Male Inequality: Why modern men are on the decline | Richard Reeves

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Male Inequality: Why Modern Men Are on the Decline"

Podcast: Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Richard Reeves (Author, "Of Boys and Men")
Air Date: May 11, 2023

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the alarming decline in the status and wellbeing of modern men and boys in Western societies. Tom Bilyeu interviews Richard Reeves, author and scholar, about the complex interplay of biological, cultural, and economic factors driving male inequality today. Together, they challenge popular narratives, discuss shifting gender roles, and examine the consequences of women's advancement and changes in traditional marriage and family structure. The conversation digs into the need for new scripts of masculinity, the decline of male agency, the myth and reality of “surplus men,” and how society should approach these challenges for the flourishing of both genders.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Who Has It Worse – Boys or Girls?

• Reeves: “Girls and boys, young men and young women are struggling in different ways in different domains of life. I just can't call it right now. Some people think it’s obvious one way or the other. I don't think it's obvious that one is suffering more than the other.” [02:08]
• Academic decline disproportionately affects boys, while spikes in anxiety and depression hit girls harder. Both face domain-specific struggles.

Biology vs. Society

• The “brakes” put on women in history were deliberate societal limitations, not reflections of women’s abilities.
• Reeves: Applying biological roles as destiny is mistaken; instead, “Biology does matter… but culture is the way that our biology or biological differences is expressed.” [04:25–07:15]
• Concrete example: Aggression appears early in boys, likely due to biology rather than early socialization.

Impact of Birth Control and Women’s Economic Liberation

• Tom: Birth control was a cultural “nuclear bomb”, allowing women to enter the workforce and pursue financial independence. [13:04]
• Reeves: “Effective birth control has been one of the most significant changes in the culture of human societies... it allowed them [women] to become more full economic participants.” [15:02]
• This fundamentally changed marriage from necessity to choice for women, altering the social contract.

Consequences of Economic Shifts Between Genders

• Women’s independence led to:
  • Sharp decline in “shotgun marriages”
  • 40% of U.S. children now born outside of marriage, especially among non-college-educated Americans [20:23–21:14]
• Traditional role of “male provider” destabilized, leading to increased rates of male suicide, opioid addiction, and a crisis of agency.
• Reeves: “We cannot create a society which is more gender equal… but which also makes so many men feel like they’re of no use anymore.” [23:45]

The Myth of Surplus Men: From “Mad Max” to the Basement

• Conservative fears of men turning violent have not materialized en masse. Instead, many “surplus men” retreat into solitary habits (video games, porn).
• Reeves: “Maybe the screens are saving us from the worst consequences of this kind of surplus to requirements thing around men.” [22:30]

The Biological and Social Script for Men

• Men's traditional role as breadwinner was socially constructed atop some biological realities (risk tolerance, aggression, etc.).
• Tom: “Men are basically the answer to the question of what do women want? Women are the sexual gatekeepers.” [28:11]
• With shifting societal structures, many men lack a clear, valued role and feel lost.
• Reeves: "We are just beginning to answer that question... we don't have a new script for masculinity. We've torn up the old one, we haven't replaced it." [38:51]

The Need for Male Agency & Rites of Passage

• Tom: Shares the personal story of getting a tattoo before marriage as a modern rite of passage in the absence of societal rituals. [42:00]
• Reeves: Cites Joseph Campbell and importance of rituals in male development.
• Lack of clear male milestones (rites of passage, institutional anchors like marriage, religion, labor force) contributes to drift among men.
• Reeves: “Becoming a man, mature masculinity, positive masculinity, is more learned, more socialized than femininity.” [38:51]

Adversarial Dating & Modern Monogamy

• Rise of dating apps has led to a winner-takes-all effect; a small percentage of men get most matches, reviving ancient polygamous patterns [54:24].
• Reeves: “Monogamous marriage was invented yesterday... 95% of human societies have been polygamous, and only 50% of men historically have reproduced.” [50:30]
• Dislocation in men leads to checking out from dating, work, and even life itself (suicide/opioids).

Building a New, Positive Masculinity

• Male agency (purpose, going for it, having dreams) is declining.
• Modern men show less mobility, less risk-taking in meaningful domains compared to women [60:59].
• Women still desire agency and proactivity from men in relationships, not passivity or shrinking.
• Reeves: "Women are saying, I want a guy that's with me, that has agency, that has purpose, that has a goal for himself, that's propelling himself forward in the world." [61:00]
• Danger in pathologizing male agency; pushing men to lean out rather than encouraging both genders to thrive.

The Power of Contending Partners

• Tom: “You need your partner to win, you need to want everybody to shine and figure out like, hey, what would make you happy? ... The only reason these relationships work is because it’s a partner. It’s somebody to contend with.” [64:16]
• Absence of strong male agency is not what women want; “just be more feminist” is an incomplete answer.

Finding a Script for Future Masculinity

• Men need both “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck"[74:27], combining social graces, restraint, and selflessness in crisis.
• Pro-social masculine behaviors (heroism, agency, risk-taking directed toward the good) should be acknowledged and celebrated.

The Cultural Context and Moral Aim

• Both: Human flourishing—defined by maximizing agency and reducing suffering—is the fundamental moral goal.
• Reeves: “The triangle of biology, culture, and individual is where flourishing occurs.” [87:26–90:51]
• Healthy culture (not draconian law or laissez-faire neglect) is key to channeling biology into a flourishing, pluralistic, cooperative society.

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Reeves: "We've torn up the old [script for masculinity], we haven't replaced it. But actually masculinity doesn't invent itself." [38:51]
• Reeves: “We don't need to suppress male agency in order to support female agency—it’s a false choice.” [63:58]
• Tom: “It is so gross to say slow down so I can lead. You want people going all out, trying to be the best that they can be in a loving and compassionate way." [64:16]
• Reeves (on marriage): “More American men say that marriage is important to them than American women do… women are twice as likely to initiate divorce as men. Post-divorce, men do much worse than women.” [46:32]
• Reeves: “Every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men. This behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively.” (referencing Margaret Mead) [33:53]
• Tom: “If you find a fence in the middle of the woods, do not tear that fence down until you understand why that fence was there.” (Chesterton’s fence, about institutions and marriage) [16:07]
• Reeves: “Acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” [74:27]

---

Timestamps for Notable Segments

• Introduction and Theme: [01:00–02:57]
• Biology vs. Culture: [04:00–07:15]
• Birth Control and Female Empowerment: [13:04–17:36]
• Consequences of Shifting Gender Roles: [20:16–23:45]
• Surplus Men & Social Withdrawal: [22:30–25:53]
• Agency and the Need for a New Script: [60:59–64:16]
• Modern Dating and Monogamy: [50:30–54:24]
• Acceptable at a Dance / Invaluable in Shipwreck: [74:14–76:01]
• Defining Human Flourishing & Society's Role: [87:17–90:51]
• Culture as the Solution: [94:23–97:19]

---

Tone and Language

The conversation is thoughtful and intellectually curious, with both Tom and Richard exchanging personal stories and challenging each other’s assumptions with vulnerability and respect. While the discussion includes humor and personal anecdotes, it never loses sight of the urgent and serious questions surrounding modern masculinity, agency, and the future of cooperative living between men and women.

---

Further Reading / Where to Find More

• Richard Reeves' Substack: Of Boys and Men
• Book: "Of Boys and Men" by Richard Reeves

---

For listeners new to the topic or searching for solutions to the male decline paradox, this episode is an insightful, nuanced entry point—raising more questions than answers and demanding honest, creative, and compassionate reimagining of what it means to thrive as men and women in the 21st century.

Transcript

[A]

Get a jump on next summer with vrbo's early booking deals. Don't wait to claim your dream summer spot, whether that includes a good porch swing or a poolside lounger. When you book early, you get the best places at the best prices. But back to poolside loungers. With vrbo, you don't have to reserve any loungers. They're all yours. In fact, the whole private home is yours. Book with early booking deals and you can lounge around all summer long, however you please. Book with vrbo. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters, but when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[B]

What's up guys? I'm really excited to talk to you about a very important topic, why the modern man is struggling and falling behind at an alarming rate. My guest today, Richard Reeves, is the author of an extraordinary book called Of Boys and Men. He was named one of the top 50 thinkers in the US and his latest book is exposing the fact that boys and men are declining rapidly in society as more and more opportunities open up for women. Something, however, is causing men to falter, and in this episode we discuss who has it worse and whether or not the beautiful rise of women has anything to do with the terrifying decline of men. We discuss the biological and societal differences between the sexes that play a major role in this issue, and the unexpected consequences of the declining rates of marriage and why marriage may be even more important for men's well being than women in our modern culture. I think you guys are going to love this conversation and if you do, please dance on that subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. Also, subbing really helps the channel reach even more people and I thank you guys in advance for your support. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Who has it worse right now, boys or girls?

[C]

Depends which domain you're looking at. If you look at how like boys are doing in school and college, clearly they're doing worse in some aspects of mental health. I think it's pretty clear that girls are doing worse. You've seen a recent spike in depression and anxiety among teenage girls, along with a big rise in male suicide. So that's again, another difference. And then when you get into the labor market, look, there's all kinds of issues that face young men and young women differently. And so right now I think the most honest thing to do is to just say that girls and boys, young men and young women are struggling in different ways in different domains of life. And I just can't call it right now. I don't think it's obvious. Some people think it's obvious one way or the other. I don't think it's obvious that one is suffering more than the other. I think it's more honest to say that boys and girls are struggling in different ways and perhaps at different points in their life.

[B]

One thing I really want to understand about this. So for a long time it just everybody took it as self evident that women were where we needed to target. There were structural issues that were creating major problems that were. I think the way that most people talk about it is there were breaks put on women and that we now live in the era where brakes have been taken off. And I think a pretty typical narrative is that as we took the brakes off women, we have done something bad to men and boys. I will be honest that I'm just beginning to really explore this as somebody that doesn't have kids. So a lot of the ideas that I will put forth today to get your sort of sanity check against are me at the initial point of my thinking. But it does not feel like this is a you take the brakes off, women and men suddenly fall apart scenario. But it does seem to be tied to what the evolutionary reason for what have become gender stereotypes. Like is this a societal structure issue or is it a biology issue?

[C]

I love your analogy of like the taking the brakes off. Right. Because those. But those breaks were put on in some ways deliberately. Right. There was an injustice in what was happening to girls and women.

[B]

So that, that to me is a societal statement that because I have a hypothesis that this did not begin as a societal problem, that this began as a biological problem. And when you're in the red and tooth and claw issue, that those things are going to spring up in that way.

[C]

Well, I think what happens in some ways you've got it with the roles thing. So if we just go, let's go back 50 years, right? When or 50 or 60 years when not very many women went to college. Right. Was that because they weren't as good at high school? No, they were doing as well at high school. Was it because women couldn't succeed at college? No. So why weren't women going to college? Well, because that wasn't seen as appropriate or necessary or useful for them. Because, after all, their main role was going to be as wives and mothers. And so to some extent, going to college was, if anything, just a luxury. And in fact, of the women who did go to college back in the 70s, most of them were married within a year of graduating. Imagine that. It's a completely different world. And so by ascribing very tight roles that were based on biology to men and women, we actually put the brakes on. And we basically said female education is kind of a waste of time and money because they're just going to be wives and mothers. Once we took those breaks off in a way that I think was both necessary and justified, that allowed the kind of natural advantages of women and girls to show up in the education system. And so, in a sense, to use your analogy, again, you took the brakes off. Women, what happened was it turned out that they can drive the car faster once you take the brakes off. And so they went past men. So there's actually a bigger gap in American higher education today than there was 50 years ago. In 1972, when Title IX was passed, it just flipped. So women are further ahead of men today on college campuses than men were ahead of Women in 1972. So there's been an extraordinary reversal in education. And this biology culture question is really, I think you're right at the heart of a lot of this. And so let me be a bit unfair to both sides. One side says, well, we're biologically different. We have different reproductive roles, and so we're never going to be equal. And this is how women are supposed to be, and this is how men are supposed to be on the other side. No, no, no. Biology has no influence at all. Everything's socialized. Gender's a construct which underpins the patriarchy. So let's just kind of all enter the androgynous future. And the reality, of course, is somewhere in the middle, biology does matter. And it matters in all kinds of ways that affect men and boys differently to women and girls. But culture is the way that our biology or biological differences is expressed. So I don't know, just to choose one example, aggression. Are boys and men more aggressive than women and girls? Yes. And is that biological? Yes. There's this huge gap in violence at 17 months, 18 months. Now, it's possible that one and a half year olds have picked up the cues from a society that says it's okay for boys to hit each other in the Face, but not okay for girls to hit each other in the face. But I'm skeptical that we've socialized them that strongly by 18 months to explain this massive difference.

[B]

When was that study done?

[C]

I don't know. It's a good question.

[B]

I would say that the tenor on that societally has shifted so far that if that were anywhere in the last 10 or 15 years, there's no way that's coming from culture, in my estimation. Like, the way that people look at me when I say that my mom spanked me and thank God is like, I said that she put me in the icu. So there's been a real cultural shift in that.

[C]

And there's much less fighting in schools now as well. Actually, interestingly, most American parents, even today, engage in some kind of physical punishment of their children. I was really surprised. Yeah. I looked at this for Brookings, like 10 years, eight years ago, because I got interested and I was just kind of astonished by how common it is. Because if you live in a bubble of upper class, upper middle class people, it's like absolutely verboten. There was this. There was this book a year ago, it was called the Slap or something like that. Basically the whole premise of the book was what happened when one parent hit their kid in front of other parents and all the ripples from that. Right. Can you imagine that? That would make a kind of book. And so, sure, culture's changed in ways that we can argue about whether they're positive or negative. But the underlying point is that there are these biological differences. So let's say aggression, then the question is, do you live in a society where being aggressive, expressing that aggression is good or bad? In some societies through human history, you bet. Absolutely. Today, not so much. Right. It's probably, if you get up now, if I say something that offends you and you come over here and punch

[B]

me in the face, even I would be very surprised if I did that.

[C]

I don't think the people watching this would be like, yeah, absolutely fantastic. Great cage fight. They'd be like, what is wrong with him?

[B]

Will Smith, pretty, pretty stark.

[C]

Great example.

[B]

Different people responded differently. I thought everyone was going to roundly condemn it. And while largely, yes, I was startled that there was. There were people that were like, yeah, he had to come in.

[C]

Yeah. The point I'm trying to make here is that how a culture encourages, discourages, incentivizes, disincentivizes, rewards or doesn't reward certain biological traits is hugely important. And a good feminist argument would be that let's say that women do more care work than men, raising children and other kinds of care work. And let's say that's partly because of differences in biology. Let's just say that's true. Does that mean that that work is less valuable, should be lower status, should be worse paid? Well, yes, if you think women's work is worth less, but no, if you think that just because it's women's work doesn't make it worth any less. And so there is a feminist argument that care work is predominantly female work and that it should be paid much better and rewarded much better. That's where the kind of wages for housework movement came from. So we have to think about biology and culture as co evolving. And most importantly, recognizing biological differences doesn't make culture less important, it makes it more important because culture is how we learn how to express or not express these tendencies or when it's appropriate to express them and when it's not appropriate to express them.

[B]

Yeah, very well said. So there were a lot of things that you said in there that I want to go back and address. So the first is this idea of wives and mothers as a throwaway comment or a throwaway category. So my wife, who and I should set the stage for people that are seeing me for the first time because they're attracted to you and your work. So my wife and I have no kids. My wife is the quote, unquote boss bitch, like super hardcore, very talented entrepreneur, been very successful. And she was once standing in line at a restaurant with another woman. And they just started talking. And the woman asked my wife what she did, and she was explaining, you know, run companies, blah, blah, blah. And the woman was like, oh, wow. My wife was like, what do you do? And she said, oh, I'm just a mother. And my wife was like, yo, hold the phone. Now, my wife has decided not to have kids, but she has just crazy amounts of respect and quite frankly, gratitude to other women that do. And so I. I will. My wife doesn't say these words, but she shares the sentiment. When I meet parents, I always thank them for their service, which, by the way, thank you for your service. And I mean that completely unironically. Like, I'm very grateful that very thoughtful, caring, loving people have kids and raise them well. We just need that as a society. And I couldn't do what I did if other people weren't out there having children. So the idea of like, oh, wives and mothers. As if that weren't something that should be venerated. And so I think the central thing that you and I are going to. You will hopefully help me shape my thinking on this, because you've thought much more deeply about it. But I come at it and I'm like, oh, there's a nuclear bomb in the center of this discussion and very few people are talking about it, which is birth control. And so my hypothesis goes something like this. We have reached a moment of crisis, which I know you don't love when people use the hyperbolic use word, overused a word, but. Yeah, but I would say something pretty dramatic is happening right now that I think it warrants that language, if for no other reason than to get people to pay attention. But I think this is all an echo. This is largely an echo. Let me be somewhat careful in my speech here. This is largely an echo of birth control. So you get this idea of you said, okay, if we value parenting and raising children and women are doing that, then they should be effectively compensated. It's not the exact words that you use. But my initial reaction to that is not all value can or should be captured financially. So just because it's this insanely important thing does not mean that we should

[C]

be paying to do it.

[B]

And you can even think that the family unit effectively is paying the person to do that if they are truly within the home being equal. And so this is something, I've earned my stripes on this with my wife for eight years of our marriage. My wife didn't work, but I was like, you are my equal in every way. But we have very different roles now. Ended up changing over time, but same idea. We've just everything for us has always been equal. So in some ways they are being paid. But at a governmental level, which is what I think people mean. They want the government effectively to come in and pay. And this is where the shit starts to nest inside of these crazy ideas. But just to get at the complexity of why I think this is falling apart in this moment. So birth control changes the dynamic. Women start flooding into the workforce. They're now in control of whether they need to be at home with kids or not. And then we have this other idea, which is that basically the miracle of the way that the modern world works is not in production, to use a Marxist term, but instead is in the redistribution. And once you, my hypothesis goes, once you start thinking that the miracle is the redistribution, then you forget that as you start to redistribute, then all the people that would rise up that are entrepreneurial minded, they stop doing that. And all of a sudden There is nothing left to redistribute. And so getting this moment right and understanding the really foundational dynamic between men and women, I think becomes incredibly important. So if we were to try to recognize the contributions of women through a financial instrument, I think we are just absolutely headed for disaster. So how do we recognize the contributions of something that is incredibly important?

[C]

Okay, so I agree with you. The control of fertility was a cultural game changer, especially for women. There's no question that effective birth control has been one of the most significant changes in the culture of human societies. And most importantly, because by allowing women to control their fertility, it allowed them to become more full economic participants in the labor market. I'm thinking here about a kind of more recent capitalist labor market economy. And the central goal of the post war women's movement was to secure economic independence for women. So if you read Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, etc. They will say, and they said things like, the purpose is to make marriage a choice, not a necessity, so that women could stand economically on their own two feet. And of course, effective birth control was an important way in which women could do that, as well as educational success.

[B]

Do your alarm bells go off though, when you hear that? Because mine do.

[C]

Which bit of it that you're already

[B]

creating a problem for yourself the second you. If you find a fence in the middle of the woods, do not tear that fence down until you understand why that fence was there.

[C]

GK Chesterton.

[B]

Yeah, I always forget the guy's name. Yes. Thank you. So the underlying thing that you are being very gracious to, let me think through out loud, is that evolution has created something, a dynamic between men and women that can become pathological and become tyrannical for sure, but there's an underlying something there. And so I'll use. This is maybe dangerous of oversimplifying, but I will use my own relationship to my wife as an example of why that moment, to me, is something that people need to stop before we just throw out the, oh, maybe marriage should be this thing nobody needs to do. And it's like, I want people to do it by choice, a hundred percent. I don't want anybody to be forced into marriage. I can think of nothing worse. You just have a recurring nightmare about ending up in a loveless marriage. But when I think I once, and I'm not a crier man, but I once wept in front of my wife because I was like, this was before we started this company and she stepped out front, became an entrepreneur. And I was like, the world is Never going to understand that I would not be able to do what I do without you. You have made me a better person. And that makes me ask the question. It feels to me like men and women need to come together.

[C]

I agree that we're in a moment now of massive flux and uncertainty. And that one result of that is to leave men in particular very uncertain of their role in this new society. So the securing of greater economic independence for women, I think has been the greatest economic liberation in global human history. So in the US today, 40% of women now earn more than the average man. In 1979, it was 13% of women. So it's not as we don't have absolute gender equality in the labor market yet, but my God, in the last 50 years have we seen this extraordinary change. And so Steinem and Mead and others have to some extent achieved their goal, which is women will not need to be with a man in order to feed their kids, have a home, et cetera. And of course the welfare state has stepped in as well. So that securing that separation, that's like, I don't need a man anymore, materially has been very significantly achieved. And you're right, birth control was part of the story. That is where we are now. And I'm glad that's where we are. And when I use my, I'll use my own marriage as an example of this, which is my wife and I have actually taken it in turns essentially to be more of the kind of breadwinner and more of the carer. When we've been raising our children, we were absolutely determined we would raise our kids ourselves. It's not that we never had any help, but we were not going to be this kind of two professional career, full time nanny, you know, see the kids at the weekend couple. We were not going to do that. And actually there have been periods where like my wife has been full on and I've been at home raising the kids and vice versa. What a wonderful world where we had that choice. My parents didn't have that choice. When my dad lost his job, there was no possibility that my mum was going to be able to say, it's okay, I'll do the breadwinning for a bit, you do the kids. Just, it was impossible. She didn't have the economic power to do that. It was all him. That's not true for our generation. And that's a huge gain not only for women, but also for men. However, does that come with consequences about how we think about male and female roles, about marriage, about Mating, about child rearing, about fertility. Oh, yes, it's a massive change. And I think there's a tendency sometimes to just to not recognize that fundamentally altering the economic relation between men and women is huge. Culturally, sociologically, in almost every way imaginable. Like you don't do that and not have massive consequences.

[B]

I want to hear about those consequences which you go through in the book in an amazing way. So what are the consequences?

[C]

Well, the first one is of course, that women don't have to have a man in order to survive. And so one result of that is that 40% of kids in the US are now born outside marriage and most kids born to non college educated Americans are born outside of marriage. And one reason that we've seen this really big increase in the share of kids being born outside marriage, and this is work from the Joint Economic Committee that was led by my friend Scott Winship at the aei, is the decline in shotgun marriages. So actually, if you look back to 60s and 70s, there was a very high percentage of births took place less than nine months after the wedding. It was a real thing.

[B]

How high the percentage?

[C]

Well, June Carbon has this number, which is like 30% of first births around 1960 were within nine months. It's something like that.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So it was non trivial. Right. So the point is it was a lot. So it wasn't that people weren't necessarily kind of having sex before marriage and getting pregnant before marriage. It was that if you had sex and you got pregnant, the next step was get married. That's almost fallen away now. There isn't this sense of like, well, we're having a kid together, we'll have to get married. And here I want to actually be really fair to the conservative critics from the 1970s. So I went back and you read these folks, including George Gilder, who was the misogynist of the year, I think, two years running. I mean, he was incredibly ended up being one of Reagan's advisors and he and then others, Jeff Dench and others, they argued that if women secured economic independence in the way that the women's movement wanted, that actually that would basically make men redundant. If men didn't have that role of kind of provider, they would effectively become surplus to requirements. And men who are surplus to requirements are very dangerous in human history. This is what Joe Henrick calls the math problem of surplus men. Surplus men are bad news for society. They marauder around, they're very violent, they're very risk taking. And so the conservatives were saying if the women's movement Gets its way. We're going to have Mad Max style bands of marauding, violent men setting fire to everything, et cetera. In fact, the opposite has happened. We've seen a drop over the last few decades in violent crime, drop in expressed aggression, et cetera. I think largely because of the Internet. I think actually what's happened is that far from kind of running out and setting fire to things, a lot of these men are retreating stereotypically to the basement, maybe to video games and pornography. So there's this kind of very weird and provocative thought I sometimes have that maybe the screens are kind of saving us from the worst consequences of this kind of surplus to requirements thing around men. So that worst fear has not been realized. But the conservatives were right to say that if we get to this world where there's much greater economic inequality between men and women, which was that that means that the men don't have this specific, very dedicated role anymore of breadwinner, we're going to have trouble with these guys. These guys are going to be either in trouble or trouble. And although the nature of the trouble is different to what was predicted, nonetheless, I think that was right. So if you look at the men who opioid overdose, mostly men, suicide rates are four times higher among men and young, young and boys, young men than among women and any number of other pathologies that are affecting a lot of men. And I looked at, I looked at their work on suicide and one of the studies that really stop me in my tracks, honestly. And it's a moment where you stop being a scholar and you just become a human being. This work by Fiona Shand looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before suicide. And the two most commonly used words by those men were useless to describe themselves, useless and worthless. There's something going on there which is we cannot create a society which is more gender equal, which I fully support, if in case that's not clear by now, but which also makes so many men feel like they're of no use anymore, they're worthless now. Thanks guys, we've got it from here is not a great message. And so we've got to find a way to get through this messy situation we're in now so that there's a positive script for men, a positive description of masculinity and what we need fathers and men and boys to be like that is compatible with this new world of economic inequality, of economic equality, because it's not going away. We're not going back to a world where women were economically dependent on men, except within families by choice. As my wife was on me for periods and as I was on her for periods. And interestingly, couples who do have the most economic power and the most resources are the ones where women stay home to look after the kids more easily because they can afford to do so. That's great. And I think that the women's movement have dodged a very, very big bullet by not, I think, pathologizing the women who chose to become parents. You said that to your wife. The just a mom thing, that's much less common now. I think there was a moment where the women's movement started to look like it might look down on women who weren't sort of in the labor market full time, et cetera. I think that was largely avoided. And now what I see in the women's movement is actually a desire to support moms if that's what they want to do, a respect for women's choice. So I think they largely avoided that trap. And that's a great thing.

[B]

Yeah, agreed. So now I want to talk about this idea of surplus men and what happens when they no longer really have a need to be the breadwinner, especially if they're being outperformed by women. So I'm going to keep anchoring this in my logic around. Okay, you're having a biological experience. This is like my obsession is to get people to understand that you are living life through your brain and your brain works in a certain kind of way. And male brains work a little differently than women. There's way more overlap than there are differences, but the differences end up mattering. And so.

[C]

Well, it depends on the issue. There's more overlap on some things than others.

[B]

That's very interesting.

[C]

I mean, there's 95% of violent crime is committed by men.

[B]

But do you think that's a distribution problem? Meaning that. So you have a tremendous amount of overlap in these things, but the most violent things are going to happen at the tail.

[C]

At the tail, yeah. But there are some things like aggression, sex drive, risk taking, people things. There's a whole series of dimensions, agreeable, disagreeable, where the distributions just overlap different amounts. So the agreeable disagree. Oh, you agree that's a personality trait thing. Agree. That overlaps a lot. In fact, I'm more agreeable than my wife. Right, there you go. Same said it now. Yeah, that's right. So, and that does. But aggression, potential for physical aggression, that doesn't overlap very much. And so, yes, you're right. It's at the tails, but just in Everyday life just as much less physical aggression from women than there is for men. So I really like the fact you said they overlap, but so the question is not does this distribution overlap or not? Because they almost always do overlap. The question is, how much do they overlap and how much does it matter?

[B]

I am going to continue to anchor around the idea of biology just to give myself a thread to pull through all of this. And I do understand that I am taking an extraordinarily complicated topic and simplifying it, but I think it will help people think through. Certainly it will help me as you check me in different areas. So surplus men could end up being Mad Max style has not been Mad Max style. We're probably. We have a new opiate for the male masses anyway in pornography and video games, which, hey, give you a sense of like, I did get laid.

[C]

See, I'm okay and I did win at that competition.

[B]

Right, Exactly. So very interesting. I don't yet know as somebody who plays video games. And when my wife does not match, my libido is more than happy to dip into pornography. It's like, I hesitate to say it's bad, but at the same time, I'm very good at self regulation, so I don't end up having a problem. I know a lot of people do. Okay, so we've got this moment where you've got over how many hundreds of thousands or millions of years you want to clock it of evolution. That's driving a slight differentiation between men and women. You get men needing to be, not needing to be. But men are shaped because they can't breastfeed, which is a choice that evolution makes. Men can't breastfeed, nor can they carry a baby to term. But you need them for the genetic mixing that you get from sexual reproduction. Okay, cool. So what is going to be their role? And it becomes, okay, you're going to be optimized women. You're going to be optimized for caring for infants. So one of the things I find utterly fascinating, I think it's 15% of women have a fourth photoreceptor. So they can literally see colors that guys can't see. That one struck me because it is so obviously physiological. Like they just have an extra thing that guys don't have. Why might that be? To be able to perceive changes in the skin color of their child, to detect sickness, early, whatever. I don't know. But that's one hyperbole hypothesis that's interesting. Obviously, having mammary glands and being able to produce milk, women are just optimized to have and care for children. So now you've got guys that are. Oh, God, I don't know how much time to spend on this. I will say things quickly. If there's anything you disagree with or think I'm crazy about, just let me know. But men are basically the answer to the question of what do women want? Women are the sexual gatekeepers. And so the vast majority of reproduction comes from what women are willing to grant their sexual access to. And so men are stronger in upper body. Men have the aggression, all the things that you talked about. Okay. So basically women are saying, I need a partner, which is my whole thing. If I were going to sum my thesis up, it is men and women need each other and they need to shape each other. Okay. So if at a societal level, that shaping happens in evolutionary timeframes, being out in the savannah, having to fight lions and stuff like that, it's like, okay, I need you to be stronger, more aggressive, more willing to take risks, all of that, so that I can take care of the child. You go out and do the more dangerous shit, Whether that's hunting, protecting from other males in their tribe. Cool. But that's what you're going to do. Now as we evolve, we build these very stable societies, we are able to do all the things that we can do in a modern context, Include separate sex from reproduction. Now women go into the labor force, but now, like, they're still going to be able to have babies, which is absolutely necessary. And biology is going to be like, oh my God, you can breastfeed. Like, this is amazing. They're going to get all this biological reinforcement, including the neurochemical flood the oxygen.

[C]

Yep, yep.

[B]

But guys, you can't breadwin anymore. Or you don't necessarily need to.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And by the way, if you're going after it, you're a bad person.

[C]

Well, you don't need to. I think you so that you that that final point you made, which is that we don't necessarily need you to do that anymore. So are men necessary? I think. Who is it who wrote that book? Maureen Dowd, I think, wrote that book. Like, are men necessary?

[B]

It's a terrifying question.

[C]

Great question. And of course there are these kind of women only utopias, right. Which you see all the way through from kind of Perkins through to Rick. And there's a Rick and Morty episode, right. Raising Gazathorpe or something where there's like, again, it's like, it's an old trope which is there's this kind of Utopian female society. And then the of savage men down there and they come and get the sperm and whatever, they solve the reproduction problem one way or the other and just kind of get rid of all those. Get rid of all those men. So I think there's a few things going on here. One is the shaping. You talk about the shaping of men and women of each other. I look at it slightly more through the lens of parenting and so how the raising of the having and the successful raising of kids shapes us. So I'm very influenced here by the work of Anna Machin, who's an anthropologist at Oxford. She wrote a book called the Life of Dad. And what she shows, and there are other people who have shown this too, is that fatherhood really, really was created when our brains went through that huge expansion. And the years it took to get our kids to nutritional independence just became huge. And the calorie requirements to get kind of a newborn to nutritional independence suddenly became massive. There's no way women could do it on their own. And so if you wanted your kid to survive, you kind of needed to be a dad. And so I see this as kind of much more around reproduction and what happens to our offspring. And that that's kind of at an evolutionary level that's affecting a lot of our behavior. And so then the question becomes like, well, what if you'd not need it anymore? Why do you need dad when you have food stamps and women earning 40% of women earning more than men. And so we have to come up with a different answer to that same question. And we have to find ways in which the natural tendencies of men say to be more risk taking. Because you're right, men are more risk taking than women. Where does that go now? We can't just suppress it. We can't somehow expunge it.

[B]

Right.

[C]

We can't take that out of men like an appendix, right? It's not some obsolete thing that you can just sort of remove only if it comes inflamed. But otherwise it's just this kind of obsolete part of our evolutionary manipulate it.

[B]

And this is.

[C]

You can channel it. You can channel it, right? But so do. So do we want men to be risk taking? Yes and no. Depends on the circumstances. Right? So when I was running across in front of trucks or flipping doing somersaults over the side of a ski resort to see and hitting farm machinery, and I. No. Do you want people to kind of take risks in terms of starting businesses? Do you want people to kind of willing to come be more adventurous Et cetera. Yes. So that risk taking appetite among, among men, is it good or bad? Is the wrong question. It's when is it good and when is it bad? And how can we find ways to channel it in ways that are more appropriate than others? And that's not a new problem. We have a new set of challenges around it. But there's this line from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, which I've now used so much that I've got it committed basically to memory, which is every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men. This behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively. I think that's exactly right. So male nurturing, and it doesn't mean necessarily one on one nurturing. Male nurturing can be a little bit more tribal. It can be a little bit more for a bigger group. But male nurturing matters, right? It has. Ancestrally it's mattered because it's different in

[B]

tonality than female nurturing.

[C]

It's just more. Well, you've made the point that kind of like women breastfeed, there's the oxytocin thing. There's that kind of. For very young children especially, there's that kind of. There is a difference between the biological relationship between fathers and mothers of very young children. Where I disagree with some of the conservatives on this is like that's less true for 12 year olds. In fact, I'm reasonably convinced by the evidence that dads, if anything, have a bit of competitive advantage when it comes to adolescents. So just because women like breastfeed for the first few months doesn't mean that they, that's them for the next 25 years, right? Yeah, you're a mom. That's the problem. People over determine the biological difference, turn it into roles and trap people with them. And the other side say, oh no, there are no biological differences. So you just end up with this absurd situation where neither side makes any sense. And so the question is like, well okay, what about the guys then? Well, fatherhood still really matters, just in a slightly different way. So you're still needed by your kids, you still have to provide for your kids. And by the way, that could include materially, there aren't probably very many women out there that love the idea that men aren't going to do any more earning anymore. And in fact there's this very interesting new recent evidence that shows that a big reason for the gender pay gap is parenting. We know that already there's a difference between men and women's parenting. But it's not just that mothers earn and work less, it's that fathers earth earn and work more. And that drives the gender pay up very significantly. Right. So actually fatherhood triggers more work, higher earnings among men. Right. So the idea that men, the providing role of men is kind of somehow kind of behind us, that's wrong. It's just that they don't have exclusive access to it anymore. But they also matter as dads, they're a bit better at helping their kids take risks. They may be a little bit better around some of the physical stuff. With sons, I only have boys, so I can only speak to three boys. And a friend of ours said, well, you've got boys and they're like dogs. Just run them out twice a day and you'll be fine. It is a bit more complicated than that. But there's some truth in that. It's just the physical needs of boys and girls are a little bit different. And dads actually are pretty good at all that. So I guess my big point here is that we are where we are in terms of the economic relationship between men and women. We also are who we are in terms of our biology. And so the question is, what kind of culture do we need to create that recognizes biological differences without in any way making them determinative, but without imagining they're not there? Which celebrates economic and economic, greater economic equality between men and women, but which nonetheless gives men a specific role to play in society and in their kids lives. We are just beginning to answer that question. In fact, I honestly think through my own work, I have to persuade some people that it's even a question that needs answering, which is there is a problem right now with boys and men. And one of the sources of that problem is we don't have a new script for masculinity. We've torn up the old one, the breadwinning one. We haven't replaced it. But actually masculinity doesn't invent itself. And back to this point about the learned thing from Mead, I think it's basically true that becoming a man, mature masculinity, positive masculinity, is more learned, more socialized than femininity. Women have a much clearer sequence of biological milestones, etc. There isn't quite. If you look at the history of human cultures, they've worked really hard around rites of passage for men. Is that because they were patriarchies? Not mostly, I don't think. I think it's because humans have known forever that the challenge of turning boys into good men is a bigger cultural challenge than turning girls into women, because we don't have quite the same biological markers. And that is a task that every culture has taken very, very seriously. And I think it would be incredibly arrogant of us to think that we can be the first society in human history that doesn't have to pay attention to the way we turn boys into men.

[D]

If you work in university maintenance, Granger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[B]

I agree with that. Really aggressively. So one of the.

[C]

I shouldn't say aggressively because that's very male of you.

[B]

I know, which I love.

[C]

So punch me.

[B]

The funny thing is I am. I am more. I am. I don't know what the right way to say this is, so I'll say it overly simplistic. I'm more traditionally feminine than my wife, and my wife is more traditionally masculine than I am. And so us coming together has been really interesting in that we have a very easy time understanding each other because there's not this catastrophic difference. Like when I think of, like an MMA fighter getting with somebody that, you know, all they want to do is play with dolls and have kids. Yeah, it's like, whew. Like that. That could be a much tougher bridge to cross. But when I was, I guess right before I met my wife, I read the book the Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. And I sometimes get made fun of for this, but I actually think it's one of the most important things that I did in my life, which I read the book, and he has a hypothesis in that that a big problem that we face is the breakdown of coming of age rituals. And there are no coming of age rituals. And My own journey into entrepreneurship was one of toughening up, of becoming more traditionally masculine, of learning to be aggressive, of learning to be disagreeable. And it really, really served me. Now, the fact that I had to learn it means that I had skills on the other side of empathy, connection, all of that, which has served me incredibly well as well. But I realize I would not have gotten where I've had I not developed those skills. And so it got me thinking a lot about, I didn't have a coming of age ritual. My dad wasn't hyper involved. He was married to my mom the whole time I was growing up. Left three weeks after I went to college. That tells you a little something.

[C]

Great divorce.

[B]

Yeah. So it was. He was absent despite being physically there. He worked in the garage a lot and all that. So I didn't have a super strong male role model of what being a man looked like. And he grew up without a father, so it was like he didn't even. He probably didn't know what to pass on or how to pass it on. Anyway, so when I read this book, the Power of Myth, hey, these coming of age rituals are missing. That really echoed true for me because of how I came up. And so I'm thinking, oh, I am about to. At some point in the near future, hopefully we'll find somebody that I want to get married to. And he also mentions in the book that he thinks part of the reason that 50% of marriages end in divorce is because there's similarly no really hardcore ritual of you were single and now you are married, and you are different now forever. And so as a part of getting married, I got myself ritualistically scarred. Now, the reason that people make fun of me is what it was was a tattoo. Now, most people think of it as a tattoo, but I did not. I only have one tattoo. I absolutely, at the time, really had a hard time with needles. And so for me, it was facing a gigantic fear that I had. I wanted it to be painful, and I wanted it to be permanent.

[C]

And so was it of something of your wife? Was it to be married?

[B]

Yeah, of course. Of course. So I end up getting a tattoo designed, which is, she's Greek. So it was her name in Greek, and then in Greek, the four words that were my basically promise to her. And when I did it, I said, I want to lean into the fact that this is painful. I want to be completely present with what I'm going through and as it's happening. So I made her come with me, but I did not want her to give me any comfort or solace or anything like that. I was like, don't distract me. I want this to be painful. And so going through that was, between her and I, a pact. We will never joke about divorce or anything like that. That's completely off the table. Barring this becoming loveless or abuse on either side. This is forever. And not because we say words in front of friends, because we believe that's the most logical thing to living a fulfilling, amazing life, but that it's necessary to walk through some kind of threshold for me. And it's interesting because I didn't feel she needed to go through something like that as well, because she was like, you know, should I get a tattoo? And I was like, no, actually, I don't. Doesn't feel intuitively like. I was like, if you want one, obviously get one, but it is not what I would want. And so we did this whole thing and talked about it, and that really laid a foundation for us where, for me, I knew there is no going backwards, and there is no unwinding this. There is only what is the path through, what is the path to a loving, long lasting, healthy relationship. And so by conceptualizing it as a ritualistic scarification to remind myself that I am different tomorrow than I was today, that we are married, and it is a line in the sand that I'm never going to retrograde back across.

[C]

So interesting.

[B]

But I had to think of it like that, and I needed something to. I needed to make a big deal out of something. I needed it to grandeur.

[C]

You needed this. It's super interesting to me. I mean, first of all, I think that there are lots of these different rites of passage that we kind of. We all need. And just at an anecdotal level, I think things like the. So I've been a Scout leader in the past, and so things like, you know, that moving up from different Scout groups to another. I remember one we used to do where they went from being a Cub Scout to a Scout, and they would literally, they'd have their kind of Scout uniform on underneath their Cub uniform, and they'd go under this kind of parachute, and everyone would line up and go into a parachute, and they'd go in a parachute and take. And they'd come out, and they were a Scout and they came out. Right? So they went in as a Cub Scout and came out as a Scout, Right. Kind of sounds silly, et cetera, but I remember doing that. Big deal, right? And so there's these kind of all of these. These Rituals. What's interesting is the role of marriage. I've been really struck by the fact that more American men say that marriage is important to them than American women do. Whoa. Women are twice as likely to initiate divorce as men. Post divorce, men do much worse than women. And so I think that is very interested in your story that marriage as an institution is more important for men than for women. Now.

[B]

Really shocking now. So interesting.

[C]

It's so counterintuitive, right? It goes against the narrative. The narrative is, well, you know, she dragged me into it, and, you know, the guy's stagnant, he rolls his eyes and like. And the narrative is that women are kind of trying to trap men into marriage, right? And they find someone to marry and they obsess about their wedding day and all that. And men are, like, reluctantly dragged in because we'd much rather be out on the range being a cowboy or shooting whatever it is bullshit. It actually turns out, especially now that women are a bit more like, yeah, I could marry, I might not marry, et cetera. And if he's not working out, or if. Whereas for men, actually, that institutional anchor, I think, is becoming more important and super interesting to me that one of the results of the women's movement has been to make marriage more important for men. But I also think it's because men don't have these alternative rites of passage. So becoming a mother still has a different impact for women than it does for men. And I think that's going to remain true for some time. I would love fatherhood to have much more salience than it does. And. And that's why I want more paid leave for dads and all that stuff I get into in the book. But I am super interested in the deinstitutionalization of masculinity. There's a sound bite for you that no one's ever going to use again. Put it on the bumper sticker. What do we want? The reinstitutionalization of masculinity. When do we want it? Now. It is catchy, isn't it? I think you heard it here first. And so what I mean by that is that actually many of the institutions through which actually men's roles were formed could be a labor market, it could be church, it could be marriage, are actually kind of falling away. And those are affecting men much more than women, including marriage. And so it's interesting to me that, like, the tattoo example is some. I think that some deep level, what was happening there is you wanted to connect yourself to the institution in A way that felt just, you know, irremovable. You wanted to. You wanted to embrace the institution. You wanted to become part of the institution. You wanted to step into the institution. And that took more than just the saying of a few vows. You needed something more than that to mark that institutional marker. And I think that just generally there are fewer and fewer of those for men in our society now. And that's a problem. Campbell. Campbell was right to that extent.

[B]

Yeah, I am. I'm. I'm at a really weird intersection of. As an entrepreneur, governmental tinkering bothers you as a podcaster who's trying to think well through these things, and.

[C]

And

[B]

you get confronted with, oh, God, does tinkering work? But then at the same time, as a person in the world with people that you love and care about, you're like, thank God the government exists and that they do their best to come up with policies that help people, and thank God there's a safety net and that people aren't just like, well, you got blindsided. Sorry. But while I think it is important, and I am very much not the tear it all down and let hope the thing that we build back is better, I do worry that people aren't being thoughtful enough. That tinkering in and of itself is the finding the fence in the middle of the field and going, I think it'd be a bit better like this. And then you realize, oh, we just made it so things could crawl underneath it, or we made it shorter and now things can leap over it. And we didn't realize what the second and third order consequences.

[C]

We didn't think through what the role of that institution was before we tore it down.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

That's the difference between a revolutionary and a reformer, I think.

[B]

Yes. And so when I think about where these. To call it an institution makes me uneasy because going back to biology, this stuff was born very naturally over very long periods of time.

[C]

From when you say an institution, what are you talking about? Marriage specifically or anything? Or, of course, monogamous Marriage is a very recent invention. Attention.

[B]

Interesting.

[C]

So 95 of human societies have been polygamous, and only 50% of men historically have reproduced. So that's crazy. Twice as many of our ancestors are female as men.

[B]

So sorry, walk me through 95%. So when you say polygamy is the norm, as in this is the actual structure of our society is like, yeah, guys have more than one wife.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. It's almost always been polygyny, which is men having multiple wives, not the other way around. That's what we mean by that. But yeah, it's important, I think, when we have these discussions about what's traditional marriage, what are traditional societies, to recognize that across the arc of evolutionary history, which is, I think this band that you're interested in, monogamous marriage, was invented yesterday largely by the Christian church and then kind of spread across the world from there. And that's been huge in terms of its cultural impact. And one of the reasons, by the way, that men probably have an evolutionary higher appetite for risk is because actually, if you only had a 50% chance of reproducing ancestrally, it was worth taking risks to try and get into the 50% who were going to reproduce.

[B]

Okay. I don't know these stats well enough, but I'm going to push on some what my intuition is telling me. So the only way for men to be polygamous is that if they're able to acquire resources in such disproportion that you're, as a woman, rather than going to a relationship where you can have all of that one man and the things that he produces, that you would rather have a smaller percentage. How on earth is that possible?

[C]

Pre agriculture, chiefs, tribal chiefs. I mean, Genghis Khan, for example. This is the most famous example. Yeah.

[B]

But even that those really spring up. Non God. I want to fully acknowledge that I'm outside of what I understand.

[C]

So the status hierarchy of men was what led them to have like multiple wives at the top of the hierarchy

[B]

and none at the bottom 100,000 years ago. That seems impossible.

[C]

Absolutely. This is across human history. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

But there's a debate as to whether human societies are more than technological societies and more than 10 or 20.

[D]

Sure.

[C]

So there's going to be a bit of a discussion here as to, like, what counts as quotes, a society. And in order for us to know the stat I just gave you about polygamy, I'm quoting from Joe Henrich there. Again, we have to know about that society. So we have to have kind of. We have to have evidence for it. So that's by definition a more recent one. So you're right. And I don't want to be. I don't want to get the kind of starting date wrong for this, but to the extent that we know about human society, so the societies we know about, 95% of them have been polygamous. Now, now to very different degrees, of course. Right. So there's a world where one guy gets all of the women, and there's a world where women and men get one of each and everything in between. But it does generate this issue of the kind of the historic problem. The math problem of surplus men was actually one that kind of every society had under conditions of polygamy. Because if one guy has multiple wives, by definition, that means there's a bunch of guys who don't have a wife. And it was monogamy that came along and quite solved that problem. And so actually Henrik and others are really good about saying, look, everyone says, of course men would love this, right? They roll their eyes and say, yeah, of course men would like, of course men are in favor of it. It's like, don't be too careful to assume that there are not some advantages to those societies, including for women. And so to put it very bluntly, in a modern context, if you went to the average woman and said, okay, you can be the third wife of Jeff Bezos or the only wife of an unemployed steel worker, damn, what are you going to choose? And it might depending on your view of marriage, et cetera. But I've tried that question on a lot of women and they're like, eh, interesting, right?

[B]

That is terrifying. It's terrifying because of my world.

[C]

Being Jack's third wife is terrifying.

[B]

When I look at it, I'm really unnerved by that. It isn't easy to dismiss and go, oh, I want to say you're better off as the wife of an unemployed steelworker, but I would actually, if it were my sister, I would hesitate.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, at the same time, obviously not third kind of consecutively. I find this very interesting in light of the rise in polyamory and kind of what's happening to relationships now and sort of seeing where kind of where ending up. Plus there is all this discussion of what happens on dating apps, for example. So dating apps have been, and you probably know this, but they've been kind of quite well studied. And there is something of a kind of winner takes all dynamic that happens on those dating apps. And so you do see like some, you know, a small percentage of the guys getting a disproportionate share of the dates. And so it's not, that's a kind of like a little microcosm, if you like, of that kind of society where actually a very high status male can end up with many more women, in this case just dates and so on too, leaving lots of other men without any women. And that's a kind of debate that's happening in the manosphere. There's a lot of discussion about incels kind of et cetera. And there's a lot of grievance, honestly, around kind of what's happening, most of which I don't think is justified. But nonetheless, it's interesting in the context of this kind of biological history.

[B]

Yeah. To say this is interesting, that is an understatement. I want to go back to this because you've really, you're. You're helping me identify base assumptions that I have. So everybody is a slave to their frame of reference. My phrase, your frame of reference is your values, beliefs, base assumptions. So this is how I am. This is how the world works. Often those beliefs are invisible to people. They don't even realize that they don't see the frame. Yeah. So they're.

[C]

You can't see your own frame.

[B]

Exactly. And when you said that about being the third wife of Jeff Bezos, man, that's really. So that's made me confront something. So I'm realizing now that my base assumption is that a thriving relationship between two people that love each other, because I don't even need it to be men and women, that just happens to be, from an evolutionary standpoint, the default. The vast majority of people end up there. So. But that, that relationship with my wife has been the most unbelievably nurturing and soul affirming thing in the world. So I have a subroutine that runs in my brain that as long as I have my wife, everything's going to be okay. And that's allowed me to take tremendous risks and try things from a place of security rather than from a place of like. Like, because a lot of the risk taking behavior, and I think you will agree with this, a lot of the risk taking behavior that men display are because they're from an evolutionary standpoint, they're trying to win access to females. Yes, I already have that. And it's possible I get blindsided one day and realize my wife's been unfaithful this whole time. But I really, really doubt it. And so I'm not trying to win over access to a woman. I have a woman. It's a very emotionally nourishing experience. And yet it also manifests in a way that has me taking bigger risks and trying different things. And so when we talk about what is the moving forward script for men in a way that does not replace brakes on women, which I will just say emphatically, I'm on that team, I want to see women thrive. I want to see men thrive as well. And I think that one thing I'm always trying to get guys. I'm so curious to see how you respond to this. I'm trying to get guys to be more aggressive and that I don't want women. I absolutely despise any human being that says, I'll slow down so you can lead. I want people to go as hard as they possibly can, but with love in your heart for other people when

[C]

you say that you want. So, yes, I largely agree with all that, but I'd love to hear more. When you say that you're encouraging guys to be more aggressive, what do you mean by that? And give me some specific examples.

[B]

Yeah, thank you. Because I'm sure people will misread my intent. So I want to see people try to push their skill set as far as humanly possible, to get as good as possible, to pour as much time and energy into an honorable goal as they can muster. I think it is very important that people have a crystal clear goal, that that goal be exciting to them, meaning it's just something that they're interested in. And honorable, meaning that it's serving not only themselves, but other people. And in that frame, I want to see people maximize every second of their day. Now, to me, all of that needs to be in service of fulfillment. It is the only resilient mental state. So happiness does not survive a period of mourning. So you will have no happiness while in mourning, but you can still have fulfillment in mourning.

[C]

So I really like this. And what I would do, my friendly amendment would be to maybe change the language a little bit, because when you say more aggressive, I know what you're doing with that. But people can mishear that and say, okay, what does he mean? They're physically aggressive. And it gives me a chance to talk about something I don't get the chance to talk about very much. So thank you for opening this particular door, which is to talk about agency, going for it, that sense of purpose, having kind of wind in your sails, being under your own steam. Certainly when I've raised my own kids, the thing I've always just thought is, are they under their own steam team? Are they going for something? It doesn't matter what it is. So one of my sons, for example, dropped out of college to become an esports coach in Las Vegas, which was his life's dream. So he's calling me up, say, dad, should I do this? You know, I'm going to get paid well and all this, and I'm going to get an apartment in Las Vegas and be a professional esports coach. But I have to drop out. I Have to stop out of college for a while. Like, of course you should do that. That's your dream. And maybe he would have carried on doing that, but. But it was his dream and he was purposeful. So agency, purpose, drive, just a sense of going for itness. I think that's what you're talking about 100%. And what's interesting is that you see less of that now in men than in women. So some of the kind of data points say that women are more likely to move than men in search of opportunity, more likely to move home.

[B]

This is crazy.

[C]

More likely to move, more likely to go abroad, more likely to study abroad, more likely to volunteer for America, more likely to go for the Peace Corps, more likely to be the first to buy their own home, less likely to be living at home with their parents in their 20s. So if you take these kind of measures of agency, let's call it that, actually kind of men are falling behind. And there's a bunch of things going on there. I think one is that it turns out that the old scripts for what men and women were supposed to do, actually, as we took them away, it turns out men really needed them. What they're actually now being asked to do is what you're asking them to do, which is have more agency, go for it. And the men that I'm most worried about are not the ones who are acting out. They hit the attention. January 6th is kind of like the stereotypical example, but men who are acting out, it's the men who are checking out that worry me and who are actually becoming quite passive, who in some ways don't have a clear sense of where they're going. A lot of young women will say how frustrated they are very often by that among men. And I give you one more example on this, which is there's a question that's asked in the Pew survey and lots of other surveys, which is asking men and women what they're looking for in a potential mate. And one of the things women always say is breadwinning potential. They're much more likely to say that the other way around. And a lot of people will say, you see, even women still want men to have that traditional role. And this female colleague of mine said something to me years ago that made me absolutely stop in my tracks. She said, no, no, no. That question, breadwinning potential is a proxy for, have you got your act together? Are you with me? Are you going to be a partner? Shoulder to shoulder? Maybe I'll be the breadwinner for a while. But you're going to be raising the kids and you're going to be doing it well or you're going to volunteer or you're going to try. Right now my wife's doing a startup, like she's trying that maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I've tried various things. We try it out, et cetera. And back to your point about the security of someone else, someone on your team, Women are saying, I want a guy that's with me that has agency, that has purpose, that has a goal for himself, that's propelling himself forward in the world. And maybe by the way, that means he'll be the breadwinner for a while, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. So underneath all of these questions, I think it's just this sense of agency, purpose, direction. I think that's what you're talking about and that there aren't, I think now because men aren't quite sure how to be, they're kind of sure what they're supposed to not do. There's a long list of don'ts for men, but they're not quite sure what they're supposed to do. And in some ways there's a danger, and I hear I'll go out on a bit of a limb and say sometimes in these discussions there's a bit of a danger of almost pathologizing male agency for women to lean in, men have got to lean out. And we need men to get out of the way. And if you could stop mansplaining, please shut up, get out of the way, et cetera. And that's in my view, incredibly damaging. We don't need to suppress male agency in order to support female agency as a false choice.

[B]

And it seems like that is proving out like this is why I'm trying to get people to understand. It is so gross to say slow down so I can lead. You want people going all out, trying to be the best that they can be in a loving and compassionate way. I'm not saying be a dick and step on somebody's neck. Like I'm saying go desperate, go all out.

[C]

Life is quite short.

[B]

Yes. And so getting people to come around to you've in a marriage, you have to want your partner to win. As a species, you need your, you need to want your partner to win. You need to want everybody to shine and figure out like, hey, what would make you happy? Like what do you want to pursue? And let's figure out how we do that. But when it, it gets adversarial and this is what freaks me out about modern dating. If I could be a dad for a second, I will just tell everybody, hey, I get it, guys. Maybe you're not feeling good. Between hypergamy and the way the dating apps are set up and the Internet and all that, you really do get a winner take all scenario. And a very thin slice of men at the top are getting women, and it's breaking down into monogamy's falling apart, yada, yada. Okay, I get it. But the only reason that these relationships work is because it's a partner. It's somebody to contend with. It's somebody that helps you think better and pushes you to be better, and you push them to be better.

[C]

To meet you. Like, toe to toe.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And there was. Exactly. There was a moment. This is very personal now, but there was a moment for me and my wife when we were in therapy and we were talking about the issues we were having, and I was talking about how supportive I've been of her career, how I'd help raise the kids and all of that. And she looked me in the eye and said, you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. That's not the problem. The problem is you're not masculine enough.

[B]

What did she mean?

[C]

Hence the rest of the therapy. Honestly, I think that comment, I think it may have saved our marriage because, well, what do you mean by that? And she said, you're not stating your own needs clearly enough. You're being too passive. You think you need to get out of the way, you're not stepping up enough. You're not meeting me as an equal. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that being a good feminist, being a good male feminist, being a good ally, whatever language you want to use, meant that I had to somehow shrink myself and not be very good at declaring my own needs, going for my own goals, et cetera. That I had denuded myself of some of my own agency. And she didn't want that. She wanted someone to contend with, to use your language. And I realized that that was exactly what happened. And actually it was incredibly healing for us to realize that.

[B]

That.

[C]

And I'll be honest, I think that's probably one of the things that's led me down the journey to look at what's happening to boys and men generally, because at the risk of taking my own frame and using it, that sense of, like having. Of just shrinking ourselves, having to be less somehow is really caught, I think, a lot of men in that situ, boys and men in that situation. And so we haven't got this empowering, joyful, liberating, exciting script about how great it is to be a guy guy and how here is the way to be a guy. We don't have that. And I think that has left a lot of us struggling in various ways. I've just given you that very intimate portrait. But I think that more structurally and more culturally, there's this issue of what I can only describe as a lack of male agency. And that's a problem. And women don't want that. And it's bad for men and it's bad for society. But we've got ourselves into a position where somehow we are somewhat shrinking. I think this sense of we're a bit suspicious of male agency. And of course, there are very good reasons historically why male agency has sometimes been bad, et cetera. But I'm really worried that we're overdoing it and that we're sending now a kind of message to too many boys and young men. Their own agency is less important, and it's not.

[B]

I am gobsmacked by that. I don't want to breathe until you finish that point. That's so powerful and because it resonates so profoundly with me and the journey that I had to go on where it's like, yes, if you want to be good at it. Because for me, it really came through business. If you want to be good at this thing, you are going to have to get. And they didn't. It wasn't like it was, you have to get more mail. It was like, you have to be more aggressive. You have to. It's a great movie called Rush about these two. I forget the names of the drivers, but these two race car drivers that went back and forth. Yeah. And one of them said the second, you don't look for the gap to try to get your car in front like you're lost, retire immediately. And that's what I had to learn how to do was. And shooting that gap is risky. And there it's so easy to not. And I am. I really believe in the phrase that leaders make great leaders. And so on my team, I'm constantly trying to empower other people to step up, to be leaders and finding people that will shoot that gap, that will own this was my decision. And if it works, we can clash me on the back. And if it fails, then we can say, you made a poor decision. You did not execute this well. And then letting them understand that you're. And this is the difficulty of the human experience that now you're on a razor's edge of this is a quote unquote, safe space to try to shoot that gap. And if you miss it, none of us are going to be like, you're an asshole. We're going to be like, hey, you really tried something, you did it well. Well done. Yeah, but if you miss that gap every time, you'll lose your job.

[C]

Job.

[B]

And so it's like, God, like, contending with that is really hard. But the reality is we will go out of business. If I, as the CEO, shoot that gap and miss too many times, we go out of business. And so there is.

[C]

But if you don't go for it at all, you won't be a great

[B]

business or will go out.

[C]

What's interesting, back to where we were, you know, some time ago, talking about appetite for risk, right? Everything else equal. It's pretty clear that risk taking tends to be more associated with men than for women. Again, distributions usually overlap, as your own experience shows you. It's not that all men. To say that all men are more risk taking than women is like saying all men are taller than all women. It's just insane. But nonetheless, given that that's the case, it's interesting to see what in some ways you'd see as a risk aversion among a lot of boys and young men now in the spaces you'd want to see it, like entrepreneurship, going to college is a risk, right? There's financial risks, et cetera. Asking someone out is a risk. There's all kinds of risks. Moving home, moving to a different city for a job, that's a risk. And women are taking those risk more than men now. So where's that risk taking appetite among men going if it's not being expressed? And there's other ways now, it's still true in entrepreneurship, et cetera, but I worry a little bit that it's being sublimated, maybe into games, maybe into kind of something else. And that's not. I'm with you. I don't think it's bad with video gaming, not least because they paid my son well for a while. But there's nothing bad about that. But I worry a little bit that we're not promoting healthy risk taking among men in society, in the economy, in dating, et cetera. And that's, in the end, that's kind of bad for all of us. So where's it going? Maybe it's being suppressed and that's not good if it's a natural tendency to take risks. Because maybe it'll go somewhere else. Maybe it'll go to drug taking or some other kind of risk taking that's really not healthy. So what does healthy male risk taking look like in our modern society? That's the question that we're not really answering very well.

[B]

Yeah, I want to talk about that in a grander way. So you talked about men needing a script. So if masculinity done well is far less tied to biological cues, because I still think it is tied to biology in terms of the male brain works a certain way, but there isn't that immediate reinforcement of child rearing, how do we get that script right?

[C]

Well, in a way that's the huge question that, that I'm personally grappling with, which is what is what does a script for positive masculinity look like today in a world of gender equality? And I think it's incredibly important that it has both the aspects of being positive. Like there are aspects of masculinity that are positive but also has to be recognizably masculine. I think there's someone's a tendency when neo people talk about non toxic masculinity or positive masculinity. They're very often when you ask them what do you mean by that? They'll say, you know, emotional availability, vulnerability, compassion, care, emotional accessibility, willingness to cry. Like, wait, are we still talking about masculinity? Because I think actually that sounds a lot like femininity and that's a form of gender appropriation. And again, it's not to say that everyone's like, obviously these things overlap. But to work, this has to be recognizably something that kind of on average, boys and men are going to resonate with. It's like, yeah, this is my lived experience. This is what it's like to be in my body. This is what it's like, like to be me. But I do think that building it around fatherhood is huge. I think that acknowledging and embracing that it's good to maybe have a bit more appetite for risk even. And this is a much more difficult area recognizing that men have a higher sex drive than women. Right. Driven sexuality is the technical term. But like men are just like, sex is a bigger deal for men. Right. In terms of like, I misphrase that, Not a bigger deal in some ways a bigger deal for women for the evolutionary reasons you talk about. But. But men are more driven by sex, more of their behavior, etc. Is that a good or bad thing? Answer yes, it is a good and a Bad thing, depending on how it's expressed and so on. But finding ways to say that actually the desire of men for women, the sexual desire of men for women is a good thing, not a bad thing. And then helping boys and men to express that appropriately is incredibly important. So one of the things that I have tried to raise my sons to be like is to be courageous enough to ask a girl out, gracious enough to accept no for an answer, and then responsible enough to make sure that either way she gets home safely. And to me, that's a world that we want all of our men and boys to be in, I think, which is absolute equality between men and women and total respect for the kind of autonomy and opportunities of each, but a willingness to take a risk. And one of the things I've noticed is that there isn't any good language for this. I was talking to someone about this the other day and we ended up talking about courtship and chivalry and shipwreck dances.

[B]

I literally. Because I know where you're going with this dance and disaster.

[C]

What's the new language for this? Because you end up sounding like a 17th century French knight.

[B]

Tell people what you mean about dance and disaster. I found this really well.

[C]

There's this great line. This is from 19, 1930. The headmaster of Stowe School, which is a boys school in England. He said that his goal was to create men who would be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck. And I was asked to update that recently. I was like, I don't know. Cool, a rave, but useful in an earth. I don't know. Actually, you know what he means. That stands the test of time. Acceptable at a dance. Okay. So socialized in a way where understanding the rules of the game, absolute respect for women, etc. Know about courtship. Know. Know when it's appropriate to approach when it's not what's going on there. Right. But just having that skill. Right. Being a gentleman. There you go. Now I sound at least 19th century, not 17th century, etc. But knowing how to conduct yourself. Right. Knowing how to be around women, knowing how to know, et cetera. But then invaluable in a shipwreck. Yeah. When things go south and there's a really dangerous, physically dangerous situation that you are. You are willing to put yourself on the line and if necessary, sacrifice yourself for others. Absolutely. That you will do what needs to be done. I got to tell you, that sounds pretty good to me. And there aren't very many women who I've shared That with who say, that's a terrible thing. When you say to them, do you want guys who are acceptable at a dance? But would it be invaluable in a shipwreck? There aren't very many women that say, no, that sounds terrible. Right? They get it. They understand what that means.

[B]

What's the flip side for women, though? Because I think there's something very telling. I'm not, I, I don't need a woman to be invaluable in the shipwreck. In fact, if I'm completely honest, in that moment, I go to the disposable male hypothesis.

[C]

Absolutely. You want to be the one that's invaluable.

[B]

And that makes me feel good about.

[C]

There's a reason why most of the women survive the time Titanic.

[B]

Give me the percentages. You listen in the book, 19 male and 70 something percent female. And I was like, whoa, I don't

[C]

know the exact numbers, but here's when

[B]

I heard the stat, I was scandalized by the 19.

[C]

I was like, most of the men died.

[B]

Yeah, how did that. But meaning what were the 19% that

[C]

got on the boat?

[B]

Like, there were 30 women that didn't make it.

[C]

Sure, what the hell.

[B]

And so I was.

[C]

But if you watch the movie Titanic, you would think it was a lot more than 19%, by the way. But another example of that is I mentioned this too in the book, and here I learned this from Carol Hooven, who has a book on testosterone. Do you know that book?

[B]

I don't.

[C]

It's called T the Story of the Hormone that Defines and Divides Us or whatever. Anyway, fabulous book about testosterone. Actually, you'd really like it. She actually alerted me to the existence of the Carnegie Civilian Hero Awards.

[B]

Yeah, you talked about that in the book.

[C]

I mean, who's heard of that? So they've been going for nearly 100 years now, and they issue medals every year to people who have risked their own lives, not for their own family or in the course of their job to save the lives of another. So this is people running into a burning building to save someone. This is people jumping into a freezing river to save someone. This is someone who's just like everyday life. Something happens. Do you put yourself on the line? Do you risk your own life to save the lives of others? Almost all men. 95% of those medals go to men. And it's not because they're not trying to find women. They are. It's just because if you're looking for a. There's one kid, a 17 year old, who died in 2021. He dived into a freezing river, saved a mother and her three year old child, but then drowned himself. And many of them do die in the attempt. So they're awarded posthumously. They're all gone dies. And it seems to me that that's something that we should really honor that actually in the breach it is men who run into burning buildings to save strangers. And that's back to the risk taking thing and the kind of the men put themselves on the line thing. That is obviously a tragic thing, but wow, what a wonderful thing. But no one's heard of these awards. They're never held at the White House. There's never a discussion of. And I think partly that's because we're still just a little bit. We have some ambiguity about celebrating the aspects of masculinity that are pro social. And that's a huge problem because it makes a lot of young boys and men fear that society is not on their side, doesn't care about as much, and isn't valorizing them. That creates a vacuum in our culture that I'm afraid irresponsible forces both online and sometimes even at the ballot box can exploit. I think it's an axiom that if there are real problems and responsible people don't address them, them irresponsible people will exploit them. And I also think it's true that the demand for a story about positive masculinity is huge and it will find supply and it will probably find it online. And so if we don't like the people that our boys and men end up listening to and reading when they ask themselves the question, how should I be a man today, Then maybe we should be providing a better answer ourselves.

[B]

Yeah, that's in line with biology because there is a picture that some people will paint for men, which is what you were talking about, where they're listing all these things that sound like femininity. And it's like if you try to hold that up as a thing to be celebrated, you get this sort of nice guy phenomenon where you've got a guy who's trying to be nice, but in reality, like there's some sex drive in there and so that can create some weird conflict. And, and he's hyper feminizing himself, but he's doing it partly, and I don't want to be cynical, but partly because he wants to get laid. Like there's just, there's a real driver for guys like even in myself. And, and, and I will say that I was not like, I wasn't doing it as a way to manipulate women at all, but I really was trying to be what they wanted. So in my early years, I was really bad with women. Really bad with women. I'll. I'll share a very embarrassing story, though. Some people will probably clap, but I was literally in bed with a woman. We're getting naked, the whole nine. Oh, God.

[C]

Keep going.

[B]

And just.

[C]

Just you and me. No one's.

[B]

Yeah, right. No one's watching. It'll be fine.

[C]

It'll be fine.

[B]

And I said, let's not do this if it doesn't mean anything to you. Now, I did not say that because I was truly worried about it. I said it because I thought she was going to be more excited. And then she was like, yeah, let's stop then. And so then I was like, oh, I guess I can't believe that's true. That is a true story. And so that was the end. And because I didn't know how to recover from that, because I was like, wait, I thought this is exactly what was the right move at this point. And to the story that you shared earlier. She did not need me to be a greater ally to women. What she needed was for me to be a man.

[C]

Man. Right.

[B]

And so she just wanted you to

[C]

want her at that moment.

[B]

Correct. And so it's like, you can't imagine how much. How many more years it took me to go, oh, now I get why. That was like, the wrong play. But it was baffling in the moment

[C]

because of that dance. Because of that. Like this, this. The magic of the difference and the kind of the courtship and the differences that there are between men and women. I actually think that the. The failure to acknowledge some of these differences between men and women when it comes to. Especially when it comes to sex and how sex and how our sex drive gets institutionalized expressed. Just the elaborate rituals acceptable at a dance, et cetera, that have been created is for a reason. It is actually to make it work, to make these differences between men and women magic when it comes to that. But we can't just assume that they're just going to go away. And I've been very interested recently how many books are being written by women of very different political persuasions. Erica Bacchioki, Christine Ember, and Louise Perry, for example, which are really kind of coming out from a largely feminist perspective against the sex positivity movement, which they say has essentially been about saying to women, yeah, you need to be like men, and if you're not like men, you're A prudent and that actually. And basically failing to recognize that there are some differences between men and women on this point. And so there's this real movement now and you think you see it playing out in the stats around sex, particularly 20 somethings having less sex today than they were.

[B]

So crazy.

[C]

And I think part of this is just actually a lot of women are like, hold on a second, hold on, hold on. Like we're not like men on average when it comes to sex. Some women are more like men. Men, some men more like women. The distributions overlap. But there's a pretty big difference in the kind of psychology of sex for men and women. There just is. And then how does that work when it's magic? It works really well, but it doesn't work by itself. We have to have elaborate institutions and rules and forms and courtships and et cetera in order to kind of make it work. And in fact, like, what was like, I don't know, 70% of literature is probably based on that. I was really struck recently actually that there's been an increase in the interest of Gen Z women for romantic literature. They're reading more romance and I just found that really interesting.

[B]

Do we know what kind of romance are reading? Like, is it traditional? Pirates, werewolves?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's quite traditional in this kind of sense. And, and again, I find that just. That's sociologically interesting, isn't it? It's like, okay, so what's happening there? And you might, I think it's reasonable to speculate that it might because maybe that's missing a little bit bit in contemporary society. Right? Where's the, where's the romance? Even saying romance makes you sound, you know, that ship sailed. Anyway, I've said chivalry, I've said courtship, I've said. But romance, seriously, that's considered outdated, I think among some people. Doesn't it sound old fashioned? I mean, it's like making love. I remember once being teased by a colleague of mine when I had used the phrase making love love. And she said like, you mean having sex? And I was like, you're so old, you're so old making love. Who makes love? Like, what are you talking about? Do you mean having sex? And that was a real moment for me. I thought, no, I know, I actually mean making love. But that sounds like a really semantic difference. But actually, of course we get it right? It is making love and it can sometimes be having sex. Right? And it's in the kind of the two. And how that, how, how does having sex Become making love and when and how. And maybe this was partly what you were getting at, your story, which I'm grateful for you sharing, because I think a lot of men will probably resonate with that story. Like, I'm trying to do the right thing, and the result is I don't get laid. And so I think we. We're in danger of just missing the fact that these. These things just don't happen by themselves. Right. You're. You've been emphasizing throughout this conversation of our biological hard drives or whatever kind of language you want to use. I think that there's a real danger. We miss that. But I think it's incredibly important that the interaction between biology and culture is where the really interesting work is. It's how do cultures interact with our biology in ways that make for flourishing lives for everybody, men and women? What kind of culture do we need that allows us all to flourish, even in a world where there are these kind of differences? And that's a question that's probably as old as humanity itself, but it's one that we have to ask differently all the time, and we're having to ask it differently again. So to that extent, there's nothing new here. We're just having to ask the question again, which is, okay, what does it mean? And now we're having to ask in a world where, as we've discussed, huge economic changes in power relationships between men and women, okay, so what do all these things mean now? And we have to come up with better answers than the ones who come up with, but even before that, we have to agree that there's a question. And right now I'm not sure that everyone agrees that there's even a question which is to be answered.

[B]

Yeah, I think one of the most important things to get to that, that we have to cover is what is good. Both of us have made assumptions throughout this about, oh, we should do that, we ought to do that, whatever. But that's predicated on an assumption of what. What the desired outcome is. And this is something that I find most people never take the time to pull into their conscious mind. So if you had to describe the thing that we're striving towards at the highest level, just to orient to what I'm asking at the highest level, I think we ought, and I use that as a moral statement. We ought to always be steering towards what creates the most human flourishing and reduces human suffering.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Now, as we shrink down to this topic of the relationship between the genders, what ought we be striving towards what is good?

[C]

Well, I think that. I think you've framed it exactly correctly, which is around human flourishing. But then the question is like, well, what does that look like for particular people? And here I'm going to draw on some of my earlier intellectual underpinnings, which is John Stuart Mill's liberalism and Mill's biography philosopher. And Mill's view about flourishing is that it has to be, back to your point about going for it, autonomous. So it has to be to some extent driven, Right? It has to be about individuality, not individualism.

[B]

Ooh, define the difference.

[C]

Well, individualism is. I'm just all about me, right? And so my worldview just says that I'm going to be essentially selfish. Would be a kind of reasonable way to think about it. Or a kind of world where you just think it's every man for himself. Himself. Hobbes. War of all against all. Individuality is a description of the fact that everybody is different and needs different things to flourish. They're biologically different, they're culturally different, they're just made differently. Their genes are different, their interests are different, their tastes are different, their preferences are different. And Mill's insistence on individuality is what drove him to being kind of a full liberal. And by the way, I would argue that probably the most important 19th century feminist, certainly in the UK day, but that individuality, that being who I am and growing, this sense of growth is intrinsic to liberalism, properly understood, but also to lots of theologies, by the way. I mean, I think a lot of good theologies are all about growth. In that case, it would be growing towards God. In Mill's case, it would be just growing to being the better version of yourself. And some of this sounds schlocky, right? I'm aware of that. Be the best person you can be, et cetera. But actually it is just this sense of it's about development and it's about. About growth and it's about reaching. It's very organic. That means that we have to have a real understanding of our own nature. And that includes our bodies, our biology and our brains and our skills and our culture and our upbringing and our relationships like who I am in the world. Am I an animal? Yes, absolutely right. Am I sitting here, I need to pee as it happens, right? So I'm being reminded right now that I'm an animal because I need to pee. Okay, so like the fact that my bladder is telling me you need to pe. Pee. Good reminder that I'm an animal, right? But I'm also a In a, in a culture where I'm just not going to get out and pee here, right. I'm going to go to a restroom. I've been taught by culture. You're welcome. So I'm going to go kind of somewhere else about, it's about the, the culture will tell me in another culture, by the way, I'll just go and pee over there. Right. So there's culture. But then by the way, there's also me, Richard, and I'm. And I might decide I'm not going to pee now because I'm trying to hold it for some reason extend my. Whatever reason, right. And so the triangle of biology, culture and individual is where flourishing occurs. And we want to get to a society where as much as possible the individual within a culture has the opportunity to flourish. But you don't have to eradicate biology and you don't have to leap past culture. So some people would say blank slate, biology doesn't matter. Other people would say culture is the problem, let's erase it it all, let's just have a revolution. Those would be the kind of the French revolutionaries or whoever it is, et cetera, in order for the individual to flourish. And I actually think that the real sweet spot is in recognizing that all three of those matter.

[B]

Yeah, that seems profoundly true. So now the question becomes the one of those. The biology takes care of itself. At least for now. Gene editing is going to be a thing. But that's beyond the scope of this conversation. The individual is the part I most want to talk about, but society is the hammer that scares me. So one of the things I want

[C]

to know, are you quite libertarian? Would that be a fair way?

[B]

No, actually I thought I. On paper I feel like I should be a libertarian, but I'm so enmeshed in reality that I'm like dude, if you don't have some guideposts, if you don't have people nudging each other in the right direction, it just, you're not going to scale. Like that probably works when we're, you know, in hunter gatherer bands of 100 to 150. But I consider modern society to be a miracle that I want to continue to be a part of. And so very much I'm, I am all for government, well manicured. The problem is that I think government, like anything can go pathological. And so the way that I see it is everything is on a scale and you government will be the easiest one to talk about. So you have the left and the right, the left can become pathological and the right can become pathological and both sides go towards tyranny. And so our job as people that are just historically aware and, and understand that history is driven biology in my estimation. And so it's like, okay, understand thyselves as a species, understand thy structure and know that, oh, you can slam to this side if you haven't read Mao, the Untold Story. Like, if you want a real picture of how the left goes so pathological that 100 plus million people die. Terrifying. And then obviously the right and the way that it goes wrong is so very well documented thanks to Hitler and a bunch of other psychopaths. And so it's like we understand that there is pathology, but if we can understand that the pathologies are on both sides. And so now, now we have to find it isn't even just the middle. What you're trying to find, in my estimation, is the tension between two ideologies. I think there is a biological reason that we have a left and a right. And I think that biological reason is that for a society to scale the way that we do, and yuval know Harari's idea of we're the only animal that can cooperate flexibly at this scale. Okay, so how is it that we do that? I think we do that, that evolution goes. You need two things, things. One is compassion. People can't be left to just die. Like, you have to look out for the group, otherwise you're not going to have any social cohesion. So nature has rewarded the living daylights out of us for being willing to jump into a freezing river to save somebody that we don't even know. Like, that's beautiful. When I hear that story, I move. And all of that biology that makes me respond so powerfully to the story that makes that guy jump into the river. It's amazing and it's super important. But hey, there's pathology on that side, which is the group is the only thing that matters. And you decimate the individual individual. So then you have to have on the other side the people that go, whoa, whoa, whoa, free rider problem. You can't just let the group override the individual. The individual is the thing that we need to care about. It's about personal responsibility. And my thing is there's pathology on that side. So now what you need is that dynamic tension between the two. This is why my marriage is strong, because my wife and I came into this and I said, hey, I think differently than you, you think differently than me, but the way you think is worthy and thank God you think differently than me and the way I think is worthy and thank God I think differently than you. So what I'm never going to do is say, oh, you're an idiot. The way that you think is dumb.

[C]

You have to be like me.

[B]

Yeah. I'm going to say, hey, you want the dynamic.

[C]

Your marriage is an example of a liberal pluralist society in the sense of recognizing that difference. I like the way you framed it and the way I think about this now is that both you get the statist left and the statist right, to use a renowned direct. The goal is seize the state and enforce our view of the good and turns out to be bad. But that's our view. We're going to have society conform to our view of the good or the human nature or whatever. And then there's the stereotypically kind of anarchic or libertarian view, which is like, get everybody out of the way. No one judges anybody else. As long as I don't harm somebody else, I can do whatever the hell I want. But what's really, really important is culture. So in between the coercive power of the state and the kind of quotes atomized individual is culture, the interaction. What's the phrase from? There's this beautiful book, if you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich? By Jerry Cohen. It's a fantastic book. And in there he says cultures are created in the thick of everyday life. And I love that phrase because that died into the thick of everyday life, life in the interaction, in the relationships, in the institutions we build, et cetera, which might then end up with legal force, et cetera. But culture is what moderates expresses, incentivizes rewards certain kinds of behavior, such that if cultures are healthy, you don't need as much law. It's when cultures are failing that you need stronger states. But it's not because the individuals are doing their own thing. So, so these Carnegie hero, the guy going into the river, right? He gets this civilian hero award. The government doesn't do anything. His parents don't get a tax break. No one pays him to jump in the river, right? There's no public policy for jumping into a freezing river to save somebody, but nor would someone do that in a society that's truly just about the individual. Why would you save a stranger? And the answer is partly biology, but that's the result of culture. And culture and biology co evolve in such a way that that kind of behavior is rewarded and, and rewarding. And so both sides in these debates not least when you have a culture war, are actually in some ways disrespectful of culture. Because what they're not doing is saying, let's allow our culture to develop. Because cultures are really good at developing to change. And it has to develop now to accommodate these differences between men and women. This is where I'm going to end, which is actually, it's culture that's going to save us. It's culture that's going to help men and women to succeed. But the culture worry is they're not interested. They don't trust culture. They just want to take the culture and force it on somebody else. They're not fighting over culture in that sense. They're fighting for culture. And that's exactly their own kind of culture war.

[B]

Richard, this has been amazing. Where can people find you?

[C]

I have a substack of boys and men, and so I'd love people to subscribe to that newsletter.

[B]

Please do, everybody. And speaking of subscribing, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to this channel. And until next time, my friends, friends be legendary. Take care. Peace.