The Daily Stoic - Richard Reeves on Why Men Are Being Set Up To Fail (PT. 1)

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

While women have made incredible strides over the past few decades, men have found themselves stuck in a tornado of confusion and disinformation around what masculinity means. Today, Ryan talks with Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, about why helping one gender won’t hurt the other, how the educational system is failing men, and what the biggest misunderstandings are about gender dynamics. Richard Reeves is author of Of Boys and Men, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Follow Richard on Instagram and X @RichardVReeves Check out Richard’s substack: https://ofboysandmen.substack.com/📚 You can grab signed copies of Of Boys and Men and Richard’s other book, Dream Hoarders, at The Painted Porch.💡 Want to hear more about this topic? Check out Ryan’s interview with Scott Galloway on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Right Now on audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. So for this tour I was just doing in Europe we had I think four days in London and I was with my kids, my wife, and my in-laws so we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune, we'd be cramped. So we booked an Airbnb and I was with my kids, my wife and my in-laws. So we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune, we'd be cramped.

So we booked an Airbnb and it was awesome. As it happens, the Airbnb we stayed in was like this super historic building. I think it was where like the first meeting of the Red Cross or the Salvation Army ever was. It was awesome. That's why I love staying in Airbnbs. To stay in a cool place,

you get a sense of what the place is actually like. You're coming home to your house, not to the lobby of a hotel every night. It just made it easier to coordinate everything and get a sense of what the city is like. When I spent last summer in LA, we used an Airbnb also. So you may have read something that I wrote while staying in an Airbnb.

Airbnb has the flexibility in size and location that work for your family and you can always find awesome stuff. You click on guest favorites to narrow your search down. Travel is always stressful. It's always hard to be away from home, but if you're going to do it, do it right and that's why you should check out Airbnb. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics.

We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I mean, I do get it.

It's, look, it's hard to be a person in the world, right? It's just hard to be a person in the modern world. Whatever your circumstances are, whatever your lifestyle is, whatever your race is, whatever your gender is. Is it harder for some people than others? Yeah, but it's just, it's hard. And we should have just empathy for how hard it is to be a human.

And then when we look at the statistics, it showed that this group or that group is struggling, we shouldn't try to dismiss that struggle, which we do across the board. Every race, gender, society, culture, privileged person tries to do this. Oh, well, what about this? Or, oh, what about that?

Or what about this group? Or what about what I'm going through? And the reality is everyone is struggling in some way or another. And we again, should be sympathetic to that. And we shouldn't try to explain away the data that alarms us. And look, for many, many years,

the data was alarming, at least in America, about women. Women were not given the same educational opportunities. They were discriminated against. Opportunities were closed off to them and they were deeply and profoundly unhappy. And this was a grave injustice. And as a society, at least the American political system, but I think all over the world, probably other countries did better than America, we took real strides to address this. And we are going to have to reckon with the fact

that the same is true for men these days. And I don't mean this as like men are the new victims, but as Richard Reeves talks about in his new book, boys and men are struggling. Women graduate from college at rates that dwarf men, men are adrift. And this is a real problem. And I say this not just as a father of two young boys.

I'll talk about that more in a minute. Like even if you don't have boys, even if you don't care, as I say in the afterword of Right Thing Right Now, we do, we have a generation of lost men. Women are thriving in school and higher education, I write, and in the workplace in encouraging and inspiring ways. Men in America and many other countries, the statistics show, are in kind of a doom loop.

They're struggling, they're angry. They're angry that on top of their own struggles, they're supposed to care about other people who are struggling for different reasons. That they have to consider other people's disadvantages and other injustices than the ones that they're dealing with. And I say that it shouldn't surprise us that demagogues and grifters would step into this void, playing off these insecurities and offering misguidance as well as grievances that many of these folks have taken the tenants of stoic philosophy,

perverted it, mixed it with equal parts toxic masculinity and resentiment, absorbing right-wing talking points and normalizing a kind of modern-day know-nothingism. And this is good for business in some ways, as many of the massive online audiences of these certain controversial figures would indicate. You know, they're speaking to people who feel ignored and feel mistreated and perhaps it was inevitable that someday someone would step up to meet this demand. And I say, look, all I know is I'm not going to be one of those people. It's been hard. I've certainly cost me an audience. Maybe someone's already pissed off from this intro.

But as I say, I have two boys of my own and I am made responsible. I feel compelled to demonstrate a different path and I carry a debt that I feel like I must pay forward by being a good father and a good citizen. And look, I get it, I have some issues with my dad. I felt like I was lacking in guidance as a young man, left in many ways to fend for myself. So when I read Richard Reeve's book of boys and men,

I was just so struck by it. I've been familiar with his work for a while. It actually, when he came out to boys and men, I was just so struck by it. I've been familiar with his work for a while. It actually, when he came out to the painted porch, I was just so impressed. He was calm and kind, not histrionic. He was empathetic. He deliberately avoids culture war nonsense and fights. He's just, he seemed like a classy guy

and a smart individual. And right now I'm a big fan of his work and I think you should be too. And that's what I want to tee up this interview here with the one and only Richard Reeves. You might also wanna check out my interview with Scott Galloway where we talked about some of the current struggles of young men today.

Actually here, I'll bring you a chunk of Scott's episode real fast, because I think it's actually a decent preface for here. I want to talk about stoicism again for a second, because I think to go back to this crisis of men, I think when perhaps the reason that some people, there is some sort of elite sneering at stoicism,

you know, it's associated with toxic masculinity. It does seem to be like that people associate stoicism with a lack of emotions. I think not being, I think there's a difference between being emotionless and being less emotional. But the idea that, you know, the way forward in life, that the key to success, the being a man is stuffing those emotions down and not having them. That strikes me as a dangerous thing to tell young people and also a dangerous way to live. Dave So first off, I think the reason that your work resonates with people so much is not only because you're a compelling storyteller, but young men need guardrails. And the reason why I would assume your audience is predominantly male is that young men need

guardrails. And a few and fewer men have the guardrails of a relationship. Only one in three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. And it's interesting, two in three women under the age of 30 have a boyfriend because they're dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. They don't have religion as much. A lot of them don't have a male role model. We have the second most single parent homes in the world behind Sweden. One out of three men has no contact with their kids at six years post divorce. So, you have a lot of kind of men who are just sort of wandering and looking for a code. They're looking for

guardrails. And I think stoicism, especially the way you presented it in a very sort of optimistic, practical way, I think a lot of people are latching onto it because there's a void of what is a productive code or guardrails for me or an ideology that I can hold to that can help me make better decisions in my life. And I think that's why stoicism is resonating so much as it relates to emotions. From the age of 29 to 44, I didn't cry. I didn't cry when I got divorced. I didn't cry when my mother died. I just literally forgot how.

I don't know if it was because some weird sense of masculine men don't cry. I don't know what it is, but I literally just forgot how to cry. And then I started crying again at 44. I learned how. And what I would say is it's one of the nicest things that's happened to me in the last 15 years, because when something really moves me, I saw Hirsch Goldberg-Pollin's mother give that eulogy on him. And it was so beautiful.

And I was thinking about it, I was packing my son for boarding school on Monday, and his feet are now size 10, and see these new balance shoes and he's Wearing too much cologne and he's got his first razor and he's bought this vintage Adidas sweatshirt that he's so proud of and and I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking about the loss There's these the grieving parents. I have to excuse myself because I get very emotional I go out of the room and I think well I need to go back into the room to show him that it's okay to cry. But what I tell men or young men is if something moves you, try and lean into it and learn how to cry because it's not like cathartic but it it informs what's

important to you. Like I have figured out because of my willingness to cry what I think really moves me. Also try to figure out a way to laugh out loud a lot. That is really rewarding. But if you think about the advantage we have as sentient beings, especially humans, we have a larger range of emotions. And so to not really lean into your emotions, happiness, sadness, grieving, joy, laughter,

is to not take advantage of your blessings as this species. And also you become smarter. You become better at what you do. Why am I so moved by this content? Well, understand it. Why do you think it's so powerful? Why is it moving you this way? And then learn from it.

Why are you upset about this? Okay, this is what's important to you. This is what offends you. But otherwise you're just sort of, as I was through 29 through 44, I was just kind of sleepwalking through life. I didn't really feel anything. So, men really need to get over this bullshit notion of masculinity as not showing your emotions. It is so important and all that. It's just so rewarding. Yeah. We only have a couple of stories about Marcus Aurelius, the human being, not the

philosopher, but I think it's striking that almost all of them involve him crying, crying over victims of the plague, crying over the loss of one of his tutors. We even hear that he cries when he finds out he's gonna be emperor, because it strikes him as this utterly overwhelming, you know, impossible job. And it strikes me that, you know, when people talk about, you know, men don't show their emotions, you know, yet, we

know, we see those men get angry all the time. So it's not that they don't have emotions. It's it's that the only emotion they are in touch with is their temper, or their anger or their frustration. And if there is any emotion to work on controlling, it's your anger. And then it's those other emotions compassion and love those are the kind of ones that you want to explore because those are Enriching and they tell you something and they tell you you know what you probably need and want more of in your life Yeah

I'm struggling with this because I'm writing a book on masculinity and I'm trying to figure out a way This is you've used stoicism as a means of developing a code or guidepost for people, I'm wondering if masculinity or a more aspirational form of masculinity could also serve a similar type of guidepost for young men. Because we're built differently, we have more testosterone, people born as men are more prone to certain types of activities and attributes than, and women are born to their own set of attributes, which isn't to say women can't demonstrate wonderful masculinity and men can't demonstrate wonderful femininity.

But I think we need to stop demonizing masculinity and re-embrace it and develop a more kind of aspirational tone of it. And I do think there's something about masculinity where you have a code and you speak up for yourself and there is a line. I went to a football match and these guys were in our seats and wouldn't move. And I got very, very angry and upset and my son was freaked out. And I'm glad he saw it. It was like, okay, I'm, you know, I have a line and I get in people's faces. It doesn't happen very often, but it happens. And I thought I'm actually glad that happened and that he saw that. At the same time, when someone cuts me off in

traffic, when someone says me off in traffic, when someone says something to me and is rude, someone's rude to me on a plane or something from my boys, the person I was 20 years ago would have been like, I need to get back in their face. I need to restore harmony to the universe. No one gets the best of me. And I do think the real masculinity is that you're strong enough to kind of on a regular basis, you take blows. It's okay. It's all right. You're going to be fine if someone gets the better of you every once in a while. You can take it. You're a man. You can absorb these blows. So anyways, please read of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves. And if you are a parent,

you might also wanna check out Daily Dad or other daily podcasts and daily email. You can follow Richard on Instagram and at Twitter, at Richard V. Reeves. His other book, Dream Hoarders, is quite good too. And check it out. Dream Hoarders is quite good too. And check it out.

So you're not going out of your mind, not being able to exercise. I'm trying to do a little bit of just basic strength stuff, but what's interesting is that I got quite angry about it. And I don't think in my case, it was that I'm one of these people like has to exercise in order to maintain some equal liberal. I think that is true for some people. But I did, I did actually come to realize that this injury and the incapacitation comes with it. And a couple of other disabilities that I struggle a bit with, is maybe realize that

I am treating my body as a means to an end. Even when I'm treating it well, it's in order to secure another end. So there's this idea that like, maybe we should talk about this, like brains on a stick. And although, and it goes completely contrary to my kind of faith tradition now as well, which is very much about the embodied experience. I realized that the reason I was mad was because in order to do the work I'm supposed to be doing intellectually and like this, right? I need my body to function, but it's still completely instrumental. It's not, I realized I still...

Your body was getting in the way of your mind. That's where you're a man. Yeah. So I actually think like the big realization for me was that if you'd said to me like, you're just treating your body, you're not treating your body well enough. I'd say no, it's not true. I do treat it well now, but still in the service of something else rather than because it matters in and of itself.

Yes. Yeah, I rolled my ankle really bad in January. And then, you know, they were like, take a couple weeks off. And I took like a week off. And then I rolled it extremely bad and I had to take like five or six weeks off. And it's very clear to me that I use running some form of high intensity cardio as my serotonin adjustment.

And if I don't have it, I know maybe a day and it's a problem. And so I did some strength training stuff, but that doesn't give it, that doesn't do it for me. You need the aerobic to get the kind of endorphin kick or the dopamine. Yeah. Yeah. So which is, it's like on the one hand, not great. The stoics would say like sort of anything that you're dependent on or a slave to is bad or is a problem. And yet it's also, it's weird because it's one of those things that's positive. It's good for you, but it's probably not good for you to not be able to not do things. But don't you also point out that the Stoics say you could never be perfect Stoic. Yes.

Right? Yeah. You have a whole thing about anti-perfectionism in there too. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I mean, what I had to take the challenge of, like the rehab of the ankle for me, and ankle injuries are weird because like when I heard it the second time, it hurts so bad.

I thought when I looked down, like I would see like my bones sticking out. And then so I ended up going, I ended up going to the ER or whatever. They're like, oh, it's just an ankle sprain. And I was like, please tell me it's worse. This is like, there was just the invalid validation. I was like, give me something. I had exactly the opposite experience where they, I took it in originally and they x-rayed it and they missed the break in the leg. I said, yeah, you probably just right. It sent me out and I got two weeks later, I'm still walking around and then I went back. This was like, you know, I was walking around. I felt like, and they went, oh yeah, you're broken your leg.

Oh, oh, by the way, you've destroyed your ankle. You're like, oh, I am tough. Oh yeah. I was like working for like, so I'm the opposite to you. Like, yeah, I'm the real man here. I was like, oh, the challenge is, how can I not be miserable to live with for a month as I'm pro, like, I was like that,

to me that I had to take that as a challenge. You were gonna become a different person, basically. And how did you manage it? I tried to go, okay, this is my coping thing. So like, it's going away. So when I'm getting go, okay, this is my coping thing. So like it's going away. So when I'm getting frustrated or like, I tried to be really cognizant that I wasn't just channeling that energy into like nitpicking about stuff

or being anxious about like, it's like clearly I use that physical thing as an outlet for energy that otherwise could be destructive or unpleasant or just annoying. And I was like, okay, I'm just going to, that's my problem because I can't spill it on the pavement. I don't get to just spill it on my spouse or my employees or my editor. So you notice, so you just observed yourself starting to feel that and tried to... Yeah. And then I was like, okay, now what...

So where do you go with it? Well, I just start drinking heavily. That's the thing. Right? I don't have, I know. I wish I just, I wish I did. I used to, I wanted to also go, okay, this is a, imagine it's like this forever. What it, what's the low intensity thing you're replacing it with? Oh, that's interesting. And so, yeah, cause if you had something on a permanent, yeah, it meant you couldn't, I mean, when I was walking out, I felt sorry for myself because the surgery was much bigger than they thought it was going to be.

And so I came out and we had these plans for vacations and stuff and like, we're going to have to check, basically cancel all that. And the recovery is going to be much longer than I thought. And so I'm sort of moping a bit as you're coming out. Like, and then as these things often do, this moment occurs to you, which is very instructive. So I'm getting in the elevator to go down feeling sorry for myself. And then the guy who follows me into the elevator and it's like cheerful, doesn't have a leg. And I thought about telling him how unfair life was about my ankle surgery on my left leg. And then I realized that might not go down with a guy that doesn't

have a left leg at all. Yes. And then you're like, okay. It could always be worse is true, but not always so comforting. No, no. Well, it's also not like, you know, how, like the, if your parents would say to you, if you didn't eat your food, right, people starving in China or, or somehow if you're depressed about the thing that's in your life, it doesn't invalidate.

So I was, my feelings were not invalidated by the fact that, that is not as bad as losing your leg, but they were, they were, they were helped. It helped me to, like, I didn't suddenly start beating up on myself for feeling bad. One of the things I've learned about mental health is that you start to feel bad, then you feel guilty and bad about feeling bad. And that can actually become worse. And then you just spiral downwards. And so you've got to validate the fact that you feel bad. And it's okay to feel bad, even though somebody else next to you could be rolling their eyes at you. Otherwise, it's almost like people who have problems when they don't feel that they somehow kind of should have problems, end up in that really difficult spiral. I've noticed that

with some friends. That is a masculinity problem. There's a difference between saying, hey, don't be ruled by your emotions and pretend you don't have the emotions, right? Like, or the stuff the emotions down and shrug them off. That's a problem. I think what you're feeling a thing, you're seeing someone else, you're getting some perspective on your feelings and then you're just kind of working through and processing

that that's what you're supposed to do with the emotions. To me, it's this kind of dialogue with the self. Yeah, and observe the emotion. So it's you're in conversation with the emotion, but the emotion's neither dominating you nor to be dismissed. And there is this kind of difficult ground. I think you're right, a lot of men struggle with that.

Actually, one of the things I wanna ask you about is how the word stoicism is used in relation to men and masculinity, because of course you've got- The American Psychological Association, when they put down the traits of toxic masculinity, I think stoicism was number two. Yeah, it was. They're referring to lower cases of stoicism.

They really are. And I've said this before, but I think it's funny. Stoicism and Epicureanism, like stoic and Epicurean, those two words in the English language are like the opposite of what the philosophies were about. And it's one of those things where, yeah, the word means the opposite of what people think it means. And so it gets a bad reputation.

I would agree stoic as the way they were defining it is a trait of unhealthy masculinity. Stoicism, the thing I write about, the people I idolize, I wouldn't describe with that word necessarily. Yeah, well, that's what happens. So it's same with the sophists, actually. I have a friend who's maybe gonna write a book about that, but you've got sophistry.

And that's just all about like basic, someone who's engaging sophistry is kidding you, right? Snake oil salesman. And so it has that association, but his claim anyways, if you go back to it, it's not much about the art of rhetoric and how you think about argument, et cetera. But these terms take on a life of their own. And so it sounds defensive when you say it, but like, well, it depends what you mean by Stokes. But also even in that narrow, like lowercase Stoicism, I think that idea of,

it's sometimes it is appropriate to have sort of emotional restraint and ability, right? Totally. The Stoics say the greatest empire is command of oneself. And I do think both genders, all people would be better off if they were more in command of themselves. And so if that's how we're defining it, like I say Stoicism is not emotionlessness, but it is aimed at being less emotional. Because very rarely are we like, when we look back at a time when we were carried away by our emotions, are we like, I'm so glad I did that. Positive or negative.

Like the idea of, I think the ancients talked a lot about the passions as a bad thing. And today we talk about passion as like the main thing you should be cultivating. Follow your passion. Yeah, and it's blinding and overwhelming and can be deceiving. So when I do something because I'm angry or because I'm jealous or I'm worked up or I'm scared, anxious, that doesn't tend to age very well. I'm like, oh, that was dumb. Yeah. I haven't turned down the volume.

Do you ever get accused of it being a very masculine thing? Totally. Yeah. I haven't turned down the volume. Do you ever get accused of it being a very masculine thing? Like they're all men. And like, of course, of course a man would say command, self command and whatever is what you'd say, because that's more of a masculine way of being in the world. And that it actually elevates that philosophical framework above a different framework, which would give emotions much more space. I'm thinking a bit about even someone like Martha Nussbaum, philosophers written about emotions and the intelligence contained within emotions. And a lot of the feminist philosophy would say, actually that whole focus on command the emotion so that the brain, so that we can be rational, is actually squeezed out a lot of feminist and

more women centered philosophy. Yeah. I mean, my wife likes to joke that one of us is a stoic and the other writes about stoicism. She's actually much more in control of her emotions. And for me, it's a thing I have to work on. But I think it's interesting we don't think of Zen Buddhism as a masculine or feminine philosophy. But it says a lot of the same things about sort of watching those emotions happen and observing them and not being ruled by them.

I wonder if that's a, it's a cultural distinction or it's like an East West thing. But again, we don't, if anything, the same practices might even have a slightly more feminine connotation to us, even though the idea of like letting those passions sort of pass on by like clouds, what is just a softer way of expressing,

I think a very similar idea of not being ruled by those emotions. ["The Grinch Holiday Podcast"] Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. The Grinch is back again to ruin your Christmas season with his The Grinch Holiday Podcast. After last year, he's learned a thing or two about hosting and he's ready to rant your Christmas season with his The Grinch holiday podcast. After last year, he's learned a thing or two about hosting and he's ready to rant against bristmas cheer

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To listen ad free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. I have a sense of the distinction you're talking about in your work from my audience because yet people think it's all men and yet who's actually really focused on self-improvement, succeeding at the office. Like I hear from so many really successful, ambitious, put-together women because they are dominating in so many spheres. So it's actually, I would think for people who were running the empire, right? Which is the West today. And so, so if you're suddenly, you know, as successive generations have gotten, now you

have more and more women in place of leadership, they're having to learn and avail themselves of some of the timeless wisdom that humans have developed for these positions of influence and power. And I think are turning to things like stoicism to figure it out. Well, I actually had this interesting conversation with Carol Hooven, who wrote a book about testosterone. Yeah. And she talked about this evidence around differences in crying.

Yeah. And how she was criticizing this idea that probably men, they don't cry enough. Yeah. Right. And I've been on podcasts where they say, when did you last cry? Yeah. And how she was criticizing this idea that I probably meant they don't cry enough. Yeah. Right. And I've been on podcasts where they say, when did you last cry? Yeah. And the only acceptable answer is yesterday. Like, it's supposed to virtue signal that you do cry. Absolutely. That's required now. And interestingly, I cry much less now that I've stopped drinking. Sure. I think for me, like actually drinking was one way that kind of made it a bit more permeable maybe. And you might say, okay, that's bad that you're not crying as much.

But what Carol's work shows is that like holding the same kind of emotional position, roughly constant is that women are a little bit somewhat more likely to cry than men. Yeah. Right. And I have actually found that quite helpful in both directions, like, because if you apply a sort of male standard about what crying signals in terms of where you are on the emotional scale and a woman comes into you, as has happened to me in the workplace and is in tears, you're

going to think, whoa, this is really bad. Yeah. Right? Because you apply a sort of male standard to it. But actually- It must be serious or she wouldn't be crying. Must be serious. Yeah. Or you might be a bit judgmental about it or keep yourself together or whatever. And so I find that quite helpful because it allows me to contextualize, and it could be men as well too, right? But I was aware that I might have inadvertently ended up

with a kind of male centric standard of what justifies tears, right? Yes. But of course it could be true the other way around as well, which is like, well, these terrible things happen to you. Like why aren't you crying? Yeah. Right. And it must be because you're stunted.

You're stunted. You can't express yourself. And so like, you know, and so it's a great example, I think of this difference, which at the average is just seems to be real and where we want to be very careful not to create cultures or environments where one is seen as somehow superior to the other, whether that's not crying or crying. So in a patriarchy, like these emotional women constantly coming into my office and crying all the time, like no wonder we can't make a profit.

But another culture might be like, well, these guys, like even though something terrible just happened, he's not crying. So he's clearly emotionally stunted and unable to express his feelings. And so he's probably got some problems. And both of those are equally bad as a way to think about humans. Well, I think about that because we have such an interesting... So let's say crying is being overwhelmed by an amount of emotion that you have. I don't think that's a weird way to define it, but you feel something so intensely,

you're having like a physical reaction to it. So, yeah, on a masculine scale, we say that's somewhat negative or that's a loss of control. Maybe it's somewhat more positive when women do it. But then if you look at other things that we judge, it's the same thing, but we judge it differently with men. Like I've said this before, but if you get so angry, you punch a wall. That's like very masculine, right? Maybe it's not immediately judged, but we're wall. That's like very masculine, right? Maybe it's not, it's,

it's not immediately judged, but we're like, there's something about that. And then I don't know, you have an affair. Like there's different, different forms. How did you go from punching a wall to having an affair? I'm just saying you're overwhelmed by it. You're overwhelmed by an emotion, you like a feeling of lust or attraction. So. So in these different cases, like one is considered unmanly, say like crying, and then others we might judge as good or bad, but we wouldn't say are unmanly or not, right? And so I think it's interesting how like crying is this thing that men don't do,

but if men lose their temper and get in a fight, that is what men do, but it's still losing your, it's still losing command, it's still losing command of oneself. And so I just think it's, it's, it's interesting how certain emotions are indulged in culture and then others are not. Yeah, that is interesting. And it's also in a, the context of mental health, this idea of externalizing versus internalizing. Yeah. I've been talking to a lot of people recently about what's been happening, particularly to the mental health of young men

and teenagers, et cetera. And how actually the measures that we use to try and get out what's happening in mental health can inadvertently capture one more than the other because boys and young men tend to externalize. They act out. Whereas of women, and again, these are all at the average, of course,

tend to be more internalizing. And so it's more about feelings of sadness. But if you take the main CDC measures of like mental health, they only ask internalizing questions. And so there's a lot of attention right now to the share of young women, for example, that are feeling persistent sadness. But they don't ask about acting out. So don't ask about, did you punch a wall?

Right? Did you do something like more externalizing? And there's a tendency sometimes to see that as, well, that's just antisocial behavior. But there's symptoms of the same problem. Yes. It's just a different expression of the two. And so if you have survey instruments that pick up one and not the other, or you sort of see one as a mental health problem, the other as a punitive problem, like in the classroom say, then you've inadvertently built into your mental health system some discrimination against what's happening with boys.

And one of the other interesting things that really happened was that during the pandemic, actually, boys didn't have as much kind of opportunity to externalize their behavior. There's less fights to get into. Yes. And so some of the mental health people I'm talking to now are saying like, there was this weirdly, it's basically this kind of suppressed mental health problems or you couldn't see them as much as boys because the way they would normally have expressed them weren't available to them. Yes.

Now good or bad, but it just seems like that was a factor in this apparent gender gap in mental health. Because I'm absolutely convinced that the mental health problems of teen boys are every bit as great as teen girls, even if they're expressed differently, but that's not the current narrative. Well, what you look for and what you expect is going to change what you see. My wife was telling me she was looking at something and it was like how under diagnosed ADHD is in women versus men or was historically. And it's like, if you don't have high standards or you don't care, like you're not expecting

them to do well in school, it's not important to you. You're not gonna notice that they're not paying attention as well. And so, yeah, what you're expecting is gonna change what you're looking for. And so I do think though, cause there's this interesting passage in Mark Sturlus' meditations where he talks about

how it's not manly to lose your temper. It's like, if we're gonna apply societal pressure into suppressing a kind of emotion, crying would not be the one I would wanna suppress because it doesn't harm anyone. It's like if we're going to apply societal pressure into suppressing a kind of emotion, crying would not be the one I would want to suppress because it doesn't harm anyone. And so it's weird how we judge one as being weak or silly or whatever. And then these other ones, which have real negative externalities on society and then also the person doing it, it's kind of interesting how we're willing to tolerate certain things is what boys do.

And then we'll make a boy feel bad for doing a different thing, even though it's not harming anyone. Yeah. But we've made so much progress, I think, on those fronts where actually it's almost at the point now where if you're not getting tearful or expressing your emotions in some way or sharing your vulnerabilities that you're not taking seriously. So there can be a degree of performance in that now. And so I actually think there's a danger that you replace one performance, which was the

sort of stiff upper lip, not going to express anything with the kind of like, let me share with you my struggles with depression or get tearful. It's like a weird form of honor culture in its own way. Yeah. We just adjust to the new status symbols around that. Now, but what's interesting about this idea of the expressions that you have around emotions and how they might vary somewhat, it gets us into this debate about the classic nature nurture type debate. One thing that I find frustrating about the discussion of sex differences is that people interpret any claim that there could be some differences in psychology between men and women as biological determinism or somehow saying one is better than the other or has

saying that culture is less important. I take exactly the opposite view. My reading of this is that if you do understand that there are some differences, say in propensity towards aggression, right? Or propensity towards driven sexuality, so I've been driven more by sex, right? If you think that those are actual differences

that are not just socialized, that doesn't make culture less important. It makes it more important for the reasons you just said. You have to work on it. You have to work on it. You have to work on it. We have to decide as a society to some extent, like which of these, under which circumstances is it appropriate to encourage the expression of that and which is it not? You might actually think that, maybe a better example is risk taking.

Pretty clear evidence that risk appetite or risk taking, but what is higher among boys and men that is among women and girls. And there's lots of examples of that. The one I've been looking at recently is that every single age group, boys and men are at least twice as likely to die from drowning as women and girls. Just to drown a lot more. And there's no evidence that there's a particular difference in skill level around swimming, swimming ability or anything.

And when it's at every age group, it's got to be about risk taking. In fact, there's this, I live in rural East Tennessee now. There's a bridge near us where the local teenagers gather and one group of teenagers jumps off this bridge into the lake and it's a long drop. I've looked at it and thought about it and said, no, it's a long drop. So one group of teenagers line up and jump in and then another group of teenagers watch them doing it. Have a guess. And so of course they're jumping off high bridges. They kind of more like drown. Now, if it's true that the average is a bit more risk appetite or risk taking behavioural, but is that good or bad? If it means that you

do crazy, silly things, you risk your own life or other people's lives or you try drugs or short, bad. But if it's actually like we need people to go and parachute into wildfires to put them out or maybe a bit of entrepreneurship, et cetera. If the average, that means that you've got a little bit more of that in one group, another. The question is, are these differences being encouraged to be expressed in a pro-social way? When it cuts both directions, you had a tweet that I really liked where you were saying there was like more female fighter pilots than male nurses or- A kindergarten teacher.

Yes. Something like that. And obviously it took work as a society to get the number of one of those up. We had to focus on it. And it's great and we're reaping the benefits of it. I've been doing this series of lectures at the Naval Academy. You meet these young women who would not have been

in the audience 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. And every year there's more. And those are the best and the brightest of the country. It's fantastic that we've done that work. You think of the invisible graveyard of amazing kindergarten teachers that we don't have, because some man was encouraged to work in a, I don't know, on Wall Street and he hates it, but he would have been the greatest kindergarten teacher of all time. But just as a society, we didn't push him in that direction. So I think you go, look, there's certain proclivities or predilections. And then as a society, like we do with all things, we decide what do we want to incentivize?

What do we want to culturally incubate? And then we go to work on that. Yeah. And we try and get to a society where we can feel pretty confident that whatever patterns emerge are genuinely the result of us giving people equal opportunities. But the trouble is that there is one group, more conservatives, let's say, who insist that these biological differences are so great that they would say, well, of course only 3% of kindergarten teachers are male. What do you think?

Men are into things, right? And of course only 15% of engineers are women because women are into people. They use these real differences in average proclivities to justify extraordinary differences in actual behavior. But then on the other side, there are people who say until everything's 50-50, then we won't be at a real equality because the only reason that men might be more interested in engineering than women or that men might be more interested in the Navy, can only be socialization. And of course, the truth is in the middle. The truth is that I think under conditions of absolute equality of opportunity, do I

think 50% of kindergarten teachers would be male and 50% of fighter pilots or smoke jumpers, the people that go into wildfires, do I think they would be female? No. But I got to tell you, it's a damn sight more than 3%. So what is the number? And actually there are some studies that kind of look at this and depending on the occupation, it's probably maybe 25% or 30% or something. But so we can't make a shibboleth of 50% if we think there are any differences underlying it. But as soon as you say that people are,

okay, so you're saying women can't be engineers. And I say, hold on. My son is a fifth grade teacher and my sister-in-law is an engineer. And if anybody came along and said, we are all men can't really teach. You guys have to switch. Sorry. Sorry. Something went wrong here. Do you mind switching? I would be of course, furious as would they. Well, and look, the most, one of the most basic laws of economics is the law of comparative advantage. You want a society where people are doing the thing they are best equipped to do. And in fact, it doesn't really matter what the averages are. What matters is that each individual is doing their

main thing. There's a Theodore Roosevelt quote I love that I think about all the time when people get in these silly debates about these things. I think I heard it in the Ken Burns documentary and I interviewed him recently. But someone was pointing out to Theodore Roosevelt, who was a supporter of women's suffrage, they were, you know, what about all the differences between men and women? And he said, there may be differences between men and women, but he's like, these pale in comparison

between the differences between men and other men. And so there might be some, all sorts of different, law and large enough data sets, you might see all these different patterns emerge, but it doesn't matter to you as the individual. That's what I think. So there is this other conservative fascination of like, are there race-based IQ differences?

And they like, they insist on like, we need to talk about this. And it's like, show me one company that's big enough that these percentages would even matter to them. Do you know what I mean? Like it would have, you would, what would you possibly do with this information? Effectively nothing. What we should have is a society that goes, you as an individual seem to be showing a predilection for X. We want to support and enable and help you realize that potential.

Yeah. Cause that's what the economists call statistical discrimination, where you assume that, because on average, women are more like kindergarten teachers. And my own son has faced discrimination trying to go into elementary education, as has my sister-in-law into engineering. And that's a form of discrimination we don't want. I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history.

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Experience all episodes ad free and be the first to binge the newest seasons only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today. I can't find who said this. I wish it was Hans Rosling whose book Factfulness I really like. I don't know who said this, but the line is that so many of society's problems are caused by an unwillingness or inability to imagine overlapping distributions.

So in other words, take a trait, whatever it is, and the distribution. So let's talk about women a bit more into people, men a bit more into things. That's true. But wow, do those distributions overlap? Most of the sex differences that you were interested in, there's going to be huge overlap. Let's take height as an example. I use this as a good, like the statement that men are taller than women is one that most people understand to mean that on average men are taller than women is one that most people understand to mean that on average

men are taller than women. Most people don't think that statement means all men are taller than all women. They realize that there are some tall women and some shorter men, right? But they also know that the distributions are different. So they're different, they overlap. The question then becomes like, what are we talking about? How much does it overlap? And does it matter? Yeah. So back to the kind of, let's say on average, women cry a bit more and men spit a bit more, which apparently is also true. Right. Do we care? No. Yeah. Um, if there's something else, which is like, they tendency towards risk taking or something, do we care?

Well, we certainly don't care when it comes to hiring people. We wouldn't say to a woman who wants to be a fighter pilot or parachute smoke jump, sorry, women can't do that. But we might actually look at the distributions and say, look, the fact that most of the people parachuting out of serviceable airplanes into wildfires are men doesn't necessarily mean that there's a sexism at work. It might just be there's some selection based on it, right? And to most of us, none of this has anything to do with how we live.

Like I have two boys, I have two boys, that's my problem. I don't have statistical boys. Yeah. You don't have two. You have a statistical girl. And so I think describing what these things are as average is kind of a distraction from the, you've got these two kids in front of you

that you've got to figure out how to make through the world. And understanding that because of how we saw things in the past or because of these statistical averages, you might have this obstacle or that obstacle that you have to think about is the main thing. In a way, I think the purpose of recognizing differences at the average, say in sex, is to then be able to ignore them when it comes to the individual. And the reason I say that is because if there are differences at the average, then what

it means is that we don't inadvertently end up treating someone as there's something wrong with them because we have this inadvertent default. So one of the- You know, a bed of pro-cresties or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I worry about in the school system, for example, is that no one's fault, but ends up treating boys a bit like malfunctioning girls.

Because there's this like, if you have this implied standard of how to behave, how to sit still, what kind of learning, you know, physicality, et cetera. And the kind of median person you've got in mind there is like the median girl, right? Because that's who's doing best. Right. And most of the teachers are female and so on. Then you're going to look at how the boy behaves and go, ah, what's wrong with him? In just the same way, by the way, in a corporate culture that's mostly male, right?

And I don't know, let's say there's a woman who's a bit more emotional and expressive or whatever it is, right? So we have a workplace that still tends to treat many women like malfunctioning men, but we have a school system that treats kind of boys like malfunctioning girls. And the point of recognizing there are some differences is to then kind of go, cool, now can we get on with it? Will you talk about this in the book? And I had heard you talk about it

so it actually affected a decision we made. You were looking at some of the data that says like, boys tend to succeed better if you hold them back a year before they enter. And so my oldest, his birthday lined up with that and we ended up doing it. He started it a year later. Now, if he had been crushing it and was like,

like we didn't go, oh, the data says you're a boy, you should start school a year earlier. It's like you have a data point and then you measure, you compare that data point with the specific person or kid that you have in front of you. And then you go, is this helpful? Are you the exception or are you representative? And then you sort of proceed from

there. Yeah. It's, it's, I'd say similar. How old are your kids now? Eight and five. Yeah. So once you get into the, into the high school years, middle and high school, which is where you see some of these gender gaps already opening up, something similar happens there too, which is where you see this huge gap in, in GPA between boys and girls, but no gap in SAT, right? So there's no gender gap on standardized tests, SAT or ACT, but huge ones and grades. So it's just behavior mostly or togetherness. Yes, exactly.

And so what, I mean, in some ways I wish I'd known when I was, my kids were younger, what I know now, which is that actually it just does take boys a little bit longer at the average to develop some of those skills, which are like the GPA skills, right? Which are turn in your homework skills, right? Which is very difficult for 50 people. Don't just shove it all on the bottom of your back.

Yeah, I mean, I like people who don't believe in sex difference, as I say, go into the average eighth or ninth grade classroom and ask them to open up their bags, right? And the girls just much more like to be organized, neatly labeled and the boys is like a controlled explosion. Where's your homework? And of course these are stereotypes and everyone kind of goes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the reason that's kind of true. And so what that means is that if you have a school system or a college admissions process, yeah, that only leans on one, then it's inevitably going to be a bit more gendered. So what's interesting, we have data on this now because a bunch of colleges went test optional, especially during the pandemic, where they actually said, we don't need your SAT or ACT score anymore. Right. Right?

We're just going to do it on GPA and other things where the girls are killing it compared to the boys. And the main result was they became four percentage points more female almost overnight, those colleges. Because you changed what you were measuring and you didn't think about how that there might be a sort of, not an injustice, but a preference in what you were measuring. Exactly. It wasn't clearly, and actually it was definitely not the main point of the policy.

It was actually to try and get more kids of color in and kids from poorer backgrounds, which it didn't really seem to work. But obviously if you've got these two different variables and you've got a big gender gap on one and actually no gender gap on the other and you take that one out, then of course you're going to skew that way, which is again, not necessarily to say you shouldn't do it, but it's an example of how, and it used to go the other way by the way. I mean, one of the reasons that we moved towards more like GPA and continuous assessment was because at the average, boys seem to just dial it in a bit better when it came to high

stakes competitive standardized tests. Boys just seem to just dial it in a bit better when it came to high stakes, competitive, standardized tests. Boys just seem to like, they like that. They just do a bit better and girls didn't do quite as well. And so there's been a shift to say, well, we can't just do these high stakes one day tests, right? How about we measure what they're doing all year? And that's a perfectly appropriate thing to do. But again, it might come back to just trying to get a

balance here. We don't want an education system that tilts more towards classically male attributes, but not we want it the other way around. Well, we can see it in a lot of different ways. Paul Tough wrote a book a couple of years ago, and you know, the marshmallow test. And he pointed out this thing about the marshmallow test that I never thought about, which was like, when you give the marshmallow test to say a kid in the inner city, he or she is like, just give me the marshmallow. I don't trust you. And so the idea of your cultural experience in four, sometimes we're just not thinking

about the assumptions inherent on what we're measuring or looking at. And so if you live in a rules-based cause and effect world, if somebody says, hey, if you defer gratification here, it'll be better for you, you're like, okay. But if you've been screwed over or deceived or you're not sure you're gonna live till tomorrow, you're like, give me the marshmallow now, I wanna get out of here.

Yeah, it's only worth deferring gratification if you can be reasonably confident that that will pay off. And maybe Paul talked about this, but do you, but someone replicated the marshmallow test, but with an additional condition. Did you know? Maybe he talked about this. So you get the marshmallow test, how long can you wait for the marshmallow, basically? And then if you wait longer, you get two or whatever it is.

And so it's a measure of deferring gratification. But someone then repeated it and it just seemed very interesting. They said, okay, we're going to do the marshmallow. Before they did that, they said to the kids, we're going to start in a minute, but while you're waiting, do some coloring. Yeah. I'll bring, and then they gave them a bunch

of broken pencils and they said, I'll bring, then they said, I'll bring you some new pencils. And half of the kids, they brought them new pencils. Half of the kids, they didn't bring them new pencils. They said, oh no, sorry, we didn't have any. They lied to them. They lied to them. Yeah.

Right? Then they ran the marshmallow test. And guess what? Yeah. Guess what? The kids were like, I don't trust you. It's a rational decision. You said you'd bring me new pencils and you didn't. So I'm definitely not waiting for another marshmallow.

And so it was just a real, a kind of baked into the experiment was this, I go, well, how about if we change the kids' assumptions about how reliable you are and how reliably their deferring gratification is in fact gonna deliver this thing. And what they found was that difference between the kids who'd been promised the pencils and didn't get them and those who promised them and did get them

was bigger than anything they'd found in a previous marshmallow test. The idea, you know, we say like trust the process, right? And I've thought about that in my own life. Like the reason I can trust a process on a book is that I've been through the process and it's paid off for me. Trusting the process on the first book was tough because I didn't actually know if you stick with the thing, you come out the

other side and it's good. And so discipline, understanding discipline just as understanding like reading a hard book or doing your schoolwork. We're expecting them to understand. At a young age, when they're already struggling with cause and effect, we're expecting them to trust a process that they have never actually experienced before. And expecting them to do it on the word of adults, some of whom they respect and trust,

and others they don't respect and trust. You know, and you think about it, it's like if you come from a family that has, that is demonstrable evidence of hard work pays off, you're gonna have an easier time trusting a process or being self-disciplined than someone who has not or someone who's surrounded in people by people who live in the moment and don't.

So it is interesting just like what we're asking of people and not really thinking about what a leap of faith we are asking of them. Yeah, and actually I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently in the context of optimism and pessimism and what's happening to young people, especially, and this real quite steep decline in optimism. And I think that's a profound cultural shift because for exactly the reasons that you're

just identifying, which is for people to feel like the future is going to be reliably better than the present, conditional on doing certain things, is what leads you to invest, to work, to defer gratification, to make difficult choices, to start a business, to go away to college, whatever it is. To get up for a down payment. Whatever it is, right? That you're making it. And actually, capitalism's built on that presumption.

Yes. Actually, the idea that things are going to go up, things are going to get better, is in some ways the psychological engine of capitalism. And so I've actually come to believe that the real enemy of capitalism is not socialism, it's pessimism. I totally agree. If you stop believing that that investment is going to pay off, that hard work is going to pay off, the future can be reasonably reliably better.

I think you're in real trouble then. Well, this is the self-defeating nature of what you call dream hoarding. Why are young people moving more and more to the left, less and less believer in institutions, capitalism, et cetera? Young women, I should just say. Show me where it's working. Show me where it's... But I would say for Gen Z or my generation, period, show me when the last time it really worked,

the way that it worked for their parents. Of course, as a general trend, I think they're gonna be much more skeptical of these things than people who watched it work for their parents, watched it work for their older siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. And then can sense that it's working for them. If you let's say you take 2000 to today, show me some market efficiency or market based solution that we're all widely agreed as a culture

like worked great. I don't, I can't see that. Like I could see what about online shopping? What about so is the world worse or better on that sits Amazon? I think, I think it's better. I would say it's better in many ways, but if you were a kid who now doesn't have the experience of in many ways, but if you were a kid who now doesn't have the experience of retail or malls, it also hollowed out a bunch of stuff. And I think kids are aware of that in a way that maybe in the past, we definitely talk about the costs of tech in a way that maybe we wouldn't have in past generations about certain innovations. Yeah.

I really think one of the most difficult things for us to do as parents and as a society is to get the balance right between recognizing that even net positive changes in society can have negative byproducts and consequences and to responsibly deal with those. This is actually relevant to my work, which is the rise of women and the changes in society are amazing, but one of the, it has dislocated a lot of men. And just like we can think that big change, a good, but look what's happening to be same with the Amazon example. And so as a parent, but also just as a policy person or someone working in this space, I

was trying to get the balance right between being honest about these downsides and these troubling trends, but without catastrophizing and without falling into the trap, the self-fulfilling trap, I think, of making a whole generation think the world is so screwed that it's not really worth doing anything. I worry a lot about that. I worry that there's a generation who have been overtaught the downsides of recent changes, have internalized some of that into a now form of pessimism.

And if you saw this recent World Values Survey showing that actually quite uniquely young people, young adults in the US are now less happy than middle-aged adults, which is a reversion of the normal U shape rate and more so than in other countries too. So there's something happening around this idea of optimism among young people in the US too. And I worry a lot about the nature of even just political rhetoric now, where you sort of look in vain for the optimists because there's a general agreement that we're all going to hell in the handcart that is either the climate is going to kill us, democracy

is in peril, it's American carnage, and the competition in politics right now, it's like, who can tell the most gloomy story? On the left, it will be like, since Dobbs, Handmaid's Tale is literally around the corner and the climate is going to kill you and racism and sexism and et cetera. And then on the right, you've got American carnage, the church is going to get destroyed, the immigrants are killing everybody, whatever. So there's this kind of competing dystopianism in politics right now. And then you wonder why young people are so sad. Thanks so much for listening.

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