The Gender Expert: Men Are Emotionally Dependent On Women & We're Treating Them Like Malfunctioning Women! Richard Reeves

500,000 men are dying by suicide, and 6% of men are unemployed, is masculinity in crisis? And what is the cure? Richard Reeves is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, an organisation that researches and addresses issues affecting men. He is also the author of the book, ‘Of Boys and Men’. In this conversation, Richard and Steven discuss topics such as, the rising rates of male suicide rates, the health benefits of marriage for men, the toxic impact of Andrew Tate, and the relationship crisis among men. (00:00) Intro (01:23) Why Dedicating Your Career To Men's Issues (03:53) What's Your Background? (06:05) The Crazy Stats That Made You Research This Topic (08:06) We're Going Through A Cultural Revolution (12:31) We Need A New Way To Approach This (17:11) Are Men And Women Differently? (21:06) Men Take More Risks (26:16) Unconscious Behaviours Of Men (34:10) Suicide Is The Biggest Killer Of Men (38:43) Why Is This Suicide Increasing? (42:46) Why Do Humans Feel Like They Need To Be Needed? (46:58) Why Men Feel Less Needed (49:42) Does Retirement Kill You? (54:42) We're Losing Connection In Our Modern Society (57:41) The Dating Environment Has Changed (01:05:22) Are Dating Apps Being Unfavourable To Men? (01:09:40) Is Marriage In Decline? (01:12:50) Births Are Increasing Outside Of Marriage (01:13:55) Is Marriage Better For Women Or Men? (01:15:58) Enforced Monogamy (01:17:54) Why Andrew Tate Converted To Islam (01:20:46) Women Economic Power (01:22:55) What Do You Think About The Word Toxic Masculinity (01:27:07) There Is A Friendship Male Recession (01:31:37) Men Shed's Movement (01:33:47) My Experience With Couples Therapy (01:36:29) The Hard Times Of Going Through Couples Therapy (01:40:24) How Masculinity Can Be Expressed (01:47:41) What Advice You'd Give Your Children (01:53:57) Using Our Voices To Make Men Be Heard (02:01:21) The Last Guest Question You can buy Richard’s book, ‘Of Boys And Men’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/BGBtdbitXKb Follow Richard: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/8swNmRotXKb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/9iup1brtXKb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It is pretty clear, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well. In fact, they do terribly. And in modern society, that's a problem.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Richard Reeves is the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  An organisation dedicated to researching and tackling the challenges faced by boys and men in modern society. We're in the early stages of a cultural revolution, so that women are not economically reliant on men, which is great. One consequence of that is that it's put a big question mark next to the role of men, which used to be filled with a whole script of ways to be a man, ways to be ahead of household, etc. Because of that, they're struggling. They're behind in education, wages have stagnated. You're seeing a massive rise of young men who are single, and now the suicide rate is four times higher and rising. They looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives. And the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless. And the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  You said the hardest thing you've ever done as a man is couples' therapy. Why?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  I was talking about what I'd done at home and how it's supported her career. My wife said that you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. The problem is that you're not masculine. What I came to realise is that men feel like that in order for women to become bigger, we had to make ourselves smaller. That is not the answer.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  So what would you do at a social level to fix things?

• 1:25Speaker 00

  The most important move would be to sing.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  Richard, you wrote a book called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling and Why It Matters and What to Do About It. Of all the things you could have done, why? Why did you do this?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Partly because I was warned so strongly against it by my colleagues, by friends, by professionally, just saying this is such a difficult subject to write about. Particularly right now, in this sort of moment we're in culturally. And, and the reason I say I did it despite being warned or because I was warned, isn't because I'm like a sucker for punishment. I'm actually like very thin skinned. Interestingly, my wife said that in some ways I was in the worst of all worlds because I'm a thin skinned polemicist. So in other words, the someone who kind of goes out of their way to kind of make provocative points. Right. I'm provocative, so I provoke responses, but then I'm kind of upset at the responses. Right.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  And actually, this, this work around boys and men is not, is not intended at all to be provocative. Ironically, I'm trying to make it less provocative. I'm trying to make it more data based, more mainstream, like more boring in a way.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  But it was very interesting to me, and it was very hard to get a publisher in the US for the book. And so it was interesting to me that this whole debate was one that was just seen as too risky to enter. And I honestly thought, well, hang on, if I, as a fairly boring guy with charts and research, I'm being warned against this, who is going to talk about it? And are we sure that it's better that those other people are talking about it and that we're not talking about it? We're basically benching ourselves from the conversation because of our fear about what's going to happen to us professionally or reputationally. We're basically benching ourselves and that just leaves the ground open. And if you think there's a real issue around boys and men, real questions around boys and men, it's not like it's not going to be talked about.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  That's not the question. The question is who's talking about it? And I actually thought we need more people like me talking about it. I E. boring, research based, policy oriented, you know, nonfiction type people, Brookings type people. And not just some of the people who are currently talking about it online. And that's not, there are lots of great people talking about this online. Don't mistake me, but, but it's almost like it wasn't a topic that you were supposed to approach unless you were willing to risk something. And that just seems crazy to me.

• 4:03Steven Bartlett?

  When you say you come from this, from a place of stats, graphs, figures, et cetera, what is your background? Where does that come from?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  I bounced around essentially between academia, think tanks, politics, journalism. So when I was over here, I was in the UK until 2012 and I'd served in the coalition government, working as a director of strategy for Nick Clegg. Before that, I'd run Demos, the think tank. I'd worked, I'd written for The Guardian and The Observer. I'd worked at IPPR. I'd worked at the Institute of Psychiatry. I did a PhD in philosophy at Warwick. And so I basically found myself in this space where either I'm trying to make policy or I'm writing about policy, or I'm trying to think about policy in that sort of semi-academic space. And so I'm a kind of social scientist by experience, I guess, rather than by training.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  And that led me to the Brookings Institution in DC, where I was for 10 years, working on race inequality, class inequality. And Brookings is like a big blue chip, you know, policy think tank place. It's regularly ranked as the most important think tank in the world, whatever that means today, I don't know. And so in a way, that was a kind of natural place for me to end up. And so, yeah, I come at this, and I'm very non-partisan. So I try to be as fact-based as possible. I'm not partisan, but I am very, very concerned about trying to do what we can to reduce the obstacles that people face to human flourishing. I know that sounds really like vague, but that's what's driven all of my work.

• 5:35Steven Bartlett?

  And you run the Institute for Boys and Men?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, the American Institute for Boys and Men. It's actually the first think tank, like research policy shop on this issue, certainly in the US and arguably anywhere. We've had lots of institutions, quite rightly, created to look at issues for women and girls, and we need those. Arguably, we need more of them in many parts of the world. But we haven't actually thought that it was important to have any that specifically look at the issues of boys and men through a kind of research lens and a policy lens. And so in the end, I felt like that was necessary. And then I was persuaded that I had to do it myself. I actually looked quite hard for other ways to get someone else to do it because it was a difficult move.

• 6:16Steven Bartlett?

  When was the moment where you decided that this was the subject that you were going to tackle? Was there, was there a stat you read, a moment you had, a eureka moment of sorts, or was it just a culmination of things?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  It was more of a culmination. There was just a series of statistics that I just kept running into and not just stumbling over, but sort of just running into with my shin, bruising my shin and going, wait, really? And then checking those stats with people. And, and most of them, I had a sense of the direction, but I didn't know how big some of the changes had become. So for example, discovering that there's like a bigger gender gap in higher education now than there was in the seventies, but it's the other way around. So we kind of completely flipped the gender gap in, in higher education. Or, or learning that the suicide rate is four times higher among men and boys and, and

• 7:10Speaker 00

  rising. But you know, I think I was already on this track when COVID hit, but actually COVID probably underlined my determination to keep doing it because in the US at least, the immediate impact of COVID was huge for boys and men. The college enrollment rate dropped seven times more for men in the US than, than for women. And then I noticed that men were dying in much bigger numbers from COVID and no one was really researching that. So I found myself doing research on COVID death rates, which was not my field at all, because it wasn't being done elsewhere. And those sorts of moments illustrated to me that it wasn't anybody's job to wake up each morning and think about, how is this

• 7:55Speaker 00

  thing, in this case, a pandemic? How is it affecting boys and men? It was no one's job to do that. And so those stats that I've just mentioned to you, they didn't get any attention because no one was drawing attention to them. Whereas the impact of the COVID nineteen pandemic on girls and women was getting a lot of attention because lots of people were producing good reports on that.

• 8:17Steven Bartlett?

  What is the, the sort of the macro then on the current state of boys and men? If, if I'd never, if I'd just landed on this planet and I was an alien and I said to you, how are men getting on comparatively versus how they used to be getting on?

• 8:34Steven Bartlett?

  What information would you supply to me to make your case? And what would you say to me?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  So assume that we're going to talk about advanced economies. So we're going to talk about the UK, the US, Scandinavia, et cetera. I think a fair answer there would be to say that there are many ways in which boys and men are struggling in those societies. They're behind in education for sure. Wages have stagnated, especially if they're working class. The mental health challenges of men are playing out differently, but in some ways more tragically because of these very high suicide rates. So in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45. So playing out differently for women and girls. But I think I'd probably say we're in the relatively early stages of a cultural revolution in advanced economies.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  And that revolution is one where the economic relation between men and women has been dramatically transformed. And so the old world, my, my father's world, my father just turns 80 today. And the world that he and my mom have occupied was one where their roles were just much more tightly defined. Right. It was a kind of, it wasn't really about much of a question about what their roles were going to be. And women had just so little economic power that they were essentially forced into relationships, marriages like with men. Right. And so there was this economic dependency of women on men. And I would argue an emotional dependency of men on women. And of course, a huge reliance on women to kind of raise the kids. But there was, there was like a script, there was a story, there was a way.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  The economic rise of women has achieved what Gloria Steinem set out to achieve, which is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity. That argument, which was really about changing the economic relation between men and women, so that women weren't economically reliant on men. That was the central, I think the central argument of that wave of the women's movement. And very largely achieved. And I would argue that's probably the greatest economic liberation in human history is still playing out. We need to do more in other parts of the world. But one consequence of that is to then put a big question mark next to the role of men. Right, so I think underpinning a lot of these issues that we see kind of playing out for boys and men is really just, there's just a gap.

• 10:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  There's a space with a question mark in it now, whereas, which used to be filled with a whole script of ways, you know, ways to be a man, ways to be a dad, ways to be a head of household, et cetera. And so we've torn up those old scripts by and large in these advanced economies, which is great. But I would say that we've replaced the old script that women had, or my mum had. So the script my mum had was, you're going to be a wife and a mother, primarily. She was also a nurse, but part-time. Skip forward one generation to my sister, my, my wife, my female friends. And it was, you're going to be able to stand on your own two feet. Right, so in the blink of an eye, we changed the story for women in a way that I think

• 11:30Speaker 00

  is profoundly positive. And how did we change the story for men? The old story, my father's story, you're going to have to do as well as you can because you're going to have to look after a family, you know, make some money, provide, right? That's going to be your role. So we took away that story because we don't know if he's going to be a provider anymore. Right, I've certainly not been the main provider, certainly not all of the time in, in my relationships. And we, what did we replace it with? What's the new script for masculinity? What's the new set of roles? What's the new set of do's that we've got for men? You could argue we've got quite a lot of don'ts, many of which we need, but not a very long list of do's. And so I think that that sense of that category being, that question mark now, being open,

• 12:15Speaker 00

  has just left a lot of men feeling adrift, uncertain of their role, uncertain of their place, uncertain of being needed, wanted. And I think that's, that's feeding into a lot of the things that are easier to measure, like mental health, education, employment, et cetera. But underlying it, I, I, I think it's this coming to terms with this huge revolution that we've seen.

• 12:42Steven Bartlett?

  I want to make sure by the end of this conversation, we do our very best to hazard a guess at what that list of dues are for men, but also to kind of fill that question mark. I get so many women and men come up to me often talking about their young sons. And encouraging me to have more conversations like this because they want a good script for their young sons. In a world where their young sons are going online and being offered maybe a not so good script.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:11Steven Bartlett?

  By certain influencers and influencers online. So that's, that's one of my objectives with having these conversations. And I think it's worth pausing there just to say that from looking at your work, you're not suggesting we go backwards to the old way of things.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  No, that's part of the challenge is that there's in some ways, an understandable reaction to change that is disorienting. It's destabilizing, it maybe threatens a sense of status among men. And to reach back for the world as it once was very recently, right? This is not, we don't have to go back millennia, probably only have to go back one generation or two generations to a world where like men had their roles, women had their roles, everyone knew their place. And you can see the appeal of that when there's just so much uncertainty. But emphatically not the answer to go back. And I think in this debate, what you very often feel is if those who are perhaps on that more conservative side of the argument,

• 14:10Speaker 00

  they want to kind of turn back the clock, especially on women and women's roles. But I would say on the other side of the argument, maybe more on the progressive side of the argument or liberal side of the argument in American terms, there's a bit of a sort of turning a blind eye to the actual problems of boys and men.

• 14:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And so I think for a lot of young men, and I, having spoken to them and had some responses to my work from them, they feel as if there are two fairly unappetizing options on the table for them. From the right, they get the message of like, you should be more like your father or your grandfather. Be a real man, right? Provide, protect, et cetera. Have a wife that can stay at home, fill in the gap. But then they're going from the left, the message they get is you should be more like your sister. The problem with your masculinity is your masculinity and we should just basically should be more like a woman, right? And actually, it's not surprising to me that most young men who are strongly in favour of gender equality, like they've grown up with it, there's no evidence they're turning against it.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  So they want gender equality, but they also, there's something about the way they feel in the world that means that they don't want to be treated as some, there's something wrong with them because they're a man, right? And I think even, especially in schools, but maybe more broadly, there's a danger that we treat men like malfunctioning women. So your problem is you're not feminine enough, you're not caring enough, you're not nurturing enough, you're not emotionally vulnerable enough, you don't cry enough, you don't spend enough time with your kids. And I'm not saying those aren't all valid challenges, but if that's all we've got, if

• 15:52Speaker 00

  in other words, we're just defining positive masculinity in a way that is completely synonymous with femininity, I'm not surprised we're driving, we're seeing a lot of young men in particular say, well, no, I'm not interested in that. And the only other thing else they can see on offer is this more reactionary alternative. And so if we give them that choice between being feminine and being reactionary, it's not clear to me that they're all going to choose the former.

• 16:22Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because the way that the digital world, the algorithms, the social media are designed is to kind of push you towards camps. So this like space in the middle of nuance, it's just not going to get the likes, the retweets, the engagement. In fact, it's the, the ideas on the outside, the men should be more. Feminine, or men should be extremely masculine, that are going to get all of the attention because of the way the algorithms are designed. So if the if the answer is some kind of nuanced position in the middle, I just can't see in a world how that's ever going to form a tribe and be rewarded by the algorithm. So, you know, this is this is part of the the beauty, I guess, of having podcast conversations because you can because

• 17:06Steven Bartlett?

  we're not really held hostage by an algorithm here. We can kind of, you know, speak openly, but most of the algorithms don't work in such a way. At the heart of this issue, though, I think, is a very difficult question, which is, are men and women different?

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Okay, well, let's let's come to that. But can I go back to your previous point?

• 17:23Steven Bartlett?

  Please, yeah, it's two questions at once.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Because I think you're you're underselling yourself in a way. I agree that the way the algorithm works drives the kind of short term attention towards those more tribal, simplistic ideas. But the mere fact of your success and the success of others like you, to me, is an incredibly positive sign. It suggests to me that actually, there is an appetite for more nuanced conversation. There is an appetite for recognizing that two things can be true at once, and that there are trade offs, like A is mostly good, like the rise of women, amazing, some causing some issues that we should deal with. And I have to tell you, my own experience of this, as a, you know, we've established,

• 18:05Speaker 00

  boring, chart driven, policy wonk type person, right? I did this video for Big Think, the YouTube platform, and it's had more comments than I've sold copies of the book.

• 18:16Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Different audience, of course. My wife calls me, I'm traveling somewhere, and she says, have you read the comments on your video? And I said, of course not. Like, I'm old school journalist, never read the comments. She didn't know we got to. We started reading them together. And by the end of that taxi journey, wherever I was, we're both in tears. Because what what we found was, young men, including some teenage boys, saying, thank you.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  For recognizing that the problems that boys and young men are facing are real, but not saying, and therefore become a reactionary misogynist. Actually saying, guys, this is a difficult time. There is some transitions. We've got to think about, you know, come to your question about are they different? We are different in some ways that we have to talk about, but that in no way means we should be trying to turn back the progress of women. The solution to your problem as a young man is not to make your sister less powerful or independent. And there's a huge appetite for that. It's just hard to articulate. It doesn't drive the algorithm. But I honestly, the conversations you've had around this, other people are having around

• 19:25Speaker 00

  this, gives me a lot of hope that actually most young men out there want that real conversation. But it does, I agree, it has to start with a recognition of the fact that there are differences on average between men and women. And I can't remember who said this. It might have been this Swedish public health economist called Hans Rosling, who I absolutely love. He's passed away now, but it might have been him. It's the sort of thing he would have said. And I'm paraphrasing it, but something like, "The world would be much better if everyone could understand the idea of an overlapping distribution." Everyone, we're all trying, if you say, "Men are taller than women," most people know what that means, right? On average.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Like, no, if you say, "Men are taller than women," no one in their right mind thinks it means every man is taller than every woman, right? Yeah. No, no one thinks that. They know that that means mostly, so that most of the men, most of the people over six foot are male. You know, the average man is taller than two thirds of women or, you know, whatever it is, right? So it's two. And that's what most sex differences are like. They're not completely separate or completely the same. They just, they have overlapping distributions. And so on average, men might be a little bit less likely to cry. That's true. But it doesn't mean that there aren't some very weepy men, some of whom I think you've had on this podcast.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  And who knows where this conversation's going, right? Or some women who are less likely to. And we could, we could take in aggression, we could take in risk-taking, we could take in sex drive, we could take in competitiveness. And, and we could take in more interest in things rather than people and put all of those on this sort of distribution and just say, "Look, we can accept there are differences on average." Ask if they really matter and influence it in what way? And then never use that as a way to discriminate against an individual.

• 21:17Steven Bartlett?

  So women and women different?

• 21:18Speaker 00

  On average, yeah.

• 21:19Steven Bartlett?

  And and in what ways are they different that are pertinent to this conversation?

• 21:24Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when we talk about.

• 21:27Steven Bartlett?

  It's really about. Societal roles and gender roles that I'm I'm getting to here because when we talk about the changes that have happened. And also when we get to the heart of what a man's script should be.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:39Steven Bartlett?

  There must be clues in how we are different. If you know what I mean.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. The the way I think about this is that if there are these differences on average. In say, risk taking.

• 21:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, because men are the ones that are, I saw the stats, it's like ninety percent of men are. Ninety percent of people that have like gambling addictions, for example, are men.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it definitely opens up all kinds so that there's, let's take on average, men, boys and men, somewhat more likely to take risks. Right? So let's take that as an example, like, does it matter?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Well, it does matter in some negative ways because you just identified, look, there's an addiction issue. There's also like teenage boys, like twice as likely to die. As teenage girls.

• 22:24Steven Bartlett?

  From.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  From from risk taking activity by and large, from car crashes or accidents. You know, much more likely to drown all these kinds of things, right? Because they're just. Taking more risks, right? And so. That aspect of kind of risk taking, and especially if the risks involve somebody else's life or wellbeing. Obviously, that's a problem. But if the risk taking means that, say, they're on average, a little bit more likely to kind of take a risk in business. Right? Or they're more likely to sign up to be a smoke jumper in the US. Do you know what a smoke jumper is?

• 22:57Steven Bartlett?

  No idea.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  You're gonna love this.

• 22:59Steven Bartlett?

  What is it?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  A smoke jumper is someone, you know, have these wildfires out in kind of west of the US.

• 23:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Right, in California and places like that, in very remote places. Sometimes the only way to fight the fire. Is to parachute people into the middle of the fire. Or just close to the fire in the middle of nowhere. Out of a plane. So you, basically, these are people who for a living parachute out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes into a raging inferno. And stay there for as many days as necessary to try and fight the fire incredibly dangerous.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  And it's almost all men. Okay.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  It's hard for me to imagine a world where it wouldn't be mostly men selecting into that occupation because it's very high risk, right? And you could think of others. Is that okay? Probably, right? You don't want to exclude anybody, but you're also not going to freak out that that one's not kind of fifty fifty. And you're also going to say, well, that's, that's good. And on the risk take, actually, you, I think you'll be interested. I'd like to get your reaction to this because I was very interested to discover that if you, this is based on, on one study, to be clear, but I liked the study that companies that are led by women, as in CEO and CFO, both women, are a bit less likely to go bankrupt than ones run by men.

• 24:14Steven Bartlett?

  I knew what you were going to say before you said the stats.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  But a little bit less profitable.

• 24:18Steven Bartlett?

  So, yeah, I knew what you were going to say before you said the stats because my experience has been that exactly kind of what you described in the sense that the CEO of my company now is a woman and the CEO of my group of companies is a woman. And in my experience, men have a higher risk appetite as it relates to company finances typically, a little bit more, yeah, prone to risk. And so, you know, for me, the real, real important thing has been combining that set of perspectives. So we get the balance.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. So people could, I, I think you've drawn the right conclusion from your own experience, which is, it's like, some people look at that data, right? I'll, I'll be unfair to, but they'd say, well, of course, look, look at these profitable companies led by men, these entrepreneurial risk-taking men. That's why men have to be running all the companies, right? And these women, they're just, they're just too safetyism, they're, you know, they're, they're just too scaredy cat, right? For capitalism, right? So let's have men. And the other view would be like, hey, look at all these women-led companies that don't go under as often, don't go bankrupt. Sure, they're a bit less profitable, but you know, they're less risky. So we should have women running companies. Or your conclusion, which is, given that it's probably likely benefits to both sides of that, and again,

• 25:40Speaker 00

  recognizing it's not all women and all men, maybe we should have diverse leadership teams. That seems to me to be the right conclusion from that. But the conclusion is itself, the arguments for gender diversity. Are based on the assumption, there must be some differences.

• 25:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  If there weren't differences, why on earth would we care?

• 25:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  About gender diversity, right? If we don't think that women are bringing something different to the party, not just because of their life experience, but it's like something else, a bit different, but risk taking, competition, et cetera. If we didn't think that mattered, then we wouldn't care how many board members were women. But we do care about that, quite rightly, because we presume that actually there are some differences between men and women. And so sometimes that, the idea that there are differences between men and women is seen as a conservative idea. But weirdly, it underpins a lot of the progressive movements for gender diversity.

• 26:27Steven Bartlett?

  It's so true. It's so very true. And this is why it is difficult to talk about the differences between men and women at a physiological level without it appearing to be inherently sexist. Because it's not to say that either is better or worse, it's just to say that there's differences. And I think it goes back to what I was saying, to understand the script for male to fill in that question mark, there must be some clues hidden in our biology. There must be, because I think there is. Because I'm trying to, you know, it's interesting, I'm 31 years old now and my girlfriend is 31 years old.

• 27:07Steven Bartlett?

  And in the way that the world has changed, I'm still trying to figure out if like me holding the door open for her is me being old school and old fashioned and a bit misogynist? Or if that's because that's what I want to do and she likes it.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Does she?

• 27:21Steven Bartlett?

  Of course she loves it.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  That's the big question, right?

• 27:24Steven Bartlett?

  Of course.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Presumably you wouldn't still be together if you were doing that.

• 27:27Steven Bartlett?

  I want to do that and she loves it. And she, she will have moments where she turns to me and tells me, she'll thank me for doing things like that. And she'll thank me for the way that I am. And she'll acknowledge that my brain and her brain have two completely different perspectives on the world. And it's, it's the differences that make us work, you know, because I'm, I come to everything super logical. How can I fix it, babe? It's like I show up with like a spanner to every problem in our relationship. And she has this much more holistic, she almost has like this sixth emotional sense. And together we like navigate issues really well.

• 28:02Steven Bartlett?

  But we can't.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  But it does require you to respect those differences and not see, the old problem was one was seen as better than the other.

• 28:10Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Right? So that kind of lets, with all the caveats about averages and overlapping distributions. So let's agree now that we, by this point in the conversation, anybody listening to this gets that when we say these things, we're not saying all men are all women, right?

• 28:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  If there are differences, the problem in the past was, let's say, men were a bit more risk-taking, a bit more competitive, a bit more inclined to kind of rational approaches to problems, that that was better.

• 28:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  That's the definition, in my mind, a useful definition of patriarchy. A patriarchy is one where more typically masculine virtues or attributes are seen as better, right? And you could argue that a matriarchy, were we to have one, would be the other way around. And an equal society isn't one of androgyny. It's one where they're treated as equal value. So we don't say one is better than the other. We say they're different and try and bring them into kind of collaborative and constructive and rather beautiful equality. But I do think a lot of people are making the mistake of thinking that equality requires androgyny. That's a nice, simple intellectual idea. Like, let's get rid of these, all these ideas, right?

• 29:11Steven Bartlett?

  It's androgyny.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  But there's no difference between men and women.

• 29:14Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  So it's just androgyny is where, like, if you have an androgynous species, there's no difference between men and women.

• 29:19Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Or, like, we're gonna have to double down on this. I find your door-opening one really interesting. So I was, I was raised to, when you're walking along a street, to always with a woman, always to put yourself roadside.

• 29:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  You do that?

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  Always, yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Why do you do that?

• 29:40Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know now you've said it, but I remember when I was crossing the road yesterday, my first instinct was to reach back and grab her hand and basic, because there was like a big bus coming and then there was this black cab coming. And my instinct was to. Solve that problem, which was like to put myself in the front of the taxi. Maybe because I think in my head, because I thought this was the only conscious element to it. My body's bigger, so the taxi will see me. My girlfriend's about a foot smaller than me and she's really, really small. So I thought maybe the taxi would see me. And also there's a protective element. It's two things. It's if I put myself in front of the taxi that's coming, it will see me better. But also I kind of would rather take the hit.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that wasn't, you didn't, you didn't think all that.

• 30:27Steven Bartlett?

  No, I didn't. It's a, it's a reaction I have.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Right, that's all coded in you.

• 30:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  And you, and you, and you see it actually even in quite tragic circumstances in the U S. When you see these kind of mass shooting incidents, when they do the kind of, when they reconstruct afterwards, what you very often see is that quite often men have been killed when they're just automatically putting their body between the shooter and their girlfriend or somebody, usually a woman, right? And, and there's also this great, there's a great photograph of a baseball heading towards this kid, right? It's been whacked really hard and it's heading towards this kid. And, and there, and you see these two guys doing this in the shop. They're diving in front of it. Whereas the mums are kind of like doing this, like the dads are like.

• 31:09Steven Bartlett?

  They're protecting the kids.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. And whoever's going to get hit by it, right? And, and again, they weren't, they didn't think through, oh, my body's big. It's just a reaction. And the, and this, the road one is very interesting. And again, most of the women that I've been with, I don't say anything, I just, I just do it. I just go roadside. And that's because the road could be, that you could get splashed, it's dirty. So it could be like a chivalry thing, it's about, but also things like that, there's more danger there. Like if someone comes off the road or something like, so to the extent that just at some psychological level, danger, more danger that side, right? You want to put yourself between that and the woman that you're with. And it's happening at a, quite a natural level. Now, is there any danger there? Does it make any kind of sense?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Probably not, but is it still symbolically quite a good thing? My answer would be yes. And. I don't, I know not everyone's going to agree with this, but I've come to believe that some of those symbolic acts, which are quite gendered, are still valuable, even in a world where we want absolute substantive gender equality. And so the test would be, you hold the door for a woman who's your boss, and that's okay. You're okay with the fact that having gone through the door, she goes to the CEO suite, right? And she's okay with the fact that even though she's the CEO and your boss, you held the door for her. And so I sometimes fear that in our desire to sort of squeeze out all of

• 32:35Speaker 00

  these symbolic differences, we lose a little bit of those symbols of difference, which even in a world of complete gender equality, which we're hopefully getting closer to, I don't know if we want to eradicate them. And increasingly, I find a lot of young women not wanting to eradicate them. They just, they want us to hold, many of them want us to hold the door, but then by God, help them rise up the corporate ladder if that's necessary and have no problem at all with them being our boss, them being boss to us. That's what they ask of us. I think that's a reasonable thing for them to ask. We could do that, right?

• 33:09Steven Bartlett?

  What's the rebuttal to that? Is it that holding the door is a symbol of like the patriarchy and it's a symbol of oppression and that I am, you need me?

• 33:19Speaker 00

  She's too weak to open the door.

• 33:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  But actually, I've noticed there's got a lot of feminists now, they're like, I've seen this a bit on social media, they're like, for the love of God, guys, feminism doesn't mean you shouldn't offer to help me get my overhead down on the plane. You are taller, you are stronger. Get my bag down, right? And I do think, and you've seen a bit of reluctance around that, Millie, because I think men are almost entirely wrongly afraid if they offer, right? That the woman will turn to them and say, why? Because I'm weaker than you? Right? That's, by the way, that's never going to happen, almost never going to happen. But she might say, no, I'm good. Thanks. I'm fine. Right? But especially if it's obviously a shorter woman or a kind of older woman, or even a man, right? But

• 34:04Speaker 00

  but more, and so I think that's a kind of danger is that some of this has kind of descended into this kind of, these symbols are bad. Meanwhile, we've got so much more work to do to get more women on boards and, you know, increase female safety, that it sort of feels like too much politics has become locked in these symbolic things.

• 34:21Steven Bartlett?

  You said that you think one of the biggest issues facing men today is the issue of suicide.

• 34:28Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, you talked about some of the stats at the top of this conversation that relate to men. The most startling of all, as being someone that lives most of the time in the UK is that it's now the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.

• 34:42Steven Bartlett?

  Have you been exposed to those stories, especially as you've you published this book, but in your own personal life, have you been exposed to those stories of the impact of suicide directly?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, people rarely talk about it in an open forum, but they will very often afterwards talk about it. And I had this moment recently, someone I'm actually working with, and I've been working with for some time, I did a I did a little piece on Morning Joe, which is a daytime thing in the US. And I talked about this crisis of kind of male suicide. And she told me afterwards that they put up a just a stat that four times higher among men. It was just a graphic. And she said she burst into tears. And she said, I'm so grateful you're doing this work. I lost my son to suicide when he was 16. And started telling me kind of why. And I have worked with this woman for years on

• 35:33Speaker 00

  this issue. And she'd never raised it with me before. I had no idea. And I now understand why, particularly given her situation, she's been so supportive of my work. It wasn't just an intellectual thing. This is very rarely just an intellectual thing. It's usually visceral as well. There's usually something going on there. And I've had countless stories like that. People sharing their stories, it's heartbreaking. And you've had, you know, people on this show who've talked quite a lot about this. Jordan Peterson was asked in a in an event once by this guy, he said, I'm thinking, I delayed my suicide to come and hear you talk. Why should I not take my own life? No, I haven't had anything like

• 36:13Speaker 00

  that. But it's there. This crisis is there in our communities playing out.

• 36:20Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a I'm just thinking about that woman who's been working with you, supporting your work, but hadn't said anything. And I'm wondering why people don't say something about about it when it happens in their family with with other deaths with with a cancer death, you'll see a Facebook post, you'll see

• 36:39Speaker 00

  a whatever you'll see, you know, but it seems I I'm wondering here if there's a different

• 36:45Steven Bartlett?

  level of, I don't know, public sharing as it relates to suicide, because it's a different type of death, isn't it?

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:52Steven Bartlett?

  That creates a lot of guilt and feelings.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Guilt and shame. And like, so you're in her situation. And I have to tell you, having raised boys, one of whom in particular, really struggled with his mental health through teen years, there are days where you just hope as a parent that they're still around. And you think, well, it was, and actually at 16, and we've seen a huge rise in in young, young men's suicides in the US especially. And you just think, if you're a parent and you lose a child to suicide, the idea that you can cannot free yourself of the burden of what could I have done? What did I miss? Was it me?

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Right? Being a parent is already a lifelong trip in rethinking your decisions, right? And you add that to the mix.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  I I can't imagine it. I mean, my my parents lost a daughter very young to a heart defect and they have an amazing marriage and they've been amazing parents. But I do think that the loss to this illness, this terrible tragedy thing, it's just different. It's hugely grief, but but you know, but it doesn't turn them like it turns the mirror on you. It's like, was this you? Was this your fault? Are you the reason your son is dead?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Just think about that for a moment and what that kind of does to people. And so because of that, people don't talk about it. So you'll get died unexpectedly.

• 38:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  We're not willing to talk about it in the same way as we are others, because we think it might reflect on us in some way, perhaps, or on the memory of that person.

• 38:35Steven Bartlett?

  Or them, yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  I mean, it's still a crime, technically.

• 38:38Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, is it?

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Now, people say it's a really interesting thing. I've really learned not to say commit suicide.

• 38:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, died by suicide.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Died by suicide.

• 38:47Steven Bartlett?

  I just wanted to, because I've got some crazy unthinkable stats here that I wanted to just add on top of what you're saying, which come from the Institute of Boys and Men Report that really was staggering to me is that

• 39:00Steven Bartlett?

  a man dies by suicide approximately every 13 minutes.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  In the US, yes.

• 39:04Steven Bartlett?

  In the United States alone. So that's not including other countries and the UK.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Just the US.

• 39:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. If men's suicide rates had matched those of women's, approximately 545,000 fewer men would have died since 1999. And that's again, just in the US.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Just US, half a million men, yeah.

• 39:24Steven Bartlett?

  Suicide rates amongst younger men have grown the fastest. The growth of male suicides has occurred almost entirely since the beginning of 2010s.

• 39:36Steven Bartlett?

  And interestingly as well, rural countries in the USA have higher rates of suicide than those in urban metros. So it highlights again that suicidality is geographically distributed in certain ways.

• 39:49Steven Bartlett?

  Why? What's going on here? What's going on with this full picture? Why, why, why is this a state of suicide amongst men?

• 39:56Speaker 00

  In some ways, the decision to end your own life, obviously it's complex and it varies, but in some ways it's like the ultimate

• 40:05Speaker 00

  signal that you don't feel as if the world is better off with you than without you.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Like so many people who take their own lives, lose their lives to suicide, will say something like, you'll be better off without me. I've been a burden to you. I know I've been difficult. They convince themselves that they're not wanted. They're not needed. In some ways, that goes back to like Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman. Takes his own life because he thinks that the life insurance his family will get will be a better breadwinner than he can be because he's so badly failed in his primary responsibility as a breadwinner. So it's not a new idea, but there's a really nice piece of work by Fiona Shand. She's an Australian researcher and the work was done primarily in Australia, where they looked at the words that men who did take their own lives

• 40:58Speaker 00

  used to describe themselves before doing so. Or in some cases, attempting to, but usually when men attempt suicide, they do lose their lives. And the two most commonly used words by those men who took their own lives were about themselves, were useless and worthless. Now, of course, this is a sample of people who then went on to take their own lives, but it's nonetheless, I think, very powerful statement that to get to that stage, you don't think you have worth. You don't think you have use. You don't think you're needed. And I believe that the most fatal place to end up in as a human being

• 41:42Speaker 00

  is to feel unneeded. I think to be needed is arguably the most important and constant human requirement. And so if you end up feeling like I'm not needed, I mean, my family don't need me. My employer doesn't need me. My community doesn't need me. I am surplus to requirements. If anything, I'm a drag on my parents or on my community. I'm not adding value, however you define value, to the people around me. I'm taking away from it.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  That's the psychological trajectory that seems to put a lot of men towards this path. And well short of suicide, I think many of the other mental health problems we see among men, addiction, checking out in one way or another, coming out of the labour market, et cetera. They're not the most extreme form, of course, of checking out by literally taking your own life, but they are a different form of that. They are a different way of kind of benching yourself, taking yourself out of the equation because of a sense of like, well, who needs me anyway? Right? And so I just think in a way that the suicide statistics are in some ways the kind of tip of the iceberg of this sense that many men have of feeling unneeded. Unwanted.

• 42:57Steven Bartlett?

  Is there an evolutionary basis for why men, all humans, I guess, need to be needed amongst their community, do you think? Have you thought about that at all?

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, when we started operating in tribes, of course, we realised we were gonna sink or swim together, right? Or hunt or die together, maybe is a better way to put it. And so what that meant was being needed by your community and/or your family was kind of central to the human experience. So the kind of invention of those bonds. And the difference is that for women, particularly once they become mothers, or if they're intending to become mothers, the question of like whether I'll be needed is never asked in quite the same way, because you're literally needed to grow children and to give birth to them and feed them, right? And so that kind of very rooted sense of being

• 43:49Speaker 00

  needed for the species. I think it's just more obvious with women, but why do we need men? Why do we need dads? And that's a much more kind of recent phenomenon in the sense of being dads. And the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by Anna Machin. She's an anthropologist at the University of Oxford about fatherhood. And so I'm just paraphrasing her now, but she has this wonderful description of how we invented fatherhood because we went bipedal. Do you know all this? And the baby's head thing? It's amazing. So we had this bit of a crisis X hundreds of thousands of years ago. I'm terrible at remembering whether it's millions or hundreds of thousands,

• 44:32Speaker 00

  so Google it. Right? Back in the ancestral times is what people say, right? So what happened was, we had this massive growth spurt in our brains, in our heads, right? So we've got massive heads, but we also went bipedal. And if you're bipedal, your hips can't be that big. And so women couldn't get the heads of the babies out of their smaller hips, right? So we're actually facing a bit of a crisis. So the way we solved that crisis was by giving birth to babies way earlier than we should. Way, way older. In fact, if we were like other mammals, pregnancies would last about two years. So I don't know how women watching will feel about that. Can't speak to that, but two years would be about the average, right? We don't, we do obviously do it nine

• 45:15Speaker 00

  months. So they're incredibly vulnerable and mum has to literally keep feeding them, right? And the calorific requirements, just the amount of food that they need, mum and baby, was huge. And so dad, go get food. Right? This is only gonna work, that we're only gonna survive as humans if this stuff comes. So in a way, that was the invention of fatherhood. And you see the brains of fathers, you know, getting activated by all this stuff. So being needed by the community, family, et cetera, to produce something, to provide something is, I think it's just deeply encoded. It's encoded in our DNA. It's like part of, like, if we're not needed, then we're dead. Because we're gonna be on

• 45:58Speaker 00

  our own, right? So these ties, familial ties, tribal ties, are actually central to our identity. And so the danger now is that if people, particularly men, start to feel like, am I needed? Does the community need me? Do my kids need me? Does the woman I've had my children with need me? Am I needed? If the answer to that is not clear, I think that has all kinds of downstream consequences. And we've just done a really poor job of making sure that even in this time of great transition, we still need you. We need every man, every boy, every, everybody. We need you. We don't yet know exactly what we need

• 46:39Speaker 00

  you for, but by God, we need you. We cannot afford to lose you. You are precious. And we need you. You know, I don't know what you're gonna go on to be yet. But by God, our community cannot afford to lose you. And so that message of just like, how much we need you, I just think we've lost a little bit of that in recent debates. And too many men have drawn the conclusion that maybe they aren't needed.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  With tragic consequences.

• 47:08Steven Bartlett?

  A few questions there, just because I want to make sure I'm clear. Fiona's work in Australia around these letters that men had left before they had died by suicide. Did she also look at the letters that women had left?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  No, she only looked at men.

• 47:21Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, fine, that's my first question. And for me, the key thing in the suicide stats is that it's increasing.

• 47:32Steven Bartlett?

  It's increasing. So if we're saying that it's a case of men not feeling needed, then why is that sense that men aren't needed increasing? If we're saying there's some kind of link between those two ideas?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Yes, because the extent to which they're needed is less clear now than it was.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  So it was very clear before that you're needed because you're the breadwinner.

• 47:56Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  You're the provider, right? So go back, and I don't, I think part of the point here is that this idea of being kind of, this gets us into discussions about masculinity, but being generative, like producing, providing. It gets narrowed down to like the breadwinner model of like post-war Western societies, right? It's like a wage earner, but that's not all it means. It used to mean going and getting meat, it used to mean helping farm together. There's all kinds of ways you can be a provider.

• 48:24Steven Bartlett?

  Service, I guess, as well, just like.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's about being more.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  There's this great line from C.S. Lewis, the very good theologian, but obviously much better known for his work on the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Chronicles of Narnia. But he has this lovely line, and he was talking here about what it meant to be a Christian. But I think it applies to what it means to be a mature man as well. He said, "You shouldn't think less of yourself, you should just think of yourself less."

• 48:57Speaker 00

  And there's something about service and just doing for others, your family, your community, et cetera, that I think is quite intrinsic to these ideas of of mature masculinity. And if if men don't feel as if they are necessary or encouraged to have a kind of distinct and important role in the family, in the community, then I think that kind of question mark over, well, am I needed anymore? Is is a real one. And lots of people like Margaret Mead, anthropologists in the 70s, and a lot of conservatives were saying, look, if women do achieve a significant degree of economic independence, she thought that was a wonderful thing, the conservatives didn't, right? But they all agreed that we will have to think really hard about men.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  How do we make sure that men still feel connected and needed in our society if we have very quickly changed the central way in which they express that?

• 49:53Steven Bartlett?

  A few things came to mind. So it's interesting, before I move forward on this point, when you're talking about this idea of humans needing to be needed, it made me reflect on some of the stats that came out around how quickly someone dies after they retire.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:07Steven Bartlett?

  And that that kind of general narrative that if you retire, you don't have long left, which is kind of, you know, this idea of a social tribe and feeling like you need to be serving the tribe in some way. I've always wondered if there was any truth to that, this idea that, you know, retirement can speed up your mortality. Because you're

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:27Steven Bartlett?

  So it's almost like there's something in your body. Either one or two things could be happening. Number one, you just sit around more, which means, you know,

• 50:34Speaker 00

  You're more sedentary.

• 50:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. This is going to kill you anyway. But number two is that there's almost, I don't know, I've pondered this idea that there's this almost device in our brains that makes us the tribe. And when when it knows that we might have switched from becoming useful to the tribe to becoming burdensome to the tribe in some way, now that we're consuming resources but providing none, this device in our brain like turns us off or something?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what we're done. We are surplus to requirements.

• 51:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  And so the decent thing to do is just, you know, die.

• 51:05Steven Bartlett?

  For the tribe.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:06Steven Bartlett?

  For the tribe. And that theoretically, from an evolutionary standpoint, we evolved as tribes. So it's not impossible.

• 51:15Steven Bartlett?

  That there's some, you know.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Well, I do think that we, I mean, of course, we didn't used to live anything like as long.

• 51:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  This is a stat that I came across today that some of this new book that's just come out, which is in the, in 1963, the most common age of death was one. And now it's 83, whatever, right? Do you know what I mean? So the progress we've made towards greater life expectancy generally has been huge. But it has then asked these questions about kind of being needed later on in life. So there's a couple of things I would say. One is that like having a job is just massively powerful way of feeling needed. Right? Just showing up. Like we, we, we need you to start to open up at six. We need you to like, and in fact, Arthur Brooks, who used to run the American Enterprise Institute.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  He tells this wonderful story. He was interviewing this guy who'd come out of prison, was in this new program rehabilitation, et cetera. And he's chatting to him, the guy gets a text while he's chatting to him and he bursts into tears. Like it's really tearful. And Arthur says, is everything all right? Did he get some bad news? You know, what's happening? Is this bad news? And he said, no, it's the opposite. And he showed the text to Arthur and the text just said, Fred, can you get over here as soon as possible? I really need you.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  And the guy said to Arthur, I've never heard anyone say that sentence to me before.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  I've never had anyone say to me, I need you. And in this case, it was, I need you to come and I don't even know what it was. Right? Fix this floor tile, deal with this customer. I don't know, but I need you. And it brought this guy to tears because he hadn't kind of felt that sense of neededness before. And at its best, the workplace signals to us on a daily basis or whatever. Like, yeah, you're needed, right? You, your colleagues need you. They need each other. That, that, that's huge. And so if you then don't have that. In the labour market, maybe because you've retired, the question is, are you still needed? And then I just think we have to reinvent the ways in which we can make use of the skills and wisdom

• 53:24Speaker 00

  of the people who've suddenly got time. So my mum, she volunteers as a reader in a primary school because she has time, right? And it's amazing. She gets to know the kids really well and she loves it and so on. You know, my father, he's on the board of a technical thing and he runs charity. They do stuff, right? They raise money for all these because they've got time. And so they're just, they're contributing to the community in a new way. And actually, as more and more women work, those community roles that were previously very often filled by mums at home, like school volunteering, for example, right? Now they can be done by, perhaps by more, by older people. And so part of this story here, I think, is also making sure that older people don't lose that sense too. Because although we focus quite rightly on what's happening to young men, the suicide rates among older

• 54:09Speaker 00

  men are also very high, especially if they end up on their own. So kind of men on their own later in life are at massive risk because if you take my theory about being needed quite seriously, they're just looking around and saying, will anyone even notice? If I'm gone, maybe they'll be better off. And so even for those older men, we have a job of work to do to make them feel really like, yeah, we need you. Your church needs you. Your scout group needs you. Your local charity needs you. Your neighbours need you. The kid across the street who needs help with his university applications needs you. The boy down the road who's like struggling because, you know, his parents have split up and just wants someone to give him a cup of tea every now and then. They need you.

• 54:53Steven Bartlett?

  We don't know the boy down the road anymore or the family next door anymore. And I think, so when you described that, you were describing like an old fashioned way of the world in my mind. Because you even said the word church. I was like, well, you know, where there's been a rise in atheism and a fall in religiosity. So.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's part of the problem though. And from this point of view is that we used to have more institutional structures through which our connection to the broader community could be, you know, captured and organised, honestly, right? So you didn't have to sort of sit there on your own somewhere saying, how can I contribute to the community? You just. Volunteer as an usher or for Bible class or to do the soup kitchen at your church.

• 55:35Steven Bartlett?

  Life came sort of inherent with responsibility, like, because even with church, I just grew up in there in my family. I wasn't religious after the age of eighteen, but as early as I knew, I was in the church and I was in Sunday school and I was in St Luke's Hospice on the on the weekends with my mum. And I didn't choose that. It was just came with life.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And actually, so the deinstitutionalization of those community relationships, as we've seen these institutions weaken, has created a real problem because the needs are still there, but it's like we didn't have the organizing framework, right? So whether it's churches or community groups or whatever, and and mums, like, one of the things that would happen, like, my mum was at home kind of most of the time. And back in the dark ages when I was being raised in the seventies and eighties, they were a lot of mums around, right? And so they organized a bunch of stuff and they kind of took care of the community and they volunteered for stuff. And it's amazing now that women are in the workplace, of course, but that sense of like, there were soft institutions like those networks, but also just churches, community

• 56:35Speaker 00

  groups, etc. They basically provided a way to kind of plug in my time and energy to an institution that then did stuff for other people. It's really hard to do that on your own, right? It's really hard to recreate those institutions online or just on your own. And so I actually think that that's had a bigger effect on men as well, because

• 56:56Speaker 00

  historically and even today, women are a little bit better at kind of maintaining those community and social networks than men are. So absent those institutional roles,

• 57:06Speaker 00

  you're going to be a scout leader, you're going to be an usher at church, you're going to volunteer for the school PTA, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna, we need men to do this, this, this, and this, right? You're gonna do that. And you're right, some of it wasn't even question, it was just what you did. Of course, we want more choice, but I do worry about the loss of those institutional frameworks if we don't find ways to replace them. And you're starting to see that now, men's sheds movements and men's groups and and so on. But it's really hard to find secular online alternatives to those traditional institutions.

• 57:40Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned an elderly man who's now alone, you know, maybe lost his partner, maybe, what do they call it, widowed, no, widower, what's the male?

• 57:49Speaker 00

  I think widowed is both, isn't it?

• 57:51Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, is it?

• 57:51Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 57:52Steven Bartlett?

  A widowed man.

• 57:54Steven Bartlett?

  But as we think about younger men and the environment in which the sort of dating, love environment that they're in, what's changed there? Because one of the ways that we can feel needed is if at, you know, 18 years old, we find a partner and, you know, she makes me feel needed. My, in my life, my girlfriend is one of the people that makes me feel most needed.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:13Steven Bartlett?

  Most important, she's constantly asking when I'm coming back from Jack and's Den filming or when I'm going to be here and she's, you know, she makes me feel like I'm service to her in the same way that she's service to me. So, but, but that landscape seems to have changed as well, the dating environment, the romantic environment.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting, again, I'm just reflecting on my own personal experience too, just through the lives of my sons. And I, one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend buy her first car. And he's really into cars and all that stuff and, and he's into finance with the loans and he's just basically done, like basically done the, and the work for her around it because she's working full time and he's got a bit of time. And so that is a really good example. He said to me the other day, he said, I said, God, you put a load of time into this, like test driven like 20 cars and all of this stuff, loads of this for, for your girlfriend. He's like, well, right now I don't have that much of my own stuff to do. So it's really nice to be able to do stuff for her. And so you're right, I think those relationships, they can be in like traditional families,

• 59:11Speaker 00

  but also of course friends, but particularly romantic relationships, they can do that for you. So it's not for nothing that we're dating less, dating later. You're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single by comparison, both to young women and in the past. And, and so that's another change, which you could argue is good or bad, right? Is it good or bad that we're dating later and having sex later and taking longer to get married and so on? Again, I think you can argue for sure, there's lots of good stuff there, but one consequence of that is to leave a lot more men going a lot longer before those romantic relationships were also pulling on them, calling, calling on them.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  To say, I need you to do this. I need you to drive me to work. Can you pick me up from this? Can you do to do this? Right. And that used to happen much, much earlier than it's happening now. And so there's now perfectly possibly 25, 26, 27 years of age and your parents don't need you. Cause then you maybe you've left home, they don't need you. Maybe you don't have a girlfriend. So you don't have a girlfriend that needs you. Maybe you're not working or you're working in a place that you don't really feel like it matters if you're there or not. It's like, so it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid and late twenties as a man. And honestly feel like it's not quite clear who needs you.

• 1:00:30Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because also when you layer on top of that, the dating app environment. I had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about, I mean, I've had a couple of founders of the big dating apps, but I've also had.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Have you had the Tinder founder on?

• 1:00:43Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:44Steven Bartlett?

  I've had people that have left Tinder and started their own apps like Bumble. But one of the things that I've come to learn is that the bottom sort of 50% of men are basically getting not much action at all.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Almost none. Yeah.

• 1:00:57Steven Bartlett?

  Almost none. And then the like top 10% of men are getting all the action because the way that these dating apps are set up is to really reward that sort of most affluent, most attractive, top 10% of men that are most desirable. But I imagine if you'd gone back a hundred years, it was really like, who's in your village versus, you know?

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Versus an algorithm sorting millions of people.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  But that's, it's so interesting, that pattern that you describe of like the bottom 50% of men basically not getting much action, if any, and the top 10% are getting almost all of it. Because an evolutionary psychologist that I know looked at that data and said, that looks like human history to me.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  So if we go back further, actually 95% of known human societies were polygamous.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  All right, monogamy is very weird and very recent. And here's one that always blows my mind, even though I've said it so many times now, is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. We have twice as many women in our ancestral past as men.

• 1:02:08Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that? How does that make sense?

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Because, and the reason it's so hard for a modern brain to get a head around that is because you're thinking, well, you need a man and a woman to have a kid, right? So you'd have to have equal numbers.

• 1:02:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  But you're thinking about monogamy. Across human history, men have only had about a 50% chance of reproducing.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  So back in each generation, half the male lines just literally die out, like 50% of the men just don't have kids. So boom, they're gone. And almost all women have reproduced, right? So if you've got almost all women reproducing and 50% men, then mathematically, you're going to end up with twice as many female ancestors because you don't need that many men to have babies. And so historically, what's happened is the top status men with the gold and the rich, whatever, they've had multiple wives or certainly concubines or multiple partners. And there's like famous examples like Genghis Khan is the ancestor to whoever, or in Ireland, something like more than one in five Irish people are descended from king, whatever it is.

• 1:03:08Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I was told my grandfather in Nigeria has, I'm going to say 10 wives.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Steven Bartlett?

  I'm told that I have 40 odd uncles and aunties in Nigeria. Not intending to go back anytime soon, just, just in case there's a lot of conversations.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  You're not tempted by that model?

• 1:03:26Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not, no, no, I'm, I'm actually going to Nigeria soon, but, uh, but it's, it's a headache to think about navigating that many uncles and aunties.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  But isn't it interesting how actually these, by going online and sort of taking away the sort of cultural norm around kind of monogamy?

• 1:03:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  In a way, what is exposed is kind of this ancient pattern, which is women are much pickier than men.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Around partner selection, right? And so women are trying to, women are a sort of, ideally I'll go for him. And women are just going, no, no, no, no. I don't know which way it is, that's right, which way.

• 1:03:59Steven Bartlett?

  It's right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so, so the women are going, no, no, no, no.

• 1:04:03Steven Bartlett?

  Swipe, swipe.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  Oh, he's incredibly handsome and incredibly rich and right, maybe, whatever, like, maybe. Whereas the men are like, yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. She looks nice. Maybe not. Yeah. So, so you get this incredible asymmetry between the two. But in some ways, it's like, I'm making light of it, but, but actually, could you find a kind of more telling sign of the fact that so many men are just kind of feeling like, well, maybe a bit useless? Not very attractive, not very needed, not very like, just, right? The old rules about how to kind of navigate the romantic space, the old rules about how to be a man, the old rules about how to succeed, a lot of those have just been turned upside down,

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  creating this huge vacuum, uh, which has been filled by all kinds of bad stuff and, and, but also just this massive sense of disorientation. It's like a kaleidoscope. You shake it, right? But it's still moving. We don't know what the new patterns look like yet. And so I genuinely kind of feel like when I talk to a lot of young men and see them, like, that is the sense they've got. They're just like, whoa, like the, the disorientation that they're feeling, uh, as we've kind of shifted these equal liberties. In some ways, the online dating apps are just magnifying that. But there's a, that's not a great feeling, is it? To kind of go on a dating app and not get any interest at all.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  I mean, you wouldn't know because you're not on dating app.

• 1:05:28Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I'm not on dating app.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  And when you were, I'm sure you got plenty of attention.

• 1:05:30Steven Bartlett?

  Well, do you know what's funny? When I was on dating apps, I didn't get much attention.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:05:35Steven Bartlett?

  No, I didn't. And I've got a very good looking best friend and he got all of the attention. So bear in mind, I was 18, shoplifting food to feed myself. I was scrawny as hell.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:49Steven Bartlett?

  I was, you know.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Did you put all that on the profile?

• 1:05:52Steven Bartlett?

  But I tried to put my best selfie on there and I just couldn't get any like decent leads. And my best friend, who's like blonde and beautiful and he's got the perfect hair and he looks like something out of like a magazine. I would sit with him and he would just get the pick of the litter. So my whole strategy was I would just do much better in person when I met people. But obviously it's much more difficult to meet people. If you look at the stats around how people meet. It's crazy. It's like a vertical line upwards. When you look at the, the line that's showing people meeting online, just out of nowhere. And it went, school's gone down and church has gone down and through a friend has gone down and it's pretty much all online. So if you're, if you're not,

• 1:06:34Steven Bartlett?

  I think aesthetically beautiful in the typical sense of the word.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Steven Bartlett?

  And, you know, have signals of wealth and status, you really are going to struggle. And I actually came to learn this a lot, not just from my own experience in dating apps once upon a time, but also from doing this podcast. And I remember the first time we had on a founder of a dating app and put the episode out, assuming everyone would love it. And just the anger in the comment section from pretty much all men who feel like dating apps have ruined their lives or are just, are just an evil thing in the world. And it really caught me off guard. In fact, reading those comments on that particular episode is when I go, oh my God, people hate dating apps. There's like this group of people that just think it's like the, the cause of all pain.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  This is really difficult stuff to talk about, I think, because it's so, it's so visceral. It's primal. Like we're talking about sex. We're talking about procreation. We're talking about our DNA being passed on and who with. And so it's not for nothing, if, if something's happening in that, in that market. And it's not for nothing. We see a huge rise in the share of childless men. Like especially getting to 40 and, and of women, but more, even more so for men. And more men saying that having children is important to them, more men starting to say actually forming a family is kind of important to them. And so there's a, there's a weird paradox here, which is that, you know, the old idea of like marriage and kids is that like, women have

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  to kind of trap men into it, right? You know, as men, we just wanna go our own way, right? We're like cowboys around the desert or the forest or something, but the ball and chain, the woman, she traps you, right? And she domesticates you and you kind of go along with it because you wanna have kids, right? But, but in your heart, in your heart, you're still out there on the frontier, right? And she's the one at the heart. That is complete bullshit on every single level. Actually, historically, back to where we were before, being masculine meant being in the tribe. It meant generating more than you need for yourself. I love this idea of a surplus that comes from this guy, David Gilmour, that mature men generate more of whatever it is than they need. They're surplus generators. So rather than being surplus to requirements, which is what I

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  think a lot of men feel, they actually generate a surplus for others to use. And so the idea of like, you've heard this men going their own way movement? It's like a male separatist thing online. We're gonna go our own way. We don't need, no, turning away from women is the opposite of masculinity, right? Masculinity defined as like a lone ranger or a, I'm my own man is the least masculine sentence I think you could ever utter. I'm just my own man. I do my own thing, right? If you're not a man for others, and in my view, you're not, you're not a man. And so it's quite interesting to kind of think about how the current world of like dating and families and so on, if it does leave many men feeling like they're not gonna have those connections, they're not gonna have a sense of being for others, and not just, not providing just in

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  the economic sense, but being needed, then it does leave a lot of them benched. And they either go their own way or they get mad as hell. So you see the rise of the incel movement, et cetera. And so again, you're just seeing these extreme, the extreme examples are the ones that get the headlines. But behind that, behind the kind of men who are acting out, there's a lot more men who are checking out. They're just saying, I think I'm done with this. And that's very dangerous.

• 1:09:51Steven Bartlett?

  Marriage has also had a knock on effect to this, hasn't it? Because the role of marriage in society has changed, but also the stats around marriage seem to be changing. What information do you have on that? Am I right in thinking that marriage is in decline?

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  A little bit. Yeah. Marriage has gone down. This is one area where it's very different in different countries, so I have to be careful about this. Like, in the US, there's a big class gap in marriage. Like, college-educated Americans are still getting married. Non-college-educated Americans are not. But in most of Western Europe, you've seen a big rise in the share of kids being born outside marriage. Now, the question then was like, what job, if anything, was being done by marriage? And if marriage was a way to sort of signal and enshrine a commitment to having kids together, raising those kids together, then, in a sense, like, there are all kinds of, oh, you have a civil partnership now, or there are legal documents you can have that kind of do that.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  And so, if the decline of marriage is related to a decline in fathering, that's a problem. It doesn't have to mean that, because, A, you can be a perfectly good father if you're living with your partner and you're not married. But also, you can be a good father if, for whatever reason, the relationship with the mother doesn't work out. It's harder, you're going to have to kind of work at it a bit more, but you can still do it. But because of this old idea of, like, fathering being bundled together with marriage, right? I think that's my big problem, is it was like a one-stop thing, right? It's like, husband and father was kind of like one thing. But that's not true anymore. So, it's okay if that's not true, so long as we don't lose the fathering bit.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Because dads matter for their kids as much as their mums, in different ways and at different times, on average. But, so, my worry about the changes in family are not about marriage per se, they're about what that might mean for fatherhood. And what a lot of conservative critics will say is, well, the evidence is that actually the men who marry are more engaged fathers and do stick around for longer. But, of course, the problem with that, that's one of the reasons they got married.

• 1:11:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, of course, yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Right. So it's very hard to tease out cause and effect there. And in the end, I'm sort of agnostic about the marriage question, but I'm not agnostic about the fathering question. Like, I don't think you have a moral responsibility to get married before you have kids at all. I do think that if you have kids, you have a moral responsibility to be a father to those kids. That is, uh, that is just, that's an inextinguishable moral responsibility. And that gets a little bit lost because sometimes on the, the feminist left, to just characterize horribly, say, do we need, do we need dads anymore? Isn't that a bit heteronormative? I've sometimes been accused of being heteronormative for being pro dad. You know, what about same-sex couples? What about single parents? Are we saying that they need their dads? Right? Isn't that, that feels a bit old fashioned, a bit conservative to get that on the other side.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  And then, and then it's like, yeah, of course dads matter. That's why they all have to get, that's why they should be married. And of course, the truth is between the two. The truth is that dads matter will stop, whether they're married to the mother or not. Um, and both the people who insist the only way to do that is through marriage are wrong. And the people who insist that dads don't matter are equally wrong.

• 1:13:03Steven Bartlett?

  And about forty percent of births in the US now take place outside of marriage, which is up from about ten percent.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Yes, quadrupled in the US.

• 1:13:09Steven Bartlett?

  That's crazy. That's, that's just, why is that?

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  US is really weird because it has really high rates of like unmarried, um, pregnancies and births. But then like really high rates of marriage among the kind of college educated at the top. So as I said, this huge class gap, there's a race element here. So seventy percent of black kids in the US are born outside marriage. There's also a huge education gap here, as I just alluded to, is a big, big class gap. So most kids to non-college educated parents are born outside marriage in the US now. And so it's weird. What's happened is that the average marriage rate in the US is really disguising these huge differences by race and class. Whereas in most Western European countries, there aren't such big differences by race or class. It's sort of more of a, just more of a general decline. It hasn't declined particularly more for one class than another in, in the UK.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  So quite common in the UK for couples to decide to have kids together, have kids together and not get married. And that's definitely true in Scandinavia and Northern Europe as well.

• 1:14:04Steven Bartlett?

  And who is marriage good for? Who is it serving more, men or women?

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Now, men.

• 1:14:11Steven Bartlett?

  Because I was thinking, if we pressed a button and the marriage stats went backwards in time, i.e. more people got married and they got married within, when they gave birth within marriages, would that be better for men or women?

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Better for men.

• 1:14:25Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Because marriage, being with the kids and kind of with the mum is just, right now, still an incredibly important way for men to feel needed, connected, involved, et cetera. Now, that might change, but right now, it is pretty clear that they'll do better. And like, if you look at the impact of being married and not married on employment, earnings, health, physical and mental health, life expectancy, huge positive impacts for men, much less so for women. So it's like, women, and of course, if you go back, if we went the other way, like, you'd say, well, actually, women who weren't married were in real trouble economically until recently, right?

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  So my line from before was that like, women used to be economically dependent on men, but men were emotionally dependent on women. And I think we've really done a lot on the first half of that, and it's kind of revealing the second part, the kind of the fact that actually, wifeless men, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well. In fact, they do terribly. So I've mentioned this fourfold suicide difference in risk, it's eight, an eightfold difference among divorced men and women. So men who get divorced, their risk of suicide skyrockets. So the question is like, why? And I think it is because of this sense of like, not being needed, not being served.

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  Like, if your kids are at home and your wife's at home and you're just, you're contributing to the family unit, I think that's much more obvious. And it's really interesting, in recent surveys, in the US at least, men are now more likely than women to say that it's important to them to get married.

• 1:16:09Steven Bartlett?

  So what does that say about what's going on in men's heads if they're now more keen on marriage than women? What's, because that's to me sounded a little bit territorial.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  Well, there's a danger of that. And of course, you can, you can get into real trouble, as one of your previous guests did, by talking about enforced monogamy.

• 1:16:27Steven Bartlett?

  Who talked about?

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Jordan Peterson.

• 1:16:28Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, did he?

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, he talked about enforced monogamy. And you can imagine.

• 1:16:32Steven Bartlett?

  Enforced monogamy?

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Enforced monogamy.

• 1:16:34Steven Bartlett?

  He didn't say that on this show, did he?

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  I don't think so.

• 1:16:37Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  But no, I think he said in the interview. It's a very, it's a very unfortunate term. It's actually a term from anthropology that basically was a way of describing this new way of raising families. It's only been around for a few centuries, where you just, where men and women, either by law or by social norm, are only required to marry one person.

• 1:16:56Steven Bartlett?

  They're required?

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Well, you can't, bigamy is a crime.

• 1:17:00Steven Bartlett?

  What's bigamy?

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Being married to more than one person.

• 1:17:02Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  Right? It's a crime in the US, it's a crime in the UK, it's a crime in most, in most countries. It's actually against the law to have more than one spouse. Imagine how, how illiberal is that? The state telling me how many wives I'm allowed or how many husbands?

• 1:17:16Steven Bartlett?

  I thought when you said required, I thought you meant you have to marry one person.

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  Sorry, that's what people thought it meant. And that's why you got into such terrible trouble. But actually, what it's referring to is a social system, which is, which is basically against polygamy. It's basically saying, no, no, no, no one gets forced into marriage. What it is, is saying, if you're going to marry, it can only be monogamous.

• 1:17:34Steven Bartlett?

  Right?

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  Okay. So the, the trouble is that people, the trouble is people heard it as, we're going to force you into marriage and into monogamy. And actually, what the term means is, we're not going to allow you to be polygamous.

• 1:17:44Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  Right? So it's, it was kind of, it was sort of misinterpreted. The term was kind of misinterpreted. But it does speak to this fear, I think, that people will feel forced economically or socially into it. It's actually, not for nothing, that Andrew Tate, I'm sure you know Andrew Tate and his work.

• 1:18:05Steven Bartlett?

  I know who he is, yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:18:06Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know him. I've never spoken to him.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  Right. But I know who I'm referring to, right? Why did he convert to Islam?

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  People aren't talking about this, by the way. This is not a polite topic of conversation. Andrew Tate's conversion. For understandable reasons, people don't want to be seen to be stoking Islamophobia or whatever. But, but I will tell you this, and we published a piece by an Imam in the US. Andrew Tate has a huge following among young Muslim men in the US and the UK. And he's now converted to Islam publicly.

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  And the reason he's done that is so he can have multiple wives.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  Which is, to be fair to him, entirely consistent with his worldview about gender and gender equality and the role of men and women, right? And so it's interesting to kind of think about the role, and there's this rise of polyamory now and so on. Actually, thinking about monogamy, polygamy, et cetera, it's, it's a much more complicated story, I think, than many people are willing to admit. Because it's not clear that if we just kind of take away the sort of social norms around like the one and one model, that that will necessarily be better for men. So when you say, of course, men are in favor of polygamy, and of course, you'd be in favor of it, like, who wouldn't want three wives? Shouldn't speak for you.

• 1:19:26Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to satisfy one at the moment.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:33Speaker 00

  But actually, as some people point out, you know, actually, if you're a woman, is it clear that you'd rather be the only wife of an unemployed steelworker than the second wife of an incredibly successful podcaster? Maybe, maybe for all women, that's a clear choice, right? But, but the kind of point simply being is we shouldn't just assume that this is kind of a male, you know, only for kind of men idea. Anyway, it's a digression into an area that I'm far from expert in. But it's prompted by this whole idea about dating, marriage and commitment. And so where I would land on this is that even as we reform marriage.

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  Family life, the roles of men and women, we have to be really careful to keep grounding men in a sense of being needed by their kids especially and by their communities. So if not in the traditional way, through a recently traditional marriage as a breadwinner and provider and all that, the one my father had, and also lots of other things besides, swimming coach, math tutor, chauffeur, all the ways he provided for us and as a father. If we're going to replace that with a new model, we have to be really careful to make sure that we do replace it and that we don't actually make men feel like they are not needed in this new world.

• 1:20:57Steven Bartlett?

  Are women asking for divorce, you know, you're talking about that, you know, idea of polygamy and women and men, are women asking for divorce now more so than men are?

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Yes, women are more likely to precipitate divorce than men.

• 1:21:09Steven Bartlett?

  And again, does this-

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  About two to one, I think.

• 1:21:12Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  Certainly, in the US, it's much higher among women, yeah.

• 1:21:16Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's an indication of something, an indication of a healthy freedom.

• 1:21:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, exit power.

• 1:21:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exit power, yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  And that's what an economist would call it, right? And that's, that shows you, that's a massive sign of success, that women can leave relationships in a way that they couldn't before because they were trapped economically. And so this kind of economic trap that was marriage, which the women's movement really kind of really took aim at and just said, this institution of marriage is basically a way to trap and oppress women in relationships of economic dependency, where she'll be powerless because he has the money, right? That feminist critique of traditional marriage was profound and correct, and the results have been extraordinary in unbundling that and giving women economic power.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  Because without economic power, women don't have choice about marriage. So now we've got this massive rise in women's choice as to whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have kids, who to have kids with, et cetera. And so you've seen this massive expansion of women's choice and power, which is magnificent and destabilising, especially for men. Both of those things can be true at once.

• 1:22:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  It can be creating these unintended destabilising consequences for men. And if we then add to that a danger sometimes to either mock men or masculinity, almost pathologise them.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  In humour, but sometimes maybe not so much in humour as well. I think that just doubles down on this sense. It's like, not only are you not needed, but maybe you're actually a bit toxic.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  And so I think there's, of all the moments to not be really kind of making sure that men feel really bad about themselves. This is not that moment. What do you think of that phrase, toxic masculinity? I think it's toxic.

• 1:23:11Speaker 00

  I think the term toxic masculinity is toxic. I didn't always think that. It's taken me a while to get to that. But I would now say it's basically a slur. It's a gender slur, if you like. And it's just used too easily, too loosely, too casually to describe male behaviour that we don't like. And I would say actually most thoughtful kind of women's groups and feminists are not supporting it now. Because it just, it's not a great recruiting tool by and large, right? So there's one, one big problem with it is if you ask people who use the term toxic masculinity to define non-toxic masculinity,

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  they struggle. They'll say, oh, no, no, there are positive aspects of masculinity. So, okay, great, great. What are they? And they'll say nurturing and caring and kindness and emotional availability. And you go, and is that different from femininity? They'll say, no, no, it's the same. Okay, so let me get this straight. Masculinity is either toxic or not masculine. Because if they start saying courage, positive risk-taking, you know, well-channeled competitiveness. Do you say, what, are you saying women aren't courageous?

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm not saying that. Okay, so sorry, what, what do you? So it's an empty set. So non-toxic masculinity is basically an empty set. So they can't fill that category. So you've either got toxic or, or nothing. That's bad. But also just think on a visceral level, it reminds me, and you have a church background, so the phrase toxic masculinity really reminds me of the term original sin.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  It's something in you that's kind of, you didn't have any choice about it, like you inherited it from previous generations and it's kind of bad and we can't get rid of it. So it sounded like you're born with this flaw.

• 1:24:57Steven Bartlett?

  You've got to repent at all opportunities for you.

• 1:25:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. It just feels like that to me. And maybe this is the third point, I don't know, but it's like, honestly, is the best we can offer to young men is a prospectus that we could make them not toxic? How would you like to be non-toxic? Isn't that an exciting idea? That's the worst recruiting slogan ever. And so it's driving young men away. It's an incredibly unhelpful term. It's unfairly applied. It used to have some value in academia, like before 2016, it had this very technical term in academia. But I think as a term now, it really just does send this incredibly unfortunate message to men, which doesn't encourage a debate about how to be a better man. I much prefer immature and mature masculinity. I like the idea of saying, like, what does mature masculinity look like?

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  Because you know what immature masculinity looks like?

• 1:25:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  And so I think this kind of maturation is a much better way to frame it than toxic, non-toxic.

• 1:25:52Steven Bartlett?

  Is there such a thing as, and I've never asked this question before, but it just came to mind, is there such a thing as toxic femininity?

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  Have you watched Mean Girls?

• 1:26:03Steven Bartlett?

  I can't say I've watched it, but I know the movie and I've seen trailers and stuff.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  And there's a new Tina Fey movie, I think, right?

• 1:26:09Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  An update of it, but yeah, and I think this relates to the debate about social media and the way that social media is so particularly damaging to the mental health of teen girls and young women, because it's very relational. And so the relational bullying that girls and young women are more likely to engage in than men are, so men are more likely historically, much less so today, but to have bullied physically.

• 1:26:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:33Speaker 00

  Women are much more likely to bully relationally. So they exclude you, you're not my best friend anymore, you're not invited, you're et cetera. And they bully by using, you know, how you look. But so that relational bullying gets amplified by social media. And so if you were to try and define toxic femininity, I suspect that's where you would go. And it would be around ostracism and meanness. If you think the mean girls phenomenon is getting at something real, which is the ability of women to be pretty brutal to each other. It's probably something more around that. But I just think putting the word toxic before either femininity or masculinity is a bad move. I think it's a bad move intellectually, and I think it's a terrible move culturally.

• 1:27:18Steven Bartlett?

  On this subject of masculinity, one of the defining traits of masculinity in society is that men don't speak, they don't open up, and they're less likely to. I think they struggle more to form friendships. I've certainly found that to be the case in my life. If you drop me and my partner in London, as actually has happened, and she wasn't from here, she's never lived here before. It only took her a couple of months before she's got a group. She's going to these dance this class. And I'm away doing Dragon's Day next week. So she's found a group of Portuguese girls and she's going to go watch the match. And I could never, I don't know how the hell she's made friends. I've made zero new friends in London in five years. My friends are my colleagues and my friends that I've had for 10 years. That is it. I don't make new friends.

• 1:28:04Steven Bartlett?

  And this is something that I have echoed to me a lot when I meet men out and about, when I do talks and stuff and they come up to me after. I've had men whisper to me, how do I make friends where I'm lonely? And when they do it, they come really, really close.

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:28:15Steven Bartlett?

  So that the person behind them in the queue can't hear them say it.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  I've had exactly the same experience.

• 1:28:18Steven Bartlett?

  And they whisper it about how do I make friends or I'm feeling lonely or something like that. And I've heard in your work, the work that was in your book, I think on page 45, you say that there is a male friendship recession. What did you mean when you said that?

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  We're seeing a decline in friendships generally, but it's much more acute for men. So in the US, 15% of men under the age of 30 say they don't have a single close friend. That's up from 3% in 1990. And so it's almost one in seven men. We're seeing declining number of men saying how much time they spend with friends, shrinking social networks, everything you've just described, which is like the process of making and sustaining friends is just something that men are really struggling with right now. Much more so than women. And I think there's a couple of things going on here. One is we're revealing the extent to which a lot of that work was actually outsourced to women before.

• 1:29:16Speaker 00

  Right. So if you're in a couple, how often are the social arrangements made by the women?

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  They do a lot of that maintenance, the relationship maintenance and the men free ride on the women. Right.

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  Every like weekend plan that's outside of my comfort zone, pretty much most of them come from my partner.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  All right. She's organised something.

• 1:29:33Steven Bartlett?

  She's an organiser. She wants to go try this thing.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  Right. And you're like.

• 1:29:37Steven Bartlett?

  Let's go do vegan sushi roll.

• 1:29:38Speaker 00

  No, I just want to play Far Cry Five.

• 1:29:40Steven Bartlett?

  I just want to lie on my back and watch Manchester United.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  All right, fine. I chose the wrong, I chose the wrong thing. But yeah, no. So I think like, and women have been better at it and men haven't had to do as much of it. So in some ways, like, I think we're being exposed a bit more in a sense that like, women aren't doing as much of that work for us anymore. They're saying, look, I'm like, it's not my job to create your friendship network for you. So we're having to do it and we're not very good at it. And we're certainly not very good at it yet. And I've had the same experience. I mean, I wrote a bit, I wrote a bit about loneliness and I spoke at an event not long afterwards. And I had a couple of young men, exactly the same as you, just come close and just say, I'm incredibly lonely. And thank you for talking about this. And you end up hugging them and like, and actually for me,

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  I was talking to somebody this the other day, there's something about loneliness that just breaks my heart in a way that other forms of suffering don't. And I don't know why, but if I hear about someone that's really lonely, it just, my mum was talking about this guy that who, she ran into him and he was going to this supermarket and, you know, he was in front of her, you know, in the queue and she's like, no, go after you. He's like, no, no, no, you go first. And he says, I'm on my own. And actually, the hours after dinner, especially in the summer, they're the hardest. So I always come down here to the supermarket and I buy a couple of things and then come back and have a chat and then, you know, it fills my time. And my mum, because she's like a massive, like, she's like a social worker to the world. She ends up chatting to him and getting his phone number.

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  But actually, that just. Pierced my heart. It's just, and so when you hear about these men, young, old women as like who are lonely, I think it's huge. And, and so, and, and back to our earlier bit of the conversation too, is like those institutions that maybe used to kind of connect you to other people, right? Where do you, where do you make friends? And you just said at work, right? And so I think our colleagues in some ways become our friends. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, saying it is a bad thing, but, but it's, it's different to the friends you've made at church or through your sports or through, do you know what I mean? Or wherever. And, and so the other thing I'll say about this is, have you heard of the men's sheds movement?

• 1:31:48Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know what a men's sheds is, but I've heard of men, male groups and stuff emerging.

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  Yes, it's like, but male groups emerging. There's one which is, the Australian government just funded this in Australia. It's called the, the men, men's sheds. And they're places where men go and fix stuff. Like you'll bring a lawn mower, do stuff, right? And it's one of the things that I've found, I've really learned from this. I wish I'd known more about it before. It's like, have you heard of this thing about men communicating more easily shoulder to shoulder than face to face? Have you come across this?

• 1:32:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I've heard about this. Yeah.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  It's really interesting. So when my, uh, my wife would sometimes, when her boys came home from school, she'd sit down directly opposite them, like across the breakfast bar type thing, right? And she'd sit directly opposite and give them protein. And then she'd be like, how's your day?

• 1:32:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  And I'm like, oh, right. And then later on, we'd be driving somewhere or watching soccer or playing a video game, like shoulder to shoulder. And they'd be like, yeah, it's weird thing happened today. With her or with me, right? So eventually I said, you've got to stop staring them in the face. That's not how, that's not how men open up, right? And so the men's sheds movement is actually, I think, based on a profound insight, which is that men have to be doing something in order to be being with their friend. Go into any coffee shop and count how many people are sitting there staring at each other for hours on end, mostly women. Not saying, right? And then go to fishing, road trips. It's the only explanation for golf. Do you play golf?

• 1:33:14Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  Thank God. But like, like when a guy is saying, do you think I should use the five iron?

• 1:33:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  I don't play golf either. Right. But what he's really saying is, I love you.

• 1:33:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Speaker 00

  Or I'm lonely or need help. And so there is something to be said for like men and even people have studied actually how men stand in relation to each other at like a party or something. When I've told you this, you won't be able to stop looking is that men actually are always a bit of an angle. Right. We just don't stand face to face. It's it spikes our threat cortisol or whatever. So we always stand a little bit of an angle. Um, but also like doing something together. Um, requires us to be more shoulder to shoulder, which is why some psychotherapists now they do walking, talking therapy. They've realized that with men especially, like sitting them down and staring at them is less effective quite often than going for a walk.

• 1:33:58Steven Bartlett?

  You've done therapy, haven't you?

• 1:33:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Steven Bartlett?

  How was it?

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  I've done therapy and I've done couples therapy and um, actually I will say that I did much better with a male therapist and one of them we did walk. Um, and so I'm basing some of it some kind of personal experience, which is like, there's something about sitting on a chair or kind of and being stared at and told to open up.

• 1:34:21Steven Bartlett?

  I've been there.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  Do you find it hard to do that?

• 1:34:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I do. I find it really, really hard. When I did couples therapy and I've done um, individual therapy, I found it really hard. I found it even harder in couple couples therapy.

• 1:34:35Speaker 00

  Was it a male or a female therapist?

• 1:34:37Steven Bartlett?

  It was, I had a male therapist and then I had a male and female therapist at the same time.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:34:45Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because in couples therapy, I found it easier with just a woman.

• 1:34:50Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:51Steven Bartlett?

  And then in in individual therapy, I find it easier with a man, I think.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, it's one of the reasons I'm really worried about the declining share of men in psychology and therapy. I mean, you know, we're emptying the men out of those professions.

• 1:35:07Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:35:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. The share of men going into psychology and counselling has plummeted in the US and the UK. So there are fewer and fewer men. It's getting harder and harder to find a male therapist. Now, maybe that doesn't matter, but I absolutely think it matters. And again, we're basically like, you've just shared your experience, I'll share mine is that I think to have the option when, you know, one of my kids really needed therapy too. I think for him, he did so much better with a man and I, I, I think there's some, depending on the nature of the problem, maybe that you're.

• 1:35:36Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  It's just, but it's just something about like intuitive connection.

• 1:35:42Steven Bartlett?

  I think I heard you say that going to couples counselling with your partner was one of the most difficult things you've ever done.

• 1:35:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:35:52Steven Bartlett?

  This is a quote, "The hardest thing you've ever done as a man is when him and your wife went to couples therapy." You said that on Scott Galloway's podcast.

• 1:36:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:36:02Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  So my wife and I were working through, actually a lot of these issues that we've been talking about today, like what our relative roles were and responsibilities. And she's been very successful professionally and we raised our kids together. I've been a stay at home dad and then worked and so on. And there was this moment where, that was really one of those pivotal moments in your life, where I was talking about what I'd done at home and how I'd supported her career and, you know, all of that. And she looked at me and said, "You seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough.

• 1:36:50Speaker 00

  The problem is that you're not masculine enough."

• 1:36:57Speaker 00

  Like, that's a moment. That's a real moment. That was a, it was, and we then started talking, what did she mean by that? And it was about responsibility. It was about stepping in, in some ways, some of those roles. And, and what I came to realise, and this is in some ways, the book, the, the book underneath that book, which is my own journey and my own struggles with my own sense of what does it mean to be a man? What does masculinity mean in a relationship and a society of profound moral equality between men and women? And

• 1:37:40Speaker 00

  I realised that in some ways I'd... I'd been sort of almost at war with my own masculinity for quite a long time because it didn't fit my feminist mindset, right? Like, to the extent that there were things that I kind of wanted or felt that didn't fit with the kind of model of gender equality and feminism, that was a problem to be solved, rather than a way of being to be expressed and learned about. And it took that moment of my incredibly feminist, unbelievably professionally successful wife to say, I think the problem is you're not masculine enough. And it was

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  just like the energy that I had and like, I felt as if like asking for more in our relationship for myself was to be a bad feminist, was to not support her. I was supposed to be a good ally. You know, the world is made for men and all our needs and desires and so on. So my job was to be an ally to her. And anything that got in the way of that, or that was difficult or complicated, and it was, well, I don't know what would have happened to our relationship without it. But I can tell you that from that moment onwards, our relationship grew and flourished and continues to flower in a way that it

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  just would not otherwise have done. Because it's almost like by being so direct, she forced this movement inside me where I almost gave myself permission to give some expression to the sides of myself that are more masculine.

• 1:39:27Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's not the conversation people hear publicly.

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  You're not putting this out, are you? I thought it was just us.

• 1:39:35Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean, people don't, people don't. There's so much truth to that. And I think there's so many women that are listening right now that are nodding their head and can relate in various ways because of the way that society is to some degree now. But that's not the narrative we hear that a woman would turn to you and ask you to be more masculine in the context of sort of the typical idea of what masculinity means, or at least what it means to her.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, almost the opposite. It would be, the toxic, back to your point about it. Is masculinity the problem, which I thought it was? And it took her to point out that, no, no, no, it's how it's expressed that's the question. And for me, it was like, I just, I thought that being assertive in the relationship was somehow bad because it was associated with kind of, you know, patriarchy, masculinity, and like, men dominating, and like, and it's very interesting. Like, I'll bring it down to like, a more benign level. I think a lot of young women, actually, one of the things they feel about a lot of young men is that they're a bit passive. It's almost like a lot of those men almost

• 1:40:44Speaker 00

  don't feel they have permission to be assertive. And what women, like, it's fun for you and I to talk about what women want, isn't it? But I think there's something, what a lot of the women I talk to say is like, I just want someone who's my equal. And that's so weird to say now, right? But they, they want someone that's a partner that's with them. And, and they say, well, what should we do tonight? Or, you know, where should we go for dinner? And if he says, I don't know, you decide. I don't mind, right? It's always just like, well, no, you decide. And you make a plan. And you, you, you know, you book it. You like, show some agency here. And I might not always agree with you or even like it. We can get it, get into that, right? But just going passive is not what

• 1:41:26Speaker 00

  makes you a good partner or a good feminist. And I, and I, I think my, maybe my generation, I'm older than you, maybe my generation of men have really struggled more with that. Just because I think it was a kind of, there was this kind of strong sense that we, that we needed to sort of, yeah, just, in order for women to become bigger, we had to make ourselves smaller.

• 1:41:48Speaker 00

  And I think that was a profound intellectual and for me emotional and relational error. The point is, we all need to get bigger. We all want to rise and grow and challenge each other and challenge each other to grow, not silence ourselves or bench ourselves.

• 1:42:06Steven Bartlett?

  Following going through that process with your partner, how did you change?

• 1:42:12Speaker 00

  I became much more willing. So one of my issues is I'm quite agreeable. All right. So I don't, I avoid conflict quite a bit.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  But I also saw like provoking conflict and disagreeing and arguing as like bad for the relationship. And also like me doing it as a man, like bad for her. And so I actually became much more willing to say, no, I don't want to do that. I want to do this, or I want to go there, not there, or I'd like to do this, not that.

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  And, and it caused more arguments,

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  which was uncomfortable for me, but it was great and it was what she wanted. There were two aspects to it, if I'm honest, like one was like stand up a little bit more for myself and a little bit like in the relationship and a little more like, no, I like, I disagree about that. We're going to do this and just give her more of a equal in that sense of challenge. But the other thing that was really an issue was just actually just the kind of responsibility, responsibility around kind of economics and so on too. And I don't think this was just about gender, but it took me a while, I think, to really

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  get a proper sense of like just being a provider, a co provider wasn't bad. Right. Making money in a way that would help our family and give us more choices wasn't bad. And so there was, there was that kind of sense too, it's like, because she'd, up until that point, she'd actually done more of a breadwinning. And so there was a kind of sense of her saying, look, I'm, I'm about as feminist as you get. But you know what?

• 1:43:40Speaker 00

  Wouldn't mind it if we couldn't do a bit of this, you couldn't do a bit more of that as well.

• 1:43:44Steven Bartlett?

  I read some study the other day and I'll triple check this and put it on the screen. But I think the study, if I'm gonna get this correct, said that about 70% of women want to be with a guy that's earning more than them. Something like that. It was like 70, 80% or something like that.

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  That's about right. I mean, you can check it, but it depends which survey. You can choose a survey. But yeah, like, but you know, it's so interesting that's. I've been thinking about that quite a bit recently, that reliably in surveys, women will say, like, I want a guy that can, that has earning potential. Earns more, can earn more. But what you have to really care for, I think, how the question's asked and what the interpretation of it is.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  I think actually what it's very often about is women wanting, and a lot of young women have suggested this to me, not just young women, but but even women of my generation, that what they really want is a partner. And earning is a really good proxy for someone who's got their act together, right? Someone who's a good earner is also gonna be a good father, probably, and a good partner and so on too. So it's actually just a really good signal, right? The market, the labor market is a very good signal of all kinds of other skills and so on. So that's number one. I think they're actually just getting someone who like is, he's got his act together, right? He's, he's, he's a good thing. He's got skills. He's got, you know, he's got agency. He's like. And those are good in all kinds of other circumstances too. So when I was a stay at home dad, I like to think I had a lot of agency and I didn't like lie on the sofa all day.

• 1:45:09Speaker 00

  Like I did stuff and organized stuff. And so I think it's partly that, but I also think it's partly because a lot of women want choice. They want options to maybe take some time themselves to be at home. And that's a really interesting modern development, right? Is I think the feminist call now from a lot of women to men is like, I don't know if I'm gonna wanna take time out to kind of raise the kids, but I'd like the option.

• 1:45:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 00

  Right? And that's only an option if you're doing your bit, if you're earning, right? And so I do know some women who like very successful professionally and then they have kids and their partner is much less successful. Like I know one couple where he was, he was literally a kind of failing musician as she was like this partner in some law firm or whatever. So it was like a, it was like a movie. It's so stereotypical, but and she like, she has kids and she's like, well, I'd like to have a bit of time, but I ain't gonna live on his, you know, solo guitar YouTube salary or whatever it was, right? And at that point, she's mad at him. Maybe a little bit too late, but you know what I mean? Because like, I just, I'd just like you to

• 1:46:17Speaker 00

  give me the option. And of course, we want it both ways now, right? Like, it was great for me to be able to have time at home while my, uh, my partner was able to just go for it professionally for a while, just totally go for it. That was beautiful for both of us. But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that it shouldn't go both ways. Like, we can't, we can't, we, we gotta, couldn't get rid of the provider more. We gotta think about ourselves as co-providers of a whole bunch of things, money, time, love, energy, and not take ourselves out of the equation at all. That's not, that's not, that's not what the women's movement was about. The women's movement was about women securing economic independence, not about men losing it. That's not attractive.

• 1:46:54Steven Bartlett?

  You've got two sons, right?

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

  Three.

• 1:46:56Steven Bartlett?

  Three sons. Okay. So I guess this kind of brings us to the penultimate point, which is, and if you were sitting down with all three of your sons, which you might have done already, and they said to you, Dad, listen, what does it mean to be a man in the modern world? What should I do? Should I hold the door open? Should I, I don't know, uh, go to the gym? Should I pursue a high-flying bread-winning job? What does it mean to be a man? What advice would you give them about being a man in the modern world? Honestly, the advice that would set them up to be successful in their romantic relationships and in the world and in their mind?

• 1:47:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's interesting because in some ways, I think the fact that conversation might almost be a sign of failure, not just individually, but more socially, because I really believe that people believe their eyes before they believe their ears. And so what I would really hope is that I've been showing, not telling. Um, that it's not a curriculum. It's not a here or the, here's the four-point plan for modern masculinity based on my years of research. It's more like, well, you've seen how I am. You've seen how I am with your mom. You've seen how I've worked. You've seen how I've raised you. You've seen like how you've seen, you've seen how I interact with people. And there's this lovely phrase from a philosopher is in the thick of daily life. Like, how are you in the thick of daily life?

• 1:48:17Speaker 00

  You've seen me help that person. You've seen me, like, they tease me this, I pick up the Lime scooters all the time. Right, because someone's gonna trip over them, right? You've, you've, you've seen how I've reacted, right? And I haven't done that kind of thing, oh, this is masculinity. But you've seen me do certain things that you've just kind of imbued along the way. So that sounds like a cop out, but I won't cop out completely. Because I think I would say, look, first of all, recognize that there are on average differences. Right, so there are going to be things that you're going to be inclined towards or want to do. They're just different, right? There's nothing wrong with masculine. There's nothing wrong with some of these impulses and instincts that you've got, right?

• 1:48:57Speaker 00

  Of course, you want complete gender equality. And so you're going to look for partners who are going to give you that as well. And above all, be for others. Serve. And so the first two, I'd open the door, for sure. Yeah, what was the second one? I can't remember, but you said, open the door. It's about career and it's about going to the gym. Go to the gym, sure. I mean, actually, all the evidence about being physically healthy is, is important. But then kind of get a high earning job, I wouldn't say that. I would say, find work that, yes, will pay, don't be naive about that. But it's much more important that you're passionate about your work. You'll be much more attractive to someone if you're passionate. We only, we're only here once, for God's sake.

• 1:49:41Speaker 00

  And so the idea that you're gonna, you know, that someone's attracted to someone who like does kind of into their work just because it makes a bunch of, back to our, that's not sexy. It doesn't matter what the paycheck is, right? What's sexy is passion and agency and, you know, verve, mojo, whatever. So absolutely, I would, I would advise all of that. I actually think it's kind of weird, back to the dating thing, is that in some, I think it captures a lot of our conversation though, which is that I, I've tried to raise them in a way that would give them the courage to ask a girl out, the grace to accept no for, just accept no for an answer,

• 1:50:24Speaker 00

  and then the responsibility to make sure that either way, she gets home safely.

• 1:50:30Speaker 00

  So what I've got in there is a little bit of agency, a little bit of leaning in, a little bit of taking it with risk. It's a risk to ask someone out, right? And I think risk taking is, is on average, a bit more masculine. That's secondly, you have no sense of entitlement about that. And if you've read it wrong or whatever, and she's like, no, thank you. Like, you are totally cool with that, right? Incredibly. But then thirdly, either way, like, there is a responsibility to make sure people are kind of safe. And if you're in a position where you're a little bit stronger and able to do that, great. In fact, I had a rule with my kids that they, they had a curfew. But actually, if they broke the curfew because they were getting someone home safely, they got an exemption from that. And there was one night when my sons came home and he was, I was waiting for him and he was 30 minutes after curfew, pouring with rain. He came home drowned rat and he'd walked a girl home, got home safely. It's like, great.

• 1:51:16Speaker 00

  Now, I like to think that sort of formulation is capturing some stuff that is a bit more inherently masculine. But in a world where there's no entitlement, there's no sense of inequality. And I don't think that's a horrible formula. And generally speaking, I've kind of found a lot of men, kind of men and women, like, yes, actually, actually, I would quite like you. It's a covered garage order. I would actually quite like to kind of make you, make sure that I get to my car safely or kind of whatever. And I don't think that's patriarchy. I think that's good manners and responsibility. What that doesn't mean is that, and you do it for your boss, you do it for somebody else. It doesn't mean that there's any going back to a world where that gave you some sort of extra power in the labour market or something like that. So I think it's really difficult, honestly, right now to get this right.

• 1:52:01Speaker 00

  I think, but I think too many people are also treading on eggshells a little bit too.

• 1:52:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Speaker 00

  Like they do, rather than run the risk of doing something wrong, they do nothing. And that's the worst of all worlds because we don't learn.

• 1:52:14Steven Bartlett?

  But also those kids are going to fall into the hands of others in terms of their influence. So they're going to learn how to be a man from TikTok or Twitter. And you never know which algorithm's gonna sweep them away.

• 1:52:25Speaker 00

  One thing we can be pretty sure of is that with some exceptions, you're not gonna learn how to be a man from social media or online. You're gonna learn it from your dad, your neighbour, your brother, your teacher, your coach. The best antidote to some of the reactionary content that some young men are encountering online now isn't other online content, much though, of course, we're all producing more online content. It's actually a real, live man in your life. It's flesh and blood. And I think that's so much more powerful. I think that my son, as a teacher in front of a classroom of boys, is going to be a much more powerful antidote to those reactionary figures that they might see online than somebody

• 1:53:08Speaker 00

  else online. That's how we win. We win in real life, not online.

• 1:53:11Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, there's kind of two adjacent points here. The first is your son is going into a profession that is increasingly depleting in men.

• 1:53:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:17Steven Bartlett?

  Because, what's it, like 20% or 30% of primary school teachers are men?

• 1:53:22Speaker 00

  No, in primary, it's one in 10.

• 1:53:24Steven Bartlett?

  One in 10?

• 1:53:25Speaker 00

  In primary, yeah.

• 1:53:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so those role models are lacking in primary education, but then he's going into, is it high school, secondary school?

• 1:53:30Speaker 00

  He's gonna be teaching elementary to start with, yeah, so primary school, yeah.

• 1:53:33Steven Bartlett?

  So those role models are really needed there. And the adjacent point was, you've talked to me about what you'd say to your sons around the kitchen table, but if I elect you as president of the world, or at least the Western world, UK and US, let's say, and North America, and I tell you that you've got to solve the issues you talk about in this book, of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It. In fact, you had to solve the issues you described so eloquently. What would you do at a social level to fix things? The suicidality, the mental health issues we're seeing, the loneliness we're seeing, the educational gap we're seeing?

• 1:54:11Speaker 00

  If you're in a position where you have a voice, you're in a position of authority, president, prime minister, or anybody, actually. I think it's very easy to understate the power of simply acknowledging a problem and having empathy for the people who are struggling from it. And so whilst I could list the whole bunch of policy solutions, which I think would be part of the interview, you'd have to say, and that's why I'm doing X. That's why I'm having a men's health strategy and we're hiring male teachers and we're, you know, we're having a, we're funding mental health services for men, et cetera. I would do all that, but I actually think that the most important move would be to send a signal, especially to young men and boys who are struggling.

• 1:54:56Speaker 00

  I see you. We see you, we hear you, we've got you. We understand that you're struggling. We are not going back on the move for women and girls, but we are taking your problems seriously. And we're continuing to take the problems of women and girls seriously. Simply making them feel seen and heard and empathized with is a massive thing. It's a massive, because so many of them right now feel as if their problems aren't being discussed, aren't being addressed at that level. They are being addressed online over here by many reactionary figures, but they're not being addressed by the people in positions of power.

• 1:55:40Speaker 00

  Very often they're being dismissed sometimes. And the result of that is to create this really dangerous vacuum in our society, also in men's lives. Like if there are real problems and we neglect them and they don't feel, they can become grievances. And that's the perfectly natural result of having real problems that are neglected. And so simply saying, we understand. It is, it is a struggle right now. There are a lot of problems facing young men and we are on it. I can't, I can't tell you how powerful I think that would be because so many men feel right now as if their problems are sort of second order problems. They just don't count as much. They're not being addressed in the same way.

• 1:56:23Speaker 00

  Or if they are, it's turned back on them. It's because you don't try, it's because you're lazy, it's because you watch too much porn, it's because you're toxic, it's got to, so individualize back on them and you need to fix yourself. And I think if we were just, if we were just able to say, we can do two things at once and we can continue to fight for women and girls, but we can also help you, boys and men, I think it would be profound.

• 1:56:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's so clearly so important to that group in particular as well, because letting them know that they are seen in a situation where they are already unbelievably alone in a sense of loneliness is especially powerful. And I think just from having these conversations on the podcast, I've seen that, I've seen that, I've seen that just by having the conversations, even if we don't have all the solutions yet, just by turning the lights on and saying, okay, this is a thing. People are so unbelievably grateful. And it's not just men that are grateful. If you look at the, the gender split on the podcast that I've done with men and women on these male issues, the comment section are full of mothers

• 1:57:29Steven Bartlett?

  and grandmothers and sisters and daughters who are equally concerned about men and boys in the same way that we should all be concerned about the issues that women and girls face. And I think that's a really wonderful thing because I feel like someone said to me on the podcast, you know, we've spent a long time calling men out and now we need to call them back in.

• 1:57:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:57:47Steven Bartlett?

  And I think it's just a wonderful expression of where I think we find ourselves at, where we're now trying to figure out how we coexist and champion each other and the individual issues we both have as two different sexes. And

• 1:58:00Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for your work in this space. I do think that using your platform to honestly engage, to grapple with decisions in the way that we have today and you have with others and just to look, there aren't any, it's hard. I think that's an incredibly important thing because if you're not talking about it, others will be. And so for you to use your voice in this kind of space, to just say, we get it, we're hearing you, we're seeing it, we maybe don't have the answer. It's very powerful for you to use your voice to do that. And I'm glad you're getting the reaction that you are, which is to a much lesser extent in my, the reaction I get too, which is thank God, because you're not framing it in a reactionary way. You're not saying, and that's why we need to go back to the 50s where men were men and women were. You're saying, no, this is hard, right? But yeah.

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  We we see it.

• 1:58:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I I love the progress we've made as a society. I love that. I love it for all the women in my lives. I love it for myself. I love it for my sister, for my mother, for my partner, for all the wonderful women that work with me. But I also know that with all with all upsides comes a unintended consequence as well. And if we can manage that, if we can manage both the upside and sustain that while managing the unintended consequence and talk about it, and this is something, this is not just about socialism, it's about medicine. We're talking before about medicine or any other, you know, being really successful in work comes with an unintended consequence over here, right? You lose your friends or you you might become lonely. If we can highlight both and manage both and talk about both,

• 1:59:30Steven Bartlett?

  then I think we'll we'll be much better as a society. And if we're much better as a society, then I think we'll be much better. We'll all be happier and we'll all be better. And it's it's difficult to have these conversations sometimes because obviously this is, these are such polarizing issues.

• 1:59:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:59:44Steven Bartlett?

  But what the what the fuck are we here for if not to have those conversations?

• 1:59:47Speaker 00

  And also, if you, as you speak about this stuff, and I found myself doing it a bit in this conversation, you think, like, what's the what's the kind of least generous interpretation of what I've just said?

• 1:59:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

  That someone's gonna post somewhere, right?

• 1:59:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:58Speaker 00

  But if if if you, if we're constantly worried about what the least generous interpretation of what we're saying is, we'll never say anything.

• 2:00:05Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:00:05Speaker 00

  And and so just by saying it and trying to be honest about it and changing your mind, we're just having, I think you're proving this, that the appetite for good faith conversations about real issues is huge right now. I think people kind of over the simplification, they're over the algorithm, they're over the soundbite. No, we're all kind of in it still, but but just honestly wrestling with real problems and seeing that we have to rise together, I think that's a huge gift.

• 2:00:34Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.

• 2:00:37Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:00:38Steven Bartlett?

  Not knowing who they're leaving it for.

• 2:00:39Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 2:00:40Steven Bartlett?

  I'm assuming that's the last one. Yeah, it must be. There's no other. Yeah, it is. Okay. Interestingly, they've written a statement at the top, which is, someday is now, full stop. And then they've written, at your age, at this point in your journey, what is one thing you always swore you would do one day? Have you done it yet? And if not, why not?

• 2:01:03Speaker 00

  I can't answer that question. I'm trying really hard because

• 2:01:11Speaker 00

  I'm trying to think of anything that I've sworn I will do one day.

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  And I can't think of a single thing.

• 2:01:20Steven Bartlett?

  Richard, thank you.

• 2:01:21Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:01:21Steven Bartlett?

  It's been such a wonderful conversation for so many reasons and you know, I have zero doubt that there are so many, so many men and women out there that are, have benefited tremendously from the fact that you do the work that you do in the way that you do it. And I think that's a really important additional part to the sentence, which is the way in which you do it.

• 2:01:41Speaker 00

  Tone matters, right?

• 2:01:42Steven Bartlett?

  It really, really matters. It really matters because I think you're able to call everybody into the room. In a way that other people aren't, they call half of the group into the room or just some of the group into the room, which I never think is the best way to get ideas across, but really skillfully in your book, but in your work more generally, you call everybody into the room and you, you do it in a way which is objective, it's not political. And it's incredibly powerful and compelling. And that's exactly what your, your book was. I spent a long time after having multiple conversations on this podcast, looking for the book that sets the right tone. And can speak to someone like me who considers myself, I'm not sure if this is always true because I've said biases and stuff, but considers myself right in the middle.

• 2:02:26Steven Bartlett?

  In terms of politics and all these things. So your book was, it didn't seem to be pandering to either group. It seemed to be able to maintain an absolute objectivity, which was incredibly powerful, but everything is supported by data and stats, not just vibes. And I think that is the book that society is needed. And I think it is this book. So I'd highly recommend everybody give it a read if you have any interest in these subjects we've discussed today. I'm going to link it below for everyone. And it's called Of Boys and Men. Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It. But also for all of the millions of people listening right now, um, thank you. Because I'm sure all of them would like to say thank you for, for a variety of different reasons, but on behalf of them, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. It's very, very important.

• 2:03:09Steven Bartlett?

  And to kind of close off this conversation.

• 2:03:12Speaker 00

  Thank you. It means a lot to me.

• 2:03:13Steven Bartlett?

  We need you.

• 2:03:14Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. We need you too.