AI transcript
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0:01:17 Will the VP debate move the needle
0:01:20 in what’s shaping up to be a neck and neck election?
0:01:21 You never know in advance what will be the thing
0:01:24 that matters and the thing that doesn’t matter.
0:01:27 But Donald Trump will be almost 80
0:01:32 and J.D. Vance will be one cheeseburger away
0:01:34 from the presidency should they win.
0:01:36 I’m Preet Bharara and this week,
0:01:39 the Atlantic magazines David Frum joins me
0:01:41 on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet,
0:01:43 to break down what happened at the debate.
0:01:45 The episode is out now.
0:01:47 Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet
0:01:49 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:54 Episode 318.
0:01:56 218 is the area covering cities
0:01:59 in northern and central Louisiana in 1918.
0:02:01 World War I ended.
0:02:02 So a little bone to pick.
0:02:04 I saved 100 orphans from a burning building.
0:02:06 Do they call me orphan, save or no?
0:02:10 I’ve put your 20 men with my bare hands in World War I.
0:02:12 Do they call me the butcher, no?
0:02:14 But you fuck one goat.
0:02:16 Just one goat.
0:02:18 Go, go, go!
0:02:19 Go!
0:02:34 Welcome to the 318th of Jesus Christ, 318th.
0:02:36 What am I like, 800 years old?
0:02:37 I mean, when does it end?
0:02:39 When does it end?
0:02:42 Anyways, the 318th episode of the Prop G-Pod
0:02:44 in today’s episode, we speak with someone I refer to
0:02:48 as my Yoda on the topic of young men,
0:02:49 specifically struggling young men,
0:02:51 and that is Richard Reeves,
0:02:53 who was the president of the American Institute
0:02:54 for Boys and Men,
0:02:56 and a non-resident senior fellow
0:02:57 at the Brookings Institution.
0:02:59 We discussed with Richard his new research
0:03:00 on unnatural male deaths,
0:03:03 including injury, suicide and drug overdose,
0:03:05 along with solutions and his take
0:03:07 on what the script for masculinity should look like.
0:03:08 Okay, what’s happening?
0:03:11 That’s right, I’m back in London.
0:03:14 I’m back in the UK, but I was in Madrid.
0:03:15 By the way, Madrid,
0:03:17 let’s talk a little bit about Madrid.
0:03:18 Hola, Senor Galway.
0:03:20 Who’s the old dude living upstairs?
0:03:22 Who is that guy?
0:03:23 He’s funny.
0:03:24 That’s right.
0:03:26 Who’s the guy with the big dog and the little dog?
0:03:27 Oh, that’s the dog.
0:03:29 Anyway, absolutely love Madrid.
0:03:31 I’m into this idea.
0:03:33 Richard Florida, I couldn’t remember the same the other day.
0:03:36 He’s like the, he is not like, he’s the city guy.
0:03:38 By the way, lives in Toronto and Miami.
0:03:40 What does it say when the city guy lives in Toronto and Miami?
0:03:41 That means those two cities
0:03:43 have it kind of going on for different reasons,
0:03:45 but Richard looks at the future of cities
0:03:48 and I am fascinated by looking at cities
0:03:50 in a similar way you look at stocks.
0:03:52 What is an undervalued city?
0:03:53 Where would you wanna move if you’re young?
0:03:55 ‘Cause a young person, I would argue,
0:03:57 needs to be constantly thinking about
0:04:00 what I would refer to as a lifestyle arbitrage.
0:04:01 Now, unfortunately, the arbitrage gets harder
0:04:04 as you put down roots, dogs, kids, shit like that,
0:04:07 but you always wanna be thinking about a lifestyle arbitrage
0:04:10 when you’re kind of very young or very old, for example.
0:04:11 Yeah, and my, one of the best things
0:04:13 or most creative things I did in my life,
0:04:16 I did a lifestyle arbitrage moving from San Francisco
0:04:18 to New York, but it wasn’t a lifestyle arbitrage.
0:04:20 It was more a philosophical arbitrage.
0:04:22 I wanted to get away from the tech community.
0:04:24 I didn’t like San Francisco.
0:04:26 Most beautiful city in the union, I get it.
0:04:28 Great, great professional environment.
0:04:29 I can’t stand the fog.
0:04:32 I can’t stand political extremism on either side
0:04:33 and I found it politically extreme.
0:04:35 But anyways, love New York,
0:04:36 but then the lifestyle arbitrage
0:04:39 is I moved to Florida in 2010.
0:04:43 And basically, not 80% of New York
0:04:44 ’cause it’s so different,
0:04:49 but water, beaches, Miami, hello, Latina, sexy vibe.
0:04:51 And I could do it on 40% of the price.
0:04:53 And I got to start saving money, invested a bunch of money
0:04:57 and the markets took off and champagne and cocaine
0:04:59 or as I call it, I moved to London.
0:05:02 So that was the kind of ultimate lifestyle arbitrage.
0:05:04 And I think a lot of people recognize that arbitrage
0:05:06 at the same period moving from California to Texas
0:05:07 or to other places.
0:05:09 Ultimately, the term arbitrage is the correct one
0:05:10 because people figure it out
0:05:12 and more and more human and financial capital
0:05:15 moves into these underpriced lifestyle areas
0:05:16 and things go up in price
0:05:17 and the arbitrage gets starched out.
0:05:21 By the time I moved away from Florida two years ago,
0:05:23 our house had tripled in value.
0:05:25 The school we sent our kids to had gone
0:05:27 from I think 12,000 intuition to 22,000.
0:05:28 So it almost doubled and they’re out of seats.
0:05:31 They didn’t have the capacity for new people.
0:05:33 So that arb is gone, if you will.
0:05:35 But anyways, I’m back from Madrid.
0:05:37 Oh, and I’m heading to Munich tomorrow.
0:05:38 I love Munich, it’s a beautiful city.
0:05:40 If I spoke German, I would probably move to Munich,
0:05:42 but I don’t, so I won’t.
0:05:44 I actually prefer Munich over Berlin.
0:05:45 I love Berlin for the history,
0:05:47 but Munich, that’s a nice, wealthy city.
0:05:49 Anyways, what else is going on?
0:05:52 Nike CEO John Donahoe is stepping down next month,
0:05:55 a move welcomed by pretty much everyone involved with the firm.
0:05:57 Critics, investors, and employees alike
0:06:00 say that Donahoe who took over a CEO in 2020
0:06:02 essentially oversaw Nike’s fall,
0:06:05 becoming a loser, ruining retail partnerships
0:06:06 and diminishing the brand.
0:06:09 As the former CEO of eBay and Bank Company,
0:06:11 he was hired to upgrade Nike’s digital sales.
0:06:13 Donahoe focused on direct consumer sales
0:06:14 and cut ties with longtime retail partners,
0:06:18 including Footlocker, DSW and Macy’s.
0:06:19 We actually talked about this
0:06:22 in our most recent episode of Office Hours.
0:06:25 Donahoe’s demise really started coming to full view
0:06:27 when Nike’s stock fell 20% in June
0:06:31 following disappointing sales growth and oblique forecast.
0:06:34 So essentially sales have really, really had a tough time.
0:06:36 As a matter of fact, they’re kind of,
0:06:39 Nike’s in a sales recession for the first time in a while,
0:06:41 meaning that you’re on your cells have gone down.
0:06:43 I think it’s really easy to play Monday morning quarterback.
0:06:47 I ran a firm called L2 that was a business intelligence firm
0:06:48 and Nike was one of our biggest clients.
0:06:53 And I want to be clear, my advice was to double down
0:06:56 on direct to consumer that they needed to develop more,
0:06:58 have more control over their channels,
0:07:00 either through the web or their own stores.
0:07:03 And it ends up that retail sales,
0:07:06 in-store retail sales came back much stronger
0:07:09 than anyone had anticipated post COVID
0:07:10 and they were caught flat footed.
0:07:14 I would argue the decision they made at that time
0:07:15 was the right decision.
0:07:17 By the way, very interesting, I think it’s very interesting.
0:07:19 When the military reviews and operation,
0:07:21 sure they look at the outcome, but more than that,
0:07:25 when they try to evaluate the officer’s decisions,
0:07:27 they look at given the information
0:07:30 that person had at that time was at the right decision.
0:07:32 Okay, maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t work,
0:07:35 but given what he or she knew at that moment
0:07:36 was at the right decision.
0:07:38 And I would argue doubling down on direct to consumer,
0:07:41 given what they knew was the right idea.
0:07:43 Where they have fucked up or fallen short,
0:07:44 they have not been nearly as innovative
0:07:48 around product and merchandising as Adidas
0:07:49 or, and they’ve lost a ton of share
0:07:51 to some long tail brands, Hoka and On Running,
0:07:53 which are the shoes I wear.
0:07:56 Hello, douchebag venture capitalist.
0:07:59 Anyways, I would also say there’s some bigger macro factors
0:08:00 that are outside of their control,
0:08:03 specifically China sneezes
0:08:05 and a bunch of these companies get a cold,
0:08:08 whether it’s Starbucks, whether it’s Estee Lauder,
0:08:11 these companies I’ve become so over-invested in China.
0:08:13 China was a gift that kept on giving
0:08:15 and when China domestic demand fell,
0:08:18 these companies really got whacked hard.
0:08:21 In addition, on a more meta-level, TikTok.
0:08:24 And that is the sword that has been the weapon of choice
0:08:28 for Nike has been building an okay shoe
0:08:31 that they infuse with unbelievable brand codes.
0:08:33 And the primary weapon for building those brand codes
0:08:35 has been broadcast television.
0:08:38 Nike is the best broadcast advertiser in history,
0:08:41 but that sword, that weapon of war, if you will,
0:08:44 has been getting dollar and dollar for the last 20 years.
0:08:46 And so it is harder for them to reach their core customer
0:08:49 with their core confidence than Adidas advertising.
0:08:51 They’re fantastic with endorsement.
0:08:53 They’re pretty good at direct to consumer.
0:08:55 I would argue the stores have gotten a little bit stale.
0:08:57 I remember everyone wanted to go to Nike town in 2000.
0:08:59 I’m not sure they’ve been closing some of their stores.
0:09:02 It feels like they need a freshen up, a refresh,
0:09:04 something that makes them a little bit
0:09:05 stand out a little bit more.
0:09:08 Anyways, do not count these guys up.
0:09:13 The new CEO, the new CEO is, oh shit, who is he?
0:09:14 Oh, Elliot Hill, I know Elliot.
0:09:17 I don’t know him well, but I did work
0:09:18 with him a little bit at L2.
0:09:20 I think this is a great hire.
0:09:22 I think the board did a really good job here.
0:09:24 And that is they brought in someone
0:09:27 that would provide some stability, some credibility.
0:09:29 And this guy’s kind of, you know,
0:09:30 if you were to stab him with a fork,
0:09:32 he kind of bleeds the swoosh.
0:09:33 He’s very much Nike.
0:09:36 And I think it was a great hire for them.
0:09:37 So well done.
0:09:38 Look for Nike.
0:09:40 Nike had its best trading day, I think of 2024.
0:09:41 The day they announced on it was stepping down
0:09:44 and they brought in, brought in Elliot.
0:09:45 But look for Nike.
0:09:47 I think Nike’s absolutely,
0:09:49 you do not want to bet against Nike.
0:09:51 Moving on, the Biden administration plans
0:09:53 to ban Chinese developed software
0:09:55 and internet connected vehicles in the US.
0:09:57 You don’t say.
0:09:58 Why?
0:09:59 National security concerns.
0:10:00 Wow.
0:10:03 Why national security concerns?
0:10:05 The ban aims to prevent Chinese intelligence
0:10:07 from tracking Americans and using car electronics
0:10:09 to get into important systems,
0:10:10 including the electric grid.
0:10:12 Jesus Christ.
0:10:14 That sounds very much spy versus spy.
0:10:17 National security advisor, Nate Silver said,
0:10:18 on a call with reporters,
0:10:20 with potentially millions of vehicles on the road,
0:10:22 each with 10 to 15 year lifespans.
0:10:25 The risk of disruption and sabotage increases dramatically.
0:10:27 Wow.
0:10:29 I don’t know how much of that is true.
0:10:31 Is the real national security concern
0:10:32 or it’s Mary Barra from General Motors saying,
0:10:34 “We need more jobs.
0:10:37 Detroit needs your help, Joe.”
0:10:39 I would argue we tend to err on the side
0:10:42 of being too permissive, too promiscuous
0:10:43 with our data and our infrastructure.
0:10:45 And there’s no fucking way they would let us
0:10:48 into their country or have they with Tesla and Auto Drive.
0:10:49 I don’t know, that’s an interesting question.
0:10:50 It’s an interesting question.
0:10:53 But typically what I see playing out in China,
0:10:54 and I’m paranoid, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong,
0:10:57 is that China will let companies in just long enough
0:10:58 to figure out what they’re doing
0:11:01 to establish a market in that sector,
0:11:03 create some demand, create some economic liquidity,
0:11:05 and then they boot out that company
0:11:06 or make it hard for them,
0:11:08 prop up a local Chinese entrepreneur
0:11:09 and capture the value internally,
0:11:11 as they did with Facebook and Google.
0:11:12 Ever heard of Baidu?
0:11:14 And it looks a lot like Google,
0:11:16 and my guess is the majority of the IP was stolen.
0:11:18 By the way, the greatest economic boom
0:11:21 in the history of China is probably the migration
0:11:22 from rural areas into city areas
0:11:24 and some of their central planning,
0:11:25 which has actually worked in autocracy.
0:11:28 The second biggest has been just out-of-fucking-control
0:11:32 IP theft from Europe and the US.
0:11:35 Anyways, I think that this follows
0:11:37 or this initiative follows previous actions
0:11:38 against Chinese technology,
0:11:40 including bans on Huawei products
0:11:43 and investigations into Chinese cranes at US ports.
0:11:46 Officials have emphasized the ban is driven by security,
0:11:47 not political models.
0:11:48 Okay, that makes sense.
0:11:51 The ban will also target Russian software and hardware.
0:11:53 Is there a lot of Russian hardware and software in the US?
0:11:55 What is it, vodka?
0:11:56 That’s my software.
0:11:58 That’s my Russian software.
0:12:01 By the way, Stola Chenaya is brewed in like Denmark
0:12:03 or something or is still in Denmark.
0:12:04 It’s a mean vodka, though.
0:12:05 True story.
0:12:07 I used to just drink beer in college
0:12:08 with a little bit of marijuana.
0:12:10 And then I started drinking vodka
0:12:11 ’cause I thought it was more elegant.
0:12:13 It’s kind of the alcohol, it’s alcohol.
0:12:14 I didn’t think the hangovers were bad.
0:12:16 And I literally became immune to vodka.
0:12:18 I literally became immune.
0:12:19 Could drink eight vodka drinks and I’d be like,
0:12:23 “Oh, I don’t like me, which means this isn’t working.”
0:12:25 And just a reminder, just a reminder,
0:12:26 I don’t know how I got there with Russia.
0:12:28 Oh yeah, there’s not a lot of Russian software,
0:12:29 I think, in the US.
0:12:30 And just a reminder, in May,
0:12:32 the Biden administration increased tariffs
0:12:35 on Chinese electric vehicles to 100%
0:12:37 and limited tax credits for Chinese-made EVs.
0:12:39 We also covered this issue in an office hours episode
0:12:41 back in July.
0:12:43 This ban would hinder the entry of Chinese car manufacturers,
0:12:45 including BYD, into the US market,
0:12:48 which poses a potential risk to US automakers
0:12:50 if they lack access to advanced technologies.
0:12:51 I’m not sure that’s accurate.
0:12:54 I think it’s probably a boon for US car manufacturers,
0:12:56 specifically Tesla, if they don’t allow BYD.
0:12:59 And I fucking hate tariffs.
0:13:00 I hate them.
0:13:01 The second biggest tax cut in the world
0:13:04 would be if we broke up big tech, it would oxygenate.
0:13:06 The economy, companies wouldn’t,
0:13:08 companies’ parents, consumers wouldn’t have
0:13:11 this extraordinary tax placed on them
0:13:13 called the monopolization of social search
0:13:16 and our kid’s wellbeing by a small number,
0:13:17 a handful of small companies.
0:13:19 So bringing these companies up
0:13:21 would require them to compete and lower the rents
0:13:24 on suppliers, retailers through party marketers,
0:13:27 digital firms, companies trying to acquire people online,
0:13:30 retailers, little brands trying to sell their shit online
0:13:31 when they have to pay these onerous,
0:13:35 useless prices in terms to Amazon.
0:13:37 So you wanna oxygenate the economy, break up big tech,
0:13:39 but the biggest tax cut in the history of mankind
0:13:43 would be if China and the US kissed and made up.
0:13:44 We have money, consumer demand,
0:13:46 incredible intellectual property.
0:13:49 They have a supply chain like no other
0:13:51 and also a decent consumer demand,
0:13:52 although it’s fallen off a little bit.
0:13:54 It seems like we should kiss and make up
0:13:57 and make cheap shit for everyone around the world.
0:14:00 More for less is the ultimate gangster business strategy
0:14:04 and we kinda got the more part in the US
0:14:06 and they got it for less, if you will.
0:14:08 Anyways, let’s hope we can all get along.
0:14:12 We’ll be right back for our conversation with Richard Reeves.
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0:17:13 (upbeat music)
0:17:29 – Welcome back.
0:17:30 Here’s our conversation with Richard Reeves,
0:17:32 the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men
0:17:34 and non-resident senior fellow
0:17:37 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
0:17:39 Richard, where does this podcast find you?
0:17:42 – I’m home in East Tennessee, Southern Appalachia,
0:17:45 but I’ve been on the road of being in Hong Kong
0:17:46 and then being in Oregon.
0:17:49 I had this amazing trip out to this community college
0:17:52 in Oregon, where they’re just cratering
0:17:53 male share of employment.
0:17:55 They’re dealing with it, they’re acting on it.
0:17:58 And this guy told me he’s been visiting
0:18:00 all these rural high schools in Oregon
0:18:02 to find out why the boys are not applying
0:18:04 to college anymore.
0:18:05 And there’s a bunch of reasons.
0:18:08 He said the most common thing he heard was,
0:18:10 I’m afraid that I’ll be lonely.
0:18:13 That I kind of won’t belong, I won’t have friends.
0:18:15 – Really? – It’s really struck me, yeah.
0:18:18 – That’s wild, I mean, I know that generally speaking,
0:18:21 young men have a tendency to stay on the farm
0:18:24 and women have a tendency to take off for the city.
0:18:26 But that’s, I had never heard that about,
0:18:28 that being a reason for why young men
0:18:30 weren’t applying to college.
0:18:31 – Same.
0:18:32 I mean, we know they are more lonely,
0:18:33 like we’ve talked about this before,
0:18:36 like the loneliness epidemic has hit young men a bit more.
0:18:39 And a number of college campuses have told me
0:18:41 that when they do their kind of belonging surveys,
0:18:43 they very often find it’s kind of, it is men,
0:18:46 especially those from kind of more rural areas,
0:18:48 who will say that they just don’t really feel
0:18:49 like they belong on the campus,
0:18:51 like they don’t have the right habits,
0:18:54 the right language, the right sensibilities or whatever.
0:18:55 And I really worry about that
0:18:58 because you start to feel like college is not
0:19:01 for working class guys, especially from rural areas,
0:19:05 then you’re losing a heck of a lot of potential talent.
0:19:07 – Yeah, I’ve always been a big advocate
0:19:10 and it’s not as toxic to people now as it was,
0:19:12 but I’ve always been a huge advocate
0:19:14 for joining a fraternity or a sorority
0:19:16 when you get to school.
0:19:17 And there’s some credible stats.
0:19:21 You become twice as likely to complete
0:19:24 your four year education when you join a fraternity
0:19:26 or a similar organization that kind of
0:19:29 distills it down to a smaller,
0:19:30 I know a smaller community, if you will.
0:19:33 But anyways, the reason we wanted to bring you on
0:19:36 is you just put out a paper on unnatural male deaths,
0:19:39 including injuries, suicide, and drug overdose.
0:19:41 Why is this happening?
0:19:42 – Yeah, so we’re really motivated
0:19:45 by our previous work on suicide,
0:19:47 where the well-known big gap,
0:19:49 especially now among young men,
0:19:50 or like take their lives from suicide,
0:19:53 but CDC actually captures this really good data
0:19:55 on unnatural deaths,
0:19:59 so kind of injuries is the language they sometimes use.
0:20:01 And we really hadn’t seen anyone break that down by gender.
0:20:04 And so we did break it down by gender.
0:20:07 And a number of things jumped out to me.
0:20:08 The thing I wasn’t prepared for
0:20:12 was just the scale of the increase in injury deaths.
0:20:16 So it’s up by 57% since 2001.
0:20:19 It’s 200,000 men a year who are dying
0:20:21 from one of these quotes, non-natural causes.
0:20:24 The biggest one is drug poisonings,
0:20:29 followed by suicide, followed by motor vehicle crashes,
0:20:31 followed by homicide, and then the other ones.
0:20:33 And it’s just, it’s two and a half times higher
0:20:36 among men than among women.
0:20:38 And that increase is so big
0:20:43 and largely driven by this drug epidemic that we’re seeing.
0:20:44 The thing that really blew me away
0:20:45 is like if you look at the deaths,
0:20:48 you’re always gonna see deaths from non-natural causes,
0:20:49 the ones we’ve seen above, right?
0:20:52 The question is, are they going down or up?
0:20:55 And they’re going up in a way that’s extraordinary.
0:20:57 So just to kind of put a sharp data point on this,
0:21:01 if the death rate from these unnatural causes
0:21:05 had remained the same since 2001, right?
0:21:07 So it’d been a flat line since then,
0:21:11 then we would have lost 400,000 fewer men
0:21:13 in those couple of decades.
0:21:17 And that’s about the number of men we lost in World War II.
0:21:19 – That’s a fascinating stat.
0:21:21 The question I would have is that, okay,
0:21:24 the leading cause here appears to be drug poisonings.
0:21:28 Is that fentanyl and also is this rooted in loneliness
0:21:31 and depression and why people are men are turning to drugs
0:21:32 or because drugs are more available,
0:21:34 because they’re more accepted in culture?
0:21:39 Like what, give us some of the nuance here.
0:21:43 – Yeah, the way this has been framed a lot,
0:21:44 you talked about this yourself,
0:21:47 but this idea of deaths of despair.
0:21:49 And as I said, the rates are highest among middle-aged men,
0:21:53 men between 30 and mid-50s.
0:21:55 And it’s been associated for a long time
0:21:57 with kind of declining economic prospects,
0:22:00 community breakdown, loss of affiliation
0:22:03 to family, religion, et cetera.
0:22:05 And so if you like, that’s the kind of demand side,
0:22:08 but there’s also clearly a supply side issue here too,
0:22:11 which is the way in which these drugs,
0:22:13 fentanyl and others have just been flooded into
0:22:15 some of these communities on the supply side.
0:22:17 It’s clearly part of the story too.
0:22:19 And so there’s actually a big debate now
0:22:20 among social scientists,
0:22:23 whether this term deaths of despair is actually helpful
0:22:25 or not, because what that does is it kind of points
0:22:28 to the individuals themselves, to the communities,
0:22:30 and says, it’s all demand-driven, right?
0:22:33 But actually it’s supply side as well.
0:22:34 And we have to take both into account, I think.
0:22:37 But you’re right, there’s clearly a despair element to it.
0:22:39 One of the things I find interesting about this
0:22:42 is that the drugs that people generally die from
0:22:44 are things like fentanyl, opioids, et cetera.
0:22:45 They’re not party drugs.
0:22:48 They’re not drugs you take to go out and have a good time,
0:22:50 right?
0:22:53 They’re drugs that you take to retreat and withdrawal.
0:22:55 And interestingly, one of the main reasons
0:23:00 why those drugs do end up, or even killing people,
0:23:02 is because if there is a bad reaction,
0:23:04 then there’s no one with you.
0:23:08 And so a big predictor of dying from drugs is being alone.
0:23:11 – Johann Hari, I hope I’m saying that name correctly,
0:23:14 said that the opposite of addiction is connection.
0:23:15 I absolutely love that.
0:23:17 That basically kind of confirms everything
0:23:18 you’ve been saying.
0:23:22 And so I wanna use that as a bridge to a jumping off point
0:23:24 other than telling kids, you know,
0:23:25 not the Nancy Reagan, don’t do drugs.
0:23:27 Don’t do drugs alone.
0:23:30 But also, what are some potential solutions?
0:23:32 Should we be legalizing drugs,
0:23:35 or is it more just programs to help young men
0:23:37 feel more connected?
0:23:39 – Yeah, so I’m gonna confess to not being enough
0:23:43 of an expert on drug policy to talk seriously
0:23:45 about that side of it.
0:23:47 But what I would say, I’m much more interested
0:23:50 in the demand side and the conditions
0:23:53 with which what would lead people to kind of take drugs
0:23:56 and then with whom and to what end, right?
0:23:58 To what basis back to the like are you,
0:24:01 I’m not here to endorse drug use period.
0:24:04 But I just think like if you’re taking a relatively safe pill
0:24:06 to try and stay up late at night,
0:24:07 or you think you’re taking some cocaine,
0:24:10 you do that very occasionally, et cetera.
0:24:12 That’s very different to this drug of retreat,
0:24:15 drug of despair, drug of loneliness stuff
0:24:16 that we’re seeing playing out.
0:24:20 So to the extent that Johann’s line is correct
0:24:22 about, and I’ve heard him say that too,
0:24:24 and I like it too, it’s connection.
0:24:26 Then I think what we should be doing is pushing hard
0:24:29 on where are the places that men,
0:24:31 that boys and men can connect?
0:24:33 What are the social institutions?
0:24:36 What are the places and spaces and institutions
0:24:41 that promote, encourage and support fraternity, right?
0:24:42 It’s really weird.
0:24:45 That’s interesting to me reflecting on fraternities
0:24:48 is that the thing that I think that’s probably most lacking
0:24:51 in the lives of many young men and middle-aged men
0:24:53 is fraternity.
0:24:56 It’s friendships, it’s male friendships in particular.
0:24:58 It’s a sense of community and attachment and connection.
0:25:03 So why we’ve allowed boy scouts to drop the boy, for example,
0:25:05 so that it’s no longer boy scouts.
0:25:08 It’s now scouting for America and has gone kind of co-ed.
0:25:13 But also Scott, like the decline in participation in sport
0:25:16 in high school among boys, it’s going up among girls,
0:25:20 it’s going down among boys, the lack of coaches,
0:25:23 the disengagement from extracurricular activities,
0:25:27 all that stuff, it actually takes quite a lot
0:25:29 to build community, to build connection.
0:25:31 And we have not done a good enough job
0:25:35 of creating places and spaces and institutions
0:25:38 where boys feel comfortable creating those relationships,
0:25:39 which are back to where I started.
0:25:41 Like I was blown away by the fact
0:25:43 that these 17, 18 year old boys are afraid
0:25:45 of being lonely on college campuses.
0:25:47 And it’s less true for other groups
0:25:49 because those colleges are actually making a real point
0:25:51 of saying there’ll be affinity groups.
0:25:54 There’ll be a girl, a women’s support group.
0:25:57 There’ll be a girl to code group.
0:26:00 There’ll be a whatever, very intentional, explicit attempts
0:26:03 to create a sense of community among other groups.
0:26:04 And I think we’ve made the mistake of thinking
0:26:06 that men don’t need that.
0:26:07 – I saw some really interesting,
0:26:09 or I talked to someone who’s a family attorney,
0:26:12 which is a way of saying elsewhere we got divorced.
0:26:16 And he sent me some data saying that amongst gay men,
0:26:20 marriages with gay men, 28% divorce rate.
0:26:24 Straight couples, 48% divorce rate.
0:26:27 Gay women, lesbian marriages, 72%.
0:26:31 And I thought, wow, does this mean women
0:26:35 bring more quote unquote divorce energy to the relationship?
0:26:37 And that just sort of blew me away
0:26:38 ’cause I’d never heard that before.
0:26:39 And he said that the path,
0:26:42 he said he’s had a lot of his clients commit suicide
0:26:46 or die by suicide.
0:26:48 I’m told it’s the right way to say it now.
0:26:52 And he said something really rattling.
0:26:55 He said that we all wanna believe they’re mentally ill
0:26:56 and it’s something outside of our control
0:26:57 and outside of their control.
0:26:58 We have empathy for them.
0:27:00 They had no control over it.
0:27:02 Or that it’s not our fault.
0:27:04 He struggled with depression.
0:27:07 And he said, I get it.
0:27:10 He said these guys basically do the math.
0:27:12 They don’t wanna get divorced.
0:27:14 Essentially, their divorce is usually
0:27:17 presaged by some sort of financial stress,
0:27:19 a bankruptcy, lose the business,
0:27:21 some sort of emotional breakdown on the part of the man.
0:27:27 His spouse decides she doesn’t wanna stay in the marriage.
0:27:30 Family court is biased towards men.
0:27:34 So, and you actually may have even talked about this.
0:27:36 I apologize if I keep parroting back
0:27:38 to what I’ve learned from you.
0:27:40 But in one fell swoop within a matter of months
0:27:43 or a small number of years,
0:27:47 a guy loses his primary relationship, his children,
0:27:49 his economic wellbeing,
0:27:53 and he makes a very rational decision to kill himself.
0:27:57 I wonder if at some point you come back on one of our pods
0:28:02 and say drug poisonings, suicide and divorce.
0:28:05 What are your thoughts?
0:28:10 – Yeah, so the suicide risk among men generally
0:28:13 is four times higher than among women.
0:28:18 If you narrow that scope to just divorced men and women,
0:28:21 it is eight times higher among divorced men
0:28:23 than among divorced women.
0:28:25 And so I think there’s a general point here.
0:28:27 I didn’t know that data about divorce.
0:28:31 It’s also true that women initiate twice as many divorces.
0:28:34 Women account for two thirds of divorce initiations
0:28:35 in the US now.
0:28:37 So women are, just as a empirical matter,
0:28:39 they’re more likely to initiate divorce.
0:28:41 And there’s this interesting study recently,
0:28:43 I think it was out Sweden,
0:28:47 which looked at what happens to men and women
0:28:48 who win the lottery.
0:28:50 The men who won the lottery became a bit more likely
0:28:53 to get married and not to have children.
0:28:54 The women who won the lottery were more likely
0:28:56 to divorce their husband.
0:28:58 – I love that.
0:29:02 – I mean, I’m laughing in a sort of gallows humor way
0:29:05 because, and of course, a good feminist critique of that
0:29:07 would be, well, the women have got more exit power
0:29:07 and they’re using it, right?
0:29:09 And if it’s economic dependency,
0:29:12 tying them to the guy, then hallelujah, she’s free of that.
0:29:15 And that’s actually a great sort of microcosm
0:29:19 of the whole push for more economic independence for women.
0:29:21 And you and I are both strong advocates
0:29:24 of that being a wonderful thing.
0:29:28 The issue then is what happens to men
0:29:30 who get detached from institutions
0:29:32 like family and marriage,
0:29:33 and therefore end up, as you say,
0:29:35 feeling like they’re not valued.
0:29:37 And I probably said this to you before,
0:29:40 but the two words that men use to describe themselves
0:29:43 before they take their lives from suicide in notes
0:29:44 and so on, the two most commonly used words
0:29:46 are useless and worthless.
0:29:47 And we just did other paper,
0:29:48 this will be interesting to you, I think,
0:29:50 where we looked at the differences between men
0:29:53 with a college degree and those without,
0:29:54 to paper and working class men.
0:29:56 And one of the stats in there that really blew me away,
0:29:59 and I think I know this stuff,
0:30:01 and then I dig deeper and really get surprised,
0:30:04 which is that men without a college degree
0:30:07 between the ages of 30 and 50
0:30:10 are only about 50% of those men
0:30:11 have a child in their household.
0:30:13 It’s basically 50, 50,
0:30:15 whether they’ve got kids in their household.
0:30:17 For women without a college degree, it’s still 80%.
0:30:20 And for those men, it was north of 80%.
0:30:23 And so we’ve got to a situation now where,
0:30:24 like particularly for working class men,
0:30:26 if I can use that definition of them,
0:30:30 like 50, 50, whether they have kids in their household,
0:30:31 and they might have kids,
0:30:32 but not be in their household anymore.
0:30:35 And I think one of the things we’re learning
0:30:40 is there was some truth to the conservative concern
0:30:43 that if men became less economically important,
0:30:45 if women became less economic reliant on men,
0:30:48 that was gonna leave a lot of men feeling beached
0:30:50 and surplus to requirements.
0:30:53 And their fear was those men would start acting out,
0:30:56 we’d see massive rises in crime,
0:30:57 all kinds of antisocial behavior.
0:30:59 It’d be like Mad Max, right?
0:31:01 As these men are kind of roaming around.
0:31:03 And of course the opposites happened by and large.
0:31:05 We’ve actually seen men retreating,
0:31:06 they’re checking out more than acting out.
0:31:09 And I see suicide as in some ways
0:31:11 the most tragic version of men
0:31:15 just checking out, looking around
0:31:17 and deciding that society, their family,
0:31:21 their community, their church, their workplace,
0:31:22 really would be fine without them,
0:31:24 maybe even better off without them.
0:31:27 And if there is a greater human tragedy,
0:31:30 then leading people to feel unneeded to that extent,
0:31:32 then I don’t know what it is.
0:31:36 – Yeah, I was fascinated by that study on divorce.
0:31:40 So I looked into it and some additional data was that
0:31:44 they believed that a lot of women, quote unquote,
0:31:46 if you’re gonna say women have more divorce energy,
0:31:48 which is disparaging towards women,
0:31:50 you also have to acknowledge
0:31:52 that as women have made more money,
0:31:55 men shouldering domestic responsibilities
0:31:58 has not kept pace with women’s economic ascent.
0:32:02 And that marriage has become a worse deal.
0:32:04 And that is a lot of women feel like,
0:32:07 okay, I’m now making as much or more money,
0:32:09 but I’m also taking care of the house.
0:32:11 This is just a raw deal for me.
0:32:13 I don’t know if you thought about solutions,
0:32:16 but this goes to a question around solutions is,
0:32:18 if we know that the single or a single point of failure
0:32:21 for when a boy becomes much more likely
0:32:24 to engage in self-harm, be incarcerated, become addicted,
0:32:26 is when he loses a male role model.
0:32:27 Man, as mom and dad get divorced,
0:32:31 and I think 92% of the time mom ends up with the kids,
0:32:34 shouldn’t there be massive programs and immediate triggers
0:32:36 that when there’s a householder divorce,
0:32:39 it’s just the next thing is we have got to get,
0:32:42 figure out resources and programs to get men
0:32:44 to ensure men are involved in this boy’s life,
0:32:45 moving forward.
0:32:48 And two, when a man is divorced,
0:32:50 or when a couple gets divorced,
0:32:53 that there needs to be some sort of education
0:32:58 or program availability for these men post-divorce.
0:33:03 – Yeah, the work of Catherine Eden and Tim Nelson on this,
0:33:06 on particularly working with kind of lower income families,
0:33:08 just basically they conclude by saying
0:33:11 that the current child support system,
0:33:15 family court system, especially for unmarried men,
0:33:17 needs to be radically reformed.
0:33:20 It needs to be reformed into a pro-family system,
0:33:22 and into a pro-fatherhood system.
0:33:24 And right now, the way that the system works
0:33:25 is that it kind of treats,
0:33:28 it basically splits men, fathers into two halves.
0:33:31 It says on the one hand, where’s the money?
0:33:33 So it’s the child support element to it.
0:33:36 And then on the other hand, completely unrelated,
0:33:37 do you want to see your kid?
0:33:39 And the father, in every US state,
0:33:41 the father has to prove paternity
0:33:42 if the kid was born outside marriage.
0:33:45 And it’s a completely separate legal process to get access.
0:33:49 And so I think moving to the presumption of equal access
0:33:52 and equal custody is important.
0:33:53 Of course, there are always gonna be exceptions
0:33:55 that people can point to.
0:33:57 What’s interesting about this is that in states
0:33:59 that have tried to move to like an equal custody presumption,
0:34:02 in other words, in law, you just presume,
0:34:04 unless there’s a good reason to the contrary,
0:34:05 which they could be that, you know,
0:34:07 moms and dads have the same rights.
0:34:10 This weird alliance of lawyers
0:34:14 and pretty strong feminist groups join forces to kill it.
0:34:16 And the reason that the women’s groups do it
0:34:21 is because they’re protecting women’s position in the family
0:34:24 and access to child support.
0:34:26 And the reason the lawyers do it
0:34:29 is because they’re gonna lose half their business, right?
0:34:31 If it just becomes a straightforward 50/50 split,
0:34:33 then they don’t have couples arguing with each other,
0:34:36 then they’re gonna lose half their legal fees.
0:34:39 And so I do agree that thinking about fatherhood,
0:34:44 custody access more in a more pro dad way
0:34:46 is just huge.
0:34:48 I just like, we have failed to update our views
0:34:49 about fatherhood.
0:34:51 And by the way, fathers need to step up more
0:34:52 in the way you just said.
0:34:56 And so the legal system is still just antiquated.
0:34:57 And especially it’s antiquated,
0:35:00 given that like, except for college educated Americans,
0:35:03 most kids aren’t born inside marriage now.
0:35:05 And so you can’t just rely on divorce laws to do it.
0:35:07 You’ve got to deal with the fact that like,
0:35:08 the preponderance of cases here,
0:35:10 that the parents weren’t married.
0:35:11 The last thing I’ll say on this
0:35:14 is I actually had this guy in tears
0:35:16 at an event where I gave all my charts
0:35:18 showing how good dads are for kids, right?
0:35:19 They’re high school graduation rates.
0:35:21 Actually, their chances of using drugs
0:35:24 or just how important dads are as role models.
0:35:26 And this dad came up to me tears afterwards and said,
0:35:27 “Yeah, but also being a father
0:35:29 “is the most important thing in my life.”
0:35:30 And what he came to realize
0:35:32 is that fatherhood isn’t just a means to an end.
0:35:35 Fatherhood is actually a central part of the identity,
0:35:39 purpose, and meaning that a lot of men have in their lives.
0:35:42 – It’s really, I mean, what you say always resonates so much.
0:35:46 I’m struggling with my 17-year-old is now a boarding school
0:35:49 and it was sold to me and I’m gonna act like the victim here
0:35:51 as I’ll be home Friday afternoons
0:35:53 and go back to school on Monday morning.
0:35:54 No, he has school Saturday morning,
0:35:57 he gets home for 24 hours.
0:35:59 And I not only miss him, but what I’ve come to realize
0:36:01 is that I like myself as a dad.
0:36:04 I really do feel good about, you know,
0:36:06 I feel like I’m programs like this.
0:36:08 I virtue signal and create this picture
0:36:09 that I’m a better father than I actually am,
0:36:11 but I know I’m a good dad.
0:36:13 And I get a lot of confidence from it.
0:36:17 It gives me a certain level of, I don’t know, my role.
0:36:21 Like I check this box, I’m helping the species
0:36:26 and not 50% of my ability to act
0:36:30 in what I think is a nice role is gone
0:36:32 ’cause he’s no longer here during the week.
0:36:34 And it has really fucked with me.
0:36:36 It has hurt my self-esteem.
0:36:38 I feel anchorless.
0:36:41 I just wonder if there’s programs I’m even thinking like,
0:36:43 I am dreading, Richard, I don’t know if you feel about this.
0:36:44 I know you have kids.
0:36:46 I am so freaked out about the moment
0:36:48 my second leaves for college.
0:36:51 Like I, they talk about women go through this.
0:36:54 My partner, she’s gonna be fine.
0:36:56 She’s like, she’s already kind of counting the days
0:37:00 to let her out of the house ’cause I think she gets,
0:37:03 you know, she gets more work and less fun than I do.
0:37:07 But it just strikes me so much how that role of fatherhood,
0:37:10 it’s not only, you know, something I enjoy,
0:37:12 it’s just so central to my identity
0:37:17 and I can’t imagine what it must be like to just,
0:37:19 to, you know, I think in family court,
0:37:22 you know, you lose your kids, you lose access.
0:37:25 Mom, at least when my parents got divorced,
0:37:27 did your parents stay together, Richard?
0:37:29 – Yeah, mine did, yeah, still all together.
0:37:31 – That’s wonderful.
0:37:32 What happens or at least happened with me
0:37:34 and I saw happen with most of my friends is that
0:37:39 a kid can’t process the agitator or the dissent
0:37:43 or the problem of these two people splitting up.
0:37:44 It makes no sense.
0:37:46 So immediately they go, oh, someone must be a bad person.
0:37:48 And it’s unlikely that the bad person
0:37:50 is the person you’re living with
0:37:52 making your breakfast every morning.
0:37:55 It’s the bad person is the one who’s left,
0:37:57 whether he or she wanted custody.
0:37:59 And so I just think there’s a very easy tendency
0:38:04 for kids of divorced parents to kind of demonize dad.
0:38:05 And that’s what I did.
0:38:08 I’m like, mom’s a saint, dad’s awful.
0:38:13 I’m fascinated by this notion of what you said
0:38:16 was really striking that men are four times more likely
0:38:19 to commit suicide, excuse me, die of suicide,
0:38:21 but become eight times more likely recently divorced.
0:38:24 Are there programs or any more data that you’ve talked about
0:38:27 in terms of what happens with men
0:38:29 after they lose their primary relationship
0:38:31 and no longer live with their kids?
0:38:32 – Yeah, there’s data.
0:38:34 I mean, I’ve given you the suicide one,
0:38:37 but just their life expectancy goes down.
0:38:40 Their chances of earning, being employed,
0:38:44 goes down, other health conditions worsen.
0:38:46 And sometimes that’s a bit of an eye roll moment.
0:38:47 It’s like, well, of course,
0:38:49 if men don’t have women to look after them
0:38:52 and remind him to take his pills and go to the doctor,
0:38:54 then he’s hopeless, isn’t he?
0:38:58 There’s a sort of sense of that bit of an eye roll around it.
0:38:59 But I think a deeper understanding
0:39:01 of it’s closer to what you were talking about,
0:39:06 which is that sense of connection and purpose and meaning.
0:39:09 And neededness, right?
0:39:14 The sense of being needed versus surplus to requirements.
0:39:16 I think it’s really the access.
0:39:19 I try to think about this along.
0:39:22 Now, it’s very interesting to me that men now are more likely
0:39:24 to say that having kids and getting married
0:39:28 is important for a satisfying life than women are, right?
0:39:30 So the old trope about like,
0:39:32 it’s women that want to get married and have kids
0:39:33 and men who have to be dragged into it,
0:39:34 like the ball and chain.
0:39:37 And men would rather be off like a cowboy
0:39:38 just doing their own thing,
0:39:41 but it gets ensnared into domestic life.
0:39:43 But deep down, they want to be out on the range
0:39:44 or doing their own thing.
0:39:46 And that is bullshit.
0:39:48 It is absolutely the opposite of the truth
0:39:52 is that actually men, what makes you a man
0:39:54 is what you’re doing for others.
0:39:57 We both talk about this, the kind of connection to others,
0:39:59 but also generating a surplus, being generative.
0:40:02 This idea of generative masculinity.
0:40:03 And actually listening to you now
0:40:05 is just part of the thought that one of the things
0:40:08 we know from the work of Anna Machen and other people,
0:40:09 she’s great scholar on fatherhood, by the way.
0:40:10 If you don’t know her stuff,
0:40:13 she has this wonderful book called “The Life of Dad”,
0:40:15 which is basically about how we invented fatherhood
0:40:16 in humanity.
0:40:19 But actually dads really come into their own
0:40:22 in the adolescent years, right?
0:40:23 Mums seem to have a bit of a competitive advantage
0:40:25 in the early years.
0:40:27 And dads have a competitive advantage
0:40:27 in those adolescent years.
0:40:30 Cause you’re helping your kids like go out into the world
0:40:33 to grow, to develop, to take risks appropriately,
0:40:35 develop social skills.
0:40:37 In other words, like the simpler way to put it,
0:40:40 is that mums are really good when the kids are in the nest
0:40:41 and dads are really good at helping
0:40:44 prepare them to leave the nest.
0:40:45 But actually when they then leave the nest,
0:40:48 you’ve just lost the thing that you were doing
0:40:49 over the previous few years.
0:40:51 And so in a weird way, I think for dads,
0:40:55 their kids leaving at 18 is much more of a loss
0:40:56 than for mums.
0:40:58 Cause mums have sort of done more of their work,
0:41:02 if you like, emotionally anyway, like when the kids were eight,
0:41:03 right?
0:41:05 Whereas dads come into their own in these later years,
0:41:06 only to see them kind of fly away.
0:41:08 And a lot of dads, I certainly feel this,
0:41:10 is this mixture of pride and loss.
0:41:13 We’ll be right back.
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0:42:16 so you can get back to business fast.
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0:42:21 because they have the tools to help find
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0:42:31 even those who aren’t actively searching for a new job,
0:42:34 but might be open to the perfect position.
0:42:35 And according to LinkedIn,
0:42:37 over 70% of LinkedIn users
0:42:40 don’t visit other leading job sites in a given month.
0:42:42 So to put it quite simply,
0:42:43 if you’re not looking on LinkedIn,
0:42:45 you’re looking in the wrong place.
0:42:47 I’ve tried LinkedIn jobs myself
0:42:49 and we found that we got qualified candidates.
0:42:52 And just in general, I just like to vibe more on LinkedIn
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0:42:55 It’s a little bit more civil.
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0:43:20 On the diary of a CEO,
0:43:23 you said that we’re in the relatively early stages
0:43:25 of a cultural revolution.
0:43:27 One where the economic relation between men and women
0:43:29 has dramatically transformed.
0:43:30 Say more?
0:43:33 – Yeah, so with 1979,
0:43:36 13% of women earned more than the median man,
0:43:38 typical man, 13%.
0:43:41 Last time I looked, it was 40% of women
0:43:44 earned more than the typical man.
0:43:47 40% of breadwinners, a male in the,
0:43:49 female rather in the U.S. now.
0:43:50 So in the space of my lifetime,
0:43:53 I’m at mid ’50s, born in ’69.
0:43:55 In the space of my lifetime,
0:43:58 we have utterly transformed the relative economic position
0:44:00 of men and women in advanced economies,
0:44:01 including in the U.S.
0:44:04 Now, we haven’t achieved full equality
0:44:07 and obviously there’s still some work to be done,
0:44:09 but the level of economic independence
0:44:12 that women have achieved in the matter of decades
0:44:14 has been just gigantic
0:44:18 and hugely liberating, wonderful, et cetera.
0:44:21 But I genuinely think that it takes time
0:44:25 for cultures to adjust to such massive economic changes.
0:44:27 I mean, that is a fundamental change
0:44:29 in the economic relationship between men and women.
0:44:30 And what it’s done is it’s unbundled
0:44:32 the traditional ways in which men and women
0:44:34 were kind of tied to each other economically.
0:44:36 And I do think this comes back to earlier conversation.
0:44:39 I really think that we were focused
0:44:42 on the economic dependence of women on men
0:44:45 in traditional marriage and try to reduce that.
0:44:48 But I don’t think we paid quite enough attention
0:44:54 to the emotional dependence of men on those families,
0:44:56 on those marriages and on the kind of being
0:44:58 the co-residents with their kids.
0:44:59 And what’s happened is that as women
0:45:01 have become more economically independent,
0:45:04 the degree to which men are actually quite emotionally
0:45:06 dependent on those traditional structures
0:45:08 has become glaringly apparent
0:45:10 and the gap has really opened up.
0:45:13 And I think that’s the chasm that I see a lot of men
0:45:15 really struggling to cross or fall into.
0:45:20 And so culturally, just, I mean, that’s a gigantic shift
0:45:22 and it’s all, it’s good, it’s good.
0:45:23 But the thing I find frustrating about this
0:45:25 is people’s inability to say you can have
0:45:27 this really great change,
0:45:30 like the rise of women’s economic independence and choice
0:45:33 and to say, but by the way,
0:45:34 there’s gonna be some bumps in the road here
0:45:37 because you’ve just radically transformed
0:45:41 the way in which kind of men feel their place in society.
0:45:43 And you don’t have to end up being reactionary and saying,
0:45:44 oh, that’s why we should go back,
0:45:46 which is what some of the reactionary right wingers
0:45:48 are saying, which is that’s why we need to go back, right?
0:45:50 No, no, no, we need to go forward.
0:45:52 But we have to go forward with some empathy
0:45:55 and compassion for the fact that this is a very different world
0:45:58 that men are navigating now.
0:46:01 – You’ve touched on the idea of a new script for masculinity
0:46:04 and the new set of roles and the new set of dues.
0:46:07 What do you mean and what does the script look like?
0:46:10 – Yeah, so I’m always a bit reluctant around this
0:46:12 ’cause of course there are lots of different scripts,
0:46:14 but I mean, it comes back a bit to fatherhood.
0:46:18 I’ve now placed a lot of weight,
0:46:20 increasingly actually as I’m doing the work
0:46:24 on the importance of fatherhood as that anchoring,
0:46:27 I’m using the way you describe your own relationship
0:46:29 with your son like the anchor you feel anchored by
0:46:31 as an anchor for men.
0:46:36 And being a provider and a protector
0:46:41 in a way that is appropriate for the kind of modern world.
0:46:45 So I’ve come to believe that we have to retain these ideals,
0:46:49 these ideas about the role of men, but just update them.
0:46:51 So rather than saying, okay, we don’t need protectors,
0:46:53 we don’t need providers, we don’t, you know,
0:46:55 instead I think we need to say that you can provide
0:46:56 and protecting different ways now.
0:46:57 So I think actually, for example,
0:46:58 and your colleague, Jonathan Hyatt,
0:47:00 now a mutual friend is doing a lot of work right now
0:47:02 on how do you protect kids from some of the online
0:47:04 environments that they kind of might be?
0:47:08 Like how do you step in between some of the forces
0:47:10 out there in the world and your kid’s wellbeing, right?
0:47:13 That’s being a protector that have to be
0:47:14 throwing a punch every time.
0:47:17 And I would say the same way being a provider
0:47:19 doesn’t necessarily mean that your dollar, you know,
0:47:22 the dollar amount on your monthly paycheck,
0:47:23 you know, has to be a certain level
0:47:25 or has to be a certain level more
0:47:26 than your wife’s or your partner’s.
0:47:28 But by God, it means you need to be providing
0:47:32 to your household, time, energy, you know,
0:47:34 skills, et cetera, right?
0:47:37 You don’t have to be doing providing
0:47:39 in just this very narrow economic way,
0:47:40 but by God, you have to provide, right?
0:47:43 So I said this before, but like as a stay at home dad,
0:47:45 I felt like a provider, right?
0:47:48 Because I was providing the space and energy
0:47:50 for my wife to be able to work,
0:47:52 not knowing her kids were in safe hands.
0:47:53 I think actually for a lot of women,
0:47:56 knowing that their kids are in their father’s care
0:47:59 while they’re working, that’s usually powerful.
0:48:02 – I love this notion and we’ll wrap up here
0:48:05 because I just think it’s such a great construct
0:48:08 for young men or a great framework.
0:48:10 Talk about the notion of surplus value.
0:48:14 – So when you look through the history of like,
0:48:19 what turns a boy into a man in most human societies,
0:48:23 it is some mark of them producing more of something
0:48:26 than they need for themselves.
0:48:30 Now, in a kind of post-war economy with more money,
0:48:32 that’s the breadwinner version of it,
0:48:34 but that wasn’t true 5,000 years ago on the Savannah.
0:48:38 That was meat, that was protein for the tribe
0:48:40 and for the mother of your child.
0:48:42 In other places, it could be something else.
0:48:45 But I think that I love this idea
0:48:50 of masculinity, mature masculinity,
0:48:53 being defined in terms of giving more than you get.
0:48:55 It’s a service-oriented form of masculinity.
0:48:59 It’s definitely the one I got from my father’s knee.
0:49:02 I mean, just absolutely the kind of giving more than you get.
0:49:03 And that’s why there’s this movement online
0:49:05 of men going their own way,
0:49:07 like a men’s separatist movement saying,
0:49:09 we don’t need women, we don’t need marriage,
0:49:11 we don’t need kids, we don’t need the labor market,
0:49:13 screw you, we’re off.
0:49:15 That is literally the opposite of masculinity.
0:49:19 The idea of masculinity is surplus generator is,
0:49:23 I know you’re a man, when you’re generating more energy,
0:49:27 time, love, money, meat, whatever the hell it is,
0:49:30 then you need for your own survival
0:49:34 because that is historically what men have had to do
0:49:37 is to contribute to the family, to the tribe,
0:49:38 to the community.
0:49:40 And if you’re not a contributor
0:49:43 in all these different ways, then you ain’t a man.
0:49:45 And so if you’re wondering how to be a man,
0:49:47 start by doing something for somebody else
0:49:49 and that will lead you in the right direction.
0:49:51 – Richard Reeves is the president
0:49:52 of the American Institute for Boys and Men,
0:49:55 which he founded in 2023 to raise awareness
0:49:56 of the problems of boys and men
0:49:58 and advocate for effective solutions.
0:50:00 He’s also a non-resident senior fellow
0:50:02 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC,
0:50:04 where he previously directed the future
0:50:06 of the middle class initiative
0:50:08 and the center on children and families.
0:50:10 His 2022 book of Boys and Men,
0:50:12 While the Modern Male is Struggling,
0:50:14 Why It Matters and What to Do About It,
0:50:17 was described as a landmark in the New York Times
0:50:20 and named a book of the year by both the economist
0:50:22 and the New Yorker and distinctive as accent.
0:50:24 He joins us from Eastern Tennessee.
0:50:26 Did I get that right, Richard?
0:50:28 – Correct, yeah, Southern Appalachian, yeah.
0:50:30 I would bet you’re one of the more interesting people
0:50:31 in that area, and that’s a disparaging statement
0:50:32 about Eastern Tennessee,
0:50:34 but I bet people are fascinated with you as we are.
0:50:37 And Richard, I say this, but it bears repeating,
0:50:40 you have literally inspired me to take this on as an issue.
0:50:42 Thank you so much for your good work.
0:50:43 – Thank you for your work, Scott.
0:50:44 Always a pleasure.
0:50:53 – This episode is produced by Caroline Shagren.
0:50:55 Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer
0:50:57 and Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
0:50:59 Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod
0:51:00 from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:51:03 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice,
0:51:04 as read by George Hahn.
0:51:07 And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod
0:51:09 wherever you get your pods for new episodes
0:51:10 every Monday and Thursday.
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0:01:17 Will the VP debate move the needle
0:01:20 in what’s shaping up to be a neck and neck election?
0:01:21 You never know in advance what will be the thing
0:01:24 that matters and the thing that doesn’t matter.
0:01:27 But Donald Trump will be almost 80
0:01:32 and J.D. Vance will be one cheeseburger away
0:01:34 from the presidency should they win.
0:01:36 I’m Preet Bharara and this week,
0:01:39 the Atlantic magazines David Frum joins me
0:01:41 on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet,
0:01:43 to break down what happened at the debate.
0:01:45 The episode is out now.
0:01:47 Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet
0:01:49 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:54 Episode 318.
0:01:56 218 is the area covering cities
0:01:59 in northern and central Louisiana in 1918.
0:02:01 World War I ended.
0:02:02 So a little bone to pick.
0:02:04 I saved 100 orphans from a burning building.
0:02:06 Do they call me orphan, save or no?
0:02:10 I’ve put your 20 men with my bare hands in World War I.
0:02:12 Do they call me the butcher, no?
0:02:14 But you fuck one goat.
0:02:16 Just one goat.
0:02:18 Go, go, go!
0:02:19 Go!
0:02:34 Welcome to the 318th of Jesus Christ, 318th.
0:02:36 What am I like, 800 years old?
0:02:37 I mean, when does it end?
0:02:39 When does it end?
0:02:42 Anyways, the 318th episode of the Prop G-Pod
0:02:44 in today’s episode, we speak with someone I refer to
0:02:48 as my Yoda on the topic of young men,
0:02:49 specifically struggling young men,
0:02:51 and that is Richard Reeves,
0:02:53 who was the president of the American Institute
0:02:54 for Boys and Men,
0:02:56 and a non-resident senior fellow
0:02:57 at the Brookings Institution.
0:02:59 We discussed with Richard his new research
0:03:00 on unnatural male deaths,
0:03:03 including injury, suicide and drug overdose,
0:03:05 along with solutions and his take
0:03:07 on what the script for masculinity should look like.
0:03:08 Okay, what’s happening?
0:03:11 That’s right, I’m back in London.
0:03:14 I’m back in the UK, but I was in Madrid.
0:03:15 By the way, Madrid,
0:03:17 let’s talk a little bit about Madrid.
0:03:18 Hola, Senor Galway.
0:03:20 Who’s the old dude living upstairs?
0:03:22 Who is that guy?
0:03:23 He’s funny.
0:03:24 That’s right.
0:03:26 Who’s the guy with the big dog and the little dog?
0:03:27 Oh, that’s the dog.
0:03:29 Anyway, absolutely love Madrid.
0:03:31 I’m into this idea.
0:03:33 Richard Florida, I couldn’t remember the same the other day.
0:03:36 He’s like the, he is not like, he’s the city guy.
0:03:38 By the way, lives in Toronto and Miami.
0:03:40 What does it say when the city guy lives in Toronto and Miami?
0:03:41 That means those two cities
0:03:43 have it kind of going on for different reasons,
0:03:45 but Richard looks at the future of cities
0:03:48 and I am fascinated by looking at cities
0:03:50 in a similar way you look at stocks.
0:03:52 What is an undervalued city?
0:03:53 Where would you wanna move if you’re young?
0:03:55 ‘Cause a young person, I would argue,
0:03:57 needs to be constantly thinking about
0:04:00 what I would refer to as a lifestyle arbitrage.
0:04:01 Now, unfortunately, the arbitrage gets harder
0:04:04 as you put down roots, dogs, kids, shit like that,
0:04:07 but you always wanna be thinking about a lifestyle arbitrage
0:04:10 when you’re kind of very young or very old, for example.
0:04:11 Yeah, and my, one of the best things
0:04:13 or most creative things I did in my life,
0:04:16 I did a lifestyle arbitrage moving from San Francisco
0:04:18 to New York, but it wasn’t a lifestyle arbitrage.
0:04:20 It was more a philosophical arbitrage.
0:04:22 I wanted to get away from the tech community.
0:04:24 I didn’t like San Francisco.
0:04:26 Most beautiful city in the union, I get it.
0:04:28 Great, great professional environment.
0:04:29 I can’t stand the fog.
0:04:32 I can’t stand political extremism on either side
0:04:33 and I found it politically extreme.
0:04:35 But anyways, love New York,
0:04:36 but then the lifestyle arbitrage
0:04:39 is I moved to Florida in 2010.
0:04:43 And basically, not 80% of New York
0:04:44 ’cause it’s so different,
0:04:49 but water, beaches, Miami, hello, Latina, sexy vibe.
0:04:51 And I could do it on 40% of the price.
0:04:53 And I got to start saving money, invested a bunch of money
0:04:57 and the markets took off and champagne and cocaine
0:04:59 or as I call it, I moved to London.
0:05:02 So that was the kind of ultimate lifestyle arbitrage.
0:05:04 And I think a lot of people recognize that arbitrage
0:05:06 at the same period moving from California to Texas
0:05:07 or to other places.
0:05:09 Ultimately, the term arbitrage is the correct one
0:05:10 because people figure it out
0:05:12 and more and more human and financial capital
0:05:15 moves into these underpriced lifestyle areas
0:05:16 and things go up in price
0:05:17 and the arbitrage gets starched out.
0:05:21 By the time I moved away from Florida two years ago,
0:05:23 our house had tripled in value.
0:05:25 The school we sent our kids to had gone
0:05:27 from I think 12,000 intuition to 22,000.
0:05:28 So it almost doubled and they’re out of seats.
0:05:31 They didn’t have the capacity for new people.
0:05:33 So that arb is gone, if you will.
0:05:35 But anyways, I’m back from Madrid.
0:05:37 Oh, and I’m heading to Munich tomorrow.
0:05:38 I love Munich, it’s a beautiful city.
0:05:40 If I spoke German, I would probably move to Munich,
0:05:42 but I don’t, so I won’t.
0:05:44 I actually prefer Munich over Berlin.
0:05:45 I love Berlin for the history,
0:05:47 but Munich, that’s a nice, wealthy city.
0:05:49 Anyways, what else is going on?
0:05:52 Nike CEO John Donahoe is stepping down next month,
0:05:55 a move welcomed by pretty much everyone involved with the firm.
0:05:57 Critics, investors, and employees alike
0:06:00 say that Donahoe who took over a CEO in 2020
0:06:02 essentially oversaw Nike’s fall,
0:06:05 becoming a loser, ruining retail partnerships
0:06:06 and diminishing the brand.
0:06:09 As the former CEO of eBay and Bank Company,
0:06:11 he was hired to upgrade Nike’s digital sales.
0:06:13 Donahoe focused on direct consumer sales
0:06:14 and cut ties with longtime retail partners,
0:06:18 including Footlocker, DSW and Macy’s.
0:06:19 We actually talked about this
0:06:22 in our most recent episode of Office Hours.
0:06:25 Donahoe’s demise really started coming to full view
0:06:27 when Nike’s stock fell 20% in June
0:06:31 following disappointing sales growth and oblique forecast.
0:06:34 So essentially sales have really, really had a tough time.
0:06:36 As a matter of fact, they’re kind of,
0:06:39 Nike’s in a sales recession for the first time in a while,
0:06:41 meaning that you’re on your cells have gone down.
0:06:43 I think it’s really easy to play Monday morning quarterback.
0:06:47 I ran a firm called L2 that was a business intelligence firm
0:06:48 and Nike was one of our biggest clients.
0:06:53 And I want to be clear, my advice was to double down
0:06:56 on direct to consumer that they needed to develop more,
0:06:58 have more control over their channels,
0:07:00 either through the web or their own stores.
0:07:03 And it ends up that retail sales,
0:07:06 in-store retail sales came back much stronger
0:07:09 than anyone had anticipated post COVID
0:07:10 and they were caught flat footed.
0:07:14 I would argue the decision they made at that time
0:07:15 was the right decision.
0:07:17 By the way, very interesting, I think it’s very interesting.
0:07:19 When the military reviews and operation,
0:07:21 sure they look at the outcome, but more than that,
0:07:25 when they try to evaluate the officer’s decisions,
0:07:27 they look at given the information
0:07:30 that person had at that time was at the right decision.
0:07:32 Okay, maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t work,
0:07:35 but given what he or she knew at that moment
0:07:36 was at the right decision.
0:07:38 And I would argue doubling down on direct to consumer,
0:07:41 given what they knew was the right idea.
0:07:43 Where they have fucked up or fallen short,
0:07:44 they have not been nearly as innovative
0:07:48 around product and merchandising as Adidas
0:07:49 or, and they’ve lost a ton of share
0:07:51 to some long tail brands, Hoka and On Running,
0:07:53 which are the shoes I wear.
0:07:56 Hello, douchebag venture capitalist.
0:07:59 Anyways, I would also say there’s some bigger macro factors
0:08:00 that are outside of their control,
0:08:03 specifically China sneezes
0:08:05 and a bunch of these companies get a cold,
0:08:08 whether it’s Starbucks, whether it’s Estee Lauder,
0:08:11 these companies I’ve become so over-invested in China.
0:08:13 China was a gift that kept on giving
0:08:15 and when China domestic demand fell,
0:08:18 these companies really got whacked hard.
0:08:21 In addition, on a more meta-level, TikTok.
0:08:24 And that is the sword that has been the weapon of choice
0:08:28 for Nike has been building an okay shoe
0:08:31 that they infuse with unbelievable brand codes.
0:08:33 And the primary weapon for building those brand codes
0:08:35 has been broadcast television.
0:08:38 Nike is the best broadcast advertiser in history,
0:08:41 but that sword, that weapon of war, if you will,
0:08:44 has been getting dollar and dollar for the last 20 years.
0:08:46 And so it is harder for them to reach their core customer
0:08:49 with their core confidence than Adidas advertising.
0:08:51 They’re fantastic with endorsement.
0:08:53 They’re pretty good at direct to consumer.
0:08:55 I would argue the stores have gotten a little bit stale.
0:08:57 I remember everyone wanted to go to Nike town in 2000.
0:08:59 I’m not sure they’ve been closing some of their stores.
0:09:02 It feels like they need a freshen up, a refresh,
0:09:04 something that makes them a little bit
0:09:05 stand out a little bit more.
0:09:08 Anyways, do not count these guys up.
0:09:13 The new CEO, the new CEO is, oh shit, who is he?
0:09:14 Oh, Elliot Hill, I know Elliot.
0:09:17 I don’t know him well, but I did work
0:09:18 with him a little bit at L2.
0:09:20 I think this is a great hire.
0:09:22 I think the board did a really good job here.
0:09:24 And that is they brought in someone
0:09:27 that would provide some stability, some credibility.
0:09:29 And this guy’s kind of, you know,
0:09:30 if you were to stab him with a fork,
0:09:32 he kind of bleeds the swoosh.
0:09:33 He’s very much Nike.
0:09:36 And I think it was a great hire for them.
0:09:37 So well done.
0:09:38 Look for Nike.
0:09:40 Nike had its best trading day, I think of 2024.
0:09:41 The day they announced on it was stepping down
0:09:44 and they brought in, brought in Elliot.
0:09:45 But look for Nike.
0:09:47 I think Nike’s absolutely,
0:09:49 you do not want to bet against Nike.
0:09:51 Moving on, the Biden administration plans
0:09:53 to ban Chinese developed software
0:09:55 and internet connected vehicles in the US.
0:09:57 You don’t say.
0:09:58 Why?
0:09:59 National security concerns.
0:10:00 Wow.
0:10:03 Why national security concerns?
0:10:05 The ban aims to prevent Chinese intelligence
0:10:07 from tracking Americans and using car electronics
0:10:09 to get into important systems,
0:10:10 including the electric grid.
0:10:12 Jesus Christ.
0:10:14 That sounds very much spy versus spy.
0:10:17 National security advisor, Nate Silver said,
0:10:18 on a call with reporters,
0:10:20 with potentially millions of vehicles on the road,
0:10:22 each with 10 to 15 year lifespans.
0:10:25 The risk of disruption and sabotage increases dramatically.
0:10:27 Wow.
0:10:29 I don’t know how much of that is true.
0:10:31 Is the real national security concern
0:10:32 or it’s Mary Barra from General Motors saying,
0:10:34 “We need more jobs.
0:10:37 Detroit needs your help, Joe.”
0:10:39 I would argue we tend to err on the side
0:10:42 of being too permissive, too promiscuous
0:10:43 with our data and our infrastructure.
0:10:45 And there’s no fucking way they would let us
0:10:48 into their country or have they with Tesla and Auto Drive.
0:10:49 I don’t know, that’s an interesting question.
0:10:50 It’s an interesting question.
0:10:53 But typically what I see playing out in China,
0:10:54 and I’m paranoid, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong,
0:10:57 is that China will let companies in just long enough
0:10:58 to figure out what they’re doing
0:11:01 to establish a market in that sector,
0:11:03 create some demand, create some economic liquidity,
0:11:05 and then they boot out that company
0:11:06 or make it hard for them,
0:11:08 prop up a local Chinese entrepreneur
0:11:09 and capture the value internally,
0:11:11 as they did with Facebook and Google.
0:11:12 Ever heard of Baidu?
0:11:14 And it looks a lot like Google,
0:11:16 and my guess is the majority of the IP was stolen.
0:11:18 By the way, the greatest economic boom
0:11:21 in the history of China is probably the migration
0:11:22 from rural areas into city areas
0:11:24 and some of their central planning,
0:11:25 which has actually worked in autocracy.
0:11:28 The second biggest has been just out-of-fucking-control
0:11:32 IP theft from Europe and the US.
0:11:35 Anyways, I think that this follows
0:11:37 or this initiative follows previous actions
0:11:38 against Chinese technology,
0:11:40 including bans on Huawei products
0:11:43 and investigations into Chinese cranes at US ports.
0:11:46 Officials have emphasized the ban is driven by security,
0:11:47 not political models.
0:11:48 Okay, that makes sense.
0:11:51 The ban will also target Russian software and hardware.
0:11:53 Is there a lot of Russian hardware and software in the US?
0:11:55 What is it, vodka?
0:11:56 That’s my software.
0:11:58 That’s my Russian software.
0:12:01 By the way, Stola Chenaya is brewed in like Denmark
0:12:03 or something or is still in Denmark.
0:12:04 It’s a mean vodka, though.
0:12:05 True story.
0:12:07 I used to just drink beer in college
0:12:08 with a little bit of marijuana.
0:12:10 And then I started drinking vodka
0:12:11 ’cause I thought it was more elegant.
0:12:13 It’s kind of the alcohol, it’s alcohol.
0:12:14 I didn’t think the hangovers were bad.
0:12:16 And I literally became immune to vodka.
0:12:18 I literally became immune.
0:12:19 Could drink eight vodka drinks and I’d be like,
0:12:23 “Oh, I don’t like me, which means this isn’t working.”
0:12:25 And just a reminder, just a reminder,
0:12:26 I don’t know how I got there with Russia.
0:12:28 Oh yeah, there’s not a lot of Russian software,
0:12:29 I think, in the US.
0:12:30 And just a reminder, in May,
0:12:32 the Biden administration increased tariffs
0:12:35 on Chinese electric vehicles to 100%
0:12:37 and limited tax credits for Chinese-made EVs.
0:12:39 We also covered this issue in an office hours episode
0:12:41 back in July.
0:12:43 This ban would hinder the entry of Chinese car manufacturers,
0:12:45 including BYD, into the US market,
0:12:48 which poses a potential risk to US automakers
0:12:50 if they lack access to advanced technologies.
0:12:51 I’m not sure that’s accurate.
0:12:54 I think it’s probably a boon for US car manufacturers,
0:12:56 specifically Tesla, if they don’t allow BYD.
0:12:59 And I fucking hate tariffs.
0:13:00 I hate them.
0:13:01 The second biggest tax cut in the world
0:13:04 would be if we broke up big tech, it would oxygenate.
0:13:06 The economy, companies wouldn’t,
0:13:08 companies’ parents, consumers wouldn’t have
0:13:11 this extraordinary tax placed on them
0:13:13 called the monopolization of social search
0:13:16 and our kid’s wellbeing by a small number,
0:13:17 a handful of small companies.
0:13:19 So bringing these companies up
0:13:21 would require them to compete and lower the rents
0:13:24 on suppliers, retailers through party marketers,
0:13:27 digital firms, companies trying to acquire people online,
0:13:30 retailers, little brands trying to sell their shit online
0:13:31 when they have to pay these onerous,
0:13:35 useless prices in terms to Amazon.
0:13:37 So you wanna oxygenate the economy, break up big tech,
0:13:39 but the biggest tax cut in the history of mankind
0:13:43 would be if China and the US kissed and made up.
0:13:44 We have money, consumer demand,
0:13:46 incredible intellectual property.
0:13:49 They have a supply chain like no other
0:13:51 and also a decent consumer demand,
0:13:52 although it’s fallen off a little bit.
0:13:54 It seems like we should kiss and make up
0:13:57 and make cheap shit for everyone around the world.
0:14:00 More for less is the ultimate gangster business strategy
0:14:04 and we kinda got the more part in the US
0:14:06 and they got it for less, if you will.
0:14:08 Anyways, let’s hope we can all get along.
0:14:12 We’ll be right back for our conversation with Richard Reeves.
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0:17:29 – Welcome back.
0:17:30 Here’s our conversation with Richard Reeves,
0:17:32 the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men
0:17:34 and non-resident senior fellow
0:17:37 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
0:17:39 Richard, where does this podcast find you?
0:17:42 – I’m home in East Tennessee, Southern Appalachia,
0:17:45 but I’ve been on the road of being in Hong Kong
0:17:46 and then being in Oregon.
0:17:49 I had this amazing trip out to this community college
0:17:52 in Oregon, where they’re just cratering
0:17:53 male share of employment.
0:17:55 They’re dealing with it, they’re acting on it.
0:17:58 And this guy told me he’s been visiting
0:18:00 all these rural high schools in Oregon
0:18:02 to find out why the boys are not applying
0:18:04 to college anymore.
0:18:05 And there’s a bunch of reasons.
0:18:08 He said the most common thing he heard was,
0:18:10 I’m afraid that I’ll be lonely.
0:18:13 That I kind of won’t belong, I won’t have friends.
0:18:15 – Really? – It’s really struck me, yeah.
0:18:18 – That’s wild, I mean, I know that generally speaking,
0:18:21 young men have a tendency to stay on the farm
0:18:24 and women have a tendency to take off for the city.
0:18:26 But that’s, I had never heard that about,
0:18:28 that being a reason for why young men
0:18:30 weren’t applying to college.
0:18:31 – Same.
0:18:32 I mean, we know they are more lonely,
0:18:33 like we’ve talked about this before,
0:18:36 like the loneliness epidemic has hit young men a bit more.
0:18:39 And a number of college campuses have told me
0:18:41 that when they do their kind of belonging surveys,
0:18:43 they very often find it’s kind of, it is men,
0:18:46 especially those from kind of more rural areas,
0:18:48 who will say that they just don’t really feel
0:18:49 like they belong on the campus,
0:18:51 like they don’t have the right habits,
0:18:54 the right language, the right sensibilities or whatever.
0:18:55 And I really worry about that
0:18:58 because you start to feel like college is not
0:19:01 for working class guys, especially from rural areas,
0:19:05 then you’re losing a heck of a lot of potential talent.
0:19:07 – Yeah, I’ve always been a big advocate
0:19:10 and it’s not as toxic to people now as it was,
0:19:12 but I’ve always been a huge advocate
0:19:14 for joining a fraternity or a sorority
0:19:16 when you get to school.
0:19:17 And there’s some credible stats.
0:19:21 You become twice as likely to complete
0:19:24 your four year education when you join a fraternity
0:19:26 or a similar organization that kind of
0:19:29 distills it down to a smaller,
0:19:30 I know a smaller community, if you will.
0:19:33 But anyways, the reason we wanted to bring you on
0:19:36 is you just put out a paper on unnatural male deaths,
0:19:39 including injuries, suicide, and drug overdose.
0:19:41 Why is this happening?
0:19:42 – Yeah, so we’re really motivated
0:19:45 by our previous work on suicide,
0:19:47 where the well-known big gap,
0:19:49 especially now among young men,
0:19:50 or like take their lives from suicide,
0:19:53 but CDC actually captures this really good data
0:19:55 on unnatural deaths,
0:19:59 so kind of injuries is the language they sometimes use.
0:20:01 And we really hadn’t seen anyone break that down by gender.
0:20:04 And so we did break it down by gender.
0:20:07 And a number of things jumped out to me.
0:20:08 The thing I wasn’t prepared for
0:20:12 was just the scale of the increase in injury deaths.
0:20:16 So it’s up by 57% since 2001.
0:20:19 It’s 200,000 men a year who are dying
0:20:21 from one of these quotes, non-natural causes.
0:20:24 The biggest one is drug poisonings,
0:20:29 followed by suicide, followed by motor vehicle crashes,
0:20:31 followed by homicide, and then the other ones.
0:20:33 And it’s just, it’s two and a half times higher
0:20:36 among men than among women.
0:20:38 And that increase is so big
0:20:43 and largely driven by this drug epidemic that we’re seeing.
0:20:44 The thing that really blew me away
0:20:45 is like if you look at the deaths,
0:20:48 you’re always gonna see deaths from non-natural causes,
0:20:49 the ones we’ve seen above, right?
0:20:52 The question is, are they going down or up?
0:20:55 And they’re going up in a way that’s extraordinary.
0:20:57 So just to kind of put a sharp data point on this,
0:21:01 if the death rate from these unnatural causes
0:21:05 had remained the same since 2001, right?
0:21:07 So it’d been a flat line since then,
0:21:11 then we would have lost 400,000 fewer men
0:21:13 in those couple of decades.
0:21:17 And that’s about the number of men we lost in World War II.
0:21:19 – That’s a fascinating stat.
0:21:21 The question I would have is that, okay,
0:21:24 the leading cause here appears to be drug poisonings.
0:21:28 Is that fentanyl and also is this rooted in loneliness
0:21:31 and depression and why people are men are turning to drugs
0:21:32 or because drugs are more available,
0:21:34 because they’re more accepted in culture?
0:21:39 Like what, give us some of the nuance here.
0:21:43 – Yeah, the way this has been framed a lot,
0:21:44 you talked about this yourself,
0:21:47 but this idea of deaths of despair.
0:21:49 And as I said, the rates are highest among middle-aged men,
0:21:53 men between 30 and mid-50s.
0:21:55 And it’s been associated for a long time
0:21:57 with kind of declining economic prospects,
0:22:00 community breakdown, loss of affiliation
0:22:03 to family, religion, et cetera.
0:22:05 And so if you like, that’s the kind of demand side,
0:22:08 but there’s also clearly a supply side issue here too,
0:22:11 which is the way in which these drugs,
0:22:13 fentanyl and others have just been flooded into
0:22:15 some of these communities on the supply side.
0:22:17 It’s clearly part of the story too.
0:22:19 And so there’s actually a big debate now
0:22:20 among social scientists,
0:22:23 whether this term deaths of despair is actually helpful
0:22:25 or not, because what that does is it kind of points
0:22:28 to the individuals themselves, to the communities,
0:22:30 and says, it’s all demand-driven, right?
0:22:33 But actually it’s supply side as well.
0:22:34 And we have to take both into account, I think.
0:22:37 But you’re right, there’s clearly a despair element to it.
0:22:39 One of the things I find interesting about this
0:22:42 is that the drugs that people generally die from
0:22:44 are things like fentanyl, opioids, et cetera.
0:22:45 They’re not party drugs.
0:22:48 They’re not drugs you take to go out and have a good time,
0:22:50 right?
0:22:53 They’re drugs that you take to retreat and withdrawal.
0:22:55 And interestingly, one of the main reasons
0:23:00 why those drugs do end up, or even killing people,
0:23:02 is because if there is a bad reaction,
0:23:04 then there’s no one with you.
0:23:08 And so a big predictor of dying from drugs is being alone.
0:23:11 – Johann Hari, I hope I’m saying that name correctly,
0:23:14 said that the opposite of addiction is connection.
0:23:15 I absolutely love that.
0:23:17 That basically kind of confirms everything
0:23:18 you’ve been saying.
0:23:22 And so I wanna use that as a bridge to a jumping off point
0:23:24 other than telling kids, you know,
0:23:25 not the Nancy Reagan, don’t do drugs.
0:23:27 Don’t do drugs alone.
0:23:30 But also, what are some potential solutions?
0:23:32 Should we be legalizing drugs,
0:23:35 or is it more just programs to help young men
0:23:37 feel more connected?
0:23:39 – Yeah, so I’m gonna confess to not being enough
0:23:43 of an expert on drug policy to talk seriously
0:23:45 about that side of it.
0:23:47 But what I would say, I’m much more interested
0:23:50 in the demand side and the conditions
0:23:53 with which what would lead people to kind of take drugs
0:23:56 and then with whom and to what end, right?
0:23:58 To what basis back to the like are you,
0:24:01 I’m not here to endorse drug use period.
0:24:04 But I just think like if you’re taking a relatively safe pill
0:24:06 to try and stay up late at night,
0:24:07 or you think you’re taking some cocaine,
0:24:10 you do that very occasionally, et cetera.
0:24:12 That’s very different to this drug of retreat,
0:24:15 drug of despair, drug of loneliness stuff
0:24:16 that we’re seeing playing out.
0:24:20 So to the extent that Johann’s line is correct
0:24:22 about, and I’ve heard him say that too,
0:24:24 and I like it too, it’s connection.
0:24:26 Then I think what we should be doing is pushing hard
0:24:29 on where are the places that men,
0:24:31 that boys and men can connect?
0:24:33 What are the social institutions?
0:24:36 What are the places and spaces and institutions
0:24:41 that promote, encourage and support fraternity, right?
0:24:42 It’s really weird.
0:24:45 That’s interesting to me reflecting on fraternities
0:24:48 is that the thing that I think that’s probably most lacking
0:24:51 in the lives of many young men and middle-aged men
0:24:53 is fraternity.
0:24:56 It’s friendships, it’s male friendships in particular.
0:24:58 It’s a sense of community and attachment and connection.
0:25:03 So why we’ve allowed boy scouts to drop the boy, for example,
0:25:05 so that it’s no longer boy scouts.
0:25:08 It’s now scouting for America and has gone kind of co-ed.
0:25:13 But also Scott, like the decline in participation in sport
0:25:16 in high school among boys, it’s going up among girls,
0:25:20 it’s going down among boys, the lack of coaches,
0:25:23 the disengagement from extracurricular activities,
0:25:27 all that stuff, it actually takes quite a lot
0:25:29 to build community, to build connection.
0:25:31 And we have not done a good enough job
0:25:35 of creating places and spaces and institutions
0:25:38 where boys feel comfortable creating those relationships,
0:25:39 which are back to where I started.
0:25:41 Like I was blown away by the fact
0:25:43 that these 17, 18 year old boys are afraid
0:25:45 of being lonely on college campuses.
0:25:47 And it’s less true for other groups
0:25:49 because those colleges are actually making a real point
0:25:51 of saying there’ll be affinity groups.
0:25:54 There’ll be a girl, a women’s support group.
0:25:57 There’ll be a girl to code group.
0:26:00 There’ll be a whatever, very intentional, explicit attempts
0:26:03 to create a sense of community among other groups.
0:26:04 And I think we’ve made the mistake of thinking
0:26:06 that men don’t need that.
0:26:07 – I saw some really interesting,
0:26:09 or I talked to someone who’s a family attorney,
0:26:12 which is a way of saying elsewhere we got divorced.
0:26:16 And he sent me some data saying that amongst gay men,
0:26:20 marriages with gay men, 28% divorce rate.
0:26:24 Straight couples, 48% divorce rate.
0:26:27 Gay women, lesbian marriages, 72%.
0:26:31 And I thought, wow, does this mean women
0:26:35 bring more quote unquote divorce energy to the relationship?
0:26:37 And that just sort of blew me away
0:26:38 ’cause I’d never heard that before.
0:26:39 And he said that the path,
0:26:42 he said he’s had a lot of his clients commit suicide
0:26:46 or die by suicide.
0:26:48 I’m told it’s the right way to say it now.
0:26:52 And he said something really rattling.
0:26:55 He said that we all wanna believe they’re mentally ill
0:26:56 and it’s something outside of our control
0:26:57 and outside of their control.
0:26:58 We have empathy for them.
0:27:00 They had no control over it.
0:27:02 Or that it’s not our fault.
0:27:04 He struggled with depression.
0:27:07 And he said, I get it.
0:27:10 He said these guys basically do the math.
0:27:12 They don’t wanna get divorced.
0:27:14 Essentially, their divorce is usually
0:27:17 presaged by some sort of financial stress,
0:27:19 a bankruptcy, lose the business,
0:27:21 some sort of emotional breakdown on the part of the man.
0:27:27 His spouse decides she doesn’t wanna stay in the marriage.
0:27:30 Family court is biased towards men.
0:27:34 So, and you actually may have even talked about this.
0:27:36 I apologize if I keep parroting back
0:27:38 to what I’ve learned from you.
0:27:40 But in one fell swoop within a matter of months
0:27:43 or a small number of years,
0:27:47 a guy loses his primary relationship, his children,
0:27:49 his economic wellbeing,
0:27:53 and he makes a very rational decision to kill himself.
0:27:57 I wonder if at some point you come back on one of our pods
0:28:02 and say drug poisonings, suicide and divorce.
0:28:05 What are your thoughts?
0:28:10 – Yeah, so the suicide risk among men generally
0:28:13 is four times higher than among women.
0:28:18 If you narrow that scope to just divorced men and women,
0:28:21 it is eight times higher among divorced men
0:28:23 than among divorced women.
0:28:25 And so I think there’s a general point here.
0:28:27 I didn’t know that data about divorce.
0:28:31 It’s also true that women initiate twice as many divorces.
0:28:34 Women account for two thirds of divorce initiations
0:28:35 in the US now.
0:28:37 So women are, just as a empirical matter,
0:28:39 they’re more likely to initiate divorce.
0:28:41 And there’s this interesting study recently,
0:28:43 I think it was out Sweden,
0:28:47 which looked at what happens to men and women
0:28:48 who win the lottery.
0:28:50 The men who won the lottery became a bit more likely
0:28:53 to get married and not to have children.
0:28:54 The women who won the lottery were more likely
0:28:56 to divorce their husband.
0:28:58 – I love that.
0:29:02 – I mean, I’m laughing in a sort of gallows humor way
0:29:05 because, and of course, a good feminist critique of that
0:29:07 would be, well, the women have got more exit power
0:29:07 and they’re using it, right?
0:29:09 And if it’s economic dependency,
0:29:12 tying them to the guy, then hallelujah, she’s free of that.
0:29:15 And that’s actually a great sort of microcosm
0:29:19 of the whole push for more economic independence for women.
0:29:21 And you and I are both strong advocates
0:29:24 of that being a wonderful thing.
0:29:28 The issue then is what happens to men
0:29:30 who get detached from institutions
0:29:32 like family and marriage,
0:29:33 and therefore end up, as you say,
0:29:35 feeling like they’re not valued.
0:29:37 And I probably said this to you before,
0:29:40 but the two words that men use to describe themselves
0:29:43 before they take their lives from suicide in notes
0:29:44 and so on, the two most commonly used words
0:29:46 are useless and worthless.
0:29:47 And we just did other paper,
0:29:48 this will be interesting to you, I think,
0:29:50 where we looked at the differences between men
0:29:53 with a college degree and those without,
0:29:54 to paper and working class men.
0:29:56 And one of the stats in there that really blew me away,
0:29:59 and I think I know this stuff,
0:30:01 and then I dig deeper and really get surprised,
0:30:04 which is that men without a college degree
0:30:07 between the ages of 30 and 50
0:30:10 are only about 50% of those men
0:30:11 have a child in their household.
0:30:13 It’s basically 50, 50,
0:30:15 whether they’ve got kids in their household.
0:30:17 For women without a college degree, it’s still 80%.
0:30:20 And for those men, it was north of 80%.
0:30:23 And so we’ve got to a situation now where,
0:30:24 like particularly for working class men,
0:30:26 if I can use that definition of them,
0:30:30 like 50, 50, whether they have kids in their household,
0:30:31 and they might have kids,
0:30:32 but not be in their household anymore.
0:30:35 And I think one of the things we’re learning
0:30:40 is there was some truth to the conservative concern
0:30:43 that if men became less economically important,
0:30:45 if women became less economic reliant on men,
0:30:48 that was gonna leave a lot of men feeling beached
0:30:50 and surplus to requirements.
0:30:53 And their fear was those men would start acting out,
0:30:56 we’d see massive rises in crime,
0:30:57 all kinds of antisocial behavior.
0:30:59 It’d be like Mad Max, right?
0:31:01 As these men are kind of roaming around.
0:31:03 And of course the opposites happened by and large.
0:31:05 We’ve actually seen men retreating,
0:31:06 they’re checking out more than acting out.
0:31:09 And I see suicide as in some ways
0:31:11 the most tragic version of men
0:31:15 just checking out, looking around
0:31:17 and deciding that society, their family,
0:31:21 their community, their church, their workplace,
0:31:22 really would be fine without them,
0:31:24 maybe even better off without them.
0:31:27 And if there is a greater human tragedy,
0:31:30 then leading people to feel unneeded to that extent,
0:31:32 then I don’t know what it is.
0:31:36 – Yeah, I was fascinated by that study on divorce.
0:31:40 So I looked into it and some additional data was that
0:31:44 they believed that a lot of women, quote unquote,
0:31:46 if you’re gonna say women have more divorce energy,
0:31:48 which is disparaging towards women,
0:31:50 you also have to acknowledge
0:31:52 that as women have made more money,
0:31:55 men shouldering domestic responsibilities
0:31:58 has not kept pace with women’s economic ascent.
0:32:02 And that marriage has become a worse deal.
0:32:04 And that is a lot of women feel like,
0:32:07 okay, I’m now making as much or more money,
0:32:09 but I’m also taking care of the house.
0:32:11 This is just a raw deal for me.
0:32:13 I don’t know if you thought about solutions,
0:32:16 but this goes to a question around solutions is,
0:32:18 if we know that the single or a single point of failure
0:32:21 for when a boy becomes much more likely
0:32:24 to engage in self-harm, be incarcerated, become addicted,
0:32:26 is when he loses a male role model.
0:32:27 Man, as mom and dad get divorced,
0:32:31 and I think 92% of the time mom ends up with the kids,
0:32:34 shouldn’t there be massive programs and immediate triggers
0:32:36 that when there’s a householder divorce,
0:32:39 it’s just the next thing is we have got to get,
0:32:42 figure out resources and programs to get men
0:32:44 to ensure men are involved in this boy’s life,
0:32:45 moving forward.
0:32:48 And two, when a man is divorced,
0:32:50 or when a couple gets divorced,
0:32:53 that there needs to be some sort of education
0:32:58 or program availability for these men post-divorce.
0:33:03 – Yeah, the work of Catherine Eden and Tim Nelson on this,
0:33:06 on particularly working with kind of lower income families,
0:33:08 just basically they conclude by saying
0:33:11 that the current child support system,
0:33:15 family court system, especially for unmarried men,
0:33:17 needs to be radically reformed.
0:33:20 It needs to be reformed into a pro-family system,
0:33:22 and into a pro-fatherhood system.
0:33:24 And right now, the way that the system works
0:33:25 is that it kind of treats,
0:33:28 it basically splits men, fathers into two halves.
0:33:31 It says on the one hand, where’s the money?
0:33:33 So it’s the child support element to it.
0:33:36 And then on the other hand, completely unrelated,
0:33:37 do you want to see your kid?
0:33:39 And the father, in every US state,
0:33:41 the father has to prove paternity
0:33:42 if the kid was born outside marriage.
0:33:45 And it’s a completely separate legal process to get access.
0:33:49 And so I think moving to the presumption of equal access
0:33:52 and equal custody is important.
0:33:53 Of course, there are always gonna be exceptions
0:33:55 that people can point to.
0:33:57 What’s interesting about this is that in states
0:33:59 that have tried to move to like an equal custody presumption,
0:34:02 in other words, in law, you just presume,
0:34:04 unless there’s a good reason to the contrary,
0:34:05 which they could be that, you know,
0:34:07 moms and dads have the same rights.
0:34:10 This weird alliance of lawyers
0:34:14 and pretty strong feminist groups join forces to kill it.
0:34:16 And the reason that the women’s groups do it
0:34:21 is because they’re protecting women’s position in the family
0:34:24 and access to child support.
0:34:26 And the reason the lawyers do it
0:34:29 is because they’re gonna lose half their business, right?
0:34:31 If it just becomes a straightforward 50/50 split,
0:34:33 then they don’t have couples arguing with each other,
0:34:36 then they’re gonna lose half their legal fees.
0:34:39 And so I do agree that thinking about fatherhood,
0:34:44 custody access more in a more pro dad way
0:34:46 is just huge.
0:34:48 I just like, we have failed to update our views
0:34:49 about fatherhood.
0:34:51 And by the way, fathers need to step up more
0:34:52 in the way you just said.
0:34:56 And so the legal system is still just antiquated.
0:34:57 And especially it’s antiquated,
0:35:00 given that like, except for college educated Americans,
0:35:03 most kids aren’t born inside marriage now.
0:35:05 And so you can’t just rely on divorce laws to do it.
0:35:07 You’ve got to deal with the fact that like,
0:35:08 the preponderance of cases here,
0:35:10 that the parents weren’t married.
0:35:11 The last thing I’ll say on this
0:35:14 is I actually had this guy in tears
0:35:16 at an event where I gave all my charts
0:35:18 showing how good dads are for kids, right?
0:35:19 They’re high school graduation rates.
0:35:21 Actually, their chances of using drugs
0:35:24 or just how important dads are as role models.
0:35:26 And this dad came up to me tears afterwards and said,
0:35:27 “Yeah, but also being a father
0:35:29 “is the most important thing in my life.”
0:35:30 And what he came to realize
0:35:32 is that fatherhood isn’t just a means to an end.
0:35:35 Fatherhood is actually a central part of the identity,
0:35:39 purpose, and meaning that a lot of men have in their lives.
0:35:42 – It’s really, I mean, what you say always resonates so much.
0:35:46 I’m struggling with my 17-year-old is now a boarding school
0:35:49 and it was sold to me and I’m gonna act like the victim here
0:35:51 as I’ll be home Friday afternoons
0:35:53 and go back to school on Monday morning.
0:35:54 No, he has school Saturday morning,
0:35:57 he gets home for 24 hours.
0:35:59 And I not only miss him, but what I’ve come to realize
0:36:01 is that I like myself as a dad.
0:36:04 I really do feel good about, you know,
0:36:06 I feel like I’m programs like this.
0:36:08 I virtue signal and create this picture
0:36:09 that I’m a better father than I actually am,
0:36:11 but I know I’m a good dad.
0:36:13 And I get a lot of confidence from it.
0:36:17 It gives me a certain level of, I don’t know, my role.
0:36:21 Like I check this box, I’m helping the species
0:36:26 and not 50% of my ability to act
0:36:30 in what I think is a nice role is gone
0:36:32 ’cause he’s no longer here during the week.
0:36:34 And it has really fucked with me.
0:36:36 It has hurt my self-esteem.
0:36:38 I feel anchorless.
0:36:41 I just wonder if there’s programs I’m even thinking like,
0:36:43 I am dreading, Richard, I don’t know if you feel about this.
0:36:44 I know you have kids.
0:36:46 I am so freaked out about the moment
0:36:48 my second leaves for college.
0:36:51 Like I, they talk about women go through this.
0:36:54 My partner, she’s gonna be fine.
0:36:56 She’s like, she’s already kind of counting the days
0:37:00 to let her out of the house ’cause I think she gets,
0:37:03 you know, she gets more work and less fun than I do.
0:37:07 But it just strikes me so much how that role of fatherhood,
0:37:10 it’s not only, you know, something I enjoy,
0:37:12 it’s just so central to my identity
0:37:17 and I can’t imagine what it must be like to just,
0:37:19 to, you know, I think in family court,
0:37:22 you know, you lose your kids, you lose access.
0:37:25 Mom, at least when my parents got divorced,
0:37:27 did your parents stay together, Richard?
0:37:29 – Yeah, mine did, yeah, still all together.
0:37:31 – That’s wonderful.
0:37:32 What happens or at least happened with me
0:37:34 and I saw happen with most of my friends is that
0:37:39 a kid can’t process the agitator or the dissent
0:37:43 or the problem of these two people splitting up.
0:37:44 It makes no sense.
0:37:46 So immediately they go, oh, someone must be a bad person.
0:37:48 And it’s unlikely that the bad person
0:37:50 is the person you’re living with
0:37:52 making your breakfast every morning.
0:37:55 It’s the bad person is the one who’s left,
0:37:57 whether he or she wanted custody.
0:37:59 And so I just think there’s a very easy tendency
0:38:04 for kids of divorced parents to kind of demonize dad.
0:38:05 And that’s what I did.
0:38:08 I’m like, mom’s a saint, dad’s awful.
0:38:13 I’m fascinated by this notion of what you said
0:38:16 was really striking that men are four times more likely
0:38:19 to commit suicide, excuse me, die of suicide,
0:38:21 but become eight times more likely recently divorced.
0:38:24 Are there programs or any more data that you’ve talked about
0:38:27 in terms of what happens with men
0:38:29 after they lose their primary relationship
0:38:31 and no longer live with their kids?
0:38:32 – Yeah, there’s data.
0:38:34 I mean, I’ve given you the suicide one,
0:38:37 but just their life expectancy goes down.
0:38:40 Their chances of earning, being employed,
0:38:44 goes down, other health conditions worsen.
0:38:46 And sometimes that’s a bit of an eye roll moment.
0:38:47 It’s like, well, of course,
0:38:49 if men don’t have women to look after them
0:38:52 and remind him to take his pills and go to the doctor,
0:38:54 then he’s hopeless, isn’t he?
0:38:58 There’s a sort of sense of that bit of an eye roll around it.
0:38:59 But I think a deeper understanding
0:39:01 of it’s closer to what you were talking about,
0:39:06 which is that sense of connection and purpose and meaning.
0:39:09 And neededness, right?
0:39:14 The sense of being needed versus surplus to requirements.
0:39:16 I think it’s really the access.
0:39:19 I try to think about this along.
0:39:22 Now, it’s very interesting to me that men now are more likely
0:39:24 to say that having kids and getting married
0:39:28 is important for a satisfying life than women are, right?
0:39:30 So the old trope about like,
0:39:32 it’s women that want to get married and have kids
0:39:33 and men who have to be dragged into it,
0:39:34 like the ball and chain.
0:39:37 And men would rather be off like a cowboy
0:39:38 just doing their own thing,
0:39:41 but it gets ensnared into domestic life.
0:39:43 But deep down, they want to be out on the range
0:39:44 or doing their own thing.
0:39:46 And that is bullshit.
0:39:48 It is absolutely the opposite of the truth
0:39:52 is that actually men, what makes you a man
0:39:54 is what you’re doing for others.
0:39:57 We both talk about this, the kind of connection to others,
0:39:59 but also generating a surplus, being generative.
0:40:02 This idea of generative masculinity.
0:40:03 And actually listening to you now
0:40:05 is just part of the thought that one of the things
0:40:08 we know from the work of Anna Machen and other people,
0:40:09 she’s great scholar on fatherhood, by the way.
0:40:10 If you don’t know her stuff,
0:40:13 she has this wonderful book called “The Life of Dad”,
0:40:15 which is basically about how we invented fatherhood
0:40:16 in humanity.
0:40:19 But actually dads really come into their own
0:40:22 in the adolescent years, right?
0:40:23 Mums seem to have a bit of a competitive advantage
0:40:25 in the early years.
0:40:27 And dads have a competitive advantage
0:40:27 in those adolescent years.
0:40:30 Cause you’re helping your kids like go out into the world
0:40:33 to grow, to develop, to take risks appropriately,
0:40:35 develop social skills.
0:40:37 In other words, like the simpler way to put it,
0:40:40 is that mums are really good when the kids are in the nest
0:40:41 and dads are really good at helping
0:40:44 prepare them to leave the nest.
0:40:45 But actually when they then leave the nest,
0:40:48 you’ve just lost the thing that you were doing
0:40:49 over the previous few years.
0:40:51 And so in a weird way, I think for dads,
0:40:55 their kids leaving at 18 is much more of a loss
0:40:56 than for mums.
0:40:58 Cause mums have sort of done more of their work,
0:41:02 if you like, emotionally anyway, like when the kids were eight,
0:41:03 right?
0:41:05 Whereas dads come into their own in these later years,
0:41:06 only to see them kind of fly away.
0:41:08 And a lot of dads, I certainly feel this,
0:41:10 is this mixture of pride and loss.
0:41:13 We’ll be right back.
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0:43:20 On the diary of a CEO,
0:43:23 you said that we’re in the relatively early stages
0:43:25 of a cultural revolution.
0:43:27 One where the economic relation between men and women
0:43:29 has dramatically transformed.
0:43:30 Say more?
0:43:33 – Yeah, so with 1979,
0:43:36 13% of women earned more than the median man,
0:43:38 typical man, 13%.
0:43:41 Last time I looked, it was 40% of women
0:43:44 earned more than the typical man.
0:43:47 40% of breadwinners, a male in the,
0:43:49 female rather in the U.S. now.
0:43:50 So in the space of my lifetime,
0:43:53 I’m at mid ’50s, born in ’69.
0:43:55 In the space of my lifetime,
0:43:58 we have utterly transformed the relative economic position
0:44:00 of men and women in advanced economies,
0:44:01 including in the U.S.
0:44:04 Now, we haven’t achieved full equality
0:44:07 and obviously there’s still some work to be done,
0:44:09 but the level of economic independence
0:44:12 that women have achieved in the matter of decades
0:44:14 has been just gigantic
0:44:18 and hugely liberating, wonderful, et cetera.
0:44:21 But I genuinely think that it takes time
0:44:25 for cultures to adjust to such massive economic changes.
0:44:27 I mean, that is a fundamental change
0:44:29 in the economic relationship between men and women.
0:44:30 And what it’s done is it’s unbundled
0:44:32 the traditional ways in which men and women
0:44:34 were kind of tied to each other economically.
0:44:36 And I do think this comes back to earlier conversation.
0:44:39 I really think that we were focused
0:44:42 on the economic dependence of women on men
0:44:45 in traditional marriage and try to reduce that.
0:44:48 But I don’t think we paid quite enough attention
0:44:54 to the emotional dependence of men on those families,
0:44:56 on those marriages and on the kind of being
0:44:58 the co-residents with their kids.
0:44:59 And what’s happened is that as women
0:45:01 have become more economically independent,
0:45:04 the degree to which men are actually quite emotionally
0:45:06 dependent on those traditional structures
0:45:08 has become glaringly apparent
0:45:10 and the gap has really opened up.
0:45:13 And I think that’s the chasm that I see a lot of men
0:45:15 really struggling to cross or fall into.
0:45:20 And so culturally, just, I mean, that’s a gigantic shift
0:45:22 and it’s all, it’s good, it’s good.
0:45:23 But the thing I find frustrating about this
0:45:25 is people’s inability to say you can have
0:45:27 this really great change,
0:45:30 like the rise of women’s economic independence and choice
0:45:33 and to say, but by the way,
0:45:34 there’s gonna be some bumps in the road here
0:45:37 because you’ve just radically transformed
0:45:41 the way in which kind of men feel their place in society.
0:45:43 And you don’t have to end up being reactionary and saying,
0:45:44 oh, that’s why we should go back,
0:45:46 which is what some of the reactionary right wingers
0:45:48 are saying, which is that’s why we need to go back, right?
0:45:50 No, no, no, we need to go forward.
0:45:52 But we have to go forward with some empathy
0:45:55 and compassion for the fact that this is a very different world
0:45:58 that men are navigating now.
0:46:01 – You’ve touched on the idea of a new script for masculinity
0:46:04 and the new set of roles and the new set of dues.
0:46:07 What do you mean and what does the script look like?
0:46:10 – Yeah, so I’m always a bit reluctant around this
0:46:12 ’cause of course there are lots of different scripts,
0:46:14 but I mean, it comes back a bit to fatherhood.
0:46:18 I’ve now placed a lot of weight,
0:46:20 increasingly actually as I’m doing the work
0:46:24 on the importance of fatherhood as that anchoring,
0:46:27 I’m using the way you describe your own relationship
0:46:29 with your son like the anchor you feel anchored by
0:46:31 as an anchor for men.
0:46:36 And being a provider and a protector
0:46:41 in a way that is appropriate for the kind of modern world.
0:46:45 So I’ve come to believe that we have to retain these ideals,
0:46:49 these ideas about the role of men, but just update them.
0:46:51 So rather than saying, okay, we don’t need protectors,
0:46:53 we don’t need providers, we don’t, you know,
0:46:55 instead I think we need to say that you can provide
0:46:56 and protecting different ways now.
0:46:57 So I think actually, for example,
0:46:58 and your colleague, Jonathan Hyatt,
0:47:00 now a mutual friend is doing a lot of work right now
0:47:02 on how do you protect kids from some of the online
0:47:04 environments that they kind of might be?
0:47:08 Like how do you step in between some of the forces
0:47:10 out there in the world and your kid’s wellbeing, right?
0:47:13 That’s being a protector that have to be
0:47:14 throwing a punch every time.
0:47:17 And I would say the same way being a provider
0:47:19 doesn’t necessarily mean that your dollar, you know,
0:47:22 the dollar amount on your monthly paycheck,
0:47:23 you know, has to be a certain level
0:47:25 or has to be a certain level more
0:47:26 than your wife’s or your partner’s.
0:47:28 But by God, it means you need to be providing
0:47:32 to your household, time, energy, you know,
0:47:34 skills, et cetera, right?
0:47:37 You don’t have to be doing providing
0:47:39 in just this very narrow economic way,
0:47:40 but by God, you have to provide, right?
0:47:43 So I said this before, but like as a stay at home dad,
0:47:45 I felt like a provider, right?
0:47:48 Because I was providing the space and energy
0:47:50 for my wife to be able to work,
0:47:52 not knowing her kids were in safe hands.
0:47:53 I think actually for a lot of women,
0:47:56 knowing that their kids are in their father’s care
0:47:59 while they’re working, that’s usually powerful.
0:48:02 – I love this notion and we’ll wrap up here
0:48:05 because I just think it’s such a great construct
0:48:08 for young men or a great framework.
0:48:10 Talk about the notion of surplus value.
0:48:14 – So when you look through the history of like,
0:48:19 what turns a boy into a man in most human societies,
0:48:23 it is some mark of them producing more of something
0:48:26 than they need for themselves.
0:48:30 Now, in a kind of post-war economy with more money,
0:48:32 that’s the breadwinner version of it,
0:48:34 but that wasn’t true 5,000 years ago on the Savannah.
0:48:38 That was meat, that was protein for the tribe
0:48:40 and for the mother of your child.
0:48:42 In other places, it could be something else.
0:48:45 But I think that I love this idea
0:48:50 of masculinity, mature masculinity,
0:48:53 being defined in terms of giving more than you get.
0:48:55 It’s a service-oriented form of masculinity.
0:48:59 It’s definitely the one I got from my father’s knee.
0:49:02 I mean, just absolutely the kind of giving more than you get.
0:49:03 And that’s why there’s this movement online
0:49:05 of men going their own way,
0:49:07 like a men’s separatist movement saying,
0:49:09 we don’t need women, we don’t need marriage,
0:49:11 we don’t need kids, we don’t need the labor market,
0:49:13 screw you, we’re off.
0:49:15 That is literally the opposite of masculinity.
0:49:19 The idea of masculinity is surplus generator is,
0:49:23 I know you’re a man, when you’re generating more energy,
0:49:27 time, love, money, meat, whatever the hell it is,
0:49:30 then you need for your own survival
0:49:34 because that is historically what men have had to do
0:49:37 is to contribute to the family, to the tribe,
0:49:38 to the community.
0:49:40 And if you’re not a contributor
0:49:43 in all these different ways, then you ain’t a man.
0:49:45 And so if you’re wondering how to be a man,
0:49:47 start by doing something for somebody else
0:49:49 and that will lead you in the right direction.
0:49:51 – Richard Reeves is the president
0:49:52 of the American Institute for Boys and Men,
0:49:55 which he founded in 2023 to raise awareness
0:49:56 of the problems of boys and men
0:49:58 and advocate for effective solutions.
0:50:00 He’s also a non-resident senior fellow
0:50:02 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC,
0:50:04 where he previously directed the future
0:50:06 of the middle class initiative
0:50:08 and the center on children and families.
0:50:10 His 2022 book of Boys and Men,
0:50:12 While the Modern Male is Struggling,
0:50:14 Why It Matters and What to Do About It,
0:50:17 was described as a landmark in the New York Times
0:50:20 and named a book of the year by both the economist
0:50:22 and the New Yorker and distinctive as accent.
0:50:24 He joins us from Eastern Tennessee.
0:50:26 Did I get that right, Richard?
0:50:28 – Correct, yeah, Southern Appalachian, yeah.
0:50:30 I would bet you’re one of the more interesting people
0:50:31 in that area, and that’s a disparaging statement
0:50:32 about Eastern Tennessee,
0:50:34 but I bet people are fascinated with you as we are.
0:50:37 And Richard, I say this, but it bears repeating,
0:50:40 you have literally inspired me to take this on as an issue.
0:50:42 Thank you so much for your good work.
0:50:43 – Thank you for your work, Scott.
0:50:44 Always a pleasure.
0:50:53 – This episode is produced by Caroline Shagren.
0:50:55 Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer
0:50:57 and Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
0:50:59 Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod
0:51:00 from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:51:03 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice,
0:51:04 as read by George Hahn.
0:51:07 And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod
0:51:09 wherever you get your pods for new episodes
0:51:10 every Monday and Thursday.
Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, joins Scott to discuss his new research on unnatural male deaths including injury, suicide, and drug overdose, along with solutions and his take on what the script for masculinity should look like.
Follow Richard, @RichardvReeves.
Scott opens with his thoughts on Nike CEO John Donahoe stepping down, and then he gets into the Biden Administration’s plan to ban Chinese tech from connected vehicles.
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