team team and um and so he's in that space of doing it all but I think that coaches are very often like mental health professionals in disguise right and one of the reasons why it worked by the way is because it's shoulder to- shoulder and I think I know you've talked a lot about this which is like you're on the bench you're chatting how are things going oh how's everything all right at home you're kind of chatting and you know M you know the because it's not threatening you're just on the bench and you're chatting right and so maybe that creates an environment where it's a bit easier for boys especially to open up to a trusted the children's equivalent of the men's sheds initiative yeah like you're there with Coach and he's Ching to you and he cares about you and same thing the same thing is true now so pickle ball I'm the most Austin man ever um my my new sport of choice um playing pickle ball if you and your friend there's a you start with what's called dinks at the net so you're just doing the little you're just doing the little sort of warmup over the top yeah sometimes that's ended up being 45 minutes because we're just yeah my M's going on and dude you can talk while you're playing you're just you're there and you're like we haven't even started competing yet we're just sort of we've got this thing that's occupied five or 10% of our brain and then the rest of it is just running through emotions I'm struggling with this thing or blah blah blah I've got this issue that I'm coming up with and yeah before you know it it's like a a mental health therapy masquerading as a racket Pursuit and um you have to be it is true that men sort of have to be doing something else else or pretending to do something else fixing a lawn mow or that's why the men sheds movement work and why the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff worked and you can either roll your eyes at that or just say that's true and so let's work with it and I'm much more in the lad Camp which is that's true you can't but I think this point about the stigma uh and it's also self-perpetuating once it becomes weird to say be a teacher as a man then the stigma associated with it gets I mean weird just statistically you stand out more when you go and do it it's like being a female engineer in the 1950s right what's wrong with you like um well even on that on that point my um ex-girlfriend was a teacher and she was telling me I think in the entirety of the primary school in the northeast of the UK I think there was maybe one or two no there was I think there was two or three uh teachers one of whom was sort of a late 40s Indian man who had the turban and all that happily married like blah blah blah there was one guy who was maybe 20s something like that and uh there's a lot of kind of the the viciousness the real viciousness sides of femininity like status game playing that's kind of done behind the scenes venting gossip all of the stuff that happens when you get a ton of women together but the way that he was treated by the women a lot of very lwd comments made to him uh in a manner that if it was reversed would be a [ __ ] immediate disciplinary there was a staff night out at some point in Newcastle and a you know sort of like hand very handsy women which in many ways is like a yeah it gives you that response it doesn't give you a full on ick response it's like a he's probably fine at dealing with it weird so like the evidence that I've seen is suggests that once men are in these professions they typically are pretty well supported by the women in them they're stigmatized by the people outside them including by other men whereas a low status job yeah whereas women it's the other way around like women if they go into kind of traditionally male roles they're on construction sites or in engineering or whatever they actually face problems inside but they're actually celebrating applauded outside so there kind of that does look like it plays out a bit the other way but I this is a personal thing but when um I told somebody that my son was had got his first job as a fifth grade teacher um and how proud I was of him um they said well they they said let me ask you one question about it I said sure and they said does his door have a window does his classroom door have a window said I don't know I'll ask him said yeah he needs to a window and and there have been schools where the male teachers have insisted that Windows get put in the doors cuz they want to make sure they can be observed um and and most most of those doors do but but it was just this kind of moment of wow I would literally never have thought of that right but a lot but if you talk to male teachers that's exactly the sort thing they'll bring up which is make sure door has a window um and make sure that there's no blind or anything like so that like at any point during the day anybody can kind of look in um and of course most other teachers in there as well but relating to that I I I tweeted this earlier on so I'm probably in trouble right now for it but um I saw a quote that I thought was really fascinating about male Behavior so I want to get your thoughts on this as so this is the duality of warning men about bad behavior the problem with giving men advice like don't be pushy is that the men who really need to hear it won't listen and the men who' benefit from being more assertive will take it straight to heart and I thought that that framing was so interesting to me that is interesting I it's a little bit like the sort of sense that like the men who are like dark Triad total know like trying trying to getting a narcissist to sort of not be a narcissist is basically impossible right you can put as many posters up and have as many social campaigns as yeah I mean taking a narcissist through a sort of like compulsory 3-hour you know harassment training just doesn't really work um but you're right that the it's it's an interesting kind of thought I mean I I I struggle with this a little bit because on the one hand I I'm older than you and so I can remember some of of the behaviors in the workplace that were seen as acceptable now I was in journalism and it was a particular time in the '90s um but I do look back and think wow really um like that was like not okay exactly but that was like to really tolerated and the women were just well just don't get in just don't get in the lift with him after lunch we know he's a bit handsy he's a bit handsy after lunch because he's been drinking right just don't the advice was that so the women's job was to make sure they didn't get in the lift with him if he'd been out drinking right that um H and I think what the hell uh equ have don't walk home alone at night but in the office I mean honestly like to the extent that I feel slightly implicated in those cultures going kind of looking back I actually feel in I feel genuinely ashamed looking back on what we thought was acceptable and just some of the Norms around kind of behavior so in that sense I think that the positive effects of just saying what is and is not appropriate in terms of like male female interactions and what men can and can't do amazing do I think that of course there's a danger that some people will take it the wrong way that it will get over interpreted or whatever of course but but I I I really do worry a little bit that the the reaction to things like the me too movement and to those changes in poliy is is disproportionate compared to the overall good that those movements have done you can always find exceptions but it's back to where we were a little bit before they've got to look in the round here and not just use the edge cases to kind of make your case and as a as a whole I I've got to tell you like the workplaces that my sons are going into and if I had daughters that they would be going into so much better on most fronts than um than the ones that were in existence does that mean that we want to get to a place where people feel like they can't like just be natural with each other ask each other out for coffee or whatever no of course not but no one seriously wants that it's only The Fringe people yeah I I you know I had this little bit that I ran for a while talking about how uh me too had sought to sanitize the elements of bad male behavior and accidentally ended up sterilizing all of it like all male Behavior had been removed and he' largely bated there was this rule supposedly from Netflix's offices oh how long you could look at each other but the reason I love that story though was how the Netflix employees responded to it so the rule was what you couldn't look for more than 9 seconds or something and so it became this internal joke and so the Netflix employees would start looking at each other and going one two three and they'd look away they go one two so they all just took the piss out of it right and just go CU it was so patently absurd that you could sort of regulate you can call the meta on it yeah yeah and so and actually I think the market sort of the equilibrium figuring itself we're certainly we're certainly correcting with that we we are certainly correcting I've had I mean how many it's kind of over done in cliche now to say that we're past Peak woke but I think that we are I think um I'm fascinated by the talking point of what will the more reactionary elements of the right-wing commentariat do when most people agree with the this is an overreach crazy blah blah thing campaign uh well it's like yeah of course mate like that's obvious it's no longer revolutionary and anarchistic and and you're fighting the good fight it's like you're just saying the thing that everybody else knows so I think that's going to be a big pivot in my world of online commentary stuff whatever I think that's going to be a a really big change but yeah just to round out the the talk about giving blanket coverage advice often uh doesn't find the ear of the people that you're trying to give it to and does hit the ear of the people that you're not um David bus badman which I'm going to guess that you read uh in that you know when you're looking at uh sexual assault it's a very small cohort of men the the um what is it it's not all men but it's always a man was like the tagline because it it's not all men on hash not all men or whatever was one of the defenses and then it's not all men but it's always a man was the defense of the defense um but with David's thing it really is a very small cohort of men committing a thousand offenses not a thousand men committing one offense each yes across time yeah and um I just think that I'm really interested like as a good man who is friends with Good Men I'm like you're going to switch off there's going to be like a of fatigue uh like messaging fatigue if you're regularly told that you are a thing that you're not and uh I wonder how many times you can say well we know and you go well hang on a second that's not me and my friends and that's not the people that I know and so on and so forth the the um assumptions or the implicit accusations and stuff like that of male behavior of the things that you do can kind of like uh the boy who cried wolf it makes you desensitize if every everything's racism then kind of nothing's racism if everything's misogyny then kind of nothing's misogyny and if you continue to um degrade the importance of using particular words or trying to get people on board of any cohort with the things that you're talking about you go well after a while people are maybe going to switch off and they're not going to listen when you really need them to yeah and I'm just reflecting on that and thinking that the other danger with always going to some of the more extreme behaviors that you're talking about or or catastrophizing like certain kind of behavior is that we might actually also lose like most of this is about learning how to be a grownup proper person right um I remember myediting adulthood yeah it's what my mom used to call having good manners right and I think so much of this is like right you know I explained to her what's happening when we had know some training after some of the me too stuff she mean like you mean like having good manners it's like yeah it is that moment but like it's a whole different thing had to be reinvented right right um but what what what's the truth that's in that is that like learning how to conduct yourself with other people learning how to kind of regulate your own behavior appropriately um through some you know just through social learning right and that to some extent some of that's can to be a little bit different for men as for women just because of some of the different average proclivities of men like just you know dealing with certain things like we've talked about risk taking but you could talk about like romance and dating and so on too that actually that's the point is that you grow up uh and that's what the reason I don't really don't like toxic masculinity but I quite like mature masculinity because I think kind of the difference between 15year old Chris and how old are you now 36 36 is is very big so what's the difference well 21 years of learning and growing and learning from other people and probably getting some stuff wrong and then like oh that didn't work right going to get it right yeah so I actually this this idea of formation is one that I think quite a lot about now which is actually more of a theological one and people talk about formation in the church and more generally but of course that's just true generally right we forming ourselves and each other and so the things we choose to form us are very important and how we form others is hugely important as well and what I don't want to lose from all this is the fact that like as a father one of my jobs was to help form my sons into mature men and that meant learning this it's okay to be like this but it's not okay to act like that and this is the appropriate kind of behavior and this is when it's good to do that and this is when it's bad to do that regulating yeah and and most of it just everyday stuff it's not well this was the thing you know the the the sort of common uh laughing track that's put after Jordan Peterson's advice is do you really need this Canadian psychologist to tell you to stand up straight and make your bed and you go yeah yeah actually for a lot of young guys yeah and you know that criticism is often uh thrown from the sorts of people who should really be thinking a little deeper about why there was a market for that which was fatherless listeners you know Jordan Peterson was the the surrogate father to a few million men for it also wasn't a lot of I mean it wasn't new right Admiral mccraven yeah the rich make will make your bed right and actually had a bit of influence on me which is like and actually the thinking behind it which is Achieve something good it's a gift to your future self it's like taking care of your environment and showing some discipline and habit and all that's actually pretty compelling stuff and then it just appeared in you know 12 rules for life I have to tell you that that is not the rule that my sons took from that book unfortunately I kept saying I kept waiting for them because they had the book I'm like still your beds aren't made boys like unfortunate made your bed we mentioned it earlier on you've been focusing on workingclass men yeah what have you learned about workingclass men well I thought I I I've written quite a lot about class before partly because I was so interested in the lack of attention to class in the U us British Heritage and it's so weird because actually I was trying to escape from it and I ended up missing it uh and the thing the because the the only thing worse maybe than a class-bound society that's constantly obsessed with its classness you know where you right is a class-bound society that pretends it isn't and that camouflages unbelievable class divides under this idea of classlessness underneath this idea that we're not classless we're not like the UK but actually social Mobility is lower in the us. than it is in the UK um and so the gap between the classes is much bigger and and the upper middle class and the in the US are much better at protecting their position than the upper middle class are in in the UK for all kinds of thing they rig the housing market they rig the college Market but any that was my I wrot a book about this called dream hoarders but so I thought I thought I knew the data on class pretty well I thought I knew the data on men pretty well so what does it tell us some of stuff we already knew you know stagnant weight so we use the college non-college break as the main one stagnant wages for men without a college degree plummeting employment um rates for those men that's where a lot of the drug poisoning deaths come from to like is really class-based as well so working class men um who were losing to drugs why let's well if you think that they are quotes deaths of Despair to use this phrase that case and Deon have used then it's part of a sense of just you've lost out economically you've lost out socially you don't know if you're needed and so you just take more risks around drug taking um you're about to fall through the bottom of the net in any case in any case so and it might fits maybe a little with the sedation thesis too which is like things are a bit things are a bit [ __ ] out there so like we know cool all right um the things I was surprised by uh even though I thought I knew some of the data was the huge increase in the class Gap in marriage and living with children and so I was astonished to learn for example that if you take men without a college degree in the US in their 30s and 40s only half of them are in a household with children now and that was 80% just in 19 80 um and so it's it's 50/50 now whether a guy in his 30s and 40s is in a household with children if he doesn't have a college degree most men with college degrees they are in a household with children right there's a massive class Gap but actually I was kind of Blown Away by that I thought well that's just culturally a huge fact because your 30s and your 40s they're the use you're typically raising kids right you got kids around and so if only half of the men working-class men in the US are now in that situation it's gone from like it's not half it like it was fewer than one in five just a few decades ago now it's half if you think that feeling needed feeling connected feeling like you've got value is part of that is part of just anthropologically being in that kind of family unit I think that's huge now it doesn't mean they're not they have kids in other households and it could be non-residents and all that but nonetheless I was I was very surprised to see quite how much the the class Gap in having kids in your life had opened up have you looked at Nicholas eat's work yeah yeah he's another just outstanding IM stuff on employment is amazing yeah yeah I should bring him back on uh because that first conversation I had with him was great and I'd love to know where he's at with that but that you know I think about um what percentage of men under the age of 30 or 35 is still living at home with their parents I think it's the most common living Arrangement it depends what age you do it at in at 24 it's about I want to say it's like 34% of men something like that so I still think it's the I think it's the modal one yes it's the modal up to maybe 30 yeah I don't know if it goes up to 30 that's true it's certainly much more true for men than is for women correct exactly and then but if you were to then say uh let's break this down by working class men yes how many more of them are going to be living at home more likely because they're going to have less disposable income so they're going to be more reliant on their their family's home maybe still in the bedroom that they had 20 30 years ago that's interesting I don't think we did broke the data that way it would also be partly explained by the fact that the college goinging Gap agenda Gap is much bigger for workingclass families than it is for upper middle class families so B CL big class grade and and and for rural families and so on too so the further so if you look at the income distribution um parental income distribution uh and you look at the ones at the bottom who like at their fifth or the 10th percentile I can't remember exactly where it is there's like a 16p point gap in college enrollment between boys and girls from those poorest families and there's like a fivepoint gap at the top now it's much higher at the top generally but you also see the gender gap just gets narrow and narrow so Raj ched has a great paper just showing this gender gap getting narrower and narrower and so it's not that there isn't a gender gap everywhere there is but if you want to see the big gender gaps you go to the bottom of the distribution you go to the poorest households where you'll see the sister going away to college and the sun staying at home and you also see we haven't published this data yet but geographical Mobility rates are now higher among women young women than they are among young men so women moving more they're more likely to go to a different city more likely to go to a different state so you know this this idea of like Go West Young Man of like the men are going to go out and no it's the opposite now it's actually the women who are moving out and what that means by the way is you then get some place parts of the country where the sex ratio starts to skew because the women leave yeah um and the men don't uh and so there's kind of more men Left Behind as the women have gone off to seek opportunities and that has all kinds of potentially interesting implications sex ratio work is so interesting to me I mean I think it has to get quite big is my sense of it before you start seeing like the the gap before you start seeing serious results but I'm early I'm early in the process of looking at it but you do see Stark examples where then like East Germany was a place that where just the men the men stayed the women just emptied out and they all ran West and there you see some you look uh was it Portugal in the 18th century do you have a look at that it's pretty interesting so um I don't know why but there was going to be a very male skewed sex ratio so there was a a law that was put in uh where the first son was permitted to marry and any subsequent Sons after that were put on gallion ships and sent off to explore the new world really and in many ways I think that was more male sedation stuff that they were trying to avoid young male syndrome coming in and they were you know well it wasn't really sedation more like extradition the male extradition hypothesis like off you go yeah so you um yeah so what else what else in uh workingclass man we've got this like very interesting Gap with regards to going to college yeah fascinating you've got the health you've got the health stuff where you're seeing I mentioned the kind of drug poisoning Gap being much much bigger for workingclass men I don't think I quite realized that the earnings for men without for your college degrees even though they've come up a little bit in the last few years are still basically flat since the 79 um and so it's adjusted for inflation yeah right yeah and so the sort of there's a lot of argument about this among labor economists but the sort of basic story that it's only really men at the top of the distribution that have seen wages go up relative to men a generation ago still seems to be true and I and I I I I thought that might have improved a bit more than it has because as I say wages have gone up in the last few years but it's just been such a long-term Trend this kind of economic stagnation story for kind of these for working-class men that doesn't appear to have been undone just in the last few years it will take quite a lot longer um for that to happen and then the other thing was when you look at men who are not in the labor force so this is back to eat stuff um and you look at the reasons why so you can see okay these are men they're not unemployed they're not like seeking work they're actually out of the labor force all together yeah and that's a much bigger group that's that's where the story is I think and then you ask them why aren't you working for men workingclass men 52% say it's because I'm sick or disabled that's the modal answer uh and it's more more than half of them for men with a four-year college degree what do you think the most common reason why a guy with a college degree is not in the labor force can't get a job no that's much much slow down it's I'm getting more education wow followed by uh I'm looking after family members there a bit of stay-at home there followed by I've retired cuz I don't need the money anymore and these are Prim a fire yeah they've gone out so and then I'm sick of disabled right down there so so like it's Fourth it's the fourth most common reason so first of all men with a college degree are much more lik to be in the labor force anyway but if they're out the fourth reason they give is s how much of that how much I mean this was one of Nick next his point yeah this is one of Nick's things where he wor wonders how many men are gaming the system from a benefits standpoint yeah he's worried about disability benefits correct yeah and I think that he he he's got this stat that I've forgotten about um the number of hours per year that they play video games and then he's broken down the number of hours per year they play video games whilst on either prescription or recreational drugs seen it's like some absurd amount of time like like like thousands of hours a year was one of my one of one of my friends would say where is where is this Nirvana of which you talk um when I talk to him about about this stuff but but I where I disagree a bit with Nick and some of those others is that I I that's a kind of supply side explanation which is well of course the men aren't working they you know they're they're all high and they'd rather play Call of Duty or whatever and I actually think it's different I think that and there is some evidence for this that's like actually if you don't think you need to work then you're going to do those other things instead and so I think the causality runs more that way which is that having opted out of the labor market one way other then you might more likely to be doing those other things he's right that once you're on disability benefits the incentive to come off right and so there is this and then of course you do if you're out the labor market you tend to get sicker Etc um and a lot of these health problems are mental health problems and their drug addiction problems like substance abuse is a I don't know the number but it's a significant share of that this is not people who've kind of like Lo lost two fingers on an oil rig this is more of that but in some ways it it it runs the risk of this IR roll pull yourself up by the bootstraps thing too and I think we've got to understand a little bit more about what's the incentive for men to be in the labor market and staying in labor market and doing well you know where you should go you should send one of the interns from your I don't know whether you have massive organization yeah exactly you're huge huge Institute well funded Institute um check out or maybe just run some chat GPT analysis on the comment section of my eat episode that's reached over a million people and it it has got per play one of the highest comment uh ratios of any episode we've ever it maybe the highest it's just an absurd it's that that episode's two years old and it's still multiple times per day it's the most commented site and I don't wonder what it's discussions that people are having or whatever um and just getting like a sentiment analysis that would be because it it's definitely speak talk people they didn't know themselves largely themselves it's men that have it is men that have checked out of society at least from a employment sort of contribution standpoint and uh you don't know how many people are laughing you know you're not going to be able to use it for sort of registered laughing uh liveaction role playing like pretending to be something um but yeah that that really got to me that episode and the comment SE not got to me but like it upset me a little bit did U made me feel a little uh sad because I it just so many men evidently saying the world doesn't need me nobody needs me why should I contribute to a place that hates me I'm like I I don't hate you like I I I I think it would be cool if you were out in the world doing stuff I think it would be pretty sweet idea so it just this uh this self-perception yeah um but it also ties into this family stuff too so the things like we can treat these so I have different charts on labor force participation family life kind of Etc but I I'm I'm reasonably convinced by the evidence that when men are like in a relationship feeling feeling the kind of the need to contribute one way or the other it doesn't have to be financially but like to be in it like partnering that massively predicts them being in the labor market and then of course the men who are doing well in the labor market are also much more likely to be the ones who are then kind of the Matthew Principle as it's known yes exactly yeah and so so that's the problem I think a little bit with this and and is that it's very easy to S of Miss the fact that there's lots of different Dynamics playing out at the same time here and then the question is how do you break it right how do you break that cycle what are your um suggestions structurally systemically policy side to help working class men well number one is in the education system but not just for like kids but more generally the US is at the bottom of the league table of oecd countries for investments in a hang on hang on hang there's like a million acronyms yeah so the oecd is the advanced economy so it's the organization for economic cooporation and velopment so it's like these are the rich countries in the world right if you look at those countries and see who invests the most in apprenticeships and the least in apprenticeships the US is at the bottom right and so just the US doesn't do apprenticeships it just doesn't do vocational training anything like other countries that's crucially important particularly to help men retrain but also because apprenticeships turn out to be very male friendly forms of learning you know not for young men um and also we don't spend enough of the money on apprenticeships on young men in the US there's another country they are for young men here they're very often not but so that's number one number two is the it's relates a little bit to what we talking about before one of the real problems we've got is that even though we have created through the infrastructure investment as I mentioned more of those quotes classically male jobs as a general proposition the kind of traditionally male jobs have declined and it seems very unlikely they're going to come back in huge numbers again like heavy Industries mining steel Works Etc not least because even if we have those things so much it's automated now right so those classically male jobs are making up few a smaller and smaller part of the labor market okay so what are these guys going to do then well we have these massive growth areas in healthcare we've talked about mental healthare teacher shortages in education par Educators Etc and so in just the same way we've had this huge effort to get more women into stem professions and so on too I think we need a huge effort to help get men into those growing parts of the economy including in areas that are traditionally seen as more female like healthcare social work uh teaching Etc and they don't necessarily have to do like a four-year college degree or get a master's degree a lot of these professions now are trying to get people mid-career to come in and if you take something like teaching men are much more likely to enter teaching as a second career than a first career compared to that's interesting right so but it's very hard to do that so one thing we could do is make it much easier to switch into teaching as a profession and if we did that we'd get a lot more men in and you can lower what's have you heard of this term the paper ceiling this gust stuff and so Byron does a lot of work he's from opportunity at work and does a lot of work on the paper sealing is saying you needed a degree for this job when you don't really and so it's like the it's a kind of diploma thing right and of course because men are now much less likely to have a college degree they hit the paper ceiling a lot more than women do um but a lot of these jobs actually you just don't necessarily need like you you don't need a master's degree in education to to be an elementary school teacher um and if you've had 10 years say in Tech uh or something and you want to going and be a science teacher you really don't need to go and get a you know Ma college degree to do that and so just opening up those professions to men and then destigmatizing them which we talked about a bit earlier so we if we want men in the growth areas of the economy it's not going to happen automatically and if anything the problem's getting worse we have fewer men in those professions not more even though that's where the growth is coming from Richard Reeves ladies and gentlemen Richard I I absolutely love your work this is so great I I can't believe it's two years since you came on so I want to make this an annual thing need to get you back more frequently given that you only live two hours away now uh by plane I guess that's right that's close yeah you're significantly closer than you are um where should people go they keep up to date with all of your work Institute all of that so the Institute is aibm as in American Institute for boysand men.org so amm.org and then I have a substack which is just called of boys and men which people can find that URL on substack and I tend to update there as well um but I would really encourage people to look at our website I I will warn you that and I've already warned you it's a little bit boring my com people are going to kill me for this and what I mean by that is like if you want authoritative data on any of the things we've talked about come to our website like we pride ourselves on being the kind of source of like high quality data if you get anything wrong we'll correct it please let us know if we've got something wrong but I think what's lacking from this very of is just like what's the data what's the hard evidence here in a nonpartisan unbiased way and that's the mission of The Institute you're saying that it's not going to have a Halloween themed header image of you in a fancy dress costume or anything like that we're not going have that and we haven't commented on the man versus bear or Barbie movie of these things make it sexy this is what people say make it sexy and I am resolutely keeping it boring but here's my final thought maybe boring is the new sexy is that too much to hope for said like a true British I appreciate you thank you you too thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my conversation with Scott Gallow just him come on