A Shocking Turn in the War on Men - Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves is a writer, researcher and the Founder of the American Institute for Boys & Men. What is the current state of men and boys? As social movements have focused on supporting historically marginalised groups, Richard has led the march on whether men’s challenges have been overlooked. So what is the current state of men and boys, and are we finally moving toward meaningfully addressing their challenges? Expect to learn how the debate on men and boys has changed since Richard and I last spoke, how progressives are doing with helping men now, if we need new language to talk about gender issues, what the feminism movement is pushing for at this point, why fatherhood is the “last male institution,” and much more… - Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com⁠⁠ - 0:00 What’s Changed in the Boys and Men Debate? 6:09 Do Men’s Rights Activists Actually Want to Win? 12:07 Why We Need Better Conversations About Boys and Men 28:31 Does Gender Politics Need a New Language? 29:46 Looksmaxxing: The Manosphere’s Next Obsession? 35:01 Are Men Being Written Out of Society? 47:37 Should Men Lead the Household? 49:28 Is Modern Society Becoming Feminised? 51:28 Why Feminists Need to Stop Demonising Men 55:57 How is Mate Value Changing Modern Dating? 01:05:45 Are Working Women Changing Fertility Rates? 01:20:21 Are We Waiting Too Long to Have Families? 01:27:15 Why Paternity is So Important 01:30:37 Should Fathers Be in the Delivery Room? 01:36:49 Why Fathers Need More Recognitio 01:40:33 Are Modern Men Satisfied With Life? 01:42:46 Is Title IX Helping or Hurting Men? 01:47:18 What Does the Future Look Like For Men? 02:04:21 Where to Find Richard - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:07Richard Reeves?

  I think when we last spoke, I was still frustrated that there was no sort of political space for this. I think people have become aware, things aren't great with boys and men. There was raised awareness of it, but I still felt maybe particularly on the centre left, that it was difficult to actually do anything about it. And that's changed. I used to say, one of my talking points used to be that it was very hard to get people, especially on the political left, to actually do anything about this problem. First of all, we have to get them to talk about it. A, it's a problem. B, we can talk about it. And then C, we can do something about it. And I can't say that anymore. We've got governors, Governor Newsom, Governor Whitmer, Governor Wes Moore in Maryland, also Governor Spencer Cox in Utah, all of whom have got pretty serious initiatives now to try and promote boys and

• 0:52Richard Reeves?

  men. We've got, as I'm speaking to you now, two bills have just been introduced to Congress to create a men's health strategy in office and to help men with their mental health after fatherhood, right? The Men Matter Bill. And there are a bunch of stuff happening in states. And so I can't credibly say anymore, you know what? No one's paying any attention to this. I can't sort of say anymore, like you're shouting into the wilderness. And I used to say like I'm banging my head against the brick wall, especially on the Democrat side of the aisle. That is just not true anymore. And there's some politics behind that, of course. I will, I think, I have to be honest, that I felt like I was banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024. And then there was an election and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:40Richard Reeves?

  I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the Democrats I've just mentioned and that we're working with are very often also mentioned as potential presidential candidates. And so they've, they've realised that we can't win without young men. So I'm not going to lie, I think there's a political dimension to this, but I don't. Unlike many people, I don't blame politicians for doing politics. So some of the more men's rightsy people have said about Governor Newsom's initiative, for example, which is a serious initiative. What is it? So he signed an executive order last year saying, telling his administration to come back to him with comprehensive plans to help boys and men in K-12 education, employment, and especially

• 2:25Richard Reeves?

  mental health. He's already done a male service challenge. He's done a call to get 10,000 more men in California into service, into mentoring, into coaching. They're following that up with a big push on getting more men into teaching, like male role models in the classroom would be a good idea. And it was very interesting that the men's rightsy folks, if I can use that language for now, although I'm on the more conservative side of it, they're just like, oh, he's just, he's just doing, he's just doing politics. He's just realised that the Democrats have lost young men and so he's just doing stuff to try and win their votes back.

• 2:57Richard Reeves?

  And why is that a bad thing? Isn't that how democracies are supposed to work? And so I just can't say it anymore. I think it's, there's real progress on this. It's serious. Not all of it's making it into the culture war, but that doesn't mean that it's not good. In fact, most of it's not in the culture war. It's not being discussed generally on podcasts or even on cable TV, but it doesn't mean it's not happening.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

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

• 3:26Richard Reeves?

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

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

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

• 3:45Richard Reeves?

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

• 3:47Chris Williamson?

  Not sufficient yet.

• 3:48Richard Reeves?

  No. And I think part of my role and part of my institute's role is to hold these people to account, is to say, okay.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  You said you were gonna do that.

• 3:54Richard Reeves?

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

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  When did your book come out?

• 4:24Richard Reeves?

  2022.

• 4:25Chris Williamson?

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

• 4:28Richard Reeves?

  2024.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

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

• 4:33Richard Reeves?

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

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  Sexy to talk about it.

• 5:07Richard Reeves?

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

• 5:52Richard Reeves?

  I want this issue to be mainstream.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys are falling behind. We've heard it. We've heard it. Like, we know we're working on it. We've got it.

• 5:57Richard Reeves?

  Kind of, yeah. And I want people to say, well, that's why we've got this Office of Men's Health. And that's why we've created this. That's why we've got this big push on male teachers. We're doing it. What are you talking about?

• 6:05Chris Williamson?

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

• 6:08Richard Reeves?

  Beds already made.

• 6:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. You said that the men's right C types

• 6:12Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  don't actually want to win. What do you mean?

• 6:16Richard Reeves?

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

• 6:46Chris Williamson?

  These people inside of government, the men's rights?

• 6:47Richard Reeves?

  No, no, no, these are advocates, these are activists.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay, like commentators?

• 6:51Richard Reeves?

  Yes, or people that have been like, there are various groups out there, they tend to be small and not that well-funded, and honestly, quite often fueled by grievances, not necessarily illegitimate grievances, I don't want to be misunderstood, but I'm on various, you know, conversations with them. And I, I heard this rabbi, David Welpis is his name, on a podcast the other day, and he said something that really struck me. He said, activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed.

• 7:20Richard Reeves?

  Because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you'll have to start saying, great, we've done it, now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, there's been a feminist conspiracy against men, no one cares against men, and I've spent decades saying this, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, and they do start doing stuff about men. You've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, and change your identity, or say, no, no, that can't be true. I don't, but I think that's true for like LGBTQ activists, I think it's true for like climate, I just, like, basically, people can't take a win anymore, right? People

• 8:00Richard Reeves?

  can't say, that's a win. It may not be perfect, but it's a win. It has to be glass half-empty rather than glass half-full.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the reasons for that is that people worry if they are too grateful for a success, it's not going to continue to push. The purpose forward. It's the same reason that hard charging, overachiever type A people refuse to let themselves feel too much pleasure when they succeed because my displeasure is exactly the fuel that keeps me going. And

• 8:30Richard Reeves?

  Right.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  It's not too dissimilar with climate, the climate crisis. Not enough is done because, well, maybe if I stop now, even if lots has been done, it'll slow down or it'll reverse or people will forget. So now that we've got the front foot, we must keep going. That would be the more virtuous way to put it. But I also agree. There's a fascinating graph. If you look at the uses of the word racism in the New York Times over the last 20 years and you compare it to how much racism is actually happening. The two lines just have nothing in common and going completely opposite direction. It's like some insane multiples times increase in the word racism. Lots of people made their careers around identifying racism. So you concept creep out things like racism.

• 9:12Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, you end up slaying smaller and smaller dragons.

• 9:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes, which makes your cause less and less legitimate.

• 9:17Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, which makes it easier for your opponents then to say, actually, that's kind of silly. And so in the end, I don't think it works. And I'd say that I don't want to, I want to be balanced about this because I remember getting an email, I think, from the human human rights, whatever they're called, H R A. And it was something like along the lines of there's never been a worse time to be trans in America. And this was two months after Gorsuch had written his really, I think, incredible civil rights victory to include trans people under the sex discrimination law. I mean, that was a massive civil rights victory for the trans community. And it was almost like, yeah, when we did get that, but that, but look at this terrible thing over here. And I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't want to suggest there aren't still challenges for trans people. But the idea that after

• 10:00Richard Reeves?

  extraordinary civil rights victory, I mean, really, no one saw that coming, especially from that Supreme Court. They couldn't just take that win. And then you have to send out an email funding saying, it's never been a worse time. Is that true? And I'm not saying it's a left, right thing. It's a this so attached to the idea that you can't win. And I've really noticed it in my space too. And it's something I think about a lot in my own work is to try and I really want to update my own view of the world and make sure that if good stuff's happening, I don't get trapped in this kind of rut. I want to win. I want us to become mainstream and that will mean like I have less to say. But that's good.

• 10:40Chris Williamson?

  You want to put yourself out of a job.

• 10:41Richard Reeves?

  I do.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 10:46Richard Reeves?

  Do and don't, shouldn't we all want to do that?

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  It's designed to be deleted.

• 10:49Richard Reeves?

  It's sort of hard, right? But that requires you not to wrap your identity up so strongly in it.

• 10:54Chris Williamson?

  There's a line from Ben Francis, the founder and CEO of Jim Shark. And he said, when your aspirations for the business are bigger than your aspirations for yourself, then you can be a proper leader. And his point there was that he stepped, he was the founder, then he became CEO, then he stepped down as CEO and got some guy from Reebok in who could take them from whatever a hundred million to whatever billion. And then Ben came back in because he was needed at a different time. And he was just happy to do what the mission called him to do. And yeah, if you don't have a grievance anymore. And we saw the rug get pulled out from BLM with this regard, right? It was, some people sounded the alarm early. There's a lot of money there and we can't really work out where it's gone. And they all leave in really nice houses.

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  And then it took a lot of pressure and then eventually that's kind of dissolved. And I think it's done damage to putting forwards the rights of black people and minorities in the modern world, because now everything's been tarred with the same brush.

• 11:52Richard Reeves?

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

• 12:01Chris Williamson?

  Playing into the caricature that they have of you.

• 12:04Richard Reeves?

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

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  There's definitely been more of a mainstream recognition of it. To me, I have to certainly sort of.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  Do a little bit of breath work when I read one of these headlines because I'm trying to work out, is this lip service being paid to blowing with the wind of a cool topic at the moment? Is it kind of like a disclaimer? Well, we did talk, you must remember, we released four, a four-part series in Politico on the crisis of boys and men, by the way, all written by women.

• 12:57Richard Reeves?

  Well, not my piece in Politico, but yes, I take your point.

• 13:00Chris Williamson?

  They did the Christine Ember had theirs and hers came out, theirs came out at the same time. Not one was written by a man. If it was, why are men talking about women's bodies? That would have probably been an issue had it have been reversed. So I'm trying to work out, okay, there's definitely more headlines about it that I see in the press. I'm not tapped into what's happening in Washington, what's happening on the policy side. It would probably be good, I know that you guys are promoting it, but it would be good if there was a way to get that out more, that, you know, good news about men newsletter or something, to really allow that to sort of make people who care about the issues of boys and men not feel like it's a permanent losing battle, or like all of their efforts,

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  the best that they can hope for is a Washington Post headline once every three months or something like that.

• 13:47Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  We've got Ross Kemp just released a three or five-part series about young men. Louis Theroux's documentary just came out on Netflix. Adolescence did so much fucking damage, I think, when, with the way that it tried to frame things, with the language that it used.

• 14:09Richard Reeves?

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

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Well, it was, that's, that's correct, yeah. It was purposefully left up to interpretation.

• 14:19Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Chris Williamson?

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

• 14:53Richard Reeves?

  I know, it was the first time in British history that a political leader has been criticised for not watching television.

• 14:58Chris Williamson?

  Do you see this, Jared? Mate, it was fucking insane. She gets pulled up on morning TV by-

• 15:06Richard Reeves?

  I haven't watched it yet.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  Saying, saying, "You need to watch this." Hey, what? Wow. What do you mean? It wasn't even reality TV, let alone a documentary. It was, "You need to watch this fictional portrayal." Wow. It was wild. Of the show Adolescence.

• 15:20Richard Reeves?

  Right, so that's, so the UK's a good example. I've actually, since we spoke, I think, set up a think tank there as well. And we're working quite closely over there. And it's like, it is, you do feel, always one step back, one forward. And a lot, some of the stuff that gets the most attention is not necessarily the stuff that either should or is most important. So simultaneously, the UK has released the first ever men's health strategy. And it's a very good document, where Streating's kind of put that forward. They had a very serious debate in Parliament on International Men's Day. And actually, all of the MPs told a dad joke at the beginning. I think it's like, this organisation called Dad Shift did that. And it's absolutely, it's absolutely fucking amazing. I really kind of, it's so cool. Wes Streating did it as well. It's very funny.

• 16:03Richard Reeves?

  It was, it was an amazing debate about men's mental health, about what's happening. They're doing a summit on this.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  Were you happy with what they talked about?

• 16:09Richard Reeves?

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

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah.

• 16:35Richard Reeves?

  So it feels like, yeah, that's maybe how people were thinking three years ago, but it's not how it feels now.

• 16:41Chris Williamson?

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• 17:25Chris Williamson?

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• 18:10Chris Williamson?

  And he says, uh, so incels, they, they, they kill a lot of people, right? And William says, we think that the total number of incel killings worldwide is the upper bound. Five. And Ross Kemp looks like he's been punched in the head. And you go five, five, five per day? He goes, no, five, five, total five. So is, is the territory going to be gained equally? No. What would I, what would I say?

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  The gender wars or the sex wars, I guess, of what's happening inside of the home? What's happening with men's roles? Those things that, that is going to be downstream from all of the structural changes that need to be made. Like, how are we doing with boys literacy rates, which I know are just falling through the floor? Like, they can't read, boys can't read. What's happening with getting them into education or higher education or apprenticeships? And then what's happening with employment? And then what's happening with your place in society and fatherhood and all the rest of it? Like all of these, the issues that I think matter most, that people feel the most, which is, well, what's my meaning? And what's my job like? And what's my income like?

• 19:27Chris Williamson?

  All of those are after effects of the stuff that comes before it. And that is education, that's employment, that's mental health support, that's all of the systemic kind of, like your work.

• 19:39Richard Reeves?

  Yes.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  And it almost feels.

• 19:41Richard Reeves?

  Did you just call my work systemic and boring? Because if you did, I'm so happy.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What I've always wanted to be.

• 19:47Richard Reeves?

  Oh, my God. This is like, hallelujah.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

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

• 20:31Richard Reeves?

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

• 20:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I'm both of the guys and the human centipede.

• 20:41Richard Reeves?

  Sort of doing the work of both, like they feel that and I'm somewhere in the middle, I'm like the rest.

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  You can be the, you can be the middle of the.

• 20:46Richard Reeves?

  Can I be the middle of that? I don't know if this analogy is working for me, but anyway.

• 20:51Richard Reeves?

  So, because you have to have space for a good faith conversation about what's actually going on with boys and men.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 20:59Richard Reeves?

  And a good faith investigation of that. And you also need young men especially to hear that conversation and to feel like we're talking about this stuff that in a way that takes them seriously and that says they have problems, not that they are the problem. And so I do think that these sorts of spaces are important for creating the conditions under which policymakers and politicians and others can then do their work, which will then hopefully address the material problems. I don't think, we're not going to change some of these material issues like overnight.

• 21:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Richard Reeves?

  But I think that we could at least do no harm. And for too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  What's deficit framing?

• 21:36Richard Reeves?

  We start with like, what's wrong with them? So a classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity, which I think we've talked about before. And just like, let's start with that. Let's start with not making you toxic, right? Or like, what's wrong with boys in school? They don't try. Or, and even like, my friend Scott Galloway falls into this a little bit when he says, oh, like, the daughters are a pen or a lawyer, and then the guys in the basements vaping and playing video games or whatever. Like, there's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. And I will just say, given the young men I know who listen to you and to others, that this hunger just for honest

• 22:17Richard Reeves?

  disagreement, good faith engagement around the problem is huge. And so I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, right? So cultural stuff's both before and after.

• 22:29Chris Williamson?

  I get what you mean. I think that the challenge that you have when speaking to men about the balance between ambition and compassion, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. We need to do things to help you, but you also don't want to be a victim.

• 22:43Richard Reeves?

  That's right.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  Especially for men, it comes into contact inside of their minds, because nobody wants to feel like they're not doing it on their own, especially if you're a guy. What was the heroism in that? And, you know, I think what Scott's sort of trying to point the finger at there is he's saying, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

• 23:00Richard Reeves?

  Right.

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  And for many men, that is true. I had this idea earlier this year called advice hyper responders. So. Advice doesn't distribute evenly like medicine, it distributes like alcohol. The people that are already drunk on it take too much when the people who need to loosen up don't have a

• 23:17Richard Reeves?

  I think you've talked about this in the context of Me Too, haven't you?

• 23:19Chris Williamson?

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

• 23:46Richard Reeves?

  Not in education, employment or training.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Nicholas

• 23:50Richard Reeves?

  Eberstadt.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  Eberstadt.

• 23:53Richard Reeves?

  Eberstadt.

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  Eberstadt, yeah, he corrected me.

• 23:55Richard Reeves?

  Really?

• 23:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Richard Reeves?

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

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  It's fine. Look, you're right that we've gone through this period of informing men of how to be men.

• 24:06Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  By telling them everything that they shouldn't do.

• 24:09Richard Reeves?

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

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

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

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

  Like if you can't eat food, you'll eat tree bark instead because it's the closest thing that's approximating food.

• 24:58Richard Reeves?

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

• 25:03Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 25:04Richard Reeves?

  Right? Because every culture has had to answer that question. And, and so the, it's not, the question is not, is there going to be a question? It's who's giving the answer? And if you don't like the answers, as you say, that some of the men are getting, then what's the alternative? And so you can't just vacate the ground and then complain, you can't give up the ground and then complain that somebody else takes it.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 25:24Richard Reeves?

  And that's exactly what's happened. Like mainstream culture just basically gave the, gave up the ground and said like, we're only going to talk about masculinity. If we put the prefix toxic in front of it. In fact, you can't even really use the word masculinity now with young men. Because it codes so la- it codes left because it's come with the modifier toxic. Right.

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  Only if you use it, even if you use it as just on its own.

• 25:47Richard Reeves?

  Even only, yeah. So what young men have kind of heard, they've only heard it in that context now. And so you've got, even the words really count here in terms of which, what, how does it signal? And it's really interesting to me that the, the word masculinity itself now to a lot of young men. They've only heard that coming out the mouths of people who are about to say something bad about it. Right? And sometimes they'll say, right?

• 26:06Chris Williamson?

  That's so good.

• 26:07Richard Reeves?

  And they'll, or they'll say healthy masculinity, right? Implying of course against unhealthy.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  That normal masculinity without the modifier is unhealthy.

• 26:15Richard Reeves?

  Just don't hear it the other way around. Right? And so they, they know what's coming when you hear you talk that way. And I do think you're right that there's been this huge cultural vacuum.

• 26:25Richard Reeves?

  I'll come back to something you said a minute ago, which is like, and I struggle with this a bit in my own work. And in some of the work that policymakers are doing, which is you don't want to say to young men especially. We're here to help you, poor you. Right? Look at you struggling, poor you. What we want to say is we need you.

• 26:45Richard Reeves?

  That's the message I think most young men need is we need you. Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We need you and we also need you in these service offerings. I, I wrote a thing with Robert Putnam in the Times last year, talking about the boy crisis of the early 20th century. And how all these civic organizations, Boy Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers, Big Sisters were created almost overnight to respond to what was happening with boys in the cities after urbanization. They were staffed by men, there were four boys and there was a so huge civic response. But it took men to do it, whereas all of the youth serving organizations now have way more women volunteers than male volunteers.

• 27:27Richard Reeves?

  And of course, I'm not blaming the women who are stepping up to do that work, God bless them. But I am saying, if you want to serve boys and young men, you better have some men too. But are men hearing that message? We need you, not despite being men, not as a volunteer, but as a man, we need, we need men. Right, it's just not.

• 27:47Chris Williamson?

  Because you're good, because you have something to add.

• 27:49Richard Reeves?

  Not, yes, that your masculinity, and I've made, I've used the word again, your manhood, right? Well, basically, we want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Richard Reeves?

  And I just don't think enough men have got that.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, even that, right, the, the, the idea of duty, um, of, uh, almost like service, turns very quickly into.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  Obligation isn't nasty enough of a word that, well, I mean, you know, you, you, you, you should, you should go and do this. As opposed to, this is a noble pursuit for you to try and pass on good things and good advice to the next generation of young men.

• 28:30Richard Reeves?

  Right.

• 28:30Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so do we need new language to talk about gender issues then? Femininity, is that, is that also a difficult one to talk about?

• 28:37Richard Reeves?

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

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  Femininity, actually, I would very rarely hear being spoken about other than anybody from the right. Femininity would be pushed as part of a sort of sundress and baking trad wife dream.

• 28:53Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I don't hear many people from the left talking about it because it's not something to be pedestalized. I would hear masculinity talked about primarily from the left as a cudgel to beat men with, usually with some sort of modifier of toxic or whatever. Um, so yeah, and feminism as well. Manosphere, unfortunately, uh, well, it was, it was very quickly kind of. Feminism was something that previously in the past, I think a lot of people think was, was, was.

• 29:22Richard Reeves?

  Right. It was about, it was a gender equality claim. Yeah.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Very quickly moved into something else. Uh, actually, it gets increasingly quickly moved into something else. When I learn about some of the factions that sort of birthed out of feminism at the very beginning.

• 29:35Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Chris Williamson?

  I was learning about this yesterday.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  But the manosphere was used to describe a group of people, not necessarily a movement or an ideology, a group of people happened to all agree about it. So maybe the manosphere was never going to be it. I've given you my bit about the three waves of the manosphere, right?

• 29:49Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  There was first wave, which is pick apart history, second wave, which was red pill, and then the third wave, which originally I was going to say was the gentle manosphere.

• 29:56Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 30:00Richard Reeves?

  What?

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  Lux maxing.

• 30:02Richard Reeves?

  You think that's the third wave?

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  I, so here's my, here's my theory about, about lux maxing. Most of the lux maxing guys, if, if it sticks, because it's only been around for six months.

• 30:11Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

  If it, if it sticks and it becomes even more ascendant, and it might do because it's really memeable, if it stays, what it will create is basically a sexier version of the black pill and MGTOW. So it'll be men going their own way. If you look at what the men are coding for, presenting for, it's not for women. They don't care about women all that much at all. They care in as much as women can get them acclaim in the eyes of other men. But it is basically, formidability is what they're signaling.

• 30:43Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Chris Williamson?

  Height, unbelievably masculinized faces, which if you look at the evidence, most women prefer an either average in terms of masculinization or a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body. That's what they find most attractive.

• 30:58Richard Reeves?

  Hmm.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  But men think about giga chad. They think about these protruding cheekbones, insane draw. Yeah, the mandible.

• 31:04Richard Reeves?

  People put mewing?

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  Mewing.

• 31:06Richard Reeves?

  I learned about that the other day.

• 31:08Chris Williamson?

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

• 31:10Richard Reeves?

  Why, why do they do that?

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

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

• 31:14Richard Reeves?

  Am I doing it?

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you look like a giga chad. You look fantastic.

• 31:18Richard Reeves?

  I look like a twat.

• 31:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you do look like, yeah. Look, a lot of the, the most extreme version of male lux maxing basically is a male to male transsexual operation. It is taking a man and trying to turn up, trying to turn up the caricature. So my, my thinking about this, if it sticks, what it will be is basically disregard women.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  And just focus on mogging, which is male to male, intersexual competition. It's trying to be as formidable as possible. Now, you saw this with Ziz 15 years ago in 2010, but he was still obviously very female attraction coded. It was a much more kind of holistic bro-y version of this. It was way less autistic and he had this great line, which was disregard women, acquire dance moves. But it was done in a lol cow kind of way, whereas this is, this to me feels like genuine disregard of, we're not bothered about mating, we're not bothered about getting women, we're not bothered about really anything other than male to male, intersexual competition. And if that sticks, it's going to become very insular.

• 32:24Richard Reeves?

  Well, it won't stick, will it? I mean, the idea that these, these guys are hammering their faces or breaking their bones or doing the thing you just, what I just tried to do, kind of mewing.

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it worked.

• 32:35Richard Reeves?

  And they're not interested in women. No, I, I don't, I think it'll go. Did you see Stephen Colbert just did a thing on Looks magazine? It's from a very feminist perspective. Funny, as you can imagine, but the whole thing about it. It's worth, it's just worth watching because he goes into it. But I should think, I just, again, I think, I don't want to be empirical about this, but like, how many men are we talking about? Like, is it, how long will this last? Will it, will it last? Will it go? Is this the start of a, you know, decades long shift in the gender tectonics? Or is it just another?

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Probably decades long, but it could stick about for a while and it would definitely put things on the back foot because it's going to be less.

• 33:14Richard Reeves?

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

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  Which is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the next decade.

• 33:26Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I've seen that stat. I, I don't know if that's true or not, but.

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  Scott Griffiths.

• 33:31Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, and I, I just always worry about those lines being projected forward. But anyway, it's a real thing.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 33:36Richard Reeves?

  And, and what I think it speaks to is.

• 33:40Richard Reeves?

  I do think lying behind all of these trends, right? Whatever the thing is now, what it will be before is what we're talking about a moment ago was just this guy, John Delavolpe, I don't know if you know him, Paulster. He wrote this really nice piece a few months ago where he talked about masculinity vertigo. And which is, basically what's happening to young men is that I call it pinball, but same idea, which is on Monday, what you're being told is the problem is that you're not masculine enough, right? You need to work out more, eat more protein, looks max, be more dominant, et cetera. Right? You need to, you need to man up and be more masculine. The next day, what you're being told is you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad and go to therapy more and like find your feminine side.

• 34:24Richard Reeves?

  And then on Wednesday, you're back to, so it's just become this very contested and kind of difficult thing right now, in a way that just wasn't before. And into that, you'll get looks maxing or you'll get whether body dysmorphia will get, whatever moral panic people want to put into it, they will. But behind it, what I actually see is just a bunch of men, especially young men, honestly just trying to figure this out and to be good people and to be good dads and good friends and have a good life.

• 34:53Chris Williamson?

  And to matter.

• 34:54Richard Reeves?

  And definitely to matter.

• 34:55Chris Williamson?

  They want to be wanted. They want to belong.

• 34:57Richard Reeves?

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

• 35:01Chris Williamson?

  But what was that line? You know, I went and searched it. I went and searched for the original source of that line that you gave me two episodes ago, maybe even our first ever episode.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  The, the modern family is a myth that makes men tolerably useful.

• 35:18Richard Reeves?

  At least one that at least makes men tolerably useful. Jeffrey Dench.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:22Richard Reeves?

  And it's kind of, it's actually this good opportunity to say that masculinity, manhood, whatever your words want to look, is always more socially constructed.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  It's a cultural construct, same with fatherhood, right? Margaret Mead talked about the invention of fatherhood. Fatherhood is a social invention. And it is just true that the roles, the structures, the scaffolding, the norms, the messages from society. We have to make men, basically. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in, they sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer, the margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes,

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

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• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  And modern wisdom at checkout. This is what I fought Louis about. He pushed back against the idea that women are born with value, men need to create it. And well, what value are men born with? Women have this unbelievable capacity to make the next generation. What do men have? What are they born with? Not in the same way. And look around the animal kingdom and every man needs to, every male needs to construct himself into something useful in order to matter and be a part of the. Is that a bad thing? Is that part of the drive for men to sort of push for mastery and conquer and progress and improvement? I think that's something that you have the choice between men that are driven or men that are useless.

• 37:49Chris Williamson?

  I'd much prefer the driven men. Obviously, that can overshoot and turn into very squirrely outcomes where they become tyrants or scammers or whatever, because that's the same drive just turned up in the wrong direction. They can be letharios and they can play the field in a way that really hurts people. But yeah, I am.

• 38:07Richard Reeves?

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

• 38:35Chris Williamson?

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

• 38:40Richard Reeves?

  Right, that's basically right. That's a good summary of the work. And so it's just true. And I just think it's incredibly naive for anybody to just assume that we can just get to some androgynous future and that we don't have to keep doing the hard work of making sure that there is a cultural message to men. All right, we need you, we need you to do this, we need you to not do that, sure, but this is why our tribe, the tribe still needs you. There's this, there are these cave paintings from, they're in northern Italy, I think, Remigia. And they're famous because they're some of the oldest, or if not the oldest cave paintings that have ever been found. And the famous ones are the ones where there's kind of very violent, there's kind of stabbing and spearing and stuff like that. But the most haunting one is actually of a group, clearly the tribe, and then another

• 39:25Richard Reeves?

  figure who's moving away from them. And the interpretation of that is an ostracism.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yeah, I've heard about this.

• 39:31Richard Reeves?

  This person has been expelled by the tribe and to actually, yeah, because the tribe's saying, we don't want you anymore. I mean, spitting you out, we don't need you. In fact, you're kind of, you're worse. So we're gonna, now we'd probably incarcerate, but to ostracize someone, there was social death and then very often kind of physical death too. So this has been, this is not a new thought around how do we kind of make sure that the tribe needs you?

• 39:52Chris Williamson?

  That's true, but when you en masse ostracize an entire sex. All of them feel like they're being pushed out of the tribe.

• 39:59Richard Reeves?

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

• 40:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 41:14Richard Reeves?

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

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

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

• 42:05Richard Reeves?

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

• 42:20Chris Williamson?

  The whole fucking deadbeat dad thing.

• 42:22Richard Reeves?

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

• 42:59Chris Williamson?

  This is the second shift.

• 43:01Richard Reeves?

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

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  Forty five versus thirty five.

• 43:45Richard Reeves?

  If you add it all up, it's about 60 hours a week each.

• 43:51Richard Reeves?

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

• 44:36Richard Reeves?

  in the interest of the women's groups to put out this bad social science because it'll get destroyed.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  I understand what you mean, but the problem is the more simple headline always wins. In our current age, I'm, this is an iron law. The simplest headline always wins.

• 44:52Richard Reeves?

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

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, maybe. But okay, but I mean, I'm one guy, I'm one guy like tossing a fucking droplet of water into it.

• 45:11Richard Reeves?

  People want to know the truth. And people are actually a little bit sick of this thing going. Now, of course, some people just want a stat that goes with their priors and that they can say over dinner and say, did you know that women do more, 30% more of the housework, even, even when they both work full time? Right? Good that, but, but then I say, and then I come on and say, yeah, but if you look at the whole thing, they're actually doing, doing the same amount. It's a kind of, I actually think enough people listening to you and to others, I know, I want to give you some credit here, Chris. I think that one of the reasons you're successful is because you are curious and you do have good faith discussions about these issues. Right? So, and you will change your mind about things.

• 45:54Richard Reeves?

  And I actually think the hunger, especially among young people. For that is huge. And I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of podcasters are actually have a lot more credibility than you think. And I actually really like, one of the things I like listening to you, this moment, and we may have had this moment ourselves when we first spoke, but I love this moment. I've heard this a few times recently where you get this expert comes on, right, on whatever it is, like something and they get, and they don't know who you are, right? They're an academic and they've been told by their PR company, this is great. He has a huge platform. And maybe they haven't done the time, right? And you've had it with my friend Melissa Khan, and you've had it with other people, where they get about 10 minutes into the interview and you're quoting these papers at them, or you're saying, yeah, I had them on or whatever.

• 46:37Richard Reeves?

  And they go, what? And actually, one of them, I think, actually said out loud, she said, God, you really know about this, right? I should have prepared better. Yes, you can see this kind of shot because they look at you, they look at the vibe, they look at the thing and they kind of go into it and they go, wait, what? Wait, what? I think it's a credit to you. And I think it does make you somewhat different to many of the other people in the so-called manosphere, because I do think that even when I disagree with you or disagree with some folks you've had on, I think there is an attention there to trying to get this right. The only thing I'd say on the household thing, and this is actually something that I wanted to bring up with you because it's, it's bugged me a couple of times in some of the conversations you've had. So I think it's, it's just us, right? So that's a spoonful of sugar to get the medicine down.

• 47:22Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, the trouble is that shit sandwich doesn't work anymore because everyone knows what's coming, right? Although some young people are saying, no, no, still give me the nice thing. I know there's something bad coming, but I still want the nice thing first. I know it won't, I will, I will take, the only child in me will take a shameless compliment. I mean, it helps, right? But, and I don't, and I don't know how you think about this, but I've also noticed like I just on my rant about like the, the anti dad rhetoric of the left, right? But I've also kind of noticed just in a lot of these conversations, there's this kind of implied return to a world where the dad is the head of the household, where we're going to reassert this idea of kind of gender inequality within the household. And I, I wish I could remember who it was, but you had somebody on. Off the Brooks. CEO, COO.

• 48:06Richard Reeves?

  Yes, someone said that the mum, she's had a hugely important role. I'm not saying the mum's like the COO of the household. Right. And somebody else will say like, men need to lead their families, right. But the COO one really stuck with me, right. Because, okay, so she's COO. What, who's the dad again? He's CEO. Okay, so what you've just done there is you said, we're going to go back in a way to a world where there was this implied gender inequality within the household.

• 48:35Chris Williamson?

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

• 48:40Richard Reeves?

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

• 48:49Chris Williamson?

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

• 48:56Richard Reeves?

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

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  Subordinate.

• 49:28Richard Reeves?

  Yes.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about the feminization of society?

• 49:32Richard Reeves?

  Has there been a feminization of society?

• 49:34Chris Williamson?

  Helen Andrews thought so.

• 49:35Richard Reeves?

  Yes, I know. But, well, it's interesting. I mean, Helen Andrews, have you had her on, by the way?

• 49:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 49:47Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I mean, I did, it was one of those things where I tried to ignore it because it was a culture war thing, right. Everyone's talking about this great feminization piece that she wrote. In the end, I just did something on my own Substack about it. Where.

• 50:01Richard Reeves?

  I don't see, the fields she talks about law, et cetera, they've only just approached 50 50, right? For one thing. And so I just don't see the evidence empirically that that's driving any of the changes in those fields. What upset me most about it was there are some fields that are being quite strongly feminized, mental health care, psychology, social work, and K 12 education. There was no mention of that. And so actually, I'm very worried about the real feminization problem, which is that a lot of these occupations are skewing more and more female over time. That has implications for the people in those professions, the kids being served, or the patients. But also for men, like last, as we record this, the last jobs report showed that three times as many women had gone into the labor force as men. Now, this is one month, but be careful about that. And the reason was

• 50:45Richard Reeves?

  healthcare jobs. Right? And so again, one of my differences with some of the folks on the right, political right, is that I'm saying, look, this is, the jobs are going to be coming from areas like healthcare, et cetera. And so we have got to get more men into them.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  Especially with AI.

• 50:58Richard Reeves?

  Yeah. And they're like, no, no, those aren't jobs for men. You know, we need to get men into men's jobs, you know, into factories and mines and stuff like that. I'm like, oh, okay. Good luck with completely reordering the economy again to make that happen. But in the meantime, I see where the jobs are actually coming from. And so I think that's a real problem. I think that the, the idea that, you know, the legal profession has somehow become less good because women are in it. I just don't think.

• 51:20Chris Williamson?

  The legal profession is not going to be around for that much longer, and certainly not in its.

• 51:23Richard Reeves?

  Well, AIs are going to, AIs are better than men and women. So.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 51:25Richard Reeves?

  Gender becomes irrelevant.

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 51:56Richard Reeves?

  It's very hard for me to answer that because I see it through the lens that I approach. And I am at quite a lot of meetings and conferences stuff now, you know, which would be described as feminist meetings. And I would say that slowly but surely, the women's movement or feminist movement is coming to realize that demonizing or dismissing men is not a good strategy.

• 52:19Richard Reeves?

  It's happening patchily and slowly but surely, but it is happening. I'm seeing a lot of leaders in those spaces saying, okay, we have got to do better about the boys and the men. Now, you might say, well, they're only doing it for tactical reasons or political reasons. And they will very often say, because it's good for women, right? And so I have this interesting disagreement with them, and I'm very open about this. They say, we should care about boys and men because we care about women. And I'm saying, we should care about boys and men. I just end the sentence earlier than you, right? In the same way that we don't say we should care about women because it's good for the economy or good for men, right? I just, I, I think we should care about boys and men more generally.

• 52:53Chris Williamson?

  I've had to do that too. I had this piece about zero sum empathy. And I tried to legitimize the reason, there was a lot of things and it wasn't just this. But I remember I sort of tossed this coin into the pool that I knew would be effective, which was if you, if you don't care about boys and men falling behind and also whine about there being no good men today, that is the equivalent of sort of mating logic sepuku, that you are creating the precise dearth of eligible partners that you say that you and your daughters and your friends and your sisters are looking for. Like, if you're not prepared to help boys and men, you can't go, where, where are all the good

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  men at? Because that's precisely what is causing the lack of eligible partners that you're talking about. But I didn't want to have to couch, good men are good in as much as they can be of service to you as a woman.

• 53:48Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  It's just that we should care about the falling behind of any group.

• 53:52Richard Reeves?

  We should care about human flourishing, right? And if there's a group in society that aren't doing well, then we should care about them. I just, I just think that's just, for me, that's just a straightforward moral proposition. Now, I'm also, you know, obviously different groups have different agendas, right? And so if you care about this group or that issue because it affects that other issue, I'm fine with that. So when people kind of say, like, Melinda French Gates has, you know, supported me and Gary Barker because it's part of a gender equality thing, right? And she's very clear. She says, it's not good for women and girls if boys and men are struggling. Right? Now, you might say, oh, okay. So this is where the kind of, again, the reactionaries will be like, oh, of course she has to couch it as that. And it's kind of, I'm like, guys, for the love of God, she is a global feminist. Like, what do you want, right?

• 54:35Richard Reeves?

  And she's supporting my work. She's supporting all this and boys and men's work. Like, no, no, no. They're like, they're the purists. They're the ones that are saying, no, no, no, she has to completely come over to our side. I'm like, guys, take a win, right? Of course, as a feminist, she says she's going to couch it that way, right? That's okay. Um, do you find yourself doing the same thing? Couching it that way? No. No, I don't. I do openly with, with, uh, Melinda and with others. I was at a recuic forum with the, uh, with, um, some leading women. And I'm just like, no, I'm like, my position and the position of the American Institute for Boys and Men is just very straightforward. Like, we care about boys and men doing better and flourishing, right? We just care about that period. Now, is that also good for the economy? Is it good for families? Is it good for women? Is it good for? Yes, yes, of course. Yes. Right?

• 55:19Richard Reeves?

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

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 56:01Richard Reeves?

  Well, as a 56 year old man who's been married for my, almost my entire adult life, my

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  Your expert subject.

• 56:07Richard Reeves?

  Fortunately, I have three sons in their twenties at various stages. That helps. And a bunch of younger friends. I mean, I do, um, I, I, it comes back to bits, this politicization point, which is, I worry that the message that young women are getting from the left. Is life's really tough for women now and it's the fault of all those men and the patriarchy. And the message that young men are getting from the right is life's pretty tough for young men right now. And it's the fault of all those woke feminists and those women. So they're being encouraged respectively to blame each other for their real problems. That is a colossal waste of political energy and not true.

• 56:50Richard Reeves?

  It's also creating some difficulties, I think, around dating, mating, et cetera, because we do see now that that political polarization is affecting dating and mating. I worry a lot, and Dan Cox has written for us on this, that you see this decline in dating in high school and among kind of young adults. And that's a huge problem because that's where you develop relational skills, the ability to endure and deliver rejection gracefully, et cetera. I worry a lot about that. But I also worry that, and maybe this is something we could talk about, that the, there's something about the marketplace mate value, ego psych stuff. I know you're very interested in. I've revised my, Paul Eastwick has a book out called Bonded by Evolution. Do you know his stuff? I had him on the show. Oh, yeah. We had a long debate.

• 57:35Richard Reeves?

  Right. And I'm not going full Eastwick on you here. Please don't. But I do find that something, here's a bit I do like about it. Like, is that if we're serious about thinking about kind of ancestral mating patterns, we do have to take seriously the fact that we didn't live in cities of 10 million people with a phone. Right. That wasn't the marketplace we faced. We were in smaller groups. So maybe you've done this with him, smaller groups, and we kind of would know these people and they'd kind of come with us. And, and that whole idea of kind of mate value doesn't, does shift a little bit over time. And so my middle ground here is that it's clearly insane not to suggest that there isn't something, you know, quasi-market or a mate value thing going on.

• 58:12Richard Reeves?

  But there's also something quite interesting about this idea that kind of knowing somebody or someone being known by the people among you that are coming socially sanctioned. Like someone you meet through the workplace, friend of a friend, et cetera. That that's very powerful as opposed to someone you just algorithmically got attached to on an app on the other side of New York. I don't. That's, that's not, that's not how we evolved. I agree. Right. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

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• 59:21Chris Williamson?

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• 59:49Chris Williamson?

  A checkout. It's a very sexy argument and the argument is mate value. He thinks mate value simply doesn't exist, that there are no, there is no way that beyond the first look, anybody is more or less preferable than somebody else, that revealed bonded preferences over time end up flattening the mating dynamic down, that tens could get with threes and that threes could get with tens.

• 1:00:12Richard Reeves?

  Wasn't how I read him. I didn't read him that way. I think that's an exaggeration, but maybe, maybe I'm wrong about that. So I think he just, it just gets flatter, not that it flattens completely.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:00:30Richard Reeves?

  So, well, he's more of the expert on his work than I am, but I read it as like mate values a more complicated idea.

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:00:56Richard Reeves?

  No one's hot.

• 1:00:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Richard Reeves?

  But it's like.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  No one's hot and no one's ugly.

• 1:00:59Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, what's the Kurt Vonnegut short story? Harry Bergeron, someone could check this, where the ministry, do you know this story?

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:01:08Richard Reeves?

  The ministry for equality levels everybody out, right? And so it's satire. So it's like, if you're a really good dancer, you have to wear weights around your feet. If you're beautiful, you have to have plastic surgery to make you less so. And if you're ugly, you have plastic surgery to make you more so. But what really like the main character of the story is like, if you're intelligent, if you're high IQ. That's right. Yeah, Harrison Bergeron. Yeah, if you're intelligent, they put a thing in your ear that's just making a noise all the time to distract.

• 1:01:38Chris Williamson?

  Distract you, yeah.

• 1:01:39Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:02:39Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Richard Reeves?

  So I look great.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:58Richard Reeves?

  Right, like, ah, right? Or, but then, or I don't, I look, I don't look great. But then we talk for a while and let's say I'm kind or funny, or let's say I'm an asshole, right? That's going to change very significantly, right? And then you see me doing something hard for somebody else, right? You see me taking care of my mom, you see me, you see me working hard, right? All these things are adding up.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  Repealed over time.

• 1:03:18Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  That was the best, that was the best bit of what, of what Paul said. I really, I really thought it was a nice twist on the very shallow, sort of typical understood, and this is the internet interpretation of mate value, right? And what's interesting about this is it's almost exclusively for short-term mating.

• 1:03:38Richard Reeves?

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:39Chris Williamson?

  Almost everything, all of the mating advice is for short-term mating as well.

• 1:03:42Richard Reeves?

  It's not, it's not like, so actually I got into this argument with Shadi Hamid for a piece of the Post, where he said, are you telling me to settle? Because I said, we're talking about marriage, and I think the problem with the marketplace idea is that it sort of suggests that it's over once you've mated. But of course, that's just the beginning. And the story you tell about your relationship and the way that the relationship evolves over time, within that story you're telling, and the way you treat each other as you become different people over the decades, that's the job. And so the other problem with the marketplace is it doesn't capture that, it's about that maximizing, and you match, and so on, and then you cash out. Yeah, it's like, and you've made a great match, and that's the solution. No, no, no.

• 1:04:25Richard Reeves?

  And I said this to Shadi and said to others too, I said, sure, you obviously, you know, if you're lucky, your forehead over heels in love, and it will just be obvious, and you'll find somebody. But it is much less about the wife you choose than it is about the husband you become.

• 1:04:39Chris Williamson?

  I.

• 1:04:39Richard Reeves?

  And that's 50 years.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think, I think you're right. The, the, the evil script, as Paul said, it.

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  It's definitely a book of the moment because evolutionary psychology is second only to behavioral genetics as the unspeakable topic. But it's very predictive and the guy, I have a particular bias here because I'm in the city of David Buss and William Costello and they're about as well meaning of a scientist as you're going to get, right? They're not, they're not curating their data, they're not trying to push some ideological bent as far as I can see.

• 1:05:17Richard Reeves?

  Right.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 1:05:18Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:05:21Chris Williamson?

  He's moved back and forth between a bunch of different theories that were the cornerstone of what it was that he was pushing for a while. But you know, there was another element in that. So there was the mate value doesn't exist. There was a denial of sex differences really in preferences between men and women that they're almost, they simply are not there.

• 1:05:38Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which I don't, and I'm like, oh, okay. I'm starting to construct a little bit of a corkboard Sherlock Holmes style thing here. Anyway, okay. So mating and dating, some problems.

• 1:05:48Richard Reeves?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  Some people have argued that women entering the workforce has caused fertility rates to drop.

• 1:05:54Richard Reeves?

  Yes.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  What's your perspective there?

• 1:05:55Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:06:07Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I think she did. I think, and I've definitely heard other people say it, which is this idea. And again, this is, this is a great example of this category of claim that feels intuitive, fits with your priors and is wrong. And so you've just got to, those are the ones I always worry. So if someone brings a claim to me and I'm like, yeah, that feels true. And as it happens, I was thinking that myself. That's when I always like triple check it because it worries me. And there is this claim that the fertility decline is being caused by the entry of women into the workforce, right? Again, it sounds perfectly plausible, right? Like women are too busy earning to be sprobbing, right? Can't do two things at once, et cetera.

• 1:06:51Richard Reeves?

  And so, but you look at the data and you look at from the period from 1975 to 2005.

• 1:07:00Richard Reeves?

  The labor force participation rate of women went up by 20 percentage points. Absolutely massive. Like, that was a huge period of growth. And over the same time period, the total fertility rate went from 1.8 to 2.1, rough, right, something like that, right? This is just, this is me and Claude figuring this out. So, hands above the table, haven't done a peer-reviewed academic articles. But, and then the women's labor force participation leveled out. It's basically been pretty flat since, and then it just had a little bit of a spike.

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  Lot of that since when?

• 1:07:30Richard Reeves?

  Since about 2007, 2005, 2007. I mean, it's just drifting up. So, and then like that, right? Unlike in other countries, actually, where it continued to go up. And that's when the fertility rate really went down in the, in the US. And so, it just, it seems to me there's got to be something else going on here. And the fertility rate conversation, I know you're very interested in this, you just had Stephen on again, right? The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought, right? And so, Jennifer Schuber, who I know, it's a TED Talk, she, she's got a book, co-authored book Toxic Demography. And her

• 1:08:12Richard Reeves?

  basic conclusion is, the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, right? Korea, Japan, et cetera, right? Gender equity, right? Right? And, and that might be true. There's some evidence against it, but there's some evidence for it. And then conservatives will say, you know, the thing that's causing the fertility rate is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace, right? Okay. Again, you can see the argument, there's evidence for it, and I've just given some evidence against it. And truth to that, no one knows. And so, it's a really dangerous subject, because it is one of those things that we don't know yet. And we should have a lot of humility, by the way, about projecting population trends forward. If we have not learned anything, is don't take a straight line and project it forward. We don't know what's going to happen, right?

• 1:08:58Richard Reeves?

  So be careful. I would say, I'm thinking about the population bomb thing, right?

• 1:09:04Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:09:13Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  True, yeah, maybe, you might be right.

• 1:09:21Richard Reeves?

  So fewer people, having fewer people means fewer people. I mean, I'm obviously simplifying it horribly, but like,

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  Pretty accurate.

• 1:09:26Richard Reeves?

  I just don't. So now there is a thing like mechanically. So I, I'm, I'm, but I will just come out and say, look, I don't think a rapidly declining population is a good thing. Right. For some of it is good. Right. I just, I just don't. But it's very interesting because people, when you actually try and push people on why they, why they think it's a bad thing. You get into all kinds of discussions and I think people are bringing lots of prize and lots of, they are. I think Jennifer's right about this. There's a lot of morality being brought into this. People bring a lot of ethics. So a lot of very pro-life people. I think if they're honest are saying like, we don't like there to be less life because we like life and we want more of it. Right. That's a very like more life is good. Less life is bad. That's a perfectly legitimate religious and ethical position.

• 1:10:10Richard Reeves?

  And it could be for institutional reasons. It could be for fiscal reasons. It could be because it's, or it could be for me, it's more symptomatic. The reason I worry about it more is like, I think if you got to a point where you're significantly below replacement rate and your society is rapidly declining in size. That should be seen as a big flashing signal that all is not well somehow or other. Now, what's not well? We don't know yet.

• 1:10:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Some things I've thought of to do with this. It seems to me that

• 1:10:39Chris Williamson?

  births are just downstream from coupling.

• 1:10:42Chris Williamson?

  For a large part, if you look at the number of couples who are together that are together for a while and get married.

• 1:10:48Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:10:52Chris Williamson?

  Marriage, married couples.

• 1:10:53Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:11:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:11:14Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:11:33Richard Reeves?

  Right. I see.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  If you're looking to go to the dance with someone and you're looking for another dance partner, it's really easy if everybody is dancing at the same time. Yeah. But if you're 21, looking for a dance partner and the curve is now flatter and longer and shifted right. Right. Half the people think a dance is five, 10 years from now. Exactly. Exactly. This is his point. Yeah. And also, if you shift it later, there are just some raw physics of the system that come in to sort of squish down what you're able to do. Yeah. If you are cycling through partners, if there's a more permissive culture of casual sex, of moving on, so on and so forth, more options, which means that you don't need to quite invest so much. But his point around the labour force entry for women thing, the

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  dips that you see in 1970 and then 2007, 2008, what's interesting there is because you now need a two parent income in order to drive the household, people are much more sensitive to economic indicators. And that means that if you have a turn, that's why he thinks in 2007, 2008, 2007, 2008, global financial crisis saw sudden accelerations in the delaying of first births like a ratchet. And as we discussed in our last podcast, once first births move later, the whole starting a family system shifts for everyone. As the vitality curve shows, delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. And that goes in line with what you said. Mm hmm. There's fewer teen pregnancies. Right.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  If you shift this all rightward, this begins to skew. But his position is that it's a ratchet, that it never snaps back, because you need to lose a lot of the things that people want. You need to sequester your independence. You need to do things that makes you feel like you're falling behind. One of the points that my friend who I spoke to, I told you the story about her friend saying she wished that she was with her when she had more going on. She made this point, I wish I'd had a kid during COVID, because it wouldn't have felt like I was missing out on anything.

• 1:13:32Richard Reeves?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  Rest of the world's moving forward. And I think that that's a one person microcosm of why, why is it a ratchet? Why does the average age of first motherhood move only to the right and never to the left? Well, because it feels like you're missing out. All of your friends are continuing to do things in the real world and you're not. He's got this, this line here.

• 1:13:53Chris Williamson?

  Vitality curve shows delaying the median age of first birth predictably raises childlessness and lowers total birth rates. In that sense, childlessness is largely a timing problem. And so even if women no longer worked hypothetically, of course, my thesis from data modeling is that birth rates would not fundamentally change unless family formation also happens sooner, which arguably it could. This is cross-cultural. Economic uncertainty pushes parenthood later across nations, religions and political systems. It all comes back to timing. P S. Historically, the U S managed this better than most countries. Women could work and start families at the same time, although that balance has clearly started to break down since the 2007, 2008 crisis.

• 1:14:29Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:14:54Chris Williamson?

  Feels like it's wildly higher.

• 1:14:55Richard Reeves?

  Yeah. And it's just, and I, I think I really, really don't, I really want to stand against that idea. People set the bar so high on how much parenting, how much you've got to buy your house, you've got to career. The number of boxes are supposed to tick now is terrifying to me.

• 1:15:08Chris Williamson?

  This was the discussion that we had last night, which it doesn't matter where people are. It's where people feel they are compared to where their parents were and where they feel like other people were. It is all through the interpretation. This is, this is like.

• 1:15:27Chris Williamson?

  I can't think of a way to emphasize how much this is the fucking driver of so much that how much money do I think I need to have? How much do I think I need to be earning? How big do I think my house needs to be? How secure do I think my life needs to be? Before I can do this thing? And where do I think my parents were at my stage? And where do I think their lifestyle was like? And what do I think that everybody else is doing with their life? And how easy do I think that they have it? Because all of this is being filtered through what we feel like we should have and what we feel like our level of exposure to risk is. And it's not necessarily objective. And that.

• 1:16:04Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:16:43Chris Williamson?

  Risk taking.

• 1:16:44Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:16:58Chris Williamson?

  Keeping them feral is good.

• 1:16:59Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:17:10Chris Williamson?

  There's a man child over here. Marry him and make him a normal person.

• 1:17:12Richard Reeves?

  I mean, like, the women want the men wants their house trade. Right, they don't think it's their job to house train the man anymore. Right, and I, I, I find that a difficult position to argue against. But the problem is that if that take, you know, what's going to happen to the men in the meantime? Are the, are the men getting themselves ready? Are they getting their competence skills up ready? Yes, if so, yes, maybe. But I worry that continued delay misses out for this kind of, this moment, this kind of, and I, you know, I'm a dad and there is just this imperceptible feeling of this kind of cog inside you just going click. And you become a different kind of creature. You, you do.

• 1:17:54Richard Reeves?

  I mean, it's very hard. In fact, some philosopher, whose name I've forgotten now, she had this great analogy, it was like trying to explain to someone who doesn't have kids, what it's like to have kids is like trying to explain to someone that's not a vampire, what it's like to be a vampire. Right, so I'm the vampire and I'm like, yeah, well, I, you know, I like to go out at night, I like to suck blood. You know, I hang upside down, et cetera, and, and you're like a human, you're like, I, right. And she uses that as an analogy between the chasm of the different kind of creature you become. And it's like you suddenly, it's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives, there is a life or lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own.

• 1:18:37Richard Reeves?

  And for whom you would do anything, you would give your life for them.

• 1:18:40Chris Williamson?

  It's very pro-social.

• 1:18:41Richard Reeves?

  You would throw, yes, you would throw, and so it changes men in this massively kind of positive, which is why fatherhood, fatherhood is, someone, one of my colleagues put this to me the other way, fatherhood is the last male institution.

• 1:18:56Richard Reeves?

  You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. I'm not saying there aren't still some that are predominantly male, but like actually fatherhood, like that is always going to be a male institution. And it is, it is so in a way that isn't just like a fact, it's actually a thing, it's an institution that changes us. It, it transforms us from the inside out. And so if that's not happening to enough men. And you do see this rise in childlessness. I mean, for all the discussion about incels, it's the kind of, what would be the equivalent of like not having a kid and involuntary dad,

• 1:19:29Chris Williamson?

  dad, you know, in dads, but yeah, that's a much more troubling trend because without

• 1:19:35Richard Reeves?

  that pro-social structure and script and implication for men, that's a huge problem. So maybe, maybe it going later is bad, but I also think that the way free societies work as opposed to communist China, where they just said, wait, there's going to be too many children, you're only allowed one, or even happened in Singapore, I just learned recently that like your third, the government would pay for the births of the first two kids, but you're on your own after that. So you'd have to pay for the medical costs of your third child, right? And so, because they read Ehrlich's book and they just freaked out. So you saw it. In a free society, what happens is we learn from our own, only from our own mistakes, but from other people's mistakes. And so if we're starting to see more and more women say, or men start saying, you know what, I kind of regret not doing

• 1:20:16Richard Reeves?

  that earlier. I kind of wish I'd done that, et cetera. Then that learning will get passed on.

• 1:20:21Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:20:26Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I think.

• 1:20:39Richard Reeves?

  That's how progress happens.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  I, I would love that to be the case. I would really love for there to be, uh, at least parity between the different types of life paths that people can take.

• 1:20:49Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Chris Williamson?

  And at the moment, it doesn't feel that way. If you look in the media, or if you look in popular culture, if you look in music, you know, there's a really fascinating song by Kelsea Ballerini and it's called I Sit in Parks. Uh, and what she talks about is she was in a, a long-term relationship. She was 30, her partner was 37 and he was ready to have kids. She said she wanted to freeze her eggs and that was her gift to her and him on her 30th birthday because she wanted to go and chase her music. She wanted to go and play music and do this to her. And he said, I'm ready to have kids now. If we're not ready to have kids now, I'm going to move on. She said, I'm not. He moved on and then this song and the album, the EP got released two or three years later and it's a story about her sitting in the park and watching this family,

• 1:21:33Chris Williamson?

  this mother and father, and she sits on the bench and she rips her vape and she says, Rolling Stone is telling me that I'm doing all the right things, but I wonder if I've left it too late to be a mother. I chose to do the damn tour instead of going back. So I take my Lexapro and I, I make my next song and she's watching this family sort of have a wonderful Saturday morning to themselves and wondering whether or not she's made the wrong decision. That was so fucking shocking and she's a country artist anyway.

• 1:22:03Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Chris Williamson?

  But that was so, so fucking shocking and the comments are filled with women who agree, but that is not.

• 1:22:10Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:22:29Chris Williamson?

  The grass is always greener when you've got optionality.

• 1:22:32Richard Reeves?

  And also like she probably got a good night's sleep kind of last night. I remember like when, when I, when, when our kids were really young, we kind of lived on this flat in, in Bessys Park in London. And I would, you know, get, I did the early shift like a lot of dads did, right? I remember like I would, my wife would be sleeping and I'd be there with the kids, both had two under three at one point and I, and I would wait. Dawn would break. I'd be tired. And then this gay couple, these gay guys lived opposite us, right? The other side of the street.

• 1:23:01Chris Williamson?

  You think about going gay.

• 1:23:02Richard Reeves?

  Right. I watched, I watched, they would get up, they had lovely bathrobes. They'd make a coffee, great coffee machine.

• 1:23:09Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, you were watching two gay guys through the window.

• 1:23:11Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:23:53Richard Reeves?

  We do this and we all learn from each other's, and we, and we adapt as a culture.

• 1:23:58Chris Williamson?

  As a, as a eternal pessimist, uh, I, I really hope that that's the case. I, you're, you're right.

• 1:24:03Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:24:05Chris Williamson?

  Cool. I mean, it, it, the, the reason that it seems surprising to me is it's so rebellious. Like, that is a much more rebellious song to put out than Sleep With Him and Not Catch Fields.

• 1:24:16Richard Reeves?

  I don't think that's true anymore. I actually suspect that song seemed to do pretty well.

• 1:24:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it is, it is, but, but that is more rebellious.

• 1:24:22Richard Reeves?

  She's obviously famous anyway.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  That's not the main culture at the moment. I don't get the sense, and look, I'm, I'm.

• 1:24:26Richard Reeves?

  What's the main culture? If she's not the main culture, right? She's a huge star.

• 1:24:31Chris Williamson?

  One, one country artist with the two million played songs.

• 1:24:33Richard Reeves?

  I think, I, I, I really worry that you like see the main culture as like the New York Times. Right? Um, which is like a peripheral counterculture at this point. I shouldn't say that, cause I, you know, I occasionally write, occasionally write for them.

• 1:24:45Chris Williamson?

  You need them at some point.

• 1:24:46Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:25:15Chris Williamson?

  It is complex, which is.

• 1:25:17Richard Reeves?

  And they're not going back, they're, as I said, like dads are doing more. Um, but I think she's the one also, right? Like he opens the door and like is very courteous and stuff like that, just really land. So I, I, I hope you won't mind me saying something. My youngest son went to the University of Tennessee and, um, like he always opens the car door and closes the car door for his girlfriend or who he's kind of with, and his friends who are up from the Northeast. I'm like, oh God, I have to start doing that now. Cause they went to liberal colleges where that's like the non-feminist thing to do.

• 1:25:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:25:42Richard Reeves?

  But by and large, even the kind of liberal women don't hate it. And so I think that actually the mainstream culture is kind of moving on this thing.

• 1:25:53Chris Williamson?

  I hope so.

• 1:25:53Richard Reeves?

  I that would be, that would be great.

• 1:25:55Chris Williamson?

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• 1:26:38Chris Williamson?

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• 1:27:20Richard Reeves?

  Did you see it?

• 1:27:20Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know that this happened.

• 1:27:21Richard Reeves?

  Oh, you didn't see it? Okay. Well, partly because I know them both and Scott's on our advisory board, as I mentioned. So Derek Thompson came back from paternity leave and it was actually the first thing he did was go on Scott Galloway's podcast. I think he said, it's not just like the first day back, it's the first hour back. And he'd been, I think, on paternity leave for a couple of months. And that just triggered this debate where Scott said, you're just back from paternity leave, how, you know, how are you doing? And I'm finding my way back. I won't be as coherent as usual. Of course, Derek was incredibly coherent. And Scott just said, well, honestly, I don't understand this whole paternity leave thing, or even why men should go to the births. I don't think men should be at the births. It's disgusting. The men should be outside smoking cigarettes like the old days and

• 1:28:05Richard Reeves?

  then they should go back to work. I just think it's ridiculous, basically. And Derek was like, uh, well. Actually, men do need to take time, time off to kind of be with their kids because otherwise like women are the only ones doing it and you'll have gender inequality in the workplace. What I found interesting about that, I haven't like said anything about this publicly yet, but I think you're

• 1:28:26Richard Reeves?

  both wrong. I think that Scott was wrong in suggesting that men and dads are of no use in the kind of early months. They are of a different use to mums for sure, but they are very often the main aloe parent now. Right. They're very often the kind of one that's around and they very often are the one that's like getting stuff done. They're like, have you heard of the owl monkeys or like the best dads in the, in the natural world, apparently? No. Owl monkeys, right? Where the dads are kind of around all the time and basically mums are doing the breastfeeding and nurturing, dads are doing everything else, right? Dad is getting shit done, right? He's getting the food, he's getting organised, he's right, he's around, but he's still around them, right? That's kind of how it is. I think that was certainly my experience, right? So you're not gonna, you can't do what mum's doing.

• 1:29:10Richard Reeves?

  At that point, you also don't feel the same way that mum does about the baby. You just can't, right? Just can't. You're not wired to at that point. And so you're still useful. So Scott was wrong about that. Um, but I didn't like the way Derek framed this as like, men should take time off so that women aren't the only ones taking time off so that we can get close the gender pay gap. He framed it as a gender equity issue, right? And I, my view is dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off their kids, not just when they're young, et cetera. Not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome and kids are awesome and kids do really well with their dads around them, right?

• 1:29:52Richard Reeves?

  So I don't, I don't, I don't want to be the deputy, the kind of malfunctioning mum, the kind of, oh, if only you could be a mum. Like, no, dads are amazing. And so I'm, I'm really pushing this idea that kind of fell between those two stools. So like the old idea of like dads is just go back to work, smoke a cigar, have a cigar. I think he meant cigar actually, but have a cigar, whiskey, back to work. And Derek's thing is like, no, if you're a good gender egalitarian, you've got to take time off. Yeah. Right? Even if you hate it and you suck at it, right? Because that's the way to get gender equality. I'm like, guys, guys, what about just saying? Dads are cool and being a dad and the way dads are with their kids, a bit different to mums on average in many ways. Amazing. So I want like a, again, a pro dad argument rather than

• 1:30:35Richard Reeves?

  a gender equality argument for fathering. Should dads be in the birthing room? The evidence on actually interesting Darby Saxby, who I mentioned earlier, Dad Brain, she did write a response to, to this kind of thing, which people can find. And she kind rightly pointed out that actually the evidence on how the unprecedented trial of dads being in the birthing room is going is really mixed. We don't know. And actually kind of sometimes in surveys afterwards, like mums have mixed feelings about it. If the birth doesn't go well, I think you talked to animation about this, it can be quite traumatizing for the dad. So I think I, I might get in trouble for saying this now, but I think that we have to be honest, the evidence is a little bit mixed. And I think it shouldn't, it shouldn't be like, it shouldn't be shamed for doing it or shamed for not doing it. And mums, by

• 1:31:19Richard Reeves?

  the way, should also feel like if they feel that they'll be better off with their mum or their friend or kind of somebody else, they should feel okay saying that to their partner too, for the actual birth, right? Neither are obliged to. I don't, yeah, it's a sort of, uh, cause as Darby points out, we've never done this before, right? This is completely unprecedented. How long have men been in the birthing room? Maybe about thirty, forty years. No way. I shared this with my, with my wife. I said, things blew up. And she said, oh, Scott says that men shouldn't even be in the birthing room. She said, yeah, I probably wish you hadn't been. What? I said, what? It's like twenty five, twenty five years later. I said, what? I thought it was really useful. What about all of my words of encouragement? You're more harm than good. You're more harm than good. I mean, I don't, I haven't,

• 1:32:01Richard Reeves?

  I'm now sort of litigating something personal on air. Like, we just go back to it. But there are pros and cons. But, but I honestly think like, it's not, it wasn't, I mean, the real truth is, it was a very hot day and I'd ordered a fan because I knew it was going to be hot, but I didn't realise the fan wasn't made. So I opened the box and she went into labour. She went into labour. She's in labour. And I'm showering from the other, I go into the other room, but she's having contractions. So we're doing it at home, right? And, um, and I said, uh, do you know where the Phillips screwdriver? Ah. She says, I said, I don't need a Phillips screwdriver to have a baby. I'm like, no, but I need a Phillips screwdriver to make the fan. Ah.

• 1:32:44Richard Reeves?

  I'm not great at DIY anyway, to be honest. So, so like, so I said, do you know where it is? And she's like, I probably need to dress up. I'm in the other room. I'm trying, like, under this huge pressure now, right? This is like.

• 1:32:56Richard Reeves?

  Trying to make, trying to make. And she's like, forget the fucking fan. Just like, I'm having the, I'm having the baby. I'm having the baby. Fan or no fan, the baby's coming. I'm nearly done. I'm nearly done. I'm on, I'm on like, I'm on like step seven with the. So I, you know, I didn't, I wasn't amazing from that point of view. So I think that the fan thing, it jaundiced her about my view.

• 1:33:18Richard Reeves?

  And then, uh, anyway, the other one, I, I'm all in now. The other one I'd say was in the birthing pool, right? Cause I was very into that. And the birthing pool. And we'd been to one of these very.

• 1:33:30Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I think I could share this. It would be just very, very like progressive. Forward thinking. Like midwifey thing, right? About birthing at home. And if you have it in the pool, that's kind of great, which is good, by the way. I mean, I'm, I think the whole like over-medicalization of childbirth thing, like I'm, I'm really persuaded by that argument now. That actually doing it more naturally is really good. So I don't really misunderstood here. Put in the pool. But she said, but guys, just can I just say something to you? She said, like, it's quite, it can get quite murky in there. Can't see it all, which is true. And she said, and so the only thing I'll say is if you get in the pool with your partner to support them, right? Put something on, put some swimming trunks on. She said, because there have been occasions when I've seen something spherical and hairy

• 1:34:14Richard Reeves?

  in the water and I've assumed that it's the baby's head crowning. And I've gone in to help it and it wasn't the baby's head crowning. It was the dad's testicle. And so I grabbed him by the bollocks.

• 1:34:26Richard Reeves?

  And literally every guy in the room was like.

• 1:34:31Richard Reeves?

  This is the other child, right? So, so this time she's having a baby. She's like, you know, I want you to get in and rub my back and do all this. I'm cool. I'm here for you, honey. And then I go to the other room and then I'm shouting out, where am I swimming? She's like, what are you talking about? So I need my swimmers. So she's like, I don't know where they are. I can't find them. I'm slamming drawers open and the midwife is like, for God's sake, she's having the baby. Get in the pool. I don't care. I don't care. I said, it's not about modesty. I said, the lady of the thing, the lady of the Lamar's class. She said, you've got to, you've got to wear swimming trunks. I said, I'm not getting in there without.

• 1:35:02Richard Reeves?

  So anyway, so my main advice, and then I guess, you know, the other one, the other child's like, you get to cut the corn. And I was terrible about it. I couldn't cut it. I was hacking through it. I thought you'd have these massive shears, you know.

• 1:35:13Chris Williamson?

  Like, like opening up a new fucking city hall.

• 1:35:18Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:35:53Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I guess seventies. I don't know. That's really when it came in was like seventies and eighties. And it went from being like, it's a really interesting cultural change. I mean, if you look at, I didn't have the numbers to hand, but, but it really flipped very fast. And as I say, like, you know, it's too soon probably to get this kind of strong evidence around it. And it was a great example of how like, like the internet, I think Scott ended up kind of collapsing, kind of, you know, on him and kind of, kind of apologizing. But, but as I said, Darby Saxby was saying, actually, we don't really know yet about the dads in the birthing room thing because we've, that is a completely unprecedented culture. And she came out in favor of it and said, but you know, dads are great, putting them on. So with my kids, like you put the, you put the kid on your, on your chest and one of them

• 1:36:34Richard Reeves?

  pooped all over me. But actually that skin to skin thing or getting building skinship, to use a term that someone uses. That's all true. And that's great. But that got lost, of course, in, you know, the positions that people had to take on.

• 1:36:49Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:36:55Richard Reeves?

  Much easier now. And it's interesting, like it's not, most states are doing something on it now. So the, basically the Democrat states are passing some sort of paid leave policy for dads. And the Republican ones are having tax credits to encourage employers to offer paid leave. And so the idea that dads, you know, dads are parents too, and bring something different. That's not really a controversial idea anymore. And we have seen a massive increase. I mentioned earlier in parenting by dads and a massive increase in the uptake. There are some states now where so the new parental leave policy is as likely to be taken by dads as by moms. And so there's been this, I find this very interesting, like a way, you get these culture wars, right? Where either we're being overrun by woke feminists who like, you know, demonizing men and, you know,

• 1:37:37Richard Reeves?

  running everything into the ground, or you get these kind of reactionary podcast type, you know, people are like reactionary who are kind of taking us back to the Handmaid's Tale. And then you just go to the data and you say, huh, interesting. Dads are doing more parenting than before. It's not like a significant kind of increase, right? Labour force participation for women's actually hit its all time high after the pandemic. I mean, it was, it was up a little bit. Violent crime is way down. It's halved in the last new decades. The number of boys fighting at school also halved in the last kind of few decades, et cetera, et cetera. And so, um, away from the cliques, to use your language from earlier, and away from the culture war.

• 1:38:20Richard Reeves?

  What I see is by and large, ordinary people, moms and dads, young people, boys and girls, trying to figure this out and figuring it out one way or the other. And it's bumpy and it's difficult and it's messy, but I think that the progress line is there. And I'm, I'm, I'm a little bit sick of the pessimism. I'm a little bit sick of the deficit frame. My, my hero, John Stuart Mill, once said, everybody who knows anything of the world is supposed to think ill of it. Right? So that intellectual snobbery in favor of pessimism has always been there, right? And he was like, and so I'm trying to recalibrate some of my own talking about this. Cause there, there is a danger that you're like, we could talk about stuff we've talked about before, about wages and male suicide and, you know, real problems.

• 1:39:01Richard Reeves?

  But I just kind of worry that it becomes a bit of a, almost a cultural race to the bottom. It's like, who can describe exactly how we're going to hell in a handcart?

• 1:39:11Chris Williamson?

  In the most grave terms, the fastest.

• 1:39:13Richard Reeves?

  And then you'll get on podcasts, then you'll get clicks, then you'll get book deals. And, and the market for that, it's not a new, it's not a new problem. I actually think about the number of books that start with the end of, right? And at one point, I thought it might be the end of endings or something, because I'm just sick of those as well. Like, everything's the end of everything, right? Rather than, you know what, we're figuring this out, it's a bit difficult, we should help each other out, we should have some supportive policies, we shouldn't demonize each other, we should definitely not pathologize men or women or anybody else. And we should try and figure this out. But, but onwards and upwards, because otherwise pessimism is a self fulfilling prophecy. And I think it's a real problem, particularly for America. I mean, we're in America now, right? And things I love about America, the thing I hated about our old country was that everyone

• 1:39:55Richard Reeves?

  lived in the past. And this definition of an old person is, you know you're old when you spend more of your time thinking about your past than your future. I think the same is true of societies. Once societies start thinking more about their history and their, you know, and all of that, which you want, you want that sense of history and patriotism, but you want to be spending more time thinking about the future. I just heard this guy on a podcast, I can't remember who it was, somewhere, it's the guy that left Harvard, actually. And he sort of said, Americans, the thing about America is that it's obsessed with progress and innovation. I'm like,

• 1:40:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:29Richard Reeves?

  Yes.

• 1:40:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's why I'm here.

• 1:40:31Richard Reeves?

  That's why I'm a proud American.

• 1:40:31Chris Williamson?

  That's why I'm here.

• 1:40:32Richard Reeves?

  That's why I love it.

• 1:40:33Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:40:37Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  But you mentioned, here's a bunch of reasons why stuff's maybe not quite as fucked as people think it is.

• 1:40:45Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Chris Williamson?

  But I think if you were to lick your finger and put it in the air and take a cultural temperature of how people are talking about this situation.

• 1:40:52Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Chris Williamson?

  I think more people would, what's the number one reason for why people, the Pew research data around why they don't have kids just don't feel ready yet?

• 1:41:02Richard Reeves?

  Uh, yes. And then the second is couldn't find the right person.

• 1:41:05Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't find the right person, the second one. But just don't feel ready yet. It's like unfinished article, a little bit unsure of myself and the world.

• 1:41:11Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, there is this kind of, yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's a mixture of objective and subjective measures here. There was this really interesting paper looking at the kind of five milestones to adulthood, like finishing education, getting a job, leaving home, getting married, I think, having kids. And it was very, and what it found was that 20 years ago, men were more likely to hit those milestones. And now men are less likely than women to hit those milestones. So the milestones to adulthood are being hit more by women now than by men. The coefficient has, has flipped. As far as the wellbeing stuff goes, my, last time I looked at this, it was relatively stable on the kind of good subjective wellbeing measures. Um, we do know that men are much more affected by relationship breakup and unemployment. And so negative economic and social shocks damage male wellbeing more than female wellbeing. So you might expect some of the recent shocks to have affected men more. The trouble with this, honestly, is that there's just so many bad surveys out there that will ask these kind of point in time questions from both sides.

• 1:42:02Richard Reeves?

  I'm not throwing anybody under the bus here, but just like, and it gets clicked and it, some of the surveys, like there's so many surveys on young men now. I mean, like if I get another email saying, we want to do a survey on what young men are really thinking, I'm like, no, please don't, because you'll just ask some stupid questions and then you'll over interpret the answers and we won't be able to repeat the question because it doesn't, there's no time series on it. And people are just in that moment, they'll just react to the question in that kind of particular cultural moment and then will over interpret it.

• 1:42:31Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:42:34Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:42:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What was that nuance on Title IX that I texted you about? I thought this was really interesting. I saw I texted you about, um. Some guy had done a video and it was actually of the episode that I did with Scott, just Scott talking.

• 1:42:59Richard Reeves?

  Yeah. Oh, that's right.

• 1:43:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:43:11Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:12Chris Williamson?

  What's the nuance?

• 1:43:14Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:43:59Chris Williamson?

  Is there a thumb on the scale against the favor of men?

• 1:44:03Richard Reeves?

  Uh, no, not, not, I've seen absolutely no evidence for that. In fact, if anything, most colleges, public or private, although the publics don't have this carve out, actually are quite worried about this. We've got a whole, we've got a thing now, Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative, working with colleges because they like, they, they start to worry once they get to sixty, forty, sixty five, because not only do their male applications drop, their female applications start to drop too, because the dating market on a college campus where there are twice as many women as men is not awesome for women. So maybe it comes back to a little bit. People who don't think there's any difference between men and women should look at the difference in the dating market on college campuses that skew to where there are two women for every man. And I've had young women saying that they, they look at the gender ratio of colleges before they decide to apply because this message has gotten

• 1:44:48Richard Reeves?

  out there now that it's not awesome to be among, in a college where there are twice as many. So no, no, no strong evidence for a thumb on the scale against men. The exception is Title IX carves out private undergraduate colleges and undergraduate admissions. And the reason they did that was otherwise you would have at a stroke abolished the single-sex colleges. You wouldn't have been able to have single-sex colleges. You have to let Wellesley only admit women, right? But the result of that is that those colleges do have a thumb on the scale in favor of men now to try and stay closer to 50/50. So it's an open secret that it's a bit easier to get into those elite colleges if you're a guy than if you're a woman.

• 1:45:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:45:41Richard Reeves?

  Well, you're a nightclub promoter.

• 1:45:43Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:45:52Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, no, the sex ratio is not like that in New York as a whole. In fact, we we have empirical data on this. We've looked at the sex ratios by county and you've seen a shift. So there are twice as many majority male counties today as there were 20, 30 years ago, largely because of outmigration, we think, outmigration by women. And then there are some urban counties, of course, where it's the sex ratio is where there are a lot more women.

• 1:46:13Chris Williamson?

  The singles, the sex ratio of the singles?

• 1:46:16Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:46:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:23Richard Reeves?

  It just skews a little bit.

• 1:46:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:46:35Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, but your example suggests like the men, like there are more women than men of dating age, let's put it that way, in New York and.

• 1:46:43Chris Williamson?

  Who are motivated to.

• 1:46:44Richard Reeves?

  But then the question is like, who's out, right? Like.

• 1:46:46Chris Williamson?

  Who's motivated?

• 1:46:46Richard Reeves?

  Yeah. Who's in, who's like, you can, are you in the market? To come back to the analogy that I didn't like earlier, but like, are you, are you out there doing it? And so there we might see, and you see like women are more likely to travel now than men. I do think it's like, I don't see any empirical evidence for this, but my anecdotal sense of it, just sort of traveling around, as I do kind of a bit now, is like, when you're in a restaurant or a kind of bar now, if you see a group of young people together for a night out, I think it's more likely to be women now. Again, no strong empirical evidence on that, but I just think that those kind of public spaces. If anything, maybe it's good a little bit more, more female.

• 1:47:17Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:47:32Richard Reeves?

  I, I'm an inveter optimist. I do think the glass is half full. But for me, I've come to realize is that my optimism isn't just an orientation or a personality trait. It is that. I think for me, it's getting close to something like a virtue.

• 1:47:52Richard Reeves?

  That to think well of the future is valuable in and of itself.

• 1:48:00Richard Reeves?

  Because I think otherwise, the kind of messaging to young people more generally is just so relentlessly negative. And then we kind of blame them for feeling down, right? I'm so, I'm pretty optimistic. And the reason I'm optimistic is because it's, it's a hell of a mess right now. Like it's very messy, it's goopy, figuring it out. Some of the stuff we've talked about here and argued about here just shows you that particularly for kind of young men and young women, just kind of figure out this new, these new realities. But I think we're kind of past the sort of, we're breaking past, I hope, more of the zero sum. We are getting more to a kind of world where young men and young women are kind of trying to figure this out in good faith. And I think they will figure it out. I don't know how, but we always have one way or the other.

• 1:48:40Richard Reeves?

  And I think we will again. And I think that people are ready to get past some of the bullshit ideological traps that people have been trying to put us in for too long. I really think there's a hunger for that.

• 1:48:51Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:49:01Richard Reeves?

  Masculinity vertigo.

• 1:49:02Chris Williamson?

  Vertigo.

• 1:49:02Richard Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:49:12Richard Reeves?

  Yoga on Friday.

• 1:49:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, one of the problems, I think, that can come out of that is a type of.

• 1:49:21Chris Williamson?

  If there's lots of conflicting messages, it doesn't convince you of any one particular message, it just makes you immune to being convinced, apathy, right? This is what a disinformation and a misinformation campaign is supposed to achieve when it's done en masse as a information warfare by a foreign adversary. It's not to convince the populace of one thing or another all the time. Sometimes it's just to make them distrust all advice.

• 1:49:46Richard Reeves?

  Yes.

• 1:49:46Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:49:57Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, this is your syndrome.

• 1:49:59Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:50:22Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, there's push and a pull at this point, yes.

• 1:50:25Chris Williamson?

  Correct, and they're both going in the same direction.

• 1:50:27Richard Reeves?

  That's why, I mean, you've talked, I know you've talked a lot about this, that's why I think it's consistent with crime going down even as more young men are disengaged, which is historically, I think, unprecedented, which is the kind of sedation or sometimes like, they're on the screens, not on the streets, is another way to think about this. And in some ways, I think that makes it a harder thing to get attention to, right? I think if there was, if we did see an increase in crime among young men, if we were seeing like more antisocial behavior, et cetera, then I think it would be very close to the top.

• 1:50:52Chris Williamson?

  Sound the alarm.

• 1:50:53Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:51:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I just hope that uselessness doesn't beget more uselessness, sedation doesn't beget more sedation, because you're gonna have to reverse the trend here, right? Like, you can say... We're worried about there being too many people on the planet and the population bomb is a really big deal. You go, well, if that's going to stop or if that's going to slow down, it's going to require reversal of the direction. And the same thing is true now. If the trend is moving in the right direction, and you're right, the line is between, do we want more useless men? Or do we want more dangerous men? If those are the two options that we have in front of us, that's not a particularly good fucking scenario. I would say 51 49, it's better to have useless men than dangerous men. But that's only because we're in peacetime. I would much sooner have competent, peaceful,

• 1:52:05Chris Williamson?

  right, than useless or dangerous. I got sent this morning a new Institute for Family Studies survey. There's some cool stuff in here, which I think you might like. Institute for Family Studies survey of 2,000 young men aged 18 to 29 challenges nearly everything being said about the male crisis in America, including by its most prominent voices on both left and right. 68% of unmarried men want to get married with another 21% unsure the crisis isn't lacking desire at circumstance. 59% are not in a romantic relationship, but 74% of those men are open to dating. So there was that famous, 2/3 of men say that, 50% of men in that age bracket say that they're not looking for casual or long-term

• 1:52:49Chris Williamson?

  relationships. That looks like it's changed. 62% of childless young men want to be a father. Less than half of men aged 24 to 29 feel like adults, but the benchmarks most related to feeling like an adult are the traditional ones: marriage, parenthood, full-time work, completing education. Young men's number one role model is their mother, 79%, followed by their father, 69%. Andrew Tate ranked last among all prominent figures.

• 1:53:21Chris Williamson?

  Eighty nine percent say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others, challenging a manosphere narrative. Young men who completed trade school programs are employed full time at almost identical rates to college graduates, sixty, seventy seven percent versus eighty percent. And even college educated young men are sceptical of college with half saying it wasn't worth the time or money.

• 1:53:40Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  It's good. Well, that's what it, that's the landscape.

• 1:53:46Richard Reeves?

  That was an emotional roller coaster for me, Chris. I've got to tell you, like, I was cheering half of it.

• 1:53:51Chris Williamson?

  I was down.

• 1:53:51Richard Reeves?

  I was like, oh, that's good, that's bad. Only sixty two percent of childless men want to be a father. That sounds way low to me.

• 1:53:58Chris Williamson?

  Childless young men, right? That's under twenty nine. Want to be a father? I don't know whether intend to become a father. It'd be interesting to see how they worded the question.

• 1:54:08Richard Reeves?

  Want to become a father. Because it's interesting, there was this NBC poll that came out not that long ago, got a lot of attention, where they ranked men and young men and young women by whether they'd voted for Harris or not, right? Or Trump. And like, number one for the Trump voting men was family and kids. And actually, men are a bit more likely to say that they want to have marriage, get married and have kids now than women are. That's a reversal. So I'm finding that number, that sixty two percent number is kind of low for me.

• 1:54:31Chris Williamson?

  I was surprised by that.

• 1:54:32Richard Reeves?

  I think the anti-college thing worries me because the ROI on college is the same for men as it is for women, roughly speaking.

• 1:54:38Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:54:49Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:55:21Chris Williamson?

  So because fewer people are getting married.

• 1:55:22Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, well, not among the college educated, that's the thing. Like, the line, the marriage rate, it's about ninety percent. The marriage rate among college educated American women basically hasn't changed for the last forty, fifty years.

• 1:55:34Chris Williamson?

  What about among men? College educated men.

• 1:55:36Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:55:41Chris Williamson?

  Even though there's a smaller number of percentages.

• 1:55:44Richard Reeves?

  Exactly. But the, I mean, it's a bit of a nuance here. We published on this is actually college educated women have always been willing to marry non-college educated men. And continue to. So like 20% of them, of the women with a college degree.

• 1:55:55Chris Williamson?

  White collar to blue collar.

• 1:55:56Richard Reeves?

  Yeah. And it's like, it's a very elitist conversation this because people, when they're talking about this, they're talking about someone who went to some sort of fancy college, right? But I'm like, in my family, I've got nurse married to a plumber, right? Nursing requires a college degree, right? Does anyone out there think that nurses are looking down their noses at plumbers? If he's making a good living and he's doing well, he's working hard. No, I didn't. The idea that that somehow, you know, or a teacher won't marry a, you know, carpenter or a dad. It's just nonsense. So the marriage and the marriage rate is actually, if anything, slightly up. So there was mixed in there. I didn't like the courage, but yeah, what the thing also thing was untrue was said, challenging this idea in the manosphere that men don't sacrifice themselves.

• 1:56:32Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:56:38Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:56:44Chris Williamson?

  I'm the fucking vanguard of the gentle manosphere.

• 1:56:46Richard Reeves?

  I think that they've just.

• 1:56:47Chris Williamson?

  Been kicked out of the manosphere after I spoke to Louis Verru.

• 1:56:49Richard Reeves?

  Talking about. I mean, I guess, and also the Tate thing, of course, the Tate thing was really interesting and I don't remember if we talked about this last time. I mean, it really came back. And there was a kind of, I, I guess I've lost my friends at the New York Times by this point in the interview anyway, but like there's a New York Times headline drove me mad. I think I wrote about it publicly. Tate returns, MAGA celebrates. And so I went through it. So that's very interesting because I've actually, I've actually heard or read Josh Hawley, Megyn Kelly, DeSantis, DeSantis, AG, all condemning Tate.

• 1:57:20Chris Williamson?

  Shapiro doesn't like him.

• 1:57:21Richard Reeves?

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

• 1:57:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Richard Reeves?

  Isn't that the headline?

• 1:58:00Chris Williamson?

  I think we're gonna see, I think we're gonna see more around the men's movement. M R A come, manosphere come, incel, black pill, lux max in mogging community. Especially after Ross Kemp and this Louis Theroux documentary, I can't wait for you to watch it. It's Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix. It's his first ever Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix. And he said it's the final video game boss of his entire career because it's all of the things, it's casual sex with OnlyFans. It's sort of conspiracy theorist, which he's done a turn. It's sort of almost cult like behavior, which he's done previously. It's financial grift, which he's been a part of as well. All bundled up into this sort of Tik Tok-ification version for 2026.

• 1:58:45Chris Williamson?

  And I with adolescence, with the way that Louis' doc was presented. I do think that we're gonna see more of a moral panic around what's happening with young men. I think that it's going to look a lot like these guys are being led astray by bad actors. There is limited hope socially. They are learning not to sacrifice for others, but to dominate.

• 1:59:17Richard Reeves?

  To be narcissists.

• 1:59:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very much so. It's a very, very self-serving. It's not great. And, you know, for all that I can keep on doing podcasts that I think are accurate and balanced and hopefully really educate people about what's actually going on.

• 1:59:35Chris Williamson?

  I don't have the reach of fucking huge documentaries or series, right? Like adolescence was a global fucking phenomenon.

• 1:59:42Richard Reeves?

  It was a huge hit and it was great drama.

• 1:59:45Chris Williamson?

  It was a great TV show, apart from some of the.

• 1:59:48Richard Reeves?

  It was the way, and again, back to, I just think there's a lag here. I actually think that it's a little bit out of step now and that enough people are starting to say. The moral panic around men, the pathologisation of young men, the demonisation of young men is exactly the wrong thing to do. And that kind of narrative rut that everyone's in, like the easy thing to say, I just think it's out of date and people are realising that and they're realising it hasn't, it has not worked out well for anybody, for us as a society, to point our fingers at young men and say, what the hell is wrong with you? You're either lazy, you're useless, or you're being radicalised, or kind of whatever. There's long litany of things that are wrong with you. I just think

• 2:00:30Richard Reeves?

  enough people are kind of realising that that's A, just unbelievably lacking compassion and B, massively counterproductive.

• 2:00:37Chris Williamson?

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

• 2:00:56Richard Reeves?

  Wouldn't you count yourself among those reasonable voices? Aren't you a big platform?

• 2:00:59Chris Williamson?

  I would, yeah. And I, but I think, you know, if you're talking about people who are genuinely engaging with the issues of boys and men and of mating and dating and birth rates and stuff like that, it's certainly in the minority to be a part of the gentle manosphere than it is to be a part of sort of militant aggressive feminism. Or to be a part of sort of classic.

• 2:01:19Richard Reeves?

  Reactionary anti feminism.

• 2:01:20Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 2:01:20Richard Reeves?

  Lascalynism.

• 2:01:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, this is not, it's not superbly sexy. You know, when I, when I sort of look around at whatever motley weird Avengers group that I've got, it's like me, you, Arthur Brooks, Scott Galloway, Mack and Murphy, William Costella, Rob Henderson, maybe Andrew Thomas. Like, it is, it's a Alexander Date psych, but he's sort of stepped away from things now. It's, I'm not, it would be Stephen Shaw kind of, but he's not really talking to men. Like, you know, it really sort of runs flat pretty quick. I don't know who else is, is engaging with this stuff. And then when you were to look at who does fucking huge plays, that.

• 2:02:06Chris Williamson?

  Push the narrative in a much more bombastic way, like it's.

• 2:02:11Richard Reeves?

  I don't know. I mean, I, the long run way to win this is just to keep doing it, Chris. All right. I think this whole idea that there needs to be this kind of huge play is going to change. This is going to change slowly. And I also think we should give a little bit of credit to some of the people consuming this content. I think a lot of young men in particular are perfectly willing to listen to this conversation and agree or disagree with us, but probably agree that we're having a good faith conversation as you do with others. And realize that that is different to what they're going to get from certain other producers, right? I, I go there if I want a quick laugh or an eye roll, it's whatever. But I come here if I want a more serious conversation. And then if I get sufficiently enticed, I'll go and read some of A I B M's policy briefs, right? Right? No question it's going to go viral. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that.

• 2:02:55Richard Reeves?

  But I just think people are able to be more discerning about the difference between these content types. And if you look at their actual behavior and what's happening, I'm just much more hopeful, but it just keep doing the work. And then over time, I don't know whether this is going to be a good example or not, but I have, although he put them on his reading list, not always been thrilled with the way President Obama has talked about this issue, especially in the run up to the last election. But on the podcast he did with his wife not long ago, he said, and I quote, "We've quite rightly invested in the girls, create a level playing field so that we can have equality. We have not been as intentional about investing in the boys and that has been a mistake. And people are starting to recognize that."

• 2:03:40Richard Reeves?

  When Obama is saying that, now, of course, the only bit that got covered from that podcast was the brief discussion about their so-called marital difficulties in the first three minutes. The remaining one hour long conversation about the challenges of boys and men that he had with his wife and his wife's brother, his name I've forgotten, that didn't get covered, but it's there. And so I just think bit by bit, person by person, governor by governor, you know, Ruben Gallegos out there with his very episode by episode. And because, because it's actually, it's actually what people want in the end.

• 2:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Also because it's the truth.

• 2:04:15Richard Reeves?

  It's true, exactly. The truth. Well, in the end, I do think it's, and people can tell the difference between something that's truthful and not.

• 2:04:21Chris Williamson?

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

• 2:04:25Richard Reeves?

  Well, those policy briefs I mentioned are all.

• 2:04:26Chris Williamson?

  Stop trying to force your policy. No one's reading your fucking.

• 2:04:29Richard Reeves?

  Our, our, our policy brief on sports betting is the best, best piece of policy work out there on the very live issue of sports betting. So A I B M dot org.

• 2:04:37Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Richard, I appreciate you.

• 2:04:39Richard Reeves?

  So fun.

• 2:04:39Chris Williamson?

  Goodbye, everybody. Dude, yes. So good. Gotta go. Hey, that was so fun.

• 2:04:47Richard Reeves?

  It was. Told a lot of ground.

• 2:04:49Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 2:05:00Speaker 03

  Digger not a center of this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 2:05:06Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 2:05:10Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 15 without parent.