Why Are More Men Dying From Unnatural Causes? — with Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, joins Scott to discuss his new research on unnatural male deaths including injury, suicide, and drug overdose, along with solutions and his take on what the script for masculinity should look like. Follow Richard, @RichardvReeves. Scott opens with his thoughts on Nike CEO John Donahoe stepping down, and then he gets into the Biden Administration’s plan to ban Chinese tech from connected vehicles. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:22Scott Galloway?

  Episode 318. 218 is a zero code covering cities in northern and central Louisiana. 1918, World War I ended. So a little bone to pick. I saved 100 orphans from a burning building. Do they call me Orphan Saver? No. I butchered 20 men with my bare hands in World War I. Do they call me The Butcher? No. But you fuck one goat. Just one goat.

• 1:58Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 318th, Jesus Christ, 318th. What am I, like 800 years old? I mean, when does it end? When does it end? Anyways, the 318th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with someone I refer to as my Yoda on the topic of young men, specifically struggling young men. And that is Richard Reeves, who is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. We discuss with Richard his new research on unnatural male deaths, including injuries, suicide, and drug overdose, along with solutions and his take on what the script for masculinity should look like. Okay, what's happening? That's right, I'm back in London.

• 2:41Scott Galloway?

  I'm back in the UK, but I'm on, I was in Madrid. By the way, Madrid, let's talk a little bit about Madrid. Hola, Senor Galloway. Who's the old dude living upstairs? Who is that guy? He's funny. That's right. Who's the guy with the big dog and the little dog? Oh, that's the dog. Anyway, absolutely love Madrid. I'm into this idea, Richard Florida, I couldn't remember his name the other day. He's like this, he is not like, he's the city guy. By the way, lives in Toronto and Miami. What does it say when the city guy lives in Toronto, Miami? That means those two cities have it kind of going on for different reasons. But Richard looks at the future of cities. And I am fascinated by looking at cities in a similar way you look at stocks. What is an undervalued city? Where would you want to move if you're on?

• 3:23Scott Galloway?

  Cause a young person, I would argue, needs to be constantly thinking about what I would refer to as a lifestyle arbitrage. Now, unfortunately, the arbitrage gets harder as you put down roots, dogs, kids, shit like that. But you always want to be thinking about a lifestyle arbitrage when you're kind of very young or very old, for example. Yeah, and my, one of the best things or most creative things I did in my life, I did a lifestyle arbitrage, moving from San Francisco to New York. But it wasn't a lifestyle arbitrage, it was more a philosophical arbitrage. I wanted to get away from the tech community. I didn't like San Francisco. Most beautiful city in the Union. I get it. Great, great professional environment. I can't stand the fog. I can't stand political extremism on either side. And I found it politically extreme. But anyways, love New York. But then the lifestyle arbitrage is I moved to Florida.

• 4:08Scott Galloway?

  In 2010 and basically not 80% of New York is it's so different, but water, beaches, Miami, hello Latina sexy vibe. And I could do it on 40% of the price and I got to start saving money, invested a bunch of money and the markets took off and champagne and cocaine, or as I call it, I moved to London. So that was the kind of ultimate lifestyle arbitrage. And I think a lot of people recognize that arbitrage to the same period, moving from California to Texas or to other places. Ultimately, the term arbitrage is the correct one because people figure it out and more and more human financial capital moves into these underpriced lifestyle areas and things go up in price and the arbitrage gets starched out. By the time I moved away from Florida two years ago, our house had tripled in value. The

• 4:53Scott Galloway?

  school we sent our kids to had gone from I think 12,000 in tuition to 22,000. So it almost doubled and they're out of seats. They didn't have the capacity for new people. So that arb is gone, if you will. But anyways, I'm back from Madrid. Oh, and I'm heading to Munich tomorrow. I love Munich. It's a beautiful city. If I spoke German, I would probably move to Munich, but I don't. So I won't. I actually prefer Munich over Berlin. I love Berlin for the history, but Munich, phew, that's a nice wealthy city. Anyways, what else is going on? Nike CEO John Donahoe is stepping down next month, a move welcomed by pretty much everyone involved with the firm. Critics, investors and employees alike say that Donahoe, who took over as CEO in 2020, essentially oversaw Nike's fall, becoming a loser, ruining retail partnerships and diminishing the brand. As the former CEO

• 5:36Scott Galloway?

  of eBay and Bain Company, he was hired to upgrade Nike's digital sales. Donahoe focused on direct to consumer sales and cut ties with longtime retail partners, including Foot Locker, DSW and Macy's. We actually talked about this in our most recent episode of Office Hours. Donahoe's demise really started to come into full view when Nike's stock fell 20% in June following disappointing sales growth and a bleak forecast. So essentially sales have really, really had a tough time. As a matter of fact, the kind of Nike's in a sales recession for the first time in a while, meaning their year on yourselves have gone down. I think it's really easy to play Monday morning quarterback. I was, I ran a firm called L2 that was a business intelligence firm and Nike was one of our biggest clients. And I want to be clear.

• 6:21Scott Galloway?

  My advice was to double down on direct to consumer, that they needed to develop more, have more control over their channels, either through the web or their own stores. And it ends up that retail sales, in-store retail sales, came back much stronger than anyone had anticipated post-COVID, and they were caught flat-footed. I would argue the decision, or the decision they made at that time, was the right decision. By the way, very interesting, I think it's very interesting, when the military reviews an operation, sure, they look at the outcome, but more than that, when they try to evaluate the officer's decisions, they look at, given the information that person had at that time, was that the right decision? Okay, maybe it worked, maybe it didn't work, but given what he or she knew at that moment, was it the right decision?

• 7:06Scott Galloway?

  And I would argue doubling down on direct to consumer, given what they knew, was the right idea. Where they have fucked up or fallen short, they have not been nearly as innovative around product and merchandising as Adidas, or, and they've lost a ton of share to some long-tail brands, Hoka and On Running, which are the shoes I wear. Hello, douchebag venture capitalist. Anyways, I would also say there's some bigger macro factors that are outside of their control, specifically China sneezes and a bunch of these companies get a cold, whether it's Starbucks, whether it's Estee Lauder. These companies have become so over-invested in China, China was a gift that kept on giving, and when China, domestic demand fell, these companies really got whacked hard.

• 7:47Scott Galloway?

  In addition, on a more meta-level, TikTok, and that is, the sword that has been the weapon of choice for Nike has been building an okay shoe that they infused with unbelievable brand codes. And the primary weapon for building those brand codes has been broadcast television. Nike is the best broadcast advertiser in history, but that sword, that, you know, weapon of war, if you will, has been getting duller and duller for the last 20 years. And so it is harder for them to reach their core customer with their core competence, and that is advertising. They're fantastic with endorsement, they're pretty good at direct to consumer, I would argue the stores have gotten a little bit stale. I remember everyone wanted to go to Nike Town in 2000, I'm not sure, they've been closing some of their stores.

• 8:29Scott Galloway?

  It feels like they need a freshen up, a refresh, something that makes them a little bit, stand out a little bit more. Anyways, do not count these guys out. The new CEO, the new CEO is, oh shit, who is he? Oh, Elliot Hill, I know Elliot. I don't know him well, but I did work with him a little bit at LT. I think this is a great hire. I think the board did a really good job here. And that is they brought in someone that would provide some stability, some credibility. And this guy's kind of, you know, if you were to stab him with a fork, he kind of bleeds the swoosh. He's very much Nike and I think it was a great hire for them. So well done. Look for Nike. Nike had its best trading day, I think of 2024, the day they announced Donna was stepping down and they brought in,

• 9:12Scott Galloway?

  brought in Elliot, but look for Nike. I think Nike is absolutely, you do not want to bet against Nike. Moving on, the Biden administration plans to ban Chinese developed software and internet connected vehicles in the US. Hmm. You don't say. Why? National security concerns. Wow. Huh. Why national security concerns? The ban aims to prevent Chinese intelligence from tracking Americans and using car electronics to get into important systems, including the electric grid. Jesus Christ. That sounds very much spy versus spy. National security advisor Nate Silver said on a call with reporters, with potentially millions of vehicles on the road, each with 10 to 15 year lifespans, the risk of disruption and sabotage increases dramatically.

• 9:55Scott Galloway?

  Wow. I don't know how much of that is true. Is a real national security concern? Or it's Mary Barra from General Motors saying, we need more jobs. Detroit needs your help, Joe. I would argue we tend to err on the side of being too permissive, too promiscuous with our data and our infrastructure. And there's no fucking way they would let us into their country, or have they with Tesla and Autodrive? I don't know. That's an interesting question. It's an interesting question, but typically what I see playing out in China, and I'm paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong, is that China will let companies in just long enough to figure out what they're doing to establish a market in that sector, create some demand, create some economic liquidity. And then they boot out that company or make it hard for them, prop up a local Chinese entrepreneur.

• 10:38Scott Galloway?

  And capture the value internally as they did with Facebook and Google. Ever heard of Baidu? And it looks a lot like Google. And my guess is the majority of the IP was stolen. By the way, the greatest economic boom in the history of China is probably the migration from rural areas into city areas and some of their central planning, which has actually worked in autocracy. The second biggest has been just out of fucking control IP theft from Europe and the US. Anyways, I think that this follows or this initiative follows previous actions against Chinese technology, including bans on Huawei products and investigations into Chinese cranes at US ports. Officials have emphasized the ban is driven by security, not political motives. Okay, that makes sense. The ban will also target Russian software and hardware. Is there a lot of Russian hardware and software in the US?

• 11:23Scott Galloway?

  What is it? Vodka? That's my software. That's my Russian software. By the way, Stolichnaya is brewed in like Denmark or something or distilled in Denmark. It's a mean vodka, though. True story. I used to just drink beer in college with a little bit of marijuana. And then I started drinking vodka because I thought it was more elegant. It's covered the alcoholics alcohol. I didn't think the hangover was bad. And I literally became immune to vodka. Like I literally became immune. Could drink eight vodka drinks and I'd be like, oh, I don't like me, which means this isn't working. And just a reminder, just a reminder, I don't know, I got there with Russia. Oh yeah, there's not a lot of Russian software, I think, in the US. And just a reminder, in May, the Biden administration increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100% and limited tax credits for Chinese made EVs.

• 12:07Scott Galloway?

  We also covered this issue in an Office Hours episode back in July. This ban would hinder the entry of Chinese car manufacturers, including BYD, into the US market, which poses a potential risk to US automakers if they lack access to advanced technologies. I'm not sure that's accurate. I think it's probably a boon for US car manufacturers, specifically Tesla, if they don't allow BYD. And I fucking hate tariffs. I hate them. The second biggest tax cut in the world would be if we broke up big tech. It would oxygenate. The economy, companies wouldn't, companies, parents, consumers wouldn't have this extraordinary tax placed on them called the monopolization of social search and our kids' wellbeing by a small number, a handful of small companies. So breaking these companies up would require

• 12:49Scott Galloway?

  them to compete and lower the rents on suppliers, retailers, third-party marketers, digital firms, companies trying to acquire people online, retailers, little brands trying to sell their shit online when they have to pay these onerous, eustrious prices in terms to Amazon. So you want to oxygenate the economy, break a big tech, but the biggest tax cut in the history of mankind would be if China and the US kissed and made up. We have money, consumer demand, incredible intellectual property, they have a supply chain like no other, and also a decent consumer demand, although it's fallen off a little bit. It seems like we should kiss and make up and make cheap shit for everyone around the world. More for less is the ultimate gangster business strategy, and we kind of got the more part in the US,

• 13:33Scott Galloway?

  and they got it for less, if you will. Anyways, let's hope we can all get along. We'll be right back for our conversation with Richard Reeves.

• 13:48Scott Galloway?

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• 14:49Scott Galloway?

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• 17:19Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Richard, where does this podcast find you?

• 17:31Richard Reeves?

  I'm home in East Tennessee, Southern Appalachia, but I've been on the road, I've been in Hong Kong and then been in Oregon. I had this amazing trip out to this community college in Oregon where they're just cratering male share of employment. They're dealing with it. They're acting on it. And this guy told me he's been visiting all these rural high schools in Oregon to find out why the boys are not applying to college anymore. And there's a bunch of reasons. He said the most common thing he heard was, "I'm afraid that I'll be lonely, that I kind of won't belong, I won't have friends."

• 18:05Scott Galloway?

  Really?

• 18:05Richard Reeves?

  It really struck me, yeah.

• 18:07Scott Galloway?

  That's wild. I mean, I know that generally speaking, young men have a tendency to stay on the farm and women have a tendency to take off for the city. But that's, I had never heard that about, that being a reason for why young men weren't applying to college.

• 18:21Richard Reeves?

  Same. I mean, we know they are more lonely. Like, we've talked about this before, like the loneliness epidemic is hitting young men a bit more. And a number of college campuses have told me that when they do their kind of belonging surveys, they very often find it is men, especially those from kind of more rural areas, who will say that they just don't really feel like they belong on the campus. They don't have the right habits, the right language, the right sensibilities, or whatever. And I really worry about that because you start to feel like college is not for working class guys, especially from rural areas, then you're losing a heck of a lot of potential talent.

• 18:56Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I've always been a big advocate, and it's not as toxic to people now as it was, but I've always been a huge advocate for joining a fraternity or a sorority when you get to school. And there's some credible stats, you become... Twice as likely to complete your four-year education when you join a fraternity or a similar organization that kind of distills it down to a smaller, I know, a smart community, if you will. But anyways, the reason we wanted to bring you on is you just put out a paper on unnatural male deaths, including injuries, suicide and drug overdose. Why is this happening?

• 19:31Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, so we're really motivated by our previous work on suicide, where there's a well-known big gap, especially now among young men, or like take their lives from suicide. But CDC actually captures this really good data on unnatural deaths, the kind of injuries is the language they sometimes use. And we really hadn't seen anyone break that down by gender. And so we did break it down by gender. And a number of things jumped out to me. The thing I wasn't prepared for was just the scale of the increase in injury deaths. So it's up by 57% since 2001. It's 200,000 men a year who are dying from one of these, quote, "non-natural causes." The biggest one is drug poisonings, followed

• 20:16Richard Reeves?

  by suicide, followed by motor vehicle crashes, followed by homicide, and then the other ones. And it's just, it's two and a half times higher among men than among women. And that increase is so big and largely driven by this drug epidemic that we're seeing. The thing that really blew me away is like, if you look at the deaths, you're always going to see deaths from non-natural causes, the ones we've seen above, right? The question is, are they going down or up? And they're going up in a way that's extraordinary. So just to kind of put a sharp data point on this, if the death rate from these unnatural causes had remained the same since 2001, right? So it'd been a flat line since then, then

• 20:59Richard Reeves?

  we would have lost 400,000 fewer men in those couple of decades. And that's about the number of men we lost in World War II.

• 21:08Scott Galloway?

  That's a fascinating stat. The question I would have is that, okay, the leading cause here appears to be drug poisonings. Is that, is that fentanyl? And also, is this rooted in loneliness and depression and why people are, men are turning to drugs? Or because drugs are more available, because they're more accepted in culture? Like what? Give us, give us some of the nuance here.

• 21:31Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, the, the way this has been framed a lot, you, you've talked about this yourself, but this idea of deaths of despair, and as I said, the rates are highest among middle aged men, men between thirty and, and, you know, mid fifties. And it's been associated for a long time with declining economic prospects, community breakdown, loss of affiliation to family, religion, et cetera. And so if you like, that's the kind of demand side. But there's also clearly a supply side issue here too, which is the, the way in which these drugs, fentanyl and others, have just been flooded into some of these communities on the supply side is clearly part of the story too. And so there's actually a big debate now among social scientists, whether this term

• 22:12Richard Reeves?

  deaths of despair is actually helpful or not, because what that does is it kind of points to the individuals themselves, to the communities and says, it's all demand driven, right? But actually, it's supply side as well, and we have to take both into account, I think. But, but you're right, there's clearly a despair element to it. One of the things I find interesting about this is that the drugs that people generally die from are things like fentanyl, opioids, et cetera. They're not party drugs. They're not drugs you take to go out and have a good time, right? They're drugs that you take to retreat and withdraw. And interestingly, one of the main reasons why those drugs do end up very often killing people is because if there is a bad reaction, then there's no one with you.

• 22:55Richard Reeves?

  And so a big predictor of dying from drugs is being alone.

• 22:59Scott Galloway?

  Johann Hari, I hope I'm saying that name correctly, said that the opposite of addiction is connection. I absolutely love that. That basically kind of confirms everything you've been saying. And so I want to use that as a bridge to a jumping off point, other than telling kids, you know, not the Nancy Reagan, don't do drugs, don't do drugs alone, but also what are some potential solutions? Should we be legalizing drugs or is it more just programs to help young men feel more connected?

• 23:28Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, so I'm gonna confess to not being enough of an expert on drug policy to talk seriously about that side of it. But what I would say, I'm much more interested in the the demand side and the conditions with which, Rick, what would lead people to kind of take drugs and then with whom and to what end, right, to what basis back to the like, are you, I'm not here to endorse drug use, period, but but I just think like, if you're taking a relatively safe pill to try and stay up late at night, or you think you're taking some cocaine, you do that very occasionally, etc. That's very different to this drug of retreat, drug of despair, drug of loneliness stuff that we're seeing playing out. So to the extent that Johan's line is correct about, and I've heard him say that too, and

• 24:13Richard Reeves?

  I like it too, it's connection, then I think what we should be doing is pushing hard on where are the places that men, that boys and men can connect? What are the social institutions? What are the places and spaces and institutions that promote, encourage and support fraternity, right? It's really weird, that's interesting to me, you to reflecting on fraternities is that the thing that I think that's probably most lacking in the lives of many young men and including and middle aged men is fraternity. It's friendships, it's male friendships in particular, it's a sense of community and attachment and connection. So why we've allowed like Boy Scouts to drop the boy, for example, so that it's no longer

• 24:55Richard Reeves?

  Boy Scouts, it's now scouting for America and has gone kind of coed. But also Scott, like the decline in participation in sport in high school among boys, it's going up among girls, it's going down among boys, the lack of coaches, the disengagement from extracurricular activities, all that stuff. It's like, it actually takes quite a lot to build community, to build connection. And we have not done a good enough job of creating places and spaces and institutions where like, boys feel comfortable creating those relationships, which I'm back to where I started, like, I was blown away by the fact that these eighteen, seventeen, eighteen year old boys are afraid of being lonely on college campuses. And it's less true for other groups, because those colleges are actually making a real

• 25:40Richard Reeves?

  point of saying there'll be affinity groups, there'll be a girl, a women's support group, there'll be a, you know, girls who code group, there'll be a whatever, very intentional, explicit attempts to create a sense of community among other groups. And I think we've made the mistake of thinking that men don't need that.

• 25:57Scott Galloway?

  I saw some really interesting, or I talked to someone who's a family attorney, which is a way of saying helps people get divorced. And he said, he sent me some data saying that amongst gay men, marriages with gay men, 28% divorce rate. Straight couples, 48% divorce rate. Gay women, lesbian marriages, 72%. And I thought, wow, does this mean women bring more quote unquote divorce energy to the relationship? And that just sort of blew me away because I'd never heard that before. And he said that the path, he said he's had a lot of his clients commit suicide. And, um, or die by suicide. I'm told it's the right way to say it now.

• 26:40Scott Galloway?

  And he said something really rattling. He said that we all want to believe they're mentally ill and it's something outside of our control and outside of their control. We have empathy for them. They had no control over it. Or that it's not our fault to struggle with depression. And he said, he said, I get it. He said, these guys basically do the math. They don't want to get divorced. Essentially their divorce is usually presaged by some sort of financial stress, a bankruptcy, lose the business, some sort of emotional breakdown on the part of the man. His spouse decides, uh, she doesn't want to stay in the marriage. Family court is biased towards men. So, and you actually may have even talked about this.

• 27:25Scott Galloway?

  I apologize if I keep parroting back what I've learned from you. But in one fell swoop, within a matter of months or a small number of years, a guy loses his primary relationship, his children, his economic well being, and he makes a very rational decision to kill himself. I wonder if at some point you come back on one of our pods and say drug poisonings, you know, suicide and divorce. What are your thoughts?

• 27:57Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, so the the suicide risk among men generally is four times higher than among women. If you narrow that scope to just divorced men and women, it is eight times higher among divorced men than among divorced women. And so I think there's a general point here. I didn't know that data about divorce. It's also true that women initiate twice as many divorces. Women account for two thirds of divorce initiations in the US now. So women are, just as an empirical matter, they're more likely to initiate divorce. And there's this interesting study recently, I think it was out Sweden, which looked at what happens to men and women who win the lottery.

• 28:39Richard Reeves?

  The men who won the lottery became a bit more likely to get married and look to have children. The women who won the lottery were more likely to divorce their husband. I love that. I mean, I'm laughing in a sort of gallows humor way because, and of course, a good feminist critique of that would be, well, you know, the women have got more exit power and they're using it, right? And if it's economic dependency tying them to the guy, then hallelujah, she's free of that. And that's actually a great sort of microcosm of the the whole push for more economic independence for women. And, you know, you and I are both strong advocates of that being a wonderful thing. The issue then is what happens to men who get detached from institutions like family

• 29:22Richard Reeves?

  and marriage and therefore end up, as you say, feeling like they're not valued. And I probably said this to you before, but the two words that men use to describe themselves before they take their lives from suicide in notes and so on, the two most commonly used words are useless and worthless. And just another paper, this will be interesting to you, I think, where we looked at the differences between men with a college degree and those without, a paper on working class men. And one of the stats in there that really blew me away, and I, you know, I think I know this stuff, and then I dig deeper and really get surprised, which is that men without a college degree, between the ages of 30 and 50,

• 29:59Richard Reeves?

  Are only about fifty percent of those men have a child in their household. It's basically fifty fifty whether they've got kids in their household. For women without a college degree, it's still eighty percent. And for those men, it was eighty percent, north of eighty percent. And so we've got to a situation now where, like particularly for kind of working class men, if I can use that definition of them, like fifty fifty whether they have kids in their household. Now, they might have kids but not be in their household anymore. And I think one of the things we're learning is there was some truth to the conservative concern that if men became less economically important, if women became less economically reliant on men, that was going to leave a lot of men feeling beached and surplus to requirements. And their fear was those men would start acting out.

• 30:44Richard Reeves?

  We'd see massive rises in crime, all kinds of antisocial behavior. It'd be like Mad Max, right? As these men are kind of roaming around. And of course, the opposite's happened by and large. We've actually seen men retreating, they're checking out more than acting out. And I see suicide as in some ways the most tragic version of men just checking out, looking around and deciding that society, their family, their community, their church, their workplace really would be fine without them, maybe even better off without them. And if there is a greater human tragedy than leading people to feel unneeded to that extent, then I don't know what it is.

• 31:24Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I was fascinated by that study on divorce. I looked into it and some additional data was that they believed that a lot of women, quote unquote, if you're going to say women have more divorce energy, which is disparaging towards women, you also have to acknowledge that as women have made more money, men shouldering domestic responsibilities has not kept pace with women's economic ascent.

• 31:50Scott Galloway?

  And that marriage has become a worse deal. And that is, a lot of women feel like, okay, I'm now making as much or more money, but I'm also taking care of the house. This is just a raw deal for me. I don't know if you've thought about solutions, but this goes to a question around solutions is, if we know that the single or a single point of failure for when a boy becomes much more likely to engage in self-harm, be incarcerated, become addicted, is when he loses a male role model. That is, mom and dad get divorced, and I think 92% of the time, mom ends up with the kids. Shouldn't there be massive programs and immediate triggers that when there's a divorce, when there's a household divorce, it's just a, the next thing is, we have got to get, figure out resources and programs to get men, to ensure men are involved in this boy's

• 32:35Scott Galloway?

  life moving forward. And two, when a man is divorced, or when a couple gets divorced, that there needs to be some sort of education or program availability for these men post-divorce.

• 32:49Richard Reeves?

  Yeah. The work of Catherine Eden and Tim Nelson on this, on particularly working with kind of lower income families, just basically, they conclude by saying that the current child support system, family court system, especially for unmarried men, needs to be radically reformed. It needs to be reformed into a pro-family system and into a pro-fatherhood system. And right now, the way that the system works is that it kind of treats, it basically splits men, fathers, into two halves. It says, on the one hand, where's the money? So it's the child support element to it. And then, on the other hand, completely unrelated, do you want to see your kid? And the father, in every US state, the father has to prove paternity if the kid was born outside marriage.

• 33:34Richard Reeves?

  And it's a completely separate legal process to get access. And so I think moving to the presumption of equal access and equal custody. Is important. Of course, there are always going to be exceptions that people can point to. What's interesting about this is that in states that have tried to move to like an equal custody presumption, in other words, in law, you just presume, unless there's a good reason to the contrary, which there could be, that, you know, mums and dads have the same rights. This weird alliance of lawyers and pretty strong feminist groups join forces to kill it. And the reason that the women's groups do it is because they're protecting women's position in the family. And they know and child's and access to child support. And the reason the lawyers do it is because they're going to lose half their business.

• 34:20Richard Reeves?

  Right? If it just becomes a straightforward 50 50 split, then they don't have couples arguing with each other. Then they're going to lose like half their legal fees. And so I do agree that thinking about fatherhood, custody, access more in a more pro dad way is just is huge. I just think we have failed to update our views about fatherhood. And by the way, fathers need to step up more in the way you just said. But and so the legal system is still just antiquated. And especially it's antiquated, given that like for except for college educated Americans, most kids aren't born inside marriage now. And so you can't just rely on divorce laws to do it. You've got to deal with the fact that like the preponderance of cases here that the parents weren't married. The last thing I'll say on this is I actually had this guy in tears.

• 35:05Richard Reeves?

  An event where I gave all my charts showing how good dads are for kids, right? Their high school graduation rates, actually their chances of using drugs or just how important dads are as role models. And this dad came up to me in tears afterwards and said, yeah, but also being a father is the most important thing in my life. And what I came to realize is that fatherhood isn't just a means to an end. Fatherhood is actually a central part of the identity, purpose and meaning that a lot of men have in their lives.

• 35:30Scott Galloway?

  It's really, I mean, what you say always resonates so much. I'm struggling with my 17 year old is now boarding school and it was sold to me. And I'm going to act like the victim here as, oh, I'll be home Friday afternoons and go back to school on Monday morning. No, he has school Saturday morning. He gets home for 24 hours. And I not only miss him, but what I've come to realize is that I like myself as a dad. I really do feel good about. You know, I feel like on programs like this, I virtue signal and create this picture that I'm a better father than I actually am, but I'm, I know I'm a good dad and I get a lot of confidence from it and it gives me a certain level of, I don't know, my role, like I check this box.

• 36:10Scott Galloway?

  I'm, I'm, I'm helping the species and not 50% of my ability to act in what I think is a nice role is gone because he's no longer here during the week and it is really fucked with me. It has hurt my self-esteem. I feel anchorless. I just wonder if there's, I'm even thinking like, I am dreading Richard. I don't know if you feel about this. I know you have kids. I am, I am so freaked out about the moment my second leaves for college. Like I, they talk about, uh, women go through this. My partner, uh, she's gonna be fine. She's like, she's already kind of counting the days till they're out of the house because I think she,

• 36:50Scott Galloway?

  she gets, you know, she gets more work and less fun than I do, but it, it just strikes me so much how that role of fatherhood, it's not only, you know, something I enjoy, it's just so central to my identity and I can't imagine what it must be like to just, to, you know, I think in family court, you know, you lose your kids, you lose access. Mom, at least when I, my parents got divorced. Were you, did your parents stay together, Richard?

• 37:18Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, mine did. Yeah. Still are together.

• 37:21Scott Galloway?

  That's, that's wonderful. What happens, or at least happened with me and I saw it happen with most of my friends is that a kid can't process the agita or the dissent or the problem of, of these two people splitting up. It makes no sense. So immediately they go, oh, someone must be a bad person. And it's unlikely that the bad person is the person you're living with making your breakfast every morning. It's the bad person is the one who's left, whether he or she wanted custody. And so I, I just think there's a very easy tendency for kids of divorced parents to kind of demonize dad. And that's what I did. I'm like, mom's a saint, dad's awful. I'm fascinated by this notion of, uh, what you said was really

• 38:04Scott Galloway?

  striking that men are four times more likely to commit suicide, excuse me, die of suicide, but become eight times more likely recently divorced. Are there programs or any more data that you've talked about in terms of what happens with men after they lose their primary relationship and no longer live with their kids?

• 38:22Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, there's data. I mean, I've given you the suicide one, but just their life expectancy goes down, their chances of earning, being employed goes down, other health conditions worsen. And sometimes that's a bit of an eye roll moment. It's like, well, of course, you know, if men don't have women to look after them and remind him to take his pills and go to the doctor, then, you know, he's hopeless, isn't he? There's a sort of sense of that bit of an eye roll around it. But I think a deeper understanding, it's closer to what you were talking about, which is that sense of connection and purpose and meaning and

• 38:59Richard Reeves?

  neededness, right? The sense of being needed versus surplus to requirements, I think is really the axis I try to think about this along. Now, like, it's very interesting to me that men now are more likely to say that having kids and getting married is important for a satisfying life than women are. Right? So the old trope about like, it's women that want to get married and have kids and men who have to be dragged into it, you know, the ball and chain and, you know, the men would rather be off like a cowboy, just doing their own thing, but it gets ensnared into domestic life. But deep down, you know, they want to be out on the range or doing their own thing. And that is bullshit. It is absolutely the opposite of the truth, is that actually, men, what makes you a man is

• 39:44Richard Reeves?

  what you're doing for others. We both talk about this, the kind of connection to others, but also generating a surplus, being generative, this idea of generative masculinity. And actually, listening to you now has sparked the thought that one of the things we know from the work of Anna Machin and other people, she's a great scholar on fatherhood, by the way, if you don't know her stuff, she has this wonderful book called The Life of Dad, which is basically about how we invented fatherhood in humanity. But actually dads really come into their own in the adolescent years. Right, mums seem to have a bit of a competitive advantage in the early years. And dads have a competitive advantage in those adolescent years because you're helping your kids like go out into the world to grow, to develop, to take risks appropriately, develop social skills.

• 40:26Richard Reeves?

  In other words, like the simpler way to putting this is that mums are really good when the kids are in the nest and dads are really good at helping prepare them to leave the nest. But actually, when they then leave the nest, you've just lost the thing that you were doing over the previous few years. And so in a weird way, I think for dads, their kids leaving at 18 is much more of a loss than for mums because mums have sort of done more of their work, if you like, emotionally anyway, like when the kids were eight, right? Whereas dads come into their own in these later years, only to see them kind of fly away. And a lot of dads, I certainly feel this, is this mixture of pride and loss.

• 41:03Richard Reeves?

  We'll be right back.

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• 43:08Scott Galloway?

  On the diary of a CEO, you said that we're in the relatively early stages of a cultural revolution, one where the economic relation between men and women has dramatically transformed. Say more.

• 43:19Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, so with 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man, like typical man, 13%. Last time I looked, it was 40% of women earned more than the typical man. 40% of breadwinners, a male in the, female rather, in the US now. So in the space of my lifetime, I'm in my mid-50s, born in 69. In the space of my lifetime, we have utterly transformed the relative economic position of men and women in advanced economies, including in the US. Now, we haven't achieved full equality, and obviously, there's still some work to be done, but the level of economic independence that women have achieved in the matter of decades has been just gigantic

• 44:03Richard Reeves?

  and hugely liberating, wonderful, et cetera. But I genuinely think that it takes time for cultures to adjust to such massive economic changes. I mean, that is a fundamental change in the economic relationship between men and women. And what it's done is it's unbundled the traditional ways in which men and women were kind of tied to each other economically. And I do think this comes back to our earlier conversation. I really think that we were focused on the economic dependence of women on men in traditional marriage and tried to reduce that. But I don't think we paid quite enough attention to the emotional dependence of men on those families, on those marriages and on the kind of co-residents with their

• 44:46Richard Reeves?

  kids. And what's happened is as women have become more economically independent, the degree to which men were actually quite emotionally dependent on those traditional structures has become glaringly apparent. And the gap has really opened up. And I think that's the chasm that I see a lot of men really struggling to cross or fall into. So culturally, just, I mean, that's a gigantic shift. And it's all, it's good, it's good. But the thing I find frustrating about this is people's inability to say, you can have this really great change, like the rise of women's economic independence and choice, and to say, but by the way, there's going to be some bumps in the road here because you've just radically transformed the way in which kind of men feel their place in

• 45:29Richard Reeves?

  society. And you don't have to end up being reactionary and saying, oh, that's why we should go back, which is what some of the reactionary right wingers are saying, which is that's why we need to go back, right? No, no, no, we need to go forward. But we have to go forward with some empathy and compassion for the fact that this is a very different world that men are navigating now.

• 45:47Scott Galloway?

  You've touched on the idea of a new script for masculinity and the new set of roles and the new set of do's. What do you mean? And what does the script look like?

• 45:56Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, so I'm always a bit reluctant around this because of course there are lots of different scripts. But I mean, it comes back a bit to fatherhood. I now place a lot of weight, increasingly, actually, as I'm doing the work, on the importance of fatherhood as that anchoring. I'm using the way you describe your own relationship with your son, like the anchor, you feel anchored by it, as an anchor for men. And being a provider and a protector. In a way that is appropriate for the kind of modern, modern world. So I've come to believe that we have to retain these ideals, these ideas about the role of, of men,

• 46:37Richard Reeves?

  but just update them. So rather than saying, okay, we don't need protectors, we don't need providers, we don't, you know. Instead, I think we need to say that you can provide and protect in different ways now. So I think actually, for example, and your colleague Jonathan Haidt, and our mutual friend, is doing a lot of work right now on how do you protect kids from some of the online environments? That they kind of might be like, how do you, how do you step in between? Some of the forces out there in the world and your kids' wellbeing, right? That's being a protector, that have to be throwing a punch every time. And I would say the same way being a provider, doesn't necessarily mean that your dollar, you know, the dollar amount on your monthly paycheck, you know, has to be a certain level or has to be a certain level more than your wife's or your partner's. But by God, it means you need to be providing to your household.

• 47:19Richard Reeves?

  Time, energy, you know, skills, et cetera, right? You don't, you don't have to be doing providing in just this very narrow economic way, but by God, you have to provide, right? So I said this before, but like as a, as a stay at home dad, I felt like a provider. Right? Because I was providing the space and energy for my wife to be able to work, not wanting, knowing her kids were in safe hands. I think actually for a lot of women, knowing that their kids are in their father's care while they're working, that's hugely powerful.

• 47:48Scott Galloway?

  I love this notion and we'll wrap up here because I just think it's such a great construct for young men or a great framework, framework. Talk about the notion of surplus value.

• 48:00Richard Reeves?

  So when you look through the history of like, what turns a boy into a man? In most human societies, it is some mark of them producing more of something than they need for themselves. Now, in a kind of post-war economy with more money, bread, that's the breadwinner version of it, but that wasn't true 5,000 years ago on the savanna. That was meat, that was protein for the tribe and for the mother of your child. And in other places, it could be something else. But I think that I love this idea. Of masculinity, mature masculinity, being defined in terms of giving more than you get. It's a service oriented form of masculinity.

• 48:44Richard Reeves?

  It's definitely the one I got from my father's knee. I mean, just absolutely the kind of giving more than you get. And that's why there's this movement online of men going their own way, like a men's separatist movement, saying, we don't need women, we don't need marriage, we don't need kids, we don't need the labor market, screw you, we're off. That is literally the opposite of masculinity. The idea of masculinity is surplus generator is, I know you're a man when you're generating more energy, time, love, money, meat, whatever the hell it is, than you need for your own survival. Because that is historically what men have had to do, is to contribute, contribute to the family, to the tribe, to the community.

• 49:27Richard Reeves?

  And if you're not a contributor in all these different ways, then you ain't a man. And so if you're wondering how to be a man, start by doing something for somebody else, and that will lead you in the right direction.

• 49:38Scott Galloway?

  Richard Reeves is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he founded in 2023 to raise awareness of the problems of boys and men and advocate for effective solutions. He's also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, where he previously directed the Future of the Middle Class Initiative and the Center on Children and Families. His 2022 book of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It, was described as a landmark in The New York Times and named a Book of the Year by both The Economist and The New Yorker. And distinctive as accent, he joins us from eastern Tennessee. Did I get that right, Richard?

• 50:15Richard Reeves?

  Correct, yeah, southern Appalachian, yeah.

• 50:17Scott Galloway?

  I would bet you're one of the more interesting people in that area, and that's a disparaging statement about eastern Tennessee, but I bet people are fascinated with you as we are. And Richard, I say this, but it bears repeating, you have literally inspired me to take this on as an issue. Thank you so much for your good work.

• 50:31Richard Reeves?

  Thank you for your work, Scott. Always a pleasure.

• 50:40Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shageran. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prof G Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

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