The Crisis of Men and Boys — with Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves

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Speaker 7 Episode 361. 361 is your eye code for Corpus Christi, Texas.
In 1961, Ken, Barbie's boyfriend, was first introduced by Mattel. Okay, this is just...
This is just too much for me to handle.

Speaker 7 What happened? Why is there never a pregnant Barbie? Because Ken comes in another box. Okay, so I saw a little girl playing with Barbie and Tor and I said, doesn't Barbie come with Ken?

Speaker 7 And she said, no, she comes with Tor. She just fakes it with Ken.

Speaker 7 Go, go, go.

Speaker 7 Welcome to the 361st episode of the Prop G-Pod. What's happening? It's Scott-free August, but we're still bringing you thoughtful conversations all month long.

Speaker 7 In today's episode, we speak with Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation,

Speaker 7 and Richard Reeves, the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. These two are, I'm not exaggerating, they're role models.

Speaker 7 Jonathan Haidt is fearless and is also a world-class academic. I think he's probably the most relevant scholar in the world right now.

Speaker 7 His book, The Anxious Generation, has resulted in entire nations banning phones in school.

Speaker 7 Like, what do I do? I tell dick jokes, and Jonathan is improving the mental health of kids all over the world. Anyways, and the other thing I love about him is he's like a hardcore researcher.

Speaker 7 He will, whenever I talk to him, he says, actually, that's not true. The peer-reviewed research there is really weak.

Speaker 7 He's, I don't know, I think he's just an inspiration, thoughtful, incredibly rigorous, incredibly creative, a great writer, and also a really nice man. I've gotten to know him.

Speaker 7 I would call us friends. And then Richard Reeves has literally literally been my inspiration around focusing on the struggles of young men.

Speaker 7 He does it in a thoughtful, again, rigorous way, is not afraid to say things regardless of who it offends.

Speaker 7 And then also the thing I really appreciate about Richard was he was at the Brookings Institute and then started a business, started a foundation focusing on the struggles of young men and boys.

Speaker 7 And within about

Speaker 7 two months, raised $15 million. The guy is an entrepreneur, but instead of trying to make money selling an AI company to Microsoft, he's decided he wants to make the world a better place.

Speaker 7 So I think he's got real skills that most people with a research background don't usually have. Anyways, also a really

Speaker 7 decent man. So, two of my heroes, two of my role models.
With that, here's our conversation with Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves.

Speaker 7 Jonathan and Richard, where does this podcast find you?

Speaker 8 I'm at our beach house, relaxing for the summer.

Speaker 7 Does it say anxious generation on the front door? Literally, Jonathan has the best-selling book of any academic in the last several years.

Speaker 7 I'm in a hotel in Denver, and I had that moment where, you know, you arrive really late at night, you just settle in, you don't think about it, and then you open the curtains in the morning and you think, oh, I wonder what amazing view I've got.

Speaker 7 I'll try and show you my view. That's the view I've got.
It's a parking garage. You see the parking garage?

Speaker 7 Richard, I feel like

Speaker 7 this is called Working for a Living, which the two of us are still doing. We're not

Speaker 7 reaching the heights of Jonathan Hyde.

Speaker 8 I'm just kicking back and doing nothing these days.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. He's just taking it easy.
So we wanted to kick off. These two guys are kind of role models for me, and Richard got me inspired about

Speaker 7 the struggles young men are facing, and Jonathan just continues to be a role model for fearlessness in the world of scholarship.

Speaker 7 And we wanted to come together and see if there's some work we could produce or at least try and create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts and work on some stuff together.

Speaker 7 Jonathan, can you talk a little bit about what we're trying to do here?

Speaker 8 Sure. Each of us have been writing about problems facing young people for a long time.

Speaker 8 And each of us knows the other one.

Speaker 8 We've each known each other for a while. We each admire each other.
And there was one morning where

Speaker 8 Scott was in town in New York City, because Scott lives everywhere in the world, it seems.

Speaker 8 Scott was in town, and so I arranged a breakfast with him. And I had just had a breakfast with Richard to talk about our common interests.
And it was just so clear that the three of us need to talk.

Speaker 8 And so I can't remember how it worked, but somehow or other, the three of us ended up at a table in a restaurant, in a hotel in Soho. And out of that,

Speaker 8 the realization was each of us is expert in a couple areas of

Speaker 8 what are these obstacles that are facing young people, but each of us only has part of the story. But if we draw on the other two, then we have, I think, the most complete story.

Speaker 8 We can tell the most complete story that anyone has told about the changes in the economy, in technology, in family life, in law, in...

Speaker 8 business practices. So that's why I was so inspired by that breakfast.
And we put together this Google document and we gave it a grand name, the Intergenerational Compact.

Speaker 8 Don't quote that because that's just our tentative name, but that sort of is what we're trying to do together.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and speak a little bit, Richard, about what we mean by the intergenerational compact.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think there's a presumption, isn't there, that we will create a better life for our kids.

Speaker 7 This is something that you've talked a lot about, Scott, and your own TED talk, I think, really nailed this point that we're failing the younger generation.

Speaker 7 We're actually distributing resources to older folks. We're not investing enough in kids.
We're not investing enough in education. They're struggling to get into the housing market.

Speaker 7 You see this rise among men anyway, with college degrees struggling in the labor market. And

Speaker 7 the connection to, I think, some of the work we're all interested in too around gender is that

Speaker 7 my sense is how much political energy young men and young women are spending on blaming each other for their challenges

Speaker 7 rather than being shoulder to shoulder and fighting for more a fairer economy, a better housing market, and a better education system for them.

Speaker 7 This is really a generational issue that's being turned into a gender issue by both sides.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I've been parroting you as I usually do, saying that

Speaker 7 both genders, and this is literally a quote from you, have done an amazing job of blaming the other gender.

Speaker 7 And I think that's really powerful in the need to restore the most powerful, what I would argue is the most powerful alliance in history, and that is the alliance between men and women.

Speaker 7 I want to put forward a thesis, and Richard, I'll start with you, and then, Jonathan, I want you to respond. My thesis is that I teach a course called brand strategy.

Speaker 7 And basically, brand is how do we convince people to make irrational decisions? Irrational decisions result in huge margins. People who are rational do not buy high-margin products.
They are smart.

Speaker 7 They say, okay, my dad used to come out and

Speaker 7 he did this about 10 years ago, smack together a pair of shoes. He's like, I bought eight pairs of these shoes.
They were $2.99. They're $24.
I will never wear another pair of shoes again.

Speaker 7 My dad is the worst consumer in the world. Brands hate him because he's smart.
He's like, shoes are just about protection to your feet. You can get them for $2.99.

Speaker 7 People in their mating years make irrational decisions and they buy high-margin stupid stuff like cars and panorize and brunella cuccinelli and brands love them.

Speaker 7 And that's the basis for the most profitable business model in the world.

Speaker 7 And that is to find a flaw in our instincts that results in irrational behavior, specifically of young people, and that tech companies have been able to come in.

Speaker 7 They're the great white sharks feeding off this carcass. They have been able to come into the greatest gap in the flaw in our instincts with technology that scales and exploits those flaws.

Speaker 7 Richard, I'd like you to respond to that thesis first, and then I'll turn it back to Jonathan.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, I feel like you're really very strongly in both our territories

Speaker 7 here.

Speaker 7 I'm really interested to hear what John says. So look, this is not a new problem, Scott.
right? I mean,

Speaker 7 the speed of development of our frontal cortex hasn't significantly changed over the last couple of hundred years.

Speaker 7 What's happened is we have a new economic system, which, as you say, can play into that.

Speaker 7 And I would say thinking about this through the lens, particularly of young men, is the frontal cortex, impulse control, we don't get that sorted out until our mid-20s. And even then,

Speaker 7 even then, all of life is a battle between impulse control and sensation seeking, right?

Speaker 7 All of us struggle with that. It's just we struggle with it, particularly when we're young.

Speaker 7 But what we've done in the past, I think, is a better better job of balancing individual freedom and the fun that comes of being young with institutions and norms that have acted as guardrails against that becoming too damaging.

Speaker 7 We've had ways to socialize young men, we've had peers, we've had mentors, we've had rules, we've had norms.

Speaker 7 We have, as a society, taken very seriously the risk you've just described.

Speaker 7 And we have found ways to create institutions and norms and supports around those young people rather than just saying, okay, you're 18 now,

Speaker 7 whatever you want, or even younger. And so I think I see part of the social deinstitutionalization of young adulthood, especially for young men, has created this real opening.

Speaker 7 And then, of course, tech comes in, which is

Speaker 7 where John's amazing work has made such a big difference.

Speaker 7 And I think I would say that my goal with John has been to try and persuade him that this is as big an issue for boys and young men as it is for women and young girls.

Speaker 7 And that's an ongoing conversation that we're having.

Speaker 8 What I would add, I think

Speaker 8 two of the things that I tend to bring into our conversations, one is going even deeper into the role of technology, and the other is a little bit of sociology, especially the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

Speaker 8 So I'll come back to him in just a second. But on the technology front, you know, as Richard said, this has been going on a long time, but there's a qualitative change.

Speaker 8 When it was the era of television, of course, television wanted to market to kids. I actually remember seeing an advertisement for cigarettes on Saturday morning cartoons when I was very young.

Speaker 8 And I ran to tell my mother, mom, there's a mint-flavored cigarette, because I thought this was important news because they told me it was important news.

Speaker 8 Okay, they weren't marketing to me exactly, or maybe they were.

Speaker 8 But there's a qualitative difference when it's this sort of one-way, you know, marketing to kids when they're sitting in front of a TV versus the change that happened in the technosphere and in the lives of young people between 2010 and 2015.

Speaker 8 We go from having flip phones, which were not major marketing tools for companies, to every kid carrying a supercomputer that's hooked up to the internet that can interrupt them with push notifications.

Speaker 8 We go to kids providing huge amounts of information about what they like.

Speaker 8 And so now we super empower these tech companies who, you know, we're all fans of the free market system with appropriate guardrails, but suddenly you give huge new power to the most predatory companies, which some of which are led by people that seem to have very poor ethics and no restraint.

Speaker 8 And what we have is a multiple X increase in the ability of predatory companies.

Speaker 8 Richard and and AIBM have been leading the charge on studying sports gambling, sports betting, which is a complete disaster for boys.

Speaker 8 So I would just bring in, adding on to what Scott said, just technology is not a continuous set of changes over the last couple hundred years.

Speaker 8 There was a pivot point in the early 2010s when everyone got hooked up to smartphones, especially kids.

Speaker 8 And then the second thing I'd bring in is even though I've only taken one sociology course in my life, I find that sociology is such a valuable discipline for understanding what's happening to us.

Speaker 8 And one of the main things happening to young people, you can see it in the graphs in my book, is a sudden loss of the sense of meaning. And it happened in the early 2010s.

Speaker 8 Young people, there's a survey question, my life feels useless, or my life feels meaningless. There's a bunch of questions like that.

Speaker 8 And it was about 9% of American high school seniors agreed with that

Speaker 8 from the 90s through 2010, 2011. There's no change at all.
And then over the next five or eight years, it doubles. This is is before COVID.
It just doubles.

Speaker 8 Kids, once they enter the virtual world, they have no structure. They have no sense of a stable group.
They have lots of shifting groups.

Speaker 8 So lots of big stuff happened to kind of just knock us all for a spin. And especially, we see it with kids.

Speaker 8 I'll just say, Richard, you long ago convinced me that the boys, I actually now think the boys have it even worse than the girls.

Speaker 8 When I started the project, I was focused on girls and social media, and I thought that was the main story.

Speaker 8 And it was in part reading of boys and men that, of course, we draw on that a lot in the book.

Speaker 8 So don't worry, I'm right there with you that the problems are different to some extent, but they're incredibly serious for both sexes.

Speaker 7 Jonathan, you said something really powerful. And I want to bring this down to sort of a ground level as parents, how this impacts our kids.
And it really, I mean, it really shook me when you said it.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I'll start what you said, and then I want you to finish. You said, imagine if 50% of the time that you laughed with friends in your childhood years went away.
That's what's happened.

Speaker 7 That this is a destruction in youth as we know it. Say more?

Speaker 8 Yeah, so humans are an evolved species. We're primates.
Our kids need to develop in free play. How do we bond with others?

Speaker 8 You don't bond just by talking, you bond by moving together in time, synchronous action. You bond by touch.
You put your arm around your friends.

Speaker 8 You bond by synchronous laughter when you laugh together with people. It's very, very powerful.
You bond together by eating together. So we have bodies, we are embodied creatures.

Speaker 8 And kids used to have this childhood, and they would develop friendships and they would feel they're part of a group.

Speaker 8 And they, you know, there was always loneliness for some kids, but they were at levels that they've been at for a long time. And then between 2010 and 2015, everything changes.

Speaker 8 Kids are now spending, it's now about eight hours a day on their phone, and that's just the phone. Then there's all the other screens.

Speaker 8 So a lot of kids are literally spending most of their time on a screen alone.

Speaker 8 And so the way that I try to walk people through just to wrap your mind around the size of this transformation of childhood is think of all the times you laughed with your friends in person and cut that.

Speaker 8 It's actually more than 50%. It's down more, time with friends is actually down more than 50%.

Speaker 8 Imagine all the sunshine that came into your eyes. Well, cut that by 20 or 30% because just inside on a screen.
Think of all the exercise you got, cut that.

Speaker 8 Think of all the books you ever read, cut that by 70%.

Speaker 8 And so so many of the formative experiences for young people are greatly reduced.

Speaker 8 And then we're surprised that young people come out with the highest levels of anxiety, depression, a sense of meaninglessness, suicide that we've ever seen.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it really is, really is dramatic.

Speaker 7 The destruction of childhood, it just kind of brought it home to every parent.

Speaker 7 Richard, let's talk a little bit about something the three of us have been talking a lot about, and that is I always try and I always look at something through the lens of shareholder value in the markets.

Speaker 7 The smartest thing you can do on a risk-adjusted basis is to spend less than you make, take that savings, put it away, and forget about it and not trade.

Speaker 7 And yet 90% of the financial markets, which we are obsessed with, is essentially speculation. Again,

Speaker 7 and Richard, I want you to agree or disagree with this, which reverse engineers, I don't know if it's an absence of free play, the risk aggressiveness of men.

Speaker 7 Occasionally you want some of that risk aggressiveness. And it seems to be manifesting itself, see above, tech entering into that

Speaker 7 flaw in our species and putting a casino in everyone's pocket. I know you've been looking at gaming, which is a fancy way of saying gambling amongst young men.
Why is it happening?

Speaker 7 Talk about some of the data and the threat it presents.

Speaker 7 There's this great quote from Margaret Mead.

Speaker 7 I find anthropologists very useful in this space in the same way that John finds sociologists useful, which is she said, look, we'll have to find a way for men to demonstrate their courage and valor, even in the absence of war.

Speaker 7 And that's mead in the 60s. And so I do think that finding a way, what does that mean, courage, risk-taking, how do we find positive expressions for that?

Speaker 7 Even in a world where we hopefully don't want to do it in a martial way at the front lines.

Speaker 7 One of the things I've noticed, and this is directly relevant to the whole debate about sports betting, which, as John says, we've just done a huge event on that with Arnold Ventures.

Speaker 7 And I just want everyone to know that Arnold Ventures is putting the biggest investment into research, into sports betting that we've seen. And it'll be independent.

Speaker 7 So much of the research out there is actually funded by the betting companies. So we desperately need independent research.
And Arnold are putting millions of dollars into understanding this better.

Speaker 7 But this getting rich slowly thing, Scott, that's not very fashionable, especially among young men. We did some research on why young men aren't going to college.

Speaker 7 And this term kept coming back, which is, I need passive income quickly. quickly.

Speaker 7 They want to get rich, but they want to get rich quick. I think you're in the space more, like, what's happening there? Because it's really boring to save money and wait and have a tracker fund.

Speaker 7 And I think it's this sense of I get it right with crypto or betting or whatever. And then I'll get a girlfriend and then I'll then I'll get the nice car.

Speaker 7 And I can't wait till I'm 50 for that because I'll be too old.

Speaker 7 And so I wonder if there's a little bit even in the online world where young men are actually being persuaded that they both need to and can get rich quickly, which of course is just by and large not true.

Speaker 7 And so

Speaker 7 they're looking for a shortcut to economic success.

Speaker 7 And they're being persuaded by some of the more reactionary figures online that they need that if they're ever going to get a girlfriend, which is by and large not true.

Speaker 7 And so I think it's all tied up with this sense of young men not quite knowing how to do the thing that their dads did or their grandfathers did, which was slower and more boring, but more honourable.

Speaker 7 We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Speaker 7 Isn't this some of this, aren't we to blame? I mean, there's technology, there's over-parenting, but also some of, isn't some of this a value system where we have basically say to young people,

Speaker 7 we have figured out that the downside of democracy is that old people and people of our generation can continue to vote themselves more money and we continue to do that?

Speaker 7 Do they have no choice but to create their own volatility in their own casino, hoping to get lucky? Jonathan, any thoughts?

Speaker 8 Wow, that's super interesting. I think this is a great example of how the three of us each bring different perspectives on the same phenomena that we're trying to understand.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 that had never occurred.

Speaker 8 Richard heard this phrase

Speaker 8 from young men,

Speaker 8 I need passive income quickly.

Speaker 8 Scott, you pointed out something I never thought about, which is the changes in the market that make it harder for men to get started.

Speaker 8 So, what I'd like to add is something that I covered in chapter four of The Anxious Generation, which was about puberty and initiation rights.

Speaker 8 I studied cultural psychology long ago with Richard Schwader at the University of Chicago.

Speaker 8 And one thing I learned in reading ethnographies is that most societies have ways of turning girls into women and boys into men.

Speaker 8 For girls, it, in a sense, happens naturally in the sense that they tend to be anchored around menstruation.

Speaker 8 And then women come in, not the mother, it's an other women come in and sort of induct them into the secrets and the rites and the religious practices of being a woman.

Speaker 8 But wherever you have initiation rights, they're always harsher, stricter, tougher for boys, because it's a much bigger jump to turn a boy into a man than to turn a girl into a woman.

Speaker 8 Girls and women traditionally are defined by their roles as reproductive, as mothers, as wives. Boys have to, they start off in the women's world.

Speaker 8 They're little, they're feminine, they're surrounded by girls and women. And then somehow they have to make the jump to making their way in the world of men.

Speaker 8 And they have to both join in and stand out because their mating success is going to be based on: are you the most appealing, the highest ranking, the best earning, the best hunter?

Speaker 8 So the boys' journey is longer and more fraught. And you see this in fraternity initiations.
Sorority initiations, they exist, but they're like, let's love bomb you.

Speaker 8 Let's have a big sister who gives you secret gifts. Whereas boys, my son just went through this, they have to do a lot of painful and disgusting stuff and dangerous too.

Speaker 8 So I just want to bring in that without that, boys will tend to just vegetate. They don't turn into men on their own.

Speaker 8 And especially once we took away risk, we overprotected, we said, you know, sometimes like no running at recess, no wrestling, no physics, you know, we take away rough and tumble play.

Speaker 8 We take away so much from boys. And then we expect them to somehow turn into men who are going to be protectors.

Speaker 8 Also, in this crucial period of usually it's around maybe 11 or 12 to 15 is when initiation rates tend to take place. This is exactly when our young people are becoming full devotees of social media.

Speaker 8 They're hooking up gigantic data pipelines into their eyes and ears and stuffing their head full of thousands of times more information that would ever come in any other way. And who's this from?

Speaker 8 It's from influencers who are stressing a certain kind of masculinity, which is, I've got, look at, you know, I've got my passive income, I've got my fancy car.

Speaker 8 I've got, so it's about material success and also having flat abdomen, they've got body dysmorphia issues more than they used to.

Speaker 8 So the idea of abandoning our boys, saying, we're not going to give you any guidance. We're not even going to use words like gentlemen anymore.
No guidance on what it is to be a man from adults.

Speaker 8 And then we're going to put you in front of a screen and hook you up to influencers that don't have your best interests.

Speaker 8 We're going to completely renege on our responsibility to socialize the next generation.

Speaker 8 And so, of course, they don't know what it is to be a man, and they're very vulnerable to being led off in different directions.

Speaker 8 And so, the urge to make money quickly and show that you're smart and that you're then rich, and that's going to give you mating success.

Speaker 8 Of course, a lot of boys get sucked into it with disastrous results.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I really want to add to that because John and I have talked quite a bit about this, the rights of passage point for boys.

Speaker 7 And I just happened, I had a conversation yesterday with a woman who's a psychologist, and she said, pain produces growth. We grow through pain.
And for women, pain is built in.

Speaker 7 We have a menstrual cycle, there's childbirth. And so like,

Speaker 7 whereas with men, we're actually, if they're going to grow through pain, actually, there's a way we have to create that.

Speaker 7 Now, at an extreme, of course, you don't want it to be dangerous, except there's a kind of line here, but there's something about growth through pain, grow through discipline, grow through some kind of hardship.

Speaker 7 All of these rites of passage that John's talking about will involve some kind of hardship, some kind of anxiety, some kind of difficulty, and it will require discipline.

Speaker 7 And so, there's a weird thing, Scott. I was thinking about what you said earlier about like the search for volatility.

Speaker 7 That's sort of true, but it's also true for, I would say, there's a hunger among young men for a solid solid framework within which to grow through pain. Institutions,

Speaker 7 mentors, etc.

Speaker 7 And absent that, they're simultaneously searching for some of that risk-taking stuff, maybe in an unproductive way, but they're also desperately searching for the solidity and the structure that we used to give them.

Speaker 7 Just very anecdotally, I mentioned earlier I was in Denver, so I went to the Latin Mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Denver on Sunday night. It was full of young men, most of them on their own.

Speaker 7 Why are they going to two-hour Latin Mass on a Sunday evening?

Speaker 7 And I think it's because at least some of them are searching for structure and discipline and purpose and institutions that will help them become men. And so this is weird contradiction.

Speaker 7 I think that they are hungry for the things that we're not giving them.

Speaker 7 And so how we give it to them, it doesn't have to be through church. It doesn't have to be through.

Speaker 7 through Boy Scouts, it doesn't have to be through fraternities, but we certainly have to find ways to reinstitutionalize the passage from boy to man and we have to stop only saying what boys shouldn't do and also give them an idea of what they should do and why we need them and i think that gap and actually president obama said on his wife's podcast last week that on the left all we've done is say what's wrong with boys we've never said what's right with them and he's absolutely right about that and i wish he'd said it perhaps six months or 12 months ago but you know it's great he's saying it now

Speaker 7 the

Speaker 7 the statement I referenced earlier that really struck me of yours, Richard, was that the genders have done an amazing job of convincing themselves that it's the other gender's fault.

Speaker 7 And also, we have a tendency, I find in our society,

Speaker 7 to give women the benefit of the doubt and to pathologize men, and that everything is a derivative of the Simpsons, that Homer and Bart are reckless and stupid, maybe a heart of gold, and Lisa and Marge are just these incredibly high character, flawless people who are underappreciated.

Speaker 7 And what I have found in this war of convincing that the other side is the problem, you do have a lot, you do have some young men who feel that the assent of women has come at their cost.

Speaker 7 I would argue that's mostly the far right, not young men.

Speaker 8 Correct.

Speaker 7 They're being convinced of that, Scott. I will correct my statement, is that they are being convinced of that rather than that they've convinced themselves.

Speaker 7 Because a lot of young men, and I found this in your data, a lot of young men are actually quite progressive on gender equality.

Speaker 7 And I'll get shit for this, but when I go on TikTok, I do see a lot of women saying things like, why would I ever go out on a date?

Speaker 7 Why would I not expect to get an Uber when there's a huge chance I might be unalived?

Speaker 7 But the dude going out on a date with you is 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you. It feels as if

Speaker 7 the algorithms love really positioning men unfairly, and women have bought into it, or a lot, but not,

Speaker 7 I'm being very reductive, into this notion that men are just more, young men are just more dangerous than they actually are. Richard, any thoughts?

Speaker 7 Well, there was that meme a while ago, wasn't there? Would you rather run into a bear or a man in the woods?

Speaker 7 Which I managed to avoid commenting on, but it was exactly this line because most women said they'd prefer to run into a bear than a man.

Speaker 7 And so there's an online phenomenon around that. But I would say it cuts both ways.

Speaker 7 I would say that, and it genuinely saddens me, because I think that it is true that on the left, the messaging has been around, if young women are struggling, it is because of the patriarchy, it's because of young men.

Speaker 7 It's really sort of pointing the finger horizontally

Speaker 7 at young men, which is by and large completely unfair for the reasons that you've just said.

Speaker 7 But I think it's true now, increasingly on the other side, too, which is that young men are being told, yeah, you're struggling, and it's the fault of all those young women, it's the fault of feminism, it's the fault of the women's movement.

Speaker 7 And so, it's almost like a conspiracy between the progressive left and the reactionary right to blame young, to get young men and young women to blame each other for their problems rather than the economy, rather than the institutions that are failing both of them.

Speaker 7 And so, I'm not saying it's deliberate, but my God, if you really wanted to kind of avoid the political energy of young people being directed at the institutions of the economy and education and housing market, this is a brilliant way to do that because the energy instead gets spent blaming each other mostly completely incorrectly.

Speaker 8 Do you agree with that, John? Yeah, yes. Well, let me add on to what you just said.
You're tracing out a trend in which boys have been increasingly demonized and toxic masculinity.

Speaker 8 I've been studying the trends, the ways that ideology captures institutions, especially universities, for a long time. Really since 2011, I began studying that.

Speaker 8 And that led to to me being concerned about the lack of viewpoint diversity and founding Heterodox Academy and writing a lot on this.

Speaker 8 And then writing The Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianov.

Speaker 8 And so what I can say is that as our society has gotten more polarized, institutions that have leaned left, which is a lot of them, then have gotten more concentrated, more extreme, more ideological.

Speaker 8 And that process got worse and worse. There was never a reversal.
It got worse and worse through

Speaker 8 certain 2015 was a big year on campus for protests and

Speaker 8 extension of this way of thinking. And then with summer 2020, with George Floyd and COVID, things gotten more intense.

Speaker 8 And this has brought about a huge backlash against, you know, call it wokeness, call it the progressive activists.

Speaker 8 So this trend of demonizing boys and never saying anything good about them, I fully agree. This has been happening and it goes back to probably the 70s or 80s.
And it's gotten worse and worse.

Speaker 8 But I actually think that it's turning around now.

Speaker 8 What I mean is I think many on the left have realized that going this extreme into the identitarianism, that some groups are good, some groups are bad based on gender, race, etc.

Speaker 8 That the identitarianism is what is destroying the Democrats. It's what is keeping them in the wilderness.
You might have just seen the finding.

Speaker 8 The public opinion of the Democrats is the lowest it's ever been, or at least lowest since they started collecting data in the early 90s.

Speaker 8 So I am seeing among people on the left a much greater willingness to break with that tradition of boys bad, girls good.

Speaker 8 And so, and Richard, and you've been a part of it. I mean, I watched, because I've known you since we met, I think, 2015, or 2014, we were working on that big Brookings AEI report together.

Speaker 8 I've watched you thread the needle carefully and try to, you know, bring up, you know, bring up attention to boys without saying, no, don't worry, we're not saying that it's going to be at the expense of girls.

Speaker 8 But I think, and tell me if I'm wrong here, I think that to make those arguments today is so much easier and you're finding so much more receptivity than you would have, say,

Speaker 8 in 2017.

Speaker 7 So much easier. I mean,

Speaker 7 the fact that Obama's talking about it now, and that we've got, sorry, and then we've got governors talking about it. So Gavin Newsom is about to drop an executive order

Speaker 7 specifically focused on boys and men. He follows on the heels of Gretchen Whitmer, Wesmore.

Speaker 7 The penny has absolutely dropped, John. You're right.

Speaker 7 And I'm even finding now that when I talk to some women, even from more, much more progressive organizations, they're saying to me, Yeah, yeah, I get it's not zero sum.

Speaker 7 I know, I know you still care about women and girls. Let's talk about boys and men.
Whereas previously, I'd have had to spend 50% of my time doing all of that. Now it's like, Yeah, yeah, we get it.

Speaker 7 So it's you're right. It's part of a general move.
It's not just about gender.

Speaker 8 Which is very healthy. That is one very positive trend we can report.
I think we can think more openly about these issues than we could have a few years ago.

Speaker 7 Richard, why are young men so much more susceptible to gambling abs than women?

Speaker 7 They are more risk-taking.

Speaker 7 They want, they think they've been persuaded that they can get rich quick through some of these

Speaker 7 activities. Their frontal cortex is way behind girls, just they'd mature kind of much, much later.

Speaker 7 And they are more isolated.

Speaker 7 The evidence on this is kind of fuzzy, to be honest, but it seems pretty clear that they're more isolated

Speaker 7 from

Speaker 7 communities, from institutions, et cetera. And then maybe lastly, they're struggling economically, educationally.

Speaker 7 I mean, if you're looking for someone who's struggling in the education system, struggling to launch, still living at home with their parents, you've said a lot about this, Scott.

Speaker 7 Much more likely to be men. And so if you add the fact that they are biologically more likely to be risk-taking, they're sociologically much more disconnected now from society, and they're...

Speaker 7 exposed to these risks. I mean, the sports betting thing is just, it's hitting young men.
Something like 98%

Speaker 7 of the problem gamblers we're seeing now are men. I mean, John just published and then we republished a piece by Jonathan Cohen and Isaac Rose Berman on sports gambling particularly.

Speaker 7 And what they say is, because of the change in law in 2018, we've just seen this massive explosion, as we know. And they describe it as making the gambling fully frictionless.

Speaker 7 Fully frictionless. And it's the friction that has saved us.
And it has particularly saved the young men because we are predisposed.

Speaker 7 in any circumstances to this kind of risk-taking activity. And then we don't have the same social institutions and we're struggling in life.

Speaker 7 To make it fully frictionless then to go to this other shiny place that make all your dreams come true, it is absolutely perfect storm. And it couldn't be worse timed.

Speaker 7 It couldn't be worse timed, given what's the struggles that young men are having right now.

Speaker 7 And so if you were to choose the worst year to legalize casinos in your pocket, it's especially the casino thing in your pocket, it's probably 2018, which is exactly when the Supreme Court did it.

Speaker 7 There's just a couple of things.

Speaker 7 And you can comment on this, Richard, and I'd love to get your thoughts, Jonathan, is that

Speaker 7 supposed to be 50% of college-age males, the ones that are supposed to be smarter, right, bet on the Super Bowl. So one out of two

Speaker 7 men on a college campus bet on the Super Bowl.

Speaker 7 My understanding is that, as a percentage,

Speaker 7 gambling addicts have the highest suicide rate of any addiction because you can get in so deep. If you're addicted to meth, people figure it out and they try and intervene, and that's a helpful thing.

Speaker 7 You can get in so deep with gambling, no one has any idea, and you decide that it's too late.

Speaker 7 And then, in states that have legalized gambling, they immediately see a spike in bankruptcy filings immediately.

Speaker 7 And it's not, and when you look at the leakage, it's not a great way to grow an economy.

Speaker 7 Richard, any ideas on or public policy solutions around how we attempt to cauterize what appears to be a pretty negative trend? And that is, as you put it, putting a casino in everyone's pocket.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so you're right. The bankruptcy rates go up.
They particularly affect young men in low-income communities. And so this is really laser-focused on the men that I'm most worried about.

Speaker 7 And I think we're just in the early stages of understanding this. The states who haven't legalized yet should think very hard.

Speaker 7 I don't think we're going to or probably should undo all of the legalization of sports betting. I think it's different for casino betting.

Speaker 7 And we're going to have to develop much better regulations and norms around this. I think the challenge with this one, and you've just alluded to this, I'm brilliant to know what John thinks of this.

Speaker 7 I was thinking about what John said about us being embodied creatures, right?

Speaker 7 Is that the very privacy of this online betting makes it very hard to socially regulate? I mean, I was thinking about alcohol, right?

Speaker 7 If you go, I know some of you are interested in Scott, but like if you drink in a pub or a bar when there are other people around, you know, your spouse, your friends, your teachers, your whatever, then it's very different to being on your own.

Speaker 7 And the trouble is with this online thing is it's very solitary. And so I think it makes it much harder for us as a society to develop those social norms and those reflex.

Speaker 7 You're almost holding each other to account. And so you can't even see it happening very often.
And I think that makes this a very, very different kind of problem.

Speaker 7 And I don't have a quick solution because I think we're still in the early stages of fully understanding this and developing some of these muscles that we need to develop.

Speaker 7 So I'm not in full-scale panic on all of this, but I am deeply concerned. And I think

Speaker 7 John's further along the panic spectrum than I am, right? John,

Speaker 7 I'm at a six out of ten. You're at a nine nine out of ten.
You've leaned into the panic, Jonathan.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I think what's happening is so vast and accelerating so fast. Yeah, I think, well, of course, you know, panic itself isn't productive, but I think communicating that this is

Speaker 8 the damage here is almost beyond comprehension. One thing, so one thing I'll add to this discussion about gambling and men,

Speaker 8 you know, I've been I've been studying why is it that

Speaker 8 boys and girls and so many people start getting much more depressed and anxious at a certain time? Critics say, oh, well, of course, because the state of the world and the financial crisis.

Speaker 8 But when you look at how

Speaker 8 economic changes affect mental health, you don't generally find that much. Mental health depression is not based on your thoughts about the world.

Speaker 8 It is based on how connected you are and how

Speaker 8 your state. So in general, we don't see that connection.

Speaker 8 I remember there was some data set I saw where it was about suicide rates, and it was that men, when there's a big economic downturn, you do get a big increase in suicide for men, but not for women.

Speaker 8 And I think what's going on here, if we also bring in the case, there was a number of years ago where the price of taxi medallions in New York City plunged.

Speaker 8 And all of these immigrant men, all of these men from South Asia and elsewhere who'd borrowed from their whole, everybody in their family to get the million dollars or whatever it is to get a taxi medallion.

Speaker 8 Now, suddenly they're bankrupt. They've let down their

Speaker 8 wasted the investment of their whole family. What do they do? A lot of them kill themselves, even though they still have obligations.

Speaker 8 If you're a man, especially a man who is a provider and you're taking a risk to make a better life and it fails, for many men, suicide is the only way out. And so I suspect,

Speaker 8 you know, Richard has told us about how much bankruptcies go up in any state that legalizes gambling, online frictionless gambling, you're going to have dead young men.

Speaker 8 Because if a man gets into that situation in great debt, suicide is going to loom very large as a solution to his problems.

Speaker 8 And so I would go much stronger than Richard, when Richard says, states that might consider gambling, they should be sure they have. No, they shouldn't do it.
They just should not do it.

Speaker 8 I mean, this is a terrible, terrible thing.

Speaker 8 And so that's just one thing I would add as a psychologist.

Speaker 7 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 7 We're back with more from Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves.

Speaker 7 Just in our remaining time here, I want to bring up a couple kind of current events because I thought of you,

Speaker 7 Jonathan, on one of these and you on another Richard, but I couldn't help but think, I wonder what Jonathan thinks here. Cold play.

Speaker 7 Shaming has played a really important role in our society, and you talk about it, and it seems like we have industrialized and scaled shame.

Speaker 7 I would just love to get your thoughts on how this whole cold play thing is

Speaker 7 playing out.

Speaker 8 So what I would say is,

Speaker 8 you know, so in a couple of my books, you know, because I study morality, my main area of research is moral psychology, how do we become moral creatures.

Speaker 8 And so in two or three of my books, I talk about the importance of shame and embarrassment.

Speaker 8 If you didn't have shame and embarrassment, you wouldn't have people feeling they're bound into a moral matrix that constrains their action.

Speaker 8 So these are healthy, normal things, good for society when they're within limits.

Speaker 8 But what happens when you create a potential for shame that is a hundred times greater than what we would have experienced previously?

Speaker 8 And when you expose children to it, when children, when teenagers have to face the risk, not just that a few friends will laugh at them,

Speaker 8 but that their whole school will know instantly and be sharing photos and commenting on it. And so there's a savagery that the online world has introduced in which shaming and embarrassment are

Speaker 8 so powerful that

Speaker 8 we feel afraid. My sense about a lot of young people is that it's like, imagine growing up in a minefield, like literally a minefield, and lots of people you know are missing a leg.

Speaker 8 You would walk really carefully. And I think that's part of why we're seeing kind of the anxiety and a drop in risk-taking among young people.

Speaker 8 And so while I don't have many deep thoughts about what happens to a 50-year-old man caught cheating,

Speaker 8 a man and woman caught cheating,

Speaker 8 but I will say that

Speaker 8 before social media developed the feed, when it was just, here's my page, it wasn't so viral,

Speaker 8 life was one way. And once we have instant, unlimited shaming possible for all of us at any time, life is a different way, much more savage,

Speaker 8 much more inhumane.

Speaker 7 But wasn't at the end of the day, wasn't shaming meant to be a means of maintaining the social fabric? You're not supposed to

Speaker 7 beat up other people's kids. You get shamed to potentially expensive from the community, which could mean death, as a means of creating social cohesion.

Speaker 7 And hasn't it just gone crazy and now it's ripping us apart where there's no economic incentive and shaming anyone for anything? And then I talked to your

Speaker 7 colleague, Greg Lukinoff, and he's totally convinced me that there needs to be a movement to separate shaming from your livelihood. Like we made that connection.

Speaker 7 You know, no one ever gets canceled for being too woke, but the idea now that the go-to is a partner at Sequoia says something indelicate, off-color, whatever, inappropriate.

Speaker 7 Well, let's go after his livelihood. I mean, that's a new thing, isn't it?

Speaker 7 Hasn't shaming,

Speaker 7 what used to be a means of social cohesion has become a means of social destruction?

Speaker 8 Well, I think if you're publicly shamed, you know, for centuries,

Speaker 8 you would step down. You know, Japanese business people would commit harikari.
I said, you know, I suppose that's true.

Speaker 8 So I think the connection has been there for a long time. It's a question of proportionality and frequency.

Speaker 8 And I think what we're all agreeing on here is once everybody is commenting on everybody and everybody has a camera and everybody,

Speaker 8 you know, it's like growing up in East Germany where there are spies everywhere and cameras everywhere.

Speaker 8 And so I think that's part of Greg's point is the idea that if you are are caught doing something wrong or just alleged to have done something wrong,

Speaker 8 we need to have a clear rule. No, you don't lose your job for that.
We don't fire people for that because it's coming for all of us.

Speaker 8 And with AI, even if you haven't done anything wrong, if anyone wants to get you, they can just make a video or misinterpret or reinterpret a video of you.

Speaker 8 So, yeah, we have to get, we have to develop defenses against this because, you know, shaming, you know, this sort of savage, frequent shaming is rising and is part of our future unless we do something to constrain it.

Speaker 7 Richard, I had a, I'd love you to come. I had a clip go somewhat viral that got several million views of a podcast I did with a woman named Liz Plank, who I think is fantastic.

Speaker 7 And she has a podcast, I think, called Man Troubles. And I said that I think men should pay for everything on a date.
at least initially.

Speaker 7 And that if you look at the gestation period window, which is much shorter for women than it is for men, when you look at the research that you have produced, that actually there's a myth that women benefit more from relationships.

Speaker 7 No, actually, men benefit more from relationships.

Speaker 7 And the downside of sex is so much greater for women than men, and the majority of men date with at least a decent hope of sex, that there's an asymmetry in what the woman is offering in terms of her time, in terms of the risk presented.

Speaker 7 And that one way you attempt to show that you recognize the asymmetry and kind of level up is to economically sacrifice and pay.

Speaker 7 And this got all sorts of, of, it was hugely polarizing. A lot of people very much in support of it.
A lot of people saying, oh, so you want to continue to own us and I do not want to owe men.

Speaker 7 I'm curious what you think about the dynamics between men and women and economics around the early stages of mating.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 7 it leads very well from the conversation that we just had and John's point about suicide risk and feeling unneeded, unwanted among men. I think that's absolutely right.

Speaker 7 We've just published work showing that separation is just massively spikes suicide risks among men, not among women.

Speaker 7 And interestingly, the

Speaker 7 most recent surveys show that actually men are now more likely to say that getting married and having kids is important to them than women are.

Speaker 7 So like men, men, men know at some level

Speaker 7 that the idea that like men don't want to settle down, they just want to go their own way, whatever, it's just absolute bullshit. And the vast majority of men know that.

Speaker 7 They know they'll have a better life. The The question of economic resources and signaling, I just talked to my sons about this.
So one of my sons is a, he's a fifth grade teacher in Baltimore City.

Speaker 7 All my sons are very thoughtful on these questions, you can imagine. And we ended up, all three boys had this conversation about paying on the first date.
And their interpretation of it was

Speaker 7 what the signal here is not to the, is between the man and the woman, is not, I'm going to pay for everything. I'm the provider.
Don't you worry your pretty head about making money or anything.

Speaker 7 The signal is I have some economic resources.

Speaker 7 It's not necessarily that I'm going to provide, but it is just something. It's a signal that I

Speaker 7 and it's a signal I've got resources. So I'm bringing something to this relation.
And it's a symbol

Speaker 7 of some of this kind of sense of provider, et cetera. Right.

Speaker 7 And so I think it has both symbolic value, which remains even in this new world, and it's a signal is that I am not going to be relying on you. So that's where I land on it.

Speaker 8 I'd like to add to that, because I've had this discussion with every one of my MBA classes. I teach a course called Work, Wisdom, and Happiness at NYU Stern.

Speaker 8 It's about 35 to 50 MBA students. These are young men and women in their late 20s mostly.
Most are single, most are on the apps. And every year.

Speaker 8 I guide them, we talk about what this is doing to them and how to play the game.

Speaker 8 And every year we have this conversation because I want them all to see what always comes out, which is almost all of the women agree the man should pay on the first date.

Speaker 8 And the man, just like, there's no question about this. Like a man who offers to split the check or doesn't offer to pay is a real turnoff.

Speaker 8 And the way that I understand this is that monogamy is pretty rare among mammals. But where you do find monogamy and birds and occasionally mammals, you have courtship rituals.

Speaker 8 We evolved to have certain courtship rituals. And, you know, mating is a dance and hooking up is not.

Speaker 8 But if you want to actually fall in love, or if you want to, if a young man wants a woman to fall in love with him,

Speaker 8 he should engage in the courtship ritual.

Speaker 8 And the courtship ritual is the man needs to take the initiative and offer to pay while, and this always comes out in conversation, while being incredibly sensitive for signs that the woman would prefer it a different way.

Speaker 8 So as long as you offer, and then if she insists, okay, that's a different story. But you should take the initiative.
We, again, we're an evolved species.

Speaker 8 We have evolved for heterosexual sex. Obviously, there's 5% or more of people are gay.

Speaker 8 But we have deep within us courtship rituals that

Speaker 8 we can't erase no matter what our conscious ideology is.

Speaker 7 I'm going to suggest, and I'm going to tease a second episode here or Part B where we go through a half a dozen to a dozen policy recommendations and talk about the upside and the downside and how viable they would be to address some of these issues.

Speaker 7 Because to your credit or to your point, Richard, I think I can't tell you, and I know you sense this, how much more productive the conversation has become.

Speaker 7 Five years ago, if you said anything, quote unquote, talking, referencing the struggles of young men, you're a misogynist, you're Andrew Tate, you know, teaching at a business school.

Speaker 7 Now your hair is on fire. And all of a sudden, and the real allies here have been mothers who say, I sense something.
I'm a feminist. Something is up with my son relative to the daughter.

Speaker 7 So I'd like to do a second, and I know you guys are up for this, a second podcast where we go through each of the policy solutions.

Speaker 7 And Rich has proposed the most from red shirting young men to more men in K through 12.

Speaker 7 I have some ideas around tax policy, but I'd like to just go through each of them and get each of your responses.

Speaker 7 But before we wrap up here, I would just love to hear something around something you did recently with one of your boys and

Speaker 7 any insight or advice for young fathers or any just sort of of

Speaker 7 the world of dadding, the world of being dad from Jonathan Hyde and Richard Reeves?

Speaker 8 Okay, which will go first because Richard will have more to say having three sons. I have just one.

Speaker 8 But about

Speaker 8 two or three years ago, I took my son and a good friend of his to a gun range, and

Speaker 8 they learned to shoot. And, you know, in our social circles, I don't think very many people who live in Greenwich Village are shooters.

Speaker 8 But that was, it was an exciting day for my son and for his friend. And it was just a really fun day of, you know, of bonding.

Speaker 8 So yeah, just giving your,

Speaker 8 do things with your kid, give them experiences and excitement.

Speaker 8 That's, that's one example.

Speaker 7 I live in East Tennessee now. I got to tell you, my sons love the gun range.

Speaker 7 That is a big part of the attraction of where we live now.

Speaker 7 But actually,

Speaker 7 I was thinking about you the other day, John, when I was thinking about this.

Speaker 7 My son and I would play tennis together

Speaker 7 and he would get so distressed when he lost. There was one particular day he came home and he was like, his head was down.
He'd lost again. He was better than me at this point, just couldn't beat me.

Speaker 7 He's really upset and he goes in the house and he's still can't beat dad.

Speaker 7 And my wife said to me, he said, well, can't you just let him win? Just once. He's so upset.
Right. Because she's doing a maternal thing.
She's like, he's so upset. Right.

Speaker 7 And I said, I well, he should be upset. I just beat him again.
And then I said, He will know if I back off. He will know.

Speaker 7 He will sense it. And it will mean all the more to him when he beats me.
And then that day came when he beat me. It was a long game, and he beat me.
And he knew, and I played, I tried to beat him.

Speaker 7 I tried, but he beat me. And so, you've got to make your kids work for it.
You've got to make it, it's got to be painful. You grow through pain.

Speaker 7 And so it was very painful for him to keep losing to his middle-aged dad at tennis. But I got to tell you, and now he's a very good tennis player.

Speaker 7 But I said to my wife,

Speaker 7 he's got to win real.

Speaker 7 He's got to suffer. And then it will mean all the more when he wins.
And so that's probably one of the best things that I've done with my sons. I love that.

Speaker 7 So I'm going to go. I recently took my youngest to Chicago.
I like to do one trip a year with him just solo.

Speaker 7 I find the dynamic is so different when you have them alone as opposed to with their siblings. And we went and saw, you know, we did all the stuff, Pizza, Tallest Building, Building, Rivertour.

Speaker 7 And we went and saw the movie F1. And at the end of the movie, he said, I love the end of Fantastic Four as we're walking out.
And I said, let's go in and watch it. And my son, kids are so,

Speaker 7 at least my kids are so politically correct now. He's like, no, we can't do that.
I'm like, sure, we can. And I grab him.

Speaker 7 And I passed on the age-long tradition that I was fantastic at as a boy. I used to sneak into movies all the time when I was a kid.

Speaker 7 And sneaking into movies now is you sit in the back and you watch the last two minutes and he's sweating. He's He's so nervous.
And I told his mom about it.

Speaker 7 She said, you know, you're teaching him really bad values. And I'm like, look, your job is to make sure he doesn't get into too much trouble.
My job is to make sure he gets into a little.

Speaker 7 So anyway, sneaking into movies with my youngest, teaching him poor values. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation.

Speaker 7 Richard Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. We hope you enjoyed this podcast.

Speaker 7 We're going to do a second one where we speak specifically to policy recommendations and try and dissect them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for your time today.
Thanks, Go.

Speaker 8 Scott, great to be on the show with you.

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