The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Gender Expert: Men Are Emotionally Dependent On Women & We're Treating Them Like Malfunctioning Women! Richard Reeves

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

500,000 men are dying by suicide, and 6% of men are unemployed, is masculinity in crisis? And what is the cure?  Richard Reeves is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, an organisation that researches and addresses issues affecting men. He is also the author of the book, ‘Of Boys and Men’.  In this conversation, Richard and Steven discuss topics such as, the rising rates of male suicide rates, the health benefits of marriage for men, the toxic impact of Andrew Tate, and the relationship crisis among men.  0:00 (Intro) (01:24) Why Dedicating Your Career To Men's Issues (03:54) What's Your Background? (06:06) The Crazy Stats That Made You Research This Topic (08:07) We're Going Through A Cultural Revolution (12:32) We Need A New Way To Approach This (17:12) Are Men And Women Differently? (21:07) Men Take More Risks (26:17) Unconscious Behaviours Of Men (34:11) Suicide Is The Biggest Killer Of Men (38:44) Why Is This Suicide Increasing? (42:47) Why Do Humans Feel Like They Need To Be Needed? (46:59) Why Men Feel Less Needed (49:43) Does Retirement Kill You? (54:43) We're Losing Connection In Our Modern Society (57:42) The Dating Environment Has Changed (01:05:23) Are Dating Apps Being Unfavourable To Men? (01:09:41) Is Marriage In Decline? (01:12:51) Births Are Increasing Outside Of Marriage (01:13:56) Is Marriage Better For Women Or Men? (01:15:59) Enforced Monogamy (01:17:55) Why Andrew Tate Converted To Islam (01:20:47) Women Economic Power (01:22:56) What Do You Think About The Word Toxic Masculinity (01:27:08) There Is A Friendship Male Recession (01:31:38) Men Shed's Movement (01:33:48) My Experience With Couples Therapy (01:36:30) The Hard Times Of Going Through Couples Therapy (01:40:25) How Masculinity Can Be Expressed (01:47:42) What Advice You'd Give Your Children (01:53:58) Using Our Voices To Make Men Be Heard (02:01:22) The Last Guest Question You can buy Richard’s book, ‘Of Boys And Men’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/BGBtdbitXKb  Follow Richard:  Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/8swNmRotXKb  Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/9iup1brtXKb  Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes  My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook  Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb  Sponsors: Linkedin Jobs: https://www.linkedin.com/doac Colgate - https://www.colgate.com/en-gb/colgate-total

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. It is pretty clear, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well. In fact, they do terribly. And in modern society, that's a problem. Richard Reeves is the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. An organization dedicated to researching and tackling the challenges faced by boys and men in modern society. We're in the early stages of a cultural revolution so that women are not economically reliant on men, which is great. But one consequence of that is that it's put a big question mark

next to the role of men, which used to be filled with a whole script of ways to be a man, ways to be a head of household, etc. Because of that, they're struggling. They're behind in education. Wages have stagnated. You're seeing a massive rise of young men who are single,

and now the suicide rate is four times higher and rising. They looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives and the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless. And the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded. You said the hardest thing you've ever done as a man is couples therapy. Why? I was talking about what I'd done at home and how it supported her career. My wife said that you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. The problem is that you're not masculine enough. What I came to realise is that men feel like that in order for women to become bigger,

we had to make ourselves smaller. That is not the answer. So what would you do at a social level to fix things? The most important move would be to... Richard, you wrote a book called Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling and Why It Matters and What to Do About It. Of all the things you could have done, why? Why did you do this? Partly because I was warned so strongly against it by my colleagues, by friends, by professionally, just saying this is such a difficult subject to write about, particularly right now in this sort of moment we're in culturally

and and the reason i say i did it despite being warned or because i was warned isn't because i'm like a sucker for punishment i'm actually like very thin-skinned interestingly my wife said that in some ways i was in the worst of all worlds because i'm a thin-skinned polemicist so in other words someone who kind of goes out of their way to kind of make provocative points, right? I'm provocative, so I provoke responses, but then I'm kind of upset at the responses, right? And actually, this work around boys and men

is not intended at all to be provocative. Ironically, I'm trying to make it less provocative. I'm trying to make it more database, more mainstream, like more boring in a way. But it was very interesting to me, and it was very hard to get a publisher in the US for the book. So it was interesting to me that this whole debate was one that was just seen as too risky to enter. And I honestly thought, well, hang on, if I, as a fairly boring guy with charts and research,

I'm being warned against this, who is going to talk about it? And are we sure that it's better that those other people are talking about it and that we're not talking about it? We're basically benching ourselves from the conversation because of our fear about what's going to happen to us professionally or reputationally. We're basically benching ourselves. And that just leaves the ground open. And if you think there's a real issue around boys and men, real questions around boys and men, it's not like it's not going to be talked about. That's not the question. The question is, who's talking about it? And I actually thought, we need more people like me talking about it, i.e. boring, research-based, policy-oriented, nonfiction-type people, Brookings type people,

and not just some of the people who are currently talking about it online. There are lots of great people talking about this online, don't mistake me, but it's almost like it wasn't a topic that you were supposed to approach unless you were willing to risk something. And that just seems crazy to me. When you say you come from this from a place of stats, graphs, figures etc what is your background? Where does that come from? I bounced around essentially between academia, think tanks, politics, journalism. So when I was over here I was in the UK

until 2012 and I'd served in the coalition government working as a director of strategy for Nick Clegg. Before that I'd run Demos, the think tank. I'd worked, I'd written for the Guardian and the Observer. I'd worked at IPPR. I'd worked at the Institute of Psychiatry. I did a PhD in philosophy at Warwick. And so I basically found myself in this space where either I'm trying to make policy or I'm writing about policy or I'm trying to think about policy in that sort of semi-academic space. And so I'm a kind of social scientist by experience, I guess, rather than by training. And that led me to the Brookings Institution in DC, where I was for 10 years working on race inequality, class inequality. And Brookings is like a big blue chip policy think tank place. It's regularly ranked as the

most important think tank in the world. Whatever that means today, I don't know. And so in a way, that was a kind of natural place for me to end up. And so, yeah, I come at this and I'm very non-partisan. So I try to be as fact-based as possible. I'm not partisan, but I am very, very concerned about trying to do what we can to reduce the obstacles that people face to human flourishing. I know that sounds really like vague, but that's what's driven all of my work. And you run the Institute for Boys and Men. Yeah, the American Institute for Boys and Men.

It's actually the first think tank, like research policy shop on this this issue certainly in the US and arguably anywhere we've had lots of institutions quite rightly created to look at issues for women and girls and we need those arguably we need more of them in many parts of the world but we haven't actually thought that it was important to have any that specifically look at the issues of boys and men through a kind of research lens and a policy lens and so in the end I felt like that was necessary and then I was persuaded that I had to do it myself I actually looked quite hard for other ways to get someone else to do it because it was a difficult move. When was the moment where you decided that this was the subject that you were going to tackle was there was there a stat you read, a moment you had,

a eureka moment of sorts, or was it just a culmination of things? It was more of a culmination. There was just a series of statistics that I just kept running into, and not just stumbling over, but sort of just running into with my shin, bruising my shin and going, wait, really? And then checking those stats with people.

And most of them, I had a sense of the direction, but I didn't know how big some of the changes had become. So for example, discovering that there's like a bigger gender gap in higher education now than there was in the 70s, but it's the other way around. So we kind of completely flipped the gender gap in higher education or learning that the suicide rate is four times higher among men and boys and rising. But, you know, I think I was already on this track when COVID hit, but actually COVID probably underlined my determination to keep doing it because in the US, at least, the immediate impact of COVID was huge for boys and men. The college enrollment rate dropped seven times more for men in the US than for women.

And then I noticed that men were dying in much bigger numbers from COVID and no one was really researching that. And so I found myself doing research on COVID death rates, which was not my field at all because it wasn't being done elsewhere. And those sorts of moments are illustrated to me that it wasn't anybody's job to wake up each morning and think about how is this thing, in this case, the pandemic, how is it affecting boys and men? It was no one's job to do that. And so those stats that I've just mentioned to you, they didn't get any attention because no one was drawing attention to them whereas the impact of the covid 19 pandemic on girls and women was

getting a lot of attention because lots of people were producing good reports on that what is the the sort of the macro then on the current state of boys and men if if I'd never, if I just landed on this planet and I was an alien and I said to you, how are men getting on comparatively versus how they used to be getting on, what information would you supply to me to make your case? And what would you say to me? So assume we're going to talk about advanced economies. So we're going to talk about the UK, the US, Scandinavia, et cetera. I think a fair answer there would be to say that there are many ways in which boys and men are struggling in those societies. They're behind in education,

for sure. Wages have stagnated, especially if they're working class. The mental health challenges of men are playing out differently, but in some ways more tragically because of these very high suicide rates. So in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 so playing out differently for women and girls but i think i'd probably say we're in the relatively early stages of a cultural revolution in advanced economies and that revolution is one where the economic relation between men and women has been dramatically transformed and so the old world my my father's world my father just turns 80 today and um the world that he and my mom have occupied was one where their roles are just much more tightly defined right it was a kind of it wasn't really

that much of a question about what their roles were going to be and women had just so little economic power that they were essentially forced into relationships, marriages with men. And so there was this economic dependency of women on men, and I would argue an emotional dependency of men on women. And of course, a huge reliance on women to kind of raise the kids. But there was like a script, there was a story, there was a way. The economic rise of women has achieved what Gloria Steinem set out to achieve, which is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity. That argument, which was really about changing the economic relation between men and women so that women weren't economically reliant on men, that was the central, I think, the central argument of that wave of the women's movement

and very largely achieved. And I would argue that's probably the greatest economic liberation in human history. It's still playing out. We need to do more in other parts of the world. But one consequence of that is to then put a big question mark next to the role of men. So I think underpinning a lot of these issues that we see kind of playing out for boys and men, it's really just, there's just a gap. There's a space with a question mark in it now whereas which used to be filled with a whole script of ways you know ways to be a man ways to be a dad ways to be a head of household etc and so we've torn up those old scripts by and large in these advanced economies which is great

but i would say that we've replaced the old script that women had, the one my mom had. So the script my mom had was, you're going to be a wife and a mother, primarily. She was also a nurse, but part-time. Skip forward one generation to my sister, my wife, my female friends. And it was, you're going to be able to stand on your own two feet so in the blink of an eye we changed the story for women in a way that i think is profoundly positive and how did we change the story for men the old story my father's story you're going to have to do as well as you can because you're going to have to look after a family you know make some money provide right that's going to be your role So we took away that story because we don't know if he's going to be a provider anymore. I've certainly not been the main provider, certainly not all of the time in my relationships.

And what did we replace it with? What's the new script for masculinity? What's the new set of roles? What's the new set of do's that we've got for men? You could argue we've got quite a lot of don'ts, many of which we need, but not a very long list of do's that we've got for men you could argue we've got quite a lot of don'ts many of which we need but not a very long list of do's and so i think that that sense of that category being that question mark now being open has just left a lot of men feeling adrift uncertain of their role uncertain of their place uncertain of being needed, wanted. And I think that's feeding into

a lot of the things that are easier to measure, like mental health, education, employment, etc. But underlying it, I think it's this coming to terms with this huge revolution that we've seen. I want to make sure by the end of this conversation we do our very best to hazard a guess at what that list of dues are for men but also to kind of fill that question mark i get so many women and men come up to me often talking about their young sons um and encouraging me to have more conversations like this because they want a good script for their young sons in a world where their young sons are going online and being offered maybe a not so good script yes by certain influences and influencers online so that's that's one of my objectives with having these

conversations and i think it's worth pausing there just to say that from looking at your work you're not suggesting we go backwards to the old way of things no that's part of the challenge is that there's in some ways an understandable reaction to change that is disorienting it's destabilizing it maybe threatens a sense of status among men and to reach back for the world as it once was. Very recently, right? This is not, we don't have to go back millennia, probably only have to go back one generation or two generations to a world where men had their roles, women had their roles, everyone knew their place.

And you can see the appeal of that when there's just so much uncertainty, but emphatically not the answer to go back. And I think in this debate, what you very often feel as if those who are perhaps on that more conservative side of the argument they want to kind of turn back the clock especially on women and women's roles but i would say on the other side of the argument maybe more on the progressive side of the argument or liberal side of the argument in american terms there's a bit of a sort of turning a blind eye to the actual problems of boys and men.

And so I think for a lot of young men, having spoken to them and had some responses to my work from them, they feel as if there are two fairly unappetizing options on the table for them. From the right, they get the message of like, you should be more like your father or your grandfather, be a real man, right? Provide, protect, et cetera. Have a wife that can stay at home, fill in the gap. But then they're going from the left. The message they get is you should be more like your sister. The problem with your masculinity is your masculinity. And we should just basically, you should be more like a woman, right? And actually it's not surprising to me that most young men who are strongly in favor of gender equality, like they've grown up with it. There's no evidence they're turning against it. So they want gender equality, but they also,

there's something about the way they feel in the world that means that they don't want to be treated as something wrong with them because they're a man. And I think even especially in schools, but maybe more broadly, there's a danger that we treat men like malfunctioning women. So your problem is you're not feminine enough. You're not caring enough. You're not nurturing enough. You're not emotionally vulnerable enough. You don't cry enough.

You don't spend enough time with your kids. And I'm not saying those aren't all valid challenges, but if that's all we've got, if in other words, we're just defining positive masculinity in a way that is completely synonymous with femininity, I'm not surprised we're seeing a lot of young men in particular say, well, no, I'm not interested in that. And the only other thing else they can see on offer is this more reactionary alternative. And so if we give them that choice between being feminine and being reactionary,

it's not clear to me that they're all going to choose the former. It's interesting because the way that the digital world, the algorithms, the social media are designed, is to kind of push you towards camps so this like space in the middle of nuance it's just not going to get the likes the retweets the engagement in fact it's the the ideas on the outside the men should be more feminine or men should be extremely masculine that are going to get all of the attention because of the way the algorithms are designed so if the if the answer is some kind of nuanced position in the middle i just can't see in a world how that's ever going to form a tribe and be rewarded by the algorithm so you know this is this is part of the the beauty

i guess of having podcast conversations because you can because we're not really held hostage by an algorithm here we can kind of you know speak openly but most of the algorithms don't work in such a way at the heart of this issue though i think is a very difficult question which is are men and women different okay well let's let's come to that but can i go back to your previous point? Because I think you're underselling yourself in a way. I agree that the way the algorithm works drives the kind of short-term attention towards those more tribal, simplistic ideas. But the mere fact of your success and the success of others like you, to me, is an incredibly positive sign. It suggests to me that actually there is an appetite for more nuanced conversation. There is an incredibly positive sign it suggests to me that actually there is an appetite for more nuanced conversation there is an appetite for recognizing that two things can be true at

once and that there are trade-offs like a is mostly good like the rise of women amazing some causing some issues that we should deal with and i have to tell you my own experience of this as a you know we've established boring, chart-driven, policy wonk type person, right? I did this video for Big Think, the YouTube platform, and it's had more comments than I've sold copies of the book. Oh, wow. Different audience, of course.

My wife calls me, I'm traveling somewhere, and she says, have you read the comments on your video? And I said, of course not. I'm old school journalist, never read the comments on your video and i said of course not like i'm old school journalist never read the comments she said no we got to we started reading them together and by the end of that taxi journey wherever i was we're both in tears because what what we found was young men including some teenage boys saying thank you for recognizing that the problems that boys and young men are facing are real, but not saying, and therefore become a reactionary misogynist. Actually saying, guys,

this is a difficult time. There is some transitions. We've got to think about, you know, come to your question about, are they different? We are different in some ways that we have to talk about, but that in no way means we should be trying to turn back the progress of women the solution to your problem as a young man is not to make your sister less powerful or independent and there's a huge appetite for that it's just hard to articulate it doesn't drive the algorithm but i i honestly the conversations you've had around this that other people are having around this gives me a lot of hope that actually most young men out there want that real conversation but it does i agree it has to start with a recognition of the fact that

there are there are differences on average between men and women and i can't remember who said this it might have been this the swedish public health economist called Hans Rosling, who I absolutely love. He's passed away now, but it might have been him. It's the sort of thing he would have said. And I'm paraphrasing it, but something like, the world would be much better if everyone could understand the idea of an overlapping distribution. Everyone, we're all trying, if you say men are taller than women, most people know what that means, right?

On average. If you say men are taller than women, no one in their right mind thinks it means every man is taller than every woman, right? No one thinks that. They know that that means most of the people over six foot are male. The average man is taller than two-thirds of women or whatever it is. So there's two cut. And that's what most sex differences are like. They're not completely separate or completely the same.

They have overlapping distributions. And so on average, men might be a little bit less likely to cry. That's true. But it doesn't mean that there aren't some very weepy men, some of whom I think you've had on this podcast. And who knows where this conversation is going, right? Or some women who are less likely to. And we could take in aggression. We could take in risk-taking. We could take in sex drive. We could take in competitiveness. And we could take in more interest in things rather than people and put all of those on this sort of distribution and just say, look, we can accept there are differences on average,

ask if they really matter and illustrate it in what way and then never use that as a way to discriminate against an individual. So are men and women different? On average, yeah. And in what ways are they different that are pertinent to this conversation? You know, when we talk about about it's really about societal roles and gender roles that i'm i'm getting to here because when we talk about the changes that have happened and also when we get to the heart of what a man's script should be yeah there must be clues in how we are different if you know what i mean yeah the way i think about this is that if there are these

differences on average in say risk taking yeah because men are the ones that are i saw the stats it's like 90 of men are um 90 of people that have like gambling addictions for example are men yeah so it definitely opens up all kinds so that there's let's take on average men boys and men somewhat more likely to take risks right so let's take that as an example like does it matter um well it does matter in some negative ways because you just identified look there's an addiction issue there's also like teenage boys like twice as likely to die as teenage girls from from from risk-taking activity by and large from car crashes or accidents you know much more like to drown all these kinds of things right because

they're just taking more risks right and so that aspect of kind of risk-taking and especially if the risk involves somebody else's life or well-being obviously that's a problem but if the risk taking means that say they're on average a little bit more likely to kind of take a risk in business right or they're more likely to sign up to be a smoke jumper in the u.s do you know what a smoke jumper is no idea you're gonna love this what is it a smoke jumper is someone you know i have these wildfires out in the kind of west of the u.s yeah right in california and places like that in very remote places sometimes the only way to fight the fire is to parachute people into the middle of the fire or just close to the fire in the middle of nowhere out of the plane so you basically these are people who for a living parachute out of perfectly

serviceable airplanes into a raging inferno and stay there for as many days as necessary to try and fight the fire. Incredibly dangerous. And it's almost all men. Okay. It's hard for me to imagine a world where it wouldn't be mostly men selecting into the occupation because it's very high risk, right? And you could think of others. Is that okay? Probably, right? You don't want want to exclude anybody but you're also not going to freak out that one's not kind of 50 50 and you're also going to say well that's that's good and on the risk take actually you're i think you'll be interested i'd like to get your reaction to this because i was very interested to discover that if you this is based on on one study to be

clear but i liked the study that companies that are led by women as in ceo and cfo yeah both women are a bit less likely to go bankrupt yeah than ones run by men i knew you were going to say before you said the stats but a little bit less profitable so yeah i knew what you were going to say before you said the stats because my experience has been that exactly kind of what you described in the sense that the CEO of my company now is a woman and the CEO of my group of companies is a woman. And in my experience, men have a higher risk appetite as it relates to company finances, typically. A little bit more prone to risk.

And so, you know, for me, the real important thing has been combining that set of perspectives so we get the balance. Exactly. So people could, I think you've drawn the right conclusion from your own experience, which is, it's like some people look at that data, right? I'll be unfair to, but they'd say, well, of course, look, look at these profitable companies led by men, these entrepreneurial risk-taking men. That's why men have to be running all the companies,

right? And these women, they're just too, you know, safetyism. They're just too scaredy cat, right? For capitalism, right? So let's have a minute. And the other view would be like, hey, look at all these women-led companies that don't go under as often, don't go bankrupt. Sure, they're a bit less profitable, but they're less risky. So we should have women running companies. Or your conclusion, which is, given that there's probably likely benefits to both sides of that, and again, recognizing it's not all women and all men, maybe we should have diverse leadership teams. That seems to me to be the right conclusion from that. But the conclusion is itself.

The arguments for gender diversity are based on the assumption there must be some differences. If there weren't differences, why on earth would we care about gender diversity, right? If we don't think that women are bringing something different to the party, not just because of their life experience,

but it's like something else a bit different, but risk-taking, competition, et cetera. If we didn't think that mattered, then we wouldn't care how many board members were women. But we do care about that quite rightly, because we presume that actually there are some differences between men and women. And so sometimes the idea that there are differences between men and women is seen as a conservative idea, but weirdly underpins a lot of the progressive movements for gender diversity it's so true it's so very true and um this is why it is difficult to talk about the differences between men and women at a physiological level without it appearing to be like inherently sexist because it's not to say that either is better or worse it's just to say that there's differences and i think it goes back to what i was saying to understand the script for male to fill in that

question mark there must be some clues hidden in our biology there must be because i i think there is because i'm trying to you know it's interesting as i'm i'm 31 years old now and my my girlfriend is 31 years old and in the the way that the world has changed i'm still trying to figure out if like me holding the door open for her is me being old school in old fashion and a bit misogynist or if that's because that's what i want to do and she likes it does she that she loves it that's the big question right of course she says you wouldn't still be together i want to do that and she loves it and she she will have moments where she turns to me and tells me she'll thank me for doing things like that and she'll thank me for the way that i am and she'll acknowledge that my brain and her brain have two completely different perspectives on the world and it's it's the differences that make us work you know because i'm i come to everything super logical how can i fix it babe it's like i show up

with like a spanner to every problem in our relationship and she has this much more holistic she almost has like the sixth emotional sense and together we like navigate issues really well um but we does but it does require to respect those differences and not see the old problem was one was seen as better than the other yeah right so that kind of lets the you know with all the caveats about averages and overlapping distribution so let's agree now that we by this point in the conversation anybody listening to this gets that when we say these things we're not saying all men are all women right yeah if there are differences the problem in the past was let's say men were a bit more risk-taking a bit more competitive a bit more inclined to kind of rational uh approaches to

problems that that was better yeah that's the definition in my mind a useful definition of patriarchy a patriarchy is one where more typically masculine virtues or attributes are seen as better right and you could argue that a matriarchy were we to have one would be the other way around and an equal society isn't one of androgyny it's one where they're treated as equal value so we don't say one is better than the other we say they're different and try and bring them into kind of collaborative and constructive and rather beautiful equality but i do think a lot of people making the mistake of thinking that equality requires androgyny that's a nice simple intellectual idea like let's get rid of these or all these ideas right and then we'll all be it's but there's no difference between men and women okay so it's just androgyny is where like if you have an androgynous species

there's no difference between men and women okay um or like we're gonna have to double down on this i find your door opening one really interesting. So I was raised to, when you're walking along a street, to always, with a woman, always to put yourself roadside. Yes. You do that? Always, yeah. Why do you do that?

I don't know now you've said it, but I remember when I was crossing the road yesterday um my first instinct was to reach back and grab her hand and bait uh and basic because there was like a big bus coming in and there was this black cab coming and my instinct was to solve that problem which was like to put myself in the front of the taxi maybe because i think in my head because i thought this was the only conscious element to it. My body's bigger. So the taxi will see me. My girlfriend's about a foot smaller than me

and she's really, really small. So I thought maybe the taxi would see me. And also there's a protective element. It's two things. It's if I put myself in front of the taxi that's coming, it will see me better. But also I kind of would rather take the hit. Yeah, but that wasn't you

didn't you didn't think all that no i didn't it's a it's a reaction i have right that's all coded in you yeah and you and you and you see it actually even in quite tragic circumstances in the u.s when you see these kind of mass shooting incidents when they do the kind of when they reconstruct afterwards what you very often see is that quite often men have been killed when they're just automatically putting their body between the shooter and their girlfriend or somebody usually a woman right and and there's also this great there's a great uh photograph of a baseball heading towards this a kid right it's been whacked really hard and it's heading towards this kid and and there and you see these two guys doing this right in the shot they're diving in front of it um whereas the moms are kind of like doing this like the dads are and they're and he's just these two guys doing this right in the shot they're diving in front of it um whereas the moms are kind of like doing this like the dads are like they're

protecting the kids yeah and whoever's going to get hit by it right and and again they weren't they didn't think through oh my body's big it's just a reaction and the and this the road one is very interesting and again most of the women that i've been with i don't say anything i just do it i just go roadside and that's because the road could be that you could get splashed it's dirty so it could be like a chivalry thing it's about but i also think it's more that there's more danger there like if someone comes off the road or something like so to the extent that just at some psychological level danger more danger that side right you want to put yourself between that and the woman that you're with and it's happening at a

quite a natural level now is there any danger there does it make any kind of sense probably not but is it still symbolically quite a good thing and my answer would be yes and i don't i know not everyone's going to agree with this, but I've come to believe that some of those symbolic acts, which are quite gendered, are still valuable, even in a world where we want absolute substantive gender equality. And so the test would be, you hold the door for a woman who's your boss. And that's okay. You're okay with the fact that having gone through the door, she goes to the CEO suite, right? And You're okay with the fact that having gone through the door, she goes to the CEO suite, right? And she's okay with the fact that even though she's the CEO and your boss, you held

the door for her. And so I sometimes fear that in our desire to sort of squeeze out all of these symbolic differences, we lose a little bit of those symbols of difference, which even in a world of complete gender equality, which we're hopefully getting closer to, I don't know if we want to eradicate them. And increasingly, I find a lot of young women not wanting to eradicate them. They just, they want us to hold, many of them want us to hold the door, but then, by God, help them rise up the corporate ladder

if that's necessary and have no problem at all with them being our boss, them being boss to us. That's what they ask of us. I think that's a reasonable thing for them to ask we could do that right what's the rebuttal to that is it that holding the door is a symbol of like the patriarchy and it's a symbol of oppression and that i am you need me she's too weak to open the door okay but actually i've noticed there's quite a lot feminists now they're like i've seen this a bit on social media they're like for the love of god guys feminism doesn't mean you shouldn't offer to help me get my overhead down on the plane you are taller you are stronger get my bag down right

and and i i do think and you've seen a bit of reluctance around that merely because i think men are almost entirely wrongly afraid if they offer right the woman will turn to them and say why because i'm weaker than you right that's by the way that's never going to happen almost never going to happen um but she might say no i'm good thanks i'm fine right but specifically if it's obviously a shorter woman or a kind of you know older woman or even a man right but but more and so i think that's the kind of danger is that some of this has kind of descended or a kind of older woman or even a man right but but more and so i think that's the kind of danger is that some of this has kind of descended into this kind of these symbols are bad meanwhile we've got so much more work to do to get more women on boards and you know increase female safety that it sort of feels like too much politics has become locked in these symbolic

things you said that you think one of the biggest issues facing men today is the issue of suicide i mean you talked about some of the stats at the top of this conversation that relate to men the most startling of all as being someone that lives most of the time in the uk is that it's now the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 um have you been exposed to those stories especially as you've you published this book but in in your own personal life have you been exposed to those stories especially as you've you published this book but in your own personal life have you been exposed to those stories of the impact of suicide directly yeah yeah people rarely talk about it in an open forum but they will very often afterwards talk about it and i had this moment recently someone i'm actually working with and i've been working

with for some time i did a i did a little piece on morning joe which is a daytime thing in the u.s and i talked about this crisis of kind of male suicide and she told me afterwards that they put up a just a stat that four times higher among men it was just a graphic and she said she burst into tears and she, I'm so grateful you're doing this work. I lost my son to suicide when he was 16 and started telling me kind of why. And I have worked with this woman for years on this issue. And she'd never raised it with me before. I had no idea. And I now understand why, particularly given her situation, she's been so supportive of my work it wasn't just an intellectual thing this is very rarely just an intellectual thing it's usually visceral as well

there's usually something going on there and i've had countless stories like that people sharing their stories it's heartbreaking and you've had you know people on this show who've talked quite a lot about this jordan peterson was asked was asked in an event once by this guy, he said, I delayed my suicide to come and hear you talk. Why should I not take my own life? No, I haven't had anything like that. But it's there. This crisis is there in our communities playing out.

Is there a, I'm just thinking about that woman who's been working with you, supporting your work, but hadn't said anything. And I'm wondering why people don't say something about it when it happens in their family. With other deaths, with a cancer death, you'll see a Facebook post, you'll see a whatever, you'll see, you know. But it seems, I'm wondering here if there's a different level of i don't know public sharing as it relates to suicide because it's a different type of death isn't it yes that creates a lot of guilt and feelings and shame and like so you're in her situation and i have to tell you having raised boys one of whom in particular really struggled with his mental health through teen years there are days

where you just hope as a parent that they're still around and you think what it was and actually 16 and we've seen a huge rise in and young young men's suicides in the u.s especially and just think if you're a parent and you lose a child to suicide the idea that you can cannot free yourself of the burden of what could i have done what did i miss was it me right being a parent is already a lifelong trip in rethinking your decisions right and you add that to the mix i i can't imagine it i mean my parents lost a daughter very young to a heart defect and they have an amazing marriage and they've been amazing parents but i do think that the loss to this illness this terrible tragedy thing it's just different cycle it's not it's hugely grief but but you know but it doesn't turn them like it turns the mirror on you it's like was this you was this your fault

are you the reason your son is dead just think about that for a moment and what that kind of does to people um and so because of that people don't talk about it so you'll get died unexpectedly yeah we're not willing to talk about it in the same way as we are others because we think it might reflect on us in some way perhaps or on the memory of that person or them yeah i mean it's still a crime technically oh is it now people say it's a really interesting thing I've really learned not to say commit suicide. Yeah, died by suicide. Died by suicide. I just wanted to, because I've got some crazy unthinkable stats here that I wanted to just add on top of what you were saying,

which come from the Institute of Boys and Men Report that really was staggering to me is that a man dies by suicide approximately every 13 minutes. In the US, yes. In the United States alone. So that's not including other countries and the UK? No, just the US. Okay.

If men's suicide rates had matched those of women's, approximately 545,000 fewer men would have died since 1999. And that's again just in the US? Just the US. Half a million men, yeah. Suicide rates amongst younger men have grown the fastest the growth of male suicides has occurred almost entirely since the beginning of 2010s and interestingly as well rural countries in the usa have higher rates of suicide than those in urban metros so it highlights again that suicidality is geographically distributed in in certain ways why what's going on here what's going on with this full picture why why why is

this the state of suicide amongst men in some ways the decision to end your own life obviously it's complex and it varies but in some ways it's like the ultimate signal that you don't feel as if the world is better off with you than without you. Like so many people who take their own lives, lose their lives to suicide, will say something like, you'll be better off without me. I've been a burden to you. I know I've been difficult. They convince themselves that they're not wanted,

they're not needed. And sometimes that goes back to Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman. Willie Loman takes his own life because he thinks that the life insurance his family will get will be a better breadwinner than he can be because he's so badly failed in his primary responsibility as a breadwinner.

So it's not a new idea, but there's a really nice piece of work by Fiona Shand. She's an Australian researcher and the work was done primarily in Australia where they looked at the words that men who did take their own lives used to describe themselves before doing so, or in some cases attempting to. But usually when men attempt suicide, they do lose their lives. And the two most commonly used words by those men who took their own lives were, about themselves, were useless and worthless. Now, of course, this is a sample of people who then went on to take their own lives, but it's nonetheless, I think, very powerful statement

that to get to that stage, you don't think you have worth. You don't think you have use. You don't think you're needed. And I believe that the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded. I think to be needed is arguably the most important and constant human requirement. And so if you end up feeling like I'm not needed, I mean, my family don't need me. My employer doesn't need me. My community doesn't need me. I am surplus to requirements. If anything, I'm a drag on my parents or on my community. I'm not adding value, however you define value, to the people around me.

I'm taking away from it. That's the psychological trajectory that seems to put a lot of men towards this path. And well short of suicide, I think many of the other mental health problems we see among men addiction checking out in one way or another coming out of the labor market etc they're not the most extreme form of course of checking out by literally taking your own life but they are a different form of that they are a different way of kind of benching yourself taking yourself out of the equation because of a sense of like well who needs me anyway right and so i just think in a way that the suicide statistics are in some ways the kind of tip of the iceberg of this sense that many men have a feeling unneeded unwanted is there an evolutionary basis for why men or humans i guess

need to be needed amongst their community do you you think? Have you thought about that at all? Yeah. Well, when we started operating in tribes, of course, we realized we were going to sink or swim together, right? Or hunt or die together, maybe is a better way to put it. And so what that meant was being needed by your community and or your family was kind of central to the human experience. So the kind of invention of those bonds.

And the difference is that for women, particularly once they become mothers or if they're intending to become mothers, the question of whether I'll be needed is never asked in quite the same way because you're literally needed to grow children and give birth to them and feed them. And so that kind of very rooted sense of being needed for the species. I think it's just more obvious with women. But why do we need men?

Why do we need dads? And that's a much more kind of recent phenomenon in the sense of being dads. And the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by Anna Machen. She's an anthropologist at the sense of being dads and the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by anna machin she's a an anthropologist at the university of oxford about fatherhood and she she's so i'm just paraphrasing her now but she has this wonderful description of how we invented fatherhood because we went bipedal do you know all this and the baby's head thing it's amazing so we had this

bit of a crisis x hundreds of thousands of years ago i'm terrible at remembering whether it's millions or hundreds of thousands so a long time ago google it right back back in the ancestral times is what people say right right so what happened was we had this massive growth spurt in our brains in our heads right so we've got massive heads. But we also went bipedal. And if you're bipedal, your hips can't be that big. And so women couldn't get the heads of the babies out of their smaller hips. So we're actually facing a bit of a crisis. The way we solved that crisis was by giving birth to babies way earlier than we should.

Way, way earlier. In fact, if we were like other mammals, pregnancies would last about two years. So I don't know how women watching will feel about that. Can't speak to that, but two years would be about the average, right? We don't. We obviously do it in nine months. So they're incredibly vulnerable. And mom has to literally keep feeding them, right? And the calorific requirements, just the amount of food that they need, mom and baby, was huge. And so, dad, go get food. This is only going to work. We're only going to survive as humans if this stuff comes.

So in a way, that was the invention of fatherhood. And you see the brains of fathers getting activated by all this stuff. So being needed by the community, family, et cetera, to produce something, to provide something is, I think it's just deeply encoded. It's encoded in our DNA. It's like part of, like if we're not needed, then we're dead because we're going to be on our own, right? So these ties, familial ties, tribal ties, are actually central to our identity. And so the danger now is that

if people, particularly men, start to feel like, am I needed? Does the community need me? Do my kids need me? Does the woman I've had my children with need me? Am I needed? If the answer to that is not clear, I think that has all kinds of downstream consequences. And we've just done a really poor job of making sure that even in this time of great transition, we still need you. We need every man, every boy, every everybody. We need you. We don't yet know exactly what we need you for, but by God, we need you.

We cannot afford to lose you. You are precious. And we need you. I don't know what you. You are precious and we need you. You know, you, I don't know what you're going to go on to be yet, but by God, our community cannot afford to lose you. And so that message of just like how much we need you. I just think we've lost a little bit of that in recent debates and too many men have drawn the conclusion that maybe they aren't needed with tragic consequences. A few questions there there just because i want to make sure i'm clear fiona's work in australia around these letters that men had left before they had died by suicide did she also look at the letters that women had

left no she only looked at men okay fine that fine. That's my first question. And for me, the key thing in the suicide stats is that it's increasing. It's increasing. So if we're saying that it's a case of men not feeling needed, then why is that sense that men aren't needed increasing? If we're saying there's some kind of link between those two ideas. Yes, because the extent to which they're needed is less clear now than it was. So it was very clear before that you're needed because you're the breadwinner. Okay.

You're the provider, right? So go back. And I think part of the point here is that this idea of being kind of, this gets us into discussions about masculinity, but being generative, like producing, providing, it gets narrowed down to like the breadwinner model of like post-war Western societies, right? It's like a wage earner, but that's not all it means.

It used to mean going and getting meat. It used to mean helping farm together. There's all kinds of ways you can be a provider. Service, I guess, guess as well just like yeah it's about being more there's this great line from c.s lewis the um very good theologian but obviously much better known for his work on the line the witch and the wardrobe the chronicles of narnia but he has this lovely line and he was talking here about what it meant to be a Christian. But I think it applies to what it means to be a mature man as well. He said, you shouldn't think less of yourself.

You should just think of yourself less. And there's something about service and just doing for others, your family, your community, that I think is quite intrinsic to these ideas of mature masculinity. And if men don't feel as if they are necessary or encouraged to have a kind of distinct and important role in the family, in the community, then I think that kind of question mark over, well, am I needed anymore, is a real one. And lots of people like Margaret Meadad anthropologists in the 70s and

a lot of conservatives were saying look if women do achieve a significant degree of economic independence she thought that was a wonderful thing the conservatives didn't right but they all agreed that we will have to think really hard about men how do we make sure that men still feel connected and needed in our society if we have very quickly changed the central way in which they express that a few things came to mind so it's interesting before i move forward on this point um when you're talking about this idea of humans needing to be needed it made me reflect on some of the stats that came out around how quickly someone dies after they retire. And that kind of general narrative that if you retire, you don't have long left, which is kind of, you know, this idea of a social tribe and feeling like you need to be serving the tribe in some way.

I've always wondered if there was any truth to that, this idea that, you know, retirement can speed up your mortality. Because you're, it's almost like there's something in your body either one or two things could be happening number one you just sit around more which means you know you're more sedentary yeah exactly it's going to kill you anyway but um number two is that there's almost i don't know if i've pondered this idea that there's this device in our brains that makes us the tribe and when when it knows that we might have switched from becoming useful to the tribe to becoming burdensome to the tribe in some way now that we're consuming resources but providing none this device in our brain like turns us off or something yeah i thought we're done we are surplus to requirements

yeah and so the decent thing to do is just, you know, die. For the tribe. Yeah, for the tribe. And theoretically, from an evolutionary standpoint, we evolved as tribes. So it's not impossible that there's some, you know. Well, I do think that we, I mean, of course, we didn't used to live anything like as long. This is a stat that I came across today,

some of this new book that's just come out, which is in 1963, the most common age of death was one and now it's 83 or whatever right do you know it's like so the progress we've made towards greater life expectancy generally has been huge but it has then asked these questions about kind of being needed later on in life. So there's a couple of things I would say. One is that like having a job is just a massively powerful way of feeling needed, right? Just showing up. Like we, we, we need you to start to open up at six. We need you to like, and in fact, Arthur Brooks, who used to run the American Enterprise Institute, he tells this wonderful story. He was interviewing this guy who'd come out of prison, was in this new program, rehabilitation, et cetera.

And he's just chatting to him. The guy gets a text while he's chatting to him and he bursts into tears. That gets really tearful. And Arthur says, is everything all right? Did he get some bad news? You know, what's happening? Is this bad news? And he said, no, no, it's the opposite.

And he showed the text to arthur and the text just said fred can you get over here as soon as possible i really need you and the guy said to arthur i've never heard anyone say that sentence to me before i've never had anyone say to me i need you and in this case it was i need you to come and i don't even know what it was right fix this floor tile deal with this customer I don't know but I need you and it brought this guy to tears because he hadn't kind of felt that sense of neededness before and at its best the workplace signals to us on a daily basis or whatever like yeah you're needed right your colleagues need you they need each other that that that's huge and so if you then don't have that in the labor market maybe

because you've retired the question is are you still needed and then i just think we have to reinvent the ways in which we can make use of the skills and wisdom of the people who've suddenly got time. So my mum, she volunteers as a reader in a primary school because she has time. And it's amazing. She gets to know the kids really well and she loves it and so on. My father, he's on the board of a technical thing and he runs charity. They do stuff, right? They raise money because they've got time. And so they're contributing to the community in a new way. And actually, as more and more women work, those community roles that were previously very often filled by moms at home, like school volunteering, for example,

right? Now they can be done by, perhaps by more, by older people. And so part of this story here, I think, is also making sure that older people don't lose that sense too because although we focus quite Rightly on what's happening to young men the suicide rates among older men are also very high Especially they end up on their own so kind of men on their own later in life are massive risk because if you take my Theory about being needed quite seriously. They're just looking around and saying will anyone even notice if I'm gone maybe they'll be better off and so even for those older men we have a job of work to do to make them

feel really like yeah we need you your church needs you your scout group needs you your local charity needs you your neighbors need you the kid across the street who needs help with his university applications needs you the boy down the road who's like struggling a bit because you know his parents have split up and just want someone to give him a cup of tea every now and again taught him they need you we don't know the boy down the road anymore or the family next door anymore and i think so when you you described that was that was you're describing like an old-fashioned way of the world in my mind because even you even said the word church i was like well you know where there's been a rise in atheism and a and a fall in religiosity so yeah that's part of the problem though and from this point of view is that we used to have more institutional structures

through which our connection to the broader community could be you know captured and organized honestly right so you didn't have to sort of sit there on your own somewhere saying how can i contribute to the community you just volunteered as an usher or for bible class or to do the soup kitchen at your church life came sort of inherent with responsibility like because even with church i just grew up in there in my family i wasn't religious after the age of 18 but as early as i knew i was in the church and i was in sunday school and i was in saint luke's hospice on the on the weekends with my mom and i didn't choose that it was just it came with life yeah and actually so the deinstitutionalization

of those community relationships as we've seen these institutions weaken has created a real problem because the needs are still there but it's like we didn't have the organizing framework right so whether it's churches or community groups or whatever and and mums like one of the things that would happen like my mum was at home kind of most of the time and back in the dark ages when i was being raised in the 70s and the 80s um they were a lot of mums around right and so they organized a bunch of stuff and they kind of took care of the community and they volunteered for stuff. And it's amazing now that women are in the workplace, of course, but that sense of like,

there were soft institutions like those networks, but also just churches, community groups, et cetera. They basically provided a way to kind of plug in my time and energy to an institution that then did stuff for other people. It's really hard to do that on your own, right? It's really hard to recreate those institutions online or just on your own. And so I actually think that that's had a bigger effect on men as well, because historically, and even today, women are a little bit better at kind of maintaining those community

and social networks than men are. So absent those institutional roles, you're going to be a scout leader. You're going to be an usher at church. You're going to volunteer for the school PTA. You're going to, you know, you're going to, we need men to do this, this, this, and this, right? You're going to do that.

And you're right. Some of it wasn't even questioned. It was just what you did. Of course, we want more choice, but I do worry about the loss of those institutional frameworks if we don't find ways to replace them and you're starting to see that now men's sheds movements and men's groups and and so on but it's really hard to find secular online alternatives to those traditional institutions you mentioned uh an elderly man who's now alone you you know, maybe lost his partner, maybe, what do they call it? Widowed? No. Widower? What's the male?

I think widowed is both, isn't it? Oh, is it? Okay, so a widowed man. But as we think about younger men and the environment in which the sort of dating love environment that they're in, what's changed there? Because one of the ways that we can feel needed is if, you know years old we find a partner and you know she makes me feel needed my in my life my girlfriend is one of the people that makes me feel most needed and most important she's constantly asking when i'm coming back from dragon's den filming or when i'm going to be here and she's you know she makes me feel like i've i'm service to her in the same way that she serves to me so but but that landscape seems to have changed as well

the dating environment the romantic environment yeah it's interesting again i'm just reflecting on my own personal experience too just through the lives of my sons and one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend buy her first car and he's really into cars and all that stuff and and he's into finance with the loans and he's just basically done like basically done the and the work for her around it because she's working full-time and he's got a bit of time and so that is a really good example he said to me the day he said i said god you put a load of time into like test driven like 20 cars and all of this stuff loads of this for for your girlfriend he's like well right now i don't have that much of my own stuff to do so it's really nice to be able to do stuff for her and so you're right i think those relationships they can be in like traditional

families but also of course friends but particularly romantic relationships they can do that for you so it's not for nothing that we're dating less dating later um you're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single by comparison, both to young women and in the past. And, and so that's another change, which you could argue is good or bad, right? Is it good or bad that we're dating later and having sex later and taking longer to get married and so on? Again, I think you can argue for sure. There's lots of good stuff there, but one consequence of that is to leave a lot more men going a lot longer before those romantic relationships were also

pulling on them, calling on them to say, I need you to do this. I need you to drive me to work. Can you pick me up from this? Can you do this? And that used to happen much, much earlier than it's happening now. And so there's now perfectly possibly 25 26 27 years of age and your parents don't need you because then you know you maybe you've left home because they don't need you maybe you don't have a girlfriend so you don't have a girlfriend that needs you maybe you're not working or you're working in a place you don't really feel like it matters if you're there or not it's like so it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid and late 20s as a man and honestly feel like it's not quite clear who needs you. It's interesting because also when you layer on top of that, the dating app environment, I had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about, I mean, I've had a couple of founders of the big dating apps, but I've also had...

Have you had the Tinder founder on? No. Okay. I've had people that have left Tinder and started their own apps like Bumble. Oh, okay. But one of the things that I've come to learn is that the bottom sort of 50% of men

are basically getting not much action at all. Almost none, yeah. Almost none. And then the like top 10% of men are getting all the action because the way that these dating apps are set up is to really reward that sort of most affluent most attractive top 10 of men that are most desirable but i imagine if you'd gone back 100

years it was really like who's in your village versus you know yeah yeah versus an algorithm sorting millions of people but that's it's so interesting that pattern that you describe of like the bottom 50 of men basically not getting much action, if any, and the top 10% getting almost all of it. Because an evolutionary psychologist that I know looked at that data and said, that looks like human history to me. So if we go back further, actually 95% of known human societies were polygamous all right monogamy is very weird and very recent and here's one that always blows my mind even though i've said it so many times now is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors we have twice as many women in our ancestral past as men why is that how does that make sense because and the reason it's so hard for a modern brain to get ahead around that

is because you're thinking well you need a man and a woman to have a kid right so you'd have to have equal numbers yeah but you're thinking about monogamy. Across human history, men have only had about a 50% chance of reproducing. So in each generation, half the male lines just literally die out. Like 50% of the men just don't have kids. So boom, they're gone. And almost all women have reproduced, right? So if you've got almost all women reproducing

and 50% of men, then mathematically you're going to end up twice as many female ancestors because you don't need that many men to have babies. And so historically what's happened is the top status men with the gold and the rich or whatever, they've had multiple wives or certainly concubines or multiple partners. And there's like famous examples like Genghis Khan is the ancestor to everyone.

But in Ireland, something like more than one in five Irish people are descended from king whatever it is. Well, I was told my grandfather in Nigeria has, I'm going to say, 10 wives. I'm told that I have 40-odd uncles and aunties in Nigeria. Not intending to go back anytime soon, just in case there's a lot of conversation. You're not tempted by that model? I'm not. No, no. I'm actually going but uh but it's it's a headache to think about navigating that many uncles and aunties but it's but it's interesting how actually these by going online and sort of taking away the sort of cultural norm around kind of monogamy yeah in a way what

is exposed is kind of this ancient pattern which is women are much pickier than men around partner selection right and so women are trying to women are sort of ideally i'll go for him and women just going no no no no i don't know which way is that's right which way it's right yeah so the women are going no no no no he's incredibly handsome and incredibly rich and right maybe whatever like maybe whereas the men are like yeah sure yeah sure she looks nice maybe not yeah so so you get this incredible asymmetry between the two but in some ways it's like um i'm making light of it but but actually could you find a kind of more telling sign of the fact that so many men are just kind of feeling like, well, maybe a bit useless, not very attractive, not very needed, not very like

just right. The old rules about how to kind of navigate the romantic space, the old rules about how to be a man, the old rules about how to succeed. A lot of those have just been turned upside down creating this huge vacuum uh which has been filled by all kinds of bad stuff and and but also just this massive sense of disorientation it's like a kaleidoscope you shake it right but it's still moving we don't know what the new patterns look like yet and so i genuinely kind of feel like when i talk to a lot of young men and see them like that is the sense they've got they're just like whoa like the disorientation that they're feeling uh as we've kind of shifted the equilibrium in some ways the online dating apps are just magnifying that but there's a

that's not a great feeling is it to kind of go on a dating app and not get any interest at all i mean you wouldn't know because you're not on dating well i'm not on dating apps when you were i'm sure you got plenty of attention well do you know what's funny when i was on dating apps i didn't get much attention really no i didn't and i've got a very good looking best friend and he got all of the attention so bear in mind i was 18 shoplifting food to feed myself i was scrawny as hell okay um i was you put all that on i didn't put that in my bio but i tried to put my best selfie on there i just couldn't get any like decent leads and my best friend who's like blonde and beautiful and he's got the perfect hair and he looks like something out of

like a magazine i would sit with him and he would just get the pick of the litter so my whole strategy was i would just do much better in person when i met people yeah but obviously it's much more difficult to meet people if you look at the stats around how people meet yeah it's crazy it's like a vertical line upwards um when you look at the the line that's showing people meeting online just out of nowhere and school's gone down and church has gone down and through a friend has gone down and it's pretty much all online so if you're if you're not i think aesthetically beautiful in the typical sense of the word yeah and you know have signals of wealth and status you really are going to struggle and i actually came to learn this a lot not just

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

We're talking about our DNA being passed on and who with. And so it's not for nothing if something's happening in that market. And it's not for nothing we see a huge rise in the share of childless men, especially getting to 40, and of women, but even more so for men. And more men saying having children is important to them, more men starting to say actually forming a family is kind of important to them. And so there's a weird paradox here,

which is that, you know, the old idea of like marriage and kids is that like women have to kind of trap men into it, right? You know, as men, we just want to go our own way, right? We want to be cowboys around the desert or the forest or something but the ball and chain the woman she traps you right and she domesticates you and you kind of go along with it because you want to have kids all right but but in your heart in your heart you're still out there on the frontier right and she's the one at the that is complete bullshit on every single level historically, back to where we were before, being masculine meant being in the tribe. It meant generating more than you need for yourself. I love this

idea of a surplus that comes from this guy, David Gilmour, that mature men generate more of whatever it is than they need. They're surplus generators. So rather than being surplus to requirements, which is what I think a lot of men feel, they actually generate a surplus for others to use. And so the idea of like, you've heard this men going their own way movement? It's like a male separatist thing online. We're going to go our own way. We don't need, no, turning away from women is the least masculine sentence I think you could ever utter. I'm just my own man. I do my own thing, right? If you're not a man for others, and in my view, you're not a man. And so it's quite interesting to kind of think about how the current world of like dating and families and so on, if it does leave many men feeling like they're not going to have those connections and not going to have a sense of being for others and not just not providing just in the economic sense, but being needed, then it does leave a lot of them benched and they

either go their own way or they get mad as hell. So you see the rise of the incel movement, et cetera. And so again, you're just seeing these extreme examples of the ones that get the headlines. But behind that, behind the kind of men who are acting out, there's a lot more men who are checking out. They're just saying, I think I'm done with this. And that's very dangerous. Marriage has also had a knock-on effect to this, hasn't it? Because the role of marriage in society has changed,

but also the stats around marriage seem to be changing. What information do you have on that? Am I right in thinking that marriage is in decline? A little bit. Marriage has gone down. This is one area where it's very different in different countries so i have to be careful about this like in the u.s there's a big class gap in marriage like college educated americans are still getting married non-college educated americans are not but in most of western europe you've seen a big rise in the share of kids being born outside marriage now the question

then was like what job if anything was being done by marriage and if marriage was a way to sort of signal and enshrine a commitment to having kids together raising those kids together then in a sense like but all kinds of only have a civil partnership now or there are legal documents you can have that kind of do that and so if it gets if the decline of marriage is related to decline in fathering that's a problem it doesn't have to mean that because a you can be a perfectly good father if you're living with your partner and you're not married but also you can be a good father if for whatever reason the relationship with the mother doesn't work out. It's harder.

You're going to have to kind of work at it a bit more, but you can still do it. But because of this old idea of like fathering being bundled together with marriage, right? I think that's my big problem is it was like, it was like a one-stop thing, right? It's like husband and father was kind of like one thing, but that's not true anymore. So it's thing but that's not true anymore so it's okay

if that's not true so long as we don't lose the fathering bit because dads matter for their kids as much as their mums in different ways and at different times on average but so i my worry about the changes in family are not about marriage per se they're about what that might mean for fatherhood and what a lot of conservative critics will say is well the evidence is that actually the men who marry are more engaged fathers and do stick around for longer but of course the problem with that that's one of the reasons they got married yeah of course yeah right so it's very hard to tease out cause and effect there and in the end i'm sort of agnostic about the marriage question but i'm not agnostic about the fathering question like i don't think you have a moral responsibility to get married

before you have kids at all i do think that if you have kids you have a moral responsibility to be a father to those kids that is a that's just a that's an inextinguishable moral responsibility and that gets a little bit lost because sometimes on the feminist left to just characterize horribly say do we need do we need dads anymore isn't that a bit heteronormative i've sometimes been accused of being heteronormative for being pro-dad now what about same-sex couples what about single parents are we saying that they need their dads right isn't that that feels a bit old-fashioned a bit conservative to get that on the other side and then another side yeah of course dads matter that's why they all have to get that's why they should be married and of course the truth is between the two the truth

is that dads matter both stop whether they're married to the mother or not um and both the people who insist the only way to do that is through marriage are wrong and the people who insist that dads don't matter are equally wrong and about 40 percent of births in the u.s now take place outside of marriage which is up from about 10 percent yes quad births in the u.s now take place outside of marriage which is up from about 10 percent yes quadrupled in the u.s that's crazy that's a bigger that's just why is that it's the u.s is really weird because it has really high rates of like unmarried um pregnancies and births but then like really high rates of marriage among the kind of college educated at the top so as i said this huge class, there's a race element here. So 70% of black kids in the US are born outside marriage.

There's also a huge education gap here, as I just alluded to, is a big, big class gap. So most kids to non-college educated parents are born outside marriage in the US now. And so it's weird. What's happened is that the average marriage rate in the US is really disguising these huge differences by race and class. Whereas in most Western European countries, there aren't such big differences by race or class. It's more of a general decline. It hasn't declined particularly more for one class than another in the UK.

So quite common in the UK for couples to decide to have kids together, have kids together and not get married. And that's definitely true in Scandinavia and Northern Europe as well. And who is marriage good for? Who's it serving more, men or women? Now, men.

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

Why? Because marriage, being with the kids and kind of with the the mom is just right now still an incredibly important way for men to feel needed connected involved etc now that might change but right now it is pretty clear that they'll do better and like if you look at the impact of being married and not married on employment earnings health physical and mental health life expectancy huge positive impacts for men much less so for women so it's like women and of course if you go back if we went the other way, you'd say, well, actually, women who weren't married were in real trouble economically until recently.

So my line from before was that women used to be economically dependent on men, but men were emotionally dependent on women. And I think we've really done a lot on the first half of that, and it's kind of revealing the second part, the fact that actually wifeless men, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well. In fact, they do terribly. So I've mentioned this fourfold suicide difference in risk. It's an eightfold difference among divorced men and women. men who get divorced their risk of suicide skyrockets so the question is like why and i think it is because of this sense of like not being needed not being so like if your kids are at home and your wife's at home and you know you're just

you're contributing to the family unit i think that's much more obvious and it's really interesting in recent surveys in the u.s at least men are now more likely than women to say that it's important to them to get married. So what does that say about what's going on in men's heads if they're now more keen on marriage than women? Because that's to me sounded a little bit territorial. Well, there's a danger with that. And of course, you can get into real trouble as one of of your previous guests did, by talking about enforced monogamy. Who talked about it? Jordan Peterson.

Oh, did he? Yeah, he talked about enforced monogamy. And you can imagine... Enforced monogamy? Enforced monogamy. He didn't say that on this show, did he? I don't think so. Okay.

No, I think he said it in an interview. It's a very unfortunate term. It's actually a term from anthropology that basically was a way of describing this new way of raising families that's only been around for a few centuries, where men and women, either by law or by social norm, are only required to marry one person. They're required? Well, bigamy is a crime.

What's bigamy? Being married to more than one person. It's a crime in the US. It's a crime in the UK. It's a crime in most countries. It's actually against the law to have more than one spouse. Imagine how illiberal is that? The state telling me how many wives I'm allowed or how many husbands? I thought when you said required, I thought you meant you have to marry one person. Sorry, that's what people thought it meant. Yeah, okay.

And that's why you got into such terrible trouble. But actually what it's referring to is a social system which is which is basically against polygamy it's basically saying no no no no one gets forced into marriage what it is is saying if you're going to marry it can only be monogamous right okay so the i the trouble is that people the trouble is people heard it as we're going to force you into marriage and into monogamy and actually what the term means is we're not going to allow you to be polygamous okay right so it's it kind of it was sort of misinterpreted um the term was misinterpreted um but it does speak to this fear i think that people will feel forced economically or socially in into it it's actually it's not for nothing that andrew tate i'm sure you know andrew tate and his work i know

who he is yeah right i don't know him i've never spoken to right but i'm sure you know Andrew Tate and his work. I know who he is, yeah. Right. I don't know him. I've never spoken to him. Right, but you know who I'm referring to, right? Why did he convert to Islam? People aren't talking about this, by the way. This is not a polite topic of conversation,

Andrew Tate's conversion. For understandable reasons, people don't want to be seen to be stoking Islamophobia or whatever, but I will tell you this, and we published a piece by an imam. Andrew Tate has a huge following among young Muslim men in the US and the UK, and he's now converted to Islam publicly. And the reason he's done that is so he can have multiple wives, which is to be fair to him, entirely consistent with his worldview about gender and gender equality and the role of men and women. Right. And so it's interesting to kind of think about the role and as this rise of polyamory now and,

and so on, actually thinking about monogamy, polygamy, et cetera, etc it's it's a much more complicated story i think that many people are willing to admit because it's not clear that if we just kind of take away the sort of social norms around like the one-on-one model that that will necessarily be better for men so when you say of course men are in favor of polygamy of course you'd be in favor of it like who wouldn't want three wives i shouldn't speak for you. No, I'm trying to satisfy one at the moment. Right! Right, that's the answer. But actually, as some people point out, actually if you're a woman,

is it clear that you'd rather be the only wife of an unemployed steel worker than the second wife of an incredibly successful podcaster? Maybe, maybe for all women, that's a clear choice, right? But the kind of point simply being is we shouldn't just assume that this is kind of a male, you know, only for kind of men idea. Anyway, it's a digression into an area that i'm far from expert in but it's prompted by this whole idea about dating marriage and commitment and so where i would land on this is that even as we reform marriage family life the roles of men and women we have to be really careful to keep grounding men in a sense of being needed by their kids especially and by their communities if so if not in the traditional way through a kind of you know a recently traditional marriage as a breadwinner and provider and all

that the one my father had and also lots of other things besides swimming coach math tutor chauffeur all the ways he provided for us and as a father if we're going to replace that with a new model we have to be really careful to make sure that we do replace it and that we don't actually make men feel like they are not needed in this new world are women asking for divorce you know you're talking about that you know idea of polygamy and women and men are women asking for divorce now more so than men are yes women are more likely to precipitate divorce than men and again about two to one i think wow certainly that's certainly a much in the u.s it's much higher among women yeah i mean that's an

indication of something an indication of a healthy freedom yeah exit power yeah exit power yeah i mean that's what an economist would call it right and that that's that shows you that's a massive sign of success that women can leave relationships in a way that they couldn't before because they were trapped economically and so this kind of economic trap that was marriage, which the women's movement really kind of really took aim at and just said, this institution of marriage is basically a way to trap and oppress women in relationships of economic dependency, which will be powerless because he has the money, right? That feminist critique of traditional marriage was profound and correct.

And the results have been extraordinary in unbundling that and giving women economic power. Because without economic power, women don't have choice about marriage. So now we've got this massive rise in women's choice as to whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have kids, who to have kids with, et cetera. And so you've seen this massive expansion of women's choice and power, which is magnificent and destabilizing, especially for men. Both of those things can be true at once. It can be creating these unintended destabilizing consequences for men. And if we then add to that a danger sometimes to either mock men or masculinity, almost pathologize them in humor but sometimes

maybe not so much in humor as well i think that just doubles down on this sense it's like not only are you not needed but maybe you're actually a bit toxic uh and so i think there's of all the moments to not be really kind of making sure that men feel really bad about themselves this is not that moment what do you think of that phrase toxic masculinity i think it's toxic i think the term toxic masculinity is toxic i didn't always think that it's taking me a while to get to that but i would now say it's basically a slur it's a gender slur if you like and it's just used too easily too loosely too casually to describe male behavior that we don't like and it's just used too easily too loosely too casually to describe male behavior that we don't like and i would say actually most thoughtful kind of women's groups and feminists

are not supporting it now um because it just it it's not a great recruiting tool by and large right so one one big problem with it is if you ask people who use the term toxic masculinity to define non-toxic masculinity, they struggle. They'll say, oh no, no, there are positive aspects of masculinity. So, okay, great, great. What are they? And they'll say nurturing and caring and kindness and emotional availability. And you go, and is that different from femininity? They'll say, no, no, it's the same. Okay. So let me get this straight. Masculinity is either toxic or not masculine. Because if they start saying courage, positive risk-taking, well-channeled competitiveness,

do you say, well, are you saying women aren't courageous? No, no, I'm not saying that. Okay, so sorry, what are you... So it's an empty set. So non-toxic masculinity is basically an empty set so they can't fill that category so you've either got toxic or or nothing that's bad but also just think on a visceral level it reminds me and you have a church background so the phrase toxic masculinity really reminds me of the term original sin because it's something in you that's kind of you didn't have any choice about it like you inherited it

um from previous generations and it's kind of bad and we can't get rid of it uh so this you're born with this flaw you've got to repent at all opportunities for you yeah and it feels like that to me just like just and maybe this is the third point i don't know but it's like honestly is that the best we can offer to young men is a prospectus that we could make them not toxic? How would you like to be non-toxic? Isn't that an exciting idea? That's the worst recruiting slogan ever. And so it's driving young men away. It's an incredibly unhelpful term. It's unfairly applied. It used to have some value in academia, like before 2016, it had this very technical term in academia.

But I think as a term now, it really just does send this incredibly unfortunate message to men, which doesn't encourage a debate about how to be a better man. I much prefer immature and mature masculinity. I like the idea of saying, what does mature masculinity look like? Because you know what immature masculinity looks like, right? And so I think this kind of maturation is a much better way to frame it than toxic, non-toxic. Is there such a thing as,

and I've never asked this question before, but it just came to mind. Is there such a thing as toxic femininity? Have you watched Mean Girls? I can't say I've watched it, but I know the movie and I've seen trailers and there's a new tina fey uh movie i think right okay uh an update of it but um yeah and i think this relates to the debate about social media and the way that social media is so particularly damaging to

the mental health of teen girls and young women because it's very relational and so the relational bullying that girls and young women are more likely to engage and so the relational bullying that girls and young women are more likely to engage in than men are so men are more likely historically much less so today but to have bullied physically yeah women are much more likely to bully relationally so they exclude you you're not my best friend anymore you're not invited you're etc and they bully by using you know how you look but so that relational bullying gets kind of amplified by social media and so if you were to try and define toxic femininity i suspect that's where you would go and it would be around ostracism and meanness if you think the mean girls phenomenon is getting at

something real which is the ability of kind of women to be pretty brutal to each other it's probably something more around that but i i just think putting the word toxic before either femininity or masculinity is just a bad move i think it's a bad move intellectually and i think it's a terrible move culturally on this subject of um masculinity one of the sort of defining traits of masculinity in society is that men don't speak they don't open up and um they're less likely to i think they struggle more to form friendships i've certainly found that to be the case in my life if you drop me and my partner in london as actually has happened and she she wasn't from here she's never lived here before it only took her a couple of months before she's got a group she's going to these like dance this class and i'm away doing

dragon's den next week so she's found a group of portuguese girls and she's going to go watch the match and i could never i don't know how the hell she's made friends i i've made zero new friends in london in five years my friends are my colleagues and my friends that i've had for 10 years that is it i don't make new friends um and and this is something that i have echoed to me a lot when I meet men out and about when I could do talks and stuff and they come up to me after I've had men whisper to me how do how do I make friends where I'm lonely and when they do it they come really really close yeah so that the person behind them in the queue can't hear them say I've had exactly the same experience and they whisper it about how do I make friends or I'm feeling lonely or something like that and I've heard in your work the work

that was in your book I think on page, you say that there is a male friendship recession. What did you mean when you said that? We're seeing a decline in friendships generally, but it's much more acute for men. So in the US, 15% of men under the age of 30 say they don't have a single close friend. That's up from three percent in 1990 and so it's almost one in seven men um you're seeing declining number of men saying how much

time they spend with friends shrinking social networks everything you've just described which is like the process of making and sustaining friends is just something that men are really struggling with right now much more so than women and i think there's a couple of things going on here one is we're revealing the extent to which a lot of that work was actually outsourced to women before right so if you're in a couple how often are the social arrangements made by the women um they do a lot of that maintenance the relationship maintenance and the men free ride on the women um they do a lot of the that maintenance the relationship maintenance and the men free ride on the women right every like weekend plan that's outside of my comfort zone pretty much most of them come from my partner all right she's organized something she's an

organizer she wants to go try this thing right and you're like let's go do vegan sushi roll no i just want to play far cry 5 i just want to lie on my back and watch manchester united all right fine i chose the wrong i chose the wrong thing. Yeah, I know. So I think like, and women have been better at it and men haven't had to do as much of it. So in some ways, like, I think we're being exposed a bit more in the sense that like,

women aren't doing as much of that work for us anymore. They're saying, look, it's not my job to create your friendship network for you. So we're having to do it. And we're not very good at it. And we're still not very good at it yet. And've had the same experience i mean i wrote a bit i wrote a bit about loneliness and i spoke at an event not that long afterwards and i had a couple of young men exactly the same as you just come close and just say i'm incredibly lonely and

thank you for talking about this and you end up hugging them and like and actually for me i was talking about this the other day there's something about loneliness that just breaks my heart in a way that other forms of suffering don't and i don't know why but if i hear about someone's really lonely it just my mom was talking about this guy that who she ran into him and he was going to this supermarket and you know he was in front of her you know in the queue and she's like i'll go after you he's like no no no you go first and he says i'm on my own and actually the hours after dinner especially in the summer they're the hardest

so i always come down here to the supermarket and i buy a couple of things and i come back and have a chat and you know it fills my time and my mom because she's like a massive like she's like a social worker to the world she ends up chatting to him and getting his phone number um but actually that just pierced my heart it's just and so when you hear about these men young old women as like who are lonely i think it's huge and and so i and back to our earlier bit conversation too, is like those institutions that maybe used to kind of connect you to other people, right? Where do you make friends?

And you just said at work, right? And so I think our colleagues in some ways become our friends. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying it is a bad thing, but it's different to the friends you've made at church or through your sports or through, do you know what I mean? Or wherever. And so the other thing I'll say about this is, have you heard of the men's sheds movement? I don't know what i mean or wherever and and so the other thing i'll say

about this is have you heard of the men's sheds movement i don't know what a men's sheds is but i've heard of men male groups and stuff yes there's a lot of male groups there's one which is the australian government just funded this in australia it's called the men men's sheds and they're places where men go and fix stuff like you'll bring a lawnmower i do stuff right um and it's one of the things that i found i've really learned from this i wish i'd known more about it before it's like have you heard of this thing about men communicating more easily shoulder to shoulder than face to face have you come across this yeah i've heard about this it's really interesting so when my uh my

wife would sometimes when her boys came home from school she'd sit down directly opposite them like across the breakfast bar type thing right and she'd sit directly opposite and give them protein and then she'd be like how was your day yeah and then later on we'd be driving somewhere or watching soccer or playing a video game like shoulder to shoulder and they'd be like yeah this weird thing happened today with her or with me right so eventually i said that you've got to stop staring them in the face that That's not how men open up. And so the men's sheds movement is actually, I think, based on a profound insight, which is that men have to be doing something in order to be being with their friend. Go into any coffee shop and

count how many people are sitting there staring at each other for hours on end mostly women not saying right and then go to fishing road trips it's the only explanation for golf do you play golf no thank god um but like like when a guy is saying do you think i should use the five iron yeah i don't play golf either right but what he's really saying is i love you yeah or i'm lonely or need help and so there is something to be said for like men and even people have studied actually how men stand in relation to each other like a party or something when i've told you this you won't be able to stop looking is that men actually there's always a bit of an angle right we just don't stand face to face it's it spikes our threat cortisol or whatever so we always stand a little bit of an angle um but also

like doing something together um requires us to be more shoulder to shoulder which is why some psychotherapists now they do walking talking therapy they realize that with men especially like sitting them down and staring at them is less effective quite often going for a walk you've done therapy haven't you yeah how was it i've done therapy and i've done couples therapy and um actually i will say that i did much better with a male therapist and one of them we did walk um and so i'm basing some of some kind of personal experience which is like there's something about sitting on a chair or kind of and being stared at and told to open up i've been there do you find it hard to do that yes i do i find it really really hard when i did couples therapy and i've done um individual therapy i found it really hard i found

it even harder in couple couples therapy was it a male or female therapist it was i had a male therapist and then i had a male and female therapist at the same time. Okay. It's interesting because in couples therapy, I found it easier with just a woman. And then in individual therapy, I find it easier with a man, I think. It's one of the reasons I'm really worried about the declining share of men in psychology and therapy. I mean, you know, we're emptying the men out of men in psychology and therapy i mean you know we're

emptying the men out of those professions really yeah yeah the share of men going into psychology and counseling has plummeted in the us and the uk so there are fewer and fewer men it's getting harder and harder to find a male therapist now maybe that doesn't matter but i absolutely think it matters and again we're basically, you've just shared your experience, I'll share mine. I think to have the option when one of my kids really needed therapy too, I think for him,

he did so much better with a man. And I think there's some, depending on the nature of the problem, maybe you're, it's just something about like intuitive connection. If you're a B2B marketeer, then you want to stick around for the next 30 seconds or so.

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The hardest thing you've ever done as a man is when him and your wife went to couples therapy. You said that on Scott Galloway's podcast. Yes. Why? podcast yes why so my wife and i were working through actually a lot of these issues that we've been talking about today like what our relative roles were and responsibilities and she's been very successful professionally and we raised our kids together i've been a stay-at-home dad and and then worked and so on and there was this moment where that was really one of those pivotal moments in your life where i was talking about

what i'd done at home and how it supported her career and you know all of that. And she looked at me and said, you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. The problem is that you're not masculine enough. It's like, that's a moment. That's a real moment. That was a, it was, and we then started talking, what did she mean by that? And it was about responsibility. It was about stepping in, in some ways, some of those roles. And, and what I came to realize, and this is in some ways, the book, the, the book underneath that book, which is my own journey and my own struggles with my own sense of what does it mean to be a man? What does masculinity mean in a relationship and a society

of profound moral equality between men and women? And I realized that in some ways I'd been sort of almost at war with my own masculinity for quite a long time because it didn't fit my feminist mindset. To the extent that there were things that I kind of wanted or felt that didn't fit with the kind of model of gender equality and feminism, that was a problem to be solved rather than a way of being to be expressed and learned about. And it took that moment of my incredibly feminist, unbelievably professionally successful wife to say, I think the problem is you're not masculine enough and it was just like the energy that I had and like I felt as if like asking for more in our relationship for myself was to be a bad feminist was to not support her I was supposed to be a good ally you know the world is made for men and all our needs and desires and so on so my job was to

be an ally to her and anything that got in the way of that or that was difficult or complicated and it was well i i don't know what would have happened to our relationship without it but i can tell you that from that moment onwards our relationship grew and flourished and continues to flower in a way that it just would not otherwise have done because it's almost like by being so direct she forced this movement inside me where i almost gave myself permission to give some expression to the sides of myself that are more masculine i mean that's not the conversation people hear publicly you're not putting this out are you i thought it was just us but i mean people don't people don't there's so much truth to that and i think there's so many women that are listening right now that are nodding their head and can relate in various ways because of the way that society is to some degree now

um but that's not the narrative we hear that a woman would turn to you and and ask you to be more masculine in the context of sort of the typical idea of what masculinity means it released what it means to her yeah almost the opposite it would be with the toxic back to your point about it is masculinity the problem which i thought it was and it took her to point out that no no no it's how it's expressed that's the question and and for me it was like i just i thought that being assertive in the relationship was somehow bad because it was associated with kind of you know patriarchy masculinity and like men dominating and like and it's very interesting like i'll bring it down to like a more benign level i think a lot of young women actually one of the things they feel about

a lot of young men is that they're a bit passive it's almost like a lot of those men almost don't feel they have permission to be assertive and what women like it's almost like a lot of those men almost don't feel they have permission to be assertive and what women like it's fun for you and i to talk about what women want isn't it but i think there's something that what a lot of the women i talk to say is like i just want someone who's my equal and that's so weird to say now right but they they want someone that's a partner that's with them and and they say, well, what should we do tonight? Or where should we go for dinner? And if he says, I don't know, you decide.

I don't mind. It's always just like, well, no, you decide. You make a plan and you book it. You show some agency here. And I might not always agree with you or even like it. We can get into that. But just going passive is not what makes you a good partner or a good feminist and i and i i think my maybe my generation i'm older than you maybe my generation of men have really struggled more with that

just because i think it was kind of there was this kind of strong sense that we that we needed to sort of yeah just in order for women to become bigger we had to make ourselves smaller and i think that was a profound intellectual and for me emotional and relational error the point is we all need to get bigger we all want to rise and grow and challenge each other and challenge each other to grow not silence ourselves or bench ourselves following going through that process with your partner how did you change i became much more willing i said one of my issues is i'm quite agreeable right so i don't like i avoid conflict quite a bit um but i also saw like provoking conflict

and disagreeing and arguing as like bad for the the relationship and also me doing it as a man, bad for her. And so I actually became much more willing to say, no, I don't want to do that. I want to do this. Or I want to go there, not there. Or I'd like to do this, not that. And it caused more arguments, which was uncomfortable for me. But it was great and it was more arguments which was uncomfortable for me but it was great and it was what she wanted there were two aspects to it if i'm honest like one was like stand up a little bit more for myself and a little bit like in the relationship and a bit more like no i like i disagree about that i'm gonna do this and just give her more of a equal in that sense of challenge but the other thing was really an issue was just actually just the kind of

responsibility responsibility around kind of economics and so on too and i don't think this was just about gender but it took me a while i think to really get a proper sense of like just being a provider a co-provider wasn't bad right making money in a way that would help our family and give us more choices wasn't bad and so there was there was that kind of sense too it's like because she'd that up until that point she'd actually done more of the bread winning and so there was a kind of sense of her saying look i'm i'm about as feminist as you get but you know what wouldn't mind it if we couldn't do a bit of this you can do a bit more of that as well i read some study the other day and i'll triple check this and put it on the screen but i think the study if i'm gonna get this correct said that about 70 percent of women

want to be with a guy that's earning more than them something like that it was like 70 80 percent or something like that's about right i mean you can check it but it depends which server you can choose a server yeah but you know what it's's so interesting. I've been thinking about that quite a bit recently, that reliably in surveys, women will say, I want a guy that has earning potential, earns more, can earn more. But what you have to be really careful, I think, how the question's asked and what the interpretation of it is um i think actually what it's very often about is women wanting and a lot of young women have said suggested this to me not just young women but but even women of my generation that what they really want is a partner and earning is a really

good proxy for someone who's got their act together right someone who's a good earner is also going to be good father probably and a good partner and so on too so it's actually just a really good signal right the market the labor market is a very good signal of all kinds of other skills and so on um so that's number one i think they're actually just getting someone who like is he's got his act together right he's he's he's good thing he's got skills he's got you know he's got agency he's like and those are good in all kinds of other circumstances too so when i was a stay-at-home dad i like to think i had a lot of agency and i didn't like lie on the sofa all day like i did stuff and organize stuff and so i think it's partly that but i also think

it's partly because a lot of women want choice they want options to maybe take some time themselves to be at home and that's a really interesting modern development is I think the feminist call now from a lot of women to men is like, I don't know if I'm going to want to take time out to kind of raise the kids, but I'd like the option. And that's only an option if you're doing your bit, if you're earning. And so I do know some women who are very successful professionally and then they have kids and their partner is much less successful like i know one couple where he was he was literally a kind of music failing musician as she was like this partner in some law firm or whatever so it was like a it was like a movie it's so stereotypical but and she's like she has kids

and she's like well i'd like to have a bit of time. I ain't going to live on his solo guitar YouTube salary or whatever it was, right? And at that point, she's mad at him. Maybe a little bit too late. But generally, she goes like, I'd just like you to give me the option. And of course, we want it both ways now, right? It was great for me to be able to have time at home

while my partner was able to just go for it professionally for a while like it was great for me to be able to have time at home while my uh my partner was able to just go for it professionally for a while just totally go for it that was beautiful for both of us but we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that it shouldn't go both ways like we can't we can't we gotta couldn't get rid of the provider model we gotta think about ourselves as co-providers of a whole bunch of things money time love energy and not take ourselves out the equation at all that's not that's not that's not what the women's movement was about the women's movement was about women securing economic independence not about men losing it that's not attractive you've got two sons right three three sons okay so i guess this kind of

brings us to the penultimate point which is and if you were sitting down with all three of your sons which you might have done already and they said Dad, listen, what does it mean to be a man in the modern world? What should I do? Should I hold the door open? Should I, I don't know, go to the gym? Should I pursue a high-flying, breadwinning job? What does it mean to be a man? What advice would you give them about being a man in the modern world honestly the advice that would set them up to be successful in their romantic relationships and in the world and in their mind yeah well it's interesting because in some ways i think the fact that conversation might almost be a sign of failure not just individually more

socially because i really believe that people believe their eyes before they believe their ears and so what i would really hope is that i've been showing not telling um that it's not a curriculum it's not a here are the here's the four point plan for modern masculinity based on my years of research it's more like well you've seen how i am you've seen how i am with your mom you've seen how i've worked you've seen how i've raised you you've seen like how you've seen you've seen how i interact with people and there's this lovely phrase from a philosopher is in the thick of daily life like how are you in the thick of daily life you've seen me help that person you've seen me like they tease me this i pick up the lime scooters

all the time right because someone's gonna trip over them right you've you've you've seen me, like they tease me this, I pick up the lime scooters all the time, right? Because someone's going to trip over them, right? You've seen how I've reacted. I haven't done that kind of thing, oh, this is masculinity, but you've seen me do certain things that you've just kind of imbued along the way. So that sounds like a cop-out, but I won't cop out completely because I think I would say, look, first of all, recognize that there are on average differences, right? So there are going to be things that you're going to be inclined towards or want to do that just different, right? There's nothing wrong with masculinity. There's nothing wrong with some of these impulses and instincts that you've got, right? Of course, you want complete gender equality. And so you're going to look for partners who are going to give you that as well and above all be

for others serve and so the first two i'd open the door for sure yeah what was the second one i can't remember but you said open the door um it's about career and it's about going to the gym go to the gym sure i mean actually all the evidence about being physically healthy is is important um but then kind of get a high-earning job i wouldn't say that i would say find work that yes we'll pay don't be naive about that but it's much more important you're passionate about your work you'll be much more attractive to someone if you're passionate we only we're only here once for god's sake and so the idea that you're gonna you know that someone's attracted someone who's

like just kind of into their work just because it makes a bunch of back to our that's not sexy it doesn't matter what the paycheck is right what sexy is passion and agency and you know verve mojo whatever so absolutely i i would uh i would advise uh all of that i actually think it's kind of weird back to the dating thing is that in some way i think it captures a lot of our conversation though which is that i i've tried to raise them in a way that would give them the courage to ask a girl out the grace to accept no for just accept no for an answer and then the responsibility to make sure that either way she gets home safely so what i've got in there is a little bit of agency a little bit

of leaning in a little bit of taking a risk it's a risk to ask someone out right and i think risk taking is is on average a bit more masculine that's secondly you have no sense of entitlement about that and if you've read it wrong or whatever, and she's like, no, thank you. You are totally cool with that. Right? Incredibly. But then thirdly, either way, there is a responsibility to make sure people are kind of safe. And if you're in a position where you're a little bit stronger and able to do that, great.

And in fact, I had a rule with my kids that they had a curfew, but actually they broke the curfew because they were getting someone home safely. They got an exemption from that. And there was one night when my sons came home and I was waiting for him and it was 30 minutes after curfew, pouring with rain. He came home, drowned right, and he'd walked a girl home. Got home safely. It's like, great. Now, I like to think that sort of formulation is capturing some stuff that is a bit more inherently masculine. But in a world where there's no entitlement, there no sense of inequality and i don't think that's a horrible

formula and generally speaking i've kind of found a lot of men kind of men and women like yes actually actually i would quite like you i mean it's a covered garage order i would actually quite like to kind of make you make sure that i get to my car safely or kind of whatever and i don't think that's patriarchy i think that's good manners and responsibility what that doesn't mean is that and you do it for your boss you do it for somebody else it doesn't mean that there's any going back to a world where that gave you some sort of extra power in the labor market or something like that so i think it's really difficult honestly right now to get this right i think but i think too many people also treading on eggshells a little

bit too. Like they do rather than run the risk of doing something wrong, they do nothing. And that's the worst of all worlds because we don't learn. But also those kids are going to fall into the hands of others in terms of their influence. So they're going to learn how to be a man from TikTok or Twitter. And you never know which algorithm is going to sweep them away. One thing we can be pretty sure of is that with some exceptions, you're not going to learn how to be a man from social media or online. You're going to learn it from your dad, your neighbor, your brother, your teacher, your coach. The best antidote to some of the reactionary content that some young men are encountering online now isn't other online content much though of course we're all producing more

online content it's actually a real live man in your life it's flesh and blood it's i and i think that's so much more powerful i think that my son as a teacher in front of a classroom of boys is going to be a much more powerful antidote to those reactionary figures that they might see online than somebody else online that's how we win we win in real life not online i mean there's kind of two adjacent points here the first is your your son is going into a profession that is increasingly depleting in men yeah because i think what's it like 20 or 30 percent of primary school teachers are women uh men uh no it's primary it's one in ten one in ten in

primary yeah okay so there's those role models are lacking in primary education but then he's going into high school secondary school uh he's going to be teaching elementary to start with yeah okay primary school yeah so it's those role models are really yes needed there and the adjacent point was you've talked to me about what you'd say to your sons around the kitchen table but but if i elect you as president of the world or at least the western world uk and us let's say um and north america and i tell you that you've got to solve the issues you talk about in this book of boys and men why the modern male is struggling white matters and what to do about it in fact you had to solve the issues you described so eloquently what would you do at a social level to fix things

the suicidality the mental health issues we're seeing the loneliness we're seeing the educational gap we're seeing if you're in a position where you have a voice you're in a position of authority you president prime minister or anybody actually i think it's very easy to understate the power of simply acknowledging a problem and having empathy for the people who are struggling from it. And so whilst I could list a whole bunch of policy solutions, which I think would be part of the interview, you'd have to say, and that's why I'm doing X. That's why I'm having a men's health strategy and we're hiring male

teachers and we're, you know, we're having a, we're funding mental health services for men, et cetera. I would do all all that but i actually think that the most important move would be to send a signal especially to young men and boys who are struggling i see you we see you we hear you we've got you we understand that you're struggling. We are not going back on the move for women and girls, but we are taking your problems seriously. And we continue to take the problems of women and girls seriously. Simply making them feel seen and heard and empathized with is a massive thing. It's a a massive because so many of them right now feel as if their problems aren't being discussed aren't being addressed at that level they are being

addressed online over here by many reactionary figures but they're not being addressed by the people in positions of power very often they're being dismissed sometimes and the result of that is to create this really dangerous vacuum in our society also in men's lives like if there are real problems and we neglect them and they don't feel it they can become grievances and that's the perfectly natural result of having real problems that are neglected and so simply saying we understand it is it is a struggle right now there are a lot of problems facing young men and we are on it i can't tell you how powerful i think that would be because so many men feel right now as if their problems are sort of second order problems they just don't count as much they're not being addressed in the same way or if they are it's

turned back on them it's because you don't try it's because They're not being addressed in the same way. Or if they are, it's turned back on them. It's because you don't try. It's because you're lazy. It's because you watch too much porn. It's because you're toxic. It's whatever. So individualize back on them and you need to fix yourself. And I think if we were just able to say we can do two things at once

and we can continue to fight for women and girls, but we can also help you, boys and men, I think it would be profound. It's so clearly so important to that group in particular as well because letting them know that they are seen in a situation where they are already unbelievably alone in a sense of loneliness um is especially powerful and i think just from having these conversations on the podcast, I've seen that. I've seen that just by having the conversations, even if we don't have all the solutions yet,

just by turning the lights on and saying, okay, this is a thing. People are so unbelievably grateful. And it's not just men that are grateful. If you look at the gender split on the podcast that I've done with men and women on these male issues, the comment section are full of mothers and grandmothers and sisters and daughters who are equally concerned about men and boys in the same way that we should all be concerned about the issues that women and girls face. And I think that's a really wonderful thing because I feel like someone said to me on the podcast, you know, we've spent a long time calling men out

and now we need to call them back in. Yes. And I think it's just really wonderful thing because i feel like someone said to me on the podcast you know we've spent a long time calling men out and now we need to call them back in yes and i think it's just a wonderful expression of um where i think we find ourselves at where we're now trying to figure out how we co-exist and champion each other and the individual issues we both have as um two different sexes and um well thank you for your work in this space. I do think that using your platform to honestly engage, to, to grapple with decisions in the way that we have today and you have with others and just to look, there aren't any as hard. I think that's an incredibly important thing because if you're not talking about it, others will be. And so for you to use your voice and this kind of space to just say, we get it, we're hearing you, you we're seeing it we maybe don't have the answer it's

very powerful for you to use your voice to do that and i'm glad you're getting the reaction that you are which is to a much lesser extent in my the direction i get to which is thank god because you're not framing it in a reactionary way you're not saying and that's why we need to go back to the 50s yeah men were men and women were you're saying no this is hard right but yeah we we see it yeah and i i love the progress we've made as a society um i love that i love it for all the women in my lives i love it for myself i love it for my sister for my mother for my partner for all the wonderful women that work with me but i also know that with all with all upsides comes a unintended consequence as well and if we can um manage that if we can manage both the upside and sustain that while managing the unintended consequence and talk about it and this is something this is not just about

social issues about medicine we're talking before about medicine or any other you know being really successful in work comes with an unintended consequence over here right you lose your friends or you might become lonely if we can highlight both and manage both and talk about both and i think we'll we'll be much better as a society and if we're much better as a society then i think we'll be much better um we'll all be happier and we'll all be better and it's it's difficult to have these conversations sometimes because obviously this is these are such polarizing issues yes but what the what the fuck are we here for if not to have those conversations if you as you speak about this stuff and i found myself doing it a bit in this conversation you think like what's the what's the kind of least

generous interpretation of what i've just said yeah someone's going to post somewhere right but if if you if we're constantly worried about what the least generous interpretation of what we're saying is we'll never say anything a hundred percent and so just by saying it and trying to be honest about it and changing your mind we're just having i think you're proving this that the appetite for good faith conversations about real issues is huge right now i think people kind of over the simplification they're over the algorithm they're over the sound but no we're all kind of in it still but but just honestly wrestling with real problems and seeing that we have to rise together i think that's a huge gift we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for so i'm assuming that's

the last one yeah it must be it be. There's no other. Yeah, it is. Okay. Interestingly, they've written a statement at the top, which is, someday is now, full stop. And then they've written, at your age, at this point in your journey, what is one thing you always swore you would do one day? Have you done it yet? And if not, why not?

I can't answer that question i'm trying really hard because i'm trying to think of anything that i've sworn i will do one day and i can't think of a single thing richard thank you thank you it's been such a wonderful conversation for so many reasons and um you know I have zero doubt that there are so many, so many men and women out there that have benefited tremendously from the fact that you do the work that you do in the way that you do it. And I think that's a really important additional part to the sentence, which is the way in which you do it.

Tone matters, right? It really, really matters. It really matters because I think you're able to call everybody into the room um in a way that other people aren't they call half of the group into the room or just some of the group into the room which i never think is the best way to get ideas across but really skillfully in your book but in your work more generally you call everybody into the room and you you do it in a way which is objective It's not political. And it's incredibly powerful and compelling. And that's exactly what your book was. I spent a long time after having multiple conversations on this

podcast, looking for the book that sets the right tone and can speak to someone like me who considers myself, I'm not sure if this is always true because i've said biases and stuff but considers myself right in the middle in terms of politics and all these things so your book was it didn't seem to be pandering to either group it seemed to be able to maintain an absolute objectivity which was incredibly powerful but everything is supported by data and stats not just vibes and i think that is the book that society has needed. And I think it is this book. So I'd highly recommend everybody give it a read. If you have any interest in these subjects

we've discussed today, I'm going to link it below for everyone. It's called Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters and What to Do About It. But also for all of the millions of people listening right now, thank you. Because I'm sure all of them would like to say thank you

for a variety of different reasons. But on behalf of of them thank you so much for doing the work that you do it's very very important and to kind of close off this conversation thank you it means a lot to me we need to say that oh thank you we need you too Thank you.