Modern Wisdom - The Masculinity Debate Is A Huge Mess - Richard Reeves - #1087

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Richard Reeves is a writer, researcher and the Founder of the American Institute for Boys & Men. What is the current state of men and boys? As social movements have focused on supporting historically marginalised groups, Richard has led the march on whether men’s challenges have been overlooked. So what is the current state of men and boys, and are we finally moving toward meaningfully addressing their challenges? Timestamps: (0:00) What’s Changed in the Boys and Men Debate? (6:09) Do Men’s Rights Activists Actually Want to Win? (12:07) Why We Need Better Conversations About Boys and Men (28:31) Does Gender Politics Need a New Language? (29:46) Looksmaxxing: The Manosphere’s Next Obsession? (35:01) Are Men Being Written Out of Society? (47:37) Should Men Lead the Household? (49:28) Is Modern Society Becoming Feminised? (51:28) Why Feminists Need to Stop Demonising Men (55:57) How is Mate Value Changing Modern Dating? (01:05:45) Are Working Women Changing Fertility Rates? (01:20:21) Are We Waiting Too Long to Have Families? (01:27:15) Why Paternity is So Important (01:30:37) Should Fathers Be in the Delivery Room? (01:36:49) Why Fathers Need More Recognition (01:40:33) Are Modern Men Satisfied With Life? (01:42:46) Is Title IX Helping or Hurting Men? (01:47:18) What Does the Future Look Like For Men? (02:04:21) Where to Find Richard Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - 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

What has changed or how is the debate about boys and men adapted since we last spoke? What's new? I think when we last spoke, I was still frustrated that there was no sort of political space for this. I think people have become aware. Things aren't great with boys and men. I was raised awareness of it. But I still felt maybe particularly on the centre left, that it was difficult to actually do anything about it. And that's changed.

I used to say one of my talking points used to be that it was very hard to get people. especially on the political left to actually do anything about this problem. First of all, we have to get them to talk about it. A, it's a problem. B, we can talk about it and then C, we can do something about it. And I can't say that anymore. We've got governors, Governor Newsom, Governor Whitmer, Governor Wesmore in Maryland, also Governor Spencer Cox in Utah, all of him have got pretty serious initiatives now to try and promote boys and men. We've got, as I'm speaking to you now, two bills have just been introduced to Congress to create a men's health strategy and office and to help men with their mental health after fatherhood, right? The Men Matter bill. And there are a

bunch of stuff happening in states. And so I can't credibly say anymore, you know what? No one's paying any attention to this. I can't sort of say it anymore like you're shouting into the wilderness. And I used to say like I'm banging my head against the brick wall, especially on the Democrat side of the aisle. That is just not true anymore. And there's some politics behind that, of course. I will, I think I have to be honest that I felt like I was banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November, 24. And then there was an election. And then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things

that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men and especially young men in a very, very big way. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the Democrats I've just mentioned and that we're working with are very often also mentioned as potential presidential candidates. And so they've realized that we can't win without young men. So I'm not going to lie. I think there's a political dimension to this. But I don't, unlike many people, I don't blame politicians for doing politics. So some of the more men's rightsy people have said about Governor Newsom's initiative, for example, which is a serious initiative. What is it? So he signed an executive order last year. telling his administration to come back to him with comprehensive plans to help boys and men in K-12 education, employment, and especially mental health.

He's already done a male service challenge. He's done a call to get 10,000 more men in California into service, into mentoring, into coaching. They're following that up with a big push on getting more men into teaching. Like male role models in the classroom would be a good idea. And it was very interesting that the men's rights, he folks, if I can use that language for now, or they'm on the more conservative side of it. They're just like, oh, he's just doing politics. He's just realized that the Democrats have lost young men. And so he's just doing stuff to try and win their votes back.

And why is that a bad thing? Isn't that how democracies are supposed to work? And so I just can't say it anymore. I think there's real progress on this. It's serious. Not all of it's making it into the culture war. But that doesn't mean that it's not good. In fact, most of it's not in the culture war.

It's not being discussed generally and podcasts or even on cable TV, but it doesn't mean it's not happening. How much is it, is it a good first step, or is this a really significant move? It's a significant move in the sense that it's the first time we've seen, like, serious political figures and policymakers making serious efforts to address the problem. Right. Okay. So it's a, it's a significant move in the same way as firing the first shot of a war is a significant move. It's the first thing that happens. And from that, it suggests that more will come after. That's right. So the question is, is there substance behind it? Not sufficient yet. No. And I think part of my role and part of my institute's role is to hold these people to account. It's to say, okay, you said you were going to do that. Yeah, you said you're going to do this. Great. Six months later, we're going to be like, did you do that? Where is the initiative to get more men into mental health care, governor? What did happen? Did you get 10,000 more men into service, Governor Newsom? Did you increase access to mental health care and paternity leave, governor more? Yes or no, right? So I'm not certainly not saying it's enough, but it is a lot.

lot more than we had three or four years ago. I mean, three or four years ago, you couldn't even get people particular on that side of the aisle even to talk about this problem. When'd your book come out? 2012. Okay, so pretty much bang on that. And when did Obama endorse it? 2024. Okay, right. So you're sort of tracking this journey over time. Yeah. And honestly, it's been for us, then we've suddenly got a pivot and say, okay, we've now got policymakers coming to us saying, okay, I got it. What shall I do? Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. That was on our 2029 plan, right? Didn't quite expect to catch up this quickly. And that's obviously a good problem to have. But we have had to pivot and say, okay, how do we actually help these governors or these senators or these legislators do something about it?

And my worry, honestly, is that this will just have a moment. Either it'll be driven by the politics or it'd be driven by suddenly there's this issue, right? Boys and men are being discussed in a way that they weren't before. Sexy to talk about it. Yeah. Where are we going to be five years from now? Five years from now, it might be, I don't know, something else, right? Because these things do have their moments. And the question I'm asking myself is, what will I be able to appoint to that still standing that's still here. And so actually, Virginia is a good example. Virginia is, if the governor, new governor signs it, going to create the first commission on boys and men to sit alongside the commission on women and girls. Now, it's just a government commission in a

state. You might say, great. But what that means is that the issues of boys and men will be at the table in policymaking in Virginia in a way that they weren't before. And that will still be there five years from now if that happens. That's going to get a line item. It's going to be real. It's going to be institutionalized. And my whole thing, I think we've talked about this before, is I want this issue to become boring. I want this issue to be mainstream. Yeah, yeah, yeah, guys are falling behind. We've heard it. We've heard it. We've heard it. We know we're working on it. We've got it. We've got it. We've got it. And I want people to say, well, that's why we've got this office of men's health. And that's why we've got this big push on male teachers. We're doing it. What are you talking about?

Yeah. It's mom coming upstairs and telling you to clean your room when you're already done the hoover. Beds already made. Yeah, exactly. You said the men's rightsy types. Yeah. Don't actually want to win. What do you mean? Well, I've just sort of noticed that when something does happen, something, and there was very nearly a commission in Washington State. I've mentioned the governor's moves, is that sometimes what will happen with the folks, some of whom have been in this field for a long time, and I would say that they come at this from a more conservative or sometimes even a reactionary perspective. It's like they tend to dismiss these efforts. They'll say, oh, sure, there's been an executive order.

Sure, they're creating a commission on boys and men, but they'll put their people on it, Or they don't really mean it. Are these people inside of government, the men's rights? No, no, no. These are advocates. These are activists. Okay, like commentators. Yes.

Or people that have been like, there are various groups out there. They tend to be small and not that well funded. And honestly, quite often fueled by grievances. Not necessarily illegitimate grievances. I don't want to be misunderstood. But I'm on various, you know, conversations with them. And I heard this rabbi, I think it's David Walpies's his name on a podcast the other day. And he said something really struck me.

He said, Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed. Because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you'll have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that whole of society is stacked against men, there's been a feminist conspiracy against men, no one cares against men, and I've spent decades saying this, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, and they do

start doing stuff about men. You've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore and change your identity or say, no, no, that can't be true. I think that's true for like LGBTQ activists. Climate. Climate. Basically, people can't take a win anymore, right? People can't say, that's a win. It may not be perfect, but it's a win. It has to be glass half empty rather than glass half full. I think one of the reasons for that is that people worry if they are too grateful for a success, it's not going to continue to push the purpose forward. It's the same reason that hard charging overachiever type A people refuse to let themselves feel too much pleasure when they succeed because my displeasure is exactly the fuel that keeps me going. And it's not too dissimilar with climate, the climate crisis.

Not enough is done because, well, maybe if I stop now, even if lots has been done, it'll slow down or it'll reverse or people will forget. So now that we've got the front foot, we must keep going. That would be the more virtuous way to put it. But I also agree, there's a fascinating graph if you look at the uses of the word racism in the New York Times over the last 20 years. And you compare it to how much racism is actually happening. The two lines just have nothing in common and going completely opposite direction. It's like some insane multiples times increase in the word racism. Lots of people made their careers around identifying racism.

So you concept creep out things like racism. Yeah, you end up slaying smaller and smaller. dragons. Yes, which makes your cause less and less legitimate. Yeah, which makes it easier for your opponents then to say, actually, that's kind of silly. And so in the end, I don't think it works. And I'd say that I don't want to, I want to be balanced about this because I remember getting an email, I think from the human rights, whatever they call, HRA. And it was something like, along the lines, there's never been a worse time to be trans in America. And this was two months after Gorsuch had written his really, I think, incredible civil rights victory to include trans people

under the sex discrimination law. I mean, that was a massive civil rights victory for the trans community. And it was almost like, yeah, when we did get that, but look at this terrible thing over here. And I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't want to suggest there aren't still challenges for trans people. But the idea that after extraordinary civil rights victory, I mean, really no one saw that coming, especially from that Supreme Court, they couldn't just take that win. And then you have to send out an email funding saying it's never been a worse time. And I'm not saying it's a left right thing. It's a this so attached to the idea that you can't win.

And I've really noticed it in my space too. And it's something I think about a lot in my own work is to try and I really want to update my own view of the world and make sure that if good stuff's happening, I don't get trapped in this kind of rut. I want to win. I want us to become mainstream. and that will mean, like, I have less to say. But that's good. You want to put yourself out of a job?

I do. Like the best dating app would be one that's designed to be deleted. And shouldn't we all want to do that? You should design to be deleted? It's sort of hard, right? But that requires you not to wrap your identity up. So strongly in it. There's a line from Ben Francis, the founder and CEO of Jimshark.

And he said, when your aspirations for the business are bigger than your aspirations for yourself, then you can be a proper leader. and his point there was that he stepped, he was the founder, then he became CEO, then he stepped down as CEO and got some guy from Reebok in who could take them from whatever 100 million to whatever billion. And then Ben came back in because he was needed at a different time and he was just happy to do what the mission called him to do. And yeah, if you don't have a grievance anymore. And we saw the rug get pulled out from BLM with this regard. Right. It was some people sounded the alarm early.

There's a lot of money there and we can't really work out. it's gone and they all even really nice houses. And then it took a lot of pressure and then eventually that's kind of dissolved. And I think it's done damage to putting forward the rights of black people and minorities in the modern world because now everything's being tarned with the same brush. That's the problem is that you actually just become too easy a target. Right. And you, the last thing you ever want to do is do your enemies work for you, right, by just being bad. Yeah. Playing into the caricature that they have of you. Exactly, which is the big, I heard you talk about that, it was a big fear.

But I would turn the tables a bit and ask you, because you have been thinking about, talking about this issue of boys and men for many years as well. How do you think the debates moved just in the last up two to three years? There's definitely been more of a mainstream recognition of it. to me, I have to certainly sort of do a little bit of breathwork when I read one of these headlines because I'm trying to work out, is this lip service being paid to blowing with the wind of a cool topic at the moment? Is it kind of like a disclaimer? Well, we did talk, you must remember, we released four-part series in Politico on the crisis of boys and men. By the way, all written by women.

Well, not my piece in Politico, but you. Yes, I take your point. But they did the Christine Ember had theirs and hers came out, the, theirs came out at the same time. Not one was written by a man. If it was why are men talking about women's bodies, that would have probably been an issue had it been reversed.

So I'm trying to work out, okay, there's definitely more headlines about it that I see in the press. I'm not tapped into what's happening in Washington, what's happening on the policy side. It would probably be good. I know that you guys are promoting it, but it would be good if there was a way to get that out more, that you know good news about men

newsletter or something to really allow that to sort of make people who care about the issues and boys and men not feel like it's a permanent losing battle or like all of their efforts the best that they can hope for is a Washington Post headline once every three months or something like that we've got Ross Kemp just released a three or five

part series about young men Louis Theroux's documentary just came out on Netflix. Adolescence did so much fucking damage, I think, with the way that it tried to frame things, with the language that it used. Not so much adolescence itself, I think, but the way it was picked up by and interpreted. Correct. Well, it was, that's correct, yeah, it was purposefully left up to interpretation. There was a lot of vacuum in there, and I know that at least some of the guys that helped to contribute to it. Some of the showrunners, I feel like, had a bit of an agenda and actually did have some things that they wanted to put across

that I didn't like, I didn't really like. But yeah, it was purposefully left open to interpretation. Unfortunately, if it's like a raw shock test. It was like an ideological raw shock test for the world. And what did almost everybody think? They all thought the same thing, or the mainstream thought the same thing. What was it?

Kemi Badenock was being pulled up for having not watched it, as if it was a fucking documentary. I know. It was the first time in British history that a political leader has been criticized for not watching television. Do you see this, Jared? Mate, it was fucking insane.

She gets pulled up on morning TV by... I haven't watched it yet. Saying you need to watch this. What do you mean? It wasn't even reality TV, let alone a documentary. It was you need to watch this fictional portrayal.

Wow. It was wild. Of the show adolescents. Right. So the UK is a good example. I've actually since we spoke, set up a think tank there as well. and we're working quite closely over there.

And it's like it is, you do feel, always one step back, one forward. And some of the stuff that gets the most attention is not necessarily the stuff that either should or is most important. So simultaneously, the UK has released the first ever men's health strategy. And it's a very good document where streetings kind of put that forward. They had a very serious debate in Parliament on International Men's Day. And actually, all of the MPs told a dad joke. At the beginning of that, this organization called Dad Shift.

did that and it's absolutely, it's absolutely fucking amazing. I really kind of, it's so cool. It's so cool. Wes Streeting did it as well. It's very fun. It was an amazing debate about men's mental health, about what's happening. They're doing a summit on the money. Were you happy with I was very happy with it. And so, but then the way that they were talking about adolescence wasn't great for a while. There's been like, so it's never going to be a straight line. And the other thing that happens is, particularly with things like adolescence and I suspect with these new documentaries too, I've really noticed this is that the last. between the idea to the screen is so great that by the time it lands, it's out of touch with

where the culture currently is. Correct. So it feels like, yeah, that's maybe how people were thinking three years ago, but it's not how it feels now. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem. It's also what's missing from it, which is why for the last five years, I've started

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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Louis filmed the documentary from the start of 25 until the middle end of 25. But that means that they were thinking about it through 24. 24. And you go, this is a fast-moving, Ross Kemp probably almost spurred on by the adolescence thing, I think.

And, you know, he sits down opposite William Costello, and he says, so in-cells, they kill a lot of people, right? And William says, we think that the total number of in-cell killings worldwide is the upper-bound, five and Ross Kemp looks like he's been punched in the head and you go five five five per day he goes no five five total five so is is the territory going to be gained equally no what would I what would I say um the gender wars or the sex wars I guess of what's happening inside of the home what's happening with men's roles those things that that is going to to be downstream from all of the structural changes that need to be made. Like, how are we doing with boys literacy rates, which I know are just falling through the floor? Like, they can't read, boys can't read. What's happening with getting them into education or higher education or apprenticeships? And then what's happening with employment and then what's happening with your

place in society and fatherhood and all the rest of it? Like all of these, the issues that I think matter most, that people feel the most, which is, well, where's my meaning? And what's my job like? And what's income like all of those are after effects of the stuff that comes before it and that is education that's employment that's mental health support that's all of the systemic kind of like your work yes and it almost you just call my work systemic and boring yes if you did i'm so happy yeah made my fucking day i've always wanted to be oh my god this is like hallelujah i feel like i feel like a guy who's got who's in a a relay race and i'm the last dude I'm the last dude because this sort of stuff, the way that I speak and the place that I can have the biggest impact is actually much closer to the end, I think, in some ways that if we're going to talk about what is the role, maybe not that. I can definitely influence the way that people think and the approaches that guys and girls take to the sort of structure of their lives. But ultimately, the big movers that come before that really,

the groundwork are going to be more on the side of what's happening in school, what's happening in employment, what's happening. Well, I think actually it's interesting you put it that way because in some ways I think you're kind of at the back and the front of the relay because... I'm both of the human centipede. Sort of doing the work of both. They feel like, and I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm like the rest of the...

You can be the middle of the show. Can I be the middle of that? I don't know this analogy is working for me. But anyway, so because you have to have space for a good faith conversation. about what's actually going on with boys and men and a good faith investigation of that. And you also need young men, especially, to hear that conversation and to feel like

we're talking about this stuff in a way that takes them seriously and that says they have problems, not that they are the problem. And so I do think that these sorts of spaces are important for creating the conditions under which policymakers and politicians and others can then do their work, which will then hopefully address the material problems. I don't think, we're not going to change some of these material issues like,

overnight. But I think that we could at least do no harm. And for too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men. What's deficit framing? We start with like, what's wrong with them? So a classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity, which I think we've talked about before. And just like, let's start with that. Let's start with not making you toxic, right? Or like, what's wrong with boys in school? They don't try or, and even like, our, my friend Scott Galloway falls into this a little bit when he says, oh, the daughters are a pen

or a lawyer, and then the guys in the basement's vaping and playing video games or whatever. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem

rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. And I will just say, given the young men, I know who listen to you and to others, that this hunger just for honest disagreement,

good faith engagement around the problem, is huge. And so I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work. So cultural stuff both before and after the policy. I get what you mean. I think the challenge that you have when speaking to men about the balance between ambition and compassion, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. We need to do things to help you, but you also don't want to be a victim.

Especially for men, it comes into contact inside of their minds because nobody wants to feel like they're not doing it on their own, especially if you're a guy. Where's the heroism in that? And, you know, I think what Scott's sort of trying to point the finger out there is he's saying, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Right. And for many men, that is true. I had this idea earlier this year called advice hyper responders. So advice doesn't distribute evenly like medicine. It distributes like alcohol.

The people that are already drunk on it take too much when the people who need to loosen up don't have a sick. I think you talked about this in the context of me too, haven't you? Yes, exactly. The guys that are told that they shouldn't. push it with women, the nervous ones take it to heart and the dudes that were blowing through boundaries just disregarded entirely. A person who is already loading too much responsibility and working too hard, he has just work harder and goes, I knew, I knew that I wasn't working hard enough, I must push more. Whereas the guy that is laying on the couch, and there is a huge,

what is it, 14 million men who are not in education employment or training. Yeah, exactly. Nicholas Ebestat. Ebersstat. Ebersstat. Yeah, he corrected me. Really? Yeah. God, I've been getting it wrong for years. It's fine. Look, you're right that we've gone through this period of informing men of how to be men

by telling them everything that they shouldn't do. That's right. A long list of don'ts. Yeah, it doesn't inform what you should actually move toward. And the vacancy is hugely detrimental. And if you're going to complain about what men are doing, but only tell them. them what they shouldn't be doing without a replacement, you can't complain when people step in and fill that gap. Whether you don't like Rogan or me or Peterson or Tate or Nick Fuentes or fucking

Myron or whoever, whoever it is that you do or don't like, whoever is or is not, if you don't like Aragon from fucking Lord of the Rings, like, if there's a vacuum, that will get sucked in because there's a market to speak to people. And if nothing else, even if people aren't speaking to it, if you don't service the market, someone will reverse engineer another message to become the thing that they're missing. If you can't eat food, you'll eat tree bark instead because it's the closest thing that's approximating food. Yeah, so there's a certain naivety in thinking that we don't have to answer the question,

what does it mean to be a man? Correct. Because every culture has had to answer that question. And so it's not, the question is not, is there going to be a question? It's who's giving the answer. And if you don't like the answers, as you say, that some of the men are getting, then what's the alternative? and so you can't just vacate the ground and then complain,

you can't give up the ground and then complain that somebody else takes it. And that's exactly what's happened. Like mainstream culture just basically gave up the ground and said, like, we're only going to talk about masculinity if we put the prefix toxic in front of it. In fact, you can't even really use the word masculinity now with young men because it codes the left because it's come with the modifier toxic. Even if you use it as just uninterested. So, yeah, so what young men have kind of heard, they've only heard it in that context now.

And so you've got to, even the words really count here in terms of which, how does it signal? And it's really interesting to me that the word masculinity itself now to a lot of young men, they've only heard that coming out of the mouths of people who are about to say something bad about it, right? And sometimes they'll say, right. Or they'll say healthy masculineness, right, implying, of course, against unhealthy. That normal masculinity without the modifier is unhealthy. Just don't hear it the other way around, right? And so they know what's coming when you hear you talk that way.

And I do think you're right that there's in this huge cultural vacuum. I come back to something you said a minute ago, which is like, and I struggle with this a bit in my own work and in some of the work that policymakers are doing, which is you don't want to say to young men especially, we're here to help you, poor you, right? Look at you struggling, poor you. What we want to say is we need you. That's the message I think most young men need it,

We need you. Society still needs you. The tribe still needs you. Your family still needs your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We need you. And we also need you in these service offerings. I wrote a thing with Robert Putnam in the Times last year talking about the boy crisis of the early 20th century and how all these civic organizations, Boy Scouts, Boys and girls, clubs, big brothers, big sisters were created almost overnight to respond to what was happening with boys in the cities after urbanization. They were staffed by men. There were four boys and there was a huge civic response but it took men to do it whereas all of the youth serving organizations now have way more women volunteers than male volunteers and of course i'm not blaming

the women who are stepping up to do that work god bless them but i am saying if you want to serve boys and young men you better have some men too but are men hearing that message we need you not despite being men, not as a volunteer, but as a man. We need, we need men, right? It's just not... Because you're good. Because you have something to add. Not, yes, your masculinity, and I've made the, I've used the word again, your manhood, right? Well, basically, we want you because you're a man, not despite being a man, we see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. Yeah. And I just don't think enough men have colored that. Well, even that, right, the idea of duty, um, of, almost like, service, turns very quickly into obligation isn't nasty enough of a word that, well, I mean, you know,

you should go and do this, as opposed to this is a noble pursuit for you to try and pass on good things and good advice to the next generation of young men. Right. So do we need new language to talk about gender issues then? Femininity, is that also a difficult one to talk about? No, I mean, femininity is hard. I mean, feminism has become quite. I, for all... Femininity, actually, I would very rarely hear being spoken about

other than anybody from the right. Femininity would be pushed as part of a sort of sundress and baking tradwife dream. I don't hear many people from the left talking about it because it's not something

to be pedestalized. I would hear masculinity talked about primarily from the left as a cudgel to beat men with, usually with some sort of modifier of toxic or whatever. So yeah, and feminism,

as well. Manosphere, unfortunately, well, it was very quickly kind of, feminism was something that previously in the past, I think a lot of people think was, was a gender equality claim. Very quickly moved into something else. Actually, it gets increasingly quickly moved into something else when I learn about some of the factions that sort of birthed out of feminism at the very beginning. I was learning about this yesterday. But the manisphere was used to describe a group of people, not necessarily a movement or an ideology, the group of people happened to all agree about it. So maybe the manosphere was never going to be it. I've given you my bit about the three waves of the manosphere, right? Yeah, yeah. It was first wave, which is pick a part of three,

second wave, which was red pill and then the third wave, which originally I was going to say it was the gentle manosphere. Yeah. But I actually think it's lux maxing. I think that is going to be the third wave. What? Lux maxing. You think that's the third wave? So here's my, here's my theory about lux maxing. Most of the lux maxing guys, if it sticks, because it's only been around for months. If it sticks and it becomes even more ascendant, and it might do because it's really memeable. If it stays, what it will create is basically a sexier version of the black pill and migTow. So it'll be men going their own way. If you look at what the men are coding for, presenting for, it's not for women. They don't care about women, all that much at all.

They care in as much as women can get them acclaim in the eyes of other men, but it is basically, formidableity is what they're signaling. Yeah. Hight, like unbelievably masculinized faces, which if you look at the evidence, most women prefer an either average in terms of masculinization or a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body.

That's what they find most attractive. But men think about gigacad. They think about these protruding cheekbones, insane draw, yeah, the mandible. They have that. People mewing. Mewing. I learned about that the other day. Pushing their tongue into the roof of the mouth.

Yeah. Why do they do that? It's to try and create a tighter jawline. You're doing it. Am I doing it? Yeah, you look like a gigacad. You look like a swat. I look like a twat.

Yeah, you do look like that. Look, a lot of the most extreme version of male lux maxing basically is a male-to-male transsexual operation. It is taking a man and trying to turn up the caricature of, caricature. So my thinking about this, if it sticks, what it will be is basically disregard women and just focus on mogging, which is male-to-male intracual competition. It's trying to be as formidable as possible. Now, you saw this with Ziz 15 years ago in 2010, but he was still obviously very female attraction coded. It was a much more kind of holistic, bro-y version of

this. It was way less autistic. And he had this great line, which was disregard women. And acquire dance moves, but it was done in a lull-cow kind of way, whereas this to me feels like genuine disregard of, we're not bothered about mating, we're not bothered about getting women, we're not bothered about really anything other than male-to-male intracual competition. And if that sticks, it's going to become very insular. Well, it won't stick, will it? I mean, the idea that these guys are hammering their faces or breaking their bones

or doing the thing you just, what I just try to do, kind of mewing. Yeah, it worked. And they're not interested in women. No. I think it'll go. Do you see Stephen Colbert just did a thing? No.

On looks maxing? No. It's from a very feminist perspective. It's funny, as you can imagine, but a whole thing about it. It's just worth watching because he goes into it. But I sort of, I just again, I think, I don't want to be empirical about this, but like, how many men are we talking about? Like, is it, how long will this last?

Will it last? Will it go? Is this the start of a, you know, decades-long shift in the gender tectonics or is it just another decades long but it could stick about for a while and it would definitely put things on the back foot because it's going to be less I just I see that I see it breaking through I hear people talking about it I'm not saying it's not happening and actually we're doing some work on growing issues around body dysmorphia and so on among which is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the next decade

yeah I've seen that stat I don't know if that's true or not but Scott Griffiths yeah and I just always worry about those lines being projected forward. But anyway, it's a real thing. And what I think it speaks to is, I do think a lying behind all of these trends, right, whatever the thing is now, what it will be before, is what we're talking about a moment ago was just this guy John Della Volpe, I don't know if you know, impolster. He wrote this really nice piece a few months ago where he talked about masculinity vertigo, in which he says, basically what's happening to young men is that they're just, I call it pinball, but the same idea, which is on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that, that

you're not masculine enough, right? You need to work out more, eat more protein, looks max, be more dominant, et cetera, right? You need to man up and be more masculine. The next day, what you're being told is you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad and go to therapy more and like find your feminine side. And then a Wednesday you're back to the, so it's just become this very contested and kind of difficult thing right now in a way that just wasn't before. And into that, you'll get looks maxing or you'll get whatever. body dysmorphia will get whatever moral panic people want to put into it they will but behind it what i actually see is just a bunch of men especially young men honestly just trying to figure this out

and to be good people and to be good dads and good friends and have a good life and to matter and definitely to matter they want to be wanted they want to belong well everybody i mean like not being needed is fatal to the human condition but what was that line you know i went and searched it I went in search for the original source of that line that you gave me two episodes ago, maybe even our first ever episode, uh, uh, uh,

the modern family is a myth that makes men tolerably useful. At least, one that at least makes men tolerably useful. Jeffrey Dent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's actually this good opportunity to say that,

that masculinity, manhood, whatever your words want to look, is always more socially constructed. It's a cultural construct. with fatherhood, right? Margaret Meade talked about the invention of fatherhood. Fatherhood is a social invention. And it is just true that the roles, the structures, the scaffolding, the norms, the messages from society. We have to make men, basically. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still

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And well, what value are men born with? Women have this unbelievable capacity to make the next generation. What do men have? What are they born with? Not in the same way. and look around the animal kingdom, and every man needs to, every male needs to construct himself

into something useful in order to matter and be a part of the, and is that a bad thing? Is that part of the drive for men to sort of push for mastery and conquer and progress and improvement? I think that's something that, you have the choice between men

that are driven or men that are useless, I'd much prefer the driven men. Obviously, that can overshoot and turn into very squirrelly outcomes where they become tyrants or scammers or whatever. because that's the same drive just turned up in the wrong direction. They can be letharios and they can play the field in a way that really hurts people. But yeah, I'm...

It's a question of driven by what, isn't it? See, that word driven is really sitting with me, interestingly, because as if you're driven, what you actually feel is like you belong, you're connected, you're needed, you have a role, you have a purpose. And so, sure, if that's what we're talking about. And that has to be constructed a lot more. I mean, I think Mead's right. And you've had animation on talking about the birth of father,

how we invented fatherhood to survive as a species, right? Because baby's heads got too big, and women were either, they had the choice between being snapped in half or having a husband that would care. Right, that's basically right. That's a good summary of the work. And so it's just true.

And I just think it's incredibly naive for anybody to just assume that we can just get to some androgynous future and that we don't have to keep doing the hard work of making sure that there is a, cultural message to men. We need you. We need you to do this. We need you to not do that, sure, but this is why our tribe, the tribe still needs you. There's this, there are these cave paintings from, they're in northern Italy, I think, Rameggia. And they're famous because there's some of the

oldest, or if not the oldest cave paintings that have ever been found. And the famous ones are the ones where there's kind of very violent, there's kind of stabbing and spearing and stuff like that. But the most haunting one is actually of a group, clearly the tribe, and then another figure who's moving away from them. And the interpretation of that is an ostracism. This person was being spelled by the tribe and to actually yeah, because the tribe's saying we don't want you anymore. I'm spitting you out.

We don't need you. And in fact, you're kind of worse. So now we'd probably incarcerate. But to ostracize someone, there was social death and then very often kind of physical death too. So this is not a new thought about how do we kind of make sure that the tribe needs you? That's true. But when you en masse, ostracized an entire sex, all of them feel like they're being pushed out of the tribe.

If you do that, yeah. And so the message that I think too many young men have got is that, that we do we need, you know, we got it from here, boys, right? Thanks for the last X,000 years, don't need you anymore. We got it from here. Or get on board the future as female train, right? That is a fatally flawed message. And I actually don't think, if you get away from the cultural war, it is not overwhelming majority people think, right? Most of the most of the people think, moms and dads are a bit different and that's cool. Most people think men and women bring some complementary skills, right? That's the whole argument for DEI, right? Is that you want a mix of skills. You want a mix of backgrounds, right? And so most people get that. If you get away from the

culture war, most people believe all this stuff. I think that most people believe to one degree or another that different groups are different. But when you start to create a value stack based on who is more or less worthy around that. It's no longer we bring complementary or different skills to the table and therefore everybody should have a seat. It is you and your particular skill set are surplus requirements or actively negative or tyrannical in some sort of a way. Therefore, you should change. That seems to be the message. That's right. And then no surprise that then people will lean into that identity. If you really want someone, to lean hard into an identity, all you have to do is threaten it. And that will be the result.

And I think we've seen some of that. But of course, I don't think that the answer is to go back to a more kind of reactionary and kind of conservative view about the role of men and women, or to introduce some kind of gender, bring back gender inequality in order to resupply men with their purpose. That's not the answer either. And it's also not what most people want. I mean, we're about to publish some work showing that we've just seen the biggest increase in the of hands-on fathering that we've seen for probably half a century. It's like American dads is just doing more. Wasn't it that millennial fathers spend as much time with their kids as

silent generation of baby boomer mothers? That's exactly right. Yeah. The amount of direct child, it gets complicated because it's secondary and primary childcare. But the amount of primary childcare being done by dads now is as high as it was being done by mums in 1985. And of course, moms are doing even more. The whole fucking deadbeat dad thing.

Yeah. I mean, this is a bit of a rant coming now because I think the whole, the whole deficit framing around fatherhood and dads, right, either deadbeat or dofuss, is really upsetting me. And I think partly as a dad. And one of the things that upsets me in here, I'm going to real take aim at some folks on the left, is this idea, I just exposed to it again recently, that if you look at full-time mothers and full-time fathers, so working full-time in the life. labor market, that mums are doing 25 to 30% more of the housework and childcare, right?

That's the fact that's out there's a book by Eve Rodsky called Fair Play. Because it's the second shift. And then there's the idea of the second shift, yeah, women working the double shift, etc. And I just saw it again, a woman's group just kind of put out, same thing, like, and the stat, this is a good example of a category of statistics that feel true. Go with your intuition, but on close examination. collapse, but they're not actually false. So it is true that men and women living together with kids, both working, quotes, full time, she's doing more of the housework and the child care

than he is. But what they've done is defined full time as 35 hours or more. He is doing more hours. So full time working dads are doing more hours than full time working moms. And if you 45 versus 35, if you add it all up, it's about 60 hours a week. each. It is, to quote, Suzanne Bianchi from a paper for like 20 years ago, she describes the contributions of mothers and fathers in those households as, quote, amazingly similar. And that remains true to this day. So dads are doing about eight hours more paid work a week. And moms are doing about eight hours more unpaid work a week. And they're doing exactly the same amount of work. They are putting in the same work week. But this idea somehow that like dads aren't doing their, they're not

pulling their share. They're not doing it. It's just untrue. And every time I see that, it infuriates me as a dad and on behalf of dads and also because it's just a colossally terrible social science. And it's going to be blown up within three minutes by anybody that wants to destroy it. And so it's actually not even in the interest of the women's groups to put out this bad social science because it'll get destroyed. I understand what you mean. But the problem is the more simple headline always wins. In our current age, this is an iron.

law. The simplest headline always wins. I don't think that's true anymore. Because we'll come here and talk about it and your audience isn't going to listen to it. And they might have read that headline. And so I think, I actually think you're being modest.

Maybe. Maybe. But, okay, I mean, I'm one guy. I'm one guy like tossing a fucking dropout of water into it. People want to know the truth. And people are actually a little bit sick of this thing going, now, of course, some people just want a stat that goes with their priors and that they can say over dinner and say,

did you know that women do 30% more of the housework, even when they both work full time? Right? Good, that. But then I say, and then I come on and say, yeah, but if you look at the whole thing, they're actually doing the same amount. It's a kind of, I actually think enough people listening to you and to others. I want to give you some credit here, Chris. I think that one of the reasons you're successful is because you are curious and you do have,

good faith discussions about these issues, right? So, and you will change your mind about things. And I actually think the hunger, especially among young people, for that, is huge. And I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of podcasts are actually, have a lot more credibility when you think. And I actually really like, one thing I like listening to you, it's this moment. And we may have had this moment ourselves when we first spoke. But I love this moment. I've heard this few times recently way they get this expert comes on, right, on whatever it is, like something. And they get, And they don't know who you are, right? They're an academic and they've been told by their PR company.

This is great. He has a huge platform. Maybe they haven't done in time, right? And you've even had it with my friend Melissa Kahn and you've had it with other people where they get about 10 minutes into the interview and you're quoting these papers at them or you're saying, yeah, I had them on or whatever. And they go, what? And actually one of them, I think actually said out loud, she said, God, you really know about this, right?

I should have prepared better. Yes, you can see this kind of shot because they look at you. They look at the vibe. They look at the thing. And they kind of go into it and I go, wait what? Wait what? I think it's credit to you. And I think it does make you somewhat different to many of the other people in the so-called

Manosphere because I do think that even when I disagree with you or disagree with some folks you've had on, I think there is an attention there to trying to get this right. The only thing I'd say on the household thing, and this is actually something I wanted to bring up with you because it's bugged me a couple of times of some of the conversations you've had. So I think it's just us, right? So that's a spoonful of sugar to get the medicine down. Yeah, the trouble is that shit sandwich doesn't work anymore because everyone knows what's coming, right? Although some young people are saying, no, still give me the nice thing.

I know there's something bad coming, but I still want the nice thing first. I know. It worked. I will take a, the only child in me will take a shameless compliment. I mean, it helps, right? But, and I don't know how you think about this, but I've also noticed, like, I just on my rant about, like, the anti-dad rhetoric of the left. But I've also kind of noticed just in a lot of these conversations, there's this kind of implied return to a world where the dad is the head of the household, where we're going to reassert this idea of kind of gender inequality within the household. And I wish I could remember who it was, but you had somebody on CEO, CEO. Yes, someone said that the mum, she's a hugely important role. I'm not saying the mom's like the CEO of the household. Right. And somebody else will say, like, men need to lead their families, right? But the C-O-O one really stuck with me, right? Because, okay, so she's C-O. Who's the dad again? He's CEO. Okay. So what you've just done there is you said, we're going to go back in a way to a world where there was this implied gender inequality within the household. Do you think that there's an inequality between CEO and C-O when it comes to the household?

I think it's a... If you're going to use that as an analogy, right? The CEO is the boss of the company, right? And the COO reports to the CEO. Interesting. I think... So look, I think it was Arthur Brooks.

Have you got any more to say on why you had an issue with it? That framing. Just because of that framing, but I'm hearing it elsewhere, generally, more on the sort of conservative side of this argument. And here's what I don't like it.

It's very rarely stated explicitly. The explicit version of it would be we need to get back to stable families and families where men feel a sense of purpose and so we need to go back to families where he is the head of the household he is the ultimate decision maker he is the leader of the family

whatever language you want to use and therefore women are going to have to kind of recognize that they are in the end subordinate what do you think about the feminization of society has there been a feminization of society Helen Andrews thought so yes I know

But, well, it's interesting. I mean, Helen Andrews, have you had her on, by the way? No, she didn't see. I can't get her on. I don't know what she thinks of me or the show, but we can't get her on. Yeah, I mean, I did end. It was one of the things where I tried to ignore it because it was a cultural war thing, right? Everyone's talking about this great feminization piece that she wrote.

In the end, I just did something on my own substack about it, where I don't see, the field she talks about law, etc., they've only just approached 50-50, right, for one thing. And so I just don't see the evidence empirically that that's driving any of the changes in those fields. What upset me most about it was there are some fields that are being quite strongly feminized, mental health care, psychology, social work, and K-12 education. There was no mention of that. And so actually, I'm very worried about the real feminization problem, which is that a lot of these occupations are skewing more and more female over time.

That has implications for the people in those professions, the kids being served, the patients. But also for men, like last, as we record this, the last jobs report showed that three times as many women had gone into the labor force as men. Now, it was one month, we'd be careful about that. And the reason was, healthcare jobs. Right. Right. And so again, one of my differences with some of the folks on the right, political right, is that I'm saying, look, this is, the jobs are going to be coming from areas like healthcare, etc. And so we have got to get more men into them. Especially with AI. Yeah. And they're like, no, no, those aren't jobs for men. You know, we need to get men into men's jobs, you know, into factories and mines and stuff

like that. I'm like, okay, good luck with completely reordering the economy again to make that happen. But in the meantime, I see where the jobs are actually coming from. And so I think that's a real problem. I think that the idea that, you know, the legal profession has somehow become less good because women are in it. I just don't think still. The legal profession is not going to be around for that much longer. And certainly not in its capacity. Well, AI is better than men and women. So

gender becomes irrelevant. That funny. What do you think about the feminism movement at the moment. I spend all of my time thinking about this through the lens of what's happening to boys and men. So even feminism for me is a reflection of how is it going to impact the thing that I care about most. Not that I don't care about women, but again, like, I've got my priorities. What's the current status of the feminism movement? How do you think of it when you come to think about its factions? It's very hard for me to answer that because I see it through the lens that I approach it. And I am at quite a lot of meetings and conferences stuff now,

which would be described as feminist meetings. And I would say that slowly but surely, the women's movement or feminist movement is coming to realize that demonizing or dismissing men is not a good strategy. It's happening patchally and slowly but surely, but it is happening. I'm seeing a lot of leaders in those spaces saying, okay, we have got to do better about the boys and the men. Now, you might say, well, they're only doing it for tactical reasons or political reasons,

and they will very often say because it's good for women, right? And so I have this interesting disagreement with them, and I'm very open about this. So they say, we should care about boys and men because we care about women. And I'm saying we should care about boys and men. I just end the sentence earlier than you, right? In the same way that we don't say we should care about women because it's good for the economy or good for men, right? I just, I think we should care about boys and men more generally. I've had to do that too.

I had this piece about zero-sum empathy, and I tried to legitimize the reason. There was a lot of things, and it wasn't just this. But I remember I sort of tossed this coin into the pool that I knew would be effective, which was if you don't care about boys and men falling behind and also whine about there being no good men to date, that is the equivalent of sort of mating logic sepuku that you are creating the death of eligible partners that you say that you and your daughters and your friends and your sisters are looking for. Like if you're not prepared to help boys and men, you can't go, where are all the good men at? Because that's precisely what is causing the lack of eligible partners that you're talking about. But I didn't want to have to couch good men are good in as much as they can be of service to you as a woman. It's just that we should care about the falling behind of any group. We should care about human flourishing. Right. And if there's group in society that aren't doing well, then we should care about them. I just, I think that's just,

for me, that's just a straightforward moral proposition. Now, I'm also, you know, obviously different groups of different agendas, right? And so if you care about this group or that issue because it affects that other issue, I'm fine with that. So when people kind of say, like, Melinda French Gates has, you know, supported me and Gary Barker because it's part of a gender equality thing, right? And she's very clear. She says, it's not good for women and girls if boys and men are struggling. Right? Now, you might say, oh, okay, so this is where the kind of, again, the reactionaries will be like, oh, of course she has to couch it as that. And it's kind of, I'm like, guys, for the love of God, she is a global feminist. Like, what do you want? Right? And she's supporting my work. She's supporting girls and boys and men's work. Like, no, no, no. They're like, they're the purists. They're the ones are saying, no, no, she has to completely come over to our side. I'm like, guys, take a win. Right. Of course, as a feminist, she says she's going to couch it that way, right? That's okay. Do you find yourself doing the same thing? couching it that way? No. No, I know I'm going to openly with with Melinda and with others. I was at Reykivik Forum with some of the leading women. I'm just like, no, I'm like my position and the

position of the American Institute for Boys and Men is just very straightforward. Like we care about boys and men doing better and flourishing, right? We just care about that period. Now, is that also good for the economy? Is it good for families? Is it good for women? Is it good for yes. Yes. Yes, of course, yes. Right. In the same way that the Women's Services Prevention Initiative, their tagline is, when women are healthy, communities thrive. I'm like, true. Also true that when men are healthy communities thrive, but you don't have to condition it.

And I honestly think there's a deeper point there, which is men in particular, I kind of kind of see the conditioning coming. You see it like, oh, well, if there's something bad happens, like men, men do bad thing, A, oh, now we should care about boys and men. And they see that conditionality. They see, oh, you only care about me if X,

if I do something bad or something bad happens. And what they actually need to hear is, no, dude, we just care about you. Yeah. What do you make of the current state of mating and dating? Well, as a 56-year-old man who's been married for almost my entire adult life, my... Your expert subject. Fortunately, I have three sons in their 20s at various stages. That helps.

And a bunch of younger friends. I mean, I do... It comes back to bits of this politicisation point, which is, I worry. worry that the message that young women are getting from the left is life's really tough for women now and it's the fault of all those men and the patriarchy. And the message that young men are getting from the right is life's pretty tough for young men right now and it's the fault of all those woke feminists and those women. So they're being they're being encouraged respectively to blame each other for their real problems. That is a colossal waste of political

energy and not true. It is also creating some difficulties, I think, around dating, mating, et cetera, because we do see now that that political polarization is affecting dating and mating. I worry a lot, and Dan Cox has written for us on this, that you see this decline in dating in high school and among kind of young adults, and that's a huge problem, because that's where you develop relational skills, the ability to endure and deliver rejection gracefully, etc. I worry a lot about that. But I also worry that. that, and maybe this is something we could talk about, that there's something about the marketplace,

mate value, Evo-Syke stuff. I know you're very interested in. I've revised my, Paul Eastwick has a book out called Bonded by Evolution. Do you know his stuff? I had him on the show. Oh, you don't. We had a long debate. Right.

And I'm not going full Eastwick on you here. Please don't. But I do find that something, here's a bit I do like about it. Like, is that if we're serious about thinking about kind of ancestral mating patterns, we do have to take seriously the fact that we didn't live in cities of 10 million people with the phone, right? That wasn't the marketplace we faced. We were in smaller groups, so maybe you've done this with him, smaller groups, and we kind of would know

these people, and they'd kind of come with us. And the whole idea of kind of mate value doesn't, does shift a little bit over time. And so my middle ground here is that it's clearly insane, not to suggest that there isn't something, you know, quasi-market or a mate value thing going on. But there's also something quite interesting about this idea that kind of knowing somebody or someone being known by the people among you that are coming socially sanctioned, like someone you meet through the workplace, friend of a friend, etc. That that's very powerful as opposed to someone you just algorithmically got attached to on an app on the other side of New York.

That's not how we evolved. I agree, right? A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard, but that's why Momentus built Fiber Plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential.

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And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee. By going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomomomentus.com and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-M-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. It's a very sexy argument, and the argument is he thinks mate value simply doesn't exist, that there is no, there is no way that beyond the first look, anybody is more or less preferable than somebody else, that revealed, bonded preferences

over time end up flattening the mating dynamic down that tens could get with threes and that threes could get with tens. That wasn't how I read him. I didn't read him that way. I think that's an exaggeration, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I think it just gets flatter, not that it flattens completely. He said there is no, there is no such thing. After a couple of meetings, there is literally no such thing as mate value. There is no such thing as a disparity. So, well, he's more of the expert on his work than I am. But I read it as like mate values a more complicated idea. I would agree with that. I would agree with mate values a more complicated idea. What makes me sort of bristle a little bit. What makes me concerned is,

If you've got this world that basically flattens, it makes egalitarian the mating market is one way that you could read it. Right. No one's hot. Yeah. No one's hot and no one's ugly. Yeah. What's the Kurt Vonnegut short story?

Harry Bergeron, someone could check this where the minister, do you know this story? No. The ministry for equality levels everybody out, right? And so it's a satire. So it's like if you're a really good dancer, you have to. to go wear weights around your feet. If you're beautiful, you have to have plastic surgery to make you less so, and if you're

ugly, a plastic surgery to make you more. So the main character's story is like if you're intelligent, if you're high IQ, that's right. Yeah, Harrison Bergeron. If you're intelligent, they put a thing in your ear that's just making a noise all the time to distract you. It distract you, yeah. Yeah, and it's obviously like a kind of

flattening type thing. So look, if the idea is like there is just, no difference in how attractive someone is as a mate to anybody else. I think that's not, I think that's bad shit crazy. But I don't, over time, even with, even with the revealed preferences, the revealed value that occurs as you get to know somebody a little bit better, that this is how beautiful elements of someone's personality and the way they hold themselves and their poison, and their patience and their regulation

and all the rest of it sort of appear over time I think that denying the fact that there are more and less preferable mates and this isn't just idiosyncratic that if you were to take a big, broad survey that many people would rank as more

preferable even if you knew them for four years and other people would rank less preferable even if you know them for four years. Yeah, my understanding of it and again, like we're talking about his work now but it was that over time you learn more about someone and so more of their kind of different the different elements of mate value come to the four right so if i just if you just see me you don't you don't hear me speak right you just see me maybe i'm

mewing yeah so i look great yes right right right but then or i don't i look great but then we talk for a while and let's say i'm kind or funny or let's say i'm an asshole right that's going to change very significantly right and then you see me doing something hard for somebody else right You see me taking care of my mom. You see me working hard at them. All these things are adding up. Right. Revealed over time.

Yeah. That was the best bit of what Paul said. I really thought it was a nice twist on the very shallow sort of typical understood. And this is the internet interpretation of mate value. And what's interesting about this is it's almost exclusively for short term mating. Almost everything. All of the mating advice is for short term mating as well. It's not like, so.

So actually I got into this argument with Shadi Hamid for a piece of the post where he said, are you telling me to settle? Because I said, we're talking about marriage. And I think the problem with the marketplace idea is that it sort of suggests that it's over once you've mated. But of course, that's just the beginning. And the story you tell about your relationship and the way that the relationship evolves over time within that story you're telling. And the way you treat each other as you become different people over the decades, that's the job.

And so the other problem with the marketplace is it doesn't capture that. It's about maximizing and you match and so on. Then you cash out. Yeah. And you've made a great match. And that's the solution. No, no, no.

And I said this to Shaddy and said to others too, he said, sure, you obviously, if you're lucky, you'll fall head over heels in love and it will just be obvious. You'll find somebody. But it is much less about the wife you choose than it is about the husband you become. That's 50 years. Yeah. I think you're right.

The evil script. as Paul said, it's definitely a book of the moment because evolutionary psychology is second only to behavioral genetics as the unspeakable topic. But it's very predictive. And I have a particular bias here because I'm in the city of David Bus and William Costello and they're about as well-meaning of a scientist as you're going to get. They're not curating their data. They're not trying to push some ideological bent as far as I can see. Right. And they change their minds about stuff too. All the time. He's moved back and forth between a bunch of different theories.

The cornerstones of what it was that he was pushing for a while. But, you know, there was another element in that. So there was the mate value doesn't exist. There was a denial of sex differences, really, in preferences between men and women. They simply are not there. Yeah, which I don't. And I'm like, okay, I'm starting to construct a bit of a cork board Sherlock Holmes style thing here. Anyway, okay, so maintaining and dating some problems. Some people have argued that women entering the workforce has caused fertility rates to drop. Yes. What's your perspective there? Didn't you have someone say that? I feel like I've heard someone say that on your... Danny Solikowski definitely

pushing back against a lot of what women are doing at the moment. We think she implied it. I don't know whether she's... Yeah, I think she did. I think, and I've definitely heard other people say it, which is this idea. And again, this is a great example of this category of claim that feels intuitive, fits with your priors,

and is wrong. And so you just got to, those are the ones I always wear. So if someone brings a claim to me, and I'm like, yeah, that feels true. As it happens,

I was thinking that myself, that's when I was like, triple check it, because it worries me. And there is this claim that the fertility decline is being caused by the entry of women into the workforce. Again, that sounds perfectly plausible, right?

Like women are too busy earning to be sprogging, right? Can't do two things at once, et cetera. But you look at the data and you look at from the period from 1975 to 2005, the labor force participation rate of women went up by 20 percentage points. Absolutely massive. That was a huge period of growth. And over the same time period, the total fertility rate went from 1.8 to 2.1, right, something like that, right? This is just, this is me and Claude figuring this out. So hands above the table, haven't done a peer-reviewed academic articles.

And then the women's labor force participation leveled out. It's basically been pretty flat since. And then it just had a little bit of a spike. Leveled up since when? Since about 2007, 2005, 2007. I mean, just drifting up. So it went and then like that, right? unlike in other countries actually where it continued to go up. And that's when the fertility rate really went down in the US. And so it just, it seems to me there's got to be something else going on here.

And the fertility rate conversation, I know you're very interesting this. You just had Stephen on again, right? The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought, right? And so Jennifer Schuber, who I know, it's a TED Talk. She's got a book, co-authored a book, Toxic Demography. And her basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline in fertility rate is a lack of gender equality. Right.

Korea, Japan, etc. Right. Gender equity, right? Right. And that might be true. There's some evidence against it, but there's some evidence for it. And then conservatives will say, you know, the thing that's causing the fertility rate is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Okay, okay. Again, you can see the argument that's evidence for it and I've just given some evidence against it. And truth's like no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet. And we should have a lot of humility, by the way, about projecting population trends forward. If we have not learned anything, it is don't take a straight line and project it forward. We don't know what's going to happen, right? So be careful. I would say, I'm thinking about the population bomb thing, right?

Yeah, of course, but the population bust seems more reliable to be able to predict going forward. But it seemed like that about the population bomb, which is like more people are going to have more people, which means more people. True. Yeah, maybe you might be right. So fewer people having fewer people means fewer people. I mean, I'm obviously simplifying it horribly. But like, I just don't. Now, there is a thing like mechanically.

So I'm, I will just come out. I don't think a rapidly declining population is a good thing. Right? For some radical, I just don't. I just don't. But it's really interesting because people, when you actually try and push people on why,

why they think it's a bad thing, you get into all kinds of discussions, and I think people are bringing lots of prize and lots of, they are, I think Jennifer's right about this, there's a lot of morality being brought into this, people bringing a lot of ethics. So a lot of very pro-life people, I think if they're honest,

are saying, like, we don't like there to be less life because we like life, and we want more of it, right? That's a very, like, more life is good. Less life is bad. That's a perfectly legitimate, religious, and ethical position. And it could be for institutional reasons. It could be for fiscal reasons.

It could be because it's, or it could be for me, it's more symptomatic. The reason I worry about it more is, like, I think if you got to a point where you're significantly below replacement rate and your society is rapidly declining in size, that should be seen as a big flashing signal that all is not well. Somehow or that. Now, what's not well? We don't know yet.

Okay. Some things that I've thought of to do with this, it seems to me that births are just downstream from coupling for a large part. If you look at the number of couples who are together that are together for a while and get married. Well, yeah. Lots are going to depend on how you define coupling in this example, but yeah. Marriage, married couples. Well, no, because one of the reasons the fertility rates gone down is a decline in teen pregnancy,

and most of them were not coupled. It was an accidental pregnancy. Okay, that's interesting. At least from, I was speaking to Stephen, I actually asked him, after we went for dinner last night, I asked him what his thoughts were, and he agrees with you, that his whole thing is this vitality curve, which was the most recent episode that I did with him.

And that's kind of... There's kind of a measure of the society's forward-lookingness and vitality and energy. No. So the vitality curve is basically, when are people looking to start families? And if you have a graph that's like this, and it's the age across the bottom,

and if it goes from 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, which it does that. I see. If you're looking to go to the dance with someone and you're looking for another dance partner, it's really easy if everybody is dancing at the same time. Yeah. But if you're 21 looking for a dance partner and the curve is now flatter and longer and shifted right. Right. Half the people think the dance is five, ten years from now. Exactly.

Exactly. This is his point. Yeah. And also, if you shift it later, there are just some raw physics of the system that come in, to sort of squish down what you're able to do. If you are cycling through partners, if there's a more permissive culture of casual sex, of moving on, so on and so forth,

more options, which means that you don't need to quite invest so much. But his point around the labor force entry for women thing, the dips that you see in 1970 and then 2007, 2008, what's interesting there is, because you now need a two-parent income in order to drive the household, people are much more sensitive to economic indicators.

And that means that if you have a turn, that's why he thinks in 2007-2008, 2007-2008 global financial crisis saw sudden accelerations in the delaying of first births like a ratchet. And as we discussed in our last podcast, once first births move later, the whole starting a family system shifts for everyone. As the vitality curve shows, delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. And that goes in line with what you said. There's fewer teen pregnancies.

Right. If you shift this all rightward, this begins to skew. But his position is that it's a ratchet, that it never snaps back because you need to lose a lot of the things that people want. You need to sequester your independence. You need to do things that makes you feel like you're falling behind. One of the points that my friend who I spoke to her, I told you the story about her friend saying she wished that she was with her when she had more going on. She made this point. I wish I'd had a kid during COVID because it wouldn't have felt like I was missing out on anything.

The rest of the world's moving forward. And I think that that's a one-person microcosm of why is it a ratchet? Why does the average age of first motherhood move only to the right and never to the left? Well, because it feels like you're missing out. All of your friends are continuing to do things in the real world and you're not. He's got this line here. Vitality curve shows delaying the median age of first birth, predictably. raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. In that sense, childlessness is largely a timing

problem. And so even if women no longer worked, hypothetically, of course, my thesis from data modeling is that birth rates would not fundamentally change unless family formation also happened sooner, which arguably occurred. This is cross-cultural. Economic uncertainty pushes parenthood later across nations, religions, and political systems. It all comes back to timing. P.S., historically, the US managed this better than most countries. Women could work and start families at the same time, although that balance has clearly started to break down since the 2007-2008 crisis. Well, that would be consistent with what we're saying earlier about the need to kind of just economically for boys and for men to do better so that they can actually, we know that

particularly in low-income areas where men are doing better, the marriage rate is higher. And so I think it's true. One thing I do worry about is that the bar that you have to clear now before embarking on kind of parenthood is just wildly higher than it used to be. Right. If you've got to have your house. Feels like it's while we're going to know. Yeah. And it's just, and I really, really don't, I really want to stand against that idea. People set the bar so high. How much parenting, how much you've got to bought your house, you've got to be career. The number of boxes are supposed to tick now is a terrifying to me.

This was the discussion that we had last night, which it doesn't matter where people are. It's where people feel they are compared to where their parents were and where they feel like other people were. It is all through the interpretation. This is like, I can't think of a way to emphasize how much this is the fucking driver of so much. That how much money do I think I need to have? How much do I think I need to be earning? How big do I think my house needs to be? How secure do I think my life needs to be before I can do this thing?

And where do I think my parents were at my stage? And where do I think their lifestyle was like? And what do I think that everybody else is doing with their life? And how easy do I think that they have it? because all of this is being filtered through what we feel like we should have and what we feel like our level of exposure to risk is. And it's not necessarily objective. And that...

Yeah, and it goes against people. And then people come along and say, but that's not true. And here's my chart. And here's my data. And you try and argue people out of the feeling, which you can't do. But that feeling of... What did you say? I kind of precariousness or whatever.

It's a challenge, but it may be... maybe I'm going to change my mind about something here because one of the things we do know about men is that becoming a father actually does significantly change their behavior in the world, right? And not least economically, towards themselves, et cetera, right? And we now know that changes there. Darby-Saxby has this book coming out, Dad Brain and how kind of your brain changes as well. And we obviously know the stuff about testosterone, et cetera. Risk taking. Right. Yeah. And so I just, I feel like we actually used to use marriage.

and fatherhood as a way to kind of help men grow up. And yeah, exactly. I just really hate that word. And to say we have to domesticate men because it sort of feels... Keeping them feral is good. Yeah, it does. Also, just like, it's because the alternative is feral, right? It's like we have to, and also it tends to put the burden on women.

It's like, we basically say to women, would you mind domesticating the men for us? And I'm like, no, I'm not like... There's a man child over here. Marry him and make him a normal person. I mean, like, the women want the men wants their house trained. Right? They don't think it's their job to house train the man anymore. right and I

find that a difficult position to argue against but the problem is that if that take what's going to happen to the men in the meantime are the men getting themselves ready are they getting their competence skills are ready yes if so yes maybe but I worry that continued delay misses out

for this kind of this moment this kind of I'm a dad and there is just this imperceptible feeling of this kind of cog inside you just going click and you become a different kind of creature. You do. I mean, it's very hard. In fact, some philosopher whose name I've forgotten now, she had this great analogy. It's like, trying to explain to someone who doesn't have

kids, what it's like to have kids, is like trying to explain to someone that's not a vampire, what it's like to be a vampire. Right. So I'm the vampire. I'm like, yeah, well, I, you know, I like to go out at night. I like to suck blood. You know, I hang upside down, et cetera. And you're like a human. And you're like, right. And she uses that as an analogy between the chasm of the different kind of creature you become. And it's like you suddenly, it's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives, there is a life or lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own. And for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them.

It's very pro-social. You would throw, yes, you would throw. And so it changes men. in this massively kind of positive way. This is why fatherhood. Fatherhood is, one of my colleagues put this to me the other way. Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male.

I'm not saying there aren't still some that are predominantly, but like actually fatherhood, like that is always going to be a male institution. And it is so in a way that isn't just like a fact. It's actually a thing, it's an institution that changes us. It transforms us from the inside out. And so if that's not happening to enough men, and you do see this rise in childlessness. I mean, for all the discussion about in cells, it's the kind of, what would the equivalent of like not having a kid and involuntary dad? Dad.

And dads. But yeah, that's a much more troubling trend. Because without that pro-social structure and script and implication for men, that's a huge problem. So maybe it going later is bad. But I also think the way free societies work as opposed to communist China, where they just said, wait, there's going to be too many children, you're only allowed one. Or even happened in Singapore, I just learned recently that like your third, the government would pay for the births of the first two kids, but you're on your own after that.

So you'd have to pay for the medical costs of your third child, right? And so because they read Ehrlich's book and they just freaked out. So you saw it. In a free society, what happens is we learn from not only from our own mistakes, but from other people's mistakes. And so if we're starting to see more and more women say, or men saying, you know what, I kind of regret not doing that earlier. I kind of wish I'd done that, et cetera. Then that learning will get passed on. Do you hear many women saying that? Is that a popular topic that's being pushed much at the moment? There I will have to plead ignorance. But I'm just saying as a general point. Cultures learn if they're free. And so if it's not working out for people, people will see that it's not working out for people and they'll do it differently. Yeah, I think that's how progress happens. that to be the case. I would really love for there to be at least parity between the different types of life paths that people can take. Yeah. And at the moment, it doesn't feel that way. If you look in the media, if you look in popular culture, if you look in music, you know, there's a really

fascinating song by Kelsey Ballerini, and it's called I Sit in Parks. And what she talks about is she was in a long-term relationship. She was 30, her partner was 37, and he was ready to have kids. She said she wanted to freeze her eggs and that was her gift to her and him on her 30th birthday because she wanted to go and chase her music. She wanted to go and play music and do this to her. And he said, I'm ready to have kids now. If we're not ready to have kids now, I'm going to move on. She said I'm not. He moved on. And then this song and the album, the EP got released two or three years later. And it's a story about her sitting in the park and watching this family, this mother and father and she sits on the bench and she rips her vape and she says Rolling Stone is telling me that

I'm doing all the right things but I wonder if I've left it too late to be a mother I chose to do the damn tour instead of going back so I take my lexar pro and I make my next song and she's watching this family sort of have a wonderful Saturday morning to themselves and wondering whether or not she's made the wrong decision that was so fucking shocking and she's a country artist anyway But that was so fucking shocking. And the comments are filled with women who agree, but that is not. I'm saying what's the equivalent song from the parents who obviously like everyone's glamorized there. The parents' song is like, God, I wish I could have gotten up late like her and had time to make myself up and have a dress and have to be free.

Maybe the mom is looking at her thinking like, why did I have kids with this guy when I could be like her on a swing and a gray dress? The grass is always greener when you've got optionality. And also like she probably got a good. night's sleep kind of last night. I remember like when when our kids were really young, we kind of lived on this flat in, uh, in Balsight Park in London. And I would, you know, get it. I did the early shift like a lot of dads did. I remember like I would, my wife would be sleeping and I'd be there with the kids, both had two under three at one point. And I, and I would wait, dawn would break. I'd be tired. And then this gay couple, these gay guys lived opposite. Right. The other side

of the street, kind of friend about being gay. Right. Right. I watched, I watched, they would get up, they had lovely bath robes, they'd make a coffee, great coffee machine. Hang on, you were watching two gay guys through the window. Listen, there's like a long night, okay. And I'm just like watching them and they had this kind of terrace. And the point is like, and I would just, I say, they'd get up late, they'd have nice coffee, they'd read the paper on the thing. They didn't have kids crawling on the mechanic. So, yeah, the grass is always greener.

But here's, I actually think, I think you're making my point, you're making my point for me, which is there you have this incredibly breakout country artist. and, right, with this strong message, which is maybe I wait too long, like, maybe this wasn't, maybe this wasn't the right thing for me to do. It's a, it's a story of regret, right? Song of regret. That is going to be listened to, as you said, by like millions and millions and millions of women, right? That's how cultures change, is that we get stuff a bit wrong and we try it, and we try this, and that didn't work, we do this, and we all learn from each other's, and we, and we adapt as a culture. As a, as a eternal pessimist, uh, I, I really hope that that's the case. It's too early not to assume it won't be.

That's all I ask. Cool. I mean, the reason that it seems surprising to me is it's so rebellious. Like, that is a much more rebellious song to put out than sleep with him and not catch feels. I don't think that's true anymore. I actually suspect that song is going to do pretty well. Oh, it is. But that is more.

That's not, that's not the main culture at the moment. I don't get the sense. And look, I'm also the main culture. If she's not the main culture, right, she's a huge star. One country artist with the two million played song. I think I really worry that you like see the main culture as like the New York Times, right? Which is like a peripheral counterculture at this point. I shouldn't say that because I, you know, occasionally right for them.

I guess that I guess that road's closing. But they're just like they do not like or even like CNN or kind of right. That's like actually the mainstream culture, it's her. It's you. It's it's it's you know country music is top now number one. You just like there's this really interesting. thing going on now where I just think the young people in particular they're trying to figure out how to take the best of what came before but not be landed with the worst of it and part of that

is to rethink this whole kind of gender relationship thing and they're doing that and it's hard it is complex right and they're not going back they're as I said like dads are doing more um but I think she's the one also right like he opens the door and like it's very courteous and stuff like that just really land so I i hope you won't mind me saying so my youngest son went to the University of Tennessee. And he always opens the car door and close the car door for his girlfriend or who's kind of with. And his friends who are up from the northeast. I'm like, oh, God, I have to start doing that now because they went to liberal colleges where that's like the non-feminist thing to do. But by and large, even the kind of liberal women don't hate it. And so I think that actually

the mainstream culture is kind of moving on this thing. I hope so. That would be great. And we have to make them feel that we've got their backs. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients and that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 next gen, the same one scoop ritual but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, boost healthy gut bacteria by 10 times,

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the link in the description below. I heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What happened with this debate between Scott Galloway and Derek Thompson? Did you see it? I didn't know that this happened. Oh, you didn't see it? Okay. Well, partly because I know them both. and Scott's on our advisory board, as I mentioned. So Derek Thompson came back from paternity leave, and it was actually the first thing he did was go on Scott Galloway's podcast. I think it's not just like the first day back,

it's the first hour back. And he'd been, I think, on paternity leave for a couple of months. And that just triggered this debate where Scott said, you're just back from paternity leave, how are you doing? I'm finding my way back. I won't be as coherent as usual. Of course, Derek was incredibly coherent. and Scott just said well honestly I don't understand this whole paternity leave thing or even why men should go to the births I don't think men should be at the births it's disgusting the men should be outside smoking cigarettes like the old days and then they should go back to work I just think it's ridiculous basically and Derek was like well actually men do need to take time time off to kind of be with their kids because otherwise like women are the only one's doing it and you'll have gender inequality in the workplace well I've found interesting about that I haven't like

said anything about this publicly, yeah, but I think you're both wrong. I think that Scott was wrong in suggesting that men and dads are of no use in the kind of early months. They are of a different use to moms, for sure. But they are very often the main aloe parent now, right? They're very often the kind of one that's around. And they very often are the one that's like getting stuff done. They're like, do you have heard of the owl monkeys or like the best dads in the natural world, apparently? No. Our monkeys, right?

Where the dads are kind of around all the time. And basically, mom's doing the breastfeeding and nurturing. Dad's doing everything else, right? Dad is getting shit done. Right. He's getting the food. He's getting organized.

He's around them, but he's still around them, right? That's kind of how it is, I think, that was certainly my experience, right? So you're not going to, you can't do what mom's doing. At that point, you also don't feel the same way

that mom does about the baby. You just can't, right? Just can't. You're not wired to at that point. And so you're still useful. So Scott was wrong about that. but I didn't like the way Derek framed this as like men should take time off

so that women aren't the only ones taking time off so that we can get closed the gender pay gap. He framed it as a gender equity issue, right? And my view is dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off their kids, not just when they're young, etc., not because they can do what moms do,

nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome and kids are awesome and kids do really well with their dads around them, right? So I don't want to be the deputy, the kind of malfunctioning mom, the kind of, oh, if only you could be a mom. Like, no, no, dads are amazing. And so I'm really pushing this idea that kind of fell between those two stools.

So like the old idea of like, dads is you to go back to work, smoke a cigar. I think he meant cigar, actually, but have a cigar, a whiskey, back to work. And Derek Singh is like, no, if you're a good gender egalitarian, you've got to take time off. Right. Even if you hate it and you suck at it, right? Because that's the way to get gender equality. I'm like, guys, guys, what about just saying dads are cool? And being a dad, and the way dads are with their kids, a bit different to moms on average,

in many ways, amazing. So I want, like, again, a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering. Should dads be in the birthing room? The evidence is actually interesting Darby-Saxby, who I mentioned earlier, Dad Brain, she did write a response to this kind of thing which people can find. And she can't rightly point it out that actually the, the evidence on how the unprecedented trial of dad's being in the birthing room is going. It's really mixed.

We don't know. And actually, kind of sometimes in surveys afterwards, like, moms have mixed feelings about it. If the birth doesn't go well, I think you talk to animation about this. It can be quite traumatizing for the dad. So I think, look, I might get trouble for saying this now, but I think we have to be honest to say the evidence is a little bit mixed. And I think it shouldn't be, you shouldn't be shamed for doing it or shamed for not doing it. And moms, by the way, should also feel like if they feel that they'll be better off with their mom or their friend or kind of somebody else, they should feel okay saying that to their partner too for the actual birth.

Neither are obliged to. Yeah, as Darby points out, we've never done this before. How long have men been in the birthing room? Maybe about 30, 40 years. No way. I shared this with my wife. I said, things blew up and she said, oh, Scott says that men shouldn't even be in the birthing room. she said, yeah, I probably wish you hadn't been.

What? I said, what? It's like 25 years later. I thought, what? I thought it was really useful. What about all of my words of encouragement? You're more harm than good. You did more harm than good.

I mean, I don't, I'm now sort of litigating something personal on air. Like, we just go back to it. But, there are pros and cons. But I honestly think, like, it's not, it wasn't, I mean, the real truth is it was a very hot day and I'd ordered a fan because I knew it was going to be hot. But I didn't realize the fan wasn't made. so I opened the box and she went into labor she's in labor and I'm shouting from the other

I go to the other room right she's having contractions to go down at home right and and I said do you know with the Phillips screwdriver she says I don't need a Phillips screwdriver to have a baby I'm like no but I need a Phillips screwdriver

to make the fat I'm not great at DIY anyway. So I said, do you know where it is? She's like, I'm probably addressed. I'm in the other room. I'm trying, like, and there's huge pressure now, right? This is like, I'm trying to make it.

I'm trying to make it. And she's like, forget the fucking fan. Just like, I'm having the baby. I'm having the baby. Fan or no fan, the baby's coming. I'm nearly done. I'm nearly done. I'm on like, I'm on like step seven with the Phillips Spura.

So I, you know, I didn't. I wasn't amazing from that point of view. So I think that the fan thing, it jaundiced her about my view. And then, yeah, anyway, the other one, I'm all in now. The other one, I'd say, was in the birthing pool, right? Because I was very into that. I was in the birthing pool. And we'd been to one of these very, I think, I could share this.

So it would be just very, very, like, progressive, largey, like midwifey thing, right, about birthing at home. and if you have it in the pool, that's kind of great, which is good, right away. I mean, I think the whole, like, over-medicalization of childbirth thing, like, I'm really persuaded by that argument now. That actually doing it more naturally is really good. So I don't really misunderstood here. Putting in the pool.

But she said, but guys, can I just say something to you? She said, like, it's quite, it can get quite murky in there. Can't see that around, which is true. And she said, and so the only thing I'll say is, if you get in the pool with your partner to support them, right, put something up, put some swimming trunks on. she said because there have been occasions when I've seen something spherical and hairy

in the water and I've assumed that it's the baby's head crowning and I've gone in to help it and it wasn't the baby's head crowning it was the dad's testicle and so I grabbed him by the bollocks and literally every guy in the room was like I must buy a pair of speeder so this is the other child right so at this time she's having a baby she's like

you know I want to get in and rub my back and do it So I'm cool, I'm here for you, honey, and then I go into the other room, and then I'm shouting out, where am I swimming? She's like, what I'm talking about? So I need my swimmers. She's like, I don't know where they are. I can't find them. I'm slamming trots open. And the midwife is like, for God's sake, she's having the baby, getting in the pool.

I don't care. I don't care. I said, it's not about modesty. I said, the lady of the thing, the lady at the Lamar's class. She said, you've got to, you've got to wear a swimming trunks. I'm not getting in there without swimming. So, anyway, so my main advice. And then, I guess, you know, the other one, the other trial is like,

you'd get to cut the corn and I was terrible. I couldn't cut it. I was hacking through it. I thought you'd have these massive shears, you know. It'd be like, like opening up a new fucking city hole. It's a tiny little pair of scissors and you're trying to hack through it. It's really grisly. It took me ages.

And then the end of the nurse, like crying, I'll do it. And to this day, my eldest son has got its really weird belly button. And he blames me for it because, isn't it? So, so all the father's out there. Key, key items, if you are going to be with a Phillips fan driver. Or pre-make the fan or have a Philip screwing. driver, a really good pair of scissors, because the ones they give you a crap and swimming trunks. And then you'll be fine.

Fuck me. Oh, God. Well, is the idea of not being in the boat, I didn't know that it's only been four decades? Yeah, I guess 70s. I don't know. I mean, that's really when it came in was like 70s and 80s. Wow. And it went from being like, it's really interesting cultural change. I mean, if you look at, I didn't have the numbers to hand, but it really flip very fast. and as I say it's too soon probably to get this kind of strong evidence around it and it was a great example

of how like the internet I think Scott ended up kind of collapsing on him and he ended up kind of apologising but as I said Darby Saxby was saying actually we don't really know yet about the dad's in the birthing room thing because that is a completely unprecedented cultural and she came out in favour of it and said but

you know dads are great putting them on it so with my kids like you put the kid on your on your chest and one of them pooped all over me. But actually that skin to skin thing, building skinship to use a term that someone uses. That's all true. And that's great.

But that got lost, of course, in the positions that people had to take on. paternity leave seems a little bit more of a easy discussion to pass. Much easier now. And it's interesting, like, most states are doing something on it now. Basically, the Democrat states are passing some sort of paid leave policy for dads.

And the Republican ones are having tax credits to encourage employers to offer paid leave. And so the idea that dads are parents too and bring something different, that's not really a controversial idea anymore. And we have seen a massive increase. I mentioned earlier in parenting by dads and a massive increase in the uptake. There are some states now where so the new parental leave policy is as a likely you be taken by dads as by moms. And so there's been this, as find this very interesting. Like a way, you get these culture wars, right, where either we're being overrun by woke feminists who, like, like, you know, demonizing men and, you know, running everything into the ground,

or you get these kind of, you know, reactionary podcast type, you know, people are like, reactionaries who are kind of taking us back to the handmade's tail. And then you just go to the day show and you say, huh, interesting. Dads are doing more parenting than before. It's not like a significant kind of increase, right? Labor Force participation for women's actually hit its all-time high after the pandemic. Yeah. I mean, it was a little bit.

violent crime is way down. It's halved in the last new decades. The number of boys fighting at school also halved in the last kind of a few decades, etc., etc. And so, away from the cliques to use your language from earlier and away from the culture war, what I see is by and large, ordinary people, moms and dads, young people, boys and girls, trying to figure this out and figuring it out one way or the other. And it's bumpy and it's difficult and it's messy. But I think that the progress line is there.

And I'm a little bit sick of the pessimism. I'm a little bit sick of the deficit friend. My hero, John Stuart Mill, once said, everybody who knows anything of the world is supposed to think ill of it. Right. So that intellectual snobbery in favour of pessimism has always been there. And he was like, and so I'm trying to recalibrate some of my own talking about this. Because there is a danger that you're like,

we could talk about stuff we've talked about before, about wages and male suicide and real problems. but it's just kind of worry that it becomes a bit of a almost cultural race to the bottom. It's like who can describe exactly how we're going to hell in the hand cart. In the most grave terms, the fastest. And then you'll get on podcasts, then you'll get clicks,

then you'll get book deals. And the market for that, it's not a new problem. Actually, think about the number of books that start with the end of, right? Actually, at one point I thought it might be the end of endings or something, because I'm just sick of those as well. Like, everything's the end of everything, right?

Rather than, you know what, we're figuring this out. It's a bit difficult. We should help each other out. We should have some supportive policies. We shouldn't demonize each other. We should definitely not pathologize men or women or anybody else. And we should try and figure this out. But onwards and upwards, because otherwise, pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I think it's a real problem, particularly for America. I mean, we're in America now, right? And things I love about America, I think I hated about our old country was that everyone lived in the past. And this definition of an old person is, you know you're old when you're old, when you're spend more of your time thinking about your past than your future. I think the same is true of societies. Once societies start thinking more about their history and their, you know, and all of that, which you want, you want that sense of history and patriotism, but you want to be spending more time thinking about the future. I just heard this guy on a podcast saying, I can't remember

who was somewhere. He's the guy that left Harvard, actually. And he sort of said, Americans, the thing about America is that it's obsessed with progress and innovation. I'm like, yes. Yes. Yes. That's why I'm proud America. That's why I'm here. That's why I love it. What's happening with men's life satisfaction at the moment? I don't know the latest data on that, actually. I don't. But you mentioned here's a bunch of reasons why stuff's maybe not quite as fucked as people think it is. Yeah. But I think if you were to lick your finger and put it in the air and take a cultural temperature of how people are talking about this situation. Yeah. I think more people would, what's the number one reason for why people,

the Pew Research data around why they don't have kids, just don't feel ready yet? Yes, and then the second is couldn't find the right person. Couldn't find the right person. It's the second one. But just don't feel ready yet. It's like unfinished article, a little bit unsure of myself and the world. Yeah, there is this kind of, yeah, I mean, there's a mixture of objective of the subject in measures here. There was this

really interesting paper looking at the kind of five milestones to adulthood, like finishing education, getting a job, leaving home, getting married, having kids. And it was very, what it found was that 20 years ago, men were more likely to hit those milestones, and now men are less likely than women to hit those milestones. So the milestones to adulthood are being hit more by women now than by men. The coefficient has flipped. As far as the well-being stuff goes, my last time I looked at this, it was relatively stable on the kind of good subjective well-being measures. we do know that men are much more affected by relationship breakup and unemployment. And so negative economic and social shocks damage male well-being more than female well-being. So you might expect some of the recent shocks to have affected men more.

The trouble with this, honestly, is that there's just so many bad surveys out there that all ask these kind of point in time questions from both sides. I'm not throwing anybody under the bus here, but just like, and it gets clicked. And some of the surveys, like, there's so many surveys on young men now. I mean, like, if I get another email saying, we want to do a survey on what young men are really thinking. I mean, please don't, because you'll just ask some stupid questions and then you'll overinterpret the answers. And we won't be able to repeat the question because it doesn't, there's no time series on it. And people will just in that moment, they'll just react to the question in that kind of particular cultural moment.

And then we'll over interpret it. So if you're in the middle of the Iran war, you're going to feel differently than if it's... Yeah. Yeah, or even like, and also we've seen massive swings in some of these things just like one side of the other of a presidential election. And you think really, if like who's in the White House is massively changing how you feel about the world, then that's telling us that this is highly subjective. What was that nuance on Title IX that I texted you about? I thought this was really interesting. I swear I texted you about some guy had done a video and it was actually of the episode that I did with Scott, which is Scott talking.

Oh, that's right. And Scott had said Title IX is used to sort of pull back men, but the guy's video said it could also be used for. raising up men. Yeah. So the nuance. Yeah, the nuance there is that Title IX is a, is anti-sex discrimination in higher education, right? It basically just takes the idea of you can't discriminate on the base of sex and it makes

it clear that that's true in higher education. There is one exception to that, which is undergraduate admissions to private colleges, which I'll come back to because it's relevant to the answer. But what it basically says is you can't discriminate on the basis of sex. And so it was really an anti-discrimination measure. not a strongly affirmative action measure. So it didn't say to colleges, everything else equal,

you should let women in, not men. And there's no evidence that that's happening, right? There's no evidence that the reason there are more women in college now than men is because there's a thumb on the scale in favor of the women.

They're just better in terms of the standard. Is there a thumb on the scale against the favor of men? No, not, not, I've seen absolutely no evidence for that. In fact, if anything, most colleges, public or private, though the publics don't have this carve out, actually are quite worried about this.

We've got a thing now, higher education, male achievement collaborative, working with colleges because they start to worry once they get 60, 40, 605, because not only do their male applications drop, their female applications start to drop too, because the dating market on a college campus where there are twice as many women as men

is not awesome for women. So maybe it comes back to Little bit, people who don't think there's any difference between men and women, should look at the difference in the dating market on college campus, is at skew where there are two women for every man. And I've had young women saying that they look at the gender ratio of colleges before they decide to apply because this message

has gotten out there now that it's not awesome to be among in a college where there are twice as many. So no, no strong evidence for a thumb on the scale against men. The exception is Title IX carves out private undergraduate colleges and undergraduate admissions. And the reason they did that was otherwise you would have at a stroke abolished the single sex colleges. you wouldn't have been able to have single-sex colleges you have to let Wellesley only admit women right but the result of that is that those colleges do have a thumb on the scale in favour of men now

to try and stay closer to 50-50 so it's an open secret that it's a bit easier to get into those elite colleges if you're a guy than if you're a woman did you see there was a dating singles mixer that happened in New York and women were charged a hundred dollars to a

and men will let in free. Well, that's, you're a nightclub promoter. The ratio was still three to one women to men. Yeah. So the sex ratio in New York is similar to, well, it's a bit more, but it's not far off what it's going to be on college campuses. Yeah, no, the sex ratio is not like that in New York as a whole. In fact, we have empirical data on this.

We've looked at the sex ratio is by county. Right. And you've seen a shift. So there are twice as many majority male counties today as there were 20, 30 years ago. Okay. largely because of out migration, we think, out migration by women. And then there are some urban counties, of course, where the sex ratio is kind of, where there are a lot more women. You've looked into singles, than the sex ratio of the singles.

No, but we did look within age cohort. And we do see a difference, but it's, of course, nothing like as dramatic as three to one. Yeah, of course. It just skews a little bit. You know, there's something going up. Maybe it's a selection mechanism that guys have checked out of the dating market. Maybe it's that women are pushing more toward trying to find partners. Yeah, but your example would suggest.

like the men, like there are more women than men of dating age. Let's put it that way in New York and who are motivated to. But then the question is like who's out, right? Like, who's in, who's like, you can, are you in the market to come back to the analogy that I didn't like earlier? But like, are you out there you might see. And you see like women are more like to travel now than men. I do think it's like, I don't see any empirical evidence for this, but my anecdotal sense of it, just sort of traveling around as I do kind of a bit now is like, when you're in a restaurant or a kind of bar now. If you see a group of young people together for a night out,

I think it's more likely to be women now. Again, no strong empirical evidence on that. But I just think of those kind of public spaces, if anything, maybe it's good, a little bit more female. If you zoom out for 50 years, what do you think happens for men over the next few decades? Are you optimistic, pessimistic? What are you most concerned about?

What are you most hopeful for? I'm an inveterate optimist. I do think the glasses are full. But for me, I've come to realize is that my optimism isn't just an orientation or a personality trait. It is that. I think for me it's getting close

to something like a virtue. That to think well of the future is valuable in and of itself because I think otherwise the kind of messaging to young people more generally is so relentlessly negative. And then we kind of blame them for feeling down, right? So I'm pretty optimistic.

And the reason I'm optimistic is because it's a hell of a mess right now. Like it's very messy. It's goofy figuring it out. Some of the stuff we've talked about here and argued about here just shows you that, particularly for kind of young men and young women, just kind of figure out these new realities. But I think we're kind of past the sort of, we're breaking past, I hope, more of the zero sum. We are getting more to a kind of world where young men and young women are kind of trying to figure this out in good faith. And I think they will figure it out.

I don't know how. But we always have one way or the other. And I think we will again. And I think that people are ready to get past some of the bullshit ideological traps that people have been trying to put us in for too long. I really think there's a hunger for that. I hope so because one of the byproducts that you have of lots of conflicting messages, you know, you said the pinball or the male vertigo, masculinity.

Masculinity vertigo, yeah. 30 ago, where men don't know what they're supposed to be. They're supposed to be masculine on a Monday and then soft on a Tuesday and then a tyrant on a Wednesday and then, you know, in therapy on a Thursday. Yoga on Friday. Yeah, exactly. One of the problems I think that can come out of that is a type of, if there's lots of conflicting messages, it doesn't convince you over any one particular message.

It just makes you immune to being convinced apathy, right? This is what a disinformation and a misinformation campaign is supposed to achieve when it's done en masse as a information warfare by a foreign adversary. It's not to convince the populace of one thing or another all the time. Sometimes it's just to make them distrust all advice. And I think that, you know, the checking out of men, the retreat, that you have a poll in screens, video games, porn, weed, sedation hypothesis. But this is another twist of it, and you're right, but there is an attractor, which is, it may be difficult to convince men to not go out into the real world and try to make stuff happen through conflicting messages if it wasn't for the fact that there's something else that they can do. Like, these two things need to be happening at once. Yeah, there's push and a pull at this point.

Yes. Correct. And they're both going in the same direction. That's why, I mean, you've talked, I know you've talked a lot about this. That's why I think it's consistent with crime going down, even as more young men are disengaged, which is historically, I think, unprecedented, which is the kind of sedation or somebody's like, like, they're on the screens, not on the streets, is another way to think about this. And in some ways, I think that makes it a harder thing to get attention to, right? I think if there was, if we did, if it sort of increase in crime among young men,

if we were seeing, like, more antisocial behavior, etc., then I think it would be very close to the top of the problem. Yes. Because it's more of a silent retreat, and very often because, you know, turning inward, that's less like to sound, the alarm. But I actually think in the end, most people do want to flourish and they do want to find someone to be with. And I think that women and men are both seeking partners and someone who's got someone about them, right? It's got agencies, got forward momentum, got optimism. Dude, that's going to win. I think it always has won. I don't know how it will win this time, but I'm sure it will. Yeah, I just hope that uselessness doesn't beget more uselessness.

Sedation doesn't beget more sedation. Because you're going to have to reverse the trend here, right? You can say we're worried about there being too many people on the planet and the population bomb is a really big deal. You go, well, if that's going to stop or if that's going to slow down, it's going to require reversal of the direction. And the same thing is true now. If the trend is moving in the right direction and you're right, the line is between do we want more useless men or do we want more dangerous men?

If those are the two options that we have in front of us, that's not a particularly good fucking scenario. I would say, 51, 49, it's better to have useless. men than dangerous men, but that's only because we're in peace time. I would much sooner have competent, peaceful, right, than useless or dangerous. I got to send this morning a new Institute for Family Studies survey. There's some cool stuff in here, which I think you might like. Institute for Family Studies survey of 2,000 young men, aged 18 to 29, challenges nearly everything being said about the male crisis in America, including by its most prominent voices

on both left and right. Sixty-eight percent of unmarried men want to get married with another 21% unsure the crisis isn't lacking desire its circumstance. 59% are not in a romantic relationship, but 74% of those men are open to dating. So there was that famous 2 thirds of men say that 50% of men in that age brackets say that they're not looking for casual long-term relationships. That looks like it's changed. 62% of childless young men want to be a father. Less than half of men aged 24 to 29 feel like adults.

but the benchmarks most related to feeling like an adult are the traditional ones, marriage, parenthood, full-time work, completing education. Young men's number one role model is their mother, 79%, followed by their father, 69%. Andrew Tate ranked last among all prominent figures. 89% say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others, challenging a manisphere narrative. young men who completed trade school programs are employed full-time at almost identical rates

to college graduates, 67% versus 80%, and even college-educated young men are skeptical of college with half saying it wasn't worth the time or money. There's a mixed bag in there, I'd say, wouldn't you? I'm going, yeah, it's good. That's what the landscape is right?

That was an emotional roller coaster for me, Chris. I've got to tell you, like, I was cheering half of them. I was down. I was like, oh, that's good, that's bad. Only 62% of childless men want to be a father. That sounds way low to me. Childless young men, right?

That's under 29. Wow. Want to be a father. I don't know whether intend to become a father. It would be interesting to see how they worded to question. Wanted to become a father. Because it's interesting, there was this NBC poll that came out not that long ago. It got a lot of attention where they ranked young men and young women by whether they'd

voted for Harris or not, right, or Trump. And number one for the Trump voting men was family and kids. And actually, men are a bit more likely to say that they want to have marriage. marriage, get married and have kids now than women are. That's a reversal. So I'm finding that number, that's 62% number is in the low. I don't, I think the anti-college thing worries me because the ROI on college is the same for men as it is for women, roughly speaking. And presumably could increase if you were to go to college now, if in 10 years time we were to look at how valuable a male college graduate is in the workforce, because they're going to be increasingly rare.

Yeah, just in terms of, I mean, this is another thing I've had this argument with Scott about, which is that actually college graduates are getting married as much as they have for last 40 years. There hasn't been a collapse in marriage among college graduates, even though there's this massive gender gap in college. The collapse in marriage has been among those without a college degree. That's a huge class gap. And so the kind of fretting about who will my daughter marry now that she's got a college degree is like that's just completely unfounded. It's a flat line. And if anything, maybe a bit more like to stay married than their mothers were because the divorce rates gone down a bit.

Because fewer people are getting married. Yeah, well, not among the college educated. That's the thing. The line, the marriage rate, it's about 90%. The marriage rate among college educated American women basically hasn't changed for the last 40, 50 years. What about among men? College educated men? the same because they're matching with college educated women at about the same rate. Even though there's a smaller number of percentages. I mean, it's a bit of a nuance here. We've published on this is that actually college educated women have always been willing to marry non-college educated men and continue to. So like 20% of the women with a college degree. White collar to blue calling.

Yeah. And it's like, it's a very elitist conversation in this because people, when they're talking about this, they're talking about someone who went to some sort of fancy college, right? But in my family, I've got nurse married to a plumber. right nursing requires a college degree right does anyone out there think that nurses are looking down their noses at plumbers if he's making a good living and he's doing well he's working hard no I don't the idea that somehow you know or a teacher won't marry you know carpenter or

it's just nonsense so the marriage and the marriage rate is actually if anything slightly up so there was mixed in there I didn't like the courage but yeah what the thing also think it was untrue it said challenging this idea in the manosphere that men don't sacrifice themselves? 89% say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others challenging the manosphere narrative. Well, as a prominent

proponent of the manosphere, I would say that you think men should sacrifice themselves. I'm the fucking vanguard of the gentle manosphere. I think that they've just... I don't know which manorstphere they're talking about. I mean, I guess, and also the Tate thing, of course, the Tate thing was really interesting

and I don't remember if we talked about this last time. I mean, it really came back. And there was a kind of... I guess I've lost my friends in New York Times by this point in the interview anyway, but there's a New York Times headline, drove me mad. I think I read about it publicly.

Tate returns, MAGA celebrates. And so I went through, that's very interesting, because I've actually heard, or read Josh Hawley, Megan Kelly, Desantis,

DeSantis Aegee, all condemning tape. Shapiro doesn't like him. Shapiro condemned him. They all, like, they all condemned him in that moment, right?

All that. So I'm like, who you're talking about? And it turned out that it was the young Republicans of so-and-so County in Florida had said, we're happy he's back and we'd love him to come speak to us. It was literally the only people they could find celebrating it. But the headline was MAGA celebrates.

Because again, that kind of fit. We like this idea that kind of MAGA wanted to take back. But like, actually the truth was, I did write about this. And it was like, everyone hates Andrew Tate. And that should be when radical feminists are shoulder to shoulder with Josh Hawley and Ben Shapiro condemning Andrew Tate, then surely we can take that as a win. Like, isn't this a win? Isn't that the headline? I think we're going to see more around the men's movement, MRA, come Manusphere, come in cell, black pill, lux max in, mogging community, especially after Ross Camp and this Louis Theroux documentary, I can't wait for you to watch it. This Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix. It's his first ever Louis Theru documentary on Netflix. And he said it's the final video game boss of his entire career because it's all of the things.

It's casual sex with only fans. it's sort of conspiracy theorist which he's done a turn. It's sort of almost cult-like behavior, which he's done previously. It's financial grifts, which has been a part of as well, all bundled up into this sort of TikTokification version for 2026. And I, with adolescence,

with the way that Louis Dock was presented, I do think that we're going to see more of a moral panic around what's happening with the young man. I think that it's going to look a lot like these guys are being led astray by bad actors. There is limited hope. Socially, they are learning not to sacrifice for others, but to dominate. But not a non-sacist. Yeah, very much so.

Selfish. Very self-serving. It's not great. And, you know, for all that I can keep on doing podcasts that, I think accurate and balanced and hopefully really educate people about what's actually going on. I don't have the reach of fucking huge documentaries or series, right? Like adolescence was a global fucking phenomenon. It was a huge show.

And it was great drama. It was a great TV show, apart from some of the natural elements. And again, back to the, I just think there's a lag here. I actually think that it's a little bit out of step now. and that enough people are starting to say the moral panic around men, the pathologization of young men, the demonization of young men

is exactly the wrong thing to do. And that kind of narrative rut that everyone's in, like the easy thing to say, I just think it's out of date and people are realizing that and they're realizing it hasn't, it has not worked out well for anybody, for us as a society

to point our fingers at young men and say, what the hell is wrong with you? You're either lazy or useless or you're being radicalized or kind of whatever. There's long litany of things that are wrong with you. I just think enough people are kind of realizing that that's, A, just unbelievably lacking compassion and B, massively counterproductive. So you're right. The place that I actually think is doing the worst at this is online. It's streaming culture and it's YouTube because there are not many reasonable voices

that do big plays on social media. There's just not. Wouldn't you count yourself among those reasonable voices? And aren't you, aren't you a big platform? I would, yeah. But I think, you know, if you're talking about people who are genuinely engaging with the issues of boys and men and of mating and dating and birth rates and stuff like that, it's certainly in the minority to be a part of the gentlemanosphere than it is to be a part of sort of militant, aggressive feminism or to be a part of sort of classic. Reactionary anti-feminism. Yeah. This is not, it's not superbly sexy.

You know, when I sort of look around at whatever motley, weird Avengers group that I've got, it's like me, you, Arthur Brooks, Scott Galloway, Macon Murphy, William Costello, Rob Henderson, maybe Andrew Thomas. Like, it is, it's a Alexander Datesike, but he's sort of stepped away from things now. I'm not, Stephen Shaw, kind of, but he's not really talking to Met. Like, you know, it really sort of runs flat pretty quick. I don't know who else is engaging with this stuff. And then when you were to look at who does fucking huge plays that push the narrative in a much more bombastic way, like it's...

I don't know. I mean, the long run way to win this is just to keep doing it, Chris. Right? I think this whole idea that there needs to be this kind of huge play is going to change. This is going to change slowly. and I also think we should give a little bit of credit to some of the people consuming this content. I think a lot of young men in particular

are perfectly willing to listen to this conversation and agree or disagree with us, but probably agree that we're having a good faith conversation as you do with others and realize that that is different to what they're going to get from certain other producers, right? I go there if I want a quick laugh

or an eye roll, it's whatever, but I come here if I want a more serious conversation and then if I get sufficiently enticed, I'll go and read some of AIBM's policy briefs, right? There's no level of enticement. It doesn't get any better than that. But people are able to be more discerning about the difference between these content types.

And if you look at their actual behavior and what's happening, I'm just much more hopeful. But just keep doing the work. And then over time, I don't know if this is going to be a good example or not, but I have, although he put him on his reading list, not always been thrilled with the way President Obama has talked about this issue,

especially in the run-ups of the last election. But on the podcast he did with his wife, not long ago, he said, and I quote, we've quite rightly invested in the girls, create a level playing field, so that we can have equality. We have not been as intentional about investing in the boys.

And that has been a mistake. And people are starting to recognize that. When Obama is saying that, now, of course, the only bit that got covered from that podcast was a brief discussion about their so-called marital difficulties in the first three minutes.

The remaining one hour, long conversation about the challenges of boys and men that he had with his wife and his wife's brother, his name of forgotten, that didn't get covered, but it's there. And so I just think bit by bit, person by person, governor by governor, you know, Ruben Gaya goes out there with his very episode by episode. And because it's actually what people want in the end. Also because it's the truth. It's true. The truth will in the end, I do think it's, and people can tell the difference between something that's truthful and not. Heck yeah.

Richard Reeves, ladies and gentlemen. Richard, where should people go to keep up to date with whatever you've got? Well, those policy briefs I mentioned are all up. Stop trying to catch your policy. No one's reading. Our policy brief on sports betting is the best piece of policy work out there on the very live issue of sports betting. So AIBM.org.

Cool. Richard, I appreciate you. So fun. Goodbye, everybody. Dude. Yes. Oh good. You got to go. Go.

That was so fun. It was. It was. Thank you.