Modern Wisdom - #511 - Max Dickins - Does Anyone Care About Male Loneliness?

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Max Dickins is a comedian, writer and a mental health advocate. Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. And men are suffering worse than ever. This is bad for them, it's bad for their partners, it's bad for their employers, their children and society at large. Men are struggling to toe the line between manning up and opening up and many of them are doing neither. Expect to learn what Max learned from having no best man to choose for his wedding, how men's loneliness differs from female loneliness, the evolutionary explanation for shallower male friendships, how being in a shed can help you bond, why contributing to a project and doing things is crucial for bonding amongst men, whether the manosphere is helping and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Billy No-Mates - https://amzn.to/3PZV38i  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Max Dickens. He's the director of Improv Company Hoopler, an author and a mental health advocate. Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking and men are suffering worse than ever. This is bad for them, it's bad for their partners, it's bad for their employers, their children

and society at large. Men are struggling to toe the line between manning up and opening up, and many of them are doing neither. Expect to learn what Max learned from having no best man to choose from for his wedding, how men's loneliness differs from female loneliness, the evolutionary explanation for shallower male friendships, how being in a shed can help you bond, why contributing to a project and doing things is crucial for bonding amongst men, whether the manosphere is actually helping, and much more.

Don't forget that if you're listening, you should have also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom Reading List, 100 books that you should read before you die, it's 100 of my favorite, fiction and nonfiction, and links to them, and descriptions about why I like them, you can get your copy right now for free. Go to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Max Dickens. Music Max Dickens, look at the show. Hey, good to be here. Did you watch Paddy Pimlet's Octagon interview this weekend?

I did. Funnily enough, I tweeted something about that today. I thought he was brilliant, and I thought it was brilliant for two reasons. Number one, the message, which was about friendship and about guys having to talk about real stuff to kind of intervene in these mental health challenges that men are having, but also, I think the messenger

with men is really important. So there's a lot of messengers that I think men just tune out, but an absolute animal like Fadi the baddie saying this stuff, I think a lot of men are going to buy into it. So I was delighted and I thought he was brilliant. Yeah, it's for the people that didn't see it, Paddy is a UFC fighter currently up and coming, people drawing some similarities between him and Connor McGregor, quite outspoken, he's scous, which means that he's from Liverpool, if you don't know where that is, very, very strong accent, swears a lot, very much a laddy lad gets very fat in between fights.

And at the end of this victory that he had, he said that his friend had taken his own life on what must have been Thursday night, and I think he weighed in on Friday morning, so he woke up at 4am on the morning of his way in. So this is 36 hours before he's about to fight to find out that one of his own friends has taken his life and he got the text or whatever the alert somehow from one of the family members and then used his opportunity to speak and he octagon about how men need to speak up. You know, I would much sooner take a phone call from a friend that was crying than attend his funeral.

He was beautifully done man, so spectacularly done. Yeah, and I watched the post match he did on the SPN as well and he went into a bit more detail. He was talking about how, I think this is a Scouse word, but he said, the thing about women is they can have a gab, he said, they can have a gab with their mates over a cup of tea.

And he said, they don't stop talking, but he said, we're blokes. If you try to talk about certain stuff, I think the line he said is like, what you're doing lad, grow up.

I thought that was, we've all been in conversations, maybe when we were a bit younger, where similar sort of phrase has been used. And yeah, I mean, it's great that some of such profile is talking about it, but in language that normal people use, you know what I mean? I find it interesting at the moment because there's sort of two worlds that are colliding at the same time when it comes to talking about men and mental health. One of them is stopping such a victim, get hold of your bootstraps, pick yourself up,

carry the weight, re-embrace traditional masculine roles and archetypes, the jocco, Goggins, Jordan Peterson, style of things, but also the reassuring menu you just need to do some stuff that's going to make you feel good and reconnect with your masculine purpose. That is so close to the line of just man-up stopping such a pussy. The next conversation, which is men need to open up about their emotions, men can be sad too. It's important that if you are feeling down as a guy that you open up to people and it's not just enough to treat male depression or sadness in the same way that female depression

gets treated by making them feel like they belong. They need to feel like they're worth something. They need to feel like they have purpose and meaning and capability. And those two worlds of men being told to man up, which has its uses and men also being told to open up, yeah, that is a really difficult line to pass. I think it is.

I spoke to a psychologist called Fred Rabinovitz at the University of Redlands in California, and he's a poker player, semi pro, plays golf, as well as running men's groups being a therapist. So he's got both sides to it, right? Almost like what you're kind of what you're explaining. And he put it to me in a way that seemed just really sort of simple, which is you need to have a expanded toolbox.

So as long as you've got tools for different conversations, that's fine. You don't only have to be one way. You don't have to be new age mush all the time, because I think a lot of men switch off to that. I don't know why I certainly did, but also there are sometimes wherever you want to go through the gears in a conversation to mix my metaphors, you do have to have other tools. Sometimes in life you've got to have a conversation about something big and you've got to show up a bit different to that than if you're in the pub and you're having some fun with your mates. I think it doesn't have to be as complex as maybe we think it is, but I completely agree with you. Those two world views that are kind of rubbing up against each other, but maybe

they're more complementary than both sides reckon. I think a lot of it is to do with expectation, because manning up and opening up, it takes a lot of courage and bravery, which are typically masculine traits, in order to open up in any case, but it's more about sort of like cultural stereotypes. What does it mean to be a man, things like that? Going back, what got you starting to think about men's friendships in the first place? So, just pure necessity. I didn't really realise I had a problem with my friendships until I was planning on proposing to my girlfriend and I literally went as far as being in a shop in Hattengarden, which is a jewellers district in London. I went

with a female pal for sort of moral and aesthetic support because I don't know what I'm doing obviously. And afterwards having shopped she said to me in the pub, so who are you going to have as best man? And I sort of parmed her off and thought, oh, my man's gone blank, I just, I'll be fine. I'll fine, it will come to me in a moment. And I went back that night and I made a list of my male friends and I looked down the list and I realized I worked with most of them and they'd find it really weird if I asked them to be best man. And the rest of them I maybe hadn't had any meaningful contact

with them for two, three years and I just thought, oh my god, where have all my friends gone? And then I googled the phrase, getting married, no best man. And there was something like 950 million results. And if you click on them, a lot of them are wedding website forums and bloke saying, I'm really worried. I'm getting, I'm, I'm time to know. I've got no one. People giving them terrible advice like, why don't you use your dog?

It's awful, awful tips. And I realized that a lot of other guys were in this position. And when I looked into the research, I discovered that men since the 1970s, social scientists have looked at the data. And when they're measuring this stuff, men have had less friends than women, and especially less close friends. And I'm sure we'll get into what that means to have a close friend.

And also what was interesting, the second problem men seem to have is that this gets worse as they get older. So men have bigger social groups than women in their mid-20s, get to your mid-40s, that's flipped on its head. So sociologists call it network shrinkage, very boring terms, something pretty simple. Our mates seem to disappear, whereas women are better at maintaining and probably developing new friendships. So I thought that was interesting. So why is that? And I tried to work out

the reasons so I could solve my friendship problem, get a best man, but also kind of go, this is a question that's curious, right? Because we're always told that men have it best, but in this case, they don't. So what's the reason why? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, talking about different inequalities that you've got in the world, there seems to be a friendship inequality that's going on here that's pretty stark and that is upstream from the suicide inequality that you see as well. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, they're connected. So, if you look at male mental health, we, as you say, Paddy, the baddie's talking about it, think it's killer of men under the age of 45, certainly in the UK, and the Samaritans

who look into this stuff do studies, they say one of the biggest causes of male suicide is a lack of social support, that the fact that men are isolated. Don't have people to talk to, there's what's called a big build effect. You don't tell anyone about what you're going for, and then you maybe take an action, which is obviously seriously lethal or dangerous rather than talking about it, but also physical problems. Loneliness is worse for you than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, a big matter of study revealed recently. Loneliness is worse for you than being obese or drinking a lot. So that's, I never thought that would be true. It shows you, if you get some mates,

you can also abuse your body. So there is an upside, so buy yourself some beers and some burgers if you have some mates. That's the positive. But I read that, I was like, that's mad. That's because you wouldn't think it would have anything to do with your physical body, but it does.

Why is male loneliness unique then? How come it's gendered in a way? So, the way male loneliness is gendered is, I suppose, two things. One is, kind of like I said, they lack intimacy in their friendships, so the people that they can go to and talk about a meaningful thing. So, for example, the MoVamber Foundation, the Mell Mental Health Charity, recent survey, recent studies said one in three men have no close friends. And then part of that same study was to ask that group of men how many people in your life could you talk to about something serious, like a health problem, work problem, relationship problem, 50% said no one at all.

So those sort of conversations, that sort of sense of someone really knowing you and you really knowing them, men don't seem to have often that many of those friendships relationships. But also, this was the other gender thing which I found most shocking I think is that when you get to the pinch points in life, so when men get bereaved, to say they're part and die, as they get divorced, or they retire, that's when they have a lot worse mental and physical health outcomes than women because they are isolated. And the grimest thing I looked at with this was something known as public health funerals. So public health funerals are basically when the council or the government bury you because

no one's there to do it for you. So maybe you've not got any money, but no one will take on your state and bury you. No one shows up. Really sad. And this happens all the time in communities all over the world, America, UK. And men were three times more likely to have those funerals than women, even though women, if you look at the stats, are way more likely to live alone. So that's bonkers, that's complete paradox.

And I think that shows the level of isolation a lot of men get to when they do get a bit older. So that's probably the gender, those are the two things that summarise it. Did that's wild? Yeah, I couldn't believe it. You said the important question is not whether men are lonelier than women, it's wild. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. You said the important question is not whether men alone are the women, it's how are men lonely. And I think that that kind of reflects what you're talking

about there, that it's not just the breadth of your connection. It's not how many people can you say all right to in the pub or at the season ticket seat that you've got at whatever football team that you support. It's to do with the actual function of friendships. Like why we have them, what they're useful for and a million shallow ones. Does that compensate for one really good and deep one? Well, I mean, that's interesting. So, I mean, I'm sure we'll get on to the work of a guy

called Dr. Robin Dunbar later, who's kind of like known as the Goff father of friendship research, evolutionary anthropologist. But one of the things that he looks at is introverts versus extroverts. Extroverts have a lot more friendships than introverts, but they tend to be a lot shallower. Introverts have less friends, but they tend to be closer. So personality type comes into it, and I suppose there's no right answer to this. Like loneliness is not an objective measure, it's subjective, it's about do you feel your friendships are sufficient for you. And if you're really happy with your social life and you've got one friend, good luck to you. It doesn't really matter, but I suppose it's

where are you happy with it. And I think blocs are there honest a lot of the time, it's wet, are you happy with it? And I think bloke's if they're honest a lot of the time, it's certainly true for me. We don't like to talk about it. I was really embarrassed, to be honest, to not have a best man. And it took me a long time to talk about it. And even now, it's kind of like a bit of a double-edged sword, I feel, being the face of Billy No-Mates, right? I get introduced on things, it's like, he's a go over No-Mates. And I've done a lot of work on it, but there's a guy with no mates. And I've done a lot of work on it, but there's a lot of stigma to it. So I think a lot of men won't confess to it. Was it always like this? You said since the 1970s, what happened in 1970?

I mean, I mean, this is a really good question. So, I mean, the honest answer is they started measuring it, so we don't know what happened for the 1970s. But we can maybe get into why this happens now. So there's essentially three broad theories, maybe the third one you could argue interact with other two. The first one, and so when I got into this, I thought, I'm going to talk to a load of psychologists, therapists, gender people, and go, right, why is it going wrong for me? Why is it going wrong for men? And they would say the kind of,

you will have guests on this podcast before, that's the same thing, right? The man box idea that we have restrictive gender norms that stop us having intimacy in our relationships, whether it be, I look a lot at banter in the group. So like, taking the piss out of each other, that jazz of casual brutality that men have, right? Which is great fun, but maybe it stops, it's a moat around us. I remember I went, I forced myself to go to therapy doing this book,

and after four months, the therapy stopped and said, the thing is with you Max, is you can talk about anything in a funny way or an intellectual way, but I think your friends get a feeling that if they go somewhere vulnerable, you won't be able to reciprocate. They get an aura that you're closed, that you're not open. Maybe that's why you've got no friends. And after like four months of being with someone, that was like a haymaker. That was like a paddy-the-baddy hook to the chin. I'm on the canvas going like, okay, I can't read to know that.

So there's something to it, but then on the flip side, we'll get to that later maybe as well. The banter is a form of intimacy, but it's this idea that we have these rules. Another one is affection. Like wait, I thought, when have I ever told a male friend I like them, let alone I love them?

And maybe after seven or eight beers, and we maybe won't talk about that. So I often feel like male friendships are like a probationary period. Well, you're not sure you really like each other. Is there going to be a job at the end of it? So we kind of keep it at the same level. So these sort of basic rules to do with masculinity, you'd say, they're getting in the way. The psychologists would argue. But then to go back to your point, Chris, about you said about, well, what happened in

the 70s? Well, one thing that happened in the 70s is we started talking about gender, and now you cannot argue that it's not easier to be a man than it was in the 70s in terms of masculine roles. It's a lot looser. We can do much more ways of being a bloke than my dad has, right, who's turning 17 in October. But male friendships, the stat show haven't got better, so it can't only be the gender stuff, which is when you get into kind of the second theory. Which is? Which is? That's... We're now coming to to Dr Robin Dunbar. So Dr Robin Dunbar who's an amazing guy

He's got a book about friends. He's basically he came up with what's known as the social brain hypothesis Which is essentially this idea? Well, he proved it. I think someone else came up with it, but he proved it Which is that there's a cognitive limit to the number of friends we can have as a human being So this is 150. So what's become known is Dunbar's number. We can only have 150 friends. And within that number, there are different circles of friendship.

So they go 5, 15, 50, 150. So you have five really close mates, maybe your parents are in there, girlfriend or an, and et cetera, et cetera. But he said to me, the social world of men and women is really different and it's not trendy to talk about it, but actually if you look at it's really different and to summarise it quickly, it can be represented like this. Female friendships tend to be face to face. Based around talk, there's a lot of emotional

disclosure. Male friendships tend to be side-by-side based around sharing, space, sharing activities often in groups. That's about style and it's about preference. And so fundamentally, there's differences there and that might be why male friendships are less close and why they may look different in terms of closeness compared to the female ones. And he also said that when it comes to our software, so the stuff in our brain, he talked about something called mentalizing. So mentalizing is essentially the ability to understand other people's mind states.

So with you, Chris, I'm looking at you now. I'm hearing the tone of your voice. I'm reading your body language. I'm taking some contextual clues. I'm trying to read the room and work out what's an appropriate response here to stay in rapport to build a relationship. That's all known as mentalizing. And they measure that in tasks known as Jack and Jill tests. I won't go into it too much, but women outperform men. What is it? Tell us. I want to know. So Jack and Jill tests are essentially, this is how they test, I think,

often autism with children where, they've got a Jack and Jill, I imagine there's two dolls. It's about orders of intentionality. So it's about working out. So Jack thinks this about Jill, but Jill's thinking this about so-and-so, who's thinking this about so-and-so. Can you follow those lies of intentionality? So for example, in a conversation, what would that look like?

I say something to you, which is a bit tatless. Your girlfriend stood next to you going, bloody hell, that's a bit much. And her mum's there going, God, I hate Chris's mates. Right? Okay. So reading those kind of relationships all at once, which when we see examples like that all the time, is what socializing is, reading the room, reading each other, women are much better at it than men.

And he said, they're better at it than men to the factor of, they can handle two more close friends than women can, or the main can I should say, so women can have two more close friends than women care or the main camera should say. So women can have two more close friends than women in that inner circle of five. Now that's, there's not much you can do about that. Change your gender. You can't change the... And that's biologically hardwired in. That's some sort of predisposition that men have and women have. Yeah, I mean, we both have the mentalising mentalising software and we do it all the time.

It's just men are not as good as it is. I mean the classic example is you go out for pizza with your mate and then you come back home and your girlfriend says, oh how so and so, how's his baby? And you go up, I don't know, we talked about, you know, we talked about how much broccoli is the in the world to the nearest square foot? We talked about that for an hour I I thought that's baby So that's kind of in microorganism. We see these things all the time when you kind of understand the mechanism behind it You're like, oh, right that explains it. Dumbard did say so I asked him What's the balance between you know nature and nurture here? And he said that's a 64,000 dollar question

We don't know the exact balance, but to say that he is all gender-normed and he is all about psychology is just not true. Did he have a potential explanation for how this would be adaptive? Yeah. So I spoke to him and I spoke to another evolutionary anthropologist called Anna Mackin or an evolutionary psychologist obligeous She's quite famous. She's got her own stuff out there Done a lot of research with Dunbar and it goes back to What our French our friendships used to be for so if you can go back to you know thousands thousands thousands of year ago We're women needed their friends to help them bring up children.

So you imagine you've got a baby. You'd want to really trust the person you left the baby with to go to the toilet or to go out the road to fetch a pile of water, whatever it is. You have to really, I don't understand a lot about Brian Maudiel, man and woman, but you'd want to really know them deeply and vice versa. And you want to feel it was reciprocal, whereas the men would have to form groups to go and fight, to go and hunt. They'd have to have friendships that were maybe a bit shallower

because you'd be working with new people all the time. You couldn't get to emotionally attached because they might die. I mean, that was the adaptive argument. Right. And different ev different evolutionary anthropologists have different kind of versions of that same thing. Essentially, men have evolved to work incredibly well

in groups and to have those build support within those groups. So status hierarchy is handling that, which is one reason where they argue men are more aggressive, whereas women have evolved to be, they call them diets, basically pairs, have really close bonds there. So that's kind of, that's the argument about where it's come from and why it's adaptive. Would also potentially explain why women use emotional and social punishment and sort of backstabby gossip talk as their form of enforcement within the group as well.

Yeah, exactly. So I read a like a meta study about aggressiveness, a male aggressiveness is very out there, you know, you punch people, but it's much more passive, like you say, we're much more around sort of relational aggression. I read a really interesting study by someone called Joyce Beninson, who's an evolutionary psychologist from Harvard. She's great. She's an all sorts of interesting stuff. But she's something about roommates. So at US colleges, male and female roommates, women share, women, men share with men.

But how many of those in second year chose to live with each other? Almost none of the women would live with each other. They'd all go, I can't stand this person. And then the men, even though they do study, you know, questionnaires going, what do you, or do you, or don't you like about this person? The men would go like, he stinks, he's always coming in drunk, it's closer everywhere, he's a real pain in the ass.

Do you want to live with him next year? Yeah, why not? Right, that's, so that shows you have, like there's kind of the tolerance there. And I've read a Dutch study that was kind of that same thing. And the title of it was, I don't like you, but who cares? I just thought it was quite an interesting study of the male dynamic. Did you see, I think it was done by that did this.

I got to stole this from Rob Henderson, that women, when they're standing talking to each other, will stand straight on at whatever you want to call it, like 108 degrees or zero degrees or whatever. They're going to be completely opposite, whereas men usually stand at about 120 degrees. And you can do this the next time that you're looking at a party or a group of people, even yourself as a guy or as a girl, you can look at the guys and you'll find that they sort of just angle themselves ever so slightly. And I remembered that study as I was stood talking to a friend and looked down at our feet and I swet a God if I'd drawn a line between them, if I'd got my protractor out, I'd been like, that's a hundred, that's pretty much bang on 120 degrees.

And the argument there was that men, when they are face to face with each other, that's typically because they're ready to fight. There's an increased level of intimacy and aggression. There, whereas with women, that there's no concern. Yeah, I mean, that's completely by that. And also, I mean, when I said face to face and side by side, I mean, that's basically talking about the same thing there, I mean, very similar dynamic. I think a lot of people go like, might say, well, so what? What's this stuff? And I think it's really important for two reasons.

Maybe it's the second one in the set. The first one is that if you don't accept that men have a different social style or have different social preferences, you can't do too much about male loneliness and male mental health. Here's two examples. Men's groups are really effective for men, maybe more than therapists, because therapists, you're faced to face a lot of eye contact, really intense chat. Some people can do this, some people can't. Men's groups are in circles, you're shoulder to shoulder, and it's a lot more indirect indirect and I think men prefer that. They, they, I mean, like you say, I mean, it might be the angle of the body, the lack

of eye contact, the lack of intensity. And one of the most successful interventions in male loneliness in the whole world is the thing known as men sheds. It came out of Australia. And essentially what was happening in Australia is the local government were putting on all these things like for, for lonely old people, like coffee mornings and stuff. And men would never show up. And then eventually some boredoy Aussie guy went, now wonder now on's coming, no men don't want to go to a coffee morning, right?

So he said, build a shed. So they put a shed up, so men would show up and build stuff, fix stuff, together, Matt would rant every week. And they'd come out with friends, and they'd call it health by stealth because the conversation would come out. You talk about your prostate while you were fixing a pepper grinder, right? And it works. And maybe it's too phallic, the pepper grinder of prostate. I just realized that. Depends if you do that, we had double twisty thing. The girls with experience know what I'm talking about. But I went to one and they say, shoulders are shoulder is the key to male bonding in

men's sheds and it's absolutely, you see them and you can't stop men talking men's sheds. They go, they're weighing on and people say men don't talk. They do. If you set the context up, but you only set the context up, if you don't treat men like they're exactly the same as women, and that's important. What do you think are the ways in which men and male mental health is being treated like female mental health?

What is female mental health and what are the ways that that tries to be fixed that have been ported across unto men? I think it's how it's diagnosed. I should say I'm not a mental health professional, so I'm just talking about some of the research I've read in my own personal experience. So this is a theoretical tendon befriend, which a lot of psychologists are really behind. This is not some esoteric piece of nonsense that I've plucked out of thin air. You can google it. There's lots of evidence for it. It's essentially how the different

genders deal with stress and upset. Women tend to tendon befriend. They get really upset. They suffer a trauma. They seek people out. They won't come for it, they want to talk about it. Men tend to do the opposite, they tend to withdraw or they tend to act out and they drink a lot, they do drugs, they fight. So think often we maybe men don't understand they're having mental health problems or we don't understand men are having it because they're doing things that don't look like depression. They're not crying, they're not on people's shoulder, they're not low energy, they're doing things that don't look like depression. They're not crying. They're not on people's shoulder. They're not low energy. They're just not there. Like, they went here, as I can say,

a friend of my parents is like an incredibly obese and it's so obese that he's had his basically most of his stomach removed and he lost all his weight and then his wife has left him and I saw him the other day and he's put all his huge again. He's basically eaten through his stomach and my parents and their friends were like, oh you know that's classic so and so you know he's a bit of a character, it loves his food. That's mental illness, that he's depressed, he is depressed and until you see that, this guy isn't going to get any help, but it's because he doesn't look depressed because he's not doing what we would, if you've got

people to write down on a postcard, what is depression? They go crying, eyes on the floor, you know, all the body language and the, but it's different for guys, and I think it's important that we understand that because otherwise we can't spot it. I had a guy on the show called Adam Lane Smith who's a psychotherapist working out at the Midwest and he was talking about how male depression gets treated like female depression. That female depression is being made to feel

like somebody hears you, like you belong, like you're cared for, but he had this quote and he said, give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it and he'll crawl over broken glass with a smile. And the problem is that when you get men in and you make them feel seen and like they're safe and stuff like that, a lot of the time that, I don't think that that's necessarily what men want.

They want somebody that will sit and listen for sure, but most of the stuff that you've come up with so far, the shallow friendships that men have Want they want somebody that will sit and listen for sure, but Most of the stuff that you've come up with so far the shallow friendships that men have that are bonded together over the top of tasks Like it's a they're in a shed. It's literally a workplace It's a doing thing. It's absolutely a doing thing I mean that's it was a sentence to be that it's a doing thing and also the men's shed to go back to that and to come But you can actually to to men needing a purpose. What the men's shed is, it doesn't talk about loneliness on the ticket, what it is, it doesn't talk about health, none of that crap. It's come to the shed, make stuff, fix stuff, be with your mates. But also they're building

their part of the community, they build the shed together. It's like, it's bootstrap, it's bloats come together, what can we do? And it is that purpose, you're part of something, you're not just fixing stuff, doing stuff, but you are part of something. And that's one reason which attracts people, men need a reason to get together. And it is the pretence of the shed that solves the problem, but you need, men need the pretence.

You've got to give them one. But also, even if you're not of that age, or you're not depressed, I mean, if I ring up a mate and say, do you want to meet up? They'll go, yeah, why? But if I say, do you want to meet up and watch the football, they'll go, yeah, yeah, watch the football, yeah, yeah.

There's a reason, or play poker, whatever it is. So there is definitely something to this stuff. And I think the thing, I haven't connected it with purpose until with this conversation, but I think that is a big part of it. What was the third potential reason that linked together the first two? So I mentioned, I'm going to come to that. I mentioned the second thing that Dunbar said, and it was about what maintains friendships over time and its activities, building the habitats of friendships, spaces where friendships happen. We have a lot of those when we're kids, when we're at college, if you go to college, as you get a bit older, they disappear. Those activities, if you want to

maintain friendships, you want to rebuild them or keep them going, those routines, those rituals. But, so come back to the thing you just asked me, what do they need? They need time. So the third theory is that a big turning point in the social world of men. And also of women, but as I said, it's worse for men, is turning 30, getting to a serious relationship often, having a family, a lot of people, career gets more intense, you lose a lot of time. And there's one thing that friendships need, it's time, especially if you're a guy in their base around sharing activities because it's not have a chinwag on the phone, it's get together, play around a golf, it's whatever and that takes more time.

And if you think about as the world, I would argue the world has got less friendly to friendship because we've got a lot of calls in our time. There's a thing, there's a lot more content, Netflix, whatever you want to do, a lot more on social media. The stats suggest the research that's just we're taking that away from our friendships. There's all sorts of ways the world is less friendly to friendship. Our big one is third spaces.

So a third space is a space that isn't working as a new home, right? There used to be tons of them when you're 50, 60, 70s, 80s, whether it's a church, it's a gym, it's a coffee shop, it's a park, we used to hang out in these places. We'd meet new people there, they're a place where we could maintain relationships, meet new people. They don't exist anymore.

They've really kind of gone down the toilet for a lot of communities. You either live miles away from your work, you live miles away from your socialize. I know I don't live in America, but I know in America that's often your driving long distances to go and socialize in places, certainly true in the UK.

So that's kind of the third argument in the context, whether it be the places you meet that's kind of the third argument in the context, whether it be the places you meet, all the amount of time available, it just makes friendships a lot harder. Does that explain why time with friends peaks are 18 years old, that routineized thing? Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's a really interesting study. I quote in the book, I have it in the end notes, I think, the resource. So it's time for friends to pick 18. Then it's time for your girlfriend, I think takes over a time at work, and then it's

time for your family. Yeah. So by the way, I should say that this isn't all bad news. So spending a lot more time with your spouse or with your family is something that men wouldn't do in the 70s, 80s. But then it's kind of like working men's clubs to go to and other stuff like that. Yeah, so you could argue that's that is moving things forward. But yeah, I think it's definitely connected to that.

Are there some common elements of masculinity that you found in terms of how people perceive men, what a man is, what he's supposed to stand for. Common elements. Like in the way that masculinity shows up, like if someone was asked what is a man or what is a masculine man, was there any common elements that you saw there? Yeah, I think it's about... A lot of the things we'll be familiar with, it's about winning, not showing weakness, not being seen as being intellectually inferior, sexually inferior, career inferior, strength inferior. I think that's when it's connected to humour. A big

thing about masculinity is men are meant to be funny, not all men are funny, but like, you do not want to be the guy who's known as not funny. Like, do you want to mean? Like, we really attach a lot of importance to being humorous, so that's a big thing. I think that connects to friendships and how we do and how we show up in them. And I think loyalty is a big thing. But then we can get into this idea maybe about is intimacy between men. Does it simply difference?

So this is maybe the more provocative question that I kind of got to, which is, I'll keep on being told that men have a friendship problem. They've got no one to talk to about all this stuff. But then when you actually ask men to find what closeness means, tell me what our close friend is, they don't talk about feelings. They talk about other stuff.

And they may be men's friendships aren't represented in the modern conversation, because we're measuring the wrong thing. How so? Well, for example, when you ask men about friendships, they're not going to talk about comfort, so that I'm really cancer with my friend, right? We don't talk about a lot of stuff, but I just, I know he's there. It's not complicated. It's just, we can hang out. It doesn't feel weird. I feel really relaxed around. They talk a lot in moral terms, men about friendship, which is, shit hits the fan.

I know my mates can be there on my doorstep. Someone has a go at me. They're going to be on my side. They're super loyal. This is resilient in this friendship. So they talk about it in those terms. They also talk about a lot in terms of forgiveness, and I think this is connected to like, we talked about banter earlier, that kind of taking the piss out of each other. This can endure,

it's like the power of forgiveness. I think the example given the book is, you know, those ph phone ads where they kind of smash a phone with a hammer, they throw it in the sea, they set it on fire. Then it's like the phone still works. I think men, for a lot of close friends, for men alike, I can do that with my mate metaphorically and I'll still be my mate. And that's what closeness is. And then also shared adventure used to be a big part of like the iconography of male

friendships. You think about wall movies, you think about... When I looked at the friendships I really missed in my life, it was that shared adventure, that shared sense of mission, purpose, kind of locked in that time of life. And we were doing really difficult things together that we loved. Those are what I missed. That for me was close friendship. And it was shown in behaviour, not in talk. It was in what we did. So do men need intimacy then? Or do they need something else? Is the word intimacy? Is an intimate friendship for a man something that's different to the word intimate and what we usually think about that when we think about friendships?

I mean, that's a great question because I think the semantics are important here. I think what intimacy means to men is different. And I think when we look at close friendships, we need to understand that that exists and we shouldn't ignore it and we should count it or notice it and not look down on it. But then men also, and we know this from the mental health stats, men do need more areas to talk about certain things. They don't need hundreds of people they can do it to, but I think it goes to the tools thing, right? The toolbox. Have I got enough people and enough skills or the vocabulary to have these conversations when I need them? So I actually looked at, I get to at the

end of the book going like, when I'm a bit older, I'm 34, I'm having more conversations to now with mates, which are about bigger stuff. Like, you know, I made you had a, you know, nervous breakdown last summer, mate who's, you know, lost a, lost a baby. Those conversations don't have any 20s often because your life is simpler. So you have to have those chops, but I also really want the friendships that are like those other like the shared events you want to be just mentioned. So I think you need both, but you're right, that word intimacy can fall in both directions. I think it gets confused.

I think as well, the word intimacy and thinking about an intimate friendship, I think you mentioned it in the show that a lot of guys are just kind of keen to not come across as gay. They just don't want to be seen as gay. You know, one of the reasons I think why men standing face to face, it's going to be like, what, you're going to kiss me? How many times would you have said that if you stood a little bit too close, that fucking hell, mate, I'm not going to snog you. And so I do think that there is a little bit of, yeah, I don't know whether it would be fear of coming across in that way. Yeah, definitely, but I think it also gets into your bones and then

we forget how it's got in there. At my school, everything you did, you'd be called a gay Lord, whatever it was. I haven't heard that word in a decade. Gaylord, that's not. American listeners, I don't know if you've got Gaylord. Maybe Gaylord. Fuck. Oh God, that is. You're a Gaylord, short hair. You're a Gaylord.

You speak French. What a Gaylord. There was a Gaylord. There's a story I heard where some guy some like kid in school some it was your eight or your nine so a 12 or 13 years old or something. This kid had come in with new shoes and one of the days everybody had identified the fact like oh new shoes he was called new shoes for the rest of school. I mean everybody had gotten a pair of new shoes in the period that he was called new shoes, but that was him. I spoke to a friend who, he's like, yeah, a friend and his dad went to an old school reunion and it was all like, they were like 65. They

all get the old school reunion, the old school, and the guy walked in and everyone starts hitting the table going, worm, worm, worm, worm, worm. This guy had a small dick, it was known as worm at school. Even at 65, 200 people screaming, worm it in. I mean, imagine that. Does that happen at all girls schools? I don't know. I don't think it does.

Men have these brutal nicknames, and that kind of like shows the dynamic, right? Yeah, fucking hell. But yeah, I think the banter thing's an interesting one, because as I was reading the book and thinking about reflecting on male friendships and the stuff that I've learned, especially this year, had a conversation with Nina Power about masculinity.

You had a conversation with Louise Perry about the sexual revolution. Matt Rudd about men's mental health. Yeah. And I think this is not just a male problem. I think this is a British problem. I think that there is an anglicized problem to this that we're talking about. And I've only been able to notice it since I've come over to America. So the relationship that I have, and this may be self-selecting because I'm in Austin, the sort of people that come to Austin are a very particular type of people, blah, blah, blah. But since I've been in America, the general culture is much more uplifting. It is a lot more about celebrating other people's successes. It is significantly more open and

attuned if you text one of your friends and say, fucking hell, man, I'm having a bad day. It's successes, it is significantly more open and attuned if you text one of your friends and say, fucking hell man, I'm having a bad day. It's like, look, tonight I'll make what you want to do, what should we do, where do you want to go? Let's do something, we'll do something cool. And that, the sense that you have in the UK, and it's difficult if someone isn't from the UK to kind of highlight it, but there's, it's a kind of a scarcity mindset. It's a bit of a zero-sum game.

There's always a bit of piss-taking. There's a huge no-no around celebrating your wins because it's seen as being a bit of a gobb-shite or being big-headed or whatever. And there's just constantly this, below the surface ambient level of kind of like stress in a way, of not showing off too much that everybody's on the on the cusp to try and find some way to take the piss out of you.

And I find that when I go back to the UK that I slip more toward that style of behaviour and yet when I come out here, it's not. So I do think that this is at least in part something that's played into by British culture specifically as well. Yeah, I think there's a lot to you that. I mean, for example, one thing I talk about in the book is that I'm really uncomfortable with hugs, like I hate it, that kind of repressed, like absorbed faux homophobia from school maybe. Just think, hey, someone sees you hugging and calls you a gay lord. Yeah, it's all called myself a gay lord.

Yeah, it's like, where's that come from, that voice? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, but then I think that kind of repression of a, of a, of a motion, if you compare that to say, French guys kiss each other on the cheek, I spoke to an Argentinian dude called Fernando de Souche, as he said, Argentinian men kiss each other all the time. It's very physically tactile. He runs an agency in the UK called New Matcho and what they're trying to do is change our men

a represented in marketing. So they're trying to rebrand links, which used to be spray more get more when I was growing up, when I was a boy. I think now it's something else, a bit more inclusive. It's called Axe in the States. But he did some cross-cultural study into masculinity, and it is different in different places. But what they had in common was that masculinity was performed, right? And you perform it depending on the context of the certain things that are masculine and some areas that are different in other areas. But it's the performance. I think what I realized was, I didn't think I did perform my masculinity and I went to a party with my girlfriend when I was when I just confessed having this friendship

problem and she stole me with a male guise and she was like, do you realize what you're like with men? You're like completely different. You become this kind of belligerent, you know, chest is out, abrasive, loud, slightly cruel, but it's all bants. You kind of do that thing and I realise, yeah, I do put a performance on and the masculinity was not just in me, it was between us, right? So I think it's really interesting when you say you go to Austin and you become slightly different version of Chris and you come back to the UK, you switch into that. That mask comes back on again. Yeah. Well, I realized this looking back at my very lengthy time as a club promoter in the

UK. And I realized that for a big, big chunk of time, what I thought was being a party lad and the life of the party was actually me lubricating my own social anxiety with alcohol. So what I was doing was I was pretty uncomfortable around other people for the most part, so I didn't have a massive amount of stuff to say to them. And this is something for young people, if you are, especially in the UK,

young people spend their time socializing in nightclubs. You go out Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, between the ages of 20 and 25. That's what you do. That's how you spend your time for the most part. But very few people that do that are actually meant to be there. The reason that you go there is because it's what everybody else does. So it's just this big, mimetic game. And I didn't have a massive amount of stuff to talk to people about.

So I remember looking, I ran a thousand club nights. I was the guy on the front door, the one that every single person in the city knew. And I remember standing in nightclubs and looking at other people laughing and joking and talking about stuff or seeming to talk about stuff. But it's a club, right? So it's super loud.

And I always remember thinking, why is it that they've got so much to talk about when I don't really know what one I should be talking about? And what I realized was that they were talking about, may, this song's min, isn't it? Yeah, this song's min, isn't it? Like, that just wasn't the level that I was at. That wasn't the sort of conversation that I had when I was in private.

And what I would do is I'd drink that would make me into the simulation of the version of people that I thought that everybody else wanted. And I think that the mask on that you put on with your friends and all the rest of it. A big chunk of that is finding people that you genuinely feel that you can be yourself around. I've got this. Go ahead. I've got a theory about introversion that most people aren't introverts, they're just around friends that are shit. Like most people are super extroverted when they're around people that they adore having conversations with, but

if you're not, the difference between being an introvert and being around people that you don't have anything to talk to with, it's basically the same thing. Who wants to go out of the house if you've got, if the only people that you have to talk to are ones that you have to be drunk to be around? Absolutely, I think I heard a couple of things. I can't remember who said it, but it said, your good friends are someone who make your best self, make you feel that your best self is your true self, which I think is lovely, but also,

without getting pretentious, Aristotle, who's like, first wrote about friendships in ancient Greece. He basically said, what friendship is, is it's a mirror. So your great mates are like a mirror to you. And I think that's almost right. But who you're with, it's not just to play mirror because it's shaped in their shape. So they'll reflect back what they want to reflect back. If they're boring, they'll find the bits and you that are boring. If they're boredy or facile or dumb, they're gonna find those bits and you,

and when you spend time with those people, you go, oh, maybe I'm not interesting. Maybe I am this lad, because that's what they're seeing in me, and that's what they're reflecting back to me. But it's entirely to do with the context, and you go somewhere else. So actually, I went off being friends with men because

a lot of my friends were kind of similar to the vibe you're talking about in the clubs, right? Were very kind of actively laddy, boredy, and there's nothing wrong with that, but all the time. And I find when I found when I was with women, I bring out a completely different side of myself, and I'd be much more complex. I'd be much more fully myself and but discover I had a much more interesting varied self and I just thought maybe it is a gender thing but then like you say if you find the right friends doesn't matter their gender then you can you can find something that isn't a performance. I think that the UK seems to be a lot more mimetic, generally. So that groups seem to meme each other more harshly, and that that inevitably ends up

shaving off all of the interesting and odd different edges from everybody until you kind of have an archetype of like the lad, right, the Larry Laga-Lowty sort of dude that does the banter thing. But I think I genuinely think it's a case of continuing to lean into being yourself, and unapologetically as much as possible, which is hard if you don't have positive reinforcement, which is why finding someone that you can even, I remember the first ever guy that I lived with

who made me feel comfortable around genuinely having intellectual interests. I was maybe 23 or 24, and I'd watch documentaries about potential solutions to the Fermi paradox. And it is the great filter, the reason that we haven't ascended to a type two civilization on the Kardashev scale and stuff.

And but then I'd go to the nightclubs and be like, all right mate, how are you mate? Yeah, fine mate. Whatever, like that would be me who's got the bags. So I would have almost like a Bruce Wayne Batman thing, like a two lives going on. But then I lived with this guy who was like that pretty unapologetically because he didn't have the night life side to him. And I thought, oh, shit, I can actually be, I can have this curiosity and that can inhabit the personality that I am. And yeah, I think it's a case

of trying to find people that permit you to be more like the self that you want to be. And the more that you lean into that, you get positive reinforcement for being you. And you no longer need to play this role that's always felt a bit sort of shallow and pointless and and eki and sort of and you come home and you never really feel that good. That was one of the big changes for myself. Yeah, absolutely. I've written various bits of press for newspapers in the UK and then on the comments section. I normally have a look at the comments section which is always a mixed bag, admittedly. But it's interesting when people come back and

some people say, oh, I think friendship's overrated. Then all my friends are dicks or, and I just think you've got the wrong friends. Right. Friendship is massively a creative force. Get the right friends, it makes you who you are and can make you a much better person. You find the wrong friends, it shrinks you. So again, but then you get maybe also the friends you deserve.

You have to be invested, I think, in that journey as well. Like this guy you've mentioned here gave you permission to be that, but he couldn't give you permission unless you had that in you and you were showing up and you had that curiosity. Yeah, the first mover of where does the authentic self come from is kind of an interesting one, I suppose. You know, do people allow you to be more of you? How can you be more of you if you're not being you at all?

But yeah, I... What, you spoke, there's this term, emotional labor. What's that? Yeah. So emotional labor is... It was a term originally created by someone called Ali Horseshard, he's a sociologist, and it was about work. So emotional labor is the emotional work that

people in the service industry do to do their job. So you go to a server who's having a shit day, but has a huge grin on her face and she gives you your latte even though she wants to stab you in the eyes. Right? Or, you know, the person, the waitress on the airplane who's handing out nuts and she's had it up to a teeth with difficult passengers, but it's smiling. That's emotional labor, but it's then grown to be this, it became this feminist idea that

it's the work women do to keep people's lives going. It's their buying, their husbands dry cleaning. They are fixing things in the supermarket. They're going, oh, on Saturday, we're going for dinner with the Chalterns or whatever it is. All that work of remembering and organising people's life, so they have a nice time that men don't notice and goes unpaid is emotional labour or mental load, but connected to this in the world of friendships and relationships is this idea called Kinkeeping, which is in families, it's the women who hold the family together.

They organise the celebrations, similar idea to emotional labour, they organise to get together to keep people up to date with each other's news on the phone, but then think about it in friendship groups, often men will outsource that social work to their wife and girlfriend. They treat the women in their life like the HR department. But if they were being honest, they'd say, you know, this is Jane and the director of people operations that Jeff limited, that's what the conversations they have. And it is true in my life.

I was, I basically cuckolded my girlfriend's social group because it was easy. And I couldn't really be bothered or I wasn't aware of the work that went into maintaining friendship groups. So connected to that third theory about time, women have the same time restrictions. Generally, yeah,

they haven't got the same friendship problem as men. So I think this idea of emotional labour is massively part of it and is connected to how we hold relationships together. Is there a problem with marriage and does something happen when men get into marriages? Do they either settle in and believe that this is all I need to or is there an issue with the disneyification of marriage that your wife should be the only thing that you need some expectations going on here that restrict men's ability to have friendships post marriage? Yeah, there's that's a matter I think that's there's a lot in that. So there's

loads of people who have studied this stuff about the role the way marriage has changed and meaning. It used to be that we didn't marry for love, we would marry for power or for resources. The idea that we'd marry for love is actually very modern incarnation didn't come into about the 1920s, so it's a pretty new idea, but now it is the absolute central thing, and people stand up at their weddings, get teary and say, I'm marrying my best friend today, and everyone goes, how lovely. And I suppose it is nice. But then you maybe have a problem where,

if you're with your best friend, why would you hang out with anybody else? So I think there is a cultural idea that your beloved should be everything to you, your emotional home, your sexual home, your home for fun and leisure and as well as the parent you co-parent with. That's a lot of pressure. It also shrinks your life if you're not careful. But then there's also part of it where maybe people buy into that and they don't like their spouse going off and

having other friendships. I think there's a lot to that as well. But we are surrounded by this cultural idea that we should only want one massively important relationship and it should be in a romantic relationship. I saw another post from Rob Henderson that said, social networks have a strong degree of gender homophily. Around 70% of women's personal social networks consist of women and around 70% of men's social networks consist of men with most, but not all of the cross cross gender members being family members over whom we have a little choice. When two researchers asked a group of American adolescents to list their close friends from home and

school, 72% were same sex. So I can see here just a game theoretic issue, if men are worse at making friends and men have mostly male friends, that just that itself is the reason why men are struggling to make friends and hold on to them. That's it. You don't need anything else on top of that. I mean, I wish we'd get this conversation before I polish the book. I think there's a really interesting theory. Yeah, I think there's a lot to it. And there's a lot of stigma, and we are uncomfortable about cross-sex friendships as well. Like I would, I live with women for 10 years to women, and everyone who's obsessed with the idea that we were banging, or that if we weren't banging, we had banged, or will

bang. It was like, no, it's fine. We won't. And we haven't. It's all cool. But people like, no, no, no, no, you'll be banging, we had banged or we'll bang. It was like, no, it's fine. We won't. And we have an, it's all cool. But people are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, social circle that's potentially more intimate than guys that have them distributed out. I remember in school I used to be asked, so who's your best friend? As if that was some sort of an expectation. I always used to feel the same way as you maybe with the best man thing. Well, what if I don't have, what if they don't feel like I'm their best friend, but I

feel like their mind is that unrequited best friendness? Yeah, the hierarchy in friendship is really awkward. But to go back to something done by said, he actually looked at this. Women will often report having a best friend. And what's interesting, I think, is they'll often report being more intimate as in, you know, closer with their best friend than they are with their spouse. Whereas if you ask, if that was, there's not a true of almost no men, but men, when you ask them about best friends, they'll go, well,

I can't rename one person, but it's Kev, Steve, John O'Pall. Pretty much named the Beatles there. But, you know, they'll say it's a group, right? And it's more casual, but then Don't Barz has an interest to be on interview, Jimmy said, because it's casual, when one person drops out the group, it's like, all right, because it's casual when one person drops out of the group, it's like, all right, cheers and see you. And then someone else will fill in and it will come a different dynamic. And it's like, out of sight, out of mind.

Not in an unpleasant way, it's just like, we've got this, if you're over there, I'm not gonna worry about you. Whereas with women, there's much more of an effort to maintain that and they'd really miss that because it's much more of an effort to maintain that and they'd really miss that because it's much more intense. The bonding over doing things makes so much sense to me as a guy that's run a lot of different projects and businesses, the sort of bond and this may be true for women as well but the sort of bond

that I have with the guys that I've gone through fire in Brimstone trying to create a project or be on a sports team together or do whatever is it's beyond friendship. You know, there's even an upper bound on how friendly I can be with my friends that I haven't had shared suffering through trying to create something that's worthwhile and difficult. You can't cheat that either, you have to do it and worthwhile and difficult. You can't cheat that either. You have to do it. I think this is coming to maybe, like, connected so much of what we said, I call it in the book, The Vulnerability Industrial Complex now, where everyone's meant to talk about their

feelings and talk about, be very outward and very verbose with how they relate to somebody else, whereas actually the behavior will show you a lot more. And when you go through something with someone, they're being vulnerable, because they're taking risks alongside you. They're being sad, excited, angry. When you go through that with someone, in complex environments or achieving difficult difficult things that is a form of vulnerability in itself that maybe again is not represented a lot of conversations about vulnerability and actually Chris when I looked at all these friendships this was that without what I don't want to sound depressing, but friendship is such a confluence of you, the person and the context.

And once you leave the context or you change or they change, sometimes you can never get that back. It lives in that moment in that time and it is so special and rare and just fucking amazing. I've got a chapter where about a guy who used to be in a double act with on the comedy circuit in the UK and we came from big students to being professionals and it's like wow what a journey and then when we stop performing and we try to own things career wise we'd stop being so close and then when we get back together now, we're mates, but I'm different. He's different. That context doesn't exist anymore and you're like, oh wow.

How do you think people should feel about that? Should men feel wistful about that? Should they try and hold on to it? I don't, I've kind of wrestle with that. I think it is, you should, I mean, you will feel wistful about it, but in a sense, I suppose maybe a more positive frame of that is when you're having it, you should be just reflecting be grateful of it. I think often we don't realize the importance of friendship until they're not around anymore, we don't have it. And when I look back, I was obviously obsessed and reflected my friendships while writing the book

was like, oh man, I really missed that, but in the moment, I didn't realize how rare it was to have that or how rare it was. But it also, in a positive way, it shows you how, it shows you that I have this line in the book, it shouldn't quote myself something like a complete wanker, but I said that friendship is something that grows on you like a suntan, right?

When you're doing something else. And C.S. Lewis is like an English writer, obviously quite famous, but he wrote a book about friendship himself. And he says friendship needs to be about something. So like, he says that the opening lines of friendship is, oh, you too, I thought it was just me. I'm paraphrasing that. But you know, that sense of being on a common journey, common mission, but friends look forward. They've got spot on the horizon. They're moving towards, right? It's about something. And so I, it's kind of the positive thing is,

it doesn't happen, great friendship, when you're being timid with life. It is connected to attacking life. And it, it's, it's a side effect of doing interesting cool things. If you wanna go out and get more friends, I'm not sure that's the best approach. Go out and get a life and do cool stuff you're into. People will be there alongside you side by side.

That's fucking go, dude, I love that. I love that so much. And it is, there's an action, there's a vector to friendship, especially amongst men, you know, how are you and this person going through something together? And that makes, you know, it look at me bro-sizing my way through adaptive explanations for friendship, but you and the people

that you were closest to would bond together over the shared challenge of hunting, of collecting food, of ensuring that your tribe doesn't get killed by another group of people. Why do you think it is that football hooliganism is just so, like, look at the way that these guys, they'll take a brick to their face for each other because they support the same football team. I always think they're about high-smoothies. You know, you know, classic, you know, those classic things you read sometimes,

is like, the old gangsters get together at 70 years old. They've got enough money. They're not doing it for the cash. They're mad. They're going 70 years old. They've got enough money. They're not doing it for the cash. They're mad. They're going to get caught. They're going to put in prison for the rest of their life. But they're not doing it for the times. They're going to get the boys back together.

One more job. But it's the stakes. I mean, this is a thing you don't, this is again without being too wistful. Like the stakes of it. Like the hooligans, I wouldn't want to be a hooligan, but I kind of see it's the risk of it, the stakes of it. Like, Rhett, look at it, the stakes of it.

Like, Rhett, look at you talk about hunting there. You know, we screw this up with dead, or that's more sort of warfare, but you know, we're out and about, we don't eat, we're going to die. Those stakes are connected to friendship, and maybe it's connecting to the thing you had about purpose. It's got to have some heft to it. The problem that you have with that is that it makes friendships sound transactional. It makes them sound like friendships of convenience, like the only reason that you have a sense of

belonging or attachment to somebody else is because they can do something for you that they're useful in a way. It sounds like using somebody, I think, and there is a romanticization around not just the disneyification of relationships, but also the same friendships too, that people are supposed to be friends purely because there's kind of this soul to soul bond between you and somebody else. But there are rarely, there is a very small number of friends that I have held onto throughout my entire life that I've been able to maintain that deep level of connection with without there being something that we're working toward.

Yeah, and so to quote Aristotle again, he said there's basically three sorts of friendship. One is that friends that are useful to each other, so the transactional thing. So maybe we work together, so in an office. I think it's slightly different to some of these bigger kind of journeys we've been mentioning that. Second is with friends because it's pleasurable. I think you're great fun, I'm great fun, we have a great time hanging out. The third one is hard as

a translator, but it's about goodness. I'm with you because I see virtue when you and I really appreciate the virtue. You can be not nice to be with sometimes or you're not necessarily useful to me, but maybe I really admire your courage or I really admire your wisdom or the fact that you are kind. And that, you know, we don't have loads of friends in our life where we can say, I just think this person is such a good human being and makes me a better human being. But then those also in due beyond context are like, a lot of this stuff has like, they've worked it out years ago, but maybe like you say, we've narrowed down what we think a friend is, Disneyfication's the nice way of putting it.

But again, it comes down to celebrating that, that when you've got it, be really grateful for it. Think about this, it might be a more modern way that people put it, that they say, I just think that they're a really good influence on me. You know, I like myself when I'm around them. That's that that's sense that you are a better version of you or you see in them things that you would like to be like.

You know, the training partner that always seems to gas you up a little bit more and you go, yeah, I want to be around that guy. I don't want to be around the training partner that's always making me feel down in the dumps when I went to go and train with them. Yeah, absolutely. I've got a friend called Philip who, whenever I'm with, if we go, we're in a room together, go to a party or something. I watch her work at the room and I'm like, she's just setting this room on fire. She's amazingly kind of kind outgoing, interested, like listening the shit out of people. I'm like, what, what, what, I'm like, what a good person.

So that, but that is, I don't work with her. I don't see her all the time. She's not useful to me. Although I would say you're completely unuseful to me. But you know, it is, it is exactly that she makes me better, but also I kind of aspire to kind of absorb her qualities. What do you think about the modern atmosphere? Do you think that that is helping men at the moment?

So it's an interesting one. So I think if social media and including Manusphere within that is a bridge into real connection as in your meeting and having experiences together. I think it can be positive. I think it is a bit of a symptom of isolation more broadly that it exists and you get in those groups. Often they get stuck in a vortex and echo chamber getting more and more extreme and there is a shared purpose in extremity. So a lot of these people are attached to their often mad ideological police because they are part of something.

And these are boys and men in their bedrooms who don't have a social group, but they find it online. And to depart from some of these very eccentric views is to lose that. I think it's intimately connected to loneliness. Is it positive? I think it depends on the sort of messages they're finding there. A lot of people, you mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier. I know you're friendly with him.

I've never met Jordan Peterson, but if you find some messages for him and go take responsibility for your life and find a lot of positivity in that, great. If you find some other folks on that world who are giving you less positive messages and maybe entrench you in that isolation, obviously less positive. But there's lots of research that your online relationships are not as effective in terms of your well-being as face-to-face ones. And there's not really a way around that. I'm not saying you should only have face-to-face friendships,

but you do need to get out of the house. Yeah, I have a mixed feelings about the Manusphere. A proto-idea that I've got about it is that this is first wave Manusphere work in the same rise you had first wave feminism. And then each time that it kind of falls, we'll actually probably know it's second wave of manosphere. So it's said that the first wave was 2006 to 2014, 17.

So that would have been the game Neil Strauss, it would have been Tuckermax with I hope this beer in hell, would have been very much around pick apart history and game and negging and neuro linguistic programming. That sort of fell away because society basically decided that that was a bit much mate. And then what came back around, were very similar sort of talking points,

but now under the guise of red pill, black pill, alpha, beta, sigma, migtow, in cells, like sipping, only fans, That was the language that got used. And I think that we're moving toward the tail end of that now as well, because as soon as any movement can become meamed, as soon as you can caricature a movement, it's kind of becoming a piss take of itself. And I think that you're seeing a lot of that kind of space. People are starting to break off and try and find like holistic men's work or holistic self-improvement or organic.

Like they're trying to do something that moves it on a little bit more. But there's certain elements, dude. I had this lady Namakate's on who done some research into the in-sell and black pill forums. And she basically said, I didn't know this, but if you're in one of the in-cell and black pill forums. And she basically said, I didn't know this, but that if you're in one of these in-cell chats, that if you were to say that you had any positive interaction with a woman that day, that you would be very seriously

ostracized or maybe even kicked out of the group. And I was like, oh, like, if you got a girls phone number at Starbucks and she was like, no, no, no, no, no. Like if the Starbucks server, if her eyes lingered at you for more than half a second, because what that is giving to the group is an undue sense of hope. What people are bound together by there is we're all in this together, this is the shared purpose,

and what's called ascending. So ascending up out of the Black Pill in Cell World to somebody that may be one of the normies that's actually able to have sex, that that gives, it creates a delta between where all of the people in the group are and what they could be. And it's almost like, look, if nobody has hope,

then there's no pain to feel that delta between what we could be and what we're not. And as you see other people rise up, that creates that compulsion and that pain in you. So what they're actually optimizing for in these groups is for people to never actually try to ascend, they're never trying to do anything which would pull them out. And the shared suffering is seen as a badge of loyalty. That's the field. That's the flag that you're waving. It's so wild. Yeah, I mean, that's...

Also, what's interesting about that is it's so, there's so many instances in history where that is kind of happened, where groups of people in difficult circumstances have been swept up in ideology and want to get lost with it. I mean, it's hard to overcome that, isn't it? Because it's sort of that ideological, not ideological, that primal urge to have brotherhood or have connection, but then maybe there may be plays into the dynamics of memes and of social networks,

online and algorithms and things. I mean, it's potent, it's really interesting. I'd be interested to know what the next step of the manuscript looks like. To give a positive, maybe it's not out in atmosphere. I've got a bit in the book where I spent a day with a guy in Ipswich who lives with 26 life-sized sex dolls. And they're all around his house.

And you think this guy would be really, really weird. But he's got two grown-up kids, he's been married, and he kind of, he made me banana bread when I was there, we had a cup of tea. I'm hoping washed his hands. Ah! Oh! Actually, it did taste slightly soapy.

And, um, yeah, and he, I said, so, talked to him about this, and he takes f of them, he's got his own studio, and that connects him to the doll community, and they don't like calling them sex dolls, because they think it demeans what it is. They call it, it's the doll community, and through his interactions and his work with these dolls, he's made an online community, and actually it's quite tasteful. It's not about sex. Does he occasionally use the dolls in that way? I'd imagine he does. Good luck to him. But Godspeed, sir. It wasn't about that. And actually, if you look into the doll world, it's really interesting.

I spoke to someone who spoke to real dolldoll who make sex dolls and they're making, I get the name, it gets to my mind now, but the world's first sex robot. When they ask customers, what do you want in this? They're not talking about self-loot-bricating vaginas and gyrating nipples and all that stuff. They're saying, we want it to be able to have memory for affectionate responses. We want it to be able to have conversations. They're saying, we want it to be able to have memory for affectionate responses. We want it to be able to have conversations. They're actually wanting it to be about human connection. And my point with this is that this stuff that seems a bit off-putting, that seems a bit weird, that seems of guys who have maybe lost the plot, they can use these communities

and as bridges into something more positive and things important not to we have to have a complex nuance look at this stuff as well as calling out the stuff that's terrible and the idea of Manifib 3.0 yeah maybe we could be a lot more positive in terms of applied stuff then, what's the prescription? The prescription I think is three things. One is, so I asked Dr Robin Dunbar, so if you could be one piece of advice, what would it be? He said join a club. So there's a lot of hemifile in gender in friendships. You're mainly friends with your own sex as you've pointed out already. But with tends to be friends with people who like us. So if you're struggling with friends, join a place with lots of people like you.

So if some of you are into join a club and you'll be in that community in those self-fulding loops, I spoke to someone out the road the other day, CrossFit gym, they've made loads of friends there, whatever it is for you, in Proph Theatre, whatever it is. And men need these activities, but I would say as you get older, be intentional, you have to do the intentional, you have to do the work, you have to be deliberate with it, do not rely on spontaneity, the miracle of diary syncing. That's the first thing, the second thing is connected to this emotional labour point,

which is I spoke to someone with amazing friendships, a guy, and I said, what's going on? He said, well, my mates call me the Sherpa. The Sherpa is in those guys in Nepal who carry everything up the mountain for the rest of their buddies. And he said, they call me the Sherpa because I organize everything. But they said, if you didn't organize everything, Mark, we'd never meet up. And I just thought, what a brilliant simple phrase, be the Sherpa in your relationships. Be the one who texts. Be the one who organizes, even when it's hard. Don't leave it to your girlfriend. Don't leave it to the other guys and you just

look at each other across the ether in this holding pattern. Be the Sherpa. And then finally, expand your toolbox a little bit. So we're kind of coming back right to the start here. How do you got different ways of showing up in relationships? I think this has been a great example of it, this conversation. Some of it has been going, asking direct, provocative questions. Some of it has been banter. Some of it has been openness and vulnerability. I mean, that's a great example. Different tools to have different outcomes. Have you got enough different ways of showing up? And then the three, those are three things. But then if you're going to have a sentence, it would be show up when you're asked to show up. I'd stop showing up and lost my friends. Go first when you're not asked to show up and finally keep going even when it's hard, because sometimes

your mates are going to be shit because they're bloke. But that in a nutshell is the solution. Max, I love it, man. I really appreciate the work that you've done. I think being open and vulnerable about this sort of stuff is, it is a difficult stage to go in. That line, at the very, very beginning, the difference between opening up and manning up, that is the one that everyone's trying to walk. So I appreciate you. I really, really do.

People want to check out the stuff that you do and follow you online. Where should they go? MaxTikens.com is my website. I'm on Twitter at MaxDikins. I'm on Instagram as well. I don't reuse it very much, so maybe find me on Twitter, guys. Amazing. Yeah, be it, say hello.

Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks, mate. Buh!