A Shocking Turn in the War on Men - Richard Reeves - #1087

27:15They were staffed by men, there were four boys, and there was a huge civic response. But it took men to do it, whereas all of the youth-serving organizations now have way more women volunteers than male volunteers. And of course, I'm not blaming the women who are stepping up to do that work. God bless them. But I am saying, if you want to serve boys and young men, you better have some men too. But are men hearing that message? We need you, not despite being men, not as a volunteer, but as a man. We need men. Because you're good. Because you have something to add. As a man. Yes, your masculinity, and I've used the word again, your manhood, right?

27:55Basically, we want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. And I just don't think enough men have played that. Well, even that, right, the idea of duty, of almost like service, turns very quickly into obligation isn't nasty enough of a word that, well, I mean, you should go and do this, as opposed to this is a noble pursuit for you to try and pass on good things and good advice to the next generation of young men. So do we need new language to talk about gender issues then? Femininity, is that also a difficult one to talk about? No, I mean, femininity is hard.

28:39I mean, feminism has become quite fraught. Femininity, actually, I would very rarely hear being spoken about other than anybody from the right. Femininity would be pushed as part of a sort of sundress and baking trad wife dream. I don't hear many people from the left talking about it because it's not something to be pedestalized. I would hear masculinity talked about primarily from the left as a cudgel to beat men with, usually with some sort of modifier of toxic or whatever. So yeah, and feminism as well. Manosphere, unfortunately, well, it was very quickly kind of... Feminism was something that previously in the past, I think a lot of people think was pretty...

29:23Right. It was a gender equality claim. Yeah. very quickly moved into something else. Actually, it gets increasingly quickly moved into something else when I learn about some of the factions that sort of birthed out of feminism at the very beginning. I was learning about this yesterday. But the Manosphere was used to describe a group of people, not necessarily a movement or an ideology. The group of people happened to all agree about it. So maybe the Manosphere was never going to be it. I've given you my bit about the three waves of the Manosphere, right? There was first wave, which is pick-a-part-a-tree, second wave, which was Red Pill, and then third wave, which originally I was going to say it was the gentlemanosphere.

29:56But I actually think it's luxmaxing. I think that is going to be the third wave. What? Luxmaxing. You think that's the third wave? So here's my theory about luxmaxing. Most of the luxmaxing guys, if it sticks, because it's only been around for six months, if it sticks and it becomes even more ascendant, and it might do because it's really memeable, if it stays, what it will create is basically a sexier version of the black pill and MGTOW. So it'll be men going their own way. If you look at what the men are coding for, presenting for, it's not for women. They don't care about women all that much at all.

30:35They care in as much as women can get them a claim in the eyes of other men. But it is basically formidability is what they're signaling. Height, unbelievably masculinized faces, which if you look at the evidence, most women prefer an either average in terms of masculinization or a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body that's what they find most attractive but men think about giga chad they think about these protruding cheekbones insane draw yeah the mandible they have that people mewing mewing i learned about that the other day pushing their tongue into the roof of the mouth yeah why do they do that it's to try and create a tighter jawline you're doing it am i doing it Yeah, you look like a giga-chad.

31:17You look fantastic. I look like a twat. Yeah, you do look like a twat. But look, a lot of the most extreme version of male luxmaxing basically is a male-to-male transsexual operation. It is taking a man and trying to turn up the caricature. So my thinking about this, if it sticks, what it will be is basically disregard women and just focus on mogging, which is male-to-male intersexual competition. It's trying to be as formidable as possible. Now, you saw this with Ziz 15 years ago in 2010, but he was still obviously very female attraction coded. It was a much more kind of holistic bro-y version of this.

31:59It was way less autistic. And he had this great line, which was, disregard women, acquire dance moves. But it was done in a lol pal kind of way. Whereas this is, this to me feels like genuine disregard of, we're not bothered about mating we're not bothered about getting women we're not bothered about really anything other than male-to-male intrasexual competition and if that sticks it's going to become very insular well it won't stick will it i mean the idea that these these guys are hammering their faces or breaking their bones or doing the thing you just well i just tried to do kind of mewing that worked uh and they're not interested in women uh no i i think it'll go do you see stephen colbert just did a thing on looks maxing uh it's from a very feminist perspective it's funny as you can imagine but the whole thing about it um it's worth it's just worth watching because he goes into it but i sort of think i just again i think i don't want to be empirical about this but like how many men are we talking about like is it how long will this last will it will it last will it go is this the start of a you know decades long shift in the gender tectonics or is it just another decades long?

33:09But it could stick about for a while and it would definitely put things on the back foot because it's going to be less - I just, I see that. I see it breaking through. I hear people talking about it. I'm not saying it's not happening. And actually we're doing some work on growing issues around body dysmorphia and so on among - Which is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the next decade. Yeah, I've seen that stat. I don't know if that's true or not. Scott Griffiths. Scott Griffiths. Yeah, and I just always worry about those lines being projected forward. But anyway, it's a real thing.

33:35Yeah. and what I think it speaks to is I do think lying behind all of these trends whatever the thing is now, what it will be before is what we were talking about a moment ago this guy John De La Volpe I don't know if you know him, Polster he wrote this really nice piece a few months ago where he talked about masculinity, vertigo in which he says basically what's happening to young men is that I call it pinball but same idea which is on Monday what you're being told is the problem is that you're not masculine enough You need to work out more, eat more protein, looks max, be more dominant, etc.

34:11You need to man up and be more masculine. The next day, what you're being told is you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad and go to therapy more and find your feminine side. And then on Wednesday, you're back to the... So it's just become this very contested and kind of difficult thing right now in a way that just wasn't before. And into that, you'll get Lux Maxing or you'll get whatever body dysmorphia. Whatever moral panic people want to put into it, they will. But behind it, what I actually see is just a bunch of men, especially young men, honestly just trying to figure this out and to be good people.

34:50And to be good dads and good friends and have a good life. And to matter. And definitely to matter. They want to be wanted. They want to belong. Well, everybody, I mean, not being needed is fatal to the human condition. But what was that line? You know, I went and searched it. I went and searched for the original source of that line that you gave me two episodes ago, maybe even our first ever episode.

35:14The modern family is a myth that makes men tolerably useful. At least one that at least makes men tolerably useful. Jeffrey Dench. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's actually a good opportunity to say that masculinity, manhood, whatever your words want to look, is always more socially constructed. It's a cultural construct. Same with fatherhood, right? Margaret Mead talked about the invention of fatherhood. Fatherhood is a social invention. And it is just true that the roles, the structures, the scaffolding, the norms, the messages from society, we have to make men, basically. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard.

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37:06This is what I fought Louis about. He pushed back against the idea that women are born with value, men need to create it. And well, what value are men born with? Women have this unbelievable capacity to make the next generation. What do men have? What are they born with? Not in the same way. And look around the animal kingdom and every man needs to, every male needs to construct himself into something useful in order to matter and be a part of the, And is that a bad thing? Is that part of the drive for men to sort of push for mastery and conquer and progress and improvement? I think that's something that you have the choice between men that are driven or men that are useless.

37:50I'd much prefer the driven men. obviously that can overshoot and turn into very squirrely outcomes where they become tyrants or scammers or whatever because that's the same drive just turned up in the wrong direction they can be lotharios and they can play play the field in a way that really hurts people but yeah I um it's quite sure driven by what isn't it so that word driven is really sitting with me interestingly because as if I you're driven is what you actually feel is like you belong you're connected you're needed, you have a role, you have a purpose. And so, sure, if that's what we're talking about.

38:24And that has to be constructed a lot more. I mean, I think Mead's right. And you've had animation on talking about the birth of fatherhood, how we invented fatherhood to survive as a species, right? Because baby's heads got too big and women were either, they had the choice between being snapped in half or having a husband that would care. Right. That's basically right. That's a good summary of the work. And so it's just true. And I just think it's incredibly naive for anybody to just assume that we can just get to some androgynous future and that we don't have to keep doing the hard work of making sure that there is a cultural message to men like we need you we need you to do this we need you to not do that sure but this is why our tribe the tribe still needs you there's this um there are these cave paintings from um they're in northern israel and they're they're famous because they're some of the oldest or if not the oldest cave paintings that have ever been found and the famous ones are the ones where there's kind of very violent and they're stabbing and spearing and stuff like that.

39:19But the most haunting one is actually of a group, clearly the tribe, and then another figure who's moving away from them. And the interpretation of that is an ostracism. Yeah, I've heard about this. This person is being expelled by the tribe. And actually, yeah, because the tribe's saying, we don't want you anymore. We're spitting you out. We don't need you. And in fact, you're worse. So now we'd probably incarcerate. But to ostracize someone, there was social death and then very often kind of physical death too. So this is not a new thought about how do we kind of make sure that the tribe needs you.

39:52That's true. But when you en masse ostracize an entire sex, all of them feel like they're being pushed out of the tribe. If you do that, yeah. And so the message I think too many young men have got is that we got it from here, boys, right? Thanks for the last X thousand years. Don't need you anymore. We got it from here. Or get on board the Futurist Female train, right? That is a fatally flawed message. And I actually don't think if you get away from the culture war, it is not what the overwhelming majority people think. Most people think moms and dads are a bit different and that's cool. Most people think men and women bring some complementary skills.

40:31That's the whole argument for DEI. Is that you want a mix of skills. You want a mix of backgrounds. And so most people get that. If you get away from the culture war, most people believe all this stuff. I think that most people believe to one degree or another that different groups are different. But when you start to create a value stack based on who is more or less worthy around that, it's no longer we bring complementary or different skills to the table and therefore everybody should have a seat. It is you and your particular skill set are surplus requirements or actively negative or tyrannical in some sort of a way.

41:10therefore you should change that seems to be the message that's right and then then no surprise that then people will lean into the identity right if you if you really want someone to lean hard into an identity all you have to do is threaten it and that and that will be the result and i think we've seen some of that but of course i don't think that the answer is to go back to a more kind of reactionary kind of conservative view about the role of men and women or to introduce some kind of gender, bring back gender inequality in order to resupply men with their purpose. That's not the answer either.

41:44And it's also not what most people want. I mean, we're about to publish some work showing that we've just seen the biggest increase in the amount of hands-on fathering that we've seen for probably half a century. So American dads are just doing more. Wasn't it that millennial fathers spend as much time with their kids as silent generation or baby boomer mothers? That's exactly right. The amount of direct child care gets complicated because it's secondary and primary child care. But the amount of primary child care being done by dads now is as high as was being done by mums in 1985. And of course mums are doing even more.

42:21The deadbeat dad thing. Yeah. I mean, this is a bit of a rant coming now because I think the whole deficit framing around fatherhood and dads, either deadbeat or doofus, is really upsetting me. And I think partly as a dad. And one of the things that upsets me in here, I'm going to really take aim at some folks on the left, is this idea I just exposed to again recently, that if you look at full-time mothers and full-time fathers, so working full-time in the labor market, that mums are doing 25 to 30 percent more of the housework and child care right that's the fact that's out there's a book by eve rodsky and fair called fair play this is the second shift and then there's the idea of the second shift yeah women working the double shift etc and i just saw again a women's group just kind of put out same thing like and the stat this is a good example of a category of statistics that feel true go with your intuition but on close examination collapse but they're not actually false so it is true that men and women living together with kids both working quotes full time she's doing more of the house work and the childcare than he is but what they've done is defined full time as 35 hours or more he is doing more hours so full time working dads are doing more hours than full time working mums and if you add it all up it's about 60 hours a week each.

43:50It is, to quote Suzanne Bianchi from a paper like 20 years ago, she describes the contributions of mothers and fathers in those households as quote amazingly similar. And that remains true to this day. So dads are doing about eight hours more paid work a week and mums are doing about eight hours more unpaid work a week and they're doing exactly the same amount of work. They are putting in the same work week. But this idea somehow that like dads aren't doing their, They're not pulling their share. They're not doing it. It's just untrue. And every time I see that, it infuriates me as a dad and on behalf of dads.

44:26And also because it's just a colossally terrible social science. And it's going to be blown up within three minutes by anybody that wants to destroy it. And so it's actually not even in the interest of the women's groups to put out this bad social science. Because it'll get destroyed. I understand what you mean. But the problem is the more simple headline always wins. In our current age, this is an iron law. The simplest headline always wins. I don't think that's true anymore. Because we'll come here and talk about it, and your audience is going to listen to it, and they might not have read that headline.

45:01And so I actually think you're being modest. Maybe. Okay, but I mean, I'm one guy tossing a fucking droplet of water into it. No, but people want to know the truth. And people are actually a little bit sick. of this thing going now of course some people just want a stat that goes with their priors and that they can say over dinner and say did you know that women do more 30 percent more of the house work even even when they both work full-time yeah right good that but but then i say and then i come on so yeah but if you look at the whole thing they're actually doing doing the same amount it's a kind of i actually think enough people listening to you and to others i know i want to give you some credit here chris i think that one of the reasons you're successful is because you are curious and you do have good faith discussions about these issues right so and you will change your mind about things and i actually think the hunger especially among young people for that is huge and i think it's one of the reasons why a lot of podcasters are actually have a lot more credibility than you think and i actually really like one thing i like listening to you uh it's this moment and we may have had this moment ourselves when we first spoke but i love his moment i've heard this a few times recently where you get this expert comes on right on whatever it is like something and they get and they don't know who you are right they're an academic and they've been told by their pr company this is great he has a huge platform maybe they haven't done the time right um and you've had it with my friend melissa carney you've had it with other people where they get about 10 minutes into the interview and you're quoting these papers at them or you're saying, yeah, I had them on or whatever.

46:37And they go, what? And actually one of them, I think actually said out loud, she said, God, you really know about this, right? I should have prepared better. Yes, you can see this kind of shot because they look at you, they look at the vibe, they look at the thing and they kind of go into it and I go, wait, what? Wait, what? I think it's a credit to you. And I think it does make you somewhat different to many other people in the so-called manosphere because I do think that even when I disagree with you or disagree with some folks you've had on, And I think there is an attention there to trying to get this right.

47:09The only thing I'd say on the household thing, and this is actually something I wanted to bring up to you because it's bugged me a couple of times in some of the conversations you've had. So I think it's just us, right? So that's a spoonful of sugar to get the medicine down. Yeah, the trouble is that a shit sandwich doesn't work anymore because everyone knows what's coming, right? Although some young people are saying, no, no, still give me the nice thing. I know there's something bad coming, but I still want the nice thing first. I know it worked. I will take a, the only child in me will take a shameless compliment.

47:35I mean, it helps, right? But, and I don't know how you think about this, but I've also noticed, like, just on my rant about, like, the anti-dad rhetoric of the left. But I've also kind of noticed just in a lot of these conversations, there's this kind of implied return to a world where the dad is the head of the household, where we're going to reassert this idea of kind of gender inequality within the household. And I wish I could remember who it was, but you had somebody on. Arthur Brooks. CEO, COO. Yes. Someone said that the mom, she's got a hugely important role. I'm not saying the mom is like the COO of the household.

48:15Right. And somebody else will say, men need to lead their families. But the COO one really stuck with me. Because, okay, so she's COO. Who's the dad again? He's CEO. Okay, so what you've just done there is you said, we're going to go back in a way to a world where there was this implied gender inequality within the household. Do you think that there's an inequality between CEO and COO when it comes to the household? I think there's an inequality. If you're going to use that as an analogy, rake the ceo is the boss of the company right and the coo reports to the ceo interesting i think so look i think it was arthur brooks have you got any more do you have you got any more to say on that on why you had an issue with it um that framing just because that framing but i i'm hearing it elsewhere generally more on the sort of conservative side of this argument and it's here's what i don't like it's very rarely stated explicitly the explicit version of it would be we need to get back to stable families and families where men feel a sense of purpose.

49:12And so we need to go back to families where he is the head of the household. He is the ultimate decision maker. He is the leader of the family, whatever language you want to use. And therefore, women are going to have to kind of recognize that they are in the end - Subordinate. Yes. What do you think about the feminization of society? Has there been a feminization of society? Helen Andrews thought so. yes i know but um well it's interesting i mean helena andrews have you had her on by the way no she didn't she i can't get her on i don't know what she thinks of me or the show but we can't get her on yeah i mean i didn't it was one of those things where i tried to ignore it because it was a culture war thing right um everyone's talking about this great feminization piece that she wrote in the end i just did something on my own sub stack about it um where uh i don't see the fields she talks about law etc they've only just approached 50 50 right uh for one thing and so i just don't see the evidence empirically that that's driving any of the changes in those fields what upset me most about it was there are some fields that are being quite strongly feminized mental health care psychology social work and k-12 education yeah there was no mention of that and so actually i'm very worried about the real feminization problem which is a lot of these occupations are skewing more and more female over time that has implications for the people in those professions, the kids being served or the patients.

50:35But also for men, as we record this, the last jobs report showed that three times as many women had gone into the labor force as men. Now, it was just one month. We'd be careful about that. And the reason was healthcare jobs. And so, again, one of my differences with some of the folks on the right, political right, is that I'm saying, look, the jobs are going to be coming from areas like healthcare, etc. And so, we have got to get more men into them. Especially with AI. Yeah. And they're like, no, no, those aren't jobs for men. We need to get men into men's jobs. into factories and mines and stuff like that.

51:04I'm like, okay, good luck with completely reordering the economy again to make that happen. But in the meantime, I see where the jobs are actually coming from. And so I think that's a real problem. I think that the idea that the legal profession has somehow become less good because women are in it, I just don't think it's done. The legal profession is not going to be around for that much longer and certainly not in its kind of situation. Well, AI is better than men and women. So gender becomes irrelevant. Funny. What do you think about the feminism movement at the moment? I spend all of my time thinking about this through the lens of what's happening to boys and men.

51:39So even feminism for me is a reflection of how is it going to impact the thing that I care about most. Not that I don't care about women, but again, I've got my priorities. What's the current status of the feminism movement? How do you think of it when you come to think about its factions? It's very hard for me to answer that because I see it through the lens that I approach it. And I am at quite a lot of meetings and conferences, stuff now, which would be described as feminist meetings. And I would say that slowly but surely, the women's movement or feminist movement is coming to realize that demonizing or dismissing men is not a good strategy.

52:18It's happening patchily and slowly but surely, but it is happening. I'm seeing a lot of leaders in those spaces saying, okay, we have got to do better about the boys and the men. Now, you might say, well, they're only doing it for tactical reasons or political reasons. And they will very often say, because it's good for women. And so I have this interesting disagreement with them, and I'm very open about this. They say, we should care about boys and men because we care about women. And I'm saying, we should care about boys and men. I just end the sentence earlier than you. In the same way that we don't say we should care about women because it's good for the economy or good for men.

52:51I think we should care about boys and men more generally. I've had to do that too. I had this piece about zero-sum empathy, and I tried to legitimize the reason. There was a lot of things, and it wasn't just this. But I remember I sort of tossed this coin into the pool that I knew would be effective, which was if you don't care about boys and men falling behind and also whine about there being no good men to date, that is the equivalent of sort of mating logic seppuku, that you are creating the precise dearth of eligible partners that you say that you and your daughters and your friends and your sisters are looking for.

53:30Like if you're not prepared to help boys and men, you can't go, where are all the good men at? Because that's precisely what is causing the lack of eligible partners that you're talking about. But I didn't want to have to couch good men are good in as much as they can be of service to you as a woman. It's just We should care about the falling behind of any group. We should care about human flourishing, right? And if there's a group in society that aren't doing well, then we should care about them. I just think that's just, for me, that's just a straightforward moral proposition. Now, I'm also, you know, obviously different groups of different agendas, right?

54:06And so if you care about this group or that issue because it affects that other issue, I'm fine with that. So when people kind of say, like, Melinda French Gates has supported me and Gary Barker because it's part of a gender equality thing, right? And she's very clear. She says, it's not good for women and girls if boys and men are struggling, right? Now, you might say, okay. So this is where the kind of, again, the reactionaries will be like, oh, of course, she has to couch it as that. I'm like, guys, for the love of God, she is a global feminist. Like, what do you want? And she's supporting my work.

54:37She's supporting boys and men's work. No, no, no. They're the purists. they're the ones are saying no no she has to completely come over to our side i'm like guys take a win right of course as a feminist she says she's going to couch it that way right that's okay um do you find yourself doing the same thing couching it that way no no i don't i do openly with with uh melinda and with others i was at a recuvic forum with the with um some leading women and i'm just like no i'm like my position and the position of the american institute for boys and men is very straightforward like we care about boys and men doing better and flourishing right We just care about that, period.

55:11Now, is that also good for the economy? Is it good for families? Is it good for women? Is it good for... Yes. Yes, of course. Yes. In the same way that the Women's Services Prevention Initiative, their tagline is, when women are healthy, communities thrive. I'm like, true. Also true that when men are healthy, communities thrive. But you don't have to condition it. And I honestly think there's a deeper point there, which is men in particular, I kind of see the conditioning coming. you see it like oh well if there's something bad happens like men men do bad thing a oh now we should care about boys and men and they see that conditionality they see oh you only care about me if x if i do something bad or something bad happens and what they actually need to hear is no dude we just care about you yeah what do you make of the current state of mating and dating well as a 56 year old man who's been married for my almost my entire adult life my your expert subject.

56:07Fortunately, I have three sons in their 20s at various stages. That helps. And a bunch of younger friends. I mean, it comes back to bits, this politicization point, which is, I worry that the message that young women are getting from the left is, life's really tough for women now. And it's the fault of all those men and the patriarchy. And the message that young men are getting from the right is life's pretty tough for young men right now and it's the fault of all those woke feminists and those women so they're being they're being encouraged respectively to blame each other for their real problems that is a colossal waste of political energy and not true it is also creating some difficulties i think around dating mating etc because we do see now that political polarization is affecting dating and mating i worry a lot and Dan Cox has written for us on this, who sees this decline in dating in high school and among kind of young adults.

57:06And that's a huge problem because that's where you develop the relational skills, the ability to endure and deliver rejection gracefully, et cetera. I worry a lot about that. But I also worry that, and maybe this is something we could talk about, that there's something about the marketplace make value Evo psych stuff I know you're very interested in. i've revised my paul eastwick has a book out called bonded by evolution do you know his stuff i had him on the show oh yeah we had a long debate right and i'm not going full eastwick on you here please don't but i do find that something here's a bit i do like about it like is that if we're serious about thinking about kind of ancestral mating patterns we do have to take seriously the fact that we didn't live in cities of 10 million people with a phone right that wasn't the marketplace we faced we were in smaller groups so maybe you've done this with him smaller groups and we kind of would know these people and they'd kind of come with us.

57:59And the whole idea of kind of mate value does shift a little bit over time. And so my middle ground here is that it's clearly insane not to suggest that there isn't something, you know, quasi market or mate value thing going on. But there's also something quite interesting about this idea that kind of knowing somebody or someone being known by the people among you that are coming socially sanctioned, like someone you meet through the workplace, friend of a friend, et cetera, that that's very powerful. as opposed to someone you just algorithmically got attached to on an app on the other side of New York.

58:31That's not how we evolved. I agree. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95 % of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentus built Fiber Plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential.

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59:42That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. out it's a very sexy argument and the argument is mate value he thinks mate value simply doesn't exist that there are no there is no way that beyond the first look anybody is more or less preferable than somebody else that revealed bonded preferences over time end up flattening the mating dynamic down that tens could get with threes and that threes could get with that wasn't how i read him i i didn't read him that way uh i think that's an exaggeration but maybe maybe i'm wrong about that. I think it just gets flatter, not that it flattens completely.

1:00:22He said there is no such thing after a couple of meetings, there is literally no such thing as mate value. There is no such thing as a disparity. Well, he's more of the expert on his work than I am, but I read it as like mate value is a more complicated idea. I would agree with that. I would agree with mate value is a more complicated idea. What makes me sort of bristle a little bit. What makes me concerned is if you've got this world that basically flattens, it makes egalitarian the mating market is one way that you could read it. Right. No one's hot. Yeah. No one's hot and no one's ugly. Yeah.

1:00:59What's the Kurt Vonnegut short story? Harry Bergeron. Someone can check this. Do you know this story no the minister the ministry for equality um uh levels everybody out right and so uh it's satire so it's like if you're a really good dancer you have to go wear weights around your feet if you're beautiful you have to get have plastic surgery to make you less so and if you're ugly a plastic so to make you more so the one it really like the the main character story is like if you're intelligent if you're high iq um that's right yeah harrison burgeon yeah um that if you're intelligent they put a thing in your ear that's just making a noise all the time to distract you yeah yeah and it's obviously like a kind of a flattening type thing so look i if the idea is like there is just no difference in how attractive someone is as a mate uh to anybody else i think that's not i think that's batshit crazy but i don't over time even with even with what you're saying what even with the revealed uh preferences the revealed um value that occurs as you get to know somebody a little bit better that um this is how beautiful elements of someone's personality and the way they hold themselves and their poison their patience and their regulation and all the rest of it sort of appear over time uh i think that denying the fact that there are more and less preferable mates, and this isn't just idiosyncratic, that if you were to take a big, broad survey, that many people would rank as more preferable, even if you knew them for four years, and other people would rank less preferable, even if you know them for four years.

1:02:40Yeah, my understanding of it, and again, we're talking about his work now, but it was that over time, you learn more about someone, and so more of the different elements of mate value come to the fore, right? So if I just, if you just see me, you don't, you don't hear me speak, right? You just see me, maybe I'm mewing. So I look great. Right. Like, ah, right. Or, but then, or I don't, I look, I don't look great, but then we talk for a while and let's say I'm kind or funny, or let's say I'm an asshole, right? That's going to change very significantly, right? And then you see me doing something hard for somebody else, right?

1:03:13You see me taking care of my mom. You see me, you see me working hard, right? All these things are adding up, right? field over time. That was the best bit of what Paul said. I really thought it was a nice twist on the very shallow, sort of typical understood, and this is the internet interpretation of mate value, right? And what's interesting about this is it's almost exclusively for short-term mating. Almost everything, all of the mating advice is for short-term mating as well. It's not like, so actually I got into this argument with Shadi Hamid for a piece of the post where he said, are you telling me to settle?

1:03:48Because I said, we're talking about marriage. And I think the problem with the marketplace idea is that it sort of suggests that it's over once you've made it. But of course, that's just the beginning. And the story you tell about your relationship and the way that the relationship evolves over time within that story you're telling and the way you treat each other as you become different people over the decades, That's the job. And so the other problem with the marketplace is it doesn't capture this. It's about maximizing and you match and so on. And then you cash out. Yeah, it's like, and you've made a great match.

1:04:23And that's the solution. No, no, no. And I said this to Shadi and said to others too. He said, sure, you obviously, if you're lucky, you'll fall head over heels in love and it will just be obvious. You'll find somebody. But it is much less about the wife you choose than it is about the husband you become. And that's 50 years. Yeah, I think you're right. The Evo script, as Paul said, it's definitely a buck of the moment because evolutionary psychology is second only to behavioral genetics as the unspeakable topic. But it's very predictive. And I have a particular… I have a little bit of bias here because I'm in the city of David Buss and William Costello, and they're about as well-meaning of a scientist as you're going to get.

1:05:08They're not curating their data. They're not trying to push some ideological bent as far as I can see. And they change their minds about stuff too. I've seen David do that all the time. He's moved back and forth between a bunch of different theories, the cornerstones of what it was that he was pushing for a while. That's right. But there was another element in that. So there was the, mate value doesn't exist. There was a denial of sex differences, really, in preferences between men and women that they simply are not there. Yeah, that I did not agree with. Yeah, which I don't. And I'm like, okay, I'm starting to construct a little bit of a corkboard Sherlock Holmes style thing here.

1:05:45Anyway, okay. So, mating and dating, some problems. Some people have argued that women entering the workforce has caused fertility rates to drop. Yes. What's your perspective there? Didn't you have someone? say that i feel like i've heard someone say that on your danny solikowski yeah definitely pushing back against a lot of what women are doing at the moment i think she implied i don't know whether she's yeah i think she did i think and i've definitely heard other people say it which is this idea and again this is this is a great example of this category of claim that feels intuitive fits with your priors and is wrong uh and so you just gotta those are the ones i always So if someone brings a claim to me and I'm like, yeah, that feels true.

1:06:29And as it happens, I was thinking that myself. That's when I always like triple check it because it worries me. And there is this claim that the fertility decline is being caused by the entry of women into the workforce. Again, it sounds perfectly plausible, right? Like women are too busy earning to be sprogging, right? Can't do two things at once, et cetera. But you look at the data and you look at from the period from 1975 to 2005, the labor force participation rate of women went up by 20 percentage points. Absolutely massive. That was a huge period of growth. And over the same time period, the total fertility rate went from 1.8 to 2.1.

1:07:15Something like that. This is me and Claude figuring this out. So hands above the table. Haven't done a peer-reviewed academic article. And then the women's labor force participation leveled out. It's basically been pretty flat since. And then it just had a little bit of a spike. Leveled out since when? Since about 2007, 2005, 2007. I mean, it's just drifting up. So it went, and then like that, right? unlike in other countries actually where it continued to go up and that's when the fertility rate really went down in the US and so it just it seems to me there's got to be something else going on here and the fertility rate conversation I know you're very interested in this you just had Steven on again right um the fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought right and And so Jennifer Shuber, who I know, it's a TED Talk.

1:08:07She's got a book, co-authored a book, Toxic Demography. And her basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality. Korea, Japan, et cetera, right? Gender equity, right? And that might be true. There's some evidence against it, but there's some evidence for it. And then conservatives will say the thing that's causing the fertility rate is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. right okay again you can see the argument there's evidence for it and i've just given some evidence against it and truth like no one knows um and so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet and we should have a lot of humility by the way about projecting population trends forward if we have not learned anything is don't take a straight line and project it forward we don't know what's going to happen right um and so be careful i would say i'm thinking about the population bomb thing right yeah of course but the population the population bust seems more reliable to be able to predict going forward but it seemed like that about the population bomb which is like wait more people are going to have more people which means more people true yeah maybe maybe you might be right fewer people having fewer people means fewer people i mean i'm obviously simplifying it horribly but like pretty accurate i just don't don't so now there is a thing like mechanically so i i'm i'm but i will just come out and say look i don't think a rapidly declining population is a good thing right for some radical right i just i just don't um but it's very interesting because people when you actually try and push people on why they why they think it's a bad thing you get into all kinds of discussions and i think people are bringing lots of prize and lots of they are i think jennifer's right about this there's a lot of morality being brought into this people bring a lot of ethics so a lot of very pro-life people I think if they're honest, are saying, we don't like there to be less life because we like life and we want more of it.

1:10:04More life is good. Less life is bad. That's a perfectly legitimate religious and ethical position. And it could be for institutional reasons. It could be for fiscal reasons. It could be because it's, or it could be for me, it's more symptomatic. The reason I worry about it more is like, I think if you got to a point where you're significantly below replacement rate and your society is rapidly declining in size, that should be seen as a big flashing signal that all is not well, somehow or other. Now, what's not well, we don't know yet. Okay. Some things that I've thought of to do with this. It seems to me that births are just downstream from coupling for a large part.

1:10:43If you look at the number of couples who are together that are together for a while and get married. Well, yeah. Lots are going to depend on how you define coupling in this example, but yeah. Marriage, married couples. Well, no, because one of the reasons the fertility rate's gone down is a decline in teen pregnancy, and most of them were not coupled. It was an accidental pregnancy. Okay, that's interesting. At least from, I was speaking to Stephen, I actually asked him after we went for dinner last night, I asked him what his thoughts were, and he agrees with you, that his whole thing is this vitality curve, which was the most recent episode that I did with him.

1:11:13And that's kind of - It's kind of a measure of the society's forward-lookingness and vitality and energy. No. So the vitality curve is basically when are people looking to start families? And if you have a graph that's like this, and it's the age across the bottom, and if it goes from 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, if it does that, if you're looking to go to the dance with someone, and you're looking for another dance partner, it's really easy if everybody is dancing at the same time. But if you're 21 looking for a dance partner, and the curve is now flatter and longer and shifted right.

1:11:48Half the people think the dance is five, 10 years from now. Exactly. Exactly. This is his point. And also, if you shift it later, there are just some raw physics of the system that come in to sort of squish down what you're able to do. If you are cycling through partners, if there's a more permissive culture of casual sex, of moving on, so on and so forth, more options, which means that you don't need to quite invest so much. But his point around the labor force entry for women thing, the dips that you see, 1970, and then 2007, 2008. What's interesting there is because you now need a two-parent income in order to drive the household, people are much more sensitive to economic indicators.

1:12:30And that means that if you have a term, that's why he thinks in 2007, 2008, 2007, 2008, global financial crisis saw sudden accelerations in the delaying of first births like a ratchet. And as we discussed in our last podcast, once first births move later, the whole starting a family system shifts for everyone. As the vitality curve shows, delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. And that goes in line with what you said. There's fewer teen pregnancies. Right. If you shift this all rightward, this begins to skew. But his position is that it's a ratchet, that it never snaps back because you need to lose a lot of the things that people want.

1:13:12You need to sequester your independence. You need to do things that makes you feel like you're falling behind. One of the points that my friend who I spoke to, I told you the story about her friend saying she wished that she was with her when she had more going on. She made this point, I wish I'd had a kid during COVID because it wouldn't have felt like I was missing out on anything. rest of the world's moving forward. And I think that that's a one-person microcosm of why is it a ratchet? Why does the average age of first motherhood move only to the right and never to the left? Well, because it feels like you're missing out.

1:13:46All of your friends are continuing to do things in the real world and you're not. And he's got this line here, vitality curve shows delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. In that sense, childlessness is largely a timing problem. And so even if women no longer worked, hypothetically, of course. My thesis from data modeling is that birth rates would not fundamentally change unless family formation also happened sooner, which arguably it could. This is cross-cultural. Economic uncertainty pushes parenthood later across nations, religions, and political systems.

1:14:16It all comes back to timing. P.S. Historically, the U.S. managed this better than most countries. Women could work and start families at the same time, although that balance has clearly started to break down since the 2007-2008 crisis. well that would be consistent with what we're saying earlier about the need to kind of just economically for boys and for men to do better so that they can actually we know that particularly in low income areas where men are doing better the marriage rate is higher and so i think it's one one thing i do worry about is the the bar that you have to clear now before embarking on kind of parenthood is just wildly higher than it used to be right if you've got to have your It feels like it's while we're married.

1:14:55Yeah, and it's just, I really, really don't, I really want to stand against that idea. People set the bar so high. How much parenting, how much you've got to bought your house, you've got to have a career. The number of boxes you're supposed to tick now is terrifying to me. This was the discussion that we had last night, which it doesn't matter where people are. It's where people feel they are compared to where their parents were and where they feel like other people were. It is all through the interpretation. this is this is like i can't think of a way to emphasize how much this is the fucking driver of so much that how much money do i think i need to have how much do i think i need to be earning how big do i think my house needs to be how secure do i think my life needs to be before i can do this thing and where do i think my parents were at my stage and where do i think their lifestyle was like and what do i think that everybody else is doing with their life and how easy do I think that they have it?

1:15:50Because all of this is being filtered through what we feel like we should have and what we feel like our level of exposure to risk is. And it's not necessarily objective. And that, yeah, and it goes against people. And then people come along and say, but that's not true. And here's my chart and here's my data. And like, and you try and argue people out of a feeling, which you can't do. But that feeling of, what did you say? economic precariousness or whatever um it's a challenge but it maybe maybe i'm going to change my mind about something here because i one of the things we do know about men is that becoming a father actually does significantly change their behavior in the world right and not least economically towards themselves etc right and we now know that changes their darby saxby has this book coming out dad brain and how can your brain changes as well um and we obviously know the stuff about testosterone, et cetera.

1:16:43Risk-taking. Right. Yeah. And so I just, I feel like we actually used to use marriage and fatherhood as a way to kind of help men grow up. And yeah, exactly. I just really hate that word to say we have to domesticate men because it sort of feels - Keeping them feral is good. Yeah. Also just like, it's because the alternative is feral, right? I mean, it's like we have to, and also it tends to put the burden on women. It's like, we basically say to women, would you mind domesticating the men for us? And I'm like, no, I'm not. There's a man child over here. marry him and make him a normal person.

1:17:12I mean, like the women want, the men wants their house trained, right? They don't think it's their job to house train the man anymore, right? And I find that a difficult position to argue against. But the problem is that if that takes, you know, what's going to happen to the men in the meantime? Are the men getting themselves ready? Are they getting their competence skills ready? Yes. If so, yes, maybe. But I worry that continued delay misses out for this moment, this kind of, and I'm a dad, and there is just this imperceptible feeling of this kind of cog inside you just going click, and you become a different kind of creature.

1:17:51You do. I mean, it's very hard. In fact, some philosopher whose name I've forgotten now, she had this great analogy. It was like, trying to explain to someone who doesn't have kids what it's like to have kids is like trying to explain to someone that's not a vampire what it's like to be a vampire right so i'm the vampire i'm like yeah well i you know i like to go out at night i like to suck blood you know i hang upside down etc and you're like a human you're like right and she uses that as an analogy between the chasm of the different kind of creature you become and it's like you suddenly it's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives, there is a life, or lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything.

1:18:39You would give your life for them. It's very pro-social. Yes, you would throw. And so it changes men in this massively kind of positive way. This is why fatherhood, fatherhood is, one of my colleagues put this to me the other way, fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. I'm not saying there aren't still some that are predominantly male. But like actually fatherhood, like that is always going to be a male institution. And it is so in a way that isn't just like a fact. It's actually a thing. It's an institution that changes us.

1:19:11It transforms us from the inside out. And so if that's not happening to enough men and you do see this rise in childlessness, I mean, for all the discussion about incels, it's the kind of what would be the equivalent of like not having a kid and involuntary dad, you know, in dads, but yeah, that's a much more troubling trend because without that pro-social structure and script and implication for men, that's a huge problem. So maybe, maybe make it going later is bad, but I also think the way free societies work as opposed to communist China, where they just said, wait, there's going to be too many children.

1:19:50You're only allowed one. Or even happened in Singapore. I just learned recently that like your third government would pay for the births of the first two kids, but you're on your own after that. So you'd have to pay for the medical costs of your third child, right? Because they read Erlich's book and they just freaked out. So you saw it. In a free society, what happens is we learn only from our own mistakes, but from other people's mistakes. And so if we're starting to see more and more women say, or men start saying, you know what? I kind of regret not doing that earlier. I kind of wish I'd done that, et cetera.

1:20:19Then that learning will get passed on. Do you hear many women saying that? Is that a popular topic that's being pushed much at the moment? There I will have to plead ignorance. But I'm just saying as a general point, cultures learn if they're free. And so if it's not working out for people, people will see that it's not working out for people and they'll do it differently. Yeah. I think - That's how progress happens. I would love that to be the case. I would really love for there to be at least parity between the different types of life paths that people can take. And at the moment, it doesn't feel that way.

1:20:51If you look in the media, if you look in popular culture, if you look in music, you know there's a really fascinating song by kelsey ballerini and it's called i sit in parks and what she talks about is she was in a long-term relationship she was 30 her partner was 37 and he was ready to have kids she said she wanted to freeze her eggs and that was a gift to her and him on her 30th birthday because she wanted to go and chase her music she wanted to go and play music and do this to her and he said i'm ready to have kids now if we're not ready to have kids now i'm going to move on. She said, I'm not.

1:21:23He moved on. And then this song and the album, the EP got released two or three years later. And it's a story about her sitting in the park and watching this family, this mother and father, and she sits on the bench and she rips her vape. And she says, Rolling Stone is telling me that I'm doing all the right things. But I wonder if I've left it too late to be a mother. I chose to do the damn tour instead of going back. So I take my Lexa Pro and I make my next song and she's watching this family sort of have a wonderful Saturday morning to themselves and wondering whether or not she's made the wrong decision.

1:22:00That was so fucking shocking. And she's a country artist anyway. But that was so fucking shocking. And the comments are filled with women who agree, but that is not. I'm saying, what's the equivalent song from The Parents? Who obviously like everyone's glamorized there, right? The Parents song is like, God, I wish I could have gotten up late like her and had time to make myself up and have a dress and be free. Maybe the mom is looking at her thinking, why did I have kids with this guy when I could be like her on a swing in a gray dress? The grass is always greener when you've got optionality. And also, she probably got a good night's sleep last night.

1:22:35I remember when our kids were really young, we lived on this flat in Belsize Park in London. And I did the early shift like a lot of dads did. I remember like, my wife would be sleeping and I'd be there with the kids, but I had two under three at one point. And I would wait, dawn would break, I'd be tired, wait for a couple. And then this gay couple, these gay guys lived opposite us, right? The other side of the street, you can't find these gay couples, right? I thought I watched, they would get up, they had lovely bathrobes, they'd make a great coffee machine. Hang on, you were watching two gay guys through the window.

1:23:11Listen, it's like a long night, okay? And I'm just like watching them and they had this kind of terrace. And the point is like, I know, I know, just I say they'd get up late, they'd have nice coffee, they'd read the paper on the thing. They didn't have kids crawling on the mechanic. So, yeah, the grass is always greener. But here's, I actually think, I think you're making my point. You're making my point for me, which is there you have this incredibly breakout country artist, right, with this strong message, which is maybe I waited too long. Like maybe this wasn't, maybe this wasn't the right thing for me to do.

1:23:41It's a story of regret, right? Song of regret. That is going to be listened to, as you said, by millions and millions and millions of women. That's how cultures change, is that we get stuff a bit wrong and we try it and we try this and that didn't work. We do this and we all learn from each other's media and we adapt as a culture. As an eternal pessimist, I really hope that that's the case. You're right. It's too early not to assume it won't be. That's all I ask. Cool. I mean, the reason that it seems surprising to me is it's so rebellious. Like that is a much more rebellious song to put out than sleep with him and not catch feels.

1:24:17I don't think that's true anymore. I actually suspect that song is going to do pretty well. Oh, it is. But that is more rebellious. She's obviously famous anyway. That's not the main culture at the moment. I don't get the sense. And look, I'm also the main culture. If she's not the main culture, right? She's a huge star. She's one country artist with a two million played song. I think I really worry that you like see the main culture as like the New York Times, right? which is like a peripheral counterculture at this point. I shouldn't say that because I'm occasionally right for them. You need them at some point.

1:24:46I guess that road's closed now. They do not, or even like CNN. Actually, the mainstream culture, it's her, it's you. Country music is top now, number one. There's this really interesting thing going on now where I just think the young people in particular, they're trying to figure out how to take the best of what came before but not be landed with the worst of it and part of that is to rethink this whole kind of gender relationship thing and they're doing that and it's hard it is complex which is and they're not going back there as i said like dads are doing more um but i think she's the one also right like he opens the door and like it's very courteous and stuff like that just really land so i i hope you won't mind me saying my youngest son went to the university of tennessee and um like he always opens the car door and close the car door for his girlfriend or who he's kind of with.

1:25:34And his friends are up from the Northeast. I'm like, oh God, I have to start doing that now because they went to liberal colleges where that's like the non-feminist thing to do. But by and large, even the kind of liberal women don't hate it. And so I think that actually the mainstream culture is kind of moving on this thing. I hope so. That would be great. And we have to make them feel that we've got their backs. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier.

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1:27:16What happened with this debate between Scott Galloway and Derek Thompson? Did you see it? I didn't know that this happened. Oh, you didn't see it? Okay. Well, partly because I know them both, and Scott's on our advisory board, as I mentioned. And so Derek Thompson came back from paternity leave and it was actually the first thing he did was go on Scott Galloway's podcast. And he said, it's not just like the first day back, it's the first hour back. And he'd been, I think, on paternity leave for a couple of months. And that just triggered this debate where Scott said, you're just back from paternity leave.

1:27:47How are you doing? I'm finding my way back. I won't be as coherent as usual. Of course, Derek was incredibly coherent. And Scott just said, well, honestly, i don't understand this whole paternity leave thing or even why men should go to the births i don't think men should be at the births it's disgusting uh the men should be outside smoking cigarettes like the old days and then they should go back to work um i just think it's ridiculous basically and derek was like uh well actually men do need to take time time off to kind of be with their kids because otherwise like women are the only ones doing it and you'll have gender inequality in the workplace right well i found interesting about that i haven't like said anything about it's publicly yeah but i think you're both wrong i think that scott was wrong in suggesting that men and dads are of no use in the kind of early months they are of a different use to mums for sure but they are very often the main allo parent now right they're very often the kind of one that's around and they very often are the one that's like getting stuff done they're like do you have you heard of the owl monkeys or like the best dads in the in the natural world apparently no owl monkeys where the dads are kind of around all the time.

1:28:55And basically, moms are doing the breastfeeding and nurturing. Dad's doing everything else, right? Dad is getting shit done, right? He's getting the food. He's getting organized. He's around them, but he's still around them, right? That's kind of how it is, I think. That was certainly my experience, right? So you're not going to, you can't do what mom's doing at that point. And you also don't feel the same way that mom does about the baby. You just can't, right? Just can't. You're not wired to at that point. So you're still useful. So Scott was wrong about that. but I didn't like the way Derek framed this as like men should take time off so that women aren't the only ones taking time off so that we can get close the gender pay gap he framed it as a gender equity issue right and I my view is dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off their kids not just when they're young etc not because they can do what mums do nor in support of gender equality but because dads are awesome and kids are awesome and kids do really well with their dads around them right so i don't i don't i don't want to be the deputy the kind of malfunctioning mom the kind of oh if only you could be a mom like no no dads are amazing and so i'm really pushing this idea that kind of fell between those two stools so like the old idea of like dads just go back to work smoke a cigar have a cigar i think he meant cigar actually but have a cigar whiskey back to work and derek singh is like no if you're a good gender egalitarian you've got to take time off.

1:30:15Even if you hate it and you suck at it, because that's the way to get gender equality. I'm like, guys, what about just saying dads are cool? And the way dads are with their kids is a bit different to moms on average, in many ways. Amazing. So I want, again, a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering. Should dads be in the birthing room? The evidence, and actually interesting, Darby Saxby, who I mentioned earlier, dad brain, She did write a response to this kind of thing, which people can find. And she kind of rightly pointed out that actually the evidence on how the unprecedented trial of dads being in the birthing room is going is really mixed.

1:30:56We don't know. And actually kind of sometimes in surveys afterwards, like mums have mixed feelings about it. If the birth doesn't go well, I think you talked to Anna Machen about this, it can be quite traumatizing for the dad. So I think, look, I might get in trouble for saying this now, but I think we have to be honest, the evidence is a little bit mixed. And I think it shouldn't be like, it shouldn't be shamed for doing it or shamed for not doing it. And mums, by the way, should also feel like if they feel that they'll be better off with their mum or their friend or kind of somebody else, they should feel okay saying that to their partner too for the actual birth.

1:31:29Neither are obliged to. Yeah, just sort of, because as Darby points out, we've never done this before. How long have men been in the birthing room? About 30, 40 years. No way. I shared this with my wife. I said, things blew up. She said, oh, Scott says that men shouldn't even be in the birthing room. She said, yeah, I probably wish you hadn't been. What? I said, what? It's like 25 years later. I said, what? I thought it was really useful. What about all of my words of encouragement? You're more harm than good. You did more harm than good. I mean, I'm now sort of litigating something personal. like we just go back to it but there are pros and cons but but i honestly think like it's not it wasn't i mean the real truth is it was a very hot day and i'd ordered a fan because i knew it was going to be hot but i didn't realize the fan wasn't made so i opened the box and she went into labor she's in labor she's in labor and i'm shouting from the other i go to the other room she's having contractions so we don't at home right and um and i said uh do you know where the Phillips screwdriver.

1:32:33She said, I don't need a Phillips screwdriver to have a baby. I'm like, no, but I need a Phillips screwdriver to make the fan. I'm not great at DIY anyway. So I said, do you know where it is? She's like, I'm in the other room. I'm trying, I'm under this huge pressure now. This is like, I'm trying to make it. And she's like, forget the fucking fan. Just like, I'm having the baby. I'm having the baby. Fan or no fan, the baby's coming. I'm nearly done. I'm nearly done. I'm on like step seven with the Phillips screw. So I didn't, I wasn't amazing from that point of view. So I think that the fan thing, it jaundiced her about my view, to be honest.

1:33:18And then, anyway, the other one, I'm all in now. The other one, I'd say, was in the birthing pool, right? Because I was very into that. In the birthing pool. And we'd been to one of these very, yeah, I think I can share this. It would be just very, very like progressive, like midwifey thing, right? About birthing a home. And if you have it in the pool, that's kind of great, which is good, by the way. I mean, I think the whole like over-medicalization of child birthing, like I'm really persuaded by that argument now, that actually doing it more naturally is really good. So I don't really misunderstood here.

1:33:52But in the pool, but she said, but guys, just can I just say something to you? She said, like, it's quite, it can get quite murky in there. Can't see it around, which is true. And she said, and so the only thing I'll say is if you get in the pool with your partner to support them, right, put something on, put some swimming trunks on. She said, because there have been occasions when I've seen something spherical and hairy in the water, and I've assumed that it's the baby's head crowning. And I've gone in to help it, and it wasn't the baby's head crowning. It was the dad's testicle. and so I grabbed him by the bollocks.

1:34:26And literally every guy in the room was like, I must buy a pair of speeder. So this is the other child, right? So this time she's having a baby. She's like, I want you to get in and rub my back and do it. So I'm, cool, I'm here for you, honey. And then I go into the other room and then I'm shouting out, where are my swimming trots? She's like, what are you talking about? So I need my swimmers. She's like, I don't know where they are. I can't find them. I'm slamming trots open. And the midwife is like, for God's sake, she's having the baby, get in the pool. I don't care. I don't care. I said, it's not about modesty.

1:34:55I said, the lady at the thing, the lady at the Lamaze class, she said, you've got to wear swimming trunks. I said, I'm not getting in there without swimming. So anyway, so my main advice. And then I guess the other one, the other trial is like, you get to cut the corn. And I was terrible at it. I couldn't cut it. I was hacking through it. I thought you'd have these massive shears, you know. It'd be like opening up a new fucking city hall. It's a tiny little pair of scissors, and you're trying to hack through it. It's really grisly. It took me ages. and in the end the nurse started crying, I'll do it.

1:35:23And to this day, my eldest son has got this really weird belly button and he blames me for it. So, all the fathers out there, key items, if you are going to be with a Phillips screwdriver or pre-make the fan or have a Phillips screwdriver, a really good pair of scissors, because the ones that give you a crap and swimming trunks, and then you'll be fine. Fuck me. Oh, God. Well, the idea of not being in the boat, I didn't know that it's only been... four decades. Yeah, I guess 70s. I don't know. I mean, that's really when it came in was like 70s and 80s. And it went from being like, it's a really interesting cultural change.

1:35:59I mean, if you look at, I didn't have the numbers to hand, but it really flipped very fast. And as I say, it's too soon probably to get this kind of strong evidence around it. And it was a great example of how, like the internet, I think Scott ended up kind of collapsing on him and kind of apologizing. But as I said, Darby Saxby was saying, actually, we don't really know yet about the dads in the birthing room thing because we've that is a completely unprecedented cultural and she came out in favor of it and said but you know dads are great putting them on so my kids like you put the you put the kid on your on your chest and one of them pooped all over me and but actually that skin to skin thing or building skinship to use a term that someone uses oh nice that's all true um and that's great uh but that got lost of course in the positions that people had to take on.

1:36:49Paternity leave seems a little bit more of an easy discussion to pass. Much easier now. And it's interesting, most states are doing something on it now. Basically, the Democrat states are passing some sort of paid leave policy for dads, and the Republican ones are having tax credits to encourage employers to offer paid leave. And so the idea that dads are parents too and bring something different, that's not really a controversial idea anymore and we have seen a massive increase i mean mentioned earlier in parenting by dads um and a massive increase in the uptake there are some states now where so the new parental leave policy is as likely to be taken by dads as by moms and so there's been this i find this very interesting like a way you get these culture wars right where either we're being overrun by woke feminists who like you know demonizing men and you know running everything into the ground or you get these kind of you know reactionary podcast you People are like erectionaries who are kind of taking us back to the Handmaid's Tale.

1:37:45And then you just go to the data and you say, huh, interesting. Dads are doing more parenting than before. It's not like a significant kind of increase. Labour force participation for women's actually hit its all-time high after the pandemic. I mean, it was up a little bit. Violent crime is way down. It's halved in the last new decades. The number of boys fighting at school also halved in the last few decades, etc., etc. And so away from the cliques, to use your language from earlier, and away from the culture war, what I see is by and large ordinary people, moms and dads, young people, boys and girls, trying to figure this out and figuring it out one way or the other.

1:38:31And it's bumpy and it's difficult and it's messy. But I think that the progress line is there. And I'm a little bit sick of the pessimism. I'm a little bit sick of the deficit frame. My hero, John Stuart Mill, once said, everybody who knows anything of the world is supposed to think ill of it. So that intellectual snobbery in favor of pessimism has always been there. And so I'm trying to recalibrate some of my own talking about this. Because there is a danger that you're like, we could talk about stuff we've talked about before, about wages and male suicide and real problems. But I just kind of worry that it becomes a bit of a almost cultural race to the bottom.

1:39:06it's like who can describe exactly how we're going to hell in the handcart in the most grave terms the fastest and then you'll get on podcasts then you'll get clicks then you'll get book deals and and the market for that it's not a new it's not a new problem actually think about the number of books that start with the end of right actually at one point i thought it might be the end of endings or something because i'm just sick of those as well like everything's the end of everything right rather than you know what we're figuring this out it's a bit difficult we should help each other out. We should have some supportive policies.

1:39:36We shouldn't demonize each other. We should definitely not pathologize men or women or anybody else. And we should try and figure this out, but onwards and upwards, because otherwise pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think it's a real problem, particularly for America. I mean, we're in America now, right? And things I love about America, I think I hated about our old country, was that everyone lived in the past. And this definition of an old person is, you know you're old when you spend more of your time thinking about your past and your future. I think the same is true of societies.

1:40:06Once societies start thinking more about their history and all of that, which you want, you want that sense of history and patriotism, but you want to be spending more time thinking about the future. I just heard this guy on a podcast saying, I can't remember who it was somewhere, he's the guy that left Harvard actually, and he sort of said, Americans, the thing about America is that it's obsessed with progress and innovation. I'm like, yes, that's why I'm a proud That's why I'm here. That's why I love it. What's happening with men's life satisfaction at the moment? I don't know the latest data on that, actually.

1:40:40I don't. You mentioned, here's a bunch of reasons why stuff's maybe not quite as fucked as people think it is. But I think if you were to lick your finger and put it in the air and take a cultural temperature of how people are talking about this situation, I think more people would... What's the number one reason for why people, the Pew research data around why they don't have kids, just don't feel ready yet? Yes. And then the second is couldn't find the right person. Couldn't find the right person is the second one. But just don't feel ready yet is like unfinished article, a little bit unsure of myself and the world.

1:41:12Yeah. I mean, there's a mixture of objective and subjective measures here. There was this really interesting paper looking at the kind of five milestones to adulthood, like finishing education, getting a job, leaving home, getting married, having kids. And what it found was that 20 years ago, men were more likely to hit those milestones, and now men are less likely than women to hit those milestones. So the milestones to adulthood are being hit more by women now than by men. The coefficient has flipped. As far as the well-being stuff goes, last time I looked at this, it was relatively stable on the kind of good subjective well-being measures.

1:41:45We do know that men are much more affected by relationship breakup and unemployment. and so negative economic and social shocks damage male well-being more than female well-being so you might expect um some of the recent shocks to have affected men more the trouble with this honestly is that there's just so many bad surveys out there that will ask these kind of point in time questions uh from both sides i'm not throwing anybody under the bus here but just like and it gets clicked and it that some of the surveys like there's so many surveys on young men now i mean like if i get another email saying we want to do a survey on what young men are really thinking i I'm like, no, please don't, because you'll just ask some stupid questions, and then you'll over-interpret the answers.

1:42:21And we won't be able to repeat the question, because there's no time series on it. And people are just in that moment. They'll just react to the question in that kind of particular cultural moment, and then we'll over-interpret it. So if you're in the middle of the Iran war, you're going to feel differently than if it's - Yeah, or even like, and also we've seen massive swings in some of these things, just like one side of the other of a presidential election. And you think, really, if like who's in the White House is massively changing how you feel about the world, then that's telling us that this is highly subjective.

1:42:46What was that nuance on Title IX that I texted you about? I thought this was really interesting. I saw I texted you about some guy had done a video, and it was actually of the episode that I did with Scott, which was Scott talking. Oh, that's right. And Scott had said Title IX is used to sort of pull back men, but the guy's video said it could also be used for raising up men. What's the nuance? Yeah, the nuance there is that Title IX, is anti-sex discrimination in higher education, right? It basically just takes the idea of you can't discriminate on the basis of sex, and it makes it clear that that's true in higher education.

1:43:26There is one exception to that, which is undergraduate admissions to private colleges, which I'll come back to, because it's relevant to the answer. But what it basically says you can't discriminate on the basis of sex. And so it was really an anti-discrimination measure, not a strongly affirmative action measure. So it didn't say to colleges, everything else equal, you should let women in, not men. And there's no evidence that that's happening, right? There's no evidence that the reason there are more women in college now than men is because there's a thumb on the scale in favor of the women.

1:43:57They're just better in terms of the... Is there a thumb on the scale against the favor of men? No, I've seen absolutely no evidence for that. In fact, if anything, most colleges, public or private, although the publics don't have this carve out, actually are quite worried about this. We've got a whole, we've got a thing now, Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative working with colleges because they start to worry once they get 60, 40, 65 because not only do their male applications drop, their female applications start to drop too because the dating market on a college campus where there are twice as many women as men is not awesome for women.

1:44:34So maybe it comes back to a little bit but people who don't think there's any difference between men and women should look at the difference in the dating market on college campuses that skew where there are two women for every man. And I've had young women saying that they look at the gender ratio of colleges before they decide to apply because this message has gotten out there now that it's not awesome to be in a college where there are twice as many. So no, no strong evidence for a thumb on the scale against men. The exception is Title IX carves out private undergraduate colleges and undergraduate admissions, and the reason they did that was otherwise you would have, at a stroke, abolished the single-sex colleges.

1:45:09you wouldn't have been able to have single sex colleges you have to let wellesley only admit women right but the result of that is that those colleges do have a thumb on the scale in favor of men now to try and stay closer to 50 50 so it's an open secret that it's a bit easier to get into those elite colleges if you're a guy than if you're a woman did you see there was a dating singles mixer that happened in New York and women were charged$100 to attend and men were let in free. You're a nightclub promoter. The ratio was still three to one women to men. So the sex ratio in New York is similar to, well, it's a bit more, but it's not far off what it's going to be on college campuses.

1:45:52Yeah. No, the sex ratio is not like that in New York as a whole. In fact, we have empirical data on this. We've looked at the sex ratios by county, and you've seen a shift. So there are twice as many majority male counties today as there were 20, 30 years ago, largely because of out-migration, we think, out-migration by women. And then there are some urban counties, of course, where the sex ratio is where there are a lot more women than the sex ratio of the singles. No, but we did look within age cohort, and we do see a difference, but it's, of course, nothing like as dramatic as three to one.

1:46:22Yeah, of course. It just skews a little bit. You know, there's something going on. Maybe it's a selection mechanism that guys have checked out of the dating market. Maybe it's that women are pushing more towards trying to find partners. Yeah, but your example suggests like the men, like there are more women than men of dating age, let's put it that way, in New York and - Who are motivated to - But then the question is like, who's out, right? Who's motivated? Yeah, who's in, who's like, you can, are you in the market to come back to the analogy that I didn't like earlier, but like, are you out there doing it?

1:46:52And so there we might see, and you see like women are more likely to travel now than men i do think it's like i i don't see any empirical evidence for this but my anecdotal sense of it just sort of traveling around as i do kind of commit now it's like when you're in a restaurant or a kind of bar now if you see a group of young people together for a night out i think it's more likely to be women now again no strong empirical evidence on that but i just think that those kind of public spaces um if anything maybe it's good a little bit more more female if you zoom out for 50 years what do you think happens for men over the next few decades?

1:47:27Are you optimistic, pessimistic? What are you most concerned about? What are you most hopeful for? I'm an inveterate optimist. I do think the glasses are full. But for me, I've come to realize is that my optimism isn't just an orientation or a personality trait. It is that. I think for me, it's getting close to something like a virtue. that to think well of the future um is is valuable in and of itself um because i think otherwise the kind of messaging to young people more generally is just so relentlessly negative and then we kind of blame them for feeling down right um i'm so i'm pretty optimistic and the reason i'm optimistic is because it's it's a hell of a mess right now like it's very messy it's goopy figuring it out some of the stuff we've talked about here and argued about here just shows you that particularly for kind of young men and young women just kind of figure out this new these new realities but i think we're kind of past the sort of we're breaking past i hope more of the zero sum we are getting more to a kind of world where young men and young women are kind of trying to figure this out in good faith and i think they will figure it out i don't know how but we always have one way or the other and i think we will again and i think that people are ready to get past some of the bullshit ideological traps that people have been trying to put us in for too long.

1:48:49I really think there's a hunger for that. I hope so, because one of the byproducts that you have of lots of conflicting messages, you know, you said the pinball or the male vertigo, masculinity. Masculinity vertigo, yeah. Vertigo, where men don't know what they're supposed to be. They're supposed to be masculine on a Monday and then soft on a Tuesday and then a tyrant on a wednesday and then you know you're in therapy on a thursday yoga on friday yeah exactly um one of the problems i think that can come out of that is a type of if there's lots of conflicting messages it doesn't convince you of any one particular message it just makes you immune to being convinced apathy right that this is what a disinformation and a misinformation campaign is supposed to achieve when it's done en masse as a information warfare by a foreign adversary.

1:49:38It's not to convince the populace of one thing or another all the time. Sometimes it's just to make them distrust all advice. And I think that the checking out of men, the retreat, you have a pull in screens, video games, porn, weed, sedation hypothesis. But this is another twist of it, and you're right, but there is an attractor which is it may be difficult to convince men to not go out into the real world and try to make stuff happen through conflicting messages if it wasn't for the fact that there's something else that they can do. Like these two things need to be happening at once. Yeah, there's push and a pull at this point.

1:50:25Correct. And they're both going in the same direction. That's why, I mean, I know you've talked a lot about this. That's why I think it's consistent with crime going down, even as more young men are disengaged, which is historically, i think unprecedented which is the kind of sedation or sometimes like they're on the screens not on the streets is another way to think about this um and in some ways i think that makes it a harder thing to get attention to right i think if there was if we did see sort of increase in crime among young men if we were seeing like more antisocial behavior etc then i think it would be very close to the top of the alarm yes because it's more of a silent retreat and very often because you know turning inward that's less likely to sound the alarm but i actually think in the end most people do want to flourish and they do want to find someone to be with.

1:51:06And I think that women and men are both seeking partners and someone who's got someone about them, right? It's got agency, it's got forward momentum, got optimism. I think that's going to win. I think it always has won. I don't know how it'll win this time, but I'm sure it will. Yeah. I just hope that uselessness doesn't beget more uselessness. Sedation doesn't beget more sedation because you're going to have to reverse the trend here, right? Like you can say, we're worried about there being too many people on the planet and the population bomb is a really big deal, you go, well, if that's going to stop or if that's going to slow down, it's going to require reversal of the direction.

1:51:40And the same thing is true now. If the trend is moving in the right direction, and you're right, the line is between do we want more useless men or do we want more dangerous men? If those are the two options that we have in front of us, that's not a particularly good fucking scenario. I would say 51, 49, it's better to have useless men than dangerous men, but that's only because we're in peacetime. I would much sooner have competent, peaceful, right, than useless or dangerous. I got sent this morning a new Institute for Family Studies survey. There's some cool stuff in here, which I think you might like.

1:52:15Institute for Family Studies survey of 2 ,000 young men aged 18 to 29 challenges nearly everything being said about the male crisis in America, including by its most prominent voices on both left and right. 68 % of unmarried men want to get married with another 21 % unsure. The crisis isn't lacking desire, it's circumstance. 59 % are not in a romantic relationship, but 74 % of those men are open to dating. So there was that famous two-thirds of men say that 50 % of men in that age bracket say that they're not looking for casual or long-term relationships. That looks like it's changed. 62 % of childless young men want to be a father.

1:52:54Less than half of men aged 24 to 29 feel like adults, but the benchmarks most related to feeling like an adult are the traditional ones, marriage, parenthood, full-time work, completing education. Young men's number one role model is their mother, 79%, followed by their father, 69%. Andrew Tate ranked last among all prominent figures. 89 % say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others challenging a manosphere narrative young men who completed trade school programs are employed full-time at almost identical rates to college graduates 60 as 77 versus 80 and even college educated young men are skeptical of college with half saying it wasn't worth the time or money there's a mixed bag in there i'd say wouldn't you like i'm i'm going yeah it's good that's what it that's the with the landscape.

1:53:46That was an emotional rollercoaster for me, Chris. I got to tell you, like I was cheering half of it. I was up, I was down. I was like, oh, that's good. That's bad. Only 62 % of childless men want to be a father. That sounds way low to me. Childless young men, right? That's under 29. Wow. Want to be a father. I don't know whether intend to become a father. It would be interesting to see how they worded the question. Want to become a father. Because it's interesting, there was this NBC poll that came out not that long ago. It got a lot of attention where they ranked men young men and young women by whether they'd voted for Harris or not, right?

1:54:18Or Trump. And like, number one for the Trump voting men was family and kids. And actually, men are a bit more likely to say that they want to have marriage, get married and have kids now than women are. That's a reversal. So I'm finding that number, that 62 % number is going to blow. I think the anti-college thing worries me because the ROI on college is the same for men as it is for women, roughly speaking. And presumably could increase if you were to go to college now, if in 10 years time, we were to look at how valuable a male college graduate is in the workforce because they're going to be increasingly rare uh yeah just in terms of i mean it's this is another thing i've had this argument with scott about which is that actually uh college graduates are getting married as much as they have for the last 40 years right there hasn't been a collapse in marriage among college graduates even though there's this massive gender gap in college right the collapse in marriage has been among those without a college degree that's a huge class gap and so the kind of fretting the fretting about who will my daughter marry now that she's got a college degree is like That's just completely unfounded.

1:55:14It's a flat line. And in fact, if anything, maybe a bit more like to stay married than their mothers were because the divorce rate's gone down a bit. So - Because fewer people are getting married. Yeah, well, not among the college educated. That's the thing. Like the line, the marriage rate, it's about 90%. The marriage rate among college educated American women basically hasn't changed for the last 40, 50 years. What about among men? College educated men? The same because they're matching with college educated women at about the same rate. Even though there's a smaller number of percentages. But I mean, it's a bit of a nuance here.

1:55:46We published on this is actually college educated women have always been willing to marry non-college educated men and continue to. So like 20 % of the women with a college degree marry them. White collar to blue collar. Yeah. And it's like, it's a very elitist conversation this because people, when they're talking about this, they're talking about someone who went to some sort of fancy college, right? But in my family, I've got nurse married to a plumber, right? Nursing requires a college degree, right? Does anyone out there think that nurses are looking down their noses at plumbers? If he's making a good living and he's doing well, he's working hard.

1:56:11No, I don't. The idea that somehow, you know, or a teacher won't marry a carpenter, it's just nonsense. So the marriage rate is actually, if anything, slightly up. So there was mixed in there. I didn't like the courage. But yeah, the thing I also think was untrue, it said, challenging this idea in the manosphere that men don't sacrifice themselves. 89 % say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others, challenging the manosphere narrative. well as a prominent uh proponent of the manosphere i would say that you think men should sacrifice men should sacrifice themselves right i think that they've just been kicked out of the manosphere i don't know which manosphere they're talking about i mean i guess and also the tate thing of course the tate thing was really interesting and i don't remember if we talked about this last time i mean it really came back and there was a kind of uh i i guess i've lost my friends at the new york times by this point in the interview anyway but like there's a new york Times headline drove me mad.

1:57:04I think I read about it publicly. Tate returns, MAGA celebrates. And so I went through it. That's very interesting because I've actually heard or read Josh Hawley, Megyn Kelly, DeSantis, DeSantis Agee, all condemning Tate. Shapiro doesn't like him. Shapiro condemned him. They all condemned him in that moment, right? All that. So I'm like, who are you talking about? And it turned out that it was the young Republicans of so-and-so county in florida had said we're happy he's back and we'd love him to come speak to us it was literally the only people they could find celebrating but the headline was maga celebrates yeah because again that kind of fitted right we were we what we like this idea that kind of maga wanted to take back but like actually the truth was i did write about this and it was like everyone hates andrew tate right and that should be when when radical feminists are shoulder to shoulder with josh hawley and ben shapiro condemning andrew tate then surely we can take that as a win like isn't this a win yeah isn't that the headline i think we're gonna see no i think we're gonna see more around the men's movement mra come manosphere come incel black pill lux max in moggin community especially after ross camp and this louis through documentary i can't wait for you to watch it it's louis through documentary on netflix it's his first ever louis through documentary on netflix and he said it's the final video game boss of his entire career because it's all of the things it's casual sex with only fans it's um it's sort of a conspiracy theorist which he's done a turn it's sort of almost cult-like behavior which he's done previously it's financial grifts which he's been a part of as well all bundled up into this sort of tick-tockification version for 2026 and i I, with adolescence, with the way that Louis Dock was presented, I do think that we're going to see more of a moral panic around what's happening with young men.

1:58:57I think that it's going to look a lot like these guys are being led astray by bad actors. There is limited hope. Socially, they are learning not to sacrifice for others, but to dominate and be domineering. Yeah, very much so. It's very self-serving. It's not great. And for all that I can keep on doing podcasts that I think are accurate and balanced and hopefully really educate people about what's actually going on, I don't have the reach of fucking huge documentaries or series, right like adolescence was a global fucking phenomenon it was a huge hit and it was great drama it was a great tv show apart from some of the it was the way and again back to i just think there's a lag here i actually think that it's a little bit out of step now and enough people are starting to say the moral panic around men the pathologization of young men the demonization of young men is exactly the wrong thing to do and that kind of narrative rut that everyone's in like the easy thing to say.

2:00:11I just think it's out of date and people are realizing that and they're realizing it has not worked out well for anybody, for us as a society to point our fingers at young men and say, what the hell is wrong with you? You're either lazy or useless or you're being radicalized or whatever. There's a long litany of things that are wrong with you. I just think enough people are kind of realizing that that's A, just unbelievably lacking compassion and B, massively counterproductive. So you're right. The place that I actually think is doing the worst at this is online, it's streaming culture, and it's YouTube because there are not many reasonable voices that do big plays on social media.

2:00:54There's just not. Wouldn't you count yourself among those reasonable voices? Aren't you a big platform? Yeah, but I think if you're talking about people who are genuinely engaging with the issues of boys and men and of mating and dating and birth rates and stuff like that, it's certainly in the minority to be a part of the gentlemanosphere than it is to be a part of sort of militant aggressive feminism or to be a part of sort of classic. Reactionary anti-feminism. Exactly. Esculinism. Yeah. This is not superbly sexy. When I sort of look around at whatever motley weird Avengers group that I've got.

2:01:33It's like me, you, Arthur Brooks, Scott Galloway, Mac and Murphy, William Costello, Rob Henderson, maybe Andrew Thomas. Like it is, it's a Alexander Datesike, but he's sort of stepped away from things now. It's, I'm not, Stephen Shaw kind of, he's not really talking to men. Like, you know, it really sort of runs flat pretty quick. I don't know who else is engaging with this stuff and then when you were to look at who does fucking huge plays that push the narrative in a much more bombastic way like it's i don't know i mean i the long run way to win this is just to keep doing it chris all right i think this whole idea that there needs to be this kind of huge play it's going to change this is going to change slowly and i also think we should give a little bit of credit to some of the people consuming this content i think a lot of young men in particular are perfectly willing to listen to this conversation and agree or disagree with us, but probably agree that we're having a good faith conversation as you do with others, and realize that that is different to what they're going to get from certain other producers.

2:02:41I go there if I want a quick laugh or an eye roll, but I come here if I want a more serious conversation. And then if I get sufficiently enticed, I'll go and read some of AIBM's policy briefs. No question is going to go viral. It doesn't get any better than that. But I just People are able to be more discerning about the difference between these content types. And if you look at their actual behavior and what's happening, I'm just much more hopeful. But just keep doing the work. And then over time, I don't know if this is going to be a good example or not, but I have, although he put me on his reading list, not always been thrilled with the way President Obama has talked about this issue, especially in the run-up to the last election.

2:03:18But on the podcast he did with his wife not long ago, he said, and I quote, we've quite rightly invested in the girls create a level playing field so that we can have equality we have not been as intentional about investing in the boys and that has been a mistake and people are starting to recognize that when obama is saying that now of course the only bit that got covered from that podcast was a brief discussion about their so-called marital difficulties in the first three minutes the remaining one hour long conversation about the challenges of boys and men that he had with his wife and his wife's brother, whose name I've forgotten, that didn't get covered, but it's there.

2:04:01And so I just think bit by bit, person by person, governor by governor, Ruben Gallais goes out there with his very episode by episode. And because it's actually what people want in the end. Also because it's the truth. The truth, well, in the end, I do think it's, and people can tell the difference between something that's truthful or not. Heck yeah. Richard Reeves, ladies and gentlemen. Richard, where should people go to keep up to date with whatever you've got? Well, those policy briefs I mentioned are all... Stop trying to push your policy briefs. No one's reading your fucking... Our policy brief on sports betting is the best piece of policy work out there on the very live issue of sports betting.

2:04:36So, AIBM.org. Cool. Richard, I appreciate you. So fun. Goodbye, everybody. Dude. Yes. Oh, good. You gotta go. That was so fun. It was. It held a lot of ground. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required.

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