The Masculinity Debate Is A Huge Mess - Richard Reeves - #1087

Summary

Modern Wisdom Episode #1087

The Masculinity Debate Is A Huge Mess – Richard Reeves

Released: April 20, 2026

Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Richard Reeves – Writer, Policy Researcher, Founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the complex, evolving discourse surrounding modern masculinity, focusing on the “mess” of current debates about boys and men. Chris and Richard explore the increasing (but often fraught) attention to male challenges, shifting political attitudes, media framing, and the backlash and progress within men's issues advocacy. They critique both reactionary and progressive approaches, dissect policy changes, discuss masculinity in culture and relationships, and question the future for men in society, touching on mating, family, education, optimism, and the need for better narratives and practical support.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Political Shifts in Attention to Boys and Men

• Increased Policy Initiatives (00:07 – 03:20)
  • Initiatives on boys' and men's issues have become mainstream in U.S. politics, especially after Democrats recognized declining support from men post-2024 elections.
  • Governors (Newsom, Whitmer, Wes Moore, Spencer Cox) now sponsor real programs: e.g., mental health strategies, more male teachers, “Men Matter” bills.
  • Reeves: "I can't credibly say anymore, you know what? No one's paying any attention to this." (02:52)
• The Role of Self-Interest in Politics
  • Rather than deriding political moves as cynical, Reeves argues it's how democracy works: politicians care when their constituents do.
  • Admits political motivations but emphasizes that “serious efforts” matter regardless of the initial cause.

2. Critique of Men's Rights and Advocacy “Victory Aversion”

• Activists' Reluctance to Celebrate Wins (06:16 – 10:41)
  • Some in the men’s rights movement are “psychologically reluctant to succeed”: their identities are built on fighting an unwinnable struggle.
  • Reeves references activist psychology: "If you succeed, you'll have to start saying, 'Great, we've done it.' Now I have to find some new identity." (07:17)
• Parallels with Other Movements
  • This phenomenon is not unique to men's issues: applies to climate, LGBTQ, BLM—success can undermine activist identity and funding.

3. Media, Narratives, and Cultural Lag

• Mainstream Media’s Shifting Tone (12:23 – 14:13)
  • Recognition of boys’ and men's crises has grown, but skepticism remains whether this attention is substantive or “lip service”.
  • Noted: Politico’s coverage of boys’ issues often authored by women; absence of male voices still a point of tension.
• Danger of Deficit Framing
  • Both the media and policy often focus on "what’s wrong with men" (e.g., “toxic masculinity”), which can be alienating and counterproductive.
  • Reeves: "There's just this way of talking about young men that suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the systems around them." (21:35)

4. Masculinity, Language, and Cultural Vacuums

• The Crisis of Language (24:09 – 27:44)

  • Masculinity now is almost always heard with a negative modifier (“toxic”) among young men; genuine, positive frameworks are rare.
  • Left a vacuum filled by figures from Rogan to Tate; “nature abhors a vacuum—if there’s a market, it will be filled.”
  • Reeves: “If you want to serve boys and young men, you better have some men, too.” (27:16)

• A Call for Positive, Purpose-Driven Messaging

  • Instead of "we're here to help you, poor you," the message should be "we need you."
  • Manhood as a feature, not a bug—men’s masculinity should be positively embraced and directed.

5. Manosphere, Feminism, and the New Trends

• Fragmentation and Evolution of the ‘Manosphere’ (29:49 – 32:24)
  • Chris outlines the “three waves” of the manosphere: Pick-up Artists, Red Pill, and emerging Lux Maxing (personal aesthetics, “gigachad” culture), with skepticism about whether the latest trends will stick.
• Concerns about Looksmaxing and Male Insecurity
  • Looksmaxing feeds male-to-male status contests, not genuine connection with women—potential rise in male body dysmorphia.
  • Reeves: “I do think lying behind all of these trends… is just a bunch of men, especially young men, honestly, just trying to figure this out and to matter.” (34:55)

6. Structural Change: Education, Family, Work

• Material versus Cultural Drivers (Systemic and Boring)

  • Policy must address foundational issues: falling boys’ literacy, education attainment, apprenticeships, employment, fatherhood.
  • Chris: “All of these, the issues that matter most…are after effects of the stuff that comes before it. And that is education, employment, mental health.” (19:41)

• The Myth of 'Useless’ Men

  • Dangerous public narratives pathologize men; a better approach is role-modeling, service, and including men (especially fathers) in solutions.

7. Mating, Dating, Fertility and Social Change

• Dating Market Complexity

  • Modern dating is influenced by political polarization; men and women both told to blame the other side for their woes.
  • Delays in relationships and parenthood ratchet later due to economic insecurity and shifting life aspirations.

• Empirical Myths around Fertility and Gender Roles (65:54 – 68:59)

  • Rebuttal of the idea that women working causes falling fertility: historical and cross-national data don’t support it.
  • Decline in early parenthood is linked more to subjective thresholds for readiness than to any one social change.

• Parenthood as Transformation, Not “Domestication”

  • The framing of marriage/fatherhood as “domesticating” men is problematic—it’s a positive, transformative cultural institution for men, not just for societal benefit.

8. Reality vs. Cultural Panic: Glass Half-full

• Data vs. Narrative

  • Despite negative cultural narratives, the data on father involvement, violent crime, and even marriage among the educated show progress, not decline.

• Resisting Pessimism

  • Reeves: “Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy… Americans, the thing about America is that it's obsessed with progress and innovation. I'm like, yes, that’s why I'm here.” (99:11 – 100:33)
  • Calls for balanced optimism: problem-awareness without catastrophizing.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On political attention to men:
  “I can't say it anymore. I think there's real progress on this. It's serious. Not all of it's making it into the culture war, but that doesn't mean that it's not good.” – Richard Reeves [02:52]

• On activists’ aversion to success:
  “Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure.” [07:17]

• On masculinity and language:
  "You can't even really use the word masculinity now with young men because it codes left because it's come with the modifier toxic." [25:46]

• On positive narratives:
  "What young men need to hear is: We need you. Society still needs you. Your family still needs you. Your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you." [27:16]

• On the future:
  “I'm an inveterate optimist...I think for me, it’s getting close to something like a virtue – to think well of the future is valuable in and of itself.” [107:33]

• On Apathy:
  "If there's lots of conflicting messages, it doesn't convince you of any one particular message. It just makes you immune to being convinced." – Chris Williamson [109:03]

• On descriptive statistics vs. narrative:
  "Despite negative cultural narratives, the data on father involvement, violent crime, and even marriage among the educated show progress, not decline." [99:11 – 100:33]

• Humor and Human Stories:

  • Chris and Reeves share personal moments: from Chris’s analogy-heavy metaphors (“relay race of influence”/“human centipede of social impact”) to Richard’s chaotic experience at his children’s birth (“Put some swimming trunks on...the midwife said, ‘I’ve seen something spherical and hairy in the water, assumed it was the baby’s head and grabbed the dad’s bollocks.’” [93:31])
  • “If you want to understand men, look at who their first role model is: 79% say mother, 69% say father. Andrew Tate last among all prominent figures.” [113:40]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:07: What’s changed in the masculinity debate since last episode
• 02:52: Political reasons for new interest in men’s issues
• 06:16: Why men’s rights activists “don’t actually want to win”
• 12:23: Trends in media and deficit framing of men
• 21:35: How deficit framing fails young men
• 24:09: The loss of positive language around masculinity (“toxic masculinity” dominance)
• 27:16: The importance of needing men, not just “helping” men
• 29:49: Chris’s “three waves of the manosphere”
• 34:55: Looksmaxing, insecurity, cultural confusion
• 65:54: Fertility, women in the workforce – mythology vs. data
• 76:59: Fatherhood as transformation for men
• 87:19: Galloway vs. Thompson paternity leave debate
• 99:11: Data vs. narrative: real progress vs. culture war panic
• 107:33: Richard’s optimism about the future for men

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Final Thoughts / Episode Tone

Chris and Richard combine rigorous data-driven analysis, personal anecdotes, critiques of both left and right, and a refreshingly balanced perspective. They refuse empty catastrophe or easy scapegoating, urging nuanced, constructive cultural narratives, and practical support for young men and women alike. Richard consistently pushes for optimism grounded in reality, calling for a mainstream that is “boring”—not beset by endless debate, but driven by ongoing, effective support. There is a strong emphasis on responsibility, humility, and hope.

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For More

• Visit the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) at aibm.org for research and policy briefs
• Chris’s recommended reading list: chriswillx.com/books

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Episode summary by Modern Wisdom Podcast Summarizer.

Transcript

[A]

What has changed or how has the debate about boys and men adapted since we last spoke? What's new?

[B]

I think when we last spoke, I was still frustrated that there was no sort of political space for this. I think people have become aware things aren't great with boys and men. There was raised awareness of it, but I still felt maybe particularly on the center left, that it was difficult to actually do anything about it. And that's changed. I used to say one of my talking points used to be that it was very hard to get people, especially on the political left, to actually do anything about this problem. First of all, we have to get them to talk about it. A, it's a problem. B, we can talk about it, and then C, we can do something about it. And I can't say that anymore. We've got governors, Governor Newsom, Governor Whitmer, Governor Wesmore in Maryland, also Governor Spencer Cox in Utah, all of whom have got pretty serious initiatives now to try and promote boys and men. We've got, as I'm speaking to you now, two bills have just been introduced to Congress to create a men's health strategy in office and to help men with their mental health after fatherhood. Right. The Men Matter bill. And there are a bunch of stuff happening in states. And so I can't credibly say anymore, you know what? No one's paying any attention to this. I can't sort of say anymore like you're shouting into the wilderness. And I used to say, like I'm banging my head against the brick wall, especially on the Democrat side of the aisle. That is just not true anymore. And there's some politics behind that. Of course I will. I think I have to be honest that I felt like I was banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024. And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with

[A]

Democrats because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men.

[B]

I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the Democrats I've just mentioned and that we're working with are very often also mentioned as potential presidential candidates. And so they've realized, look, we can't win without young men. So I'm not going to lie. I think there's a political dimension to this. But unlike many people, I don't blame politicians for doing politics. So some of the more men's rightsy people have said about Governor Newsom's initiative, for example, which is a serious initiative. What is it? So he signed an executive order last year telling his administration to come back to him with comprehensive plans to help boys and men in K12 education, employment, and especially mental health. He's already done a male service challenge. He's done a call to get 10,000 more men in California into service, into mentoring, into coaching. They're following that up with a big push on getting more men into teaching, like male role models in classroom would be a good idea. And it was very interesting that the men's rightsy folks, if I can use that language for now, or that I'm on the more conservative side of it, they're just like, oh, he's just doing politics. He's just realized that the Democrats have lost young men, and so he's just doing stuff to try and win their votes back. And why is that a bad thing? Isn't that how democracies are supposed to work? And so I just can't say it anymore. I think there's real progress on this. It's serious. Not all of it's making it into the culture war, but that doesn't mean that it's not good. In fact, most of it's not in the culture war. It's not being discussed generally on podcasts or even on cable tv, but it doesn't mean it's not happening.

[A]

How much is it? Is it a good first step, or is this a really significant move?

[B]

It's a significant move in the sense that it's the first time we've seen serious political figures and policymakers making serious efforts to address the problem. Right.

[A]

Okay. So it's a significant move in the same way as firing the first shot of a war is a significant move. It's the first thing that happens. And from that, it suggests that more will come after.

[B]

That's right. So the question is, is there substance

[A]

behind not sufficient yet?

[B]

No. And I think part of my role and part of my institute's role is to hold these people to account is to say, okay, you said you were going to do that. Yeah. You said you're going to do this. Great. Six months later, we're going to be like, did you do that? Where is the initiative to get more men into mental health care? Governor, what did happen? Did you get 10,000 more men into service? Governor Newsom, did you increase access to mental health care and paternity Leave Governor Moore, yes or no? Right. So I'm certainly not saying it's enough, but it is a lot more than we had three or four years ago. I mean, three or four years ago, you couldn't even get people, particularly on that side of the aisle, even to talk about this problem.

[A]

When'd your book come out?

[B]

2022.

[A]

Okay. So pretty much bang on that. And when did Obama endorse it?

[B]

2024.

[A]

Okay. So you're sort of tracking this journey over time.

[B]

Yeah. And honestly, it's been for us. Then we suddenly got a pivot and say, okay, we've now got policymakers coming to us saying, okay, I got it. What shall I do? Wait, wait, wait, hold on. That was on our 2029 plan. Right. Didn't quite expect to catch up this quickly. And that's obviously a good problem to have. But we have had to pivot and say, okay, how do we actually help these governors or these senators or these legislators do something about it? And my worry, honestly, is that this will just have a moment. Either it'll be driven by the politics or it'll be driven by suddenly there's this issue, right. Boys and men are being discussed in a way that they weren't before.

[A]

Sexy. To talk about it.

[B]

Yeah. Where are we going to be five years from now? Five years from now? It might be, I don't know, something else, because these things do have their moments. And the question I'm asking myself is, what will I be able to point to that's still standing, that's still here? And so actually, Virginia is a good example. Virginia is, if the new governor signs it, going to create the first commission on Boys and men to sit alongside the Commission on Women and Girls. Now, it's just a government commission of state. You might say, great. But what that means is that the issues of boys and men will be at the table in policymaking in Virginia in a way that they weren't before. And that will still be there five years from now. If that happens. That's going to get a line item. It's going to be real. It's going to be institutionalized. And my whole thing, I think we've talked about this before, is I want this issue to become boring. I want this issue to be mainstream.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys are falling behind. We've heard it.

[B]

We've heard it.

[A]

We know. We're working on it.

[B]

We've got it kind of. Yeah. And I want people to say, well, that's why we've got this Office of Men's health. And that's why we've created this. That's why we've got this big push on the LT to do it. We're doing it. What are you talking about?

[A]

It's mum coming upstairs and telling you to clean your room when you're in the room.

[B]

It's already done. It's got the Hoover in bed's already made. Yeah, exactly.

[A]

You said that the men's rightsy types don't actually want to win. What do you mean?

[B]

Well, I've just sort of noticed that when something does happen, something. There was very nearly a commission in Washington state. I've mentioned the governor's moves. Is that sometimes what will happen with the folks, some of whom have been in this field for a long time, and I would say that they come at this from a more conservative or sometimes even a reactionary perspective. It's like they tend to dismiss these efforts. They'll say, oh, sure, there's been an executive order, sure, they're creating a commission on boys and men, but they'll put their people on it. Or they don't really mean it.

[A]

Are these people inside of government, the men's rights issues?

[B]

No, no, no. These are advocates. These are activists.

[A]

Okay. Like commentators.

[B]

Yes. Or people that have been like, there are various groups out there. They tend to be small and not that well funded and honestly, quite often fueled by grievances, not necessarily illegitimate grievances. I don't want to be misunderstood, but I'm on various conversations with them, and I heard this rabbi, I think it's David Wolpe's his name, on a podcast the other day, and he said something really struck me. He said, activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you'll have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that whole of society is stacked against men, there's been a feminist conspiracy against men. No one cares against men. And I've spent decades saying this, and then suddenly people do start caring about men and they do start doing stuff about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, and change your identity, or say, no, no, that can't be true. I think that's true for LGBTQ activists. Climate, climate. Basically, people can't take a win anymore. Right. People can't say that's a win. It may not be perfect. But it's a win has to be glass half empty rather than glass half full.

[A]

I think one of the reasons for that is that people worry if they are too grateful for a success, it's not going to continue to push the price forward. It's the same reason that hard charging overachiever type A people refuse to let themselves feel too much pleasure when they succeed. Because my displeasure is exactly the fuel that keeps me going. And it's not too dissimilar with climate, the climate crisis. Not enough is done because well, maybe if I stop now, even if lots has been done, it'll slow down or it'll reverse or people will forget. So now that we've got the front foot, we must keep going. That would be the more virtuous way to put it. But I also agree there's a fascinating graph. If you look at the uses of the word racism in the New York Times over the last 20 years and you compare it to how much racism is actually happening, the two lines just have nothing in common and going completely opposite directions. Like some insane multiples times increase in the word racism. Because lots of people made their careers around identifying racism. So you concept creep out things like racism.

[B]

Yeah. You end up slaying smaller and smaller dragons. Yes.

[A]

Which makes your cause less and less legitimate.

[B]

Yeah. Which makes it easier for your opponents then to say actually that's kind of silly. And so in the end I don't think it works. And I'd say that I want to be balanced about this because I remember getting an email, I think from the human rights, what are they called? Hra. And it was something like along the lines there's never been a worse time to be trans in America. And this was two months after Gorsuch had written his really, I think incredible civil rights victory to include trans people under the sex discrimination law. I mean that was a massive civil rights victory for the trans community. And it was almost like, yeah, we did get that. But look at this terrible thing over here. And I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't want to suggest there aren't still challenges for trans people. But the idea that after extraordinary civil rights victory, I mean really no one saw that coming, especially from that Supreme Court. They couldn't just take that win and then you have to send out an email and funding saying it's never been a worse time. And like is that true? I'm not saying it's a left right thing. It's so attached to the idea that you can't win. And I'VE really noticed it in my space, too. And it's something I think about a lot in my own work, is to try. And I really want to update my own view of the world and make sure that if good stuff's happening, I don't get trapped in this kind of rut. I want to win. I want us to become mainstream. And that will mean, like, I have less to say. But that's good.

[A]

You want to put yourself out of a job.

[B]

I do.

[A]

Like, the best dating app would be one that's designed to be deleted.

[B]

And shouldn't we all want to do that?

[A]

I'm designed to be deleted.

[B]

It's sort of hard. Right. But that requires you not to wrap your identity up so strongly.

[A]

There's a line from Ben Francis, the founder and CEO of Gymshark, and he said, when your aspirations for the business are bigger than your aspirations for yourself, then you can be a proper leader. And his point there was that he stepped. He was the founder, then he became CEO, then he stepped down as CEO and got some guy from Reebok in who could take them from whatever 100 million to whatever billion. Then Ben came back in because he was needed at a different time, and he was just happy to do what the mission called him to do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And, yeah, if you don't have a grievance anymore. And we saw the rug get pulled out from BLM with this regard. Right. It was. Some people sounded the alarm early. There's a lot of money there, and we can't really work out where it's gone. And they all live in really nice houses. And then it took a lot of pressure, and then eventually that's kind of dissolved. And I think it's done damage to putting forward the rights of black people and minorities in the modern world, because now everything's been tarred with the same brush.

[B]

That's the problem is that you actually just become too easy a target. Right. And the last thing you ever want to do is do your enemy's work for you. Right. By just being bad. Right.

[A]

Playing into the caricature that they have of you.

[B]

Exactly. Which is the big. I heard you talk about that as a big fear. But I'm gonna turn the tables a bit and ask you, because you have been thinking about talking about this issue of boys and Men for many years as well. How do you think the debate's moved just in the last two to three years?

[A]

There's definitely been more of a mainstream recognition of it. To me, I have to certainly sort of do a Little bit of breathwork when I read one of these headlines because I'm trying to work out, is this lip service being paid to blowing with the wind of a cool topic at the moment? Is it kind of like a disclaimer? Well, we did talk. You must remember, we released four. Four part series in Politico on the crisis of Boys and men, by the way, all written by women.

[B]

Well, not my piece in Politico, but yes. I don't.

[A]

But they did. The Christine Ember had theirs and hers came out. Theirs came out at the same time. Not one was written by a man. If it was, why are men talking about women's bodies? That would have probably been an issue had it been reversed. So I'm trying to work out, okay, there's definitely more headlines about it that I see in the press. I'm not tapped into what's happening in Washington, what's happening on the policy side. It would probably be good. I know that you guys are promoting it, but it would be good if there was a way to get that out more. But that, you know, good News about Men newsletter or something to really allow that to sort of make people who care about the issues in Boys and Men not feel like it's a permanent losing battle or like all of their efforts. The best that they can hope for is a Washington Post headline once every three months or something like that. Yeah, we've got Ross Kemp just released a three or five part series about young men. Louis Theroux documentary just came out on Netflix. Adolescence did so much fucking damage. I think when. With the way that it tried to frame things, with the language that it used.

[B]

Not so much adolescence itself, I think, but the way it was interpreted by. And interpreted.

[A]

Well, it was. That's a. That's correct. Yeah, it was purposefully left up to interpretation. There was a lot of vacuum in there. And I know that at least some of the guys that helped to contribute to it, some of the showrunners, I feel like, had a bit of an agenda and actually did have some things that they wanted to put across that I didn't like. I didn't really like. But yeah, it was purposefully left open to interpretation. Unfortunately, if it's. It's like a Rorschach test. It was like an ideological Rorschach test for the world. And what did almost everybody think? They all thought the same thing. All the mainstream thought the same thing. What was it? Kemi Badenoch was being pulled up for having not watched it as if it was a fucking documentary.

[B]

No, it's the first time in British history that a political leader has been criticized for not watching television. Did you see this, Jared Mate? It was fucking insane.

[A]

She got pulled up on morning TV

[B]

by said, I haven't watched it yet,

[A]

saying, you need to watch this.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

What do you mean? It wasn't even reality tv, let alone a documentary. It was, you need to watch this fictional portrayal.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

It was wild.

[B]

Of the show adolescence. Right. Of the show adolescence. So the UK is a good example. I've actually, since we spoke, set up a think tank there as well. And we're working quite closely over there. And it's like it is, you do feel always one step back, one forward. And some of the stuff that gets the most attention is not necessarily the stuff that either should or is most important. So simultaneously the UK has released the first ever men's health strategy. And it's a very good document where Streeting's kind of put that forward. They had a very serious debate in Parliament on International Men's Day and actually all of the MPs told a dad joke at the beginning. I think this organization called dad shifted that and it's absolutely fucking amazing. I really thought it was so cool. Wes Streaking did it as well. It's very fun. It was an amazing debate about men's mental health, about what's happening. They're doing a summit on the money.

[A]

Were you happy with what they did?

[B]

I was very happy with it. And so. But then the way that they were talking about adolescence wasn't great for a while there's been like, so it's never going to be a straight line. And the other thing that happens is, particularly with things like adolescence and I suspect with these new documentaries too, I've really noticed this, is that the lag between the idea to the screen is so great that by the time it lands it's out of touch with where the culture currently is. Correct?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So it feels like, yeah, that's maybe how people would think in three years ago, but it's not how it feels now.

[A]

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[B]

Yes.

[A]

And it almost.

[B]

Did you just call my work systemic and boring? Because if you did, I'm so happy. Made my goal. Oh, my God. This is like hallelujah for me.

[A]

I feel like a guy who's got. Who's in a relay race and I'm the last dude. I'm the last dude. Because this sort of stuff, the way that I speak and the place that I can have the biggest impact is actually much closer to the end. I think in some ways that if we're gonna talk about what is the role. There are. There are maybe not that I can definitely influence the way that people think and the approaches that guys and girls take to the sort of structure of their lives, but ultimately the big movers that come before that really lay the groundwork are going to be more on the side of what's happening in school, what's happening in employment, what's happening.

[B]

Well, I think, actually it's interesting you put it that way, because in some ways I think you're kind of at the back and the front of the relay.

[A]

Because I'm both of the guys in

[B]

the human centipede sort of doing the work of both. Like, they feel like. And I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm like the rest.

[A]

You can be the middle of the.

[B]

Can I be the middle of it? I don't know. This analogy is working for me. But anyway, so because you have to have space for a good faith conversation about what's actually going on with boys and men and a good faith investigation of that. And you also need young men, especially, to hear that conversation and to feel like we're talking about this stuff in a way that takes them seriously and that says they have problems, not that they are the problem. And so I do think that these sorts of spaces are important for creating the conditions under which policymakers and politicians and others can then do their work, which will then hopefully address the material problems. I don't think we're not going to change some of these material issues overnight, but I think that we could at least do no harm. And for too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men.

[A]

What's deficit framing?

[B]

We start with what's wrong with them. So classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity, which I think we've talked about before. And just like, let's start with that. Let's start with not making you toxic. Right. Or like, what's wrong with boys in school? They don't try cry. And even my friend Scott Galloway falls into this a little bit when he says, oh, the daughters are a pen or a lawyer, and then the guys in the basement's vaping and playing video games or whatever. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. And I will just say, given the young men I know who listen to you and to others, that. That this hunger just for honest disagreement, good faith engagement around the problem is huge. And so I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work right. So cultural stuff's both before and after the fight.

[A]

And I get what you mean. I think that the challenge that you have when speaking to men about the balance between ambition and compassion, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. We need to do things to help you, but you also don't want to be a victim. Especially for men, it comes into contact inside of their mind because nobody wants to feel like they're not doing it on their own, especially if you're a guy. Where's the heroism in that? And I think what Scott's sort of trying to point the finger at there is he's saying you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And for many men, that is true. I had this idea earlier this year called advice hyper responders. So advice doesn't distribute evenly like medicine. It distributes like alcohol. The people that are already drunk on it take too much. When the people who need to loosen up don't have a. I think you've

[B]

talked about this in the. In the context of me, too, haven't you? Yes.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. The guys that are told that they shouldn't be pushy with women, the nervous ones take it to heart. And the dudes that were blowing through boundaries just disregard it entirely. A person who is already loading too much responsibility and working too hard hears, just work harder and goes, I knew that I wasn't working hard enough. I must push more. Whereas the guy that is laying on the couch and there is a huge. What is it, 14 million men who

[B]

are not in education, employment, or training.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Nicholas Eberstadt. Eberstadt is Eberstat Eberstadt. Yeah, he corrected me.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

God, I've been getting it wrong for years.

[A]

It's fine. Look, you're right that we've gone through this period of informing men of how to be men by telling them everything that they shouldn't do.

[B]

That's right. A long list of don'ts. Yeah.

[A]

It doesn't inform what you should actually move toward. And the vacancy is hugely detrimental. And if you're going to complain about what men are doing, but only tell them what they shouldn't be doing without a replacement, you can't complain when people step in and fill that gap. Whether you don't like Rogan or me or Peterson or Tate or Nick Fuentes or fucking Myron or whoever. Whoever it is that you do or don't like, whoever is or is not unspeakable. If you don't like Aragon from fucking Lord of the Rings. Like if there's a vacuum that will get sucked in because there's a market to speak to people. And if nothing else, even if people aren't speaking to it, if you don't service the market, someone will reverse engineer another message to become the thing that they're missing. If you can't eat food, you'll eat tree bark instead, because it's the closest thing that's approximating food.

[B]

Yeah. So there's a certain naivety in thinking that we don't have to answer the question, what does it mean to be a man?

[A]

Correct.

[B]

Right. Because every culture has had to answer that question. And so the question is not is there going to be a question? It's who's giving the answer? And if you don't like the answers, as you say that some of the men are getting, then what's the alternative? So you can't just vacate the ground and then complain. You can't give up the ground and then complain that somebody else takes it. And that's exactly what's happened. Like, mainstream culture just basically gave up the ground and said, like, we're only going to talk about masculinity if we put the prefix toxic in front of it. In fact, you can't even really use the word masculinity now with young men because it codes left because it's come with the modifier toxic. Right. Only people on the left, even if

[A]

you use it as just on its own.

[B]

Yeah. So what young men have kind of heard, they've only heard it in that context now. And so you've got. Even the words really count here in terms of how does it signal. And it's really interesting to me that the word masculinity itself now to a lot of young men, they've only heard that coming out the mouths of people who are about to say something bad about it. Right. And sometimes they'll say, Right. So good. It hurts so much. Or they'll say, healthy masculinity. Right. Implying, of course, against that normal masculinity

[A]

without the modifier is unhealthy.

[B]

People just don't hear it the other way around. And so they know what's coming when you hear you talk that way. And I do think you're right that there's been this huge cultural vacuum. Come back to something you said a minute ago, which is, I struggle with this a bit in my own work and in some of the work that policymakers are doing, which is you don't want to say to young men especially, we're here to help you. Poor you. Right. Look at you, struggling, poor you. What we want to say is we need you. That's the message I think most young men need here, is we need you. Society still needs you. The tribe still needs you. Your family still needs you. Your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We need you. And we also need you in these service offerings. I wrote a thing with Robert Putnam in the Times last year talking about the boy crisis of the early 20th century and how all these civic organizations, Boy Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, were created almost overnight to respond to what was happening with boys in the cities after urbanization. They were staffed by men. There were four boys. And there was a huge civic response, but it took men to do it. Whereas all of the youth serving organizations now have way more women volunteers than male volunteers. And of course, I'm not blaming the women who are stepping up to do that work, God bless them. But I am saying, if you want to serve boys and young men, you better have some men, too. But our men hearing that message, we need you. Not despite being men, not as a volunteer, but as a man.

[A]

We need.

[B]

We need men. Right. It's just not because you're good, because

[A]

you have something to add as a man.

[B]

Not. Yes. Your masculinity. And I've made the. I've used the word again. Your manhood. Right. Well, basically, we want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. And I just don't think enough men have heard that.

[A]

Well, even that. Right. The idea of duty, of almost like service turns very quickly into obligation. Isn't nasty enough of a word that. Well, I mean, you know, you should go and do this as opposed to this is a noble pursuit for you to try and pass on good things and good advice to the next generation of Young men. So do we need new language to talk about gender issues then? Femininity? Is that also a difficult one to talk about?

[B]

No, I mean, femininity's hard. I mean, feminism has become quite fraught.

[A]

Femininity, actually, I would very rarely hear being spoken about other than anybody from the right. Femininity would be pushed as part of a sort of sundress and baking tradwife dream. I don't hear many people from the left talking about it because it's not something to be pedestalized. I would hear masculinity talked about primarily from the left as a cudgel to beat men with. Usually with some sort of modifier of toxic or whatever. So, yeah. And feminism as well. Manosphere, unfortunately. Well, it was very quickly kind of. Feminism was something that previously in the past, I think a lot of people

[B]

think was a gender equality claim.

[A]

Yeah, very quickly moved into something else. Actually, it gets increasingly quickly moved into something else when I learn about some of the factions that sort of birthed out of feminism at the very beginning. I was learning about this yesterday, but the manosphere was used to describe a group of people, not necessarily a movement or an ideology. A group of people happened to all agree about it. So maybe the manosphere was never going to be it. I've given you my bit about the three waves of the manosphere.

[B]

Right.

[A]

First wave, which is. Pick apart, it's three. Second wave, which is red pill, and then third wave, which originally I was going to say was the gentlemanosphere.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I actually think is Lux maxing. I think that is going to be the third wave.

[B]

What?

[A]

Lux maxing?

[B]

You think that's the third wave?

[A]

So here's my. Here's my theory about Lux maxing. Most of the Lux maxing guys if. If it sticks, because it's only been around for six months. If it. If it sticks and it becomes even more ascendant, and it might do because it's really memeable if it stays, what it will create is basically a sexier version of the black pill and mgtow. So it'll be men going their own way. If you look at what the men are coding for, presenting for, it's not for women. They don't care about women all that much at all. They care in as much as women can get them a claim in the eyes of other men. But it is basically formidability is what they're signaling. Height, unbelievably masculinized faces, which, if you look at the evidence, most women prefer an either average in Terms of masculinization or a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body. That's what they find most attractive. But men think about gigachad. They think about these protruding cheekbones. Insane draw.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The mandible.

[B]

People mewing.

[A]

Mewing.

[B]

I learned about that the other day.

[A]

Pushing their tongue into the roof of the mouth. Yeah.

[B]

Why do they do that?

[A]

It's try and create a tighter jawline. You're doing it.

[B]

Am I doing it?

[A]

Yeah. You look like a gigachad.

[B]

You look like a squats. I look like a squat. Yeah, you do look like twat.

[A]

Look. A lot of the most extreme version of male lux maxing basically is a male to male transsexual operation because the intersection trying to turn up the caricature. So my, my thinking about this, if it sticks, what it will be is basically disregard women and just focus on mogging, which is male to male intersexual competition. It's trying to be as formidable as possible. Now, you saw this with Ziz 15 years ago in 2010, but he was still obviously very female attraction coded. It was a much more kind of holistic bro y version of this. It was way less autistic. And he had this great line which was disregard women acquire dance moves, but it was done in a lolcow kind of way. Whereas this to me feels like genuine disregard of we're not bothered about mating, we're not bothered about getting women. We're not bothered about really anything other than male to male intersexual competition. And if that sticks, it's going to become very insular.

[B]

Well, it won't stick, will it? I mean, the idea that these guys are hammering their faces or breaking their bones or doing the thing, you just. Well, I just tried to do kind of mewing. It worked. And then. Not interested in women. No, I, I don't. I think it'll go. Do you see Stephen Colbert just did a thing on looks maxing. No, it's from a very feminist perspective. It's funny as you can imagine. But the whole thing about it, it's worth. It's just worth watching because he goes into it. But I sort of think, I just. Again, I think I don't want to be empirical about this, but like, how many men are we talking about? Like, is it, how long will this last? Will it, will it last? Will it go, Is this the start, a decades long shift in the gender tectonics? Or is it just another decades long?

[A]

But it could stick about for a while and it would definitely put Things on the back foot, because it's going to be less.

[B]

I see that. I see it breaking through. I hear people talking about it. I'm not saying it's not happening. And actually, we're doing some work on growing issues around body dysmorphia and so

[A]

on, among which is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the next decade.

[B]

Yeah, I've seen that statistic. I don't know if that's true or not. Scott Griffith said Australia. I just always worry about those lines being projected forward. But anyway, it's a real thing. And what I think it speaks to is, I do think lying behind all of these trends. Right, Whatever. The thing is now, what it will be before is. What we're talking about a moment ago was just this guy, John Della Volpe, I don't know if you know him, pollster. He wrote this really nice piece a few months ago where he talked about masculinity, Vertigo, in which it says, basically, what's happening to young men is that. I call it pinball. But same idea, which is on Monday, what you're being told is the problem is that you're not masculine enough, right? You need to work out more, eat more protein, look smacks, be more dominant, et cetera, Right? You need to man up and be more masculine. The next day, what you're being told is you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad and go to therapy more and find your feminine side. And then on Wednesday, you're back to. So it's just become this very contested and kind of difficult thing right now in a way that just wasn't before. And into that, you'll get looks maxing, or you'll get whether body dysmorphia will get whatever moral panic people want to put into it. They will. But behind it, what I actually see is just a bunch of men, especially young men, honestly, just trying to figure this out and to be good people and to be good dads and good friends and have a good life and to matter, and definitely to matter.

[A]

They want to be wanted. They want to belong.

[B]

Well, everybody. I mean, not being needed is fatal to the human condition.

[A]

But what was that line? You know, I went and searched it. I went and searched for the original source of that line that you gave me two episodes ago, maybe even our first ever episode. The Modern Family is a myth that makes men tolerably useful.

[B]

At least one that at least makes men tolerably useful. Geoffrey Dench. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's kind of actually this good opportunity to say that, that masculinity, manhood, whatever words want to look, is always more socially constructed. It's a cultural construct. Same with fatherhood, right? Margaret Mead talked about the invention of fatherhood. Fatherhood is a social invention. And it is just true that the roles, the structures, the scaffolding, the norms, the messages from society. We have to make men basically before we continue.

[A]

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[B]

by what, isn't it? So that word driven is really sitting with me, interestingly, because as if you're driven, what you actually feel is like you belong, you're connected, you're needed, you have a role, you have a purpose. And so, sure, if that's what we're talking about and that has to be constructed a lot more. I mean, I think Mead's right. And you've had animation on talking about the birth of how we invented fatherhood to survive as a species. Right.

[A]

Because baby's heads got too big and women were either they had the choice between being snapped in half or having a husband that would care. Right.

[B]

That's basically right. That's a good summary of the work. And so it's just true. And I just think it's incredibly naive for anybody to just assume that we can just get to some androgynous future and that we don't have to keep doing the hard work of making sure that there is a cultural message to men. All right, we need you. We need you to do this, we need you to not do that. Sure. But this is why our tribe, the tribe still needs you. There are these cave paintings from. They're in northern Italy, I think, Romeggia. And they're famous because they're some of the oldest, or if not the oldest cave paintings that have ever been found. And the famous ones are the ones where there's kind of very violent. There's stabbing and spearing and stuff like that. But the most haunting one is actually of a group, clearly the tribe, and then another figure who's moving away from them. And the interpretation of that is an ostracism. This person spelled by the tribe. And actually, yeah, because the tribe's saying, we don't want you anymore. We're spitting you out. We don't need you. And in fact, you're worse. So now we'd probably incarcerate. But to ostracize someone, there was social death and then very often kind of physical death, too. So this is not a new thought about how do we kind of make sure that the tribe needs you.

[A]

That's true. But when you unmasked, ostracize an entire sex, all of them feel like they're being pushed out of the tribe.

[B]

If you do that yeah. And so the message I think too many young men have got is that, do we need, you know, we got it from here, boys, right? Thanks for the last X thousand years. Don't need you anymore. We got it from here. Or get on board the futurist female train. Right? That is a fatally flawed message. And I actually don't think if you get away from the culture war, it is not the overwhelming majority of people think, right? Most people think mums and dads are a bit different and that's cool. Most people think men and women bring some complimentary skills, Right? That's the whole argument for dei, right, is that you want a mix of skills, you want a mix of backgrounds, right? And so most people get that if you get away from the culture war, most people believe all this stuff.

[A]

I think that most people believe to one degree or another that different groups are different. But when you start to create a value stack based on who is more or less worthy of around that, it's no longer we bring complementary or different skills to the table and therefore everybody should have a seat. It is you and your particular skill set are surplus requirements or actively negative or tyrannical in some sort of a way. Therefore you should change. That seems to be the message.

[B]

That's right. And then no surprise that then people will lean into that identity. Right. If you really want someone to lean hard into an identity, all you have to do is threaten it and that will be the result. And I think we've seen some of that. But of course I don't think that the answer is to go back to a more kind of reactionary and kind of conservative view about the role of men and women, or to introduce some kind of gender bring back gender inequality in order to resupply men with their purpose. That's not the answer either. And it's also not what most people want. I mean, we're about to publish some work showing that we've just seen the biggest increase in the amount of hands on fathering that we've seen for probably half a century. It's like American dads are just doing more.

[A]

Wasn't it that millennial fathers spend as much time with their kids as silent generation or baby boomer mothers?

[B]

That's exactly right. Yeah. The amount of direct child gets complicated because it's secondary and primary childcare, but the amount of primary care childcare being done by dads now is as high as was being done by Mums in 1985. And of course mums are doing even

[A]

more deadbeat dad thing.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is a bit of a rant coming now because I think the whole, the whole deficit framing around fatherhood and dads, right, either deadbeat or doofus, is really upsetting me. And I think partly as a dad, and one of the things that upsets me, and here I'm gonna really take aim at some folks on the left, is this idea I just exposed to again recently that if you look at full time mothers and full time fathers, so working full time in the labor market, that moms are doing 25 to 30% more of the housework and childcare. That's the fact that's out there. There's a book by Eve Rodsky called Fair Play.

[A]

This is the second shift.

[B]

And then there's the idea of the second shift. Yeah, women working the double shift, et cetera. And I just saw it again. A woman's group just kind of put out same thing. And the stat. This is a good example of a category of statistics that feel true, go with your intuition, but on close examination, collapse, but they're not actually false. So it is true that men and women living together with kids, both working quotes full time, she's doing more of the housework and the childcare than he is. But what they've done is define full time as 35 hours or more. He is doing more hours. So full time working dads are doing more hours than full time working mums.

[A]

And if you add 45 versus 35,

[B]

if you add it all up, it's about six, 60 hours a week each. It is, to quote Suzanne Bianchi from a paper like 20 years ago, she describes the contributions of mothers and fathers in those households as, quote, amazingly similar. And that remains true to this day. So dads are doing about eight hours more paid work a week and mums are doing about eight hours more unpaid work a week. And they're doing exactly the same amount of work they are putting in the same work week. But this idea somehow that like dads aren't doing their, they're not pulling their share, they're not doing it, is just untrue. And every time I see that, it infuriates me as a dad and on behalf of dads, and also because it's just a colossally terrible social science and it's going to be blown up within three minutes by anybody that wants to destroy it. And so it's actually not even in the interest the women's groups to put out this bad social science because it'll get destroyed.

[A]

I understand what you mean. But the problem is the more simple headline always wins in our current age. This is an iron law. The simplest headline always wins.

[B]

I don't think that's true anymore, because we'll come here and talk about it and your audience isn't going to listen to it, and they might not have read that headline. And so I think. I actually think you're being modest.

[A]

Maybe.

[B]

Maybe. Okay.

[A]

But I mean, I'm one guy, like, tossing a fucking drop.

[B]

People want to know the truth. And people are actually a little bit sick of this thing going now. Of course, some people just want a stat that goes with their priors and that they can say over dinner and say, did you know that women do 30% more of the housework even when they both work full time? Right, good, that. But then I say. And then I come on and say, yeah, but if you look at the whole thing, they're actually doing the same amount. I actually think enough people listening to you and to others. I want to give you some credit here, Chris. I think that one of the reasons you're successful is because you are curious and you do have good faith discussions about these issues, and you will change your mind about things. And I actually think the hunger, especially among young people, for that is huge. And I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of podcasters are actually have a lot more credibility than you think. And I actually really like. One thing I like listening to you is this moment. And we may have had this moment ourselves when we first spoke, but I love this moment. I've had this few times recently where you get this expert comes on. On whatever it is, like something, and they get. And they don't know who you are. Right. They're an academic and they've been told by their PR company, this is great. He has a huge platform and maybe they haven't done the time. Right. And you've had it with my friend Melissa Carney. You've had it with other people where they get about 10 minutes into the interview and you're quoting these papers at them, or you're saying, yeah, I had them on, or whatever. And they go, what? And actually one of them, I think, actually said out loud, she said, God, you really know about this, right?

[A]

I should have prepared better.

[B]

Yes. You see this kind of shot because they look at you, they look at the vibe, they look at the thing and they kind of go into it. And I go, wait, what? Wait, What I think is a credit to you, and I think it does make you somewhat different to many Other people in the so called manosphere. Because I do think that even when I disagree with you or disagree with some folks you've had on, I think there is an attention there to trying to get this right. The only thing I'd say on the household thing, and this is actually something I wanted to bring up, Viv, because it's bugged me a couple of times in some of the conversations you've had. So I think it's no, it's just us. Right.

[A]

So that's a spoonful of sugar to get the medicine down.

[B]

Yeah. The trouble is that shit sandwich doesn't work anymore because everyone knows what's coming. Right. Although some young people say no, still give me the nice thing. I know there's something bad coming, but I still want the nice thing.

[A]

I know I will take. The only child in me will take a shameless compliment.

[B]

I mean, it helps, right? But. And I don't know how you think about this, but I've also noticed like just on my rant about like the, the anti dad rhetoric of the left, but I've also kind of noticed just in a lot of these conversations, there's this kind of implied return to a world where the dad is the head of the household, where we're going to reassert this idea of kind of gender inequality within the household. And I wish I could remember who it was, but you had somebody, Brooks, CEO, coo. Yes. Someone said that the moment. She's a hugely important role. I'm not saying the mom's like the COO of the household. Right. And somebody else will say like men need to lead their families.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But the COO one really stuck with me. Right. Because. Okay, so she's coo. Who's the dad again? He's CEO. Okay, so what you've just done there is you said we're going to go back in a way to a world where there was this implied gender inequality within the household.

[A]

Do you think that there's an inequality between CEO and COO when it comes to the household?

[B]

I think if you're going to use that as an analogy, the CEO is the boss of the company.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And the COO reports to the CEO.

[A]

Interesting. I think so. Look, I think it was Arthur Brooks. Have you got any more, have you got any more to say on why you had an issue with it, that framing?

[B]

Just because of that framing. But I'm hearing it elsewhere generally more on the sort of conservative side of this argument. And here's what I don't like. It's Very rarely stated explicitly. The explicit version of it would be, we need to get back to stable families and families where men feel a sense of purpose. And so we need to go back to families where he is the head of the household, he is the ultimate decision maker, he is the leader of the family, whatever language you want to use. And therefore, women are going to have to kind of recognize that they are, in the end, subordinate. Yes.

[A]

What do you think about the feminization of society?

[B]

Has there been a feminization of society?

[A]

Helen Andrews thought so.

[B]

Yes, I know, but. Well, it's interesting. I mean, Helen Andrews. Have you had her on, by the way? I think I've seen her.

[A]

No, she didn't. I can't get her on. I don't know what she thinks of me or the show, but we can't get her on.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I did end. It was one of those things where I tried to ignore it because it was a culture war thing. Right. Everyone's talking about this great feminization piece that she wrote. In the end, I just did something on my own substack about it, where the fields she talks about, law, et cetera, they've only just approached 50 50, for one thing. And so I just don't see the evidence empirically that that's driving any of the changes in those fields. What upset me most about it was there are some fields that are being quite strongly feminized. Mental health care, psychology, social work, and K12 education. There was no mention of that. And so, actually, I'm very worried about the real feminization problem, which is that a lot of these occupations are skewing more and more female over time. That has implications for the people in those professions, the kids being served or the patients. But also for men, as we record this, the last jobs report showed that three times as many women had gone into the labor force as men. Now, it was just one month. We'd be careful about that. And the reason was healthcare jobs. And so, again, one of my differences with some of the folks on the right, political right, is that I'm saying, look, the jobs are going to be coming from areas like healthcare, et cetera. And so we have got to get more men into them, especially with AI. Yeah. And they're like, no, no, those aren't jobs for men. You know, we need to get men into men's jobs, you know, into factories and mines and stuff like that. I'm like, okay, good luck with completely reordering the economy again to make that happen. But in the meantime, I see where the jobs are actually coming from. And so I think that's a real problem. I think that the. The idea that, you know, the legal profession has somehow become less good because women are in it. I just don't think the legal profession

[A]

is not going to be around for that much longer than. Certainly not its.

[B]

Well, AIs are going to. AIs are better than men and women, so gender becomes irrelevant.

[A]

Funny. What do you think about the feminism movement at the moment? I spend all of my time thinking about this through the lens of what's happening to boys and men. So even feminism for me is a reflection of how is it going to impact the thing that I care about most. Not that I don't care about women, but again, I've got my priorities. What's the current status of the feminism movement? How do you think of it when you come to think about its factions?

[B]

It's very hard for me to answer that because I see it through the lens that I approach. And I am at quite a lot of meetings and conferences stuff now, which would be described as feminist meetings. And I would say that slowly but surely the women's movement or feminist movement is coming to realize that demonizing or dismissing men is not a good strategy. It's happening patchily and slowly but surely, but it is happening. I'm seeing a lot of leaders in those spaces saying, okay, we have got to do better about the boys and the men. Now you might say, well, they're only doing it for tactical reasons or political reasons. And they will very often say, because it's good for women. Right. And so I have this interesting disagreement with them, and I'm very open about this. They say we should care about boys and men because we care about women. And I'm saying we should care about boys and men. I just end the sentence earlier than you. Right. In the same way that we don't say we should care about women because it's good for the economy or good for men. Right. I think we should care about more generally. I've had to do that too.

[A]

I had this piece about zero sum empathy, and I tried to legitimize the reason. There was a lot of things, and it wasn't just this, but I remember I sort of tossed this coin into the pool that I knew would be effective, which was if you. If you don't care about boys and men falling behind and also whine about there being no good men to date, that is the equivalent of sort of mating logic, seppuku that you are Creating the precise dearth of eligible partners that you say that you and your daughters and your friends and your sisters are looking for. Like, if you're not prepared to help boys and men, you can't go, wah, where are all the good men at? Because that's precisely what is causing the lack of eligible partners that you're talking about. But I didn't want to have to couch good men are good in as much as they can be of service to you as a woman. It's just that we should care about the falling behind of any group.

[B]

We should care about human flourishing, Right? And if there's a group in society that aren't doing well, then we should care about them. I just think that's just. For me, that's just a straightforward moral proposition. Now, I'm also, obviously, different groups of different agendas, right? And so if you care about this group or that issue because it affects that other issue, I'm fine with that. So when people kind of say, like, Melinda French Gates has supported me and Gary Barker because it's part of a gender equality thing, right? And she's very clear. She says it's not good for women and girls if boys and men are struggling right now. You might say, okay, so this is where the kind of. Again, the reactionaries will be like, oh, of course she has to couch it as that. And it's got to be. I'm like, guys, for the love of God, she is a global feminist. What do you want? And she's supporting my work. She's supporting boys and men's work. Like, no, no, no. They're like, they're the purists. They're the ones that are saying, no, no, no. She has to completely come over to our side. I'm like, guys, take a win. Right? Of course, as a feminist, she says she's going to couch it that way. Right? That's okay.

[A]

Do you find yourself doing the same

[B]

thing, couching it that way? No, no, I do openly with Melinda and with others. I was at a Reykjavik forum with some leading women, and I'm just like, no. My position and the position of the American Institute for Boys and Men is very straightforward. Like, we care about boys and men doing better and flourishing.

[A]

Right?

[B]

We just care about that period. Now, is that also good for the economy? Is it good for families? Is it good for women? Is it good for. Yes, yes, of course. Yes. Right. In the same way that the Women's Services Prevention Initiative, their tagline is, when women are healthy, communities thrive. I'm like, true, Also true that when men are healthy, communities thrive, but you don't have to condition it. And I honestly think there's a deeper point there, which is that men in particular, I kind of see the conditioning coming. You see it like, oh, well, if there's something bad happens, men do bad thing A oh, now we should care about boys and men. And they see that conditionality. They see, oh, you only care about me if X if I do something bad or something bad happens. And what they actually need to hear is, no, dude, we just care about you.

[A]

Yeah. What do you make of the current state of mating and dating?

[B]

Well, as a 56 year old man who's been married for almost my entire adult life, your expert subject, Fortunately, I have three sons in their 20s at various stages. That helps. And a bunch of younger friends. I mean, it comes back a bit to this politicization point, which is I worry that the message that young women are getting from the left is life's really tough for women now and it's the fault of all those men and the patriarchy. And the message that young men are getting from the right is life's pretty tough for young men right now and it's the fault of all those woke feminists and those women. So they're being encouraged respectively to blame each other for their real problems. That is a colossal waste of political energy and not true. It's also creating some difficulties, I think, around dating, mating, et cetera, because we do see now that political polarization is affecting dating and mating. I worry a lot, and Dan Cox has written for us on this, that you see this decline in dating in high school and among kind of young adults. I think that's a huge problem because that's where you develop the relational skills, the ability to endure and deliver rejection gracefully, et cetera. I worry a lot about that. But I also worry that, and maybe this is something we could talk about, that there's something about the marketplace, mate value, evo psych stuff that I know you're very interested in. I've revised my. Paul Eastwick has a book out called Bonded by Evolution. Do you know his stuff?

[A]

I had him on the show.

[B]

Oh, you do?

[A]

We had a long debate.

[B]

Right. And I'm not going full Eastwick on you here.

[A]

Please don't.

[B]

But I do find that something. Here's a bit I do like about it is that if we're serious about thinking about kind of ancestral mating patterns, we do have to take seriously the fact that we didn't live in cities of 10 million people with a phone. Right. That wasn't the marketplace we faced. We were in smaller groups. So maybe you've done this with him. Smaller groups. And we kind of would know these people and they'd kind of come with us. And that whole idea of kind of mate value does shift a little bit over time. And so my middle ground here is that it's clearly insane not to suggest that there isn't something quasi market or a mate value thing going on. But there's also something quite interesting about this idea, that kind of knowing somebody or someone being known by the people among you, that coming socially sanctioned, like someone you meet through the workplace, friend of a friend, et cetera, that. That's very powerful, as opposed to someone you just algorithmically got attached to on an app on the other side of New York.

[A]

I don't.

[B]

That's not how we evolved. I agree. Right.

[A]

A quick aside. There is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentous built fiber plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working, looking at a fraction of its potential. Fiber is a three in one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength and blood sugar stability all at once. And this cinnamon flavor is unreal. You might think fiber. Wow. I bet that tastes great. Well, yeah, actually it does. Doubters, I really enjoyed this. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not sure you can buy fiber plus, try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back and they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout, that's L I V E m o m e N-T-O u s.com ModernWisdom and ModernWisdom a checkout. It's a very sexy argument. And the argument is mate value. He thinks mate value simply doesn't exist. That there are no, there is no Way that beyond the first look, anybody is more or less preferable than somebody else. That revealed bonded preferences over time end up flattening the mating dynamic down. That tens could get with threes and that threes could get with tens.

[B]

That wasn't how I read him. I didn't read him that way. I think that's an exaggeration, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I think it just gets flattered. Not that it flattens completely.

[A]

He said there is no such thing after a couple of meetings. There is literally no such thing as mate value. There is no such thing as a disparity.

[B]

So. Well, he's more of the expert on

[A]

his work than I am.

[B]

But I read it as like, make values a more complicated idea. I would agree with some of the.

[A]

I would agree with make values a more complicated idea. What makes me sort of bristle a little bit, what makes me concerned is if you've got this world that basically flattens it make. It makes egalitarian. The mating market is one way that you could read it.

[B]

Right. That no one's hot.

[A]

Yeah. But no one's hot and no one's ugly.

[B]

Yeah. What's the Kurt Vonnegut short story? Harry Bergeron. Someone could check this. Where? The Ministry. Do you know this story? No, the Minister. The Ministry for Equality levels everybody out. Right. And so it's satire. So it's like if you're a really good dancer, you have to wear weights around you, your feet. If you're beautiful, you have to have plastic surgery to make you less so. And if you're ugly, you have plastic surgery to make you more so. The one that really like the main character story is like, if you're intelligent, if you're high iq. That's right, yeah. Harrison Bergeron. Yeah. If you're intelligent, they put a thing in your ear that's just making a noise all the time to distract.

[A]

Distract you.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And it's obviously like a kind of a flattening type thing. So look, I. If the idea is like there is just no difference in how attractive someone is as a mate to anybody else, I think that's not. I think that's batshit crazy. But I don't.

[A]

Over time, even with.

[B]

Even.

[A]

That's what you're saying, even with the revealed preferences, the revealed value that occurs as you get to know somebody a little bit better, that this is how beautiful elements of someone's personality and the way they hold themselves and their poise and their patience and their regulation and all the rest of it. Sort of appear over time. I think that denying the fact that there are more and less preferable mates, and this isn't just idiosyncratic, that if you were to take a big broad survey, that many people would rank as more preferable even if you knew them for four years. And more other people would rank less preferable even if you know them for four years.

[B]

Yeah, my understanding of it. And again, like I'm talking about, we're talking about his work now, but is that over time you learn more about someone and so more of their kind of different. The different elements of mate value come to the fore. Right. So if I just, if you just see me, you don't hear me speak, Right. You just see me. Maybe I'm mewing. Yeah. So I look great.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right. Right. But then. Or I don't. I look. I don't look great. But then we talk for a while and let's say I'm kind or funny or let's say I'm an asshole. Right. That's going to change very significantly. Right. And then you see me doing something hard for somebody else.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You see me taking care of my mom. You see me what? No. You see me working hard. Right. All these things are adding up, revealed over time. Yeah, that was the best.

[A]

That was the best bit of what, of what Paul said. I really, I really thought it was a nice twist on the very shallow sort of typical. Understood. And this is the Internet interpretation of mate value.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And what's interesting about this is it's almost exclusively for short term mating.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

Almost everything. All of the mating advice is for short term mating as well.

[B]

It's not like. So actually I got into this argument with Shadi Hamid for a piece of the post where he said, are you telling me to settle? Because I said we're talking about marriage. And I think the problem with the marketplace idea is that it sort of suggests that it's over once you've mated. But of course, that's just the beginning. And the story you tell about your relationship and the way that the relationship evolves over time within that story you're telling and the way you treat each other as you become different people over the decades, that's the job. And so the other problem with the marketplace is it doesn't capture that. It's about maximizing and you match and

[A]

so on and then you cash out.

[B]

Yeah. It's like. And you've made a great match and that's the solution. No, no, no. And I said this to Shadi and said to others too. He said, sure, obviously, if you're lucky, you'll fall head over heels in love and it will just be obvious you'll find somebody. But it is much less about the wife you choose than it is about the husband you become. That's 50 years.

[A]

Yeah, 70 years. I think you're right. The Evo script, as Paul said, it's definitely a book of the moment because evolutionary psychology is second only to behavioral genetics as the unspeakable topic. But it's very predictive. And the guy. I have a particular bias here because I'm in the city of David Buss and William Costello and they're about as well meaning of a scientist as you're going to get.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They're not curating their data. They're not trying to push some ideological bent as far as I can see. So.

[B]

And they change their minds about stuff too. I've seen David do that all the time.

[A]

He's moved back and forth between a bunch of different theories that were the cornerstones of what it was that he was.

[B]

That's right. He was pushing for a while.

[A]

But you know, there was another element in that. So there was the mate value doesn't exist. There was a denial of sex differences really, in preferences between men and women that they simply are not there.

[B]

Yeah, I agree with. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Which I don't. And I'm like, okay, I'm starting to construct a little bit of a corkboard, Sherlock Holmes style thing here. Anyway, okay, so. So mending and dating some problems. Some people have argued that women entering the workforce has caused fertility rates to drop.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

What's your perspective there?

[B]

Didn't you have someone say that? I feel like I've heard someone say that on your.

[A]

Danny Solakowski, definitely pushing back against a lot of what women are doing at the moment. We think she implied it. I don't know whether she's.

[B]

Yeah, I think she did. I think. And I've definitely heard other people say it, which is this idea. And again, this is a great example of this category of claim that feels intuitive, fits with your priors and is wrong. And so you just got to. Those are the ones I always worry. So if someone brings a claim to me and I'm like, yeah, that feels true. And as it happens, I was thinking that myself, that's when I always triple check it, because it worries me. And there is this claim that the fertility decline is being caused by the entry of women into the workforce. Again, it sounds perfectly plausible, right? Like women are too busy earning to Be sprogging, can't do two things at once, et cetera. But you look at the data and you look at, from the period from 1975 to 2005, the labor force participation rate of women went up by 20 percentage points. Absolutely massive. That was a huge period of time growth. And over the same time period, the total fertility rate went from 1.8 to 2.1. Right. Something like that.

[A]

Right.

[B]

This is me and Claude figuring this out. So hands above the table. Haven't done a peer reviewed academic article on this. And then the women's labor force participation leveled out. It's basically been pretty flat since. And then it just had a little bit of a spike.

[A]

Since When?

[B]

Since about 2007, 2005, 2007. Just drifting up. So it went and then like that. Right. Unlike in other countries, actually, where it continued to go up. And that's when the fertility rate really went down in the US and so it seems to me there's got to be something else going on here. And the fertility rate conversation, I know you're very interested in this. You just had Stephen on again. Right. The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. And so Jennifer Schuber, who I know, it's a TED Talk, she's got a book, co authored a book, Toxic Demography. And her basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline in fertility rate is a lack of gender equality. Right. Korea, Japan, et cetera. Right. Gender equity. Right. And that might be true. There's some evidence against it, it, but there's some evidence for it. And then conservatives will say the thing that's causing the fertility rate is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Okay. Again, you can see the argument, there's evidence for it and I've just given some evidence against it. And truth's like no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet. And we should have a lot of humility, by the way, about projecting population trends forward if we have not learned anything is don't take a straight line and project it forward. We don't know what's going to happen. Right. So be careful.

[A]

I would say

[B]

I'm thinking about the population bomb thing, Right?

[A]

Yeah, of course. But the population bust seems more reliable to be able to predict going forward.

[B]

But it seemed like that about the population bomb, which is like more people are going to have more people, which Means more people. True.

[A]

Yeah, maybe you might be right.

[B]

So fewer people having fewer people means fewer people. I mean, I'm obviously simplifying it horribly, but pretty accurate. I just don't. Now there is a thing like mechanically. So I will just come out and say, look, I don't think a rapidly declining population is a good thing for some. I just don't. But it's very interesting because people, when you actually try and push people on why they think it's a bad thing, you get into all kinds of discussions and I think people are bringing lots of prize and lots of. They are. I think Jennifer's right about this. There's a lot of morality being brought into this. People bring a lot of ethics. So a lot of very pro life people, I think if they're honest, are saying we don't like there to be less life because we like life and we want more of it. Right. That's a very like more life is good, less life is bad. That's a perfectly legitimate religious and ethical position. And it could be for institutional reasons, it could be for fiscal reasons, it could be because it's. Or it could be, for me it's more symptomatic. The reason I worry about it more is like I think if you got to a point where you're significantly below replacement rate and your society is rapidly declining in size, that should be seen as a big flashing signal that all is not well somehow or other. Now what's not well, we don't know yet. Okay.

[A]

Some things that I've thought of to do with this. It seems to me that births are just downstream from coupling for a large part. If you look at the number of couples who are together that are together for a while and get married.

[B]

Well, yeah, lots are going to depend on how you define coupling in this example.

[A]

But yeah, marriage, married couples?

[B]

Well, no, because one of the reasons his fertility rate's gone down is a decline in teen pregnancy and most of them were not coupled. It was an accidental pregnancy.

[A]

Okay, that's interesting, at least from. I was speaking to Steven. I actually asked him after we went for dinner last night. I asked him what his thoughts were. And he agrees with you that his whole thing is this vitality curve, which was the most recent episode that I did with him. And that's kind of, it's kind of

[B]

a measure of the society's forward lookingness and vitality and energy and.

[A]

No, so the vitality curve is basically when are people looking to start families? And if you have a graph that's like this. And it's the age across the bottom. And if it goes from 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, it does that.

[B]

I see.

[A]

If you're looking to go to the dance with someone and you're looking for another dance partner, it's really easy if everybody is dancing at the same time. But if you're 21 looking for a dance partner and the curve is now flatter and longer and shifted. Right.

[B]

Half the people think the dance is five, ten years from now.

[A]

Exactly, exactly, exactly. This is his point. And also if you shift it later, there are just some raw physics of the system that come in to sort of squish down what you're able to do. If you are cycling through partners, if there's a more permissive culture of casual sex, of moving on, so on and so forth, more options, which means that you don't need to quite invest so much. But his point around the labor force entry for women thing, the dips that you see 1970 and then 2007, 2008, what's interesting there is because you now need a two parent income in order to drive the household, people are much more sensitive to economic indicators. And that means that if you have a turn. That's why he thinks in 2007-2008-2007-2008, global financial crisis saw sudden accelerations in the delaying of first births. Like a ratchet. And as we discussed in our last podcast, once first births move later, the whole starting a family system shifts for everyone. As the vitality curve shows, delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. And that goes in line with what you said. There's fewer teen pregnancies.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If you shift this all rightward, this begins to skew. But his position is that it's a ratchet, that it never snaps back. Because you need to lose a lot of the things that people want. You need to sequester your independence. You need to do things that makes you feel like you're falling behind. One of the points that my friend who I spoke to, I told you the story about her friend saying she wished that she was with her and she had more going on. She made this point. I wish I'd had a kid during COVID because it wouldn't have felt like I was missing out on anything. Rest of the world's moving forward. And I think that that's a one person microcosm of why is it a ratchet? Why does the average Age of first motherhood move only to the right and never to the left. Well, because it feels like you're missing out. All of your friends are continuing to do things in the real world and you're not. He's got this line here. Vitality curve shows delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. In that sense, childlessness is largely a timing problem. And so even if women no longer worked hypothetically, of course, my thesis from data modeling is that birth rates would not fundamentally change unless family formation also happened sooner, which arguably it could. This is cross cultural economic uncertainty pushes parenthood later across nations, religions and political systems. It all comes back to timing. P.S. historically, the US managed this better than most countries. Women could work and start families at the same time. Although that balance has clearly started to break down since the 2007, 2008 crisis.

[B]

Well, that would be consistent with what we were saying earlier about the need to kind of, of just economically for boys and for men to do better so that they can actually, we know that particularly in low income areas where men are doing better, the marriage rate is higher. And so I think it's two. One. One thing I do worry about is the, the bar that you have to clear now before embarking on kind of parenthood is just wildly higher than it used to be. Right. If you've got to have your.

[A]

Feels like it's wildly higher.

[B]

Yeah. And it's just. And I really, really don't. I really want to stand against that idea. People set the bar so high. How much parenting, how much you could have bought your house, you got a career. The number of boxes you're supposed to tick now is terrifying to me.

[A]

This was the discussion that we had last night, which. It doesn't matter where people are, it's where people feel they are compared to where their parents were and where they feel like other people were. It is all through the interpretation. And this is, this is like I can't think of a way to emphasize how much this is the fucking driver of so much that. How much money do I think I need to have? How much do I think I need to be earning? How big do I think my house needs to be? How secure do I think my life needs to be before I can do this thing? And where do I think my parents were at my stage? And where do I think their lifestyle was like? And what do I think that everybody else is doing with their life? And how easy do I think that they have it? Because all of this is being Filtered through what we feel like we should have and what we feel like our level of exposure to risk is. And it's not necessarily objective. And that.

[B]

Yeah. And it goes against people. And then people come along and say, but that's not true. And here's my chart and here's my data. And like. And you try and argue people out of a feeling, which you can't do, but that feeling of. What did you say? Economic precariousness or whatever. It's a challenge, but it may be. Maybe I'm going to change my mind about something here because one of the things we do know about men is that becoming a father actually does significantly change their behavior in the world, and not least economically towards themselves, et cetera. And we now know that changes. Darby Saxby has this book coming out, dad brain and how your brain changes as well. And we obviously know the stuff about testosterone, etc.

[A]

Risk taking.

[B]

I feel like we actually used to use marriage and fatherhood as a way to kind of help men grow up and. Yeah, exactly. I just really hate that word. And to say we have to domesticate men because it sort of feels keeping

[A]

them feral is good.

[B]

Yeah, it does. Also, Just like, it's because the alternative is feral. Right. I mean, it's like we have to. And also it tends to put the burden on women. It's like we basically say to women, would you mind domesticating the men for us? And like, no, I'm not.

[A]

Like, there's a man child over here. Marry him and make him a normal person.

[B]

I mean, like, the women want. Want the men, once their house trained.

[A]

Right.

[B]

They don't think it's their job to house train the man anymore. Right. And I find that a difficult position to argue against. But the problem is that if that takes what's going to happen to the men in the meantime, are the men getting themselves ready? Are they getting their competence skills up? Ready? Yes. If so, yes, maybe. But I worry that continued delay misses out for this kind of. This moment, this kind of. And I'm. I'm a dad. And there is just this imperceptible feeling of this kind of cog inside you just going click. And you become a different kind of creature. You do. I mean, it's very hard. In fact, some philosopher whose name I've forgotten now, she had this great analogy was like trying to explain to someone who doesn't have kids what it's like to have kids is like trying to explain to someone that's not a vampire what it's like to be a vampire, right? So I'm the vampire. And I'm like, yeah, well, I like to go out at night, I like to suck blood, I hang upside down, et cetera. And you're like a human. You're like, all right. And she uses that as an analogy between the chasm of the different kind of creature you become. And it's like you suddenly it's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives. There is a life or lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything, you would give your life that's very pro social. You would throw. Yes, you would throw. And so it changes men in this massively kind of positive way. This is why fatherhood. Fatherhood is. One of my colleagues put this to me the other way. Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. I'm not saying there aren't still some that are predominantly. But actually fatherhood, like that is always going to be a male institution. And it is. So in a way that isn't just like a fact, it's actually a thing. It's an institution that changes us. It transforms us from the inside out. And so if that's not happening to enough men and uduces rise in childlessness, I mean, for all the discussion about incels, it's the kind of, what would be the equivalent of like not having a kid, an involuntary dad and dads. But yeah, that's a much more troubling trend because without that pro social structure and script and implication for men, that's a huge problem. So maybe it going later is bad. But I also think that the way free societies work, as opposed to communist China where they just said, wait, there's going to be too many children, you're only allowed one. Or even Singapore. I just learned recently that the government would pay for the births of the first two kids, but you're on your own after that. So you'd have to pay for the medical costs of your third child. Because they read Ehrlich's book and they just freaked out. So you saw it. In a free society, what happens is we learn from not only from our own mistakes, but from other people's mistakes. And so if we're starting to see more and more women say, or men start saying, you know what, I kind of regret not doing that earlier. I kind of wish I'd done that, et cetera, then that learning will get passed on.

[A]

Do you hear many women saying that. Is that a popular topic that's being pushed much at the moment there?

[B]

I will have to plead ignorance, but I'm just saying as a general point, cultures alert, if they're free and so if it's not working out for people, people will see that it's not working out for people and they'll do it differently.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's how progress happens. I would love that to be the case. I would really love for there to be at least parity between the different types of life paths that people can take.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And at the moment, it doesn't feel that way. If you look in the media, if you look in popular culture, if you look in music, you know, there's a really fascinating song by Kelsea Ballerini and it's called I Sit in Parks. And what she talks about. She was in a long term relationship. She was 30, her partner was 37, and he was ready to have kids. She said she wanted to freeze her eggs. And that was her gift to her and him on her 30th birthday because she wanted to go and chase her music. She wanted to go and play music and do this to her. And he said, I'm ready to have kids now. If we're not ready to have kids now, I'm gonna move on. She said, I'm not. He moved on. And then this song and the album, the ep, got released two or three years later. And it's a story about her sitting in the park and watching this family, this mother and father. And she sits on the bench and she rips her vape and she says, rolling Stone is telling me that I'm doing all the right things, but I wonder if I've left it too late to be a mother. I chose to do the damn tour instead of going back. So I take my Lexapro and I make my next song. And she's watching this family sort of have a wonderful Saturday morning to themselves. I'm wondering whether or not she's made the wrong decision. That was so fucking shocking. And she's a country artist anyway. But that was so, so fucking shocking. And the comments are filled with women who agree, but that is not.

[B]

I'm saying, what's the equivalent song from the parents who are obviously like, everyone's glamorized there, right? The parents song is like, God, I wish I could have gotten up late like her and had time to make myself up and have a dress and be free. Maybe the mom is looking at her thinking, like, why Did I have kids with this guy when I could be like her on a swing in a great dress?

[A]

The dress is always greener when you've got. Optional.

[B]

Also, like, she probably got a good night's sleep kind of last night. I remember, like, when our kids were really young, we kind of lived on this flat in Belsize park in London. And I would, you know, get. I did the early shift, like a lot of dads did. I remember, like, my wife would be sleeping and I'd be there with the kids. Both we had two under three at one point. And I would wait. Dawn would break. I'd be tired. My third couple. And then this gay couple. These gay guys lived opposite us, right? The other side of the street. You're kind of thinking about gay couples, right? I thought. I watched. I watched. They would get up, they had lovely bathrobes, they'd make a coffee. Great coffee machine.

[A]

Hang on. You were watching two gay guys through the window.

[B]

Listen, it's like a long night, okay? And I'm just watching them. And they had this kind of terrace. And the point is, like. And I would just say they'd get up late, they'd have nice coffee, they'd read the paper on the thing. They didn't have kids crawling on mechanics. So, yeah, the grass is always greener. But here's. I actually think. I think you're making my point. You're making my point for me, which is there you have this incredibly breakout country artist with this strong message, which is, maybe I waited too long. Maybe this wasn't the right thing for me to do. It's a story of regret, right? Song of regret that is going to be listened to, as you said, by millions and millions and millions of women. That's how cultures change, is that we get stuff a bit wrong and we try it and we try this. That didn't work. We do this and we all learn from each other's and we adapt.

[A]

As a culture, as an eternal pessimist, I really hope that that's the case. You're right.

[B]

It's too early not to assume it won't be. That's all I ask. Cool.

[A]

I mean, the reason that it seems surprising to me is it's so rebellious. Like, that is a much more rebellious song to put out than sleep with him and not catch feels.

[B]

I don't think that's true anymore. I actually suspect that song's gonna do pretty well. Oh, it is.

[A]

But that is more.

[B]

Because you don't see famous.

[A]

Anyway, that's not the main Culture at the moment. I don't get the sense. And look, what's the main culture if

[B]

she's not the main culture? Right. She's one.

[A]

She's one country artist with the 2

[B]

million plus, I think I really worry that you like see the main culture as like the New York Times, right. Which is like a peripheral counterculture at this point. I shouldn't say that because I, you know, occasionally. Right. I occasionally write for them.

[A]

You need them at some point.

[B]

I guess that road's closed now. But they're just like. They do not like or even like CNN or like actually the mainstream culture. It's her, it's you, it's, you know, country music is top now, number one. You just like. There's this really interesting thing going on there where I just think the young people in particular, they're trying to figure out how to take the best of what came before but not be landed with the worst of it. And part of that is to rethink this whole kind of gender relationship thing. And they're doing that. And it's hard.

[A]

It is complex, which is. Yeah.

[B]

And they're not going back. They're, as I said, like dads are doing more. But I think she's the one also.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like he opens the door and is very courteous and stuff like that just really lands. So I hope you won't mind me saying something. My youngest son went to the University of Tennessee and he always opens the car door and closes the car door for his girlfriend or who he's kind of with. And his friends are up from the northeast. Oh, God, I have to start doing that now because they went to liberal colleges where that's like the non feminist thing to do. But by and large, even the kind of liberal women don't hate it. And so I think that actually the mainstream culture is kind of moving on this thing.

[A]

I hope so.

[B]

That'd be great. And we have to make them feel that we've got their backs before we continue.

[A]

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[B]

Did you see it?

[A]

I didn't know that this happened.

[B]

Oh, you didn't see it? Okay. Well, partly because I know them both and Scott's on our advisory board, as I mentioned. So Derek Thompson came back from paternity leave and it was actually the first thing he did was go on Scott Galloway's podcast. I think he said it's not just like the first day back, it's the first hour back. And he'd been, I think, on paternity leave for a couple of months. And that just triggered this debate where Scott said, you're just back from paternity to leave. How are you doing? I'm finding my way back. I won't be as coherent as usual. Of course, Derek was incredibly coherent. And Scott just said, well, honestly, I don't understand this whole paternity leave thing or even why men should go to the births. I don't think men should be at the births. It's disgusting. The men should be outside smoking cigarettes like the old days, and then they should go back to work. I just think it's ridiculous, basically. And Derek was like, well, actually, men do need to take time off to kind of be with their kids because otherwise women are the only ones doing it and you'll have gender inequality in the workplace. What I found interesting about that, and I haven't said anything about this publicly yet, but I think they were both wrong. I think that Scott was wrong in suggesting that men and dads are of no use in the kind of early months. They are of a different use to mums for sure. But they are very often the main alloparent now, right? They're very often the kind of one that's around and they very often are the one that's like getting stuff done. They're like, have you heard of the owl monkeys? Or like the best dads in the natural world? Apparently no. Owl monkeys, right? Where the dads are kind of around all the time and basically moms are doing the breastfeeding or her nurturing dads are doing everything else. Right? Dad is getting shit done, right? He's getting the food, he's getting organized, he's around, but he's still around them. Right, Right. That's kind of how it is. I think that was certainly my experience. Right? So you're not gonna. You can't do what mum's doing at that point. And you also don't feel the same way that mum does about the baby. You just can't. Right? Just can't. You're not wired to at that point, so you're still useful. So Scott was wrong about that. But I didn't like the way Derek framed this as like, men should take time off so that women aren't the only ones taking time off so that we can get close the gender pay gap. He framed it as a gender equity issue. And my view is dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off their kids. Not just when they're young, et cetera, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome and kids are awesome and kids do really well with their dads around them. Right? So I don't want to be the deputy, the kind of malfunctioning mum, the kind of, oh, if only you could be a mom. Like, no, no, dads are amazing. And so I'm really pushing this idea that kind of fell between those two stools. So, like the old idea of like, dads, you should go back to work, smoke a cigarette, have a cigar. I think he meant cigar, actually, but have a cigar, a whiskey, back to work. And Derek Singer's like, no, if you're a good gender egalitarian, you've got to take time off even if you hate it and you suck at it. Right? Because that's the way to get gender equality. I'm like, guys, guys, what about just saying dads are cool and being a dad and the way dads are with their kids, a bit different to moms, on average, in many ways. Amazing. So I want like a. Again, a pro dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.

[A]

Should dads be in the birthing room?

[B]

The evidence. And actually interesting. Darby Saxby, who I mentioned earlier, dad brain, she did write a response to this kind of thing, which people can find. And she kind of rightly pointed out that actually, the evidence on how the unprecedented trial of Dan's being in the birthing room room is going is really mixed. We don't know. And actually kind of sometimes in surveys afterwards, mums have mixed feelings about it if the birth doesn't go well. I think you talk to Anna Machen about this, it can be quite traumatizing for the dad. So I think, look, I might get in trouble for saying this now, but I think we have to be honest. The evidence is a little bit mixed. And I think you shouldn't be shamed for doing it or shamed for not doing it. And moms, by the way, should also feel like if they feel that they'll be better off with their mum or their friend or kind of somebody else, they should feel okay saying that to their partner, too, for the actual birth. Right?

[A]

Neither are obliged to, I think.

[B]

Yeah, this sort of. Because as Darby points out, we've never done this before. Right.

[A]

This is how many men being in the birthing room?

[B]

Many? About 30, 40 years. I shared this with my. With my wife. I said, things blew up. And she said, oh, Scott says that men shouldn't even be in the birthing room. She says, said, yeah, I probably wish you hadn't been. What? I said, What? It's like 25 years later, I thought. What?

[A]

I thought I was really. What about all of my words of encouragement?

[B]

You're more harm than good. You did more harm than good. I mean, I'm now sort of litigating something personal on air. We need to go back to it. But there are pros and cons. But I honestly think it's not. I mean, the real truth is it was a very hot day, and I'd ordered a fan. Cause I knew it was gonna be hot, but I didn't realize the fan wasn't made. So I opened the box, and she went into labor. She went into labor. She's in labor. She's in labor. And I'm shouting from the other. I go into the other room. She's having contractions. So we did it at home, right? And I said, do you know where the Phillips screwdriver, Said, I don't need a Phillips screwdriver to have a baby. I'm like, no, but I need a Phillips screwdriver to make the fan. I'm not great at DIY anyway, to be honest. So, like, do you know where it is? She's like, I'm in the other room. I'm trying, like this huge pressure now, right? This is like trying to make, Trying to make. She's like, forget the fan. Just like, I'm having, I'm having the baby. I'm having the baby. Fan or no fan, the baby's coming. I'm nearly done. I'm nearly done. I'm. I'm on like, I'm on like step seven with the Philips screw. So I, you know, I didn't, I wasn't amazing from that point of view. So I think that the fan thing, it jaundiced her about my view, to be honest. And then anyway, the other one, I'm all in now. The other one. So was in the birthing pool, right? Because I was very into that. I mean, the birthing pool. And we'd been to one of these very. Yeah, I think I can share this. So it would be just very, very like progressive, forward thinking, like, midwifey thing, right, about birthing a home. And if you have it in the pool, that's kind of great. Which is good by the. I mean, I think the whole like over medicalization of childbirth thing, like, I'm really persuaded by that argument now that actually doing it more naturally is really good. So I'm only misunderstood here. Put it in the pool. But she said, but guys, just. Can I just say something to you? She said, like, it's quite. It can get quite murky in there. Can't see it. All right? Which is true. And she said, and so the only thing I'll say is if you get in the pool with your partner to support them, right, Put something up, put some swimming trunks on. She said, because there have been occasions when I've seen something spherical and hairy in the water and I've assumed that it's the baby's head crowning and I've gone in to help it. And it wasn't the baby's head crowning, it was the dad's testicle. And so I've grabbed him by the bollocks. And literally every guy in the room was like, by your parents. So this is the other child, right? So this time she's having a baby. She's like, I want you to get in and Rub my back and do all that. So cool. I'm here for you, honey. And then I go into the other room and then I'm shouting out, where am I swimming? What are you talking about? I need my swimmers. She's like, I don't know where they are. I can't find them. I'm slamming drawers open and the midwife is like, for God's sake, she's having the baby. Get in the pool. I don't care. I don't care. I said, it's not about modesty. I said, the lady at the thing, the lady at the Lamar's class, she said, you've got to wear swimming trunks. I'm not getting in there without. So anyway, so my main advice, and then I guess the other one, the other trial, is like, you get to cut the cord. And I was terrible at it. I couldn't cut it. I was hacking through it. I thought you'd have these massive shears, you know. You know, it'd be like, like, like

[A]

opening up a new fucking city hall.

[B]

Just tiny little pair of scissors and you're trying to hack through it. It's really grisly. Took me ages. Nearly in the nurse, like crying, I'll do it. And to this day, my eldest son has got this really weird belly button and he blames me for it because, you know, so. So all the fathers out there, key, key items, if you are going to be with a Phillips fan driver or make pre. Make the fan or have a Phillips screwdriver, a really good pair of scissors, because the ones that give you a crap, and swimming pool trunks, and then you'll be fine.

[A]

Fuck me.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

Well, is the idea of not being in the book. I didn't know that. It's only been four decades.

[B]

Yeah, I guess 70s, I don't know. That's really. When it came in, was like 70s and 80s. And it went from being like, it's a really interesting cultural change. I mean, if you look at. I didn't have the numbers to hand, but it really flipped very fast. And as I say, it's too soon, probably to get this kind of strong evidence around it. And it was a great example of how the Internet, I think Scott ended up kind of collapsing kind of on him. He ended up kind of apologizing, but as I said, Darby Saxby was saying, actually, we don't really know yet about the dads in the birthing room thing, because that is a completely unprecedented culture. And she came out in favor of it and said, but dads are Great. Putting them on my kids. You put the kid on your chest and then one of them pooped all over me. But actually that skin to skin thing, or building skinship, to use a term that someone uses, that's all true and that's great. But that got lost, of course, in the positions that people had to take on.

[A]

Paternity leave seems a little bit more of an easy discussion to pass.

[B]

Much easier now. And it's interesting, most states are doing something on it now. So basically the Democrat states are passing some sort of paid leave policy for dad, and the Republican ones are having tax credits to encourage employers to offer paid leave. And so the idea that dads are parents too and bring something different, that's not really a controversial idea anymore. And we have seen a massive increase, I mentioned earlier in parenting by dads and a massive increase in the uptake. There are some states now where the new parental leave policy is as likely to be taken by dads as by moms. And so there's been this, I find this very interesting, like a way you get these culture wars, right, where either we're being overrun by woke feminists who like demonize organizing men and running everything into the ground, or you get these kind of reactionary podcast type people, reactionaries who are kind of taking us back to the Handmaid's tale. And then you just go to the data show and you say, huh, interesting. Dads are doing more parenting than before. It's not like a significant kind of increase. Labor force participation for women's actually hit its all time high after the pandemic. I mean, it was up a little bit. Violent crime is way down. It's halved in the last decades. The number of boys fighting at school also halved in the last few decades, et cetera, et cetera. And so away from the clicks, to use your language from earlier, and away from the culture war, what I see is by and large ordinary people, moms and dads, young people, boys and girls, trying to figure this out, out and figuring it out one way or the other. And it's bumpy and it's difficult and it's messy. But I think that the progress line is there. And I'm a little bit sick of the pessimism. I'm a little bit sick of the deficit frame. My hero, John Stuart Mill once said, everybody who knows anything of the world is supposed to think ill of it. So that intellectual snobbery in favor of pessimism has always been there. And he was like. And so I'm trying to Recalibrate some of my own talking about this because there is a danger that you're like, like we could talk about stuff we've talked about before, about wages and male suicide and real problems, but I just kind of worry that it becomes a bit of a almost cultural race to the bottom. It's like, who can describe exactly how we're going to hell in a handcart

[A]

in the most grave terms, the fastest.

[B]

And then you'll get on podcasts, then you'll get clicks, then you'll get book deals and the market for that. It's not a new problem. Actually. Think about the number of books that start with the end all. Actually, at one point I thought it might be the end of endings or something because I'm just sick of those as well. Everything's the end of everything. Rather than, you know what, we're figuring this out. It's a bit difficult. We should help each other out. We should have some supportive policies. We shouldn't demonize each other. We should definitely not pathologize men or women or anybody else. And we should try and figure this out. But onwards and upwards. Because otherwise pessimism is a self fulfilling prophecy. And I think it's a real problem, particularly for America. I mean, we're in America now, right? And things I love about America, things I hated about our old country, was that everyone lived in the past. And this definition of an old person is, you know, you're old when you spend more of your time thinking about your past than your future. I think the same is true of societies once societies start thinking more about their history and their, you know, and all of that which you want, you want that sense of history and patriotism, but you want to be spending more time thinking about the future. Future. I just heard this guy on a podcast saying, I can't remember who it was somewhere. He's the guy that left Harvard, actually. And he sort of said, americans, the thing about America is that it's obsessed with progress and innovation. I'm like, yes, yes, yes, that's why I'm here. That's why I'm a proud American.

[A]

That's why I'm here.

[B]

That's why I love it.

[A]

What's happening with men's life satisfaction at the moment?

[B]

I don't know. The latest data on that, actually. I don't, I don't know.

[A]

But you mentioned here's a bunch of reasons why stuff's maybe not quite as fucked as people think it is. But, but I think if you were to lick your Finger and put it in the air and take a cultural temperature of how people are talking about the situation. Yeah, I think more people would. What's the number one reason for why people. The Pew Research data around why they don't have kids. Just don't feel ready yet.

[B]

Yes. And then the second is. Couldn't find the right person.

[A]

Couldn't find the right person. Second one, but just don't feel ready yet. It's like unfinished article. A little bit unsure of myself.

[B]

Yeah, there is this kind of. Yeah, I mean there's, there's a mixture of objective and subjective measures here. There was this really interesting paper looking at the kind of five milestones to adulthood, like finishing education, getting a job, leaving home, getting married, I think having kids. And what it found was that 20 years ago men were more likely to hit those milestones and now men are less likely than women to hit those milestones. So the milestones to adulthood are being hit more by women now than by men. The coefficient has flipped. As far as the well being stuff goes, my, my last time I looked at this, it was relatively stable on the kind of good subjective wellbeing measures. We do know that men are much more affected by relationship breakup and unemployment and so negative economic and social shocks damage male well being more than female well being. So you might expect some of the recent shocks to have affected men more. The trouble with this honestly is that there's just so many bad surveys out there that will ask these kind of point in time questions from both sides. I'm not throwing anybody under the bus here. But just like, and it gets clicked and some of the surveys. There's so many surveys on young men now. I mean like, if I get another email saying we want to do a survey on what young men are really thinking, I'm like, no, please don't. Because you'll just ask some stupid questions and then you'll over interpret the answers and we won't be able to repeat the question because there's no time series on it. And people are just in that moment. They'll just react to the question in that kind of particular cultural moment and then we'll over interpret it.

[A]

So if you're in the middle of the Iran war, you're gonna feel differently than if it's.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Or even like. And also we've seen massive swings in some of these things. Just like one side or the other of a presidential election. I think really if, like who's in the White House is massively changing how you feel about the world Then that's telling us that this is highly subjective.

[A]

What was that nuance on Title IX that I texted you about? I thought this was really interesting. I saw. I texted you about

[B]

some guy had

[A]

done a video and it was actually of the episode that I did with Scott, just Scott talking.

[B]

Oh, that's right.

[A]

And Scott had said Title IX is used to sort of pull back men, but the guy's video said it could also be used for raising up men.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What's the nuance?

[B]

Yeah, the nuance there is that Title nine is anti sex discrimination in higher education. Right. It basically just takes the idea of you can't discriminate on the basis of sex. And it makes it clear that that's true in higher education. There is one exception to that, which is undergraduate admissions to private colleges, which I'll come back to because it's relevant to the answer. But what it basically says, you can't discriminate on the basis of sex. And so it was really an anti discrimination measure, not a strongly affirmative action measure. So it didn't say to colleges, everything else equal, you should let women in, not men. And there's no evidence that that's happening. Right. There's no evidence that the reason there are more women in college now than men is because there's a thumb on the scale in favor of the women in. They're just better in terms of the.

[A]

Is there a feminist scale against the favor of men?

[B]

No, not. I've seen absolutely no evidence for that. In fact, if anything, most colleges, public or private, although the publics don't have this carve out, actually are quite worried about this. We've got a whole. We've got a thing now. Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative working with colleges because they start to worry once they get 60, 40, 65, because not only do their male applications drop, their female applications start to drop too. Because. Because the dating market on a college campus where there are twice as many women as men is not awesome for women. So maybe it comes back to a little bit. People who don't think there's any difference between men and women should look at the difference in the dating market on college campuses at skew, where there are two women for every man. And I've had young women saying that they look at the gender ratio of colleges before they decide to apply, because this message has gotten out there now that it's not awesome to be among in a college where there are twice as many. So no strong evidence for a thumb on the scale against men. The exception is Title IX carves out private undergraduate colleges in undergraduate admissions. And the reason they did that was otherwise you would have, at a stroke, abolished the single sex colleges. You wouldn't have been able to have single sex colleges. You have to let Wellesley only admit women. Right. But the result of that is that those colleges do have a thumb on the scale in favor of men now to try and stay closer to 50, 50. So it's an open secret that it's a bit easier to get into those elite colleges if you're a guy than if you're one of the.

[A]

Did you see there was a dating singles mixer that happened in New York and women were charged $100 to attend and men were let in free.

[B]

You're a nightclub promoter.

[A]

The ratio was still three to one, women to men. So the sex ratio in New York is similar to. Well, it's a bit more. But it's not far off what it's going to be on college campus.

[B]

Yeah. Now the sex ratio is not like that in New York as a whole. In fact, we have empirical data on this. We've looked at the sex ratios by county and you've seen a shift. So there are twice as many majority male counties today as there were 20, 30 years ago, largely because of out migration, we think outmigration by women. And then there are some urban counties, of course, where the sex ratio is. Where there are a lot more women than the singles.

[A]

Than the sex ratio of singles.

[B]

No, but we did look within age cohort and we do see a difference. But it's of course, nothing like as dramatic as three to one. Yeah, yeah, of course it skews a little.

[A]

You know, there's something going on. Maybe it's a selection mechanism that guys have checked out of the dating market. Maybe it's that women are pushing more towards trying to find partners. But.

[B]

Yeah, but your example suggests like the men, like there are more women than men of dating age, let's put it that way, in New York, and who are motivated to. But then the question is like, who's out? Right? Like who's motivated? Yeah. Who's in? Who's like you can. Are you in the market? To come back to the analogy that I didn't like earlier, but like, are you out there doing.

[A]

Doing it?

[B]

And so there we might see. And you see, women are more like to travel now than men. I do think it's like, I don't see any empirical evidence for this, but my anecdotal sense of it just sort of traveling around as I do kind of A bit now is like when you're in a restaurant or a kind of bar. Now, if you see a group of young people together for a night out, I think it's more likely women. Now, again, no strong empirical evidence on that, but I just think that those kind of public spaces, if anything, maybe do a little bit more female. Hmm.

[A]

If you zoom out for 50 years, what do you think happens for men over the next few decades? Are you optimistic, pessimistic? What are you most concerned about? What are you most hopeful for?

[B]

I'm an inveterate optimist. I do think the glass is half full. But for me, I've come to realize is that my optimism isn't just an orientation or a personality trait. It is that I think for me, it's getting close to something like a virtue that to think well of the future is valuable in and of itself, because I think otherwise. The kind of messaging to young people more generally is just so relentlessly negative. And then we kind of blame them for feeling down. Right. I'm pretty optimistic. And the reason I'm optimistic is because it's a hell of a mess right now. Now it's very messy. It's goopy figuring it out. Some of the stuff we've talked about here and argued about here just shows you that particularly for young men and young women, just kind of figure out these new realities. But I think we're kind of past the sort of. We're breaking past, I hope more of the zero sum. We are getting more to a kind of world where young men and young women are kind of trying to figure this out in good faith. And I think they will figure it out. I don't know how, but. But we always have, one way or the other. And I think we will again. And I think that people are ready to get past some of the bullshit ideological traps that people have been trying to put us in for too long. I really think there's a hunger for that.

[A]

I hope so, because one of the byproducts that you have of lots of conflicting messages. You know, you said the pinball or male. Vertigo. Masculinity.

[B]

Masculinity. Vertigo, yeah, Vertigo. Yeah.

[A]

Where men don't know what they're supposed to be. They're supposed to be masculine on a Monday and then soft on a Tuesday and then a tyrant on a Wednesday. And then, you know, you're in therapy on a Thursday.

[B]

Yoga on Friday.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. One of the problems I think that can come out of that is a type of if there's lots of conflicting messages. It doesn't convince you of any one particular message. It just makes you immune to being convinced.

[B]

Apathy.

[A]

Right. That this is what a disinformation and a misinformation campaign is supposed to achieve when it's done en masse as a information warfare by a foreign adversary. It's not to convince the populace of one thing or another all the time. Sometimes it's just to make them distrust all advice.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I think that, you know, the checking out of men, the retreat that you have a pull in. Screenshot, video games, porn.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This is your weed sedation hypothesis. But this is another twist of it. And you're right, but this is. There is an attractor which is it may be difficult to convince men to not go out into the real world and try to make stuff happen through conflicting messages if it wasn't for the fact that there's something else that they can do. Like these two things need to be happening at once. Yeah.

[B]

They is push and pull at this point. Yes. Correct.

[A]

And they're both going in the same direction.

[B]

That's why, I mean, you've talked. I think. I know you've talked a lot about this. That's why I think it's consistent with crime going down even as more young men are disengaged, which is historically, I think, unprecedented, which is the kind of sedation or sometimes like they're on the screens, not on the streets is another way to think about this. And in some ways I think that makes it a harder thing to get attention to.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I think if there was. If we did see, if we saw an increase in crime among young men, if we were seeing like more antisocial behavior, et cetera, then I think it would be very close to the top

[A]

of the sound the alarm.

[B]

Yes. Because it's more of a silent retreat. And very often because turning inward, that's less likely to sound the alarm. But I actually think in the end, most people do want to flourish and they do want to find someone to be with. And I think that women and men are both seeking partners and someone who's got someone about them. Right. It's got agency, it's got forward momentum, got optimism. I think that's going to win. I think it always has won. I don't know how it'll win this time, but I'm sure it will.

[A]

Yeah. I just hope that uselessness doesn't beget more uselessness. Sedation doesn't beget more sedation because you're going to have to revolve reverse the trend here, right? Like you can say we're worried about there being too many people on the planet and the population bomb is a really big deal. You go, well, if that's gonna stop or if that's gonna slow down, it's gonna require reversal of the direction. And the same thing is true now. If the trend is moving in the right direction and you're right, the line is between do we want more useless men or do we want more dangerous men? If that. If those are the two options that we have in front of us, that's not a particularly good fucking scenario. I would say 51, 49, it' have useless men than dangerous men. But that's only because we're in peacetime. I would much sooner have competent, peaceful, right than useless or dangerous. I got sent this morning a new Institute for Family Studies survey. There's some cool stuff in here which I think you might like. Institute for Family Studies survey of 2,000 young men aged 18 to 29 challenges nearly everything being said about the male crisis in America, including by its most prominent voices on both Left and right. Right. 68% of unmarried men want to get married, with another 21% unsure. The crisis isn't lacking desire, it's circumstance. 59% are not in a romantic relationship. But 74% of those men are open to dating. So there was that famous. Two thirds of men say that. 50% of men in that age bracket say that they're not looking for casual or long term relationships. That looks like it's changed. 62% of childless young men want to be a father. Less than half of men aged 24 to 29 feel like adults. But the benchmarks most related to feeling like an adult are the traditional ones. Marriage, parenthood, full time work, completing education. Young men's number one role model is their mother, 79%, followed by their father, 69%. Andrew Tate ranked last among all prominent figures. Figures 89% say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others, challenging a manosphere narrative. Young men who completed trade school programs are employed full time at almost identical rates to college graduates, 77% versus 80%. And even college educated young men are skeptical of college, with half saying it wasn't worth the time or money.

[B]

There's a mixed bag in there, I'd say, wouldn't you like? I'm going, yeah, it was good.

[A]

That's what the landscape is.

[B]

That was an emotional rollercoaster for me, Chris. I gotta tell you, I was cheering.

[A]

I was down.

[B]

Yeah. I was like, oh, that's good. That's bad. Only 62% of childless men want to be a father. That sounds too way low to me.

[A]

Childless young men. Right. That's under 29.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Want to be a father. I don't know whether intend to become a father. It would be interesting to see how

[B]

they worded the question become a father. Because it's interesting. There was this NBC poll that came out not that long ago. It got a lot of attention where they ranked young men and young women by whether they'd voted for Harris or not. Right. Or Trump. And number one for the Trump voting men was family and kids. And actually men are a bit more likely to say that they want to have marriage, get married and have kids now than women are. That's a reversal. So I'm finding that 62% number is low. I think the anti college thing worries me because the ROI on college is the same for men as it is for women. Roughly speaking, it presumably could increase if

[A]

you were to go to college now if in 10 years time we were to look at how valuable a male college graduate is in the workforce because they're going to be increasingly rare.

[B]

Yeah. Just in terms of, I mean this is another thing I've had this argument with Scott about which is that actually college graduates are getting married as much as they have for the last 40 years. There hasn't been a collapse in marriage among college graduates even though there's this massive gender gap in college. Right. The collapse in marriage has been among those without a college degree. It's a huge class gap. And so the kind of fretting, the fretting about who will my daughter marry now that she's got a college degree, that's just completely unfair rounded. It's a flat line and in fact, if anything, maybe a bit more like to stay married than their mothers were because the divorce rate's gone down a bit.

[A]

So because fewer people are getting married.

[B]

Yeah. Well, not among the college educated. That's the thing. Like the line, the, the marriage rate, it's about 90. The marriage rate among college educated American women basically hasn't changed for the last 40, 50 years.

[A]

What about among men, college educated men?

[B]

The same. Because they're matching with college educated women. Women at about the same rate.

[A]

Even though there's a smaller number that perceives.

[B]

Exactly. But I mean it's a bit of a nuance here we published on this is that actually college educated women have always been willing to marry non college educated men and continue to. So like 20% of them of the Women with a college degree, collar to blue collar. Yeah. And it's like, it's a very elitist conversation, this. Because people, when they're talking about this, they're talking about someone who went to some sort of fancy college. Right. But in my family, I've got nurse married to a plumber. Right. Nursing requires a college degree. Right. Does anyone out there think that nurses are looking down their noses at plumbers? If he's making a good living and he's doing well, he's working hard. No, I don't. The idea that somehow. Or a teacher won't marry carpenter or it's just nonsense. So the marriage. And the marriage rate is actually, if anything, slightly up. So there was mixed in there. I didn't like the character. But yeah, the thing also thing was untrue. It said, challenging this idea in the manosphere that men don't sacrifice themselves.

[A]

89% say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others. Challenging the manosphere narrative.

[B]

Well, as a prominent proponent of the manosphere, I would say that you think men should sacrifice. Men should sacrifice.

[A]

Vanguard of the gentle manosphere.

[B]

I think that they've just been kicked

[A]

out of the manosphere.

[B]

I don't know which manosphere they're talking about. I mean, I guess. And also the Tate thing, of course, the Tate thing was really interesting. And I don't remember if we talked about this last time. And when he came back and there was a kind of. I guess I've lost my friends at the New York Times by this point in the interview anyway. But there's a New York Times headline, drove me. I think I wrote about it publicly. Tate Returns. MAGA Celebrates. And so I went through it. That's very interesting because I've actually heard or read Josh Hawley, Megyn Kelly, Desantis, Desantis Agee, all condemning tapes.

[A]

Shapiro doesn't like him.

[B]

Shapiro condemned. They all condemned him in that moment, right. All that. So I'm like, who are you talking about? And it turned out that it was the Young Republicans of so and so county in Florida had said, we're happy he's back and we'd love him to come speak to us. It was literally the only people they could find. But the headline was MAGA Celebrates. Because, again, that kind of fitted, right. We like this idea, that kind of MAGA wanted Tate back. But, like, actually, the truth was, I did write about this, and it was like, everyone hates Andrew Tate. Right? And that should be when radical feminists are shoulder to shoulder with Josh Hawley and Ben Shapiro condemning Andrew Tate, then surely we can take that as a win. Like isn't this a win? Yeah. Isn't that the headline?

[A]

I think we're going to see. I think we're going to see more around the men's movement. MRA come manosphere, come incel blackpill, Lux Max in Moggin community. Especially after Ross Kemp and this Louis Theroux documentary. I can't wait for you to watch it. This Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix. It's his first ever Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix and he said it's the final video game boss of his entire career because it's all of the things. It's casual sex with onlyfans. It's sort of conspiracy theorist, which he's done a turn. It's sort of almost cult like behavior which he's done previously. It's financial grifts which he's been a part of as well, all bundled up into this sort of TikTok ification version for 2026 and I with adolescence, with the way that Louis Doc was presented, I do think that we're gonna see more of a moral pattern around what's happening with Young Man. I think that it's going to look a lot like these guys are being led astray by bad actors. There is limited hope socially. They are learning not to sacrifice for others, but to dominate. Domineering. Yeah, very much so. It's selfish, very self serving. It's not great. And you know, for all that I can keep on doing podcasts that I think are accurate and balanced and hopefully really educate people about what's actually going on. I don't have the reach of fucking huge documentaries or series. Right. Like adolescence was a global fucking phenomenon.

[B]

It was a huge hit and it was great drama.

[A]

It was a great TV show.

[B]

Great TV show. From so of the way and again back to. I just think there's a lag here. I actually think that it's a little bit out of step now and that enough people are starting to say the moral panic around men, the pathologization of young men, the demonization of young men is exactly the wrong thing to do. And that kind of narrative rut that everyone's in the easy thing to say. I just think it's out of date. And people are realizing that and they're realizing it has not worked out well for anybody for us as a society to point our fingers at young men and say what the hell is wrong with you? You're either lazy or useless or you're being Radicalized or kind of this long litany of things that are wrong with you. I just think enough people are kind of realizing that that's A, just unbelievably lacking compassion and B, massively counterproductive.

[A]

So you're right. The place that I actually think is doing the worst at this is, is online, it's streaming culture and it's YouTube because there are not many reasonable voices that do big plays on social media. There's just not.

[B]

Wouldn't you count yourself among those reasonable voices? And aren't you? Are you a big platform?

[A]

Yeah. But I think, you know, if you're talking about people who are genuinely engaging with the issues of boys and men and of mating and dating and birth rates and stuff like that, that it's certainly in the minority to be a part of the gentlemanosphere than it is to be a part of sort of militant aggressive feminism or to be a

[B]

part of sort of classic reactionary, anti feminine.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Masculinism.

[A]

Yeah. This is not. It's not superbly sexy. You know, when I sort of look around at whatever motley weird Avengers group that I've got, it's like me, you, Arthur Brooks, Scott Galloway, MC and Murphy, William Costello, Rob Henderson, maybe Andrew Thomas. Like it is. It's a Alexander Datesych. But he's sort of stepped away from things now. I'm not Stephen Shaw kind of, but he's not really talking to men like, you know, it really sort of runs flat pretty quick. I don't know who else is engaging with this stuff. And then when you were to look at who does fucking huge play that push the narrative in a much more bombastic way.

[B]

I don't know. I mean, the long run way to win this is just to keep doing it. Chris. Right. I think this whole idea that there needs to be this kind of huge play is going to change. This is going to change slowly. And I also think we should give a little bit of credit to some of the people consuming this content. I think a lot of young men in particular are perfectly willing to listen to this conversation and agree or disagree with us, but probably agree that we're having a good faith conversation as you do with others, and realize that that is different to what they're going to get from certain other producers. Right. I go there if I want a quick laugh or an eye roll, but I come here if I want a more serious conversation and then if I get sufficiently enticed, I'll go and read some of AIBM's policy briefs. Right. No question. Does it get any better than that. But people are able to be more discerning about the difference between these content types and if you look at their actual behavior, what's happening, I'm just much more hopeful but just keep doing the work. And then over time, I don't know if this is going to be a good example or not, but I have, although he put me on his reading list, not always been thrilled with the way President Obama has talked about this issue, especially in the run up to the last election. But on the podcast he did with his wife not long ago, he said, and I quote, we've quite rightly invested in the girls create a level playing field so that we could have equality. We have not been as intentional about investing in the boys and that has been a mistake and people are starting to recognize that when Obama is saying that. Now of course the only bit that got covered from that podcast was the brief discussion about their so called marital difficulties in the first three minutes. The remaining one hour long conversation about the challenges of boys and men that he had with his wife and his wife's brother, whose name I've forgotten that didn't get covered but it's there. And so I just think bit by bit, person by person, governor by governor. Ruben Gaye goes out there with his very episode, episode by episode, episode by episode because it's actually what people want in the end.

[A]

Also because it's the truth.

[B]

The truth will in the end I do think it's and people can tell the difference between something that's truthful than not.

[A]

Heck yeah. Richard Reeves, ladies and gentlemen. Richard, where should people go to keep up to date with whatever you've got going?

[B]

Well those policy briefs I mentioned are

[A]

all no one's reading.

[B]

Your policy brief on sports betting is the best, best piece of policy work out there on the very live issue of sports betting. So aibm.org cool richard.

[A]

I appreciate it.

[B]

So fun.

[A]

Goodbye everybody.

[B]

Dude. Yes. So good. It's gonna go. That was so fun. It was towed a lot of ground.

[A]

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com books that's chriswillx.com com books.