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

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Schedule your visit today at brighthorizons.com. So if you tuned into the podcast, you may have noticed a theme, a theme that continues to emerge around men and boys.
What is going on with our men and boys, increasingly isolated, increasingly feeling disengaged, disconnected,

depressed. Big conversations with Jackson Katz and Scott Galloway, where this issue was highlighted.
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. 80% of suicides.
Men, dropout rates, suspension rates, disproportionately men. You see graduation rates, particularly college attendance and graduation, going through the roof for women and girls, but not, again, for men.
It's not just an electoral issue. 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.
But the issue is an important issue that we need to dive deeper in. And that's just what we did recently with Richard Reeves, who's the founder, the president of the American Institute of Boys and Men.
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 with young men. And this led me to look inward as well as governor of California to say, what more can I do? 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. This is Gavin Newsom.
And this is Richard Reeves. All right, Richard Reeves, thanks so much for joining us.
And more importantly, thank you for your work. And I'm just curious, because 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. But I'm curious what moment led you to this moment, meaning this whole issue around masculinity, issues around boys and men, your own journey to being one of the most important figures in trying to understand what the hell is going on with American men? Yeah, well, thank you.
Thanks for that question and for having me. 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. And that is exactly what we do.
You read a paper, you go to a seminar, you read another paper. And I was working on issues around economic inequality.
That's really been the through line of my work. And in particular, intergenerational inequality, like what's stopping people moving up the ladder.
I did that in the UK government, which is where I'm originally from, and then at Brookings. 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 colour, who were driving a lot of the economic inequalities that we were worried about.
But I didn't see that many people paying attention to that particular gender part of the story. And then I would be going home, and I've got three sons, and they're being raised in an affluent, educated household.
So they are not the boys and men who we should be most worried about from a policy point of view. But nonetheless had a lot of questions they were spending a lot of time online 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 and honestly part of it was that I didn't think that many people were having a good faith conversation about this.
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.
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.
And so what year roughly was that, that research really started? And you started to notice this trend or this lack of focus and intentionality on boys and men. Yeah.
So I wrote a book called Dream Hoarders, which came out in 2017. 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.
And candidly, that we, because I would put myself solidly in that class, really weren't taking responsibility for the ways in which we were actually rigging the opportunity system. You think about the housing market, which I know you're very interested in, higher education, which you're also very interested in.
I saw those systems working pretty well for me and my neighbours in Bethesda, Maryland, where I was living at the time. But I also saw us holding other people out.
So 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? It's a lot of men who are just struggling to rise up the ladder.
They're doing worse than their fathers did. 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. 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.
Or if they do, they're not able to kind of provide for them in the way they'd hope to. 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 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.
And so that's really why in the end, I think, just needed a different kind of spotlight on the question. 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.
And we're talking about boys and men, we're talking about it. It's sort of historic advantage that goes back, you know, hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands of years to, you know, particularly white males.
Why the hell do we need to be focusing on them at a time when women still are struggling to get equal pay, 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. Women are still absorbing so much of that burden and so much of that work.
There's still so much more work that needs to be done for women and girls. Why, Richard, spend so much time on boys and men? Well, because we can do two things at once.
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, and you've just listed some of them.
I'll add one more. I think it's particularly relevant to your state, which is only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders.
Now, I happen to be married to someone who has herself tried to raise money for the venture capital market 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 and so like the idea and what 25 percent 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. 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.
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. And I 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.
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 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 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 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 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 and i thought about that decided 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 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.
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've found their president.
But there's a serious point behind that, which is that we need data, we need research, and we need to do it, as you said a moment ago in a non-zero some way

because

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

the question is not

Is there going to be a conversation about what does it mean to be a man today?

The question is who's going to have it?

Are you gonna 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? 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. And I'm afraid that if that's the case, we deserve to lose these young men.
You don't create a vacuum and then complain about the fact that someone's pouring into it. 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. And I want to talk a little bit more, not about necessarily that space specifically in the manosphere, and talk about your reaction to notion of the manosphere, just the nomenclature of the manosphere more broadly.
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. Right, 2021.
Yeah. There was that kind of reticence around moving this conversation forward or broadening the appeal beyond just sort of a reactionary right-wing framework.
And you're, by the way, hardly a left-wing. This is not a political thing per se, but it's interesting to me, even your friends and colleagues were warning you against entering in this space.
It's just seen as, it was seen as very dangerous territory. I think the permission space has really opened up around it 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. 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. And so if I'm in a conversation with someone who is sore on the men's right 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, right? They will say, so a figure like Andrew Tate or others will say, they don't care about boys and men.
And I want that claim to sound crazy. But the trouble is, it doesn't sound crazy.
Right now, we haven't done enough done enough 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 like i think it's this is a fantastic move but i 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-women, but that has just created this, it's seeded the ground. And so I don't, my goal is to make the crazies sound crazy, but right now they don't.
And it's interesting, just in taking a little bit of my own journey on this, and I appreciate your reference to my wife, she's done a series of documentaries, and one of the documentaries, her second documentary was around masculinity. It was around the issues of boys and men in 2015, around the same time you were starting to write that book around income inequality.
She was highlighting the suicide rates and the dropout rates and issues around incarceration, crime, self-harm and the like, self-isolation, loneliness. It wasn't a focus as much on what was happening in terms of algorithms and online activity, 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 focus on the issues of violence and women. But the reaction to it was pretty remarkable, to your point.
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 to enter that debate 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 uh and you're right these folks on the other side have have walked into that debate and they've weaponized it um some more benign than others uh but obviously the issues how the how the politics has changed is, I think, an interesting part of this. 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.
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.
And I suspect that you're still feeling some of that now. And what I would say is good.
You don't want to lose that discomfort because I honestly think that it should be an uncomfortable conversation given the history, given the issues we still have to work on for women. should be a difficulty to this conversation there should be a discomfort to this conversation i honestly think if you don't find this conversation a little bit uncomfortable you shouldn't be in it right 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 pick.
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, that obviously women are going to feel much more strongly.
That should be acknowledged. That should be discussed.
But it shouldn't stop us. It should make us pause.
that should be acknowledged that should be discussed but it shouldn't stop us 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 have women and girls and there's also this bunch of issues for boys and men and my experience of this 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 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 that's not what you're doing, then I have discovered the appetite for this conversation is huge. What does feeling safe at home really mean to you? For many, it might seem that having good locks and maybe an alarm that would, you know, make a lot of noise if somebody actually broke in.
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There's no safe like SimpliSafe. Hi, I'm Erika Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.
When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here. In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.
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That's a central part, I think, of creating that, as you said, that permission, that space where we could have this dialogue in a constructive way. That said as well, I mean, there's been that reaction.
We've got people like Josh Howley writes a book on manhood 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.
I think you've written about and talked about even your own kids' relationship to Andrew as it relates to their algorithms online. Even Jordan Peterson, who has had his own evolution or devolution, depending on how some people view his perspectives on a myriad of issues.
But this issue, you're right, has really come to the fore. I think about it.
With my wife, we have two boys, two girls. And my wife is now the bigger crusader on this, saying, what the hell has happened to our boys? What is going on online? What is happening? Why is he bringing up Andrew Tate? Why is he talking about he he talked? 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.
And I said, who the hell is Andrew Tate uh 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 uh and it's very interesting how the let's just assume for the sake of this argument that you and I are both middle aged right that Right. That might be flattering both of us, but let's go with it.
It is. Right.
Let's take it. Little-aged.
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.
And I don't think you'd do that now. I think that was a moment where this sort of gauauzy blobby thing over there was just hard to decode but as you get closer to it you understand that within it big differences i even i've actually come to think that the term manosphere is not helpful because it's just it just lumps together people who are doing very very different things in different ways and the young men who are the disproportionate consumers of a lot of that content they understand the differences and so if we don't sound like we understand the differences then we just sound like you know old men shaking our fist at the world um and so i don't know how to do this yet but there's almost like a bro sphere which is more like rogan it's certainly chris williamson who i like quite a lot and maybe even you know theo von i've been on his podcast and then there's the kind of misogynosphere or i don't know what to call you know what i mean and they're they're very different 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 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 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 cede all that ground. Just don't go there.
I love what you said. I think what you just said is extraordinarily important.
And what you also referenced I think is important. What are these young boys looking for? I mean, we see how they fall prey to the algorithms.
And, you know, you've written obviously a lot about, you know, what, you know, these kids and their body images and issues related, you know, six pack abs or, you know, maybe there are gaming. And all of a sudden then, you know, they're on an Andrew Tate.
You know, 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? And the bit of that that's hard is today.
It's just much harder. And 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.

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.

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? But in 1979, that figure was 13%.
And that's well within my lifetime. 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, the greatest economic liberation in human history as it rolls around the world, still far from complete.

But like, is that like the fact that my wife has had opportunities that my mom could only dream of?

That's just the most wonderful thing.

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 and going online and finding all kinds of different answers.
And I will say one more thing, which is maybe a bit more of a critique of the cultural blobby left. I don't know what I just i'm sure you know what i mean that's the blob the liberal blob which is they they have done a much better job of outlining what not to do 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.
Don't say this. Don't do that.
Don't say this. I mean, just in terms of the political correctness, the way.
Yeah. And just the consent story and so on too.
And to be clear in case it needs to be said again, 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 whatever orwellian term is being used to describe the kind of social emotional skills how to how like how to get by in the world class thing right uh and uh sorry that was very unfair to say it was orwellian but But you know 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.

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.

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? And he said, no, that was it. So 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 but what that means is that we've done a really good job of setting out the curriculum of what not to be without anything positive to take 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 and we've torn up the old one around femininity which was you know you're gonna be a mom housewife mom we torn them both up 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 love 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 we also tore up the old male script and we didn't replace it 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 well what should i be like then we haven't had a good answer to that but a long 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 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 equality will require androgyny 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 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, that that is naive, that we do actually still need a way to talk about men and women overlapping and distinct, but still beautiful.
So I want to unpack that. And this notion of filling that void and painting a positive alternative, uh, 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.

You've written a lot about this sort of,

and I,

you know,

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 white horse comes saving the day,

sort of the,

you know,

John Wayne of vacation,

Reagan,

uh,

you know,

coasted,

the whole thing,

this,

Thank you. gal, or at least guy in this case, on the white horse, comes saving the day, sort of the John Wayne of vacation, Reagan, you know, Costa Drea, the whole thing, this notion of the lone ranger, as you write about it, being free, but you suggest increasingly lonely.
I mean, sort of bring us back a little bit. Yeah, and to be clear, just that description, I mean, I'm a proud US 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. I love, love, love that about this country.
but do you think there's a sense that 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 just separate ourselves away from society but even a bit less extreme than that there's this sense of like men are supposed to be independent and and if men going to get married it's because you know a woman will sort of trap him into it 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 and that's because men men men know something and the truth is that masculinity properly defined has always been relational it's always been about service and surplus i came across this definition in the 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 you're producing a surplus right could be meat it could be money it could be something and that's because the just in the natural environment like it takes a long time to raise kids and that's very demanding on the moms. And so it was masculinity was literally defined by service, was literally defined by giving more than you get, producing more than you need.
Now, what that thing is going to be will change. 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 the way that you can tell if someone's a man is how he is with other people how he is with his own kids other people's kids if he's a teacher as my my my middle son is now a teacher in baltimore city and and like watching him big guy at the front of a classroom and he coaches soccer he coaches the with a girls' soccer team. 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.
And 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 strand of separatism and stark autonomy that you see online, which is like a real man is a man who answers only to himself.
And sorry, but that's just bullshit. And every human society has shown that to be the case.
A man is someone who gives.

And my father was like that. 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.
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.
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in this notion of community versus you know of this disconnect and 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? I mean, is that the trend line or is it something deeper? Is it just self-worth, feeling worthless? Is it the fact that I've no longer had value because 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.

What is it?

I mean, what are these?

These suicide rates are jaw-dropping.

Amazing.

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

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. 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. And I'm sure it's connected to some of these conversations that you've been having around what i call neededness for want of a better term i i yeah i just think there's like i've come to believe that a human universal is the need to be needed and the feeling unneeded is, in this case, almost literally fatal.
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 and useless.
We also know that the suicide rate among men

goes up very significantly after a breakdown,

a marital breakdown or a separation.

Does not go up for women.

Goes up a lot for men.

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 indicated a minute ago, disconnected, isolated.

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. 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. We still need you.
Like, we need you. And I've actually been struck.
This struck this is something i again i learned recently is that there's a huge lack of men volunteering in many civic institutions 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 but i was shocked to discover that the waiting list for boys where i live in East Tennessee for a big is 12 months 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 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 and so big brothers big sisters is becoming big sisters by default because of a lack of male volunteers 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 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 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 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 the as men we like as fathers that's obvious in the workplace. But if we start to doubt whether the tribe needs us, I think we fade away.
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? Is it now because we're online more and it's algorithms that it's getting exacerbated? Or is it just the ascendancy of the feminist movement and sort of that friction, that dialectic that we're not expressing or at least discussing as much. What do you attach this to? Yeah.
I mean, am I allowed to say yes to all of the above? Yeah. A little bit of everything, huh? A little bit.
But I do think that the way I think about this is that it's like 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 yet and some of those some of the culture as like a kaleidoscope, I think it's been shaken very significantly, and the pieces have not settled again yet. And some of those, some of the forces that have shaken our culture have been really good, like the economic rise of women, which you mentioned earlier.
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 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 around it, right? So finding a way to take men with us on this journey, that's huge. But as you just referred to, it's also true that while that was

happening, that de-industrialization, some of the issues around trade just disproportionately hit working class men. 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, we focus a lot on the negatives of online culture, I sometimes

wonder about

the potential positives.

Because We focus a lot on the negatives of online culture. I sometimes wonder about the potential positives.
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. That seems to be almost like a fixed law of societies right that hasn't happened this time and i think it's plausible to suggest that that might be because the men have something else to do uh with gaming with pornography with whatever the online content is etc and so now i'm not arguing a 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 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 that's not happened and so in some ways what's happened instead is a male retreat 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 and i don't in any way want to diminish the problems around men acting out but i see a much much deeper problem here, which is that just this withdrawal, this retreat, 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.
And so what it gives men is an alternative world to escape to. And the question is, so many of them wanting to escape and that i mean it's a rhetorical question for you i mean what why is that then i mean is what what i mean it's good well let's i mean this is an opportunity obviously to segue into what we need to do but i mean but why i mean again is there any is it is it just these larger trend? I mean, what, 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 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 happen over decades but they're like you know the tectonic plates shifting around uh and then you'll get once they hit a certain point then you'll get the earthquake or the or the volcano but but but beneath the surface and this is very much your state so you understand this better than most Governors.
It's like stuff, the ground is moving beneath the surface, and this is very much your state, so you understand this better than most governors.

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.
It's been shifting economically with a shift away from blue collar male favored jobs. 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. 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.
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 about 60, 40 now, female, male.
And so these things didn't happen overnight. They'd been building and developing.
And then I think this online culture has intersected with this in one way, just talked about to kind of give a place to retreat to which I think is bad in the long run but also to start weaponizing to use the term 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 but 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. But I honestly think they've been building for many decades now.
So speaking of politics, I mean, obviously, the Trump campaign did not ignore this space. And I don't think they ignored it for, you know, for 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. Obviously, the amount of time and energy the campaign spent targeting young men, targeting men broadly, that paid huge dividends.
I think there was a 15-point shift from 41%, 56% of men under 30 that moved towards Trump campaign. What do you make of his approach to these issues? Do you think they're cynical? Do you think he's approached it at least with a sensitivity, a recognition? 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, 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.
And it was every single thing that's out there in the imaginable, except 26% of the population that DNC didn't seem to care about at all, at least based on their own website and their own priorities and policy. What do you think of Trump's efforts in this space? Yeah.
So the way I think about this is that in politics, something almost always beats nothing. And what there was from the Democrats on issues around boys and men was nothing.
It was the sound of deafening silence on these issues. And that's been true for a while.
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.
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 really, I would just put it as meeting men where they were, especially young men.
And if you look at recent work from David Shaw, the Democrat pollster, it's very striking that it wasn't just like men under 30 it was men under 20 it was men under 23 like 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 they toxic masculinity was only invented really in 2016 for public use. But you were 10 when that happened if you were voting for the first time in 2024.
You were in high school when that happened if you were 24 when you were voting. 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. 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. They didn't have anything to offer them by way 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. 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. But I don't think the Democrats did a very good job of making young men the we see you and we like you and i don't think there was anything more to it than that but i don't think the democrats did a very good job of making young men feel the same way 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 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.
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 men.
First public school teacher to run for such high office, coach. I had a speech he was going to give and it's going to be all about the things we're going to do for women as the demo 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 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 Democrat, I'm going to set out this agenda to help young men and to help men, as well as our agenda to help young women.
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.
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 i mean extraordinarily well with not only his bio in the military as well but his his the person he is there's a there's a sweetness of softness there's a decency inherent in him there's not an edge people are not put off uh by tim they they They feel they want it. He's a decency inherent in him.
There's not an edge. People are not put off by Tim.
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. Really, I appreciate that insight.
So look, that begs the question, and you made the point, and I appreciate you making the point, because I was curious your thoughts of whether whether 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. You've advanced a number of principles, a number of ideas to solve them.
One of them reflected in that speech you just mentioned. 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.
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. You want to focus on this thing called HEAL.
Yes. Yes.
Thank you. So most people know what STEM is by now, 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, and then Judith Ramley at the National Science Foundation said, can I call it STEM? And they said, sure, whatever, Judith, and the rest is history.
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, 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. 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.
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. And so those would be jobs like teaching, nursing, healthcare assistants, social work,

mental health professionals, et cetera.

And what's really striking about that is that the share of men in those fields has actually

gone down.

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

jobs.

So as I mentioned a moment ago, declining share of male teachers, it was 33% when Tim

Walsh was a teacher, was the male share yeah now it's 23 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 some governors i know you're interested in it i've seen gretchen whitmer and wes moore and others really to talk about this issue. And you mentioned Josh Hawley a moment ago who wrote his own book on 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. And so if you've got Josh Hawley on board on one side and the American Psychological Association, quite a progressive organization, also saying, that's a big tent to work.
I can work with that. If I've lost everybody to the right of Hawley and everybody to the left of the APA, 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%.
It was 40% in the 70s. The share of psychologists that are male is 20%.
It was more than 50% in the 70s. 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.
I think representation really matters in those fields. And gender is part of that story.
There are other kinds of representation too, but I'm going to get out on a limb here and say, I think that if the teaching profession, social work profession, psychology profession were becoming all male, you'd be reading about it. And we'd be acting on it.
We would not think it was a good idea. Isn't it true the other way around as well? And again, people are worried that they somehow, oh, this is about men.
When I wanted therapy, when my son wanted therapy, it was really great to be able to find a male. 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, labor shortages, and it's not a very good idea to try and solve a labor shortage with half the workforce. And there are jobs.
So 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 can't have the gender, the degendering of the labor market only go one way. 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.
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.
You also are very intentional and you've called out the importance of looking at men, fathers in the context of paid parental leave. Tell me more what your thinking is along those lines in terms of just, and we didn't talk about fatherlessness.
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 issues as it relates to being a breadwitter, but also at home and making sure that you're providing for the family in terms of that care.
Yeah, and it speaks a bit to your wife's concerns, too, about the division of labor that we have around kids. 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.
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 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 if we really think that dads matter and i do and then we've got to be saying that through policy and it's really interesting when i when i brought my book out i i made the proposal that moms and dads should each get six months of uh of paid leave at a very high replacement rate and and one of my friends says what are you european and i And I said, well, actually, by background, I am. But I get it.
It's like wildly utopian. But, you know, guess what? Under the Biden administration, the US military introduced three months paid leave separately for mothers and fathers.
And so maybe we could try the same for civilians. And the key point for me here is a paid leave is such an important policy.
And yeah, California, of course, a very strong state level policy, which I'm sure you're very proud of that the US doesn't, but a lot of this is at state level. But it's very important both in the way that the policy 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.
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.
And we also need more dads involved in their kids' lives. And there are lots of things that's hard to do through policy, right?

Maybe many of the things we've talked about today, there's no obvious policy solution. 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.
And so there is a policy, it's a pro-male policy that's on the table and that is one that 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.
And it currently isn't being sold that way. Well said.
And it sure is held by definition a pro-family policy in terms of strengthening that family bond. Well, Richard, thank you for sort of strengthening our attention to this critical issue.

And I'm just, you know, I've been really inspired not only by your work, but by sort of the rediscovery of your work, because you've been at this for some time.

And to see all the energy and support that you're getting, to have the opportunity to dialogue with Scott Galloway and the work he's doing, highlighting this space. 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.
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. Thank you, Governor.
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