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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 351 | How Do We Make America Love Again? | Guest: Warren Farrell
01:08:59
Matt Kibbe sits down with author and educator Warren Farrell to talk about his new book, “Role Mate to Soul Mate,” which seeks to help couples communicate better and build stronger relationships.
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking with my friend Dr. Warren Ferrell, author of the Boy Crisis and most recently the author of Role Mate to Soulmate. Cover a lot of ground. How do we have strong men again in this country? How do we actually listen to our partner? And how could we scale this new model to make America love again? Check it out.
- [00:27]
B
Foreign.
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A
Welcome to Kibby at Liberty. Warren, so good to see you again.
- [01:03]
B
Matt, it's really wonderful to see you. The last time we were together and did a show, we had a wonderful response to it.
- [01:10]
A
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about that and it was. We first met in 2018, and it's kind of funny to go back and watch these videos because a lot of things were so different in 2018 and. And we did a series of videos on the Boy Crisis and the correlation between fatherless boys and school shootings. And I forget which one in particular, but those videos were insanely viral. Like millions and millions of views.
- [01:41]
B
22 million views on one of them.
- [01:42]
A
Yeah. Of course, that was before the censorship industrial complex clamped down on that sort of thing. And your book, I think the first time we talked, your book, the Boy Crisis had not even come out yet. It was about to come out.
- [01:57]
B
That's correct.
- [01:58]
A
And it's kind of comical now because we have so much in common intellectually and otherwise. But the first conversation we had, I called Speaking with the Enemy.
- [02:09]
B
Oh, that's right, I forgot about that.
- [02:11]
A
And it's because you were a radical feminist. And I'm like, oh, he's a radical feminist. And. And I was trying to create this series of thoughtful conversations between people that fundamentally disagreed on some important things. And as it turns out, we didn't actually disagree much at all. But I ultimately killed that series because I couldn't get people who disagreed with me to trust me enough to have a public conversation.
- [02:39]
B
Now there is the problem. I hear so many people complaining about it being a divided world, but almost no one knows knows how to really hear and facilitate the virtue behind what they disagree with. Every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice. And almost everything we disagree with starts with a virtue that we can agree with, and we have to find that virtue. So, for example, we're talking about the feminism just for people's background. I was on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City for a number of years, and then I began to see that the. The feminists were being critical of men and making men into the enemy and part of the patriarchy. And they had gone From I am woman, I am strong to I am woman, I've been wronged. And making oneself into a victim, and especially a victim of men who have died to protect women was not the approach that was accurate. And so I began to object to that. And as a result, I went from being a feminist darling to a feminist enemy. And in fact, I just came back from London where the first document, where a documentary on my life came out. And the documentary is called the Boy Crisis. Warren Farrell canceled. And what I was canceled by was not just by the feminists, but as a result of being canceled by the feminists. I was canceled by virtually every major TV show from Oprah to Barbara Walters to the AARP and magazines. And the New York Times used to love me, and then they wouldn't touch me. And. And it was on and on like that. And, you know, the process was really, you know, I really had to work on my internal security to make that, to make, to keep speaking. What I felt was, you know, the closest thing that I could come to the truth. I don't believe anybody has the truth, and if they think that they do, they're part of the problem. But you work to get as close to the truth as possible.
- [04:37]
A
Yeah, and this was. What year was this? Because you were canceled before it was cool to get canceled, right?
- [04:42]
B
Oh, yes. I mean, I was canceled. It started back in particularly 1993, but it started in the feminist movement. Started coming out against me in 1986 when I wrote the book why Men Are the Way They Are. And in that book, I criticized a number of references in Ms. Magazine. I analyzed that every single reference in Ms. Magazine, which was the big feminist magazine at the time, was very popular. And every single advertisement and article referred to men as either like a future ex husband, that is, referred to men negatively, or alternatively, they talked about, like, the De Beers. They had De Beers ads which said, you know, marry a man who can put this type of diamond on your ring. But that diamond cost two months salary. And what it would cost to get that type of man, he was earning the equivalent of about. He'd have to earn the equivalent about a million dollars a year in today's money. And so. So they basically were looking at men as success objects or alternatively you know, just sort of saying, if. If you can't find a good success object, just don't, you know, just consider him your future ex husband. And so when, you know, Ms. Magazine found out about that, well, two things happened. Number one is they got a little bit upset with me. Number Two is they actually quit doing advertising, and they went to a foundation where they didn't have to rely on advertising. And so it was. So it had an impact in that way. But on the other hand, I didn't make friends with the feminists doing that.
- [06:22]
A
I want to.
- [06:23]
B
So that was 1986.
- [06:25]
A
Yeah, so 86. And I want to dig into the transformation of feminine feminism to something that was empowering, to something that was toxic and divisive. And my wife Terry and I have an argument that's not really an argument, and we'll do it on stage because I consider myself a radical feminist, and she considers herself an anti feminist. And it's very much a semantics argument because she's saying that I don't want to be pandered to. I don't want to be viewed as someone who's not capable of doing the things I want to do in my life. And she finds sort of the new feminism to be very patronizing. Oh, you're a victim. You're not capable. And my view of radical feminism is almost precisely the same thing. I think women are strong and powerful and capable and beautiful. But we love to argue about the semantics. And you lived the transition from what you thought was sort of a righteous, empowering version of feminism to this to something that I would consider quite toxic.
- [07:37]
B
Yeah. And I remember, you know, the beginning of feminism was exactly what I wanted for women, which was you heard constantly, I am woman, I am strong, the Helen Reddy song. And it went from I am woman, I am strong, to a I am woman, I've been wronged. And, you know, and that. That did create victim power. There was, you know, we have, for example, the men die earlier than women do out of. In 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death. And yet we have eight federal offices of women's health and zero federal offices of men's health. So the playing the victim role did get men, who are biologically programmed to be protectors of women, to compete to protect women in order to get women's favor. And nobody objected to the protection of women. And. But that. So the victim stance did create a type of victim power. But when people play the role of victim, you don't really respect them. And I want women to be respected, and I think we all do. And so it was like I felt they were undermining their respect, and they were also doing something else that was very damaging in schools. I have talked to many, many college students and high school students, and they often say that I learn in junior high school that men are part of the patriarchy. That is, they make. And the patriarchy makes rules to benefit men at the expense of women, is what they learn in school about themselves. They learned that the future is female. Now, how do you feel if you're growing up male and you're learning that the future is female? They're learning that masculinity is toxic. And of course, masculinity, parts of it are toxic, just like parts of femininity are toxic, but they just. It's focused on that. And they're learning all these negative things about themselves. And I've heard high school student and college student, one after the other, saying, it feels to me like I wish I wasn't born male. And, you know, that is not a healthy way to live one's life.
- [09:44]
A
You know, simultaneously, you see a lot of young women asking the question, where are the strong men?
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
So it's a vicious cycle of all that. When did it. And I recall you pointing toward sort of Marxist ideology, that everything had to be framed between oppressor and oppressed.
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B
Yes.
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A
And that was the tipping point for feminism when they embraced the Marxist framing.
- [10:13]
B
Yes, the Marxist framing. And also that was the civil rights framing too. But in civil rights, from my perspective, there really was an oppressor and oppressed. I mean, the slave was treated, and many black people in this country were treated, you know, really in a terrible type of way. So that hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed had a, you know, some sort of rang true in many respects. And then in Marxism, it was clearly oppressor and oppressed. And we feminists sort of like, looked at men and women in that type of way. There's the oppressor and there's the oppressed. And it was. And ironically, the National Organization for Women in New York City was about to kick men out. And the president at the time and the board, the rest of the members of the board had this discussion without my being there, saying, you know, should we kick men out? And they concluded that they would instead ask me to form men's groups at the time that the women were having their women's consciousness raising groups once per month. And I agreed to do that. And. And then when I formed the men's groups at the beginning, I didn't learn very much because I lectured to the groups, which was pretty stupid on my part. And when I got a little bit of emotional intelligence and decided to listen more than lecture, I began to hear that the men in the group, a lot of them had dreams when they were younger. And the dreams were things like, I want to be an artist. I want to be a writer like you, Warren. I want to be an actor. I want to be musician. And one of the men in the group in particular was absolutely. He loved. He had loved his job as an elementary school teacher, but when his first child was born, he realized that they couldn't move to the type of neighborhood they wanted with the type of schools they wanted if he just got an elementary school teacher salary, especially since his wife wanted to stop working or cut back significant. So he quit what he loved to do, which was elementary school teaching. He became a principal and then ultimately a superintendent of schools. But we as feminists were saying, oh, education, even though there's more women in it, it's still dominated by these men who want to be the dominant principals and superintendents of schools. He had zero interest. He hated administration. He loved kids. He was the most wonderful human being you could imagine. And he was sick of being a superintendent of schools with all the conflicts you can imagine. But what he was being, he. Not directly, but he as a man, was being criticized for doing something that he didn't want to do in order to make the life of his daughter and his wife better than he had an opportunity for it to be. And so this, this is the fundamental that feminists never got. That, yes, men did earn more money, but it wasn't men that earned more money than women did. It was fathers who earned more money than the mothers did because they left jobs that they loved more, that earned less for jobs that they loved less, that earned more. Because the role to high pay. The road to hay is a toll road.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah. And that you. You know my friend John Tierney.
- [13:34]
B
I do.
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A
Used to be with the New York Times. I feel like he was sort of semi canceled.
- [13:39]
B
Not as, perhaps dramatically, he was basically canceled. Yes, I think you're absolutely right. As it was Barry Weiss.
- [13:45]
A
Yeah.
- [13:45]
B
And unfortunately. And John was married to a woman I used to go out with, Helen Fisher, and he was my favorite writer in the New York Times.
- [13:56]
A
But he was talking about some of the institutional consequences of this shift in thinking about men and women that you lived in the middle of. And institutionally, according to John, and he makes a very persuasive case. Institutionally, there's a lot of pro woman biases that punish men who are trying to do exactly this familial imperative. I must earn. I must feed my family. And now it's become twice as difficult to do that, because if you're a university professor and you were just hired. There's a higher percentage chance that you're gonna be a woman and not a man. Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with Blaze TV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.
- [15:11]
B
We just did an eight hour course for the Peterson Academy for Jordan Peterson's Peterson Academy. And a number of people that watched it said, you know, one of the things I said in the during the course is I said, people were saying, well, why don't we hear this, this perspective on the boy crisis. And I said, well, there's not a single major university that would allow me to teach saying the things that I've said about why boys are in such crisis and the types of things I have just mentioned so far in this program, I would not literally not be allowed to say at any major university. I'm not saying I couldn't get away with it at some community college somewhere, but Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, all of whom sought me, sought after me when I was younger and was in the feminist mode. But not now.
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A
You were not. Have you ever taught at university?
- [16:04]
B
Yes, I taught at, I loves it residence scholar at Yale for a while and then I taught at George Washington Georgetown American University when my former wife was a White House fellow. And then I taught at Rutgers University for a while and Brooklyn College. But that was all when I was in feminist years.
- [16:21]
A
Yeah, because immediately when I hear about the hostility of universities, I think of Bret Weinstein, who was also just on my show, the former former progressive who had the audacity at Evergreen University to suggest that segregating the students based on race was a really bad idea. And again, oppressor versus oppressed. They've turned race into some sort of oppressed class that doesn't have responsibility for their own success in life. Very dangerous.
- [17:01]
B
Plus, the way that you get to love someone, to know them, to understand them, to have compassion for them, is to be with them, not to be separated from them. Because when you're separated from people, it's very easy to think of that other group as the other and to have stereotypes that may be accurate as a stereotype on percentage basis, but do not account for the exceptions to the rule and Therefore, seeing somebody as a real human being.
- [17:27]
A
How do I want to revisit the boy crisis for people that don't know the book? But this question of how we stop othering each other, how do we listen to each other? Because I spend too much time on social media. And I could give you the optimistic version of social media, which I think is very important. But at the same time, we're treating everybody in the more anonymous social media platforms, we're treating people in ways that we never would if we were sitting here having a conversation. How do you break that down? Because I think for all of the power of technology, we still have to gather like we still have to look the enemy in the eye and say, why do we discuss disagree so much?
- [18:16]
B
Absolutely. And you can see this, you know, Thanksgiving will be coming along soon and we're going to be getting together with our families and the chances are fairly good that somebody in our family has beliefs that are exactly the opposite of ours. And so the work I've been doing for the past 30 years on that led to the Role Mate to Soulmate book. Really this, this is the core of that. I said to myself, okay, if there's a boy crisis, the boy crisis usually happens after there's divorces and there's a lack of father involvement after divorces. That's the number one out of about ten causes of the boy crisis is boys that grew up what I call not fatherless because there's no such thing as a fatherless person, but rather dad deprived. And then from those dad deprived people, why did they were usually products of divorce. And so then take a look back at that, well, why was there a divorce? Divorce? And the single biggest causes of divorce is our biological propensity to, to respond defensively to personal criticism. So in every workshop on relationships and dealt with this issue and everybody advised John Gottman and other people all said, you know, you shouldn't, you know, it's important to not be defensive in response to personal criticism. But what I looked at more closely and John Gottman and others also agreed with this. They said that wisdom of not being defensive in response to personal criticism was very much accepted by everybody in the workshop. Then they went home from the workshop, the first criticism appeared and that wisdom disappeared. And so I said to myself, okay, what is that about that makes it so fundamental? And what I felt it was about was, historically speaking speaking, when we heard criticism, it was a potential enemy. Therefore it was functional for survival to, to be, to kill the enemy before the enemy killed us or at Least to defend oneself against the enemy. And so that was functional for survival. It's just terrible for love. And so I said, okay, if this is, if this goes back that far, what we're really talking about is requiring an evolution, evolutionary shift. And an evolutionary shift does not happen easily, obviously. So eventually I was able, this is about 30 years ago. I eventually started to figure out a way that I could have a couple have what I call a caring and sharing practice, where once a week they set aside two hours. Most of those two hours is spent learning the art and discipline of a person appreciating each other. But a part of those two hours is spent with them being able to prepare themselves to hear just one of their partner's criticisms or concerns. And before they do that, they do, let's say you're my brother and we have, you know, we think, I think that dad brought you up, privilege and me, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so before I heard your criticism. Criticism, criticism of me as always being the one that dad focused on, let's say I would alter my natural biological self through doing six mindsets. So one mindset might be, let's say you're doing this husband and wife. And the man or the woman about to hear the criticism would say, if I hear everything you say without, even if I feel it's completely distorted or even a lie, but if I nevertheless make a safe space for you to say that, and then I let you know, and so that you're not walking on eggshells, you will feel more loved by me, more secure with me, and therefore you'll have more love for me. So now I'm doing the first step of a six step evolutionary shift, rather than responding to criticism with the opportunity to be defensive. And how can I chop that apart saying, wait a minute, if I first hear everything my wife is saying or my husband is saying and I make a secure space for that, they'll love me more. So now I'm getting them to associate not with being killed with the enemy, but rather with the opportunity to be more deeply loved. And so, so that's one step of the six steps. And when the person is finished doing that, they say, okay, now I'm ready to provide that safe environment for you to be able to say whatever you want, even if I completely disagree with it, then I have built in a structure so that if I lose that, if I start becoming, thinking, doing in my mind's eye something that I call self, listening, Listening to myself respond to, to you and prepare A response, I say hold. And so then I center myself back into the meditation or the mindset that is most effective for me to be able to fully listen to you completely again. And so that works so powerfully once people practice it enough to be able to execute on that and know other intellectual advice works that way. So part of what you get in the Role Mate to Soulmate book is access to an an eight hour online couples course where you can actually practice that with your partner. Because I've found that reading the book alone or listening to it on audible, it gives you an intellectual structure. But it has the same problem. Unless you actually do it with your partner, it doesn't work that well.
- [23:48]
A
So when, when did this, this came.
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B
Out last year and about a year ago, almost a year ago today actually.
- [23:58]
A
The seven Secrets to Lifelong Love. I have not read this book yet, but I will. And I wonder if that sounds like a lot of work and a lot of face to face commitment and trust even to start the process.
- [24:19]
B
Trust? No, not to start the process because the trust is usually half there and half not there when you're starting. But there's a lot of things you love about your partner you're trying to.
- [24:31]
A
Fix the lack of trust.
- [24:32]
B
Exactly. Both sort of are intermixed with each other. You're still together because there's a certain amount of trust, but you're still. You wish you could really be heard and you, you don't really trust that process completely. And so a lot of work. Yes, actually in the course itself, the in person course, the subtitle of the Role Mate to Soulmate course is the Art and Discipline of Love. And so it is absolutely a discipline. But many people put time into it, they go to therapists, et cetera. But if they don't learn how to really make their partner safe to be able to say whatever they want to say, when, not whenever they want to say it, but just during that caring and sharing practice time. They don't really leave their partner feeling heard. And it's kind of sad because you know, in school when there was a problem presented, the goal of the person, it was to solve the problem. But when your partner has a problem, the goal, instead of getting an A for solving the problem, you get an F for solving the problem. Because your partner does not want the problem to be solved by you immediately. Your partner needs to be fully heard by you. That's before the problem is contributed to a solution. And most of the time, not all the time, most of the time your partner, partner really hearing you in a way that sounds very accurate to you and doesn't leave anything out or distort anything or miss anything that is the solution to the problem.
- [26:07]
A
Yeah. So I'm thinking about scalability and I'm reminded of a project that we at Freed the People did a long time ago and it was called the deadly isms. But it wasn't really just about communism and socialism and authoritarianism and fascism. It was supposed to be about what's the alternative to the most oppressive, top down types of regimes that don't value human life, they don't value human individuality. I could go down the list. But you, you know what they don't value? And we took the left right spectrum and we flipped it on its head and all the deadly isms are, were on the bottom. But at some point you got away from any sort of ism and you got to what I would call fundamental human values.
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B
Yes.
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A
Things we all cherish.
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B
Yes.
- [27:00]
A
And you know, you go from, from tolerance to trading to trust to respect. And eventually, and this is something that, that I had my friend Deirdre Merclosky on the show. And we think the top of this pyramid is love.
- [27:21]
B
Yes.
- [27:22]
A
And love is the deepest level of mutual respect and understanding and tolerance and empathy and all these things. So maybe I'm being too idealistic, but I'm wondering if we can, we can rebuild a culture that at least aspires to love. I don't throw that word around lightly and I think a lot of people abuse the word by sort of putting it on a bumper sticker.
- [27:54]
B
I love peanut butter.
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A
Yeah. Or just, you know, the coexist thing.
- [27:58]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [28:00]
A
I know some people mean it, but most people don't. And so the question, it's a long way of framing the question, which is what is the scalability of if? Did the same tools work to build trust and love in your most precious relationship? Well, how about your neighbors and how about your fellow city dwellers? And what about your country?
- [28:24]
B
Absolutely, totally related to the role mate to soulmate work. Because the prerequisite to love is being able to feel that whatever is happening inside of you will be heard by the person, by your partner. And that even though she or he may disagree with it and have a totally different version of that story, that it's safe for you to say your version and that you're. And when, and when, when that when you're really feeling safe to say your aversion, you'll be able, you'll discover thoughts that you didn't even know you were thinking, because especially men, if it's dangerous to go there to say something, we are very, bottom line, we don't even allow ourselves to think the feelings or to feel the feelings because it's going to lead to somewhere that's going to be a problem. So just shut them down. And the result is, is we go out and drink or we watch sports and focus on the sports, but we don't talk about the real things that are happening in our soul. And that's really deeply sad. And so part of what you mentioned, scalability, so part of what I'm working on now is I've created a proposal to create a White House Council on the Family with a section on boys and men and a section on women and girls. And somebody will be presenting that to Alex Brucewicz, who's very involved with President Trump, and then also to RFK Jr. To have that be part of HHS. And part of the job of the White House Council on Boys and Men and Women and girls will be to mass market this online virtual eight hour course where we teach people how, how to hear their partner and to have this course distributed to all the poor zip codes in the country through faith based leaders, through libraries, through psychologists and guidance counselors at schools so everybody can afford to be able to actually go through the experience. I will make no money from it. It'll be an online course and so it doesn't cost me anything except for the distribution mechanism. And so that's goal number one. Because I feel that the boy crisis can be best stemmed by people being able to be able to exercise love in a really meaningful and safe way. That then leads to fewer divorces, better families, and it leads to therefore fewer fathers left out of the home and therefore fewer boys that are dad deprived and therefore less of a boy crisis. The last time we talked I said the number one cause of the boy crisis is dad deprivation. But really when you look at the cause, that's even deeper than that. We can do more to prevent the boy crisis by not by having the good communication that leads to fewer divorces, that leads to there not being the father that is kicked out of the home or I'm not allowed to be fully involved.
- [31:33]
A
If you've made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Key Beyond Liberty is just one of the amazing products we create at Free the People. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty, independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance after the show. Check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show. It's funny how radical it feels to say that fathers matter.
- [32:19]
B
It's funny.
- [32:20]
A
I laugh at myself because it sounds ridiculous to think that's a radical statement.
- [32:23]
B
Yes. It used to be in the 1800s that when there was a divorce, it was accepted that the father would be with the children and that the mother would not be. And so now we're having to fight for the father to be equally involved. Now, many judges will agree that it's best to have both families and both mother and father involved about equally after divorce. But, but if the mother says that he's a bad father or I'm in love with another person and I want to move away, the judge will often say, well, I want her to have that opportunity to do that without any understanding of how of what I call in the Boy Crisis book, I outline what I call the four must dos after divorce. And if we want our children to have almost as good of an option of being equally of being healthy in their growth as they would if they were in an intact family, four must dos are, number one, about an equal amount of time with father and mother. Number two, that the dad and mom don't live more than 20 minutes drive time from each other so that the children don't resent the parents home that they're going to because they have to give up the birthday party of their best friend or their soccer practice. Number three is a the children aren't able to detect any bad mouthing from mom to dad or dad to mom. And number four, and that's really an important one. And number four is that there's that the couple go to couples communication counseling at least once every three or four weeks, just not just when there's an emergency. Because when there's an emergency, you usually fight for with a short time period for your perspective. But when there's not an emergency, you can begin to have the time to hear your partner's perspective.
- [34:12]
A
So you've touched on several of these. But what are the consequences? We've talked about where the boy crisis came from, but what are the consequences for civil society? Obviously the family's broken, but build it out.
- [34:30]
B
Yes. Well, Jerome Powell put his fingers on one of them on 60 Minutes about 2018, and he said that one of the consequences he said that the second biggest threat to our economic security is the problems that boys are going through because boys are crucial to being able to build a strong society, to be able to build a strong economy. They're the ones much more likely to go to war in the United States. They're the only ones that are required to register for the draft at age 18. If we lose them and we lose boys being effective, they're not going to be able to build good AI. They're not going to be able to participate when we need them in these types of activities. He said this was the second biggest cause of our, of worrying about our future in terms of defense and economic growth. The boys not being involved, they're more likely to be not just the school shooters, but 93% of your prisoners are males, and most of those males. When I ran for governor of California some years ago, as you know, and I spoke to a number of prisoners populations and I asked them to raise their hand if they, if they had an active involved father. And usually about 9 or 10% raised their hand. Now, assuming that a few percent weren't paying attention, to me, maybe it's 12, 14% that did not have significant father involvement. And so that's the people who are our homeless population is very high percentage of non lack of father involvement, the people who commit suicide. Lack of father involvement is the single biggest predictor of suicide. And people don't realize. And then as you grow up, that really doesn't change. Men who don't have father involvement oftentimes don't have as good socially emotional skills. And so if they do have a wife and their wife and they're older, when men and women are 85 years of age, men are 1,750% more likely to commit suicide than their female counterparts at 85 years of age. And so the loneliness when we're talking of we're demonizing men as we've been, it often leads to men feeling lonely and not cared for. We don't have I mentioned before, before that we have eight federal offices of women's health and zero federal offices of men's health. And that's true in most states and in many counties throughout the country. And so not only do we not encourage men to seek help emotionally, but if they were to seek help emotionally, we don't have but a tenth of probably 1/1000 of the resources for men. And who needs those resources the most? Men. Because men don't learn to express their feelings and go for psychological help. And so when men and women, for example, are in custody battles, men are eight Times more likely during custody battles to commit suicide than their wife is or their former wife is or their future ex wife is. And so you get some understanding of the need for that. And when you're being told you're toxic and there's no empathy for you. And psychologists are mostly females and the small percentage of males, a high percentage of them, are gay. And so the average heterosexual male oftentimes doesn't find somebody that identifies with him as much. And so all these things are part of what a White House Council on Boys and Men will be working on if we are able to get that through.
- [38:30]
A
So obviously I can see where the message that you are conveying there is pretty attractive to conservatives who believe in strong families and sort of obvious audience for you, I would argue some similarly libertarians for a slightly different reason. I think libertarians are never looking to government to solve our problems. They're always looking for civil society and institutional structures. Starting with the most basic building block is the family and relationships between men and women. And so I think maybe not as intuitive as conservatives, but, but I think libertarians fundamentally understand the importance of problem solving from the bottom up instead of the top down.
- [39:20]
B
I would have three answers to that. Yes, yes and yes. Meaning that if you're learning how to hear your partner without building up defenses while they're talking, that's the single biggest. Now, there's a number of other things here. The subtitle of this book is the Seven Secrets to Lifelong Love. But just working from that one secret which ties into knowing how to create a conflict free zone during the rest of the week. So when you have that conflict free zone combined with that caring and sharing time, you have people that really love each other. And two things are happening. Not only are they likely to stay together and build a strong family, but they're also modeling good communication skills that get taken on by their children to the next generation. And so you're building the single most important building block for a libertarian society, which is the strong family, strong pathway to love, and people not just theoretically believing in that which everybody believes in love. But almost nobody really knows how to exercise in the way that their partner would ideally love. And that's what motivated me for 30 years to work on what became the role mate to soulmate.
- [40:40]
A
You learn it from your parents, you.
- [40:42]
B
Learn it from your parents, and usually you learn it badly from your parents. So when I ask people in my workshop, how many of you communicate better than your parents do? And everybody raises their hand, even though a number of them are There for communication. Communication problems.
- [40:57]
A
Yeah.
- [40:57]
B
And. And so. And then I said, well, what. You know, which generation has more divorces? Your grandparents are us. Well, us. So does this mean that good communication creates divorces? No, what it means is that. That, that our expectations have increased. It used to be our grandparents. They just. The only thing that they. They learned is, you know, for better or for worse. And that meant, you know, if you. If you. If you had domestic violence or you had other things, you stayed into that relationship for better and for worse. Now if somebody is a victim of domestic violence or participant in domestic violence, your best girlfriends or boyfriends, men, friends will say something like, you know, you better get out of that relationship. And so what's happened? There are expectations for a good relationship have gotten higher. A lot of people say, well, I want unconditional love. No, you don't. You don't want unconditional love. You want much more conditional love than your grandparents had the freedom to have. Why? Because your grandparents were focused on survival. They weren't focused on the ideal relationship and listening really well and being heard real well. That was really like, you know, that was outside of the reach of their expectations. And as a result of that, they stayed together because they knew that to survive, they had to stay together, not just to survive, but to have the respect of their neighbors and their friends and the church and their family. They just had no option.
- [42:27]
A
Yeah, I want to dig into this phrase, conditional love, because I'm thinking about your. You had a very strong relationship with Nathaniel Brandon.
- [42:37]
B
Yes.
- [42:38]
A
And. And I've been, I think, a lot about. And my wife and I have actually given talks at objectivist conferences about this understanding of love that I get ultimately from Ayn Rand. And she. I'm butchering this, but she basically said, you have to love yourself before you can respect someone else. And so you put more conditions.
- [43:04]
B
On.
- [43:04]
A
And requirements on the person that you love.
- [43:08]
B
Yes.
- [43:09]
A
And hopefully you chose them for those reasons, like the things you admire about them, not that they were pathetic like a kitten and needed to be nurtured.
- [43:18]
B
Yes.
- [43:18]
A
There's something more fundamental. Tell me about. Unpack that. But in the process, tell me about your relationship with Nathaniel Brandon.
- [43:28]
B
Yes, let's see. Okay. On the. The love part, I would say a slightly different version of Ayn Rand's perspective on that, which is as you. It does. It very much helps to love yourself for sure. And then. But if let's. We all love ourselves with less security than we would like to. That is, you know, we want. We. We seek respect well, when we seek respect, that's a little bit because we don't love ourselves enough to be without that respect. And so when we're married to our partner, we're all incomplete in that love of ourselves. But as we listen to our partner and our partner really feels heard by us, and we see that we can really trust our partner to hear us and we, we can hear them, we begin to love ourselves more. And so that's so in that process. So it's not a before or after. It's an integral. It's an interactive type of phenomenon. And that's really one of the great values. We're all incomplete in our love of ourselves. We have a number of hormones that go through us that we are dependent on, from the dopamine tolerance, oxytocin to so on, and serotonin that are all. We're all seeking to make ourselves happy by stimulating those. And so that's less than she was.
- [45:00]
A
Her biggest sin, if you will, was she was very black and white.
- [45:05]
B
Yes.
- [45:06]
A
And I love to. My joke, which is not a joke, is that I'm sort of half Ayn Rand in terms of my intellectual parenting, and I'm half Jerry Garcia or Frederick Hayek. Because I think, as you said earlier, figuring out truth is a process, and you have to have a fundamental humility about it.
- [45:31]
B
And it's really important to never say to yourself or out loud, I have the truth. There's so much complexity to almost every issue that keeping your mind open to other dimensions of what we already think is one of the important pathways to peace and to love.
- [45:52]
A
Yeah. Yeah. At Kibbe on liberty. Freedom is a lifestyle24.7, something you live and breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today, just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You too can love liberty and look cool. How did you meet Nathaniel Brandon? I'm dorking out as I met him when I was young and I met him just maybe a year before he passed away. And he, of course, was a famous. The most famous associate of Ayn Rand early on in his career. But tell me a little bit about him and your relationship with him.
- [46:42]
B
Yes, I submitted the book why Men Are the Way They Are. To him not knowing who he was. I mean, knowing who he was, reputation wise, but not knowing him personally. And this is 1986, and he read it enough to give it a quote and liked it. But then he said to me, I just read your book for real. And it is, you know, he was just filled with praise for it. He said, can I invite you over and meet you? And this is when he was married to a woman named Devers Brandon. And so we got together together at Lake Arrowhead and met and. And then we just took to liking each other. And the. And then they moved to Los Angeles to. I think it was Beverly Hills and the. And we. And so we. I spent most of the most Thanksgivings with Tony Robbins in part, and Nathaniel Brandon in part. And so, And. And so we just liked each other very, very much. Now, he was too intellectual for my wife, who was not in that type of intellectual mode, but she respected him. And he. And I just sort of hit it off very much as he would always. He had a real respect for me and I had a real respect for him. And we just plowed into each other's thinking on things. And he was very much believer in what I was coming to believe in at that point in time, which was that the feminist movement had really gone too far and that the demonizing of men was not healthy for anybody and that the family was really important. And the family is really one of the single. You have a strong family and you have faith, you're going to have much less need for government. And so that's really a very core.
- [48:46]
A
So Ayn Rand didn't live to see all of this, but you could imagine that she would very much agree with my wife Terry, and be anti feminist today as a very strong, successful woman.
- [48:58]
B
The way feminism has evolved. And I still applaud the part, I say, if, you know, when I am working with somebody who is a feminist and I want to hear their perspective, you know, I delve into, you know, the fact that there wouldn't. Terry would not be respected to do the type of work she does if it was be. If it was two generations ago before feminism spoke up and said, women, you know, women can be surgeons, women can be CEOs, women can be so on. So we have feminism to thank for a lot of the progress of not just looking at women as playing a specific role. And that can coexist and must coexist with respecting anybody who plays the role of raising children. But we also know that children are very effectively raised either predominantly by dad or predominantly by mom. But ideally, they're raised best when both parents are involved and play a checks and balance role to each other.
- [49:59]
A
So I bring up this libertarian thing, and I know objectivists Wouldn't use the L word. But I feel like there was this classical liberal community and you had met Milton Friedman as well. And I don't know if you've noticed, but today on social media a lot of traditional conservatives, they call them tradcons and they spend a lot of time trashing libertarians because they claim that somehow that economic liberation of women, their ability to go into the job market is the root cause of the broken family. And I feel like you're debunking that.
- [50:41]
B
I am debunking that. There's a number of. We now have. When I did the research, research for the boy crisis, it was already apparent that children raised predominantly by dads do slightly better than children raised predominantly by moms. Now that's big caution in that note there. Children raised predominantly by dads are far more, the dads are far more self selected because the expectation is the raising of children by moms, which means that that's less self selected. So this does not mean that men, men are better as parents than mothers are. We don't have the evidence for that. But we do have the evidence for the fact that when a mom and dad make the decision to have a dad involved in the raising of the children, the children do exceptionally well as a rule. And so therefore what the freedom of women to be outside of the workplace frees society to do is to have those women be select men that they can trust to be part of the child raising process or be the predominant child raisers. So many, many women will say to me, you know, I really resent it that men can be have it all men and women can't be have it all men, women. And I say that's not accurate. Women can be have it all women in the sense of have a top notch career, have a family, have well raised children if they choose a different type of man. If you are a woman who wants to be a top notch, you know, break glass ceilings, then do not look for a man who also is breaking, you know, is doing, doing top career work and expect to have children that are raised by one of you whose none of you, neither of you is there. Look for the type of man who is, you know, listening to a woman rather than talking about himself. Look for, and when, if he doesn't ask you out, ask him out, you know, and, and if, and, and have, and have respect for him to raise the children predominantly if you want to be fully involved with your career. But the one key word that I almost let slip by there is the word Respect marriages between women who are top notch career people and men who take care of the children do not survive. If the woman does not respect the father in that father's role and wants him to really be working on something else as a side project which he will become super successful like she is. You have to really respect that. You know, there's two types of men. There's a, you know, the, the provider protector and there's the nurturer connector and the, and of course a lot of people are a mixture of both. But you must have a man if you, if you want that type of career and be having a have it all woman, you must find a man who has a good part nurture connector in him. Him is happy about that and senses that you aren't speaking, coming back from a party, a business party about oh, you, this love, you know, this, the CEO, he's this and that and that type of thing. That's, you know, that's, that will make that man feel not respected and that you're really after a man that is another CEO type like she is.
- [54:10]
A
It's both cultural and maybe even biological evolution to go from the hunter gatherer mindset that our ancestors came from to the mass abundance that we have. And I don't think it's a problem either. I think conservatives are those conservatives who argue that we have to go back to women being barefoot and pregnant is exactly the wrong solution. But we got to figure out this new world where we have abundance that is so radically different than the entire history of the human species.
- [54:51]
B
Yes, that's exactly the big you separate. This issue is an issue in societies that are in the developed world and that are the middle to upper middle class in the developed world. It's because the difference happens when survival is no longer the controlling issues. Feminists say, oh, the world was controlled by patriarchy. No, it wasn't controlled by patriarchy. It was controlled by the need to survive. In order to survive, both men and women did not have rights. You never heard our grandparents talking about rights. Women or men, they had two things, responsibilities and obligations. When I wrote my, my first draft of my first book, my father looked at me and said, warren, this is a darn good book. However, only 1 out of 100 authors find a publisher. And if you can't find a publisher, you'll never find a wife, you know. And he felt the, the obligation, his obligation was to make sure I didn't go into something artsy, fartsy or you know, something that you know, that you know Almost nobody could make a living from. And then if you made it, made a living. And after the. My first book did very well. He said, that's just one book, Warren. The next book will probably fail. Most artists, you know, go through ups and downs and you won't be able to support a family of, you know, on that type of ups and downs. He wanted security. Now, he was born in 1910 and so he'd been through two, two world wars, in a depression by the time. Time he was 35. And from his perspective, you know, he saw people that didn't have that type of fundamental focus, men, especially, on earning money. He saw them commit suicide because they were so ashamed of themselves.
- [56:34]
A
Yeah, you know, I think about the. Tell me, tell me. If you buy into this, there's. There is a crisis in purpose. And maybe this is something that Jordan Peterson would say that we no longer have to worry about whether or not there's food on the table. And obviously people do. But I'm saying, generally speaking, we don't wonder where we're going to sleep tonight. We don't wonder whether or not I'm going to be able to feed my kids. And that defined your father's life.
- [57:07]
B
Exactly.
- [57:08]
A
That's what he did.
- [57:09]
B
Right.
- [57:09]
A
So. So that gave him purpose. That gave him meaning. And I do think there's a crisis in meaning now because you're not going to get meaning out of scoring the new version of the iPad. Right. That's not meaning. That's just another acquisition. In a world flooded with stuff. How do we help young people, both boys and girls, girls solve this crisis and meaning?
- [57:40]
B
I think that first they really do need to understand that this is not a world that was controlled by men who wanted to put women down. This was a world that historically where men died so women could live. The fundamental. The subtitle of the Myth of Male Power books is why Men Are the Disposable Sex. Historically, our purpose was to be willing to die in war or to take hazardous jobs and die in the workplace, or to work ourselves up a corporate ladder until we were no longer a human being. We were basically a human doing. And so we never looked at our men defined their purpose as not really being people in touch with their feelings, people who had complex motives and so on. So we never learned to respect men in terms of their emotional intelligence because it wasn't functional for men to be emotional, intelligent. Let's say a man was in the armed services and there was a sergeant and the sergeant was making anti Semitic comments and the man said, excuse me, Sergeant, sir, but I'm a Jewish person. And I felt that those comments were really anti Semitic. And the sergeant's response would be, oh, isn't that sweet? Listen, everybody, little Jew here says that this is anti Semitic. Little Jew, why don't you do 20 push ups? And if you know. And the Jewish man learned that it wasn't functional for him to get into touch with his feelings. And what the sergeant was doing was basically saying, you know, we. We can't run a war machine with squeaky wheels. We have to run a war machine where you don't have feelings, where you just go out and do what you need to do, including die. And so men. And so is that toxic masculinity? That sure was. To have your. To have your feelings repressed is not healthy. But was it because men wanted power and privilege? No, it was the exact opposite of male privilege. It was male obligation to be willing to die so women and children could live and we wouldn't have to speak German under Hitler. And so we were willing to die for that. In the Battle of the Somme In World War I, Somme, 1 million people were killed or injured in one battle. And so this is the type of understanding of male sacrifice and male disposability that has not been honored by feminists. I've never heard of a feminist saying, we really need to sort of pray with thanks for the men who have died so we can live. We need to pray with thanks for the men who work themselves up a career ladder without ever thinking of who they were as people, but rather who they were as human doings so that we had the opportunity to take fulfilling jobs. We had the opportunity to raise our children if we wanted to. And so there's been no gratitude among feminists toward men. And that lack of gratitude has sunk into the culture to such a degree. That went on TikTok recently. There was a comment saying that. That men commit suicide four times as often as women do. And the response of somebody there was, the rate should be higher. And for men committing suicide, and 7,000 people liked that. With a heart.
- [61:25]
A
Yeah.
- [61:26]
B
And so when that type of attitude on just one social media post comes across in those types of numbers, we know we're in a sick place. If anybody ever said the rate of female suicide should be higher, I would be just appalled at them. And that would test even my willingness to be a friend with them.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah. Well, I'm going to ask a final question because. Because we're all still trying to understand how it is that someone could gun down Charlie Kirk. And perhaps more shocking than the shooting itself has been the response of people hearting someone saying, well, he had it coming. I'm going to dance on his grave. That is a level of. Of. And I don't, I don't just blame social media for this, because obviously if people are saying it on social media, that they're thinking it, it's in their hearts.
- [62:26]
B
Yes.
- [62:27]
A
And I. I don't have a question, but we have a lot of work to do.
- [62:31]
B
We have a huge amount of work to do. Nothing could be a better example of how much work we have to do. And to, you know, to, to have one human being kill Charlie Kirk is a crime. But to have so many say that that was a positive is a much, much, much bigger crime and does really manifest how much work we have to do. And I really. It was something that hit me especially hard because when I was 31, Charlie Kirk's age, when he was shot, I was speaking all around the country to colleges on the importance of feminism. And, you know, the fact that. But there wasn't enough atmosphere there where I had to worry about somebody shooting me in the process. And so that is really. But the fact that I, you know, and then that was When I was 31, when I was 61, I was speaking around the country, you know, talking about the importance of the boy crisis and so on, and why we needed to pay attention to boys and men's issues. And then that's when I experienced cancel culture and I was shut down in a much more cruel way. I think I mentioned to you before we were talking that a documentary on my life just came out and was shown in London, which I just came back from a couple of days ago, and the title was the Boy Crisis. Colon. Warren Farrell canceled. And it was all the canceling that I went through, being the darling of the media when I was talking about feminist and the importance of feminism too. As soon as I said boys and men also have problems, and that's. They're getting out of hand. Every. The media that supported me just shut me down completely and cruelly. And it was really. It was a shock to me, to be honest.
- [64:17]
A
I saw everyone should follow you on X. And I assume these might be excerpts from the movie, but I watched some of the clips of you. You're probably an Oprah or something like that. That.
- [64:26]
B
Yes.
- [64:27]
A
And just the visceral anger against you. And. And I'm sure the show was kind of set up that way so that they would find a particularly hostile female person to to shut you down. Can people watch that movie yet? Is it available or is it still.
- [64:43]
B
The movie is not though that some distributors it's daily. Daily Wire is looking at it carefully. BBC is looking at it it carefully. A couple of distributors are looking at it carefully. So I don't know if it will be available but if you have contacts with Daily Wire, encourage them because I think it's something that people will really get a lot out of, particularly in this cancel culture world.
- [65:07]
A
Send me a screener and I'll try to figure out who I might encourage because I might have some other ideas as well.
- [65:14]
B
That is a great idea. Yes, we'll do that.
- [65:17]
A
So tell me, let's talk some practical things. You're a lecturer at the Peterson Academy. Tell people if they don't know what that is, what it is and what your particular curriculum is there.
- [65:31]
B
Yes, my curriculum there is a six hour course on the Boy Crisis that is filled with a great many videos that are really some are funny and some are just powerful and then and audience participation as well. So it's a course that's been getting extremely good response. Peterson Academy is an alternative non cancel culture university that Jordan Peterson has set up. And so that's been very, very big positive. The the work on the the Boy Crisis is also, you know, basically available in book form as well and you know, audible, etc. The boy crisis is a book that I would recommend listening to on Audible or in paperback hardcover type of thing. The Role Mate to Soulmate book is not as effective on Audible, although it's bought most by Audible. I would suggest reading it but then using it with your partner through the the online video course. There's a QR code in the book to give you access to that and it's the doing of the course with your loved one that will be by far the most effective use of learning how to hear your partner's criticism and learning how to create a conflict free zone and learning how to do things like solve problems that are really your stickiest and also learning learning how to play together.
- [67:01]
A
And you also do live gatherings, retreats, seminars, things like that tell people that are really intrigued where they could connect with you there.
- [67:12]
B
Just go on my website warrenfarrell.com and you'll see something saying couples Communication Workshop. And I do most of them now at a place called Esalen Es S A L E N in Big Sur in California. And then usually there's 50, 60 people at a given workshop. But that's by far the most effective thing that I do. I'll be doing them in other places for a Mormon community up in Park City but you'll be able to find out all the locations on the website. The Esalen is a magical place in of terms terms of its environment and the vibe that's there and so it really is healing in that way as well.
- [67:57]
A
Warren, thank you for this conversation.
- [67:59]
B
It's been a real pleasure. You're always so able to talk to listen to ask questions so well. It's so feel the peace inside of your soul even as the it co exists with a wonderful intellect and so it's really a pleasure for me.
- [68:17]
A
Okay I'm clipping that for self promotion. Thank you so much.
- [68:21]
B
You're very welcome.
- [68:22]
A
Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people go to freethepeople.org.