Does Anyone Care About Male Loneliness? - Max Dickins

Max Dickins is a comedian, writer and a mental health advocate. Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. And men are suffering worse than ever. This is bad for them, it's bad for their partners, it's bad for their employers, their children and society at large. Men are struggling to toe the line between manning up and opening up and many of them are doing neither. Expect to learn what Max learned from having no best man to choose for his wedding, how men's loneliness differs from female loneliness, the evolutionary explanation for shallower male friendships, how being in a shed can help you bond, why contributing to a project and doing things is crucial for bonding amongst men, whether the manosphere is helping and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERN30) Extra Stuff: Buy Billy No-Mates - https://amzn.to/3PZV38i Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mentalhealth #men #loneliness - 00:00 Intro 02:43 Difference Between Man Up & Open Up 08:48 Why is Male Loneliness Unique? 19:49 Fundamentals of Friendship 25:56 How Treatment for Men & Women Should be Different 33:24 Defining Masculinity 40:21 Is this a British Problem? 50:55 Emotional Labour & Marriage 57:52 Importance of Bonding Through Doing Things 1:06:29 Max’s Thoughts on the Manosphere 1:14:07 How to Prevent Male Loneliness 1:16:45 Where to Find Max - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  She said to me in the pub, so who are you going to have as best man? And I sort of palmed her off and thought, oh, my mum's gone blank. I just, I'll be fine. It will come to me in a moment. And I went back that night and I made a list of my male friends. And I looked down the list and I realised I worked with most of them. And they'd find it really weird if I asked them to be best man. And the rest of them, I maybe hadn't had any meaningful contact with them for two, three years. And I just thought, oh, my God, where have all my friends gone?

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Did you watch Paddy Pimlet's octagon interview this weekend?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I did. Funny enough, I tweeted something about that today. I thought he was brilliant and I thought it was brilliant for two reasons. Number one, the message, which was about friendship and about guys having to talk about real stuff to, to kind of intervene in these mental health challenges that men are having. But also I think the messenger with men is really important. So there's a lot of messengers that I think men just tune out. But an absolute animal like Faddy the Baddie saying this stuff. I think a lot of men are going to buy into it. So I was delighted and I thought he was brilliant.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, for the people that didn't see it, Paddy is a UFC fighter, currently up and coming. People drawing some similarities between him and Conor McGregor, quite outspoken. He's Scouse, which means that he's from Liverpool, if you don't know where that is. Very, very strong accent, swears a lot, very much a laddy lad, gets very fat in between fights. And at the end of this victory that he had, he said that his friend had taken his own life on what must have been Thursday night. And I think he weighed in on Friday morning. So he woke up at 4am on the morning of his way in. So this is 36 hours before he's about to fight, to find out that one of his own friends has taken his life and he got the, the text or whatever, the alert somehow from one of the family members.

• 1:48Chris Williamson?

  And then used his opportunity to speak in the octagon about how men need to speak up. You know, I would much sooner take a phone call from a friend that was crying than attend his funeral. It was beautifully done, man. So spectacularly done.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I watched the post-match he did on ESPN as well, and he went into a bit more detail. He was talking about how, I think this is a Scouse word, but he said, the thing about women is they can have a gab, he said, they can have a gab with their mates over a cup of tea. He said they don't stop talking, but he said with blokes, if you try to talk about certain stuff, I think the line he said is like, what are you doing lad? Grow up. I thought that was, we've all been in conversations, maybe when we were a bit younger, where similar sort of phrase has been used. And yeah, I mean, it's great that someone of such profile is talking about it, but in language that normal people use, you know what I mean?

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  I find it interesting at the moment because there's sort of two worlds that are colliding at the same time when it comes to talking about men and mental health. One of them is, stop being such a victim, you know, get hold of your bootstraps, pick yourself up, carry the weight, you know, re-embrace traditional masculine roles and archetypes, the Jocko Goggins, Jordan Peterson style of things, but also the kind of reassuring men, you just need to do some stuff that's going to make you feel good and reconnect with your masculine purpose.

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  That is so close to the line of just man up, stop being such a pussy. The next conversation, which is men need to open up about their emotions, men can be sad too. It's important that if you are feeling down as a guy, that you open up to people. And it's not just enough to treat male depression or sadness in the same way that female depression gets treated by making them feel like they belong. They need to feel like they're worth something. They need to feel like they have purpose and meaning and capability. And those two worlds of men being told to man up, which has its uses, and men also being told to open up.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  That is a really difficult line to pass.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  I think it is. I spoke to a psychologist called Fred Rabinowitz at the University of Redlands in California, and he's a poker player, semi-pro, plays golf as well as running men's groups, being a therapist. So he's got both sides to it, right? Almost like what you're kind of what you're explaining. And he put it to me in a way that seemed just really sort of simple, which is you need to have a, expand your toolbox. So as long as you've got tools for different conversations, that's fine. You don't only have to be one way. You don't have to be new age mush all the time, because I think a lot of men switch off to that. I don't know, I certainly did. But also, um, there are some times where if you wanna go through the gears in a conversation to mix my metaphors, you do have to have other tools.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  You know, sometimes in life, you've got to have a conversation about something big, and you've got to show up a bit different to that than if you're in the pub and you're having, having some fun with your mates. I think it doesn't have to be as complex as maybe we think it is, but I completely agree with you. Those two worldviews that are kind of rubbing up against each other, but maybe they're more complementary than both sides reckon.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of it is to do with expectation, because manning up and opening up, it takes a lot of courage and bravery, which are typically masculine traits, in order to open up in any case. But it's more about sort of like cultural stereotypes, what is it, what does it mean to be a man, things like that. Going back, what got you starting to think about men's friendships in the first place?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  So, um, just pure necessity. I didn't really realise I had a problem with my friendships until I was, I was planning on proposing to my girlfriend, and I literally went as far as being in a shop in Hatton Garden, which is a jewelling, jewellers' district in London. I went with a female pal for sort of moral and aesthetic support, because I don't know what I'm doing, obviously. And afterwards, having shopped, she said to me in the pub, so who are you gonna have as best man? And I sort of palmed her off and thought, oh, my mum's gone blank, I just, I'll be fine, I'll just, it will come to me in a moment. And I went back that night and I made a list of my male friends, and I looked down the list, and I realised I worked with most of them, and they'd find it really weird if I asked them to be best man. And the rest of them, I maybe hadn't had any meaningful contact with them for two,

• 6:06Speaker 00

  three years, and I just thought, oh my god, where have all my friends gone? And then I Googled the phrase, getting married, no best man, and there was something like nine hundred and fifty million results. And if you click on them, a lot of them are wedding website forums, and blokes saying, I'm really worried, I'm get, I'm get, I'm tying the knot, I've got no one, people giving them terrible advice, like, why don't you use your dog? It's awful, awful tips.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  And I realised that a lot of other guys were in this position. And when I looked into the research, I discovered that men since the nineteen seventies, and social scientists have looked at the data and when they're measuring this stuff, men have had less friends than women and especially less close friends. And I'm sure we'll get into what that means to have a close friend. And also what was interesting, the second problem men seem to have is that this gets worse as they get older. So men have bigger social groups than women in their mid twenties. Get to your mid forties, that's flipped on its head. So sociologists call it network shrinkage, a very boring term for something pretty simple. Our mates seem to disappear, whereas women are better at maintaining and probably developing new friendships. So I thought that was interesting.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  So why is that? And I tried to work out the reason so I could solve my friendship problem, get a best man, but also kind of go, this is a question that's curious, right? Because we're always told that men have it best. But in this case, they don't. So what's the reason why?

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, you know, talking about different inequalities that you've got in the world, there seems to be a friendship inequality that's going on here that's pretty stark and that is upstream from the suicide inequality that you see as well.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, they're connected. So

• 7:46Speaker 00

  if you look at male mental health, we, as you say, Paddy the Baddie's talking about it, biggest killer of men under the age of forty five, certainly in the UK. And the Samaritans who look into this stuff do studies. They say one of the biggest causes of male suicide is a lack of social support, that the fact that men are isolated, don't have people to talk to. There's what's called a big build effect. You know, you don't tell anyone about what you're going through and then then you maybe take an action which is obviously seriously lethal or or dangerous rather than talking about it. But also physical problems. Loneliness is worse for you than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, a big matter study revealed recently. Loneliness is worse for you than being obese or drinking a lot.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  So that's, I never thought that would be true. It shows you, if you get, if you get some mates, you can also abuse your body. So there is an upside.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Buy yourself some beers and some burgers if you have some mates. That, that's the positive. But that's, I read that, I was like, that's mad. That's because you wouldn't think it would have anything to do with your physical body, but it does.

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  Why is male loneliness unique then? How, how come it's gendered in a way?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  So it's the way male loneliness is gendered is is I suppose two things. One is that kind of like I said, they lack intimacy in their friendships. So the people that they can go to and talk about a meaningful thing. So for example, the Movember Foundation, a male mental health charity, recent survey, a recent study said one in three men have no close friends. And then part of that same study was to ask that group of men, how many people in your life could you talk to about something serious like a health problem, work problem, relationship problem? Fifty percent said no one at all. So those sort of conversations, that sort of sense of someone really knowing you and you really knowing them, men don't seem to have

• 9:37Speaker 00

  often that many of those friendships, relationships. But also, this was the other gendered thing which I found most shocking, I think, is that when you get to the pinch points in life, so when men get bereaved, so say their partner dies, they get divorced or they retire, that's when they have a lot worse mental and physical health outcomes than women because they are isolated. And the grimmest thing I looked at with this was something known as public health funerals. So public health funerals are basically when the the council or the government bury you because no one's there to do it for you. So maybe you've not got any money, but no one will kind of take on your state and bury you. No one shows up, really sad.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  And this happens all the time in communities all over the world, America, UK. And men were three times more likely to have those funerals than women, even though women, if you look at the stats, are way more likely to live alone. So that's bonkers, that's a complete paradox. And I think that shows the level of isolation a lot of men get to when they do get a bit older. So that's probably the gendered, that those are the two things that summarize it. Dude, that's wild. Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

• 10:50Chris Williamson?

  You said the important question is not whether men are lonelier than women, it's how are men lonely? And I think that that kind of reflects what you're talking about there, that it's not just the breadth of your connections. It's not how many people can you say alright to in the pub or at the season ticket seat that you've got at whatever football team that you support. It's to do with the actual function of friendships, like why we have them, what they're useful for. And a million shallow ones, does that compensate for one really good and deep one?

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that's interesting. So I mean, I'm sure we'll get on to the work of a guy called Dr. Robin Dunbar later, who's kind of like known as the godfather of friendship research, evolutionary anthropologist. But one of the things that he looks at is introverts versus extroverts. So extroverts have a lot more friendships than introverts, but they tend to be a lot shallower. Introverts have less friends, but they tend to be closer. So personality type comes into it. And I suppose there's no right answer to this. Like loneliness is not an objective measure. It's subjective. It's about, do you feel your friendships are sufficient for you? And if you're really happy with your social life and you've got one friend, good luck to you. It doesn't really matter. But I suppose it's where are you

• 12:07Speaker 00

  happy with it? And I think blokes, if they're honest, a lot of the time, it's certainly true for me, we don't like to talk about it. I was really embarrassed, to be honest, to not have a best man. And it took me a long time to talk about it. And even now, it's kind of like a bit of a double edged sword, I feel, being the face of Billy No Mates, right? I get introduced on things, it's like, he's a guy with no mates. And I've done a lot of work on it, but there's a lot of stigma to it. So I think a lot of men won't confess to it.

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  Was it always like this? You said since the 1970s. What happened in 1970?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  I mean, this is a really good question. So I mean, the honest answer is they started measuring it. So we don't know what happened pre 1970s. But so we can maybe get into maybe why this happens now. So there's essentially three broad theories, maybe the third one you could argue interacts with the other two. The first one, and so when I got into this, I thought I go and talk to a load of psychologists, therapists, gender people and go, right, what's, why is it going wrong for me? Why is it going wrong for men? And they would say the kind of you've, you've, you've all have guests on this podcast before said the same thing, right? The man box idea that we have restrictive gender norms

• 13:21Speaker 00

  that stop us having intimacy in our relationships, whether it be, I look a lot at banter in the group. So like, you know, taking the piss out of each other, that jazz of casual brutality that men have, right? Which is great fun, but maybe, um, maybe it stops, it's a moat around us. I remember I went, I forced myself to go to therapy doing this book. And after four months, the therapist stopped and said, the thing is with you, Max, is you can talk about anything in a funny way or an intellectual way. But I think your friends get a feeling that if they go somewhere vulnerable, you won't be able to reciprocate. They get an aura that you're closed, that you're not open. Maybe that's why you've got no friends. And after like four months of being with someone,

• 14:05Speaker 00

  that was like a haymaker. That was like a paddy the paddy hook to the chin. I'm on the canvas going like, okay, I can't really deny that. So there's something to it. But then on the flip side, we'll get to that later, maybe as well as that, you know, the banter is a form of intimacy. But it's this idea that we have these rules. Another one is affection. Like, what I thought, when have I ever told a male friend I like them, let alone I love them? I mean, maybe after seven or eight beers? And we maybe won't talk about that. So I often feel like male friendships are like a probationary period where you're not sure you really like each other. Is there going to be a job at the end of it? So we kind of keep it at the same level. Um, so these sort of basic rules

• 14:48Speaker 00

  to do with masculinity, you'd say, they're getting in the way, the psychologists would argue. But then to go back to your point, Chris, about you said about what happened in the seventies? Well, one thing that happened in the seventies is we started talking about gender. And now you cannot argue that it's not easier to be a man than it was in the seventies in terms of masculine roles. It's a lot looser. We can do, we're much more ways of being a bloke than my dad has, right? Who's turning seventy in October. But male friendships, the stats show, haven't got better. So it can't only be the gender stuff. Which is when you get into kind of the second theory.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Which is? Which is? That, so you see, we're now coming to Dr. Robin Dunbar. So Dr. Robin Dunbar, who's an amazing guy. He's got a book about friends. He's basically, he came up with what's known as the social brain hypothesis. Which is essentially this idea, or he proved it, I think someone else came up with it, but he proved it. Which is that there's a cognitive limit to the number of friends we can have as a human being. So this is a hundred and fifty. So this is what's become known as Dunbar's number. We can only have a hundred and fifty friends. And within that number, there are different circles of friendship. So they go five, fifteen, fifty, a hundred and fifty. So you have five really close mates, maybe your parents are in there, girlfriend or a mate and et cetera, et cetera. But he said to me.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  The, the social world of men and women is really different. And it's not trendy to talk about it, but actually if you look at it, it's really different. And to summarize it quickly. It can be represented like this. Female friendships tend to be face to face, based around talk. There's a lot of emotional disclosure. Male friendships tend to be side by side, based around sharing space, sharing activities, often in groups. That's about style and it's about preference. And so fundamentally. Uh, there's differences there and that might be why male friendships are less close. And why they may look different in terms of closeness compared to the female ones.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  And he also said that when it comes to our software, so the stuff in our brain. He talks about something called mentalizing. So mentalizing is essentially the ability to understand other people's mind states. So with you, Chris, I'm looking at you now. I'm hearing the tone of your voice. I'm reading your body language. I'm taking some contextual clues. I'm trying to read the room and work out what's an appropriate response here to stay in rapport, to build a relationship. That's all known as mentalizing. And if you, they measure that in tasks known as Jack and Jill tests. I won't go into it too much, but women out before men. Now, what is it? Tell us. I want to know. So Jack and Jill tests are essentially, um.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  They, they, this is how they test, I think, often autism with children where they've got, Jack and Jill, imagine there's two dolls. It's about orders of intentionality. So it's about working out. So Jack thinks this, thinks this about Jill, but Jill's thinking this about so and so, who's thinking this about so and so. Can you follow those lies of intentionality? So for example, in a conversation, what would that look like? I say something to you, which is a bit tactless. Your girlfriend stood next to you going, bloody hell, that's a bit much. And her mum's there going, God, I hate Chris's mates, right? Okay. So that reading those kind of relationships all at once, which we, we see examples like that all the time. It's what

• 18:16Speaker 00

  social, socializing is, reading the room, reading each other. Women are much better at it than men. And he said, they're good, they're better at it than men to the factor of they can handle two more close friends than women can, or the men can, I should say. So women can have two more close friends than women in that inner circle of five. Now, that's, there's not much you can do about that. Change your gender. You can't change the

• 18:41Chris Williamson?

  And that's biologically hardwired in? That's some sort of predisposition that men have and women have?

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we both have the mentalizing software and that we do it all the time. It's just, men are not as good at, as good as it. I mean, the classic example is, you know, you go and have, you go out for pizza with your mate, and then you come back home and your girlfriend says, oh, how's so and so? How's his baby? And you go, well, I don't know. We talked about, you know, we talked about what's, how much broccoli is the, in the world to the nearest square foot? We talked about that for an hour. Right? I didn't talk about baby. So that, but that's kind of in microcosm. We see these things all the time. And when you kind of understand the mechanism behind it, you're like, oh, right, that explains it. Dunbar did say, so I asked him, what's the balance between, you know, nature and nurture here? And he said, that's a $64,000

• 19:29Speaker 00

  question. We don't know the exact balance. But to say that it is all gender norms and it is all about psychology is just not true.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  Did he have a potential explanation for how this would be adaptive?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I I spoke to him and I spoke to another evolutionary anthropologist called Anna Mackin, or an evolutionary psychologist, I believe she is. She's quite famous. She's got her own stuff out there. Done a lot of research with Dunbar. And it goes back to what our friendships our friendships used to be for. So if you can go back to, you know, thousands, thousands, thousands of years ago, women needed their friends to help them bring up children. So you can imagine you've got a baby, you'd want to really trust the person you left the baby with to go to the toilet or to go up the road to fetch a pail of water, whatever it is. You have to really, I don't understand a lot about prime audio man and woman, but you'd want to really know them deeply and vice versa.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  And you'd want to feel it was reciprocal, whereas the the men would would have to form groups to go and fight, to go and hunt. They'd have to have friendships that were maybe a bit shallower because you'd be working with new people all the time. You couldn't get too emotionally attached because they might die. I mean, that was the adaptive argument, right? And different evolutionary anthropologists have different kind of versions of that same thing. Essentially, men have evolved to work incredibly well in groups and to have those build build a support within those groups. So status hierarchies, handling that, which is one reason where they argue men are more aggressive, whereas women have evolved to be, they call them dyads, basically pairs, have really close bonds there.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  So that's kind of, that's the argument about where it's come from and why it's adaptive.

• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  Would also potentially explain why women use emotional and social punishment and sort of backstabbing gossip talk as their form of enforcement within the group as well.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So I read like a meta-study about aggressiveness. A male aggressiveness is very out there. You know, you punch people, but it's much more passive, like you say, with women, much more around sort of relational aggression. I read a really interesting study by someone called Joyce Benenson, who's an evolutionary psychologist from Harvard. She's great. She's done all sorts of interesting stuff. But she did something about roommates. So at US colleges, male and female roommates. So women share with women, men share with men. But how many of those in second year chose to live with each other? Almost none of the women would live with each other. They'd all go, I can't stand this person. And then the men, even though they do study, you know, questionnaires going, what don't you or do you or don't you like about this person?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  The men would go like, he stinks, he's always coming in drunk, his clothes are everywhere, he's a real pain in the arse. Do you want to live with him next year? Yeah, why not? Right, that's. So that shows you have like this kind of the tolerance there. And I've read a Dutch study that that was kind of that same thing. And the title of it was, I don't like you, but who cares? I just thought it was quite an interesting, like, study of the male dynamic.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  Did you, did you see, I think it was Dunbar that did this, I stole this from Rob Henderson. Uh, that women, when they're standing, talking to each other, will stand straight on at, whatever you want to call it. Like a hundred and eight degrees or zero degrees or whatever, they're going to be completely opposite. Whereas men usually stand at about a hundred and twenty degrees. And you can do this, the next time that you're looking at a party or a group of people, or even yourself as a guy or as a girl, you can look at the guys. And you'll find that they sort of just angle themselves ever so slightly. And I, I remembered that study. As I was stood talking to a friend and looked down at our feet, and I swear to God, if I'd drawn a line between them, if I'd got my protractor out, I'd have been like. That's a hundred, that's pretty much bang on a hundred and twenty degrees.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  And the argument there was that men, when they are face to face with each other, that's typically because they're ready to fight. There's an increased level of intimacy and aggression there. Whereas with women, that, that, there's no concern.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's, I completely buy that. And also, I mean, when I said face to face and side by side, I mean, that's, we basically talk about the same thing there. I mean, very similar dynamic. I think a lot of people go like, might say, well, so what with this stuff? And I think it's really important for two reasons. Maybe it's the second one and the second. The first one is that. If you don't accept that men have a different social style or have different social preferences, you can't do too much about male loneliness and male mental health. Here's two examples. Men's groups are really effective for men, maybe more than therapists, because therapists, you're face to face, a lot of eye contact, really intense chat. Some people can do this, some people can't. Men's groups are in circles, you're shoulder to shoulder. And it's a lot more indirect.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  And I think men prefer that. They, I mean, like you say, I mean, it might be the angle of the body, the lack of eye contact, the lack of intensity. And one of the most successful interventions in male loneliness in the whole world is a thing known as men sheds. It came out of Australia. And essentially what was happening in Australia is the local government were putting on all these things like for lonely old people, like coffee mornings and stuff. And men would never show up. And then eventually some bawdy Aussie guy went, no wonder no one's coming. You know, no, men don't want to go to a coffee morning, right? So he said, build a shed. So they put a shed up. So men would show up and build stuff, fix stuff together. Matt was rammed every week. And they'd come out with friends and they call it health by stealth. Because it would, the conversation would come up.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  You talk about your prostate while you were fixing a pepper grinder, right? And it works. And I, maybe it's too phallic, the pepper grinder and prostate. I just, I just realised.

• 25:25Chris Williamson?

  Depends if you do, it depends if you do that weird double twisty thing. The girls with experience know what I'm talking about.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  But I went to one and they say shoulder to shoulder is the key to male bonding in men sheds. And it's absolutely, you see them and you can't stop men talking in men sheds. They go, they wang on and people say men don't talk. They do if you set the context up. But you only set the context up if you don't treat men like they're exactly the same as women. And that's important.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  What do you think are the ways in which men and male mental health is being treated like female mental health? What is female mental health? And what are the ways that that tries to be fixed that have then been ported across onto men?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  I think.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I think it's how it's diagnosed, I should say, I'm not, I'm not a mental health professional. So I'm just talking about some of the research I've read and my own personal experience.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  So there's this theory called tend and befriend, which a lot of psychologists are really behind. This is not some esoteric piece of nonsense that I've plucked out of thin air. You can Google it, there's lots of evidence for it. It's essentially how the different genders deal with stress and upset. Women tend to tend and befriend. They get really upset, they suffer a trauma, they seek people out, they want comfort, they want to talk about it. Men tend to do the opposite, they tend to withdraw or they tend to act out. And they get, they drink a lot, they do drugs, they fight. So I think often we, maybe men don't understand they're having mental health problems or we don't understand men are having it because they're doing things that don't look like depression.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  They're not crying, they're not on people's shoulder, they're not low energy, they're just not there. Like, um, my, they won't hear this, I can say it. A friend of my parents is like incredibly obese and he's so obese that he's had his, basically most of his stomach removed. And he lost all his weight and then his wife has left him. And I saw him the other day and he's put all, he's huge again. He's basically eaten through his stomach. And my parents and their friends were like, oh, you know, that's classic so and so, you know, he's a bit of a character, loves his food. Like, that's not, that's mental illness, that he's depressed, he is depressed. And until you see that, this guy isn't going to get any help.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  But it's because he doesn't look depressed because he's not doing what we would. If you've got people to write down on a postcard, what is depression? They go crying, uh, eyes on the floor, you know, all kind of all the body language and the, but it's different for guys. And I think it's important. That we understand that because otherwise we can't spot it.

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  I had a guy on the show called Adam Lane Smith, who's a psychotherapist working out of the Midwest. And he was talking about how male depression gets treated like female depression, that female depression is being made to feel like somebody hears you, like you belong, like you're cared for. But he had this quote and he said, uh, give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it and he'll crawl over broken glass with a smile. And the problem is that when you get men in and you make them feel seen and like they're safe and stuff like that. A lot of the time that I don't think that that's necessarily what men want. They want somebody that will sit and listen for sure. But most of the stuff that you've come up with so far, the shallow friendships that men have that are bonded together

• 28:56Chris Williamson?

  over the top of tasks, like it's a, they're in a shed, it's literally a workplace. It's a doing thing.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  It's absolutely a doing thing. I mean, that's, if it was a sentence, it would be that it's a doing thing. And also the men's shed, to go back to that and to come, but you're connecting it to men needing a purpose. What the men's shed is, it doesn't talk about loneliness on the ticket, uh, what it is. It doesn't talk about health, none of that crap. It's come to the shed, make stuff, fix stuff, be with your mates. But also they're building, they're part of a community. They build the shed together. It's like, it's, it's bootstrapped, it's blokes coming together. What can we do? And it is that purpose, you're part of something, you're not just, you're fixing stuff, doing stuff, you are part of something. And that's one reason which attracts people. Men need a reason to get together and it is the pretense of the shed that solves the problem. But you need, men need the pretense, you've got to give them one.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  But also even if you're not of that age or you're not depressed. I mean, if I ring up a mate and say, do you want to meet up? They'll go, uh, yeah, why? But if I say, do you want to meet up and watch the football? They'll go, yeah, yeah, I watch the football. Yeah, yeah, there's a reason or, you know, play poker or whatever it is. So there is definitely something to this stuff. And I think the thing, I haven't connected it with purpose until with this conversation, but I think that is a big part of it.

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  What was the third potential reason that linked together the first two?

• 30:20Speaker 00

  So. I mentioned, I'm going to come to that. I mentioned the second thing that Dunbar said, and it was about what maintains friendships over time and its activities. Building the habitats of friendships, spaces where friendships happen. We have a lot of those when we're kids, when we're at college, if you go to college. As you get a bit older, they disappear. And those activities, if you want to maintain friendships, you want to build, rebuild them or keep them going, those routines, those rituals. But, so come back to the thing you just asked me, what do they need? They need time. So the third theory is that a big turning point in the social world of men, and also of women, but as I said, it's worse for men, is turning thirty. Getting into a serious relationship, often get, having a family, a lot of people.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Career gets more intense, you lose a lot of time. And there's one thing that friendships need. It's time, especially if you're a guy and they're based around sharing activities, because it's not have a chinwag on the phone. It's get together, play a round of golf, it's whatever, and that takes more time. And if you think about as the world, I would argue the world has got less friendly to friendship, because we've got a lot of calls on our time. There's a thing, there's, you know, a lot more content, Netflix, whatever you want to do, a lot more on social media. The stats suggest, the research suggests we're taking that away from our friendships. There's all sorts of ways the world is less friendly to friendship. A big one is third spaces. So a third space is

• 31:50Speaker 00

  a space that isn't working, isn't your home, right? There used to be tons of them. When you're, you know, fifty, sixty, seventies, eighties, whether it's a church, it's a gym, it's a coffee shop, it's a, you know, a park. We used to hang out in these places. We'd meet new people there. They're a place where we could maintain relationships, meet new people. They don't exist anymore. They've really kind of gone down the toilet for, for, in a lot of communities. You either live miles away from your work. You, you live miles away from your socialize. I know, I don't live in America, but I know in America, that's often you're driving long distances to go and socialize in places. Certainly true in the UK. So that's, that's kind of the third argument, and the context, whether it be

• 32:32Speaker 00

  the places you meet or the amount of time available, it just makes friendships a lot harder.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  Does that explain why time with friends peaks at eighteen years old, that routineized thing?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's, that's a really interesting study that I quote in the book, but I have it in the end notes, I think, the, the resource. So I mean, so it's time with friends peaks at eighteen, then it, then it's time with your girlfriend, I think, takes over, or time at work, and then it's time with your family. Yeah. So, so by the way, I should say that this isn't all bad news. Spending a lot more time with your spouse or with your family is something that men wouldn't do in the seventies, eighties.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  When they had a kind of working men's clubs to go to and other stuff like that.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you could argue that's, that is moving things forward. But, um, yeah, I think it's definitely connected, connected to that.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  Are there some common elements of masculinity that you found in terms of how people perceive men, what a man is, what are you supposed to stand for?

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Common elements.

• 33:34Chris Williamson?

  Like, in the way that masculinity shows up, like, what, if someone was asked, what is a man or what is a masculine man? Was there any common elements that you saw there?

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's about.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  A, a lot of the things we'll be familiar with, it's about winning, not showing weakness, not being seen as being intellectually inferior, um, sexually inferior, career inferior, strength inferior. I think that's when it's connected to humour. A big thing about masculinity is men are meant to be funny. Not all men are funny, but like, it'd be, you do not want to be the guy that's known as not funny, like, or do you know what I mean? Like, we really attach a lot of importance to being humorous. So that's a big thing. I think that connects to friendships and how we do in, how we show up in them. Um, and I think loyalty is a big thing. But then we can get into this idea, maybe, about is, is intimacy between men, does, is it simply different? So this is maybe the more provocative question that I kind of got to,

• 34:36Speaker 00

  which is, I keep on being told that men have a friendship problem. They've got no one to talk to about all this stuff. But then when you actually ask men, define what closeness means, tell me what a close friend is, they don't talk about feelings. They talk about other stuff. And they may be, maybe men's friendships aren't represented in the modern conversation because we're measuring the wrong thing.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Well, for example, um, when you ask men about friendships, a lot of them talk about comfort. So that I'm really comfortable with my friend, right? We don't talk about a lot of stuff, but I just, I know he's there. It's, it's, it's not, it's not, it's not complicated. It's just, we can hang out, it doesn't feel weird. Uh, I feel really relaxed around them. They talk a lot in, in moral terms, men about friendship, which is shit hits the fan. I know my mate's gonna be there on my doorstep. Someone has a go at me, they're gonna be on my side. They're super loyal. Um, this is resilient, this friendship. So they talk about it in those terms. They also talk about a lot in terms of, um, like forgiveness. And I think this is connected to like, we talked about banter earlier, that, where that kind of taking the piss out of each other. This can endure.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  It's like the power of forgiveness. So the example I give in the book is, um, you know, those phone ads where they kind of smash a phone with a hammer. They throw it in the sea, they set it on fire. Then it's like, the phone still works. I think men, for a lot of close friends, for men are like, I can do that with my mate metaphorically. And they'll still be my mate. And that's what closeness is. And then also shared adventure used to be a big part of like the iconography of male friendships. You think about war movies, you think about, um, when I looked at the friendships I really missed in my life. It was that shared adventure, that shared sense of mission, purpose, kind of locked in that time of life and we were doing really difficult things together that we loved. Those are what I missed.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  That for me was close friendship and it was shown in behaviour, not in talk, it was in what we did.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  So do men need intimacy then? Or do they need something else? Is, is the word intimacy, is an intimate friendship for a man, something that's different to the word intimate? And what we usually think about that when we think about friendships?

• 36:46Speaker 00

  I mean, that's a great question, because I think the semantics are important here. I think what intimacy means to men is different. And, and I think when we look at close friendships, we need to understand that that is, that exists. And we shouldn't ignore it and we should count it or notice it and not look down on it. But then we, men also, and we know this from the mental health stats, men do need more areas to talk about certain things. They don't need hundreds of people they can do it to. But I think it goes to the tools thing, right? The toolbox. Have I got enough people and enough skills or the vocabulary to have these conversations when I need them?

• 37:26Speaker 00

  So I actually looked at, I'll get to it at the end of the book going like, when I'm a bit older, I'm thirty four. I'm having more conversations now with mates, which are about bigger stuff, like, you know, a mate who had a, you know, nervous breakdown last summer, a mate who's, you know, lost a, lost a baby. Those conversations you don't have in your twenties often because your life is simpler. So you have to have those chops, but I also really want the friendships that are like those other, like the shared eventual ones we just mentioned. So I think you need both, but you're right, that word intimacy can fall in both directions. I think it gets confused.

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  I think as well, the word intimacy and, and, and thinking about an intimate friendship, I think you mentioned it in the show that a lot of guys are just kind of keen to not come across as gay, that they just don't want to be seen as gay, you know? It's one of the reasons I think why men standing face to face, it's gonna be, it's like, what, you're gonna kiss me? Like, how many times would, would your mate have said that if you stood a little bit too close? It's like, fucking hell, mate, I'm not gonna snog you. But, and so I do think that there is a little bit of, yeah, I don't know whether it would be fear of, of, of coming across in that way.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely, but I think it also gets into your bones and then we forget how it's got in there. At my school, everything you did, you'd be called a gay lord, whatever it was.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  Mate, I haven't heard that word in a decade.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  American listeners, I don't know if you've got gay lord, maybe, um.

• 39:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, oh, God, that is.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  You're a gay lord, short hair, you're a gay lord, you speak French, what a gay lord.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  Mate, there was a, there was a.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  A gay lord.

• 39:09Chris Williamson?

  There's a story I heard where, um, some guy, some like kid in school, some, it was year eight or year nine. So they were twelve or thirteen years old or something. And this kid had come in with new shoes and one of the days everybody had identified the fact like, oh, new shoes. He was called new shoes for the rest of school. I mean, everybody had gotten a pair of new shoes in the period that he was called new shoes, but that was him and he's just.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  I spoke to a friend who um he's he's like yeah, a friend and his dad went to an old school reunion and it was all like they're all like sixty five, they're all old school reunion, the old boy school and the guy walked in and everyone starts hitting the table going worm, worm, worm, worm. This guy had a small dick and was known as worm at school. Even at sixty five, two hundred people screaming worm at him. I mean, imagine that. Does that happen at all girl schools? I don't know. I don't think it does. Men have these brutal nicknames and that is kind of like shows the dynamic, right?

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fucking hell. But yeah, I think the banter thing's an interesting one because I, I, as I was reading the book and thinking about reflecting on male friendships and the stuff that I've learned, especially this year, had a conversation with Nina Power about masculinity, had a conversation with Louise Perry about the sexual revolution, Matt Rudd about men's mental health.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:32Chris Williamson?

  And I think this is not just a men, a male problem. I think this is a British problem. I think that there is a, an anglicized problem to this that we're talking about. And I've only been able to notice it since I've come over to America. So the relationship that I have, and this may be self-selecting because I'm in Austin, the sort of people that come to Austin are a very particular type of people, blah, blah, blah. But since I've been in America, the general culture is much more uplifting. It is a lot more about celebrating other people's successes. It is significantly more open and attuned. If you text one of your friends and say, fucking hell, man, I'm having a, I'm having a bad day. It's like, look, I'll, tonight I'll

• 41:16Chris Williamson?

  make, what do you want to do? What should we do? Where do you want to go? Let's do something. We'll do something cool. And that, I, I, the sense that you have in the UK, and it's difficult if someone isn't from the UK to kind of highlight it. But there's, it's a kind of a scarcity mindset. It's a bit of a zero-sum game. There's always a bit of piss-taking. There's a huge no-no around celebrating your wins because it's seen as being a bit of a gobshite or being big-headed or whatever. And there's just constantly this below-the-surface ambient level of kind of like stress, in a way, of, of not- Not showing off too much, that everybody's on the on the cusp to try and find some way to

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  take the piss out of you. And I find that when I go back to the UK, that I slip more toward that style of behaviour. And yet, when I come out here, it's not. So I do think that this is, at least in part, something that's played into by British culture specifically as well.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. I mean, for example, one thing I talk about in the book is that I I'm really uncomfortable with hugs. I hate it. That kind of repressed, like, absorbed faux homophobia from school, maybe.

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  Just in case someone sees you hugging and calls you a Gaylord.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, or call myself a Gaylord. I was like, where's that come from, that voice?

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  And it's, but then I think that kind of repression of emotion, if you compare that to, say, French guys kiss each other on the cheek. I spoke to an Argentinian dude called Fernando de Souches, who said, Argentinian men kiss each other all the time. It's very physically tactile. He runs an agency in the UK called New Matcho. And what they're trying to do is change how men are represented in marketing. So they're trying to rebrand links, which used to be spray more, get more, when I was growing up, when I was a boy. I think now it's something else, a bit more inclusive. It's called Axe in the States. But he did some cross-cultural study into masculinity, and it is different in different places. But what they had in common was that masculinity was a was performed, right? And you perform it depending on the context. So

• 43:21Speaker 00

  there's certain things that are masculine in some areas and that are different in other areas. But it's the performance. I think what I realised was, I didn't think I did perform my masculinity. And I went to a party with my girlfriend when I was when I just confessed to having this friendship problem. And she saw me with the male guys. And she was like, do you realise what you're like with men? You're like completely different. You become this kind of belligerent, you know, chest is out, abrasive, loud, slightly cruel, but it's all bants. You kind of do that thing. And I realised, yeah, I do put a performance on. And the masculinity was not just in me, it was between us, right? So I think it's really interesting when you when you say you go to Austin. And you become a slightly different version of Chris and you come back to the UK,

• 44:06Speaker 00

  you switch into that.

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  That mask comes back on again. Yeah. Well, I realised this looking back at my very lengthy time as a club promoter in the UK. And I realised that for a big, big chunk of time, what I thought was being a party lad and the life of the party was actually me lubricating my own social anxiety with alcohol. So what I was doing was I was pretty uncomfortable around other people for the most part because I didn't have a massive amount of stuff to say to them. And this is something for young people, if you are, especially in the UK, young people spend their time socialising in nightclubs. You go out Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, between the ages of 20 and 25.

• 44:51Chris Williamson?

  That's what you do. That's how you spend your time for the most part. But very few people that do that are actually meant to be there. The reason that you go there is because it's what everybody else does. So it's just this big memetic game and I didn't have a massive amount of stuff to talk to people about. So I remember looking, I ran a thousand club nights, right? I ran, I was the guy on the front door, the one that every single person in the city knew. And I remember standing in nightclubs and looking at other people laughing and joking and talking about stuff or seeming to talk about stuff. It's a club, right? So it's super loud. And I always remember thinking, why is it that they've got so much to talk about? When I don't really know what I should be talking about. And what I realised was that they were talking about, mate, this song's mint, isn't it?

• 45:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this song's mint, isn't it? Like, and that just wasn't the level that I was at. That wasn't the sort of conversation that I had when I was in private. And what I would do is I'd drink that would make me into the simulacrum of the version of people that I thought that everybody else wanted. And I think that the mask on that you put on with your friends and all the rest of it. A big chunk of that is finding people that you genuinely feel that you can be yourself around. I've got this, go ahead. I've got a theory about introversion that most people aren't introverts. They're just around friends that are shit. Like, most people are super extroverted when they're around people that they adore having conversations with.

• 46:14Chris Williamson?

  But if you're not, the difference between being an introvert and being around people that you don't have anything to talk to with, it's basically the same thing. Who wants to go out of the house if you've got friends? If the only people that you have to talk to are ones that you have to be drunk to be around?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think. I I heard a couple of things, I can't remember who said it, but it said you're good friends as someone who make um your best self, make you feel that your best self is your true self, which I think is lovely, but also, without getting pretentious, Aristotle, who's like, first wrote about friendships in ancient Greece, he basically said what friendship is, is it's a mirror, so your great mates are like a mirror to you. And I think that's almost right. But who you're with, it's not just a plain mirror, because it's shaped in their shape, so they'll reflect back what they want to reflect back. If they're boring, they'll find the bits in you that are boring. If they're bawdy or facile

• 47:10Speaker 00

  or dumb, they're gonna find those bits in you. And you, when you spend time with those people, you go, oh, maybe I'm not interesting, maybe I am this lad, because that's what they're seeing in me and that's what they're reflecting back to me. But it's, it's entirely to do with the context and you go somewhere else. So actually, I went off being friends with men, because a lot of my friends was kind of maybe similar to the vibe you're talking about in the clubs, right? Were very kind of archetypally laddy, bawdy. And there's nothing wrong with that, but all the time. And I find when I found when I was with women, I'd bring out a completely different side of myself. And I'd be much more complex, I'd be much more fully myself, but discover I had a much more interesting, varied self.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  And I just thought, maybe it is um, maybe it is a gender thing, but but then, like you say, if you find the right friends, doesn't matter their gender, then you can, you can find something that isn't a performance.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  I think that the UK seems to be a lot more memetic generally, so that groups seem to meme each other more harshly and that that inevitably ends up shaving off all of the interesting and odd different edges from everybody until you kind of have an archetype of like the lad, right? The Larry Lagerlauty sort of dude that does the banter thing. But I think, I I genuinely think it's a case of continuing to lean into being yourself and unapologetically as much as possible, which is hard if you don't have positive reinforcement, which is why finding someone that you can even, I remember the first ever guy that I lived with who

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  Made me feel comfortable around genuinely having intellectual interests. And I was maybe 23 or 24 and I'd watch documentaries about potential solutions to the Fermi paradox. And is the great filter, the reason that we haven't ascended to a type two civilization on the Kardashev scale and stuff? And but then I'd go to the nightclubs and be all right, mate. How are you, mate? Yeah, fine, mate, whatever. Like, that would be me who's got the bags. So I would have almost like a Bruce Wayne Batman thing, like a two lives going on. But then I lived with this guy who was like that pretty unapologetically because he didn't have the nightlife side to him. And I thought, oh, shit, like, I can actually be. I can have this curiosity and that can inhabit the personality that I am.

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  And, um, yeah, I think it's a case of trying to find people that permit you to be more like the self that you want to be. And the more that you lean into that, you get positive reinforcement for being you. And you no longer need to play this role that's always felt a bit sort of shallow and pointless and, and icky and sort of, and you, you come home and you never really feel that good. That was one of the big changes for myself.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've, I've written various bits of press for newspapers in the UK. And then on the comment section, I normally have a look at the comment section, which is always a mixed bag, admittedly. But it's interesting when people come back and some people say, oh, I think friendship's overrated. That all my friends are dicks or

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And I just think you've got the wrong friends.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  Friendship is massively, massively a creative force. Get the right friends, it makes you who you are and can makes you a much better person. You find the wrong friends, it shrinks you. So again, but then you get maybe also the friends you deserve. You have to be invested, I think, in that journey as well. Like you, this guy you've mentioned here gave you permission to be that. But he couldn't give you permission unless you had that in you and he was showing up and you had that curiosity.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the first mover of where does the authentic self come from is kind of an interesting one, I suppose. You know, do people allow you to be more of you? How can you be more of you if you're not being you at all? But yeah, I, uh, what you, you spoke, there's this term emotional labor. What's that?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So emotional labour is, um, it was a term originally created by someone called Ali Horchild, who's a sociologist, and it was about work. So emotional labour is the emotional work that people in the service industry do to do their jobs. So you go to a server who's having a shit day, but has a huge grin on her face, and she gives you your latte, even though she wants to stab you in the eyes, right? Or, or you know, the, the person, the waitress on the, on the airplane who's handing out nuts and she's had it up to her, up to her teeth with difficult passengers, but is smiling. That's emotional labour. But it's then grown to be this, then it was, became this feminist idea that it's the

• 51:40Speaker 00

  work women do to keep people's lives going. So it's, they're buying their husbands, um, uh, you know, dry cleaning. They are fixing, you know, things in the supermarket. They're going, oh, on Saturday, we're going for dinner with the Chultons, or whatever it is. All that work of remembering and organising people's lives so they have a nice time, that men don't notice, um, and goes unpaid, is emotional labour or mental load. But, connected to this, in the world of friendships and relationships, is this idea called kin-keeping, which is in families, it's the women who hold the family together. They organise the celebrations, similar idea to emotional labour. They kind of organise the get-togethers,

• 52:24Speaker 00

  keep people up to date with each other's news on the phone. But then, think about it in friendship groups, often, men will outsource that social work to their wife and girlfriend. They treat the women in their lives like the H R department. But if they were being honest, they'd say, you know, this is, um, Jane and the director of people operations at Jeff Limited. That's the conversations they'd have. And it is true in my life. I was, I basically cuckolded my girlfriend's social group because it was easy and I couldn't really be bothered, or I wasn't aware of the work that went into maintaining friendship groups. So like, connected to that third theory about time, women have the same time restrictions, generally, yet they haven't got the same friendship problem as men. So

• 53:08Speaker 00

  I think this idea of emotional labour is massively part of it, and is, is connected to how we hold relationships together.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  Is there a problem with marriage and?

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Does something happen when men get into marriages? Do they either settle in and believe that this is all I need to? Or is there an issue with the disnification of marriage? That your wife should be the only thing that you need? Some expectations going on here that restrict men's ability to have friendships post-marriage?

• 53:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a massive, I think there's a lot in that. So there's loads of people who have studied this stuff about the role, the way marriages change in meaning. It used to be that we didn't marry for love, we would marry for power or for resources. The idea that we'd marry for love is actually a very modern incarnation, didn't come into about the 1920s. So it's a pretty new idea, but now it is the absolute central thing. And people will stand up at their weddings, get teary and say, I'm marrying my best friend today. And everyone goes, how lovely. And I suppose it is nice, but then you maybe have a problem where if you're with your best friend, why would you hang out with anybody else? So I think there is a cultural idea that your beloved should be everything to you,

• 54:23Speaker 00

  your emotional home, your sexual home, your home for fun and leisure, as well as the parent you co-parent with. That's a lot of pressure. It also shrinks your life if you're not careful. But then there's also part of it where maybe people buy into that and they don't like their spouse going off and having other friendships. I think there's a lot to that as well, but we are surrounded by this cultural idea that we should only want one massively important relationship and it should be in a romantic relationship.

• 54:56Chris Williamson?

  I saw another post from Rob Henderson that said, "Social networks have a strong degree of gender homophily. Around 70% of women's personal social networks consist of women and around 70% of men's social networks consist of men, with most but not all of the cross-gender members being family members over whom we have little choice. When two researchers asked a group of American adolescents to list their close friends from home and school, 72% were same-sex." So I can see here just a game theoretic issue. If men are worse at making friends and men have mostly male friends, that, just that itself is the reason why men are struggling to make friends and hold on to them. That's it. You don't need anything else on top of that.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm that's I wish we'd have this conversation before I published the book. I think that's a good, that's a really interesting. It's a really interesting theory. Um. Yeah, I think there's a lot to it and there's a lot of stigma. And we are uncomfortable about cross-sex friendships as well. Like I would. I lived with women for 10 years, two women, and everyone was obsessed with the idea that we were banging. Or that if we weren't banging, we had banged or will bang. It was like, no, it's fine. We won't. We haven't. It's all cool. But then people are like, no, no, no, you'll be banging, I'd imagine. Like, we can't get our head around it.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What was that thing to do with, uh, was, is there an expectation around best friends as well? Obviously, you've got women who have a a social circle that's potentially uh, more intimate than guys that have them distributed out. I remember in school, I used to be asked, so who's your best friend? As if that was some sort of an expectation. And I always used to feel uh, the same way as you, maybe with the best man thing. Oh, well, what if I don't have, what if they don't feel like I'm their best friend, but I feel like they're mine? Is that unrequited best friend-ness?

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, the hierarchy in friendship is really awkward. But to go back to something Dunbar said, he actually looked at this. Women will often report having a best friend. And what's interesting, I think, is they'll often report being more intimate, as in, you know, closer with their best friend than they are with their spouse. Whereas if you ask, if that was, it's not true of almost no men, but men, when you ask them about best friends, they'll go, well, I can't really name one person, but it's Kev, Steve, Jono, Paul. I pretty much named the Beatles there. But, um, you know, they'll say it's a, it's a group, right? Um, and it's more casual. But then Dunbar says something interesting to me when I interviewed him, he said, because it's casual, when one person drops out of the group, it's like, all right, cheers then, see ya. And then someone else will fill in and it'll become a different dynamic.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  And it's like out of sight, out of mind. Not, not in an unpleasant way. It's just like, we've got this. If you're over there, I don't, I'm not going to worry about you. Whereas with, with women, there's much more of an effort to maintain that. And they'd really miss that because it's much more intense.

• 57:52Chris Williamson?

  I, the bonding over doing things makes so much sense to me. As a guy that's run a lot of different projects, done businesses, the Sort of bond, and this may be true for women as well, but the sort of bond that I have with the guys that I've gone through fire and brimstone, trying to create a project or be on a sports team together or do whatever, is it's beyond friendship. You know, there's even an upper bound on how friendly I can be with my friends that I haven't had shared suffering through trying to create something that's worthwhile and difficult.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  You can't cheat that either. You have to do it. And I think this is coming to maybe, like, connected to so much of what we said. It's, I call it in the book, the vulnerability industrial complex now, where everyone's meant to talk about their feelings and talk about, be very outward and very verbose with how they relate to somebody else. Whereas actually, the behaviour will show you a lot more. And when you go through something with someone, they're being vulnerable because they're taking risks alongside you. They're being sad, excited, angry. When you go through that with someone in complex environments

• 59:10Speaker 00

  or achieving difficult things, that is a form of vulnerability in itself that maybe, again, is not represented in a lot of conversations about vulnerability. And actually, Chris, when I looked at all these friendships, this was without, well, I don't want to sound depressing, but friendship is such a confluence of you, the person and the context. And once you leave the context, or you change, or they change, sometimes you can never get that back. It lives in that moment, in that time, and it is so special and rare and just fucking amazing. I've got a chapter about a guy I used to be in a double act with on

• 59:55Speaker 00

  the comedy circuit in the UK, and we came from being students to being professionals. And it's like, wow, what a journey. And then when we stopped performing, and we tried our own things career-wise, we'd stop being so close. And then when we get back together now, we're mates, but I'm different, he's different. That context doesn't exist anymore. And you're like, oh, wow.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  How do you think, how do you think people should feel about that? Should men feel wistful about that? Should they try and hold on to it?

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  I don't, I've, I've kind of wrestled with that. I think this, it is, you should, I mean, you will feel wistful about it, but in a sense, I suppose maybe a more positive framing of that is when you're having it, you should be just reflect and be grateful of it. I think often we don't realise the importance of friendship until they don't, they're not around anymore, we don't have it. And when I look back, I was obviously obsessed and reflecting my friendships while writing the book, I was like, oh man, I really miss that. But in the moment, I didn't realise how rare it was to have that or how rare it was. But it also, in a positive way, it shows you how, it shows you that, I have this line in the book, and I shouldn't quote myself, I sound like a complete wanker, but I say that friendship is something that grows on you like a suntan, right? When you're doing something else.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  And C S Lewis is, he's like an English writer, obviously quite famous, but he wrote a book about friendship himself. And he says friendship needs to be about something. So like the, the, he says that the opening lines of friendship is, oh, you too, I thought it was just me. I'm paraphrasing that, but you know, that sense of being on a common journey, common mission, but friends look forward, they've got a spot on the horizon, they're moving towards, right? It's about something. And so I, it's kind of the positive thing is, it doesn't happen, great friendship, when you're being timid with life. It is connected to attacking life. And it, it, you have, it's, it's a side effect of doing interesting, cool things. If you want to go out and get more friends,

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  I'm not sure that's the best approach. Go out and get a life and do, do cool stuff you're into. People will be there alongside you, side by side.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  Let's fucking go, dude. I love that. I love that so much. And it is, it is, there's an action, there's a vector to friendship, especially amongst men. You know, how are you and this person going through something together? And that makes, you know, look at me, bro, scienceing my way through adaptive explanations for friendship, but. You and the people that you were closest to would bond together over the shared challenge of hunting, of collecting food, of ensuring that your tribe doesn't get killed by another group of people. Why do you think it is that football hooliganism is just so like, look at the way that these guys, they'll take a brick to the face for each other because they support the same football team?

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  I always think about heist movies, you know, those classic, you know, those classic things you read sometimes, it's like, the old gangsters get together at 70 years old, they've got enough money, but they're not doing it for the cash, they're mad, they're gonna get caught, they're gonna get put in prison for the rest of their life, but they're not doing it for the diamonds, they're going, get the boys back together, one more job.

• 1:02:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  But it's the stakes, I mean, this is, this is a thing you don't, this is again, without being too wistful, like, the stakes of it, like, the hooligans, I wouldn't want to be a hooligan, but I kind of see it's the, kind of the risk of it, the stakes of it, like, replicate, you talk about hunting there, you know, if we screw this up, we're dead, or that's more sort of warfare, but you know, we're out and about, if we don't eat, we're gonna die. Those stakes are connected to friendship, and maybe it's connecting to that thing you had about purpose, it's gotta have some, some heft to it.

• 1:03:26Chris Williamson?

  The problem that you have with that is that it makes friendships sound transactional, it makes them sound like friendships of convenience, like, the only reason that you have a sense of belonging or attachment to somebody else is because they can do something for you, that they're useful in a way, it sounds like using somebody, I think, and there is a romanticization around not just the disnification of relationships, but also the same of friendships too, that people are supposed to be friends purely because there's kind of this soul-to-soul bond between you and somebody else, but it, there are rarely, there is a very small number of friends that I have held on to throughout my entire life,

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  that I've been able to maintain that deep level of, of connection with, without there being something that we're working toward.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so, to quote Aristotle again, he said there's basically three souls of friendship. One is that friends that are useful to each other, so the transactional thing. So maybe we work together, so in an office. I think it's slightly different to some of these bigger kind of journeys we've been mentioning that. Second is we're friends because um it's pleasurable. So like, you know, I I think you're great fun, I'm great fun. We have a great time hanging out. But the third one is kind of harder to translate, but it's about goodness. I'm with you because I see virtue in you and I really appreciate the virtue. So you can be not nice to be with sometimes, or you're not necessarily useful to me. But maybe I really admire um your courage, or I really admire your wisdom, or the fact that you are kind.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  And that, you know, we don't have loads of friends in our life where we can say, I just think this person is such a good human being and makes me a better human being. But then those also endure beyond context. So like, a lot of this stuff is like, they've worked it out years ago. But maybe, like you say, we've narrowed down what we think a friend is. Disneyification is a nice way of putting it, but again, it comes down to celebrating that, that when you've got it, be really grateful for it.

• 1:05:28Chris Williamson?

  Think about, this might be a more modern way that people put it, that they say, I just think that they're a really good influence on me. You know, I like myself when I'm around them. That's that that sense that you are a better version of you, or you see in them things that you would like to be like. You know, the training partner that always seems to gas you up a little bit more and you go, yeah, I want to be around that guy. I don't want to be around the training partner that's always making me feel down in the dumps when I went to go and train with them.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I've I've got a friend called Philippa, who whenever I'm with, if we go, we're in a room together, go to a party or something. I watch her work the room and I'm like, she's just setting this room on fire. She's amazingly kind of uh kind, outgoing, interested, like listening the shit out of people. And I'm like, what, what, what, I'm looking like, what a good person. So that, but that is, I don't work with her. I don't see her all the time. She's not useful to me. Well, I wouldn't say you're completely unuseful to me. But you know, it is, it is exactly that. She makes me better. But also I kind of aspire to kind of absorb her qualities.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about the modern manosphere? Do you think that that is helping men at the moment?

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  So it's an interesting one. So I think if social media and including manosphere within that is a bridge into real connection, as in your meeting and having experiences together, I think it can be positive. I've, I think it is a bit of a symptom of isolation more broadly that it exists and you get in those groups, often they get stuck in a vortex, an echo chamber getting more and more extreme. And there is a, there is a shared purpose in extremity. So a lot of these people are attached to their often mad ideological beliefs because they are

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  part of something. And these are boys and men in their bedrooms who don't have a social group, but they find it online. And to depart from some of these very eccentric views is to lose that. I think it's intimately connected to loneliness. Is it positive? I think it depends on the sort of messages they're finding there. A lot of people, you mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier. I mean, I know you, you're friendly with him. I've, I've never met Jordan Peterson, but if you find some messages for him and go take responsibility for your life and find a lot of positivity in that, great. If you find some other folks on that world who are giving you less positive messages and maybe entrench you in that isolation, obviously less positive.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  But there's lots of research that your online relationships are not as effective in terms of your wellbeing as face-to-face ones. And there's not really a way around that. I'm not saying you should only have face-to-face friendships, but you do need to get out of the house.

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I have a mixed feelings about the manosphere. A proto idea that I've got about it is that this is first wave manosphere work, in the same way as you had first wave feminism. And then each time that it kind of falls, well, actually probably no, it's second wave manosphere. So I'd have said that the first wave was 2006 to 2014, 17. So that would have been your, the game Neil Strauss, it would have been Tuck a Max with I hope this is a beer in hell, would have Very much around pick-up artistry and game and negging and neurolinguistic programming. That sort of fell away because society basically decided that that was a bit much, mate.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  And then what came back around were very similar sort of talking points, but now under the guise of red pill, black pill, alpha, beta, sigma, Mig Tau, incels, like simping, OnlyFans. That was the language that got used. And I think that we're moving toward the tail end of that now as well. Because as soon as any movement can become memed, as soon as you can caricature a movement, it's kind of becoming a piss-take of itself. And I think that you're seeing a lot of that kind of space. People are starting to break off and try and find like holistic men's work or holistic self-improvement or organic. Like they're trying to do something that that moves it on a little bit more.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  But there's certain elements, dudes. I had this lady, Nama Kate's on, who done some research into the incel and black pill forums. And she basically said, I didn't know this, but that if you're in one of these incel chats, that if you were to say that you had any positive interaction with a woman that day, that you would be very seriously ostracized or maybe even kicked out of the group. And I was like, oh, like if you if you got a girl's phone number at Starbucks and she was like, no, no, no, no. Like if the Starbucks server, if her eyes lingered at you for more than half a second. Because what that is giving to the group is an undue sense of hope. What people are bound together by there is we're all in this together.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  This is the shared purpose and what's called ascending. So ascending up out of the black pill incel world to somebody that may be one of the normies that's actually able to have sex. That that gives, it creates a delta between where all of the people in the group are and what they could be. And it's almost like, look, if nobody has hope, then there's no pain to feel that delta between what we could be and what we're not. And as you see other people rise up, that creates that compulsion and that pain in you. So what they're actually optimizing for in these groups is for people to never actually try to ascend. They're never trying to do anything which would pull them out. And the shared suffering is seen as a badge of loyalty. That's the fealty. That's the flag that you're waving. It's so wild. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  That's, there's also, what's interesting about that is it's so, there's so many instances in history where that is kind of happened, where groups of people in difficult circumstances have been swept up in ideology and want to get lost with it. I mean, it's hard to overcome that, isn't it? Because it's sort of that ideological, not ideological, that sort of primal urge to have brotherhood or have connection, but then, you know, that maybe plays into the dynamics of memes and of social networks, online and algorithms and things. I mean, it's potent. It's really interesting. It'd be interesting to know what the next step of the manosphere looks like. To give a positive, maybe it's not out and out manosphere. I've got a bit in the book

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  where I spent a day with a guy in Ipswich who lives with twenty-six lifestyle sex dolls. And they're all around his house. And you'd think this guy would be really, really weird. But he's got two grown up kids, he's been married, and he kind of, he made me banana bread when I was there. We had a cup of tea. I hope he washed his hands.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  Actually, it did taste slightly soapy. And, yeah, and I said, so, talk to me about this. And he takes photos of them. He's got his own studio. And that connects him to the doll community. And they don't like calling them sex dolls. Because they think it demeans what it is. They call, it's the doll community. And through his interactions and his work with these dolls, he's made an online community. And actually, it's quite tasteful. It's not about sex. Does he occasionally use the dolls in that way? I'd imagine he does. Good luck to him. But Godspeed, sir.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  But it wasn't about that. And actually, if you look into the doll world, it's really interesting. I spoke to someone who spoke to real doll who make sex dolls and they're making, the name skips my mind now, but the world's first sex robot. And when they ask customers, what do you want in this? They're not talking about self lubricating vaginas and gyrating nipples and all that stuff. They're saying, oh, we want it to be able to have memory for affectionate responses. We want it to be able to have conversations. They're actually wanting it to be about human connection. And my point with this is that this stuff that seems a bit off putting, that seems a bit weird, that seems of guys who have maybe lost the plot.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  They can use these communities and as bridges into something more positive. And I think it's important not to. We have to have a complex and nuanced look at this stuff as well as calling out the stuff that's terrible. And the idea of Manosphere 3.0, yeah, maybe it could be a lot more positive.

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  In terms of applied stuff then, what's the prescription?

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Uh, the prescription, I think, is three things. One is, so I asked Dr. Robin Dunbar, say, if you give me one piece of advice, what would it be? And he said, join a club. So there's a lot of homophily in gender in friendships. You're mainly friends with your own sex, as you've pointed out already. But we tend to be friends with people who are like us. So if you're struggling with friends, join a place where there's lots of people like you. So if something you're into, join a club and you'll be in that community in those self fulfilling loops. And I spoke to someone up the road the other day, CrossFit Gym. They've made loads of friends there, whatever it is for you, improv theatre, whatever it is. And men need these activities. But I would say as you get older, be intentional. You have to do the work. You have to be deliberate with it.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  Do not rely on spontaneity, the miracle of diary thinking. So that's the first thing. The second thing is connected to this emotional labour point, which is. I, I spoke to someone with amazing friendships, a guy, and I said, why, what's going on? He said, well, my mates call me the Sherpa. The Sherpa is in those guys in Nepal who carry everything up the mountain for the rest of their buddies. And he said, They call me the Sherpa because I organise everything, but they said if you didn't organise everything, Mark, we'd never meet up. And I just thought, what a brilliant, simple phrase. Be the Sherpa in your relationships. Be the one who texts. Be the one who organises, even when it's hard. Don't leave it to your girlfriend. Don't leave it to the other guys.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  And you just look at each other across the ether in this holding pattern. Be the Sherpa. And then finally, expand your toolbox a little bit. So we've kind of coming back right to the start here. Have you got different ways of showing up in relationships? I think this has been a great example of it, this conversation. Some of it has been going, asking direct provocative questions. Some of it's been banter. Some of it's been openness and vulnerability. I mean, that's a great example. It's different tools to have different outcomes. Are you, have you got enough different ways of showing up? And the three, so those are the three things. But then if you're going to have a sentence, it would be, show up when you're asked to show up. I'd stop showing up. I lost my friends. Go first when you're not asked to show up.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  And finally, keep going even when it's hard. Because sometimes your mates are going to be shit because they're blokes. But that, in a nutshell, is the solution.

• 1:16:29Chris Williamson?

  Max, I love it, man. I really appreciate the work that you've done. I think being open and vulnerable about this sort of stuff is, is, it is a difficult stage to go in. And that line, the very, very beginning, you know, the difference between opening up and manning up, that is the one that everyone's trying to walk. So I appreciate you. I really, really do. People want to check out the stuff that you do and follow you online. Where should they go?

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  Uh, maxdickens.com is my website. I'm on Twitter at Max Dickens. Uh, I'm on Instagram as well. I don't really use it very much, so maybe find me on Twitter, guys. Um, yeah, say hello.

• 1:16:59Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Thanks, mate.