The Truth about Masculinity: Have we really created weak & Toxic Men? & How to fix it - Sam Conniff

0:00Today on Secret Leaders, Sam Conniff. entrepreneur, best-selling author, and the mind behind the groundbreaking hard-as-nails campaign. We might have heard phrases as we grow up like, boys don't cry, or toughen up. And you've got to question what those things mean now. In this episode, we look at the landscape of masculinity, how the likes of Andrew Tate, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk have contributed to the rise of toxic masculinity that's causing real-world issues. I did Andrew Tate's course. It was awful, and eye-opening, and enlightening, and... Did you objectively learn anything? valuable. We look at Netflix's latest hit show, Adolescence, that is tackling this issue head on.

0:40Masculinity isn't a destination. It's not this place of success that you can either build your muscles up to or earn your money to buy your way into. And how men struggling with their sense of masculinity in today's world can become better fathers, brothers, sons, colleagues and leaders.

1:02sam in your view what are the biggest misconceptions about masculinity today and how do you think we can correct them um good question i think there are as many misconceptions as there are misdirections and so what i'd like to begin with is the approach that i've taken to this work which is to avoid anything that is presenting itself as blaming men. I think there is a challenge in rigid ideas of identity and strength that have become outdated for the world in which we live and I think when we conform too strongly to those we run into difficulty and ironically I think they tend to make society and men particularly weaker and I think men suffer from the ideas that are known as toxic masculinity as much as anybody else so uh i think there's a real need for a pro masculine or a healthy masculinity that's where i've tried to keep the conversation that i'm having around it because the language has been weaponized in many ways and so it's it's treacherous in one sense because we need clear terms for such a murky subject and then those terms can be offensive there's lots of phrases that are prefixed with the word man that then feel like man blaming which wasn't even a phrase i'd heard of until trying to explore this where men feel cut off by phrases like toxic masculinity and so it's complicated but to answer the question in my regard we're looking at masculinity which is the beliefs and expectations of what it means to be a man in this society and what we're trying to move away from is what's often referred to as toxic masculinity is when those beliefs have become so rigid that this idea of strength actually becomes a place of pressure vulnerability and when men don't conform to ideas of control as strength they're attacked for weakness and that can only be a corrosive and negative effect okay so how would you define masculinity then for yourself

3:05i would define the idea of healthy masculinity as no i said for yourself yeah for me why why have i chosen that term yeah it's emerged out of the work i was surprised when i got shut down by blokes because i'd said toxic masculinity by trying to explore this this space what do they say so i approached a number of different networks that support men you know that are already men who are involved in addressing their mental health or men's groups that are trying to support other men so i i expected to find positive and supportive environments but even as soon as they saw some of my early material the the the emails i'd send them by using terms like toxic masculinity um it immediately just shut me out because these terms so often feel like they're just adding to the large amount of blame that it's being men feel is being heaped upon them for the for the ills of society and you begin to open the door to the very controlled and confusing conversation that's taking place okay so you're saying that healthy masculinity is how you define it so for myself i would define masculinity as the beliefs and expectations of what it means to be a man in society right so we we might have heard phrases as we grow up like boys don't cry or toughen up or be a man about it right i'm sure most men in society of my age have grown up with those kind of ideas as the backdrop whether you heard it through your parents or you saw it in the life and culture around you and you've got to question what those things mean now and I have found myself feeling like a failure as a man because I haven't met those now very narrow feel to me somewhat narrow definitions of success because they're there in money or awards or you know other material trappings of life and so when I found myself in debt when I found myself in a relationship breakup when I found myself feeling like my business was failing around me not only was it very hard just to cope with how difficult that stuff is this horrible hole opens up inside me and I don't feel like a man or I've succeeded as a man in the society and and I began to realize how strongly I've enforced these uh images and identities that I think we've all grown up and we're part of and to feel like a failure is a very difficult thing to recover from and certainly in the instances we're talking about we know in our world in entrepreneurship and leadership we we largely like to try and consider that failure is something that we learn from.

5:33Yet most of us experience the feeling that doesn't feel like learning. It feels like failing. It feels awful. And so that's what this is about. The exploration of what contribution, rigid conformity to ideas of masculinity and their negative outliers. How do they contribute to the challenges that we as leaders and we as humans and we as society face? So how would you define masculine traits then? You've said some, you know, slogans that we would have both grown up with and therefore associated with. You've mentioned ideas around success and money. but and whilst i think that's true by the way i would argue those are societal expectations on anyone now they're also on women too now yeah so then how would you really define what you would say are particularly masculine traits on expectations in today's society i guess western society mostly right because obviously the world isn't the same everywhere yes good point and and what we're also trying to do here or i'm trying to i'm i am by no means an expert in this space This has been an unexpected exploration that I'm only midway through.

6:36So maybe if it's, tell me, I'm not trying to swerve the answer, but here's something that I've discovered, which I found really useful. It's called the man in a box concept. And there's a measurable scale that's been devised around this. And it tries to, even in its name, bring to life the challenge that's going on with masculinity. The man in a box is measured by a number of different phrases. about whether it's strong or weak to be able to form relationships, whether the man should be the controlling or dominant aspect of any relationship he has. It's about views on different types of sexuality.

7:11It's on things like metrics of success, like finance and professional business achievement, and on things like decisiveness. I know my mind, and I'm able to arrive at a decision quickly. It's a 25-point scale. It's been rigorously tested around the world, and that's why I think it's useful to put into a conversation about leadership with business people because it's evidenced and unlike lots of the conversations around masculinity which are hijacked by different people's agendas man in a box scale is really well evidenced and trusted and by answering these questions you get a sense you can find it online a sense of a score of where you sit on a scale around masculinity and it brings to life this this challenge that we're facing because to be a man trapped in a box isn't strength anymore these ideas might sound like strength or we've grown up with them as ideas of strength and there's certainly no shortage of examples that that kind of strong man image pushes the world forward and perhaps once it certainly did and there was a time where those displays of strength had a greater role in society but society's changed and have our ideas around masculinity leadership and being strong adapted with it and very often the outcome of this work is that to be be in a box to feel trapped to feel pressured is generally an awful place and the point for looking at this is to to widen the aperture and look out at the larger scale because men in the west of a certain age and it's an age that overlaps with men who will be in positions of leadership and entrepreneurship and in the echelons of business rates of mental health rates of suicide, rates of loneliness and isolation are an astronomical and almost unthinkable epidemic-like level.

8:54And much higher to women. Yes, much higher. Yeah. Male suicide rate between the ages of 45 and 55 is the number one killer of men, higher than almost every other disease. Yeah, that's insane. It's insane. And it's in a year of there's so much conflict around the world, more men still kill themselves than are killed in armed conflict. I mean, it's frightening and it's also probably to any man and probably any man or woman listening not that surprising because it's so common to know men who have experienced depression and it's also confusing because you know you frame this in in western men and i'm guessing you know i'm certainly amongst the listenership of your audience so i'm a white middle-aged bloke from Britain who's had some business success so I'm in a tiny percentage of people whose experience of life and wealth and privilege is enormous and yet I've also experienced the lowest possible feelings of my life you know awful depression even when I'm loved and with a family around me that have made me consider the darkest choices you can right felt like complete shit a failure and and at a loss and so this is a confusing paradigm for men to be in so we're trying to understand it and we've zoomed out now because we're trying to understand why do we need to define masculinity why do we need to look at this why when this group of men arguably are so well off and life is going so well for them they should be enjoying the process of finding a new degree of equality and redefining what it'd be but actually it's an incredibly tough and very very difficult time to be a man and it's also a very complicated conversation to have because broadly the idea that anyone's getting out their little fiddle for men is laughter.

10:41Yeah. So that's quite hard because I feel like that is actually broadly how both men and women feel about it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I almost felt that, as I said, it's a very, very hard time to be a man. Quiet. Is it? You know, I almost feel bad about me. Yeah, it's a joke, right? Because then people will say to you, well, it's all right for, look at all the leaders in power. 97 % of CEOs in the FTSE 350 are men and all this stuff and people will point to all that stuff and you're like absolutely it's both things can be true and you could be part of the trans community you could be a woman you could be a number of different minority groups listening to that statement and you could roll your eyes absolutely yeah and yet statistically and based on empirical evidence and based on my lived experience it is a very hard time to be a man it's a really hard time to understand what all of those things mean and to live up to it and it feels like a crushing amount of expectation and confusion and it doesn't take me very long to just even begin to read like do I mean this am I saying this from a place of truth this has been a strange thing to explore and and yet I'm driven to explore it because I think it is incredibly important and I'm and I'm okay with that I'm okay with not having all the answers to it I'm okay that I think there are some interesting questions to be pushed upon um and i have a really deep empathy for it because the experience i've had i see it around me and i think what we can also see and this is what and this is why it's a question of leadership there is need for a change there's need for difficult questions there's need for some self-reflection and awareness there's a need for this not to be oversimplified or to be missold solutions that are worse for us than they are better for us i think the best solution finders that we have in society right now i think the best answers often coming up are coming from entrepreneurs they're coming from the business community it's very hard for them to come from the public sector or the social space where traditionally fixes for society came from i think the over the last decade or more the diaspora of the best leaders have gone to to business where our smartest minds often are it's often where the funding is as well and it's where solutions are coming from well yeah incentive and rewards right sure and talent and an ability to answer questions and and freedom and you know release from frustration and social innovation so there's a number of different reasons but i think it's a question upon leaders to examine because the cost is huge be it mental health crisis uh watching and feeling the the the situation that i imagine most male you know i'm a leader i'm supposed to have an answer to this question i'm a leader and I should be strong.

13:16I'm a leader and why the heck am I thinking I need to have answers in this way and stand up in this way and be in front of everybody and live up to these expectations. Where the fuck have these expectations come from? Because the honest truth is I don't know what to do. And I would be certain, sure, that most leaders experience is that they also don't know what to say in a conversation that feels like it is a minefield of language and terminology and booby traps and and that's why there is a visible relief among some leaders about the rollback in inclusivity and diversity programs and there is an anti-woke post-woke um delight you know because there's so much for you know the argument that's been had about pronouns that so many leaders will feel empathy towards because they feel like they're going to get something wrong which they didn't understand in the first place so when they were trying to actually be inclusive and helpful and they end up with a word salad that means nothing and no one's actually communicated anything meaningful at all as a result of it yeah so let's bring progress because that's easier than facing up to how complex the challenge is it is a complex thing so you need smart people do you not feel like you know everything you're saying in modern society fair enough but usually with these situations you know let's talk about mobile phones um usually if say we're all addicted to our mobile phones today we can go and 50 years ago we didn't have this problem because x y and z you talk about masculinity 50 years ago what was life like i mean arguably worse arguably there was less equality less gender equality therefore more men in positions of power more expectations therefore that men would do these things you roll back even 50 years before that that's even ever increased you know except they're all conscripted to go to wars actually in all kinds of ways it's it's bizarre because it's that sort of narrative about gender parity and expectations on society men and women it's now as shared as it's ever been so it's almost like a oxymoron right it's like a paradox doesn't really make sense because it should be better and it isn't yeah you take us and this is partly why um the arguments around this and the arguments then can be presented by what's known as the manosphere where the kind of hotbed of toxic masculinity is often seen to emanate from um are very how do we define what toxic masculinity then so toxic masculinity takes those initial traits of masculinity strength and decisiveness and success and provision for your family i mean you know there's a there's a whole list of words that we might try to understand some of which you know are like you know you've brought in an intergenerational aspect and absolutely your idea of masculinities is informed by your fathers as it was by your grandfathers these things are handed down and the most influential people in our lives have helped us shape those and they lived in very different times and you and me both have young children it is totally expected by ourselves that we want to be really present for a way for our kids in a way that i I bet our dads weren't expected to be, and certainly their dads were not.

16:24So we are changing at a really accelerated rate, and that's what I think brings aspects of this confusion, because an old idea that a man is strong and probably not present at birth, that wouldn't appeal to me. But the new idea of masculinity isn't particularly clear. It's easy to be ridiculed, you know, and it can feel, as soon as you throw aspects of vulnerability and emotional intelligence into it, that can feel weak which goes against my very idea of masculinity you know well that's that's confusing and i think that's really what's what you know we're in a crisis of conflict and confusion about what it means to be a healthy or good man in this moment and that's a crisis of identity and that's a pretty tough thing for that's a very tough thing for a leader to find themselves in you know what where are my values on this where do they come from that's that's hard and it's incredibly hard for young men who haven't yet developed all of their critical reasoning paths and you know and that's where there's seemed to be an additional level of crisis because those young men seeking meaning and role models are being offered them from the realm known as toxic masculinity and it's a very compelling argument because it picks up on the strands you've just said well there was a time when this was fairer and surely isn't there gender parity but but and there is this this crisis facing men so has it gone too far and that's a rather my favorite statistic that I've seen in all of this is 51 % of people think equality has gone too far.

17:52Like it's mathematically impossible for equality to go too far, but nonetheless. And so there is a culture wide rollback on these ideas. And within that is, I believe, an oversimplistic argument that there are morals and values and natural balances in life that perhaps represent a better time than the one we're going through now and these these forces of inclusivity and fluidity when it comes to gender are weakening society and my guess is that's that's kind of victim blaming and that's taking us back to an oversimplified view of how things once were and actually usually when we encourage individuals rights and we try to understand the complex differences between us when we look back at history that those were good decisions right it was better when you know you You can cite your grandparents' natural racist terminology when they lived through the culture shifts that took place in this country that made it a multicultural country.

18:50It doesn't look good, what was said at the time. The signs that would have sat on pubs, the racism, antisemitism, or any other affliction that takes place as a culture changes. I think it's always really important to try and be on the right side of that. So that needs foresight, and it needs compassion, it needs empathy, it needs leadership skills. and when they're not on display at the highest echelons of political leadership they need to be on display from somewhere and and i think business is going to play a really important role in what society looks like with toxic masculinity do you think the poisons in the dose

19:26oh i think it's i think it's dangerous territory and i'll i'll try and speak cautiously because i i worry a lot about the young men caught up in this you know and i think the the manosphere is blamed i think various movements within the manosphere get blamed and they're pretty scary right i would not want my son in there but i think a lot of the young men who find themselves in there feel the pressures of the world on their shoulders and they feel invalidated and and if you can't offer a young man a healthy and inspiring pathway forward someone else will and it is a well-trodden path throughout the entirety of our history that people will seek to gain their own personal power through spreading division and fear and hate amongst others you know that's too well trodden to not be clearly a well-known playbook and i think it's what's happening here so when toxic masculinity is utilized to recruit young men to what look like you know grifting programs of training and leadership and I've you know tried to experience some of them so I'm understanding it you know I did Andrew Tate's course and he's obviously the most widely publicized and known you took Andrew Tate's course yeah what was that like it was awful and eye-opening and enlightening and scary because you can see how compelling it is did you objectively learn anything valuable

20:57the most valuable thing that i took from andrew tate's course was to realize why it is so attractive to so many young men and how big the gulf of leadership that's required is there is a need for really good leadership for positive role models that are bravely engaging the challenges of society and are able to talk about it openly in ways that represent healthy masculinity to fill that fucking vacuum that has been filled with messages that are misogynistic that are violent that dominant that are as unhealthy for those young men that are following as they are for anyone else that's what andrew tate's course taught me so did i ask for a refund yeah i didn't because i didn't use my real name because i'm thinking about there's obviously a lot of there's there's obviously some magic some secret sauce in andrew tate's courses like i've never done them i've never i i don't know anything about that world particularly right i just i buy i see him a lot on twitter and obviously what he represents it's almost the opposite of what i think is healthy discourse in any kind of way yeah but it's quite surface level i've never gone deep enough to see i mean it's terrifying right the stuff that he publicly shares is horrendous i can only imagine the stuff that hides away in those private walled gardens surely a smart model here though would be taking you know the exact philosophy of what he does and peppering it with positivity instead because i'm assuming like any smart funnel he's so successful with it any smart funnel he's probably hacked all the right psychological cues to take people down from um curious and interested into absolute fan follower you know cult leader so isn't it you know practical to say all right how do you reverse engineer that and become a cult leader with positive messaging?

22:48I'd worry about that because I think, and again, I think this speaks to the notion of leadership, right? If you are trying to solve a complex problem and build a useful organisation that is going to endure for some years to come, you are now aware and smart enough to know that it's hard and it's complicated. And very often there aren't clear answers and there are usually some kind of paradox that you're perpetually working through and so if we're going to widen the aperture and try to address a challenge that is as pervasive across society that threatens all of your kids the safety of the world in which we live and when you really see it played out in its worst levels toxic masculinity leads to international conflict and economic downsides and it's just generally one of those rare times you get to find a point of strategic intervention a red thread which really is connected to all the problems so it's it's a useful problem to try to uh address right and it's also helpful because it's good to keep reminding ourselves that we're not trying to fix men right that's not the problem we're trying to find a better explanation of what it means to be a man and understand masculinity and its role in the future because there's an ever more confusing future we're rolling into so when somebody comes along and says i've got a really simple fix mate and it's going to be dead fucking easy.

24:09And all you need to do is get a bit angry and pay me some money and follow these three simple steps. Usually in your business, you know that's a grifter. And you've been caught in their funnel and it might take you a while to escape it. But it's because of some daft late night search you did because you were tired and you were trying to find an easier way out. Right? So no. When you're caught into an oversimplified, overpromised funnel that's selling you some shitty solution, we all as leaders and business owners tend to step away unless we're fucking exhaustive and that's part of it i think there's you know even the men i know who have experienced the extremely difficult times i don't i don't see toxic men i see tired men and that's the danger you know when you're when you're weak and vulnerable and exhausted i think a lot of people are and confused and scared it's easy to go for the simplified solution and so andrew tate is clearly charismatic and intelligent and debates incredibly well and has a lot to say that a lot of men find empowering and engaging and then there's a percentage of what he says which is violent and repeatedly misogynistic and encourages violence against women and encourages exploitation there's a part of his course where you exploit your friends and family you get people in your family and your friends to work for you for nothing whilst you build a business on them it's one of the lighter parts and you know that's not far away is that what those texts from you were about yes uh and you know many of us will have got our friends to help us in our business as i say that out loud i can name the friends who've helped me in my in my business startups right so there's overlap in these worlds and that's partly what makes it interesting and you're right that there is something to learn from but no i don't i don't quite buy that the reductive notion is that we can turn andrew tate on his head and make a positive outcome fair enough i think we have to be smart grown-ups who realize the problem is complex and therefore it needs a complex solution with smart grown-ups involved and i think for reasons we've begun to touch on a lot of smart grown-ups do not want to touch this debate partly because they can empathize with the same frustrations.

26:22They're scared of the language and tripping up with it. And it's a bit of an overwhelming challenge.

26:29So I hear what you're saying and I'm drawn to just challenge the answer because you're right that it's a complex issue, therefore it needs a complex solution. Sadly, complex solutions don't do well in, well, society, policy, anywhere, like everything in business, everything's about simplicity, realistically. you have to find a way to make things really simple and provide really simple alternatives which is sometimes the most complex thing to do of all right i think you there's a distinction there your product is not a simple product it's complex it has a range of ingredients which you've rigorously tested and it's taken you a long journey and it wasn't always a guaranteed success your team is complex uh how you run the business is complex you're up against complex competitors you you have created a great brand that has simple communications and people understand what the benefits are in a simple way so there's two sides to it i don't believe that andrew tay has simplified a complex answer i think he's pretending there's a simple answer right complex problem and and you can say that of all great products you know apple devices i could never get my head around but you can take them out of the box and i'll use them and that's a well-documented version of it and this is complex on multiple layers you know it'd be just as easy to say there's a problem with toxic masculinity as there is anxious masculinity it's a really hard time to understand both what to do how to be a good man how to live up to your responsibilities as a father as a partner as an entrepreneur and you know your own internal stories and that which you've got hung over in your head from your dad and you know all of those things and there's this incredibly high Prevalence of anxiety So someone just showing up And saying it's really easy Just be strong You know Fight Get powerful Dominate your woman That'll make you feel better Even the smartest Most empathetic man Who's done the rounds And done the work Can understand why that's attractive And a more vulnerable Younger Man desperate Or searching for answers Is going to be vulnerable So yeah I do think the response Needs to be more complicated more sophisticated more robust and and the good news is i think the men are out there you know vast majority of men and women and society overwhelmingly want the right thing you know it might sound like uh the invective and the narrative is so dominant at the moment because that's what feeds our stories um but most people would prefer there to be equal rights most people prefer women to have the choice over what takes place in their body most people most people don't want society to be racist you know we have we have won some of those uh arguments and it's taken hundreds of years to even get some degree of racial parity and the feminist movement is centuries of work right and it's still not there but it's done a really good job and it demonstrates what consistent progressive powerful female leaders can do and there isn't really an equivalent and there needs to be and so there needs to be role models and structure and strategy and how How do we work this idea of masculinity through to something?

29:44And there will always be pushback and there'll be backlash and things will go wrong. But there's not the same consistent, coordinated approach that there has been for other groups who've been marginalised and exploited in the way that young men are consistently being. Have you come across the work of, just to play the other side of the argument then, have you come across a professor called Gad Saad? He's an author as well. So he has this term that he coined, which is fascinating, around suicidal empathy. and so this almost plays out the other side he grew up in lebanon and had this whole you know he's like arabic and blah blah blah like interesting life story from the middle east comes over to canada um and is now a professor in his like 60s or 70s right so long life and he's been particularly interested in this idea of well there is actually such a thing as too much empathy and on the other side of too much empathy it's a very complicated moral question i think there's that you know social experiment of like the rubber dinghy right like how many people do you have in the boat if you allow one more desperate migrant swimming in the sea there's 10 more of them they need to get in the boat or they die but one more that gets in the boat the whole boat sinks so what do you do and it's a very commonly used metaphor because obviously that is very culturally interesting around um society cultures immigration etc and not being able to engage in that conversation has actually created a disaster for every political movement, full stop.

31:12Liberalism not having a good answer to that has created a far right movement out of thin air in a lot of places because they just can't have a logical argument to that. So without debating that side of the social argument or the cultural argument, when it comes to defining, you know, masculinity, how do we think that we can reflect on, you know, is there an upper limit to the sort of empathetic man you know you and i are both very empathetic men but at what point is you know being too much that way also actually like really not a good representation for what men should or could be so to speak there's three parts to empathy there's intellectual empathy where you can uh cognitively understand somebody else's situation there's an emotional empathy where you can feel what it's like and then there's compassion which is kind of almost the more powerful because it's a bit of a combination of the both i can i can imagine and feel what this might be like for you i think empathy has to be part of the ingredient of what the modern and future man and leader is going to need things are going to be stranger more complex more confusing in the decade than they are now that's for sure and the attempt to polarize and divide will be even greater so the need to navigate this and not be offset by an extremist argument or an inability to understand a migrant experience is going to become crucial so how do we increase our capacity for empathy i think that and do so in a meaningful way i'm not sure if there is such a thing as too much empathy but i do think that you can't outsource empathy you know the the way that this must have shown up for lots of people is the argument around allyship which again is a word that has lost its power and my understanding of the definition of allyship is that it's still a very useful concept because it is about leveraging is about understanding one's own power having empathy for another group who lack that power or could benefit from that power and being able to leverage your own to benefit that and bring some equality not to suffer unnecessarily the consequences of elevating someone else is the argument by being made but to just leverage some equality so i find that a useful useful concept construct and and yet you know we're frustrated because allyship can't be understood in an off-site and you know all of a sudden my my internal measures of unconscious bias don't seem to have moved and you know we've we've somewhat made reductive a really important and powerful part of it which brings us to empathy so i think empathy is an attribute of leadership and masculinity that can be increased i think that's very hard to do how do you genuinely experience someone else's life and what it might be like for them that isn't easy sure but i do think it's increasingly important to be able to try to do so because i think in there maybe there isn't a right answer about what to do on that lifeboat but what are the tools with which you're trying to get to the answer you know show the show the working out is often the more important thing to do can you have empathy for the different people and all of their experiences in it and is there a difference in their experience life outcomes can we at least work that through from an empathetic genuinely empathetic place and if so i think we all stand to benefit it is widely documented and proven that an increased capacity for emotional intelligence leads to better performance speaking of emotional intelligence how does someone like elon musk um you know the warmest most empathetic nerd we know um how do you think that he got so entangled in toxic masculinity that's a pivot um well you're the one who mentioned empathy and uh you know these other warm fuzzy traits that he has you mentioned scientific research into empathy then hijacked my very interesting answer by bringing up elon musk well i mean i think elon musk is a preposterous bellend so that's my start point but i also think he's an evil genius yeah and and a genius genius and a genius genius and have admired him i i wrote about him in my book i i often kind of wish i had a chance to rewrite that paragraph because sadly for me as can happen in life i think he's taken a path that i no longer respect and uh as a leader i think he has compromised on values that are so significant so important to me that they do undermine even his genius and his achievement I don't think it's quite possible to reconcile one type of success, which he's clearly had as an engineer, as a thinker, as a leader, as a man who's brought complex and challenging ideas that were said were impossible to fruition and that have huge potential impact for society.

36:16and then fuck about making Nazi salutes and bringing disruption and this notion of strongman leadership to the table at a time of such great sensitivity and when there are so many people whose lives are unfairly disrupted by this callous rollback in hard-fought-for equal rights and diversity and to ride it all off as like over-liberal wokeness is just it's such a lack of not even empathy but just fucking respect for the human experience and the strength and energy it took for people whose lives were severely diminished in a way that Elon's never experienced that he'll do it laughing that undermines his value as a leader to me what do you think is the difference then or the balance between bold leadership which is how a lot of people see him and essentially toxicity and you know going too far to me leadership is about living your values it's not about signaling either that you're bold or that you're empathetic it is about living your values and nilon might argue he's doing that well they seem like pretty fucking fluid yeah i know you know it's interesting though because if that's your argument you know in many ways elon is living a lot of the values that feel consistent you know in his um biography with walter isaacson you know there's this constant thing it's not referred to this way but the best way of describing it is the thanos problem right you know it takes if you've seen marvel avengers if you haven't then this was lost on you no no i'm there but you know it's like that's a that's a phenomenal evil character because there's a lot of deep empathy inside thanos and there's also the knowledge that sadly that decision has to be made and it's the one of the toughest ones to do so someone has to be the evil person to do it it's not quite that level right but where elon thinks he is very much able throughout his biography throughout all of his work to think to such a high level about human existence that he does it on a planetary point of like hey if if an asteroid hits earth and that would wipe out all humans ever so therefore as stupid as it sounds to everyone else to do mars and it still sound stupid and all this stuff but even though that all sounds stupid there has to be an escape valve otherwise the human race doesn't exist and that is an obsession of mine it's my obsession i'll fund it i'll make sure i get you know whatever all the things that need to happen but i actually do love humans enough to know that i think that the human race should still exist if that was to happen so we need that safety valve similar thing we're ruining the earth there's big problems i've thought long and hard about this stuff actually electric cars would be a really great way to move people off fossil fuels etc it there are big ginormous thinking points that he's able to think about yeah that we can laugh about at the start or at the end of these moments and but in the in the macro they were the big bold positive moves for humanity one way or another because a lot of the time other people catch up and start playing that game as well and they are interesting and even though he's in the detail a psycho about a lot of these things even the DEI stuff is so fascinating in his book because most of the people who run his companies are women and he does it on a meritocracy so he literally goes around talking about how fucking much he absolutely despises DEI and has absolutely no intention whatsoever to hire a woman because she's a woman but the woman that's been running SpaceX for about the last 15 years is a woman and you know the leadership positions quite often in his companies are women but he doesn't bother they're talking about it so it is there there is a base of values here and it doesn't mean that people don't get absolutely destroyed and do i think that he should be allowed near a government with those kind of things i don't know not actually smart enough to figure it out but you just brought up whether they're in line with his values and sadly like his values are kind of another level to our ability to understand values so i think i can challenge a lot of that yeah well then please do there's some very very broad uh comparisons between which marvel film you're going to bring not there's a lot of there's a lot of um masculinity on display in marvel which might not be that might not serve serve my argument um and there's a lot of good female characters in marvel and there's a lot of diversity i mean there's there's a whole other conversation about the marvel universe and how it's lost its way um much like elon musk um but the uh and we're going to run into our opinion here and i hear quite a lot of opinion and interpretation what you're saying and from my perspective i think the arrogance of the idea that a small bunch of people with an awful lot of money should be the ones that get to go to mars and we don't fix the problems that we have that are within our control and power to fix and a big part of those problems is well documented to be driven by the kind of inequality which elon musk visibly represents doesn't feel like somebody taking responsibility for the problems that they're actually living with and all the billions of other people who are going through them.

41:44So I'm not completely convinced. I don't disagree with any of that. This is a man who's clear on their values. And I also think that there are positive and negative values which we can have a consensus view on. We need to try to achieve some degree of consensus view on. So the arrogance of an individual who will buy a social media platform and use it to disrupt democracies in countries that he can't possibly understand the nuance of is not what i'm calling values-based leadership right that would mean that his value is i'm more important than most other human beings and i don't need to fully understand the problem because fuck it and i can cast my magic wand and who cares who suffers so i think we've departed from values and i think sadly we've departed from leadership i don't think that can be described in any way uh within the paradigm of what i think the kind of leadership that genuinely we need and i i'm not suggesting it goes entirely the other way and i like the idea that elon musk is an anti-ed and i enthusiast who employs women at the higher echelons of his most successful business this this takes us to like jess butcher's excellent argument that she makes really clearly and points out that the very often most successful and best paid leaders will be women and so uh she constructively criticizes how some of the ideas of feminism can hold female leaders back because they believe they're disproportionately disadvantaged so there's a leader who's tackling it in a complex and sophisticated way that can help other leaders but on a similar paradigm of argument and there's elon being an arrogant wife so that would be my distinction so if elon musk is a poor leader that you don't respect and certainly a poor representation of masculinity poor role model for masculinity who are some examples of great role models for masculinity

43:36gareth southgate's been in the news recently and i think that gareth southgate's story is a really interesting one and to read his book and hear him speak he often takes it back to a crushing moment of failure where he missed an all-important penalty that then saw him suffer almost career-destroying consequences, death threats, and cultural destruction. And not only did he go through the crushing sense of failure that came with that, but he used his experience to reshape a culture that is or was certainly historically displaying some of these ideals of masculinity and the work that he did with the English football team to see it on display I don't know whether I mean this was something that he spoke about really openly I found it really impressive that he reformed the way the team took their penalties so that no one ever had those experiences of long, isolated walks on their own.

44:41The team would support one another. They'd have companionship and strength, right? But strength through connection. Whether you missed or scored. And obviously, you want your team to score. But also, I think, obviously, players shouldn't be assassinated for their best efforts. And I think that the narrative he's been really clear on, that yeah he didn't win but the success shouldn't be predicated on medals alone because only 1 % can ever actually win the medal and the joy of sport and the true joy of sport for anyone who plays it is in the team, the competition, the excitement the adrenaline and all the things that come with it Cameradery Yeah, sure Positive aspects of masculinity and leadership they're all in there The game itself is what we enjoy and solving the problem is what makes us better and doing it together is what makes us stronger and we when we lose sight of that because we're oversold the simplistic answer that it's just about the trophy at the end of it we all lose out and so i think he's a good counterpoint at that exact moment to lots of the narrative that i i interpret from the story elon's telling to the one that garrison i mean obviously gareth didn't win the world cup and elon's the most richest man So, you know, you've got to take it for what you see as strength.

46:08But I see the vulnerability with which he spoke and his willingness and ability to turn that around. And even in the midst of watching some of his best players receive out-and-out racism, the letter that... He wrote an open letter to fucking the British team's football fans calling out racism and asking for better. i mean that is a clear sign of strength and articulation understanding the cultural mood and and break out and out bravery so why has he been challenged recently you mentioned something like that um in his critique no he recently gave the dimblebee lecture which is an honor bestowed upon him for the leadership that he's displayed and in it he spoke about his concerns for young men and he talked about and referenced the manosphere which is an uh an online space um the manosphere really began in the in the in the 70s kind of as part of the men's rights movement and has you know moved from having any kind of positive association to being a relatively dark echo chamber where a lot of very frustrated and angry um clusters of male communities from the pickup artists through to the incel movement gather and communicate and he was talking about this and he was talking about the need for greater and more prevalent positive role models for young men so they don't get caught up in negative behaviors now the manosphere is really well documented incel movements are really well documented it's often slightly over if anything sold for the size of the community it is and now you know it's over reference when there's been a lone terrorist attack and that oversimplification never helps.

47:50And sadly, Gareth made a slight oversimplification when he kind of grouped all that together with gaming. And gaming is clearly a huge industry and filled with positive opportunity and tons of brilliant young people and older people really enjoy gaming in a very healthy way. There's about 100 million plus people that play GTA every week. Yeah. Although GTA might not be the most positive example. No, but it's a good example. It's a good example. There's 100 million people that play a violent game like GTA every single week. Yeah. How many of them are violent? I mean, barely any. Totally. So it is a good example.

48:22And it's a great game with a good soundtrack that's highly entertaining to play. And it's made in Britain, so. Yeah. And it's a good point of debate because does it desensitise people to violence by not demonstrating the consequences of it like a responsible movie with a good director and a storyboard would allow for some extreme violence, but you'd also see the consequences of it, which doesn't happen in GTA. So it's also an interesting debate. So I think that Gareth was unfairly then bandied in that he was blaming gaming, which I don't think he was doing. I think that's a simplification and an underreporting of what he was saying.

48:59OK. Moving slightly off topic, but really on topic. Why do we have our nails painted? Just noticed that we both seem to have our nails. Just noticed this. Yeah. Your lovely nails over there. Very sparkly. Yours are great. Interesting. Thank you. diverse range of colors and characters mainly so i'm currently participating in a science experiment that you started yeah called hard as nails why am i doing this because i'm you know whenever you say jump i say how high which is pretty much the response i gave so but why am i doing it again i'd say you're doing it because you're a good man and you are exploring and expanding the idea of what it means to be a man in an experiment expanding empathy and exploring healthy masculinity there are at this present moment we're midway through the experiment and there's nearly 400 men who are taking part so it's a scale um nearly it's quite large for a science experiment actually yes highly yeah um nearly 40 of them are outside london so we have a really good representation um there's a very broad range of industries and backgrounds that are presented so we have a really good diverse sample the majority of them in a 35 to 55 year old bracket which was the target but there's also a good age representation so it's a very valid and representative experiment and the men you included have all submitted your demographic data and then you're taking an assessment which includes the man in a box scale includes a rigidity to masculine identity scale and an empathy scale and a series of qualitative reflections which are around attitudes and behaviors in response to masculine norms that could be seen as toxic and positive and they've been overseen by academics who specialize in this and whose research finds really useful links between both toxic masculinity and violence against women and climate denial and decision making business so we're not doing it at the political outside edge of the culture wars we're trying to do it in the in the most positive and meaningful sense of challenges facing society and then once the men have done that they're participating in a empathy experiment which challenges and forces us to confront our ideas of what it means to be a man which is getting your nails done and then going about your life and business for a week or so and discovering what happens when people judge you and experience you and considering deeply how that feels so there's a series of it's mixed methods research methodology so there's then anonymous research diaries that men undertake to capture of their reflections and conversations did mine today wonderful thank you very much you're a good science participant um and then there'll be a post-assessment and there'll be a longitudinal assessment and with academic oversight and a control group so we're doing it in the most robust way we possibly can and very luckily we've won some interest from movember who clearly understand a thing or two about running organizations and campaigns at scale that benefit men and their research team have given us some oversight and direction as well so it's it's a healthy and holistic study and there's some really interesting potential positive outcomes that we saw from both the pilot and the preliminary data so far what's been some of the most interesting feedback you've heard from men about this there's a quote that i've read this morning in the whatsapp group from a bloke who said i've only just realized how much of my life i've been spending so much energy trying not to appear weak

52:29i find that quite moving i can identify with that the the first surprising response from a lot of men is disappointment because it's this really brave thing to do right it was initially i was mostly worried that this was going to be seen as performative what a what a silly bunch of guys trying to align themselves with different communities and what we really need from men is meaningful action yeah i can see i can totally see that when i was getting my nails done that that stuff went through my head because it is it is you're asking for attention by doing this mine too and i live with that and i've had that accusation online and in person but i experienced early on and the pilot group lived this out and i think the main group now does a lot of those men walk out of the nail bar and their first thought is fear and it'd be interesting if your experience went along with this the expectation that someone's going to respond in a way that's confronted or angry you know the the feeling of vulnerability and exposure the being on public transport and being sure that everyone's looking silently judging but not commenting that's a complex set of emotions which a lot of men with a certain background and experience haven't very often felt haven't felt unsafe haven't felt threatened in the street i'm very unlikely to be called out or attacked you know statistically speaking my biggest threat is myself right yeah and and yet all of a sudden to feel that is unusual and it's moving and it's an empathy increasing exercise that is taking you to compassionate empathy of what it might be like to be part of a trans community who are disproportionately affected by violence women who it's well documented and evidenced in a very present story about the level of violence against women um the gay community i mean multiple other communities so it's an empathy experiment of experiencing what it could be like to be unsafe and and then there's a secondary surprise which is that men are disappointed because there's not enough comments there's not enough celebration they're in a meeting and no one's telling them like what the fuck is going on with your nails or they're being championed or asked what it's all about and repeatedly you know i did this presentation i went to work and whether they're gardeners builders train drivers taxi drivers or they're getting up on stage it's like no one said anything i'm sure i saw them looking i know it was going through their head they put probably just thought I was gay maybe they thought I was and what's at first I worried I was like oh dear you know my original hypothesis that this would be a conversation star and a catalyst for a greater level of connection between men and then start having conversations they never normally do isn't correct and maybe it's not correct although it has led to multiple really interesting and in-depth conversations that didn't happen before but the deeper thing is that those men have been forced to confront and experience a level of inner reflection that is unusual that's not considered a masculine trait that's considered a feminine trait and considered possibly a sign of weakness in men and what you begin to realize is maybe the person who's been reinforcing the prejudices that i've been suffering from is me because i thought i was going to be attacked I thought this was a sign of weakness I thought I looked gay or vulnerable or stupid and actually people don't care and people are a lot more positive than I thought and and if that's the case about doing something as as confronting as having my nails done well what would it mean if I wore that jacket that I liked or or that I spoke up on behalf of that personal maybe I did that thing that I always wanted to or maybe I tried out that thing that I always thought I wanted to do but I always thought secretly deep down that would be weak or make me look vulnerable or make me look stupid like there's something quite powerful in beginning to understand the constraints that we put on ourselves and we tie that back to the theme of our conversation well where did those constraints come from where did i get this idea that men should be men and that that the displaying any kind of femininity was a sign of weakness that might get me attacked in the street and and and it might do and is that okay and what happens if if some you know bloke fulfilling the tropes of toxic masculinity was angry drunk and muscle-bound and decided to take me to task on the street in front of my doors that would be really scary i'd hate that but i would only be succumbing to the fear of the construct of toxic masculinity and then conforming to the vulnerability of weakness that this is all part of the story and so this lovely and interesting paradox presents itself that it's a really brave thing to do and it's really easy to do and it's not about the the way you thought and understood of being a man it's quite different and being silently judged or catcalled or or or seen as is an unusual experience and a useful experience i think for men to go through and then to deeply reflect on the limitations and definitions that one places on oneself of strength and weakness you know that's that's work and that could lead to what i believe is close to an epiphany and when people have epiphanies there tends to be a second order reframe from which you have a lasting difference to your actions and behavior and seeing as we're trying to address something that has a pervasive nature in society i think that sounds like that would be a good thing at the heads of our companies or in teams of people that i want better ideas out of or in my understanding of interrelationality between the generation that i'm trying to support as they grow up following in the footsteps of me and in all of the fucking conflicts i have to face a deepened experience and understanding of what it might be like being you it's interesting it's been a week for me and the two public transport basically i've done the bus and the tube like that's been exactly as i expect um actually sort of i would say a 50 50 women and men i thought it'd just be entirely men judging and making faces and stuff but it's definitely been 50 women um and i've been trying to reflect on what that means and to your point you don't really know because you have no idea what's going on inside someone's head but you know my narrative that i run with in my head is that oh those women are probably thinking what a great ally i am and the men are probably thinking what a queer he is and actually there's no no no fact about any of those things but it's so interesting it's probably the other way around to be honest um who knows literally who knows and so that's been really interesting just because it like you say it it it plays on your thoughts i had and how do you feel being silently judged by others well it's interesting i had the only the only person who's like properly brought this up um i had to get a physio yesterday and it was a muslim guy during ramadan and he was uncomfortable because you know he's come i mean i don't i'm making like you know assumptions here yep but it's a Muslim guy it's Ramadan he turns up at my house I'm on my own I've got my two cats they're very fluffy um there's no woman around and the first thing is the guy has to ask me take my top off and then he sees my nails it's probably not the ideal situation for him and he was visibly uncomfortable and I was like I don't really know what to do here like do I break the ice or should he break the ice or whatever and in fairness he did bring it up um and he was uncomfortable but he was like what's what's what's your what's the nails about kind of like mumbling and i was explaining he's like oh right okay and i was like and i was like i felt really quickly i had to be like my daughter loves it and he's like oh right you've got a daughter and a wife and suddenly very and i was like yeah yeah don't worry he's much more comfortable after that um but it was it was super interesting it was a really uncomfortable for a minute experience but you know got through it the only place i've been uncomfortable with this and i noticed it wasn't thinking about it and then realized i'm actually very uncomfortable with this is picking up my daughter from nursery don't know why but it felt really like i shouldn't have i don't know what i'm gonna guess we both do know why yeah like there's a pedophilic aspect to it yeah absolutely and i didn't even i just strolled right in i'm like pick you up and i suddenly look at my nails i'm like oh god this looks terrible i assume i don't know outside a nursery at conflict with what it might look like in most people's eyes to be a man oh my god now i'm going to leap to the conclusion that people might assume that i'm a pedophile yeah i'm going to snatch children yeah arguably i should have thought about it outside like before i got in i was like literally just casually getting about my day and realizing i was inside and like this doesn't look great it's strategic it's emotional it's reactive and we make judgments based on deeply held emotions and ingrained stories and very often bogeyman narratives that have permeated culture and society to your point on you know on masculinity and how people uh see men one of the things i noticed in my life when i had my daughter before i had and i said i share this with so many people because i'm like it is an interesting experience before i had my daughter i didn't really give a shit about babies i don't have a shit about kids you know they're kind of annoying I'm not interested at all and when people try and engage me or anything I'm like whatever go away and I have my daughter and you know every child on earth is this beautiful wonderful creature and suddenly I'm like a completely different person about it took myself by surprise and I take my daughter out for you know in the buggy or whatever and I would just I remember I was living and kneeling at the time and I was just like hello good morning like waving basically to other other mums it's always usually it was often mums with their buggies and they were not comfortable with that being me and i'd have this conversation my wife she's like i do that all the time and i'm like oh it's so interesting it must be like because i'm a man and maybe they're not used to a man being like hello you're you know your child's lovely and like all this kind of stuff and trying to make friends because i've got a child they've got a child but i could not get like honestly i couldn't get pretty much anyone to just sort of meet me on a level of being a human who's excited to have a child yeah because they were quite uncomfortable that i was a man doing it who's this guy with a baby on his own chatting totally yeah well i think you've brilliantly documented the both the need for this experiment and what is going on for many of us most of the time the strength of these narratives of these definitions how outdated they are and how limiting they can be how judgmental they are and let's just like explode them out and put that in a boardroom or in a hiring decision or in an innovation or trying to get in front of a client or a number of those environments where we need to advance our businesses and all of a sudden wait a minute am i getting the best out of this moment or have i got the best people or have i made the best decision or wow if i can if i can be worried that people are going to assume i might be a that's a jump that's that's one of the scariest stories you could have in society one of our ultimate bogeymen and wow i've gone there in a second because i've got my nails back it's quite a lot isn't it yeah yeah but i totally understand it we you know there are so many stories moving stories of the men who've been involved my one that sticks in my mind is is max who's uh brilliant he's very experienced in the media he runs workshops he's uh i believe part-time stand-up comedian right so there's a guy with thick skin and he took part in the pilot and he told this brilliant story about trying to get to watch the match that night and he couldn't get to his normal local so he knew it was on at another place that he considered a bit of a rough pub but you know close enough and he knew the establishment gets the pub it's his hand on the door still in time to make it looks at his hand he thinks i'm not i'm not up for it i'm just not up for it i really want to watch the match looks at his hand again and walks home so you know comparable and on his way home as hopefully you were driving back with your daughter safe in the car completely assured in your own non-paedophilic status um but wait a minute what's it like being judged all the time what's it like other people looking at you and making assumptions based on what you wear or how you present or aspects of your background or culture or your norms fuck i don't have this maybe i should have some great empathy for those that do maybe i need to share some of my safety with others in a way that i can maybe i should make sure that i don't feel like makeup and they're moving moments that i would call epiphany moments uh that take us closer to an understanding of the real problems and experiences of others and that can only bring society i think together and make us better problem solvers and make us more inclusive teams and increases our emotional intelligence and you know all the different things that we know or i believe we know and i think there's you know very good data that tells us that's how we get the best out of the experience of being human and the best out of the experience of being a team and if we're pushed the other way strange things are scary you know newcomers should be derided with fear we should go back to some traditional values where things would you know even if it's as well articulated as jordan Peterson or fucking Andrew Tate at their their total best it doesn't take long for us to work out that we've gone beyond that we've come further than that and so hopefully this experiment is taking that beyond something that you cognitively aware of and that we've read in books and that we you know we know we want to agree with to move you yeah to experience it yeah so imagine it's 2030 and this is bigger than Movember Hard as Nails is bigger than Movember what do you think would have been the impact on masculinity what's the shift that we would have seen if i was at my most ambitious where this could go i think there is a dormant army of decent men who don't know what to do to fill this space that gareth southgate's conversation is calling for who are terrified of the likes of andrew tate who've watched adolescents who don't know how to keep their sons and daughters safe and they're terrified of the language around this and yet that is the majority of men good men decent men who've experienced difficult times and they're the ones at risk of toxic masculinity as a narrative and they're the ones who are at risk statistically of suicide and i would like for all of those men i would like for any man to have the experience that these few hundred blokes are having because they are having a sense of deep connection with one another going through something that's made them feel stronger as a result of displaying some vulnerability stronger as a result of challenging these rigid ideas of masculinity and stronger as a sense of connection and brotherhood you know a missing sense of companionship that confronts the loneliness and isolation that so many men feel if if i could if i could do anything right now as a man as a father that i could think would would would strengthen community and and society and make us more able to deal with i'd like to do that yeah and and i think there is a such a large number of men out there who fucking more don't know what to do about it this doesn't give them an answer right there isn't a clear strategy as a as a result of having my nails done i now know how to fix society but as a result of having my nails done i've had a deeper empathetic experiment experience i feel closer to not just men but to other people i mean that's pretty far having watched netflix's adolescence what's the one thing that you wish every teenage boy would know about masculinity before it's too late

1:07:34i really don't want to say something trite but i think it would be that masculinity isn't a destination it's not this place of success that you can either build your muscles up to or earn your money to buy your way into i think a healthy masculinity is an ability to ask yourself a possibly unanswerable question about what it means to be a man and to be able to ask questions and explore them without shame or fear of attack and to ultimately as a result of that feel like you can be yourself and there's quite a broad spectrum of what being yourself means but you don't feel constrained or in a box by outdated generationally irrelevant ideas of manhood there's a lovely quote which is the quality of your life is defined by the quality of your questions and uh that feels very relevant very pertinent for that that's a really good quote i'll just say that i made it up then um what is some advice that you would give then to young men who are currently struggling with this like for example should they go and join hard as nails campaign if you're struggling with your masculinity right now would doing this take you to a more complicated place or would it actually take you faster to a more interesting question

1:08:52currently i think hard as nails has taught me more about leadership than any away day i've ever been on a bit harsh you've been some of my away days facts true story try painting your nails at the next one yeah i'll bring along some nail polish uh yeah i mean i like many of i like you and all the books around here and i'm sure lots of people listening you know I'm very interested in my own personal and professional development I love a good self-help book and I really love trying to dissect it very quickly and taking away the key takeaway and then not really having to adapt that to my life in any way that's too meaningful or difficult but just so that I can update and I'll take the chat GPT summary of atomic habits and then worry why I haven't got bad habits lots of our advances are surface level there's something about this which is not surface level it has forced me to confront some deeply held beliefs that have held me back and I am in the midst of a leadership journey with an idea that didn't meet some of the criteria of success that I put on it and I hated the feeling of failing and it didn't fix the financial problems that I have in my life and it didn't achieve its potential and how I recover from that in a way that doesn't compound a sense of feeling of failure and doesn't limit my ambition about what i might do next is a critical pathway for me and being able to explore where some of those feelings or interpretations come from being able to confront the narratives that i tell myself and realize how consistent they are actually also in my own fear of failing as a parent and as a friend and as a family member oh fuck and that is deeply uncomfortable and doesn't come from the surface level of professional and personal development which is often very useful and it can't you know it has to be in a safe space um so i found that remarkably useful and and like i said i i think that i don't perceive or i don't see toxic masculinity in many men i see just a lot of tiredness in many men and this has given this group such a sense of energy and empathy and and trust and unity and by god like connection is often the answer isn't it and connection is rare rare really rare for lots of men yeah i mean loneliness is a epidemic yeah for understandable reasons and and that takes you back to some of these well-worn ideas who's responsible in most relationships that you know for organizing social outings who is better at forming relationships at the school gates other than with dan who's waving at everybody you know it falls onto gendered ideals and and norms and so it's very well documented that when relationships break down very often male males are then massively isolated because the female narration takes the the relationships they had forward and this this stuff is known it's evidenced and so you can pick on any part of it again this is this is worth exploring and worth not letting ourselves be limited by the confines of the language around it by the people who are using it to to polarize and argue okay so what is something practical that someone so man listening to this say we've all got some you know some insight some degree of that that toxicity that problem within us left to explore what is the next step that we can take to identify it and hopefully shut it down or improve it it's not a practical answer sadly um i don't i don't have a simple fix for it but i don't think grand theft auto i would just like to say get your nails done and find out how it feels but but probably get your nails done and play grand theft auto there you go there you go that's really it's really blending and blurring i think it's understanding it's trying to replace the frustration that you must be feeling with the emotion that you're probably avoiding.

1:12:53And the frustration is real and so many men feel it. It leads to anxiety and resentment and oh my god I can't I don't know what words to use and this is too complicated and it doesn't make sense. And it is frustrating because there are so many other challenges and depending on your generation, age, background it's very hard to understand people who want to identify in this particular way and why. And resentment you know it's there it's palpable I have seen it and heard it and felt it and it's been said in the ways that can't be spoken in formal briefs and meeting rooms. And you'll have heard it because it is part of the leadership discussion that's taking place across all businesses.

1:13:28And the alternative is to feel the emotion. Where's this coming from? Where does that come from? Where does your response come from? Where does that anger come from? From what story? From what internal pathway? From what fight or argument or diminishment or sense of weakness or vulnerability? what is you know it's it's a cliche but you know if you want to heal it you have to try and feel it and and there's something in this experience that's that's what my big takeaway would be is these men who've participated have been taken to an emotional place that is scary but has been very very useful and it hasn't made them weaker it's made them stronger all right last question what do you think is one uncomfortable truth that men that you know can face around their masculinity that they could start today

1:14:15i just will only reiterate i'm no expert in this i'm i'm doing an experiment that came from taking my daughter to go and see harry styles right and i got my nails done because i took my daughter to do a concert where you're supposed to get dressed up and it was only because of my naivety that when they asked me if i wanted gels or shellacks i chose a kind of nail polish which is almost like apocalypse proof and didn't come off for weeks and so in the ensuing days and a month I started a series of conversations that gave me a clue that this thing could lead somewhere so that probably has to give me my answer the thing that we can do to challenge our sense of masculinity is to push ourselves outside of the man box if you don't know what the man box is you know take some responsibilities look it up see if it resonates with you see if you've ever felt inside that box and then find something that feels just brave enough and within your power to do it and and usually if you want that to be helpful and and that you're going to feel grateful and pleased that you've done it make it to do with a sense of connection connection with someone that you miss a connection with someone you disagree with connection with someone that you love and you wish you were closer to just step out the box yeah i think that's the thing you know find the find the confidence that it takes to step outside the man box because it seems to make us weaker amazing sam thank you so much for joining us on the show thank you very much for having me and the bravery to have a conversation that really like i said so many people just shut us down um because it takes us to an uncomfortable place so thank you for having me