How to Turn Boys Into Men in the Modern World | Richard Reeves

who has it worse right now boys or girls depends which domain you're looking at if you look at how like boys are doing in school and college clearly they're doing worse and some aspects of mental health I think it's pretty clear that girls are doing worse you've seen a recent spike in depression and anxiety among teenage girls along with a big rise in male suicide so that's again another difference and then when you get into the labor market look there's all kinds of issues that face young men and young women differently and so right now I think the most honest thing to do is to just say that girls and boys young men and young women are struggling in different ways in different domains of life and I just can't call it right now I don't think it's obvious some people think it's obvious one way or the other I don't think it's obvious that one is suffering more than the other I think it's more honest to say that boys and girls are struggling in different ways and perhaps at different points in their life one thing I really want to understand about this so for a long time it just everybody took it as self-evident that women were where we needed to Target there were structural issues that were creating major problems that were I think the way that most people talk about it is there were breaks put on women and that we now live in the era where breaks have been taken off and I think a pretty typical narrative is that as we took the breaks off women we have done something bad to men and boys I I will be honest that I'm just beginning to really explore this so somebody that doesn't have kids so a lot of the ideas that I will put forth today to get your sort of Sanity check against are are me at the initial point of my thinking but it does not feel like this is a you take the breaks off women and men suddenly fall apart scenario but it does seem to be tied to what the evolutionary reason for what have become gender stereotypes like is this a societal structure issue or is it a biology issue I love your analogy of like taking the breaks off right um because and those but those breaks were put on in some ways deliberately right there was an injustice in what was happening to girls and women so that that to me is a societal statement that yes because I have a hypothesis that this did not begin as a societal problem that this began as a biological problem and when you're in the red and tooth and Claw issue that those things are gonna spring up in that way well I think what happened in some ways you've got you've got it with the rolls thing so if we just go let's say about 50 years right when or 50 or 60 years when not very many women went to college right was that because they weren't as good at high school no they were doing as well at high school was it because women couldn't succeed at college no so why weren't women going to college well because that wasn't seen as appropriate or necessary or useful for them because after all their main role was going to be as wives and mothers and so to some extent going to college was you know if anything you know just a luxury and in fact all the women who did go to college back in the 70s most of them were married within a year of graduating right imagine that right it's a completely different world and so we are by ascribing very tight roles that were based on biology to men and women we actually put the brakes on and we basically said what female education is kind of a waste of time and money because they're just going to be wives and mothers once we took those breaks off in a way that I think was both necessary and Justified that allowed the kind of natural advantages of women and girls to show up in the education system and so in a sense to use your analogy again you took the breaks off women what happened was it turned out that they could drive the car faster once you take the brakes off and so they went past men so it's actually a bigger Gap or in American higher education today than there was 50 years ago in 1972 when Title IX was passed it's just flipped so women are further ahead of men today on college campuses than men were ahead of women in 1972 so there's been extraordinary reversal in education and this biology culture question is is really I think you're right at the heart of a lot of this and so let me let me be a bit unfair to both sides one side says well we're biologically different we have different reproductive roles and so we're never going to be equal and this is how women are supposed to be and this is how men are supposed to be on the other side no no biology has no influence at all uh everything's socialized genders are construct uh which underpins the patriarchy so let's just kind of all enter the androgynous future and the reality of course is somewhere in the middle biology does matter and it matters in all kinds of ways affect men and boys differently to women and girls but culture is the way that our biology or biological differences is expressed right so I don't know just to choose one example aggression right our boys and men more aggressive than women and girls yes and is that biological yes right there's this huge gap in violence at 17 months 18 months now it's possible that one and a half year olds have picked up the cues from a society that says it's okay for boys to hit each other in the face but not okay for girls to hit each other in the face but I'm skeptical that we've socialized them that strongly by 18 months to explain this massive difference when was that study done I don't know it's a good question I would say that the the tenor on that societally has shifted so far right that if that were anywhere in the last 10 or 15 years like there's no way that's coming from culture in my estimation like right the way that people look at me when I say that my mom spanked me and thank God is like I said that you know she put me in the ICU so there's been a real cultural shift in that and there's much less fighting in schools now as well actually interestingly um you know most American parents even today you know engage in some kind of physical punishment of their children I was really surprised yeah I was I looked at this for Brookings like 10 years well eight years ago because I got interested and I was just kind of astonished by how common it is because if you live in a bubble of upper class upper middle class people it's like absolutely verboten there was this there was this book a year ago was called the slap or something like that which was like it was basically the whole premise of the book was what happened when one parent hit their kid in front of other parents and all the ripples from that right can you imagine that that would make a kind of book and so sure culture has changed in ways that we can argue about whether they're positive or negative but the underlying point is that there are these biological differences so let's say aggression then the question is do you live in a society where being aggressive expressing that aggression is good or bad in some societies through human history you bet absolutely today not so much right it's probably you know if if you get up now if I say something offends you and you come over here and punch me in the face even I would be very surprised if I did that yeah yes I don't think the people watching this would be like yeah absolutely fantastic great cage fight they've been like what is wrong with him Will Smith and pretty pretty dark great for example different people responded differently I thought everyone was going to roundly condemn it and while largely yes I was startled that there was there were people that were like yeah you had to come here yeah the point I'm trying to make here is that how our culture encourages discourages incentivizes disincentivisers it rewards or doesn't reward certain biological traits is hugely important and a good feminist argument would be that let's say that women do more care work than men raising children and other kinds of care work and let's say that's partly because of differences in biology let's just say that's true does that mean that work is less valuable should be lower status should be worth paid well yes if you think women's work is worth less but know if you think that just because it's women's work doesn't make it work any less and so there is a feminist argument that care work is predominantly female work and that it should be paid much better and rewarded much better that's where the kind of wages for housework movement came from so we have to think about biology and culture as co-evolving and most importantly recognizing biological differences doesn't make culture less important it makes it more important because culture is how we learn how to express or not express these Tendencies or when it's appropriate to express them and when it's not appropriate to express them yeah very well said so there were a lot of things that you said in there that I want to go back and address so the first is this idea of wives and mothers as a throwaway comment so uh or our throwaway category so my wife who and I I should set the stage for people that are seeing me for the first time because they're attracted to you and your work uh so my wife and I have no kids my wife is the quote unquote boss [ __ ] like super hardcore very talented entrepreneur been very successful um and she was once standing in line uh at a restaurant with another woman and they just started talking and the woman asked my wife what she did she was explaining you know wrong companies blah blah blah no one was like oh wow my wife was like what do you do and she said oh I'm just a mother and my wife was like yo hold the phone now my wife has decided not to have kids but she has just crazy amounts of respect and quite frankly gratitude to other women that do and so I I will my wife doesn't say these words but she shares a sentiment when I meet parents I always thank them for their service which by the way thank you for yourself and I mean that completely on ironically like I'm very grateful that very thoughtful caring loving people have kids and raise them well we just need that as a society and I couldn't do what I did if other people weren't out there having children so the idea of like oh wives and mothers as if that weren't something that should be venerated and so I think the central thing that you and I are gonna you will hopefully help me shape my thinking on this because you've thought much more deeply about it but I come at it and I'm like oh there there's a nuclear or bomb in the center of this discussion and very few people are talking about it which is birth control and so my hypothesis goes something like this we have we have reached a moment of Crisis which I know you you don't love when people use the hyperbolic uh yeah but but I would say something pretty dramatic is happening right now that I think it warrants that language if for no other reason than to get people to pay attention but I think this is all an echo uh this is largely an echo let me be somewhat careful in my speech here this is largely an echo of birth control so you you get this idea of you said okay if we value parenting and raising children and women are doing that then they should be effectively compensated it's not the exact words that you use but my initial reaction to that is not all value can or should be captured financially so just because it's this insanely important thing does not mean that we should be paying to do it right and the re and you can even think that the the family unit effectively is paying the person to do that if if they are truly within the home being equal and so this is something I've earned my stripes on this with my wife for eight years of our marriage my wife didn't work but I was like you are my equal in every way but we have very different roles now ended up changing over time but same idea we've just everything for us has always been equal so in some ways they are being paid but at a governmental level which is what I think people mean they want the government effectively to come in and pay and this is where this [ __ ] starts to Nest inside of like these crazy ideas but just to get at the complexity of why I think this is falling apart in this moment so birth control changes the dynamic women start flooding into the workforce they're now in control of whether they need to be at home with kids or not and then we have this other idea which is that basically um the miracle of the way that the modern world works is not in production to use uh you know a Marxist term but instead is in the redistribution and once you my hypothesis goes once you start thinking that the miracle is the redistribution then you forget that as you start to redistribute then all the people that would rise up that are entrepreneurial minded they stop doing that and all of a sudden there is nothing left to redistribute and so getting this moment right and understanding the the really foundational dynamic between men and women I think becomes incredibly important so if we were to try to recognize the contributions of women by through a financial instrument I think we're just absolutely headed for disaster so how do we recognize the contributions of something that is incredibly important okay so I I agree with you the control of fertility was a cultural Game Changer especially for women right that was the there's no question that effective birth control has been one of the most significant changes in the in the culture of of human societies and most importantly because by allowing women to control their fertility it allowed them to become more full economic participants in the labor market I'm thinking here about a kind of more recent capitalist labor market economy and the central goal of the post-war women's movement was to secure economic independence for women so if you read Margaret Mead Gloria Steinem Etc they will say and they said things like the purpose is to make marriage a choice not a necessity so that women could stand economically on their own two feet and of course affect a birth control was an important way in which women could do that as well as educational success so your alarm Bells go after when you hear that because mine do which bit of it that you're already creating a problem for yourself the second you if you find a fence in the middle of the woods do not tear that fence down until you understand why that fence was okay Chesterton yeah I always forget the guy's name yes thank you so my the underlying thing that you are being very gracious to let me think through out loud is that Evolution has created something a dynamic between men and women right that can can become pathological and become tyrannical yeah for sure yes but there there's an underlying something there and so I'll use at this is maybe dangerous of oversimplifying but I will use my own relationship to my wife as an example of why that moment to me is something that people need to stop before we just throw out the oh maybe marriage should be the same nobody needs to do and it's like P I want people to do it by choice a hundred percent I don't want anybody to be forced in a marriage I can think of nothing worse I've just have a recurring nightmare about ending up in a Loveless marriage but when I think I once and I'm not a crier man but I once wept in front of my wife because I was like this was before we started this company and she stepped out front became an entrepreneur and I was like the world is never going to understand that I would not be able to do what I do without you like you have made me a better person and that makes me ask the question it feels to me like men and women need to come together I I so I I agree that we're in a moment now of massive flux and uncertainty and the one result of that is to leave men in particular very uncertain of their role in this new Society so the securing of Greater economic independence for women I think has been the greatest economic Liberation in global human history so in the US today 40 of women now earn more than the average man in 1979 it was 13 of women so it's not as we don't have absolute gender equality in the labor market yet but my God in the last 50 years have we seen this extraordinary change and so Steinem and Mead and others have to some extent achieved their goal which is women will not need to be with a man in order to feed their kids have a home Etc and of course the welfare state has stepped in as well so that's securing that separation that's like I don't need a man anymore materially has been very significantly achieved and you're right birth control was part of the story that is where we are now and I'm glad that's where we are and when I use my I'll use my own marriage as an example of this which is my wife and I have actually taken it in turns essentially to be more of the kind of Breadwinner and more of the carer when we've been raising our children we were absolutely determined we would raise our kids ourselves it's not that we never had any help but we're not going to be this kind of too professional career full-time Nanny you know see the kids at the weekend couple we were not going to do that and actually there have been periods where like my wife has been full on and I've been at home raising the kids and vice versa What a Wonderful World where we had that choice my parents didn't have that choice when my dad lost his job there was no possibility that my mum was going to be able to say it's okay I'll do the breadwinning for a bit you do the kids just it was impossible she didn't have the economic power to do that it was all him that's not true for our generation and that's a huge gain not only for women but also for men however does that come with consequences about how we think about male and female roles about marriage about mating about child rearing about fertility oh yes it's a massive change and I think there's a tendency sometimes to just to not recognize that fundamentally altering the economic relation between men and women is huge culturally sociologically in almost every way imaginable like you don't do that and not have massive consequences I want to hear about those consequences which you go through in the book in an amazing way so what are the consequences well the first one is of course that women don't have to have a man in order to survive and so one result of that is that 40 of kids in the US are now born outside marriage and most kids born to non-college educated Americans are born outside of marriage and so the and one reason that we've seen this really big increase in the the share of kids being born outside marriage and this is work from The Joint economic committee it was led by my my friend Scott Winship at the AEI is the decline in shotgun marriages so actually if you look back to kind of 60s and 70s there were there was a very high percentage of births took place less than nine months after the wedding it was a real thing well June carbon has this number which is like 30 of first births around 1961 within something like that wow so it was non-trivial right so uh the point is it was a lot so it wasn't that people weren't necessarily kind of having sex before marriage and getting pregnant before marriage it was that if you had sex and you got pregnant The Next Step was get married that's almost fallen away now there isn't this sense of like well we're having a kid together I have to get married and here I want to actually be really fair to the conservative critics from the 1970s so I went back and you read these these folks including like this uh George Gilda who was the misogynist of the year I think two years running I mean it was incredible he was ended up being one of Reagan's advisors and he and then others Jeff dent and others they argued that if women secured economic independence in the way that the women's movement wanted that actually that would basically make men redundant right if men didn't have that role of kind of provider they would have they would be they would effectively become Surplus to requirements and men who are Surplus to requirements are very dangerous in human history this is what Joe Henrik calls the math problem of surplus men Surplus men are bad news for society they maraud around they're very violent they're very risk-taking and so the conservatives were saying if the women's movement gets his way we're going to have Madden max style bands of marauding Violent Men setting fire to everything Etc in fact the opposite has happened we've seen a drop over the last few decades in violent crime drop and expressed aggression Etc I think largely because of the internet I think actually what's happened is that far from kind of running out and setting fire to things a lot of these men are retreating stereotypically to the basement maybe to video games and pornography so there's this kind of very weird and provocative thought I sometimes have that maybe the screens are kind of saving us from the worst consequences of this kind of surplus to requirements thing around men so that worst fear has not been realized but the conservatives were right to say that if we get to this world where there's much greater economic inequality between men and women which was that that means that the men don't have this specific very dedicated role anymore of Breadwinner what's up guys it's time Bill you and if you're anything like me you're always looking for ways to level up your mindset your business and your life in general that's exactly why I started impact Theory a podcast that brings together the world's most successful and inspiring people to share their stories and most importantly strategies for success and now it's easier than ever to listen to impact theory on Amazon music whether you're on the go or chilling at home you can simply open up the Amazon music app and search for impact Theory with Tom bilyu to start listening right away if you really want to take things to the next level just ask Alexa hey Alexa play impact Theory with Tom bilyu on Amazon music now playing impact impact Tom bilyu on Amazon music and boom you're instantly plugged into the latest and greatest conversations on mindset Health finances and Entrepreneurship get inspired get motivated and be legendary with impact theory on Amazon music let's do this we're going to have trouble with these guys these guys are going to be either in trouble or trouble and they're although the nature of the trouble is different to what was predicted nonetheless I think that was right so if you look at the men who like opioid overdose and mostly men suicide rates are four times higher among men and young uh young and boys young men than among women and any number of other pathologies that are affecting a lot of men and I looked at I looked at their work on suicide and one of the studies that really stopped me in my tracks honestly and it's a moment where you stop being a a scholar and you just become a human being this work by Fiona Shand looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before suicide and the two most commonly used words by those men were useless to describe themselves useless and worthless there's something going on there which is we cannot create a society which is more gender equal which I fully support if in case that's not clear by now but which also makes so many men feel like they they're of no use anymore they're worthless now thanks guys we got it from here is not a great message and so we've got to find a way to get through this messy situation we're in now so that there's a positive script for men a positive description of masculinity and what we need fathers and men and boys to be like that is compatible with this new world of economic of economic equality because it's not going away right we're not going back to a world where women were economically dependent on men except within families by choice as my wife was on me for periods and as I was on her for periods and interestingly with couples who do have the most economic power and the most resources are the ones where women stay home to look after the kids more easily because they can afford to do so that's great and I think that the women's movement of dodged a very very big bullet by not I think pathologizing the women who chose to become parents who said that they to your wife that just a mum thing that's that's much less common now I think there was a moment where the women's movements started to look like it might look down on women who weren't sort of in the labor market full-time Etc I think that was largely avoided and now what I see in the women's movement is actually a desire to support mums if that's what they want to do a respectful woman's choice so I think they largely avoided that trap and that's a great thing yeah agreed uh so now I want to talk about this idea of surplus man and what happens when they no longer really have a need to be the breadwinner especially if they're being outperformed by women so I'm going to keep anchoring this uh in my logic around okay you're having a biological experience this is like my obsession is to get people to understand that you you are living life through your brain and your brain works in a certain kind of way and male brains work a little differently than women there's way more overlap than there are differences but the differences end up mattering and so well it depends on the issue there's more overlap on some things than others that's very important I mean there's 95 of violent crime is committed by men uh so do you think that's a distribution problem meaning that so you have a tremendous amount of overlap in these things but the most violent things are going to happen at the tail or the tail yeah but there are some things like aggression sex drive risk-taking people things there's a whole series of Dimensions agreeable disagreeable where the distributions just overlap different amounts so the agreeable disagree oh you agree that's a personality trait thing agree that overlaps a lot right in fact I'm more agreeable than my wife right there you go said it now uh yes right so and that does but but aggression potential for a physical aggression that doesn't overlap very much and so yes you're right it's at the Tails but just doing it in everyday life just like this there's much less physical equation from women than there is from men so you I really like the fact you said they overlap but so the question is is not does this distribution overlap or not because they almost always do overlap the question is how much do they overlap and how much does it matter I am going to continue to Anchor around the idea of biology just to give myself a a thread to pull through all of this and I do understand that I am taking an extraordinarily complicated Topic in simplifying it but I think it will help people think through certainly it will help me as you check me in different areas so Surplus men could end up being Mad Max style has not been Mad Max style where probably we we have a new opiate for the male masses anyway in pornography and video games which hey give you a sense of like I did get laid see I'm okay and then I did and I did win at that competition right exactly so very interesting I don't yet know as somebody who plays video games and when my wife does not match up my libido is more than happy to dip into pornography it's like nah I I hesitate to say it's bad but at the same time I'm very good at self-regulation so yeah I don't end up having a problem I know a lot of people do yeah Okay so we've got this moment where you've got over how many hundreds of thousands or millions of years you want to Clock IT of evolution that's driving a slight differentiation between men and women you get men needing to be not needing to be but men are shaped because they can't breastfeed which is a choice that Evolution makes men can't breastfeed nor can they carry a baby to term but you need them for the genetic mixing that you get from sexual reproduction Okay cool so what is going to be their role and it becomes okay you're you're going to be optimized women you're going to be optimized for caring for infants so one of the things I find utterly fascinating I think it's 15 of women have a fourth photoreceptor so they can literally see colors that guys can't see it that one struck me because it is so obviously physiological like they just have an extra thing that guys don't have why might that be to be able to perceive changes in the skin color of their child to detect sickness early whatever I I don't know but that's one hypothesis that's that's interesting obviously having mammary glands and being able to produce milk like women are just optimized to have and care for children so now you've got guys that are oh God I don't know how much time to to spend on this I will say things quickly if there's anything you disagree with or or think I'm crazy about just let me know but men are basically the answer to the question of what do women want women are the sexual Gatekeepers and so the vast majority of reproduction comes from what women are willing to grant their sexual access to and so men are stronger an upper body men have the aggression all the things that you talked about okay so basically women are saying I need a partner which is my whole thing if if I were going to sum my thesis up it is men and women need each other and they need to shape each other okay so if at a societal level that shaping happens in evolutionary time frames being out in the savannah having to fight lines and stuff like that it's like okay I need you to be stronger more aggressive more willing to take risks all of that so that I can take care of the child you go out and do the more dangerous [ __ ] whether that's hunting protecting from other males in their tribe cool but that's what you're gonna do now as we evolve we build these very stable societies we are able to do all the things we can do in a modern context include separate sex from reproduction now women go into the labor force but now like they're still going to be able to have babies which is absolutely necessary and biology is going to be like oh my God you can breastfeed like this is amazing they're going to get all this biological reinforcement including the neurochemical flood the oxygen the kid yep but guys you can't breadwinn anymore or you don't necessarily need to yeah and by the way if you're going after it you're a bad person well you don't need to I think you so that you that it that final point you made which is that we don't necessarily need you to do that anymore so are men necessary I think who's it who wrote that book um uh Maureen Dowd I think wrote that book like are men necessary it's a terrifying question great question um and of course there are these kind of women-only Utopias right which you see all the way through from kind of Perkins through to Rick and there's a Rick and Morty episode right uh raising Gaza thought or something where there's like again it's like a it's an old Trope which is there's this kind of utopian female society and then the kind of savage men down there and they can make out the sperm um they solve the reproduction problem all male or the other and just kind of get rid of all those uh get rid of all those men so I think there's a few things going on here one is the the shaping you talk about the shaping of men and women of each other I look at it slightly more through the lens of parenting and so how the raising of the having and the successful raising of kids shapes us so I'm very influenced here by the worker Anna Machin who's an anthropologist at Oxford she wrote a book called The Life of dad and what she shows and there are other people have shown this too is that fatherhood really really was created when our brains went through that huge expansion and the years it took to get our kids to nutritional Independence but just came huge and the calorie requirements to get kind of a newborn to nutritional Independence suddenly became massive there's no way women could do it on their own and so if you wanted your kid to survive you kind of needed to be a dad and so I see this as kind of much more around reproduction and what happens to our Offspring and that that's kind of at an evolutionary level that's affecting a lot of our behavior and so then the question becomes like well what have you not need it anymore like what like why why do you need Dad when you have food stamps and you know women only 40 of women earning more than men and so we have to come up with a different answer to that same question and we have to find ways in which the natural tendencies of men say to be more risk-taking because you're right men are more risk-taking than women where does that go now we can't just suppress it we can't somehow expunge it right we can't take that out of men like an appendix all right just it's not some obsolete thing you can just sort of remove only if it comes in flame but otherwise it's just this kind of obsolete part of our evolutionary manipulate it and this is you can Channel it right but so do so do we want men to be risk-taking yes and no depends on the circumstances right so when I was running across in front of trucks or flipping doing some assaults uh over the side of a ski resort to see and they're hitting farm machinery and like no do you want people to kind of take risks in terms of starting businesses do you want people kind of willing to come be more adventurous Etc yes so that risk-taking appetite among among men is it good or bad is the wrong question it's when is it good and when is it bad and how can we find ways to channel it in ways that are more appropriate than others and that's that's not a new problem it's we have we have a new set of challenges around it but there's this line from Margaret Mead the Anthropologist which I've now used so much that I I've got it committed basically to memory which is every known Human Society has rested on the Learned nurturing behavior of men this Behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively I think that's exactly right so male nurturing and it doesn't mean necessarily one-on-one nurturing male nurturing can be a little bit more tribal it can be a little bit more for a bigger group but male nurturing matters right it has ancestrally it's mattered because it's different in tonality than female nurturing well it's not just more well you've made the point that kind of like women breastfeed there's the oxytocin thing there's a kind of a for very young children especially there's that kind there is a difference between the biological relationship between fathers and mothers of very young children where when I disagree with some of the conservatives on this is like that's not less true for 12 year olds in fact I'm reasonably convinced by the evidence that dads if anything have a bit of a competitive Advantage when it comes to adolescence so just because women like breastfeed for the first few months doesn't mean that they that's them for the next 25 years right yeah you're a mum that's the problem people over determine the biological difference turn it into roles and trap people with them rather and the other side say oh no there are there are no biological differences right so you just end up with this absurd situation where neither side makes any sense and so the question is like well okay what about the guys then well fatherhood still really matters just in a slightly different way so you you're still needed by your kids you still have to provide for your kids and by the way that could include materially right there aren't probably very many women out there that love the idea that men aren't going to do any more earning anymore right and in fact because this very interesting new uh recent evidence that shows that a big reason for the gender pay Gap is parenting we know that already right there's a difference between men and women's parenting but it's not just that mothers earn and work less it's that fathers earn and work more and that drives the gender pay Gap very significantly right so so actually fatherhood triggers more work my earnings among men right so the idea that that's come that that men you know the providing role of men is kind of somehow kind of behind us that's that's wrong it's just that they don't have exclusive access to it anymore but they also matter as dads they're a bit better at helping the kids take risks they may be a little bit better around some of physical stuff with sons I only have boys so I can only speak to three boys and a friend of ours said like well you've got boys and they're like dogs just run them out twice a day and you'll be fine it is a bit more complicated than that but there's some truth in that it's just the physical needs of boys and girls are a little bit different and Dad's actually are pretty good at all that so I guess my big Point here is that we are where we are in terms of the economic relationship between men and women we also are who we are in terms of our biology and so the question is what kind of culture do we need to create that recognizes biological differences without in any way making them determinative but without imagine they're not there which celebrates economic and economic greater economic equality between men and women but which nonetheless gives men a specific role to play in society and in their kids lives we are just beginning to answer that question in fact I honestly think through my own work some I have to persuade some people that's even a question that needs answering right which is there is a problem right now with boys and men and one of the sources of that problem is we don't have a new script for masculinity we've torn up the old one the breadwinning one we haven't replaced it but but actually masculinity doesn't invent itself and back to this point about the Fragile the Learned thing from Mead I think it's basically true that becoming a man mature masculinity positive masculinity is more learned more socialized than femininity women have a much clearer sequence of bile and their biological Milestones Etc there isn't there isn't quite if you look at the history of human cultures they've worked really hard around rights of Passage for men is that because they were patriarchies not mostly I don't think I think it's because humans have known forever that the challenge of turning boys into good man is a bigger cultural challenge than turning girls into young into women because we don't have quite the same biological markers and that is a task that every culture has taken very very seriously and I think it would be incredibly arrogant of us to think that we can be the first to cite Society in human history that doesn't have to pay attention to the way we turn boys into men I agree with that really aggressively so one of the I shouldn't say aggressively because that's very male of you I know which I love the funny thing is um I am I am more I am I don't know what the right way to say this is so I'll say it uh overly simplistic I'm more traditionally feminine than my wife and my wife is more traditionally masculine than I am and so us coming together has been really interesting in that we have a very easy time understanding each other because there's not this catastrophic difference like when I think of like an MMA fighter getting with somebody that you know all they want to do is play with dolls and have kids yeah it's like like that that could be a much tougher bridge to cross but when I was I guess right before I met my wife I read the book The Power of myth by Joseph Campbell and I sometimes get made fun of for this but I actually think it's one of the most important things that I did in my life which I read the book and he has a hypothesis in that that a big problem that we face is the breakdown of coming of age rituals yeah and there are no coming-of-age rituals in my own journey into entrepreneurship was one of toughening up of becoming more traditionally masculine of learning to be aggressive of learning to be disagreeable and it really really served me now the fact that I had to learn it means that I had skills on the other side of empathy connection all of that which has served me incredibly well as well but I realized I would not have gotten where I've gotten had I not developed those skills and so it got me thinking a lot about I didn't have a coming-of-age ritual my dad wasn't hyper involved he was married to my mom the whole time I was growing up last three weeks after I went to college so that tells you a little something great divorce yeah so it was um he was absent despite being physically there he worked in the garage a lot and all that so I didn't have a super strong male role model of what being a man looked like and he grew up without a father so it was like he didn't even uh he probably didn't know what to pass on or how to pass it on anyway so when I read this book The Power of myth hey these Coming of Age rituals are missing that really echoed true for me because of how I came up and so I'm thinking oh I am about to you know at some point in the near future hopefully we'll find somebody that I want to get married to and he also mentions book that he thinks part of the reason that 50 of marriages end in divorce is because there's similarly no really hardcore ritual of you were single and now you were married and you were different now forever and so as a part of getting married I got myself ritualistically scarred now the reason that people make fun of me is what it was was a tattoo now most people think of it as a tattoo but I'd not I only have one tattoo I absolutely at the time really had a hard time with needles and so for me it was facing a gigantic fear that I had I wanted it to be painful and I wanted it to be permanent and so was that was something of your wife was it today of course of course so I end up getting a tattoo designed which is she's Greek so it was her name in Greek and then in Greek the four words that were my basically promise to her and when I did it I said I want to lean into the fact that this is painful I want to be completely present with what I'm going through and as it's happening so I made her come with me but I did not want her to give me any comfort or Solace or anything like that I was like a don't distract me I want this to be painful and so going through that was between her and I a pact we will never joke about divorce or anything like that that's completely off the table barring this becoming Loveless or abuse on either side this is forever and not because we say words in front of friends because we believe that's the most logical saying to living a fulfilling amazing life but that it's necessary to walk through some kind of threshold for me and it's interesting because I didn't feel she needed to go through something like that as well because she was like you know should I get a tattoo and I was like no actually I don't it doesn't feel intuitively like there I was like if you want one obviously get one but it is not what I would want and so we did this whole thing and talked about it and that really laid a foundation for us where for me I knew there is no going backwards and there is no unwindingness there is only what is the path through what is the path to a loving long-lasting healthy relationship and so by conceptualizing it as a ritualistic scarification to remind myself that I am different tomorrow than I was today that we are married and it is it is a line in the sand that I'm never going to retrograde back across how interesting but I had to think of of it like that and I needed something to I needed to make a big deal out of something I needed it to you need to have a manager you needed this it's super interesting to me I mean first of all I think that there are lots of these different rights of Passage that that we kind of we all need and just at an anecdotal level I think things like the so I've been a scout leader uh in the past and so and things like you know that moving up from different Scout groups to another I remember one we used to do where they would bring a Cub Scout to a scout and they would literally they would have their kind of scout uniform on underneath their Cub uniform and they'd go into this kind of parachute thing and all everyone would line up and go into the parachute and they're going to parachute and take and they'd come out and they were a scout and they came out right they went in as a Cub Scout and came out as a scout right kind of sounds silly Etc but I remember doing that big deal right and so there's this kind of all of these these rituals what's interesting is the role of marriage I've been really struck by the fact that more American men say that marriage is important to them than American women do whoa women are twice as likely to initiate divorce as men post divorce men do much worse than women and so I think that is a very interested in your story that marriage as an institution is more important for men than for women that's really shocking that's so interesting it's so counterintuitive right it goes against the narrative The Narrative is well you know she dragged me into it and you know the guy's stagnally rolls his eyes and like and the The Narrative is that women are kind of trying to trap men into marriage right they find someone to marry and they obsess about their wedding day and all that and man are like reluctantly dragged in because we'd much rather be out on the Range being a cowboy or shooting whatever it is [ __ ] it actually turns out especially now that women are a bit more like yeah I couldn't there it might not marry et cetera and if he's not working out whereas for men actually that institutional anchor I think is becoming more important and super interesting to me that one of the results of the women's movement has been to make marriage more important for men but I also think it's because men don't have these alternative rights of Passage so becoming a mother still has a different impact for women than it does for men and I think that's going to remain true for for some time I would love fatherhood to have much more salience than it does and that's why I want more paid leave for dads and all that stuff I get into in the book but but I am super interested in like the deinstitutionalization of masculinity like there's there's a there's a sound bite for you that no one's ever going to use again on the bumper sticker what do we want the reinstitutionalization of masculinity when do we want it no this cat it is catchy isn't it I think you heard it here first and so what I mean by that is that actually many of the institutions through which actually men's roles were formed it could be a labor market could be Church it could be marriage they're actually kind of falling away and those are affecting men much more than women uh including marriage and so it's interesting to me that like the tattoo example is somewhat I think that some deep level what was happening there is you wanted to connect yourself to the institution in a way that felt just you know irrever you wanted to you wanted to embrace the institution you wanted to become part of the institution you wanted to step into the institution and that took more than just a saying of a few vows you needed something more than that to mark that institutional marker and I think that just generally there are fewer and fewer those for men in our society now and that's a problem to Campbell was right to that extent yeah I am I'm I met a really weird intersection of uh as an entrepreneur governmental tinkering bothers you um as a podcaster who's trying to think well through these things and um you get confronted with oh God this tinkering work but then at the same time as a person in the world with people that you love and care about you're like thank God the government exists and that they you know do their best to come up with policies to help people and think ah there's a safety net and that people aren't you know just like well you got blindsided sorry yeah so but I while I think it is important and I am very much not the uh tear it all down and let's hope the thing that we build back is better I do worry that people aren't being thoughtful enough that tinkering in and of itself is the finding the fence in the middle of the field and going I think it'd be a bit better like this and then you realize oh we just made it so things could crawl underneath it or we made it shorter and now things can leap over it and we didn't realize what the second and third order consequences we didn't think through what the role of that institution was before we tore it down exactly that's the difference between a revolutionary and a reformer I think yes and so when I think about where these to call it an institution makes me uneasy because going back to biology this stuff was born very naturally over very long periods of time from what do you say an institution what are you talking about marriage specifically or anything or this monogamous marriage is a very recent invention interesting so 95 of human societies have been polygamous and only 50 of men historically have reproduced so that's crazy twice as many of our ancestors are female as well so sorry walk me through 95 so when you polygamy is the norm as in this is the actual structure of our society is like yeah guys have more than one wife yeah yeah it's always almost always been polygeny which is men having multiple wives not the other way around that's what we mean by that but but yeah it's important I think when we have these discussions about what's traditional marriage what traditional Society is to recognize that across the Arc of evolutionary history which is I think the the the this ban that you're interested in monogamous marriage just yes it was invented yesterday largely by the Christian church and then kind of spread across the world you know from there and that's been huge in terms of its cultural impact and one of the reasons by the way that men probably have an evolutionary higher appetite for risk is because actually if you only had a 50 chance of reproducing ancestrally it was worth taking risks to try and get into the 50 who were going to reproduce you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today okay I don't know these stats well enough but I'm gonna push on some what my intuition is telling me so the only way for men to be polygamous is that if they're able to acquire resources in such disproportion that your as a woman rather than going to a relationship where you can have all of that one man and the things that you would rather have a smaller percentage of how on Earth is that possible pre-agriculture Chiefs tribal Chiefs I mean Genghis Khan for example this is the most famous example like yeah but even that those really spring up non-god I want to fully acknowledge that I'm outside of what I understand so the the status hierarchy of men was what led them to have like multiple wives at the top of the hierarchy and none at the bottom 100 000 years ago that seems impossible absolutely this is across across human history absolutely yeah yeah so but there's a debate as to whether human societies are more than technological societies of more than 10 or 20 sure so there's going to be a bit of a discussion here as to like what counselors quotes a society and in order for us to know the stat I just gave you about polygament I'm quoting from Joe Henrik there again we have to know about that Society so we have to have kind of we have to have evidence for it so that's by definition a more recent one so you're right and I don't want to be I don't want to get the kind of starting date wrong for this but to the extent that we've know about human society so the societies we know about 95 of them have been polygamous now to very different degrees of course right so there's there's a world where like one guy gets all of the women and there's a world where you know women and men get one of each and everything in between but it does generate this issue of the kind of the historic problem the math problem of surplus man was actually one that kind of every society had uh under under conditions of polygamy because if one guy has multiple wives by definition that means there's a bunch of guys who don't have who don't have a wife uh and it was monogamy that came along and quote solved solved that problem um and so that and actually Henrik and others are really good about saying look everyone says of course men would love this right they roll their eyes and say yeah of course member life of course men are in favor of anything don't be too careful to assume that there are not some advantages to those societies including for women and so to put it very bluntly in a modern context if you went to the average woman and said okay you can be the third wife of Jeff Bezos or the only wife of an unemployed steel worker damn what you're going to choose and it might depend on your view of marriage Etc but I've tried that question on a lot of women and they're like yeah interesting right um that is terrifying it's terrifying because of my world wife is terrifying um when I look at it when I look at it I am I'm really unnerved by that it isn't easy to dismiss and go oh I I want to say you're better off as the wife of an unemployed steel worker but I would actually if it were my sister I would hesitate yeah I know I thought I mean I mean at the same time obviously not Third Kind of uh consecutively it's I find this very interesting in light of the rise in polyamory and kind of what's happening to relationships now uh and sort of seeing where kind of we're ending up plus there is all this discussion of what happens on dating apps for example so dating apps have been and you probably know this but they've been kind of quite well studied and there is something a kind of Winner Takes all Dynamic that happens on those dating apps and so you do see like some you know a small percentage of the guys getting a disproportionate share of the dates and so it's not that's a kind of like a little microcosm if you like of that kind of society where actually a very high status male can end up with many more women in this case just dates and so on too leaving lots of other men without any women and that's a that's a kind of debate that's happening in the manosphere is a lot of about in cells kind of Etc and there's a lot of grievance honestly around kind of what's Happening most of which I don't think is Justified but but nonetheless it's interesting in the context of this kind of biological history yeah to say this is interesting that is uh an understatement I want to go back to this because you've really you're you're helping me identify base assumptions that I have so everybody is a slave to their frame of reference my phrase uh your frame of references your values beliefs base assumptions so this is how I am this is how the world Works often those beliefs are invisible to people they don't even realize that they don't see the frame yeah so they're they can't see your own frame exactly yes and when you said that about being the third wife of Jeff Bezos man that's really so that's made me confront something so I'm realizing now that my base assumption is that a thriving relationship between uh two people that love each other because I don't even need it to be men and women that just happens to be from an evolutionary standpoint the default the vast majority of people end up there um so but that that relationship with my wife has been the most unbelievably nurturing and soul-affirming thing in the world so I have a subroutine that runs in my brain that as long as I have my wife everything's gonna be okay and that's allowed me to take tremendous risks and try things from a place of security rather than from a place of like because a lot of the risk-taking behavior I think you will agree with this a lot of the risk-taking behavior that men display are because they're from an evolutionary standpoint they're trying to win access to females yes I already have that and I it's possible I get blindsided one day and realize my wife's been unfaithful this whole time but I really really doubt it and so I'm not trying to win over access to a woman I have a woman it's a a very emotionally nourishing experience and yet it also manifests in a way that has me taking bigger risks and trying different things and so when we talk about what is the the moving forward script for men in a way that does not replace breaks on women which I will just say emphatically I'm on that team I want to see women Thrive I want to see men Thrive as well and I think that one thing I'm always trying to get guys I'm so curious to see how you respond to this I'm trying to get guys to be more aggressive and that I don't want women I absolutely despise any human being this is all slowed down so you can lead I want people to go as hard as they possibly can but with love in your heart for other people when you say that you want uh so I yes I largely agree with all that but I want to I'd love to hear more when you say that you're encouraging guys to be more aggressive what do you mean by that and give me some specific examples yeah thank you because I'm sure people will misread my intent so uh I want to see people try to push their skill set as far as humanly possible to get as good as possible to pour as much time and energy into an honorable goal as they can muster uh I think it is very important that people have a crystal clear goal that that goal be exciting to them meaning it's just something that they're interested in and honorable meaning that it's serving not only themselves but other people and in that frame I want to see people maximize every second of their day now to me all of that needs to be in service of fulfillment it is the only um resilient mental state so happiness does not survive a period of mourning so you will have no happiness while in mourning okay but you can still have fulfillment in mourning so I I really like this and I what I would do my friendly Amendment would be to maybe change the language a little bit because when you say more about that we see more aggressive I know what you're doing with that but people can mishear that and say okay what does he mean they're physically aggressive and it gives me a chance to talk about something I don't get the chance to talk about very much so thank you for opening this this particular door which is to talk about agency going for it that sense of purpose having kind of wind in your sales being under your own steam like certainly when I've raised my own kids the thing I've always just thought is like are they under their own steam are they going for something it doesn't matter what it is so one of my sons for example dropped out of college to become an Esports coach in Las Vegas which was his live stream so he's calling me up say Dad should I do this you know I'm going to get paid well and all this I'm going to get an apartment in Las Vegas and be a professional Esports coach but I have to drop out because I have to stop out of college for a while I mean of course you should do that that's your dream and maybe he would have carried on doing that but it was his dream and he was he was purposeful so agency purpose drive just a sense of like going for itness is I think what I think that's what you're talking about 100 and what's what's interesting is that you see less of that now in men than in women so some of the kind of data points saying that women are more likely to move than men in search of opportunity more like a movie that's crazy more likely to move more likely to go abroad more like to study abroad more likely to volunteer for America more likely to go for the Peace Corps more likely to be the first to buy their own buy their own home less likely to be living at home with their parents in their 20s so take if you take these kind of measures of agency let's call it that actually kind of men are falling behind and I think there's a bunch of things going on there I think one is that it turns out the the old scripts for what men and women were supposed to do actually as we took them away it turns out men really needed them what they're actually now being asked to do is what you're asking them to do which is like have more agency like go for it and the men I'm most worried about are not the ones who are acting out they get the attention right January 6th is kind of like the stereotypical example but men who are acting out it's the men who are checking out that worry me and who are actually becoming quite passive uh who in some ways don't have a clear sense of where they're going a lot of young women will say how frustrated they are very often by that among men and I'll give you one more example on this which is there's a a question that's asked in in the Pew survey and lots of other surveys which is asking men and women what they're looking for in a potential mate and one of the things women always say is breadwinning potential they're much more likely to say that than the other way around and a lot of people say you see even women still want men to have that traditional role and this one female colleague of mine said something to me years ago that made me absolutely stop in my tracks she said no no that question breadwinning potential is a proxy for have you got your acts together are you with me are you a part are you gonna be a partner shoulder to shoulder maybe I'll be the breadwinner for a while but you're going to be raising the kids and you're going to be doing it well or you're going to volunteer or you're going to try right now my wife's doing a startup like she's trying that maybe at work maybe it won't I've tried various things we try it out Etc and back to your point about the security of someone else someone on your team women are saying I want a guy that's with me that has agency that has purpose that has a goal for himself that's propelling himself forward in the world and maybe by the way that means he'll be the breadwinner for a while but it doesn't necessarily mean that so underneath all of these questions I think it's just this sense of agency purpose Direction I think that's what you're talking about and that there aren't I think now because men aren't quite sure how to be they're kind of sure what they're supposed to not do now there's a long list of don'ts for men but they're not quite sure what they're supposed to do and in some ways there's a danger and I hear I've gotten a bit of a limb and say sometimes in these discussions there's a bit of a danger of almost pathologizing mail agency oh yes for women to lean in men have got to lean out and we kind of need men to get out of the way and if you can stop mansplaining please shut up get out of the way Etc and that's in my view incredibly damaging we don't need to suppress male agency in order to support female agency as a false choice and it seems like that is proving out like this is this is why I'm trying to get people to understand it is so gross to say slow down so I can lead you want people going all out trying to be the best that they can be in a loving and compassionate way I'm not saying be a dick and step on somebody's neck like I'm saying go all life is quite sure yes yes and so getting people to come around to you've in a marriage you have to want your partner to win as a species you need your you need to want your partner to win you need to want everybody to shine and figure out like hey what would make you happy like what do you want to pursue and let's figure out how we do that but when it it gets adversarial and this is what freaks me out about modern dating if I could be a dad for a second I will just tell everybody hey I get it guys maybe you're not feeling good uh between hypergamy and the way the dating apps are set up and the internet and all that you really do get a winner take all scenario and a very thin slice of men at the top or getting women and it's breaking down into monogamies falling apart yada yada okay I get it but the only reason that these relationships work is because it's a partner it's somebody to contend with it's somebody that helps you think better and pushes you to be better and you push them to do better to meet you like Toe to Toe yeah yes and that was exactly there was a moment this is very personal now but there was a moment for me and my wife in when we were in therapy and we're talking about the issues we're having and I was talking about how supportive I've been of her career how I'd help raise the kids and all of that and she looked me in the eye and said you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough that's not the problem the problem is you're not masculine enough wow what did she mean hence the rest of the therapy and honestly I think that comment I think it may have saved our marriage well because well what do you mean by that and she said you're not stating your own needs clearly enough you're being too passive you're you think you need to get out of the way you're not stepping up enough you're not meeting me as an equal I had fallen into the Trap of thinking that you know being a good feminist being a good male feminist being a good Ally whatever language you want to use meant that I had to somehow shrink myself and not be very good at declaring my own needs going for my own goals Etc that I had I had denuded myself of some of my own agency and she didn't want that she wanted someone to contend with to use your language and I realized that that was exactly what happened and actually that's it was incredibly healing for us to to realize that and I'll be honest I think that's probably one of the things that's led me down the journey to look at what's happening to boys and men generally because at the risk of taking my own frame and using it that sense of like having of just shrinking ourselves having to be less somehow it's really caught I think a lot of men in that situate boys and men in that situation and so we haven't got this empowering joyful liberating exciting script about how great it is to be a guy uh and how here is the way to be a guy we don't have that and I think that has left a lot of us um struggling in various ways so I'm just giving you that very intimate portrait but I think that more structurally and more culturally there's this issue of what I can only describe as a lack of male agency and that's a problem and women don't want that and it's bad for men and it's bad for society but we've got ourselves into a position where somehow we are somewhat shrinking I think this this sense of we're a bit suspicious of male agency and of course there are very good reasons historically why male agency has sometimes been bad Etc but I'm really worried that we're overdoing it and that we're sending now a kind of message to too many boys and young men the their own agency is less important and it's not I am gobsmacked by that I want to breathe until you finish that point that's so powerful and uh because it resonates so profoundly with me and the journey that I had to go on where it's like yes if you want to be good at that because for me it really came through business if you want to be good at this thing you are going to have to get and they didn't it wasn't like it was you have to get more mail it was like you have to be more aggressive you have to it's a great movie called Rush about these two I forget the names of the drivers but these two race car drivers went back and forth yeah and one of them said the second you don't look for The Gap to try to get your car in front like you're lost retire immediately yeah and that's what I had to learn how to do was and shooting that Gap is risky and there it's so easy to not and I am I I really believe in the phrase that leaders make great leaders and so on my team I'm constantly trying to empower other people to step up to be leaders and finding people that will shoot that Gap that will own this was my decision and if it works we can at me on the back and if it fails then we can say you made a poor decision you did not execute this well and then letting them understand that you're and this is the difficulty of The Human Experience that now you're on a razor's edge of this is a quote unquote safe space to try to shoot that Gap and if you miss it none of us are going to be like you're an [ __ ] we're going to be like hey you really tried something you did it well well done yeah but if you miss that Gap every time you'll lose your job and so it's like God like contending with that is really hard but the reality is we will go out of business if I as the CEO shoot that Gap and miss too many times we go out of business and so there is but if you don't go for it at all you won't be a great business what's interesting back to where uh you know some time ago talking about appetite for risk right everything else equal it's pretty clear the risk taking tends to be more associated with men than for women again distributions usually overlapping right as your own experience shows you it's not not that that all men to say that all men are more risk-taking in the room is like saying all men are taller than all women right it's just insane but nonetheless given that that's the case it's interesting to see what in some ways you'd see as a risk aversion among a lot of boys and young men now in the spaces you'd want to see it like entrepreneurship going to college is at risk right there's Financial risks Etc asking someone out is a risk right there's all kinds of risks moving home moving to a different city for a job that's a risk and women are taking those risks more than men now so where's that risk-taking appetite among men going if it's not being expressed in there's other ways now it's still true in entrepreneurship et cetera too but I worry a little bit that it's being sublimated maybe into games maybe into kind of something else and that's not I'm I'm with you I don't think isn't bad with video gaming not least because they paid my son well for a while but but but there's nothing bad about that but I worry a little bit that we are we're not promoting healthy risk-taking among men in society in the economy in dating Etc and that's that's in the end that's kind of bad for all of us so where's it going maybe it's being suppressed and that's not good if it's a natural tendency to take risks because maybe it'll go somewhere else maybe it'll go to drug taking or some other kind of risk taking that's really not healthy so what does healthy male risk taking look like in our modern society that's the question that we're not really answering very well yeah I want to talk about that in a grander way so you talked about men needing a script so if masculinity done well is far less tied to biological cues because I still think it is tied to biology in terms of the male brain works a certain way but there isn't that immediate reinforcement of child rearing um how do we get that script right well in a way that's the huge question that I'm personally grappling with which is what is what is a script for positive masculinity look like today in a world of gender equality and I think it's incredibly important that it has both the aspects of being positive like there are aspects of masculinity that are positive but it also has to be recognizably masculine I think there's someone's a tendency when newer people talk about non-toxic masculinity or positive masculinity they're very often when you ask them what do you mean by that they'll say you know emotional availability vulnerability Compassion Care emotional accessibility willingness to cry you're like wait are we still talking about masculinity because I think actually that sounds a lot like femininity and that's that's a form of gender appropriation and again it's not to say that everyone's like oh this is these things overlap but but to work this has to be recognizably something that kind of you know on average boys and men are going to resonate with it's like yeah this is my lived experience this is what it's like to be in my body this is what it's like to be me um but I do think that building it around fatherhood is huge I think the acknowledging and embracing it's good to maybe have a bit more appetite for risk even and this is a much more difficult area recognizing that men have a higher sex drive than women right driven sexuality is the technical term but like managers like sex is a bigger deal for men right in terms of like them I miss I miss phrase that not a bigger deal in some ways a bigger deal for women for The evolutionary reasons you talk about but but men are more driven by sex right more of their behavior Etc um is that a good or a bad thing answer yes it is a good and a Bad Thing depending on how it's expressed and so on but finding ways to say that actually the desire of men for women the sexual desire of men for women is a good thing not a bad thing and then helping boys and men to express that appropriately is incredibly important so one of the things that I have tried to raise my sons to be like is to be courageous enough to ask a girl out gracious enough to accept no for an answer and then responsible enough to make sure that either way she gets home safely and to me that's a world that we want all of our men and boys to be in I think which is absolute equality between men and women in total respect for the kind of autonomy and opportunities of each but a willingness to take a risk um and one of the things I've noticed is that there isn't really good language for this so I was talking to someone about this the other day and we ended up talking about courtship and chivalry and shipwreck dances and literally because I know where you're going with this dancing disaster what's the new language for this because you end up sounding like a 17th century you know French night what do you mean about dance and disaster I found this really well there's this great line from this is from 1930 the Headmaster of Stowe school which is a boys school in England he said that his goal was to create men who would be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck and I was asked to update that recently I was like I I don't know um cool a rave but useful and uh in an earth I don't know actually you know what he means that stands the test of time acceptable at adults okay so socialized in a way where you understand the rules of the game come absolute respect for women Etc know about courtship know know when it's appropriate to approach when it's not it's what's going on there right but just having that skill right being a gentleman there you go now I stand at least 19th century not 17th century Etc but knowing how to conduct yourself right knowing how to be around women knowing how to know Etc but then invaluable in a shipwreck yeah when things go south and there's a really dangerous physically dangerous situation that you are you are willing to put yourself on the line um and if necessary sacrifice yourself for others absolutely that you will do what needs to be done um I I I I got to tell you that that sounds pretty good to me and there aren't very many women who I've shared that with who say that's a terrible thing like when you say to them do you want guys who are acceptable at a dance but would it be invaluable in a shipwreck there aren't very many women that say no that sounds terrible right they get it they understand what that means what's the flip side for women though because I think there's something very telling I'm not I I don't need a woman to be invaluable in the shipwreck in fact if I'm completely honest in that moment I go to the Disposable Male hypothesis absolutely you want to be the one that's invited yeah and that makes me feel good about this there's a reason why most of the women survive the Titanic give me the percentages you listen in the book don't have a 19 male and 70-something percent female and I was like whoa I don't know the exact number but here's like when I heard I was scandalized by the 19 I was like most of the men died yeah how did that but meaning what were the 19 they got on the boat there were 30 women that didn't make it so you would think it was a lot more than 19 by the way but but another example of that is the um I mentioned this two in the book and here I actually I I learned this from Carol hooven who has a book on testosterone do you know that book I don't it's called tea uh the story of the uh hormone that just defines and divides us or whatever song and a fabulous book about testosterone you actually you'd really like it she actually alerted me to the existence of the Carnegie civilian hero Awards yeah you talked about that in the book I I mean who's heard of that so they've been going for nearly 100 years now and they they issue medals every year to people who have risked their own lives not for their own family or in the course of their job to save the lives of another so this is people running into a burning building to save someone this is people jumping into a freezing River to save someone this is this is someone who's just like everyday life something happens do you put yourself on the line do you risk your own life to save the lives of others and almost all men 95 of those medals go to men and it's not because they're not trying to find women they are it's just because if you're looking for a there's one um kid um a 17 year old who died in 2021 he dived into a freezing River saved a mother and her three-year-old child but then drowned himself and many of them do die in the attempt so they're awarded posthumously they're all guys uh and it seems to me that that's something that we should really honor that actually in the breach there are that it is men who run into burning buildings to save strangers and that's back to the risk-taking thing and the kind of the men being put themselves on the line thing that is a obviously a tragic thing but wow what a wonderful thing but no one's heard of these awards they're never held at the White House there's never a discussion of them and I think partly that's because we're still just a little bit um we have some ambiguity about celebrating the aspects of masculinity that are pro-social and that's a huge problem because it makes a lot of young boys and men fear that Society is not on their side doesn't care about as much of them isn't valorizing them that creates a vacuum in our culture that I'm afraid irresponsible forces both online and sometimes even a Ballot Box can exploit I think it's it's an axiom the if there are real problems and responsible people don't address them irresponsible people will exploit them and I also think it's true that the demand for a story about positive masculinity is huge and it will find Supply and it will probably find it online and so if we don't like the people that our boys and men end up listening to and reading when they ask themselves the question how should I be a man today then maybe we should be providing a better answer ourselves yeah that's in line with Biology because there is a picture that some people will paint for men which is what you were talking about where they're listing all these things that sound like femininity and it's like if you try to hold that up as a thing to be celebrated you get this sort of nice guy phenomenon where you've got a guy who's trying to be nice but in reality like there's some sex drive in there and so that can create some weird conflict and he's hyper feminizing himself but he's doing it partly and I don't want to be cynical but partly because he wants to get laid like there's just there's a real driver for guys like even in myself yeah and and I will say that um I was not like I wasn't doing it as a way to manipulate women at all but I really was trying to be what they wanted so in my early years I was really bad with women really bad with women I'll share a very uh embarrassing story though some people will probably clap but I was literally in bed with a woman we're getting naked the whole nine oh God keep going and it's just you and me no one's yeah right no one's watching oh no it'll be fine it'll be fine uh and I said let's not do this if it doesn't mean anything to you now I did not say that because I was truly worried about it I said it because I thought she was going to be more excited and then she was like yeah let's stop then and so then I was like oh I guess was I can't believe that's true that is a true story and so that was the end and because I didn't know how to recover from that because I was like wait I thought this is exactly what was the right move at this point and two the story that you shared earlier she did not need me to be a greater Ally to women what she needed was for me to be a man right and so I just wanted you to want her that much correct and so it's like you can't imagine how much how many more years it took me to go oh now I get why that was like the wrong play but it was baffling in the moment because of that dance and because of that like this this the magic of the difference and the kind of the the courtship and the differences that there are between men and women I actually think that the the failure to acknowledge some of these differences between men and women when it comes to especially when it comes to sex and how and how sex and how a sex drive gets institutionalized expressed you know all the just the elaborate rituals like acceptable Advance Etc that have been created is for a reason it is actually to make it work right to make to make these differences between men and women magic when it comes to that but we can't just assume that we're just they're just going to go away and I've been very interested recently how many books are being written by women of very different political Persuasions Erica bakayoki Christine Ember and Louise Perry for example which are really kind of coming out from a largely feminist perspective against the sex positivity movement which they say has essentially been about saying to women yeah you need to be like men and if you're not like men you're a prude um and that actually and basically failing to recognize that there are some differences between men and women on this point and so there's this real movement now and you think you see it playing out in the stats around sex uh particularly 20-somethings having less sex today than they were and I think part of this is just actually a lot of women are like hold on a second hold on hold on like we're not like men on average when it comes to sex some women are more like men some men more like women the distributions overlap but there's a pretty big difference in the kind of psychology of sex for men and women they're just they're just is and then how does that work when it's magic it works really well but it doesn't work by itself we have to have elaborate institutions and rules and forms and courtships and Etc uh in order to kind of make it work and in fact like what was like I don't know 70 of literature is probably based on that I was really struck recently actually that um there's been an increase in the interest of gen Z women uh for romantic literature they're reading more Romance do we know what kind of romance are reading like is it traditional Pirates werewolves yeah yeah I mean it's quite traditional in this kind of sense and and again I find that just that's sociologically interesting isn't it it's like okay so what's happening there and you might I think it's reasonable to speculate that it might because maybe that's missing a little bit in contemporary Society right where's that where's the romance even saying romance makes makes you sound uh you know that ship sailed anyway I've said chivalry I've said courtship I've said right but but Romance seriously but that's considered outdated I think among some people doesn't it sound old-fashioned I mean it's like you know making love I remember once being teased by a colleague of mine when when I I had used the phrase making love and she said like you mean having sex so old you're so old making love who makes love right what are you talking about you should do you mean having sex and that was a real moment for you I thought no I no I actually mean making love um but that sounds like a really semantic difference but actually of course we get it right it is making love and it can sometimes be having sex right and it's in the kind of the two and how the how how does having sex become making love and when and how and maybe this was partly what you were getting at the your story which I'm grateful for you sharing because I think a lot of men will probably resonate with that story um like I'm trying to do the right thing and the result is I don't get laid um and so I think we we're in danger of just missing the fact that these these things just don't happen by themselves right you're you've been emphasizing throughout this conversation the importance of kind of our biological you know hard drives or whatever kind of language or I use I think that there's a real danger we miss that but I think it's incredibly important that the interaction between biology and culture is where the really interesting work is it's how do cultures interact with our biology in ways that make for flourishing lives for everybody men and women what kind of culture do we need that allows us all to flourish even in a world where there are these kind of differences and that's that's a question that's probably as old as Humanity itself but it's one that we're having we have to ask differently all the time I'm having to ask it differently again so to that extent there's nothing new here we're just having to ask the question again which is okay what does it mean and now we're having to ask it in a world where as we've discussed huge economic changes in power relationships between men and women okay so what do all these things mean now and we have to come up with better answers than the ones we've come up with but even before that we have to agree it as a question and right now I'm not sure that everyone agrees that there's even a question which is to be answered yeah I think one of the most important things to get to that that we have to cover is what is good like both of us have um made assumptions throughout this about oh we should do that we ought to do that whatever but that's predicated on an assumption of what what the desired outcome is and this is something that I find most people never take the time to pull into their conscious mind so if you had to describe the thing that we're striving towards at the highest level just to orient to what I'm asking at the highest level um I think we ought and I use that as a moral statement we ought to always be steering towards what creates the most human flourishing and reduces human suffering yes now as we shrink down to this topic of the relationship between the genders um what ought we be striving towards what is good well I think that I think you've framed it exactly correctly which is around human flourishing but then the question is like well what does that look like for particular people and here I'm going to draw on some of my my earlier intellectual underpinnings which is John Stuart Mills liberalism my Mills biographer and Mill's view about flourishing is that it has to be back to your point about going for it autonomous so it has to be to some extent driven right it has to be about individuality not individualism well individualism is I'm just all about me right and so my world view just says that I'm gonna be it's essentially selfish would be a kind of reasonable way to think about it or a kind of world where you just think it's every man for himself Hobbs war of all against all individuality is a description of the fact that everybody is different and these different things to flourish they're biologically different they're culturally different they're just made differently their genes are different their interests are different their tastes are different their preferences are different and Mills insistence on individuality is what drove him to being kind of a full liberal and by the way I would argue that probably the most important 19th century feminist certainly in the in the UK but that individuality that being who I am and growing this sense of growth just intrinsic to liberalism properly understood but I but also to lots of theologies by the way I mean I think like a good a lot of good theologies are all about growth in that case it would be growing towards God in Mill's case it would be just growing to being the better version of yourself and some of this sounds quite schlocky right I'm aware of that right be the best person you can be Etc but actually like it is just this sense of it's about development and it's about growth and it's about reaching it's very organic that means that we have to have a real understanding of our own nature and that includes our bodies our biology and our brains and our skills and our culture and our upbringing and our relationships like who I am in the world right am I am am I an animal yes absolutely right am I sitting here I need to pee as it happens right so I'm being reminded right now that I'm an animal because I need to pee okay so like the fact that my bladder is telling me you need to pee good reminder that I'm an animal all right uh but I'm also a in a in a culture where I'm just not going to get out and pee here right I'm going to go to a restroom I've been taught by culture you're welcome um so I'm going to go kind of somewhere else just about it's about the cut the culture will tell me in another culture by the way I'll just go and pee over there right so this culture but then by the way there's also me Richard and I'm and I might decide I'm not going to pee now because I'm trying to hold it for some reason and extend my whatever reason and so this the triangle of biology culture and individual is where flourishing occurs and we want to get to a society where as much as possible the individual within a culture has the opportunity to flourish but you don't have to eradicate biology and you don't have to LEAP past culture so some people would say Blank Slate biology doesn't matter other people would say culture is the problem let's erase it all let's just have a revolution right those would be the kind of you know the French revolutionaries or whoever it is Etc in order for the individual to flourish and I actually think that the real the the real sweet spot is in recognizing that all three of those matter yeah that seems profoundly true so now the question becomes though one of those the biology takes care of itself at least for now Gene editing is going to be a thing but that's beyond the scope of this conversation um the individual is the part I most want to talk about but Society is the hammer that scares me so one of the things I want to know are you quite libertarian would that be a focus no actually I thought I on paper I feel like I should be a Libertarian but I'm so enmeshed in reality that I'm like dude if you don't have some guideposts if you don't have people nudging each other in the right direction it's just you're not going to scale like that probably works when we're you know in hunter-gatherer bands of 100 to 150 right but I consider modern society to be a miracle that I want to continue to be a part of and so very much I'm I am all for uh government well manicured the problem is that I think governments like anything can go pathological and so the way that I see it is everything is on a scale and you government will be the easiest one to talk about so you have the left and the right the left can become pathological and the right can become pathological and both sides go towards tyranny and so our job as as people that are just historically aware and and understand that history is driven biology in my estimation and so it's like okay understand thy selves as a species understand thy structures and know that up you can slam to this side if you haven't read Mao the untold story like if you want a real picture of how the left goes so pathological that a hundred plus million people die terrifying and then obviously the right and the way that it goes wrong is so very well documented thanks to Hitler and a bunch of other Psychopaths and so it's like we understand that there is pathology but if we can understand that the pathologies are on both sides and so now we have to find it isn't even just the middle what you're trying to find in my estimation is the tension between two ideologies I think there is a biological reason that we have a left and a right and I think that biological reason is that for a society to scale the way that we do and you've all know a harari's idea of we're the only animal that can cooperate flexibly at this scale okay so how is it that we do that I think we do that the evolution goes you need two things one is compassion people can't be left to just die like you have to look out for the group otherwise you're not going to have any social cohesion so Nature has rewarded The Living Daylights out of us for being willing to jump into a freezing River to save somebody that we don't even know like that's beautiful when I hear that story I moved and all of that biology that makes me respond so powerfully to the story that makes that guy jump into the river it's amazing and it's super important but hey there's pathology on that side which is the group is the only thing that matters and you decimate the individual so then you have to have on the other side the people that go whoa free rider problem you can't just let the group override the individual the individual is the thing that we need to care about it's about personal responsibility and my thing is there's pathology on that side so now what you need is the dynamic tension between the two this is why my marriage is strong because my wife and I came into this and I said hey I think differently than you you think differently than me but the way you think is worthy and thank God you think differently to me and the way I think is worthy and thank God I think differently than you so what I'm never going to do is say oh you're an idiot the way that you think is done you have to be like me yeah I'm gonna say hey so you want the Dynamics your marriage is this it's just an example Lewis a liberal pluralist Society in the sense of like recognizing that difference I like the way you framed it and the way I think about this now is that the that both you get the status left and the status right to user in our director the goal is seize the state and enforce our view of the good right and turns out to be bad but like that's our view right we have to we're gonna we're gonna have a society conform to our view of the good or the human nature or whatever and then there's the stereotypically kind of anarchic or libertarian view which is like get everybody out of the way no one judges anybody else as long as I don't harm somebody else I can do whatever the hell I want but what's really really important is culture so in between the coercive power of the state and the kind of quotes atomized individual is culture the interaction that's um it's what's the uh the phrase from there's this beautiful book if you're an egalitarian how come you're so rich by Jerry Cohen it's a fantastic book and in there he says cultures are created in the thick of everyday life and I love that phrase because that diet is the thick of everyday life in the interaction in the relationships in the institutions we build Etc which might then end up with legal Force Etc but culture is what moderates expresses incentivizes rewards certain kinds of behavior such that if cultures are healthy you don't need as much law it's when cultures are failing that you need stronger States but it's not because just the individuals are doing their own thing so these Carnegie hero the guy going into the river right he gets this civilian hero what the government doesn't do anything his parents don't get a tax break no one pays him to jump in the river right there's no public policy for jumping into a freezing River To Save Somebody But nor would someone do that in a society that's truly just about the individual why would you save a stranger right and the answer is partly biology but that's the result of culture and culture and biology co-evolve in such a way that that kind of behavior is rewarded and rewarding and so both both sides in these debates not least when you have a cultural War are actually in some ways disrespectful of culture because what they're not doing is saying let's allow our culture to develop because cultures are really good at developing to chain like as and it has to develop now to accommodate these differences between men and women right this is where I'm going to end which is like actually it's culture that's going to save us it's culture that's going to help men and women to succeed but the culture Warriors they're not interested they don't trust culture they just want to take the culture and force it on somebody else they're not fighting over culture in that sense they're fighting for culture and that's exactly their own kind of culture War Richard this has been amazing where can people find you I have a sub stack of boys and men uh and so I'd love people to subscribe to that newsletter please do everybody and speaking of subscribing if you haven't already be sure to subscribe to this Channel and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace click here now to learn why this generation of men is struggling and feeling lost I honestly think that you could look at a man on the street now point at him and have a 50 chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year that's it's what we want is for women to have partners that they are fundamentally attracted

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 65,120

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men, tombilyeu, Conversations with Tom, Health Theory, mindset, podcasts, how to be successful, entrepreneur, gender debate, male inequality, masculinity, gender equality, feminism, marriage

Id: _2ZK9Y7QSmU

Length: 96min 22sec (5782 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023