#108: TheTinMen: Why Modern Men Are Struggling (and What No One Admits)

0:00People ask me all the time about what are the issues that resonate with you, why did you set up this account, the Tin Men, and they want some sort of misery story, some sort of like origin story of some abuse I've suffered and I've lived a very happy, lovely life with obviously a few difficult parts. But the one issue that I do really empathize with and relate to on a personal level is the failure of boys in school in the sense that I don't think boys are properly served at all by school. I don't think anyone's served well by school. The idea that you have to sit down and read five hours a day quietly, text-based learning, which is what we're doing now, doesn't work for anyone, particularly boys.

0:36Certainly not me. I failed school. I got E, E, E. Three E's. Why specifically men and boys? because boys have hormones coursing through their body called testosterone especially at that adolescent age where they want to just fucking run around and want to run around do things they want it they don't they don't they're not as good at text-based learning as girls but i want to reassert that doesn't work well on girls either but they're just better able to cope with it the idea that you're going to get a boy sitting down at a table like this for four or five hours a day every day at that time of his life to learn is so naive and that is why i think boys are doing so badly in school because we're moving more and more away from vocational learning practical learning physical education we're doing exactly what i said text-based learning quietly and it's just that's why boys are slipping behind adding the fact that there's so few male teachers just gets worse and worse and worse what so having no male teachers is is it like a lack of role models or a lack of lack of role models but also male teachers have been shown to be less likely to problematize boys so-called bad behavior and that's again where i relate i was a naughty boy i wasn't like a bully or wasn't violent but i was certainly very cheeky and disruptive and uh i'm sure my teachers hated me in many ways because i was just a class clown all the time because i was not naughty at all i was just really bored and disengaged and frustrated and it's a it's annoying how boys that are frustrated and disengaged are seen as naughty boys and therefore marked down and male teachers are i've been shown to be less likely to problematize that so-called bad behavior and to recognize it as that's just a boy boy being a boy and i think if i was a teacher i'd be like i recognize that boy he's not stupid he's not bad he's just disengaged and that isn't his failure but my failure and the failure of the school to adequately meet his needs as a boy so men are less likely to do that in school and they're also teachers in general are more likely to mark boys down for the same behavior aside for the same cognitive ability so a boy and a girl same cognitive ability in an exam, they leave that exam and they'll be assessed by teachers, which is also an increasing part of the child's grade.

2:49They'll do the same in the exams, but they'll be scored differently by the teacher because the teacher will be using non-cognitive abilities, aka bad behavior, to mark a boy of equal intelligence down. So teachers marking down boys of the same intelligence as girls, that's also part of the education gap. You mentioned there was a thing where you're saying that men and boys have this thing called testosterone running around their body. And so they need to be taught differently. I'm not sure if it's the same around - Sylvester, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, in simple terms, but the term testosterone, I guess you could say, well, the thing, but people are labeling it as a term.

3:25I don't know if it's the same all around the world, but in Australia, it's kind of pushed down and it's stated that it's a bad thing. Too much testosterone going around the room. And for example, like there's some recent thing that came out in the news where in, um, in Bondi in Australia, Bondi beach, it's one of the most popular places, destination spots during COVID. They, uh, they, the community got together and they made weights for the community out of concrete and they put them in the local gym down at the, at the beach. It's kind of like this outdoor gym and they've made all these weights so everyone could train while the gyms were closed.

4:01and just recently the council removed all of the community weights and there was a big thing out on the news channels explaining that there was too much it was promoting too much testosterone in the area and they and it was a tripping hazard for pedestrians and they removed it that's the sort of thing that could only come out of australia that seems like every week something like that's happening australia these days but i i look at this and i wonder i wonder what the effects of that is, being able to label something as negative and just say, oh, it's because there's too much testosterone going in here.

4:34Surely the men that are trying to better their lives by training at the gym there. That's just how it couldn't be a more positive thing. Like men have recognized they have a problem. They have an excess of energy. They want to burn off. They have time to kill youth clubs and all these like sports societies and libraries closing down. So they're like, well, we're going to fill that gap, that need. in a way that's cost effective and positive and has healthy outcomes, but that still isn't good enough. It reminds me of another story from Australia, I can't remember his name, but Ned something. Ned Brockman.

5:07Yeah. He ran like 20 ,000 miles or something. He ran from, well, he did too. He ran from one side of Australia to the other side, and then he ran around an oval, I think, 1 ,000 miles. Yeah, and he tried to break the record for fastest or longest endurance run ever. He didn't do it, but he raised tens of thousands of Australian dollars for homeless people millions of dollars maybe 10 million for homeless people so he's a man that's putting his body on the line doing incredible things raising tens of millions of pounds for homeless people and that was still condemned but someone said it's oh this is just toxic masculinity repackaged i'm like what more could you do like what more could this man do and he's still being called toxic it's like i think the problem is quite clear that it doesn't matter what men like ned do or the boys you mentioned with the weightlifting, it's never good enough.

5:58It's never good enough. You mentioned in brief at the start of this conversation about what got you into starting the Tin Men. But more specifically, I'd love to know why you're so motivated to kind of shed light on these negative, bold claims about how men are so wrong. What do you mean? Like you obviously state a lot of claims around different, well, not claims, you basically surface claims that people make. And you kind of debunk them. And in a really kind of precise way, you unpack every facet of the thing. Yeah. What gives you this drive to want to do that? Because just chronic sense of self-righteousness.

6:37Like, I just feel like, I think I have a set of skills that makes me uniquely suitable for this area of work. Like, I have a history in the research. I come from a family of really quite well-known researchers. on top of that I have a skill set in the creative industry where I've worked across every single facet of the creative industry everything from copywriting editing motion graphics animation design filmmaking camera editing everything on top of that thick skin like you're not going to survive in a space unless you've got thick skin and just like I said the chronic self-righteousness that means I'll just keep going and going and going and I've recognized that where I don't know if I can't make change in a meaningful way I don't know who else can so I guess the answer is just out of necessity and I guess that's such an arrogant thing to say like self-aggrandizing in this way but yeah and it blows my mind how it doesn't matter how well I present the data or how relentless I am in forcing these facts down people's throats they still deny them doesn't matter how many sources no matter how clearly i make the argument how reputable the experts who i'm citing it's never it's never enough like i know and it's just and then on the opposite side but as i'm placed under impossible levels of scrutiny the other side are given a free pass all the time like as an example for australia for example australian institute for family studies aifs which is a governmental organization that looks into things like domestic violence recently published a series of headlines which you can't have missed it said one in three men admit to being to perpetrating intimate partner violence one in three australian men are violent or have been violent towards a partner shocking headline no one really makes a pass the headline they'll just throw that out into the twitter sphere and not think about it but only a few people like myself and a few others in australia have actually gone into that study found out what qualifies as intimate partner violence and of that one in three about 32 percent of the 35 percent what what qualified them as violent was they made their partner feel anxious or frightened one time and that was it so if if you did that survey and if you've made your partner feel anxious or frightened just one time in your life which everyone's fucking done suddenly you're violent towards your partner and if you actually look at actual physical violence it was eight percent which is still eight percent too much but it wasn't 35 so you've taken eight percent that's not particularly exciting but hang on if we ask this second question really we can inflate it to the one in three terrifying headline and it's frustrating it's not frustrating that i'm placed under such high levels of scrutiny because i actually appreciate it and it's it sort of sharpened my content but i just wish that same scrutiny was placed on both sides because there was so much scrutiny of these studies and make these outrageous claims that even just a lay person such as myself can easily undo them like that and yet we don't because it's not socially beneficial to argue against that because that one in three claim it looks good on your social media feed but someone like me revealing the truth doesn't look good yeah i think i i read the post you made about that you said the main sample space of people was 21 to 40 or the age age bracket um I can't quite remember, but I do know that I added up the data and there was a huge segment of surveyed men that were missing.

10:07And I think those men were the men that were abused themselves, that they captured that data, but they just didn't publish the data. So they basically, not only did they not ask the question, well, they did ask the question, but they got the answer and then they removed it. And they were the men that were victims of abuse. and if you add them back in under that assumption which i think is a fair one 31 of men have experienced abuse by partner and 35 of men have perpetrated abuse so you know it's how are they defining abuse there well they're talking about intimate partner violence in that study and they consider making your partner feel nervous or anxious just a one time to be violent and it's like i think that's emotional abuse at best and a very low threshold for emotional abuse abuse isn't just making your partner feel anxious or frightened abuse is about a pattern of behavior intended to control or intimidate a partner it has to be a pattern of behavior it's not a one-off thing like me going home and getting annoyed at my girlfriend for whatever she's not done dishes and she feels anxious that doesn't make me an abuser because i'm not doing it as a pattern of behavior certainly isn't violence so i don't want to downgrade emotional abuse because emotional abuse can actually be worse than physical abuse but to make your partner feel anxious one time is not intimate partner violence, in my opinion.

11:25Do you think this relates at all to, if we talk about suicide prevention, do you think that these statistics is making men struggle more with mental health? Or is it maybe, because I'm looking at it going, I read that and I go, that's an interesting thing to hear about. I'm not going to lose sleep over it for me personally, but if I was, say, potentially a victim of some version of abuse, then maybe that would be the people that it's affecting big time because maybe it's not shedding light and they're not being seen on the challenges that they're having. Do you think that's the main problem with the messaging like this or what would you say the main problem is with them promoting only one side?

12:07The main problem is that it's not accurate and it makes men who are experiencing abuse invisible. And obviously this isn't just some wacko university study. this is the australian institute of financial studies governmental study the biggest i think ever done in australia uh and that dictates where the support goes who does the funding go to who what what shelters are opening up what services are available for men and women who are being abused and because it's entirely one-sided that helps explain why there are no services for abused men australia there are literally no shelters i spent a long time just trying to find one i can't find any there's but there's thousands and thousands and thousands of women quite rightly so like billions upon billions upon billions of australian dollars spent protecting abused women nothing spent on men like nothing apart from like a small a few small charities nothing from the government and if you place yourself in the mind of someone that's experiencing this pattern of abusive behavior from partner from someone that's supposed to love you and there's no way out there's no one to help you know nowhere to go you're seeing these outrageous headlines that just erase your lived experience altogether suicide becomes like an actual viable so-called solution it's a way it's seen by many men who are suicidal as uh an inevitable outcome like a solution to something that they can't solve they can't escape no one believes them and a lot of men who are being abused do turn to suicide i think it's about nine percent of men in the uk at least who are being abused will consider suicide and you're talking about millions of men and yeah it's one of many causes of suicide so what do you think because because i i look at this and i understand why the women is is more promoted and i guess my it's all assumptive on my end but my my guess would be that being typically speaking men are going to be more strong and they're going to be have a power there's going to be a power dynamic from a strength standpoint between the male and the female and so it's easily justifiable saying that a man's abusing a woman but it's a lot harder to justify a woman abusing a man yeah when you reference male men being abused what are some of the things that they're being victim to like what are some of the is it like women having objects and device like what's i think it's easy to fall into like cliche views of yeah in the way you've described and that obviously does exist but an abuse can be extremely broad set of behaviors i know some men have experienced horrendous things that you wouldn't even dream of and although it's right men do rule in the physical domain they are physically stronger than women most of them at least women are as we know more emotionally attuned have a greater control of language are able to manipulate networks and build coalitions and we believe women more than we believe men like you're talking about false allegations like i know so many men who have had children turned against them i know many men i know a man who if he wasn't home by a certain time for dinner his dinner would go in the bin and he'd have to sleep underneath the dining room table that night i know a man who would get five pounds a week i think to buy himself food and he'd have to work two jobs for his wife who didn't work and she held the money and he got five pound allowance and if he spent more than that five pounds he'd get beaten like these are these are all incredibly like esoteric unbelievably cruel ways of abusing a man that totally take away that physical advantage he has because although yeah he has a physical advantage doesn't change anything like i remember talking to two of my friends about this at the pub they're dating and uh i was like trying to explain this to them and then they were like wow the power dynamic of men over women which is as you said and i was like okay if you want to talk about power dynamics you go home today and call the police and tell them your boyfriend is abusing you and then the following day your boyfriend calls the police makes the exact same allegation and then we'll see where the power dynamic really is and yeah like i know people that have had horrendous things done to them like horrendous like yeah well false allegations just destroy their lives i know i know i talked about suicide at panel last year about false allegations and then at the end some woman tapped me on the shoulder quietly and she told me about her son who was falsely accused of sexually assaulting a girl at school uh totally made up and but he was isolated nonetheless he was put in a separate student accommodation he was pushed away by a lot of the university vilified across campus killed himself so it doesn't matter how big and strong he was i wouldn't give him any advantage over that and in fact in that case i would say the power is in her court because naturally we believe women more than we believe men so abuse is a very complicated thing and it doesn't isn't just about physical abuse it's about many more it's financial abuse it's coercive control it's emotional abuse it's many different things all of them can be as cruel as the other and it's you just got to speak to some of these men to understand how how devastating it can really be i'm fascinated by it i i'm i'm naive on the topic i i i in terms of in terms of specific experiences and understanding what men have gone through.

17:23Because I guess I hear this notion that you're explaining of, say, a man working two jobs to provide for the family and then he receives five pounds to pay for his dinner or whatever it might be. For a week. For a week. I look at that in isolation. I just go, how does that happen? Like, is the money going into her account? Is there, like... So that's something. She takes control of the finances. That's what I'm talking about. a passionate behavior to control someone else she'll take control and then uh she'll give him back the money and like i think i think in that case there was also the threat of falsely accusing like if you don't give me this i'm gonna tell the police you've done x and y which is not true yeah so the manipulation and the false accusation is probably the big thing because the women have more power when it comes to the words that leave their mouth and so they go and call the police as you said they're going to be someone at the door straight away yeah and and maybe they've got a lot more power and things hold up at court maybe more yeah i read a story where a guy was basically raped by his girlfriend and she said unless you have sex with me i'm gonna dial 9-1 and unless you do what i say i'm gonna press 1 again and i'm gonna call the police and i'm gonna tell them that you raped me and it doesn't matter what happens like even if that goes to court and he's found innocent like my that woman's son doesn't matter if you found innocent you're still guilty in the public uh court public opinion and that you can destroy someone's life without even having to lift a finger just you know make one of these allegations and also place that in the context of family courts where most of the allegations are like you then you've got a man who's going through a horrible divorce facing the loss of everything like his home his his marriage even his child and it's easy is he can see how these systems can be manipulated to cause insane levels of stress onto a man or a woman that goes both ways to which again suicide one one in five suicides in the uk is linked to child custody battles and family breakdown and again like in that case a malevolent partner of male or female can cause extreme pain abuse someone in ways that you can't even begin to imagine without having to do anything physical like i could sit it, do it from across the table and do it to you, it isn't necessitated by having a physical advantage over the other.

19:44But of course, there was also that too, but it's just more complicated than that. What about people that are not in relationships, that are men struggling mentally? And say we remove from this example of being abused by women, I guess you could say. What about all of the men that are just having a hard time mentally that maybe don't have the thing of their woman is abusing them? I guess, what are some of the main causations of that? And have you done much thought around how people can kind of get out of those ruts potentially? Oh, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I would never want to give someone life advice for something I've never experienced.

20:27but I also don't want to suggest that there was only one cause of mental illness and that is experiences of abuse I mean that's just one of many examples I mean I have a friend Susie Bennett who's a an incredible researcher into male suicide and she described suicide as a as an orchestra it's not one single instrument when you listen to an orchestra playing a symphony you don't say well that's the violinist in the second row it's actually all of the instruments playing at the same time to create one symphony of sorrow in the case of suicide and that's how it works it's not one thing it's many different things one of them might be experiences of abuse but it might not so it's an impossibly difficult web to disentangle to understand what causes this immense mental pain onto men and sadly for so many ends in suicide but I always get struggle with mental illness because a lot of the men who are suicidal don't consider themselves mentally well at all like they're going through things that are legitimately real issues like family breakdown child custody experiences of abuse joblessness debt and it's not right to call them mentally unwell they're just going through things for which they feel there's no way out and there's no other solution so and I wouldn't want to give advice because I haven't experienced most of these things and that's just not I am interested in the facts there are other people that are much better giving advice doesn't just doesn't suit my personality type if i'm really honest the question i dread most on these podcasts is when someone asks me what is masculinity and they want some sort of like spiritual answer which i'm not really capable of but yeah advice if you're looking for advice on mental illness i would wouldn't ask me if i'm honest it's cool it's a very wise uh approach i think you can sometimes get ask someone a question and they'll just try and answer it for the sake of answering it and you know they're talking shit so rather to say i don't think i'm the right person to answer the question but i would like to reassert that most of the men i talk about and i speak to on a daily basis i don't think they're mentally well i think they're experiencing real issues uh that i would say it's unsurprising that that's causing distress that one of the quotes i like i learned from a friend of mine who is a clinical psychologist she would say there are no abnormal behaviors only a normal response to an abnormal set of experiences.

22:46So mental illness isn't an abnormality. Often it's a very normal response to whatever that person's experienced. If they've experienced tremendous childhood abuse, for them to grow up with mental illness isn't abnormal at all. It's actually a very normal thing to go to. It's a normal response to an abnormal set of experiences. What's the gamma bias? Oh, gamma bias is so difficult to describe, but once you see it, it's hard to unsee. It's a set of distortions through which our view of men in the world is biased. So it's essentially, it's the minimization of male victimhood in the way you've sort of covered already, and the minimization of male celebration.

23:32So we don't like to celebrate men for the great things they do, and we don't like to see them as victims. And then we maximize privilege and we maximize perpetration. so as like a example whenever a man does something bad like if a man does a terrorist attack we'll be talking about a knife man or a gun man or male violence and the male sex is highlighted within his heinous violent acts whereas the people on the other side who are almost always men are have their gender erased so they're the good samaritans or they're the bystanders of heroes or the members of the public and in the simplest terms it's a bit like we talk a lot about male violence because 79 of violent crimes are by men however 93 of bystander rescues are also by men and that's someone that steps in to save the life of a stranger that's 93 men so even a higher percentage of men do that than violent crimes so we never talk about male heroism so it's the simultaneous overemphasis of men within violent acts and then the erasure of men in heroic acts and then the erasure of a male victimhood and the highlighting of male privilege and once you look through it once you see the world for that prism it's impossible to unsee like when i talk about erasing male victims it's a bit like headlines you'll see oh 700 killed in an earthquake including 200 women and children and that's the headline you'll see again and again and again you'll see women and children women and children women and children like in iran 92 percent of protesters killed in iran and these protests a few years ago were men never heard them talked about it would always be 300 protesters killed including 60 women and children and that's what i mean that you're raising men even though they make up 90 percent of protesters killed and now you're actually highlighting the opposite i always think about hillary clinton saying in the ultimate gender bias sort of backwards mental gymnastics somersault she said women women are the the primary victim of war because it's their husbands sons and brothers being killed so even when men are being killed in she said about ukraine so we've got hundreds of thousands ukrainian men being obliterated in the most horrific way imaginable and she still thinks women are the primary victim of that conflict and it's like i get it like having a father or son or husband or killed is horrific but it's not as bad as actually being killed so that's gamma bias and it's like a distortion through which we see the world that emphasize over emphasizes the bad and under emphasizes the good and leads to like a distorted view of men masculinity that sadly we all know too well.

26:22Yeah. Do you think that potentially something that's playing a role? I'm trying to unpack why the messaging is this way, and I'm sure you've deep dived into this, but there's this thing around like when boys are growing up, their fathers or their elders will say, go make something of yourself. And that line right there implies that you don't already have anything of yourself. Whereas your sister, she's got the portal of life. She's a woman. You know, when the ship sinks, we take care of children, we take care of women, men, they're just sacrificial lamb. Do you think there's something deep down where maybe even, I don't, I mean, I don't know.

27:04I doubt this aligns with our biology, but do you think there's something deep down where intrinsically women have more value? So then they want to promote that instead and highlight that? This is like the ultimate podcast cliche. And we're talking about reproductive value. And what it is you're saying is men are more disposable than women because women have more reproductive value, which is the calling card of a million podcasts I've seen. And then inevitably ends up with one of us talking about tribes. And then the allegory goes as follows. There's two tribes. One tribe has all of its women wiped out.

27:41and because women have high repopulated value uh the tribe the tribe's gone because you can't survive about 90 of your women however if another tribe has 90 of the men wiped out 10 of the men can quite easily repopulate the tribe uh because of the way fertility works and that is why people think men have lower repopulated value which many ways they do but that that only makes sense in like a prehistoric era where we live in tribes which is no longer true and people seem to think that it's justification to value men as more disposable or value them as a means of what they can do in the way you described and uh i don't think it's fair like it's yeah i mentioned it like women and children first that's that's like the calling card of disaster particularly at sea and i guess that's male disposability and people seem to think that's justifiable and i get it it is a certain i do understand it to a certain extent that men are more physically capable in that situation but it does make me sad how people value men based on their ability to sacrifice their lives i remember asking like followers what do you think makes a man and my followers are oh you know man is you know giving his life for those he loves so it's running into the burning building and i'm like why why is a man's value always based on his ability to die or suffer immensely for those he loves i'm again that's bravery and a lot of men have done that but i feel like we need to find new value, meaningful men beyond that.

29:05I wonder if it aligns with biology and what we are deep down. I'm fascinated in unpacking that. I've always just been curious because societal norms change and different messaging changes, but how much has the human species evolved as a species? And I wonder whether... You're saying that, I'm looking at all these cameras around us, I think we evolved quite well. Look at these 4K cameras. We're in a nicely heated room. But the human biology, though, I get everything else has kind of evolved. It's more technology and different things. But is the way that the human is getting reproduced and made, has that changed?

29:50I think humans are defined by our ability to overcome nature and to do the incredible things that are quite literally all around us. And we're not victims to our biology. otherwise we'd still be in caves in the savannah of africa flinging shit at each other but we're not uh and that's the naturalistic fallacy which is to assume that what is right by nature is what is morally and ethically right and therefore we should continue to do those things but again i understand that but i think humans are best defined by our ability to overcome what nature and our biology expects of us and the past hundred million or so years we've continually proven that we are able to overcome our biology, like quite literally in the sense that we're talking through the most amazing technology in the world surrounding us.

30:38That wasn't even possible like 50 years ago, let alone a hundred million years ago. Yeah. And I think it's, it is amazing the evolution that we've seen. What I'm also just curious on though, is if we strip it back to say happiness, fulfillment, joy, these things in our life, I wonder if all of these things externally that is labelled as evolution and we've added new things into our life. I wonder if that adds more peace, more joy, more fulfilment, more happiness in our life. And I'm not sure because if suicide rates are increasing and people are struggling more mentally, I'm fascinated to know why.

31:18I mean, maybe there's not as much data from history and maybe we don't know how they felt back then. I think, yeah, we are obviously our biology, has remained relatively consistent like we are always we are sort of in many ways still cavemen walking around just surrounded by cool things but society does change i think about how the amazing change in society of the past 50 years maybe 70 years where for example women have entered the workplace they're no longer staying at home they're fully autonomous capable people individuals and full agency quite rightly so they've entered a workplace and now that has been a change that we have to adapt to where men still are held to that archetype that you seem to be alluding to where we are valued on our ability to provide whereas the whole societal landscape has changed in the in the past 70 years where men can no longer meet that requirement or not as easily the time of the single male breadwinner who's able to support a whole family on his own is over because women have entered the workplace and we've had to share that burden and i i'm not trying to say we shouldn't but shouldn't value men as providers and protectors i i get a lot of value out of that by being that role myself i'm just trying to add more strings to that boat i like to think about it like a bit like a puppet where a man is being held up by two strings one of them is a provider one of them is a protector and that's where he gets his meaning from women have way more than that they have those two strings which are newly formed strings in the past 70 years but they also have you know friends and hobbies and family and motherhood and they get meaning from so many more places so if one of those strings gets cut and they lose their job it's okay because they have other other places of meaning that keep them sustained and like they've literally done that there's a few studies where they found like where do you find meaning and men have just said my work and money that's where i get meaning and purpose whereas they ask women and yeah they'll name all the things including those those two but also community hobbies friendship family motherhood and i don't want to take away the provider from the man but i want to be like well there are other things to life that we need like being a good father like being a great friend like having hobbies that go beyond and in addition to just being a provider protector so it's not that i'm against that but i just want men to find more meaning because like i said society is changing and we need to find more meaning we need a renaissance of what it is to be a man that extends that beyond the typical 1950s proto sort of provider breadwinner from my you know the classic american sitcom yeah i i think there's this underlying aspect of uh assessing what's serving you deep down and what's not and i think removing your decisions from the societal norms is actually quite powerful because if we just take something for how it is and be like, that's just how it is now, but then you're fundamentally less happy.

34:21I'm not sure if that's something that serves you at all. And what's the point of subscribing to an ideology that actually isn't serving you? And so I think what's awesome about what we have now is what we have access to is so many resources and so many different things, but it doesn't necessarily mean that onboarding all of those things is going to be the thing that's going to unlock this life that you want that has more meaning and more fulfillment um i just i just like to i do like to look at some of these things and go you said just before i do find joy in being able to be that provider for my for my partner and i would argue that there wouldn't be very many men that experience that and go i don't enjoy that and and and and enjoy that ability to be able to provide I think there's something inherent about most men, more men than women, inherent part of them that wants to provide and protect.

35:16I think a lot of that's biological and part of men's DNA, but then it's also socially enforced too. Again, another classic cliche is talk about hypergamy, which is the idea that women will want to date a man who's more successful, more educated than she is, has higher status. And although we lean into that a lot too often, particularly in podcasts such as this one, it's truth to it. I do think the standards men are held to in dating are different to the ones that men hold women to in dating. Men value youth and good looks, and women in dating, a partner, they want security and success and status.

35:56And I think that those archetypes need to be loosened. Those expectations of men, as they become more and more difficult to fulfill for the reasons I mentioned earlier, we need to change those a little bit, widen them and loosen them a little bit. So we're not holding men to a set of expectations, meaning ability to earn money, that is really, really difficult to fulfill these days. Yeah. We mentioned earlier before we were recording about schools and how, you know, schools in Australia had to apologize just for being a man. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm forever grateful for Australians because they provide me some of my greatest content.

36:36Some of the headlines I get sent, I'm like, this is outrageous. And I always know it's really - I'll read you some things that have been pretty popular. Lifting weights equals toxic masculinity. Preaching health is the manosphere. Celebrating Australia is offensive. You're a part of the problem if you are wearing green and yellow. You're part of the problem. If you chase success, you're arrogant. If you look fit, you're a narcissist. If you eat clean, it's disordered eating. Calling someone fat is considered fatphobic. If you break the mold, you are frowned upon. Well, we talked about the NED, the runner guy, the NED guy.

37:11We talked about the AIFS study that was really misleading. And yeah, the other one we talked about was a class of boys in Victoria, Australia. They were forced to apologize to the girls. They had to stand up in assembly, all the boys, and had to apologize. for nothing, for being a boy. Literally, basically apologizing for the sins of their forefathers. And these are 12-year-olds. I can't wrap my head around that. I can, well, that's how, I mean, I don't know yet, I can understand it in the context of where it's happening, but to me it's absolutely outrageous and it caused a huge amount of backlash.

37:48Like, boys are going home to their parents and the parents say, oh, what did you do today? And they're not going to apologize. Well, what did you do? Well, nothing. I existed as a boy in 2024. for and yeah they literally had to stand in assembly and apologize to the girls and yeah it's just like they were they were so young they didn't even know what they were apologizing for they were 12 year olds so have you uh done any research on when men start to experience mental health challenges is it is it young or is it later on after they finish school because obviously we was talking about you know the the relationship one with uh women abusing them that's more obviously later when they have relationships but do you think men are suffering mentally younger growing up and there's an age or have you done any research on that i know i definitely know suicide rates which i i do see a separate to mental illness but suicide rates they do diverge in teenage years like there's nothing more depressing than talking about suicides in young children but it sadly does happen and it happens at equal rates between boys and girls but at about 12 or 13 the gap opens up and boys suicide rates skyrockets to where it is now at our age where it's about four times more likely even five times more likely to die by suicide but that isn't true all the time like boys and girls die by suicide at equal rates and then something happens at teenage years where it skyrockets for for young men boys and i only can hypothesize that part of that gap is perhaps an increasingly hostile view of boys and men when they become you know actually look like men and we start to hate them like i always want to know when do we start to hate men because no one really hates boys especially young children like we see boys and girls as equally deserving of compassion and protection and rightly so but that was another actually going back to susie who's the male suicide researcher she had one of the suicidal men ask her that she's like at what point uh in a boy's life do we stop wanting to care for them and at what point do we start hating them because they're a man and i suppose the answer is when they start to look like a man um and then interestingly it comes back down like at about 78 we see men and women as equally deserving of care and compassion it's interesting so it's like we care the same and then about 13 we don't care about boys and then it comes back together about 78 but there's a whole obviously a period in a man's life where a lot of men understandably feel like the world doesn't give a shit about them do you think it's a generalization saying that it's either we care about boys and then now we don't give a shit about men in a sense because because i i i look at it and i'm i'm really trying to and i don't and i don't know i'm trying to be sensitive of making this just some bro bro podcast but i am really trying to to tie into where the agency comes in of of like um someone's saying a certain thing about you kind of okay well that's fine that's their opinion let's take ownership let's better our life let's kind of look within and go okay what actually is the messaging out there that's serving me what messaging isn't and the the reason i i i bring up is because I had someone on that was talking about the most common things in suicide notes being feeling that I'm useless and worthless, right?

41:14Yeah. That's me too. Yeah. And I try and piece this together and go, okay, why are they feeling useless and worthless? When I look at the most life-changing moments in my life and I look at the moments that have made me really who I am today, they've been the catalyst for so much change in my life for the better. They were the very, very low times. and it's funny looking back in hindsight looking at those low times but i can't help but think if you're presented with more challenge and maybe some messaging or people projecting something down your throat it's just one of those hurdles that if framed in the right way and have the good perception around it can actually make you level up even more and so i i i look at this messaging and i go there's a lot of messaging which is unfair quite frankly when you look at how they're targeting men and saying that they're horrible.

42:04It is unfair. But I also just think about the ability to feel useful and worthy is kind of overcoming that challenge. What are your thoughts on this messaging? Totally agree. I'm not going to disagree with that at all. To quote my mum, she's a nutritionist, but it still makes sense here. She would say everything in moderation. And everything I say on this podcast doesn't mean I don't agree with what you're saying too. I'm just recognizing I can't do everything. And I've got a specific set of ideas that I hope people consume in parallel of what you're talking about and others in a way that everything in moderation.

42:43I wouldn't want everyone to look at my page and my voice and my content and be like, well, this is the single source of all gospel truth in the world. It's just one set of ideas. And I would hope that you combine what I say with a whole palette of ideas, including what you said, to help men navigate life with as many tools as possible to overcome and deal with issues but what what i talk about is the limitation of what you're saying is that a lot of men have a limited amount of agency of what you're talking about and i don't care about people saying nasty things about men in the world i'm talking about people like fathers who are fighting for children in family courts who are having things that are not just nasty but made up and for those men who are losing losing that battle for the thing that matters most in their life which is their child in addition to their half their income their home their and their marriage no amount of podcasting or listening to podcast is going to bring their child back so no amount of agency is ever going to solve that problem so yes what you're talking about will help you deal with the problem but will it solve the problem i don't know like and that's why i also am very critical of the whole men can talk thing which is another string to the bow and should also be consumed with women moderation and whilst i i do encourage men to talk and share their emotions that is also a short-term solution and it although it does deal with the problem it doesn't necessarily solve the problem so i am not i i don't disagree with you whatsoever and i that's something i've learned a lot of because some of the ideas i present to my following quite liberal and a lot of men i don't want to hear that shit like stop trying to treat us like victims all the time i want to overcome these things and i admire that and i'm like all right i'm learning especially in things like body dysmorphia like i would talk a lot about men who suffer from my body dysmorphia which is a larger than you think amount and i'll present like an image of a man who's overweight and then we don't want we don't want to normalize that we want to go to the gym we want to push back we want to start see that as the bottom and then go from there.

44:48I agree. I think that's fair. What I think is powerful about this is actually just understanding, this is actually tying into agency perfectly though, is you being able to present more information and have statistics to back it is allowing people to have more context on the whole thing as opposed to being so one-dimensional with their views. Then it's up to them to take agency on, okay, I've received new information. Let's onboard this and use this to better our life. whether it's someone that's struggling whether it's someone that's on their high horse whatever it is they're all going to be able to get more context on the situation and have more information to pull from yeah but i do think generally we we we seem to think men have more agency than they actually do have and then you know opposite women we don't give women enough agency as they do have like people would see literally think men rule the world people respond to my content by saying well you made all the laws and you started all the wars and you run the world and have done for millennia that is a that is like maximum agency so far beyond what is the reality like i've not written any laws i've not started any wars i'm 36 years old i've not lived for millennia i don't rule the world so i agree but at the same time i do think generally speaking we do think men have more agency and that's the hypo and hyper agency debate which which thinks like i said we we assume men have more agency than they have got and we take away agency from women and we assume they have less than they have got because women and women obviously have the opposite and they're seen as perpetual victims from so-called patriarchy and those warlord men that i just mentioned so do you think a healthy medium is appropriate being able to try and find a way where people are open to exploring new ideas um new ways of living i guess let's not go back to the 1950s let's take what we have and try and form a new way that's going to make men feel a bit better about themselves, I guess.

46:44It's like using the resources that we have to be able to, I don't know, help men that are going through hard times or prepare and equip men for in the event that they go through hard times. Is this kind of like what you think there needs to be more awareness? I know one of the things you were talking about is potentially the budgets are being allocated to the wrong things. And, you know, I guess, do you think that there should be the money that's being allocated to men's mental health should be allocated elsewhere? Is that something that you've been thinking, or at least a portion of it? I think talking about health in general, I know that in terms of the health spending in Australia, for example, we spend a huge amount on women's health.

47:27And I'm not saying that's wrong. We should spend that. But I just wish we would spend an equally huge amount on men's health if not more so because men's health by more or less every metric you can think of is now worse than women's health in the uk it's worse by every metric in america it's the same in australia it's the same and yet there is virtually no dedicated funding for men's health it's like and what we do give is not knowing near enough like in america there's 10 offices for women's health now 10 federal ones government funded not a single one for men so it's not that i don't want money going to his 10 offices but i want 10 for men especially when he reconsider men leading 13 of top 15 causes of death in america and they die 1.5 times the rate as women and just to be a man now is the single greatest demographic factor of predicting early death and men die younger in every country in the world and in every age group so it's like yeah no amount of agency is going to get out of that one that requires structural investment to men's health and by that i mean invest in men's health and the most frustrating thing is that people listen to this podcast will be like that's not true it's the opposite women's health has been unfunded and although there's arguments for that being true in the past 2025 that's no longer true and we need to move on from that antiquated view of gender inequality on health and actually start pumping money into men's health because it's it's matter of life and death like one of the shocking factors in the uk 15 men will die young every hour so i don't know how far through this podcast we are but if it's an hour it's 15 men dying young already and most of those are avoidable if we invested more in men's health yeah i wonder if we made 10 offices for men's health in the u.s if they would be filled due to the stigma of a man going to seek health help as well i wonder if there's a progression required because men don't feel like it's okay to even go and seek that out i'm always very apprehensive at making that accusation because one of the things i've learned is that that is true for men of working age but it's not true of men who have retired men who have retired are equally likely to go to the doctor as a woman which suggests that it's more around work and they just don't have the time off work to go and get help like i i've had various medical issues recently which nothing serious but just to see the doctor is so difficult because i'm working all the time men work longer hours than women that is a big part of why men don't seek help it's not necessarily about stigma and even if it was the messaging i see around this men need to seek help is so victim blaming it's a bit like how we blame boys for being naughty at school when it's actually education has failed boys in the same way that health care has failed men because i i work in the creative industry and i've worked with the national health service on many campaigns to help target other groups of a demographic like the black community who are also very apprehensive around health care and we would never dream of saying anything like what we say to men about men need to you know man up and go and see the doctor or i saw one it was like this year this many million men will die because of stubbornness i was like we would never say that about other groups who don't want to see the doctors we would actually talk to black communities and south indian communities i work with too to understand why are you so apprehensive about going to the doctors because you haven't got the time is something else can we change the way we look at doctors one of the i saw a skit on saturday night live and it was obviously making fun of men who don't seek help and they were like well if we made the gps more like a podcast maybe more men would go because men love podcasts as as we're showing and that was supposed to be a joke and i was like that's actually a great idea if the gp was like a podcast studio you'd have men fucking queuing up outside and i was like do it like you're saying that's like a joke but i was like you've actually recognized a way in which men are very happy to communicate to the extent that pisses people off how many podcast men do but i said i want you recognize this is one of the ways in which men do like to talk so let's have a podcast gp serious suggestion like great idea so you're saying that the the the messaging that they're coming at is like kind of victimizing men all of it and is that resulting in men not victimizing blaming men blaming men is that resulting in men kind of repelling the idea of it in the first place means men roll their eyes yeah doesn't all there's no messaging at all like again covid i worked with nhs again joined covid exact same way let's get more black communities getting vaccinated uh black communities and south asian communities are at risk to covid but guess what so are men men would die i think 1.4 times the rate as women like significantly maybe 50 more likely to die three times more likely to go to icu with covid for biological reasons i knew that very well the nhs knew that very well but there was no campaign to help men get vaccinated and even to understand you're at risk to infectious diseases by virtue of being a man but in your very dna and your x y chromosomes you are more at risk to infectious diseases not just covid but all infectious diseases but no attempt by the nhs or anywhere to actually make that accessible to men so yeah we don't these campaigns and others don't take any responsibility for our failure of men if a boy falls behind at school we only ever seem to say well he should try harder if a man is dealing with suicide or he should go and speak up or if he dies young men should go to the doctor and it's always and only about men being better and never accepting of any responsibility on a structural level for how we failed men within healthcare within education within mental health therapy as an example like if you think about they've asked in australia great study uh they asked men who dropped out therapy of which i think half of men went to therapy dropped out one quarter dropped out after one session they asked why did he drop out and they said didn't didn't work didn't get along with a therapist didn't have a connection so that really shows you where the problem is i think and if you look at a bit like teachers 80 of therapists are women i think men are falling through the cracks i think we develop therapeutic models that are more suitable for women a bit like how education models are more suitable for girls but in therapy it's more suitable for women and then we scratch our heads at why so few men seek help probably because the models we've developed aren't suitable for them and probably because 80 % of therapists are women and men want to sit down and talk to a man with similar lived experience but we're not ready for that conversation we'd rather just blame men with these stupid sloganeering ideas of men need to seek help and again accepting no responsibility one of the shocking stats i've heard was of men who died by suicide middle-aged men 91 % of them had sought help so 9 in 10 men who died by suicide did actually seek help and then still killed themselves that is obviously a disaster for suicide intervention strategies and to look at data and to assume that the men are the problem and more than 9 in 10 of them did seek help is outrageous so I would look to look at the way in which we intervene of suicide and look at therapy more generally and how perhaps it's been developed by women more for women's needs and men are paying for it with their lives and the fact that we don't do that and insist the opposite and insist this is men being too toxic to seek help is just the horrible cherry and the shitty cake that makes so many men feel failed and not seen by the system yeah that's interesting how nine out of ten people that have men that suicide seeked help and they saw therapy did they deem it to just not work and so they go okay well that doesn't work and nothing's going to work i'm done i don't know they died we'll never know but i do know that of those men who died by suicide that were covered in that study those that were assessed by the clinician so these are men who died by suicide who sought help and were seen by a clinician 80 of them were deemed as low risk or no risk 80 of the men who died by suicide saw a clinician sought help and 80 % of them were seen as no risk there's no risk of this man and then they killed themselves 80 % of the time only 20 % was seen as high risk so four in the five men were falling through the cracks that is the problem and like we don't even ask that question like the fact that even just asking that question is unpopular and we're just so far from even honestly asking maybe we could do more for men that people think that's a joke something to be sneered at or offended by but I think the stats are pretty clear certainly a discussion we should have and like soon thank you for coming on the show I think it's fascinating I uh I'm I'm very intrigued what got me into starting to post content in the first place was helping men in high school help bridge the gap from school to the real world due to the pressures that they had to do certain things they didn't want to do and it's what it's been a topic that's been interesting for me um yeah it's definitely got me giving me things to think about so i appreciate you coming on thank you and thank you for having me and yeah i'm glad i could add another string to your bow of knowledge and like i said not everything i say is the complete gospel truth it's just my attempts my best attempts to help provide a little bit more nuance and detail to a very difficult to navigate conversation and like you've obviously a lot of things you said are really important and I'm no means trying to take away from that I'm just trying to add I'm always trying to add to the picture rather than take away yeah and I think the thing I love about this is being able to expand your knowledge it's kind of like opening the peripherals of what you do know and then I think for me where I'm sitting right now is it's just understanding what things are going to serve me in my life and what things are not what things are going to be able to am I going to be able to onboard into my message to be able to help other people and be in service of others in a positive way.

57:20Because I think at the end of the day, every opinion online is, I mean, aside from all the statistics that you're stating, a lot of things are opinions and people are deeming them to be true when potentially it is just a interpretation of them. And I guess such a blurry line, mental health, right? And how it's labeled and everything. And so it's just an interesting topic that I love to learn more. And so I appreciate you coming on. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me. I know I'll have to do it again. Most of us are one good deal away from finally replacing that worn out rug, fixing up the backyard, or getting the bedroom we actually want.

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