← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
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B
If you want to put a human being in hell, rob them of meaning and purpose and don't let them kill themselves.
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C
The political class as a whole has fundamentally failed to recognize the real problems of boys and men. There's lots of discussion of AI girlfriends, not much discussion of AI boyfriends, which I think is pretty good evidence that there are differences between men and women. The MTV show 16 and Pregnant had a huge impact on teen pregnancy rates, much more than any recognizable government policy.
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B
I want to start with just a simple question. Men are struggling right now. What has the US Done to set men up for failure?
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C
Right. The US is actually, by paying not enough attention to what's happening to working class men, especially in terms of their employment, by neglecting rising issues of men's health, basically turning a blind eye to the way men have fallen behind in higher education. So I guess what I would say is the way you frame the question is more like a sin of commission. Rate is more a kind of deliberate thing. And I think it's much more an accumulated set of sins of omission. I think it's the neglect and the failure to address what were obvious and growing and real problems facing boys and men that has allowed them to deepen and fester in many cases. Now, it's still a sin. The sin of omission is a sin as well as a sin of commission. But it's important to the way I think about this not to immediately start with a sort of finger pointing. Right. Or to assume that it was somehow kind of deliberate. I think it was more, you know, so I think it's more an act of neglect than. Or of kind of malice, if I could put it that way.
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B
Interesting. So this is something that drives my team here at Impact Theory crazy, but I'm a big believer that you point fingers. You need to point fingers not with malice, but so that you can understand before we get to the the people and what kind of sin this is, I would love to get into the weeds of. So you gave some high level stuff of the omissions, but what are the problems? Help set the table for where men are today.
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C
The boys and men have just fallen way behind in education. Every stage from pre K to post grad, you see big gender gaps. And in every single case, it's with boys and men behind. So in the average school district in the U.S. now, the boys are almost a grade level behind in English and literacy. If you take the top 10% of high school students, measured by GPA, 2/3 are girls, 1/3 are boys. Among the 10% of high school students who do the worst, 2/3 are boys, a third are girls. That plays out in college. College campuses are 60, 40 female male now. And in fact, there's a big agenda gap on college campuses today than there was in the early 70s in 1972 when we passed Title 9 to help women into college. Since then, the gap's closed and then reopened. And so the specific data point is that women are about 16 percentage points more likely now to get a college degree than men, Whereas in the 70s it was 13% more likely that men would get a college degree than women. So we've reversed the old gender gap and then widened it. And so what we see is a growing gap in the share of men and women who are kind of college graduates. So educationally we just see huge drop. And it's not just in relative terms. Since 2010, college enrollments dropped by about 1.2 million. And that's for all kinds of reasons, good and bad, but of that drop, a million is men. Of the 1.2 million drop, a million of it's men. Whoa. It's much wider. HBCUs. There are actually, this is some work we haven't published yet, but there are actually fewer black men going to HBCU colleges, historically black colleges today, than there were in 1976. Whoa. And there are as many non black students going to historically black colleges, non black students, than there are as many as there are black men. And so when you went to look at it by race, it gets kind of worse. And then just kind of briefly on a couple of other areas. One is that employment. We've just seen male wages stagnating in the middle of the distribution at the bottom a little bit better in recent years. Actually, we've seen some good wage growth at the bottom of the distribution just in the last few years. But over the last few decades, seriously Stagnating wages for men. And then in family life, we've just seen an absolute transformation in family life. I'm sure we'll get to this. But for most people who don't have a four year college degree, the norm is now for children to be born outside marriage. Jesus. So that's just. And that's a transformation. Right. So we only have to go back two or three decades when that wasn't the case. But it's now more usual for a kid to be born outside marriage than inside marriage, unless they have a mum with a four year college degree. Now, among those with four year college degrees, it's only 10% of kids born outside marriage, but it's the majority of those outside. Much higher for black kids. Of course, when you think about race and so across these different dimensions, what you're seeing, and we can get into some of the things that maybe lie behind these, these are the data points that I sometimes see as like the, it's the eruption of the volcano or it's the tremor of the ground, but there's something happening beneath that. There are some tectonic plates shifting, which I think are more cultural and I'm pretty sure we're going to get into that. But the data points that kind of pop to the surface are just cratering. Educational achievements, certainly relative to women, really, really low wages. I should have added declining employment as well. So lower labor market participation, men less likely to work than their fathers, and then just this dramatic sh in family life which has left a lot of men uncertain about what their role is in the family in 2024.
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B
Yeah, that, that I think is going to be a big part of this story. So when you think about the first domino, because I think you're right, there's culture, there's policy. If I think from a policy perspective, do you think that Title nine, with obviously wonderful intentions, was the lead domino that began the rise of women and the unintended consequences became the downfall of men? Or is it something else?
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C
So I think what Title 9 has done has mostly been good in terms of just trying to raise the educational aspirations, expectations and opportunities for girls and women. I think that's, it's important to kind of recognize that that was, that was part of the mission of the women's movement. And the same, the same with the rise of women's economic independence. The way I think about this is that not enough attention was paid to a, well, what if the line keeps going? What happens if the gender gap flips? And will we update our view of the world quickly enough when that happens. And in education, I think what's happened is that the view about what gender equality looks like on college campuses now has not updated with the data. Now it's interesting that actually Title IX itself doesn't specify women. And so you're now seeing more and more sex discrimination claims under Title IX being brought on behalf of men in college campuses and with some success. So Title IX is actually now becoming a bit of a double edged sword if you're a women's rights campaigner. But I'd say the kind of deeper point here is that there has been a failure to recognize that as we've seen kind of women rise in education and we've seen a massive decline in the share of male teachers and men falling behind, we need to change our approach. We need to start worrying more about the men. We need to start thinking about men as the ones who need more help. And unfortunately for a generation who are kind of raised in the world where all the attention needed to go to women and girls, it's incredibly hard to update your priors. I think this is a big theme that might underpin a lot of what we're going to talk about, Tom, which is that just it's very hard to update your view of the world when the data changes, especially if it changes quickly. And just think there's a lot of people who are, who are stuck in their view about what gender equality looks like and they're stuck in the 80s or the 70s or 90s or whatever and they just haven't updated it for what the real world looks like in 2024. And that applies to Title 9.
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B
Yeah, that's a note I've taken here. And Mark twice now is we're getting the data points, but we're not. We're either not responding or the narrative that we're talking about with the data points to your point, isn't updating in a way that makes any sense. So getting to the underlying drivers, my base assumptions are that when you try to top down manipulate a system through incentives, you will get second and third order consequences that are very surprising and often horrific. And we are now engaging in social engineering in the same way that we've engaged in financial engineering. And I think I can give you a very compelling argument on the financial side that we have a moral obligation not to manipulate the currency and to at a minimum have a non inflatable currency. I think there's a moral argument to be made there. What is your argument on cultural manipulation? Should we be trying to say, hey, we need more women in education, in stem, in firefighting, in fighter jet pilots. We need more men in heal, which you'll know the acronym better than I, but education, nursing, things like that, where traditionally you won't find men. Do we actually need to intervene or should we leave it alone?
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C
Oh, that's a great question that we could spend, we could spend a lot of time on. And the way I think about this is ideal world, we shouldn't need to intervene. We should be confident that the patterns that we see emerging are the result of people having pretty unconstrained choices and that they're revealing their preferences in a way that is consistent with their own ideals and their own values and their own skills. So the question then, so I think the default should be non intervention. So I think we'll probably share that default. The question then is, okay, where are there circumstances where you would want to intervene? Socially engineered, to use that term. And I think that the bar for that should be when you've got pretty strong evidence that there are some artificial barriers here to people. So you would worry if you see, for example, only 5% of engineers are women, you worry about that. You might not necessarily conclude that's a problem, but you might conclude it is a problem. You might say it matters that engineering has more diversity. Or you might not. Or you might say, well, hold on, we suspect that we're leaving some talent on the table here. We suspect there are actually more women who would be good engineers than is being represented by that 5%. So let's go find out. And I'm very struck by a couple of pieces of evidence here. One is that in this is the so called STEM paradox, which you may have heard of, David Geary and others have done this work where you actually find that in countries that have done the most in terms of gender equality, the Scandinavian countries, you start to see a slight decline in the share of women going into stem. And it's a paradox because it's saying, well, hold on, you'd expect actually that as you become more and more gender equal, that the share of women going to STEM would just increase. But it looks like it just kind of levels off and even drops a bit. And their interpretation of it is that that probably just means that you're now reflecting actual levels of interest. Right? You've reached a point where you can feel confident that actually if women in Sweden are choosing not to go into engineering, it's not because they're being discriminated against or being discouraged from becoming engineers, it's because they don't want to be engineers. And so that's a point at which you can kind of chill a little bit, perhaps, and not say everything has to be 50, 50. And so I think it's partly an empirical question, which is like you look at a pattern and you look at the evidence for it and you say, A, does that pattern look like it might just be emerging as a result of natural choices? And B, do we care? And the other piece of evidence is some work by some psychologist, James Rounds, and the lead author is Rong Su, where they actually looked at personality differences between men and women and interests, especially on the people versus things dimension, which people talk a lot about. On average, men are a bit more into things, women are a bit more into people, and that's true. But of course, it's an average and the distributions overlap. So they said, look, imagine a world where that was driving your choice to either be an engineer or a nurse. What percentage of engineers would be women and what percentage of nurses would be men? And it was about 30%, 25, 25% to 30%. So if you assume that that personality distribution is accurately capturing the preferences of men and women for people and things, and that nursing and engineering are accurate proxies for people and things, then actually you should start to chill about 25%, 30% men in nursing and 25%, 30% women in engineering. But you shouldn't chill at 5% and you shouldn't insist on 50%. And of course, that's a very nuanced position to take. Most people would say it's either 50% or there's something wrong or, yeah, 5%'s fine. Women's brains don't work that way, which is what I think the men's rights people make the mistake of doing. So on the one hand, you get people who overstate the role of biology and natural differences between men and women in explaining these differences and others who understate it. So to circle all the way back, I actually think that the case for intervention has to meet a couple of criteria. And this is helpful. I'm thinking out loud here, but is that one, you should feel like there's something there that suggests there's some artificiality, something getting in the way of personal preferences. And then secondly, it's an area that we care about. So we might care about nursing, we might care about engineering, but we might not care about deep sea fishing, which is almost all men. And we might decide as a society the fact that deep sea fishing Like Offalaska, these kind of long trips. Or my other favorite example is smoke jumping. Do you know what smoke jumpers are?
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B
I do.
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C
They're people who jump out of perfectly serviceable airplanes into a raging inferno.
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B
And to give people an idea, David Goggins is a smokejumper. So that's the kind of. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to talk about somebody who financially absolutely does not need to do that and yet, does it? It tells you a lot about the type of person that's drawn to that.
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C
Yeah, it just turned and it's basically almost all men. There's a few women. And it turns out that if you have an occupation that asks you to jump out of an airplane into an inferno, you just select on certain characteristics which are almost entirely male. Now it's hard to get good numbers on it, but let's say 2% of smoke jumpers are women. Right. So you can be a smokejumper if you're a woman. There's nothing stopping you. And know they get encouraged if they do it. But as a society, how much do we care about the fact that most of our smoke jumpers are men? I would suggest we don't care very much. All we care about is that they go and put the fire out and God bless them and we should honor their courage. But I don't think that is a societal. There isn't a social welfare issue at stake there and gender balance. But if you could, things like politics in Stem, you know, tech. Interested in your views on tech? Like I think it's, it does matter to have some representation for social reasons. And so that's the second test. Like do we care?
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B
Yeah, do we care? So I will say that I think you put your finger on the right thing, which is what we should care about is whether there are barriers to entry. But I think, and this is a problem I see in companies, this is a problem I see in government. You need to state in a very simple sentence, this is the barrier to entry. Name it. Don't, don't be vague. Don't say there are barriers to entry. This is the barrier to entry.
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C
It's.
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Tech is an all boys club. Women are more drawn to people and not things cool. List them out. And then it becomes a question of, okay, well how do we remove those barriers to entry? So now if people want to go in, they can. What I have a problem with is I think that incentives come from the right place. I'll just assume incentives come from the right place. I won't even get into the nuttiness of people that are drawn to politics. I will just assume that people have good intentions. But the second and third order consequences of incentivizing something I think is where you get derangements. I don't want to turn this into an episode about financial stuff, but you need only look at the financial markets to understand how massively you can derange them by trying to meddle with them in the hopes of stopping there being a big crash and in the hopes of helping there only ever being soft landings and avoiding bad things. I get it, but you completely. The system that we have financially is to steal from everyone to protect wealthy people from ever experiencing a crash. That's what's happened to the financial system. And I'm speaking as one of the wealthy people and I'm just telling you it's a terrible system. So now I think you will run into those same second and third order consequences. But at a minimum, you need to name the barrier, not insist on outcomes, which is how we're steering now, and then read the data. So if we see data points that say, hey, this is working for women, that's super helpful. But oh, by the way, this is devastating to men. It's like, okay, now we have to figure out what we're going to do in the face of that. What if you had to put name to it? What are. And I'll let you pick whatever you think is the most obvious, the least controversial. But what are the barriers to entry for women that we were trying to overcome and what policies actually overcame them?
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C
Yeah, so in the case of women the question is probably a little bit easier than it will be maybe if we turn to men going the other way. Because for long periods of human history, of course, women weren't allowed to do some of these jobs. So the barrier to entry into certain professions was you weren't permitted to do so. Right. And so women couldn't go to medical school until the second half of the 20th century. Right. So this is why the women's rights movement kind of makes sense as a phrase and the men's rights movement doesn't, because women did actually lack rights. They couldn't get a credit card without their husband's permission until 1974. 4.
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B
Still bananas.
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C
And you see that and it's really interesting. I was talking to a friend recently and like her mom was the kind of first chemistry professor at a kind of college. And she, my friend is a dean of a school at a university. And no one thinks twice about the fact that 50% of professors are women now increasing, like getting towards 50% deans and presidents of colleges, no one thinks anything of that. But a generation ago it was hard for women and they actually faced legal. So in some case they were literally rules, laws, laws and or institutional laws preventing them. The second barrier was that because those professions take any you want, but science, etc. Because they were so male and had been so male, they had a male culture now. What does that mean now? Very hard to measure, but is some pretty clear evidence that until you get to about 30% representation and both ways, by the way, an occupation will tend to have a culture that is a bit more male and a bit more female in communication style, in the level of competitiveness, et cetera. And so being the one woman in a engineering class of 100, that was hard, just as it's hard to be the one man in a education school now. So I think there was. The second barrier was just that there were these cultural. And there was some stigma and resistance. I actually think those have both been largely addressed. So then the third question is, are there barriers for women, say in tech or in some consulting or law, et cetera, which I would say now they're less about them as women and more about the fact that women have very different patterns of caring and working, especially in their 30s. And there I think it's less about the fact they're women, but they are disproportionately affected as women because they still do most of the early years childcare. And so that is preventing a lot of women rising up career ladders because those career Ladders were designed for people who didn't have caring responsibilities. Again, that's no one's fault. It's not some plot. It's not a plot to exclude women at this point. And it's not active discrimination. Right. The evidence that women are discriminated against in any of those spaces is now zero. So we're not talking about a discrimination problem anymore, and we're not talking about a rule problem now. We're talking about either a cultural problem or the inadvertent consequence of career ladders that are just designed for people who don't have kids, basically, or who don't have to worry about their kids. And so that's now the new battleground, I think. But as I say, I'm very struck by the fact that's true of single sex parents as well. So that's not about women anymore. That's just about having caring responsibilities getting in the way of your career uplift. And that's a different, that's a kind of different question. So that would be my sort of threefold attempt to. This is kind of history really of the barriers that kind of women have faced and a history of progress that we've made over the last 50 years, extraordinary progress on getting women into those professions, like half the doctors, half the lawyers, half the scientists are now women. That's an incredible achievement in a very short, short period of time.
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B
Okay, so it's interesting, a lot of this comes down to what are the goals you're trying to achieve when I hear you talk. And as somebody who is married to a very successful female entrepreneur who does not have kids, we certainly don't have a traditional family structure yet when I step back and I look at everything that's happening at a societal level, birth rates dropping, which not to over dramatize, but literally the human civilization cannot move forward if we don't continue having kids. And if you look back over different empires that have crumbled, it's almost always tied to a radical decrease in population, either because of birth rate, famine, pandemic, whatever the case may be. But when you have a precipitous drop in birth rate, you are really in trouble. And when I look at what's happening right now, this is a tale of second and third order consequences. So we give, rightly so we pursue women being able to control their own reproduction. I love that the most. As somebody who leveraged birth control very effectively to create the life that I want, I'm not mad about it. But at the same time, you now have this Breakdown in what is the male role? And I think that that's the thing that lurks behind the scenes in terms of what's going wrong for men. You remove these barriers for women, Amazing. They're able to control their reproduction. Amazing. They go into the workforce to your point about getting access to all that talent, not wanting to leave anything on the sidelines. Amazing. However, it's broken the. The way that. The. The way that religion and the family transmitted a set of values that said, this is everybody's role. This is what you do, and this is how you please God. And I'm not religious, but I see the value and the transmission of that meme. And so everybody understands what their role is. There are some frustrations, obviously. Um, but as that narrative breaks down, because when it. To a woman, it's like there's nothing you can do. God has touched you with this blessing of being able to create a child. To have children is to honor God. And what. What a magical role that you play, man. You are here to protect your family, to provide for your family, and that is how you honor God. Okay, cool. Like, everybody knows what they're supposed to do. Now all of a sudden, you make progress and religion starts to diminish in certainly Western culture in terms of people following those precepts in order to live the good life. So people are not, as many people are living in accordance with the teachings of the religions. You begin to have a breakdown of what is my role? And so I will put the question to you this way. Given the second and third order consequences of that breakdown, is it actually progress to try to eliminate all these barriers to entry and make sure that women and men have maximum flexibility. Is that actually advantageous?
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C
Well, just a data point that struck me recently is that actually men are now more likely than women to say that getting married and having kids is important to them. Yup.
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B
I am not surprised by that.
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C
It's a reversal. It speaks, I think, to this sense of self and hopelessness. I want to do two things in response. One is just to know how you framed this, which is you talked about the rise of women in two important ways. One in terms of control of fertility, and the second in terms of control of economic destiny because of the rise of economic power for women. And you said, amazing, amazing, amazing. And then you said, however, what does that mean about the change in roles? What does it mean for the roles of men, et cetera? And the amazing, however, move that you just made? There is what's been lacking and that there's A real resistance to the idea that you can have changes in society that are on net amazing, but that still have second or third order consequences, which can be challenging, difficult, and that it's the ultimate cultural naivety to think that massive social and economic changes don't come, that you don't break some glass along the way and you have to deal with the negative consequences of even overall positive social changes. There's a kind of blindness to that, which is a real problem. And in this case, I think you're right that what's happened is that the sense of what the roles were, that's just been absolutely transformed incredibly quickly. The more I've thought about this, the deeper I think this transformation really goes. Since the 60s and the 70s, so since the changes in ability to control fertility you've mentioned and the economic rise of women. So just to put a point, it's like 40% of women today in the US earn more than the average man. So that's not 50%, it's not full equality, but that compares to 13% of women in 1979. And so just since 1979, the chances of a woman earning more than the average man almost quadrupled, has tripled. And it's gone from being quite unusual to being pretty normal. And the result of that has been, I think, to just completely upend the traditional scripts. The scripts that were provided, sure, by religion, but I think more importantly in this case by kind of family roles. So my dad, like, he knew his role. He was all kinds of things, but he knew his basic core role was economic provider. That was his core role. And my mom knew her core role, which was to raise the kids and be the main person on the domestic front. She also worked. They had an incredibly equal relationship, but it was an equal relationship based on almost unquestioned roles. Right. As you said, they knew their role. I think what's happened is that we've expanded the script for women. We've said, let's tear up this old script of wife and mother and replace it with the new script of you can be whatever you want to be. Right. The sky's the limit. Massive empowerment, a hugely positive message of empowerment. You go girl, et cetera. And that has just, I think, been wonderful to watch. And so what we've said to girls and women effectively is like, you're not trapped by the old script that your moms or grandmothers had. You can be anything thing. We've replaced the old female script with a new script about empowerment and independence. We've replaced, we've torn up the old male script, protector, provider, breadwinner, and we've replaced it with absolutely nothing. There is no new script, there is no new role. And I think we're in this really difficult transition phase now. And what I would say is that there's a real difficult balance now because a lot of people are harkening back to the era when we knew our role, we knew our place, when things were clearer, when we had institutions telling us what to do. And the hankering for that is real and in many cases noble. But it is ill. I think it's ill fated. Turning the clock back is not generally very successful. So I think by contrast we should be going forward. We need to keep going and we need to adjust our views about the role of men in accordance with the rise of women rather than thinking that for men to rise, we need to kind of somehow turn back the clock on women. That is, in my view, not effective, but also immoral. So we are where we are and right now we're in a really difficult moment. Right? The average 27 year old guy has much less of a clue about what he's supposed to be doing. He has a pretty good clue about what he's not supposed to do. Interestingly now we have a long, we do have a long list of don'ts for young men, but he has very little sense about what, as a man, he's supposed to do. And that's created a huge vacuum in our culture and it's been filled in some unfortunate ways in many, many quarters because there's a massive, there's a massive cultural question hanging over the role of men which we're not responsibly answering.
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B
Okay, so this idea of moving forward I think is really important. I'd love to get clarity from you about what a positive vision of masculinity looks like. One thing at a high level, I want to see, and as an entrepreneur, this is how I engage with this debate, which I want to see men and women compete all out on a fair playing field. And right now there's a sense of like, men should not be pushing as hard, don't follow those natural instincts for competition or for really responding to gamification, which I think is a big part of why more men play video games. Man, I just, I hyper respond to gamification in a way that my wife just does not. And I have a feeling that that is, that will carry out across the broad population. One, how do you feel about just like, all right, boys and girls, go at it in A fair fight, but go at it full bore. Every individual, regardless of male or female, you should be trying to win your ideal job. And if that isn't part of the path forward of defining masculinity in a positive sense, what is?
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A
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- [33:33]
C
Yeah, so the way I think about it is. Well, there's so many things I could say here. The first thing is to not end up sort of shrinking ourselves. I think there's been this dangerous trend in some quarters to say that somehow for women to rise and to expand, men need to fall or to contract, that men need to become less in order for women to become more. Less sure of themselves, less assertive, less competitive, less physical, whatever. Just be less of you. I think that's one of the problems with some of the tropes we see around toxic masculinity and mansplaining and so on. Which is not to say there isn't some substance there, but the message that too many men are getting is could you just be less you? Could you be less male? And instead I think what we need to be doing is kind of creating a situation where we're in shared environments. And if there is ways in which on average kind of men act in a particular way as opposed to girls or women, that's okay. It's just as okay. And one example that you just alluded to is the men and boys are on average a bit more competitive. And they respond. This is why the gamification thing's important. They respond a little bit better to competition and they're more seeking that kind of competition. Well, and girls and women are a little bit less. So the evidence that is really clear, men and boys are also quite a bit more risk taking on average than women. Is one good or is one bad? No, is the answer. But what we don't want is to lose some of that magic, some of that magical difference by somehow saying there's something wrong with attribute A or B, risk taking or competition because it's associated with men. What we need to do is to say those are not the only attributes that matter. And those shouldn't run the whole economy. So I'll give you two examples. One is from business, which is, we may have talked about this before, but there's some evidence that companies that are run by women, with CEO and coo, cfo, female, they're a little bit less profitable, but they're also less likely to go under. Those that are run by men are on average a bit more profitable, but they're also a bit more likely to go under. So I know it's a little bit riskier now. So you could conclude from that, you could say, oh, we shouldn't have women in leadership because their companies are just boring. We don't get the client, same entrepreneurship, we don't get the risk taking. Sure, it'll be fine, but the profits will never be that great. So you could say we shouldn't have women in the boardroom for that reason. Or you could say, look, these guys are just recklessly acting out and doing boyhood fantasies and they're crushing all our companies. Yes, sure, they're more profitable when they were, but look, they have so many companies. Or you could say, maybe we need a bit of both. Maybe that's a reason why you need a mix in a boardroom. Right. And here again, I'm, I need to say that the distributions overlap. The other example, I was in school recently and this female choral teacher said she needed the boys as a middle school, she needed the boys to sing soprano. And none of the boys wanted to do that. They're very self conscious. They're going through puberty and they didn't want to do that. And the girls were around as well. And so anyway, so she did two things. She kicked the girls out and just said, okay, I'm just going to work with the boys. And then what she said was, we're going to have a competition to see who can sing the highest. And I'm going to give a prize to the boy that can sing the highest immediately. They're all doing it. So I love that story, because what's that saying is here's a teacher that's recognizing sometimes there's a space for single sex. But also, okay, so boys are more competitive. Let's use that instinct for being more competitive for a positive end. Rather than saying it's bad to be competitive, let's say, okay, boys are more competitive. How do we channel that to good social ends? And that was a long, kind of slightly rambling answer, but there's something there about just not apologizing for those differences and finding Ways to channel that energy and those differences in ways that kind of benefit all of us rather than pathologizing either. So a patriarchy might be a society where more typically feminine traits are seen as lesser than, and a matriarchy would be where it was the other way around. And we don't want either of those things. We really don't want a patriarchy or a matriarchy. We want a society that genuinely honors the differences. And I talked about risk and courage. We talked about smokejumpers. Awesome. But that we have people that are willing to do that and the fact that they're almost all men. Amazing. And we shouldn't have any apology about saying that.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, totally agree. So when you were talking about the business corporations run by women are going to be less profitable but more stable, and then the flip for ones run by men. And then you said what we want is a little bit of both. Or maybe what we want, I think, is what you said, we want a little bit of both. How do we decide? Because as somebody who builds companies, invest in companies, I would say I literally do not care if the person running the company is male or female. I care very much about the metrics that we agreed that we are going to hit and who is more capable of hitting those metrics. So I, I don't care if Every single Fortune 500 company is run by a man. I don't care if every Fortune 500 company is run by a woman. What I care about is whether those people were allowed to compete in a relatively unbridled fashion. I'm not a no government guy, so I do believe in, in sensible regulation. So with. Within sensible regulation, I would want them to really be able to go in and compete. Would you be uncomfortable in a world where the men and women were allowed to compete sensibly with an even starting point of education? I'm talking when they're five years old. But that all Fortune 500 companies in the end are run by men. Would that bother you?
- [39:30]
C
It would bother me for the reasons that we talked about earlier, which is let's assume that there's a certain set of attributes that make you more likely to be a good CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And let's assume that the market is selecting reasonably rationally on that and so that the people who are getting to be CEOs are being selected against a certain set of characteristics. If every single one of those CEOs is male, then I think you'd have very good reason to worry that the number of women who also have those characteristics is not being reflected in those numbers that something is happening to artificially hinder the progress of women up the corporate hierarchy such that we are missing some potential leadership talent.
- [40:16]
B
All right, but if you looked at everything and you did not see any barriers to entry, would it bother you.
- [40:31]
C
If you didn't see any barriers to entry? Well, this is where I think things get a little bit difficult around representation. I'm thinking about politics as well. Right. Maybe you could apply this to politics. But I don't want to seem like I'm kind of moving away from the question. I'm just thinking of other areas. Where does representation matter in and of itself in certain roles? Because the absence of women in CEO positions, whether we like it or not, sends a cultural signal to other women and to girls that that's not a job for you.
- [41:07]
B
But where do you think we should solve that problem? So here would be my pitch. That is true. I think representation actually matters. But I don't think it matters enough to engage in social engineering except at the family level. At the family level, I want to see parents tell their kids, hey, just because you don't see somebody that looks like you in this thing, I assure you this is about can you get so good at something that people can't stop you from doing it? And look at mom and dad like we do these things that are very unexpected and we did that because we got so good that people couldn't stop us from doing it. Now if that message were propagated with ferocity and then people were educated in a way that didn't make me want to headbutt the head of the educational system, then I would be here for it. But the thing I worry about is people are so concerned about there being representation that they end up doing the social engineering that has all these crazy distorting, knock on effects that end up ultimately being worse.
- [42:08]
C
Okay, yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's why in the end I end up being against, as a general proposition, quotas. Whether they're kind of hard or soft quotas, obviously that can work in different ways in say, a business setting. Now, of course, in Europe and many countries there are quotas, soft or hard, that are set. And in some Scandinavian countries, by law, a certain percentage of the directors of publicly traded companies have to be women. Now. And so you do get these kind of, that's a hard quota system, but you also get soft quota systems where it's kind of implicit that you're trying to get to a Certain number. So that's not the solution because it doesn't actually address the problem. It addresses the symptoms of the problem artificially. It actually skips over the problem. So rather than asking ourselves the question, if we think that the representation of a certain group, and it could be people of color, it could be whatever. If we think it's suspiciously low, it's low enough to make us think that doesn't look like it could have happened. Unless there's something going on here. If all of the members, if all board members of Fortune 500 companies are white men, I wish they were not that long ago. That's reason to be suspicious about the fact that there are things getting in the way of black Hispanic women and men getting into those. Now. Could that be the education system all the way back? Maybe. Could it be what happens in the labor market? Maybe. Could it be middle management? Maybe. Could it be discrimination in hiring? Whether advertent or maybe let's go find out and let's try and do everything we can to kind of remove those artificial barriers. But you wouldn't solve that by saying, okay, we're just going to have X percent of that group in there. Because actually in the end that doesn't solve what might be leading to that outcome. And I think it's just so it's impractical. But in politics I feel different because in a representative democracy, the people who are making the decisions about the laws under which we live, I think there's a strong moral case that there should be decent levels of representation in a representative democracy. And so there, I think there's a case for some pretty strong social engineering in order to try and get to that and get to it quicker than might happen naturally. But I don't think that that argument that I would make in politics and in representative democracies applies to say, boardrooms or other places where I think the
- [44:37]
B
argument would go, oh, okay, so how do you. Social engineer then? When are you going to go to a district and say you guys have to elect a woman?
- [44:46]
C
That's what the Labor Party did in the UK where I'm from. It's interesting to see what happens. Now. This is actually, this is a really good test case actually of the theory. So let's put it on the table. So when Margaret Thatcher became a Prime Minister, only 5% of members of Parliament were women. So that tells you something about Margaret Thatcher.
- [45:05]
B
No kidding.
- [45:06]
C
At the time, right? I mean, this is extraordinary for all kinds of reasons, but just to have come from like 1 in 20 of even MPs were women. And she managed to become not only leader of the Conservative Party, but Prime Minister for most of my childhood. Now it's about a third of MPs are women and the majority of the, of all the other parties except the Conservatives are now women. So actually this is above 50% women in all the other parties. But the Labor Party still has a policy of women only shortlists. And so in certain constituencies or districts, to use the US language, they actually say that district can only have a woman. And so it's exactly what you just said, which is that you have to the primary in the district in the US could only be women. And so it's very interesting now that the Labour Party is actually slightly more female than male. What do they do about that policy? And that's something that's being kind of discussed right now. And I think you can get rid of the policy. My view is, well, mission accomplished. But once the policy's in place, it's really difficult to get rid of. And so I was in favor of all women shortlists at the time to just try and move the needle a bit on women's representation in Parliament. But, but job done and pretty quickly in terms of labor parties. So great, now we can get rid of them. But they haven't gotten rid of them yet. And so that's a good test of whether or not you were serious about this. Just as a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
- [46:36]
B
Wow. I am shocked that you were for where you are quite literally distorting the democratic process. Now, this may be your British upbringing, but to an American ear that hits gnarly that people. I already have a problem with the way that the two party system works and the way that like we effectively just witnessed the Democratic Party give no option. Like, yeah, it's going to be Kamala Harris and that's that. I hope you enjoy. That's really bad. If people are like, you can vote for anyone as long as it's a woman. It's like the, the Henry Ford quote. You can have any color you want for your car as long as it's black. It's like, oh, that in politics, man. That's pretty crazy. So make me a believer. How is it possibly a good idea to tell the voting public you guys are too stupid to elect the right person? And so we're going to artificially narrow the choice to one gender.
- [47:42]
C
Yeah. So of course what they could do is in these seats where there was a women only shortlist. And so the labor candidate was going to be a woman in those constituencies. So you could of course vote for the Conservative candidate or the Liberal Democrat candidate who might be male. But you're right that what's happening there is that the party is deciding that it cares sufficiently about representation that it's going to change its own internal processes. It's going to socially engineer its candidate selection process to significantly increase the share of women. Because what they were finding is that the constituency part is the districts who made the decision about it. So it's not like a primary system. It was made by kind of a pretty small group of local party members that they weren't choosing that many women. And so there was some top down social engineering. Now of course that's been true in lots of countries actually. Why is Mexico 50, 50 female male in its parliament now? Because of quotas. And so it's something that's not very controversial in other countries. The reason I was in favor of it was because.
- [48:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, wow, okay.
- [48:58]
C
It's very common and it's actually one of. If you look at kind of, if you look at the countries that are just like Rwanda, Mexico, that have just made massive, just like overnight, almost changes in the share of women in politics, they've almost always had some sort of quota system put in place as an accelerant to get there. And it clearly works as an accelerant. Now, are there downsides? We can obviously discuss that. But the reason I was in favor of it until now, I think the mission accomplished and so it can go now is because it just felt a bit stuck. It felt like the political system was stuck and that the lack of representation of women in politics, specifically just in politics in a representative democracy, was a problem in and of itself. It wasn't just a symptom of a broader of another problem, which is what we've been talking about up to the point. It was a problem in itself.
- [49:54]
B
But how do we have a representation problem when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister? It's the same way that it feels to me when we say that racism is as bad in America as it's ever been. Oh, except for the fact that we just had a two term black president. It's like I cannot reconcile that those two things are true. I can say, hey, it's still a problem and we need to keep going. Yeah, word. But I cannot say that it's just as bad as it's ever been. So anybody African American would look at that in America and be like, oh my God, this is amazing. Representation in the extreme. Anybody that's a woman in the UK looking at Margaret Thatcher being in office, not briefly being in office for a long ass time at the, like one of the most pivotal moments in the history of most people that are alive today. Right. So obviously post World War II, but this was not a flash in the pan. This was not just sort of a forgotten time in history. I mean, the Falkland War, like, like this is, this is somebody that was like in the thick of it. So any young girl growing up is like, I can be that, obviously. So why in a post Margaret Thatcher world would we need quotas? Quotas to up that number?
- [51:07]
C
Yeah. And to be clear, again, it's quotas at the party level. It's because despite Margaret Thatcher and her rise, the share of women in politics remained very low and was growing pretty slowly. And so one party, the Labor Party, the most progressive party, decided to take it upon itself to accelerate share of women into it through social engineering.
- [51:28]
B
What do you think was the barrier to entry? Because to me it seems like the barrier is voters. Is there something that I'm missing? Was there a barrier in the party itself?
- [51:37]
C
Yeah, it seemed to be in the selection process. So it seemed to be in the kind of, I'll try and use US language, like in the, in the district that was deciding who was going to be their labor candidate, that there was a distinct skew in favor of the male candidates. Now maybe it's because the male candidates were better and they were making good choices. We can't get inside that kind of black box of the decisions that were happening in every constituency across the country. And it was felt, and I agreed with it at the time, that actually something we needed a short term accelerant to get the share of women in politics to a point where we could feel comfortable about the fact that politics felt like it was a place that women could go. It also, as a result of the share of women in politics, did start to change the culture of British politics and it started to change the provision of things like child care in the House of Commons, the ability to kind of take time off. I don't think that David Cameron would have taken paternity leave as prime minister in 2010 if the culture of British politics hadn't changed sufficiently. Maybe we can get back to whether you think that was a good or a bad thing, but let me turn the tables a little bit. If you felt confident that there were no legal barriers to or formal barriers to women entering politics in the US as now, and every single member of the House of Representatives and Every single senator minister and every single cabinet minister was mayor. If we had an all male congress, would that trouble you?
- [53:12]
B
The first question I would ask is what is the outcome that I'm aiming at? For me it's human flourishing. Next I would ask, are we achieving human flourishing? If yes, I have no problem whatsoever, literally none. If no, then I start asking, okay, something has to change. What is going to be the thing that changes? And on my list of very early questions to ask would be, is this being a male dominated field creating a problem? Are we being blindsided to the way that women think? And could that be just wildly advantageous to us moving towards human flourishing? But that's the primary question that I'm asking is where am I trying to end up? What reason do I have to believe that the following experiment would actually yield that outcome? And then PS if we were to run this experiment, go, yes, we're going to try this and right now let's say we're at 12% women, by the time we're 20%, 25%, I'm going to check in and be like, are we now moving towards human flourishing? Because if we're not, if moving that wildly, because that would be a true doubling, if moving that wildly in that direction is not yielding an outcome, I will just tell you right now, from a entrepreneur up against the market perspective, you have not identified the real solution. So at that point I would have said, ah, it has not led us to where we want to go. What I fear we have is this is a luxury belief. People are complaining about a luxury item. We are in such an amazing time in human history that people can actually worry about the gender makeup of their government instead of fighting tooth and claw just to exist. Which is. That's the tale of human history. So yeah, I would be really thoughtful to map out. Here's where I want to go. Here is what I think is causing the problem. Again, if there is a problem and then this is a hypothesis, more women will help us. And I'm going to, when I bring women on, this is a key that people always lose sight of. I'm going to run this experiment and I expect this outcome. So once I have doubled the number of women in Parliament, I would expect to see this improvement. Do I see that improvement? And if I don't, you have not identified the right problem. But people just get so myopically focused on the outcome they actually want. Is 50 representation or 70 representation or secretly it's being driven by people that want a hundred percent representation and just like any man that says women in politics, you know, that's terrible. And they can never be a good leader. They are a moron. There's nothing that I have seen at the population level that tells me that that would be true. But it is equally true to say that men are all toxic and we have to get them out of politics. Both are stupid.
- [55:58]
C
Yeah. So there's two issues at stake here. One is just the kind of moral claim about who should be making the laws that we all have to live under, and should we have a degree of representation about the people who are making the laws? And the second question is, are we making better laws for human flourishing? There's more of a kind of performance side of it, too. Is this institution performing well against this outcome, which you've said is human flourishing? And I guess you would feel the same about jury. Right. So if all our juries were men, if everybody's tried under a jury and it's 12 good men, TCL, and we didn't have women on juries as we do have to now I'm pretty sure we have to. Actually, I'm saying this, and someone needs to fact check this. But, like, I don't know what the rules are, but I don't think we can have all male juries or all female juries. And you can imagine some trials where that really matter. But you'd feel the same about that if. If all the. If all the members of juries in trials were male, if you felt confident that justice was being done and that this justice system was working and that people being treated fairly, men and women, you know, whatever, being treated equally fairly by these all male juries, then you wouldn't have a problem with it.
- [57:22]
B
Not in the slightest. Because before you get to that, let me say why I don't think that I would have a beef. Why I would not have a beef with that. It is an adversarial system that creates that pool of jurors. So you have both sides saying, I need this juror on, and both sides saying, I absolutely cannot have a given juror. And so they're battling to make sure that they have a pool that they think is most likely to win for their side. If they both agree, this is all women, this is all men, this is all Asian people, this is all black people, whatever. Rad. I don't care that that. That is the nature of the adversarial system. And that's what I'm talking about in politics. That's what I'm talking about in business. I want people to compete against the marketplace. So we pick a metric for the nation, whether it's happiness ratings, whether it's gdp, whatever. But we say here are the metrics that we think matter and here are the probably policies way before people. Here are the policies that are getting us there and here are the people that happen to represent those policies that we believe in. And by the way, you, the people via a representative democracy, I'm here for that, but that's how we're getting there. So, yes, whatever the constitution of humans, whether it's race or gender that move us towards the metrics that we want, human flourishing by my vote, then that is what it is.
- [58:49]
C
Yeah. So you're being entirely and consistently instrumental about this and consequentialist about it and applying that to all these institutions. Whereas I'm doing a carve out for representative democracy from that and saying that I think it's a, it's a different, a different creature than some of these other institutions we've, we've talked about. Whereas I think you're applying the same, you're applying the same moral logic to politics as you are to business.
- [59:15]
B
I have a feeling you are as well. I don't think you are. And, and let, let me ask a clarifying question. Do you want women in government for the sake of representing the people's wishes, or do you want women in government simply because you believe that it is a moral good to have like literally pure representation? So if the women that made it into parliament voted exactly the same as their male counterparts, brought exactly the same ideas as their male counterparts, would you be perfectly fine with that? Or would you say, okay, this actually didn't do the thing I wanted, which was to get a feminine perspective?
- [59:56]
C
Yeah, that's a great clarifying question because I presume in my argument for greater gender representation, something like politics, that that is bringing different perspectives to the process of making laws. I'm presuming that.
- [60:12]
B
And that that is a good thing
- [60:13]
C
and the same endures and that is a good.
- [60:16]
B
Because it has a good outcome or for some other reason because it's a good outcome.
- [60:19]
C
So it has a good outcome.
- [60:20]
B
You and I are saying the exact same thing. So we, we are both saying outcome. I have an outcome that I desire and I think by doing this thing we get that outcome. The only difference is I'm saying I think social engineering is a bad way. You're going to guess poorly, you're going to think it's this. But there are second and third order consequences that probably don't lead you there. And you're saying, no, no, no, there are things that we can know and getting both perspectives is inherently more likely to lead us to the desired outcome. But we're both instrumental, we are both driving towards an outcome.
- [60:53]
C
Yeah, that's correct. It's that I, I guess I don't feel very confident that I could identify external metrics of performance against which we could kind of measure the success. And so I'm kind of betting quite heavily on the fact that, that there will be improved outcomes as a result of diversity, such that I would not be comfortable with an all male Congress even if we could somehow invent some sort of external measure. That said, okay, well, that Congress is doing just as well as one with women in it. Because I don't know how we would ever know. And so, because I don't think we would ever know. I think we have to err on the side of the, in a, in representative democracy to be clear, on the side of representation, because then at least we can, we can eliminate the risk that we're underperforming if we think the diversity is bringing more performance to it. But I will say one more thing, and this might bridges to some other issue. So some other areas that I worry about, which is, it's back to, you know, we had the conversation about kind of barriers to entry into a kind of particular profession. And one of the ones I identified was if you don't see, you know, this is one of the feminist mantras, is you can't be it if you can't see it.
- [62:08]
B
It.
- [62:09]
C
I think there's some truth to that. I think that one of the barriers that there might be to entering a certain kind of profession or a certain activity might be that you just don't see anybody like you doing it. It's one of the reasons I worry, for example, about the kind of lack of male teachers, because at a certain point, if you haven't never seen men in the classroom, then you grow up thinking that's not something men do. And I worry a lot about that. I worry that it gets harder and harder to get people to go into those professions if they just don't see anyone like them. So I do also worry about these tipping point effects and these can't be it if you can't see it effects. And so if you have a profession that's all male or all female, it just gets really hard to persuade people to go into that profession if it's going against that grain. And in some professions, I think that really matters. So we talked a lot about politics, where I think it matters, but I think it matters in something like education or the mental health professions, which are increasingly becoming female. Does it matter if there aren't any male teachers? How would we feel about all female teaching profession? I wouldn't feel great about it, and there's a number of reasons I wouldn't. But one of the reasons that's relevant to this discussion, that I wouldn't feel great about it is because it's going to get much harder to persuade a boy that he could become a teacher, if that's really what his vocation could be and what his skill set would lead him to, if he would be literally the only male teacher in the us. Right. It's just going to get very, very hard to persuade him. So there is a bit of a. There is a bit of a vicious and virtuous cycle here, which again, I don't think leads you to say you have to have quotas or you have to have 50%, but I think it means you have to be attentive to areas where there is a very low representation of one gender and worry a lot that there's something going on there that is leading to such low representation and try to do everything you can to reduce those barriers. So you shouldn't fetishize 50% and you shouldn't have quotas, but you should worry if it's 3%, if it's an area you care about. So we've already talked about smokejumpers, don't care, broadly speaking, education, politics, science, medicine. And I do care if it's only 3% of one sex or the other. And as I say, that's partly because it then just becomes intergenerationally a vicious cycle. It took ages for me to persuade one of my sons that men could be doctors because he'd only seen female doctors. Doctors. And then we saw a male doctor. I can't remember how old he was, but like seven or something. And we went and on the way home he said, dad, that I didn't know men could be doctors. Wow. Could be physicians.
- [64:38]
B
My, how things have changed.
- [64:39]
C
I said, what are you talking about? Because he'd only ever seen. And so of course, of course, he'd drawn the rational conclusion. If you only see people of one sex doing, doing a thing, you naturally assume that that's the thing that that sex does. And if you're of the opposite sex, you assume that's not for me. And that's a problem in itself. I think. I don't know quite how to think about that in terms of the numbers or the shares. And as I say, there is about. There does seem to be some evidence for like a 30 tipping point. But I worry about that just in terms of the messages we're saying to the next generation. And that's a social norm effect rather than a. It's not a legal barrier or a, or a formal barrier, but it can be an informal barrier. If you think you're going to be a freak by choosing to be the one female engineer or the one male primary school teacher.
- [65:25]
B
Yeah. Okay. So I think that all of the problems of letting people sort themselves out into what they want to do, the barriers for women, they go away when you remove any and all laws that say that they can't be financially independent. So we've already talked about that. That's an absolute must. Glad it happened. It has happened certainly here in the US and then the next one is now that women have control over their reproductive timing. You do those two things and now greedy capitalists are going to take over. Because if somebody comes into my company and they are smarter than the next person, they are more capable than the next person, and they happen to have a uterus, I'm here for it. Like, I don't care. I just want the most intelligent, driven, like person that's a great teammate, that elevates the other people here, makes them play at a higher level. Like, I just don't care. So I feel like people want to do the social engineering rather than just letting the fact that we've solved that problem already run its course. And the fact that we have in places quotas, that we have scholarships, incentives and things like that that are meant to act as accelerants. And quite frankly they do. But now you get this huge pendulum swift swing that is inevitably going to go too far and then you start doing damage, which is how we open this conversation. Men are struggling. And I would say after researching you now multiple times, that what I see is all the things that were meant to be accelerants for girls worked extraordinarily well. But now the narrative that we told was that men were creating these barriers, men are the problem. And now men are withdrawing, they are tapping out, they are not engaging. And so all that talent that we were worried about leaving on the sideline, we've just changed. It's now not the females that are being left on the sideline, it's the men. And the thing I would hope people take away from my worldview, that they are welcome to reject, but I would love them to understand it is just that when you tinker with a system that is as complicated as what jobs are filled by what gender, that, oh, dear Lord, there's no way you're going to avoid very problematic second and third order consequences. Now, what's my solution? My solution is this is to a hammer, every problem is a nail. I understand that, but to me, the solution is storytelling. You need to tell stories of the little boy who never sees a female or never sees a male doctor and thinks that men can't be doctors. And then, oh my gosh, you have this story and that book makes its way into households or they read it online or they see the cartoon or whatever, that kind of telling a new story so that people can see beyond the limitations that they see. Now, I think that's incredibly potent and is probably one of the greatest services that art can perform for society.
- [68:31]
C
Yeah, I strongly agree with that. And actually I've just been writing a little bit about Pamela Harris's pick for her vp, her running mate, Tim Walsh. He's getting a lot of attention for having been a. He's a former high school teacher and a high school football coach. And my son is just starting his career as a public school teacher, also social studies, which is what Tim Waltz got. And he texted me to say, hey, Dad, I might end up being vice president. And it was just a kind of jokey text, but it was very interesting to see, like, okay, you can be a high school teacher, you can be a public school teacher. So the storytelling around him, I think is going to be quite important and quite interesting. So here we agree is that actually the stories you tell about what kinds of people can be teachers, nurses, tech, et cetera, I think is important. But. But I guess a lot of this will come down to what we think, what tinkering means. One of the things I'm very interested in is the programs that are really encouraging young men to consider teaching as a career by having kind of role models go into schools and talk to them. I'm actually in favor of even some financial incentives to get more men to go into teaching. I suspect that's where we'll disagree. Just as there are some financial incentives for getting women into stem. So it's not a. But it's not a quota, it's an incentive. And it's deliberately trying to incentivize an underrepresented group, in this case men in teaching, to go into teaching when they wouldn't otherwise through a kind of financial Incentive sounds like we might agree that it's not great if there aren't any men in teaching. And it's down to 23% now. It's 33% when Tim Wallace became a teacher in the Reagan era and falling. I would be in favor of some tinkering, to use your term, if that means some financial incentives, some messaging, some storytelling, some soft power around trying to make teaching a more attractive profession to men. Also making lateral moves into teaching more attractive because a lot of men come in later from other professions. And so you do that explicitly, try and get more men in. What would be your reaction to that? That's the kind of tinkering I'm in favor of to try and address that gender imbalance. And it sounds like you'd probably be against and you just want to let the market keep doing its thing around teaching, which would probably mean fewer and fewer men.
- [70:53]
B
Yeah. So that would very much be my instinct, is, okay, there's an outcome that I want because I share your desire for it not to be only women. So the question is, how do I culturally incentivize people to recognize that it would be useful Now I don't trust myself enough and my ability to see what is true where I would want to tinker. So one base assumption you have to understand about me, for anything that I say to make sense, is that I think every human being needs to wildly distrust themselves. And it is mostly, not entirely, but it's mostly in the aggregate that we find our way to something sensible. So I would want the opportunity to write stories, tell stories, do podcasts, all of that. Put ideas out into the system and say, hey, I really believe that we need more men as school teachers. We really need more women as pilots, whatever. I don't believe that one. But if I did that, I would put that idea out into the marketplace and I would very much be as passionate as I can, tell that story as convincingly and compellingly and just data rich as I can, get it in front of as many people as possible and then get them at a grassroots level with their own children to go to the school and make demands. I know your own story is that you ended up going to a school because the new headmaster came around and said, hey, dear neighborhood, I need you to send your kids to this ailing school that I am going to turn around, but I need you guys to send me your kids and that kind of grassroots. A parent making the decision about their own child. That's what I'm talking about. So let putting the idea into the world, fighting for it as just passionately and convincingly as possible. But then knowing I don't want people to just believe me, I want people to push back. And then I want ultimately people to make their own decisions in their own lives.
- [72:44]
C
What do you make? So I agree with all of that. I think that a lot of what we very often attempt to do through tinkering, policy making, changing incentives, is actually much more effectively done at a kind of cultural level. And I'll give an example of that from a paper that Melissa Carney did. She's a Maryland economist who's actually. You love her work. I think her recent book is called Two Parent Privilege. And it's all about this issue of marriage and family. And she's really taken on this kind of very difficult debate, particularly on the left, around two parents being better than one. And she does it brilliantly. She did a study earlier where she showed that The MTV show 16 and Pregnant had a huge impact on teen pregnancy rates, really much more than any any recognizable government policy. And the reason that they were able to track that was because that show aired at different times in different states. And so they had a wonderful natural experiment. And so they could see that show aired in Nevada at this point in time and then in Illinois at this point in time. And they saw the teen pregnancy rate drop and stay lower as a result of an MTV show. So I think that's actually a great data point for your position, which is an MTV show can be much more powerful in shifting a narrative about the pros and cons of becoming pregnant as a teenager than any amount of government policy or government, certainly government lecturing model, which tends to fall on kind of deaf ears. And so I agree with that. One of my questions for you is what do you think of the culture making institutions right now, specifically around these kind of issues of gender? One of the criticisms that's made more from the conservative side is that the commanding heights of the cultural economy are really dominated by a very, very progressive worldview, one that may not be kind of being updated. And that's kind of making it harder to kind of get cut through with other cultural messages, whether that's kind of pro marriage or pro religion, or I would say from my point of view, like stories about men in teaching or whatever. So I just kind of be very interested. Given that you've made the case for culture and storytelling, how would you rate the performance of our current cultural industries against that metric?
- [75:10]
B
I don't have a problem with the culture engines per se. What I have a problem with is censorship. So that you don't know are there cultural entities that would be putting great ideas into the system, but that system is behind the scenes stopping them from finding their audience. That, that would bother me a lot. So I operate under the cultural belief that every period in time gets to create the world that they want. And as I get older, some of the changes that people want to make just seem absolutely absurd to me. Based on my metric of human flourishing, I don't think the things are going that they're doing are going to lead to human flourishing. Case in point, open borders, case in point, the quotas in making sure that the only person you can vote for in a given district is female like that, that is crazy to me. However, I recognize I can't trust myself. I don't want to be dictator. Like I want to be able to argue that idea and give you data and give you why. I think that's absurd. But then I want people to be able to make that decision. And I just fully understand that when, when any generation has their moment of control, they get to create the world that they want. And so cool. There it. If you live long enough, if you were that fortunate, you will inevitably look back at the world and go, you guys are making dumb decisions. And that, that is a question of frame of reference more than it is objective reality. Now that brings us to something that we just cannot move on unless we touch. Because you hit me so hard with something you said, because I realized you have solved a problem for me of why so much of the world seems like they have roaches on their face to me, which is we can't identify the right metrics. And so this is me putting words to what you said. So you're going to go by proxies instead. So having 50% women in government is a proxy for human flourishing. I think you'd be comfortable with that. But since you'll never be able to identify those metrics or measure them accurately, you just have to go by a proxy. And I have a feeling you're just going off of gut instinct about what those proxies would be. My beef with that is that we can tell there are metrics. So for instance, I know somebody who wrote a really amazing book called Of Boys and Men, which details very compellingly statistics that you can look at that show boys and men are in real trouble. And so I would say the data is out there for anybody that's willing to define where they're trying to go to define what metrics would indicate that we're headed in that direction and then have the courage to look at the data that we see now and either say, yes, we're moving in the right direction or no, are not
- [77:55]
C
right. And so a lot here is going to hinge on our, our selection of metrics. Yes. And. And so if, if you were to. We're like, we spent a lot of time talking about arcane aspects of British politic gender politics, but, you know, you could say we increased the share, we accelerated the share of women mps and then entered the a decade of the fastest economic growth that the UK has experienced for a significant period of time. Do I think they're related? No. But you could choose a metric, particularly under an umbrella like human flourishing, that would give you. That would allow you to kind of post hoc. There's a lot of post hoc rationalization going on. In fact, post hoc rationalization is the kind of ultimate postmodern skill. And so you could do some post hoc rationalization to support that. But I will say this, that I think that probably for reasons that are not related to tinkering or social engineering, that the political class as a whole has fundamentally failed to recognize the real problems of boys and men and the lack of flourishing in so many of our boys and men. And so that's an interest as to why that's happened, why that failed, if you agree, A, there are real problems facing boys and men, B, the political class as a whole has largely failed to acknowledge, let alone address them. Why is that? I think that's a perfectly reasonable and a criticism I make a lot of the political class as a whole. Now, as to why that is, I don't know. But I do know that it's true. And I think that that failure on the part of the political class to recognize the problems of boys and men is in and of itself now part of the problem. Because it means that so many boys and men feel unseen and unheard. And in a way, I think that's a kind of mirror image of how a lot of women may have felt previously, which is that just I don't feel seen, I don't feel heard. I don't feel like the issues that kind of women are confronting. This is a big part of the women's movement, are being properly addressed, not being seen and not being heard. And that's one of the reasons why there's a big argument for having more female representation, because it's a sense that you're going to be seen and heard. And so here, I guess I'M going to argue against myself because although US politics is still skewed male, there has been a huge failure in seeing male problems. Now, as to why that is, as I said, I don't know. But the downstream consequence of that failure are ones that we're still coming to terms with now.