July 30, 2025 • 56 mins
Founder & President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard Reeves joins the show to discuss why young men are so lost and what can be done to reach them.
Warning: This episode discusses suicide and suicidal feelings. If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. Please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the US and Canada, or visiting their website at 988lifeline.org
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
So if you tune into the podcast, you may have
noticed a theme, a theme that continues to emerge around
men and boys. What is going on with our men
and boys increasingly isolated, increasingly feeling disengaged, disconnected, depressed. Conversations
with Jackson Katz and Scott Galloway where this issue was highlighted.
We mind the issue not only on the substance as
(00:27):
it relates to this crisis of isolation for men and boys,
but outcomes, outcomes that are moving in just devastating directions.
Eighty percent of suicides, men, dropout rates, suspension rates disproportionately men.
You see graduation rates, particularly college attendance and graduation going
through the roof for women and girls, but not again
(00:50):
for men. It's not just an electoral issue. So often
this is discussed in the context of Trump doing so
well in the last election with young men and the manosphere,
and more broadly doing well with men generally. But the
issue is an important issue that we need to dive
deeper in and that's just what we did recently with
(01:12):
Richard Reeves, who's the founder of the president of the
American Institute of Boys and Men, and we had a
conversation that really goes to the root of why what
is going on not just in the United States, but
increasingly all around the world with young men. And this
led me to look inward as well as Governor of California,
(01:34):
to say, what more can I do? And so we
are also putting out today concurrent with this podcast and
executive order that focuses exactly on that what to do,
not just who's to blame and what the challenges are,
but specific tangible actions that we can invest our time
and energy into beginning to solve this growing crisis. This
(02:06):
is Gavin Newsom and this is Richard Reeves. All right,
Richard Reeves, thanks so much for joining us, and more importantly,
thank you for your work. And I'm just curious because
the amount of attention you're getting is outsize. Obviously, people
rediscovering this remarkable book that was extraordinarily well received of
(02:26):
boys and men when you wrote it, but now seemingly
rediscovered it because of sort of the moment we're living in.
But I'm curious what moment led you to this moment,
meaning this whole issue around masculinity, issues around boys and men,
your own journey to being one of the most important
(02:48):
figures in trying to understand what the hell is going
on with American men.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, well, thank you thanks to that question for having me.
I guess the way to think about it is I
was spending my days at the Brookings Institution being a scholar,
reading papers, going to seminars. You know, imagine what a
Brookings Institution scholar does, and that is exactly what we do.
Like you read a paper, you go to a seminar,
you read another paper. And I was working on issues
(03:14):
around economic inequality. That's really been the through line of
my work, and in particular intergenerational inequality, like what's stopping
people moving up the ladder. I did that in the
UK government, which is where I'm originally from, and then
at Brookings, and I just kept seeing these data points
where it was really a lot of boys and men,
especially those from working class backgrounds, boys and men of color,
(03:36):
who were driving a lot of the economic inequalities that
we were worried about. But I didn't see that many
people paying attention to that particular gender part of the story.
And then I would be going home and I've got
three sons and they're being raised in that you're an affluent,
educated household. So they are not the boys and men
who we should be most worried about from a policy
(03:56):
point of view. But nonetheless they had a lot of questions.
They were spending a lot of time online. I think
the whole debate about masculinity, the roles of men and
women shifting so quickly, was playing out over our dinner
table as well. And so in the end, as those
things came together, and honestly, part of it was that
(04:17):
I didn't think that many people are having a good
faith conversation about this. I saw a lot of bad
faith discussions of what was happened to boys and men,
but not many empirically based good faith discussions.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
And so that was what I decided to do.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
And so you're at Brookings, You're focused on issues around
middle class, income inequality, wealth inequality. You wrote a book
in that space around upper middle class and so give
it what year roughly was that that research really started
and you started to notice this trend or this lack
of focus and intentionality on boys and men.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, So I wrote a book called Dream Hoarders, which
came out twenty seventeen, and it was really about the
way that the upper middle class, the professional class top
ten twenty percent, we're really pulling away from everybody else,
and how that was causing all kinds of issues, and
candidly that we, because I had put myself solidly in
that class, really weren't taking responsibility for the ways in
(05:14):
which we were actually rigging the opportunity system.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
You think about the.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Housing market, which I know you're very interested in, higher education,
which you're also very interested in. I saw those systems
working pretty well for me and my neighbors in Bethesda, Maryland,
where I was living at the time, but I also
saw us holding other people out. So I think that
was one of the root causes of the political moment
(05:38):
that we're in, but also just this cultural moment. And
then I looked at it harder, and I looked and
I saw, actually, know what, it's a lot of men
who are just struggling to rise up the ladder. They're
doing worse than their fathers did. I mean, the fact
that men without a college degree only earned the same
today as that group of men did fifty years ago,
like wage stagnation for most men over a half century,
(06:02):
is a story, and it's a huge part of that
economic inequality, and it's a huge part of why we
don't see that upward mobility because those men are struggling,
they then maybe don't form families, or if they do,
they're not able to kind of provide for them in
the way they'd hope to. Women are of course then
picking up more and more of the slack because I
know something you're also interested in. I think your other
(06:22):
half is even more interested in the whole idea of
fair play and so on, and so I took it.
In the end, it's just bad for everybody if young
men and boys are struggling in our economy and struggling
in our society, And so that's that's really why in
the end, I think just needed a different kind of
spotlight on the question.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So the question always arises, is this notion of a
zero sum game that if we're talking about boys and men,
we're not talking about women and girls, and we're talking
about boys and men, we're talking about it. It's sort
of the historic advantage that goes back you know, hundreds
and hundreds, thousands and thousands of years to you know,
particularly white males. Why the hell do we need to
(07:01):
be focusing on them at a time when women still
are struggling to get equal pay. Still do not have
the gender equality in the home. Back to the reference
you were just making in terms of fair play in
the household, women are still absorbing so much of that
burden and so much of that work. There's still so
much more work than needs to be done for women
(07:22):
and girls. Why Richard spend so much time on boys
and men.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Well, because we can do two things at once. That's
my bet, My huge bet here is that people, including
policymakers like yourself, are able to do both, able to
simultaneously say there's a bunch more stuff we need to
do for women and girls, and you've just listed some
of them.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
I'll add one more.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I think it's particularly relevant to your state, which is
only two percent of venture capital money goes to female founders. Now,
I happen to be married to someone who has herself
tried to raise money for the venture capital market. So
I'm obliged by the terms of my marital contract to
mention that in every interview that I do, and you're
not allowed to cut that out. And so the idea,
(08:09):
and what twenty five percent of members of Congress are women,
ten percent of CEOs of women, like the idea that
there isn't more still to do for women and girls
is crazy, but the idea that that means we can't
also look at the fact that the suicide rate among
young men has risen by a third since twenty ten,
and that we lose forty thousand men a year to suicide,
(08:32):
four times as many as we do for women. I've
mentioned wage stagnation, that we have these huge gender gaps
in education now, a lot of boys really struggling at school,
and I was thinking, it's a bit like saying to
a parent who has a son and a daughter, or
at least one of each, and basically saying to them,
you're only allowed to choose one of them to care about.
It's almost that we've done that to ourselves as a society.
(08:52):
And somehow anybody advocating for the issues of boys and
men is immediately castigated as someone who's women, And to
be fair, lots of the people who are advocating for
boys and men are anti women, right, and so that
becomes a really vicious cycle. And just to speak personally
for a moment, that was one of the reasons why
I couldn't get a publisher for my book to start with.
(09:14):
It's one of the reasons why at the time I
was at Brookings, my colleagues were lining up outside my
door warning me against this issue. And the argument was
only reactionary angry misogynists write books about boys and men. Therefore,
if you write a book about boys and men, you
will be seen as an angry, reaction and misogynist. And
(09:36):
I thought about that, decided that's the definition of a
vicious cycle. And you've then just ceded all that ground
to those very folks. You've created a vacuum. And honestly,
if people as people as boring as I am, Governor
can't talk about this issue, then we're in real trouble.
Like one of the mottoes of my new institute, the
(09:57):
American Institute for Boys and Men, is keep pit boring.
And as my son, my middle son likes to point out,
he says, you're the man for that job, Dad, If
that's your mission, they found their president. But there's a
serious point behind that, which is that like we need data,
we need research, and we need to do it, as
you said a moment ago, in a non zero some way,
(10:20):
because I think you've spoken about this and it'd be
interesting to see how your thinking has evolved on this,
which is the question is not is there going to
be a conversation about what does it mean to be
a man today? The question is who's going to have it?
Are you going to have it in the conversations you're
(10:40):
having now, are other governors going to have it? Are
the mainstream media are gonna have it? Our think tank's
going to have it? Or are we all just going
to say no, no, no, that's not for us. We
don't want people to think we're misogynists, and so we
leave the conversation to the reactionary online right. And I'm
afraid that if that's the case, we deserve to lose
these young men like we can't. You don't create a
vacuum and then complain about the fact that someone's pouring
(11:02):
into it.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I love what you just said. I mean, it's one
of the reasons we started this podcast with Charlie Kirk,
who's one of the many people in this space that
is filling that void. And I want to talk a
little bit more, not about necessarily that space, specifically in
the minisphere, and talk about your reaction to this notion
of the manisphere, just the nomenclature of the manisphere more broadly.
(11:24):
But it is interesting to me, just backing up a
little bit what you said, I mean the fact that
you had difficulty finding publishers for the book that there
was so and this isn't that long, I mean you're
talking about just a few years ago.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Right one.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, there was that kind of reticence around moving this
conversation forward or broadening the appeal beyond just sort of
a reactionary right wing framework. And you're, by the way,
hardly a left wing. This is not a political thing
per se. But it's interesting to me. Even your friends
and colleagues were warning you against entering in the space.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
It was seen as very dangerous territory. I think the
permission space has really opened up around it in recent
years because I just think in the end, these things
are true, these problems are true, and if something's true,
you can't ignore it forever. And it's become one of
my strongest beliefs that the way to turn a real
(12:23):
problem into a grievance is to simply ignore it. I
think ignored problems are what metastasize into grievances, and so
if I'm in a conversation with someone who is mates
or on the men's right side of the eye or reactionary.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
I want them to.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Sound crazy when they claim that the governor's, the presidents,
the think tanks don't care about boison men, right They
will say so, a figure like Andrew Tate or others
will say they don't care about boison men. And I
want that claim to sound crazy. But the trouble is
it doesn't sound crazy right now. We haven't done enough.
(12:59):
There haven't been enough policies, there haven't been enough public
announcements about we see the problems of boys and men
from frankly, people like you, Governor, and from others. I
think it's this is a fantastic move, But I don't
think it's unfair of the people on the conservative or
even the reactionary side of this argument to point to
what has been something of a deafening silence from the
(13:21):
other side of the aisle on this issue for the
reasons that we've already talked about, that fear that somehow
you be seen as anti women, but that has just
created this seated the ground, and so I don't I
my goal is to make the crazies sound crazy, but
right now, they don't.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
You know, it's interesting just in taking you know, a
little bit of my own journey on this, you know,
and I appreciate your reference to my wife. She's done
a series of documentaries, and one of the documentaries, her
second documentary, was around Masculinity, was around the issues of
boys and men in twenty fifteen, around the same time
you were starting to write that book around and in
(13:58):
company Quality, she was highlighting the suit rates and the
dropout rates, and issues around incarceration, crime, self harm and
the like, self in isolation, loneliness. That wasn't a focus
as much on what was happening in terms of algorithms
and online activity, but it was interesting just that the
reaction she got. She did it from the feminist perspective,
(14:19):
bringing in Jackson Katz and some of the others that
focus on the issues of violence and women. But the
reaction to it was pretty remarkable to your point, And
even I saw myself on that journey as I'm there
promoting the film, promoting the sort of contours of that debate,
how uncomfortable it was, particularly for me to enter that debate,
(14:41):
and I sort of stepped back. And you're right, I
think there's been a huge void, particularly in the Democratic
Party on this issue, and you're right, these folks on
the other side have walked into that debate and they've
weaponized it, some more benign than others. But obviously the
issues how the politics has changed is I think an
(15:02):
interesting part of this.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
To be fair to you and to the Democratic Party,
I don't think it was just the Democratic Party. I
think it was the liberal establishment written large, it was
the think tanks, it was the media where this was
just difficult. And one of the things I've really come
to believe about this is that you just described your
own discomfort we're talking about this issue, and I suspect
that you're still feeling some of that now. And what
(15:25):
I would say is good you don't want to lose
that discomfort, because I honestly think that it should be
an uncomfortable conversation, given the history, given the issues we
still have to work on for women, there should be
a difficulty to this conversation. There should be a discomfort
to this conversation. I honestly think if you don't find
(15:46):
this conversation a little bit uncomfortable, you shouldn't be in it, right.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
I think if you think it's all simple.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, men are struggling because the woke feminists have taken
over and we just need to go back, say fifty
one hundred and hundred fifty year, take your pack. Anybody
who thinks like that shouldn't be in the conversation. But
on the other hand, we shouldn't let the natural, in
fact honorable discomfort that we feel, and honestly that obviously
women are going to feel much more strongly. That should
(16:15):
be acknowledged, that should be discussed, but it shouldn't stop us.
It should make us pause. It should be something that
we get into the room that we say, of course
this is difficult, and of course there's more we needed
to have women and girls, and there's also this bunch
of issues for boys and men. And my experience of this,
and I'd be interested to see whether you agree with this,
(16:37):
is that if you frame it that way, actually there's
a huge appetite to have this conversation, including among the
most feminist women out there, because they have sons, they
have brothers, they have husbands. As long as there isn't
this fear that this is going to be used as
a way to go back on women's rights or to
negate the ongoing work of women. As long as people
(16:58):
trust you that's not what you're doing, then I have
discovered the appetite for this conversation is huge.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
But laying that foundation becomes critical, and that's the central
part I think of creating that as you say, that permission,
that space where we can have this dialogue in a
constructive way. That said as well, I mean there's been
that reaction. You know, we've got you know, people like
Josh Howley writes a book on manhood and seem to
go again in a direction that a lot of folks
(17:31):
online have gone. You expressed one of the or least highlighted,
one of the more extreme voices Andrew Tait in this space.
I think you've written about and talked about even your
own kids, the relationship to Andrew as it relates to
their algorithms online. Even Jordan Peterson, who you know has
had his own evolution or devolution depending on how some
(17:52):
people view his perspectives on a myriad of issues. But
this issue, you're right, has really come to the fore.
Think about it. You know, with my web we have
two boys, two girls, and my wife is now the
bigger crusader on this saying, what the hell has happened
to our boys? What is going on online? What is happening?
(18:13):
Why is he bringing up Andrew Tate? Why is he
talking about He talked, I'm smiling because when you were
writing about this Jordan Peterson, he's telling me about Jordan Peterson.
Before I knew much about Jordan.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Peterson, my kids were telling me about Andrew Tate. My
youngest son, who's now twenty three, said, when I was
finishing my book, he said, Dad, you have to write
about Andrew Tate. And I said, who the hell is
Andrew Tate. I looked briefly at him, decided that he
wasn't a big enough figure to worry about, didn't mention him.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
But of course, you know, of course I was wrong.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
And it's very interesting how the let's just assume, for
the sake of this argument that you and I are
both middle aged, right, that might be flattering both of us,
but might go with it. Right, Let's take it a little.
But we just honestly don't understand. I think you got
into a little bit of trouble for lumping together Joe Rogan,
(19:05):
Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
At one point and I don't think you do that now.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
I think that was a moment where this sort of
gauzy blobby thing over there was just hard to decode.
But as you get closer to it, you understand that
within it big differences. Even I've actually come to think
that the term manosphere is not helpful because it's just
it just lumps together people who are doing very very
(19:32):
different things in different ways, and the young men who
are the disproportionate consumers a lot of that content, they
understand the differences. And so if we don't sound like
we understand the differences, then we just sound like, you know, old.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Men shaking our fist at the world.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
And so I don't know how to do this yet,
but there's almost like a bro sphere, which is more
like Rogan. It's certainly Chris Williamson, who I like quite
a lot, and maybe even you know THEO Vaughn.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
I've been on his podcasting.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
And then there's the kind of missogyn no sphere or
I don't know what to call, you know what I mean,
And they're they're very different, and it's quite important to
keep that difference in our minds because otherwise people think
they're all the same, and they're really not. What they
are all doing is trying to come up with answers
to the questions that many young men are asking. And
(20:25):
they're doing so with various degrees of openness and fidelity,
and you can't you can't throw them all together. And
to do so is to again make a similar version
of that mistake we were talking about earlier, which is
to seed all that ground. Right, just don't don't go there.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
I love what I think what you just said is
extraordinarily important, and in what you also reference, I think
is important. What are these young boys looking for? I mean,
we you know, we see how they far prey to
the algorithms, and you know, you've written obviously a lot
about you know what. You know, you know these kids
in their body images and issues related you know, a
(20:59):
six pack abs or you know, maybe there are gaming
and all of a sudden then you know they're on
an Android taite. You know they're asking their parents for
thirty five bucks to become part of his Andrew Tate
Masculinity University or some highbred version of that for someone else.
But what are young boys looking for?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
They are looking for an answer to the question, how
should I be a man today, and the bit of
that that's hard is today it's just much harder, and
that has that question is being asked with an urgency,
which is new. It's not that it hasn't always had
to be asked to some extent, right, I think every
(21:39):
generation that's got to think about that, But there's a
new urgency to it now, partly for the really good
reason of the huge rise in the economic independence of women.
So I'm one of the people who celebrates the fact
that forty percent of women now earn more than the
typical man, the median man. Now that's not equality, that
(22:00):
would mean fifty percent, right, But in nineteen seventy nine
that figure was thirteen percent, right, And that's well within
my lifetime. And so in the space of a very
short period of economic history, we have transformed the economic
relationships between men and women in a way that is wonderful.
Arguably the greatest economic liberation in human history as it
(22:21):
rolls around the world, still far from complete. But is
that like the fact that my wife has had opportunities
that my mum could only dream of. That's just the
most wonderful thing. And it has put a question mark
next to the role of men, because the traditional role
of breadwinner has to very large extent now disappeared for
(22:46):
the very good reason I've just identified. But we shouldn't
be naive about the fact that doesn't actually then put
a big question mark, and we shouldn't be naive about
the fact that will leave some men at least hungering
for the world where you knew what it meant to
be a man.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
So they're asking the question.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And going online and finding all kinds of different answers.
Now I will say one more thing, which is maybe
a bit more of a critique of the what's the
cultural blobby left? I don't know what just I'm sure
you know what I mean. It's the block, the liberal block,
which is they they have done a much better job
(23:21):
of outlining what not to do as a man, what
not to be as a man, than what to do.
A lot of young men feel like they've come out
into the world with a long list of don'ts.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Don't say this, don't say this.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
I mean just in terms of political correctness the way.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah, and just you know, the consent story and so
on to and to be clear in case it needs
to be said again, all good but I had this
experience with one of my kids came home from I
guess it was middle or early high and they've done
the social skills class or the relationship class or whatever whatever.
All Wellian term is being used to describe the kind
(24:00):
of social emotional skills how to like, how to get
by in the world class thing. And sorry, that was
very unfair to say it was all well in, but
you know what I mean. It's always this this weird thing,
the social skills and emotional vocabulary literacy class or something.
And I said, well, what did you learn? And he said,
we did masculinity stuff today. And I said, that's interesting.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
What did you learn?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
And he said, here's a list of thirty three things
that I know I'm not supposed to do also, and
we went through the list together. I agreed with every
single one of them, and we had a good conversation
about them. And I said, and I said, no, that
was it. So for reasons that I understand, but I
am increasingly impatient with there's been a reluctance to set
(24:47):
out a kind of positive vision of modern masculinity, one
that's compatible with gender equality, but it's still appealing to
young men. For fear that that will somehow send us
down this slippery slope back to the nineteen fifty again.
But what that means is that we've done a really
good job of setting out the curriculum of what not
to be without anything positive to take to take the
(25:10):
place of the old script. So we've torn up the
old script of masculinity, which was based around protector, provider, breadwinner.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
We've torn that up.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
And we've torn up the old one around femininity, which
was you're going to be a mum, housewife, mom.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
We torn them both up.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
We replaced the female one with an incredibly powerful and
rather beautiful one about empowerment and liberation. You go Girl
the Future's Female Girls on the Run, Black Girl Magic.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
I love all of it.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
So it's very kind of cultural empowerment and possibility that
we've replaced now for girls and women. We also tore
up the old male script, and we didn't replace it,
and so we just tore up the old one and said, yeah, well,
you're not going to be like your dad. The economy
is very different now, and so then the question, okay,
(25:58):
well what should I be like?
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Then?
Speaker 2 (26:00):
We haven't had a good answer to that, but a
long come some of the online folks, and they have
a very clear answer, and if we don't like it,
we need a better one. The idea that we don't
need one is the ultimate naivety. And I think that's
what's happened. Has become the sense that equality will require androgyny.
(26:21):
And honestly, I think I used to think that too.
I think in my I used to think, Ah, let's
get past all this masculine, feminine male female stuff. Let's all,
you know, all human. And I still love that idea,
but I've really come to believe, partly as a result
of my own experience as a parent, more generally, but
that is naive that we do actually still need a
way to talk about men and women, overlapping and distinct
(26:42):
but still beautiful.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And so I want to unpack that. I and this
notion of filling that void and painting a positive alternative
is foundational critical and I want to get to some
of your specific ideas in that space. But take me
back a little bit. You've written a lot about this
sort of you know, I come from California, Go West,
young man, Go West, this notion of the great Frontier,
(27:06):
the freedom, and this guy or gal or at least
guy in this case, and the white horse comes saving
the day, sort of the John Wayne a vacation Reagan,
you know, Coast to Jury, the whole thing, the ocean
of the lone Ranger. As you write about it being free,
but you suggest increasingly longely. I mean it sort of
(27:26):
bring us back a little bit.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Yeah, And to be clear that I just that description.
I mean, I'm a proud US citizen, have been since
twenty sixteen. And that pioneering spirit, that sense of optimism
and growth and possibility is I used to work here
before this too.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Love love that about this country.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Do you think there's a sense that at its worst,
there's this movement online, the men going their Own Way movement,
which is literally just men decoupling from society and becoming
they're sort of male separatists, essentially just saying we just
separate ourselves away from society. But even a bit less
extreme than that, there's this sense of like men are
supposed to be independent, and if men going to get married,
(28:06):
it's because you know, a woman will sort of trap
him into it. You talk about the ball and chain,
there's all this tropes around that. Well, actually it turns
out in the rost recent surveys, men think being married
is more important than women do. And that's because men men,
men know something. And the truth is that masculinity properly
defined has always been relational. It's always been about service
(28:29):
and surplus. I came across this definition in the literature
for anthropology saying that actually, in a lot of societies,
the marker of going from boy to man was when
you were producing more of something than you needed for yourself.
You're producing a surplus, right. It could be meat, it
could be money, it could be something. And that's because
just in the natural environment, like it takes a long
(28:52):
time to raise kids, and that's very demanding on the mums.
And so it was masculinity was literally defined by service,
was literally defined by giving more than you get, producing
more than you need. Now, what that thing is going
to be will change. That's very important to say, because
again this can sound like we're calling for the old system,
(29:12):
but I still love that idea. That actually the way
that you can tell if someone's a man is how
he is with other people, how he is with his
own kids, other people's kids. If he's a teacher, as
my middle son is now a teacher in Baltimore City
and like watching him, this big guy at the front
of a classroom and he coaches soccer, coaches a girl's
(29:33):
soccer team. Just there's something about that which is beautiful.
And I'm not suggesting, of course, that women don't also
do that, to be clear, but there is something about
this idea of what I would refer to as relational
masculinity as opposed to lone ranger masculinity. I think a
man going his own way and only looking out for
(29:53):
himself is actually not a man. That's the least masculine
thing you can do, is only out for yourself, and
that's been true throughout human history, right, It's about the tribe,
it's about the family, it's about your people. And so
I've really been disturbed by this strand of separatism and
(30:19):
stark autonomy that you see online, which is like a
real man is a man who answers only to himself,
And I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit, and every human
society has shown that to be the case. A man
is someone who gives, and that's my father was like that.
I mean, I saw that being played out in my
own childhood, which was like he was the guy that
(30:40):
defined himself by his very embeddedness in his community, not
his separateness from it. And I really worry about the
isolation that's gripping many of our men now, and I
think it's because of this false idea about what it
means to be a.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Man in this notion of community versus you know, this
disconnect that people are now, you know, deeply lonely. That
I imagine is that the core of y eighty percent of
suicides are men. Is that it? I mean, is that
the trend line? Or is it something deeper? Is it
(31:14):
just self worth feeling worthless? Is it the fact that
you know, you know, I've no longer had value because
you know, my physical strength, my physical capacity is no
longer the advantage in a sort of cognitive world in
terms of the economic shifts and realities. Is it? Or
what is it? I mean? What are these These suicide
rates are job dropping amazing?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
And then I will say that the thing that I
didn't know until we dug into more recently was that
it three swung to young men. So up until twenty ten,
it was really middle aged men where we saw this
rise in suicide, which I think was consistent with the
story of deaths of despair, what was happening in the
economy and so on. But since twenty ten the riots
has basically all been among young men under thirty, and
(31:56):
we honestly don't really know why, but it's a huge,
huge rise, and I'm sure it's connected to some of
these conversations that you've been having around what I call
neededness for want of a better term, yeah, I just
think there's like I've come to believe that a human
universal is the need to be needed, and that feeling
(32:21):
unneeded is in this case and was literally fatal. A
very good study by Fiona Shand and her colleagues are
looked at the words that men used to describe themselves
before taking their own lives through suicide, and the two
most commonly used to describe themselves were worthless and useless.
We also know that the suicide rate among men goes
(32:45):
up very significantly after a breakdown. A marital breakdown or
a separation does not go up for women, goes up
a lot for men, so that gap gets even bigger.
We know it's much higher for men who are not employed.
We know it's much higher for men who as you
just indicate them in a disconnected, isolated and so what's happening,
I think, is that too many men aren't sure that
(33:06):
they're needed. They're not sure that the economy needs them,
they're not sure that their family needs them, they're not
sure their community needs them. And so we've got to
find a way to supply that sense to many men
that we still need you like we need you. And
I've actually been struck this as something again I've learned
recently is that there's a huge lack of men volunteering
(33:28):
in many civic institutions. So I just signed up to
be a big brother. I'm a big fan of big brothers,
big sisters, and now that I've empty nested, maybe I'm
also trying to fill a hole in myself too. But
I was shocked to discover that the waiting list for
boys where I live in East Tennessee for a big
is twelve months. For girls it's three months, because they
have at least as many boys being referred as girls,
(33:50):
and they have so few male volunteers. And I look around,
and people should look in their own area, and they
will almost certainly discover that there is a massive shortage
of male beings, and so big brothers big sisters is
becoming big sisters by default because of a lack of
male volunteers. And at the same time, we have a
lot of men who maybe lack some structure and purpose
(34:11):
in their lives, and so there's got to be a
way to make that call. But it has to be
to men. That's the thing that sounds a bit socially
conservative about this, which is that I think you've got
to make a specific call, which is like, guys, we
need a you. We don't just need volunteers, we need
some guys for this. If guys are told like we
need guys, they much want to turn up. And we
could argue forever about why that is, but it just
(34:33):
seems to be true. And so there's something quite deep
in our culture here as men we like as fathers.
That's obvious maybe in the workplace, but if we start
to doubt if whether the tribe needs us, I think
we fade away.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Is this do you sign these trend lines to deinstitutionalization
the conversations we're having today around reshoring and manufacturing. Are
you seeing these trend lines globally along those same lines?
Is it now because we're online more and its algorithms
that it's getting exacerbated. What I mean, what are the
(35:12):
what are the sort of or is it just the
ascendancy of the feminist movement and sort of that friction
that dialectic that's you know that we're not expressing or
at least discussing as much. What what do you attach
this to? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (35:26):
I mean, am I allowed to say yes to all
of the above? Right?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
A little bit of everything?
Speaker 3 (35:32):
A little bit?
Speaker 2 (35:32):
But I do think that the way I think about
this is that it's like that if you think of
the culture as like a kaleidoscope, I think it's been
shaken very significantly, and the pieces have not settled again yet.
And some of those, some of the forces that have
shaken our culture have been really good, like the economic
rise of women, which we mentioned earlier. Now, the economic
(35:53):
rise of women is a profound fact about modern societies.
It is a wonderful thing, and it has also massively
destabilized the way you think about male and female role.
And we've got to acknowledge that if we want to
keep making progress, I think like a big thing here
is you can have a huge step forward, which still
has some turbulence around it, right, So finding a way
(36:16):
to take men with us on this journey, that's huge.
But as you just referred to it, it's also also
true that while that was happening, that deindustrialization, some of
the issues around trade just disproportionately hit working classmen. So
that's happened at the same time. And then right towards
the end of this period we're seeing the rise of
online culture. Now we focus a lot on the negatives
(36:39):
of online culture, I sometimes wonder about the potential positives,
because in almost all of human history, having more men
who don't have that much to do, have time on
their hands, has predicted much higher crime rates and much
higher social unrest. Seems to it's almost like a fixed
(37:01):
law of societies, right, that hasn't happened this time, And
I think it's plausible to suggest that that might be because.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
The men have something else to do.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
With gaming, with pornography, with whatever the online content is, etc.
And so now I'm not arguing in favor of those
things when I say this, but it is nonetheless striking
that these trends in young male, particularly young male disengagement,
which would almost automatically produce higher crime rates in every
(37:35):
other era ofkeep because they'd be kicking around on the streets,
they'd be trying to figure out what to do, they'd
be getting into vites. They'd be like, that's not happened.
And so in some ways what's happened instead is a
male retreat. And so I've ended up being more worried
about the men who are checking out than the men
who are acting out. Now, of course, the men who
act out get all the headlines, and I don't in
(37:57):
any way want to diminish the problems around men acting out,
But I see a much deeper problem here, which is
the just this patrol, this retreat, this passivity that many
men feel because they can retreat to this online world
which wasn't there. Wasn't there when I was growing up
or when you're growing up in the same way, but
it is there now. And so what it gives men
(38:18):
is an alternative world to escape to. And the question
is why are so many of them wanting to escape?
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And that, I mean, it's a rhetorical question for you.
I mean, why is that?
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Then?
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I mean? Is what what I mean? It's well, let's
I mean, there's an opportunity obviously to segue and what
we need to do. But I mean, but why, I
mean again, is there any is it? Is it just
these larger trend lines? I mean, what is there? Is
there sort of a moment that marks I mean? Or
is it just this longer shift it's decades in the making,
(38:50):
I mean, or can you literally mark is there a
cultural moment that really sort of where you saw this
trend accelerate, this trend line became headline.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
The way I think about this is that you see
these cultural trends happening relatively slowly in terms of the
human life span, or it happened over decades. But they're
like you know, the tectonic plates shifting around, and then
you'll get once they hit a certain point, then you'll
get the earthquake or the volcano. But beneath the surface.
And this is very much your state, So you understand
(39:22):
this better than most governors. It's like stuff that the
ground is moving beneath the surface, and then that will
create this kind of eruption. I think the ground has
been shifting for at least half a century. It's been
shifting economically with a shift away from blue collar, male
favored jobs. It's been shifting in terms of the relative
position of men and women, with women going from being
(39:44):
essentially economically dependent on men to being economically independent.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
To a very large degree.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
And in the education system, we've seen this massive reversal
of the gender gaps, so that boys and men are
now way behind women and girls when they leave school,
leave college, I mean at college. Now there's a bigger
gender gap on college campuses today than there was in
nineteen seventy two when we passed Title nine. But it's
the other way round, so about sixty forty now female male.
(40:11):
And so these things didn't happen overnight. They've been building
and developing. And then I think this online culture has
intersected with this in one way just talked about to
kind of give men a place to retreat to, which
I think is bad in the long run, but also
to start weaponizing, to use the term used earlier, some
of these grievances, some of these issues, and so I
(40:32):
think it takes quite a long time to neglect issues
that have been but but I think they've been coming
for quite a while now. It's just that they've broken
through the surface now into our culture and into our
politics in a way that's made them very hard to ignore,
but I honestly think they've been building for many decades now.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
So speaking of politics, I mean, obviously the Trump campaign
did not ignore this space, and I don't think they
ignored it, you know, for eight years prior either. But
they seemed to have really been the beneficiary of more
focus on young men on some of these trend lines. Obviously,
the amount of time and energy the campaign spent targeting
(41:11):
young men, targeting men broadly, that paid huge dividends. I
think there was a fifteen point shift from forty fifty
six percent men under thirty that moved towards Trump campaign.
What do you make of his approach to these issues?
(41:32):
Do you think they're cynical? Do you think he's approached
it at least with a sensitivity, a recognition And where
do you think my party as Democrats? It sort of
seemed completely devoid of focus and energy. I was certainly
not a focus at the DNC. You know, we have
a post acquaintance. At least I had a privilege having
him on the podcast got Galloway post Front of Yours.
(41:54):
Scott talked about the DNC and he talked about going
on there DNC, what we care and it was every
single thing that's out there, I imaginable except twenty six
percent of the population that the DNC didn't seem to
care about in a least at all, at least based
on their own their own website and their own priorities
(42:16):
and policy.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
What.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
What do you think of Trump's efforts in the space.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, So, the way I think about this is that
in politics, something almost always beats nothing, and what there
was from the Democrats on issues around bois and men
was was nothing.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
It was this.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
It was the sound of deafening silence on these issues
and has That's been true for a while, And I
think for the reasons that were identified earlier, which is
that the Democrats were very determined to be seen, particularly
by women, as the party that were supporting them, and
they felt that any moves to acknowledge the issues the
challenges of boys and men would somehow undermine their claim
(42:57):
to be the party for women. I think that was
a fate miscalculation. I also think, honestly it was somewhat
insulting to women, because there are plenty of women out there,
and we may know some in our own lives, Governor,
who are simultaneously worried about the issues facing women access
for example, a reproductive health care, justice at work, and
(43:18):
they're desperately worried about their son's mental health, and they're
very worried about their brother's job. And so a party
that managed to do both I think would have been
pretty unstoppable. But there was nothing on the Democrat side.
On the Republican side, there was really I would just
put it as meeting men where they were, especially young men.
(43:38):
And if you look at recent work from David Shore,
the Democrat polster, it's very striking that it wasn't just
like men under thirty, it was men under twenty, it
was men under twenty three. The younger the men were,
the more they swung. And I think that is partly
because that's the microgeneration who grew up with terms like
toxic masculinity and man's plaining, and the women's movement they
(43:59):
toxic masculine. He was only invented, really in twenty sixteen
for public use, but if you were you could you
were ten when that happened. If you were voting for
the first time in twenty twenty four, you were in
high school when that happened. If you were twenty four
when you were voting. So I think what's happened was
that there was this sense of young men coming up
for grabs. They didn't hear anything from Democrats, And in
(44:19):
the end, I think I think the Republicans did a
better job of signaling to young men we like you,
we like the stuff you like, and we are going
to go to the places you go, like the podcast,
And so I think they met young men where they
were both culturally and in terms of communications strategy. They
didn't have anything to offer them. But by way of policy,
(44:43):
this wasn't a policy referendum, and in fact, my work
suggests that they've views on policy among young men haven't
really changed. This wasn't a policy win. It was a
cultural win. The Republicans managed to convince young men that
we see you and we like you, and I don't
think there was anything more to it than that. But
(45:04):
I don't think the Democrats did a very good job
of making young men feel the same way. If anything,
Democrats struggle with the idea that men might have problems
because too many of them are still convinced that men
are the problem. And until the Democrats get past that,
until they kind of acknowledge that there are real problems
(45:24):
facing boys and men and issues facing women and girls.
They just couldn't get past. There are some just as
we don't do it. It's very frustrating, especially when Tim
Walls came on the ticket. I had this fantasy speech
in my head where Tim Walls would go out and
talk about the need for first public school teacher to
run for such high office.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Coach.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
I had the speech she was going to give, and
it was going to be all about the things we're
going to do for women as the Democrats. So he
was going he said, but you know what, I'm very
worried about the ten percent decline in the share of
male teachers. I'm very worried about the decline in male sports.
I'm very worried about the lack of male coaches. I'm
very worried about the rising sewers among young men. And I,
as a Democrat, I'm going to set out this agenda
(46:04):
to help young men and to help men, as well
as our agenda to help young women. And I've got
to tell you, I don't think very many people would
have hated that. But there wasn't even a hint of
that from the Democrats.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Boy, I mean you really hit me when you say,
of all the people that could have done it so effectively,
Tim could have done it. I mean extraordinarily well with
not only is Bio in the military as well.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
But.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
The person he is. There's a sweetness of softness, there's
a decency inheriting him, there's not an edge. People are
not put off by Tim. They feel they want to
He's a guy you want to support, and his capacity
to deliver that message would have been profound. I couldn't
agree with you more at really, I appreciate that insight.
(46:54):
So look, that begs the question, and you made the point,
And I appreciate you making the point because I was
curious your thoughts of whether not Trump and Trump isn't
sort of reflects a policy shift as opposed to sort
of attaching themselves to the cultural shift and identifying the
issue but not necessarily advancing policy to solve them. You've
advanced a number of principles, a number of ideas to
(47:17):
solve them. One of them reflected in that speech you
just mentioned. I mean the importance of having young male teachers,
the importance of having mentors, the importance of focusing on
issues are related to vocational training. The opportunities had to
find more areas for service and contribution, to find meaning
and purpose and mission in one's life, the issues around
(47:39):
mental health. Tell me more about those areas, and tell
me about this frame that you've put together called HEEL
to sort of touch the STEM framework as it relates
to getting women and girls in the STEM field. You
want to focus on this thing called h ea.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
L yes, yes, thank you.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
So most people know what STEM is by now science, Technology, engineering,
and math. Many people don't know that it originally wasn't
going to be called that it was going to be
called SMET SMET, and then Judith Ramiley at the National
Science Foundation she said, can I call it STEM? And
they said, sure, whatever, Judith, and the rest is history.
But you're right that we've made huge efforts both to
(48:18):
invest in STEM but also to get more women into STEM.
And we have much further to go, especially in the
area of technology, but we have tripled the share of
STEM workers that are female up to about twenty seven
percent now in the US compared to the nineteen seventies.
That's not an accident. That was the result of concerted
public policy, as you know, of getting into middle schools
of scholarships of various advocacy groups to really get more
(48:41):
women into those professions and to start seeing them as
professions that were for them.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
But heel jobs are.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Those that are in health and education and requiring more
literacy skills than math skills, not just written literacy, but
kind of emotional literacy, verbal communication. And so those would
be jobs like teaching, nursing, health care assistance, social work,
mental health professionals, etc. And what's really striking about that
is that the share of men in those fields has
(49:08):
actually gone down. So the share of women in those
stem jobs has gone up, but we have fewer men
in those heel jobs. So, as I mentioned a moment
ago declining share of male teachers, it was thirty three
percent when Tim Wals was the teacher. Was the male share.
Now it's twenty three percent and falling and continues to fall,
(49:29):
and there is yet to be a sustained public policy
effort to do anything about that. Pleased to see some governors,
I know you're interested in it. I've seen Gretchen Whitmer
and Wes Moore and others really start to talk about
this issue. And you mentioned Josh Hawley a moment ago
who wrote his own book on this. To be fair,
the one thing that he agreed with me on was
(49:50):
this that actually, it would be good to get more
men in our classrooms. And so if you've got Josh
Howley on board on one side, and the American Psychological Association,
quite a progressive organization also saying we can that's a
big tent to work with. Or I can work with that.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
If I've lost everybody.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
To the right of Hawley and everybody to the left
of the APA, I can live with that. But it's
also true in mental health care. So the share of
men in social work, or i should say the share
of social workers who are male, is now twenty percent.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
It was.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
Forty percent in the seventies. The shriff psychologists that are
male is twenty percent. It was more than fifty percent
and seventies. And so we are creatoring the share of
men in education and in mental health care, just at
a point in our history where we're so worried about education,
especially for boys, and we're so worried about mental health care,
and where we have this rising suicide rate among men.
(50:44):
I think representation really matters in those fields, and gender
is part of that story. There are other kinds of
representation too. But I'm going to get out on a
limb here and say I think that if the teaching profession,
social work profession, psychology profession were becoming all male, you'd
be reading about it and we'd be acting on it.
(51:06):
We would not think it was a good idea. Isn't
it true the other way around as well? And again
people are worried that they somehow, oh, this is about men.
I'm like, when I wanted therapy, when my son wanted therapy,
it was really great to be able to find a
male all right, Not for everything and not for everybody,
but I do think it should be an option to
(51:26):
be able to find men. And the other thing is
those fields need workers, labor shortages, and it's not a
very good idea to try and solve the labor shortages
half the workforce.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
And there are jobs.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
So if we can, if we can do for heal
these health and education jobs for men what we did
for women into STEM, put the same kind of effort
on that would I think be a huge win. It
would actually be a win win win. It would be
a win for the professions who need workers. It would
be a win for the people using our schools and
hospitals and mental health professions, who would see themselves reflected
in it, and it would be a win for men.
(52:00):
Many of people are kind of looking for jobs now,
and so I'd love to see a concerted policy effort
really learning the lessons for women in stem around these jobs.
We can't have the the degendering of the labor market
only go one way, right. I don't think we should
be relaxed about that. I'm certainly not relaxed about the
creatoring share of men in those professions, and I.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
Don't think any policy maker should be.
Speaker 1 (52:20):
It's interesting, and I appreciate all of the above, and
hear you loudly and clearly in my day job and
my responsibility as governor to call that out and be
more intentional in that space as well. You also are
very intentional, and you've called out the importance of looking
at men fathers in the context of paid parentally. Tell
(52:42):
me more what you're thinking is along those lines in
terms of just and we didn't talk about fatherlesseners. We
didn't get into that issue necessarily, but I imagine in relationship
to being a parent and a provider, not just being
a protector, but back to being a provider is not
just about aconomic issues as relates to being a breadwinner,
(53:03):
but also at home and making sure that you're providing
for the family in terms of that care.
Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, and it speaks a bit to your wife's concerns
too about the division of labor that we have around kids.
I mean, the main reason for the gender paid gap
now is the care gap, is that women are just
doing much more of the care than men. And I'm
not suggesting that's going to go away overnight, or that
people shouldn't be free to choose whatever they want, but
I don't think policy should be inadvertently supporting these gender roles.
(53:33):
And so what that means is that if you have
paid leave, you should have paid leave for mothers and
fathers independently.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Available to each of them.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
If we really think that dad's matter, and I do,
then we've got to be saying that through policy.
Speaker 3 (53:47):
And it's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
When I brought my book out, I made the proposal
that moms and dads should each get six months of
paid leave at a very high replacement rate. And one
of my friends says, what are you European, And well,
actually by background I am, but I get it. It's
like wildly utopian. But guess what. Under the Biden administration,
(54:09):
the US military introduced three months paid leave separately from
mothers and fathers, and so maybe we could try the
same for civilians. And the key point for me here
is a paid leave. It's such an important policy. And California,
of course is very strong state level policy, which I'm
sure you're very proud of that the US doesn't, but
(54:31):
a lot of this is at state level. But it's
very important both in the way that the policy is
designed and the way that it's marketed and sold and
described that it's not seen as maternity leave, just called
parental leave or paid leave. We've really got to ensure
that fathers feel like this is for them as well,
and design it so that it's for them too.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
If we want more gender.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Equality at work, we need more gender equality at home.
And we also need more dads involved in.
Speaker 3 (54:58):
Their kids' lives.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
And there are there are lots of things it's hard
to do through policy, right Maybe many of the things
we've talked about today, there's there's no obvious policy solution,
but paid leave for dads is a policy solution that works.
They have more egalitarian relationships with their partners. They are
more involved with the kid's lives years later. And so
(55:22):
there is a policy, so pro mail policy that's on
the table, and that it's one that should be being
supported by most people, certainly on the Democrat side, but
it should be being sold as a pro mail, pro
dad policy, and it currently isn't being sold that way.
Speaker 1 (55:37):
Well said, and ensure as hell by definition a profamily
policy in terms of strengthening their family. Bid well, Richard,
thank you for sort of, you know, strengthening our attention
to this critical issue. And I'm just you know, I've
been really inspired not only by your work, but by
sort of the rediscovery of your work because you've been
(56:01):
at this for some time, and to see all the
energy and support that you're getting to have the opportunity
to dialogue with Scott Galloway and the work he's doing
highlighting this space. I mean, it really is a call
to arms. This is not political. This is about community,
This is about who we are. It's about the commonwealth
more broadly, and so I really wanted to thank you
(56:22):
for being such a powerful voice in that space but
also sharing that voice with us here today. So thank
you for being on the podcast.
Speaker 3 (56:30):
Thank you
So if you tune into the podcast, you may have
noticed a theme, a theme that continues to emerge around
men and boys. What is going on with our men
and boys increasingly isolated, increasingly feeling disengaged, disconnected, depressed. Conversations
with Jackson Katz and Scott Galloway where this issue was highlighted.
We mind the issue not only on the substance as
(00:27):
it relates to this crisis of isolation for men and boys,
but outcomes, outcomes that are moving in just devastating directions.
Eighty percent of suicides, men, dropout rates, suspension rates disproportionately men.
You see graduation rates, particularly college attendance and graduation going
through the roof for women and girls, but not again
(00:50):
for men. It's not just an electoral issue. So often
this is discussed in the context of Trump doing so
well in the last election with young men and the manosphere,
and more broadly doing well with men generally. But the
issue is an important issue that we need to dive
deeper in and that's just what we did recently with
(01:12):
Richard Reeves, who's the founder of the president of the
American Institute of Boys and Men, and we had a
conversation that really goes to the root of why what
is going on not just in the United States, but
increasingly all around the world with young men. And this
led me to look inward as well as Governor of California,
(01:34):
to say, what more can I do? And so we
are also putting out today concurrent with this podcast and
executive order that focuses exactly on that what to do,
not just who's to blame and what the challenges are,
but specific tangible actions that we can invest our time
and energy into beginning to solve this growing crisis. This
(02:06):
is Gavin Newsom and this is Richard Reeves. All right,
Richard Reeves, thanks so much for joining us, and more importantly,
thank you for your work. And I'm just curious because
the amount of attention you're getting is outsize. Obviously, people
rediscovering this remarkable book that was extraordinarily well received of
(02:26):
boys and men when you wrote it, but now seemingly
rediscovered it because of sort of the moment we're living in.
But I'm curious what moment led you to this moment,
meaning this whole issue around masculinity, issues around boys and men,
your own journey to being one of the most important
(02:48):
figures in trying to understand what the hell is going
on with American men.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, well, thank you thanks to that question for having me.
I guess the way to think about it is I
was spending my days at the Brookings Institution being a scholar,
reading papers, going to seminars. You know, imagine what a
Brookings Institution scholar does, and that is exactly what we do.
Like you read a paper, you go to a seminar,
you read another paper. And I was working on issues
(03:14):
around economic inequality. That's really been the through line of
my work, and in particular intergenerational inequality, like what's stopping
people moving up the ladder. I did that in the
UK government, which is where I'm originally from, and then
at Brookings, and I just kept seeing these data points
where it was really a lot of boys and men,
especially those from working class backgrounds, boys and men of color,
(03:36):
who were driving a lot of the economic inequalities that
we were worried about. But I didn't see that many
people paying attention to that particular gender part of the story.
And then I would be going home and I've got
three sons and they're being raised in that you're an affluent,
educated household. So they are not the boys and men
who we should be most worried about from a policy
(03:56):
point of view. But nonetheless they had a lot of questions.
They were spending a lot of time online. I think
the whole debate about masculinity, the roles of men and
women shifting so quickly, was playing out over our dinner
table as well. And so in the end, as those
things came together, and honestly, part of it was that
(04:17):
I didn't think that many people are having a good
faith conversation about this. I saw a lot of bad
faith discussions of what was happened to boys and men,
but not many empirically based good faith discussions.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
And so that was what I decided to do.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
And so you're at Brookings, You're focused on issues around
middle class, income inequality, wealth inequality. You wrote a book
in that space around upper middle class and so give
it what year roughly was that that research really started
and you started to notice this trend or this lack
of focus and intentionality on boys and men.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, So I wrote a book called Dream Hoarders, which
came out twenty seventeen, and it was really about the
way that the upper middle class, the professional class top
ten twenty percent, we're really pulling away from everybody else,
and how that was causing all kinds of issues, and
candidly that we, because I had put myself solidly in
that class, really weren't taking responsibility for the ways in
(05:14):
which we were actually rigging the opportunity system.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
You think about the.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Housing market, which I know you're very interested in, higher education,
which you're also very interested in. I saw those systems
working pretty well for me and my neighbors in Bethesda, Maryland,
where I was living at the time, but I also
saw us holding other people out. So I think that
was one of the root causes of the political moment
(05:38):
that we're in, but also just this cultural moment. And
then I looked at it harder, and I looked and
I saw, actually, know what, it's a lot of men
who are just struggling to rise up the ladder. They're
doing worse than their fathers did. I mean, the fact
that men without a college degree only earned the same
today as that group of men did fifty years ago,
like wage stagnation for most men over a half century,
(06:02):
is a story, and it's a huge part of that
economic inequality, and it's a huge part of why we
don't see that upward mobility because those men are struggling,
they then maybe don't form families, or if they do,
they're not able to kind of provide for them in
the way they'd hope to. Women are of course then
picking up more and more of the slack because I
know something you're also interested in. I think your other
(06:22):
half is even more interested in the whole idea of
fair play and so on, and so I took it.
In the end, it's just bad for everybody if young
men and boys are struggling in our economy and struggling
in our society, And so that's that's really why in
the end, I think just needed a different kind of
spotlight on the question.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So the question always arises, is this notion of a
zero sum game that if we're talking about boys and men,
we're not talking about women and girls, and we're talking
about boys and men, we're talking about it. It's sort
of the historic advantage that goes back you know, hundreds
and hundreds, thousands and thousands of years to you know,
particularly white males. Why the hell do we need to
(07:01):
be focusing on them at a time when women still
are struggling to get equal pay. Still do not have
the gender equality in the home. Back to the reference
you were just making in terms of fair play in
the household, women are still absorbing so much of that
burden and so much of that work. There's still so
much more work than needs to be done for women
(07:22):
and girls. Why Richard spend so much time on boys
and men.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Well, because we can do two things at once. That's
my bet, My huge bet here is that people, including
policymakers like yourself, are able to do both, able to
simultaneously say there's a bunch more stuff we need to
do for women and girls, and you've just listed some
of them.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
I'll add one more.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I think it's particularly relevant to your state, which is
only two percent of venture capital money goes to female founders. Now,
I happen to be married to someone who has herself
tried to raise money for the venture capital market. So
I'm obliged by the terms of my marital contract to
mention that in every interview that I do, and you're
not allowed to cut that out. And so the idea,
(08:09):
and what twenty five percent of members of Congress are women,
ten percent of CEOs of women, like the idea that
there isn't more still to do for women and girls
is crazy, but the idea that that means we can't
also look at the fact that the suicide rate among
young men has risen by a third since twenty ten,
and that we lose forty thousand men a year to suicide,
(08:32):
four times as many as we do for women. I've
mentioned wage stagnation, that we have these huge gender gaps
in education now, a lot of boys really struggling at school,
and I was thinking, it's a bit like saying to
a parent who has a son and a daughter, or
at least one of each, and basically saying to them,
you're only allowed to choose one of them to care about.
It's almost that we've done that to ourselves as a society.
(08:52):
And somehow anybody advocating for the issues of boys and
men is immediately castigated as someone who's women, And to
be fair, lots of the people who are advocating for
boys and men are anti women, right, and so that
becomes a really vicious cycle. And just to speak personally
for a moment, that was one of the reasons why
I couldn't get a publisher for my book to start with.
(09:14):
It's one of the reasons why at the time I
was at Brookings, my colleagues were lining up outside my
door warning me against this issue. And the argument was
only reactionary angry misogynists write books about boys and men. Therefore,
if you write a book about boys and men, you
will be seen as an angry, reaction and misogynist. And
(09:36):
I thought about that, decided that's the definition of a
vicious cycle. And you've then just ceded all that ground
to those very folks. You've created a vacuum. And honestly,
if people as people as boring as I am, Governor
can't talk about this issue, then we're in real trouble.
Like one of the mottoes of my new institute, the
(09:57):
American Institute for Boys and Men, is keep pit boring.
And as my son, my middle son likes to point out,
he says, you're the man for that job, Dad, If
that's your mission, they found their president. But there's a
serious point behind that, which is that like we need data,
we need research, and we need to do it, as
you said a moment ago, in a non zero some way,
(10:20):
because I think you've spoken about this and it'd be
interesting to see how your thinking has evolved on this,
which is the question is not is there going to
be a conversation about what does it mean to be
a man today? The question is who's going to have it?
Are you going to have it in the conversations you're
(10:40):
having now, are other governors going to have it? Are
the mainstream media are gonna have it? Our think tank's
going to have it? Or are we all just going
to say no, no, no, that's not for us. We
don't want people to think we're misogynists, and so we
leave the conversation to the reactionary online right. And I'm
afraid that if that's the case, we deserve to lose
these young men like we can't. You don't create a
vacuum and then complain about the fact that someone's pouring
(11:02):
into it.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I love what you just said. I mean, it's one
of the reasons we started this podcast with Charlie Kirk,
who's one of the many people in this space that
is filling that void. And I want to talk a
little bit more, not about necessarily that space, specifically in
the minisphere, and talk about your reaction to this notion
of the manisphere, just the nomenclature of the manisphere more broadly.
(11:24):
But it is interesting to me, just backing up a
little bit what you said, I mean the fact that
you had difficulty finding publishers for the book that there
was so and this isn't that long, I mean you're
talking about just a few years ago.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Right one.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, there was that kind of reticence around moving this
conversation forward or broadening the appeal beyond just sort of
a reactionary right wing framework. And you're, by the way,
hardly a left wing. This is not a political thing
per se. But it's interesting to me. Even your friends
and colleagues were warning you against entering in the space.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
It was seen as very dangerous territory. I think the
permission space has really opened up around it in recent
years because I just think in the end, these things
are true, these problems are true, and if something's true,
you can't ignore it forever. And it's become one of
my strongest beliefs that the way to turn a real
(12:23):
problem into a grievance is to simply ignore it. I
think ignored problems are what metastasize into grievances, and so
if I'm in a conversation with someone who is mates
or on the men's right side of the eye or reactionary.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
I want them to.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Sound crazy when they claim that the governor's, the presidents,
the think tanks don't care about boison men, right They
will say so, a figure like Andrew Tate or others
will say they don't care about boison men. And I
want that claim to sound crazy. But the trouble is
it doesn't sound crazy right now. We haven't done enough.
(12:59):
There haven't been enough policies, there haven't been enough public
announcements about we see the problems of boys and men
from frankly, people like you, Governor, and from others. I
think it's this is a fantastic move, But I don't
think it's unfair of the people on the conservative or
even the reactionary side of this argument to point to
what has been something of a deafening silence from the
(13:21):
other side of the aisle on this issue for the
reasons that we've already talked about, that fear that somehow
you be seen as anti women, but that has just
created this seated the ground, and so I don't I
my goal is to make the crazies sound crazy, but
right now, they don't.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
You know, it's interesting just in taking you know, a
little bit of my own journey on this, you know,
and I appreciate your reference to my wife. She's done
a series of documentaries, and one of the documentaries, her
second documentary, was around Masculinity, was around the issues of
boys and men in twenty fifteen, around the same time
you were starting to write that book around and in
(13:58):
company Quality, she was highlighting the suit rates and the
dropout rates, and issues around incarceration, crime, self harm and
the like, self in isolation, loneliness. That wasn't a focus
as much on what was happening in terms of algorithms
and online activity, but it was interesting just that the
reaction she got. She did it from the feminist perspective,
(14:19):
bringing in Jackson Katz and some of the others that
focus on the issues of violence and women. But the
reaction to it was pretty remarkable to your point, And
even I saw myself on that journey as I'm there
promoting the film, promoting the sort of contours of that debate,
how uncomfortable it was, particularly for me to enter that debate,
(14:41):
and I sort of stepped back. And you're right, I
think there's been a huge void, particularly in the Democratic
Party on this issue, and you're right, these folks on
the other side have walked into that debate and they've
weaponized it, some more benign than others. But obviously the
issues how the politics has changed is I think an
(15:02):
interesting part of this.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
To be fair to you and to the Democratic Party,
I don't think it was just the Democratic Party. I
think it was the liberal establishment written large, it was
the think tanks, it was the media where this was
just difficult. And one of the things I've really come
to believe about this is that you just described your
own discomfort we're talking about this issue, and I suspect
that you're still feeling some of that now. And what
(15:25):
I would say is good you don't want to lose
that discomfort, because I honestly think that it should be
an uncomfortable conversation, given the history, given the issues we
still have to work on for women, there should be
a difficulty to this conversation. There should be a discomfort
to this conversation. I honestly think if you don't find
(15:46):
this conversation a little bit uncomfortable, you shouldn't be in it, right.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
I think if you think it's all simple.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, men are struggling because the woke feminists have taken
over and we just need to go back, say fifty
one hundred and hundred fifty year, take your pack. Anybody
who thinks like that shouldn't be in the conversation. But
on the other hand, we shouldn't let the natural, in
fact honorable discomfort that we feel, and honestly that obviously
women are going to feel much more strongly. That should
(16:15):
be acknowledged, that should be discussed, but it shouldn't stop us.
It should make us pause. It should be something that
we get into the room that we say, of course
this is difficult, and of course there's more we needed
to have women and girls, and there's also this bunch
of issues for boys and men. And my experience of this,
and I'd be interested to see whether you agree with this,
(16:37):
is that if you frame it that way, actually there's
a huge appetite to have this conversation, including among the
most feminist women out there, because they have sons, they
have brothers, they have husbands. As long as there isn't
this fear that this is going to be used as
a way to go back on women's rights or to
negate the ongoing work of women. As long as people
(16:58):
trust you that's not what you're doing, then I have
discovered the appetite for this conversation is huge.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
But laying that foundation becomes critical, and that's the central
part I think of creating that as you say, that permission,
that space where we can have this dialogue in a
constructive way. That said as well, I mean there's been
that reaction. You know, we've got you know, people like
Josh Howley writes a book on manhood and seem to
go again in a direction that a lot of folks
(17:31):
online have gone. You expressed one of the or least highlighted,
one of the more extreme voices Andrew Tait in this space.
I think you've written about and talked about even your
own kids, the relationship to Andrew as it relates to
their algorithms online. Even Jordan Peterson, who you know has
had his own evolution or devolution depending on how some
(17:52):
people view his perspectives on a myriad of issues. But
this issue, you're right, has really come to the fore.
Think about it. You know, with my web we have
two boys, two girls, and my wife is now the
bigger crusader on this saying, what the hell has happened
to our boys? What is going on online? What is happening?
(18:13):
Why is he bringing up Andrew Tate? Why is he
talking about He talked, I'm smiling because when you were
writing about this Jordan Peterson, he's telling me about Jordan Peterson.
Before I knew much about Jordan.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Peterson, my kids were telling me about Andrew Tate. My
youngest son, who's now twenty three, said, when I was
finishing my book, he said, Dad, you have to write
about Andrew Tate. And I said, who the hell is
Andrew Tate. I looked briefly at him, decided that he
wasn't a big enough figure to worry about, didn't mention him.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
But of course, you know, of course I was wrong.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
And it's very interesting how the let's just assume, for
the sake of this argument that you and I are
both middle aged, right, that might be flattering both of us,
but might go with it. Right, Let's take it a little.
But we just honestly don't understand. I think you got
into a little bit of trouble for lumping together Joe Rogan,
(19:05):
Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
At one point and I don't think you do that now.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
I think that was a moment where this sort of
gauzy blobby thing over there was just hard to decode.
But as you get closer to it, you understand that
within it big differences. Even I've actually come to think
that the term manosphere is not helpful because it's just
it just lumps together people who are doing very very
(19:32):
different things in different ways, and the young men who
are the disproportionate consumers a lot of that content, they
understand the differences. And so if we don't sound like
we understand the differences, then we just sound like, you know, old.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Men shaking our fist at the world.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
And so I don't know how to do this yet,
but there's almost like a bro sphere, which is more
like Rogan. It's certainly Chris Williamson, who I like quite
a lot, and maybe even you know THEO Vaughn.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
I've been on his podcasting.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
And then there's the kind of missogyn no sphere or
I don't know what to call, you know what I mean,
And they're they're very different, and it's quite important to
keep that difference in our minds because otherwise people think
they're all the same, and they're really not. What they
are all doing is trying to come up with answers
to the questions that many young men are asking. And
(20:25):
they're doing so with various degrees of openness and fidelity,
and you can't you can't throw them all together. And
to do so is to again make a similar version
of that mistake we were talking about earlier, which is
to seed all that ground. Right, just don't don't go there.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
I love what I think what you just said is
extraordinarily important, and in what you also reference, I think
is important. What are these young boys looking for? I mean,
we you know, we see how they far prey to
the algorithms, and you know, you've written obviously a lot
about you know what. You know, you know these kids
in their body images and issues related you know, a
(20:59):
six pack abs or you know, maybe there are gaming
and all of a sudden then you know they're on
an Android taite. You know they're asking their parents for
thirty five bucks to become part of his Andrew Tate
Masculinity University or some highbred version of that for someone else.
But what are young boys looking for?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
They are looking for an answer to the question, how
should I be a man today, and the bit of
that that's hard is today it's just much harder, and
that has that question is being asked with an urgency,
which is new. It's not that it hasn't always had
to be asked to some extent, right, I think every
(21:39):
generation that's got to think about that, But there's a
new urgency to it now, partly for the really good
reason of the huge rise in the economic independence of women.
So I'm one of the people who celebrates the fact
that forty percent of women now earn more than the
typical man, the median man. Now that's not equality, that
(22:00):
would mean fifty percent, right, But in nineteen seventy nine
that figure was thirteen percent, right, And that's well within
my lifetime. And so in the space of a very
short period of economic history, we have transformed the economic
relationships between men and women in a way that is wonderful.
Arguably the greatest economic liberation in human history as it
(22:21):
rolls around the world, still far from complete. But is
that like the fact that my wife has had opportunities
that my mum could only dream of. That's just the
most wonderful thing. And it has put a question mark
next to the role of men, because the traditional role
of breadwinner has to very large extent now disappeared for
(22:46):
the very good reason I've just identified. But we shouldn't
be naive about the fact that doesn't actually then put
a big question mark, and we shouldn't be naive about
the fact that will leave some men at least hungering
for the world where you knew what it meant to
be a man.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
So they're asking the question.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And going online and finding all kinds of different answers.
Now I will say one more thing, which is maybe
a bit more of a critique of the what's the
cultural blobby left? I don't know what just I'm sure
you know what I mean. It's the block, the liberal block,
which is they they have done a much better job
(23:21):
of outlining what not to do as a man, what
not to be as a man, than what to do.
A lot of young men feel like they've come out
into the world with a long list of don'ts.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Don't say this, don't say this.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
I mean just in terms of political correctness the way.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah, and just you know, the consent story and so
on to and to be clear in case it needs
to be said again, all good but I had this
experience with one of my kids came home from I
guess it was middle or early high and they've done
the social skills class or the relationship class or whatever whatever.
All Wellian term is being used to describe the kind
(24:00):
of social emotional skills how to like, how to get
by in the world class thing. And sorry, that was
very unfair to say it was all well in, but
you know what I mean. It's always this this weird thing,
the social skills and emotional vocabulary literacy class or something.
And I said, well, what did you learn? And he said,
we did masculinity stuff today. And I said, that's interesting.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
What did you learn?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
And he said, here's a list of thirty three things
that I know I'm not supposed to do also, and
we went through the list together. I agreed with every
single one of them, and we had a good conversation
about them. And I said, and I said, no, that
was it. So for reasons that I understand, but I
am increasingly impatient with there's been a reluctance to set
(24:47):
out a kind of positive vision of modern masculinity, one
that's compatible with gender equality, but it's still appealing to
young men. For fear that that will somehow send us
down this slippery slope back to the nineteen fifty again.
But what that means is that we've done a really
good job of setting out the curriculum of what not
to be without anything positive to take to take the
(25:10):
place of the old script. So we've torn up the
old script of masculinity, which was based around protector, provider, breadwinner.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
We've torn that up.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
And we've torn up the old one around femininity, which
was you're going to be a mum, housewife, mom.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
We torn them both up.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
We replaced the female one with an incredibly powerful and
rather beautiful one about empowerment and liberation. You go Girl
the Future's Female Girls on the Run, Black Girl Magic.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
I love all of it.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
So it's very kind of cultural empowerment and possibility that
we've replaced now for girls and women. We also tore
up the old male script, and we didn't replace it,
and so we just tore up the old one and said, yeah, well,
you're not going to be like your dad. The economy
is very different now, and so then the question, okay,
(25:58):
well what should I be like?
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Then?
Speaker 2 (26:00):
We haven't had a good answer to that, but a
long come some of the online folks, and they have
a very clear answer, and if we don't like it,
we need a better one. The idea that we don't
need one is the ultimate naivety. And I think that's
what's happened. Has become the sense that equality will require androgyny.
(26:21):
And honestly, I think I used to think that too.
I think in my I used to think, Ah, let's
get past all this masculine, feminine male female stuff. Let's all,
you know, all human. And I still love that idea,
but I've really come to believe, partly as a result
of my own experience as a parent, more generally, but
that is naive that we do actually still need a
way to talk about men and women, overlapping and distinct
(26:42):
but still beautiful.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And so I want to unpack that. I and this
notion of filling that void and painting a positive alternative
is foundational critical and I want to get to some
of your specific ideas in that space. But take me
back a little bit. You've written a lot about this
sort of you know, I come from California, Go West,
young man, Go West, this notion of the great Frontier,
(27:06):
the freedom, and this guy or gal or at least
guy in this case, and the white horse comes saving
the day, sort of the John Wayne a vacation Reagan,
you know, Coast to Jury, the whole thing, the ocean
of the lone Ranger. As you write about it being free,
but you suggest increasingly longely. I mean it sort of
(27:26):
bring us back a little bit.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Yeah, And to be clear that I just that description.
I mean, I'm a proud US citizen, have been since
twenty sixteen. And that pioneering spirit, that sense of optimism
and growth and possibility is I used to work here
before this too.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Love love that about this country.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Do you think there's a sense that at its worst,
there's this movement online, the men going their Own Way movement,
which is literally just men decoupling from society and becoming
they're sort of male separatists, essentially just saying we just
separate ourselves away from society. But even a bit less
extreme than that, there's this sense of like men are
supposed to be independent, and if men going to get married,
(28:06):
it's because you know, a woman will sort of trap
him into it. You talk about the ball and chain,
there's all this tropes around that. Well, actually it turns
out in the rost recent surveys, men think being married
is more important than women do. And that's because men men,
men know something. And the truth is that masculinity properly
defined has always been relational. It's always been about service
(28:29):
and surplus. I came across this definition in the literature
for anthropology saying that actually, in a lot of societies,
the marker of going from boy to man was when
you were producing more of something than you needed for yourself.
You're producing a surplus, right. It could be meat, it
could be money, it could be something. And that's because
just in the natural environment, like it takes a long
(28:52):
time to raise kids, and that's very demanding on the mums.
And so it was masculinity was literally defined by service,
was literally defined by giving more than you get, producing
more than you need. Now, what that thing is going
to be will change. That's very important to say, because
again this can sound like we're calling for the old system,
(29:12):
but I still love that idea. That actually the way
that you can tell if someone's a man is how
he is with other people, how he is with his
own kids, other people's kids. If he's a teacher, as
my middle son is now a teacher in Baltimore City
and like watching him, this big guy at the front
of a classroom and he coaches soccer, coaches a girl's
(29:33):
soccer team. Just there's something about that which is beautiful.
And I'm not suggesting, of course, that women don't also
do that, to be clear, but there is something about
this idea of what I would refer to as relational
masculinity as opposed to lone ranger masculinity. I think a
man going his own way and only looking out for
(29:53):
himself is actually not a man. That's the least masculine
thing you can do, is only out for yourself, and
that's been true throughout human history, right, It's about the tribe,
it's about the family, it's about your people. And so
I've really been disturbed by this strand of separatism and
(30:19):
stark autonomy that you see online, which is like a
real man is a man who answers only to himself,
And I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit, and every human
society has shown that to be the case. A man
is someone who gives, and that's my father was like that.
I mean, I saw that being played out in my
own childhood, which was like he was the guy that
(30:40):
defined himself by his very embeddedness in his community, not
his separateness from it. And I really worry about the
isolation that's gripping many of our men now, and I
think it's because of this false idea about what it
means to be a.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Man in this notion of community versus you know, this
disconnect that people are now, you know, deeply lonely. That
I imagine is that the core of y eighty percent of
suicides are men. Is that it? I mean, is that
the trend line? Or is it something deeper? Is it
(31:14):
just self worth feeling worthless? Is it the fact that
you know, you know, I've no longer had value because
you know, my physical strength, my physical capacity is no
longer the advantage in a sort of cognitive world in
terms of the economic shifts and realities. Is it? Or
what is it? I mean? What are these These suicide
rates are job dropping amazing?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
And then I will say that the thing that I
didn't know until we dug into more recently was that
it three swung to young men. So up until twenty ten,
it was really middle aged men where we saw this
rise in suicide, which I think was consistent with the
story of deaths of despair, what was happening in the
economy and so on. But since twenty ten the riots
has basically all been among young men under thirty, and
(31:56):
we honestly don't really know why, but it's a huge,
huge rise, and I'm sure it's connected to some of
these conversations that you've been having around what I call
neededness for want of a better term, yeah, I just
think there's like I've come to believe that a human
universal is the need to be needed, and that feeling
(32:21):
unneeded is in this case and was literally fatal. A
very good study by Fiona Shand and her colleagues are
looked at the words that men used to describe themselves
before taking their own lives through suicide, and the two
most commonly used to describe themselves were worthless and useless.
We also know that the suicide rate among men goes
(32:45):
up very significantly after a breakdown. A marital breakdown or
a separation does not go up for women, goes up
a lot for men, so that gap gets even bigger.
We know it's much higher for men who are not employed.
We know it's much higher for men who as you
just indicate them in a disconnected, isolated and so what's happening,
I think, is that too many men aren't sure that
(33:06):
they're needed. They're not sure that the economy needs them,
they're not sure that their family needs them, they're not
sure their community needs them. And so we've got to
find a way to supply that sense to many men
that we still need you like we need you. And
I've actually been struck this as something again I've learned
recently is that there's a huge lack of men volunteering
(33:28):
in many civic institutions. So I just signed up to
be a big brother. I'm a big fan of big brothers,
big sisters, and now that I've empty nested, maybe I'm
also trying to fill a hole in myself too. But
I was shocked to discover that the waiting list for
boys where I live in East Tennessee for a big
is twelve months. For girls it's three months, because they
have at least as many boys being referred as girls,
(33:50):
and they have so few male volunteers. And I look around,
and people should look in their own area, and they
will almost certainly discover that there is a massive shortage
of male beings, and so big brothers big sisters is
becoming big sisters by default because of a lack of
male volunteers. And at the same time, we have a
lot of men who maybe lack some structure and purpose
(34:11):
in their lives, and so there's got to be a
way to make that call. But it has to be
to men. That's the thing that sounds a bit socially
conservative about this, which is that I think you've got
to make a specific call, which is like, guys, we
need a you. We don't just need volunteers, we need
some guys for this. If guys are told like we
need guys, they much want to turn up. And we
could argue forever about why that is, but it just
(34:33):
seems to be true. And so there's something quite deep
in our culture here as men we like as fathers.
That's obvious maybe in the workplace, but if we start
to doubt if whether the tribe needs us, I think
we fade away.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Is this do you sign these trend lines to deinstitutionalization
the conversations we're having today around reshoring and manufacturing. Are
you seeing these trend lines globally along those same lines?
Is it now because we're online more and its algorithms
that it's getting exacerbated. What I mean, what are the
(35:12):
what are the sort of or is it just the
ascendancy of the feminist movement and sort of that friction
that dialectic that's you know that we're not expressing or
at least discussing as much. What what do you attach
this to? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (35:26):
I mean, am I allowed to say yes to all
of the above? Right?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
A little bit of everything?
Speaker 3 (35:32):
A little bit?
Speaker 2 (35:32):
But I do think that the way I think about
this is that it's like that if you think of
the culture as like a kaleidoscope, I think it's been
shaken very significantly, and the pieces have not settled again yet.
And some of those, some of the forces that have
shaken our culture have been really good, like the economic
rise of women, which we mentioned earlier. Now, the economic
(35:53):
rise of women is a profound fact about modern societies.
It is a wonderful thing, and it has also massively
destabilized the way you think about male and female role.
And we've got to acknowledge that if we want to
keep making progress, I think like a big thing here
is you can have a huge step forward, which still
has some turbulence around it, right, So finding a way
(36:16):
to take men with us on this journey, that's huge.
But as you just referred to it, it's also also
true that while that was happening, that deindustrialization, some of
the issues around trade just disproportionately hit working classmen. So
that's happened at the same time. And then right towards
the end of this period we're seeing the rise of
online culture. Now we focus a lot on the negatives
(36:39):
of online culture, I sometimes wonder about the potential positives,
because in almost all of human history, having more men
who don't have that much to do, have time on
their hands, has predicted much higher crime rates and much
higher social unrest. Seems to it's almost like a fixed
(37:01):
law of societies, right, that hasn't happened this time, And
I think it's plausible to suggest that that might be because.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
The men have something else to do.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
With gaming, with pornography, with whatever the online content is, etc.
And so now I'm not arguing in favor of those
things when I say this, but it is nonetheless striking
that these trends in young male, particularly young male disengagement,
which would almost automatically produce higher crime rates in every
(37:35):
other era ofkeep because they'd be kicking around on the streets,
they'd be trying to figure out what to do, they'd
be getting into vites. They'd be like, that's not happened.
And so in some ways what's happened instead is a
male retreat. And so I've ended up being more worried
about the men who are checking out than the men
who are acting out. Now, of course, the men who
act out get all the headlines, and I don't in
(37:57):
any way want to diminish the problems around men acting out,
But I see a much deeper problem here, which is
the just this patrol, this retreat, this passivity that many
men feel because they can retreat to this online world
which wasn't there. Wasn't there when I was growing up
or when you're growing up in the same way, but
it is there now. And so what it gives men
(38:18):
is an alternative world to escape to. And the question
is why are so many of them wanting to escape?
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And that, I mean, it's a rhetorical question for you.
I mean, why is that?
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Then?
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I mean? Is what what I mean? It's well, let's
I mean, there's an opportunity obviously to segue and what
we need to do. But I mean, but why, I
mean again, is there any is it? Is it just
these larger trend lines? I mean, what is there? Is
there sort of a moment that marks I mean? Or
is it just this longer shift it's decades in the making,
(38:50):
I mean, or can you literally mark is there a
cultural moment that really sort of where you saw this
trend accelerate, this trend line became headline.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
The way I think about this is that you see
these cultural trends happening relatively slowly in terms of the
human life span, or it happened over decades. But they're
like you know, the tectonic plates shifting around, and then
you'll get once they hit a certain point, then you'll
get the earthquake or the volcano. But beneath the surface.
And this is very much your state, So you understand
(39:22):
this better than most governors. It's like stuff that the
ground is moving beneath the surface, and then that will
create this kind of eruption. I think the ground has
been shifting for at least half a century. It's been
shifting economically with a shift away from blue collar, male
favored jobs. It's been shifting in terms of the relative
position of men and women, with women going from being
(39:44):
essentially economically dependent on men to being economically independent.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
To a very large degree.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
And in the education system, we've seen this massive reversal
of the gender gaps, so that boys and men are
now way behind women and girls when they leave school,
leave college, I mean at college. Now there's a bigger
gender gap on college campuses today than there was in
nineteen seventy two when we passed Title nine. But it's
the other way round, so about sixty forty now female male.
(40:11):
And so these things didn't happen overnight. They've been building
and developing. And then I think this online culture has
intersected with this in one way just talked about to
kind of give men a place to retreat to, which
I think is bad in the long run, but also
to start weaponizing, to use the term used earlier, some
of these grievances, some of these issues, and so I
(40:32):
think it takes quite a long time to neglect issues
that have been but but I think they've been coming
for quite a while now. It's just that they've broken
through the surface now into our culture and into our
politics in a way that's made them very hard to ignore,
but I honestly think they've been building for many decades now.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
So speaking of politics, I mean, obviously the Trump campaign
did not ignore this space, and I don't think they
ignored it, you know, for eight years prior either. But
they seemed to have really been the beneficiary of more
focus on young men on some of these trend lines. Obviously,
the amount of time and energy the campaign spent targeting
(41:11):
young men, targeting men broadly, that paid huge dividends. I
think there was a fifteen point shift from forty fifty
six percent men under thirty that moved towards Trump campaign.
What do you make of his approach to these issues?
(41:32):
Do you think they're cynical? Do you think he's approached
it at least with a sensitivity, a recognition And where
do you think my party as Democrats? It sort of
seemed completely devoid of focus and energy. I was certainly
not a focus at the DNC. You know, we have
a post acquaintance. At least I had a privilege having
him on the podcast got Galloway post Front of Yours.
(41:54):
Scott talked about the DNC and he talked about going
on there DNC, what we care and it was every
single thing that's out there, I imaginable except twenty six
percent of the population that the DNC didn't seem to
care about in a least at all, at least based
on their own their own website and their own priorities
(42:16):
and policy.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
What.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
What do you think of Trump's efforts in the space.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, So, the way I think about this is that
in politics, something almost always beats nothing, and what there
was from the Democrats on issues around bois and men
was was nothing.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
It was this.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
It was the sound of deafening silence on these issues
and has That's been true for a while, And I
think for the reasons that were identified earlier, which is
that the Democrats were very determined to be seen, particularly
by women, as the party that were supporting them, and
they felt that any moves to acknowledge the issues the
challenges of boys and men would somehow undermine their claim
(42:57):
to be the party for women. I think that was
a fate miscalculation. I also think, honestly it was somewhat
insulting to women, because there are plenty of women out there,
and we may know some in our own lives, Governor,
who are simultaneously worried about the issues facing women access
for example, a reproductive health care, justice at work, and
(43:18):
they're desperately worried about their son's mental health, and they're
very worried about their brother's job. And so a party
that managed to do both I think would have been
pretty unstoppable. But there was nothing on the Democrat side.
On the Republican side, there was really I would just
put it as meeting men where they were, especially young men.
(43:38):
And if you look at recent work from David Shore,
the Democrat polster, it's very striking that it wasn't just
like men under thirty, it was men under twenty, it
was men under twenty three. The younger the men were,
the more they swung. And I think that is partly
because that's the microgeneration who grew up with terms like
toxic masculinity and man's plaining, and the women's movement they
(43:59):
toxic masculine. He was only invented, really in twenty sixteen
for public use, but if you were you could you
were ten when that happened. If you were voting for
the first time in twenty twenty four, you were in
high school when that happened. If you were twenty four
when you were voting. So I think what's happened was
that there was this sense of young men coming up
for grabs. They didn't hear anything from Democrats, And in
(44:19):
the end, I think I think the Republicans did a
better job of signaling to young men we like you,
we like the stuff you like, and we are going
to go to the places you go, like the podcast,
And so I think they met young men where they
were both culturally and in terms of communications strategy. They
didn't have anything to offer them. But by way of policy,
(44:43):
this wasn't a policy referendum, and in fact, my work
suggests that they've views on policy among young men haven't
really changed. This wasn't a policy win. It was a
cultural win. The Republicans managed to convince young men that
we see you and we like you, and I don't
think there was anything more to it than that. But
(45:04):
I don't think the Democrats did a very good job
of making young men feel the same way. If anything,
Democrats struggle with the idea that men might have problems
because too many of them are still convinced that men
are the problem. And until the Democrats get past that,
until they kind of acknowledge that there are real problems
(45:24):
facing boys and men and issues facing women and girls.
They just couldn't get past. There are some just as
we don't do it. It's very frustrating, especially when Tim
Walls came on the ticket. I had this fantasy speech
in my head where Tim Walls would go out and
talk about the need for first public school teacher to
run for such high office.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Coach.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
I had the speech she was going to give, and
it was going to be all about the things we're
going to do for women as the Democrats. So he
was going he said, but you know what, I'm very
worried about the ten percent decline in the share of
male teachers. I'm very worried about the decline in male sports.
I'm very worried about the lack of male coaches. I'm
very worried about the rising sewers among young men. And I,
as a Democrat, I'm going to set out this agenda
(46:04):
to help young men and to help men, as well
as our agenda to help young women. And I've got
to tell you, I don't think very many people would
have hated that. But there wasn't even a hint of
that from the Democrats.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Boy, I mean you really hit me when you say,
of all the people that could have done it so effectively,
Tim could have done it. I mean extraordinarily well with
not only is Bio in the military as well.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
But.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
The person he is. There's a sweetness of softness, there's
a decency inheriting him, there's not an edge. People are
not put off by Tim. They feel they want to
He's a guy you want to support, and his capacity
to deliver that message would have been profound. I couldn't
agree with you more at really, I appreciate that insight.
(46:54):
So look, that begs the question, and you made the point,
And I appreciate you making the point because I was
curious your thoughts of whether not Trump and Trump isn't
sort of reflects a policy shift as opposed to sort
of attaching themselves to the cultural shift and identifying the
issue but not necessarily advancing policy to solve them. You've
advanced a number of principles, a number of ideas to
(47:17):
solve them. One of them reflected in that speech you
just mentioned. I mean the importance of having young male teachers,
the importance of having mentors, the importance of focusing on
issues are related to vocational training. The opportunities had to
find more areas for service and contribution, to find meaning
and purpose and mission in one's life, the issues around
(47:39):
mental health. Tell me more about those areas, and tell
me about this frame that you've put together called HEEL
to sort of touch the STEM framework as it relates
to getting women and girls in the STEM field. You
want to focus on this thing called h ea.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
L yes, yes, thank you.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
So most people know what STEM is by now science, Technology, engineering,
and math. Many people don't know that it originally wasn't
going to be called that it was going to be
called SMET SMET, and then Judith Ramiley at the National
Science Foundation she said, can I call it STEM? And
they said, sure, whatever, Judith, and the rest is history.
But you're right that we've made huge efforts both to
(48:18):
invest in STEM but also to get more women into STEM.
And we have much further to go, especially in the
area of technology, but we have tripled the share of
STEM workers that are female up to about twenty seven
percent now in the US compared to the nineteen seventies.
That's not an accident. That was the result of concerted
public policy, as you know, of getting into middle schools
of scholarships of various advocacy groups to really get more
(48:41):
women into those professions and to start seeing them as
professions that were for them.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
But heel jobs are.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Those that are in health and education and requiring more
literacy skills than math skills, not just written literacy, but
kind of emotional literacy, verbal communication. And so those would
be jobs like teaching, nursing, health care assistance, social work,
mental health professionals, etc. And what's really striking about that
is that the share of men in those fields has
(49:08):
actually gone down. So the share of women in those
stem jobs has gone up, but we have fewer men
in those heel jobs. So, as I mentioned a moment
ago declining share of male teachers, it was thirty three
percent when Tim Wals was the teacher. Was the male share.
Now it's twenty three percent and falling and continues to fall,
(49:29):
and there is yet to be a sustained public policy
effort to do anything about that. Pleased to see some governors,
I know you're interested in it. I've seen Gretchen Whitmer
and Wes Moore and others really start to talk about
this issue. And you mentioned Josh Hawley a moment ago
who wrote his own book on this. To be fair,
the one thing that he agreed with me on was
(49:50):
this that actually, it would be good to get more
men in our classrooms. And so if you've got Josh
Howley on board on one side, and the American Psychological Association,
quite a progressive organization also saying we can that's a
big tent to work with. Or I can work with that.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
If I've lost everybody.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
To the right of Hawley and everybody to the left
of the APA, I can live with that. But it's
also true in mental health care. So the share of
men in social work, or i should say the share
of social workers who are male, is now twenty percent.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
It was.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
Forty percent in the seventies. The shriff psychologists that are
male is twenty percent. It was more than fifty percent
and seventies. And so we are creatoring the share of
men in education and in mental health care, just at
a point in our history where we're so worried about education,
especially for boys, and we're so worried about mental health care,
and where we have this rising suicide rate among men.
(50:44):
I think representation really matters in those fields, and gender
is part of that story. There are other kinds of
representation too. But I'm going to get out on a
limb here and say I think that if the teaching profession,
social work profession, psychology profession were becoming all male, you'd
be reading about it and we'd be acting on it.
(51:06):
We would not think it was a good idea. Isn't
it true the other way around as well? And again
people are worried that they somehow, oh, this is about men.
I'm like, when I wanted therapy, when my son wanted therapy,
it was really great to be able to find a
male all right, Not for everything and not for everybody,
but I do think it should be an option to
(51:26):
be able to find men. And the other thing is
those fields need workers, labor shortages, and it's not a
very good idea to try and solve the labor shortages
half the workforce.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
And there are jobs.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
So if we can, if we can do for heal
these health and education jobs for men what we did
for women into STEM, put the same kind of effort
on that would I think be a huge win. It
would actually be a win win win. It would be
a win for the professions who need workers. It would
be a win for the people using our schools and
hospitals and mental health professions, who would see themselves reflected
in it, and it would be a win for men.
(52:00):
Many of people are kind of looking for jobs now,
and so I'd love to see a concerted policy effort
really learning the lessons for women in stem around these jobs.
We can't have the the degendering of the labor market
only go one way, right. I don't think we should
be relaxed about that. I'm certainly not relaxed about the
creatoring share of men in those professions, and I.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
Don't think any policy maker should be.
Speaker 1 (52:20):
It's interesting, and I appreciate all of the above, and
hear you loudly and clearly in my day job and
my responsibility as governor to call that out and be
more intentional in that space as well. You also are
very intentional, and you've called out the importance of looking
at men fathers in the context of paid parentally. Tell
(52:42):
me more what you're thinking is along those lines in
terms of just and we didn't talk about fatherlesseners. We
didn't get into that issue necessarily, but I imagine in relationship
to being a parent and a provider, not just being
a protector, but back to being a provider is not
just about aconomic issues as relates to being a breadwinner,
(53:03):
but also at home and making sure that you're providing
for the family in terms of that care.
Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, and it speaks a bit to your wife's concerns
too about the division of labor that we have around kids.
I mean, the main reason for the gender paid gap
now is the care gap, is that women are just
doing much more of the care than men. And I'm
not suggesting that's going to go away overnight, or that
people shouldn't be free to choose whatever they want, but
I don't think policy should be inadvertently supporting these gender roles.
(53:33):
And so what that means is that if you have
paid leave, you should have paid leave for mothers and
fathers independently.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
Available to each of them.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
If we really think that dad's matter, and I do,
then we've got to be saying that through policy.
Speaker 3 (53:47):
And it's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
When I brought my book out, I made the proposal
that moms and dads should each get six months of
paid leave at a very high replacement rate. And one
of my friends says, what are you European, And well,
actually by background I am, but I get it. It's
like wildly utopian. But guess what. Under the Biden administration,
(54:09):
the US military introduced three months paid leave separately from
mothers and fathers, and so maybe we could try the
same for civilians. And the key point for me here
is a paid leave. It's such an important policy. And California,
of course is very strong state level policy, which I'm
sure you're very proud of that the US doesn't, but
(54:31):
a lot of this is at state level. But it's
very important both in the way that the policy is
designed and the way that it's marketed and sold and
described that it's not seen as maternity leave, just called
parental leave or paid leave. We've really got to ensure
that fathers feel like this is for them as well,
and design it so that it's for them too.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
If we want more gender.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Equality at work, we need more gender equality at home.
And we also need more dads involved in.
Speaker 3 (54:58):
Their kids' lives.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
And there are there are lots of things it's hard
to do through policy, right Maybe many of the things
we've talked about today, there's there's no obvious policy solution,
but paid leave for dads is a policy solution that works.
They have more egalitarian relationships with their partners. They are
more involved with the kid's lives years later. And so
(55:22):
there is a policy, so pro mail policy that's on
the table, and that it's one that should be being
supported by most people, certainly on the Democrat side, but
it should be being sold as a pro mail, pro
dad policy, and it currently isn't being sold that way.
Speaker 1 (55:37):
Well said, and ensure as hell by definition a profamily
policy in terms of strengthening their family. Bid well, Richard,
thank you for sort of, you know, strengthening our attention
to this critical issue. And I'm just you know, I've
been really inspired not only by your work, but by
sort of the rediscovery of your work because you've been
(56:01):
at this for some time, and to see all the
energy and support that you're getting to have the opportunity
to dialogue with Scott Galloway and the work he's doing
highlighting this space. I mean, it really is a call
to arms. This is not political. This is about community,
This is about who we are. It's about the commonwealth
more broadly, and so I really wanted to thank you
(56:22):
for being such a powerful voice in that space but
also sharing that voice with us here today. So thank
you for being on the podcast.
Speaker 3 (56:30):
Thank you
Host
Gavin Newsom
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