it is pretty clear partnerless men childless men they don't do so well in fact they do terribly and in modern society that's the problem Richard Reeves is the founder of the American Institute for boys and men an organization dedicated to researching and tackling the challenges faced by boys and men in modern society we're in the early stages of a cultural revolution so that women are not economically reliant on men which is great but one consequence of that is that it's put a big question mark next to the role of men which used to be filled
with a whole script of ways to be a man ways to be a head of household Etc because of that they're struggling they're behind in education wages have stagnated you're seeing a massive rise of young men who are single and now the suicide rate is four times higher and Rising they looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives and the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless and the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded you said the hardest
thing you've ever done as a man is coup's therapy why I was talking about what I done at home and how it's supported her career and my wife said that you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough the problem is that you're not masculine enough what I came to realize is that men feel like that in order for women to become bigger we had to make ourselves smaller that is not the answer so what would you do at a social level to fix things the most important move would be to we've
just hit 6 million subscribers on the D Co um so me and my team would like to do something we've never done before as little thank you and we're calling it The D subscriber raffle and here is how it works every episode this month we're going to pick three current subscribers at random and we'll send one of you a 1,000 voucher one of you tickets to come and watch the D SE behind the scenes live with our team and one of you will have a 10-minute phone call with me to discuss whatever you want to
talk about if you're a subscriber you're in the raffle thank you from the botom of my heart for allowing me to do something that me and my team love doing so much it is the greatest honor of my lifetime and I hope it I hope it continues uh off into the Future Let's get to the [Music] episode Richard you wrote a book called of boys and men why the modern male is struggling and why it matters and what to do about it of all the things you could have done why why did you do this
partly because I was warned so strongly against it by my colleagues by friends but professionally just saying this is such a difficult subject to write about particularly right now in this sort of moment we're in culturally and and the reason I say I did it despite being warned or because I was warned isn't because I'm like a sucker for punishment I'm actually like very thin skinned interestingly my wife said that in some ways I was in the worst of all worlds because I I'm thin skinned pist so in other words a p someone who kind
of goes out of their way to kind of make provocative points right and provocative so I provoke responses but then I'm kind of upset the responses right and and actually this this work around boys and men is not is not intended at all to be provocative ironically I'm trying to make it less provocative I'm trying to make it more databased more mainstream like more boring in a way um but it was very interesting to me and it was very hard to get a publisher in the US for the book and so it was interesting to
me that this whole debate was one that was just seen as too risky to enter and I I honestly thought well hang on if I as a fairly boring guy with charts and research and being warned against this who is going to talk about it and are we sure that it's better that those other people are talking about it and that we're not talking about it we're basically benching ourselves from the conversation because of our fear about what's going to happen to us professionally or reputationally we're basically benching ourselves and that just leaves the ground
open and if you think there's a real issue around boys and men real questions around boys and men it's not like it's not going to be talked about that's not the question the question is who's talking about it and I actually thought we need more people like me talking about it I.E boring research-based policy oriented you know non-fiction type people Brookings type people and not just some of the people who are currently talking about online and that's not there are lots of great people talking about this online don't mistake me but but it's almost like
it wasn't a topic that you were supposed to approach unless you were willing to risk something and that just seems crazy to me when you say you come from this from a place of stats graphs figures Etc what is your background where does that come from I bounced around essentially between Academia think tanks politics journalism so when I was over here I was in the UK until 201 12 and uh I'd served in the coalition government working as director of strategy for Nick CLE before that I'd run demos the think tank I'd worked I'd written
for the guardian and the Observer I'd worked at IPP I'd worked at The Institute of Psychiatry I did a PhD in philosophy at Warick and so I basically found myself in this space where either I'm trying to make policy or I'm writing about policy or I'm trying to think about policy in that sort of semi-academic space and so I'm a kind of social Scientist by experience I guess rather than by training uh and that led me to the Brookings institution in DC where I was for 10 years working on Race inequality class inequality and Brookings
is like a big blue chip you know policy Think Tank place it's you regularly ranked as the the most important think tank in the world whatever that means today I I don't know H and so in a way that was a kind of natural place for me to end up and so yeah I I come at this and I'm very nonpartisan so I try to be as fact-based as as possible I'm not partisan but I am very very concerned about trying to do what we can to reduce the obstacles that people face to human flourishing
I know that sounds really like vague but that's what's Driven all of my work and you run the institute for boys and men yeah the American Institute for boys and men it's actually the first Think Tank like research policy shop on this issue certainly in the US and arguably anywhere uh we've had lots of Institutions quite rightly created to look at issues for women and girls and we need those arguably we need more of them in many parts of the world but we haven't actually thought that it was important to have any that specifically look
at the issues of boys and men through a kind of research lens and a policy lens and so in the end I felt like that was necessary and then I was persuaded that I I had to do it myself I actually looked quite hard for other ways to get someone else to do it because it was a difficult move when was the moment where you decided that this was the object that you were going to tackle was there was there a a stat you read a moment you had a a Eureka moment of sorts or
was it just a culmination of things it was more of a culmination there was just a series of Statistics that I just kept running into and not just stumbling over but sort of just running into with my shin bruising my shin and going wait really and then checking those stats with people and and most of them I had a sense of the direction but I didn't know how big some of the the changes had become so for example discovering that there's like a bigger gender gap in higher education now than there was in the 70s
but it's other way around so we kind of completely flipped the gender gap in in higher education or or learning that the suicide rate is four times higher among uh men uh and boys and and Rising but you know I think I was already on this track when Co hit but actually Co what probably underlined my determination to keep doing it because in the US at least the immediate impact of Co was huge for boys and men the college en rment uh rate dropped seven times more for men in the US than than for women
and then I noticed that men were dying in much bigger numbers from covid and no one was really researching that so I found myself doing research on covid death rates which is not my field at all because it wasn't being done elsewhere and those sorts of moments Illustrated to me that it wasn't anybody's job to wake up each morning and think about how is this thing in this case the pandemic how is it affecting boys and men it was no one's job to do that and so those stats that I've just mentioned to you they
didn't get any attention because no one was drawing attention to them whereas the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on girls and women was getting a lot of attention because lots of people were producing you good reports on that what is the the sort of the macro then on on the current state of boys and men if if I had never if I just landed on this planet and I was an alien and I said to you how are men getting on comparatively versus how they used to be getting on what information would you supply to
me to make your case and what would you say to me so assume we're going to talk about Advanced economy so we're going to talk about the UK the US Scandinavia Etc I think a fair answer there would be to say that there are many ways in which boys and men are struggling in those societies they're behind in education for sure wages have stagnated especially if they're working class the mental health challenges of men are playing out differently but in some ways more tragically because of these very high suicide rates so in the UK suicide
is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 so playing out differently for women and girls but I think I'd probably say we're in the relatively early stages of a cultural revolution in advanced economies and that Revolution is one where the economic relation between men and women has been dramatically transformed and so the old world my My Father's World my father just turn turns 80 today and um the world that he and my mom have occupied was one where their roles are just much more tightly defined right it was a kind of it
wasn't really that much of a question about what their roles were going to be and women had just so little economic power that they were essentially forced into relationships marriages like with men right and so there was this economic dependency of women women on men and I would argue an emotional dependency of men on women and of course a huge Reliance on women to kind of raise the kids but there was there was like a script there was a story there was a way the economic rise of women has achieved what Gloria steinm set out
to achieve which is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity that argument which was really about changing the economic relation between men and women so that women weren't economically reliant on men that was the central I think central argument of that wave of the women's movement and very largely achieved and I would argue that's probably the greatest economic Liberation in human history is still playing out we need to do more in other parts of the world but one consequence of that is to then put a big question mark next to the role of
men right so I think underpinning a lot of these issues that we see kind of playing out for boys and men is really just there's just a gap yeah there's a space with a question mark in it now whereas which used to be filled with whole script of ways you know ways to be a man ways to be a dad ways to be a head of household Etc and so we've torn up those old scripts by and large in these advanced economies which is great but I would say that we've replaced the old script that
women had the one my mom had right so the script my mom had was you're going to be a wife and a mother primarily she was also a nurse but parttime and so skip forward one generation to my sister my my wife wife my female friends and it was you're going to be able to stand on your own two feet right so in the blink of an eye we changed the story for women in a way that I think is profoundly positive and how did we change the story for men the old story my father's
story you're going to have to do as well as you can because you're going to have to look after a family you know make some money provide right that's going to be your role so we took away that story because we don't know if he's going to be the provider anymore I've certainly not been the main provider certainly not all of the time in in my relationships and what did we replace it with what's the new script for masculinity what's the new set of roles what's the new set of Dos that we've got for men
You could argue we've got quite a lot of don'ts many of which we need but not a very long list of Dos and so I think that that sense of that category being that question mark now being open has just a left a lot of men feeling a drift uncertain of their role uncertain of their place uncertain of being needed wanted uh and I think that's that's feeding into a lot of the things that are easier to measure like mental health education employment Etc but underlying it I I I think it's this coming to terms
with this huge Revolution that we've seen I I want to make sure by the end of this conversation we do our very best to Haz it a guess at what that list of dos are for men but also to kind of fill that question mark I get so many women and men come up to me often talking about their young Sons um and encouraging me to have more conversations like this because they want a good script for their young sons in a world where their young sons are going online and being offered maybe a not
so good script yes by certain influences and influencers online so that's that's one of my objectives with having these conversations and I I think it's worth pausing there just to say that from looking at your work you're not suggesting we go backwards to the old way of things no that's part of the challenge is that there's in some ways an understandable reaction to change that is disorienting it's destabilizing it maybe threatens a sense of status among men and to reach back for the world as it once was very recently right this is not we don't
have to go back Millennia probably only have to go back one generation or two generations to men had their roles women had their roles everyone knew their place and you can see the appeal of that when there's just so much uncertainty but emphatically not the answer to go back and I think in this debate what you very often feel as if those who are perhaps on that more conservative side of the argument they want to kind of turn back the clock especially on women and women's roles but I would say on the other side of
the argument maybe more on the Progressive side of the argument or liberal side of the argument in American terms there's a bit of a sort of turning a blind eye to the actual problems of boys and men yeah and so I think for a lot of young men and I you know having spoken to them and had some responses to my work from them they feel as if there are two fairly unappetizing options on the table for them from the right they get the message of like you should be more like your father or your
grandfather be a real man right provide protect Etc have a wife that can stay at home you fill in the Gap but then they from the left the message they get is you should be more like your sister the problem with your masculinity is your masculinity and we should just basically you should be more like a woman right um and actually it's not surprising to me that most young men who are strongly in favor of gender equality right they've grown up with it there's no evidence they're turning against it so they want gender equality but
they also there's something about the way they feel in the world that means that they don't want to be treated as something there's something wrong with them because they're a man right and I think for even especially in school RS but maybe more broadly there's a danger that we treat men like malfunctioning women so your problem is you're not feminine enough you're not caring enough you're not nurturing enough you're not emotionally vulnerable enough you don't cry enough you don't spend enough time with your kids you're and I'm not saying those aren't all valid challenges but
if that's all we've got if in other words we're just defining positive masculinity in a way that is completely synonymous with femininity I'm not surprised we're driving we're seeing a lot of young men in particular say well no I'm not interested in that and the only other thing else they can see on offer is this more reactionary alternative and so if we give them that choice between being feminine and being reactionary it's not clear to me that they're all going to choose the former it's interesting because the way that the digital world the algorithms the
social media are designed is to kind of push you towards camps so this like space in the middle of nuance it's just not going to get the likes the retweets the engagement in fact it's the the ideas on the outside the men should be more feminine or men should be extremely masculine that are going to get all of the attention because of the way the gorithms are designed so if the if the answer is some kind of nuanced position in the middle I just can't see in a world how that's ever going to form a
tribe and be rewarded by the algorithm so you know this is this is part of the the beauty I guess of having podcast conversations because you can because we're not really held hostage by an algorithm here we can kind of you know speak openly but most of the algorithms don't work in such a way at the heart of this issue though I think is a very difficult question which is are men and women different okay well let's let's come to that but can I go back to your previous point because I think you're you're underselling
yourself in a way I agree that the way the algorithm Works drives the kind of short-term attention towards those more tribal simplistic but the mere fact of your success and the success of others like you to me is an incredibly positive sign it suggests to me that actually there is an appetite for more nuanced conversation there is is an appetite for recognizing that two things can be true at once and that there are tradeoffs like a is mostly good like the rise of women amazing some causing some issues that we should deal with and I
have to tell you my own experience of this as a you know we've established boring chart driven policy wonk type person right I did this video for big think the YouTube platform and it's had more comments than I've sold copies of of the book oh wow different audience of course my wife calls me I'm traveling somewhere and she says have you read the comments on your video and I said of course not like I'm old school journalist never read the comments should no we got to we started reading them together by the end of that
taxi Journey wherever I was we're both in tears because what the what we found was young men including some teenage boys saying thank you for recognizing that the problems that boys and young men are facing are real but not saying and therefore become a reactionary misogynist actually saying guys this is a difficult time there is some transitions we've got to think about you know come to your question about are they different that we are different in some ways that we have to talk about but that in no way means we should be trying to turn
back the progress of women the solution to your problem as a young man is not to make your sister less powerful or independent and there's a huge appetite for that it's just hard to articulate it doesn't drive the algorithm but I I I honestly the conversations you've had around this that other people are having around this giv me a lot of hope that actually most young men out there want that real conversation but it does I agree it has to start with a recognition of the fact that there there are differences on average between men
and women and I can't remember who said this it might have been this Swedish Public Health Economist called Hans rosling who I absolutely love he's passed away now but it might have been him it's the sort of thing he would have said and I'm paraphrasing it with something like the world would be much better if everyone could understand the idea of an overlapping distribution everyone we're all train if you say men are taller than women most people know what that means right on average like no if you say men are taller than women no one
in their right mind thinks it means every man is taller than every woman right yeah no no one thinks that they know that that means mostly so most of the men over most of the people over six foot a male you know the average man is taller than two-thirds of women or you know whatever it is right so two and that's what most sex differences are like they're not completely separate or completely the same they just they have overlapping distributions and so on average men might be a little bit less likely to cry that's true
but it doesn't mean that there aren't some very weepy men some of whom I think you've had on this podcast right and who knows where this conversation's going right or or some women who are less likely to and we could we could take in aggression we could take in risk-taking we could take in sex drive we could take in competitiveness and and uh we could take in more interest in things rather than people and put all of those on this sort of distribution and just say look we can accept there are differences on average ask
if they really matter and in what way and then never use that as a way to discriminate against an individual so were men and women different on average yeah and and in what ways are they different that are pertinent to this conversation you know when we talk about it's really about societal roles and gender roles that I'm I'm getting to here because when we talk about the changes that have happened and also when we get to the heart of what a man's script should be yeah there must be clues in how we are different if
you know what I mean yeah the way I think about this is that if there are these differences on average in say say risk taking yeah cuz men are the ones that are I saw the stats like 90% of men are um 90% of people that have like gambling addictions for example are men yeah so it definitely opens up all kinds so that there's let's take on average men boys and men somewhat more likely to take risks right so let's take that as an example like does it matter um well it does matter in some
negative ways because like you just identified look there's an addiction issue there's also like teenage boys like twice as likely to die as teenage girls from from from risk-taking activity by and large from car crashes or accidents you know much more like to drown all these kinds of things right because they're just taking more risks right and so that aspect of kind of risk taking and especially if the risk involves somebody else's life or well-being obviously that's a problem but if the risk-taking means that say they're on average a little bit more likely to kind
of take a risk in business right or they're more likely to sign up to be a smoke jumper in the US do you know what a smoke jumper is no idea you're going to love this what is it a smoke jumper is someone you know have these wildfires out in kind of west of the US yeah right in California and places like that and very remote places sometimes the only way to fight the fire is to parachute people into the middle of the fire or just close to the fire in the middle of nowhere out
of a plane so you basically these are people who for a living parachute out of perfectly serviceable airplanes into a raging Inferno and stay there for as many days as necessary to try and fight the fire incredibly dangerous uh and it's almost all men okay it's hard for me to imagine a world where it wouldn't be mostly men selecting into that occupation because it's very high risk right and you could think of others is that okay probably right you don't want to exclude anybody but you're also not going to freak out that that one's not
kind of 5050 and you're also going to say well that's that's good mhm and on the risk take actually you I think you'll be interested in I like to get your reaction to this because I was very interested to discover that if you this is based on on one study to be clear but I liked the study that companies that are led by women as in CEO and CFO yeah both women are a bit less likely to go bankrupt yeah than ones run by men I know you were going to say before you said the
stats but a little bit less profitable so yeah you know what you were going to say before you said the stats because my experience has been that exactly kind of what you described in the sense that the the CEO of my company now is a woman and the co of my group of companies is a woman um and in my experience men have a higher risk appetite as it relates to company finances typically um a little bit more yeah prone to risk and so you know for me the Bal the real real important thing has
been combining that set of perspectives so we get the balance exactly so people could I think you've drawn the right conclusion from your own experience which is it's like you some people look at that data right I I'll be unfair to about they'd say well of course look look at these profitable companies led by men these 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 too you know safetyism they you know they're they're just too scaredy cat right for capitalism right so let's have
them in and the other view would be like hey look at all these women Le 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 there's probably likely benefits to both sides of that and again recognizing it's not all women and all men like maybe we should have diverse leadership teams that seems to me to be the right conclusion from that but the conclusion is itself the argument 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 yeah about gender diversity right if we don't think that women and men bringing something different to the party not just because their life experience but like something else a bit different but risk- taking competition Etc if we didn't think that mattered then we wouldn't care how many board members were women but 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 um this is why it is difficult to talk about the differences between men and women at a physiological level without it appearing to be like inherently sexist because it's not to say that either is better or worse it's just to say that there's differences and 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 our biology there must be because I I think there is because I'm trying to you know it's interesting as a I'm I'm 31 years old now and my my girlfriend is 31 years old and in the 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 and old fashioned and a bit misogynist or if that's be that because that's what I want to do and she likes it
does she she loves it that's the big question of course you wouldn't still be together I want to do that and she loves it and she 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 it's the differences that make us work you know because I'm 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 like this sixth emot emotional sense and together we like navigate issues really well um but we can't it does but it does require to respect those differences and not see see the old problem was one was seen as better than the other yeah right so that kind of lets know with all the caveats about averages an overlapping distribution so let's agree now that we by this point in the conversation anybody listening to
this gets that when we say these things we're not saying all men or all women right yeah if there are differences the problem in the past was let's say men were a bit more risk-taking a bit more competitive a bit more inclined to kind of rational uh approaches to problems that 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 right and you could argue that a matriarchy wor 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 of 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 making the mistake of thinking that equality requires androgyny I find your door opening one really interesting so I was I was raised to when you're walking along a a street to always with a woman always to put yourself roadside yes you
do that always yeah why did you do that um I don't know now you've said it but I remember when I was crossing the road yesterday um my first instinct was to reach back and grab her hand and ba uh and basic because there was like a big bus coming and then there was this black cab coming and my instinct was to solve that problem which was like to put myself in the front of the taxi maybe I I think in head because I thought this was the only conscious element 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 it's 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 that wasn't you didn't you didn't think all that no I didn't it's a it's a reaction I have right that's all coded in you yeah and you and you and you see it
actually even in tragic circumstances in the US when you see these kind of mass shooting incidents when they do the kind of when they reconstruct Afters what we very often see is that quite often 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 uh and there's also this great there's a great uh photograph of a baseball heading towards this a kid right it's been whacked really hard and it's heading towards this kid and and there and you see these two guys
doing this like in the shop they're like diving in front of it um whereas the moms are kind of like doing this like the dads are like they're protecting the kids yeah and whoever's going to get hit by it right and and again they weren't they didn't think through oh my body's big I it's just a reaction and the and this the road one is very interesting and again most the women that I've been with I don't say anything I just I just do it I just go roadside and that's because the road could be
that could get splashed it's dirty so it could be like a sh shivalry thing it's about but also think more that there's more danger there like 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 I don't I know not everyone's going to agree with this but I 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 and 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 I increasingly I find a lot of young women not NE not wanting to eradicate them they just 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 them them being boss to us that's what they ask of us I think that's a reasonable thing for them to ask we could 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 a symbol of Oppression and that I I am you need me she's too weak to open the door okay but actually I've noticed there got a lot of feminists now they're like I've seen this
a bit on on social media they'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 and like I do think and you've seen a bit of reluctance around that merely because I think men are almost entirely wrongly afraid if they offer right that the woman will turn to them and say why because I'm weaker than you right that's by the way that's never going to happen almost never going to happen
um but she might say no I'm good thanks I'm fine right but spe if it's obviously a shorter woman or a kind of you older woman or even a man right but but more and so I think that's a kind of danger is that some of this has kind of descended into this kind of these symbols are bad uh meanwhile we got so much more work to do to get more women on boards and you know increase female safety that it sort of feels like too much politics has become locked in these symbolic things you
said that you think one of the biggest issues facing men today is the issue of suicide especially as youve you published this book but in in your own personal life have you been exposed to those stories of the the impact of suicide directly yeah 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 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 the four times higher among men just a 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 and started telling me kind of why and I I had 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 their stories and it's heartbreaking and and you've had you know people on this show who talk quite a lot about this Jordan Peterson was asked in a in an event once by this guy who said I'm thinking I 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 about it when it happens in their family with with other deaths with with a cancer death you'll see a Facebook post you'll see a a whatever you'll see you know but 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 it's one that creates a lot of guilt and feelings guil and shame and like so you're in her situation and I have to tell you having raised boys one of whom in particular really struggled with his mental health through teen years there are days where you just hope as a parent that they're still around and you think what it was and actually 16 and we've seen a huge rise in 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 can cannot Free Yourself of the burden of what could I have done what did I miss was it me right being a parent is already a lifelong trip in rethinking your decisions right and you add that to the mix I I I can't imagine it I mean my my parents lost a daughter very young to a 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 cyc not it's hugely grief but you but it doesn't turn them like 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 um um and 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 or them yeah I mean it's still a crime technically oh is it now people say it's a really interesting thing I've really learned not to say commit suicide yeah died by Suicide died by Suicide I just wanted to I've got some crazy Unthinkable stats here that I wanted to just add on top of what you were saying which come from The Institute of boys and men report that really was staggering to me is that um a man dies by Suicide approximately every 13 minutes in the US yes in
the United States alone so that's not including other countries and the UK 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 just 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 mhm 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 in certain ways why what's going on here what's going on with this full picture why 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 like you'll be better off without me I've been a burden to you I
know I've been difficult they convinced themselves that they're not wanted they not needed and some that goes back to like Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman Willie lman takes his own life because he thinks that the life insurance his family will get will be will be a better bread winner than he can be because he's so badly failed in his primary responsibility as a as a bread winner so it's not a new idea but there's a really nice piece a work by Fiona Shand she's an Australian researcher and the 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 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 went on to take their own lives but it's nonetheless I think very powerful statement that to get to that stage you you don't think you have worth
you 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 I me 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 my community I'm not adding value however you define value to the people
around me I'm taking away from it that's I that's the psychologic iCal trajectory that seems to put a lot of men towards this path and 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 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 right and so I just think in a way that the suicide statistics are in some ways the kind of tip of the iceberg of the sense that many men have a feeling unneeded unwanted is there an evolutionary basis for why men or humans I guess need to be needed amongst their Community do you think have you thought about that at all yeah well when we started operating in tribes of course like we we realized we were going to sink or swim together right or hunt
hunt or die together maybe is a better way to put it and so what that meant was being needed by your community or and or your family was kind of central to The Human Experience so the kind of invention of th 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 asked in quite the same way because you you literally needed to grow children and give birth to them and feed them right and so that
kind of very rooted sense of being needed for the for the species I think it's just it's just more obvious with women but why do we need men why do we need dads and that's a much more kind of recent phenomenon in the sense of being dads and the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by an Anna Machin she's a an anthropologist at the University of Oxford about fatherhood and she 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 it's amazing so we 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 timeo Google it right back back in the ancestral times is what people say right right so what happened was we had this massive growth SP in our brains our heads right so we got massive heads but we also went bipedal and if you're bipedal your hip hi can't be that big and so we women couldn't get the heads of
the babies out of their smaller hips right so we're actually facing a bit of a crisis so the way we solved that crisis was by giving birth to babies way earlier than we should way way ear in fact if we were like other mammals uh pregnancies would last about two years so I don't know how women watching will feel about that can't speak to that but 2 years would be about the average right we don't we obviously do it N9 months so they're incredibly vulnerable and mom has to literally keep feeding them right and the
calorific requirements just the 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 you know getting activated by all this stuff so being needed by the community family Etc to produce something to provide something is I I I think it's just deeply encoded it's 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 on our own right so these these ties familial ties tribal ties are 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 and we've just done a really poor job of making sure that even
in this time of 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 going to go 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 a few questions there just because I want to make sure I'm clear Fiona's work in 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 in okay fine that's my first question and for me the the key thing in in the suicide stats 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 if we're saying there's some kind of link between those two ideas yes because the extent to which they're needed is less Les clear now than it was right so it was very clear before that you're needed because you're the bread winner okay you're the provider right so go back and I don't NE I think part of the point here is that this idea of being kind of this gets us into discussions about masculinity but by being generative like producing providing it gets narrowed down to
like the breadwinner model of like postwar Western societies like it's like a w earner but that's not all it means it used to mean going getting meat it used to mean helping Farm together all there's all kinds of ways you can be a a provider service I guess as well just like yeah it's about being more there's this great line from CS Lewis the um a very good Theologian but obviously much better known for his work on The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe The Chronicles of nania but he 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 pro like just doing for others your family your community Etc that I think is quite intrinsic to these ideas of of mature masculinity and if if men don't feel as if they are necessary or encouraged to have a kind of 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 is a real one and lots of people like Margaret me 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 a few things came to mind so it's it's interesting before I move forward on this point um when you're 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 yeah and that that kind of General narrative that if you retire you don't have long left which is kind of you know 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 any truth
to that this idea that you know retirement can speed up your mortality because you're yes so almost like there's something in your body either one of two things could be happening number one you just sit around more which means you know you're more sedentary yeah exactly this is going to kill kill you anyway but um number two is that there's almost I don't know I've pondered this idea that this is almost device in our brains that makes us the tribe and when when it knows knows that we we might have switched from be 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's we don't we are Surplus to requirements and so the decent thing to do is just you know die for the tribe yeah for the tribe and that we the theoretically from an evolutionary standpoint we we we evolved as tribe so it's not impossible that there's some you know well I do think that we I mean of course we didn't used to live anything like
as long this is a stat that I came across today that 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 83 what whatever right do you know it's like so the progress we've made towards greater life expectancy generally has been huge but 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 a massively powerful way of feeling needed right
just showing up like we we we need you to start to open up at 6 we need you to like and in fact Arthur Brooks who used to run the American Enterprise Institute uh he tells this wonderful story he was interviewing this guy uh who'd come out of prison was in this new program Rehabilitation Etc and he's chatting to him and the guy gets a text while he's chatting to him and he bursts into tears like gets really tearful and Arthur says is everything all right did you get like some bad you know what's happening
is this bad news and he said no 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 right fix this FL 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 needed before and at its best the workplace signals to us on a daily basis or like yeah you're needed right your colleagues need you they need each other that that 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 suddenly got time you
so my mom she volunteers as a reader in a primary school because she has time right and it's amazing she gets to know the kids really well and she loves it and so on you know my father he on the board of a technical thing and he runs Char they do stuff right they raise money for all because they 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 very often fulfilled by moms at home like School
volunteering for example right now they can be done by perhaps by more by older people and so part of this story here I think is also making sure the 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 uh especially if they end up on their own so kind of men on their own later in life are at 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 neighbors need you the kid across the street who needs help with his university applications needs you the boy down the road who's like strugg bit cuz you know his parents have split up and just want someone to give him a cup of tea every and talk him
they need you we don't know the boy down the road anymore or the family next door anymore and I think so when you you described that was that was you're describing like an oldfashioned Way of the World in my mind because even you even said the word church I was like well you know where there's been a rise in atheism and and a fall in religiosity so yeah 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 organized honestly right so you didn't have to sort of sit there on your own somewhere saying how can I contribute to the community you just volunteered as an usher or a 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 age of 18 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 on the weekends with my mom and I didn't choose that it was just it came with life yeah and actually so the the de institutionalization 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 organizing framework right so whether it's churches or Community groups or whatever and and Ms like one of the things that would happen like my mom 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 um there were a lot of moms around right and so they organized 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 it'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 usher Church you're going to volunteer for the school PTA you're going to you know you're going to we need men to do this this this
and this right you're going to do that and you're right some of it wasn't even question 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 and so on but it's really hard to find secular online alternatives to those traditional institutions you mentioned uh an elderly man who's now alone you know maybe lost his partner maybe um what did call it widowed
no widower what's the male W I think widowed is both isn't it oh is it a widowed man um but 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 at you know 18 years old we find a partner and you know she makes me feel needed my 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 Dragon's Den filming or when I'm going to be here and she's you know she makes me feel like I've I'm service to her in the same way that she service to me so but but that landscape seems to have changed as well the dating environment the Romantic environment yeah it's interesting again I just reflecting on my own personal experience too just through the lives of my sons and know one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend buy her first car and he's really into cars and all that stuff and and
he's into Finance with the the loans and he's just basically done like basically done the work for her around it cuz he'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 other day he said I said God you put a load of time into's like test driven like 20 cars and all of this stuff loads of this for for your girlfriend he'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 for her and so you're right I think those relationships they can be in like traditional families but also of course friends but particularly romantic relationships they can do that for you so it's not for nothing thing that we're dating less dating later um you're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single by comparison both to young women and in the past and 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 again 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 to do this right and that used to happen much much earlier uh 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 maybe you've left home they don't need you maybe you don't have a girlfriend so you don't have a girlfriend that needs you maybe 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 like so it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid 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 um I've had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about I mean I've had a couple of the founders of the big dating apps but I've also had have you had the Tinder founder on no okay I've had people that have left Tinder and started their own apps like but 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 yeah almost none and then the like
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'd gone back a 100 years it was really like who's in your village versus you know yeah versus an algorithm sorting millions of people yes 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 because 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 right 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 me why is that how does that make sense because and the reason it's so hard
for a modern brain to get a head around that is because you're thinking well you need a man and a woman to have a kid right so 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 lies just 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 got almost all women reproducing 50% men then mathematically you're going
to end up 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 or certainly concubines or multiple partners there's like famous examples like genis Khan is the ancestor whoever but in Ireland something like more than one in five Irish people are 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 intending to go back anytime soon just just in case there's a lot of conversations you're not you're not tempted by that model I'm not no no I am actually going to Nigeria soon but uh but it's it's a headache to think about navigating that many uncles and aunties but it's but isn't it interesting how actually these by going online and sort of taking away the sort of cultural norm around kind of monogamy yeah in a way what it's exposed is kind of this ancient pattern which is women are much than men
around partner selection right 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 didn't know which way it is that's right which way it's right yeah so yeah so so the women are going no no no no oh he's incredibly handsome and Incredibly rich and right maybe whatever like maybe whereas the men are like yeah sure yeah sure she looks nice maybe not yeah so so you get this incredible asymmetry between between the two but in some ways it's like um
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 uh which has 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 it's still moving we don't know what the new patterns look like yet and so I genuinely kind of feel like when I talk to a lot of the young men and see them like that is the sense they've got they're just like whoa like the the disorientation that they're feeling uh as we kind of shifted the equilibriums in some ways the online dating apps are just magnifying that but there's a can you IM that's not a great feeling
is it to kind and go on a dating app and not get any interest at all I mean you wouldn't know because you're not on dating app well I'm not on dating up when you were I'm sure you got plenty of attention well do you know what's funny when I was on dating apps I didn't get much attention really no I didn't and I've got a very good-looking best friend and he got all of the attention so bear in mind I was 18 shoplifting food de feed myself I was scrawny as how Okay um I
was did you put all that on the I put in my 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 is like blonde and beautiful and he's got the 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 but obviously it's much more difficult to meet people if you
look at the STS around how people meet it's crazy it's like a a vertical line upwards um when you look at the the the line that's showing people meeting online just out of nowhere and it went school's 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 know came to learn this
a lot not just from my own experience on dating app once upon a time but also from doing this podcast and I remember the first time we had on a a founder of a dating app and put the episode out assuming everyone would love it and just the anger in the comment section from pretty much all men who feel like dating apps have ruined their lives or are just just an evil thing in the world and it really caught me off guard in fact reading those comments on that particular episode was when I go oh
my God people hate dating apps there's like this group of people that just think it's like the the cause of all pain um this is really difficult stuff to talk about I think because it's so it's so visceral it's Primal right we're talking about sex we're talking about procreation we're talking about our DNA being passed onh and who with and so it's not for nothing if if something's happening in that in that market and it's not for nothing we see a huge rise in the share of childless men like 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 right you know as men we just want to go our own way right we want Cowboys around in 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 to have kids but but in your heart in your heart you're still out there on the Frontier right and she's the one at the half that is complete [ __ ] on every single level actually historically back to where were 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 that mature men generate more of whatever it
is than they need they're Surplus generators so rather than being Surplus to requirements which is what I think a lot of men feel they actually generate a surplus for others to use and so the idea of like you heard this 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 know turning away from women is the opposite of masculinity right masculinity defined as like a 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 and 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 in the economic sense but being needed then it does leave a lot of them benched and
they either go their own way or they get mad as hell so you see the rise of the incell movement Etc um and so again you're just seeing these extreme the extreme examples are 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 they're just saying I think I'm done with this and that's very dangerous marriage has also had a a knock on effect to this hasn't it because this the sort of the role of marriage in society has
changed but also the stats around marriage seem to be changing what what information do you have on that am I right in thinking that marriage is in Decline a little bit bit 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 there's a big class Gap in marriage like college educated Americans are still getting married non-oled UC 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 there all kinds of only you have a civil partnership now or there are legal documents you can have that kind of do that and so if it gets if the de 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 but also you can be a good father if for whatever reason the relationship with the mother doesn't work out it's harder uh you're going to have to kind of 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 right I think that's my big problem is it was like it was like a One-Stop thing right it's like 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 dads matter for their kids as much as their moms in different ways and at different times on average but 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 and what lot of 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 yeah 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 I 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 inextinguishable moral responsibility and that gets a little
bit lost because sometimes on the the Fe the feminists left to just characterize horribly say do we need do we need dads anymore isn't that a bit heteronormative I've sometimes been accused of being heteronormative for being proad you what about samesex couples what about single parents are we saying that they need their dads right isn't that that feels a bit oldfashioned a bit conservative to get that on the other side and then and other side yeah of course dad's 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 dad's matter will stop whether they're married to the mother or not um and both the people who insist the only way to do that is through 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% 19up in us that's crazy that's I that's just why is that is that it's us is really weird because it has really high rates of like unmar
married um pregnancies and births but then like really high rates of marriage among the kind of college educated at the top so as I said this huge class Gap there's a race element here so 70% of black kids in the US are born outside marriage there's also a huge education Gap here as I just alluded to is a big big class Gap so most kids to non- colge educated parents are 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 RCI or class it's more of a just more of a general decline it hasn't declined particularly more for one class than another in in the UK so 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 is it serving more men or women now men CU I I was thinking if we
pressed a button and the marriage stats went backwards in time I more people got married and they got married within um when they they gave birth within marriages would that be better for men or women it' be better for men why because uh marriage being with the kids and kind of with the the mom is just right now still an incredibly important way for men to feel needed connected involved Etc now that might change but right now it is pretty clear that they'll do better and like if you look at the impact of being 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 if we went the other way like you'd say well actually women who weren't married were in real trouble economically until recently right so my line from before was that like women used to be economic 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 kind of the fact that actually wifeless men partnerless men childless men they don't do so well in fact they do terribly so I've mentioned this four-fold suicide difference in Risk it's eight an eight-fold difference among divorced men and women so men who get divorced their risk of 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 like if your kids are at home and your wife's at home and you know you're just you're contributing to the family
unit I think that's much more obvious 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 so what does that say about what's going on in men's heads if they're now more keen on marriage than women what are what's it because that's to me sounded a little bit I know territorial well there's a danger with that and of course you can you can get into real trouble as one of your previous guests did by talking about enforced
monogamy who who talked Jordan Peterson oh did he okay yeah he talked about enforced monogamy it's a very unfortunate term it's actually a term from anthropology that basically was a way of describing this new way of raising families there 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 bigam is a crime what's bigamy uh 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 in most countries it's actually against the law to have more than one spouse imagine how how how a liberal is that the state telling me how many wives I'm allowed or how many husbands I thought when you said required I thought you meant you have to marry one that's what people thought it meant and that's why you got into such terrible trouble um but it actually what it's referring to as a social system which is which is basically against polygamy it's basically saying no no no no one gets
forced into marriage what it is is saying if you going to marry it can only be monogamous right okay so the 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 okay right so it's it kind of it was sort of misinterpreted um the term was misinterpreted um but it does speak to this fear I think that people will feel forced economically or socially in into it it's actually
has not for nothing that Andrew Tate I'm sure you know Andrew Tate and his work I know who he is yeah right I don't know him I've never spoken to him right but I'm you know who I'm referring to right why did he convert to Islam people 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 St islamophobia or whatever but but I will tell you this and we published a piece by an Imam us Andre Tate
has a huge following among young Muslim men in the US and the UK and he's now converted to Islam 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 right and so it's interesting to kind of think about the role and there's this rise of polyamory now and and so on actually thinking about monogamy polygamy Etc it's it's a much more complicated story I think than many people
are 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 andone 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 shouldn't speak for you no I'm trying to I'm trying to satisfy one at the moment right but actually as some people point out you know actually if you're a woman is it clear that you'd rather be
the only wife of an unemployed steel worker than the second wife of an incredibly successful podcaster maybe maybe for all women that's a clear choice right but but the kind of points simply being is we shouldn't just assume that this is kind of a male you know only for kind of men idea um anyway it's a digression 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 GR rounding men in a sense of being needed by their kids especially and by their communities if so if not in the traditional way through a kind of you know a recently traditional marriage as the bread winner and provider and all that the one my father had and Al lots of other things besides swimming coach math tutor chauffeur 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 yes women are more likely to precipitate divorce than men and again does about two about two to one I think wow certainly certainly much in the US it's much higher among women yeah I mean that's an indication of something it's an indication
of a healthy Freedom yeah exit power yeah exit power yeah I mean that's what an economist 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 you'll be powerless because he has the
money right that 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 see 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 yeah it can be creating these unintended
destabilizing consequences for men and if we then add to that a danger sometimes to either mock men or masculinity almost 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 uh and so I think there's of all the moments to not be really kind of making sure that men feel really bad about themselves this is not that moment right what 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 taking me a while to get to that but 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 I would say actually most thoughtful kind of women's groups and feminists are not supporting it now um because it just it it's not a great recruiting tool by and large right one 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 no there are positive aspects of masculinity so okay great great what are they and they'll say nurturing and caring and kind kindness and emotional availability and you go and is that different from femininity say no no it's the same okay so let me get this straight masculinity is either toxic or not masculine because if they start saying courage positive risk-taking you know well channeled competitiveness do you say what are you saying women aren't courageous uh no
no I'm not saying that okay so sorry what what do you so it's an empty so non-toxic masculinity is basically an empty set so they can't fill that category so youve either got toxic or or nothing that's bad but also just think on a visceral level it reminds me and you have a church background so the phrase toxic masculinity really reminds me of the term original sin yeah it's something in you that's kind of you didn't have any choice about it like you inherited it um from previous generations and it's kind of bad and we
can't get rid of it uh so there s you're born with this flaw you got to repent at all opportunities for your yeah and it feels like that to me it's like just and maybe this is the third point I don't know but it's like honestly is the 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 that's the worst recruiting slogan ever and 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 it 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 I much prefer immature and mature masculinity I like the idea of saying like what does mature masculinity look like because you know what immature masculinity looks like right and so I think this kind of maturation is a much better way to frame it than toxic non-toxic is
there such a thing as and 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 uh I can't say I've watched it but I know the movie and I've seen trailers and stuff there's a new Tina uh movie I think right okay uh an update of it but um yeah and interest 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 likely to engage in than men are so men are more likely historically much less so today but to have bullied physically yeah women are much more likely to bully relationally so they exclude you you're not my best friend anymore you're not invited you're Etc and they bully by using you know how you look but so that relational bullying gets kind of Amplified by um 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 girl's 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 but I 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 um masculinity one of the sort of defining traits of masculinity in society is that men don't speak they
don't open up and um they're less likely to I think they struggle more to to form friendships I've certainly found that to be the case in my life if if you drop me and my partner in London as actually has happened and she 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 she's going to these like dance this class and I'm away doing Dragons day next week so she's found a group of Portuguese girls and she's gonna go watch the match and I
could never I don't know how the hell she's made friends I I've made zero new friends in London in five years MH my friends are my colleagues and my friends that I've had for 10 years that is it I don't make new friends um and and this is something that I have echoed to me a lot when I meet men out and about when I could do talks and stuff and they come up to me after I've had men whisper to me how do how do I make friends where I'm lonely and when they do
it they come really really close so that the person behind them in the queue can't hear them say it I exactly the same experience and they whisper it about how do I make friends or 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 that we're seeing a decline in 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 and so that's almost one in seven men um you're seeing declining number of men saying how much time they spend with friends uh drinking social networks everything You' 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 right so if you're in a couple how often are the social arrangements made by the women um they do a lot of the that mainten the relationship maintenance and the men free ride on the women right every like weekend plan that's outside of my comfort zone pretty much most of them come from my partner all right she's organized something she's an organizer she wants to go try this thing right and you're like let's go do vegan sushi roll I just want to play Far Cry five I just want
to lie on my back and watch Manchester United all right fine sorry I chose the wrong I chose the wrong thing yeah I know um so I think like and women have been better at it and Men haven't had to do as much of it so in some ways like I think we're being exposed a bit more in a sense that like women aren't doing as much of that work for us anymore they're saying look I'm like it's not my job to create your friendship Network for you so we're having to do it and we're
not very good at it and we're certain not very good at it yet and I've had the same experience I mean I wrote a bit I wrote a bit about loneliness and I spoke at an event not that long afterwards and I had a couple of young men exactly the same as you just come clo and just say I'm incredibly lonely and thank you for talking about this and you end up hugging them and like and actually for me I was talking to some 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 that's really lonely it just my mom was talking about this guy that who she ran into him and he was going to this supermarket and you know he was in front of her in the queue and she's like no after you he's like 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 you know it fills my time and my mom because she's like a massive like she's like a social worker to the world she ends up chatting to him and get taking his phone number um but actually that just pierced my heart it just and so when you hear about these men young old women as like who are lonely I think it's huge and and so I and and back to our earlier bit of the conversation too is like
those institutions that maybe used to kind of connect you to other people right where do you where do you make friends and you just said at work right and so I think our colleagues in some ways become our friends and that's not necessarily a bad thing saying it is a bad thing but but it's 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 and so the other thing I'll say about this is have you heard of the men's sheds movement I
don't know what a men's sheds is but I've heard of male groups and stuff emerging yes there male groups emerging there's one which is the Australian government just funded this in Australia it's called the men men's sheds and there places where men go and fix stuff mhm like you'll bring a lawnmower I do stuff right um and it's one of the things that I found I've really learned from this I wish I'd known more about it before it's like have you heard of this thing about men communicating more easily shoulder toh shoulder than face to
face have you come across this yeah I've heard about this it's really interesting so when my uh 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 right and she'd sit directly opposite and give them protein and then she'd be like how's your day yeah like she like this right and then later on we'd be driving somewhere or watching soccer or playing a video game like shoulder toh shoulder and they'd be like yeah it's weird thing happened today with her or with
me right So eventually I said you've got to stop staring them in their 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 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 not saying right and then go to fishing road trips it's the only explanation for golf do you play
golf no thank god um but like 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 or need help and so there is something to be said for like men and even super have studied actually how men stand in relation to each other like a party or something when I've told you this you won't be able to stop looking is that men actually always a bit of an angle right we just
don't stand face to face it's it spikes our threat cortisol or whatever so we always stand a little bit of an angle um but also like doing something together um requires us to be more shoulder-to-shoulder which is why some psychotherapists now they do walking talking therapy they realized that with men especially like sitting them down and staring at them is less effective quite often than going for a walk you've done therapy haven't you yeah how was it I've done therapy and I've done coup's therapy and um I actually I will say that I did much
better with the male therapist and one of them we did walk um and so I'm basing some some kind of personal experience which is like there's something about sitting on a chair or kind of and being stared at and 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 Coupes therapy and I've done um individual therapy I found it really hard I find it even harder in couple couple therapy it's one of the reasons I'm really worried about the
declining share of men in Psychology and therapy I mean you know we 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 so there are fewer and fewer 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 basic like you just shared your experience I'll share mine is that I think to have the option and when you know one of my kids really needed therapy
too I think for him he did so much better with a man and I I think there's some depending on the nature of the problem maybe you're St it's just something about like an intuitive connection if you're a B2B marketeer then you want to stick around for the next 30 seconds or say as a businesso business marketeer you all know how tough it is to explain what you do I've been there too but there's a platform that gets us and that's LinkedIn I'm happy to say sponsor this podcast imagine a place where you can connect
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and start reaching the right people go to linkedin.com doac 24 to claim your credit terms and conditions apply I think I heard you say that going to couples's counseling with your partner was one of the most difficult things you've ever done yes 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 Galloway'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 and and she's been very successful professionally and we've raised our kids together I've been a stay-at-home dad and and then worked and so on and there was this moment where it was really one of those pivotal moments in your life where I was talking about what I done at home and how i' supported her career and you know all of that and she looked at me and said you seem to think the the problem is that you're not feminist enough the problem is that you're not masculine enough like that's a moment
that's a real moment that was a it was and we then started talking what did she mean by that and it was about responsibility it was about stepping in in some ways to some of those roles and and what I came to realize and this is in some ways the book The the book underneath that book which is my own journey and 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' 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 like to 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's 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 the problem is you're
not masculine enough and it was just like the energy that I had and like I felt as if like 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 so my job was to 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 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 flourish and continues to flow in a way that it just would not otherwise have done because it's almost like VI being so direct she forced this movement inside me where I almost gave myself permission to give some expression to the sides of myself that are more masculine I mean that's not the conversation people hear publicly you're not putting this out are you 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 um but that's not the narrative we hear that a woman would turn to you and and ask you to be more masculine in the context of sort of the typical idea of what masculinity means it at least what it means to her yeah almost the opposite it would be with the toxic back to your point about it is
masculinity the problem which I thought it was and it took her to point out that no no no it's how it's expressed that's the question and 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 you know patriarchy masculinity and like men dominating and like and it's really interesting like I'll bring it down to like a more benign level I think a lot of young women actually one of the things 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 it's fun for you and I to talk about what women want isn't it but I think there something what 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 they want someone that's a partner that's with them and and they say well what know what should we do tonight or you know where should
we go for dinner and if he says 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 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 get into that right but just going passive is not what makes you a good partner or a good feminist and I and I I think my maybe my gener I'm older than you maybe my generation of men have really
struggled more with that just because I think it was kind 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 need to get bigger we all want to rise and grow and challenge each other and challenge each other to grow not silence ourselves or bench ourselves following 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 um but I 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 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 um and and it caused
more arguments which was uncomfortable for me but it was great and it was what she wanted there were two aspects to it if I'm honest like one was like stand up a little bit more for myself and a little bit like in the relationship and be like no I like I disagree about that I'm going to do this and just give her 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 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 a provider a coach provider wasn't bad right making money in a way that would help our family and give us more choices wasn't bad and so there was there was that kind of sense too as like because she' at that up until that point she'd actually done more the breadwinning MH uh and so there's a kind of sense of her saying look I'm I'm about as feminist as you get
but you know what wouldn't mind it if we could do a bit of this you can do a bit more of that as well I read some study the other day and I'll 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 it was like 70 80% or something like that that's about right I mean you can check it but it depends which server you can
choose a Ser yeah like but you know what it's so interesting that's 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 be really careful I think how the questions asked and what the interpretation of it is um I think actually what it's very often about is women wanting and a lot of young women have said suggested this to me not just young women but but even women of my
generation that what they really want is a partner and earning is a really good proxy for someone who's got their act together right someone who's a good earner yeah is also gonna be a 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 um so that's number one I think they actually just getting someone who like is he's got his act together right he's he's he's 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 stay-at home Dad I like to think I had a lot of agency and I 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 wom to men is like I don't know if I'm going to want to take time out to kind of raise the kids but 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 much less successful like I know one couple where he was he was literally a kind of mus failing musician as she was like
this partner in some Law Firm or whatever it's it was like a it was like a movie it's so stereotypical but and she like she has kids and she's like well I'd like to have a bit of time Ain going to live on his you know solo guitar YouTube salary or whatever it was right and at that point she's mad at him maybe a little bit too late you because like I just i' just like you to give me the option H and of course we won it both ways now right like it was great
for me to be able to have time at home while my uh my partner was able to just go for it professionally for a while just 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 model we got to think about ourselves as copr providers of a whole bunch of things money time love energy and not take ourselves out 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 securing economic independence not about men losing it that's not attractive you've got two sons right three three sons okay so I guess this kind of brings us to the penultimate point which is you 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 uh
go to the gym should I pursue a highflying breadwinning 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 yeah what it's interesting because in some ways I think the fact that conversation might almost be a sign of failure not just individually more socially because I really believe that people believe their eyes before they believe their ears and so what I
would really hope is that I've been showing not telling um that it's not a curriculum it's not a here are the here's the four-point plan for modern masculinity based on my years of research it's 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 I've raised you you've seen like how you've seen you've seen how I interact with people in there's this lovely phrase from a philosopher is in the thick of daily life like how are you in the thick of daily
life you've seen me help that person you've seen me like they tease me with this I pick up the lime scooters all the time right because someone's going to trip over them right You' you've you've seen how I've reacted like and I haven't done that kind of saying oh this is 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 on 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 there's nothing wrong with masculinity 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' open the door for sure yeah what was the second one I can't remember but you said open the door um it's
about career and it's about going to the gym go to the gym sure I mean actually all the evidence about being physically healthy is is important um but then kind of get a highing job I wouldn't say that uh I would say find work that yes will pay don't be naive about that but it's much more important you're passionate about your work you'll be much more attractive to someone if you're passionate we only we're only here once for God's sake and so the idea that you're going to you know that someone's attracted someone who like
kind of into their work just because it makes a bunch back to our that's not sexy doesn't matter what the paycheck is right what sexy is passion and agency and you know Verve Mojo whatever so absolutely I I would uh I would advise uh all of that I actually think it's kind of weird back to the dating thing is that in some I think it captures a lot of our conversation though which is that I 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 for just accept no for an answer and then the responsibility to make sure that either way she gets home safely so what I've got in there is a little bit of agency a little bit of leaning in a little bit of taking a risk it's a risk to ask someone out right and I think risk taking is is on average a bit more mascul 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 like 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 in fact I had a rule with my kids that they they had a curfew but actually they broke the curfew because they were getting someone home safely they got an exemption from that and there was one night one of my sons came home and he was I was waiting for him and he was 30 minutes after curfew pouring
with rain he came home drowned rat and he'd walked to girl home got home safely like 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 kind of men and women like Yes actually actually I would quite like you I'm as a covered garage or what I would actually quite like to kind of make
you make sure that I get to my car safely or kind of 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 honestly right now to get this right I think but I think too many people also treading on eggshells a
little bit too yeah 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 Tik Tok or Twitter and you never know which algorithm is 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 the the the 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 it's I 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 your son is going into a profession that is incre increasingly depleting in men yeah because I what's it like 20% or 30% of primary school teachers are women uh men uh no it's primary it's one in 10 one in 10 in primary yeah okay so those those role models are lacking in primary education but then he's going into SEC is it
high school Secondary School uh he's going to be teaching Elementary to start with yeah the primary school yeah 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 sons around the kitchen table but but if I elect you as president of the world or at least the Western World you in us let's say um and North America and 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 fact you had 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 a voice you're in a position where Authority 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 and so whilst I
could list a whole bunch of policy Solutions which I think would be part of the inter 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 and we're hiring male teachers and we're you know we're having a we're 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 and we're continuing to take the problems of women and girls seriously simp L making them feel seen and heard and empathized with is a massive thing 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 very often they're being dismissed
sometimes and the result of 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 they they can become Grievances and that's a Perfectly Natural result of having real problems that are neglected and so simply saying we understand it is it is a struggle right now there are a lot of problems facing young men and we are on it I can't I cannot tell you how powerful I think that would be because so 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 you're toxic it's what so individualize back on them and you need to fix yourself and I think if we were just 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
can also help you boys and men I think it would be profound it'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 they are already unbelievably alone in the sense of loneliness um is especially powerful and I think just from having these conversations on the podcast I've seen that I've seen that um I'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 the gender split on the podcast that I've done with um men and women on these male issues the comment section are full of mothers and grandmothers and sisters um 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 me on the podcast you know we've spent a
long time calling men out and now we need to call them back in yes and I think it's just a wonderful expression of um where I think we find ourselves at where we're now trying to figure out how we co coexist and champion each other and the individual issues we both have is um two different Sexes and um well thank you for your work in this space I do think that using your platform to honestly engage to to Grapple with this is in the way that we have today and you have with others and just
there aren't eat as 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 it'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 a 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 were men and women were you're saying no no this is hard right but yeah we see it yeah and I I love the progress we've made as a society um 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 but I also know that with all with all upsides comes a unintended
consequence as well and if we can um 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 socialis it's about medic we're talking before about medicine or any other you know being really successful in work comes with an unintended consequence over here right 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 we'll be much better as a society and if we're
much better as a society then I think we'll be much better um we'll all be happier and we'll all be better and it's it's difficult to have these conversation sometimes because obviously this is these are such polarizing issues yes but what the what the [ __ ] am are we here for if not to have those conversations if you as you speak about this stuff and I found myself doing it a bit in this conversation you think like what's the what's the kind of least generous interpretation of what I've just said yeah that someone's going
to post somewhere right and but if if if you if we constantly worried about what the least generous interpretation of what we're saying is we'll never say anything 100% And and so just by saying it and trying to be honest about it and changing your mind but just having I think you're proving this that the appetite for good faith convers ations 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 now we're all kind of in it still but 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 not knowing who they're leaving it for awesome I'm assuming that's the last one yeah must be there's no other yeah it is okay interesting they've written a statement at the top which is someday is now full stop 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 I can't answer that question I'm trying really hard because I'm trying to think of anything that I have sworn 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 um you know I have zero doubt that there are so many so many men and women out there that are 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 tone matters right it really really matters it really matters because think you're able to call everybody into the room um 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 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 you do it in a way which is objective it's not political um and it's incredibly powerful and compelling and that's exactly what your 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 said biases and stuff but considers myself right in the middle in terms of politics and all these things so 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 is need 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 um it's called of boys and men why the modern male is struggling why it matters and what to do about it um but also for all
of the millions of people listening right now um thank you because I'm sure all of them would like to say thank you for you for 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 kind of close off this conversation thank it means a lot to me we say that oh thank you we need you too [Music] [Music]
