The Gender Expert: Men Are Emotionally Dependent On Women & We're Treating Them Like Malfunctioning Women! Richard Reeves

25:42These entrepreneurial risk taking men. That's why men have to be running all the companies, right? And these women, they're just, they're just their safetyism. They're, you know, they're, they're just too scaredy cat. Right. For capitalism. Right. So let's have a minute. And the other of you would be like, hey, look at all these women led companies that don't go under. As often don't go bankrupt. Sure, they're a bit less profitable, but you know, they're less risky. So we should have women running companies or your conclusion, which is. Given that it's probably likely benefits to both sides of that.

26:09And again, recognizing it's not all women and all men. Maybe we should have diverse leadership teams. That seems to me to be the right conclusion from that. But the conclusion is itself. The arguments for gender diversity are based on the assumption. There must be some differences. Yeah. If there weren't differences, why on earth would we care about gender diversity? Right. If we don't think that women are going to bring something different to the party, not just because their life experience, but it's like something else, a bit different, but risk taking competition, et cetera. If we didn't think that mattered, then we wouldn't care how many board members were women.

26:42But we do care about that quite rightly, because we presume that actually there are some differences between men and women. And so sometimes that, the idea that there are differences between men and women is seen as a conservative idea. But weirdly, it underpins a lot of the progressive movements for gender diversity. It's so true. It's so very true. And this is why it is difficult to talk about the differences between men and women at a physiological level, without it appearing to be inherently sexist, because it's not to say that either is better or worse. It's just to say that there's differences.

27:14And I think it goes back to what I was saying. To understand the script for male to fill in that question mark, there must be some clues hidden in the book. And in our biology, there must be. Because I think there is. Because I'm trying to, you know, it's interesting as I'm 31 years old now. And my girlfriend is 31 years old. And in the way that the world has changed, I'm still trying to figure out if like me holding the door open for her is me being old school in old fashioned in a bit my socialist. Or if that's because that's what I want to do. And she likes it. Does she? That looks like she loves it.

27:53Yeah, of course. Of course, you wouldn't tell me together. I want to do that. And she loves it. And she will have moments where she turns to me and tells me, she'll thank me for doing things like that. And she'll thank me for the way that I am. And she'll acknowledge that my brain and her brain have two completely different perspectives on the world. And it's the differences that make us work. You know, because I come to everything super logical. How can I fix it, baby? It's like I show up with like a spanner to every problem in our relationship. And she has this much more holistic. She almost has this sixth emotional sense.

28:27And together we like navigate issues really well. But it does require to respect those differences and not see. The old problem was one was seen as better than the other. Yeah. Right. So that kind of lets do with all the caveats about averages and overlapping distribution. So let's agree now that we're by this point in the conversation. Anybody listening to this gets that when we say these things, we're not saying all men are all women. If there are differences, the problem in the past was let's say men are a bit more risk taking, a bit more competitive, a bit more inclined to kind of rational approaches to problems.

29:04That that was better. Yeah. That's the definition in my mind, a useful definition of a patriarchy. A patriarchy is one where more typically masculine virtues or attributes are seen as better. And you could argue that a patriarchy where we to have one would be the other way around. And an equal society isn't one of androgyny. It's one where they're treated as equal value. So we don't say one is better than the other. We say they're different and try and bring them into kind of collaborative and constructive and rather beautiful equality. But I do think a lot of people are making the mistake of thinking that equality requires androgyny.

29:38That's a nice simple intellectual idea. Like get rid of these or all these ideas. Right? And then we'll be... It's not a lot of difference between men and women. Okay. So it's just androgyny is where, like if you have an androgynous species, there's no difference between men and women. Okay. Or like we're going to have to double down on this. I found you door opening one really interesting. So I was raised to when you're walking along the street to always with a woman, always to put yourself roadside. Yes. You do that? Always, yeah. Why do you do that? I don't know now you've said it. But I remember when I was crossing the road yesterday, my first instinct was to reach back and grab her hand and basic because there was like a big bus coming in and there was this black cab coming.

30:25And my instinct was to solve that problem, which was like to put myself in the front of the taxi. Maybe because I think in my head because I thought this was the only contra -celement to it, my body's bigger, so the taxi will see me. My girlfriend's about a foot smaller than me and she's really, really small. So I thought maybe the taxi would see me. And also there's a protective element. It's two things. If I put myself in front of the taxi that's coming, it will see me better. But also, I kind of would rather take the hit. Yeah, but you didn't think all that. No, I didn't. It's a reaction I have.

30:59Right. That's all coded in you. Yeah. And you see it actually even in quite tragic circumstances in the US when you see this kind of mass shooting incidents. When they reconstructed after what you very often see is that quite often, you know, men have been killed when they're just automatically putting their body between the shooter and their girlfriend or somebody, usually a woman. Right. And there's also this great photograph of a baseball heading towards this kid. Right. It's been whacked, really hard. It's heading towards this kid. And there are, and you see these two guys doing this in the shot.

31:35They're diving in front of it. Whereas the moms are kind of like doing this. Like the dads are like protecting the kids. Yeah. And whoever's going to get hit by it. Right. And again, they weren't, they didn't think through, oh, my body's big. I just, just a reaction. And the road one is very interesting. And again, most of the women that I've been with, I don't say anything. I just do it. I just go roadside. And that's because the road could be that you could get splashed. It's dirty. So it could be like ship, ship or anything. It's about my, but also things might have that there's more danger there.

32:04Like if someone comes off the road or something. Like so to the extent that just at some psychological level, danger, more danger that side. Right. You want to put yourself between that and the woman that you're with. And it's happening at a quite a natural level. Now, is there any danger there? Does it make any kind of sense? Probably not. But is it still symbolically quite a good thing? And my answer would be yes. And I don't, I know not everyone's going to agree with this, but I've come to believe that some of those symbolic acts, which are quite gendered, are still valuable, even in a world where we want absolute substantive gender equality.

32:45And so the test would be you hold the door for a woman who's your boss. And that's okay. You're okay with the fact that having gone through the door, she goes to the CEO suite. Right. And she's okay with the fact that even though she's the CEO and your boss, you held the door for her. And so I sometimes fear that in our desire to sort of squeeze out all of these symbolic differences, we lose a little bit of those symbols of difference, which even in a world of complete gender equality, which we're hopefully getting closer to, I don't know if we want to eradicate them. And increasingly I find a lot of young women not wanting to eradicate them.

33:22They just, they, they want us to hold, many of them want us to hold the door, but then by God help them rise up the corporate ladder if that's necessary and have no problem at all with them being our boss, then them being bossed to us. That's what they ask of us. I think that's a reasonable thing for them to us. We can do that, right? What's the rebuttal to that? Is it that holding the door is a symbol of like the patriarchy and it's a symbol of oppression in that I am. You need me. She's too weak to open the door. Okay. But actually, I've noticed there's gone a lot of feminists now. They're like, I've seen this a bit on the social media.

33:56They're like, for the love of God, guys, feminism doesn't mean you shouldn't offer to help me get my overhead down on the plane. You are taller. You are stronger. Get my bag down, right? And I do think, and you've seen a bit of reluctance or anxiety, but I think that's why I'm not going to be around that merely because I think men are almost entirely wrongly afraid if they offer. The woman will turn to them and say, why? Because I'm weaker than you. That's by the way, that's never going to happen. Almost never going to happen. But she might say, no, I'm good. Thanks. I'm fine. But it's obviously a shorter woman or a kind of older woman or even a man.

34:34But more. And so I think that's the kind of danger is that some of this has kind of descended into this kind of these symbols are bad. Meanwhile, we've got so much more work to do to get more women on boards and increase female safety that it sort of feels like too much politics has become a lot than these symbolic things. You said that you think one of the biggest issues facing men today is the issue of suicide. And you talked about some of the stats at the top of this conversation that relate to men. The most startling of all as being someone that lives most of the time in the UK is that it's now the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.

35:12Have you been exposed to those stories, especially as you've you published this book, but in your own personal life, if you've been exposed to those stories of the impact of suicide directly. Yeah, people rarely talk about it in an open forum, but they will very often afterwards talk about it. And I had this moment recently someone I'm actually working with and I've been working with for some time. I did a little piece on Morning Joe, which is a daytime thing in the US. And I talked about this crisis of kind of male suicide. And she told me afterwards that they put up a just a stat that four times higher among men.

35:48It was just a graphic and she said she burst into tears. And she said, I'm so grateful you're doing this work. I lost my son to suicide when he was 16. I started telling me kind of why and I have worked with this woman for years on this issue. And she'd never raised it with me before. I had no idea. And I now understand why, particularly given her situation, she's been so supportive of my work. It wasn't just an intellectual thing. This is very rarely just an intellectual thing. It's usually visceral as well. There's usually something going on there. And I've had countless stories like that. People sharing a story is it's heartbreaking.

36:29And you've had people on this show talk quite a lot about this. Jordan Peterson was asked in an event once, where this guy said, I'm thinking, I delayed my suicide to come and hear you talk. Why should I not take my own life? No, I haven't had anything like that. But it's there. This crisis is there in our communities playing out. Is there a, I'm just thinking about that woman who's been working with you supporting your work, but hadn't said anything. And I'm wondering why people don't say something about it when it happens in their family. With other deaths, with a cancer death, you'll see a Facebook post, you'll see a, or whatever you'll see.

37:10But it seems I'm wondering here if there's a different level of, I don't know, public sharing as it relates to suicide because it's a different type of death isn't it? Yeah, it creates a lot of guilt and feel. And Shane and like so you're in her situation. And I have to tell you having raised boys, one of whom in particular, who really struggled with his mental health through 10 years, there are days where you just hope as a parent that they're still around. And you think, well, it was, I actually, the 16 and we seem to huge rise in young, young men's suicides in the US, especially. And just think if you're a parent and you lose a child to suicide, the idea that you cannot free yourself of the burden of what could I have done?

38:08What did I miss? Was it me? Right. Being a parent is already a lifelong trip in rethinking your decisions. And you add that to the mix. I can't imagine it. I mean, my parents lost a daughter very young, who are heart defect and they have an amazing marriage and they've been amazing parents. But I do think that the loss to this illness, this terrible tragedy thing, it's just different. It's hugely grief, but it doesn't turn them, it turns the mirror on you. It's like, was this you? Was this your fault? Are you the reason your son is dead? Just think about that for a moment and what that kind of does to people.

38:49And so because of that, people don't talk about it. So you'll get died unexpectedly. Yeah. We're not willing to talk about it in the same way as we are others because we think it might reflect on us in some way perhaps or on the memory of that person. With them, yeah. I mean, it's still a crime technically. Obviously. Now people say it's a really interesting thing. I've really learned not to say commit suicide. Yeah. Die by suicide. I just wanted to, so I've got some crazy, unthinkable stats here that I want to just add on top of what you're saying, which come from the Institute of the sort of boys and men report that really was staggering to me is that a man dies by suicide approximately every 13 minutes in the US.

39:34In the United States alone. So that's not including other countries and the UK. Just the US. Okay. If men's suicide rates had matched those of women's approximately 545 ,000 fewer men would have died since 1999. And that's again just in the US. Half a million men. Yeah. Suicide rates amongst younger men have grown the fastest. The growth of male suicides has occurred almost entirely since the beginning of 2010s. And interestingly as well, rural countries in the USA have higher rates of suicide than those in urban metro. So it highlights again that suicidality is geographically distributed in certain ways.

40:18Why? What's going on here? What's going on with this full picture? Why? Why is this the state of suicide amongst men? In some ways, the decision to end your own life, obviously it's complex and it varies. But in some ways it's like the ultimate signal that you don't feel as if the world is better off with you than without you. Like so many people who take their own lives lose their lives to suicide will say something like, you'll be better off without me. I've been a burden to you. I know it'd been difficult. They convinced themselves that they're not wanted, they're not needed. And somebody that goes back to Arthur Miller's, who played death of a salesman, Willie Lohman, takes his own life because he thinks that the life insurance his family will get will be a better breadwinner than he can be.

41:10Because he's so badly failed in his primary responsibility as a breadwinner. So there's not a new idea. But there's a really nice piece of work by Fiona Schand, she's an Australian research and the work was done primarily in Australia, where they looked at the words that men who did take their own lives used to describe themselves before doing so, or in some cases it's attempting to, but usually when men attempt suicide they do lose their lives. And the two most commonly used words by those men who took their own lives were about themselves were useless and worthless. Now, of course this is a sample of people who then went on to take their own lives, but it's nonetheless, I think very powerful statement that to get to that stage you don't think you have worth.

41:58You don't think you have use. You don't think you're needed. And I believe that the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded. I think to be needed is arguably the most important and constant human requirement. And so if you end up feeling like I'm not need, my family don't need me. My employer doesn't need me. My community doesn't need me. I am surplus to requirements. If anything I'm a drag on my parents or on my community. I'm not adding value. I hope you define value to the people around me. I'm taking away from it. That's the psychological trajectory that seems to put a lot of men towards this path.

42:52And well short of suicide, I think many of the other mental health problems we see among men addiction, checking out in one way or another, coming out of the labor market, etc. They're not the most extreme form of course of checking out by literally taking your own life. But they are a different form of that. They are a different way of kind of benching yourself, taking yourself out of the equation because of a sense of like, well who needs me anyway? So I think in a way that the suicides statistics are in some ways the tip of the iceberg of the sense that many men have are feeling unneeded. Unwanted.

43:27Is there an evolutionary basis for why men or humans I guess need to be needed amongst their community? Have you thought about that? Yeah. Well when we started operating in tribes of course, we realized we were going to sink or swim together, right, or hunt or die together maybe, is it better way to put it? And so what that meant was being needed by your community or your and or your family was kind of central to the human experience. So the kind of invention of those bonds. And the difference is that for women, particularly once they become mothers or if they're intending to become mothers, the question of like whether I'll be needed is never asking quite the same way because you're literally needed to grow children.

44:13And give birth to them and feed them. And so that kind of very rooted sense of being needed for the species. I think it's just more obvious with women, but why do we need men? Why do we need dads? And that's a much more recent phenomenon in the sense of being dads. And the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by Anna Machen. She's an anthropologist at the University of Oxford about fatherhood. And she's, so I'm just paraphrasing her now, but she has this wonderful description of how we invented fatherhood because we went bipedal. Do you know all this? And the baby's head thing.

44:55It's amazing. So we had this bit of a crisis, X hundreds of thousands of years ago. I'm terrible at remembering whether it's millions or hundreds of thousands. So you don't have to Google it. Back in the ancestral time, there's what people say. So what happened was we had this massive growthspot in our brains in our heads. We had massive heads, but we also went bipedal. And if you bipedal your hips can't be that big. And so women couldn't get the heads of the babies out of their smaller hips. So we're actually facing a bit of a crisis. The way we solved that crisis was by giving birth to babies way earlier than we should.

45:32Way, way earlier. In fact, if we were like other mammals, pregnancies would last about two years. So I don't know how women watching will feel about that. Can't speak to that, but two years would be about the average. We don't. We do obviously don't know. So they're incredibly vulnerable. And mom has to literally keep feeding them. Right. And the calorific requirements just amount of food that they need. Mom and baby was huge. And so dad, go get food. Right. This is only going to work. We're only going to survive as humans if this stuff comes. So in a way that was the invention of fatherhood. And you see the brains of fathers out, you know, getting activated by all this stuff.

46:11So being needed by the community family, et cetera, to produce something, to provide something is. I think it's just deeply encoded. It's encoded in our DNA. It's like part of like if we're not needed, then we're dead. Because we're going to be all right. Right. So these ties, familial ties, tribal ties are actually central to our identity. And so the danger now is that if people, particularly men start to feel like. Am I needed? Does the community need me? Do my kids need me? Does the woman I've had? My children with need me? Am I needed? If the answer to that is not clear, I think that has all kinds of downstream consequences.

46:56And we've just done a really poor job of making sure that even in this time a great transition, we still need you. We need every man, every boy, every, everybody, we need you. We don't yet know exactly what we need you for, but by God we need you. We cannot afford to lose you. You are precious. And we need you. You know, you, I don't know what you're going on to be yet. But by God our community cannot afford to lose you. And so that message of just like how much we need you, I just think we've lost a little bit of that in recent debates. And too many men have drawn the conclusion that maybe they aren't needed with tragic consequences.

47:38A few questions there just because I want to make sure I'm clear. Fiona's working Australia around these letters that men had left before they had died by suicide. Did she also look at the letters that women had left? No, she only looked at men. Okay, fine, that's my first question. And for me, the key thing in the suicide stance is that it's increasing. It's increasing. So if we're saying that it's a case of men not feeling needed, then why is that sense that men aren't needed increasing? If we're saying there's some kind of link between those two ideas. Yes, yes. Because the extent to which they're needed is less clear now than it was.

48:21So it was very clear before that you're needed because you're the breadwinner. Okay. You're the provider, right? So go back. And I don't know. I think part of the point here is that this idea of being kind of, this gets us into discussions about masculinity, but being generative, like producing, providing. It gets narrowed down to like the breadwinner model of like post -war Western societies, or like it's like a wage earner. But that's not all it means. It used to mean going and getting meat. It used to mean helping farm together. There's all kinds of ways you can be a provider. Service, I guess, as well, just like.

48:55Yeah. It's about being more... There's this great line from CS Lewis, the very good theologian. But obviously much better known for his work on the line, the witch and the wardrobe, the chronicles of Narnia. But here's this lovely line. And he was talking here about what it meant to be a Christian. But I think it applies to what it means to be a mature man as well. He said, you shouldn't think less of yourself. You should just think of yourself less. And there's something about service and... Like just doing for others, your family, your community, etc. I think he's quite intrinsic to these ideas of mature masculinity.

49:38And if men don't feel as if they are necessary or encouraged to have a distinct and important role in the family, in the community, then I think that kind of question mark over, well, am I needed anymore? Is a real one. And lots of people like Margaret Mead, anthropologist in the 70s, and a lot of conservatives were saying, look, if women do achieve a significant degree of economic independence, she thought that was a wonderful thing, the conservatives didn't, right? But they all agreed that we will have to think really hard about men. How do we make sure that men still feel connected and needed in our society if we have very quickly changed the central way in which they expressed that?

50:22A few things came to mind. So it's interesting, before I move forward on this point, when you were talking about this idea of humans needing to be needed, it made me reflect on some of the stats that came out around how quickly someone dies after they retire. And that kind of general narrative that if you retire, you don't have a long left, which is kind of this idea of a social tribe and feeling like you need to be serving the tribe in some way. I've always wondered if there was any truth to that, this idea that, you know, retirement can speed up your mortality, because you're... Yes. So it's almost like there's something in your body.

50:59Either one or two things could be happening. Number one, you just sit around more, which means, you know, you're more sedentary. Yeah, exactly. It's going to kill you anyway. But number two is that there's almost... I don't know, I've pondered this idea that there's this, there's almost a device in our brains that makes us the tribe. And when it knows that we might have switched from becoming useful to the tribe to becoming burdensome to the tribe in some way, now that we're consuming resources but providing none, this device in our brain, like turns us off or something. Yeah, that we're done.

51:31We are surplus to require. And so the decent thing to do is just, you know, die for the tribe. For the tribe. Yeah. For the tribe. And that we theoretically, from an evolutionary standpoint, we evolved as tribes. So it's not impossible that there's something... Well, I do think that we, I mean, of course, we didn't use to live anything like us long. Yeah. This is a stat that I came across today, similar to this new book that's just come out, which is in the, in 1963, the most common age of death was one. And now it's 80, throughout whatever, right? Do you know what I mean? So the progress we've made towards greater life expectancy generally has been huge.

52:08But it has then asked these questions about kind of being needed later on in life. So there's a couple of things I would say. One is that, like, having a job is just massively powerful way of feeling needed. Right? Just showing up. Like, we need you to start to open up at six. So we need you to, like, and in fact, Arthur Brooks, who used to run the American Enterprise Institute, he tells this wonderful story. He was interviewing this guy who'd come out of prison, was in this new program, rehabilitation, et cetera. And he's chatting to him. The guy gets a text while he's chatting to him and he bursts into tears.

52:47That gets really tearful. And Arthur says, is everything all right? Did he get some bad news? You know, what's happening? Is this bad news? And he said, no, it's the opposite. And he showed the text to Arthur. And the text just said, Fred, can you get over here as soon as possible? I really need you. And the guy said to Arthur, I've never heard anyone say that sentence to me before. I've never had anyone say to me, I need you. And in this case, it was, I need you to come and I don't even know what it was. Fix this floor tile, deal with this customer. I don't know. But I need you. And it brought this guy to tears because he hadn't kind of felt that sense of neediness before.

53:27And at its best, the workplace signals to us on a daily basis or whatever. Like, yeah, you'll need it, right? Your colleagues need you. They need each other. That's huge. And so if you then don't have that in the labor market, maybe because you've retired, the question is, are you still needed? And then I just think we have to reinvent the ways in which we can make use of the skills and wisdom of the people who've suddenly got time. So my mum, she volunteers as a reader in a primary school, because she has time. And it's amazing. She gets to know the kids really well and she loves it and so on.

54:06My father, he's on the board of a technical thing and he runs, they do stuff. They raise money because they've got time. And so they're just, they're contributing to the community in a new way. And actually, as more and more women work, those community roles that were previously been often filled by months at home, like school volunteering, for example. Right? Now they can be done by perhaps by more older people. And so part of this story here, I think, is also making sure that older people don't lose that sense too. Because although we focus quite rightly on what's happening to young men, the suicide rates among older men are also very high, especially at the end upon their own.

54:43So kind of men on their own later in life are a massive risk because if you take my theory about being needed quite seriously, they're just looking around and saying, will anyone even notice if I'm gone? Maybe they'll be better off. And so even for those older men, we have a job of work to do to make them feel really like, yeah, we need you. Your church needs you. Your scout group needs you. Your local charity needs you. Your neighbours need you. The kid across the street who needs help with his university applications needs you. The boy down the road who's struggling because, you know, his parents have split up and just want someone to give him a cup of tea every now and then I told him, they need you.

55:23We don't know the boy down the road anymore or the family next door anymore. And I think, so when you described that, you were describing like an old fashioned way of the world in my mind because even you even said the word church, I was like, well, you know, there's been a rise in atheism and a fall in religiosity. So, you know, that's part of the problem though. And from this point of view is that we used to have more institutional structures through which our connection to the broader community could be, you know, captured and organised, honestly, right? So you didn't have to sort of sit there on your own, someone saying, how can I contribute to the community?

55:58If you just volunteer, doesn't usher or for Bible class or to do the soup kitchen at your church? Life came sort of inherent with responsibility. Like, because even with church, I just grew up in there in my family. I wasn't religious after the 18th, but as early as I knew I was in the church and I was in Sunday school, and I was in St. Luke's hospice on the weekends with my mum. And I didn't choose that. It just came with love. Yeah. And actually, so the de -institutionalisation of those community relationships, as we've seen these institutions weaken, has created a real problem, because the needs are still there, but it's like we didn't have the organising framework, right?

56:37So whether it's churches or community groups or whatever, and mums, like one of the things that would happen, like my mum was at home kind of most of the time, and back in the dark ages when I was being raised in the 70s and the 80s, they were a lot of mums around, right? And so they organised a bunch of stuff, and they kind of took care of the community, and they volunteered for stuff, and it's amazing now that women are in the workplace, of course. But that sense of like, there were soft institutions like those networks, but also just churches, community groups, etc. They basically provided a way to kind of plug in my time and energy to an institution that then did stuff for other people.

57:14It's really hard to do that on your own, right? It's really hard to recreate those institutions online or just on your own. And so I actually think that that's had a bigger effect on men as well, because historically and even today women are a little bit better at kind of maintaining those community and social networks than men are. So absent those institutional roles, you're going to be a scout leader. You're going to be an assurement church. You're going to volunteer for the school of PTA. You're going to, you know, you're going to, we need men to do this, this, this, this, this, this. Right, you're going to do that.

57:45And you're right. Some of it wasn't even questioned. It was just what you did. Of course, we want more choice, but I do worry about the loss of those institutional frameworks if we don't find ways to replace them. And you're starting to see that now, men's Sheds, movements, and men's groups and so on. But it's really hard to find secular online alternatives to those traditional institutions. You mentioned an elderly man who's now alone, you know, maybe lost his partner, maybe. What do they call it? Widow to know. Widow, what's the male? Widow does both, isn't it? Oh, is it? Thanks. Widowed man.

58:24But as we think about younger men and the environment in which the sort of dating love environment that they're in, what's changed there? Because one of the ways that we can feel needed is if, you know, 18 years old, we find a partner and, you know, she makes me feel needed. In my life, my girlfriend is one of the people that makes me feel most needed. And most important, she's constantly asking when I'm coming back from Jack and Stan filming or when I'm going to be here. And she makes me feel like I'm service to her in the same way that she serves to me. But that landscape seems to have changed just the dating environment, the romantic environment.

58:59Yeah, it's interesting. I get out of just reflecting on my own personal experience, two just through the lives of my sons. And one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend by her first car. And he's really into cars and all that stuff. And he's into finance and the loans. And he's just basically done, like, based on the work for her around it, because she's working full time. And he's got a bit of time. And so that is a really good example. He said to me the day, he said, I said, God, you put a load of time in to his test driven like 20 cars and all of this stuff. Loads of this for your girlfriend.

59:30He's like, well, right now I don't have that much of my own stuff to do. So it's really nice to be able to do stuff. And so you're right. I think those relationships, they can be in like traditional families, but also uncourse friends. But particularly romantic relationships, they can do that for you. So it's not for nothing that we're dating less dating later. You're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single, like comparison, both the young women and in the past. And so that's another change, which you could argue is good or bad, right? Is it good or bad that we're dating later and having sex later and taking longer to get married and so on?

1:00:10Again, I think you can argue for sure there's lots of good stuff there. But one consequence of that is to leave a lot more men going a lot longer before those romantic relationships were also pulling on them, calling calling on them to say, I need you to do this. I need you to drive me to work. Can you pick me up from this? Can you do this? And that used to happen much, much earlier than it's happening now. And so there's now perfectly possibly 25, 26, 27 years of age and your parents don't need you because then you may be left home. You don't have a girlfriend, so you don't have a girlfriend that needs you.

1:00:46Maybe you're not working or you're working in a place you don't really feel like it matters if you're there or not. So it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid and late 20s as a man. And honestly, feel like it's not quite clear who needs you. It's interesting because also when you layer on top of that, the dating app environment, I had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about, I mean, I've had a couple of founders of the big dating apps, but I've also had... Tinder founder on. No. I've had people that have left Tinder and started their own apps like Bumble.

1:01:18But one of the things that I've come to learn is that the bottom sort of 50 % of men are basically getting not much action at all. Almost none. Almost none. And then the top 10 % of men are getting all the action because the way that these dating apps are set up is to really reward that sort of most affluent, most attractive top 10 % of men that are most desirable. But I imagine if you've gone back 100 years, it was really like who's in your village versus, you know, yeah versus an algorithm sorting millions of people. But that's... it's so interesting that pattern that you describe of like the bottom 50 % of men, basically not getting much action if any, and the top 10 % like getting almost all of it.

1:02:01Because an evolutionary psychologist that I know looked at that data and said, that looks like human history to me. So if we go back further, actually 95 % of known human societies were polygamous. Alright, monogamy is very weird and very recent. And here's one that always blows my mind even though I've said it so many times now, is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. We have twice as many women in our ancestral past as men. Why is that? How does that make sense? Because, and the reason it's so hard for a modern brain to get ahead around that is because you're thinking, well, you need a man and a woman to have a kid, right?

1:02:48So you'd have to have equal numbers. Yeah. But you're thinking about monogamy. Across human history, men have only had about a 50 % chance of reproducing. So back in each generation, half the male lines literally die out. Like 50 % of the men just don't have kids. So boom, they're gone. And almost all women have reproduced. Right? So if you've got almost all women reproducing 50 % of men, then mathematically you're going to learn it twice as many female ancestors. Because you don't need that many men to have babies. And so historically what's happened is the top status men with the gold and the rich, whatever they've had multiple wives.

1:03:27Certainly, concubines or multiple partners. And there's like famous examples like Genghis Khan is the ancestor of whoever already been in Ireland, something like more than one in five Irish people have descended from King, whatever it is. Well, I was told my grandfather in Nigeria has, I'm going to say 10 wives. Okay. I'm told that I have 40 odd uncles and aunties in Nigeria not tending to go back anytime soon. Just in case there's not a conversation. You're not tempted by that model. I'm not. I'm actually going to Nigeria soon, but it's a headache to think about navigating that many uncles and aunties.

1:04:02But it's interesting how actually these by going online and sort of taking away the sort of cultural norm around kind of monogamy in a way what is exposed is to kind of this ancient pattern, which is women are much pickier than men around partner selection. And so women are trying to women are sort of ideally, I'll go for him and women are just going no, no, no, no, I don't know which way is that's right, which way it's right. So the woman is going no, no, no, no, no, he's incredibly handsome and incredibly rich and right, maybe whatever, maybe where's the man I like, yeah, sure. She looks nice, maybe not.

1:04:43Yeah. So you get this incredibly symmetry between the two. But in some ways it's like I'm making light of it, but but actually could you find a kind of more telling sign of the fact that so many men are just kind of feeling like, well, maybe a bit useless, not very attractive, not very needed, not very like just right, the old rules about how to kind of navigate the romantic space, the old rules about how to be a man, the old rules about how to succeed, a lot of those have just been turned upside down, creating this huge vacuum, which is being filled by all kinds of bad stuff and, and but also just this massive sense of disorientation, it's like a kaleidoscope, you shake it, right, but still moving, we don't know what the new patterns look like yet.

1:05:28And so genuinely kind of feel like when I talk to a lot of young men and see them, that is the sense they've got, they're just like, well, like the disorientation that they're feeling as we've come shifted the equilibrium is in some ways the online dating apps are just magnifying that, but there's a, that's not a great feeling, is it to gone and gone dating app and not get any interest at all. I mean, you would know because you're not on dating app, well, I'm not dating up to where I'm sure you got plenty of money. Well, do you know what's funny, when I was on dating apps, I didn't get much attention.

1:06:05Really? No, I didn't, and I've got a very good looking best friend and he got all of the attention. So bear mind, I was 18 shoplifting food to feed myself, I was scrawny as hell. Okay. I was, you know, all that on the, but I tried to put my best selfie on there and I just couldn't get any like decent leads. And my best friend, who's like blonde and beautiful and he's got perfect hair and he looks like something out of like a magazine, I would sit with him and he would just get the pick of the litter. So my whole strategy was I would just do much better in person when I met people. Yeah. But obviously it's much more difficult to meet people.

1:06:46If you look at the stats around how people meet, it's crazy. It's like a vertical line upwards. When you look at the line that's showing people meeting online, just add a nowhere. And it's where it schools gone down and church has gone down and through a friend has gone down and it's pretty much all online. So if you're, if you're not, I think aesthetically beautiful in the typical sense of the word. Yeah. And you know, have signals of wealth and status. You really are going to struggle. And I actually came to learn this a lot, not just from my own experience and dating apps once upon a time. But also from during this podcast.

1:07:19And I remember the first time we had on a founder of a dating app and put the episode out, assuming everyone would love it. And just the anger in the comments section from pretty much all men who feel like dating apps have ruined their lives or are just an evil thing in the world. And it really caught me off guard. In fact, reading those comments on that particular episode is when I go, oh my God, people hate dating apps. There's like this group of people that just think it's like the cause of all pain. And this is really difficult stuff to talk about. I think because it's so, it's so visceral.

1:07:51It's primal. What we're talking about sex. We're talking about procreation. We're talking about our DNA being passed on. And who with. And so it's not for nothing. If something's happening in that market. And it's not for nothing. We see huge rise in the share of childless men, especially getting to 40 and and of women. But more even more so for men. And more men saying, having children is important to them. More men starting to say, actually forming a family is kind of important to them. And so there's a there's a weird paradox here, which is that you know, the old idea of like marriage and kids is that like women have to kind of trap men into it.

1:08:31Right. You know, as men, we just want to go right away. Right. We want to cowboys around the desert or the forest or something. But the ball and chain, the woman she traps you right. And she domesticates you and you kind of go along with it because you want to have kids. But in your heart, in your heart, you're still out there on the frontier. Right. And she's the one at the harbor. That is complete bullshit on every single level. Actually, historically, back to where we're before, being masculine, meant being in the tribe, it meant generating more than you need for yourself. I love this idea of a surplus that comes from this guy, David Gilmore, but mature men generate more of whatever it is and then they need their surplus generators.

1:09:11So rather than being surplus to requirements, which is what I think a lot of men feel like they're actually generate a surplus for others to use. And so the idea of like, you heard as men going their own way movement. It's like a male separatist thing online. We're going to go our own way. We don't need to turn away from women. Is the opposite of masculinity, right? Masculinity defined as like a lone ranger or a, I'm my own man is the least masculine sentence. I think you could ever utter. I'm just my own man. I do my own thing. Right. If you're not a man for others and in my view, you're not, you're not a man.

1:09:44And so it's quite interesting to kind of think about how the current world of like dating and families and so on. If it does leave many men feeling like they're not going to have those connections and not going to have a sense of being for others. And not just not providing just any economic sense, but being needed. Then it does leave a lot of them benched and they are the go their own way or they get mad as hell. So you see the rise of the in cell movement, etc. And so again, you just see these extreme extreme examples of the ones that get the headlines. But behind that, behind the kind of men who are acting out, there's a lot more men who are checking out.

1:10:17I just say, I think I'm done with this. And that's very dangerous. Marriage has also had a knock on effect to this, hasn't it? Because the sort of the role of marriage and society has changed, but also the stats around marriage seem to be changing. What information do you have on that? Am I right in thinking that marriage is in decline? A little bit. Yeah, yeah. Marriage has gone down. This is one area where it's very different in different countries. So I have to be careful about this. Like in the US, it's a big class gap in marriage. Like college educated Americans are still getting married.

1:10:46Non college educated Americans are not. But in most of Western Europe, you've seen a big rise in the share of kids being born outside marriage. Now, the question then was like, what job if anything was being done by marriage? And if marriage was a way to sort of signal and enshrine a commitment to having kids together, raising those kids together, then in a sense, like, but all kinds of only have a simple partnership now, or they're legal documents who can have that kind of do that. And so if the decline of marriage is related to a decline in fathering, that's a problem. It doesn't have to mean that because a, you can be a perfectly good father if you're living with your partner and you're not married.

1:11:34But also, you can be a good father if, for whatever reason, the relationship with the mother doesn't work out. It's harder. You're going to have to work at it a bit more, but you can still do it. But because of this old idea of like fathering being bundled together with marriage, I think that's my big problem is it was like it was like a one stop thing, right? So husband and father was kind of like one thing. But that's not true anymore. So it's okay if that's not true. So long as we don't lose the fathering bit because dad's matter for their kids as much as their mums in different ways and at different times on average.

1:12:07But so I, my worry about the changes in family are not about marriage per se. They're about what that might mean for fatherhood. And what a conservative critics will say is well, the evidence is that actually the men who marry are more engaged fathers and do stick around for longer. But of course the problem with that, that's one of the reasons they got married. Yeah, of course. Right. So it's very hard to tease out cause and effect there. And in the end, I'm sort of agnostic about the marriage question. But I'm not agnostic about the fathering question. Like I don't think you have a moral responsibility to get married before you have kids at all.

1:12:42I do think that if you have kids, you have a moral responsibility to be a father to those kids. That is a, that is just that's an inexstraceable moral responsibility. And that gets a little bit lost because sometimes on the the feminist, the feminist left to just characterize horror. Do we need, do we need dads anymore? Isn't that a bit heteronormative? I've sometimes been accused of being heteronormative for being pro dad. They're all about same sex couples, what about single parents? I'll be saying that they need their dads, right? Isn't that, that feels a bit all fashioned, a bit conservative to get that on the other side.

1:13:12And then another side is yeah, of course, dads matter. That's why they all have to get that's why they should be married. And of course the truth is between the two, the truth is that dads matter will stop whether they're married to the mother or not. And both the people who insist the only way to do that is to marriage are wrong and the people who insist that dads don't matter are equally wrong. And about 40 % of births in the US now take place outside of marriage, which is up from about 10%. Yes, that's crazy. That's crazy. That's just, why is that? US is really weird because it has really high rates of like unmarried pregnancies and births, but then like really high rates of marriage among the kind of college educated at the top says it's a huge class gap.

1:13:54There's a race element here. So 70 % of black kids in the US have born outside marriage. There's also a huge education gap here, so just alluded to as a big, big class gap. So most kids to non college educated parents and born outside marriage in the US now. And so it's weird. What's happened is that the average marriage rate in the US is really disguising these huge differences by race and class, whereas in most Western European countries there aren't such big differences by race or class. It's more of a general decline. It hasn't declined particularly more for one class than another in the UK.

1:14:25So quite common in the UK for couples to decide to have kids together, have kids together and not get married. And that's definitely true in Scandinavia and Northern Europe as well. And who is marriage good for? Who's it serving more men or women? Now, men. Because I was thinking if we press the button and the marriage stats went backwards in time, I more people got married and they got married within when they gave birth within marriages. Would that be better for men or women? Because marriage being with the kids and kind of with the mom is just right now still an incredibly important way for men to feel needed connected, involved, etc.

1:15:10Now that might change, but right now it is pretty clear that they'll do better. And if you look at the impact of being married and not married on employment, earnings, health, physical and mental health, life expectancy, huge positive impacts for men, much less so for women. So it's like women. And of course if you go back, we weren't the other way. Like you'd say, well, actually women who weren't married were in real trouble economically until recently. So by line from before was that women used to be economically dependent on men, but men were emotionally dependent on women. And I think we've really done a lot on the first half of that and it's kind of revealing the second part, the fact that actually, the wifeless men, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well.

1:16:03In fact, they do terribly. So I've mentioned this fourfold suicide difference in risk is eight and eightfold difference among divorced men and women. So men who get divorced, their risk of suicide skyrockets. So the question is like, why? And I think it is because of this sense of like not being needed, not being so. Like if your kids are at home and wife's at home and you know, you're just you're contributing to the family unit, I think that's much robberious. And it's really interesting in recent surveys in the US at least, men are now more likely than women to say that it's important to them to get married.

1:16:39So what does that say about what's going on in men's heads if they're now more keen on marriage than women? What's because that's to me sounded a little bit an territorial. Well, there's a danger of that and of course you can you can get into real trouble as one of your previous guests did it by talking about enforced monogamy. Who he talked to? Jordan Peterson. Oh, did he? Yeah, he talked about enforced monogamy and you can imagine enforced monogamy. And forced monogamy. He didn't say that on this show, did he? I don't think so. Okay, but no, I think it's an interview. It's interesting. And it's a very it's a very unfortunate time.

1:17:12It's actually a term from anthropology. But basically it was a way of describing this new way of raising families. There's only been around for a few centuries where you just where men and women either by law or by social norm are only required to marry one person. They're required. Well, you can't bigger me as a crime. What's bigger me being married to more than one person. Okay. Right. It's a crime in the US. It's a crime in the UK. It's a crime in most countries. It's actually against the law to have more than one spouse. How liberal is that? The state telling me how many wives I'm allowed or how many husbands?

1:17:46I thought when you said required, I thought you meant you have to marry one person. Sorry, that's what people thought it meant. And that's why you got to such terrible trouble. But actually what it's referring to as a social system, which is basically against polygamy. It's basically saying, no, no, no, no, no one gets forced into marriage. What it is is saying, if you're going to marry, it can only be monogamous. Okay. So the trouble is that people, the trouble is people heard it as, we're going to force you into marriage and into monogamy. And actually what the term means is we're not going to allow you to be polygamous.

1:18:14Okay. Right. So it's, it was sort of misinterpreted. The term was misinterpreted. But it just speaks to this fear, I think, that people will feel forced economically or socially into it. It's actually, it's not for nothing that Andrew Tate, I'm sure you know Andrew Tate and his work. I know who he is. Right. I don't know him. I've never spoken to him. Right. But I'm referring to, right. Why did he convert to Islam?

1:18:45People aren't talking about this, by the way. This is not a polite topic of conversation. Andrew Tate's conversion. For understandable reasons, people don't want to be seen to be stoking Islam, Afobia or whatever. But, but I will tell you this and we published a piece by an Imam. Yes. Andrew Tate is a huge following among young Muslim men in the US and the UK. And he's now converted. So it's like publicly. And the reason he's done that is so he can have multiple wives. Which is to be fair to him entirely consistent with his world view about gender and gender equality and the role of men and women.

1:19:22Right. And so it's interesting to kind of think about the role and his rise of polyamory now and so on. Actually thinking about monogamy, polygamy, et cetera, it's a much more complicated story. I think that many people are willing to admit because it's not clear that if we just kind of take away the sort of social norms around like the one and one model, that that will necessarily be better for men. So when you say, of course, men are in favor of polygamy. Of course, you'd be in favor of it. Like who wouldn't want three wives? I shouldn't speak for you. No, I'm trying to, I'm trying to satisfy one at the moment.

1:19:59Right. Right. But actually, as some people point out, I said, you know, actually if you're a woman, is it clear that you'd rather be the only wife of an unemployed steel worker? Then the second wife of an incredibly successful podcaster? Maybe. Maybe for all women, that's a clear choice, right? But the kind of point simply being is we shouldn't just assume that this is kind of a male, you know, only for kind of men, idea. Anyway, it's a aggression into an area that I'm far from expert in, but it's prompted by this whole idea about dating marriage and commitment. And so where I would land on this is that even as we reform marriage, family life, the roles of men and women, we have to be really careful to keep grounding men in a sense of being needed by their kids, especially.

1:21:01And by their communities, if so, if not in the traditional way to a kind of, you know, a recently traditional marriage as a breadwinner and provider and all that, the one my father had, and all sorts of other things besides swimming coach, math tutor, show for all the ways he provided for us and as a father. If we're going to replace that with a new model, we have to be really careful to make sure that we do replace it. And that we don't actually make men feel like they are not needed in this new world. Are women asking for divorce, you know, you're talking about that, you know, idea of polygamy and women and men are women asking for divorce now more so than men are.

1:21:36Yes, women are more like to preserve a divorce than men. And again, about two to one, I think. Wow. Certainly a much in the US is much higher among women. I mean, that's an indication of something. The indication of a healthy freedom. Yeah, exit power. Yeah, exit power. I mean, that's what economists would call it, right? And that that's that shows you that's a massive sign of success that women can leave relationships in a way that they couldn't before because they were trapped economically. And so this kind of economic trap that was marriage, which the women's movement really kind of really took aim at and just said this institution of marriage is basically a way to trap and oppress women in relationships of economic dependency, which will be powerless because he has the money.

1:22:30That feminist critique of traditional marriage was profound and correct. And the results have been extraordinary in unbundling that and giving women economic power because without economic power, women don't have choice about marriage. So now we've got this massive rise in women's choice as to whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have kids, who to have kids with, etc. And so you've seen this massive expansion of women's choice and power, which is magnificent and destabilizing, especially for men. Both of those things can be true at once. It can be creating these unintended destabilizing consequences for men.

1:23:08And if we then add to that a danger sometimes to either mock men or masculinity, or let's pathologize them in humor, but sometimes maybe not so much in humor as well. I think that just doubles down on this sense. It's like not only are you not needed, but maybe you're actually a bit toxic. And so I think there's, of all the moments to not be really kind of making sure that men feel re -bad about themselves. This is not that moment. But do you think of that phrase toxic masculinity? I think it's toxic. I think the term toxic masculinity is toxic. I didn't always think that. It's taken me a while to get to that.

1:23:46But I would now say it's basically a slur. It's a gender slur, if you like. And it's just used too easily, too loosely, too casually, to describe male behavior that we don't like. And I would say actually most thoughtful kind of women's groups and feminists are not supporting it now. Because it's not a great recruiting tool by and large. One big problem with it is if you ask people who use the term toxic masculinity to define non -toxic masculinity, they struggle. They'll say, oh no, there are positive aspects of masculinity. They'll say, okay, great, what are they? And they'll say nurturing and caring and kindness and emotional availability.

1:24:26And is that different from femininity? Let's do none of this the same. Okay, so let me get this straight. Masculine issues are the toxic or not masculine. Because if they start saying courage, positive risk taking, well -channel competitiveness, you say, what are you saying women aren't courageous? No, no, no, I'm not saying that. Okay, so sorry, what are you saying? So it's an empty set. So non -toxic masculinity is basically an empty set. It can't fill that category. So you either got toxic or nothing. That's bad. But also just think on a visceral level. It reminds me and you have a church background.

1:25:06The phrase toxic masculinity really reminds me of the term original sin. It's something in you that's kind of, you didn't have any choice about it. Like you inherited it from previous generations. And it's kind of bad. I can't get rid of it. So this side, you're born with this floor. You're going to repent at all opportunities for you. And it feels like that to me. Maybe it's the third point. I don't know. But honestly, is that the best we can offer to young men is a prospectus that we could make them not toxic? How would you like to be non -toxic? Isn't that an exciting idea? It's the worst recruiting slogan ever.

1:25:48And so it's driving young men away. It's an incredibly unhelpful term. It's unfairly applied. It used to have some value in academia. Like before 2016, I had this very technical term in academia. But I think as a term now, it really just does send this incredibly unfortunate message to men. Which doesn't encourage a debate about how to be a better man. I much prefer immature and mature masculinity. I like the idea of saying, like, what does mature masculinity look like? Because you're not immature masculinity looks like. And so I think this kind of maturation is a much better way to frame it than toxic non -toxic.

1:26:22Is there such a thing as I've never asked this question before, but it just came to mind. Is there such a thing as toxic femininity? Have you watched Mean Girls? I can't say I've watched it, but I know the movie and I've seen trailers. And there's a new Tina Fey movie, I think, right? Okay. An update of it. Yeah, and I think this relates to the debate about social media and the way that social media is so particularly damaging to the mental health of teen girls and young women. Because it's very relational. And so the relational bullying that girls and young women are more like to engage in than men are.

1:26:59So men are more likely historically, much less so today, but to bullied physically. Women are much more likely to bully relationally. So they exclude you, not my best friend anymore, you're not invited, etc. And they bully by using how you look. But that's so that relational bullying gets kind of amplified by social media. And so if you were to try and define toxic femininity, I suspect that's where you would go. And it would be around ostracism and meanness. If you think the Mean Girls phenomenon is getting at something real, which is the ability of kind of women to be pretty brutal to each other, it's probably something more around that.

1:27:36But I just think putting the word toxic before either femininity or masculinity is just a bad move. I think it's a bad move intellectually. And I think it's a terrible move culturally. On this subject of masculinity, one of the sort of defining traits of masculinity in society is that men don't speak, they don't open up in. They're less likely to, I think they struggle more to form friendships. I've certainly found that to be the case in my life. If you drop me and my partner in London, as actually has happened. And she wasn't from here, she's never lived here before. It only took her a couple of months before she's got a group.

1:28:12She's going to these like, dance this class. And I'm a way during dragons their next week. So she's found a group of poor cheeky girls and she's going to go watch the match. And I could never. I don't know how the hell she's made friends. I've made zero new friends in London in five years. My friends are my colleagues. And my friends that I've had for ten years. That is it. I don't make new friends. And this is something that I have echoed to me a lot when I meet men out and about when I do talks and stuff. And they come up to me after. I've had men whisper to me, how do I make friends where I'm lonely.

1:28:43And when they do it, they come really, really close. So that the person behind them in the queue can't hear them. I've had exactly the same experience. And they whisper it about how do I make friends where I'm feeling lonely or something like that. And I've heard in your work, the work that was in your book, I think on page 45, you say that there is a male friendship recession. What did you mean when you said that? We're seeing a decline in friendships generally, but it's much more acute for men. So in the US, 15 % of men under the age of 30 say they don't have a single close friend. That's up from 3 % in 1990.

1:29:17And so there's almost one in seven men. We've seen declining number of men saying how much time they spend with friends, shrinking social networks, everything you've just described, which is like the process of making and sustaining friends is just something that men are really struggling with right now. Much more so than women. And I think there's a couple of things going on here. One is we're revealing the extent to which a lot of that work was actually outsourced to women before. So if you're in a couple, how often are the social arrangements made by the women? They do a lot of that, that means the relationship means it's in the men free ride on the women.

1:29:58Every weekend plan that's outside of my comfort zone, pretty much most of them come from my partner. She's an organizer. She wants to go try this thing. Let's go to vegan sushi wrong. I just want to play far cry five. I just want to line my back on which man is united. Alright, fine. I chose the wrong thing. So I think, and women have been better at it and men haven't had to do as much of it. So in some ways, I think we're being exposed a bit more in a sense that women aren't doing as much of that work for us anymore. They're saying, look, it's not my job to create your friendship network for you.

1:30:32So we're having to do it and we're not very good at it. And we're certainly not very good at it yet. And I've had the same experience. I mean, I wrote a bit about loneliness. And I spoke at an event not like, oh, afterwards. And I had a couple of young men exactly the same as you. Just come close and just say, I'm incredibly lonely. And thank you for talking about this. And you end up hugging them. And actually, for me, I was talking about this the other day. There's something about loneliness that just breaks my heart in a way that other forms of suffering don't. And I don't know why, but if I hear about someone who's really lonely, it just, my mum was talking about this guy who she ran into him and he was going to this supermarket.

1:31:14And he was in front of her in the queue. And she said, I know, go after you. And she said, no, no, no, you go first. And he said, I'm on my own. And actually, the hours after dinner, especially in the summer, they're the hardest. So I always come down here to the supermarket. And I buy a couple of things. And then come back and have a chat. And then it fills my time. And my mum, because she's like a massive, like, she's like a social worker to the world. She ends up chatting to him and getting his phone number. But actually, that just pierced my heart. And so when you hear about these men and young old women who are lonely, I think it's huge.

1:31:52And so back to what I earlier bit of the conversation too, is those institutions that maybe used to kind of connect to you to other people. Where do you make friends? And you just said, it worked. And so I think our colleagues in some ways become our friends. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It is a bad thing. But it's different to the friends you've made at church or through your sports or through. Do you know what I mean? Or wherever. And so the other thing I'll say about this is, if you heard of the men's Sheds movement. I don't know what a men's Sheds is, but I've heard of men's male groups and stuff.

1:32:21Yes, there's a lot of male groups in there. There's one which is the Australian government just funded this in Australia. It's called the men's Sheds. And there are places where men go and fix stuff. Like you'll bring a lawn now where I do stuff. And it's one of the things that I've found. I've really learned from this. I wish I'd known more about it before. Like, have you heard of this thing about men communicating more easily shoulder to shoulder than face to face? Oh, yeah. You've come across this? Yeah, you've heard about this. It's really interesting. So when my, my wife would sometimes, when my boys came home from school, she'd sit down directly opposite them, like across the breakfast bar type thing.

1:32:56Right. And she'd sit directly opposite and give them protein. And then she'd be like, how's your day? Yeah. And then later on, we'd be driving somewhere or watching soccer or playing a video game. I'd shoulder to shoulder. And they'd be like, yeah, it's a weird thing to happen today. With her or with me. So eventually I said that you've got to stop staring them in the face. That's not how, that's not how men open up. Right. And so the men's Sheds movement is actually, I think based on a profound insight, which is that men have to be doing something in order to be being with their friend. Go into any coffee shop and count how many people are sitting there staring at each other for hours on end, mostly women.

1:33:37Not saying, right, and then go to fishing road trips. It's the only explanation for golf. Do you play golf? No. Thank God. But like, when a guy is saying, do you think I should use the five iron? Yeah. I don't play golf either. Right. But what he's really saying is, I love you. Yeah. Or I'm lonely already. And so there is something to be said for like men, and even super of study, actually how men stand in relation to each other, or like a party or something. And I've told you this, you won't be able to stop looking. Is that men actually always have a bit of an angle. Right. We just don't stand face to face.

1:34:10It's spikes are fret quarters all at whatever. So we always stand a little bit of an angle. But also like doing something together requires us to be more shoulder to shoulder, which is why some psychotherapists now, they do walking, talking therapy. They realize that with men, especially like sitting down and staring at them, is less effective for them going for a walk. You've done therapy, haven't you? Yeah. How was it? I've done therapy, and I've done couples therapy. And actually, I will say that I didn't much better with the male therapist, and one of them we did walk. And so I'm basing some of this kind of personal experience, which is like, there's something about sitting on a chair or kind of being stared at.

1:34:50And told to open up. I've been there. Do you find it hard to do that? Yes, I do. I find it really, really hard. When I did couples therapy and I've done individual therapy, I found it really hard. I found it even harder in couples therapy. Was it a male or a female therapist? It was, I had a male therapist, and then I had a male and female therapist at the same time. Okay. It's interesting, because in couples therapy, I found it easier with just a woman. And then in individual therapy, I find it easier with a man, I think. It's one of the reasons I'm really worried about the declining share of men in psychology and therapy.

1:35:35I mean, you know, we're emptying the men out of those professions. Really? Yeah. Yeah. The share of men going into psychology and counseling has plummeted in the US and the UK. There are a few and a few of men. It's getting harder and harder to find a male therapist. Now, maybe that doesn't matter, but I absolutely think it matters. And again, we're basically like, you've just shared your experience. I'll share mine. I think to have the option, and when one of my kids worried about you need a therapy too, I think he did so much better with a man. And I think there's some, depending on the nature of the problem, maybe that you're...

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1:37:17Yes. This is a quote. The hardest thing you've ever done as a man is when him and your wife went to couples therapy. You said that on Scott Galaway's podcast. Yes. Why? So my wife and I were working through... Actually a lot of these issues that we've been talking about today, like what our relative roles were and responsibilities. She's been very successful professionally and we've raised our kids together. I've been a stay -at -home dad and then worked and so on. There was this moment where there was really one of those pivotal moments in your life where I was talking about what I'd done at home and how it supported her career and all of that.

1:38:09And she looked at me and said, you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. The problem is that you're not masculine enough.

1:38:24That's a real moment. That was a real moment. And we then started talking what did she mean by that? And it was about responsibility. It was about stepping in in some ways, some of those roles. And what I came to realize, and this is in some ways the book... The book underneath that book, which is my own journey, my own struggles with my own sense of what does it mean to be a man? What does masculinity mean? In a relationship and a society of profound moral equality between men and women? And I realized that in some ways I'd been sort of almost at war with my own masculinity for quite a long time because it didn't fit my feminist mindset, right?

1:39:19To the extent that there were things that I kind of wanted or felt that didn't fit with the kind of model of gender equality and feminism. That was a problem to be solved rather than a way of being to be expressed and learned about. And it took that moment of my incredibly feminist, unbelievably professionally successful wife to say, I think it probably is not masculine enough. And it was just like the energy that I had and I felt as if asking for more in our relationship for myself was to be a bad feminist, was to not support her. I was supposed to be a good ally. You know, the world is made for men and all our needs and desires and so on.

1:40:12And so my job was to be an ally to her and anything that got in the way of that or that was difficult or complicated. And it was, well, I don't know what would have happened to our relationship without it. But I can tell you that from that moment onwards, our relationship grew and flourished and continues to flour in a way that it just would not otherwise have done because it's almost like, by just being so direct, she forced this movement inside me where I almost gave myself permission to give some expression to the size of myself that are more masculine. I mean, that's not the conversation people hear publicly.

1:41:00You're not putting this out. I thought it was just us. But I mean people don't, people don't. There's so much truth to that. And I think there's so many women that are listening right now that are nodding their head and can relate in various ways because of the way that society is to some degree now. But that's not the narrative we hear that a woman would turn to you and ask you to be more masculine in the context of sort of the typical idea of what masculinity means. It would at least have what it means to her. Yeah, obviously opposite. It would be the top sit, the back to your point about it is masculine to the problem, which I thought it was.

1:41:36And it took her to point out that no, no, no, it's how it's expressed. That's the question. And for me, it was like, I just, I thought that being assertive in the relationship was somehow bad because it was associated with kind of patriarchy and masculinity. And it's really interesting. I like, I bring it down to like a more benign level. I think a lot of young women actually want to think they feel about a lot of young men is that they're a bit passive. It's almost like a lot of those men almost don't feel they have permission to be assertive. And what women, like it's fun for you and I to talk about what women want, isn't it?

1:42:17But I think that there's something that a lot of the women I talk to say is like, I just want someone who's my equal. And that's so weird to say now, right? But they want someone that's a partner that's with them and they say, well, what should we do tonight? Or, you know, where should we go for dinner? And if you say, I don't know, you decide. I don't mind. Right. It's always just like, well, no, you decide and you make a plan and you, you, you, you know, you book it. You, like, show some agency here. And I might not always agree with you or even like it. We can get it, get into that. Right. But just going passive.

1:42:52Is not what makes you a good partner or a good feminist. And I, and I, I think my, maybe my generate, I'm older than you, maybe my generation of men have really struggled more with that. Just because I think it was kind of, there was this kind of strong sense that we, that we needed to sort of, yeah, just. In order for women to become bigger, we had to make ourselves smaller. And I think that was a profound intellectual and for me, emotional and relational error. The point is, we all want to rise and grow and challenge each other and challenge each other to grow, not silence ourselves or bench ourselves.

1:43:33Following going through that process with your partner, how did you change? I became much more willing. So one of my issues is I'm quite agreeable. Right. So I don't, like, I avoid conflict quite a bit. But it also saw like provoking conflict and disagreeing and arguing as like bad for the relationship and also like me doing it as a man, like bad for her. And so I actually became much more willing to say, no, I don't want to do that. I want to do this. Or I want to go there, not there. Or I'd like to do this, not that. And, and it caused more arguments. Which was uncomfortable for me. But it was great.

1:44:14And it was what she wanted. There were two aspects to it, if I'm honest. One was like stand up a little bit more for myself and a little bit like in the relationship and be like, no, I disagree about that. And we're going to do this and just give a more of a equal in that sense of challenge. But the other thing was really an issue was just actually just the kind of responsibility around kind of economics and so on too. And I don't think this was just about gender, but it took me a while, I think, to really get a proper sense of like just being a provider, a co provider wasn't bad. Right. And making money in a way that would help our family and give us more choices wasn't bad.

1:44:54And so there was there was that kind of sense too is like because she that up until that point she'd actually done more of the bread winning. And so there was a kind of sense of her saying, look, I'm about as feminists as you get, but you know what? Wouldn't mind it if we couldn't do a bit of this. You couldn't do a bit more of that as well. I read some study the other day and I'll triple check this and put it on screen. But I think the study if I'm going to get this correct said that about 70 % of women want to be with a guy that's earning more than them. Something like that was 70 80 % or something like that.

1:45:26That's about right. I mean, you can check it, but it depends which server you can choose a certain. But yeah, but you know, it's so interesting that I've been thinking about that quite a bit recently that reliably in surveys women will say like I want a guy that can that has earning potential earns more can earn more. But what you have to really care for I think how the questions asked and what the interpretation of it is. I think actually what it's very often about is women wanting and a lot of young women have suggested this to me, not just young women, but that even women of my generation that what they really want is a partner.

1:46:05And earning is a really good proxy for someone who's got their act together. Right. Someone who's a good earner is also going to be good father probably and a good partner and so on too. So it's actually just a really good signal, right. The market, the labor market is a very good signal of all kinds of other skills and so on. So that's number one. I think they're actually just getting someone who like is he's got his act together. Right. He's good. He's good thing. He's got skills. He's got you know, he's got agency. He's like, and those are good in all kinds of other circumstances too. So when I was a state of him, dad, I like to think I had a lot of agency.

1:46:34I didn't like lie on the sofa all day like I did stuff and organized stuff. So I think it's partly that, but I also think it's partly because a lot of women want choice. They want options to maybe take some time themselves to be at home. And that's a really interesting modern development, right. Is I think the feminist call now from a lot of winter men is like, I don't know if I'm going to want to take time out to kind of raise the kids. I'd like the option. Yeah. Right. And that's only an option if you're doing your bit, if you're earning, right. And so I do know some women who like very successful professionally and then they have kids and their partner is much less successful.

1:47:14Like I know one couple of where he was he was literally a kind of music failing musician as she was like this partner in some law firm or whatever. So it was like a movie is so stereotypical. And she's like, she has kids and she's like, well, I'd like to have a bit of time. I'm going to live on his solo guitar, YouTube salary or whatever it was, right. At that point, she's mad at him. Maybe a little bit too late, but you know what she's just like, I just like you to. Give me the option. And of course, we want it both ways now, right. It was great for me to be able to have time at home while my partner was able to just go for it professionally for a while.

1:47:55Just totally go for it. That was beautiful for both of us. But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that it shouldn't go both ways. Like we can't we can't we got to couldn't get rid of the provider more. We got to think about ourselves as co -providers of a whole bunch of things. Money, time, love, energy and not take ourselves out of the equation at all. That's not that's not that's not what the women's movement was about. The women's movement was about women's securing economic independence. Not about men losing it. That's not attractive. You've got two sons, right. Three. Three sons. Okay.

1:48:24So I guess this kind of brings us to the penultimate point, which is, and if you were sitting down with all three of your sons, which you might have done already, and they said to you, Dad, listen, what does it mean to be a man in the modern world? What should I do? Should I hold the door open? Should I, I don't know, go to the gym? Should I pursue a high -flying, bread -winning job? What does it mean to be a man? What advice would you give them about being a man in the modern world? Honestly, the advice that would set them up to be successful in their romantic relationships and in the world and in their mind.

1:49:00Yeah, what's interesting, because in some ways, I think the fact that conversation might almost be a sign of failure, not just individual it more socially, because I really believe that people believe their eyes before they believe there is. And so what I would really hope is that I've been showing, not telling, that it's not a curriculum, it's not a, here is the four -point plan for modern masculinity based on my years of research. Just more like, well, you've seen how I am. You've seen how I am with your mom, you've seen how I've worked, you've seen how raised you, you've seen how you've seen how you interact with people in this, this lovely phrase from a philosopher is, in the thick of daily life.

1:49:42Like how are you in the thick of daily life? You've seen me help that person, you've seen me, they tease me, I pick up the lime scooters all the time, right? Because someone's going to trip over them, right? You've seen how I've reacted, I haven't done that kind of thing, oh, this is a masculinity, but you've seen me do certain things that you've just kind of imbued along the way. So that sounds like a cop -out, but I won't cop -out completely. Because I think I would say, look, first of all, recognize that there are an average differences, right? So there are going to be things that you're going to be inclined towards or want to do that just different, right?

1:50:17There's nothing wrong with masculine, there's nothing wrong with some of these impulses and instincts that you've got, right? Of course, you want complete gender equality, and so you're going to look for partners who are going to give you that as well. And above all, be for others, serve. And so the first two, I'd open the door, for sure. Yeah, what was the second one? You said, open the door. It's about Korean, it's about going to the gym. Go to the gym, sure. I mean, actually all the evidence about being physically healthy is important. But then kind of get a high -enig job, I wouldn't say that.

1:50:54I would say, find work that yes will pay. Don't be naive about that, but it's much more important than your passionate about your work. You'll be much more attractive to someone if you're passionate. We only hear what for God's sake. And so the idea that someone's attracted to someone who does kind of into their work just because it makes a bunch of back to our, that's not sexy. It doesn't matter what the paycheck is, right? What's sexy is passion and agency and, you know, verb, mojo, whatever. So absolutely, I would advise all of that. I actually think it's going to weird back to the dedicating thing is that, in some way, I think it captures a lot of our conversation, though, which is that I've tried to raise them in a way that would give them the courage to ask a girl out, the grace to accept no, just accept no for an answer.

1:51:50And then the responsibility to make sure that either way she gets home safely.

1:51:57So what I've got in there is a little bit of agency, a little bit of leaning in, a little bit of taking it at risk. It's a risk to ask someone out, right? And I think risk taking is on average a bit more masculine. That's, secondly, you have no sense of entitlement about that. And if you've read it wrong or whatever and she's like, no, thank you, you are totally cool with that, right? Incredibly. But then thirdly, either way, right? There is a responsibility to make sure people are kind of safe. And if you're in a position where you're a little bit stronger and able to do that, great. And in fact, I had a rule with my kids that they had a curfew.

1:52:27But actually, they broke the curfew because they were getting someone home safely. They got an exemption from that. And there was one night when my son came home and he was, I was waiting for him. And he was 30 minutes after curfew, pouring the rain, he came home drown rat, and he'd walked to go home safely. Great. Now, I like to think that sort of formulation is capturing some stuff that is a bit more inherently masculine. But in a world where there's no entitlement, there's no sense of inequality. And I don't think that's a horrible formula. And generally speaking, I've kind of found a lot of men and women like, yes, actually.

1:53:01Actually, I would quite like you. I'm just a covered garage order. I would actually quite like to kind of make sure that I get to my car safely or whatever. And I don't think that's patriarchy. I think that's good manners and responsibility. What that doesn't mean is that, and you do it for your boss, you do it for somebody else. It doesn't mean that there's any going back to a world where that gave you some sort of extra power in the labor market or something like that. So I think it's really difficult on a sea right now to get this right. I think, but I think too many people are also trading on eggshells a little bit too.

1:53:33Yeah. Like they do rather than run the risk of doing something wrong, they do nothing. And that's the worst of all worlds, because we don't learn. But also those kids are going to fall into their hands of others in terms of their influence. So they're going to learn how to be a man from TikTok or Twitter. And you never know which algorithms are going to sweep them away. One thing we can be pretty sure of is that with some exceptions, you're not going to learn how to be a man from social media or online. You're going to learn it from your dad, your neighbor, your brother, your teacher, your coach.

1:54:07The best antidote to some of the reactionary content that some young men are encountering online now isn't other online content much though, of course we're all producing more online content. It's actually a real live man in your life. It's flesh and blood. And I think that's so much more powerful. I think that my son as a teacher in front of a classroom of boys is going to be a much more powerful antidote to those reactionary figures that they might see online than somebody else online. That's how we win. We win in real life, not online. I mean, there's kind of two adjacent points here. The first is your son is going into a profession that is increasingly depleting in men.

1:54:44Yeah. Because what's it like 20 % of 30 % of primary school teachers are men? No, it's primary. It's one in 10. One in 10 in primary here. Okay, so those role models are lacking in primary education. But then he's going into high school, secondary school. He's going to be teaching elementary to start with. I can primary school. So those role models are really needed there. And the adjacent point was you've talked to me about what you'd say to your son around the kitchen table. But if I elect you as president of the world, or at least the Western world, you can US, let's say, and North America.

1:55:17And I tell you that you've got to solve the issues you talk about in this book of boys and men. Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters and what to do about it. In fact, you have to solve the issues you describe so eloquently. What would you do at a social level to fix things? The suicidality, the mental health issues, we're seeing, the loneliness, we're seeing, the educational gap, we're seeing. If you're in a position where you have a voice, you're in a position authority, you're president, prime minister, or anybody actually, I think it's very easy to understate the power of simply acknowledging a problem and having empathy for the people who are struggling from it.

1:55:55And so whilst I could list the whole bunch of policy solutions, which I think would be part of the inter -are you, you'd have to say, and that's why I'm doing X. That's why I'm having a men's health strategy. We're hiring male teachers and we're having a funding mental health services for men, etc. I would do all that, but I actually think that the most important move would be to send a signal, especially to young men and boys, who are struggling. I see you. We see you. We hear you. We've got you. We understand that you're struggling. We are not going back on the move for women and girls, but we are taking your problems seriously.

1:56:39And we continue to say the problems of women and girls seriously, simply making them feel seen and heard and empathised with is a massive. It's a massive because so many of them right now feel as if their problems aren't being discussed, aren't being addressed at that level. They are being addressed online over here by many reactionary figures, but they're not being addressed by the people in positions of power. They're often being dismissed sometimes. And the result that is to create this really dangerous vacuum in our society, also in men's lives. Like if there are real problems and we neglect them and they don't feel that they can become grievances, and that's a perfectly natural result of having real problems that are neglected.

1:57:28And so simply saying we understand it is a struggle right now. There are a lot of problems facing young men and we are on it. I can't tell you how powerful I think that would be because so many men feel right now as if their problems are sort of second order problems. They just don't count as much. They're not being addressed in the same way. Or if they are, it's turned back on them. It's because you don't try. It's because you're lazy. It's because you watch too much porn. It's because your toxic gets what it is. So individualized back on them and you need to fix yourself. And I think if we were just able to say we can do two things at once and we can continue to fight for women and girls, but we could also help you boys and men, I think it will be profound.

1:58:13It's so clearly so important to that group in particular as well because letting them know that they are seen in a situation where they are already unbelievably alone in a sense of loneliness is especially powerful. And I think just from having these conversations on the podcast, I've seen that.

1:58:36I've seen that just by having the conversations, even if we don't have all the solutions yet, just by turning the lights on and saying, okay, this is a thing. People are so unbelievably grateful. And it's not just men that are grateful. If you look at the gender split on the podcast that I've done with, men and women on these male issues, the comment section are full of mothers and grandmothers and sisters and daughters who are equally concerned about men and boys in the same way that we should all be concerned about the issues that women and girls face. And I think that's a really wonderful thing because I feel like someone said to them on the podcast, you know, we spent a long time calling men out and now we need to call them back in.

1:59:13Yes. And I think it's just a wonderful expression of where I think we find ourselves where we're now trying to figure out how we co -exist and champion each other and the individual issues we both have is two different sexes. And... Well, thank you for your work in this space. I do think that using your platform to honestly engage, to grapple decisions in the way that we have today and you have with others and just look, there aren't any of these hard. I think that's an incredibly important thing because if you're not talking about it, others will be. And so for you to use your voice and this kind of space to just say we get it, we're hearing you, we're seeing it, we maybe don't have the answer.

1:59:52It's very powerful for you to use your voice to do that. And I'm glad you're getting the reaction that you are, which is to much lesser extent in my... The reaction I get too, which is thank God, because you're not framing it in a reactionary way. You're not saying, and that's why we need to go back to the 50s. Men, women and women, you're saying, no, this is hard, right? But yeah, we see it. Yeah, and I love the progress we've made as a society. I love that. I love it for all the women in my lives. I love it for myself. I love it for my sister, for my mother, for my partner, for all the wonderful women that work with me.

2:00:28But I also know that with all... With all upsides comes an unintended consequence as well. And if we can manage that, if we can manage both the upside and sustain that while managing the unintended consequence and talk about it, and this is something... This is not just about social issues, about medicine. We're talking about medicine or any other being really successful and work comes with an unintended consequence over here. You lose your friends or you might become lonely. If we can highlight both and manage both and talk about both, and I think we'll be much better as a society. If we're much better as a society, then I think we'll be much better.

2:01:02We'll all be happier and we'll all be better. And it's difficult to have these conversations sometimes because obviously these are such polarizing issues. Yes. But what the fuck am I... Are we here for if not to have those conversations? As you speak about this stuff, and I found myself doing it a bit in this conversation, you think, like, what's the kind of least generous interpretation of what I've just said? Yeah. That someone's going to post somewhere. But if you... If you are constantly worried about what the least generous interpretation of what we're saying is, we'll never say anything.

2:01:32100%. And so just by saying it and trying to be honest about it and changing your mind, we're just having... I think you're proving this, that the appetite for good faith conversations about real issues is huge right now. I think people kind of over the simplification, they're over the algorithm, they're over the sound, but no, we're all kind of in it still. But just honestly wrestling with real problems, and seeing that we have to rise together, I think that's a huge gift. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Oh. Not knowing who they're leaving it for, so I'm assuming that's the last one.

2:02:08Yeah, that's a bit of a... Yeah, it is. Okay. Interestingly, they've written a statement at the top, which is, some day is now, full stock, and then they've written, at your age, at this point in your journey, what is one thing you always swore you would do one day, have you done it yet, and if not, why not?

2:02:30I can't answer that question. I'm trying really hard, because I'm trying to think of anything that I've swore that I will do one day. And I can't think of a single thing. Richard, thank you. Thank you. It's been such a wonderful conversation for so many reasons, and you know, I have zero doubt that there are so many, so many men and women out there, that have benefited tremendously from the fact that you do the work that you do in the way that you do it. And I think that's a really important additional part to the sentence, which is the way in which you do it. Time matters, right? It really, really matters.

2:03:10It really matters, because I think you're able to call everybody into the room in a way that other people aren't. They call half of the group into the room, or just some of the group into the room, which I never think is the best way to get ideas across, but really skillfully in your book, but in your work more generally, you call everybody into the room, and you do it in a way which is objective. It's not political, and it's incredibly powerful and compelling. And that's exactly what your book was. I spent a long time after having multiple conversations on this podcast, looking for the book that sets the right tone, and can speak to someone like me who considers myself, I'm not sure if this is always true, because I have advice and stuff, but considers myself right in the middle in terms of politics and all these things.

2:03:55So your book was, it didn't seem to be pandering to either group. It seemed to be able to maintain an absolute objectivity, which was incredibly powerful, but everything is supported by data and stats, not just vibes. And I think that is the book that society has needed, and I think it is this book, so I'd highly recommend everybody give it a read if you have any interest in these subjects we've discussed today. I'm going to link it below for everyone. It's called Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Malice Traveling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It. But also for all of the millions of people listening right now.

2:04:28Thank you, because I'm sure all of them would like to say thank you for variety of different reasons, but on behalf of them, thank you so much for doing the work that you do, it's very, very important, and to close off this conversation. Thank you, it means a lot to me. We need you to say that. Oh, thank you. We need you too.

2:04:57Thank you.

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