And, This is How The Left Fails Young Men with Richard Reeves

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.

Speaker 2 Hey, Ron Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now, Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited.

Speaker 3 To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

Speaker 2 Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

Speaker 6 So that means a half day.

Speaker 2 Yeah? Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

Speaker 7 Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offers for first three months only.
Speed slow up to 35 gigabytes of networks busy.

Speaker 7 Taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 5 See Mintmobile.com.

Speaker 8 Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anibay. Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 8 That's right, sofas start at just $699.

Speaker 8 Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric.

Speaker 8 Experience cloud-like comfort with with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Speaker 8 Shop washable sofas.com for early Black Friday savings, up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

Speaker 8 No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back.
Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 10 No, it's not too soon to start holiday shopping.

Speaker 11 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 14 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 16 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 18 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 22 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 26 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 27 Owning a home is full of surprises. Some wonderful, some

Speaker 27 not so much. And when something breaks, it can feel like the whole day unravels.
That's why Home Serve exists.

Speaker 27 For as little as $4.99 a month, you'll always have someone to call, a trusted professional ready to help, bringing peace of mind to four and a half million homeowners nationwide.

Speaker 27 For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeeserve.com. That's homeserve.com.
Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month.

Speaker 27 Your first year terms apply on covered repairs.

Speaker 29 Did you know that parents rank teaching financial literacy as the toughest life skill? That's where Green Light comes in. The debit card and money app made for families.

Speaker 29 With Green Light, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and track spending with real-time notifications. Kids learn how to earn, save, and spend responsibly.

Speaker 29 While parents have peace of mind, knowing smart money habits are being built with guardrails in place. Try Greenlight Risk-Free today at greenlight.com slash iHeart.

Speaker 29 That's greenlight.com/slash iHeart.

Speaker 5 So if you tune into the podcast, you may have noticed a theme, a theme that continues to emerge around men and boys.

Speaker 5 What is going on with our men and boys increasingly isolated, increasingly feeling disengaged, disconnected, depressed.

Speaker 5 We had conversations with Jackson Katz and Scott Galloway, where this issue was highlighted.

Speaker 5 We mind the issue not only on the substance as it relates to this crisis of isolation for men and boys, but outcomes, outcomes that are moving in just devastating directions.

Speaker 5 80% of suicides, men, dropout rates, suspension rates, disproportionately, men.

Speaker 5 You see graduation rates, particularly college attendance and graduation, going through the roof for women and and girls, but not again for men. It's not just an electoral issue.

Speaker 5 So often this is discussed in the context of Trump doing so well in the last election with young men in the manosphere and more broadly doing well with men generally.

Speaker 5 But the issue is an important issue that we need to dive deeper in.

Speaker 5 And that's just what we did recently with Richard Reeves, who's the founder of the president of the American Institute of Boys and Men.

Speaker 5 And we had a conversation that really goes to the root of why, what is going on, not just in the United States, but increasingly all around the world

Speaker 5 with young men. And this led me to look inward as well as governor of California to say, what more can I do?

Speaker 5 And so we are also putting out today, concurrent with this podcast, an executive order that focuses exactly on that, what to do, not just who's to blame and what the challenges are, but specific tangible actions that we can invest our time and energy into beginning to solve this growing crisis.

Speaker 5 This is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 5 And this is Richard Reeves.

Speaker 5 All right, Richard Reeves, thanks so much for joining us. And more importantly, thank you for your work.

Speaker 5 And I'm just curious, the amount of attention you're getting is outsized, obviously, people rediscovering this remarkable book that was extraordinarily well received of boys and men when you wrote it, but now seemingly rediscovered it because of sort of the moment we're living in.

Speaker 5 But I'm curious, what moment led you

Speaker 5 to this moment, meaning this whole issue around masculinity, issues around boys and men. your own journey to

Speaker 5 being one of the most important figures in trying to understand what the hell is going on with American men.

Speaker 30 Yeah, well, thank you. Thanks for that question and for having me.

Speaker 30 I guess the way to think about it is I was spending my days at the Brookings Institution, being a scholar, reading papers, going to seminars. Imagine what a Brookings Institution scholar does.

Speaker 30 And that is exactly what we do, Rick. Like you read a paper, you go to a seminar, you read another paper.
And I was working on issues around inequality, economic inequality.

Speaker 30 That's really been the through line of my work. And in particular, intergenerational inequality, like what's stopping people moving up the ladder.

Speaker 30 I did that in the UK government, which is where I'm originally from, and then at Brookings.

Speaker 30 And so, and I just kept seeing these data points where it was really a lot of boys and men, especially those from working-class backgrounds, boys and men of color, who are driving a lot of the economic inequalities that we were worried about.

Speaker 30 But I didn't see that many people paying attention to that particular gender part of the story.

Speaker 30 And I would be going home, and I've got three sons, and they're being raised in an affluent, educated household.

Speaker 30 So they are not the boys and men who we should be most worried about from a policy point of view. But nonetheless, they had a lot of questions.
They were spending a lot of time online.

Speaker 30 And I think the whole debate about masculinity, the roles of men and women shifting so quickly was playing out over our dinner table as well. And so in the end, those things came together.

Speaker 30 And honestly, part of it was that I didn't think that many people were having a good faith conversation about this.

Speaker 30 I saw a lot of bad faith discussions of what was happening to boys and men, but not many empirically based good faith discussions and so that was what I decided to do.

Speaker 5 And so you're at Brookings, you're focused on issues around middle class, income inequality, wealth inequality. You wrote a book in that space around upper middle class.

Speaker 5 And so give it, what year roughly was that research really started and you started to notice this trend or this lack of focus and intentionality on boys and men?

Speaker 30 Yeah, so I wrote a book called Dream Hoarders, which came out in 2017.

Speaker 30 And it was really about the way that the upper middle class, the professional class, top 10, 20%, were really pulling away from everybody else and how that was causing all kinds of issues.

Speaker 30 And candidly, that we, because I put myself solidly in that class,

Speaker 30 really weren't taking responsibility for the ways in which we were actually rigging the opportunity system.

Speaker 30 You think about the housing market, which I know you're very interested in, higher education, which you're also very interested in.

Speaker 30 I saw those systems working pretty well for me and my neighbors in Bethesda, Maryland, where I was living at the time. But I also saw us holding other people out.
And so

Speaker 30 I think that was one of the root causes of the political moment that we're in, but also just this cultural moment. And then I looked at it harder and I looked and I saw, actually, you know what?

Speaker 30 It's a lot of men who are just struggling to rise up the ladder. They're doing worse than their fathers did.

Speaker 30 I mean, the fact that men without a college degree only earn the same today as that group of men did 50 years ago. Like wage stagnation for most men over a half century is a story.

Speaker 30 And it's a huge part of that economic inequality. And it's a huge part of why we don't see that upward mobility because those men are struggling.
They then maybe don't form families.

Speaker 30 Or if they do, they're not able to kind of provide for them in the way they'd hope to.

Speaker 30 Women are, of course, then picking up more and more of the slack, which is I know something you're also interested in. I think your other half is even more interested in.

Speaker 30 The whole idea of fair play and so on. And so I think in the end, it's just bad for everybody if young men and boys are struggling in our economy and struggling in our society.

Speaker 30 And so that's really why in the end, I think, just needed a different kind of spotlight on the question.

Speaker 5 So the question always arises is this notion of a zero-sum game, that if we're talking about boys and men, we're not talking about women and girls.

Speaker 5 And we're talking about boys and men, we're talking about it in sort of historic advantage that goes back, you know, hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands of years to, you know, particularly white males.

Speaker 5 Why the hell do we need to be focusing on them at a time when women still are struggling to get equal pay,

Speaker 5 still do not have the kind of gender equality in the home? Back to the reference you were just making in terms of fair play in the household.

Speaker 5 Women are still absorbing so much of that burden and so much of that that work. There's still so much more work that needs to be done for women and girls.

Speaker 5 Why, Richard, spends so much time on boys and men?

Speaker 30 Well, because we can do two things at once.

Speaker 30 That's my bet, my huge bet here is that people, including policymakers like yourself, are able to do both, able to simultaneously say, there's a bunch more stuff we need to do for women and girls.

Speaker 30 And you've just listed some of them. I'll add one more.
I think it's particularly relevant to your state, which is

Speaker 30 only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders.

Speaker 30 Now,

Speaker 30 I happen to be married to someone who has herself tried to raise money for the venture capital market.

Speaker 30 So, I'm obliged by the terms of my marital contract to mention that in every interview that I do, and you're not allowed to cut that out.

Speaker 30 And so, like, the idea, and what, 25% of members of Congress are women, 10% of CEOs are women, like the idea that there isn't more still to do for women and girls is crazy.

Speaker 30 But the idea that that means we can't also look at the fact that the suicide rate among young men has risen by a third since 2010, and that we lose 40,000 men a year to suicide, four times as many as we do for women.

Speaker 30 I've mentioned wage stagnation, that we have these huge gender gaps in education now, where a lot of boys are really struggling at school.

Speaker 30 I just think it's a bit like saying to a parent who has a son and a daughter, or at least one of each, and basically saying to them, you're only allowed to choose one of them to care about.

Speaker 30 It's almost like we've done that to ourselves as a society, and somehow anybody advocating for the issues of boys and men is immediately castigated as someone who's anti-women.

Speaker 30 And to be fair, lots of the people who are advocating for boys and men are anti-women, right? And so that becomes a really vicious cycle.

Speaker 30 And just to speak personally for a moment, that was one of the reasons why I couldn't get a publisher for my book to start with.

Speaker 30 It's one of the reasons why, at the time I was at Brookings, my colleagues were lining up outside my door warning me against this issue. And the argument was only

Speaker 30 reactionary, angry misogynists write books about boys and men. Therefore, if you write a book about boys and men, you will be seen as an angry, reactionary misogynist.

Speaker 30 And I thought about that, decided that's the definition of a vicious cycle. And you've then just ceded all that ground to those very folks.
You've created a vacuum. And honestly, if people as

Speaker 30 people as boring as I am, Governor, can't talk about this issue, then we're in real trouble. Like, one of the mottos of my new institute, the American Institute for Boys and Men, is keep it boring.

Speaker 30 And as my son, my middle son, likes to point out, he says, you're the man for that job, Dad. If that's your mission, they found their president.

Speaker 30 But there's a serious point behind that, which is that, like, we need data, we need research, and we need to do it, as you said a moment ago, in a non-zero some some way.

Speaker 30 Because

Speaker 30 I think you've spoken about this, and I'd be interested to see how your thinking has evolved on this, which is

Speaker 30 the question is not,

Speaker 30 is there going to be a conversation about what does it mean to be a man today?

Speaker 30 The question is, who's going to have it?

Speaker 30 Are you going to have it? in the conversations you're having now? Are other governors going to have it? Are the mainstream media going to have it? Are think tanks going to have it?

Speaker 30 Or are we all just going to say, no, no, no, that's not for us. We don't want people to think we're misogynists.
And so we leave the conversation to the reactionary online right.

Speaker 30 And I'm afraid that if that's the case, we deserve to lose these young men. Like we can't, you don't create a vacuum and then complain about the fact that someone's pouring into it.

Speaker 5 I love what you just said. I mean, it's one of the reasons we started this podcast with Charlie Kirk, who's one of the many people in this space that is filling that void.

Speaker 5 And I want to talk a little bit more, not about necessarily

Speaker 5 that space specifically in the Manosphere, and talk about about your reaction to this notion of the Manosphere, just the nomenclature of the Manosphere more broadly.

Speaker 5 But it is interesting to me, just backing up a little bit what you said, I mean, the fact that you had difficulty finding publishers for the book, that there was so, and this isn't that long, I mean, you're talking about just a few years ago.

Speaker 30 Right, 2021, yeah.

Speaker 5 That there was that kind of reticence around moving this conversation forward or broadening the appeal beyond just sort of a reactionary right-wing framework.

Speaker 5 And you're, by the way, hardly a left-wing, and this is not a political thing per se,

Speaker 5 but it's interesting to me, even your friends and colleagues were warning you against entering in this space.

Speaker 30 Aaron Powell, it's just seen as, it was seen as very dangerous territory. I think the permission space has really opened up around it

Speaker 30 in recent years, because I just think in the end, these things are true. These problems are true.
And if something's true, you can't ignore it forever.

Speaker 30 And it's become one of my strongest beliefs that the way to turn a real problem into a grievance is to simply ignore it. I think ignored problems are what metastasize into grievances.

Speaker 30 And so if I'm in a conversation with someone who is sore on the men's rights side of the argument or reactionary, I want them to sound crazy when they claim that the governors, the presidents, the think tanks don't care about boys and men.

Speaker 30 They will say, so a figure like Andrew Tate or others will say, they don't care about boys and men.

Speaker 30 And I want that claim to sound crazy, but the trouble is it doesn't sound crazy. Right now, we haven't done enough.

Speaker 30 There haven't been enough policies, there haven't been enough public announcements about we see the problems of boys and men from, frankly, people like you, Governor, and from others.

Speaker 30 Like, I think this is a fantastic move.

Speaker 30 But I don't think it's unfair of the people on the conservative or even the reactionary side of this argument to point to what has been something of a deafening silence from the other side of the aisle on this issue for the reasons that we've already talked about, that fear that somehow you'd be seen as anti-woman, but that has just created this, seeded the ground.

Speaker 30 And so I don't, my goal is to make the crazies sound crazy, but right now they don't.

Speaker 5 And it's interesting, just

Speaker 5 in taking, you know, a little bit of my own journey on this, you know, and I appreciate your reference to my wife. She's done a series of documentaries.

Speaker 5 And one of the documentaries, her second documentary was around masculinity. It was around the issues of boys and men in 2015.

Speaker 5 Around the same time you were starting to write that book around income inequality.

Speaker 5 She was highlighting the suicide rates and the dropout rates and issues around incarceration, crime, self-harm and the like,

Speaker 5 and isolation, loneliness. It wasn't a focus as much on what was happening in terms of algorithms and online activity.

Speaker 5 But it was interesting just that the reaction she got. She did it from the feminist perspective, bringing in Jackson Katz and some of the others that focused on the issues of violence and women.

Speaker 5 But the reaction to it was pretty remarkable, to your point.

Speaker 5 And even I saw myself on that journey as I'm there promoting the film, promoting the sort of contours of that debate, how uncomfortable it was, particularly for me. to enter into that debate.

Speaker 5 And I sort of stepped back and you're right. I think there's been a huge void, particularly in the Democratic Party, on this issue.

Speaker 5 And you're right. These folks on the other side have walked into that debate and they've weaponized it,

Speaker 5 some more benign than others.

Speaker 5 But obviously, the issues, how the politics has changed is, I think, an interesting part of this.

Speaker 30 To be fair to you and to the Democratic Party, I don't think it was just the Democratic Party. I think it was the liberal establishment kind of writ large.
It was the think tanks.

Speaker 30 It was the media where this was just difficult. And one of the things I've really come to believe about this is that you just described your own discomfort with talking about this issue.

Speaker 30 And I suspect that you're still feeling some of that now. And what I would say is, good.

Speaker 30 You don't want to lose that discomfort because I honestly think that it should be an uncomfortable conversation, given the history,

Speaker 30 given the issues we still have to work on for women. There should be a difficulty to this conversation.
There should be a discomfort to this conversation.

Speaker 30 I honestly think if you don't find this conversation a little bit uncomfortable, you shouldn't be in it, right?

Speaker 30 I think if you think it's all simple, yeah, men are struggling because the woke feminists have taken over and we just need to go back, say, 50, 100, 150 years, take your pit.

Speaker 30 Anybody who thinks like that shouldn't be in the conversation. But on the other hand, we shouldn't let the natural, in fact, honorable discomfort that we feel, and honestly, obviously women.

Speaker 30 are going to feel much more strongly. That should be acknowledged.
That should be discussed. But it shouldn't stop us.

Speaker 30 It should make us pause, it should be something that we get into the room, that we say, of course this is difficult, and of course there's more we need to do of women and girls,

Speaker 30 and there's also this bunch of issues for boys and men. And my experience of this,

Speaker 30 and I'd be interested to see whether you agree with this, is that if you frame it that way, Actually, there's a huge appetite to have this conversation, including among the most feminist women out there, because they have sons, they have brothers, they have husbands.

Speaker 30 As long as there isn't this fear that this is going to be used as a way to go back on women's rights or to negate the ongoing work of women, as long as people trust you, that that's not what you're doing, then I have discovered the appetite for this conversation is huge.

Speaker 28 If you have ever worried about the safety of your home, you need to hear this. Right now, Simply Safe is giving This Is Gavin Newsome listeners early access to their Black Friday sale.

Speaker 28 Here's why SimplySafe is the only security system you should trust to keep your home safe. Typical security systems don't really prevent someone from entering your home.

Speaker 28 They just react once someone is already inside. Real security stops a crime before it even starts.
That's why over 4 million Americans trust SimplySafe.

Speaker 28 SimplySafe takes action before a criminal gets into your home. The moment someone steps onto your property, AI security cameras identify the threat and alert SimplySafe's live agents.

Speaker 28 Agents take action immediately, confronting the criminal and, if they need to, triggering sirens and dispatching the police. SimplySafe is like having your own personal security guard.

Speaker 28 And right now, you can take 60% off any new system with early access to SimplySafe's Black Friday sale at simplysafe.com/slash Gavin. That's simplysafe.com/slash Gavin for 60% off.

Speaker 28 There's no safe safe like Simply Safe.

Speaker 2 Hey, Ryan Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now, Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited.

Speaker 3 To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

Speaker 2 And Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

Speaker 6 So that means a

Speaker 5 half day.

Speaker 2 Yeah? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Speaker 7 Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only.
Speed slow under 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 5 Cementmobile.com.

Speaker 8 Life gets messy. Spills, stains, and kid chaos.
But with Anibay, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again.

Speaker 8 Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Speaker 8 Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Speaker 8 Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.
That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Speaker 8 Get early access to Black Friday pricing right now. Sofas started just $699.

Speaker 8 Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 10 No, it's not too soon to start holiday shopping.

Speaker 11 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 14 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 16 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 18 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 22 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 26 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 32 The ocean delights us.

Speaker 33 Some marvel at the colorful world below the surface.

Speaker 34 The ocean feeds us.

Speaker 35 Others find nourishment in its bounty.

Speaker 32 The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices impact even the deepest places.

Speaker 35 The ocean moves us, whether we're riding a wave or soaking in its breathtaking beauty.

Speaker 34 The ocean connects us.

Speaker 38 Find your connection at Monterey montereybayaquarium.org slash connects.

Speaker 5 But laying that foundation becomes critical. And that's a central part, I think, of creating that, as you say, that permission, that space where we can have this dialogue in a constructive way.

Speaker 5 That said as well, I mean, there's been that reaction. You know, we've got, you know, people like Josh Howley writes a book on manhood.

Speaker 5 and seem to go again in a direction that a lot of folks online have gone. You expressed one of the, or at least highlighted one of the more extreme voices, Andrew Tate, in this space.

Speaker 5 I think you've written about and talked about even your own kids,

Speaker 5 the relationship to Andrew as it relates to their algorithms online.

Speaker 5 Even Jordan Peterson, who, you know, has had his own evolution or devolution, depending on how some people view his perspectives on a myriad of issues.

Speaker 5 But this issue, you're right, has really come to the fore. I think about it, you know, with my wife, we have two boys, two girls.

Speaker 5 And my wife is now the bigger crusader on this saying what the hell has happened to our boys what is going on online um what is happening why is he bringing up andrew tate why is he talking about he he talked i i'm smiling because when you were writing about this jordan peterson he's telling me about jordan peterson before i knew much about jordan peterson my kids were telling me about andrew tate my youngest son who's now 23, said, when I was finishing my book, he said, Dad, you have to write about Andrew Tate.

Speaker 30 And I said, who the hell is Andrew Tate?

Speaker 30 I looked briefly at him, decided that he wasn't a big enough figure to worry about, didn't mention him. But of course, you know, of course I was wrong.

Speaker 30 And it's very interesting how

Speaker 30 the, let's just assume for the sake of this argument that you and I are both middle-aged.

Speaker 30 Right. That might be flattering both of us, but let's go with it.
Right. Let's take it.

Speaker 30 Little age. But we just...
honestly don't understand it. I think you got into a little bit of trouble for lumping together Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate at one point.

Speaker 30 And I don't think you do that now.

Speaker 30 I think that was a moment where this sort of gauzy, blobby thing over there was just hard to decode. But as you get closer to it, you understand that within it, big differences.

Speaker 30 I've actually come to think that the term manosphere is not helpful. Because

Speaker 30 it just lumps together people who are doing very, very different things in different ways.

Speaker 30 And the young men who are the disproportionate consumers of a lot of that content, they understand the differences.

Speaker 30 And so if we don't sound like we understand the differences, then we just sound like, you know, old men

Speaker 30 shaking our fist at the world.

Speaker 30 And so I don't know how to do this yet, but there's almost like a brosphere, which is more like Rogan, certainly Chris Williamson, who I like quite a lot, and maybe even Theo Vaughan, I've been on his podcast.

Speaker 30 And then there's the kind of misogynosphere, or I don't know what to call it, do you know what I mean? And they're very different.

Speaker 30 And it's quite important to keep that difference in our minds because otherwise people think they're all the same. And they're really not.
What they are all doing is

Speaker 30 trying to come up with answers to the questions that many young men are asking. And they're doing so with various degrees of openness and fidelity.
And

Speaker 30 you can't throw them all together. And to do so is to, again, make a similar version of that mistake we were talking about earlier, which is to seed all that ground, right? Just don't, don't go there.

Speaker 5 I love what you think what you just said is extraordinarily important. And

Speaker 5 what you also referenced, I think is important. What are these young boys looking for? I mean,

Speaker 5 we see how they fall prey to the algorithms. And, you know, you've written obviously a lot about, you know, what, you know,

Speaker 5 these kids and their body images and issues related, you know, six-pack abs, or, you know, maybe they're on gaming and all of a sudden then, you know, they're they're they're on an Andrew Tate you know they're they're asking their parents for 35 bucks to become part of his Andrew Tate Masculinity University or some hybrid version of that for someone else but what are young boys looking for they are looking for an answer to the question how should I be a man today

Speaker 30 and the bit of that that's hard is today it's just much harder and

Speaker 30 that has that question is being asked with an urgency which is new. It's not that it hasn't always had to be asked to some extent, right? I think every generation has got to think about that.

Speaker 30 But there's a new urgency to it now, partly for the really good reason of the huge rise in the economic independence of women.

Speaker 30 So I'm one of the people who celebrates the fact that 40% of women now earn more than the typical man, the median man. Now, That's not equality.
That would mean 50%, right?

Speaker 30 But in 1979, that figure was 13%,

Speaker 30 right? And that's well within my lifetime.

Speaker 30 And so, in the space of a very short period of economic history, we have transformed the economic relationships between men and women in a way that is wonderful. Arguably

Speaker 30 the greatest economic liberation in human history as it rolls around the world, still far from complete.

Speaker 30 But, like, is that the fact that my wife has had opportunities that my mum could only dream of that's just the most wonderful thing.

Speaker 30 And it has put a question mark next to the role of men because the traditional role of breadwinner has to very large extent now disappeared for the very good reason I've just identified but we shouldn't be naive about the fact that doesn't actually then put a big question mark and we shouldn't be naive about the fact that will leave some men at least hungering for the world where you knew what it meant to be a man so they're asking the question

Speaker 30 and going online and finding all kinds of different answers. Now I will say one more thing, which is maybe a bit more of a critique of the

Speaker 30 cultural blobby left. I don't know what to do.

Speaker 30 I'm sure you know what I mean.

Speaker 30 The blob, the liberal blob, which is

Speaker 30 they have done a much better job of outlining what not to do

Speaker 30 as a man, what not to be as a man, than what to do. A lot of young men feel like they've come out into the world with a long list of don'ts.

Speaker 30 Don't say this. Don't.

Speaker 5 Don't say this. I mean, just in terms of the political correctness, the way

Speaker 30 and just, you know, the consent story and so on, too. And to be clear, in case it needs to be said again,

Speaker 30 all good. But I had this experience with one of my kids came home from, I guess it was middle or early high, and they'd done the social skills class or the relationship class or whatever.

Speaker 30 whatever Orwellian term is being used to describe the kind of social emotional skills,

Speaker 30 how to get by in the world class class thing. Right.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 sorry, that was very unfair to say it was all well in, but

Speaker 30 what I mean. It's always this weird thing.
The social skills and emotional vocabulary literacy class or something. And I said, well, what did you learn? And he said, we did masculinity stuff today.

Speaker 30 And I said, that's interesting. What did you learn? And he said, here's a list of 33 things that I know I'm not supposed to do or say.

Speaker 30 And we went through the list together. I agreed with every single one of them.
And we had a good conversation about them. And I said, and

Speaker 30 he said, no, that was it.

Speaker 30 So,

Speaker 30 for reasons that I understand, but I am increasingly impatient with, there's been a reluctance to set out a kind of positive vision of modern masculinity, one that's compatible with gender equality, but is still appealing to young men, for fear that that will somehow send us down this slippery slope back to the 1950s again.

Speaker 30 But what that means is that we've done a really good job of setting out the curriculum of what not to be

Speaker 30 without anything positive

Speaker 30 to take the place of the old script. So we've torn up the old script of masculinity, which was based around protector, provider, breadwinner.
We've torn that up.

Speaker 30 And we've torn up the old one around femininity, which was, you know, you're going to be a mom, housewife, mom. We've torn them both up.

Speaker 30 We replaced the female one with an incredibly powerful and rather beautiful one about empowerment and liberation. You go, girl, the future's female, girls on the run, black girl magic.

Speaker 30 I love all of it. So it's very kind of culture of empowerment and possibility that we've replaced now for girls and women.

Speaker 30 We also tore up the old male script and we didn't replace it.

Speaker 30 And so we just tore up the old one and said, yeah, well, you're not going to be like your dad. The economy is very different now.
And so then the question, okay,

Speaker 30 well, what should I be like then?

Speaker 30 We haven't had a good answer to that, but along come some of the online folks and they have a very clear answer. And if we don't like it, we need a better one.

Speaker 30 The idea that we don't need one is the ultimate naivety. And I think that's what's happened.
There's become this sense that

Speaker 30 equality will require androgyny.

Speaker 30 And honestly, I think I used to think that too. I think in my I used to think, ah, let's get past all this masculine, feminine, male, female stuff.
Let's all, you know, we're all human.

Speaker 30 And I still love that idea, but I've really come to believe partly as a result of my own experience as a parent more generally, generally, that that is naive, that we do actually still need a way to talk about men and women overlapping and distinct, but still beautiful.

Speaker 5 And so I want to unpack that. And

Speaker 5 this notion of filling that void and painting a positive alternative

Speaker 5 is foundational and critical. And I want to get to some of your specific ideas in that space.
But take me back a little bit.

Speaker 5 You've written a lot about this sort of, and I come from California, go west, young man, go west, this notion of the great frontier the freedom uh and this guy or gal or at least guy in this case on the the white horse come saving the day sort of the you know john wayne of vacation reagan uh you know coast a dream the whole thing this the notion of the lone ranger as you write about it um being free uh but you suggest increasingly lonely i mean

Speaker 5 sort of bring us back a little bit Yeah, and to be clear,

Speaker 30 just that description, I mean, I'm a proud U.S. citizen, have been since 2016.
And that pioneering spirit, that sense of optimism and growth and possibility is, I used to work here before this too.

Speaker 30 I love, love, love that about this country. But do you think there's this sense that

Speaker 30 at its worst, there's this movement online, the men going their own way movement, which is literally just men decoupling from society and becoming, they're sort of male separatists, essentially, just saying we need to separate ourselves away from society.

Speaker 30 But even a bit less extreme than that, there's this sense of like, men are supposed to be independent. And if men are going to get married, it's because a woman will sort of trap him into it.

Speaker 30 You talk about the ball and chain. There's all this tropes around that.
Well, actually, it turns out in the most recent surveys, men think being married is more important than women do.

Speaker 30 And that's because

Speaker 30 men know something. And the truth is that masculinity, properly defined, has always been relational.
It's always been about

Speaker 30 service and surplus.

Speaker 30 I came across this definition in the literature for anthropology saying that actually in a lot of societies, the marker of going from boy to man was when you were producing more of something than you needed for yourself.

Speaker 30 You're producing a surplus, right? It could be meat, it could be money, it could be something.

Speaker 30 And that's because just in the natural environment, like it takes a long time to raise kids and that's very demanding on the mums. And so it was masculinity was literally defined by service.

Speaker 30 was literally defined by giving more than you get, producing more than you need. Now, what that thing is is going to be will change.

Speaker 30 That's very important to say, because again, this can sound like we're calling for the old system. But I still love that idea that actually

Speaker 30 the way that you can tell if someone's a man is how he is with other people,

Speaker 30 how he is with his own kids, other people's kids, if he's a teacher, as my middle son is now a teacher in Baltimore City. And like watching him,

Speaker 30 big guy at the front of a classroom and he coaches soccer, he coaches a girls' soccer team.

Speaker 30 Just there's something about that which is beautiful and i'm not suggesting of course that women don't also do that to be clear but there is something about this idea of what i would refer to as relational masculinity as opposed to lone ranger masculinity i think a man going his own way and only looking out for himself is actually not a man That's the least masculine thing you can do is only look out for yourself.

Speaker 30 And that's that's been true throughout human history. right it's about the tribe it's about the family it's about your people and so i've really been disturbed by this

Speaker 30 strand of separatism uh and stark autonomy that you see online which is like a real man is a man who answers only to himself and i'm sorry but that's just bullshit and and and every human society has shown that to be the case a man is is a man is someone who gives and that's my my father was like that i I mean, I saw that being played out in my own childhood, which was like he was the guy that defined himself by his very embeddedness in his community, not his separateness from it.

Speaker 30 And I really worry about the isolation that's gripping many of our men now. And I think it's because of this false idea about what it means to be a man.

Speaker 8 Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anibay. AniBay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 8 That's right, sofas start at just $699.

Speaker 8 Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric.

Speaker 8 Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Speaker 8 Shop washable sofas.com for early Black Friday savings up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

Speaker 8 No return shipping or restocking fees, every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 10 No, it's not too soon to start holiday shopping.

Speaker 11 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 14 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 16 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 18 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 22 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 26 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 32 The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kilt forests.

Speaker 34 The ocean teaches us how our choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean connects us.

Speaker 39 Visit montereybayaquarium.org/slash connects.

Speaker 6 Being a parent is basically a juggling act. Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always

Speaker 6 shouting for you from another room. So yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works.
And that's why I'm all in on HelloFresh.

Speaker 6 Fresh ingredients, super easy recipes, and over 80 options every week. So everyone eats.
No one complains. and I get to feel like I've got it all together, at least for dinner.

Speaker 6 And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause any time, pick what works for you.
It's dinner on your terms. They even have 15-minute recipes.

Speaker 6 Perfect for those nights when everyone's hungry and patience is officially off the menu.

Speaker 6 And with so many options, even my pickiest eater found something they loved, which means no more backup mac and cheese. Try HelloFresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping.

Speaker 6 Go to hellofresh.ca and use promo code meal50. That's hellofresh.ca promo code meal50.

Speaker 31 Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. Well, I don't know about you, but like I never liked being told, oh, wow, you look so good for your age.

Speaker 31 Like, why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look great at any age, every age? That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about.

Speaker 31 We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now.

Speaker 26 Meaningful Beauty, beautiful skin at every age.

Speaker 31 Learn more at meaningfulbeauty.com.

Speaker 5 In this notion of community versus, you know, of this disconnect that people are now, you know, deeply lonely, that I imagine is at the core of why 80% of suicides are men. Is that it?

Speaker 5 I mean, is that the trend line or is it something deeper? Is it just self-worth, feeling worthless? Is it the fact that, you know,

Speaker 5 I've no longer had value because, you know, my physical strength, my physical capacity is no longer the advantage in a sort of cognitive world in terms of the economic shifts and realities?

Speaker 5 What is it? I mean,

Speaker 5 what are these? These suicide rates are jaw-dropping. Amazing.

Speaker 30 And I will say that the thing that I didn't know until we dug into it more recently was that it's re-swung to young men.

Speaker 30 So up until 2010, it was really middle-aged men where we saw this rise in suicide, which I think was consistent with the story of deaths of despair, what was happening in the economy, and so on.

Speaker 30 But since 2010, the rise has basically all been among young men under 30. And we honestly don't really know why, but it's a huge rise.

Speaker 30 And I'm sure it's connected to some of these conversations that you've been having around

Speaker 30 what I call neededness, for want of a better term.

Speaker 30 Yeah, I just think there's

Speaker 30 like

Speaker 30 I've I've come to believe that a human universal is the need to be needed

Speaker 30 and that feeling unneeded is in this case almost literally fatal.

Speaker 30 A very good study by Fiona Shand and her colleagues looked at the words that men use to describe themselves before taking their own lives through suicide and the two most commonly used to describe themselves were worthless.

Speaker 30 and useless. We also know that the suicide rate among men goes up very significantly after a breakdown, a marital breakdown or a separation.
It does not go up for women, goes up a lot for men.

Speaker 30 So that gap gets even bigger. We know it's much higher for men who are not employed.
We know it's much higher for men who, as you just indicate a minute ago, disconnected, isolated.

Speaker 30 And so what's happening, I think, is that too many men aren't sure that they're needed. They're not sure that the economy needs them.
They're not sure that their family needs them.

Speaker 30 They're not sure their community needs them. And so we've got to find a way to supply that sense to many men of that

Speaker 30 we still need you. Like we need you.
And I've actually been struck, this is something I, again, I've learned recently, is that there's a huge lack of men volunteering in many civic institutions.

Speaker 30 So I just signed up to be a big brother. I'm a big fan of big brothers, big sisters.
And now that I've empty-nested, maybe I'm also trying to fill a hole in myself too.

Speaker 30 But I was shocked to discover that the waiting list for boys, where I live in East Tennessee, for a big, is 12 months.

Speaker 30 For girls, it's three months because they have at least as many boys being referred as girls, and they have so few male volunteers.

Speaker 30 And I look around, and people should look in their own area, and they will almost certainly discover that there is a massive shortage of male bigs.

Speaker 30 And so, big brothers, big sisters is becoming big sisters by default because of a lack of male volunteers.

Speaker 30 And at the same time, we have a lot of men who maybe lack some structure and purpose in their lives. And so, there's got to be a way to make that call, but it has to be to men.

Speaker 30 That's the thing that sounds a bit socially conservative about this, which is that I think you've got to make a specific call, which is like, guys,

Speaker 30 we need you. We don't just need volunteers, we need some guys for this.
If guys are told like we need guys, they're much more likely to turn up.

Speaker 30 And we could argue forever about why that is, but it just seems to be true. And so there's something quite deep in our culture here that, as men, we

Speaker 30 like as fathers, that's obvious, maybe in the workplace. But if we start start to doubt whether the tribe needs us, I think we fade away.

Speaker 5 Do you assign these trend lines to deinstitutionalization, the conversations we're having today around reshoring and manufacturing? Are you seeing these trend lines globally along those same lines?

Speaker 5 Is it

Speaker 5 now because we're online more and it's algorithms that it's getting exacerbated?

Speaker 5 I mean, what are the, what are the sort of, or is it just the ascendancy of the feminist movement and sort of that friction, that dialectic that's, you know, that we're not expressing or at least discussing as much?

Speaker 5 What do you attach this to?

Speaker 30 Yeah, I mean, am I allowed to say yes to all of the above, right? Yeah.

Speaker 5 A little bit of everything, huh?

Speaker 30 A little bit, but I do think that the way I think about this is that it's like the, if you think of the culture as like a kaleidoscope, I think it's been shaken very significantly and the pieces have not settled again again yet.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 some of the forces that have shaken our culture have been really good, like the economic rise of women, which we mentioned earlier.

Speaker 30 Now, the economic rise of women is a profound fact about modern societies. It is a wonderful thing.
And it has also massively destabilized the way we think about male and female role. And

Speaker 30 we've got to acknowledge that if we want to keep making progress. I think like a big thing here is you can have a huge step forward, which still has some turbulence turbulence around it, right?

Speaker 30 So finding a way to take men with us on this journey, that's huge.

Speaker 30 But as you just referred to, it's also also true that while that was happening, that deindustrialization, some of the issues around trade just disproportionately hit working-class men.

Speaker 30 So that's happened at the same time. And then right towards the end of this period, we're seeing the rise of online culture.
Now,

Speaker 30 we focus a lot on the negatives of online culture. I sometimes wonder about the potential positives.

Speaker 30 Because in almost all of human history, having more men who don't have that much to do, have time on their hands, has predicted much higher crime rates and much higher social unrest.

Speaker 30 That seems to, it's almost like a fixed law of societies, right? That hasn't happened this time.

Speaker 30 And I think it's plausible to suggest that that might be because

Speaker 30 the men have something else to do

Speaker 30 with gaming, with pornography, with whatever the online content is, etc. And so

Speaker 30 now I'm not arguing in favor of those things when I say this, but it is nonetheless striking that these trends in young male, particularly young male disengagement, which would almost automatically produce higher crime rates in every other area of Cuba, because they'd be kicking around on the streets, they'd be trying to figure out what to do, they'd be getting into fights, they'd be like

Speaker 30 that's not happened. And so in some ways, what's happened instead is a male retreat.

Speaker 30 And so I've ended up being more worried about the men who are checking out than the men who are acting out. Now, of course, the men who act out get all the headlines.

Speaker 30 And I don't in any way want to diminish the problems around men acting out. But I see a much deeper problem here, which is just this withdrawal, this retreat,

Speaker 30 this passivity that many men feel because they can retreat to this online world, which wasn't there, wasn't there when I was growing up or when you were growing up in the same way, but it is there now.

Speaker 30 And so what it gives men is an alternative world to escape to. And the question is, why are so many of them wanting to escape?

Speaker 5 And I mean, it's a rhetorical question for you. I mean, why is that then? I mean, is it what?

Speaker 5 I mean, it's,

Speaker 5 well, let's, I mean, this is an opportunity, obviously, to segue into what we need to do. But I mean, why, I mean, again, is there any, is it just these larger trend lines?

Speaker 5 I mean, what, is there, there is there sort of a moment that marks i mean or is it just this longer shift it's decades in the making i mean or can you literally mark is there a cultural moment uh that really sort of where you saw this trend accelerate this trend line became this headline the way i think about this is that you see these cultural trends happening relatively slowly in terms of a human lifespan, right?

Speaker 30 They happen over decades, but they're like, you know, the tectonic plates shifting around.

Speaker 30 And then you'll get, once they hit a certain point, then you'll get the earthquake or the volcano.

Speaker 30 But beneath the surface, and this is very much your state, so you understand this better than most governors.

Speaker 30 It's like stuff, the ground is moving beneath the surface, and then that will create this kind of eruption. I think the ground has been shifting for at least half a century.

Speaker 30 It's been shifting economically with a shift away from blue-collar, male-favored jobs.

Speaker 30 It's been shifting in terms of the relative position of men and women, with women going from being essentially economically dependent on men to being economically independent to a very large degree.

Speaker 30 And in the education system, we've seen this massive reversal of the gender gap so that boys and men are now way behind women and girls when they leave school or when they leave college.

Speaker 30 I mean, at college now, there's a bigger gender gap on college campuses today than there was in 1972 when we passed Title IX, but it's the other way around. So we're about 60-40 now, female, male.

Speaker 30 And so these things didn't happen overnight. They've been building and developing.

Speaker 30 And then I think this online culture has intersected with this in one way, just talked about to kind of give men a place to retreat to, which I think is bad in the long run, but also to start weaponizing.

Speaker 30 to use the term you used earlier, some of these grievances, some of these issues. And so I think it takes quite a long time to neglect issues that have been built.

Speaker 30 But I think they've been coming for quite a while now. It's just that they've broken through the surface now into our culture and into our politics in a way that's made them very hard to ignore.

Speaker 30 But I honestly think they've been building for many decades now.

Speaker 5 So speaking of politics, I mean, obviously the Trump campaign did not ignore this space.

Speaker 5 And I don't think they ignored it for, you know, four or eight years prior either. But they seem to have really been the beneficiary of more focus on young men, on some of these trend lines.

Speaker 5 Obviously, the amount of time and energy the campaign spent targeting young men, targeting men broadly,

Speaker 5 that paid huge dividends. I think there was a 15-point shift from 41%, 56%,

Speaker 5 men under 30 that moved towards Trump

Speaker 5 campaign. What do you make of

Speaker 5 his approach to these issues?

Speaker 5 Do you think they're cynical? Do you think he's approached it at least with a sensitivity, a recognition?

Speaker 5 And where do you think my party as Democrats sort of seemed completely devoid of focus and energy? I was certainly not a focus at the DNC. I know we have a close acquaintance.

Speaker 5 At least I had a privilege of having him on the podcast, Scott Galloway, close friend of yours. Scott talked about the DNC and he talked about going on there, DNC, what we care about.

Speaker 5 And it was every single thing that's out there and imaginable, except 26%.

Speaker 5 of the population that the DNC didn't seem to care about in a least at all, at least based on

Speaker 5 their their own website and their own priorities and policy.

Speaker 5 What do you think of Trump's efforts in this space?

Speaker 30 Yeah, so the way I think about this is that in politics, something almost always beats nothing.

Speaker 30 And what there was from the Democrats on issues around boys and men was nothing.

Speaker 30 It was the sound of deafening silence on these issues. And that's been true for a while.

Speaker 30 And I think for the reasons that were identified earlier, which is that the Democrats were very determined to be seen particularly by women as the party that were supporting them and they felt that any moves to acknowledge the issues the challenges of boys and men would somehow undermine their claim to be the party for women I think that was a fatal miscalculation I also think honestly it was somewhat insulting to women because there are plenty of women out there and we may know some in our own lives governor who are simultaneously worried about the issues facing women, access, for example, to reproductive health care, justice at work, and they're desperately worried about their son's mental health, and they're very worried about their brother's job.

Speaker 30 And so a party that managed to do both, I think, would have been pretty unstoppable, but there was nothing on the Democrat side. On the Republican side, there was

Speaker 30 really, I would just put it as meeting men where they were, especially young men.

Speaker 30 And if you look at recent work from David Shaw, the Democrat pollsterer, it's very striking that it wasn't just like men under 30. it was men under 20, it was men under 23.

Speaker 30 The younger the men were, the more they swung. And I think that is partly because that's the micro-generation who grew up with terms like toxic masculinity and mansplaining and the women's movement.

Speaker 30 Toxic masculinity was only invented really in 2016 for public use. But if you were 20, if you that you could, you were 10 when that happened, if you were voting for the first time in 2024.

Speaker 30 You were in high school when that happened, if you were 24 when you were voting.

Speaker 30 So I think what's happened was that there was this sense of young men coming up for grabs they didn't hear anything from Democrats and in the end I think the Republicans did a better job of signaling to young men we like you we like the stuff you like

Speaker 30 and we are going to go to the places you go like the podcast and so I think they met young men where they were both culturally and in terms of communication strategy.

Speaker 30 They didn't have anything to offer them

Speaker 30 by way of policy. This wasn't a policy referendum.
And in fact, my work suggests that the views on policy among young men haven't really changed. This wasn't a policy win.
It was a cultural win.

Speaker 30 The Republicans managed to convince young men that we see you and we like you. And I don't think there was anything more to it than that.

Speaker 30 But I don't think the Democrats did a very good job of making young men feel the same way.

Speaker 30 If anything, Democrats struggle with the idea that men might have problems because too many of them are still convinced that men are the problem.

Speaker 30 And until Democrats get past that, until they can acknowledge that there are real problems facing boys and men and issues facing women and girls, they just couldn't get past the zero sum.

Speaker 30 Just as we've done today, it's very frustrating, especially when Tim Walsh came on the ticket. I had this fantasy speech in my head where Tim Walsh would go out and talk about the need for a menu.

Speaker 30 First public school teacher to run for such high office, coach.

Speaker 30 I had a speech he was going to give, and it was going to be all about the things we're going to do for women as the democrat as the democrats that he was going he said but you know what i'm very worried about the 10 decline in the share of male teachers there you go i'm very worried about the decline in male sports i'm very worried about the lack of male coaches i'm very worried about the rising suicide rate among young men and i as a democrat am going to set out this agenda to help young men and to help men as well as our agenda to help young women.

Speaker 30 And I've got to tell you, I don't think very many people would have hated that. But there wasn't even a hint of that from the Democrats.

Speaker 8 Time for a sofa upgrade. Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.
Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 8 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 8 Liquids simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in-feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 8 Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.
Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 8 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday now.
The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 8 Plus, free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 10 No, it's not too soon to start holiday shopping.

Speaker 11 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 14 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 16 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchlin fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 18 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 22 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 26 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 32 The ocean delights us.

Speaker 33 Some marvel at the colorful world below the surface.

Speaker 32 The ocean feeds us.

Speaker 35 Others find nourishment in its bounty.

Speaker 32 The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices impact even the deepest places.

Speaker 35 The ocean moves us, whether we're riding a wave or soaking in its breathtaking beauty.

Speaker 34 The ocean connects us.

Speaker 38 Find your your connection at Monterey Bay Aquarium.org/slash connects.

Speaker 6 Being a parent is basically a juggling act. Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always

Speaker 6 shouting for you from another room. So, yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works.
And that's why I'm all in on HelloFresh.

Speaker 6 Fresh ingredients, super easy recipes, and over 80 options every week. So everyone eats, no one complains, and I get to feel like I've got it all together, at least for dinner.

Speaker 6 And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause any time, pick what works for you.
It's dinner on your terms. They even have 15-minute recipes.

Speaker 6 Perfect for those nights when everyone's hungry and patience is officially off the menu.

Speaker 6 And with so many options, even my pickiest eater found something they loved, which means no more backup mac and cheese. Try HelloFresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping.

Speaker 6 Go to hellofresh.ca and use promo code RESCUE50. That's hellofresh.ca promo code rescue50.

Speaker 31 Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. Well, I don't know about you, but like I never liked being told, oh wow, you look so good for your age.

Speaker 31 Like why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look great at any age, every age? That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about.

Speaker 31 We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now.

Speaker 31 Meaningful Beauty, beautiful skin at every age. Learn more at meaningfulbeauty.com.

Speaker 5 Boy, I mean, you really hit me when you say of all the people that could have done it so effectively, Tim could have done it.

Speaker 5 I mean, extraordinarily well with not only his bio in the military as well, but his...

Speaker 5 He's the person he is.

Speaker 5 There's a sweetness, a softness, there's a decency inherent in him. There's not an edge.
People are not put off by Tim.

Speaker 5 They feel they want to, he's a guy you want to support. And his capacity to deliver that message would have been profound.
I couldn't agree with you more. I really, I appreciate that insight.

Speaker 5 So, look, that begs the question. And you made the point.

Speaker 5 And I appreciate you making the point because I was curious your thoughts of whether or not Trump and Trumpism sort of reflects a policy shift as opposed to sort of attaching themselves to the cultural shift and identifying the issue, but not necessarily advancing policy to solve them.

Speaker 5 You've advanced a number of principles, a number of ideas to solve them. One of them reflected in that speech you just mentioned.

Speaker 5 I mean, the importance of having young male teachers, the importance of having mentors, the importance of focusing on issues related to vocational training, the opportunities to find more areas for service and contribution, to find meaning and purpose and mission in one's life, the issues around mental health.

Speaker 5 Tell me more about those areas and tell me about this frame that you've put together called HEAL to sort of attach the STEM framework as it relates to getting women and girls in the STEM field.

Speaker 5 You want to focus on this thing called H-E-A-L.

Speaker 30 Yes. Yes, thank you.
So most people know what STEM is by now,

Speaker 30 science, technology, engineering, and math. What many people don't know is that it originally wasn't going to be called that.
It was going to be called SMET, S-M-E-T.

Speaker 30 And then Judith Ramilly at the National Science Foundation said, can I call it STEM? And they said, sure, whatever, Judith. And the rest is history.

Speaker 30 But you're right that we've made huge efforts both to invest in STEM, but also to get more women into STEM. And we have much further to go, especially in the area of technology.

Speaker 30 But we have tripled the share of STEM workers that are female up to about 27% now in the US compared to the 1970s. That's not an accident.

Speaker 30 That was a result of concerted public policy, as you know, of getting into middle schools, of scholarships, of various advocacy groups to really get more women into those professions and to start seeing them as professions that were for them.

Speaker 30 But heel jobs are those that are in health and education and requiring more literacy skills than math skills. Not just written literacy, but kind of emotional literacy, verbal communication.

Speaker 30 And so those would be jobs like teaching, nursing, healthcare assistants, social work, mental health professionals, etc.

Speaker 30 And what's really striking about that is that the share of men in those fields has actually gone down.

Speaker 30 So the share of women in those STEM jobs has gone up, but we have fewer men in those heel jobs.

Speaker 30 So as I mentioned a moment ago, declining share of male teachers, it was 33% when Tim Walsh was the teacher,

Speaker 30 was the male share. Now it's 23%

Speaker 30 and falling and continues to fall. And there is yet to be a sustained public policy effort to do anything about that.
I'm pleased to see some governors, I know you're interested in it.

Speaker 30 I've seen Gretchen Whitmer and Wes Moore and others really start to talk about this issue. And you mentioned Josh Hawley a moment ago, who wrote his own book on

Speaker 30 this. To be fair, the one thing that he agreed with me on was this, that actually it would be good to get more men in our classrooms.

Speaker 30 And so, if you've got Josh Hawley on board on one side, and the American Psychological Association, quite a progressive organization, also saying we can,

Speaker 30 that's a big tent to work with. I can work with that.
If I've lost everybody to the right of Hawley and everybody to the left of the APA,

Speaker 30 I can live with that. But it's also true in mental health care.
So the share of men in social work, or I should say, the share of social workers who are male is now 20%.

Speaker 30 It was 40% in the 70s. The share of psychologists that are male is 20%.
It was more than 50% in the 70s.

Speaker 30 And so we are cratering the share of men in education and in mental health care, just at a point in our history where we're so worried about education, especially for boys, and we're so worried about mental health care, and where we have this rising suicide rate among men.

Speaker 30 I think representation really matters in those fields. And gender is part of that story.

Speaker 30 There are other kinds of representation too, but I'm going to get on a limb here and say, I think that if the teaching profession, social work profession, psychology profession were becoming all male,

Speaker 30 You'd be reading about it and we'd be acting on it. We would not think it was a good idea.

Speaker 30 Isn't it true the other way around as well? And again, people are worried that they somehow, oh, this is about men.

Speaker 30 When I wanted therapy, when my son wanted therapy, it was really great to be able to find a male.

Speaker 30 Not for everything and not for everybody, but I do think it should be an option to be able to find men. And the other thing is, those fields need workers.
There are labor shortages.

Speaker 30 And it's not a very good idea to try and solve a labor shortage with half the workforce. And there are jobs.

Speaker 30 so if we can if we can do for heal these health and education jobs for men what we did for women into stem put the same kind of effort on that would i think be a huge win it would actually be a win-win win it would be a win for the professions who need workers it would be a win for the people using our schools and hospitals and mental health professions who would see themselves reflected in it and it would be a win for men many of whom are kind of looking for jobs now and so i'd love to see a concerted policy effort really learning the lessons from women in stem around these jobs we could we can't have the gender, the de-gendering of the labor market only go one way.

Speaker 30 I don't think we should be relaxed about that. I'm certainly not relaxed about the cratering share of men in those professions.
And I don't think any policymaker should be.

Speaker 5 It's interesting. And I appreciate all of the above and hear you loudly and clearly in my day job and my responsibility as governor to call that out and be more intentional in that space as well.

Speaker 5 You also are very intentional and you've called out the importance of

Speaker 5 looking at men fathers in the context of paid parental leave.

Speaker 5 Tell me more what your thinking is along those lines in terms of just, and we didn't talk about fatherlessness.

Speaker 5 We didn't get into that issue necessarily, but I imagine in relationship to being a parent and a provider, not just being a protector, but back to being a provider is not just about economic.

Speaker 5 issues as it relates to being a breadwinner, but also at home and making sure that you're providing for the family in terms of that care.

Speaker 30 Yeah, and it speaks a bit to your wife's concerns, too, about the division of labor that we have around kids.

Speaker 30 I mean, the main reason for the gender pay gap now is the care gap, is that women are just doing much more of the care than men.

Speaker 30 And I'm not suggesting that's going to go away overnight or that people shouldn't be free to choose whatever they want. But I don't think policy should be inadvertently supporting these gender roles.

Speaker 30 And so what that means is that if you have paid leave, you should have paid leave for mothers and fathers independently available to each of them.

Speaker 30 If we really think that dads matter, and I do, then we've got to be saying that through policy. And it's really interesting.

Speaker 30 When I brought my book out, I made the proposal that mums and dads should each get six months of

Speaker 30 paid leave at a very high replacement rate. And one of my friends says, what are you, European? And I said, well, actually, by background, I am.
But I get it. It's like wildly utopian.
But guess what?

Speaker 30 Under the Biden administration, the U.S. military introduced three months paid leave separately for mothers and fathers.
And so maybe we could try the same for civilians.

Speaker 30 And the key point for me here is: A, paid leave is such an important policy. And

Speaker 30 California, of course, is a very strong state-level policy, which I'm sure you're very proud of, that the U.S. doesn't, but a lot of this is at state level.

Speaker 30 But it's very important both in the way that the policy is designed and the way that it's marketed and sold and described, that it's not seen as maternity leave, just called parental leave or paid leave.

Speaker 30 We've really got to ensure that fathers feel like this is for them as well and design it so that it's for them too. If we want more gender equality at work, we need more gender equality at home.

Speaker 30 And we also need more dads involved in their kids' lives.

Speaker 30 And there are lots of things it's hard to do through policy, right? Maybe many of the things we've talked about today,

Speaker 30 there's no obvious policy solution.

Speaker 30 But paid leave for dads is a policy solution that works. They have more egalitarian relationships with their partners.
They are more involved with their kids' lives years later.

Speaker 30 And so there is a policy, it's a pro-male policy that's on the table.

Speaker 30 and that is one that is should be being supported by most people, certainly on the Democrat side, but it should be being sold as a pro-male, pro-dad policy.

Speaker 30 And it currently isn't being sold that way.

Speaker 5 Well said. And it sure is held, by definition, a pro-family policy in terms of strengthening that family bond.

Speaker 5 Well, Richard, thank you for sort of, you know, strengthening our attention to this critical issue. And

Speaker 5 I'm just, you know,

Speaker 5 I've been really inspired not only by your work, but by sort of the rediscovery.

Speaker 5 of your work because you've been at this for some time and and to see all the energy and support that you're getting uh to have the opportunity to dialogue with Scott Galloway and the work he's doing, highlighting this space.

Speaker 5 I mean, it really is a call to arms. This is not political.
This is about community. This is about who we are.
It's about the Commonwealth more broadly.

Speaker 5 And so, I really want to just thank you for being such a powerful voice in that space, but also sharing that voice with us here today. So, thank you for being on the podcast.

Speaker 30 Thank you, Governor.

Speaker 10 No, it's not too soon to start holiday shopping.

Speaker 11 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 14 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 16 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 18 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 22 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 26 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 1 Skip the stress and shop up to 30% off site-wide during Pura's Black Friday sale.

Speaker 1 Enjoy exclusive discounts on premium, long-lasting single fragrances.

Speaker 1 Curated gift sets for everyone on your list, and sleek modern diffusers for home and car.

Speaker 1 Spend less time shopping, more time enjoying.

Speaker 1 Get set for gifting season only at Pura.com.

Speaker 32 The ocean delights us.

Speaker 33 Some marvel at the colorful world below the surface.

Speaker 34 The ocean feeds us.

Speaker 35 Others find nourishment in its bounty.

Speaker 32 The ocean teaches us how our everyday choices impact even the deepest places.

Speaker 35 The ocean moves us, whether we're riding a wave or soaking in its breathtaking beauty.

Speaker 37 The ocean connects us.

Speaker 38 Find your connection at Monterey Bay Aquarium.org/slash connects.

Speaker 4 Want Black Friday prices without the crowds? Lowe's gets it. Shop their early Black Friday deals and beat the rush.

Speaker 4 $99 is all you need to grab a select seven-foot pre-lit artificial Christmas tree for the holidays. And don't sweat what gifts to get, Dad.

Speaker 4 They have up to 40% off select tools and accessories going on now. That's how Lowe's celebrates Black Friday early.
Selection varies by location while supplies last.

Speaker 40 It's the season to come together over your holiday favorites at Starbucks. Warm up with a creamy caramel brulee latte, get festive with an iced gingerbread chai, or share a velvety peppermint mocha.

Speaker 40 Together is the best place to be at Starbucks.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.