What Makes A Man? Richard Reeves on Addressing the Struggles Facing Boys and Men

21:06Kara Swisher:Check out my new show, Why Are You Like This? on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. New episodes drop every Thursday. If there's anything we've heard about this entire summer, no matter where we go or who we talk to, it's about gas prices. I want to show you something. Look at these gas prices. They're ridiculous. I don't drive as much. I think they're just skyrocketing day in, day out. Gas prices are up since Donald Trump started his war with Iran. But how much does a little pain at the pump actually affect people's vote? Who is telling the truth? And who is going to represent us and do something about it?

21:45And if gas is still near$4 a gallon come November, is it game over for Donald Trump and the Republicans?

21:52Kara Swisher:The most important is you can't deny the reality that Americans feel. People see what they're paying. You know, Trump trying to not recognize what people are struggling with and then to ignore the severity of it is just not a winning strategy. That's this week on America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of these general roles, according to a recent survey by the Young Men Research Initiative, when young men are asked what it means to be a man, the top answer was providing for your family. you've argued this isn't necessarily a bad thing but that is since it's becoming harder to do like now it's harder to buy a house than it was 20 years ago it's creating an identity crisis for boys and men and scott talks about this a lot if you can't keep up you feel shamed and then with shame comes rage etc etc yeah i think that's a really good example of the challenge that both young men and young women have like in in the modern labor market in in the housing market actually just as we're recording this, Rahm Emanuel has a piece in the Washington Post where he's arguing about young men, but also about how he said it's a housing issue.

23:01Kara Swisher:And yeah, I called, I wrote him, I said, oh, so homes and hugs will save us. Well, if only he'd come up with such a good summary, but, but yeah, I mean, actually Gretchen Whitmer pointed out that like young men are least likely to buy new homes now. And so I do think it's connected to these structural factors and that actually it allows me to make a separate point. And then I'll come back to the main one, which is that one of the things that disturbs me about how much political energy is going on into young women blaming young men and young men blaming young women for their problems is that that energy could be much better spent on issues around economic justice, around the housing market, around the education system.

23:38So imagine a world where young men and young women, instead of being taught by each side to blame each other, were actually linking arms to demand a fairer housing market, to demand a better education system, to demand more opportunity together. But the point about providing is really interesting. I've come to think that the answer here is to sort of lean into that instinct, but modernize it. I was a stay-at-home dad for a while, and I really felt like a provider. And what I do, I just kind of reconceptualized it around, well, my wife's working, but I'm going to get the kids to school, I'm going to organize, and I'm going to allow the family.

24:17I was providing for my family in a different way. And I do think that men feeling a responsibility to be providing not only money, although that remains important, but other things, time, energy, love, discipline, whatever.

24:31Kara Swisher:That's a big societal shift because most people, when they see that, they don't think that. They don't think provider. They don't think it for women either, by the way, if women stay at home. No, they don't. I think that's right. So at least for now, rather than saying, okay, male provider, male breadwinner, dustbin of history. Bye-bye. Don't need you anymore. Right. Rather than that, I think what we should be saying is your desire to provide for your family is a noble one. And that should mean, by the way, that you are a good prospect in the labor market, because it could well be that, as has happened to me, too, there are certain points where the family needs you to be the breadwinner.

25:05Right. And so having that potential. Yes. But it also then allows us to expand through that and say, but yeah, how about a world where actually the best thing for your family is for you to be providing more care? Right. So expand it.

25:19Kara Swisher:But there are the societal things that push against, still to this day, push against it. Even though men are much more participating with their children, it's still not the same. But interestingly, in your book, you write, the true cause of male malaise, I believe, is not lack of labor force participation, but the cultural redundancy. So men feel they're no longer needed, right? In the workplace and the home. I want to hone in on this a little bit. it seems like a lot of women want to share the workplace and share household chores and child care responsibilities with men. How do you change things so it doesn't feel redundant?

25:53Kara Swisher:I have to tell you, gay and lesbian couples don't have this problem to the same degree at all, I've noticed, among my friends. And I have very different friends. Talk a little bit about this idea of cultural redundancy that you were talking about. Yeah. So the worry I have is that if men start to feel as if they're not economically needed in the same way that their fathers were or their grandfathers were. Right, because women work and women have prospects. Because women work and do that. And also, they're not culturally needed because we don't actually think there's anything special about the way that, you know, men father, for example.

26:26And, you know, you can think of examples of same-sex couples where they're saying, oh, well, that's a very heteronormative idea that we need dads. And so we don't need dads. So we don't need male breadwinners. We don't need dads. Maybe we don't need, like, men to volunteer in the YMCA or Big Brothers Big Sisters or boys clubs because they're all co-ed. Most of the volunteers are women. So we don't need you for that either. And to get to a certain point where it's like, okay, so why do we need men? Maureen Dowd had a, are men necessary?

26:54Kara Swisher:I say that all the time. No, I'm kidding. She said she asked her mom and her mom said, well, we need them for procreation and to lift heavy furniture. Again, very fun. Sounds like a Joan Rivers joke. Sounds like a Maureen Dowd joke. Yeah. And so that's my fear, is that we end up sending these messages that because of these shifts in the economy and society, we're sort of saying to the guys, okay, we got it from here. We kind of don't need you. And I really feel very strongly that being needed is just incredibly important to human flourishing. Right. So you feel irrelevant. You feel irrelevant or pushed to the side in ways that you never had to think of.

27:33Kara Swisher:You were naturally the provider. Yeah, because it came naturally. The script was there for you. My dad didn't have to think about this. And when he became unemployed, he had to get another job. It wasn't like he didn't have to think about this in a way that we've had to. And certainly our sons are having to. The kind of need for men was sort of clear. And so how do we sustain this idea of needing men as men? Is needed and essential the same thing? uh essential gets harder um because there are obviously going to be circumstances where you know you don't have men around but i it's it's it's hard to articulate this because you run the risk of and perhaps i'm feeling particularly self-conscious about this because of your situation right um when so i'm i'm now writing a lot about fathers for example with the importance of fathers and father figures, right?

28:24And of male role models and of kind of men in boys' lives. But as soon as you do that, you're criticized for being a gender essentialist.

28:31Kara Swisher:No. And saying that there are some... I think about that all the time. My brother is very critical to my kids, 100%. Or Scott. Scott, oddly enough, one of my sons is really, reveres Scott. I don't know why, but he does. He's a wonderful, he's given him wonderful advice, I have to say. And it's interesting. I don't know what you think about this, but I actually find quite often the same-sex couples with children, mostly women, actually don't need all that much persuading that having good male role models around is a good idea, actually. Weirdly, that's the kind of others. No, I think it's critical.

29:08Kara Swisher:It's absolutely critical. There's no question about it. But I think we're a bit reluctant to say that. I think we're a bit reluctant to say, like, we need men and we need male role models. Because of some of the challenges we faced around getting to gender equality and the remaining challenges that we still have, I think there's been just this reluctance to articulate this positive vision for men for fear that it will somehow distract. I also think it's important for my daughter to have positive male role models, too. I don't think it's just like guys and like learn to be in the backyard. That's not it.

29:35Kara Swisher:It's a positive role model of men for my daughter, which I think is critical. Because, you know, as many people, I assume she's going to be straight, right? So she has to have good relationships with men. So one of the solutions you talked about is steering men towards careers you call HEAL, health, education, administration, literacy, which are teaching and nursing have traditionally been women's jobs and pay less. That's changing a bit. Healthcare is one of the few bright spots in this month's Dismal Jobs Report, for example. So how do you get men to see HEAL jobs or even being stay-at-home dad, manly if they have to decouple the idea of being a provider from being a breadwinner, as you mentioned.

30:14It's interesting you talk about the jobs report. I think that's, it's fascinating that you're seeing this real gap emerging, particularly among graduates, but more generally in male employment and female employment right now. And that does seem to be because of this growth in healthcare and social services, and they skew very female. So what that means is that like men are missing out on some job opportunities there so there is just a straightforward labor market argument here there's also i think an argument which we touched on earlier about it's good for patients and students to have a representative workforce i don't think it's a good idea if all the nurses are female all the nurses are male right because they're going to be serving male and female patients same with teachers and some of these areas have shortages it's interesting that nursing is the only one to have seen a slight increase in the show of men and also the best paid of all of those professions.

31:04So pay is clearly a factor here. But I think the solution is, to some extent, is to decode these professions. So it's interesting, like, early years education has always been seen as quite female, right? And it's incredibly female. Like, we have twice as many women flying fighter jets than men teaching kindergarten as a share of the occupation, right? And that hasn't really changed. That's not a new thing. But high school, high school teachers used to be Very equal. But that's where all of the drop is now. You're down to one in three in high school now, and that's where the drop is happening. So you hit these tipping points with occupations.

31:39You might have seen some of this in your own work around STEM and tech and so on, that there is some very interesting economic work showing that at a certain point, around 30%, an occupation just codes as more male or female.

31:51Kara Swisher:It does. Once you get past that point, you start to see, this is, I mean, I think this is consistent with what you find in other areas too, right? When you get the female share up to a certain point, it seems to then get much easier to attract certain women because it's no longer seen as a male profession that they're going against the grain well the same is the other way around which is why 23 percent of teachers being men problem 20 percent of social workers are men 20 percent of psychologists are men and so what's happening is that they are becoming more female professions and you're at tipping points now where you're going to have to have scholarships and outreach programs just as we have for women in stem we need them for men in heel how do you shift that well i look at organizations that have done effective work for women into stem professions so take something like the society of women engineers they've done a fantastic job of advocacy there are scholarships for women into engineering there are convenings uh there are clubs in schools there are campaigns same in science like a picture of scientists are changing the images of scientists etc this hasn't happened by accident there's federal money to support these initiatives?

32:57Kara Swisher:Well, no longer, but yes. Not today. There has been. And a lot of philanthropy. I mean, we mentioned Melinda French Gates earlier, but she's also put a huge amount of money into scholarships, convenings, and advocacy for women into STEM and in particular into tech. Hallelujah. Now, show me the equivalent efforts to get men into early education, into education, into healthcare, into social work, into social services. And they just don't exist, But they will because it is just as much of a problem that we have a massively gendered care workforce and education workforce as it is that we have a gendered tech and engineering workforce.

33:35They are both problems and we can deal with both.

33:38Kara Swisher:So if you could start over from scratch today, what would be your ideal definition of what it means to be a man? I really like this distinction between immature and mature masculinity. So that's what I'm talking about here when I say being a man. Right. I don't like toxic and non-toxic. No one really sensibly likes those terms anymore. Because I see a lot of the problems that we see in kind of men, they're really problems of immaturity. They're really problems of just like kind of not growing into that role. And boys don't become men just with the passage of time. It does take work. It takes cultural work.

34:12It takes rites of passage more strongly for men than it does for women just because of their reproductive role. And so what I see, I see mature masculinity, i.e. being a man, is the point where you are contributing more to the tribe, to the group than you are taking. That you can give more than you get. There's a certain point where, whether that's energy or food or money or whatever, it's where actually you're a generator of a surplus. You're generating more of whatever the thing is that is needed than you need for yourself. and it could be security. I mean, it could be like, right now it could be that you're taking a lot of risks on the Ukrainian border.

34:54But one way or another is that you're giving more than you get. I think that's the best definition.

34:58Kara Swisher:So mature. Yeah, when you say it, he's a grown-ass man, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of the things you use is, so we should distinguish between the manosphere and the brosphere. Explain those differences as you see it. Who are the poster man for each? would you say like Andrew Tate versus Theo Vaughn, Jordan Peter, I don't know, where does Scott fall, Elon Musk? Yeah, Scott's, okay, well, I put Scott in the bro-sphere for sure, along with people like Chris Williamson, I would put Theo Vaughn in there. Explain them first so we know how you're putting people in. Yeah, okay, well, I mean, I'm doing this kind of a little bit off the top of my head, so I think the manosphere should be restricted to the kind of misogynists, right, to the Andrew tates to the folks who are peddling and profiting from um misogyny misogyny partly because the term manosphere a bit like toxic masculinity if we're not careful just gets broadened uh i actually had a conversation with gavin newsom for his podcast and i called him out a little bit i sort of said at one point governor newsom you said all these guys online like jordan peterson andrew tate and Joe Rogan.

36:09And you just can't do that. You can't lump people like that together and be taken seriously by anybody under the age of 30. For a start, Jordan Peterson is one of the fiercest critics of Andrew Tate. I have my own differences with Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan is a whole different thing. So I think that the brosphere is my attempt to describe men who are online talking about issues around men and masculinity in a good faith way, and not in a misogynist way. It doesn't mean that they're all going to pass every progressive test, right? Scott wouldn't pass every progressive test, right? Although he's obviously very left on many issues.

36:44But Chris Williamson, Theo Vaughn, Joe Rogan, etc., who I just think to just lump them together is to do an injustice to them and to the people that follow them. We should be encouraging those conversations.

36:56Kara Swisher:Because that's what we do now. We reduce everything, don't we? Not in just that area. It's everything. And people are much more nuanced than that. So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Let's listen to yours. Hi, my name is Lauren Greenfield, and I'm the filmmaker of social studies. My question for Richard Reeves is, what should boys do about the aggressive targeting of body image pressures to them on social media? It used to be more difficult for girls with the body image pressures and the idealized images. But now social media seems to be targeting male body issues so strongly, whether it's the Caucasian body image or having big muscles or working out all the time.

37:40So how do you think this is affecting modern masculinity and what should boys do about it?

37:46Kara Swisher:It's a really interesting question. I interviewed her recently, and she talked about that, and I hadn't thought about it. But of course, there's enormous amounts of pressures around male, how they look now than ever before. And girls are used to it, right? Thoughts about this? Yeah, so there's this term online, looks maxing. And it's a serious issue. There's an incredibly fast rise in body dysmorphia issues among boys and men. It's actually one of the issues that my institute is really digging into. We're commissioning research on it right now to understand it better because it's growing very fast.

38:20That is not to say that it's at the same level or it's the same extent of problem that we already have for girls. But it is trending that way. And it does seem to be related to the conversation we're just having, which is this visual online world and this sort of the myths of perfectionism that are propagated by the manosphere types. and here I'm using the term my way, which is that they will say, look, unless you're six foot and ripped, and also, by the way, you have to make great money, et cetera, then you are not going to get a girlfriend, right?

38:51Kara Swisher:Women - The 2080 thing. Yeah, the 2080 thing. It's just, it's so pernicious and it's anti-male. They say they're about empowering men. They actually end up disempowering men and making these men feel shit about themselves, right? Just as women have historically been made to feel that way by these same images. So the honest answer is I don't have a good answer at this point other than to raise the awareness of it among parents and public health officials, et cetera, to say this is a real and growing problem. And to boys, I suppose just to try and break this myth, which is the truth is that, of course, it's important to take care of yourself.

39:26Of course, it's important to try and be healthy. But the idea that you won't get a loving partner, assume you're straight for the purpose of this argument, you won't get a loving girlfriend or partner unless you've got these biceps is a myth it is an absolute anti-women myth don't fall for it other than saying that at this point i'm not quite sure the best way to go and i think it's it's at least a demore is doing good work on this the adolescent psychologist who's an advisor to us and so we need a little bit more but main message of our parents is like don't fall for this crap that you have to have a perfect body to find a wonderful woman that is just misogynist bullshit.

40:05Kara Swisher:Yeah, it is very anti-male, actually. Very. So I just had Lauren on the show last week together with Jack Thorne, the co-creator of Netflix Adolescence and New York Times writer Matt Richtel, talking about the effects of social media on young people of all genders. I'm curious, did you see adolescence or social studies? And if so, what did you think? Adolescence obviously specifically looks at a young teen man who thinks about this 80-20 rule, etc and ends up devastating results yeah so i mean a couple of things one is what i think adolescence does a good job of is just exposing people to this world that they might not otherwise be aware of that their sons and others will be aware of and some of the myths that are being propagated it also speaks to a difference this technological shock that we've had is actually i think the way i think about this is that it's the the very relational nature of social media has actually had certain impacts for girls around body image as we mentioned but also now for boys but also bullying, online bullying.

40:59Whereas for boys, it's more about isolation. It actually kind of displaces other activity and so it makes them more isolated. Because of course, he's actually bullied online very badly by the girl kind of in question. That's good. What's bad is if people take it what is obviously a work of fiction and overstate how much those things are actually happening in kind of real life. It's generated a little bit of a moral panic. There was even this moment where the UK government was talking about showing adolescence in every school, which is a terrible idea, which I think thankfully has died.

41:27Kara Swisher:Yes, it's a terrible, the kids will laugh at us. Terrible idea because the boys will see that coming. I mean, violent crime rates are generally down. And so what you don't want to do is to say to every boy. You incel. Yeah, that there's a monster being formed in every bedroom where a boy is looking at the screen. That will just drive more of these boys away from the conversation. Is there a difference between boys and girls? You said boys are more isolated, girls are more bullied. Yeah, that's my sense of it. I mean, actually uh scott and john hight and i just had a conversation about this on uh on his other show and john hight has a chapter on boys in his book the anxious generation and the way i think this is he would agree with this is that with girls the harm is more direct right because you're getting this bullying you're getting this relationality these body image issues for the boys i think it's a bit more indirect in the sense that it's displacing other things right so you can spend so much time on porn or gaming or scrolling or youtubing and that that's not as directly harmful to boys but what it is doing is it's taking away from the other activities so the in real life stuff and so it's more of a displacement effect for boys so in other words if i'm the parent of girls i'm really really anxious about what she's looking at when i'm a parent of boys of course i'm also partly worried about that but i'm more worried about how long he's doing it and what else he could be doing instead and so i think it's as i mean it's actually weirdly more isolating for boys it's the very relationality of social media that makes it so damaging for girls but in some ways for boys it quite often goes the other way and it pulls them away from relationality which is damaging in a different way we'll be back in a minute

43:15This week, two of the most important people in Google's AI division left their jobs. Depending on who you are, that's either really terrible news for Google's whole AI project or a sign that AI may be closer to something truly world-changing than we even thought. This week on The Vergecast, we're dissecting what's going on at Google DeepMind and whether we truly are in the foothills of the singularity. All that plus the state of the no-screen wearable, what's going on with open-weight models, and much more. All that on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

43:50Kara Swisher:Let's move on to politics. Boys and men have become a political issue. It's the political issue. You and Scott have both criticized Democrats for not speaking out about the issue, including Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who seemed to be the epitome of the kind of man you want to see more of, a former teacher and coach, a family man, public servant. Why did that not win young men over where Trump did? who was, I mean, I don't, again, I also don't like to use the word toxic masculinity, but he's like the dictionary version of a toxic man. Well, I think it also speaks into this immaturity point as well.

44:21There is a certain teenage energy around some of these kind of reactions that you see on the right. Some of it just feels like immature to me. But as far as the left is concerned, I think the Democrats had an opportunity to talk about this issue in a really solutions-focused way. And as she wrote this, I said, look, if you're going to have someone come out and say, we need a campaign for more male teachers. We need a Coach for America program to get more men. We need men to step up in terms of service. We need a mental health service that really reaches our young men because this crisis of suicide among our young men cannot happen.

44:53And by the way, we're going to do all this stuff for women as well. Walsh would have been a good person to talk about that, but he didn't. He didn't. He didn't say anything like what I just said. That was the problem, not who he was, but what he didn't say, what they didn't say throughout the entire campaign. And then, of course, now, because of the gender gap we saw among young voters, they just lost young men in the last election. Now, of course, I think the kind of pennies dropped on the Democrat side, and you're seeing serious people take it seriously. But up until the election, candidly, it was like banging your head against a brick wall.

45:26Everything I've just said about male teachers, male suicide, et cetera, you couldn't get a mention of that from the Democrats. Yes, anywhere in the Democratic Party.

45:33Kara Swisher:Anywhere, nowhere. So that said, there were Bernie bros, and there really are Bernie bros. There are some up-and-coming leaders in the Democratic Party doing well with the young voters and men like Zoran Mandani. My sons adore him. There's something he's doing that is very attractive to them. And it's not because they're particularly left-wing or right-you know what I mean? It's just his messaging is really hitting with all young people and young men. Who else are you seeing in the Democratic Party could bring young men back to the fold? You mentioned Governor Newsom's executive order, Wes Moore.

46:03Kara Swisher:And does it have to be a man, necessarily? I don't think it has to be a man. In fact, I was very impressed with the way that Governor Whitmer used her own longstanding support for women as a way to insulate herself against the criticism that by focusing on men, she was somehow going over to the dark side and to become an overnight misogynist. She's like, I'm increasingly worried about men. She's instructed her own administration to work on that. So women have that advantage. They're harder to immediately paint as a potential misogynist. But I also think that there is something about men being the kind of guy that men can look up to.

46:40And it's interesting around Mamdani is like even men who don't agree with him politically, young men, they admire his authenticity, they admire his courage. He very much seems his own man, to use that very old-fashioned phrase. And they like that. It's one of the things they like about some of the people on the right, including people like Trump, is that agree or disagree, and there's no real shift in policy views, he seems like his own man. And there's something about that. That's one of the reasons I think Bernie has been so consistently popular among young men. But you are seeing politicians like Wes Moore really doing the young men's research initiative that you mentioned earlier.

47:12They've polled on this and they have found him doing really pretty well among young men too. And I think that's probably partly because of what he says. But also, I think as a former paratrooper, a father, etc., he occupies an imaginative space too that's probably important for the Democrats. So the Democrats need to talk about it.

47:30Kara Swisher:Is there anybody else you mentioned? Newsom's trying. Trying his best. But are there others? Newsom's just put out the most comprehensive executive order on boys and men. And what I like so far about what all these Democrats are doing is that they're not really performing around it. They're not challenging J.D. Vance to a debate about what real masculinity is. They're not doing cultural stuff. What they're doing is they're governing around it. And in the long run, I actually think if they can credibly say to young men, look, we've noticed, we care about you, and here are all the things we are doing.

48:02Here are all the campaigns that we're running. And they win on substance then. Because the problem that the right has had is even if they have managed to make young men feel seen and heard and liked... They haven't done a lot for them. They haven't done anything. I think that's how you win is by saying either side could do this. It's just to say, we see you, we like you, we're worried, we're concerned about you, we need you, and here's all the stuff we're doing for you. It's just that that's an open goal, I think.

48:27Kara Swisher:Or we're going to do for you. In Mandani's case, like, even$8 halal is like, oh, I'd like that. Or, you know, I'm going to get you better housing. I'm going to get you all the things. It's substance. So I think if we can agree that the problems of boys and men are real, that tackling them doesn't mean not also doing work for women and girls, that we rise together, then the next step is do something about it. And very interesting how many governors now are saying we are actually going to do more to try and track more male teachers. And if it works and they start to publicize them, I think a lot of families, boys, men, mothers and fathers will be saying, hallelujah, thank you.

49:08Because that's not a partisan thing. That's just, oh, you've noticed and you're doing something about it.

49:12Kara Swisher:I'm going to shift over to artificial intelligence and including bots and sort of impact on jobs. Could it level the playing field in your mind, for example, in the job market? Or will it exacerbate job losses? Because these are all the jobs that men tend to dominate. A lot of the jobs are being targeted in that regard. Yeah, I think anybody looking at this has to just say they don't know. And there are many people who look much harder at it than me. I'm struck right now, as we discussed earlier, that we're seeing that actually healthcare and social care are these areas that are actually still growing.

49:47And at least to some extent, they are not going to be as easy to AI, but we'll see, long run. I feel like a lot of the jobs that are most vulnerable to AI right now could be things like paralegals, administrators, health finance, healthcare finance administrators type things. And they skew quite female. And so actually, I think it's quite possible that at least in this kind of more immediate term, that it could affect women. I just think we just don't know what the effects are going to be generally. And we certainly don't know what the gender effects are going to be. But I think one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that care is going to require humans.

50:21And so for me, what that does, it makes it even more important that we try to break down the gender stereotypes about caring professions.

50:28Kara Swisher:Absolutely. So one of the things I just mentioned was the AI companions. You know, the first time it got a lot of attention was in the sci-fi film Her when Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his AI operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Do you see this as a way to fill the friendship void for men, which you've written about? or does that lead to more, as you said, isolation and maybe more suicide? And I have interviewed the mother of the young man who committed suicide who was using character AI and got too close to his bot and was suggesting suicidal ideation to this young man, allegedly.

51:04Kara Swisher:Do you see that as a good thing? Because the friendship men thing is real, right? And this idea of man-keeping. You saw that New York Times thing. Women feel they have to do man-keeping. There's got to be a way for men to have more friends, right? Because women, from every statistic, have more friends, have more emotional connections, have less of a need for an AI friend. Right, that's right. Yeah. I mean, the joke is that the men are going to fall for AI girlfriends, but the women are going to want AI husbands who listen better and are more empathetic. And I have one friend who's already trying that out with his wife.

51:38Kara Swisher:Yeah, exactly. So it's very interesting to me how gendered even that discussion is. But I worry that it will be an apparent solution to a real problem. So the problem of lack of male connection is real. The problem that it's actually still that male spaces are not necessarily celebrated. And so there's a suspicion, skepticism, which we've got to get past because actually finding ways for men to spend time, not least with each other, doing something, because men usually have to do something to spend time together, is incredibly important. And with AI, what I worry is that it'll be just good enough to feel like it's filling the vacuum, but never good enough to actually fill the vacuum.

52:22And so in that sense, one of the problems is the better the technology gets at blunting our feelings of loneliness and making us feel less lonely, the worse the isolation gets because we then don't feel motivated to get up and get out and go and make real reference.

52:40Kara Swisher:So it gives us enough, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so in a sense, it's like just good enough to be really bad. Right. So that you don't make those connections, which are critical because men without connections are much more dangerous than women without connections. It's historically and everything else. That's correct. Two last questions. Of all this data you've seen recently, what has intrigued you the most? You now have all this money to study different things. What do you think is the most important thing to study right now? We've mentioned one, which is body image issues an obvious one is what's happening to men around education especially higher education we don't still quite understand what's happening around the male enrollment problems in higher education quite understand why men aren't going to college we have theories we don't really understand it so digging much more deeply into that because that's a huge issue understanding how more vocational forms of learning would be important i think understanding and researching the narratives around fatherhood.

53:37That's something I'm already investing in, which is, I just think it's very important that the stories that we tell about fathers and their roles is hugely, hugely, hugely important. And what's happening with male teachers, like what's the bottleneck? What's the pipeline? What works to get more men into our teaching and caring professions? I think that's an incredibly important research frontier. And the last thing I'll say is that this whole area of service, which a lot of the Democrat governors we've talked about have mentioned, but like what's happening with the decline in the number of men stepping up to be volunteers in big brothers big sisters ymca etc i think this issue about like men feeling like they're needed is important there's this famous phrase that you know i think hillary clinton made it famous which is that it takes a village to raise a child i think that's true but we need to be important to add that some of the villages do have to be men and work shows that kind of when there are communities with men involved the boys do better and so there's something about service don't you think probably all the panic

54:34Kara Swisher:around pedophiles is part of that that the right is part of it uh and i understand that uh safety is paramount in this organization i totally get that it's a bit like the fear of abduction stopping people from letting their kids play outside i get it it's important but like all of these things we have to hold it in tension with the costs of not doing it it is a problem it's one of the reasons why men don't do it agreed i just think the right has stoked their pedophile QAnon thing in a way that's infected everyone. Yeah, that is, I mean, I just, I mentioned that my son is, you know, my son's a teacher and I was, he's only done his a year and I asked other male teachers for advice to give him going in, especially as a male teacher, in his case, fifth grade.

55:13And the most common advice was, we'll make sure that the classroom door has a window in it.

55:18Kara Swisher:Yeah, incredible. It does. And that's important. But it was very interesting to me that that was the most consistent theme. Well, the assumption is every man is a rapist, right? Yeah. Which is not the case. It's really, really worrying. Yeah. I can see it. I can see it. And even as a parent, you do it, and I'm always slapping myself to stop it. And I know it's because it's the infection that comes. And not to belittle the problem of pedophilia, which I think is probably more prevalent in lots of ways, or child abuse. But I think it does affect men in a lot of ways, more than we realize. So based on everything we talked about, if you were giving one piece of advice to my Gen Z sons who are just about to enter the job market, the marriage market, the housing market, what would it be?

56:01Kara Swisher:And what advice do you have for me as a parent of boys? I think I'm pretty good at it, but I don't know. I'm sure you are. What do you think? I'm sure you are. The thing that is most important is to have the feel the wind in your own sails. my mother's welsh and there's a word in welsh which is huil h-y-w-l huil and what it means is literally that like having the wind in your sails having agency and and i actually know some of my own sons they're kind of making distinctions between like the people who have agency and the people who don't and and in a sense like what you're doing as long as it's positive it's kind of less important than that you're doing it and you're under your own steam and so i think that's the thing i've always thought about my own sons is like they're doing their own thing um and i think what both young men and young women are looking for and i think young women are looking for in young men assuming they're straight is this guy's doing stuff this guy's about stuff and what the stuff is kind of less important and what we want these young men to kind of feel is our joy in them our appreciation of them not despite being men but because they're men right and and the unique gifts that that brings to them and to celebrate their maleness if you like without in any way saying that this is somehow better than or dominant than i i use this line which is that and again this assumes that uh my sons are straight which is and so i said like i wanted them to have the the courage to ask a girl out the grace to always accept no for an answer and then the responsibility to make sure that either way she got home safely and i think that's okay like i'm aware that there's stuff we could argue about and i'm like okay it was like your agency you totally recognize you have no sense of entitlement or you know, rights over women or anything like that.

57:44But also a sense of like being protective of people who are more vulnerable than you. Like that's not horrible. That's not a horrible model of masculinity. I think I want, I want all of our young kind of boys and men to kind of feel like we love them for that. We don't, we don't pathologize them for that.

57:57Kara Swisher:Yeah. I'm remembering when the first time my son got drunk, you know, the ninth grade drunk thing, I, the only way I made him feel bad was like, there was a girl there. And I said, did you protect your friend who was there also drunk? Because girls are much more, And he felt so bad. Oh, bad. No, actually, Obama was good on this recently too, this protective instinct thing. Again, you have to modernize it, but we should be modernizing these masculine instincts rather than abandoning them. Right, I said, you're there to protect your friend. Yeah, protection's good, right? Yeah, yeah. And what advice for me is, one of the things I've learned as a parent of boys is how vulnerable men are, really, when I think about it.

58:36Kara Swisher:Like, they're much more so, honestly, much more so than my daughter in a lot of ways. and that was a real revelation yeah ruth whitman's book boy mom is very good on this too the boys are a little bit more fragile developmentally and so on too and i use that word advisedly because i don't want them to hear that the wrong way but right but that actually like if anything boys need a bit more attention and love not less to grow and i think that's right and we've not kind of realized that very often enough and and we have to do it in the right way but to make again it's come back we've a point we've had earlier which is that in order to sort succeed in getting closer to gender equality we've got to make our sons and daughters feel like we've got our arms around both of them right we've got both their backs and i think that we haven't quite done a good enough job of that with our boys and young men recently and um and and parents i think are really like you absolutely you know we're doing the best we can um and we're helping our boys feel great not only about being humans but feel great about being a boy or a girl it's amazing.

59:35Kara Swisher:Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, Richard, thank you so much. The work you're doing is really important, I think, and I really appreciate you talking to me.

59:46Kara Swisher:On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, Lissa Soap, and Caitlin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemary Ho. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trachademics. If you're already following the show, you have the wind in your sails. If not, man up or woman up, whatever you want to do. Go wherever you listen to podcast, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

1:00:24Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more.