The Four Dos and Don'ts of Divorce | Warren Farrell | EP 187

why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book the title of your book refers to something that is real and and if it's real why aren't we attending to it and why is it important yeah well first of all it's real um because in all 56 of the largest developed Nations boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject including reading and writing which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure as you can probably imagine um and so and and boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school and boys in general are much more likely to drop out of high school especially in the United States and boys who drop out of high school are more than 20 percent likely to be unemployed in their 20s this is a statistic before covid when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4 versus more than 20 percent for for boys [Music] thank you hello everyone I'm pleased to be talking today with Dr Warren Farrell who I spoke with three years ago almost to the day about his previous book why why men earn more we're going to talk today about the boy crisis which was published just after our last interview so that's in 2018. Dr Warren Farrell was chosen by the financial times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders his books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 different languages they include the New York Times bestseller why men are the way they are which must be a very thick book plus the international bestseller the myth of male power is most recent is the boy crisis we mentioned why men earn more as well which is a very good book his most recent is the boy crisis as I said 2018 co-authored with John Gray the boy crisis was chosen as a finalist for the forward Indies award which is the independent Publishers award Dr Farrell has been a Pioneer in both the women's movement elected three times to the board of the National Organization of Women in New York City and the men's movement called by GQ Magazine the Martin Luther King of the men's movement he conducts couples Communications workshops Nationwide as he's appeared on over a thousand TV shows that's way too many TV shows and has been interviewed by Oprah Barbara Walters Peter Jennings Katie Couric Larry King Tucker Carlson Regis Philbin and Charlie Rose is frequently written for and been featured in The New York Times and other major Publications worldwide he has two daughters lives with his wife in Mill Valley California and resides virtually at www.warnfarrell.com as I said we spoke three years ago it was May 6 2018 just before Dr Farrell's book The Boy crisis was published we'll concentrate today on this book and Associated topics hello Warren so good to see you it is so good to see you more than normal Jordan for all the you know not we've had more than the boy crisis we've had the Jordan Peterson crisis obviously uh yeah a very dull topic that I don't know I I it's just amazing to me that during this process um of you going through what you went through not only with yourself but with Michaela with Tammy that you're not only alive but that you're also that you also produce an extraordinary book as well in the in that period of time it's just beyond me no thank you yeah well it helped keep me afloat so I've been reviewing the boy crisis in in quite a bit of detail over the last few days um it's it's something I haven't thought about for a while uh certainly I thought about it since our last conversation the world has Twisted and turned in all sorts of strange ways since then and I suppose this issue has been pushed this particular issue the boy crisis let's say has been pushed to the back burner in a major way by all sorts of well cultural movements and by covid and it's not precisely on the radar you mentioned to me just when we were discussing this issue for example begin at the beginning of our conversation today before we started Taping that uh President Biden established a White House gender policy Council which is supposed to focus on gender issues but in your opinion pretty much only focuses on women and girls and is also supposed to focus on Race but pretty much ignores black boys which is perhaps the intersectional place to use a detestable phrase where the crisis is the most noticeable so why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book the title of your book refers to something that is real and and if it's real why aren't we attending to it and why is it important you know as well first of all it's real uh because in all 56 of the largest developed Nations boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject um including reading and writing which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure as you can probably imagine um and so and and boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school boys in general are much more likely to drop out of high school especially in the United States and boys who drop out of high school are more than 20 percent likely to be unemployed in their 20s this is a statistic before covid when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4 versus more than 20 for for boys and so that's just the academic part of it on the mental health part of it when boys and girls are at nine they commit suicide about equally and very minimally between the edges ages of 10 and 14 boys commit suicide twice as often as girls between the ages of 15 and 19 they commit suicide four times as often as girls between the ages of 20 and 25 they commit suicide about five times as often as girls and most people don't even know this pay attention to this but this is only the the tip of the iceberg of the mental health issue there's you know where boys are far more likely to die from drug overdoses opioid overdoses they're far more likely to be depressed if you measure depression depression in a way that includes male symptoms of depression much much more likely to be enter into a place places that that take care of people who are mentally have mental problems and so on and and when boys and so I started asking myself you know what what causes all this you know and and when I first submitted the boy crisis to the publisher and sort of in form a proposal I outlined 10 causes and those Clauses included the environment and schools and so on but I kept coming back to realizing that the Hub cause of the boy crisis was was dead deprivation that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside and so that um got me really thinking about that so for example boys who are raised by moms and dads together and go from an intact family to a school that has very few male teachers there's not a huge impact a little bit of an impact that's negative but not much but if they go from a female only home environment have only a female role model that then they go to a school with almost no male teacher Role Models they are much more subjected to much more vulnerable to being seduced by gangs as a as a pseudo family or China not having the postponed gratification that dads tend to bring to the family and so therefore without that postponed gratification they're more vulnerable to a drug dealer saying you can make you know money really easily by dealing drugs you don't have to worry about getting the best grades in school and you'll you'll prove everybody that you know you'll drive around in a nice car you'll be able to get the girls you can't get because you're you know you're sort of a loser at school Etc so I just started looking at all these things I saw that the sperm count of boys had dropped 50 percent that the IQs of boys that dropped 15 and just I started you know looking and wondering about you know two things one is how amazing how how much evidence there was for the boy crisis and the second was exactly the question you asked since it's so evident and we're so focused on girls and women's issues why are we not even seeing the the boys and men's issues that are coming up and how damaging it is to women to not have father involvement for example women that I had dated between my marriages were constantly talking about being overwhelmed and so women are losers by fathers not being involved fathers feel a lack of purpose um and they deal with the whole thing that you talk about in your first rule of you know not having and not having some type of change of culture where there's a Vitality to give them uh to give them purpose and so we're in a very uh challenging situation I did come to understand what the cause of it is but but it really is depressing to see how ubiquitous that cause is so why do you think if the crisis is of the magnitude that you suggest um you you you cite some statistics in the early part of your book um more men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers in all wars since 1945 suicide now takes more lives than War murder and natural disasters around the world combined that might not include covid I presume that statistic stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life and the rate of suicide is growing much faster for men than for women um you mentioned that boys IQ has dropped about 15 points since the 1980s and make a case in your book that that's related to fatherlessness we'll get back into that boys scored lower than girls in the 63 largest developed nations in which the Pisa a set of international standard tests was given boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail to meet basic Proficiency in any of the Three core subjects of reading math and science by eighth grade in the U.S 40 percent of girls are at least proficient in writing compared to one in five boys one in five boys who perform as well as girls are graded less favorably you know we did some research years ago showing that agreeable children get better grades than their IQ would predict and girls are more agreeable than boys and so what that means is if you're less agreeable and more likely to be troubled then because that is associated with being less agreeable then you're graded more harshly than your pure cognitive ability would predict and that probably accounts for the gender difference or at least for part of it not that it particularly matters but um boys have gone from 61 percent of University degrees to 39 percent girls the reverse percent of boys who say they don't like school has gone up 70 since 1980. I imagine it was already pretty high in 1980. boys are expelled from school three times as often in girls as girls that's the same statistic basically as boys are more likely to be arrested for conduct disorder juvenile delinquency men are much more likely to be imprisoned um it's the same pattern there one in three children in the UK and the U.S grow up without a father um and you know our culture pushes the idea constantly that all families are of equal virtue let's say and I suppose that's justified in that it's self-evident that of all the things that people strive to do well in their lives they strive to raise their children I would say more diligently than than they might meet any other requirement or responsibility and so it seems cruel to judge the quality of the family given the commitment that it takes for example to be a single parent but I I'm releasing a podcast this week with Richard Trombley who's perhaps the world's foremost authority on the development of aggression in children development and Regulation and he his data certainly indicates that having a single mother especially a single mother with issues um is uh uh a predictor of the maintenance of aggressive behavior throughout the lifespan a major predictor now he Associates that more with uh trouble on the maternal side uh young mothers young uneducated mothers young uneducated mothers with psychiatric and other health difficulties who lack social support hasn't concentrated so much on the fatherlessness end of it but the upshot is or the takeaway is the same these are these are families that are not producing children who have the same probability of thriving let's say um you said also Japan has increased its vocational education programs so that 23 percent of its high school graduates graduate study at vocational schools and they have a 99.6 percent employment rate that's something we can talk about as well so your your book is peppered with well huh painful statistics I would say um why do you think we don't attend to this Warren I think historically and biologically um men were programmed um and and really through animals including insects right on through to human beings we were programmed to be able to be willing to die in order to get women's love and so in every generation had its war and in each generation's War we said some version of Uncle Sam needs you and we pointed to the uncle who in the Marine uniform on the on the count on the on the mantle and we were so proud of him he died in World War one or two and the boy sees that the boy he can get love and approval and respect even though he's being criticized by this person or that person or in school or at home um is he can he can he can be a soldier and so we give we Inspire boys to be disposable and we and we and and when and when somebody is likely to be lost you don't develop as much emotional attachment to that person and if you if you're if your way of surviving is for males to be willing to lose their life so we're not under Nazi rule Etc you begin to develop a connection between caring about men largely to the degree that they are willing to protect women and die for women and so you don't care about the people who are dying so much if you have a an incentive in there to uh if you have an incentive to have them be willing to die in order to protect you and so so it's a Disposable Male hypothesis that would be the hypothesis on The evolutionary psychology front I mean one of the things I've noticed is that my my critics let's say like to parody my audience as well angry white and young and male let's say um but the thing that's interesting about that is that perhaps you could give me the benefit of the doubt and say that if that is my audience and my audience is certainly much broader than that and that wasn't who I was targeting let's say but even if it was well is there something wrong with talking to those people who are alienated and angry and perhaps for some genuine reason the answer seems to be the default answer seems to be they're so contemptible that anyone who even tries to help them is to be regarded with extreme suspicion and it seems to me that that's in some manner a reflection of the phenomenon that you're discussing which is a very uh what would you say if it's it's very deeply rooted and fundamental um at least from one perspective so you know I was thinking today maybe our culture is set up so that the most esteemed people are highly successful men but the least esteemed people are unsuccessful men and so maybe maybe that maybe that's the strange Paradox is that man so in some sense have it the best if they're occupying the Pinnacle of achievement but they have it the worst if they're at the bottom of the Heap and that seems right if you look at women's dating preferences for example compared to men women disproportionately are disproportionately attracted to successful men and disproportionately likely even to rank men of average attainment as below average uh whether it's attractiveness or or any of the other uh criteria by which such things might be judged so you know the question is if it is so deeply rooted well one question is if it's so deeply rooted what makes you think there's anything that we can do about it I mean you haven't had any luck for example convincing the White House over years to to pay some attention to boys essentially even though they're the problem let's say you might think that even from the perspective of prevention there would be some some attention paid in that direction but this bias is so pervasive that it seems to even interfere with that absolutely so a few things lots of really good things you brought up so let me deal with the first thing on the anger issue um one of um I don't know um if we discussed this before uh Jordan but I've been teaching couples communication workshops for 30 years and um just produced a 30 a zoom course on that a few a few days ago and one of the things that is fundamental to that course is um is that men and women and this is gay couples as well and trans couples and um and even parents and children all complain about their Partners or their parents or their child's anger and almost and one of the things that I work with them on is to understand that anger is vulnerabilities mask and the moment you see your partner as angry look for the vulnerability that created that anger that felt the fact that they felt rejected of the possibility that they felt rejected the possibility that they felt misunderstood the possibility that they said what they feel their bother that bothers them over and over again but it's been ignored and every time that they say that uh say what bothers them there's a response to it the disconnect that cuts Cuts them off and interrupts them before they finish their full feeling they're not drawn out and the response that they get is an argument and so they tend to not bring up issues that really concern them because it's only going to be met by an argument that will escalate the problem and so they end up walking on eggshells now who does that men women both sexes do that and it doesn't make any difference whether it's straight or gay couples they both do this is a complaint that I hear from literally everybody um and so when when your audience is is criticized as being angry I would just ask you know if you if you look at that anger and as the vulnerability how is that audience not being heard and the way you are serving that audience is to hear so if to the degree that that audience is part part of your audience is is is is serving that Audience by healing them by having them have a place where they feel heard as opposed to dismissed when someone feels dismissed they become depressed they become they turn inward um and an example of that is when men and fathers and mothers go through the family court system uh fathers are much less likely to feel heard in the family courts that feel treated as equals oh that's another reason why I wanted to talk to you before and today in my clinical practice I had men who are fine upstanding men who were absolutely ground into Nothing by the family court system I mean I pulled out all the tricks I had out of my hat one client in particular a medical professional who whose life was completely destroyed by the family law system it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion to use a terrible cliche we tried every trick in the book to keep him afloat what he wanted was 50 access to his three kids and he was a really good father I went out with him a number of times with his kids and watched how he interacted with them and how he taught them and and how he cared for them and went to his house and looked at how he set up their bedroom and he did this guy did everything right he was extremely high in conscientiousness so unsurprising but um you know he had his driver's license taken away he had his passport taken away he had his livelihood demolished by ill-founded Rumors by a spouse that was hell-bent on his destruction I mean we even went so far as to have him pick up his kids when when they made the switch in front of a really really busy Supermarket she would pull up behind him right in front of the doors of the supermarket the kids would come out she would stay in the car the kids would come out and go into his truck and pull away so that everything that transpired between the two of them was in full public view all the time and despite that she managed to get into his car a number of times but anyways he he he he was just demolished and I've seen this and and you know I get criticized maybe maybe we can go into this a little bit I get criticized for a couple of things by men um regularly one is I get criticized because I stand up for traditional marriage and there's always a proportion of men who write and I they're usually men who've been demolished by the family court system who say look you should stop telling young men to adopt a permanent relationship get married because the family court system is so um prejudiced against man that to sign a marriage contract if you sign it with the wrong person is you know tantamount to a well let's not call it a death warrant but but it's a very bad idea you know and my my response to that is well you're basically married if you lived together for six months anyways and so I don't see how the marriage actually adds to that you know in terms of in terms of risk um but there it's not like I don't understand that there's a point there and it's so it's interesting because I do believe that the family court system I've looked at it I've been involved in it several times uh wasn't to my benefit I would say [Music] um the men have the men who are objecting have a point and then I'm also suggesting to young men another point of criticism that you know they adopt traditional responsibilities to the degree that that's possible and that that's where they'll find meaning but you know some of your work makes me second guess that at least to some degree wondering if I just don't see an alternative I suppose that's really the issue is that well what do we have we have our jobs we have our careers we have our loved ones we have our families that's life and if you don't have that well then you're adrift that's the purpose void that you talk about in this in this book um but if the traditional Pathways to meaning let's say are no longer reliable what's a guy to do let's say we really we really so to affirm what you're saying and put a piece of data to that when people are going through the family court system mothers and fathers are going through the family court system uh the father is eight times as likely as the mother to commit suicide from the frustration obviously of not feeling able to connect to his his children what what very few mothers and fathers understand is that you know dads have adopted in their traditional role sort of a father's Catch-22 they learn to earn money they learn to love their family by being away from the love of their family they often do things like they may drive cabs they may they may quit their passion of being an elementary school teacher becoming a superintendent or a principal of schools and they hate Administration but they end up earning more money because they want their children to do better than they had a chance to do in their life they want the children to go to a good school which means a good school district which means a more expensive home which means that if they were a musician or an actor or a writer or that elementary school teacher they have to give up that for the most part because they'll earn more doing something that they like less and so we've right which is something which is part of the pay a gap that's never really emphasized is that one of the ways you earn more and you outline that and I think a great book why men earn more I think that is a great book um you know you point out that you earn more for doing jobs that are less desirable intrinsically desirable in some sense I mean that's part of the equation at least their jobs are more dangerous they take you away from home more often Etc and those are disproportionately male jobs I mean the guy that I saw who got demolished so badly you know his wife claimed to be the primary caregiver and the courts are tilted so that they favor the mother especially in the first three years of a child's life and I've had some sympathy for that perspective for a variety of reasons although I think I've I think I've rethought my stats and believe that 50 50 custody default is the appropriate default um uh just like 50 50 default with regards to money or during the uh life of the marriage is the default um but my my client worked a lot uh to provide for his family and so and his wife stayed at home and was with the kids all the time as a consequence and because of that when they went to court she had the upper hand in the um in the in the custody negotiation because the judge believed perhaps that it was in the best interest of the children that they continue with their primary caregiver and that's a very hard argument to to push aside given the strength of the mother child Bond especially in the first especially in the first year I mean maybe maybe the first year is exceptional perhaps it's not perhaps we have to move to 50 50 regardless but what do you think about that there's four one of the things that I talk about in the boy crisis is the four must Do's of after divorce and this is like I'm now putting huge amounts of research together into sort of four simple things but one the number one and most important is that the children have an equal amount by the way this is if you want the children to do almost as well as they would in an intact family not as well but almost as well okay so this is a child's Center see that's something we should establish here too as a principal in my sense is always marriage is for children not for adults exactly they're the primary they're the primary target of of uh of rank ordered importance children first and then the adults marriages for children not for adults that's that's a very immature way of looking at the world if you think your marriage is for you you're you have a free choice when you have children to have the children and not have the children that's like having a free choice to take the job or not take the job but once you take the job you take the responsibilities with it and and so so in court what I talk about I do a lot of expert witness work on this issue and in court what I explain is that we net we now for the first time in the last five or six years we now have really incontrovertible evidence that four things are really needed if we want the children to do the best to divorce number one is an equal amount of time with mother and father the closer you get to 50 50 even when the child is like one year old or just born it is that is um that leads to the greatest possibility of a positive outcome on so many measures that we'd have to spend almost a half hour talking about those well I'd like I would like to talk about that to some degree because it's it's somewhat counterintuitive so I think it's important to delve into that absolutely and I'll be happy to do that okay um and then number two is that the father and mother live within about 20 minutes drive time from each other because when they don't oftentimes and become very resentful of the other parent because they have to go to the other parent's home and miss miss their soccer practice so therefore they don't get the skills and the teamwork and the continuity to be good on the soccer team or miss their best friend's birthday party or whatever um and so there's a tension when the father and mother live after divorce more than about 20 minutes of drive time from each other number third number three is that the children cannot experience any bad mouthing or negative body language from Mom toward Dad Dad toward Mom because when the child looks in the mirror and let's say the child's a boy and um hears that your father is irresponsible and your father's a liar and your father is this and that that boy is looking in the mirror and saying well maybe I'm a narcissist like my dad well the boys are young boys play dad and so whatever they think of his dad is going to be is be going to enter their space of fantasy and I mean what they play out in their fantasy play is their Destiny yes and so that image of of future masculinity I mean I always think of Captain Hook when I think of that because Peter Pan stays Peter Pan because he doesn't want to be Captain Hook and it's a brilliant it's brilliant mythologically that story because it's got it exactly right if you conceptualize the great father is power hungry Tyrant which is increasingly the way we conceptualize our entire society and we call it patriarchal then why would you want to grow up to be that why why do you want to be that adult and so if the mother is modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes dad that she's also modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes future mature son since he's going to be Dad yes exactly and then that boy hearing that both let's say if he hears that from the mother by the way this is true father to Mother also I mean bad mouthing in the part of the father of the mother is really damaging to the child because not only does the child is that child half the genes of the other parent but also the child can't bring it up to either parent because if it brings it up to the parent that made that complaint um and it it loses that the favoritism of that parent if it brings it up to the other parent that your dad said this or mom said this about you that destabilizes the child's future even more so the child has a terrible secret all the time at betrayal the child's in the state of betrayal all the time matter what exactly and I've seen children used as Weapons continually in exactly that manner it's it's it's appalling it's it's appalling beyond comprehension and then the fourth thing that's very important is that the children the parents rather are in couples communication counseling or relationship counseling not just when there is an emergency when there's an emergency there's everything has to be made as a quick decision and there's a tendency to see the other parents worst intent whereas long-term counseling allows the father and the mother to see to have time to hear the mother or Father's best intent about what they're doing and why they're doing it well so at the bare minimum that means that the couple gets together in an administrative sense to sort out the necessary details in the presence of a relatively uh what would you say interest-free commitment free bias free third-party exactly it's really a management Ploy rather in some sense rather than a counseling Ploy per se or at least you could parse it out in those two ways obviously once you have children with someone you're married to them permanently in some real sense and so that has to be taken care of and a lot of taking care of a marriage I do make this point to some degree in in Beyond order when I talk about making space for romance a fair bit of marriage is Administrative detail and getting that down getting that right I mean that all that does allow you to see some Good Will on the part of your partner as well yes absolutely and you you brought up a moment ago to go to the the different development developmental advantages that happen when father and mother are both involved and those developmental advantages include the father involvement so after marriage or after divorce father involvement lack of Father involvement is the single biggest predictor of suicide it is one of the biggest predictors of a child not graduating from high school dropping out of school it's a very big predictor of a child being having being aggressive but not assertive and last time when we did our last interview together we talked about the whole uh roughhousing dimension of things and I'm not going to go through that again because of the fact that people can go to that other interview and see that but there are about nine differences between dad style parenting and Mom style parenting and a lot of those differences moms are so good at say spotting a Sons and Daughters um you know gifts like say sweetie you sing so nicely or you're going to be a great actress or a musician or whatever you should try and do that and dads are likely to affirm that but not so um not so vociferously at first but are more likely to say some some version of a well you know if you want to be a gym you know if you want to be in the Olympics you've got to practice all the time and we'll yes we'll give you the um some tutoring or we'll go out of our way to take you to gymnastics practice but if you're not really focused on if you're focused son responding to tweets and and going to parties and doing other things you're never going to become an Olympic gymnast so you have to make a trade-off and the dad is the dad is much more likely to um the whole uh enforce the boundaries around that trade-off and require the child to to focus and discipline um on a focus and and have postponed gratification around what they say they want to do and give up support for the child that the child doesn't follow through with that it only has a dream that they're not willing to have the discipline okay so that's okay so there's a real hypothesis there which I think is worth delving into because one question obviously is well why is it not good to be without a father and is it not the case that someone else maybe two females for example could play the paternal role and obviously that's true to some degree if we could specify what the paternal role is but you make a very specific case which is quite an interesting one which is that its fathers primarily who are responsible for the instantiation of delay of gratification now we should point out that among psychologists who are leery of IQ as the best predictor of success in the long run the vast majority of those psychologists whose opinion I do not agree with by the way is that the thing that predicts better than IQ is the capacity to delay gratification and that seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness and trait conscientiousness which is dutifulness and industriousness and orderliness the ability to make and maintain verbal contracts conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term success outside of General cognitive ability I would also say that in cultures where families are are more likely to be intact and so we could say Southeast Asian cultures for example and point out that children from Southeast Asian cultures do disproportionately better in North America than children of North American parents the reason for that seems twofold one is more correlational perhaps in that those families are much more likely to be intact and so to have fathers but the second is is that the advantage that is accrued to those children seems to be in the domain of conscientious striving it's work ethic it's the ability to delay gratification and so if it is the case that farther involvement is a key predictor of the capacity to delay gratification then that's an absolutely crucial issue and and we need to know well is that true and we also need to know if it's true why it's true and perhaps it has something to do with the relative disagreeability of of fathers so women are more prone to negative emotion than men and they're more empathic and and and compassionate and polite than men men are more disagreeable and use disagreeableness is the best predictor by the way of criminal behavior from the personality perspective even though it's not a very good predictor but if you're really really disagreeable that's one of the things that can end that can land you in jail because you don't take other people into account you can be callous and cruel and unkind but just because something has its pathologies in the extreme doesn't mean it's not necessary in moderation and disagreeable people are better at saying no and it's setting boundaries and at being cruel to be kind let's say well sure you're good at that you want to do that but here's what it's going to take and I'm going to draw boundaries and I'm going to draw lines and you think that's fathers and what evidence do you have for that oh my goodness oh just for example one of the things I'll talk about is the um the difference between boundary setting and Boundary enforcement and you know dads and moms will both set boundaries very similarly they'll both say you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas and children will test boundaries pretty much exactly the same way though and there's two pieces possible before they get there absolutely and they balance on that edge and push because they want to find out exactly where that border is my son who's relatively disagreeable man he pushed boundaries at every opportunity when he was between two and four it was really something to behold he was a force of nature in going right up to the line and pushing on it just to see what was going to happen you know and and so go ahead yeah and then but the difference between moms and dads is not these boundary setting or the children's challenge but rather the um the boundary enforcement the child will be able to say to Mom some version of like uh you know I had a tough time in school today I really don't because I was teased one of this boy and and he's the best most popular boy or the most popular girl in the school usually would be the boy that would tease him and you know and so Mom is saying to herself you know well what am I going to do here um am I going to be get into a big argument over a few P's when he's depressed that would be insensitive and stupid uh so I'll tell you what sweetie you know you can have this many more peas and then you can have your ice cream and then the boy will see ah negotiating is or a girl will see is he negotiating as a possibility here so from a position of weakness yes exactly I I will have half that many peas that Mom you know put a set aside and then Mom is going again you know all right now he at least tried I'll give him the benefit of the doubt um okay you can have the ice cream now whereas dad is much more likely to go um I'm sorry we have a deal here sweetie I know you had a bad day in school um but you uh but you need to finish the piece the deal is before you get your ice cream Oh Daddy you're so mean mommy doesn't do that to me and she but me and yeah yeah and and dad goes well you know you can you can can continue to complain but this is my rules now and if you continue to complain there'll be no more ice cream there'll be no ice cream even it's a possibility tomorrow night now we're forcing the child is getting forced to have to pay attention to doing what she or he needs to do finish the peas before she or he gets the ice cream what they want to have okay so let me take what you said apart a little bit from a personality perspective okay so I'm gonna hit it from three perspectives so the first is I've always been entranced by the Disney movie Pinocchio and Pinocchio is about the development of an autonomous individual right someone who's free from having his strings pulled by others and who isn't a wooden head but someone who's alive and can think for himself and as Pinocchio develops he faces is a number of Temptations and one is to become an actor which means to become a deceiver or a player of Parts rather than the real thing but another is to become a neurotic wreck who wants Vacations so he's tempted by Pleasure Island and the way the fox and the cat tempt him is by convincing him that he's ill convincing him to capitalize on that and convincing him that the respite for his illness is a vacation from his a permanent vacation from his responsibility so his The Temptations are deceitful actor and neurotic victim so it's a very perspicacious film it's a remarkable film but in any case now let's take that apart a little bit so I'll first make an observation for my own marriage my wife is no pushover and she's relatively low in agreeableness by female standards but what I observed in our relationship was that it was hard for her to discipline the children especially when they were very young and I think the reason for that was partly temperament because I think the feminine temperament tilts towards compassion and nurturance whereas the masculine temperament tilts more towards um uh self-love yeah yeah fine that's good thank you for for filling in there yeah yeah it's conditional it's if there's a conditional element to it right the judgmental element which is what you'll love by the way but conditional approval as part of total love right good good clarification absolutely right because the container is love yes but but that can mean delay of gratification right and there's a cruelty and delay of gratification even when you impose it on yourself it's a it's a cruelly in the local sense because it causes distress I mean right now my son and daughter are teaching their son who's only slightly over one no and I told them to how to do it so for example he sits at our table out in the backyard and he reaches behind and he's tearing the plants out of the green wall that's behind him and so that's a no and I said I encourage them I said look take his hand hold it firmly so that he can't move it say no hold him until he stops struggling to to undertake his goal-directed activity he'll probably cry as soon as he stops resisting let go and give him a pat say you do that 20 times then when you say no he'll cry and stop and then 20 times after that he'll just stop he won't cry so 40 times and you've taught him no which is an amazing thing because then you can let him go free because whenever you say no he'll just stop and so you can facilitate his freedom instead of having to be helicopter Tyrant parent who I've seen many of who is one step behind their ambulatory two and a half year old you know interfering with absolutely everything he does because he can't grasp a basic principle of socialization in any case no has some pain associated with it because otherwise it wouldn't produce tears and no is a very very hard thing to learn and knows what the world teaches not just what people teach in any case back to my wife she spent the first year bonding with the child and also learning how to respond essentially especially in the first six months to his or her every whim because a crying infant demands instant recourse and the crying infant is always right especially if they're under six months of age but then when the kid becomes ambulatory and starts to require discipline the woman is required to switch from this primarily empathic role which is facilitated by hormonal transformation post pregnancy by the way from this primarily nurturing role do a role that is in some ways in the local environment it's antithesis it's very hard for women to do that and so my observation has been that they they need they require someone else to bolster that element because it runs at counter purposes to what they're required to do in early infancy and so okay so but so delay of gratification we're going to focus on that and an example illustrating what you're saying and this is hard database example that I talk about in the boy crisis is the um is is bedtime so we know when we look at bedtime set by mothers and fathers is that moms will set bedtimes earlier than dad's will um dads will sit bedtimes later but the children end up when studied going to bed earlier when they're with the dad than they do with the mom and so why is that when the dad will be more likely to do is say something version of like okay bedtime is nine o'clock and um if you and whatever when you get all your chores done when you get yourself your bro you brush your teeth you change your clothes you've done your homework Etc um and I see your homework and it's done well uh that any time that you have between when you're finished when when your sister and brother are both finished uh your homework Etc that time you have to play or do or or ask me to do whatever I want read your favorite story Etc uh with Mom she's more likely to and so the kids end up rushing to get through the everything that they need to do that is postponed gratification in order to get what they want to have their this story read to them some roughhousing before bedtime um and you know something along those lines um and then with the understanding that they will then uh everything will be cut off at um at nine o'clock the children with Mom are more likely to um mom is says you know bedtime is this time it's 9 30 let's say and the children that gets to be done 30 and one of the boys or kids will say you know well I haven't done my homework you know knowing that Mom will want the child to have done his or her homework um with um rather than go to bed without having homework be done and so that uh so Mom will say well all right you should have done your homework before but uh we'll allow you a little bit more time for us to finish your homework off and so the boy is able to orbit girl is able to manipulate better more time than than that 9 30 time um and stay open even or say up up even later uh what what the dad makes clear to the child is that if um if if he or she does not if they use up all that time and they haven't done up that doing the homework and it's now nine o'clock your bedtime uh sorry but you are you you will not you just go to school and not have your homework done that's your responsibility to get that done by this point in time and so the um and so that's one of the sort of dynamics that happens that lead to children being more likely to be focused on doing what they need to do and um and also children brought up by mothers are more likely to be ADHD if they're brought up predominantly by mothers 30 of children or ADHD that includes the average between boys and girls boys are obviously more likely to be ADHD whereas with fathers brought up predominantly by fathers only 15 percent are likely to have ADHD because you can see from those examples that the the boy or the girl the children are required to focus on doing what they need to do get that homework done get their teeth brushed before they get what they want to have and the same we talked last time about roughhousing how the child the children were were prevented from having more roughhousing fun if they push their sister or their brother out of the way and they didn't consider their the needs of their brother and sister so back back to the the personality differences so women are higher in negative emotion and they're higher in trait agreeableness and so the way to manipulate someone who's higher negative emotion is to manifest negative emotion and to say um here's a bunch of reasons why I'm not doing so well and so I deserve a break and that that so because of the sensitivity to negative emotion the fact of the negative emotion is more compelling because it's more deeply felt and then the agreeableness means that there's a much higher probability of being felt sorry for and and you can see that in the positive light when you're dealing with infants because when they're in distress the proper response is immediate gratification of their desires but that's not a good long-term strategy which is I think likely why well I don't exactly understand the relationship with lower agreeableness it's certainly the reason for the emergence of conscientiousness which is a cold virtue and which involves delay of gratification now men are not more conscientious than women they're more industrious and industrious to some slight degree and less orderly and those two combined make conscientiousness but the agreeableness difference is definitely you know it's it's quite pronounced and so you know partly what you're arguing for from the perspective of a personality psychologist is the necessity for two parent families really on temperamental grounds on and really on biological grounds I mean these things are mutable to some degree but not easily no and and the other thing that's quite interesting is that and this is something everyone should really listen to is that they're anti-mutable given the way that our society is proceeding so you might say well there are these personality differences between men and women higher neuroticism in women so that's proclivity to negative emotion and higher agreeableness but if we made our societies equal those personality differences would go away and then we wouldn't require bigendered um parenting but what's happened is that if you go to the Scandinavian countries where the if attempts to equalize the social landscape have gone the furthest and in some sense had the most success um there are notable exceptions so if you rank order countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies now and that doesn't require that any of them have perfectly egalitarian policies it just requires that you admit that some cultures are more egalitarian than others in their attempts and their practices and I think only a fool wouldn't put the Scandinavian countries at the top of that list then you'd say well what that should mean is that in Scandinavia the personality differences between men and women are minimized and in authoritarian countries they're maximized and exactly the reverse is what happens is if you iron out the wrinkles in the social landscape so that it's more egalitarian men and women get more different with regards to their interests people versus things so women get more interested in people and less interested in things and less interested in the stem fields at least in partial consequence science technology engineering and Mathematics and they get even more different than men in terms of their neuroticism and their agreeableness not less and so that argues against easy social amelioration of this necessity for bigender two-parent households yes yes the the children that seem to do the best are ones that have they're in intact families or as I mentioned before uh the children have about an equal amount of time with both parents and that there is a checks and balance parenting so a child will come to the mother and say can I climb the tree in the backyard and Mom will say well maybe in a few years sweetie but not right now um you're too young at it you could really hurt yourself and that child will ask the same thing of a dad and the dad will be more likely to say well yes I guess so but be careful and then if the mother finds out the child the father and the mother will go well wait a minute you know you're not blah blah blah you're playing one against the other here kid good work but no yes but well the kid will play one against the other but but one of the best responses to that is for the child to be able to see the mother and father negotiating right right absolutely and saying you know well yes you can climb the tree but you can't go this Beyond this branch this high and you can't you know go on these branches and Dad you uh you need to be out there under the tree so in case the child Falls uh the other child will will um be cushioned by your fall and and don't get preoccupied with the cell phone in fact maybe give me the cell phone while you're out there with a with ginger or Mary under the tree and right so they see the negotiation between masculine and feminine taking place why do you think that's so important and you say there's research supporting that specific proposition it's a very specific proposition so what's the research and well it's most specific and metaphorical specifically we now know that children climbing trees makes them worry about what risks are worth taking what risks are and that fires synapses that are outside of their normal synapse firing development and their op and the data that we have for that is that the is it the IQs of children doing risk-taking behaviors like climbing trees in increase as they do that risk taking behavior and they increase their cycle motor functioning we see okay so there's this prop there's this concept uh that uh Russian developmental psychologists came up with the godsky called the zone of proximal development and one of the things he noted was that um I believe it was vygotsky who discovered this it might not have been but it's the same phenomenon so it doesn't really matter so if you analyze the way that parents talk to children who are developing their language so infants who are still learning to speak the adults don't speak to the infant in terms that the infant can understand precisely the adults speak to the infant slightly up ahead of its developmental trajectory and vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development which is the key Zone to be in if you're going to learn so imagine and I make much of this in my books that there's a domain that you've already mastered and so that when you operate in that domain the things you want to happen happen that's the domain of order and then there's another domain where all hell breaks loose and you don't know what to do and that's the domain of chaos but there's an intermediary where you're expanding your zone of competence through exploration and that's really where Consciousness operates and that's that's where we learn and so risk-taking behavior isn't exactly risk-taking Behavior it's it's embeddedness in the zone of proximal development I'll give you an example so it's germane to your example so when my kids were little I bought this old wrecked wooden playset monkey bars and and swings it was dilapidated but I took it home and sanded it down and repainted it and you know gave it about five or six more years of life and uh my daughter who was about two and a half at the time would go out there on that monkey bar and so it was a ladder going up about six feet which is a pretty decent ladder for for a little two and a half year old you know and so we were inclined to watch her and she would stand on the first rung and then move her foot a quarter of the way up towards it and then half a way up towards it and then three quarters of the way up towards it and then she'd put her foot on the rung and then she'd do the same with her next foot staying in that zone of proximal development can I move a quarter of Step can I move half a step can I move three quarters of a step and we'd watch her do that and doing that she pinned all those movements together and mastered climbing up the Monkey Bar and it was much to our satisfaction to watch her because she was taking she wasn't taking a risk exactly she was pushing herself out into the zone of proximal development and and engaging in this Mastery Behavior it's so you could say in some sense and I believe this to be the case that the masculine Spirit encourages and facilitates the transformation so if the if the feminine is is concentrating on who the child is now and what that child now needs the masculine is concentrating on how that child can move to the next developmental stage and pushing that along is that is that a reasonable presumption a yes and B here's an example of that also that coordinates or connects perfectly with that the data shows that dads are more likely for example to use words that the child does not yet understand or does not understand at that time and um and the mom is oftentimes looking at saying well you know why are you saying that you know the child doesn't understand what you mean and the dad's conscious or unconscious sort of feeling is I want to plant seeds and after the child hears this in different contexts um she or he will begin to sort of understand what that word is and what that means and moms feel it's just moms are more likely to feel that's just so insensitive being in this zone of proximal development like if I brought that into the conversation because you talked about risk taking and so what you could say is that as you push the boundaries of the zone of proximal development you enter the domain of risk and so then the question would be what personality elements are capable of tolerating the transformation of the zone of proximal development into the zone of risk and the answer to that would be lower neuroticism and lower agreeableness because lower neuroticism would mean you wouldn't worry as much so the magnitude of the perceived risk would be less and lower agreeableness would mean well even if there is some risk you don't care as much it's like it's okay now it's not like you don't care about the risk exactly although it's so it is that in some felt sense but the reason for that is that well there's another judgment which is well the risk is worth taking because there's more than one risk at play here there's the proximal risk that you engage in when you push yourself but there's the distal risk that you engage in when you don't push yourself yes you're right on target there now and this is why so many of the differences between male and female style parenting is so important to understand and one of those that sort of connects to what you're saying is that the difference is that moms and dads tend to to get into about dads teasing children um and which feels to many moms like it often results in the child crying when the teasing first starts but it begins to teach the child a whole series of skill sets you know what's what tones of voice are teasing or playfulness and it's like roughhousing it has poisoning is an abstraction of rough housing exactly precisely um you know what I what eye contact is being playful what I contacted serious uh what what body language what I'm exaggerating now um you get off the bed because if you don't get off the bed daddy will always be make it make life hard for you you know how bad daddy is um and you know the child starts laughing maybe after a while maybe one time that this going like that the child goes oh my goodness is scared and so then after a while the child learns that oh that's daddy having fun that's us having fun and they begin to distinguish between um make sure you get off the bed as fun versus make sure you get off the bed as you know something that is right well they also learn to distinguish between what's mean and what's funny you know I mean when I was watching my children especially with regards to their sibling rivalry which is likely to emerge in children who are less than three years apart in their birth order and and sort of in proportion to the closeness of their of their birth um so if you want to minimize childhood sibling rivalry space the children out three years we don't know what that does to the relationship across time but we know it minimizes sibling rivalry in any case I wanted them always to stay on the funny side of teasing because teasing can easily turn into torture and so they had to learn these extremely fine gradations of humor and and and to do that they had to play on the edge and the question is how necessary is it to have the capacity to allow your children to play on the edge and fathers have that my temperament more than mothers do now but you you know you pointed out something really interesting you didn't exactly make the claim that the father was necessary you made a more subtle claim which was that the dialogue between the father's higher risk tolerance and the mother's lower risk tolerance is necessary and that takes place that can take place within an intact marriage but you also said it can take place in an in a marriage that's been broken apart as long as the couples commit to a long-term communication strategy that a super long-term supervised communication strategy yes so it's the dialogue maybe that's really the issue here it's the interplay between masculine feminine is that the key thing rather than the presence of both is because you can imagine a man and a woman in a household who don't communicate ever about anything and I can't imagine that that's going to be an optimal environment for a child despite the fact that both parents are nominally there yes yes absolutely the the children do well when both parents are involved about equally and that's because of a lot of subtle things here one for example is hangout time and particularly boys if you ask them like how is soccer today uh the boy will say okay and um but with hangout time and no not much more well what else happened what happened at soccer today nothing much um you know and then but if the father has hangout time let's say in a divorce situation with the child uh the child is likely maybe their ones doing homework the other was doing their a different type of work and they end up in the kitchen together and then looking through the thing and then the boy will say yeah dad you know Daddy I I don't get it if you're you're playing soccer and you're doing really well and I was goalie last week and this week I wasn't goalie but I thought I did really well in the and the coach even said I did really well but now he put He put in Jimmy for goalie goalie instead of me um what's that about um and that's when children with Hangouts uh with hangout time both boys and girls tend to to do much better than they do when they just are asked a quick question for a conversation for a daughter is hanging they need time for the questions to Bubble Up of their own accord exactly or some little thing reminds them of something you know if you ask a child how are you doing oftentimes they'll say fine but if you said you know if you ask them something specific how did you like having the ice cream taken away from you by by somebody at school then they'll have a response to that so when something triggers something that is very specific the child will tend to sort of open up and um on his or her own terms and interestingly I said hangout time was very important for boys psychologically some researchers at the University of California Irvine said it's a single greatest predictor of psychological security and girls hangout time with that and hang out times with moms and dads has a different dimension to it the children know that if they if they say say a problem to Mom she's more likely to be reassuring I'm sure that you know I'm sure that really what it wanted you to do really well he was probably just giving the other the other the other um a person a chance because in order for them to feel good about themselves like you did when you played goalie whereas the child is usually likely to know that the dad is more likely to say well you know what did you do that maybe was not um so good as a goalie what do you think you can do that's different with it with the uh with the coach next time did you ask the coach directly why she or he took you away from being goalie and so um that's more of a problem-solving approach or a problem and you think that's associated with the Positive developmental consequence for IQ I think it is it's not that lower IQ fathers tend to get divorced More Often by any chance is it well we well we do know that that mothers are who are well educated are far more likely about 90 of divorces um come from mothers are initiated by the plaintiff is the mother um and when the mother is well educated she has other sources of income other sources of education and um and security and she also knows um obviously that in the family courts she's far more likely to have the children and the father is far less like you know she's more likely to have the right to the children he's more likely to have to fight for the children um and um and so there's all sorts of Dynamics going on there but I think the most important thing here to understand is that like we were talking a bit before about teasing there are so many developmental um advantages to a lot of the things that dads do but I want to really make it clear that ads don't say to moms things like I'd like to Rough House with the children because it will increase the children's empathy I'd like to Rough House with the children because it will increase their social skills I'd like to tease with the children because it will increase their social abilities to to have to right God who could stand to be married to someone who did that yes and the result of that is that you know moms can't hear what dads don't say and one of the so one of the reasons why communication about what is and dads need to take responsibility for reading about uh what there is uh that we do that's differently and what the outcomes are of the things that we do differently so I've never heard of a father say to a mother you know the teasing that I do um with with our daughter or our son you know when we go into when kids go into the workplace and they haven't learned how to be they haven't learned teasing they feel the teasing is sort of an insult right they're touching they're touchy and they can't take a joke with a sense of humor exactly we have very explicit discussions about such things in my household so I mean what I wanted the kids to be inoculated against casual insult you have to take that with a sense of humor or or it just mounts I've seen people who can't respond to that initial testing you know and it's partly what people do to see if you're socialized you see because people want to socialize with people who are about as socialized as them and so what they'll do first is throw out some teasing and see what happens and if it evokes a playful response then they know that the person that they're dealing with can be relied on to play and has been reasonably socialized you're hitting the nail right of the head of the Commerce of masculinity is the the trading of wit covered put downs and Men learn as they grow up that I think probably the reason that that happens is because men learn that if you can handle if you can't handle criticism you're not going to be successful and if you're not going to be successful you're also unpredictable because it means that if something small and upsetting comes along you're going to get big and upset and that isn't what you want you don't want someone who's going to get upset about something small it's it's too dangerous in a crisis absolutely and so from a male point of view from most men's point of view um the feeling is if you can't be teased you can't be trusted right right exactly you can't be really respected and here's the type of problems that that creates in the workplace so if you're if you're dead talking to your to the mom about teasing children help her see how this evolves into the workplace so in the workplace um a girl a woman oftentimes may get teased and she will interpret that teasing like you know um did you I see you have a new dress on are you uh did you get that to flirt with the boss or do you have you know you're just um you must addressed in the dark last night um something like that that's something if you say to a guy they come back at you with some funny counter uh Point like you know well that would be typical for a short man to say uh a version of that and and and and the men with each other when they can tease each other like that and play with each other that means that they're beginning to trust that man and move them into their into their league of people they can respect and Trust whereas if the woman hears something like that comment she might feel it's a it's a sense it means that she's being discriminated against in the workplace so she takes that perspective and says now that would be a particularly true I suspect if she didn't have a lot of masculine presence in her life exactly and she know that girls who don't have brothers are much more likely to be raped yeah I I didn't know that that's interesting and I do believe that um and because a lot of the and this does confirm a number of things that I've heard of people who are experts in that area and that's very very deeply sad and particularly what's what's reinforcing this you were talking about how things in today's culture sort of reinforce it so let's say this girl this woman is new to work and she's being tested out by being teased and she feels really insulted and she interprets the teasing as discrimination against her as opposed to interpreting the teasing as an attempt to include her uh to include her yeah exactly nicely so she goes to HR it's an invitation to play it's an invitation to play it's an indication if you're skilled at it right I mean that's I mean a tease can go too far and then it's insulting but but the really good tease is right on the edge right and then that's also it's also a compliment to the person who's designed to receive it because you're are facing them with the proposition that they can tolerate a comment they're sophisticated enough to know when a comment is right on the edge and they're resilient enough to tolerate it and respond in kind so it's an it's a compliment of the highest order to push like that it is so important that you said that and that's exactly right that's exactly what teasing does test for and that's exactly what men who tease each other are testing for to see if the if the playfulness could be met with playfulness it can be met with even a a greater challenge that requires them to participate in the process but institutionally today we've taken you think part of that's crucial to IQ development I I do think that's interesting because I mean that teasing banter is a form of of of of what dynamic wit it's like a Dance I mean some cultures have really perfected that you get there's subcultures in England particularly where that's elevated to an art form and and you see that in places like Newfoundland and Canada as well and and in Alberta as well I would say in the rural areas in particular yes absolutely and so now what we've done is institutionalized this teasing as a problem so the woman upset that she's being discriminated against goes to HR and says I was discriminated against what he said to me right thus failing a test in in a more profound way because one of the things you do when you're in elementary school in junior high school in high school for that matter and then in the workplace is tease someone and see if they run off to find a figure of Authority or whether they can deal with it themselves because you assume that if they have to run off and find a figure of authority that they're not mature enough to solve their own problems that's exactly right and so what we so the woman reports it to HR and HR really is no longer HR really should be called her because it focuses almost always a complaint by the woman about usually a man and the do you know what the stats are in proportion of workplace complaints that are brought forth by women compared to men I know the OCR stats of the office of civil rights stats about on complaining is about I think it was there's a fellow named Joseph who's done the research on that and I think he said it was like 19 to 1. 19 complaints by women about men for age one complaint by men about a woman right and that's funny because you know the men probably generate the grounds for complaints more often being more disagreeable and the women are more sensitive to the uh negative consequences being less emotionally stable more more neurotic so it's that's a place where men and women don't feed back so well to one another you know and it's unfortunate but that that well I have wondered you know if men and women can inhabit the same workplace over time we don't know that I mean I've been called reprehensible for even bringing that up as an issue but it's not like we know we haven't the data aren't in we've only been working together in some sense for 50 years and there's plenty of evidence for sex segregation it seems to be the the norm rather than the exception that you know once a gender a sex starts to dominate a field that that dominance becomes more and more predominant until it becomes almost total you see that with engineering you see it with nursing those are extreme cases but it certainly does happen well they're not as Extreme as bricklaying which is like all men but women have you know women haven't moved into the bricklaying domain so we don't know what would happen if they did they won't but so we won't know but you know you know and this the the the the challenge here is is really enormous because the um in the sexual area um it's very rare that a woman is interested in dating somebody at work who is earning less uh than she is um and um is not doesn't have as high status and use a great majority of women that I've seen that have uh that were single when they entered the workplace and then married somebody a significant percentage of them have married somebody in the workplace but the great majority of that significant percentage have married somebody at least at their level and usually above them yeah it's hypergamy right and it characterizes women with regard to um potential for generous earning essentially and unsurprisingly I think it's an attempt to balance the economic scales because women take the brunt of pregnancy and and the brunt of the first year of of child rearing I would say as well so and they make themselves vulnerable as a consequence so they need to redress that inequality and that's how they do it and but there are consequences to that that are very severe in the socioeconomic in the social spheres absolutely and then when the woman when a man above her does take um interest in her and and it's explicit about it um you know it it can either result in courtship or a law court and so a courtship of one form or the other yes or and yes one courtship of one form or the other and so it's a really uh it's it's and and what the biggest problem with that's happened in the last 15 20 years especially since hashtag me too um is that's um I have not yet spoken to a single um corporate CEO um who has not said some version of the following to me you know Warren I used to love mentoring women um but I have a wife and I have children there's no way shape or form that I will Mentor a woman today right um well it was increasingly insisted upon in in my workplace at the University that if I ever had a female in the room with me that the door be open I mean and as soon as that's the rule you're you're done you have to start rethinking everything can you travel with your graduate students can you be in the same Hotel etc etc etc as soon as you have to start thinking about those things that means the risk has become so great that you're much less likely to engage in such activity and mentoring is a very intimate relationship so it's it's it is and it's oftentimes does I mean many men are particularly inspired to mentor to a woman who's younger that that is attractive and many younger and attractive women are uh increase their um their caring about and their love for a man who is who is who they see as a result of his mentoring yeah well you know across cultures women prefer men who are about four years older there's some variation and that actually is one of the things that is moderated in the Scandinavian culture so that age Gap is less rather than more in the Scandinavian cultures but that goes along with the genuine General tendency to to hypergamy which is preference for a mate who's at or above you in the social hierarchy yes or the socioeconomic hierarchy it's really the social hierarchy though which create enormous problems in different cultures like in China when we do analyzes of the dating the most popular dating site in China you see that um women want a very high percentage of women I think it's in the 92 to 93 tile approximately of women uh want men who own homes and own cars but of the people on The Dating Sites who are males only a very small percentage of them own homes and cars right well and we should also point out that women aren't actually going for the home or the car they're going for the ability to produce the home in the car of course right they're using them as secondary markers for competent for competence essentially but and then they you know you cite an interesting stat here too which which I thought was worth talking about um date on on who should pay the bill on the first date um 72 percent of women think that a man should pay the full bill on the first date now remember they've already selected this man and what that means is that he's likely to be at or above them in the socioeconomic hierarchy and perhaps slightly older so you know in some sense they can afford he can afford to pay better than she can but in any case 82 percent of men think the same and so men are playing the hypergamy game even more uh intensely than women are at least with regards to that particular statistic so and this gets into the psychology of the pay Gap because many women feel okay about that because they feel like okay men earn more than I do for the same work um when when we and in fact that is not really accurate here is what is accurate of fathers earn more than moms do the pay Gap is not men women the pay Gap is dads versus moms and when dads become dads uh they're far more likely to give up the things that they love to do that pay less and do the things that they like to do a lot less um you know quit that musician gig that paid much less and do something responsible quote unquote like selling product y um yeah that's also in line with the data that show that you know most most young men many many young men abuse alcohol most of them stop when around 27 but that's also when they get married and so they they stop engaging in primary gratification and that's another example of that delay of gratification as far as I'm concerned that ability or willingness to sacrifice yes it is also part of your whole your whole rule about the you know it's important to have stable structures but it's also important to have flexibility in structures and part of you know it's so funny that we it's so rare that we can have a real conversation about this because let's say that the pay Gap well you know it's certainly not obvious what degree the pay Gap is caused by female hypergamy right if men demanded of their dating partners that they earned more than they do my guess is that there'd be a pay Gap in favor of women because men are incentivized to earn more because if they don't the the consequences on the in the sexual Market but it's not the sexual it's the um intimate interpersonal market right to not be cynical about it because it's it's not all short-term mating that people are motivated by for quite the contrary well they're motivated to take the dangerous is more dangerous less desirable farther away from from home and family and interest for that matter jobs because the payoff is disproportionately large for men who do so and you see that you know you see and it's exaggerated at the upper end of the distribution as well which is what you pointed out with regards to the dating sites you know like 70 percent of men are rated as below the 50th percentile in attractiveness by women and so not only are there rewards for earning more there are disproportionate awards for men for earning more and that goes along with the proposition that we put forward at the beginning of this conversation I think that was recorded as well that you know the most admired people are men but the least admired people are men as well and there's a lot more least admired men than there are most admired men and that's true in in brutal force on the dating scene on the websites absolutely and and as I said part of the reason that this is sort of all Justified is because you know after all men have privilege and you know and men are you know are and the pay Gap is really a reflection of the fact that you know men do less work and earn the same or um and yes which is complete bloody nonsense that's just not true that's that there is a gap but the the reason for the Gap is very very complex and involves many factors including the ones we discussed here which you take apart so nicely in your book why men earn more I think you have 13 reasons that men earn more you know that's quite a few reasons and privilege isn't one of them it's actually 25 differences between the choices that men tend to make and the choices that women tend to make 25 25 differences are things that do lead to men earning more money but could you list a few of those now because it's such an interesting it's such an interesting topic men are more likely to take hazardous jobs they're more likely to take jobs like logging or Trucking they're more likely to take jobs that that require them to work weekends or evenings they're more likely to take jobs that um that have very little people contact uh like being an engineer and but most men do like people contact but many of the jobs with less people contact like being an engineer mathematician tend to pay less the men are more likely to um let's see e a work a longer a longer hours yeah so the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics when you hear somebody works full-time that only means that they work 35 hours a week or more not 40 hours a week was what you usually think of as full-time well the average person who works 44 hours per week makes twice the money as somebody who works 35 hours a week it's twice I see well I remember one of your stats which was I think 10 percent more working hours is 20 percent more income something like that but that's a much more dramatic step statistic 44 hours is twice as valuable as 35 hours yes and men are much more likely to work that 44 hours or more per week right and thus not be there for their children as is exposed in Family Court exactly and and that of course is very fascinating it's what I call the father's Catch-22 that dad's learned to love the family by having to be away from the love of their family but when the a Pew Research Center asked dads who were full-time working dads would you prefer to be Maine full-time working or if you had the option of leaving your job full-time and being full-time with the children which would you prefer 49 of dads said who worked full-time so these are not sort of loser dads or dad's not inclined to work 49 percent of dads who work full-time said that they would prefer to be home with their children full time and maybe work a little bit or not outside of the home and um and yet that uh that question has never it almost never even asked of that it's usually when middle and upper middle class people are married and they have children uh the mom generates three options option one is to work full-time option two is to be full-time with the children option three is to do some combination of both and dads you know they have three options too option one is to work full-time option two is to work full-time and option three is to work full-time or more accurately um if they're a working class person to work two jobs if they're um more of a white collar worker they'll tend to sort of work more hours at the job that they're doing and so that type of these types of differences are not seen and the easiest way to see these is that um women who have never been married and never had children they earn 117 of what men who have never been married and never had children earned it's only when men have get married and have children that they begin to do what you were talking about before and start taking on a commitment a new responsibility okay so your claim your claim it's no wonder you're so popular your claim is essentially that men don't earn more because of privilege they earn more because they take responsibility not not that women don't I'm not saying that but I'm not saying that they're taking responsibility in a different way because they're focused on the children and maybe they sacrifice their career for that and maybe that's what they want to do but it doesn't matter they're still doing it but the reason that men earn more is because they're earning more for the people they love even yes even politically um liberal people who normally believe in minimal sex roles uh when it when it comes to the children being born uh the mothers are much more likely to sort of even if they're working full-time remember we said full-time is 35 hours a week they're much more likely to go from maybe working 45 45 hours a week before to doing a few things that are different one is to uh working uh not only fewer hours but finding a job that is closer to home so they can be more flexible and we see this the best way I think to understand the difference in the pay Gap is to look at what happens with women who own their own businesses versus men who own their own businesses so take two groups that are quite equal they both have mbas um and they've um and so they're committed obviously to work the Rochester Institute of Technology studying both groups of men and women with both mbas who who own their own business women earned only 49 of what men earned and so the the Assumption when they started this was wow women who own their own business that will you know they don't have the Discrimination of um you know a discriminating male bosses and so therefore they'll be valued more they'll probably earn as much or more than their male counterparts and the answer was no so the Rochester Institute of Technology then investigated that further and they asked women and men which is the most important values for you in owning your own business uh 70 72 percent of the men said the most important value for me was greater income only 29 of women said it was greater income the women wanted more time they wanted time they wanted stability and they wanted safety also men were much less concerned about safety than uh women were which is a why you know all of your has why Uber drivers make more when they're men at least in part yeah and higher risk tolerance yes and I mean and if you know let's say you don't have a college education or even dropped out of high school and so if you're you might um get a job as a as a garbage collector you have to get up early in the morning um it's dirty it's hazardous um and yet a female who um is has an art degree a master's degree in art um they earn less than that garbage collector um and partially it's because you know people tend to need the garbage picked up more than they need a new piece of art and so these are so many of the 25 differences that are um between men and women but the good news about that how did we get to in a mistake Warren where the given 25 differences is a lot of differences and it doesn't make for a very big difference in pay by the way um even the most radical proponents of the unequal pay Theory are struggling to come up with a figure that exceeds 15 percent so 25 differences amounting to 15 percent isn't that much of a difference um but you know if the data are so clear that it's fathers who are driving this and it's relatively self-evident I would say if it was single guys that was driving this you could make a case that was for selfish pleasure seeking purposes right and that would fit pretty nicely into the privilege narrative right power hungry greedy selfish short-sighted men with privilege make more money it's like well wait a minute it's Father's oh so why are they doing that well and never married women who have never had children earn 117 percent of what never married men who have never had children or never married women who have never had children they are more likely to plan for their careers and they do earn more and what is most astonishing is that never married women who have never had children have earned more than never married men who have never had children since the 1970s just now it's 117 more and so exactly what you said is true it is not uh never married women with with never who have never had children they tend to focus on their careers whereas different married men who have never had children they're much more likely to be able to do something like music or art or and and gay men historically have often been very successful in art because they've been usually never married men who have never had children and they've been able to afford to do things that were less likely and dependable to produce money oh I've never heard that explanation before that's that's that's quite an explanation so so let's delve into that a little bit more deeply the the time and and money issues so when women rank order their preferences when they have options so these are the middle class upper middle class women you talked about they're going to go for more time and I presume that they want more time to spend that with their kids that's been my observation that's the number one thing okay and then men are making more money instead but it's fathers that are making more money so they're making more money for what reason is it like exactly is it for their kids is it for their wife and kids is it so that their wife maintains her attractiveness her attraction to the man because that's a that's a big issue that no one ever talks about right I mean within marriages I've seen this many times within marriages if the male takes a status hit he also takes a attractiveness hit and it's a severe hit I've seen this many many times and no one will ever talk about it but it's definitely the case here's the best way to understand that bridge the man takes a status hit um he starts losing respect for himself his wife starts losing a little bit of respect for him wondering whether or not that this is going to result in a job down the line or whether some promise or belief that he has is going to manifest now if she's really the man he thought she was she thought he was he feels that less respect and a woman it's and I think every woman will agree with this it's almost impossible for a woman to love a man she doesn't respect and there's this I think it's that the opposite is true too but maybe the grounds for respect differ the grounds for respective yeah and also a man there's more flexibility with a man on the respect issue there may not be more flexibility in terms of first Falling in Love on the beauty issue women have their burden that they have to uh that they have to live up to as well but the but on the respect issue um it's very challenging for if a woman begins to lose respect she begins to lose love and Men sense this and therefore they oftentimes brag or boast or uh or you know uh or overstate their potential in order to be able to make themselves attractive and we see this in so many levels in the lowest land level um Lois Lane you know she had no interest in Clark Kent but she fell in love with Superman and once she fell in love with Superman she wanted Superman to be able to cry and express emotions but the man who did cry and express emotions and feelings and sensitive Clark Kent she has zero interest in um you know women are oftentimes say I'm opposed to war but look at the she's much more likely to fall in love with the Officer and a Gentleman than she is the private in the pacifist um and you know and they they we talk about this even in high school most everybody's gone to high school and most high schools have football games and um and the and the women are the cheerleaders to go First and Ten do it again for the guy that scores the touchdown um or cat either by throwing the pass or catching the pass and if the guy feels like it's too dangerous for him to play football and he leaves the football team it's very rare that the foot that the cheerleader says you know I notice how well how good your listening skills were when you were in the Huddle and how warm and tender you are I want to continue cheering for you no she tends to cheer for his replaceable part another number seven risking his life um with a concussion or a spinal cord injury no this is none this is non-trivial um Behavior I mean because you look at the the football team I've been writing about that recently the football example is particularly interesting especially because it's such a Trope in American especially in American popular culture everybody knows the story right um but what's so interesting too is the men will on the team will Elevate their best player to the highest position of status despite the fact that they all take a hit in terms of sexual attractiveness by doing so I mean maybe you know being on a winning team elevates a rising tide that's all boats well definitely but but it's still the case that they'll take a a relative hit within the confines of the team to elect the man to the position where he's most likely to receive the favors of Attraction from the most valuable the most desired women yes exactly so I mean trying to puzzle out the role of sexual selection thinking that through because men men select the women that men select the men that women select absolutely very very interesting to watch that happen and yeah absolutely and you'll see this you know both sexes figure out very carefully and when people say well men are more competitive than women that's not really true um both sexes are very competitive uh for getting having the goodies that lead them to be have the greatest amount of choice so women will compete with other women about how they dress what their dresses look like if a woman is at a party and a uh and she's interested in one or two of the guys at that party in a really attractive woman comes through the door she will assess what her chances are and what you know what um how she should position herself to make sure she gets the contact with the man that she really wants to make contact with and the men will do the same type of thing around um you know the things that they feel will lead a woman to be attracted to them well this also makes it very it's very difficult for men to figure out this is another reason why I question the long-term viability of not not that I truly question it but these questions arise in my mind the long-term viability of mixed sex workplaces the rules for competing with other men are pretty clear the rules for competing with women are not clear at all yes because if you're a loser you're still a loser but if you're a winner you're just so easily a bully so it isn't obvious what what how men can negotiate that well they have to negotiate it through negotiation that's the only possible outcome but it definitely makes things much much more complex and it's it's also it's complex at least in part because as you just pointed out within the Sexes the competition is about different things so or sorry between the Sexes no no within the Sexes the competition is about different things so when a woman competes with a status with st with a man for status she's competing for male status not female status and so what to make of that well why that would be rewarding to her isn't that obvious and I think that's part of the reason why so many women bail out of high pressure situations jobs when they hit their 30s I mean part of it is that they would rather be with their family and and for obvious reasons but the the the other unspoken elephant in the room is always well why would it be particularly rewarding for a woman to attain status in the masculine hierarchy what what benefit does that confer on her well more income that's one of them but that confers no attractiveness Advantage whereas for men it accrues a tremendous attractiveness Advantage it's definitely a disproportionate male versus female I would say though that if tooth if a woman is if a man has a choice between two women and they're both equally attractive and their personalities are pretty much the same Etc and one is more successful than the other the man is likely to be more attracted to the more successful woman but he's also likely to be afraid of rejection yes definitely definitely feel that that more successful woman will have more options uh that she will have more options she will have more options and she'll have higher demands as well because she's going to want to mate that's the real issue is that's where the rejection issue comes in it's not even necessarily that she has more options it's that because she's more successful her criteria for what constitutes acceptable are going to be elevated they may even be elevated to the point of impossibility for her exactly and and the real fear here that the man has is the fear of being rejected yes definitely and I I think that that well I've made light of that uh by teasing my my class my my my students you know I said well what's the what's the old what's the joke well you're you're perfectly suitable as a companion but in no way should your genetic material be allowed to propagate itself into the Next Generation right that's that's the core of rejection and it's no it's it's it cuts to the Bone it cuts to the Bone and I I I it isn't obvious that that that's sufficiently understood how terrified men are of female rejection well that's part of the turning to pornography I would say and the advantage of dating sites like Tinder because of the rejection is taken out of the game essentially or its hidden mask Tinder is a is a revolutionary technology because it Alters the the reward structure reward and Punishment structure and dating I mean it's a it's incendiary and named properly pornography is basically accessed to a variety of attractive women without fear of rejection at a price you can afford and right and with with the with the commensurate responsibility no except to yourself right but that's easily foregone in the moment and the challenge of it is that the more so the boys who are usually doing less young men who are doing less well in school who are not the or not the football players that are getting the 15 different women coming up to them and risking rejection um or not the student body presidents who are not standing out one way or the other or not getting great grades not part of the Honor Society Etc uh the the non-standout men the ones that are oftentimes dad deprived that have minimal postpone gratification and so on and they tend to do badly in school or drop out of school those boys feel like losers and they they know that women tend to not date losers they tend to take winners and um and they end up in the unemployed and what women are looking for um forgot uh and and much more likely to be in their families um live with their families 66 percent more oh yes that's another statistic young men between 25 and 31 or 66 percent more likely than young women to be living with their parents yes and more young men are living with a parent than with a partner yes and they and you don't find women um looking um in there looking for men that are living in their parents basement or looking for men no well that's just a joke which is why you you know you could insert it there as a cliche everyone understands exactly what that means it means Failure to Launch it means Peter Pan right it's a joke and and and those women are therefore more like those guys rather I'm much more likely to turn to pornography because um they sense they're being rejected by women um and then they turn to this beautiful woman that they can be turned on by the challenge with pornography is that the more you get into it the more you tend to be stimulated by more and more risky things and more and more salacious things or you know or things that are yeah well that's because no novelty enhances enhances pleasure so that's the addictive element of it precisely and then the female who is interested in that guy and does come over to you know to be with him physically she often feels like this guy is like you know more interested in something that happened in the pornographic of things that he's been watching she feels like an object um like and because she is being treated like an object well and also those are the men who aren't going to be particularly sophisticated in their their treatment of women because how can they be they have no experience precisely and so the the pornography ends up haunting them on multiple levels um and and leads them to often turn back to pornography to avoid continuing rejection and only convinces them that a real life woman isn't somebody that he would fail at one level or another with and so it's a really um have you ever seen Robert crumbs representations of bird-headed women no you don't have it Robert Crum is an underground cartoonist and he was the feature of a documentary which you should you and everybody else who's listening to this should definitely watch huh it's it's absolutely it's the best documentary I've ever seen about anything ever it's and he he draws these women they're Pro he was a loser in high school by his own admission by every single category you could possibly generate and so it's a study in loser psychology but it's really complex because he was a loser who was extremely intelligent and unbelievably creative and who had two brothers who were probably more intelligent more creative than him although also more psychopathological and then he became successful he was one of the establishers of of underground cartooning back in the in the 1960s and and and and and spawned arguably even graphic novel you know I mean he's he's a major player in that in that Niche and and the documentary is a brilliant analysis of the relationship between failure and success and sexual failure and sexual success because in one more memorable scene he talks about he drew this card when he was a high school kid of a heart being ripped apart when he got rejected by this girl that that or by all girls he said he was beneath contempt he could he wasn't even in the category of comprehensible dating partner right he was outside the game entirely so he's rejected by the feminine as such he draws these pictures of bird-headed women with teeth you know and they're powerful big thighs big big uh big rear end like powerful physically powerful intimidating women like mothers draws sometimes these characters of little tiny men climbing up the legs of these huge tree-like women but they're very aggressive and and and and and uh domineering and the reason for that at least in part is because every woman he ever approached was rejecting an aggressive in the extreme treated him with nothing but contempt and then he says in an unbelievably memorable piece of the documentary um that all changed when I got successful and you can just hear the resentment and the bitterness in his voice even though it did change and he wasn't that old when he became successful he was in his mid-20s you know plenty of time to be on the outs completely and to experience life at the bottom of the male dominance hierarchy and and even farther down the female dominance hierarchy let's say in terms of desirable men it's a it's called Crum the documentary I would highly recommend it and it's it's absolutely brilliant study and and he had well he had an authoritarian father and a indulgent mother and she plays uh a key role in the documentary and uh it's it's awful it's it's awful it's a it's a study in Freudian Psychopathology that's deep beyond belief I've seen it like 40 times showing it to my classes and walking through it clip by clip but but anyways it's a study you don't see the world from the perspective of Down and Out male loser you know there are subcultures that that sort of exist there but this is the this is the only examination of that place in the world I've ever seen that I thought really really nailed it the the documentarist was a friend of the family so he and Charles Brothers one of them ended up a sexual offender who lived on the Streets of San Francisco and the other committed suicide by drinking furniture polish when he was like 55. after being bullied terribly in high school and living in his mother's basement essentially for his entire life oh awful awful but you know you watch the documentary it's not it's not like people really there's you you generate some compassion for the people in the documentary and what they've gone through but I wouldn't say that compassion is what's primarily elicited by the documentary and that goes back to this discussion we had right at the beginning about you know what kind of empathy we have for the men who aren't making it and the answer seems to be very very little let's go to social policy with that we might ask okay in light of this what do we do and I would say this is what I've recommended I've recommended to young men that they take that these are the facts on the ground and they're not going to change and that if you're being rejected chronically by women or if you're terrified out of your mind about that and and perhaps rightly so you should take a good hard look at yourself and see what it is that you have to offer and so I are you as educated as you could be are you working you know are you looking for a job at least are you trying to get out of your parents house are you taking the steps necessary to become gainfully employed productive generous and attractive and you know that Tangles us back up with something we also talked about in the beginning which is the criticisms that have been directed my way by men which is well you're asking men to live up to a stereotype that essentially um undermines and devalues the vast majority of them you're part of the problem not part of the solution and your emphasis on a responsible marriage given the state of current family law is nothing short of reprehensible and so you know my Approach is do what you can at the individual level to put yourself in the game but there's there's much more to the story than not absolutely this is really complex because the good news is there's a lot you can do to choose a woman who is the right woman um and so for example looking at uh when when you go both both go out to dinner um does she is she open to paying is she if she if she isn't paying does she does she cook a dinner for you the next time around um how does she treat the waiter uh somebody that can't do her um any any good I'll ask her about her uh former relationships um how they broke how they broke up and who was at fault was that is there any accountability and responsibility on her part of course ask these same questions of yourself as well especially about uh former relationships and how they broke up um and um and so that's um so choosing the right woman is probably so what are you looking for there you're looking for um generosity you're looking for kindness down the hierarchy right so that's how does she treat people who are social inferiors so to speak at least in that context like waiters and then with regards to previous relationships is she capable of some self-analysis or is is it always the guy's fault that reminds me of that Atlantic Monthly article one of them I'm a unfortunately can't remember who wrote it but it was this woman in her late 40s detailing out all the high quality men that she had rejected many many many men by her own um account and during the entire article there wasn't any recognition whatsoever of any time when it might have been her it was like I read these 40 men didn't live up to my standards it's like well after the fifth one didn't you start thinking maybe the problem was on the other side of the dating table but the answer was obviously no and she was obviously still single so but so what do you you looking for there exactly and why did you why did you bring that up at that point well because one of the ways that you can be involved in the game of marriage in a way that is positive is by making the choice of the woman differently than what we tend to do we and many men look at a woman she's beautiful and and our desire to be sexual with her leads us to sort of okay we'll pay for dinner we'll promise this we'll go we'll go here we'll go there and we should point out too I just want to point out something I talked to Randy Thornhill recently one of the world's preeminent biologists and before we get to thinking that this sexual attractiveness is nothing more than mere shallow mindedness and impulsive gratification is all the cues of sexual attractiveness are tightly associated with physical health and fecundity which is the ability to procreate and so even if men are blinded by Beauty which which I do believe is true enough there are reasons for that at the deepest possible level still have to do with the desire to continue the human species so it's it's shallow in one sense but not in another but your point is there are other markers that are character illogical that are more subtle that need to be taken into account yes both sexes have very um huge reproductive draws I mean every from an insect right on up through human beings women tend to procreate and have children with it with the out the alpha male yeah a good example of this is Buck Elks and among Buck Elks the females 85 percent of them will have um reproduced with the with the email that has the biggest wreck um but then and that but what it takes to get that biggest rack is an exhaustion of 30 of the minerals nutrients and um calcium um in the buck elk uh so the second that he reproduces if he doesn't get rid of his rack immediately he's likely to die before winter sets in and he's able to replenish the um the nutrients and the and the minerals and so on so his his his rack was very productive for being able to procreate it was very productive for being able to attract the female but it was also his weakness that is and that's very symbolic of men that men's weakness is our facade of strength because it was strength because we could use that rack or they not me but the buck Elks could use that rack to you know to to get rid of other Predators or people that were the female didn't want to protect the female when she was um you know creating the child and so on but once but he was also being used uh for being part of the next generation's benefit of producing the next generation's machine and as you said when we you know we once we have children we really live for the next generation and so now then the the next question becomes as humans are we or do we want to create more options for ourselves and so and are we at a point now where survival is mastered enough in the middle and upper middle class that we have them then we are chosen merely for our success and I think the best explanation of that um comes in Japan where the Millennials in Japan have a game called corrosia and of course Karoshi means death at the desk or death from overwork and the the game each person has a little Karoshi figure and they compete to get to the top of the ladder it might be the political ladder might be the economic ladder it might be the religious ladder and and as they compete to get to the top of the ladder the one who gets to the top of the ladder first commits suicide not in real life but in the game and the point that the Japanese Millennials are communicating with each other um is that the um that what we did to become that successful man who was it who was the most attracted who was the most able able to be eligible for sex and for love is we unbecame a human doing climbing to the top of the ladder um I was and we I'm sorry we unbecame a human being we didn't even think of ourselves as a human being that's why we're committing suicide we have just just by competing to be at the top of the ladder we've worried about what position we wanted how to have working more hours um pleasing the boss pleasing the corporation um not not selling something we wanted or doing something we wanted and we we've lost we never even considered ourselves as a human being and so now we Japanese Millennials are going to start looking at the um the loss of ourselves as human doings uh the loss of ourselves rather as human beings and that is um I and that's the in my opinion the where we need to consider going that as we have children there's this Balancing Act of helping our children see the value of being that artist that painter that's you know doing what you love to do combined with is it creating enough income to be responsible to your family to do that and um and and yes it will lose you some women but if you're developing emotional skills and emotional intelligence that may not attract as many women as the football player that risks his life in the spinal cord injury but it may attract the type of woman you want and be for me between marriages when when I would go out with women they would you know I would share with them what I did but part of that was sort of redefining equality for them and it was not offering to pay for the bill the whole bill on the first date it was um talking to them about the options like I can pay on the first date and maybe you can do something like cook the dinner for me on the second day uh type of thing but I'll tell you many many times I feared not many times I feared I know a few times that I said something like that um that I knew there was going to be no sex that evening whereas otherwise it probably would have been and so um you know it's a it's a risk that you take inside of yourself but for me what I wanted to select for was a woman who wanted me more for who I was and less for what status I had or what predictable status I had so well what do you think what do you think about the advice that I've advice I don't really think I give advice exactly I'm trying to explore ideas and that exploration has certain consequences but certainly you know I do and as is my role as a psychologist I do you know encourage the people who are reading me to do what they can with what they have to the best of their ability and I don't see that we have a a truly viable alternative to essentially classic sex rules I know they're under pressure for all sorts of different reasons including the ones that you've outlined but but you know in some sense it's it's the only game in town now what can I mean there are things we can do though you talked about um the Japan for example where they've really um invested heavily in vocational training which seems to me to be a no-brainer it's like maybe without having to revamp the entire relationship between men and women we could say well wouldn't it be good social policy for everyone concerned to pay some attention to the vast majority of men who could use vocational training for example as an Avenue to success in all domains of life and why are we so unable to do that when the Japanese can do it yes and we we really are there are so many things like that that we can do I mean schools for example um we could have one of the things I've suggested to the White House both of the Trump Administration and also under the Biden Administration is starting a male teacher Corps in which men are trained to be teachers particularly in dad deprived areas uh school districts and exchange and they get free scholarships um they get full scholarships for college but yet in exchange for that full scholarship for college they have to serve three or four years as a teacher in a debt in an in a school district that has few male teachers um another thing I've suggested to both both and so you think that's I'm thinking of objections to that selection on the basis of gender let's say which I'm you know pretty much temperamentally opposed to but in some sense but this this is a data driven suggestion the data suggests that there are areas that we so it's differentiated it's not ideologically driven it's a differentiated solution there are there's data indicating that the provision of male role models in places that are deprived of those um the addition of male role models in in the domains that are deprived of those would be of benefit to everyone concerned and so that's a targeted social policy yes it's not an ideological statement precisely it in fact it's even more complex than that the way that I've suggested it is that you don't just get males like me I consider myself more of a nurturer connector male you also get more traditional males so that that no matter who your son is um if you if you've grown up in a home without a a male role model in the home without a biological father particularly in the home that you have that your son no matter what he's prone for but his unique self is that he's able to go to find a role model find a role model that is that is not just another nurture or connector male but you know a construction worker or a a man that retired from a more of a um a profession that was more traditional like a logger or whatever whatever firefighter and that your son is able to see that possibility and then also the nurture connector male as a possibility and so that those things be offered another suggestion that I I think is by far the most important one that I made to both administrations um is the the importance of creating a father Warrior program w-a-r-r um and and because every gender you know historically speaking as you as you read in the boy Crisis book about the purpose void that men have um if by not no longer being as needed as as soldiers and no longer being as needed as full-time Breadwinners uh that that the that the male have the option of seeing himself um as POS as possibly and involved in um some and I lost where I was going with that you were talking about the male warrior idea and the need for purpose and the social policy associated with that yes and so I I what I've said adjusted to both white houses is the importance of creating a father Warrior program where we're saying we need young men to be full of fully involved learn all the traits of being a responsible emotionally connected father we need women to to Value this in men as well and so how would that work practically speaking like I'm always thinking about incentives like if we wanted to to incentivize young men to be responsible fathers which I think is exactly the right role to be playing in every virtually every role that a man plays is the role of responsible father that's the right rule not everyone but virtually everyone how do you incentivize that at the level of social policy in in a practical way the number one thing you do is you honor it so for example when we had each generation had its war and we said Uncle Sam needs you when men are told they are needed that gives them purpose that gives them drive that gives them honor okay so how do we Okay so how do we um say fathers you are needed without saying single mothers you're inadequate because that's the killer right that's the killer right there because one implies the other or that's the theory so you know and this is uh this is a Shoal upon which our culture is is Wrecking itself is how do we reward behavior that is eminently pro-social in the broadest possible sense of the word without punishing simultaneously punishing those who are excluded from that but struggling to do the best under the conditions that have presented themselves to them we say to mothers two things one is we honor mothers for being just overwhelmed I mean I've never between marriages I dated a number of almost all the women I dated were women who had children the word that they used most frequently was overwhelm um and the and so many of the mothers I tended to date very bright women and so they often felt caught between they could do better in work they could go further they could go farther uh they weren't up to their full level but and they could do better as mothers they felt guilty as mothers that they didn't have enough time for their work or they didn't have enough time yes yes guilt all the time there are whatever they're doing is inadequate exactly because they're not spending enough time with your kids and they're not spending enough time on their work and both of those are true in some sense absolutely and when they would they would say I want to spend more time with you but I'm caught between my work my um the other trait and and and my and my love interest and so um and so the larger social message that needs to come out come come out to men is Men Women need your help women do not need not we must not leave women uh to feel like that so is it women or mothers mothers I'm sorry no it's okay I mean it's just it's important to get it right right I mean absolutely women you might not need men's help mothers you do and so do your children right exactly so that you're so that when you focus on Mothers being overwhelmed every mother hears that when you say to a mother when a mother hears we're now going to be emphasizing the importance of dads getting in there to balance the picture with you to help you out to be to to to not have you have the entire burden mothers do hear that in a positive way if you are simultaneously saying which I think is 100 true that you have just been that you've been overwhelmed and you've been we respect and honor the fact that you've you've you've taken so much responsibility but it is not helpful for you to have to be pulled in so many directions it is not helpful for the children it's not optimal for the children because it's not optimal for the children and it's not helpful for the dad because the dad is experiencing a purpose void of feeling not needed and unwanted and men with purpose voice AIDS I tend to look for a purpose yes attention and or look for and be a be negative sometimes in their purpose and yes definitely we need to help mothers and fathers in the whole country understand okay so this sounds great so why the hell don't you have any traction with Trump or with Biden because that pretty much exhausts the options he says what's going on well I you know with with Trump they uh the Trump Administration said they were very excited about it they asked me to write up a speech that Trump would give and he never gave it um and so um with any idea why I mean you'd think it would have been useful to him you'd think given his constituency I would have thought it would have been 100 useful to him you know I made the case that there are about 20 million parents that have children uh that um boys rather that are in Failure to Launch mode in some way shape or form and that these mothers care more about their sons and their care about their party label that this could open or themselves maybe even yes exactly and I said this to both the Biden Administration and the Trump Administration the Biden Administration was at least you know the 14 people that I met with at the White House and with HHS they said uh they were very all to a person extremely enthusiastic with the Democrats I've gotten much more of a resistance when the White House Council on gender policy was created and I objected to that not including boys and men and fathers um and and said that you couldn't possibly say you were in favor of diversity and inclusion when you excluded fathers and boys and men and then they said that there was only 50 percent of the population yes yes or 49 is the percent whatever but you know but it's one thing if you just say boys and men are not important it's another thing to say I'm in favor of diversity and inclusion and then to say that the second mission of the gender policy council is to have racial Justice and not understand that racial Justice can that the single biggest group of people who are having challenges in the cut in the culture are black males and you know if you if you go to a homeless city which is a prime example of the intersectionality that's being touted as crucial to the development of our entire culture yes and here it's the prime example perhaps indeed here because I think black women are outperforming black men on average in almost every metric yes yes exactly so so you know well that does beg the question I mean what question does it beg you know maybe one question it begs is where exactly is the systemic racism the the racism use a horrible phrase yes I don't even want to go to a systemic racism but if if the if the goal of the White House gender policy Council um is to have racial justice as it says it is then you would but then they go ahead and exclude uh black males from racial Justice and only focus on black females that is undermining racial Justice because these as we know since the 1965 with the Moynihan report um the when we did studies of Inner City crime and the fear when Patrick Moynihan went to do that study was oh my goodness he's going to be blaming black people is going to be racist in fact he ended up finding that it was not blacks per se that were creating the crime it was just that one 25 at that point in history in 1965 it was only 25 of the children who were being raised in in families were without father involvement and almost all of the crimes that were being committed were from the the dead deprived children well now yeah that hasn't changed that well that hasn't changed except one thing has changed the percentage of children who are raised in dad deprived mode in the black community has gone way up 25 what do you think of the counter arguments to that that have been raised recently that black men are just as involved with your children it's just that it's in ways that the you know privileged White Community Jesus Christ isn't recognizing and that that's just another form that idea that you know the black father is less engaged just just another racist trope no some black fathers there are um a significant number of black fathers who are involved with their children and that is not where those children those are not the children that are having problems as long as the black mother is also involved with the children um so when whenever you have that um and and of course the the social policies we were talking about before you know of of giving money to the women infants and children program another program where the the female who didn't the black female or the white female who did not have a father in the home she would be helped if the father was not in the home that did reinforce very significantly the propensity of the mother to say let's say the father wasn't earning very much money so the father would if you if you live away from me we'll be able to get government support and so then that right incentive for a living watch your incentives right and we have to realize today it's not just that the African-American families now have more than 70 percent of the children who are raised with minimal or no father involvement or what I call Dad deprived children but also at the time of the Moynihan report in 1965 there was only 3.2 percent of Caucasian families whose children were living in dad deprived situations now that's gone up to 35 in Caucasian families and so we had this enormous dead deprivation in it's in these dad deprived families that watch what's going to happen in the fall we're going to have significant numbers of school shootings and one of the things that we see with School shooters in the 21st century every school shooter who shot 10 or more people killed 10 or more people every one of them was Dad deprived we um when we look at when you look at the prison population it's 93 male and the great majority of those males are dad deprived males um I think I've never experienced something that was more touching for me than when I ran for governor and I spoke of California and I spoke around in a few prison populations and I talked to these prison populations almost all male the first question I would ask is you know how many of you had an involved father in about three or four percent of the hands of the prison population but would go up and then I would talk to them whatever that all the the things that dads do that are different from what moms tend to do like the teasing like the postponed Veterinary occasion like the rough housing and what the psychological value of those were for the children's growth and development and I had these guys with tattoos and um you know muscles that I'll never have coming up to me and saying you're crying and saying I never realized I was worth anything I thought I was better off probably in prison because I was the worthless person in the family and suddenly for the first time I'm feeling like I want to get out of prison to help my children not have the problems that I had and not go and and not make the mistakes that I made um and so there's this enormous desire on the part of a men to know that they're valuable as fathers you know my my sense as a clinical psychologist has always been that a kid has to have one role model sometime in their life to to make it they have to have someone to mimic or they can't make it now you can get that a variety of ways I remember reading Angela's Ashes it's a great book by Frank McCourt and his dad was a recalcitrant alcoholic who drank the family's livelihood and health away it was awful uh but he kind of separated his dad into good dead and bad dad and bad dad was drunk evening dad and good dad was sober morning Dad and he got his mimicry from good sober morning Dad you know so you can you can pick it up in bits and pieces from different places but if you're even if you have an intact nervous system you know and you're not suffering from burdens right at the point of your birth from from deprivation that's that began before you were even around you need to have at least one model in your life that shows you what the good version of you could be because otherwise how the hell do you know what it is and it needs to be embodied right so you can see it play itself out so then you can play with it yes absolutely let me and let me to that effect let me address the the females in the audience here listening to this if that are single moms and and what can you do so the number one thing that that you can do is take a look at the differences between dad style parenting and Mom style parenting because oftentimes the things that dads do look like they're not caring about the children the things like teasing the things like roughhousing the things that letting the children take risks like you know climbing the trees like we talked about they all seem like um this the tough love decisions are often seen you see the toughness without the love very frequently and so um take a very careful look at that make sure that if you're still if they still have the dad at all around or available that you get into family dinner night discussions where everybody learns how to listen to everybody else's perspective in the family learn how to do a negotiating of that that checks and balance parenting but if it's absolutely impossible to get the biological father involved and I'm afraid that the biological father children do better with the biological father than they do with a stepfather mostly step parent elevates risk for abuse by a hundred-fold if I remember correctly it's a very stepfathers almost always are never allowed to be more than advisors if you do have a stepfather work on that issue that I talk about in the boy Crisis book on how to engage the SEC The Stepfather as a real equal assuming that he's a responsible and loving man but if all those things fail make sure you get your child and at the age appropriate time into Cub Scouts Cub Scouts involve children involved in Cub Scouts for two or more years have a very significant increase in character development over children that are involved in Cub Scouts minimally and or not at all Boy Scouts are a wonderful construct deconstruction of masculinity they've really figured out how to bring out the best in boys faith-based communities children who are in faith-based communities make sure your faith-based leader gets your son involved with other in small groups with other boys his age and make sure he he encourages your son to be um and all the boys in the group to talk about their feelings and their fears so that they can see that they're not alone in those feelings and fears make sure your children are involved in the what I call the liberal arts of sports but by the liberal arts of sports I mean team sports also pick up team sports uh which uh and and also Sports where you have to develop your own skills it's you're part of a team like in gymnastics or in tennis um but you're not uh interacting with the team all the time each of those things will develop and your son different types of skill sets the most important one that oftentimes moms don't realize the value of is the value of pickup team sports let your son or daughter be at a at a at the school without your supervision let them pick up a game where they have to decide without somebody supervising them how big the court should be at the basketball court should be should be half size full size what are the fouling rules who do you check it's perfect developmental skills for being an entrepreneur and being being able to make decisions without supervision obviously team sports are pretty obvious what their benefits are and um and be developing skills with that that aren't dependent on this team are part of the liberal arts of sports so spend time in the boy Crisis book with looking at what you can do as a single as a single yeah well one of the things I liked about your books and and why men earn more as well is that they're they're full of information but they're also practical and they have practical advice here's things you can actually do which is something people apparently appreciate about my books so it's nice to have it detailed down to the level of action I want to close because I know we're we've exhausted you um what why did you receive such I would like to know why you think you didn't get more traction with the Trump people but then I would like you to tell me what's up with the Democrats why didn't you get why did you get rejected so out of hand when you put forward these perfectly reasonable propositions which in principle should be in accordance with what they're claiming to support yes even the Trump people this is what I'm going to say now is 10 times tenfold this issue with the Biden people but even the Trump people were fearful that the single mother would feel criticized and they were afraid of losing that the support from her and um and so that was that was what I heard behind the scenes was the the gap between um it being very much recommended by the people that I spoke with versus actually having a a presentation delivered by Trump the other thing was that they were fearful that it would it would call attention to Trump's failed marriages and um and his his womanizing and they didn't want to open that door so those were the two okay from the Biden side um it was like it was well the best example of this is what I went to Iowa and I interviewed um nine of the presidential candidates that were Democrats and most of them were are very excited especially Andrew Yang and Senator Hickenlooper John Hickenlooper we're very excited about what I was saying Andrew Yang already had a Mastery of what was um what the problems were with boys he was on the tip of maybe being able potentially to talk about the issue um while when I finished talking with both Andrew Yang and um and Hickenlooper especially with Andrew Yang the female campaign manager came up to me and said I'm sorry Warren we just could not have him talk about these issues this will alienate our feminist base this will alienate women who are single moms it will not and we want we want also many of the women who are divorced we want them not to feel that they won't have the choice of going off and starting a new life and bringing their children to a new location with a new man and so we were afraid of losing that bait those two yes well into hell with the old man yes and so it was really um and that they were honest with me that's the good news the bad news is they were you know that um this was the case and so with when the Biden Administration um created the White House gender policy Council which was a day or two before he was actually inaugurated um the um and it was focused on you know women and girls and um you know and and both black women and girls and white women and girls I protested and um and talked with Jen Klein who's the co-chair about this uh many times and her only answer over and over again is Warren um President Biden cares about men and boys Warren President Biden cares about the fathers and my response is my my constant hammering of her about well then then it should be written into the White House gender policy Council to create these father Warrior programs to create these um these programs of dozens of which I suggested uh that could increase and improve the lives of boys and men and I was met with no answer like just so what what's the problem what's the problem as far as you're concerned we might as well have it write out what the hell's going on in in Jen Klein's case and in the um in the in the feminist uh in the the liberal political leadership and the Democrats it is just a fundamentally and totally honest belief that um women have it worse than men that boys and men and the the constant image that comes up for the political liberals is Warren right so it's the Gen it's the classification of the World by sex that's the problem it isn't who has problems and how do we help them it's it's the classification first in the problem second it's we live in a patriarchal World dominated by men who made the rules to benefit men at the expense of women the proof of that one is that um look at who's at the top of the political ladder look at who's the top of the corporate better look at who's the top of even the religious life right so it's right back to where we started which is identify that tiny minority of men who are hyper successful generalize that to the masculine uh Universe At Large and to hell with those that are in the middle or the bottom which is so what is that hypergamy in female politics is it the same thing and it's it is not the realization that the men at the top are often at the top they're earning that more money not because they feel more fulfilled or this is their choice they felt obligated to earn money that somebody else spent while they died sooner right so it's not even true for the people who have the privilege much less true for men anywhere else on the hierarchy correct and when I say to them things like you know it isn't male privilege do you consider it male privilege for every um generation during their War to train the boys and the men uh to be the ones that died in war so that you could be protected and saved and it's just like closed mouth what about the um the legislation that's become a real issue in Korea yeah South Korea oh actually I didn't know that oh yes yes there are no shortage of men who are not thrilled about the fact that they are conscripted for two years and the women aren't now you know my sense is well the women pay their dues in childbirth and and pregnancy and you know but nonetheless it's it's an issue and it's producing no shortage of resentment and friction among young Koreans and here in the United States you know it's still the law um which is probably the most unconstitutional law that most violates the 14th amendment's equal protection and laws it is still the law of the United States that your son who's 18 must register for the draft if he doesn't um he's could be fined a quarter million dollars he could be put in prison for a year or two he can he'll in 42 states he can lose his driver's license if he doesn't register for the draft um and there's a whole series of other he could never go to a school that gets Federal money which is virtually every school including private schools this is all the punishment that men have male your son has if he's 18 and doesn't register for the draft the punishment for females is zero because they don't have to register for the draft they have the option so what do you think of that Warren like the the old-fashioned patriarchal part of me thinks I think two ways at the same time you know unfortunately about that I think you know I do believe to some degree that that's the balancing of the scales you know that as you pointed out in your own book you know men die in war and women die in childbirth now they don't die in childbirth so much anymore but they did and and in in great numbers and was terrible pain and and and all of the privation that went along with that obligatory responsibility tremendous amount of that has been ameliorated not all of it but a tremendous amount thank God for technological progress and so but but having said that well it doesn't sit well the idea of women drafted for Frontline combat doesn't sit well with me yes and I think there's an answer to that which is we don't have to draft people for Frontline combat they're they're men that are not suited to that there are women that are not suited to that but but I think it's a good solution would be either you don't have registration for the draft which creates a different set of problems and not having a ready um group ready but say you but you have people register at the age of 18 for some type of service of say six months or more and and and then you you mark off the type of service that your personality that you're that your um contribution can make it could be a health care Frontline worker you can be a volunteer in this way or that way so if there's mandatory service it's mandatory for all but the service itself can differ and and and everyone could have some choice in that and who knows maybe there'd be enough people picked Frontline combat to fill the necessary places it's possible I mean there are people who are constitutionally inclined towards that and if there isn't enough people for that then you do a supply and demand type of phenomenon you raise the income for the people who do um volunteer right right right which would be that would right exactly that would be the Equitable way of dealing with it is is increase the hazard pay yes exactly right and you'd watch the demanding you'd watch the supply increase exactly because there'd be people who are right on the line right right on the edge exactly right right right right any final things to say yeah I guess maybe the most important thing I'd like us to all get is that there are so many things like hashtag me too that are so valuable um for us to hear the pain and the experience that women go through but hashtag metoo as a monologue is a disaster because it needs to be a dialogue yeah just like it needs to be a dialogue between men and women in a family exactly we need to hear that that men have pain men have all these these you know the the 50 plus developmental challenges that I talk about that men feel um lonely isolated that men why men suffer more um because when and because one thing we need to do it just for compassion secondly there's so many misunderstandings and anger that is happening by we say on the one hand men are we have toxic masculinity um they don't express their feelings they don't say who they are and then we we make men pay an enormous price when they do Express their feelings and so so many young men feel caught between a rock and a hard place yes well I would say that's happened in my case you know because I have this unfortunate proclivity to burst into tears at the slightest provocation which has haunted me my entire life but is still quite pronounced and it isn't exactly obvious to me that you know my radical left-wing critics are above using that as a weapon it's quite interesting to note you know and maybe they're justified in doing so I'm not saying that that's but that's it runs contrary to their hypothetical theory yes yes exactly and you know and I've said man after Man by the way I have that exact same characters if my if my wife were here listening now she'd be really chuckling because um anything that is you know what I had to hold myself back when I was talking about the memory of the of the men in the prison population coming up to me afterwards and themselves crying um right right yeah I think he just about got me there too uh interesting the hashtag V2 dialogue is is so important not just for empathy but also because to to eradicate the toxic part of masculinity that keeps feelings all to oneself because when you do that you end up having a volcano built inside of you and it comes out as the anger it comes out as distance it comes out as drinking it comes out in destructive behavior and it also comes out in things like school shootings mass shootings committing crimes and so both to protect ourselves from the mass shootings from the Isis recruits almost all of whom are dead deprived males and females and also Adams can you do data is there data on that one with regards to recruitment for yes there is in fact it was done um by three sociologists who looked at um the studied Isis recruits in Lebanon and after doing that they anecdotally told each other afterwards you know a lot of these these guys have um don't have their dads and they were trying to get involved with Isis to have some sense of purpose Beyond themselves and well it was never part of our questionnaire they went back and then did a systematic study of the men asking including that question that had not been asked at the beginning and found that to be the single most common denominator of the Isis recruits by the way there's 89 male Isis recruits at 11 female Isis recruits and the females had dad deprivation as an issue as well as the males as the single biggest um characteristic patriarchal ideology has a substitute for paternal relationship yes yes absolutely and just a need to have some sense of purpose and feeling of being needed and that's one of the things that guys are so good at as working with moms moms are so good at identifying a child's gifts nurturing the child's gifts and dads are so good at the tough love often times that are necessary to help the child achieve those gifts yeah well I thought you know it seems to me that the central characteristic of the benevolent paternal Spirit parodied as the patriarchy is encouragement oh encourage well I would I say I think I take a little bit of a different issue there I think moms and dads both encourage a lot um but moms oftentimes uh repeat the encouragement and when the child fails are still encouraging whereas the dads say if you want to get to that outcome you need to not do that texting you need not to you know do all the things that that outcome requires and they tend to sort of enforce those boundaries and hold the child accountable to a greater degree does that make sense sure sure that's thank you very much for talking with me today it's just much much appreciated you don't exhaust me you energize me I just oh well okay glad to hear that and I hope that I hope that everybody finds this conversation useful thank you thanks again thank you you too [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 631,453

Keywords: men, why men are the way they are, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, jordan peterson interview, patriarchy, feminism, warren farrell on men, warren farrell jordan peterson men, men going their own way, mens mental health, mental health issues in men, mental health problems in men, Jordan peterson men, divorce, dealing with divorce, struggling with divorce, how to divorce, divorce advice, divorce support, how to divorce podcast

Id: IpPr5i1aHjE

Length: 157min 35sec (9455 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021