E562 Richard Reeves

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Today's guest is a writer and a social scientist. He's also a dual citizen.

He's the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

I'm grateful that he's here today.

Today's guest is Richard Rees. I know me.

And I will find a song.

I've been singing? I'm a sister. Richard Reeves, thanks for joining us today, brother.
Yeah, I'm really thrilled to be here. Yeah, we appreciate it, man.
You want to move that in a little bit for me if you don't mind? Yeah, sure. And you are British.
By birth. I'm American now.
Okay, you're American now. Yeah, I became a U.S.
citizen in 2016. So I'm very, very proud of this country.
Oh, welcome. Nice.
Thank you. And you're the president for the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Yeah. New think tank.
Like, God knows we need more think tanks, right? That's what America's really clamoring for. It's like more scholars sitting in think tanks producing charts.
Right. Honestly, I was in another think tank for 10 years before that, the Brookings Institution, huge think tank in Washington, DC.
Great job. And I got to tell you, it was not in my life plan to create another one.
No, actually being in a think tank is great. But what that means is you basically just get paid good money to write stuff and say stuff that you're interested in.
And what happens to a lot of that information from think tanks? Well, that depends who you ask. If you ask the critics, they say it just gathers dust on people's shelves.
Maybe like two people in Congress read it. One New York Times journalist reads it.
So there is this whole thing now that think tanks used to like produce policy papers, and then grateful legislators, members of Congress would say, thank you, we'll go and turn that into a law. And ta-da! That's not how it works anymore.
And so the whole question of how do you influence law, how do you influence policy, I think is a really big question now. And so there's a big question mark against this whole idea about quotes think tank.
I certainly didn't plan to start a new one, but. But it seems like this one is important.
That's one of the reasons, yeah, that I wanted to get to talk to you today because, you know, a lot of our listeners are men and boys. I know Scott Galloway was on and he had mentioned that you were kind of his godfather of information or somebody that he really looked up to, you know.
And I did also see you were born on the 4th of July. Is that right? Correct.
Do they kick you out of Britain if you're on the- That would be great. I think it should just have a rule, right? Everyone who's born on the 4th of July gets automatic US citizenship, but then gets deported from the UK, right? But it's kind of weird because I've always had that.
And then I actually came to the US in the 90s for the Guardian newspaper. I was a journalist for quite a few years.
I just always loved America, ended up marrying an American. Do you think it was because of your birthday at all or no? You know, Because it's just interesting.
It would sound weird to say yes, wouldn't it? But if you think there's no such thing as a coincidence, I've always loved the fact that I was born on the 4th of July. And now I'm here.
It's great. Everyone has a big party for my birthday.
And actually, one of the things that I've really thought about as an immigrant, right? And I don't, when you say immigrant, you probably don't think of someone like me, but I'm a proud immigrant, is that people who are born here don't actually appreciate what it means sometimes to be a citizen. And my citizenship ceremony, which I did in a hurry, actually,

because I wanted to be able to vote

and wanted to get into the whole civic life,

I was surrounded by people in tears.

Really?

Yeah, there's people from Iran,

there's people from Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever,

refugees, a whole bunch of different people,

some people from Mexico,

and they're waving their flags,

saying the Pledge of Allegiance, you're welcomed by the president. And there wasn't really a dry eye laugh by the end of it.
And so I actually now think that every high schooler in the U.S. should go to a citizenship ceremony.
That's a great idea. Just experience it.
Because I don't think if you're born here, you can take it a bit for granted what it means to be a citizen, but to go and experience what it's like for people to become a citizen, I expected it to be more—I had a green card, and I thought, yeah, but I want to be a citizen as well. I actually was incredibly moved by the whole experience.
Yeah, you don't think about the gift of your own citizenship, right? And you don't think about what others go through to get it. And they used to have, I know whenever I was growing up, you had the Pledge of Allegiance, there was definitely a lot more, even though the Pledge of Allegiance was like a small thing, it's one of the, like those traditional things that made you feel like a part of something, right? It was like a traditional practice that, that created a commonality between, you know, between kids.
We kind of thought it was lame sometimes, but sometimes you didn't, you know, like at certain points of the year, if certain things were going on in the culture, it meant more to you. But yeah, that's...
And it's also just a ritual. And we've come to undervalue ritual.
Oh, they erode from our society. The point of a ritual, right? It's not just like you can overthink what the words mean.
You can overthink exactly what it means, but there's something about just the ritual of it. So my son is at the University of Tennessee, and he explains.
Go Vols, baby. Yeah.
But actually, when his friends come down to a Tennessee game, and they're, say, a Northeastern college or a small liberal arts college, what really strikes them is less the game. And it's more the fact that there's the Pledge of Allegiance, that there's a prayer, that the jets go over,

that there's fireworks,

that they come out through the tea.

There's a whole bunch of ritual around it,

which is actually really beautiful.

And I think sometimes we overthink

the content of the ritual

and don't actually just recognize

it's the fact of the ritual

that really, really matters.

Yeah, it's like, yeah,

people start looking at,

well, what are the words

of the Pledge of Allegiance?

It didn't matter.

It was just that we got up.

Do I mean every word of this, right?

We got up and we did it together.

And I don't think there's anything wrong.

if you live in a country and you're a member of it to pledge allegiance to that country. I feel like.
Yeah, correct. Because otherwise, then what are you? You're just a passerby? Are you like working for another country? Like what's your real modus operandi then, I guess? I have one friend actually who's from Israel.
And when he came, he gave up his Israeli citizenship because he believes that you cannot have more than one citizenship. You cannot have dual citizenship is a contradiction because you can only be pledging your allegiance to one sovereign nation.
I love that. I love that too.
And I will confess that I have kept my British passport. Oh, you have? Yeah.
So if you had to choose, what do you do then? Oh, US. No question.
Wow. Yeah, I get it.
I mean, there's a reason why everyone really wants to come here. Yeah, dude, the rock lives here.
Right. You know? Yes.
Is that the main reason people come here? No, I don't think so. But that would be a great idea if every class had to go watch that ceremony.
They always need volunteers of them as well to help out with the paperwork and stuff like that. And so you could just have some going every time.
I just think it would be really nice. Before you graduate high school, and I would just say to anyone who's listening, if you're thinking about a good, cool thing to do, volunteer at your local citizenship center and watch the people go through the process of becoming a U.S.
citizen. And that might make you appreciate it a bit more.
I can't believe that it's not mandatory in classes or in school that you have to go see that. Maybe that's something that one of these think tanks could change.
Well, I proposed it, but let's see if it will change. But we can do it ourselves as well.
Yeah, we could. There's nothing stopping us.
You're the president for the American Institute for Men and Boys. So what is that institute? So it's a research and advocacy organization.
So what we're trying to do is, the basic premise here is, there are a lot of ways in which boys and men are struggling in our country right now. And there are no institutions, there's no organizations whose job it is to basically wake up every day and draw attention to that with data, with facts, in a way that will hopefully raise awareness of it.
It's this huge asymmetry. I really noticed it in the pandemic.
So when the pandemic hit, there were a lot of reports about how it was going to affect women and girls. There was a lot of concern about employment, domestic violence, a whole bunch of real concerns.
Yeah. And a lot of press coverage for that.
And those were perfectly legitimate, coming from women's think tanks, from the UN, from the White House, etc. But I noticed that actually the college enrollment for men had dropped seven times more than for women in the first year of the pandemic.
Seven times difference in the drop. Is that true? It is true.
Then the numbers got a little bit revised, and it's partly because the men were more likely to be going to trade school and stuff, which you just couldn't do online. But it wasn't just that.
It hit male education harder than female education, number one. Number two, men were dying a lot more from COVID.
COVID was killing a lot more men. You mean the actual disease or just the loneliness or the disconnection? No, the disease.
Men were much more vulnerable to COVID. Last time I checked, we'd lost at least 100,000 more men than women.
and that's not to be expected because actually it affected older people right COVID killed older people a lot more and there are more older women so if anything you think you go the other way right but it didn't because actually men were much much more vulnerable to the disease and no one was really researching that no one was producing reports on that no one was producing reports on that. No one was writing articles about that.
And it really occurred to me that that was because it was no one's job. Right.
Right. Right.
There wasn't an American Institute for Boys and Men, but I can assure you that if we'd existed then, we'd have been pushing out lots of information about how COVID was affecting boys' education and men's education and also killing men in massively higher numbers. Well, for sure, because I think also you, I don't know if ever in my life there's been like a, like a lot of organizations where it's like, hey, men need help, you know? It's like everything is that women need help with this, children, you know, and it's certainly that makes sense.
I always think back to like women and children first like when the titanic was sinking or something you know when something like that it's like women and children first right and that's probably what most men would want as well but at a certain point you're like hey uh we exist what are we doing here you know yeah um what was your like what was your first relationship like like with your dad or something like when you were, like, how did you, like, just so we have some personal attachment to this conversation as well. What was it like with your dad when you were a kid? Because that's usually people's first male role model.
Yeah? Yeah. Yeah.
My dad was amazing. Oh, wow.
Just amazing. And is an amazing granddad to my sons as well.
And so I just, I was given the greatest gift that I think anybody can ever get, which is two parents who both loved me, still together, still loving us. And that sense of, somebody wants, this sounds like a bit of a- It's crazy that I'm shocked.
It's crazy that it's becoming this world that that's a shocking thing. Yeah, and it's not like they were perfect, to be clear.
But it's like parenting is never going to be about perfection. It's always going to be about the arc.
I think you almost get like a parental grade point average across the whole decades it takes to raise a kid. You're going to have bad days and good days, you're going to get some days where you get a really bad grade doesn't right dad got dad got an f today yeah right he like said some stuff he shouldn't have said did some stuff he shouldn't have done to me but then like you got to be the next day and a like what's my overall and and they were they were genuinely like amazing and i've come to realize that that is the most extraordinary gift i was was going to say, it sounds like a bit of a brag, but I remember someone came up to me once after I'd done a talk or something like that.
And there's your dad right there. Get a gander at him.
And they just said... What's his name, Phil? David.
David, yeah. That's a proper British name as well.
They said, like, this guy's dad loved him. You can tell his dad loved him.
And I was like, oh, so I loved you, right? And I was like, that's so weird. And I was like, I don't know that you can tell his dad loved him and i was like oh so i loved you right i was like that's so weird and i was like i don't know that you can just there's something in people men who were loved by their dads and i don't you could never quantify that right there's no chart you could ever make about that but i have i've never doubted my father's love for me and he was a coach for us he taught He taught us to swim.
He taught us to drive. But he was also the breadwinner.
And I had this moment with my dad that made a huge impression on me where, of his generation, he had to be the breadwinner. I married very young.
And he lost his job. He became unemployed a couple of times.
He worked in manufacturing during the 80s, which was a tough time in the UK and the US. And there was a time he was unemployed for quite a long time.
But every morning he got up and he shaved and he put on a shirt and a tie. His concession was he didn't put a jacket on.
He didn't fully dress up because he was trying to get a white collar job. And he had breakfast with us.
And I asked him one day, I said, dad, you're going into the spare room to type out like resumes to try and get a job. Why? Why are you shaving? Why are you still putting a shirt on? You don't have a job.
And he looked at me and he said, I do have a job. My job is to get another job so that I can take care of you.
And he worked as hard at getting a job as he ever had at his job because he knew that we needed him. And although I think that fatherhood has really changed, it's been different for me, right? Because the economic relationship between men and women has changed so dramatically, which is a huge liberation, I think.
I was able to be a stay-at-home dad for a few years in a way that he would never have been able to do. So it's a different world now.
But that basic idea that like, okay, you have this purpose in life now, which is I have to take care of you. It just changes you.
And I had that directly from my dad. Yeah, and just seeing that example, like, okay, what does a man do every day? He gets up.
He takes care of himself. He clothes himself.
And he moves forward in the world in some process. You know, like, yeah, no, I think that that's...
It took him months to find a job, and I've never been prouder of him, and I really realized that in retrospect. Oh, wow.
And he passed away now? No. Oh, good.
My parents are in their 80s now. They live in Wales.
I'm half Welsh. Oh, you are? Yeah.
And is that the bad one, or what's the bad one? Bad in what way? Yeah, I don't know. That's a good point.
I think you'd have to specify. Yeah, I got to look it up.
I mean, some people would say that the Welsh are bad. Yeah.
But I'm not going to say that. Okay.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. The Scottish? The Irish? Well, the Scottish is the easy.
Yeah. Everybody's like the Scottish are over there eating their own teeth, you know.
We can agree on that. But it's also, yeah, yeah, okay.
No, I love the UK because everybody just rips on the other group, you know. Yes.
Rips on the other part of it. It's the best.
That's true of like almost everywhere. It's like everything.
It's like college football. It's like states.
But you know we're stronger than in the UK. No, no.
It goes deeper. Yeah.
You go on stage in Ireland, you're like, fuck England. And they just, they will cheer for the...
Oh, that's right, they cheer for the other side, right? So, like, in rugby or soccer or something, like, everybody will... It's like, if England's playing Germany, the Welsh will support the Germans, right? I mean, and we have a history with the Germans, but it's like, even then, it's basically anybody but England.
Oh, so the English and the Welsh are against each other even. Oh, criks.
Oh, yes. I didn't know that.
Not quite as much as the Scots, probably. Yeah, for sure.
And also, of course, they have deep histories. I mean, it is the United Kingdom.
It is four nations. Yeah.
And so there is always going to be that difference. Yeah.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
It always just seems so much fun over there is how passionate they are about it. That's great.
I mean, it's a kind of tribalism can be good or bad, but the issue of, I know you're interested in fatherhood. Yeah, for sure.
And I was going to talk, yeah. And just so I'll relate my own.
Yeah. My dad was older when I was born.
My dad was 70 when I was born. So he was an older guy.
So I think I had this, like, this almost like fear all the time that my dad was going to be hurt or die maybe, you know, because it was always just kind of scary, you know, like, you know, like he would drive and he would ask us where we're going or if we could turn. And I was just a kid, I'd be standing on the passenger chair and we're standing up and like getting up and like looking at the lights and i'd be like it's good you know it's green or or bad or something and i remember one time i got it wrong and he just drove right out you were literally having to be his eyes while he was driving yeah i was helping out you know because sometimes he would park too close under the lights or whatever you know he'd waited at an intersection in the middle of the intersect you know know, he's just old, you know, he was just, you know, he was like 80 something at

that point.

And so it was just bizarre.

You know, I think it was a very bizarre kind of like probably fatherhood connection.

And then my parents got divorced.

And so then at that point, yeah, you kind of start to, and then my dad didn't live with

us.

And so my mom didn't want him to live with us.

And so, you know, then you're kind of like in this, you don't even realize it as a kid. You're just a kid, but you're in this starvation space for where do you get probably role models.
And who do you look to? And I had my brother around for a couple of years and then I was like a huge wrestling fan. Like I really idolized a lot of those guys um did you do it were you a wrestler no i got into steroids but i never did the wrestling you did the steroid bit but yeah yeah yeah so i did yes i guess yes you know but yeah i mean i remember collecting all the figurines and we would watch it i had a neighbor and his dad was a his dad was um like kind of dialed in and so that was helpful what did he was almost like a dad to you as well like because you can share it around i think that's part of the oh for sure i think you can get your father you can get your father little pieces from different men right you can i believe that like um yeah a basketball coach that you know showed me like care and affection and um included me in things that his family doing.
And then I ended up moving out and living with a different family when I was like 14. And that family had a stable father in the home.
And so that helped a lot. But yeah, not trying to make it about me.
I'm just trying to put both of our stories out there. Yeah, and I think it's important.
Just so we can see. But one of the things my dad also did, he was a coach.
He coached rugby and stuff. Oh, yeah.
I think particularly in the US, I've become really interested in the role of coaches. So my basic view is that coaches, especially for boys, we're actually seeing sports is going down for boys in the US now.
Boys are less likely to play sports than in the past. Is that true? Bring it up.
It's going up. yeah.
The Aspen Institute has a really good project called Project Play, where they actually track the data. It's going up for girls and down for boys.
Now, it's always been higher for boys, but sports participation is going down for boys. One reason for that is coaches.
You need coaches to do that. And we can maybe get into male teachers, because actually one of the things that male teachers do, and my son has just become a teacher.
He's teaching fifth grade in Baltimore. And within a day of starting, someone heard his accent, because he's still got a British accent, heard his accent.
He's a soccer coach now. And he actually is a good soccer player.
But the point is he's immediately a coach, right? And I think that coaches are basically mental health professionals in disguise, right? I think they're doing a lot of the work that you'd otherwise do in terms of mental health. And you can kind of see like there'll be a line from the Aspen.
Okay, here we go right here. It says, oh, we have fewer boys are playing sports.
In 2013, half of boys aged 6 to 17 participated regularly in sports, according to SFIA data. Only 41% of boys did in 2023.
Girls aged 6 to 12 had 34%, and 13 to 17 age girls were 38% played at higher levels in 2023 than in any recent years. So girls is going up, like you said, boys is going down.
Some of that could be attributed to also a lot more boys are like they choose to become gamers and that sort of thing, but more sedentary things. It could be, which is not necessarily a good thing.
I mean, ideally you'd want to do a bit of both. But then the question is like, why are boys playing less sport than in the past? And what is this coaching thing? And you can't get coaches.
I'd love to see something like a Coach for America program. You know, there's this Teach for America program, which gets people into teaching.
Because I think there's a lot of men who are struggling to know how to kind of connect with their community or what they can do. Oh, for sure.
Right? Some of the older institutions, maybe they used to do that through church or the scouts or whatever have maybe declined.

They have declined.

And so if there was a way to kind of plug those men into a coaching role, I think that's

important because when you, I mean, maybe this is maybe your experience, but like, I

think if you look at the image of a coach sitting on a bench, like with a student, you

know, a boy or a young man sitting next to him and he's like, how are you you doing? How are things at home? How are things with your mom? Et cetera. That's counseling.
That's therapy. But you're just not calling it that.
And the other thing is, critically, you're doing it shoulder to shoulder. Do you know this thing about the difference in communication style between men and women and boys and girls? Like men go shoulder to shoulder, women go face to face.
It's interesting how we're set up here. Once you've seen this, you can't unsee it.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, because guys don't usually look at each other when they're sharing information that much.
No, because actually that's a little bit of a threatening stance for men threatening stance for men like if men go face to face that's that might indicate something some aggression or some like it's a bit like you're you're intimidating each other a little bit right there's a role for that probably uh and you talk to someone you rarely stand and look directly there's always a little bit of an act not if you're male so my we learned this the hard way like even before i had any of the data and god i wish i'd had this data when we were raising our kids, right? But my wife would like, our kids would come home from school, all boys, and the two that were in high school and middle school at the time, they'd come home and they'd like sit across the breakfast bar from her, right? And she'd be feeding them stuff, like she'd feed them protein, have some protein. And then she'd stare at them like this and be like, how was your day? How was your day? And they'd be like, fine.
They'd look down, fine. Did you learn anything? I don't know.
Nothing, just nothing. And then later on, we'd be driving with them somewhere or watching a game or video game or just something like that, shoulder to shoulder.
And they would say, you know, this weird thing happened today, dad or mom, right? This girl said this thing at school today huh interesting and what we now know is that that's very very common that actually the communication style that men are most comfortable with is less face to face and it's more shoulder to shoulder now think about this fishing road trips watching sports sitting on the the bench, shoulder to shoulder. It is the only explanation I have for the existence of golf.
What is golf about? Do you play golf? Mm-mm. Okay, good.
I'd be willing to play it, but I just, I can't even calm down right now. But it's like, again, men have to be doing something else.
And they have to be doing it like just... So if you go to a party now, you will not be able to unsee this.
Watch how the men stand in relation to each other. And there are people who've done whole PhDs on measuring the angle.
We always stand a little bit catty corner, like a little bit of an angle, because to go face-to-face is threatening. Now, women, on the other hand, very comfortable face-to-face.
Walk into a coffee shop and count up how many people are sitting opposite each other staring each other in the face and then see what the gender is of them much more likely to be women now it's not like one is good or bad right but what you don't want is a mental health profession like psychology or whatever it is based on the presumption that we're all supposed to sit like this and so a lot of male male therapists now, they're taking their male patients out for a walk. That's the thing to do.
Walk and talk. That's the best.
Walk with them. Don't sit and stare at them.
I've been saying that for years. As a man, it's like we don't want that.
Yeah, Mike's girlfriend's a therapist now and she and I, whenever we really needed to discuss stuff, we go on a walk because you're in motion already. There's a part of you that feels like it's moving forward, even if you're sharing something that's troubling.
Because sometimes you get, you're sitting in a sedentary, you're just sitting there in a room somewhere. It's like, oh, well, you leave, you haven't really gone anywhere.
Nothing's happened, you know? But on a walk, you're making progress no matter what, even by just like staying in motion. Same as a road trip.
But they've now got this physiological element to it too, which is that just how you're relating to each other physically, especially for men, it's just very important that we are. I'm going to try that next time I'm with my therapist in a room.
It's like, yeah, why do, yeah, like maybe it's easier if I'm just able to share and have somebody there, right? I remember one time I was talking to my brother and I didn't know that this had been important in my life, but he said, hey, man, I can just, I was having a tough day, man. I pulled over.
I was like just, I was kind of like falling apart a little bit. And he's like, hey, man, I can just sit here on the phone with you.
We don't have to say anything, right right and i'd never he's like i have some time right i have an extra 10 minutes i can just sit here with you we don't have to say any we don't have to say anything and i can just be here with you you know and man i just i mean it was like a damn inside of me broke you know it was like literally there was tears coming out of my toenails you know like it was just like you didn't realize all the time you needed someone just to be there yeah i didn't near it needed to hear him say anything i didn't need to hear that how they thought i felt i didn't need to hear a response to anything no judgment nothing i just needed somebody there you know and it was like i mean it's i mean it like i remember my hands vibrating It just needed somebody there, you know? And it was like,

I mean, it's, I mean, it like, I remember my hands vibrating. It shook me so much, you know? You're very lucky.
That idea of being like with somebody, not necessarily for them. I think sometimes we think like we've got to be for them.
We've got to be telling them what to do. We've got to be advising them.
We've got to be advocating, like somehow we've got to be doing something. And sometimes it's just being with.

And for them to know that I'm with you, right? That's an incredibly powerful statement. And one of the things that has really motivated my work around boys and men, which I didn't ever expect really to be doing, was just this sense that I had that so many boys and men now don't have that feeling that we're with you, that we have your back.
We've noticed that you're struggling and we're with you. And instead, there's sometimes been a sense a lot of men have felt, which is being neglected or sometimes even blamed for their own problems.
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I am grateful for the one that I have, and I feel honestly thankful to be able to have one. I know they're not in everybody's price range, and that's understandable.
But at the same time, I want to support my friend and his amazing company. So I think there are these real problems, right? So I know you talked to Scott Galloway about some of these issues.
Scott's been amazing on this, but the suicide rate among men under the age of 30 has risen by 40% since 2010. Just since 2010, by 40%.
Is that true? Bring that up. Yeah.
Look, the American Institute for Boys and Men did a suicide trends analysis. And if you go down, you can then see the shift in, so up until 2010, it was much more older men who were, there you go, you got it.
So if you go down, like there's a... Let me see, if male suicide rates had been the same as women's from 1999 to 2023, we would have lost 546,000 fewer men.
Yeah. So men are, since 2010, suicide rates have risen by 30%.
For 25 to 34, but we've updated that since. And for under 20s, it's 40%.
Wow. So it was really interesting about the suicide.
And where do you get this information from? From CDC, from the Centers of Disease Control. This is official.
So we lose 40,000 men a year to suicide. And since 2010, it's all shifted to being younger men, right? So the rise, up until 2010, the rise was middle-aged men, really.
And that was about deaths of despair. You can see it's partly about the economy.
But since 2010, the rise has been among younger men. And so that's a very different thing.
That's not about the recession. That's something different going on.
I think that's more cultural. I think it's more just a lot of these young men feeling lost, feeling unseen.
Yeah, what am I a part of? Yeah, because you have to have purpose, right? And I think you have to have purpose. We've talked a lot about that on this podcast.
I learned a lot about it. But yeah, we have to have something to feel a part of.
Man, I remember there was a guy I went skydivingiving with and he'd listen to this podcast when it first started out and we he and i kind of connected and um and we connected on like kind of like some emotional levels talking about life and stuff and then there were a couple times he'd messaged me i didn't get back to him over like uh it was like six months or something i mean life you know you're busy life yeah and then he took his own life not that i had you know nothing i probably could have done but just like man it's just like oh i just like sometimes that's that just all that stuff kind of haunts you it's like but you don't you don't know it's coming and one of the things things that stopped me in my tracks, you know how sometimes, so for a living, I'm reading research reports and looking at data and stuff, but I've also been racing three boys. But even in the research, sometimes you get a finding that just stops you and affects you emotionally.
And there's one study that looked at men who'd taken their own lives and then looked at the words they'd used to describe themselves before they'd taken their lives. And the two most commonly used words that men were using about themselves before they took their own lives was, I'm useless and I'm worthless.
And that sense of worthlessness, of genuinely feeling like maybe my family, my community will be better off without me than with me is what leads to that tragic outcome. And of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
If you then look at drugs, you look at substance abuse, you look at what's happening in employment market. I think that sense that a lot of men have is that there isn't really a script anymore to follow to manhood, to mature masculinity.
And I think that that's in one way, that's for a good reason. But the way I think about this is if you think about the script that my dad had about being a breadwinner.
Yeah, so I was going to say, let's look at some previous scripts so we can examine the script. So like my, like my parents are a good example, born, you know, uh, born in the forties, had the kids in there in the 1960s.
And then it was like, my mom knew that she was mostly going to be the homemaker and the mom. She worked as well.
She was a nurse, but my dad knew that he was going to be the breadwinner, right? The provider. There was not a discussion about that.
There was no question about that. So they had pretty clear roles.
Now, the problem with that, of course, was that the roles depended on the woman, in this case, my mom, being economically dependent on my dad. Right, right.
That's the problem. And that's the problem that the women's movement successfully, to a large extent, set out to solve.
But my dad was also quite emotionally dependent on my mom and vice versa. But I do think it's a two-way street.
That was missing from the analysis. Anyway, we tore up these old scripts and we said to women, you don't have to be a housewife and mother anymore, or at least that's not your only option.
You can be whatever you want to be. You go, girl.
Be president, be an astronaut, which is amazing. Totally amazing.
That message of empowerment we sent to women. So we tore up the old female script, provided a new one about empowerment and independence and you go, girl.
We tore up the old male script, which is you're going to be the provider and the protector. We don't really have a new one.
We didn't replace it. And so we're all improvising now.
So basically we've gone from having some kind of script to improvisation. And that's incredibly difficult to do.
And so it's hard because the good news here is what's happened to women, right? Nobody wants to roll back the economic gains of women. But I think it's incredibly irresponsible and naive of us to think that that doesn't have consequences for how we think about the role of men.
We've got to be able to think both of those thoughts at once. It's good that women are gaining ground.
It is bad that men feel lost and purposeless. And we have got to solve that problem as well.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, I think that's that's really cool information. It's good to look at.
It's good to like, and it's really, it makes perfect sense, right? And it's like, you want to have a reason, right? And sometimes I think women, yes, they didn't have the access to money. And in a capitalistic society, money is power, right? But also, I think there was a missing respect there, right? There wasn't all, I think if women had been, if it had been totally respected, the, the, the sacrifices that they made and the, the just intrinsic value of who they are as mothers and as caretakers and as, um, bridges of empathy and affection, um, and as homemakers, no matter where they are, whether they're in a home or whether they're in a conversation, just being able to have that ability to create peace, I think if women had, if that had been more respected, then maybe they never would have felt as much of a movement or as much of a desire to have so much of a movement.
Because they had the power. Right.
Yeah. And the power and the money is the power.
Yeah. So the power, and that's what that, that the women's movement had a huge fight about that because there were some people in the women's movement saying, no, no, no, we, there's, it's called the wages for housework movement, which was basically what we need to do is pay women to do the traditional women's role.
That's a cool idea. And that lost out.
That was a real idea. Yeah..
Bring that up, the wages for housework movement? Yeah. There's a big split in the women's movement between the ones who are saying we need to value care and value care work, like wages for housework.
And then there's another movement, which is like, actually, you've got to be, yeah, in the 1970s. I never knew about this.
The wages for housework campaign was a 1970s international movement that demanded governments recognize the value of unpaid domestic labor primarily performed by women. Wow.
The founders were Silvia Federici, Selma James, Marielsa Diacosta, and Bridget Gautier. Their goals were to change the dependency of domestic workers, reverse power relations, and redistribute wealth.
Yeah. that's fascinating.
That's another way we could have gone, in theory at least, right? Right, right. And I'm not saying that women didn't deserve to have all the jobs in whatever they wanted to do.
I'm just saying if there had been a different level of respect and some, yeah, and this makes perfect sense, and some financial equality, maybe they wouldn't have wanted that.

I have no idea.

I'm just thinking.

No, well, this is a really interesting question

because I now think we're at a point where a lot of men and women

are feeling like this isn't quite working.

We're trying to raise kids.

We're trying to form families.

We want to raise our own kids.

Right.

Both parents are so stressed out that they can't even have a relationship anymore. Right.
We want to stay together and be married. We want to raise our own kids by and large, right? And we don't want to die of stress, right? So one of the ways I think about this is like, you had this old family system, right? Which was breadwinner father, homemaker mother, and it was unfair in many ways, but it was also pretty stable and very clear what everyone's role is.
And it was pretty good for kids, right? Because of that stability when it worked. We've replaced that with a different model now where we don't want that economic inequality.
So we're going to both men and women are going to work. That can create all kinds of stress.
And maybe that relationship is hard to sustain, which means it might end up separating, which is not good for kids. Right.
And the rules aren't super clear. You don't know who's going to be doing what you don't know who's getting certain things done.
You don't know. The division of labor is not clear.
And a division of labor, in other words, like being clear, like you do this, I do this. Like an organized business.
Yeah. I mean, it's like everybody knows that it makes more sense.
Like you're in charge of X, I'm in charge of Y. So you get really good at X and I get really good at Y.
And the interesting path we took instead was like, okay, women need to get into the labor market and have labor market power. I think that was almost certainly the – I mean, that's the right – I don't imagine a world where the wages for housework movement, like huge government subsidies to people who are staying at home, was ever likely.
And there's all kinds of problems with that idea. But it's an interesting idea, but thought behind it, which is, are we doing enough to support the people who want to raise their own kids? The whole point of the women's movement wasn't to turn women into their fathers.
It was to give everybody more choice. And we haven't achieved that yet because we haven't done the rest of it, which is to change the way the workplace works, to give more support to families.
I know you had J.D. Vance on, right? And J.D.
Vance has supported like a child tax credit, which is seen as a left-wing idea to give more money to people who've got kids in the house. And so that's not wages for housework, but it's in the direction of actually valuing care through government subsidy.

But that has not been an idea that's been popular for a pretty long time. Really? Well, since the 70s, I would give a minute.
Yeah, you're saying that. Yeah, that's interesting.
Right, so it's a similar idea. It's not the same.
Yeah, and it wouldn't be framed as wages for housework anymore, and it certainly wouldn't be aimed just at women anymore. Right.
It would be for families, et cetera. But the idea that another way to go is to actually provide financial support,

like most European countries do, to parents who are at home and not just to parents who are in the workplace. That's an interesting discussion right now.
And I think as long as it doesn't become a call to go back, we're going to help women stay in the home. Instead, it should be to help parents figure out for themselves.
And I'm a huge believer that actually fathers, fathers are doing so much more than they were in the past. Fathers are doing so much more in the home, so much more childcare.
And dads are saying they want to do more. Interestingly now, men are more likely to say that having children is important to them than women are.
Men are more likely to say that getting married is important to them than women are. And so that's a really interesting moment in history where if you've got this stereotype that it's like women who are obsessed with getting married and having kids, not anymore.
It's now men who are saying that's a higher priority for them. It's almost like men are coming to bridge the gap there of like making, because there always needs to be some

one of the parties has to be

until we can get both of the parties

to be aligned has to be the one

that wants to bring

it back to let's have a family and move

because I think you have to do it it's like

it's how we're built

how am I going to get that purpose

that you talk about I think I've heard you say that

you want to have kids at some point oh yeah I would like to have

some kids man I started this campaign

it's called 2020 Wive. That means like 2025, but it's like this is the year I get a wife.
Oh, I see. So that is- I thought you meant you were going to get 25 wives.
Oh, no. Now, look, I'd be willing to have more than one wife, but- We would need a change in the law for that, Theo.
Hey, I could be a dual citizen. You'd have to be a dual citizen with, I think, Afghanistan.
Okay. Maybe Iran.
I'm willing. I could do it, man.
You'd also have to convert to Islam. Oh, really? Well, Christianity doesn't look kindly on multiple wives.
Can you convert to Islam online or not?

Bring that up.

I'm not the right person to ask that.

How to convert to Islam.

Oh, good.

And there's a 1-800 number?

There is.

Scroll up.

Scroll down.

Oh, it's an 866 number.

Damn, that's great.

Does that mean you have to pay for it?

I'm sure they hit you with something, man. Converting to Islam is a very easy process and can be done online in privacy.
Okay. Now that makes it sound very suspect, the fact that it has to be done.
We could just tell someone, right? Oh, yeah, no one can know. Yeah.
It sounds like somebody is recruiting. I think a better route for you, if I can offer some advice, is to just have one wife.
I think that stood the test of time as a way of doing things. No, actually, look, I should be very clear.
Recent time, I think most human societies have been polygamous, have actually had. Really? Yeah, it's like 95% of known human societies have been polygamous.
And almost always, I'll get the word wrong, it's polygynous, I think, which means men are allowed to have multiple wives but not the other way around. Wow.
Right? Very rare to find it the other way around. Which is one of the reasons why, this is a fact that blew my mind.
I'm going to try on you. Okay.
See what you think. We have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
Okay, twice as many. Ancestors.
An ancestor means what? Across human history. An ancestor means somebody that existed? Yeah.
So twice as many females existed as men? There are twice as many women in human history as there are men. Twice as many.
The modern, yes, modern humans have approximately twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. This is due to a number of factors.
I love the fact that you're checking everything I say. This makes me feel much more confident about saying it because then you're going to check it.
Yeah, good, because we're trying to do a little bit better job. That's one of my goals this year is just to have a better – because sometimes I just assume everything is true, right? And a lot of this stuff is just helpful information.
But I don't understand, though. Right.
So how can you have twice as many females? You're just saying that two-thirds of the people that have ever existed have been female. Yeah.
Wow. But I guess it makes sense because there's Mother Earth, right? So obviously she's going to want more kind of babes around hanging out on her.
And then you're going to have like there's going to be – and females are the producers. They have the womb and they're the makers.
They're like the recipes. They're the chefs.
So you need like more you know life is about creation so i think it makes sense that you're going to have more women around probably right does that make any sense you think no okay um i just i just think women are the ones who like keep things together sure so i think you're going to need more of that probably to keep the world functioning. Okay.
Actually, the idea... Do you know why they have more though? Yeah.
Oh, sorry, Jesus. No, I like...
I thought we were guessing. I don't...
I mean, I don't hate your idea. It's certain...
Like the idea that Mother Earth like wants more mothers around. I think it's kind of a beautiful idea.
Yeah, I think it checks out to me. Should we...
Why aren't we Googling this? That's a good question. Who wants a bunch of dudes loitering around anyway? Someone's going to call the police.
Every time I say something, you have this guy Googling it, right? Whereas you say stuff. Google his stuff.
There you go right there. Look at that lady right there.
Are there more women because Mother Earth likes women better? Oh, for sure. Well, she's obviously going to have a probably definitely.
I don't know. Maybe Mother Earth is very jealous and she doesn't want women around.
Could be the other way around, yeah. Could be like, wouldn't Mother Earth want lots of men? That's what I would think too.
If she was straight. But men are just loyting around.
They're jerking off in the parking lot or whatever. You don't want that.
I don't think that's a, that's not what you want. You want some babes around, I think.
Can I give you an alternative theory? Yeah. Why? Which is that you, because you, societies are being polygamous, right? You don't need that many men.
Oh, yeah. In order to have a lot of children.
It's like the NBA. It's like NBA players kind of thing.
What do you mean? Like a lot of those guys have. Who has the most kids in the NBA? Bring that up.
I think it's some... Are NBA players well-known for having lots of children? I think they're promiscuous type of, you know, so it's like Calvin Murphy.
There we go. 14 children.
So I'm just saying, yeah, these guys can definitely... Well, you see it on Tinder as well.
You see on these apps, it's like a winner-takes-all type thing. And it works like the guys at the top.
That's what Scott Galloway was saying, that like the top 1% of men. Right, the numbers.
But what's interesting about that is that's basically human history. I actually showed that Tinder data to an evolutionary psychologist, someone who studies a whole history of humanity.

And he's like, yeah, that just looks like human history to me,

which is high-status men mating with multiple women.

And therefore, we are kind of reproduced.

But 50% of men across human history didn't have kids at all.

They didn't reproduce.

Now, what that meant was, there's all kinds of implications for that.

One is, first of all, I'm reading this book by Neil Stevenson now. It's called Seven Eves.
And we basically have to kind of send out a few people to survive. And there's this passing comment because the Earth's going to be destroyed.
Seven Eves? Seven Eves, yeah. There's this passing comment there, which is like, most of the colonists will have to be female.
And the reason for that is the ones we're talking about, which is you need a lot of wombs to keep the human race going, but you don't need as many men. There's this guy, actually, I can quote him directly, this guy, Roy Baumeister, who says, we have a penile surplus, which is a kind of brutal way of putting it.
But it's like, we just don't need that many men. Now, one consequence of that is, and this is going to get me back to your skydiving.
I'm going to loop this. If I'm successful here, if I'm successful, I'm going to loop this back to skydiving.
I have 0% chance of looping things. Okay, let me try.
I believe in you. So, okay.
Yeah. So 50% of men have not reproduced in human history.
So half the men have kids, half of them don't have kids.

And it's the lower status men who are not going to have kids, right? Because the higher status men have multiple wives. They're actually, if you like, they're over-consuming.
And they can afford to do it. Correct.
And so if you're a low status man, there's a good chance that you're just not going to reproduce at all, right? You're going to be an evolutionary dead end. Your DNA is not going to go anywhere.
And under those circumstances, you will risk almost anything to raise your status. Go to war, go exploring, turn to crime, do anything to try and get yourself up that hierarchy so you have a chance of reproducing.
If you stay down there, you ain't going to have kids. You're cooked.
Right? And so you've got to get up there. So you take risks.
You risk your life because actually if you die, who cares? You only got a 50-50 chance of having a kid anyway. And if you're down there, it's not 50-50.
It's maybe like you're almost certainly not going to have a kid. So you take crazy risks to raise up the hierarchy.
And one consequence of that is men, on average,

are more risk-taking than women, even today,

which is why they go skydiving.

Like, what do you think about skydiving?

Like, men are also twice as likely to drown.

Men are twice as likely to drown.

Yeah.

There's all kinds of ways.

It's like risky behavior, both good and bad,

is higher among men, right?

Good could be like being entrepreneurial, whatever.

I don't know any women that have drowned, and I know some men that have drowned.

And so skydiving, you know what?

I'm going to say something, and I don't know if this is true,

so you're going to have to get your fact checker in the sky to check,

but I bet you more men skydive.

But I know for sure that smoke jumpers are almost entirely men.

Do you know what a smoke jumper is? I don't think so. It's not a Native American thing, is it? No, you're from the South, right? Where are you from? Yeah, I'm from Louisiana.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you'd know if you were from out kind of West, right.
What does it say about men and women? Well, the number of men and women who try tandem skydiving is roughly equal. The sport of skydiving is predominantly male.
Professional skydivers, only about 14% of professional skydivers in the United States are women. Some reasons for the disparity, women may be more risk averse than men, just like you're saying.
Yeah, that's number one. And women may be perceived as less interested in taking risks.
If you, so just from an evolutionary perspective, or if you're a woman, you are highly incentivized to protect your own body, right you're probably this is just ever in evolutionary yeah you're the one who's got the future yes and you're gonna have a kid probably most women have reproduced right you'll quite like to have a kid whereas if you're a guy actually if you've only historically had like a 50 50 chance right and you've got to get more status and your body is kind of less quotes valuable right who Who cares if your nuts land out in the desert or whatever because your shoe didn't know you throw yourself out of a plane so so these these smoke jumpers smoke jumpers are highly trained firefighters who parachute from airplanes in a remote areas to fight wildfires wow it's almost like um severe barbecue like one of those TV shows or whatever.

Smoke jumpers are really interesting because these are people who have chosen for a job.

Okay.

That they will go up in an airplane, jump out of the airplane, even when there's nothing wrong with the airplane, which is what you do, apparently.

Jump out of the airplane.

But the difference is they jump out of the airplane into a blazing inferno in the middle of nowhere and stay there for days on end fighting that fire. That's an interesting job choice.
And it's almost all men. Now, there are some women, and of course women should be encouraged to do that job, and that's great if they want to do that job.
But I'm just going to go on. I said this to a female friend of mine.
I said, you know, this profession, I explained to her what it was. And she said, you can keep that one.
There's no big feminist movement to get more women into smoke jumping. Smoke is so bad for you anyway.
I guess the point here is like there's, there are ways in which on average men and women are different. And one of them is that men have this different appetite for risk.
And if that, do we think that that's good or bad is the wrong question. It's both good and bad.
It depends how it's expressed, right? Because there are times when you want people to be willing to take risks, to put themselves on the line, or to kind of try a new venture or something like that. And there are times when it's a really bad idea, right, to try a new drug when it's not a good idea, or to jump too high off a bridge or whatever it is.
And so there's ways in which those differences between men and women can either become good or bad, but we don't get anywhere by denying that they exist. What we do is we say there are these differences.
How do we channel them in productive ways? And so if young men, for example, are a bit more risk-taking, and they're a lot more risk-taking when they're young, if they're a bit more potential for physical aggression, which is absolutely clear, et cetera, if they're a bit more driven by sex, for example, which is also absolutely true, and we see that playing out in all kinds of ways around pornography, et cetera, it doesn't do any good to just say that's not true. Those things aren't, they're all socialized.
Actually, instead, what we're going to say is they are true. So what do we do about that as a culture and as a society? How do we kind of take those differences responsibly and not fall into the trap of saying one is good or one is bad? We used to think that somehow the male attributes, to call them that, were better, right? That's a patriarchy.
And the female ones, maybe more caring, more nurturing, et cetera. As you said a minute ago, right? We just, we value them less, right? We don't want a society like that, but we also don't want a society where the male, the more male-leaning attributes are seen as intrinsically bad.
It's one of the reasons why I hate the term toxic masculinity, by the way. Well, also, there's no toxic femininity either, which is interesting.
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There's a lot more of suicide. There's uncertainty is what it means to be a man.
Masculinity, this kind of masculinity with this new femininity kind of being defined now. The new masculinity is kind of undefined.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And a lot of men are looking for their place.
What do you feel like is causing that these days? Because it's not women causing it. It's not this equality of women.
No, it's not. And I think that's a really important thing to say because that sometimes is what feels like might be the case and what some people are saying, including kind of online, which is what they do is they take two facts, which is women have risen significantly economically, in terms of education now, massively overtaken men, etc.
Men are struggling and suffering. And there's cul-de-sac of sorts.
Yeah. So maybe that's because of that, right? Maybe the struggles of men are the result of the rise of women.
That's completely untrue. They're for different reasons.
So the economy has changed, right? So a lot of the jobs that men used to be able to do, especially without maybe that much education in manufacturing and steelworks and mining and stuff, they've largely gone, right? Now, are they gone for good or they've just gone away from America? They've gone away from America. They've gone away from America america okay and there's no serious prospect of those male jobs that required like strong physical labor like bruce springsteen type stuff it's not coming back i mean we can be nostalgic for them by and large i mean i'm not saying there's none no none of that right um but that's a huge shock right it's a massive change in in the workplace it's just those jobs that men used to be be able to do that their dad maybe did.
They're just not there. Yeah, I mean, that was a lot of the commercials when I was a kid.
It was like, I was born in a small town. You know what I'm saying? There was that commercial of like somebody made something.
And I remember my grandfather worked at the plant in his town and they made elevators and stuff. They made parts for elevators and it was a small town.
But he worked there and my grandma would take him lunch over there at the weekend, during lunchtime. And they had a lunch whistle in town and there was just these little things, you know, and, and whenever we drove past there, you know, like grandpa works there, you know, it was like, so there was, um, it added purpose to everybody's existence.
Yeah. And there was a real structure to it.
I mean, just think about my own family. I took my three sons to North Wales, to a town called Bliner Fustinjog in North Wales.
Bliner Fustinjog is a disease as well, I think. Oh, in a few minutes, it'll be a new drug available in America.
This will fool your fact checker. They will not be able to even spell Bliner Fustinjog.
But you was the biggest producer of slate for a long time. And generations of my family have worked in that slate mine.
Oh, really? Went there and we found their great, great, great, great, great grandfather's grave. No way.
And went down into the mine and spent some time there. It had a big effect on them.
And it's like, what did you do? You did what your dad did, go down the mine. What your granddad did, go down the mine, right? Go down the mine, go down the mine.
And even when I was growing up in a, I grew up in Peterborough, an industrial town, my mom was a part-time industrial nurse for a while. And the hooter for the ends of the shifts, we could hear it across the town.
And so we knew when she was coming home, because we would hear the factory hooter. Horn.
Horn. Yeah.
Sounder. Sounder.
Alarm. Thank you.
Wow. Yeah.
So it's almost like as men, we're out of the mines now. A little bit.
Like we had that. Not everybody.
Some people are still in there. I know.
It was such a weird experience. So we went down to the bottom of the slate mine, and there are these little huts in the bottom of the mine.
And they would go in there for like 30 minutes at lunchtime, and they would sing. This is in Welsh, right? So they'd sing.
They'd sing, and they'd eat, and they'd eat and they'd talk maybe do a bit politics right and then they'd go back up and start coming out the mind very dangerous incredibly well paid for the time but very dangerous work and there was something about i went to those huts and i sat in there like with my boys and we're kind of sitting there and thinking about like seven generations of our family being down there and actually this, this is going to sound a bit weird, but almost being a little bit envious of what it was like for those men to go down there and be in that little hut. And then, of course, you catch yourself and you think you're an idiot.
It was dangerous work. It was hard.
What are you talking about? And if you put me in there now, I probably wouldn do great right but i think what what it was catching for me and with my boys especially was the sense of like male solidarity right just a sense that visceral sense of like it did structure live male lives in particular and in that in that town when the men went down into the mines all the all the wives would come out and the kind of children and stand silently it was bad luck for there to be any noise. So they stood silently while the men went down into the mines, all the wives would come out, and the children, and stand silently.
It was bad luck for there to be any noise. So they stood silently while the men went down into the mine.
Wow. And hoped that they would come back.
And so there's something very beautiful and nostalgic about that. And I get that nostalgia.
Yeah, it was a tradition. Right.
It was a ritual. Ritual, tradition, purpose, space, clear script, right? What are you going to do? How about you do what your great-great-great-great-grandfather did and your great-grandfather and your grandfather? How about just doing that, right? And I don't think we couldn't, even if we wanted to, reconstruct that kind of world.
But I do think we should be honest about the fact that the collapse of that structure and those scripts has really left a lot of men incredibly uncertain about, am I going to be needed by my family? What am I going to do? What's my job going to be? So we've had this massive economic change. And then alongside it, we've had this huge social change, which has been the economic rise of women, right? And so it's no longer the case that women are now like looking for a man.

Gloria Steinem is a very famous feminist, still alive, from the 1970s.

I actually had a really cool meeting with her.

Really?

Cool lady or not?

Yes.

Totally cool.

I've got to meet that lady.

She's amazing.

And she said famously, she said, the point of the women's movement is to make marriage

a choice for women, not a necessity. Right? Because women needed to get married before.
Right, it was the only way who was going to pay for dinner. Right, to eat.
Not at a fancy restaurant. And so the whole point is to make it a choice so that women have enough economic power to choose marriage rather than being forced into it.
She actually, this is a weird coda, but she actually just got married herself. I think she's in her 90s now.
She's so cool. But she got married, partly because same-sex marriage is legal now, and because she said we've made enough progress that marriage, she used to describe marriage as this patriarchal citadel, et cetera.
Here's the weird thing. She got married to Christian Bale's father.

Wow.

Which I just find a bit random.

And he's British, isn't he?

No.

Is he?

I don't know.

I don't know either.

David Bale right there in 2066,

the long single Steiner married for the first time

in a Cherokee ceremony in Oklahoma.

So that was a while ago.

It was in 2000, right?

Her husband, entrepreneur and activist David Bale, sadly died of lymphoma four years later. That's right.
Wow. Yeah.
So even in the end, even Gloria Steinem felt like it was okay to get married, right? We'd made enough progress. Right.
So that actually the women, marriage was no longer this kind of trap for women economically. But it was a choice.
It was a choice. And so, but of course, what that means is when it's a choice, there's a lot of women that might be like, I choose not to marry you.
I might or might not have your kids, but we're now in this world where there's a lot more freedom of choice. And of course, that is a great and wonderful thing.
But it's also created a huge amount of uncertainty, especially among men. I think a lot of men feel now that they've been told a bunch of things that they know they shouldn't be.
Shouldn't be predator. Shouldn't, you know, this all.
Right, don't do this. Don't do this.
You can't peep in time. You can't.
And quite right too, right? But there's no like, I sometimes think that we have a long list of don'ts for men. Right, right.
But not very many do's. Yeah.
Where's the list of to-do's for men now? For sure. And it used to be that, yeah, almost every man, you weren't guaranteed a wife, but everybody's going to need to pair up because the way that the script was put together, you needed each other because you needed someone to be in the home.
You needed someone to be the breadwinner. The script was there.
You had to partner up. So figure it out and let's move on.
Let's move forward in the world. Exactly.
And what I fear now is that there are some more reactionary forces, voices saying, the way to actually for men to find purpose is to go back. Because it's very recently that there was a world where men felt purpose, which was the world we just escaped from,

where women were economically dependent on men.

And so I could totally understand why this is happening,

where people are saying, well, we used to know what our role was

when women were economically reliant on us.

Well, first of all, we ain't going back.

There's no switch you could turn out even if you wanted to.

And we don't want to.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing more to help men move forward. And actually having a bit of empathy for the fact that this is a difficult moment, a difficult transition for men.
And so rather than kind of pointing fingers at them, we should maybe offering them the occasional helping hand. And I think that lack of empathy and understanding and awareness of the genuine suffering of many of our men has created a huge vacuum in our culture and in our society.
And we need to fill it fast. Otherwise, we're going to lose more and more of our men.
And we'll be right back. Wow.
Very true. So one thing you have to start to look at is then where do men start to, you know, or where do men continue to find these building building blocks right to to create the worth inside of themselves um for me one thing has been through other men right and and um and even like you're saying shoulder to shoulder like things that experiences that i've had that have been the the best um like even when i used to go to uh brazilian jiu-jitsu and take classes there It was really amazing Because you're in this physical space But also there's so much mutual respect in there It's not people trying to beat each other up It's people trying to help each other Physically learn how to take care of themselves Right? But with that There's so much camaraderie And love and compassion that comes along with having great instructors.
And a lot of times it's just the guy next to you who's your best instructor for the next moment. Recovery meetings, you know, I go to recovery meetings for intimacy and AA.
And those meetings for me are really great, especially the intimacy ones like where, you know, they call it like sex and love addiction and stuff, but it's really just like intimacy disorders or connection disorders or just, it's almost just low self-worth. It's all, it's all of that.
And sometimes you base it off of your relationship with women, or you can look at your relationship with women to see how you're doing on your own. Are there men and women in those groups or is it just men? a lot of the ones i go to are just men and it's not that i don't want women in them it's just like i want a space where it's just men i can be able to share openly if i'm struggling with a certain thing or how i'm feeling or um and it just be other men you know it just feels and it and then you're not trying to like uh slurp on any of the chicks that are in there either you're not trying to flirt or anything you know you're.
Which would seem bad given the nature of the problems that many of the men have. Oh, and you'll be shocked.
It'd be like holding an AA meeting in a bar or something. Yeah.
I understand that. Yeah.
So it's, yeah. But you're getting male solidarity from both of those places.
That's what you're getting. And that's one of the reasons I go.
I go out and hear other men share. I go to share.
And sometimes they'll say something and like, my body will just go like that, right? It's like- Your shoulders drop, you breathe. It's an exhale that I didn't even know I needed to take.
It's an exhale that has just been running in the back of my subconscious for sometimes decades, sometimes hours, sometimes years, minutes. But it's something that I needed to hear.
I needed to hear everything was okay yeah and i needed to hear another man's voice say it yeah and um and it helps it helps uh it helps yeah it's interesting i well thank you for sharing that yeah you're welcome but yeah what spaces are there for men like what it's something beautiful about that i think i don't know back to my story about the hut like in the bottom of the slate mine it's like there's something oh yeah there's something It's beautiful. It's quite fragile.
I think. And I go back to my story about the hut, like in the bottom of the slate mine.
It's like there's something... Oh, yeah, there's something nice about it.
It's beautiful. It's quite fragile.
I think that male friendships take work. I think we sometimes don't pay enough attention to them.
It's actually something like I go on road trips with my best friend or every year I get together with my male buddies and we go hiking so that we're shoulder to shoulder and just talk and catch up. And that's, I think one of the damaging trends in recent years has been a suspicion of male spaces, right? Of like the boys weekend or even some of the institutions.
So if you actually go through the institutions now, like the Boy Scouts is not the Boy Scouts anymore. I'm actually a scout leader.
I'm not doing as much now, but I used to run a scout group over in the UK and I was a scout, But it's co-ed now. Boy Scouts is not the Boy Scouts anymore.
I'm actually a scout leader. I'm not doing as much now,

but I used to run a scout group over in the UK,

and I was a scout.

But it's co-ed now.

Boy Scouts is co-ed?

It's scouting for America now.

And what is Girl Scouts?

Are they just joined forces?

No.

Girl Scouts are still Girl Scouts.

No.

Yeah.

And we can't go over there?

The Girl Scouts does not allow boys in.

Wow.

But Boy Scouts has become Scouting for America.

Ladies, that's not even cool. But there's a pattern here.
You've got the YMCA is now co-ed, right? No one really thinks about the M in YMCA anymore. That's your point.
Right? Whereas the YWCA, still very kind of focused on women. Boys and girls clubs used to be boys clubs.
I'm thinking there's one other one I'm thinking of. And it's not that there's always bad things to be co-ed.
It's not that you also don't want institutions for girls and women. But what we've got now is a situation where we're actually really very often applauding having these spaces for girls and kind of women to have female solidarity, work together, grow together.
But we're really suspicious if it's men doing it. And I get why, right? Because of our history.
But I think that as a result, we've actually deconstructed a lot of these institutions where actually boys could learn from other boys and from men and so on too. And so I think that turning the Boy Scouts into Scouting for America and taking not for it being, I think we'll look back on that and just say, that was a bad decision.
Kind of emasculating in a way. It's just like, why can't, I mean, I just think about my own experience.
Why can't we meet? And it's not like, I went to a co-ed high school, but actually the fact that I was able to go to scouts and there'd be guys there and we could learn from each other. And I, weirdly, I actually think that male spaces are where you can help men to learn some of the not traditionally male attributes, like caring and nurturing and love and expressing that stuff.
It's just easier, right? Or a male sports team, right? Like you're learning love. You're learning comradeship.
You're learning solidarity. You're learning, exactly.
And I just think that's a bit, and it probably is true for girls too, that kind of learning some of those skills that maybe go against the stereotype about girls, like learning to be more assertive maybe or competitive, et cetera. Like you generally don't have to encourage a bunch of boys to compete with each other.
Right. That just tends to be a bit more baked in.
It's in the nature. Yeah.
Yeah. And there should be spaces where it's like, hey, men can meet up here tonight.
And they used to have more of them. There was like more American legions.
There was more like VFWs. But a lot of that was military-based type stuff.
It was. And since we haven't had that large of a war, I know we have conflicts.
And we've had some smaller wars. But I know since we haven't had such a huge conflict, there hasn't been that big band of brothers type of vibe that's brought men together so much.
And then even if and i'll go even as far to say if you're a white male right like there's there's spaces for black males latinos middle eastern clubs there can be all types but if you're a white guy you just are fucking a loo you're looked at as you're pointed at a lot of times it feels like by the media is like a loser as part of the problem as the creator of the problem i don't think a lot of that energy is also good um in our country when we do we have white males in our country you know and it's you can't like you can't make also white males feel like they don't exist you know um because also a lot of white people didn't have a lot of like yes i know there's privilege but if you grew with nothing, you didn't fucking feel any privilege sometimes. In fact, being white and having nothing, I would get looked at personally as why the fuck don't you have anything? How did you fuck this up so bad? You know, like you must, something really must be wrong with you.
If you're not, you have the right color, but you fuck your family can't even get shit together enough. Wow.
What a loser. And I'm not speaking against any other group, but I'm just saying sometimes, you know, like there's not a rep, there's no one, you're not allowed to speak up for your own group just because of history.
And that doesn't feel super fair sometimes, you know. Does that seem crazy or not? It feels so.
As a new American, I've learned a lot about the history of racism in this country and particularly for black Americans I feel very strongly if I start starting slavery as shit yeah gun me down but it's like civil rights but if I'm just playing fantasy football and trying to take care of a family let me be somebody again I think the way I see this is that it's part of a more general problem which is to be able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time,

which is it is true that America has this history of racism

and that there are still some racial issues that we need to deal with.

And Britain started it.

Yeah, we polished it up a little.

I'll agree.

But other people started it too, you know?

Yeah.

And the first slave, I think, was – who was it?

Who was the first slave ever in the history of time? It was in the Bible, wasn't it? Well, there's lots of slaves in the Bible. There you go.
So. The U.S.
has a uniquely terrible history when it comes to slavery. Yeah.
In modern history, right? That is true. Yeah.
That is absolutely true. And has an issue around race.
Absolutely true. Still issues around race.
Yes. Still issues around gender equality.
Yes. And if you're a white guy, particularly from a low-income background right now, you're actually at the highest risk of suicide.
And your economic prospects compared to your father have seen the biggest drop. So two things can be true at once.
It can be simultaneously true that we've still got to deal with these issues and that we have this history and not throw anybody under the bus. No one has to be left behind.
We have to rise together. We have to think about a way in which class is a big part of this, I think.
What's very often it's weird for me as a Brit coming to the US, one of the things I've really noticed is that the US has a class system, which I think is every bit as brutal as the British one. The difference is Americans, we pretend that we don't have a class system.
The Brits don't hide it. We have a king now.
Always forget. King.
We have an aristocracy. We have knights.
We have all kinds of... We're obsessed with class in the UK, where I come from.
It's one of the reasons I ran here. One of the reasons I loved America was there was less of it.
But the US has a class system too. And if you look at trends for men, it's really working class men.
It's men who maybe didn't do so well in school, maybe haven't had a college degree from poorer parts of the country, et cetera. Those men are the ones who are suffering the most, right? From suicide, from substance problems, mental health problems, family problems, employment problems, right? Those men, like they're really struggling.
And that includes white men as well as black and Hispanic men. That's a class issue, not a race issue.
And I think that quite often in the US, people are more comfortable talking about racial inequalities than they are about the overlapping class inequalities, because most of the people talking about this are at the top of the class hierarchy. Oh, yeah.
Well, and a lot of it's to our media. Our media is usually very well-off people, and they're like, let me break out the racism drum and beat that when it's on.
And of course, those things need to be addressed. But if that stuff becomes the only sound you hear, then you guys are going to just, then everyone is going to continue to dance the same dance.
That's the point. And so I think that that's where we're missing some of the evolution.
But I think that that's starting to change. It's why people are sick of Hollywood and everything that they've created for a while.
Like that point you just made, if that's the to change it's why people are um sick of uh of hollywood and everything that they've created for a while like that point you just made if that's the only sound you hear

right i think that's the point what i've discovered in my family my extended family through my wife

etc we have a lot of political diversity right and a lot of huge amount of class diversity my

wife is from a much more working class background than i am even kind of in in the uh in the u.s on

the maryland pennsylvania borders where she grew up up. A lot of diversity.
And actually, what I've kind of found in talking to a lot of them is that they actually are significantly more tolerant about a lot of these issues than probably the mainstream media would think. But if that's all they hear, they need to hear the other bit as well.
And I think this is kind of, if we can move from or to and, right? So on gender, like all this stuff we have to do is still stuff to do for women. I don't think there are enough women in politics in the US.
I would love us to have a female president. I think we need to do more around kind of women in certain occupations.
Sure. Yes.
And we've got to tackle the male suicide crisis. And we've got to figure out why boys are doing so badly in schools.
And we've got to figure out why male wages have been flatlining for decades, right? It's an and, not an or. But there are too many people out there who have a vested interest in making an or.
So men are struggling. Why? Because of women.
We're going to blame women and blame feminism, blame the progress. No progress no that's not it or women are struggling and you know why because of the men because of patriarchy and toxic masculinity etc has to be all and that's where the clicks are that's where the that's where the money is that's where the speaking gigs come from that's where your ratings come from is if you can position it find a villain find someone to blame that's where you get drawn, but it's almost never true.
Right. Well, a lot of times now the lens is the villain.
That's the thing that I started to realize. Yeah, find the villain.
The lens is the villain. And we didn't realize that we were having, we've been forced to look through this lens for so long because our media has just been the same.
It's been so, uh, commandeered, you know, and so now it's becoming freer. And I think that that's scaring kind of like the powers that be, you know.
I think it's one of the reasons why they don't want TikTok taken over. You know, they want to force a sale of TikTok.
You know, they're afraid that it'll share truths that they can't hold, you know, anymore. Right, but I've been thinking a bit about this, the role of podcasts like this one and others.
And I'd be interested to actually just ask you about this because one of the things I've been thinking about is the way in which these are very freewheeling conversations, right? They're very, like, we're talking. So there's a thought, we have a theme we're going to talk about.
But what you've got is usually two people thinking out loud and trying to learn from each other and trying to say stuff. And sometimes you try and fact check what you're saying.
But like, this is a very different kind of environment to like a classical media interview, right? You've got your points, you've got your bullet points, you've got, it's much more, and I think a lot of people are really attracted to it, maybe especially young men.

I think maybe they kind of like that sense of like,

we're just trying to figure this out, right?

We're having a conversation.

Well, it feels that Soda to Soda vibe in a way.

It does. It does.

It feels more like his, and almost like they're overhearing,

like we're overhearing a conversation, right?

So I know this is a little bit weird to be talking about our conversation,

but I don't know what you do. It's not just like a different media outlet.
It's like a different way of doing it. Well, because at a certain point, you can't hide.
It's like I think there has to be some bit of enough of you will be revealed. It's like even sometimes I feel like if I don't fact check certain things and I'm learning how to have certain conversations, people will get an idea of who I am or who you are by listening to us for a certain period of time, and then they can make a fair judgment for themselves.
And it doesn't even have to be a good or bad judgment. We're not saying that either one of us is good or bad.
We're probably saying that we're both both. We're just trying to have a conversation together.
And I think as a listener, you get that. You're like, okay, I don't maybe vibe with this guy.
I'm glad I got to listen to him. It gives you value for your time.
So I put my time in. I'm grateful I got to listen to that person.
I agree with some of the things they say. Oh, I'd never thought about that.
But you also get to see people as more complete. And I think it goes back to what you're saying, like that, you know, a lot of people can, we're not, they, people aren't as simple.
Both things can be true all the time for a lot of people. And they are.
Usually they are. Usually they are.
Usually two things are true. And I think that's what's, that's what's a lot happened with podcasts is it, it holds two, three, four, seven things true at the same time while you're having a conversation, which is very normal.
As opposed to get this answer, get this clip, make it short. We want to get how we feel across, and that's what matters.
It's more like the fullness of it. You know, there's this slide.
I thought about this quite a bit in terms of truth. I mentioned earlier the difference between telling the truth and being truthful, like someone who's just trying to call it as they see it, trying to be truthful.
You know, when you swear to do jury service or actually to kind of do testimony, you swear, what do you swear? You swear to tell the whole truth, the truth, nothing but the truth, the whole truth. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Sorry, nothing but the truth. They make you triple down on it.
Right, but think about that. Why don't they just say, I promise to tell the truth, right? The truth, yes.
The whole truth, and nothing but the truth, right? And actually, the middle one is really interesting to me because, of course, what you could do is you could go to the stand and say things that are kind of true, right? So you meet the first and the third. But like, yeah, but you're missing something out.
And I think right now people are hungry for the whole truth. They're actually hungry for people to just, look, I'm saying it all.
I don't agree. You might disagree with three of the seven things I've said.
But there's actually a kind of sense of which these conversations, I think, are trying to get at something more like the whole truth, which is more just a broader conception of it. And you have the opportunity in the space to maybe get stuff wrong, to just think out loud, to kind of come back.
And that's completely at odds with the old media, which is more about, I'm going to take every word you say literally. I'm going to take a clip of it, and I'm going to fact check you'm like that's not how conversations work and this is a very different kind of environment for conversation i agree with you that it means you have more authenticity but the thing i've come to value more than almost anything else when i'm talking to someone is that this person is trying to be truthful they are they're being on it they're looking stuff up they're trying to figure and if i say to them to them, that's not right, it's this, they go, oh, interesting, I'm going to choose, and the same with me.
And I'm just aspiring to try and be truthful in everything that I do. And if I get it wrong, I want to be told I'm getting it wrong, but I just want to try and be as honest as possible.
Yeah, and I think then it makes it not about you, it makes it about this greater presentation of like, of let's, yeah, let's just be,

let's be as honest as we can.

And learn from each other.

So one of my weird backstories

is that I am a massive fan of John Stuart Mill,

the 19th century British liberal philosopher,

so much so that I ended up writing his biography.

John Stuart Mill?

Let's bring up a JPEG of him. This is just making my day, I got to tell you.
Oh, wow. He also was the first person to introduce a bill to give women the right to vote in the UK.
Obviously, he was trying to get laid too, undeniable. That, in his case, was almost certainly not true.
Although I spent a lot of time- Really enjoyed men? I spent a lot of- No, no. He was just- Well, actually, the truth is that he had a woman who was in love with who was married to somebody else.
And so, it was an unrequited situation. And so, I spent quite a bit of time around that.
But he had this lovely idea, which is that we learn from each other, right? We said, we share the truth between us. And he said that when you're arguing with someone, disagreeing with someone, try to imagine that you're both trying to climb to the top of the same mountain just by different routes and i love that idea and when i'm trying to debate with someone now if i'm disagreeing with someone i'm like you know i think i'm trying to get to this they probably have got some truth that i don't have and that's great but also let's assume let's start with the assumption that we're trying to get to the same place yeah And you've got a different view about it.
So if I'm arguing with a conservative who says it's all about marriage, right? We've got to get everyone back to marriage. And I'm a bit skeptical about that.
I don't think that's because that person's a crazy right-wing misogynist who wants to kind of entrap women again. I think they want a better life.
I think they want better families. I think they want happier children, which is what I want.
So we're just arguing about the means it is kind of interesting how you can have two people with the exact same thing they'll one will say that they're this side one will say that side and they cannot agree on shit there i don't understand there's some minutiae in there that i can't even figure out yeah because it's they'll want the exact same things they'd even they could even write these are the three things i want and they in the other side right these are are the three things I want. But if they don't each say that they're on the same side, then they will find, they'll almost find a way to disagree.
No, because they want to disagree. Because at that point, that's become kind of a bad form of tribalism.
There's this really interesting, one of the things that really has disturbed me about political trends recently is the clustering of ideas now. And so actually now if you're on one side or the other, you have to like agree with, like, and so it used to be more possible to kind of like, well, I agree with that side on this and this side on this and whatever.
And everyone was a kind of different mixture, right? The idea that anybody is going to subscribe to all the views on the left or all the views on the right is dystopian, terrifying. And no one even knows all of them either.
And they're also distorted anyway. And then if they're told, by the way, that that policy idea is being proposed by your guy, then they suddenly support it.
And if it's being proposed by the other guy, you're suddenly against it. And so what's actually happening now is you're defining your position based as much on, well, what does he think? Because I don't like him.
And I'll take the other view, right? So you saw this massive swing towards being much more pro-immigration, for example, among Democrats after Donald Trump came to office in 2016, because he was so anti-immigration. Right before that, Democrats were pretty moderate on immigration, but they suddenly became really, really pro-immigration.
Why? The only explanation why is because he was so anti it. You see it in both directions, right? You can see.
I mean, well, some people say also, though, that they wanted to load states up so that they could create more voters in certain states. I've never understood that argument.
Really? Yeah, because they can't vote. Right.
But if you legalize them, if you just bring them in and then you find quick paths to legalization, then they would be able to vote. Well, one thing I will say, I hope that if that idea is still out there, that the results of the last election kill it for good, because we saw a massive swing to the Republicans among Hispanic Americans.
And given that most of the immigrants that people are worried about are from Mexico and Southern America. I don't know if they are, though.
I think a lot of the immigrants that we're getting are also from, like, they were getting, like, so many Haitians and stuff. Right, but they're not reliable Democrat voters, is my point.
Right, so any idea that, like, the Democrats are trying to do this because they think, well, if we bring them all in and then legalize them, yay, well, that's not true. The idea that those groups are just going to reliably vote Democrat, that has gone out of the window.
I don't know. I think if I come in and somebody's feeding me the first hand that feeds me, that's probably the hand that I would think that I'm going to cater to.
I don't know if that's a definite thing that they were doing. You know what I'm saying? It's hard to say if it is or isn't.
But letting 21 million immigrants in, you know, when we had two Border Patrol agents on and they said it was a nightmare for them. You know, it was a nightmare for them and their families, the stress that they went through, the fact that they would just have to get an agreement from somebody that they would come and meet the agent, like a middle person.
They would like have like a connection piece to America and they'd have to sign an agreement that they would come back and meet that person at a certain time or place and never show up. And then there's no trail for them.
It was a, the plan was not, there was no plan. It felt like.
That's a better explanation than that. There was this secret plan to create millions of voters.
Yeah, I don't know if there are or not. No plan is better.
And again, it's an example of the extremes winning. Actually, most people have probably got pretty moderate views on immigration, or at least used to, which is we should control our borders, which is not a controversial idea in any other country in the world.
I don't think at all. Because you can't know a business unless you know the inventory, right? How can you do anything? It's not like the idea in any European country that like people should only be there legally, like every European country thinks that, right? So it's not, of course, we've now had so many people come in that we've got a different problem, but we should secure our borders.
We should actually have pretty good legal immigration systems. I'm biased.
I agree biased. I'm an immigrant.
But like, good, legal immigration has been great for this country.

Yeah.

Properly controlled, legal immigration. Good, right?

Agreed.

And so, the idea that you're either for or against immigration strikes me as completely dumb.

You've got to be, what kind of immigration do we need and want?

Yeah, you've got to think a little step further.

But the trouble is, the way that our politics works right now is that you've basically either

got to be like anti-immigration and anti-immigrants or you've got to be open border i'm exaggerating a bit but like that's how it feels yeah i agree that's how it feels that well that's another issue that we just have with us we don't have enough parties we don't have enough parties and there's not enough um and i think that it's also kept that way as you know capitalism is just you know there's only, there's only so much you can do, you know. It's like you can only do so much.
And then there's a lot of darker forces at play, I think, that just care about finances on no matter what side of things you're on. And then I don't even know if America still owns itself anymore, to be honest with you.
I feel like we're just an LLC of the Middle East sometimes. But, you think different things.
The thing that I worry most about is that we lose our sense of optimism. I agree.
That's the next thing to go. And when that goes, it gets really bad.
That's bad for any country, but I think it's virtually existential for America. I agree.
Because one of the things that people always say about Americans, they're like, oh, they don't think about, they have no sense of history, you know, whereas like in Europe, like all we think about is history, right? Like in the UK, one thing I ran away from is just like, it's always Winston Churchill and World War II and World War I and the War of the Roses. I have relatives who fought in those wars.
I'm not, like they're important, but like we're always looking, basically Europe feels like it kind of has been looking in the rearview mirror right for centuries whereas americans are like yeah that happened that was interesting but we're going there we're going to the moon we're going to wherever we're going like we're we're going to build a better economy there's this there is this thing about like looking forward which i've always loved about america it's one of the reasons i wanted to come here i wanted to finish raising my kids here it's like yeah like that future orientation. And I really, I worry about that on both sides now, right? I don't like you have American carnage, you know, from the right and you have climate catastrophe from the left, take your pick.
But that catastrophizing, that sense, for the first time ever, we're seeing people now say that they are not confident their kids will be better off than them. That's a huge problem in a country like America.
And I think it's based on this problem we were just talking about, which is this kind of zero-sum idea that somehow there's only so much of something to go around, money or empathy or whatever. And so if group A is getting more of it, that means group B is getting less of it.
Right, so you see that. But it's the same with the male-female thing.
Exactly. It's like, well, like, we can't, if women are doing better, maybe that's why men are doing worse.
And for women to rise, men have got to fall, like, crazy stuff. But people think that.
Same on immigration, by the way. People think more immigrants, bad for America, etc.
We're constantly thinking about zero sum, whereas America at its best has always been positive sum in other words we can grow right grow the cake and argue less about how to divide it up we can all be more we can get better we can get bigger and like all rise and i think that's been lost not least on gender but let's talk about some escapes for men let's talk about how do men you know how do we combat like some of this illness? Because men are resilient. Men are warriors, I believe, in our hearts and in our spirits.
And I believe that I've seen enough connectivity amongst men that we want to move forward, right? And we want to do it together. What are ways that you recommend? Well, we've talked about male spaces and having like groups and spaces for men.
So starting one of those is good. And you're seeing that.
There's this thing called the men's sheds movement. Have you heard of that? It's coming over from Australia.
It's just guys who get into a shed and start fixing stuff together. Really? Bring it up.
Shoulder to shoulder. The men's sheds movement.
It's basically about guys and they get in a shed and they fix stuff, right? And it's very male because it's about fixing stuff. U.S.
Men's Sheds Association has partnered with Grouper to offer eligible members a 65 or older payments for staying healthy and socially active. Okay.
So the Men's Sheds, can you do an image of it? Can we just do Men's Sheds Movement images? Oh, there's some fellas right there building a little.

Because when men.

What is that, a birdhouse or something?

Men have to be doing something else while they're being together, right?

Right.

It's just harder for us to just be together.

When was the last time a friend of yours said,

let's just meet for a coffee and then sit down and stare at each other for two hours?

Yeah, that guy is obviously trying to be like sexy buddies or whatever i think and i think yeah you got to find something to do together paint something look for something let's go look for something service yes find service i think that's hugely important boys and girls like uh join your local boys and girls club chapter you can volunteer there um what's another one you can be a champion like you can be you can be a big brother yeah that was a good one i'm just going through the process for that myself i'm signing up to do that because i want to do that being like just i know you talked to scott about this but just being a presence i think is hugely important and like raising other people's kids like there's this line it takes a village to raise a child that's true but here's. Some of the villagers need to be men.
And like we're in that village and we're helping to raise those kids, our neighbor's kids. You know, it does, that statement that it takes a village is right.
Oh, you don't realize as a parent, if there's a kid hanging out of your house, sometimes one of your kids' friends or something, you have a ton of influence on that kid. I mean, I got so much influence from most of my influence.

You realize how important, how many men there are out there

who sometimes just kind of need to be asked.

There was this example happened in a school.

I think it was a predominantly black school.

And they had this day where they were going to teach the boys how to tie a tie.

And the dads were going to come in with their sons

and kind of teach their sons how to tie a tie. But then they realized that half the dads were going to come in with their sons and kind of teach their sons how to tie a tie but then they realized that half the dads were not there half the boys didn't have dad didn't have fathers or their fathers were in prison or they'd gone away or whatever and so they then really realized this is gonna be a huge problem because they're gonna some of the boys were gonna have their dad come in and do it and the others were going to feel left out so they just did a call out to the community i think it just i don't even know what it was like a facebook caller like could we get some volunteers we just need some men to kind of come in and help these boys come talk they had something like five times as many men as they needed to these guys just all came it's really beautiful so so men are looking for it yes just need to be somehow asked and and called and the other I'll say, because we haven't had a chance to talk about this yet, is that the fact that male teachers have become so much less common, I think is a real problem.
It's gone from 33% male in the 80s to 23% male now, and it continues to fall. And I think that's a problem for all kinds of reasons.
I think that for boys to sort of see men in a classroom, to actually have them as role models, also to see the education is a thing that like men care about as well. Oh, that's a great point.
Yeah. One of my greatest influences was this guy, Charles Aldrich.
He was my teacher. He's missing a finger.
And, um, but how did he lose his finger? You know what happened to him? He was at a baseball game cheering on his son. He stood up, his wedding ring got caught on a piece of metal on the bleachers and pulled his finger right off i do know i wish i hadn't asked now but god bless him pretty crazy and my dad was missing a finger and so i just related i was like oh god wants these men without fingers to love me or whatever you know that's how i was thinking as a kid it was just great but that's how you think as a kid yeah okay so he was a huge influence on you yeah right and, yeah.
Same for me. I had this teacher, Mr.
Wyatt, English teacher. And up until that point, we were all like, you know, words and poems.
Yeah, Wyatt's a fuck. Yeah.
And a bunch of 15, 16-year-old boys. And then we had Mr.
Wyatt. And Mr.
Wyatt was a Korean War veteran. He was a bus driver in part-time.
He total curmudgeon and he had us reading korean bus driver sounds very no no he's a korean veteran he'd fought korean veteran sorry so he'd fought in the korean war yeah and he was just like this curmudgeonly guy but he had us reading this poetry and he loved it so much that we ended up loving it and getting into it and i was like huh, huh, maybe this whole writing words thing. I used to be in remedial English way back before that.
But maybe guys can do this too. And it's a huge change for me.
And I mentioned before that my son is teaching in Baltimore City. That's one.
But we're like missing about a million men if we were to get close to gender equality. I'm not saying we'll get to that.
But I think that the best answer to some of the problems that a lot of boys have got is real living flesh and blood men in their lives. Their dads, their neighbors, their uncles, but also their teachers.
And the other thing male teachers do, they coach. Between 30% and 40% of male teachers are also coaches, much higher than for women, for all kinds of reasons we could go into.
But the point is simply that for every male teacher, you get like half a coach, right? And so if we want more male coaches to be coaching our boys' sports teams, et cetera, we need more male teachers. And I can't believe that we're just letting the share of male teachers just go down and down and down and down, and no one's doing anything about it.
Yeah, especially when we had a great TV show here called Vice Principals or whatever. And that shit, you'd think what it helped, it was with Danny McBride was in it.
How long ago was that? It was a couple of years ago, so it might help a little bit. But definitely it might but definitely might've upped the vibes of some of these guys being teachers.
And also like Abbott, do you know Abbott elementary? Yeah. People like that TV show.
That's got a bunch of male teachers in it too, which is like. So maybe you need to influence that.
Like I remember when I was a kid, they had coach was on and stuff like that, but I guess it didn't really resonate that much, but they had like, um, what was that TV? Oh, art tv art uh dead poet society or whatever yeah robin

williams yeah but i guess we there was um the one with um they set up with take a man's uh who's

that guy malcolm l l jackson or whatever that guy's name was uh no it's uh he looks like kind

of uh older but still they said it would take a man 600 years to get out of the sea of prison you what I'm talking about he talks like that no he's um that was a good accent but I don't know thanks he's in Shawshank Redemption you know what his name is Morgan Freeman he played a school teacher really Lean on Me it was called yeah but also this new one there's this other one The Holdovers just like a couple of years ago um with paul giametti so i'm saying his name yes i saw that yeah and again it's good really good and what those things have in common is there's this kind of relate this relationship between this kind of older guy this kind of younger man and they kind of learn from each other and they go through some stuff together and it's like it's really beautiful yes um it was that's a cool point that's a great movie and it just is a good and's kind of, I was really pleased to see that because it came up again with this thing. But one of the things that really frustrates me is that people will say, oh, boys need more, you know, we need more positive male role models.
And I'm like, we do. It's actually, you can't create them out of thin air, right? You can't just like add water and create male role model.
But one thing we could do is make sure we have a lot more men in our schools. That's something we could do.
We could have scholarships. We could have outreach programs.
We could be incentivizing men. We could also be making it much easier to become a teacher as like a second career.
Because one of the things that we know is that men are much more likely to go into teaching later. They do something else first and then go.
But it's really hard to do that. It shouldn't be that hard.
No, I agree. That's a great point.
So we'll start, instead of lamenting the lack of male role models, how about having more male teachers? And I would love it if more politicians, I actually kept waiting for Tim Walsh on the Democrat side to do that. We asked him to come on here, we asked him and Kamala to come on here, but I would have loved to have talked with Tim Walsh.
Tim Walsh would have been a perfect person to kind of lead that campaign, wouldn't he? Oh, his whole interview, he seemed like this cheery kind of guy. But he's like high school teacher.
So he was the first actually career public school teacher to run for such high office. He was also a coach.
Imagine if he'd done a campaign around, like we want to recruit more men to teaching. We want more men teaching, coaching, helping.
Like, a really positive pro-male campaign. I think he would have been an amazing spokesman for that.
And I think he could have been bipartisan. I agree.
I think he could have found some people on the right that would have agreed with that. Yeah, I think, I don't know if he, it felt like all the time he was making all of his own choices.
That's the only thing about some of these parties. You start to wonder.
Too much control. If there's bigger powers.
And then you're like, and you can feel that sometimes it feels like but i don't know sometimes you can't well it's back to this point about the different media environment now right which is this freewheeling be authentic like just go with the flow yeah kind of environment now i think people people like watch the politicians in those environments so they can make a judgment about what kind of person they are it's not scripted right they get a feel for them they get a feel for them exactly some of them asked are like can we do we get edit or something like timothy shallon they came on they didn't ask for one edit they didn't ask to look at anything they didn't ask i was like that's wild you know i mean but they didn't and then we've had other people come on and they're you know they're aging or whatever we get all fucking nitpicky or whatever some little fucking lizard and uh well... We'll ask to edit stuff out.
Or just like say certain things. Now, look.
I didn't know that was an option. If something horrible happens, somebody dies or something, we'll edit it out.
You know, it's like we don't want something horrible or somebody turning blue. You know what I'm talking about? Somebody can't breathe or whatever.
Like, yeah, we're not going to fucking sit there and ask questions to somebody who doesn't have... But anything short of that.
So if I die right now... O2 to their brain.
You might edit that out. But anything else I do, like...
But it's just crazy that, you know... You can't control it.
But actually, this is what happened, I think. This is a great example, right? Before he was selected, like Waltz, he was like famous for being...
You know, he did the weird thing and he was quite... You know, he just...
Yeah, he was odd. He was like...
But no, no, he described the Republicans as weird. that's what i mean like he just had a certain like that's what but actually what happened was that then he was like told to be super careful and you get these politicians they sometimes remind me like they're like a guy carrying an incredibly precious vase across a polished floor you know they're so terrified they're gonna slip and say the wrong thing right and that kind of everyone's like be disciplined don say anything wrong.
We don't want to screw up the news cycle. Don't have a gaffe.
Don't like, don't. Don't say something stupid.
Exactly. Just stand still.
Don't say anything. And hope for the best.
That's crazy. But I do think that was the old politics.
I think it was all about message discipline. And I think that the waltz before the pick and the waltz after the pick, if you watch them.
I bet they're totally different. They're totally different people.
I know. I still wish he would come on and talk to us.

Maybe he will now.

Maybe he will now.

That's a good point.

I'm going to reach out again.

We even tried to get Kamala after to see if she would come on and talk to us.

Because that's the only thing.

I just felt like you don't know who some of these people are, you know.

And not even that you do after a conversation.

There's still a politician.

Right.

But at a certain point, you just can get a feel for him.

And also, people at home can just get a feel.

You know, you want a little bit more feel these days. You had Bernie on recently, right? Yeah, it was great.
Have you had him on before? We had so much fun. No, I'd have him on again, though, dude.
We had a blast. We just have so many things that, you know, we both care about, it seems like.
Yes, so places that men can get involved. It's like a Big Brother program.
Like, do know this about Big Brother program. If you're only going to be in town for like a couple of weeks, make sure it's going to be a place where you're going to be able to commit.
Like, because you're saying to a child or something, I'm going to be there every other week or every two, you know. At least a year.
In fact, the evidence is that if you do it for less than a year, it's actually harmful. Right.
Better to not do it at all. Right.
If you can't do it for a year. So that's something right there.
And even just men getting together to like take a together, think together, spend time together. It's like, how do we start to build those new things? And also some of that is like the cycle has changed.
A lot of our energy came from wars and stuff. And there were a lot more bowling leagues.
There's a book, it's called Bowling Alone, maybe? Yeah, Robert Putnam. Yeah.
All about what he calls social capital, which is basically just this connection and community and how important that is for people. And he talks about the decline of bowling leagues, which are basically just structures through which to have this solidarity, right? Yeah, it's just hiding from your wife for an hour and you and your buddies calling each other fat, right? But that's what men need sometimes, right? But you can't say to your wife, I'm going out to just hang out with the guys and call each other fat.
You have to say, I've got bowling tonight, right? That has to be a thing, right? I've got darts tonight. I've got kind of whatever.
It's a thing, right? It's not just, I'm not, we can't just say, I'm just getting, maybe a bit more now, but like you needed like a, and I think it's a deeper truth that men do need a reason sometimes to kind of be together and that's just okay right yeah well yeah you don't want to tell your wife yeah i'm just going to hang you know it's like yeah i'm going to do something that's a man thing too is doing something like we're creatures that are supposed to be in action right it's like the more sedentary i get you know like i just notice that it's like if i do the next right thing i'm supposed, everything goes fine. The second I stand around and think it's like things get a little weird.
Yeah. Just a bit of forward momentum, right? Do the next thing.
Yeah. It's just keep it moving, man.
And it does help. It helps you.
But then, yeah. Um, but what was I thinking? Oh, I was, um, I wrote down with, was I making a point there now? I can't remember.
I wrote down this, this question. Cause I thought a lot about this, this, like men and women stuff, right? And I'm glad that we talked a lot about it, like just because, yeah, women have had this sort of evolution in a way, societally and financially.
And they had to do that. It felt like to get more respect.
And maybe if there had been a different respect in the beginning, things could have been different. But we live in a capitalistic society type of thing.
And so I wrote down what I wanted to say because it was too hard for me to remember and say. So I was saying it seems like through the feminist movements and trying to make more gender equality, close the income gap, et cetera, that women were striving to have what men had, such as more income, such as more equitable treatment, such as being able to strive in the workforce, having more access to educational opportunities, etc.
That women wanted more power or what was conceived of as power. And in a capitalistic society, money is power.
But is it really power, though? I think it is pretty lonely and disconnected when men achieve the status of being powerful, either through a lot of recognition or wealth or just producing a lot in general.

I'm not saying that men could not have this type of power and not be connected to the world around them and people around them But I think for most men it was basically lonely and disconnected

Is this what women really want when it comes to equitable treatment, etc

Or having the same opportunities for financial success and upward mobility? Do women really want what men have or had? I wonder if women are really the ones that, generally speaking, have it right as far as being connected to others, being able to communicate better generally, and providing more of a home in the sense of a settled space around themselves wherever they go or wherever they are. I think it's interesting that in trying to balance out male and female, the female wants to move towards the male.
I get it, but I just wonder if maybe it made more sense to have the male move towards the female. And I don't mean that men should be women.
What I do mean, though, is that these attributes that women seem to possess based primarily on their sex and some gender roles seem to be more fulfilling overall. So wouldn't it make more sense that the men would move a little closer to them or the women would tout that what they have is good enough and it is best instead of going ahead and trying to get what the men have um like i said i get it and i can understand why women want what they perceive men as having i just wonder if that's really the best direction for women and for children and for men and boys and for people in general do we really want to show our children that women can dominate and produce in the same ways that men can personally i don't don't really think so.
I think men have it wrong. I think that the men should be masculine and women should be feminine, but I think that the expression of masculinity, generally speaking, in our society has been kind of weak and kind of disconnected and honestly sometimes kind of dumb.
Sorry that was so much words. Yeah, that's good.
But I just did it. I was trying to like – I was like, I can't remember this, but this is like what I think, you know? Like, it's not a clown on women or that their journey or anything.
It's just like, what are we all really looking for, you know? I think we're at a really important moment for that, I think. I see the movement of the last, let's say, 50 years as largely being about women trying to get more economic independence.
I don't really like the language of power around this because it tends to presume that it's like power of person A over power of person B. It's much more like opportunity, independence, chance to flourish.
Yes. To be you.
Yeah, to let yourself be seen. To let your, yes.
And to feel equal, to feel like oh i can do these things as well to get equal respect right and and i feel like we've been up so i think this sense of like if you think about the more female virtues to use your framing as being more about like care and connection and so on and the more male ones being around kind of material money etc i do think that it was quite right for women to have more opportunities to acquire more of that economic opportunity, right? And economic independence. Quite right.
Now, I think that we might see the next 50 years are about some of the movement in the other direction, which is that men also learning that it's not actually just getting to the top of the economic ladder. It's like that's not what life is about.
It's important to provide. It's important to bring material resources to your family, to your tribe, to your community.
But it's also important to have those relationships and that care. And if that's seen as more of a female virtue, then I agree that we might see a little bit more movement now of men towards women.
But in the end, it's just about creating opportunities for all of us to be able to flourish and to rise and to do that together. And to have equal respect for what we each choose to do.
That's the biggest. Without one set being dependent on the other, without one group having power over the other, without one group being seen to be better than the other, or one set of virtues being better than the other.
And instead, to just say, look, we're all, in the end, I hope that my work focusing on boys and men is partly, in the end, humanism. It's partly about the end.
Like, we want to get to a world where we're all able to kind of flourish together. And we're not going to get there if we pretend there are no differences between men and women.
We're not going to get to equality through androgyny, right? Pretending there are no differences between men and women, right? But we can learn from each other. And isn't that amazing? Isn't that an amazing opportunity? And so I think the opportunities for men now to kind of grow and expand our roles as fathers, as coaches, as mentors, as community leaders in the home, in the community, whilst also, I think, building staff and providing, in other words, reforming masculinity rather than ditching it and saying, we don't need masculinity anymore, or somehow trying to get the old kind of masculinity back.
So I think when I'm feeling optimistic, and it's good to be optimistic sometimes, I actually think what we're experiencing now is like the birth pangs of like a different way. Yeah.
Right? And I think it's all been about women up until now, and I think that's understandable. But I think the next few decades have got to be about how do we help men as well? How do we help men rise, not instead of women, but with women, and women rise with men? Yeah, and how do we even, yeah well how do we help men rise not instead of women but with women and women rise with men yeah and how do we even yeah how do we just yeah and evolution takes takes pain you know it takes discomfort yeah for everyone change is hard yes change is hard and also i think though you look at like people having the time to do things in the evenings and stuff um it's like we create you know like a lot of people live

in separate households i talk about it with the holidays the holidays are a bummer a lot of times now because you got to go visit both your parents have been married two times and divorced now you're visiting six people or something on a you're dividing your christmas up there's it's you know it's like we're dividing up the the the comfort we had you know and it's becoming a nightmare because you're having to drive so many places

to see so many people like...

But I think the spirit of what you're saying throughout this whole conversation has been about equal empathy and respect for men and women. And I feel like there was probably a time when like if women complained about stuff and wanted more power, men would be like patronizing or maybe roll their eyes at them a little bit.
Like, oh, you know, off she goes again. But I now think the opposite is happening.
I think when we talk about some of the problems that men are having and men saying, I'm struggling, I'm trying to figure this out, there's sometimes a tendency for people to roll their eyes and just say, well, get over it. And neither of those responses is good enough.
We need to kind of look each other in the eye and just say, look, I'm here for you. Let's figure this out together and not pit us against each other.
The thing I really worry about is, particularly politically right now, that we're somehow going to end up young men and young women seeing each other as somehow not on the same team. As against each other, you see this growing political divide, cultural divide, less dating.
I think it will be really bad news if we don't see young men and women seeing that their interests as being more aligned than in antagonism with each other yeah well politics just it's a societal structure i know it's at some point it's something you need for um diplomacy and stuff but i don't even i feel like it's been so commandeered who i don't think most people even know what it is anymore or don't believe in the sanctity of it um but i do think that in the end you that other humans are your real government you know your neighbor is your government you know norms it's the atmosphere it's the yes your tradition whatever you're you know and i think it is men need to just wake up shave put on a clean shirt and be ready for you know whatever blessings do come or the things that they create for themselves too I think some of it is like just showing up for the day in the world but also we need to if we could it would be nice we need to what the fuck do I know but it'd be nice if families were together and that that everybody didn't have all these separate homes to go it was just everything didn't feel so divided I feel like even managing a life feels very dividing for a kid when one week they're here, one week we're there. That's hard.
And then the parents are separate, and they probably sit there, you know, yeah, maybe they go on, but they wish maybe they'd have been able to figure out. I don't know.
What do I know? I think I romanticize a lot. But the key thing is the relationships, right? I found this very interesting study that said that kids whose father is not resident with the mother, doesn't live with the mom anymore, but has a good relationship with them, they do better than the kids whose dad is with them, but they have a terrible relationship with.
And so it's like, in the end, it's the relationship that matters. But your point about like care and nurturing, sometimes I think we obsess about the structure and we don't actually think, no, actually what really matters here is the substance.
What's the relationship? And so one of the reasons I feel so strongly about that is because so many kids now, like most kids to parents without college degrees are born outside marriage, most. Like that's the norm outside of the college educated class.
And so I don't want to say to those fathers, oh, well, sorry, you've already failed, right? You don't- Right, that's a-

You don't want to bench the dads, right?

Good point.

And so it's incredibly important

that fathers hear the message

that they matter in their kids' lives-

Yeah, that's a great point.

Whether or not they are with the kid's mother.

And in some ways,

if they're not with the kid's mother romantically anymore,

the father might be even more important

because there's a good chance

that kids are going to be struggling in other ways. And so there is no hall pass for fatherhood.
If you become a father, it doesn't matter how you ended up having that kid. You have a moral responsibility to be there for that kid, period.
That is not a negotiable. Now you may or may not be married to the mom.
And I'm not saying it isn't easier to be married to the mom. Right.
But that doesn't really make it different always no and also like and also don't don't point at these dads who for whatever reason they're not married to the mother and blame them yeah you're right yeah yeah yeah i think i had i just have this romantic view but yeah i think if if yeah being a father is just being a father it's like and it also what do i know what the fuck am i even talking and it never ends i mean i, I'll say that it doesn't end with being a father. Like one of the, I mentioned my own father, my dad earlier.
And watching him as a grandfather to my sons has also been an extraordinary experience and made me think about, I'm already thinking about what kind of grandfather I'm going to be. My sons are all in their twenties now, from late twenties to early twenties.
And so that's the next stage for me. And I'll tell you, like my, one of my sons really struggled in high school.
He's the one who's now become a teacher. And he, when he went to college, he chose to go to college back to the UK, but not just back to the UK.
He went back to Cardiff in Wales where my parents live because he wanted to be near my parents. And he told me once that on a day when he was really, if he was really struggling, he'd get out and notice some mental health issues, whatever.
He was really struggling. He would look, he could look when he was walking to his lectures at college, he could look to the north And a couple of miles north, there's this big tower of a hospital right next to where my parents live.
And he said to me, even on a really bad day, I know that I can look up there, and I know that grandpa's there, and if I need him, he'll come. And I thought, I want my grandsons and granddaughters saying that about me one day too and and so the point is like as parents you do the best you can and then as grandparents you help out and then as uncles and nephews or neighbors or mentors you kind of help out but it it it just it never ends and that's not a bad thing it's a good thing it's a it's a beautiful a beautiful thing.
And as a father, to see my father being such an amazing support for my son. That's interesting.
Because you're in the middle. I'm in the middle.
And guess what? Sometimes maybe granddad is going to be the better person for your son in this moment than you are. And what an amazing blessing that is to have that.
I feel so incredibly fortunate that my kids have had that opportunity to have that relationship with their grandparents. So I've gone from thinking, oh God, really, grandfather? I have to do it all over again? Really? To being like, you know what? Yeah, this could be good.
Yeah, I just appreciate you thinking about this stuff with Richard. And I know there's a lot of other things we could talk about too, about recovery programs and 12-step.
We could save that for another conversation. Anytime.
I feel like this has been a nice conversation and just some good food for thought. And not to harp on man or what's going on.
And if you feel uncomfortable, it's like, I think there is that. There's a sense inside of a lot of us of like, what do we do? Where, where is my purpose? And, um, and where's that coming from, you know? And, um, and that's okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thank you. I've really, really enjoyed this.
Me too, Richard. I appreciate it.
Richard Reeves, you have books out, don't you? Yeah. Of boys and men.
Okay. Excellent.
And how do people, um, if people want to get involved with your organization, what, uh, do they just donate? Is there volunteer possibilities or what are the things? Donations would be great. But yeah, so it's AIBM.org, AIBM.org.
There is a donate button there. We'd love your support.
But also the main thing is just to be part of this conversation. And let's have a positive conversation about boys and men without putting down women and girls and just love the men and boys in in your life.
That's the mission I'm on. I feel called to this work now, and I'm excited to be part of it.
I love hearing about it, man. And I appreciate you just being patient with me today while we just kind of had this conversation.
Yeah, this was a great practice for me and just learning to talk and think about things together. It's amazing that you want to get more into this space.
Thank you.

Yeah, it's just so important, man.

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