1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity

Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show. You roll your eyes a little bit at male behavior and judge girls and women against that, all the other way around, and say, what's wrong with you? I have three boys.
They're grown now. And I used to think, I wish you were more like your sister.
They didn't have a sister. I made one up.
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.
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Here with me is Richard Reeves, author and social scientist. He's also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Didn't know that existed? Kind of glad it does. Today, we're talking about the gender gap, probably not the one you're thinking of.
Well, actually, it is the one you're thinking of. It's just kind of upside down from what you might assume.
It turns out that men are falling behind women in pretty much every area at home, at work, and at school, and the gap is only growing. Today, we'll explore what this crisis looks like, particularly in areas like education, work, mental health, and beyond.
I actually found this episode both alarming and enlightening.

I think you will as well.

And now here we go with Richard Reeves.

All right, you've said we're in a crisis of male inequality,

and you've highlighted in your work how society often overlooks men's struggles.

And even saying that, I've got this little like itch in the back of my

head where I go, now I'm going to get a lot of emails just about this particular thing.

And usually when we're talking about a gender gap, we're talking about the gap that women face.

It's a brave move for you to have even written about this. I would imagine there were a couple

of publishers that were like, how about writing about AI like everybody else? What do you think?

Yeah. The good news is I don't know anything about AI.
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you're right.
I couldn't get a publisher to start with. It was a struggle precisely for that reason, because people think, wait, is this like a men's rights thing? And you're like, angry white man rages against the modern world, feminism, women, et cetera.
And so it was a bit difficult in some ways, but that's the problem, isn't it? Because you think, you think this is going to be difficult so you don't have the conversation you don't write the book you don't do this podcast because you know that merely raising the fact that there are real problems facing some boys and men somehow marks you out as a misogynist right you've gone over to the dark you've red-pilled you've gone to the dark side you've turned against women. And it's just such bullshit, honestly, that we can't think two thoughts at once, that we're not allowed to simultaneously care about what's happening with women, promote women, do the best for our daughters, etc.
And also think, wait, why are we losing 40,000 men a year to suicide? Wow, is it that many? Why are male wages flat for those without a college degree? What's going on here? And basically, if we pay ourselves the compliment and each other the compliment, that firstly, two things can be true at once. There's a bunch of stuff to do for women and girls and boys and men.
And secondly, if we also assume goodwill in the person speaking. If you don't assume immediately that just by raising the issue of one group, it means you automatically don't care about or even hate the other group that's not true it's like saying someone who's got a son and a daughter right you're only allowed to care about one of them which one are you going to care about and if you care about him you must hate her and you care about her you must hate him and it's just not how people actually lead their lives and in the end i just think the data's clear of boys and men struggling, especially those from poorer backgrounds.
And if we don't talk about it, those problems can turn into grievances. If they're neglected, they turn into grievance.
And then we're in real trouble. And I'll get some stats in a second about how men are doing, but why do you think there's a tendency to downplay or ignore the struggles that men face? Yes, it seems like, okay, we don't want to be labeled as a misogynist, but is that it? The real reason, I think, is a genuine fear that if you start to raise the issues of men, you will somehow be diluting or retreating from the necessary work for women.
If you've only got so much time, you've only got so much money, you've only got so much energy, right? You have to choose. Like it's a zero-sum game, basically.
So it's not that they think you're even wrong in what you're saying. It's just that now is not the time to focus on those issues of men when there are still so many issues facing women.
To be fair to the people who are concerned about it, and look, you started the conversation, Jordan, by saying you've got a little bit of an ick, a little bit of a funny feeling about this issue. I think you should.
I think anybody talking about this issue should be feeling some discomfort. I think it is a difficult conversation to have, but that's not a reason to not have it because otherwise the only people having it are the ones who have no discomfort with it at all because they can say, of course, men are struggling.
It's because the bloody woke feminist agenda is taken over and we need to go back to the fifties. And so unfortunately, the debate is dominated too often by people who don't think it's an uncomfortable conversation.
It is uncomfortable, but we have to have it anyway. That makes sense.
You're right. It's a tough line to walk because you do hear from people who say, hey, you're regressing in this area.
But then you get people who are like, finally, Jordan is coming with us to the dark side. And we'll get to some of what the dark side means in a little bit.
But do you have stats off the top of your head about how men are not doing well? Yeah. So I've mentioned, I think one of the things that troubles me most is the rise in suicide.
I mentioned it's 40,000 men a year, four times as many men as women. And since 2010, the suicide rate among men under 30 has risen by 30%.
So it's rising fastest now among young men. And I'm really worried about that.
I'm worried relatedly about drug poisoning. The rise in drug poisoning deaths among men this century has been huge.
Is that overdosing? No. Unintentionally? What is drug poisoning? It's unintentional.
So when someone's dying of a quote, accidental cause. So it could be like car crash, could be drowning, but drug poisoning is the biggest one now for men.
And so there's no evidence that it was deliberate. It's not a suicide, at least not marked as an accidental overdose.
Very often it's because something's laced now, a lot of fentanyl. Also, frankly, it's quite often because they're on their own.
So there's no one to resuscitate if something goes wrong or there's something in the drug that you weren't expecting. So we just did a report showing that the rise in drug poisoning deaths among men in 2001 means that we've lost about an extra 400,000 men in that time period.
So the increase is the equivalent of 400,000 men. And for those who like their stats, that's the same as the number of men we lost in World War II.
Yeah, that's striking. That's a big number.
So we've lost a World War's worth of men since 2001 from the increase in drug poisoning. That's incredible.
So you've got this whole mental health issue. Now, that's not to say, back to what we were a minute ago, there are huge issues around mental health, especially for teen girls, which a lot of people are talking about.
It's simultaneously true that we've got this crisis

in male suicide, especially among young men, including teen boys. And it's true that we're

seeing really spiking rates of anxiety among girls and young women, I should say, and issues

around self-harm and also attempted suicide and suicidal thoughts among young women, right? So

the mental health crisis is playing out equally, but differently for young men and young women. And then in the labor market, like men without a four-year college degree, the ones doing worse, their wages are the same today as they were in 1979.
So that's nearly half a century of no wage growth. That's an extraordinary fact.
And actually, people from low-income backgrounds, they're doing worse than their fathers, which is really hard. That's hard to swallow, being economically actually poorer than your father is.
And then in education system, a lot of this is because of education. And so if you look at high school, huge gender gaps in high school now, the top 10% of students in high school, if you just look at that top 10%, there are two girls for every boy.
So there are twice as many girls as boys graduating top of their class from high school. And the gap in higher education now on college campuses is about 60-40 female-male, which is for a really good reason, more women going to college, and for a really bad reason, fewer men going to college.
But that gap, just to put a point on it, that gender gap in college is bigger than the gender gap we had in the 1970s, but the other way around. I see.
Wow. It was just a bit less than 60-40 in favor of men, if you like, in the early 70s.
And it's now 60-40 in favor of women. So we've reversed the gender gap in colleges now.
And it wouldn't matter if the men who weren't going to college were doing great. But as I've just suggested, they're not doing great.
Yeah. There's a lot of reasons to be worried about what's happened to our men and our boys.
It would be different if it was like, hey, most men are just going to trade school, but they're still making six figures. There's a lot of plumbers, electricians and other experts or whatever.
That's kind of the myth. Yeah.
That's what people say. That's just not true anymore.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
That's kind of what I was hoping was true, I guess. When I read about the statistics for college, I thought, oh, well, maybe more men are just getting apprenticeships or something like that.
Yeah, but that's not the case. It might have been probably true for their dads, actually.
It might well have been true that their dad could get a good trade job or a factory job or a job in the mine or whatever without having to go to college. But that's just much less true now.
And then I'll say one more thing which is related, I should have said this before, but about the mental health isolation thing. There's a lot of work right now about growing social isolation and loneliness, and that's true across the board, but it's particularly true for young men.
So Dan Cox is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, and he shows that 15% of men under the age of 30 now say that they don't have a single friend. A single friend at all? Does that mean even online? Or like they just mean no real life friends? No friends at all? It doesn't distinguish between a real life, just like do you have a friend? Oh my god.
And so the isolation of a lot of men now. So what's happening is that the men who are struggling in school struggle at work.
They struggle about friendship. They might struggle to form a family.
Most men under the age of 30 are not dating. Most women under the age of 30 are dating.
They're dating 40-year-old guys, but whatever. Yeah, that's right.
That's what the 40-year-old guys are hoping anyway. But yeah, there's lots of overlapping problems.
But I think underneath it all, it's just this sense among a lot of young men, which is just figuring out how to navigate this new world, a world which has seen a significant increase in gender equality, or women are no longer economically dependent on men in the way that they were. It's a good thing now that 40% of breadwinners in the US are women.
That's just quadrupling in the last few decades. So we've still seen this huge change in the way that men and women relate to each other economically.
The idea that they're the breadwinner, you're going to be the breadwinner. And women needed to marry somebody or be with somebody because they needed bread, right? But that's not true anymore.
And that's a wonderful, amazing, liberating thing. But if we allow ourselves to say that even good things can sometimes have some difficult byproducts, that's left a lot of men trying to figure out who they are.
And I think a lot of men are ending up in our current culture feeling more than a bit lost. I can see that.
Women's role in the household has expanded to provider, of course, as well as caring for children. Men's role has not necessarily expanded similarly to also caring for children.
Look, obviously, they're stay-at-home dads. You don't have to email me and tell me you take care of your kids.
I get it. But it's probably not quite the same scale.
Nothing like the same scale. I think I really like that word, expansive.
So what's happened is that we have wonderfully and incompletely still, but expanded the role of women, right? You can be a mom. You can be a wife.
You can also be a CEO, you can be an entrepreneur, you can be a fighter pilot. Amazing.
But with men, what we've taken is that old script, breadwinner, provider, and that's gone away, but we haven't really replaced it. We haven't expanded the role of men.
And so there's this horrible lag now, I think, between this idea of what a man is supposed to be and what the reality is now of the economy. And so it's happened pretty fast.
And I think a lot of people are still reeling from it, especially a lot of men. And that makes them very vulnerable to someone coming along saying, yeah, remember the old days when men were men and women were women and everyone knew their place and things work.
That's a very appealing message to men who are currently like, I don't know what to do. And worse, sometimes they know what not to do, right? They know that they're not the long list of things not to do mostly good thing right don't mansplain don't be toxic etc good that's good but not really a very clear list of things they should do it's not very actionable game plan yeah and we'll get to toxic masculinity later whatever that means but it is there's this evolving masculinity but your masculinity has to evolve.
Okay. Tell me what that means.
Oh gosh, I don't know. Figure it out, bro.
And good luck out there. Yeah.
Exactly. Good luck.
Just improvise. Everyone's improvising.
Right. Yeah.
We're really not doing a great job. Those of us that are trying are also overshadowed by grifters who are like, oh, I can come in and take advantage of this.
But you've mentioned that men are often treated as malfunctioning women, essentially. Can you explain what this means? I love that idea, that concept.
Yeah, it's particularly true probably in classrooms, right, in schools, but then we can broaden it out, which is if you have this kind of default idea of this is how to behave, right? Sit still and study harder and remember your shoes, et cetera, which, because girls are more mature than boys on average, that's a bit better at that. And then you sort of say, well, that's how you're supposed to be.
And then you say, well, the boys aren't like that. So they're basically a malfunctioning girl.
And I think a good definition of a society that's a patriarchy is one where you take male ways of acting and being in the world and then judge women against that and just say, why aren't women more like men? I'm old enough to remember when it was a big thing that women had to wear shoulder pads and learn to deepen their voice and stand in a funny way. Assertiveness training.
Really? That sounds so ridiculous. Margaret Thatcher had to have voice training to kind of lower her voice.
Because the idea was basically if women wanted to succeed, they had to become like men. They had to look.
But think about shoulder pads. What's that doing? It's taking a female physique and it's saying you have to look a male.
That's obviously terrible. And quite rightly, mostly said that's absolute BS.
Like we should change our workplace cultures. We shouldn't ask women to stop being women so that they can be CEO.
We should just say women can be CEO as women, not as pretend men. But also the other way around.
You don't want to have classrooms or societies where unless you're behaving in a stereotypically female way, sitting still, expressing your emotions in a more stereotypically female way or whatever it is. If you're just a little bit acting, then there's something wrong with you that way around as well.
We just have to create a system where we're not judging one against the behaviors of the other. This explains so much of the problems that I had in school.
I've got two kids now. One's five.
My boy is five and a half. My daughter is three.
And I will tell you right now, my daughter's probably more ready for school than my son, or at least they're close. And he's two and a half years older than her, almost twice as old.
That sounds about right. And it's crazy.
We'll say, okay, put on your socks and shoes and put your jacket on. And my three-year-old daughter will have a little bit of trouble just physically putting it on.
And then she'll be by the door and my son will be playing with matchbox cars. And it's, hello, we told you to put your socks and shoes on.
And then 10 minutes later, he's got one sock on and he's looking for a snack. And it's like, what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? And actually, I'll ask you this question.
Have you ever had the thought, I wish you were a bit more like your sister? In certain respects, yes. But also, I can really relate to this because as a kid, I was the exact same way.
I mean, they were like, oh, he's got attention deficit disorder and all these things. And it just turns out that, okay, maybe that's true.
But also, it just turns out it was a boy. Hello, all the boys were like that.
Come on. That's right.
There's a simpler diagnosis. Yeah, it's a boy.
I have three boys that are grown now. And I used to think, I wish you were more like your sister.
They didn't have a sister. I made one up.
I had an imaginary sister that I could compare them to because I had these friends who had girls. And I do think as parents sometimes and teachers and societies that we can't fall into the trap of either elevating like this is a male behavior and judging girls and women against that or the other way around just saying and you roll your eyes a little bit at the boy and say as you just said what's wrong with you and i did that with mine and i really regret it i really lacked a lot of empathy around that it's i have to just realize that he's so young that i'm essentially his external prefrontal cortex that's operating outside of his body and And by the way, you'll have that for 10 years, at least.
Maybe 20 more years. I don't know when they finished developing that thing.
Mine took a while. It is about 20 years.
My daughter will say something like, Jaden will be standing on the picnic table and she'll go, that's dangerous. And he's like, I'm going to try to fly.
And I'm like, listen to your sister on this one. I don't think this is going to work out the way you think it's going to work out.
And it's just like constantly monitoring them. And then finally, now he'll say that's dangerous.
And then he'll just do it anyway. And I'm like, that's not the point we're trying to bring across.
But I remember when I was younger, my friend Katie was a really good student and they gave us these student homework books and you would write the subject and write what you had to do in the lines next to it and write when it was due. And I would ask my friend Katie, how do you remember to look at that when you have homework? And she goes, when I come home, I just look at it.

And I go, how do you remember to write down what you need? And she goes, when the teacher's telling

you to do it, you write it then. And I go, but then, then you go home and then you pull this

out and you read it and then you do your homework. Cause I couldn't get all those steps.
That was

not happening. She's like, idiot.
All you do is write it down and then you do it when you get home. That was impossible for me to do.
I didn't even get that until towards the end of high school. So many steps.
If you think about what it takes to get your homework in, right? You have to be in class when it's set. You have to be paying attention.
You have to make some kind of note, like your friend write it down. You then have to remember later to look at your notes and then be able to read your notes and then you have to having seen your notes decide to do the homework rather than what you'd rather do and then this is the one that gets me lastly if you've actually gone through all those steps and managed to do your homework yeah small miracle you have to turn it in that's right oh yeah you have to remember to turn it in that's right with my boys, even if they made it through all those, they'd come home and I'd say, did you turn in your chemistry homework? Oh, no, I forgot.
Yeah, that sounds about right. And even if the teachers are like, bring your homework up, I'd just be sitting there staring at the wall.
And then it's, did you turn in your homework? Oh, I don't know. It's like, where was I? I don't know.
Yeah. That gap widened all the way, seemingly for me anyway, widened all the way through school.
A lot of the girls that I studied with in high school, it wasn't that they were smarter than all the guys. It's that they were organized in a way that now I see with my wife and I is like still there.
It's totally different. But it doesn't go away completely.
But actually, one of the things I find really interesting is that on GPA, I mentioned a minute ago, right, there's this massive gender gap on GPA. Girls just have much better grades than boys in high school, but there isn't on SAT scores.
Boys are a bit more clustered at the bottom and at the top, but basically there's like huge gender gap on grades, but not really a big gender gap on tests. So I think what that tells you is exactly what you just said, like it's not that girls are smarter than.
All the other way around, in case we still have to say that. Hopefully people trust us enough by now.
But what girls are really good at is turning their homework in. And that's what gets you a higher grade.
Like, getting a good grade in your class is only very slightly about smarts. It's about organisation.
It's about discipline. It's about paying attention.
It's about all that stuff. And, you know, like, girls just get that stuff much earlier.
much earlier and the biggest gap actually i think is early adolescence it is those early high school years where the girls hit puberty earlier they grow their brains grow they just grow up they become like young adults a year or two earlier than boys do just a fact anyone that's seen kids growing up knows that but our education system doesn't really reflect that it's one of the reasons i'm quite keen on this idea of starting boys in school a year later. So it just gives them a year to catch up.
We've done this with my son. We put him in preschool, then pre-K, and we're like, okay, he's finally ready for kindergarten.
So we held him back as he was on the age line. And now we're like, oh God, that was such a good idea.
I mean, it was just so dang necessary. Meanwhile, my wife said, we need to hold Juniper back? I don't know.
And it's hard to tell because she's three, but she is so much more ready, like I said, even than Jaden is at five for school. It's just absolutely unbelievable.
Starting boys a year later probably wouldn't have been a bad idea. I didn't even think about just starting everyone later.
It just as a default, a lot of private schools kind of do it. Say to the parents that they've got boys, especially if they're summer born boys, They're like, yeah, I think we should probably wait with him.
A lot of richer parents are doing it, but I think it should be a choice for parents wherever their kids are at school. What about investing more in trade schools to go back to what we were talking about at the top of the show? It seems like I went to college because my parents were like, if you don't go to college, you're never going to get a good job.
That was sort of like peak 90s parental wisdom from two parents who were the first in their families to go to college, I think, or one of the first. That made sense.
But I also didn't totally need to do that. I ended up at what you might call a trade school anyway, because I became a lawyer, but it's not quite the same thing that people are envisioning.
Different kind of trade. It's funny.
I always say I was painted into a corner and I did what a lot of people do and they're back to have no other options and became a lawyer. It's true.
It's just like a catch all for college overachievers that are like, I have no idea what to do with my life. They just go to law school.
When I was in Germany, there were different high schools for people who didn't show like they were going to go to college and then they would go to a trade school. And by the time they were 18, they were pretty much ready to go be a tool and die maker or a railroad track repair person or engineer of some kind.
And then you could go to college, but that was like, you were going to be academic and you were going to go to a professional level of something. But even in Yugoslavia, they had a high school just for people who are going to be police officers.
It was like, this is where you go to high school. And then you get out in your cop.
It's a totally different thing that we have here where it's like, oh, if you can make it, you can go to college. And if you can't, I'll take fries with that.
It's like we really just give up on those people a lot of the time. Yeah.
So I think on the one hand, I don't want to in any way discourage people from going to college, especially people who maybe they don't have parents like yours who say you have to go to college. They might have parents who are like, oh, college isn't worth it.
And actually, these kids are really smart and could do very well at college, especially boys right now. But on the other hand, I think you're right that the US just doesn't do very well on that trade school stuff, the vocational stuff.
And actually, there's one good reason for that, although I think it's out there, which is a fear of tracking. There's a history in the US where we would have more vocational stuff in high school, but it would only be like the poor kids and very often the black kids who'd be put on that track so it's like the biases about class and race really kicked in and so people have felt very concerned that if you introduce vocational tracks like they have in Germany and Scandinavia that it'll be the poorer kids and probably the kids of color who end up on those tracks so I get that fear but on the other hand it's not like our high schools are serving those kids amazingly well now.
And I think that the fear of that is now getting in the way of progress and investing much more. Like one of the things I looked at was technical high schools, which are like just much more vocational high school and boys do really well at those schools.
My dad went to one of those in Detroit. They're very male friendly and some of them go to college and some of them don't.
But the point is they just get a better high school education. And right now, a lot of boys just aren't getting good high school education.
So let's start there. And there's a bit of a, I mean, from the UK, as you know, but there's a sort of snobbery in the US about trade school and apprenticeships.
And people just really think it's lesser. And that's just not true in Europe in the same way.
I've been trying to pop that bubble for years on this show where Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. So he used to get really upset because people would say, oh, hey, Mike, I always watch your show with my son.
And I tell him, this is what happens when you don't stay in school. And Mike's, oh, you mean the people that bring electricity to everyone in the city are not as good as you? What are you again? Like a CPA? Go F yourself, pal.
And it's just like, what do you mean? This is what happens when you don't stay in school. You get a pension.
You get outside every day. I mean, you get to work outside work with your hands helping and it's just like what do you mean this is what happens when you don't stay in school you get a pension you get outside every day i mean you get to work outside work with your hands helping people it's just such an offensive notion that somebody who runs a railroad where you live is not as good as you because you spent more time indoors in school it's ridiculous one of the jobs that we have a real shortage for now is linemen the people are going to go and fix the power lines i live in east tennessee when i'm at home and when helene came through it just like wiped out like and then you just saw these guys and it was mostly guys there are some women of course but like mostly guys who were just it's one of the most dangerous occupations i think it's in the top 10 who are getting up there taking the old ones down putting the new ones up they're up there with electricity they're other kind of wires so that i could power back.
And I just, anybody who looks down their nose at someone doing that kind of work, I'm sorry, that person is just an asshole. Yeah, I agree.
A hundred percent. It's easy to say, but then, okay, let's pass the apprenticeship bill.
Let's have some technical high schools. The problem in the US is like the turning away from apprenticeships, vocational, all the stuff we just talked about.
It's bad for everyone, but it's particularly bad for boys and men because that is a way of learning that just seems to be a bit more male friendly as opposed to the normal classroom. So it's great.
Let's do more of that. Yeah.
So basically the jobs that many men would be well suited to do, we don't want to do them because we don't want to have people go, ah, couldn't make it in the academic world, eh? And it's like, well, no, I actually kind of wanted this job, you snobby SOB, right? I understand that. You also, you've talked before about heel jobs.
I've never actually heard the term heel jobs. I guess it's a term that's being contrasted with STEM jobs.
Tell me about this. Yeah.
So it stands for health, education, administration, and literacy. So the kinds of jobs that are in those fields or need those skills.
And it's something that I actually came up with as a way to think about this alternative. And whilst it is obviously true that doing the jobs we just talked about, linemen, plumbing, HVAC, driving, amazing jobs, and we still need a lot of people in those jobs.
I just paid my HVAC guy the price of a small sedan. So yeah, the guy's doing fine.
They're making good money. You have to get trained to do that stuff and they're really good.
But there's also a lot of job growth now in the health sector. In education, we have this shortage now of people, healthcare.
And I'm really worried about the fact that a lot of people just don't see those as jobs that men should do. And I just completely disagree.
My son just became a fifth grade teacher in Baltimore City. Oh, wow.
Whoa. In Baltimore? Yeah.
Had he been to Baltimore before? My wife's from Baltimore and My godson lives there. And so we have a family.
Can be a tough neighborhood, man. Yeah, actually, I'm just rewatching The Wire.
And now I'm like, oh, wait, that's where he teaches. Yikes.
I'm sort of recognizing some of it. But he's one of almost no male teachers.
And I just think that's a huge problem. Like the share of male teachers, it was 33% in the 80s.
It's now 23% percent and falling so we're just cratering the share of men in the classroom and that's bad for three reasons one we need more teachers two they're pretty good jobs then the pay's going up they're much better jobs than people i think probably realize and three most importantly i want the boys in the classroom to see men showing the education is the thing that men do and one of my things i believe as a parent and now as a sort of policy one more than anything else probably is people believe their eyes not their ears yeah and if they see it they see a guy like my english teacher i struggled a bit in school and i was in remedial english and language and and then Mr. Wyatt, the English teacher, God, he was a miserable old sod, as we say, where I come from.
He was a Korean War veteran, which might explain why he was miserable. But he taught us poetry.
And it was the first time I thought, huh, really? This is the thing guys do? Guys can get into this? This writing poetry thing changed my life. And I'm just going to say it would not have been the same if it wasn't a guy and i think that's okay just as a woman teaching science can be a huge role model for girls etc just guys in the classroom just we need men in these classrooms and in these boys lives that's a really good point i was never good at languages and we had to memorize these verb tables and stuff like that but then we had mr wilson and he was not only the football coach, but he was also the Spanish teacher and the French teacher in, I think, middle school for me.
So it became like, oh, you don't have to be some kind of weenie academic guy to be able to speak French or Spanish. Because I even remember my friends saying, oh, languages are for girls, which is such a weird thing to say.
But it happens though. It does.
It's so weird because I actually think things get coded quite quickly, right? I think, especially among kids, they code that as that's not for someone like me. So they're like, oh, well, girls do that or boys do that or whatever.
They're very sensitive to that. And especially as adolescents, I think they're very sensitive for going against the grain and all that.
And so it's a huge problem. If they don't see male teachers, of course, they won't think that teaching is a job for men.
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You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Richard Reeves.
You know, another weird thing that got coded wrong, in my opinion, is study abroad. It's almost always women doing it, which blows my mind because when I was an exchange student in the 90s, there were more women than men doing it.
But I just thought that was random chance. It turns out, I looked this up, women are much more likely to study abroad, even now.
I assume that affects hiring because that's been one of the most standout things in my resume since 1998. Yeah, it's interesting.
You get the data we talked about earlier around education, tests, scores, GPA. That's all interesting.
But in some ways, these other measures are more revealing, more like twice as likely to study abroad, women and men, twice as likely to do student government, twice as likely to join AmeriCorps, twice as likely to join the Peace Corps. All of those things, there are twice as many women as doing it.
It's not obvious why, right? You could explain GPA with the school and stuff, but actually it's really tough. When I looked at this study abroad thing, because I found the same thing as you, that like it's just much more female now, you think, that's kind of weird.
And then you say, oh, well, maybe it's because the subjects, right? Because maybe women are doing like languages or history or something. actually, that's not true.
It's like even within subjects, you get that gap, right? So when people have done research on it, it's just like the girls, young women at that point, of course, they just seem to have a bit more ambition, a bit more aspiration, a bit more adventure about them. And so there's this weird counterintuitive thing where it's supposed to be the guys who are out there adventuringuring and going west it's flipped now it's the other way around you know what the only thing that occurred to me that i tried so hard to figure this out just based on my own personal experience which is all anecdotal but whatever when i told everyone i was going to be an exchange student and go abroad one it was a woman's idea my girlfriend at the time it was her idea for me to do this in the first place she's the one who encouraged encouraged it the most when I brought it up.
She gave me the idea originally. All of my female friends were like, that's going to be amazing.
Let me help you pick the country that you go to. Let's do pros and cons.
And all my buddies, my guy friends were like, man, why are you going to leave when you're going to be a senior? It's going to be awesome. We're going to run the whole school.
And it was like, who cares? Run the whole school. I'm going to Europe for a year.
What are you talking about? Run the school. That's the dumbest possible smallest thinking goal I could ever think of.
And all the women were like, oh, I'm so jealous. You don't have to be here next year.
That's going to be amazing. So I was encouraged by my female friends to pack up and go somewhere.
And my guy friends were, they all thought I was just nuts for leaving. You have a gym here.
What more could you want? You know, it's just total opposite. They have gyms in Europe.
But it's interesting. Your experience is exactly what the research shows, which is that the effects of peers on men were to make them less likely to go.
Peers were discouraging of studying abroad, whereas female, exactly your experience. Although I have to wonder, I have to ask this question.
When your girlfriend suggests that you go abroad for a year, could be saying something else was that just a way of breaking up with so she was moving to norway to go to boarding school so that was already happening that was like hey by the way so she wanted to get you closer maybe i don't think she cared anymore but then i said i'm so jealous that you're leaving same thing that most of the women to me. And then I said, all my friends were getting in trouble.
They're getting in more trouble.

They're doing way more drugs than I'm comfortable with. I don't want to sit around drinking all day

in Russ's basement. This is getting old and we're only juniors.
And she's like, why don't you become

an exchange student like Jane? That was a girl from Norway that was in our class. And I said,

that would be cool. How do you do that? She goes, oh, I have a brochure sitting on my coffee table right now.
Next time you come over, I'll give it to you or I'll bring it over to your house. And I just read this thing and looked at every country and the world just opened up right before my eyes when I saw this brochure.
And she was like, you have to do it. And I said, it's expensive.
And she's like, my mom will help you convince your parents. And she did.
Her mom was a senator. So she was like, I'm calling your parents and telling them why this is important for you to do and they believed her so that's how i ended up an exchange student you know a little appeal i mean as you say like it is it's great for the resume it's great experience it's also interesting like girls young women are more like to move away from home right so we're about to produce some research showing that half the counties in the u.s now have got more men than women in them because the women have moved away to the cities to get jobs and have more opportunities.
And obviously they go away to college. And so women are now more mobile geographically than women as well.
So you've got this situation where you're also more likely to leave home, buy their own home, move to a different place, go to college, study abroad, volunteer. And so there's all of these things that are just like skewing much more female now and that's great of course that women are doing all those things but it's not great that men aren't doing those things and so i think we've really got to ask ourselves the question what's happening with our guys now so many of our young men where they're just not feeling that same level of motivation and aspiration as young women right we don't want to go back to a world where women were discouraged from doing it of course not not.
But we should worry when we see gender gaps like that, two to one, we should at least be asking the question, like, why is that happening? Is that good? But the trouble is back to where we started. Like so many people just don't even want to confront the fact that this could be an area where we should be more worried about men than women.
They just can't do that because they think politically that's not acceptable. And that's just got us into a horrible position.
Another thing I'm worried about, I know we just got done talking about how great the trades are, but isn't automation replacing a lot of what was traditionally men's work? I know Uncle Frank's spit takes at the dinner table say that it's because the whole generation got lazy, but that's not really what's happening, right? No, the main reason why you saw this impact on men's jobs was exactly that. It was automation, big one, but also free trade.
So as we saw the competition, and so I can't remember the exact numbers, but there's the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the federal government. They have this measure of like jobs that require you to lift a certain amount of weight.
I don't know what it is, like where you have to lift 50 pounds more than 10 times a day or something like that. I know flight attendants have that, but that's because they got to be able to put people's luggage in the overhead thing.
That's true. I hadn't thought of that.
They still count. I'm sure they do.
I've heard them say that to me because I'm like, oh, isn't that heavy? And she's like, we literally have to be able to do this for our job or we can't work. Yeah.
God, that's really interesting. I never thought about the stewardesses doing that.
But the number of jobs that require that sort of physical strength has gone from something like 30%, 10%% and falling. Like it's single figures now.
And so those sort of physical strength jobs have either been replaced by automation or they've gone somewhere where the labor is cheaper. And so that's been a big cause of this decline in male employment and male wages.
I think actually AI is going to be very different. I actually think that AI might hit some women's jobs a bit more.
It's coming for us lawyers. I know that.
All the lawyers are like, oh, it's never going to be able to do. And I'm like, let me stop you right there.
Everything that you can do, unless you're like a partner in a very specialized area of law, it can already do that. You just don't know how it works.
That's right. If there's one profession that should get wiped out by AI, it is law.
It is. Yeah.
Like it can't stand up at trial and argue for your client, but that's not what you do. You manage a spreadsheet.
Right, briefs. You said, I may be paraphrasing here, men and women's grip strength is now largely the same, which is such a weird, first of all, who's measuring this across generations? That's such a bizarre metric to even exist.
Yeah. I mean, I have to confess that looked at some other studies since and that hasn't replicated very well.

Okay, because I thought that cannot be just genetically from testosterone levels. That just can't be true.
But what do I know? It is true that younger men are actually like less strong than men used to be at their age. And that women have gotten stronger, especially some women kind of in their 30s and 40s.
And so you can easily imagine a situation where 30, 40 years ago, like your mom didn't have amazing grip strengths, and your friends did. And now you can imagine a situation where your mom is going to like Pilates and CrossFit, or your wife, and actually the boy has just got tendinitis from gaming or whatever.
And that is true. The gap has narrowed, but the gap hasn't closed completely in the way one study is one as i'll confess to you it's one of those studies i just thought that was so weird that i put it in yeah i agree with you i thought what a strange thing to even be measured but it's interesting like it is capturing something important jonathan height's work yeah yeah he's been on the show a few times Yeah, so John's got this great stat where he shows now that the average 15-year-old boy is less likely to break his arm than the average 50-year-old man.
Just because they're inside all day doing nothing? Yeah, so it used to be that 15-year-old boys would fall out of a tree, or they'd be out skateboarding or biking, so they'd fall over and break their arm like most of us did. And the 50-year-old men were not doing that.
Whereas now, like the dads are all bro-ing out on their mountain bikes. And the sons are inside.
It's true. Yeah.
I certainly now at age 45 am doing way more than I did, even as a teenager. Friends of mine are like, oh, remember when you were a kid and this happened? And I was like, man, I must've been even more of an indoor kid than I thought.
Because all this stuff's happened to me now. Now I'm finally 45 living life.
Before then, I was an indoor kid. Better late than never.
Better late than never. That's right.
I always tell people, say, I'm in the best shape of my life. They're like, wow, what's your secret? The secret is be in really bad shape for most of your life.
That's really the trick. From a really low base.
Exactly. The bar is on the floor.
It's holding up from there. Yeah.
Do you worry at all that the drop in male employment will result, or maybe even already has resulted in electoral shifts in the United States and in Europe for that matter? Yeah. I worry generally that when men are struggling economically, that it could be lack of employment, could be lower wages, could be some of these health issues.
One of the things we showed was that for men who are out of work, this is men without a college degree, half of them said that they had some sort of health problem, usually a mental health problem or an addiction problem, whatever. So health and family life and work, they all go together.
So you might measure one thing, employment, but actually it's probably capturing a bunch of other things too, like health and motivation and all kinds of stuff. But yeah, there's pretty good evidence that once men become economically vulnerable, they're really struggling, they are much more open to an argument that is a more reactionary argument that basically is a, we need to go back.
It's an argument based on, let's go back to the world that your dad had, right? Let's go back to the world where men were the breadwinners, et cetera. And you can see how if you're a guy who's just really struggling to find a footing, right? You're not doing well on lots of fronts.
You can see how your struggles could actually put you in a position where you are quite open to that sort of politics. And so I do think that without making a partisan point, I think that actually, because it could

be a reaction left or right or whatever, I just think that when men aren't doing well,

they're just much more politically available in a way.

I just saw that in the last election in the US.

I think one of the reasons for that is because they just feel like their concerns are just

not being taken seriously on the political left.

And they're not wrong about that.

And so I think that to some extent, we've all got to take some responsibility for what's

happening.

Yeah, I worry that if responsible parties don't address all these issues, that irresponsible people will take advantage of that. We've seen that throughout history in many ways.
That's exactly what happens. I think it's basically true that if there is a real problem, right? So you can imagine something's like a made up problem, right? But if it's a real problem, you don't see governments and think tanks and podcasters and media taking that stuff seriously, reporting on it, tackling it, then someone's going to come along and say, hang on.
One of the things I've noticed is that some of the more reactionary online figures in the sort of men's sphere, what they do is they come along and they say, a lot of men and boys are really struggling. The powers that be are not paying attention to those problems.
They, in parentheses. They, the elite, the whatever.
That's because they've been overrun by woke feminists and they hate men. That's why you should click on my website, unload my brochure for how to be a better buffer man or whatever, or vote for me or whatever it is.
The problem with that is the first statement is true. Men are struggling.
Boys and men are struggling. The second statement that we're not paying enough attention to those issues is also true.
The third statement, that's because the woke feminists have taken over and hate men, is not true. But you can find a few soundbites.
You can make it sound true. The way to address the problem of reactionary figures pointing accurately to the actual problems of boys and men and pointing to the neglect of them is to not neglect them.
It's to make them sound crazy. So that if they say they are not paying attention to the male suicide crisis, they are not doing anything about the fact that boys are struggling in school, you can say, what are you talking about? We have whole policies around that.
What are you talking about? You sound crazy. The trouble is right now, they don't sound crazy.
They sound plausible because we're not doing enough to help boys and men. And that just cedes the political ground to the people who can weaponize it.
Yeah. We've seen that with the rise of guys like Andrew Tate, for example.
I don't think that's a partisan comment. He's far enough out there that- He's off the reservation politically, I think.
That's right. I'd love to talk about the term toxic masculinity because I don't think it's done anybody any favors because it basically doesn't mean anything.
And if it ever did, it doesn't mean anything now to me anyway. I don't even know what people are talking about when they say it.
Do they mean that masculinity is toxic? Do they mean that too much of it is toxic? Is it a different variation of masculinity that is toxic? I don't have a clue. They don't.
What it usually means is that they don't like what you're doing right now. Yeah, that's all I know.
That's all I know is they're trying to throw a label and get me to stop talking. Good luck with that.
That's right. No, actually, oddly, it used to mean something, right? So before 2016, it was a very academic term, mentioned a few times in footnotes, journals.
It was really about how men and some had actually just their own mental health issues. Sociopaths, honestly, for whom their ideas of masculinity had to come entwined with violence and kind of dominance.
So it was a really very specific term used in a very precise way in academia. In 2016, it just burst into the mainstream and was suddenly being used for everything.
And so suddenly, everything was toxic masculinity. And so it became, I think at this point, it's a slur.
It also turns men off. I don't think it's very exciting to say to men, you know what? We have a vision for modern masculinity.
We could make you not toxic. People will say, well, not all masculinity is toxic.
Like, okay, well, tell me some good things about about masculinity though and they can't do that because then they fall into the trap of saying that there are some things that are masculine that are good they don't want to say that and so it just ends up being this sort of turn that's thrown around it's become very counterproductive and the trouble is you put the word toxic next to the word masculinity and then you wonder why so many boys have been turned off by that debate. I think it's a problem in itself but it's also just I think a symptom of a broader problem particularly on the center left in politics where just an inability to have a positive story to tell about masculinity.
I've really come to believe that too many people even now struggle to admit that men are having problems because they think men are the problem. And until we get past that, we're just going to keep losing these men.
What do you think of some of these alt men's movements? Like you mentioned earlier, Red Pill. I think you mentioned men going their own way.
MGTOW. I don't know if they say that as an acronym or not.
I think they say MGTOW. Yeah, it's awkward.
But first of all, what are those for people who've never heard of this? And what do you make of those? If you get into the sort of manosphere, men's rights stuff, there's a whole bunch of different issues. So MGTOWS, yes, men going their own way.
That's one group. They're basically male separatists.
What they're basically saying is, look, the whole system is stacked against you. If you do get a job, you're going to be screwed over.
And then if you do get a woman, have a baby with her, she's going to boot you out the moment another guy comes along who's better than you then you're going to be on the hook for child support so basically they're like screw all this they're just rejecting the idea of family of fatherhood of marriage even of work in some cases so it's a very strong reaction against the sense that like society's rigged against men now there's a red pill movement which is is just a broader term for just men who've basically somehow woken up and realized that the world has turned against them and that there's a kind of progressive feminist worldview now that's taken over, etc. There's incel, involuntary celibates, men who can't get a girlfriend, etc.
And so there's a whole bunch of different groups that are online now. And what I think about that is actually some of those groups can be quite supportive, actually in many cases, of those men.
But it's also where reaction goes. It's like they feed off each other, they victimize themselves, they find someone else to blame.
I think the big problem with those men's rights groups, it's not that they're usually misstating that there are actual problems. It's that they want someone to blame.
And they find someone blame in women or in the women's rights movements or in whatever. And the truth is that it is true that boys and men are struggling, but no one's to blame.
No one's deliberately doing it to you. So they end up being the least masculine thing of all in many ways, which is victims.
Yeah, that's true. So the whole men's rights movement like pretends to be this kind of super masculine movement, but actually they spend all their time complaining.

Yeah, whining online.

Exactly.

Whining on Reddit.

Which is not very masculine.

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Now, back to Richard Reeves.

Often about these men's movements, I just think, but for the grace of God, I was lucky I was born

at the right place at the right time in a good family. I'll let people decide if I have good

genetics based on whoever's watching on YouTube. But I had luck in the job market, especially with

timing. I had luck in business.
But if any of those things at any kind of point had gone wrong, I might also easily be blaming

women or society for my life not turning out the way that I expected it or wanted it to. So I kind

of, in a way, I have real empathy for these guys. Me too.
They're handling it terribly. It's just

the worst way possible, whining online all day. But I also really, I understand how they got there.

Yeah, I think it's important that we do, actually. I think there's a tendency to dismiss the underlying causes because you can think, look, guys, this is not a very healthy response to the challenges you're facing.
That's the right answer, right? It is not to say you don't face any challenges. What are you talking about? We live in a patriarchy.
So it's difficult because you don't want to in any way be seen to be like justifying some of these movements. But I'll also say one more thing, which having raised boys myself, they're all in their 20s now, is that actually if boys are largely exposed to very liberal environments, liberal schools, liberal households, there's a good chance they're going to go through a phase, right? They're going to go through a phase.
It might not be Andrew Tate phase, it could be Jordan Peterson phase or Ben Shapiro, but they're going to go through a phase because if all they're hearing is like a very progressive orthodoxy, then they're going to go online and they're going to find it. It's almost like an act of rebellion as well.
Teenage boys especially love being transgressive. And so if all they hear is progressive, orthodox views, they're going to transgress against them.
And if you're a 15 year old boy and you've got a feminist mom, the way to really get under her skin is start telling her, like, I think Andrew Tate's got a lot of really good points. Yeah, I agree.
I think we push people to extremes. A lot of times it's to the right, but it's not always to the right.
But we push guys like this to extremes because, like you said, some of what they say is correct. And then we refuse to acknowledge that, which just gets them to dig in their heels more.
And it's not that this is a group of guys that want all women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. That's an extreme reaction to stimuli that they're getting it elsewhere.
Our mutual friend Ryan Holiday likes to say, we can't let the crazy people make us crazy people. And the algorithms are trying to radicalize you.
Political parties are trying to radicalize you. Grifters on the internet are trying to radicalize you.
So like, can we be surprised that some of us get radicalized by the system that is doing that? Especially when, you know, you get divorced, you lose your kids, then you get laid off. And of course you're not doing well.
Of course you're going to look for a scapegoat. Yeah.
What advice would you give to young men navigating societal expectations and redefining their roles in today's world?

I know that's a really broad question, but you're the man for the job.

Thank you. I'm not sure I am, honestly.
I'm very proud of my three sons,

all in their 20s now. So I guess that's probably my best claim to expertise.

Look, your kids are functional members of society. Congratulations.

Yeah, they're amazing. I think the first thing is to just acknowledge that if you're

Thank you. That's probably my best claim to expertise.
Look, your kids are functional members of society.

Congratulations.

Yeah, they're amazing.

I think the first thing is to just acknowledge that if you're struggling, maybe at school or if you're struggling to figure this stuff out, you're not alone.

This is a perplexing time to be figuring out how to be a man.

It is, right?

For all the good reasons we've explained, et cetera.

And the school system may not be working very well for you. So the first thing is just give yourself a break it's not that there's something wrong with you right it's not that you're not masculine enough or too masculine or don't believe those people online telling you there's something wrong with you that's not true so at first have some empathy right for yourself second thing is figure out a little bit for yourself who you want don't let someone else give you a a script, whether it's me or somebody else.
That's why I'm a bit reluctant to talk about this. But the third thing I'd say is like, if you feel good about being a guy, being a boy, being a man, good.
Feel okay about that. Feel okay in your skin.
Feel okay with your male friends. If there are certain aspects of your behavior that just skew a little bit more male,

it's good.

It's fine.

Hang out and have male friends.

Make sure you've got kind of male friends.

Have your crew, have your buddies,

have your gang, whatever you want.

Go look out for each other.

And there's nothing wrong with any of that.

And so those are things like,

be very thoughtful about you making your friends.

Be very thoughtful about having your own script

but letting someone else do it.

And don't beat yourself up. And also it's a direct message to them which is we see you we care about you you're precious to us you're precious in our sight we need you the tribe needs you and i do think that we're not good enough at saying that to young men anymore we need you the tribe needs you i think that the contest for the allegiance of young men is always being fought Young men, I think, especially need to feel like part of something bigger themselves, to be allied to something, whether it's a team or a tribe or whatever.
And so let's find something to ally yourself to and be unashamed about that. I just saw this, I haven't written this up yet, but I just saw this kind of slightly worrying, disturbing survey, which finds that people, women especially, are much more suspicious of all male social groups than all female social groups right so girls nights out girls trips girls groups are like good but suspicious of male ones that's a real step backwards oh yeah when it's a boys boys trip is you're gonna do something and then everyone's gonna yeah yeah i get why but i understand it but don't agree with it.
And I think if we undermine male solidarity and we make men feel bad about wanting to hang out with men sometimes, you see the friendship recession I mentioned earlier. And actually we're signaling that maybe there's something bad about being male and nothing intrinsically bad about being male.
It's awesome being male, right? Wouldn't you say? Do you like being a guy? Yeah. I mean, personally, I like it.
It's great it's great i couldn't handle being a woman first of all so it's the only option left on the table that's right debatably so yeah i have to replay that clip for my wife when i want to go on a boys trip this summer hey i'm sorry richard reeve says the expert you could say doctor professor phd richard he says I have to authority. Exactly.
Doctors orders,

I have to go get drunk in Berlin. I'm sorry.
I don't have a choice. What steps can both men and women take to bridge maybe this growing disconnect in modern relationships too? Because we see this all the time in marriage.
Men work less when they're not providers. They don't see themselves as providers.
So they're working less. Divorce is harder on men psychologically.
I read that in your book as well. And lower earnings from men result in less marriage.
So it's not just like women are taken off without us. It's like, actually, everything's getting screwed up now and it's going to get worse.
Yeah. It's true that if men are floundering, it's hard for women to flourish.
And so it's in everyone's interest to help your partner to flourish. And if it's a man, then it's going to be flourishing more as a man, again, as a woman.
And I think that it's hard for me to kind of advise women. You can advise men if you want, just to avoid this landmine that I've set for you.
Maybe I will end up talking about women. But I think the secret probably is each of you putting equal effort in and appreciating and respecting the other for the effort that they're putting in whatever that is and if there's a bit of a division of labor either the traditional way or the other way cool i was a stay-at-home dad for a while my wife knew i had the kids i was on it i was on it i did that that was my job so she could worry about her job split every task 50 50 that's insane it's incredibly inefficient but we really respected and were appreciative appreciative for when she was doing that earning and I was doing that all the other way around.
I think in the end, that's all we can ask of each other is that we can kind of look each other in the eye, trust each other that we're working hard and never roll your eyes. Have you seen that data from the Love Lab about rolling your eyes at each other? No.
I remember that contempt is the number one indicator of divorce and rolling your eyes sounds like it's part of that. That's what it is.
Yeah, I think that's right. So if you ever find something rolling your eyes at each other, then you're in real trouble because what that indicates is contempt.
So lack of respect. And there's an old traditional saying, which is women need to hear that they're loved and men need to hear that they're respected.
And I'm going to say there's a grain of truth to that. I do not want to stereotype.
I do not want to say it's true of everybody. Don't fill up my inbox with how dare you make assumptions about everybody.
I'm sure like men need to hear their love too. But yeah, it does feel true to me.
I just think there's some level which like if men if men don't feel they're respected by their partners for their efforts, whatever they are, that's really corrosive to them. I think that men, to some extent, for good or ill, do see themselves somewhat reflected in their partner's eyes.
And so I do think that as the partner, as a kind of woman of a man, just recognize that he, to some extent, is seeing himself through your eyes. And so be very careful about how you look at him and what you say to him and of course it's the same is true the other way around of course all the caveats but i do worry it's partly back to this conversation about toxic masculinity rolling your eyes boys trips etc which is that there's sometimes in our culture a bit of a tendency to fantalize men now or to dismiss them roll our eyes at them them, tell them they're mansplaining, put them down a little bit.
And I think that's incredibly unfortunate. And we should make sure that we don't poise our own personal relationships with that kind of dynamic.
I love that. This is totally a non sequitur, but oh, well, I got to say, I'm worried about AI relationships supplanting human ones.
Just given the changing landscape where women no longer need men as much economically

and men are kind of like,

well, if this isn't going to work

and I'm not good enough,

I'm just going to retreat into the internet.

What impacts do you foresee for men moving forward?

It's only a matter of time

until guys are like,

who doesn't give me any crap?

My AI girlfriend and the woman

who doesn't cost me money

and tell me bad things and make me feel bad

because he's emasculated.

My AI boyfriend that I can turn off when I go to sleep or whatever. I feel like that's just right around the corner, man.
Well, I think it's a serious point here, but it's interesting, isn't it? It's more discussion of AI girlfriends. Well, yeah, that might come first because it's harder to program what women need for an AI boyfriend, whereas AI girlfriend, I think we can all imagine the ingredients that go into that and how simple that might actually be.
Good. So that's your inbox filling up, not mine.
I got you to say it. That one's on me.
Yeah, I think that's, but it is interesting because there is a difference. And actually, John Haidt, who we talked about before, he's actually written a piece for us, for my institute on kind of really worrying that already, I think, like young men, if they're lost, are particularly susceptible to becoming hooked by something online.
Think about like even before ai i think if the world outside is difficult to navigate hard dating etc it's confusing and the world inside is getting better and better by comparison to what was in the past i think that's a it's a huge problem and it's less for me it's some there's less of a problem in itself maybe if the guy's got an ai girlfriend, I don't know if that's bad in itself. It might be.
But I do know that it's bad if it's stopping him going out and meeting actual girls. Trust me, it will.
It's displacing it. And then he gets less skilled at it, which makes it harder for him.
And so you have a really downward spiral. I think on the other hand, the challenge for men is much more like the AI husband than the AI boyfriend ai boyfriend so this friend he just wasn't very good at listening to his wife talking about the same thing she'd come home she had this problem at work and she'd come and had this problem at work today it's basically the same problem this person's just like working with and he was like classically males what do you want me to do do you want me to fix it what's the problem here let's break this down and you call this and she's like no i just i need to listen so anyways he persuades her eventually to listen to an AI.
So they get, I don't know which AI it was, Claude or something. And he programmed it.
Be an empathetic husband to my wife. Call her Eleanor.
So Eleanor. So she talks to it and says, I'm having a difficult time at work.
It was probably my boss. And the AI says, Eleanor, I'm really sorry to hear that.
That must really hurt. Do you want to talk about that? And she's pointing at the phone saying, this is what I need you to be like.
And he's like, no, perfect. I'll go watch the baseball and I'll leave you with the AI.
You can use this for as long as you want, honey. It's 20 bucks a month.
I got it. Sorry.
He's just going to the basement. But behind the sort of humor of that is that actually there may well be slightly different things that men and women are on average looking for from relationships and part of the challenge and the beauty of every human culture has been to find ways to bring us into this really kind of wonderful relationship with each other or we do meet different needs etc over the course of relationship and then you start to worry well how much of that can be contracted out to ais and I think that's a big problem potentially it is in people they'll say I don't really think that's going to happen and I think okay I tell them the following and maybe you can disagree with me on this example here but imagine that your friend is dating someone and they don't really like them that much but they're in a relationship it's the first girl that he's dated for this long and there's so many things wrong with relationship and they both see it, but they don't break up because they don't want to be alone.
So what is he not doing? He's not going out and meeting new people. He's not really working on his social skills for meeting new people.
He's not really raising his standards much above where he's at with her. He's just complaining about the death atrophying.
basically he's atrophying yes what if he's not in a relationship with a girlfriend what if he's

in a relationship with an ai he's got the exact same set of problems except for he's got no reason and no motivation to go out to a bar with his buddies and get rejected or laughed at or maybe just not talked to by the girl that he liked why deal with that you have to constantly be charging into battle almost socially until you get good at it and then you start to enjoy it. But if you never make it through that developmental phase, you probably won't ever be able to do that comfortably.
Yeah, I think it's also part of a deeper challenge, which is that we have to get good at rejection and we have to get good at failure. And that's how you build resilience.
And if you retreat into this AI or online world, you just, you don't get rejected. Your AI girlfriend does not reject you.
Whereas in real life, the real women and real girls are going to reject you. You're going to ask them out and they're going to say no.
And that's just part of life. And you're going to apply for jobs and you're not going to get them.
And you're going to work hard and you're not going to get a good grade and you're going to take an exam and you're going to fail it and i just think it's quite a broader issue which is that kind of rejection breeds resilience and that's just as true in romantic life as it is in the other and then so you lose the skill i think in the end you end up being de-skilled and then it's a vicious cycle because you don't have good skills around other people and kind of women especially it's worse and you're very sensitive to rejection and so you get rejected you think i'm done one girl says no you ask a girl out and the next incel ai basement and if you're not careful because it's risky right i remember first time asking a girl out in school oh my god your, your heart's in your mouth. Right? And then of course she said no.
In fact, a mate of mine and I did it together. We asked two girls out.
They were both called Debbie. And so we asked both of them out.
It was just coincidence. They were best friends, but they kept called Debbie.
So we were going to ask them out together because we were so terrified. So we thought we'd ask them out on a double date.
So we got doubly rejected because they both said no to both of us. Brutal.
Brutal. And you never recovered.
That's right. Yeah.
That's right. Dang.
All jokes aside, what are some of the long-term consequences of neglecting these issues for both men and society as a whole? Because this could affect future generations, societal cohesion. I know

I might sound like I'm overstating it, but if people siphon off too much, that's a really big problem. Yeah.
I mean, there's lots of more sort of straightforward problems, which are like, we're just leaving too much skill on the table. We're not making good use of our men.
If they're not in the workforce, that's bad for the economy. All the usual arguments you'd expect a kind of policy type scholar to make.
Also family life just is harder. I mean, if men's wages aren't going up, then what we're seeing is that kind of women are having to pick up more of that.
And that's good in some ways, but also like we should be sharing. But if you're pointing towards a potential longer term cultural problem, and it's too early to say yet whether we're going to become South Korea, where there's such a huge divide now between young men and young women that the fertility rate is cratered.
You're seeing a dating market is in shambles, also very reactionary politics taking over, where it's almost like a simmering gender war, basically. And you're seeing us trending in that direction, where you're seeing political polarization, the dating market's not working well.
There's a lot of blame being flung around between young men and young women. So in the long run, it has consequences, of course, just for the men themselves.
If a man ends up despairing or taking his life or just not having a purposeful, flourishing life, that's just bad, period. Bad for women because they want generally men.
If they're going to create families, they want strong, flourishing, good, interesting men. But I also think that there's a danger that we start to see family formation really being affected.
I've been saying for quite a long time now that the declining fertility rate, changes in dating, we're fine, we're fine. To be fair, a lot more conservatives have been ringing the alarm bell on this for quite a long time.
I'm now pretty worried about it. We're about to publish some data showing that 15 to 24-year-olds are much less likely to say they want to have kids than any previous generation.
I believe that. Much less likely.
I mean, it's only happening now. They might change their mind, et cetera.
And I mentioned the loneliness stuff before, the dating problems. And so I actually think that if we don't find ways to lift up men, young men, help them educationally, help them economically, just help them in their personal life, just to be as awesome as they can be, I think we're going to have fewer kids, that we're going to have fewer families.
I think that's bad for everybody, bad for the economy, bad for women, bad for men. And so I would not have said this even probably two years ago, Jordan, but I'm, as I see the data coming in politically, culturally, economically, I didn't used to say there was a crisis.
I don't use the word crisis. I think I might start to now because I just, I'm looking at these numbers and I'm looking at what's happened to a lot of our young men.
I'm saying, we have got to get ahead of this. We've got to get ahead of this.
We're reaching some tipping points if we don't get ahead of this. One, that's alarming.
And two, it completely makes sense and jibes with just the anecdote. I always ask my younger cousins and friends and show fans questions like this.
And I don't think any of them have said they want to get some of the more sort of conservative or religious people are like, yeah, I want to have five kids because I grew up in a family of eight. It's like, oh, you're only having five.
It's one of those. But my cousins and stuff, they're like, no, why would I have kids? My life is really good right now.
And I hope they change their mind. But when I was 20 something, I said, yes, definitely.
I want to have kids. So did my wife.
She was always like, yeah, I definitely want to do this. My parents were quite similar with a lot of this.
I think it's hard to update our beliefs to match the new facts at hand. So I can see a lot of people just saying there's still so much work to do with racial equality and with women's rights, which and they are correct on that.
But I think it's hard to say men need help and then update our belief structure to match

that.

Partly because it's changed quickly, right?

It's an uncomfortable conversation to have.

It's honestly one of the reasons I ended up having it.

A lot of people just said, look, you can't do this.

I'm like, look, I'm very boring.

I have charts.

At the time, I'm a Brookings scholar.

For the love of God, if I can't talk about this, who can talk about it? The more people said I shouldn't talk about it, the more I thought, really? Wow, I must talk about it. Because if we're not having this conversation in good faith about real problems, I hope by now we've persuaded enough people, there's real stuff happening.
This is not made up. The men's rights movement is not making up problems.
They're a real problem. And if we don't talk about them and address them, it's not like somebody else won't be talking about them.
That's what happens, as you said a while ago, if you neglect problems, they turn into grievances and problems. So I get it, the sort of tiny violin, are you kidding me, eye roll thing.
I understand that instinct, but we've got to get past it. I honor that instinct.
We've got to get past it. If we don't talk about it, someone else is going to be talking about it.
Yes, do we need more women in politics? Yes, we need more women CEOs. Yes, we need to close the gender pay gap.
Yes, we need to reduce violence against women. Yes, we need more capital.
Only about 3% of venture capital money goes to female founders. Is that a problem? It's a huge problem.
Should we be doing stuff about that? We that we are by the way we are doing quite a lot about those problems and we still need to do more and we can tackle these problems of boys and men anybody who says that we have to choose between them people on the left saying we have to focus on women can't focus on men that's not sensible people on the right who say yeah we should focus on men time to ignore all this feminism stuff for women it's all quotes gone too far the people i admire people like the now former surgeon general vivek murthy who said i have a son and a daughter i'm worried about both of them i care about both of them and as a society that's how we have to think about this. It's and, not or.
And right now, too much of our politics, especially around gender, is being framed as or. Pick a side, pink or blue, left or right.
Insane. And it's got us to a very difficult place in our culture.
And so we've just all got to give ourselves permission to care about boys and men, to advocate for boys and men, to help boys and men, without living in fear of the fact that in doing that, we've somehow gone over to the dark side and become a misogynist. That is not true.
And it's more of us that say that, the less true it will become. Richard Reeves, thank you very much.
That was an awesome ending. I didn't want to step on you.
I hope that was where you wanted to land it because it was great. Fantastic.
Crushed it. I said a lot of new stuff for you because you're just a great conversationalist and interviewer, as I knew, of course, from your work.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
You're really good at this. Really good.
Thanks, man. Thank you.
You're about to hear a preview trailer of our interview with Mike Rowe, host of Discovery's Dirty Jobs and Returning the Favor, on why the advice, follow your passion, is complete BS. Follow your passion as a bromide is precisely what 98% of the people do who audition for American Idol.
And they're lined up. Thousands of people who have been told, if you believe something deeply enough, and if you want something bad enough, and if you truly embrace the essence of persistence and your passion, if you let your passion lead you, stick with it.
Well, following your passion is terrific advice if the passion is taking you to a place where opportunity and your own set of skills will be able to coexist. Passion is something that all of the dirty jobbers that I met possessed in spades.
They just weren't doing anything that looked aspirational. So it was confusing.
So the guy in a plaid shirt sipping a cappuccino, that doesn't make sense. Well, guess what? Neither does a septic tank cleaner worth a million dollars.
That guy had a million dollar business. I actually counted them up once.
I could be wrong by a couple, but I put over 40 people that we featured on Dirty Jobs as multimillionaires. Passion isn't the enemy.
It's just not the thing you want pulling the train. But look, I don't say don't follow your passion.
I say never follow your passion, but always bring it with you. For more with Mike Rowe, including a behind-the-scenes look at some of his shows, and why we shouldn't view a blue-collar career pursuit as a cautionary tale, check out episode 264 right here on The Jordan Harbinger Show.
I want to be clear again, this is not supposed to be something sort of anti-women. I know some people, they love to be offended.
Those people that do this for sport, they're going to look for something wrong with this episode. I will finish with this.
The U.S. economy is $2 trillion larger than it would be without women.
That is great for the country all around. Again, this episode is not about what women are or are not doing.
They are doing great. But this episode is about where men are actually falling behind.
Nobody expected gender equality in the other direction. There's actually a bigger gender gap now than there was when Title IX was passed in the other direction.
That's pretty serious business. And I'm not saying we need to get rid of any of these reforms.
I'm just saying, guys, we need to catch up. We need to pay attention to each other.
We need to help each other out. And men are even much more likely to drop out of school at every level.
Additionally, one in four boys is diagnosed with some sort of learning or developmental disability. That is a lot.
One in four. Holy moly.
Seems like the system is the problem, not necessarily the diagnosis here. Look, I've got some ADD.
I'm able to do quite a bit if you haven't noticed. So far, so good.
I made it through a top law school. I practiced on Wall Street.
Now I've got a little podcast that some of you all seem to enjoy here and there. Turns out I just can't sit still for hours on end listening to somebody talk about calculus equations.
I am not really convinced that that's a disability, but you know, I'm no doctor. All things Richard Reeves will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show.
Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, comes out most Wednesdays. It's practical.
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It is a great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.
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